I Sold A Company For $800M At 29... What I’m Doing Now | Jack Smith Interview (#470)

You wake up at something like 3 AM or 5 AM, and the first 2 to 3 days, the only instruction they give you is, hey, uh, feel how the breath feels on your lips when you're breathing in and out. Okay, see you in 3 days. And you sit there. So it's really extreme. What?

This is my management style too.

All right, we're live here. We have a guest, Jack Smith, one of my best friends in my wedding, an amazing person. I don't even know how to describe you, Jack. What you, I guess like the top line is you started a company that you sold for like $800 million when you were 29. That's like the, that's like the, the headline impressive stuff. But we have you here because you have done, you're just like one of the more interesting people I know.

Okay, well, thanks for having me. I also thought kind of an interesting contrast coming after Rob, um, because like he was describing himself as like the pinnacle of human optimization, right? Like he plans how long it takes him to go to the toilet each day. And then I was thinking I'm maybe an interesting contrast because I'm like human procrastination, like the exact opposite of that.

So yeah, but you do optimize stuff. Like Sean, I don't know if you know this, but Like Jack, one time we went to his birthday party and his wife made him a cake and it was in the shape of an Amazon box because he had this, like, it was like a walk-in closet, but it was basically a room in his home and it was full of Amazon boxes. And you're like, Jack, what is that? And he has this list, this Excel spreadsheet that he keeps and anything that he buys ranging from a book bag to baby apparel or baby accessories. Or one time he was obsessed with chocolate. He would literally buy 50 versions and test all of them and then rank them on this like attribute system and then have a, and so he has these huge lists of everything that he's tested and he's done this so much that we're, haven't you been banned from Amazon like multiple times?

Yeah. And then also Bonobos had this policy for, I don't know if they still have, I think for many years they had a policy where you could return any item. Even if it was used up to 365 days after. And so I had a spreadsheet tracking when I bought everything. Basically, I got a new wardrobe every year because I just sent all my clothes back on 340 days and then just got it all as like credit and bought an entire new wardrobe every year. So yeah, I got banned from Amazon a few times and— but no bonus.

So you and Rob have more in common than you think. He's planning his poops and you're planning your returns in a giant spreadsheet.

Which by the way, we should like give a background. So basically your company was called Vungle. You, how old were you? 22?

I'm 21, 20.

Um, so basically like the story that you always tell is you had like, you got into an accelerator, an incubator. I think you had one idea, but it wasn't working out. And then you just like mocked up like a PowerPoint. You went and it was like on a mobile ad network. So basically you would see an ad in between levels of games. You brought it to developers and they're like, oh yeah, this is way better. If you could actually build this, we're in. And you did that a bunch of times where you got maybe one or I think a million dollars of commitments of like, yeah, I guess if you build this, we would spend like this much money. And then you took that and you actually hired a developer, Bryant, who's now the co-founder of Webflow. And you built that business and then it like spiraled into this thing where I think you'd only raised 10 or 15 million, maybe 17 million. And within 7 years, I think wherever it was when you sold, you guys were doing a million a day in revenue. Is that like the story?

It could be in that region. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Around hundreds of millions in revenue.

It was absolutely crazy. And then you sold it for, I forget what, 800?

Yeah. Yeah. Kind of in that region. And I mean, what's interesting as well is obviously Sean talks about having worked with Ferquand at Applovin. Applovin launched. About 6 to 12 months after us. So I think is another example. You don't have to be the first to market, like everyone's jumping on the AI trend, right? To be first to market. But actually you don't have to be the first to market to be the biggest. AppLovin was one of the slower movers. And to give context, they at their peak have been multiple times bigger than Fungal. They went public and probably at their peak in the region of $10 billion market cap. Now they're a bit lower because the market crashed. Maybe more than 20.

They're 9 billion now. They were 20 billion at its peak, something like 20, 25 billion at its peak. What do you think they did? Why did they have kind of a, let's call it 10 to 20x bigger outcome if they started a year later? When you look back, what did you learn from that?

And it was also interesting because one of our investors, besides Furkan being a beast, one of our investors came to us and said like, oh yeah, we are backing, we are looking, we're investing in this company. They do like, video advertisements inside of mobile apps, et cetera. They called AppLovin and we were like, you're describing our company. What are you talking about? You're investing in that? That's what we do, dude. And actually, so they're called, they're called Web, Wynn Web Investment Network. They invested in, I think they're the only investor invested in Vungle and AppLovin. They're great guys, but at the time we were like, Fuck. So they have massive wins there. One bit we observed is actually AppLovin, Vungle. We thought that like, at the time before Vungle, mobile ads were monetized through like banner ads, like kind of on the internet, you know, when the internet first launched, you had these crappy banner ads. And we were like, well, they obviously suck. So we're going to do video ads, which is 10x better. But a difference that AppLovin did is they didn't only do video ads, they did everything they did. They were like, we don't care what you want to spend money on, we'll just take your money. So they're like one platform, you can do banner ads, video ads, everything. And so I think that enabled them to capture a bit more market share. And perhaps the founding team being more technical, like I'm saying that I'm a crappy engineer. Uh, like I could not build Bungle from scratch and Sean, listening to your story on, uh, one of the more recent episodes, you described Furquan making that dashboard for Adam that he could just look at the apps and poach them. We did similar bits. Um, but there's perhaps more technical. One of our hacks we did is we actually had a team of people in about 10 people in Pakistan. And Pakistan is so cheap. So we had an entire office and they had one job to, and this is why it was really easy to recruit there. We said, just play mobile games all day. We just got them all an iPhone and we just like, play games all day. And whenever you see an ad, write down what the ad was advertising and what ad network was using it. And so they basically built us our lead gen database by playing all the games. So maybe we did it manually. They did it by looking at this SDK source code.

So yeah.

That's amazing.

You're like, last night someone was asking me, I was at this dinner. They're like, have you ever met anyone who created a business and sold it and was wealthy enough and they just retired? And I was like, not really. Basically everyone I know who's started a company and had some type of success, usually after some amount of time, 6 months or 3 years, they usually get to something. Sometimes it's more intense. Sometimes less intense, but they usually do something. You're actually the only person I think I know who was incredibly successful at a very young age. So 30 years old or whenever you sold it, and you actually have not ever started another business before. You do a lot of odd stuff. Like for example, I'll be like, Jack, what are you doing now? You got any projects? You're like, yeah, I have like a ton of pen pals in prison and I like set up this thing where it's this website where people, inmates can order any book they want to. And I like ask them to create like a book report on it. And I'm like, That's so interesting. Do you think, A, you'll ever get back into business? And is the reason— do you just spend all your days just like seeking out all these interesting topics? Is that what you're doing now?

So I would not say that I'm retired at the moment because when I think of being retired, I think about having no stress and just like sitting around reading books all day or something like that. You know, actually I am working on a bunch of stuff. But they're not just— it's not taking an approach of trying to build another billion-dollar company. When I think back, a trait I notice in many entrepreneurs, and I observed in myself, is that I think I was successful early on because I had a chip on my shoulder. I had something to prove. And doing my first startup in London, it was really hard to do a startup. And I also felt like people kind of didn't respect me. I, they, like people just kind of thought I was a joke or whatever. And I kind of felt inside, I thought I was like, I think that I can build something successful. I didn't want, I didn't aspire to be super rich or anything. I just wanted to build a big company, but I had that chip on my shoulder, something to prove. Now when Vungle sold, when I kind of reflected, I was like, I don't think that I have that chip on my shoulder anymore. And I think if you're going to try and build a billion-dollar company, you— or really venture-backed company or something— you have to make a lot of sacrifices, right? And have a drive about why you're doing it. And when I sat, I'm like, I don't need more money now. And I don't have this thing to prove anymore. So when I sat with it, I felt what is going to motivate me more now is where can I have an impact and kind of impact the world, not necessarily trying to impact a million people in the world. But even if I just deeply impact a few people in the world, I think that will be a driver to a reason why to work on this, because making more money is not enough of a driver for me. And all of us three, we're in this chat group, right, about founders that have sold their first company. And it seems that the majority of people have this crisis. I've sold my company, but I don't know what to do with myself. And I'm good at building companies. I don't really need more money. But shall I just do it? Because that's what I'm good at. And I can't think of anything else to do. And also, I don't want to just sit around. So seems a challenge many others are facing. For me, the conclusion I came to was, where can I add impact? And that looks like setting up some charities, And a project that I'm working on at the moment, you guys have talked briefly about it before, is move to Portugal to set up a kind of digital detox type place for people to switch off from technology and be in nature. So these are the kind of things that I'm doing. I mean, that one, it will hopefully make money, but money is not the core metric if it's been a success or not. Even if it doesn't, even if it breaks even or loses a bit of money, if just it can heal people, people say like, yo, that changed my life, was super healing to me. And people talk about it. That is success for me with that project.

Dude, you are the first person I've ever met who does a lot of things that are now more popular. So I remember one time Sean, Jack and I were hanging out and we were playing frisbee golf. It was just us. It was like 10 AM in the morning. We were playing frisbee golf in San Francisco and I was like, Jack, you're being a little quiet. What's wrong? And this was like after an hour of playing, he was like, oh, I am. I was doing ayahuasca from, for the last 3 days. And I was like, what? What's ayahuasca? He's like, well, you go to this house and you like drink this thing and then you throw up and you're supposed to like, you know, find yourself or whatever. And you have like a shaman guiding you. And I was like, when did that end? And he was like, oh, I came straight from there. I was there like an, I was there like an hour and a half ago. And so you would do that stuff like way before this type of psychedelic stuff was popular. Another thing that you would do, Jack would come and speak at HustleCon and he's like, hey, I gotta go. Like literally the next day I was like, where are you going? He goes, oh, I'm going to Bali for 3 weeks for a silent retreat. And he would, I would see him leave. He would bring like basically no clothes and a massive bag, like a whole carry-on or a whole checked bag of books from the library. And I was like, what are you doing? He's like, ah, I was just overwhelmed with all the people. I gotta go to Bali now for, and he would go to the silent retreat. For literally 3 weeks and not say a word. And now I'm talking to like my quote, normal, more normal friends, my friends who are doctors and lawyers, whatever. And now they're doing it. You do so many things that are so odd. And now every, now everyone's talking about psychedelics. Now like these silent retreats are significantly more popular. You've been doing that since 2012. I remember you telling me about all this stuff. Like, this is the craziest thing I've ever heard of. And you've been doing all that now and it's way more popular.

Vipassana is a, is a type of silent meditation. So if someone says they've done a silent retreat, often they're talking about this thing called vipassana. And yes, I think it has got more mainstream nowadays, but it has actually been a pretty popular concept for a long time. But I've never done it. And that is actually a really extreme approach. Like, um, many people I speak to who have done them say it's kind of like if you can't swim, and you jump off an Olympic diving board. It's really extreme approach to switching off and feeling burned out. Some people, I think they're doing it because, well, I know people have told me they did it because it sounded like a challenge, but it's not necessarily a good thing. So to give an example, you go for 10 days, right? My friend did it. His pillow was made, it's run by monks. It's a nonprofit. They have about 300 locations around the world run by monks. And it doesn't cost any money. You maybe pay small fee. His pillow was made out of concrete. You're not allowed to make eye contact with any other person there. Your meals are like rice. You wake up at something like 3:00 AM or 5:00 AM. And the first 2 to 3 days, the only instruction they give you is, hey, uh, feel how the breath feels on your lips when you're breathing in and out. Okay. See you in 3 days. And you sit there. So it's really extreme. What?

This is my management style too.

But this is really popular. But what I did, and I was inspired by Bill Gates, he had this thing called Think Week where he just goes to a cabin in the middle of nowhere and he just reads for a week. And I was like, oh, that's awesome. And I found this place in Indonesia and it's just totally different to a vipassana because they don't have any rules. Like you can make, like the only rule is don't talk to each other. but you can make eye contact, you can do whatever you want. You don't have to do any meditation at all. But, and then so for me, I just took loads of books and I came out of that each time getting all the benefits these people doing vipassana retreats talk about. Like, I feel super re-energized. My mood feels off the charts, super happy, but I'm having an amazing time. I'm reading all these books I've wanted to read all year, and the food is amazing. It's grown on their own jungle slash farm. So I'm like, this amazing experience, and I feel awesome and all these benefits. But the other guys are like, oh, I spoke to one guy this morning, he's like, totally glad I did it, would never want to go through that again, was one of the hardest experiences of my life. And I'm like, well, you can actually get a bunch of the same benefits, but you don't have to torture yourself. But I've never found a place like this place in Indonesia. And so for many years, I kind of felt that I just have to do this, which is expand their concept to other continents around the world. So I'm starting in Portugal. If that goes well, hopefully then expand to America, et cetera.

That's awesome. You put a couple things on the sheet that I want to do. You said business opportunities. So you're not, it sounds like you're not doing, you've been able to resist the temptation to start another business even though You're good at business and you see lots of opportunities. So, uh, share with us a couple of these like random ideas that you have on this list.

Yeah, because, um, I know you guys like, I think the audience likes different business ideas and things that are also actionable with My First Million, right? So I was kind of thinking to myself and one business, I don't know if you guys have come across this, but it was kind of interesting to me. Um, it's a company, not VC backed or anything, but it's called Nomad Capitalist. And it's this guy, and he's kind of made a name for himself as the leader for rich people that just want to go around the world. He organizes a conference for like family offices. And he has a book, and he has this brand called Nomad Capitalist. And if you look on Reddit, loads of people talk about it. I actually did a prescreen call with them. And I also read the reviews about it, etc. They're basically just a reseller for tax lawyers, because tax lawyers just suck at marketing, you know, and he's got a podcast, he's got a book, he's just really great at marketing. And he's got this, like, he's like, oh, the best tax strategy is to like have free passports, I help you get multiple passports and set up a bank account in another country, etc. Did a call with them. And they basically wanted $25,000 retainer. And then what they'll do is they'll just make you a report. And they're like, alright, the $25,000, you can later put it towards whatever things we propose for you. But I was like, okay, but then as I did more research, I kind of just myself found out like, wait, I can just cut out you and just find an awesome tax attorney myself and pay $3,000. I don't need to give you $25,000. But he, he's, he's doing really well. And he also has this level like, if you pay him $75,000, you can like go and hang out with him on an island in person, and he'll, he'll, he'll be your concierge. So some of these people, I think it's just like rich people having too much money. And they don't want to do the research or reference checks to find good tax people. They're like, oh, well, this dude, his website looks really great. He must be thought leader. He's got this book, he's on all the podcasts. I'll just hire him because Also, I found tax attorneys, they don't give you a simple answer to the frickin question. You know, I'm just like, I want to do this, whatever. And then they're like, oh, it's really complicated. And they, they use all this jargon. They just suck at speaking plain English. He does. He's built a really good business. I was thinking, I think a business opportunity is building a reseller layer on top of these industries that just suck at marketing or communicating what they do. You know, so he's doing it for tax, international tax for really rich people. And I was thinking there's probably other industries where just make an amazing brand website, write a book, go on all the podcasts and make a brand about yourself, hit really great name, right? Like Nomad Capitalist, to do that for other industries, I thought was one idea.

So what do you get? What do you get for the 25 grand?

He's like, I'll make you a report. They'll make you a report, an 8-page report telling you, we think that you should set up a trust in Bermuda. And that is going to cost you 30k. The 25k that you paid us, you can put that towards the trust in Bermuda. But basically, he's just taking a cut. He's just taking a risk. He's just taking a referral fee from the lawyer, you know, it only costs $5K to do the trust. So basically, and then if he gives you the report, and you don't like it, he keeps the $25K.

So this is, this is the business model that the Think and Grow Rich guy does. And Dave Ramsey, I've come to realize, so what they did is, I know somebody who reached out to, he got into Think and Grow Rich, Robert Kiyosaki's like, you know, book plus blog.

No, you're getting confused. Poor Dad, Rich Dad is the Robert Kawasaki guy or whatever his name, Robert something. Think and Grow Rich is Napoleon Hill.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Sorry. That's what I meant. Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Oh, did I say, did I say the other one?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So he reaches out to the Rich Dad, Poor Dad guy who I think is that Kiyosaki guy and he's, Basically that, like he's got a philosophy. He's like, look, this is the way to get rich and it makes sense. And you're like, cool, I want to do it. He's like, awesome. Reach out to one of our, you know, reach out to our headquarters and we'll do a call and we'll get to know you and we'll tell you what we think you should do. And it's just a layer reselling tax strategy. And so what he did was he paid $20K to these guys to get a connection to a tax strategy lawyer, a tax strategist and lawyer. Who then did, uh, you know, saved him a bunch of money. He actually saved him like $80K or something like that. So he's like, oh yeah, this is a great deal. I put in $20K, got $80K. Then he introduced me to the tax guy and the tax guy's like, cool.

Yeah.

For all this, it'll be $6K. And I was like, oh, but like, I told my brother, I was like, you know, you, you paid $20K. I paid $6K. What do you mean? And he was like, well, yeah, like that. I was like, where did the other, you know, where were all the other money goes? Like, oh, that goes to like their central agency. Like, that filters the deal. So they don't just take a cut. It's not like we get a 10% referral fee. They mark up the whole service by 3x and keep 66% of the 3x markup in order to do this. And then Dave Ramsey does the same thing. So I was like, you see Dave Ramsey, right? Like, you know, America's, you know, favorite uncle or whatever. And he's doing this call-in show. He does all this stuff. And I was like, how much? And, and we had done this feature on him on the pod. That blew my mind. Sam, you knew a little bit about this, but he has like a huge campus of like his office is like, uh, it's in Tennessee. He's got like, you know, multiple buildings, hundreds of people on staff. And I was like, dude, how big is this guy's podcast that he could pay for that? That sounds a little outrageous. Like what's going on here? And it's basically the podcast, the books, all of that is just lead gen for people to come to him. And if you go to his website, it'll say, what do you, what do you need? You want insurance, you want a mortgage, you want to learn how to save money, you want tax help, talk to people with the Ramsey Shield. And basically what he does is he goes and finds local people in your market. He fi— he, they have to pay to apply. So they pay some number, some amount of money and like, you know, a couple thousand dollars to get certified. And when they're certified, so he makes money off them, but then he, and for them it's a no-brainer 'cause they're going to get leads from his giant top of funnel. Like, His website, if you go to like, uh, whatever the traffic, you know, analysis, um, on SimilarWeb, it says it gets 10 million visits a month on his website. So he's getting a huge amount of traffic that he just funnels down to these providers. And he basically gets his cut and they, and these advisors all have the shields. Like, what does the shield mean? It's like, our team has vetted them. It's like, vetted what? You don't know if these guys are, you know, what are you actually doing out here? And I'm pretty sure this entire business is making like $300 million a year. And this is a—

or more—

a combination of basically his, like the Ramsey trusted advisors. And it's basically like they follow the Ramsey rules and it's like, what are the Ramsey rules? It's like, oh, you know, there's parts of his philosophy that they follow. And so they can either pay for the leads or they pay for the certification. And just off this lead gen, he's just generating just like tons and tons of cash. And then on top of that, he's got his, like his university and then he's got his media ad stuff. So the combination of all those is sort of like a $300 million plus a year empire, which is pretty insane. It is doing exactly what you described, Jack. It's a layer that I call it a router business. It's going to route you to the service you want. And you know, I'm the router because I'm the trusted source. And if I do actually do a good job of curating or hand selecting, And people get a good outcome from it, then this can be a sustainable business. And so, yeah, I think you're absolutely right on that.

And what's the other one?

Yeah. What's this RTFM? What does that mean?

Oh, um, RTFM. I just meant like read the fucking manual. So basically I was talking to someone, um, have someone helping me with like Midjourney and all this stuff just came out, right? And then I was just trying to figure out, like, I kind of just delegated to him, like, all right, we, let's just see if Midjourney can help us. So And I said, I'm building this like physical place and I'm like, just see if it can make us some mockups. So take this image of a cabin and this image of the piece of land and just see if Midjourney can blend them together. And we even hired people of Upwork to, uh, or Fiverr, like Midjourney experts to help us. And the results sucked. And then it was not doing what I asked. And then he had said he'd been playing around with it for a while. And then I was at some point, I was just like, all right, fuck it. I should. This is going to be a valuable skill. I should learn how it works. At least the first step I did is I read the Midjourney guidebook that they have. And it explains how to do it. And then within 15 minutes, I saw like, hey guys, we can do what I'm asking. You just have to use this certain command. Do you even read the fucking manual about how this works? I think most people don't read the manual. Like, manuals are boring, right? Don't read the manual. They're just trying to figure it out themselves or look at YouTube. And then I was just like, just read the manual. It's pretty simple. And so I think if you just do the basics that most people don't read the fucking manual about how Midjourney works or ChatGPT or something, there's so many people that the AI is this emerging trend, but they're fucking lazy. I'm going to read the 20-page manual and you can kind of just tell them like, oh, you want to do that? I'll just do it for you. It maybe only takes you 5 seconds, but you can just charge them a premium, you know. Actually, my wife, she has a startup. And she said, there's this guy, he's going around, he's doing conference in a different country, like every few days about AI. And he's teaching business leaders like, oh, Midjourney, ChatGPT, this is how you use it. This is it. This is it. I asked my wife, I'm like, what's that guy's actual credentials? You know, and he's not He's not— he's just a nobody. But he's saying that he's an AI expert because everybody is. It only just came out recently. And he's just running workshops and charging business leaders loads of money about how to implement this in your business. And so I think if you just, you know, if you just don't sleep and just learn Midjourney, ChatGPT, learn all of these things only came out recently, you can be a thought leader and Write a book, launch it, launch on Amazon, a book, how to use ChatGPT in your business and launch it for each vertical using ChatGPT for lawyers and accounting and whatever. You guys are in the group. I don't know if you saw, Sean is more active, Sam not, but people were talking about this business CaseText just got acquired by LexisNexis for $750 million. And actually in the investor report, it's kind of embarrassing, but in the investor report, the, um, LexisNexis said the reason we paid $700 million for this business is because they came up with 8 prompts for OpenAI about how to make it give good responses, um, to law questions. So they're kind of openly saying this business is just a layer on top of OpenAI. They just came up with 8 prompt texts. And so we are buying them for $700 million.

Tell me more about this company.

I mean, I'm not an expert, but someone in the, in the group who is in the industry said LexisNexis's competitor has just come out with some AI thing. And so LexisNexis, which is like multi-billion dollar company, was like, oh shit, like we need to get up to speed and we need to get up to speed fast. And so they just paid this ludicrous, or what people are saying is ludicrous, Sam, because they needed to get up to speed. But literally in the investor report they said the reason we are buying this business is because they have 8 proprietary prompts. And then anyone who's used ChatGPT or anything knows that's like not very much intellectual property or whatever you're buying.

You know, I think Casetext has been around for like 10 years though. So whatever they were doing before, you know, they were, they were around. So like, I think they have like on their website there right now it says 10,000 law firms use them. So, you know, it's not, literally just 8 prompts, but I get your point. And definitely they got the AI premium on the exit here because it became immediately strategic and urgent for LexisNexis. And I'm totally with you about the, you know, you could become an expert in Midjourney and ChatGPT in like 9 days, 9 days of like trying to do shit and then basically Figuring out how that applies to certain vertical or job is definitely like a thing that can exist and should exist. I had the same thing. I was trying to use it in my business, my e-com business. And I was like, how do I do this? And I just reached out to the guy at Runway and I was like, hey, I'm trying to take an image and make a very similar image. And I was like, it's not image. I don't like, I can't do text to image because I can't describe this image. I have an image. I want another one like it. And I want actually 50 variations of it. Can you do that? He's like, oh yeah, we have image to image. Just go over here. And I was like, oh, thank you. Like this would have, I didn't know even which tool to use. I wouldn't have known what it's called. I wouldn't have known how to do it. And then, oh, I did it, but there's this one problem. He's like, oh, just change this setting, uh, blah, blah, blah. And then it just fixed it. I was like, wow, that's, uh, that's amazing. And it saved me so much time. And you, you really do have to play with these things. And most people don't have the time or the patience to go play with these things to figure out how they actually work.

As a business leader, you pay your lawyer $1,000, $1,500 an hour to give you tax advice, right? Why would someone not pay that for a Midjourney person if they can answer their question in an hour? For a world leader, thought leader.

Mark Cuban has this great blog. I don't think he updates anymore, but he was writing it for maybe a couple decades now. It's really old. And I used to go back and read his old posts. And a lot of people don't know this, but he actually got his first like $2 or $3 million of wealth when when he was 31 because he started this thing called MicroSolutions. It was basically, I forget how he described it, but it was basically like a IT agency. So like if a big-ish or even a small company was like implementing Oracle or something like that, he would help install it on everyone's computer and then teach people how to use it. And he goes, the reason my company was successful wasn't because I necessarily was an expert on this stuff, but he goes, I was the only one, and he used their same acronym, He goes, I was the only one who read the fucking manual. He goes, I would stay up late at night and I would read the fucking manual and I would just learn how does this HP computer work? And the next day I could go and like talk to a business owner and explain how it works and say, yeah, we can install that thing or this thing or that thing. And then I would go and read the manual on those other things. And that's all I did. And it was hard work and I stayed up all night reading these things, but that's how I became an expert in the stuff is I just read the manual, which no one does. And it's pretty funny because he used the exact, I think he has a blog post actually that has the exact same acronym that you have.

Here's what he said exactly. It's a blog post called How to Win at the Sport of Business. He goes, every night I would take home a different software manual and I would read it. Of course, the reading was captivating. I'm reading Peachtree Accounting, WordStar, Harvard Graphics, you know, Lotus, Apex. At the, every night I would read some after getting home, no matter how late it was. It turns out not a lot of people ever bother to RTFM, read the fricking manual. And so it turned out, so, so people really started thinking that I knew my stuff and that's all I was doing.

Yeah, that's hilarious that he like talks and he talks about that in a ton of different blog posts where he talks about read the, read the freaking manual. It's, uh, it's quite good. Uh, and he, and he attributes that to like a lot of his early success.

You have a few others that I gotta ask you about. Okay. So you wrote on this little cheat sheet, you wrote, uh, hack, uh, you know, non-obvious barriers to entry for business. And then you said hacking the iPhone to record screen. What are you talking about here? Non-obvious barriers, barriers to entry for business.

Sure. And I mean, as I said, you don't have to be the first mover to market, but, um, to be successful in business. But when an entirely new product comes out, there are opportunities to hack the product. That's why I was able to hack LinkedIn ads, the hack we've talked about before, because LinkedIn just launched it. So it was not properly bug-checked and all that. Stuff, you know. Now, the idea I was saying, or it's not necessarily a business idea, but where you could discover opportunities for me, and to give an example, is that you might have a wedge, or like a business, you might have a, you might have a hack, this is not a business, but maybe it can go somewhere from that initial kind of hack, you know. So to give an example with Fungal, back in like 2010, The business I had before, we were making educational videos, like how to use Adobe Photoshop and stuff like this. So like videos about desktop, like computer applications. And fairly around that time, I think a year before, the iPhone App Store had launched. And I was reading this Gartner report, like, iPhone apps are going to blow up. And then I was kind of feeling like, wait, So we're doing this for desktop and apps on your computer. Why could we not do the same on your iPhone? Now that nowadays is very easy to record your screen on the iPhone, right? Like you just pull down and tap record screen. At the time, you could not record the iPhone screen. Now I read a little bit online and I kind of felt like, hey, I think I've looked up these different pieces of hardware. It's like. A camcorder mixed with like this cable you plug in with the iPhone, but you have to jailbreak the iPhone, etc., etc. I was like, I reckon, or I just have a hunch that if we put these together, I might be able to figure out how to record the iPhone screen. Now my co-founder, he was like, dude, this is a fucking waste of time. Like, you've got 48 hours to try this out. Otherwise, we need to move on. All right. Now, not that many people know this, but actually the Apple Store lets you buy a product and you can return it within 14 days, even if you used it. A MacBook, an iPhone, an iPad, you can return it used. So we had an intern, it was his first day there. And I basically said, our company, we have about $1,000 in the bank account. And I told him like, take this credit bank credit card. And I told him to spend our entire budget at the Apple Store. I want you to buy the latest iPhone and latest iPad. And your first task as the intern is jailbreak this. And we have 48 hours to figure out if we can record the screen from this because my co-founder thinks it's a waste of time. I think it's not. And, and we, and then we're going to return it within 14 days. So we have a time, time buffer because we don't have $1,000 to just throw around. So we're going to play around with this iPhone, max 14 days, then we're going to send it back. We managed to record this, we managed to record the screen. It was a free, it was taking like a camcorder cable. You had to jailbreak the iPhone, et cetera, et cetera. But we managed to get this unique thing where we could record the screen of the iPhone. At that time, we didn't have anything useful to do with it. It's like, okay, great. We can record the screen in the iPhone. What can we do with this? But later on when we built the video ad network, um, when we came up with the idea about the video ad network that Vongo is today, Obviously, if you're going to run a video ad, an app needs to have an advertisement to run, right? And we were the only— because we had just started with this, we actually just had an in-house production studio. That's how we initially made money by charging $500 to make a video for your app. But $500, that kind of sucks. But what we did is we parlayed that idea And at some point, we made the best videos of anyone, like AppLovin or whoever. They couldn't make a video. So what they'd have to do is you'd have to spend thousands of dollars hiring a creative ad agency who probably used a camera to record the iPhone screen, or you had to do loads of work as the app developer and send them all your image assets. We could literally record the screen of the iPhone that others could not. And so what we said is like, hey guys, we're no longer— you can't buy a video from us anymore. People loved our videos, the best quality videos, but we're like, even if you offer us $2,000, we don't make videos anymore. But if you spend more than $25,000 on our advertising network, we'll make you the video for free. And our videos are the best. So they're going to convert amazingly as well. But you can, you can use the video on your website and stuff. But you cannot use this video on AppLovin or any other network. It's proprietary to us. So that was a hack that worked for Vungle. And what I would say, obviously you have to have a credit card that had this limit and check that Apple actually allows this. But what I would do is if I am 20 years old and I have a credit card because America gives everyone credit cards, I would go to the Apple Store the first day the Apple Vision Pro comes out and I would try and hack it and jailbreak it and play around with it, look up online how to jailbreak it. and I would try and find hacks, like how to record the screen of the Apple Vision Pro. That's not going to be a feature at day one. No one needs to do that. If you can hack it and do that, you have something proprietary. You could launch a business off the back of that. And I would return it within 14 days and maybe go to another Apple Store and buy it and get my friends to buy it or something. But that is one opportunity of like, you know, it's a hack. It's not a business. But that unique hack that no one else has, can lead you to have a barrier to entry to be successful and build a billion-dollar business in a tangential industry from that.

I love that.

I love that. You, you also have a couple on here. You said, why I believe in the law of attraction and practical applications. This is interesting to me because I think there's like people who believe in the law of attraction and they also, you know, believe in horoscopes and crystals and other stuff too, probably. And then there's people who are, you know, hyperlogical, rational problem solver types that typically don't believe in something like the law of attraction. I would've pegged you as more of the practical, uh, logical problem solver type, but you're saying you believe in this. So tell me why you believe in this and what do you mean by practical applications?

Yeah, people that are really rational, um, like my brother-in-law, is a bit hard to talk about this topic 'cause they're so rational. I'm pretty rational, but I'm also open-minded stuff. Now, law of attraction, the interpretation many people with the crystals take, and I kind of, it was kind of funny because I went to somebody that did this alternative kind of, kind of like massage therapy, but like alternative. And then she was doing it at her house. But then on the bookshelf was like a book like, How to Manifest Well, to be like a billionaire. But then I'm like, well, you're in this like really crappy studio. So how's that going for you? You know, like, the extreme alternative side that you're talking about, Sean, like doing horoscopes or whatever. I'm somewhere in the middle where I'm like, law of attraction, so popularized by the book called The Secret. Um, if you just do it at the basic level, it's just like, oh, just like think about what you want and it will manifest and appear to you. But actually there's a book that I like called Practical Law of Attraction. And what it's kind of saying, to be honest, it basically I didn't know about this stuff when I was launching my business, but it kind of actually reaffirmed the stuff I was already doing in my life, to be honest, which is like, clearly, clearly feeling and defining what you want, and then taking steps to get there. Now, why I think there's a practical application and why I do believe in it, I don't believe that you just think of it, and then nothing happens. I think Now, to give a— let me give— let me just give an example story that reaffirms this. I was, I was living with my roommate. And at this time, my business was going pretty good. But he was trying to launch a business off the ground. And he was 35. And he was trying to fundraise, raise a seed round. And he could not raise any money at all. And his mindset was just stuck about feeling sorry for himself. Like, he was like, oh, I read on TechCrunch about 18-year-olds getting into Y Combinator, but nobody respects me. Like, I have way more experience than him. But investors, they must just— they don't value me. They blah blah blah. He's feeling sorry for himself. He's having negative energy. I mean, a prime example of it was like one day, he called me and like, really like anxious. And he's like, oh my god, Jack, like, a letter from the IRS arrived for you. And I'm like, dude, I'm sure it's not that big of a deal. But he's like, dude, what the fuck? That he's freaking out, right? And, uh, lo and behold, it actually was a refund check. They were giving me a refund, but he had this negative mindset. And I feel that obviously people study body language and all this stuff, but I feel that law of attraction works because there is so many micro signals and body language we are projecting to people all around us that we are not in control of and don't even know. And so I feel for me, I and my co-founder, we were convinced we're gonna raise funding and we are the shit. And I think that investors and stuff can tell, you know, you can tell if someone's bluffing. So he's going into this meeting and he's got 100 rejections and he's feeling sorry for himself. He's already going in with the idea that these people are not gonna invest in me. And so they are just sensing that this guy's a loser, right? Versus me, I'm just like, we're gonna raise funding. And so when I say something, like an investor one time asked us like, how's your fundraising going? We had no investors, but we told him like, oh, it's going amazing. We're just deciding, we've got a bunch of top tier people interested. We're just deciding who's going to be the best fit for our business. And the guy kind of freaked out and actually gave us a term sheet. Because I think he could tell that we believed it, we were not lying, because we actually believed it. Now what was amazing with my friend is at just at some point, I just noticed him adopt a mindset shift, just one day, basically. And at some point, he basically just said, like, alright, look, what I've been doing thus far, it hasn't worked. And, and he also was saying that he looked at me a bit as a bit inspiration, because Jack just doesn't worry about this stuff, you know. And he's like, I realized that I haven't going, been going all in because I'm scared that if I don't raise funding, I'm gonna look like a failure to my network. And so if I try and do a business again, then they'll think like, oh, well, he failed at the last one. I'm not gonna do it again. But he's like, he's like, from this day forward, I'm adopting a mindset that if I do not raise funding for this business, I'm never going to try and raise funding for a business ever again. This is my one shot. And I'm gonna go all in. And he looked up all his connections on LinkedIn. And he was not embarrassed about rejection or that he would look stupid to them in future. He's like, I'm going to ask every single person in my network for investor intros. Literally within a month or so, he raised an amazing seed round. Business now has raised over $25 million, because he just went all in. And I think that people could tell that he had the conviction, you know, he's telling them now, he's not feeling sorry for himself, like, I can't raise money. He's like, I'm gonna raise funding. And this business is going to be fucking huge. And just, it was amazing to see him adopt that mindset shift. And so that is an example for me of law of attraction is like, yes, you're manifesting it and whatever shit, but you're actually believing it. And you're projecting it to others. Now think he's adopted that new mindset, right? So if an investor rejects him, in his original view, that would have reaffirmed his original view, right? Like, oh, all the investors hate me. And I'm never gonna raise funding because I just got rejected. If with this new mindset, actually, it doesn't necessarily have to change every single outcome in every interaction you have. But it also changes how you view them. If one investor rejects him, now you'll just be like, oh, well, I'm gonna raise funding. So I guess this guy was just not fit. I just move on to the next one. You wouldn't see it as reaffirming that you suck. You would just be like, oh, this investor's an idiot. Like, I'm still going to raise funding. It doesn't distract you from the path. So that is what I was thinking about when it comes to law of attraction.

And I've— we've been friends for a while, but I remember very distinctly, and you might need to fill in some of the details, right? And I'll try to be vague and you could decide what you want to share. But I remember distinctly, I think we were— I think we were at my apartment in Soma, in Soma, when you came over, or we could have been at my house in Glen Park, but I remember like distinctly hanging out with you and you had just— Vungle hadn't sold yet, but you had sold some shares to live off of because you were basically capped. You didn't have a lot of money. You sold some shares and you got maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars, but you lived off that for like 3 years and it was at the very end of that money and you had You didn't even tell me. I asked like how things are going. Do you have enough money to last until you think the company's going to sell? And you're like, yeah, I think it's going to sell for a whole lot of money, for hundreds of millions of dollars. And I'll be fine when that happens. And I was like, but how are you now? And for some reason, I remember I saw your Robinhood account, or I saw one of your accounts. And I don't know if you remember this, but I think there was single-digit thousand dollars left. Because you had made like a really dumb trade. Do you remember that? And you were like totally calm. And I remember like being around you and it was like, you're, you're one of my like 3 best friends. And I remember thinking like, oh, like you're my family now. Like you have inspired me because you actually were living what you're talking about now.

Do you remember that?

Do you remember when that happened?

Yeah. And I mean, in line with that, basically, yeah, I got a bit of money, like as you said, a secondary, right? And I was living and then The money was running out. Doesn't last forever. I think that I, I saw from the previous episode, people like talking about specific numbers, right? So I think that when I, I think, yeah, I think that when I left Vungle and then tried doing Shipp and it didn't work out, et cetera, but I didn't have any many savings at Vungle. I think I got $120,000 salary. We paid us after we raised funding. But prior to that, we'd never taken any money. And then just to help me out, because I was like, hey dude, I don't actually have any money. My co-founder at Vungle helped give me an introduction to some people that bought a secondary of some of my stock. Now I think that, I can't remember, I think it was $500,000 and I hadn't held the stock for 5 years, so it was not qualified for this thing called QSBS yet. So I basically had to pay a bunch of— probably have to pay half of that in tax being in California, right? So I had like, let's say $250K left. That's not a load of money. That's not a lot of money in San Francisco to pay your rent, food, if you have no other income. Now, I was advising companies and stuff, but they don't give you— they give you equity, they're not giving you money. And my money was running out. And Sam, like you said, I didn't have much money left. And people were saying to me like, hey dude, what are you going to do if you like run out of money? And I was like, oh, I guess I'll have to get a job. But I'm not really contemplating that right now. I don't have a timeline for when business is going to exit. But I kind of feel something is telling me that I'm going to be alright. I'm not freaking out about it. Even worst case scenario, I'll move back in with my parents, whatever. But I was not making a plan B.

What was the dumb trade?

I was day trading, like options trading and all this shit. And kind of funny.

You're like, $250K is not a lot of money in San Francisco for food, rent, spent in my day trading business.

I, and with hindsight is very stupid, but like I was day trading and stuff to try and make some money. When I looked back in hindsight, I actually was spending like a few hours a day because I just got interested in trading. So learned options trading and all this, spending a few hours a day. I actually would've made more money if I had just put it in the Vanguard VTI. It was S&P 500. I said, wasted all this time and yes, lost a load of money. Yeah. So that was just a negative trait of experimenting, I guess.

The way you described it, I've heard described differently. So Tony Robbins did this, this is a video on YouTube of him talking about this where he says like, you know, you've ever heard of the phrase like a vicious cycle and a vicious cycle is kind of like what you described your friend was initially doing, which is he draws these 3 circles. He says, first one's belief, second one's action, third is results. And he goes, Like what do you do when you, like, let's say you're, you're supposed to do something, but you don't really think it's going to work. It doesn't even matter what it is. Like, you know, you're looking for the salt and you know, your girlfriend says it's in the cabinet, but you already looked there. You don't think it's there. So you kind of, you go, you don't really rummage around too much because you don't believe it's there. Right? So basically low belief typically creates weak, you know, low or weak action and low or weak action almost always creates bad results. And then the The message, the story we tell ourselves is, see, I knew it. I knew it wouldn't work. And then it just reinforces the low belief. And that's the vicious cycle that happens for people. You know, it could be, I don't really believe that I'm going to stick to this diet. And so therefore I'm not really that hardcore about it. I start to slip and then my results say, yeah, you never stick to what you say. And then you reinforce a low belief, right? It could be on the end. It could be business. It could be personal. It could be whatever. And then there's the exact opposite, which is the virtuous cycle. The virtuous cycle is massive belief. This is going to work. What happens when you believe something's really going to work? You wake up before the alarm clock, you get out of bed, you start doing it immediately. You can't wait and you take massive action. What happens when you take massive action for a while? You start to get good results or massive results. When you get massive results, it reinforces the belief. See, I knew this shit was going to work. And so that, and there's basically the, that's the difference between winners and losers is which side of that cycle do you go down? And like the core thing is there's some people who just wait for a result to happen to inform their belief. And what that basically means is I'm going to sort of wait to hope to get lucky and then I'll start to believe. And I think anybody who's in this kind of entrepreneurial bucket, the prereq for any result is the belief. And you have to have that sort of massive conviction or massive belief in yourself and in what you're doing. And that part is the, that's the law of attraction part. That's the part where it's faith. It hasn't happened yet. You believe it will happen. And because you believe it will happen, you're right. It's not like Law of, uh, not like The Secret where they're just like, close your eyes and you say, I'm not, you know, there are no weeds in the backyard. There are no weeds in the backyard. You look, oh, there's still weeds in the backyard. Well, you didn't take any action. You didn't go and get rid of the weeds is, is, you know, the action is a, is a, is a requirement to actually do this. You, you also mentioned one other thing on that, which you said you have to feel it versus just say it. Is there a difference there? Because when I talk to people who kind of really believe in this, they overemphasize this feeling, feeling it part versus just saying it or trying to believe it in your head.

So my wife is totally not into this at all, and maybe it just doesn't work for her, but she's like, dude, I can't just feel that I'm going to— I can't just feel it's going to work. It doesn't work for her. But for me, maybe I'm just delusional or I just have conviction in something, but I just sometimes just feel it's gonna work. And I guess one bit that is related to this a bit is like perhaps adopting different mindset personas. So I saw this interview with Beyoncé and they were asking her about like, she has her thing like Sasha Fierce, right? Her nickname. And they were like, when does, when do you become Sasha Fierce? And when you just Beyoncé, they're saying it was a joke, but she's like, I literally become Sasha Fierce before I'm going to go on the stage. Because when I'm Beyoncé, I'm nervous, I think people are gonna hate me or whatever. And I just adopt this alternative persona that I am Sasha Fierce, and I'm going to kill this performance. People are gonna love it. It's amazing. Because they're adopting— she's adopting some persona, and she's really feeling it. I don't necessarily adopt this other persona, but that is the feeling that I think Would be insane.

Yeah, I do the same thing. And I also think that, who do you become? I have this persona that I created.

Angry Patel. Like, what are you, who are you going to become?

And again, this is another one that came out of Tony Robbins. He goes, we all have a version of our personality. Like, you know, raise your hand if you've ever been super kind to others.

Yeah.

Yeah. Everybody raise their hand. Raise your hand if you ever made made selfish choices and been a selfish asshole? Everybody raises their hand. He's like, we all have all these features of our personalities. Like the question is, who's driving the car right now? And he's like, you know, people think that they come to this weekend workshop and I'm going to, oh, Tony Robbins, he changed your life. In fact, when you go home, people sort of mock you like, oh, so what happened? You're a whole new guy now. And he's like, you know, obviously you don't, you know, you don't become a whole new person after 35 years in one weekend. Um, but he's like, you know, one thing we will do is he's like, I'm gonna take the most badass version of you and that's who gets to drive this weekend. And if you, if it's only for this weekend and you decide after this weekend, I don't want that person to be the one who's making decisions from now on. All right, fine. Fair, fair play. But for these next 2 days, that's who's in charge. We all have a version of ourselves that is the more badass version of ourselves. The one that, that does believe it's going to happen. The one that, one that is decisive versus indecisive. All these traits. He's like, and what do you call it? He's like, what do you call when you, um, I forgot what he said. He's like, he's like, we're going to make that, that, uh, he's like, we're going to make that personality our bitch. And he's like, what do you, what do you do when you train a dog? You give it a name and you train it to come when you call it. And he's like, so you're going to give it a name. You're going to figure out how you're going to be able to adopt that state when you want to be in that state. He's like, that takes practice reps and we're going to get a bunch of reps at it this weekend. And you sort of, you have to figure out, all right, what is The version of me that does have those traits, that does walk that way, that does make those decisions. And then can you call it on command? Or are you only going to do it when you feel good? Are you only going to do it when the weather's nice? Like, no, no, you want to be able to have that on demand when you want it. He says the same thing. Like, I think his real name is not Tony Robbins either. It's like his original name was like Anthony. He's got some other last name. He's like, people see me now and they see me on stage and all this stuff. They think, oh man, Tony, you're, you're, you're amazing. You, you, you're just special. And he's like, no, I was Anthony blah, blah, blah. I was broke. I was fat. I was all these things. He's like, I created this Tony Robbins motherfucker. I created him. And I was just like, I like that part of the thing that he was talking about because it's, I think, more empowering. If you feel like, oh, you just are the way you are and that's it, you're a fixed quantity and it was, you know, it's based on your genetics. It's based on your childhood, things you didn't have control of versus this idea that, oh, I actually have multiple versions of my personality. There's some that I would want to be in charge more often than others. And I can craft that. I can create that version of me that I want. That's a different mindset. Some people don't believe it. Some people are like really married to their kind of like their upbringing and their past traumas and their DNA. That's not how I look at the world, at least.

Dude, this is getting me amped. I feel good. I feel like I need to go create my version of Sasha Fierce. Jack, I, um, you inspire me. I'm happy. I feel thankful we're friends. I feel thankful that you came here. You're a very inspiring person. I just feel, I feel you, you're, you do have, it's like you're, you're almost not inspiring because you're not this like crazy intimidating person. Or I guess you're the right type of inspiring because you're not this like crazy intimidating person, but you have, and you have a very, you're very mild manner. I'll be with you and, um, other friends. And I'd be like, Jack, like, I already know, you know all about this topic that they're talking about, but you're just sitting here asking questions. Why aren't you like pumping your chest more? Or like, you are dressed like this bum right now at this thing. All these people think that you're just like one of my loser friends, but you're like, you know, successful, not in terms of just financial finances, but you've got like this awesome marriage.

You're my successful friend, dude. Can you, can you help me out here a little bit?

Well, I'll be like, you're like successful in like all attributes. Like I know you're like really insightful. I know that you're successful traditionally. You've got all these like amazing things, but you're, you don't even like, you want me to brag about you? That's like, I feel like I've got to like sometimes like put you on a pedestal. But that's one of the things I love about you is like, you're just very, very meek is a bad word because that almost sounds insulting, but you're very humble and you're very mild mannered. And that's one of the reasons why I love when you come on here and you like explaining some of these stories because you never ever brag about yourself. And I like hearing you do that every once in a while.

Jack.

Yeah. Well, thanks for having me on again. I mean, picking up on that, I mean, what it is very important for me just to, I guess just from my childhood and stuff, but I've always tried to be humble and I'm not judging any, it doesn't matter. I will have an in-depth conversation with like, to give you an example, I'm here in Portugal, right? And there's a guy I pay a guy to come and pick up my recycling. I'll, uh, my cardboard is taking the cardboard to the trash. So trash man, I'll have an in-depth conversation with him about how his life is going and stuff like that. And I think it is good to remember that you can be successful and still be humble and not judge people about where they're at now. Um, Sam, like your father-in-law lives with like a celebrity and he said like, the celebrity just fucking lives in the same apartment complex and treats everyone like shit and ignores him. He's like, and he and his, they're both rich. And the thing to remember, I think, is where people are in their life now is not where they're going to be in 10 years. And people, if you treat them like shit, they're going to remember. Like I, when I was 19, 20, we pitched a VC in London, a venture capitalist. And we'd been speaking to the associates, we had a few meetings with them. And yes, we had nothing. And our idea was terrible. But the associate said like, hey, the partners agreed to have a meeting with you, just like come by here at like 6 PM to come by the office. We're like, okay, it's a bit of a weird time to come by, but sure, whatever. And we had no money, like spent the money. My business partner especially was in a lot of debt. We spent the money, got an underground ticket, went there, etc. In within 10 to 15 minutes of the meeting getting started, because the guy was I was asking questions, he's like, you guys don't have a business. This is just like shit. And at like 6:15, he's just like, yo, I've got to go to dinner. So this meeting's over. 10 years, 15, however many years, it's been more than 10 years later, we still remember that meeting. And that guy treated us like shit. He's still got a VC fund. If he asked me for deal flow, I'm not going to give it. I'm not going to pretend that never happened. I'm like, dude, I remember how you treated me. When I was shit. 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. I call you— when I describe you to other friends, I say, I think Jack is the most interesting man in the world. And I think there's this great quote, it's like, to be interesting, you need to be interested. And to me, that's the perfect description for you. You're the most interesting man in the world because you're interested in the most things at the most depth, you know, in the highest variety. And so I've talked to you about, you know, 5 different things and you've gone down a rabbit hole in each one of them. So it turns out, and because of that, you always have like a really interesting point of view. What's been the best find, like you're talking about this chocolate rabbit hole you went down and you're like, you know, you, you, you may come out with a different conclusion than the experts or the people who've done this for a long time. What's an example where you kind of just got, you came to a different conclusion yourself?

Well, it was actually, I was listening back to our last episode or maybe one of the previous episodes. And it was what we talked about there, where it was like, I just looked, me and my co-founder at least just researched how ad networks work. For a week. And then we were like, alright, we think this is how it works. And Tomas, who runs AngelPad, was like, dude, you're thinking you come into totally different conclusions in a week. I was working at Google for a decade. And there's people with decades of experience in this. But we just thought from the principle of just very basics. And so the first bit, similar with app loving, is we were like, why are these ad networks charging based on how many times someone watches a video? We built a video ad network. We were like, apps, they actually just care about the end action. So they actually only care how many people install their app or how much money these users are gonna spend in their app. They don't actually care how many people watch the video. So why is it that the industry charges that way? And so we kind of made a bet and said, we will charge it doesn't matter how many people watch your video, we'll just only charge you based on how many people install it. It was a bet. Luckily, it worked out. Sometimes you have to kind of make a gamble, right? Like, especially with an ad network, we had no idea if the business would work, because the unit economics are kind of out of our hands, right? We don't know if these ad networks, if it's going to work.

You, you always do weird stuff like this that makes sense. But I'm like, No, why, why would you ever do that? So, um, like for example, you named your child, so Jack has a 2-year-old now. Uh, you named your child Baby.

Yeah.

For the, you told me, you're like, I'm gonna, I'm just gonna name her Baby for the first 12 months. 'Cause I want to get to know her. And I was like, dude, like everything about your life is weird. Can you just, just do, do something normal for the kid? And you're like, No, I think, I think this actually makes more sense. And then I got to know her and I like, and then you, you, you should talk about the naming ceremony, but you did this thing where you named her after a year and you're like, this name, like it fit her more. And I had to get to know her a little bit. And I was like, after a year, I was like, that actually is, makes so much sense, but it's so not normal, but you're always doing these weird things that actually appear to be, well, you've done a lot of stupid stuff, but you've done a lot of things that actually like are pretty pretty amazing, but are not normal at all.

Yeah.

And that's one of my favorite parts about you, you know what I mean?

Oh, thanks. And I mean, also, because I listened to the pod a lot, I noticed that you guys hadn't talked about— Sam had made a massive announcement on all his social that now he's going to be having a baby. And so notice you guys hadn't talked about that. So I had some of the different wackier things I've done with my baby, if you wanted to talk about them. A naming ceremony was one of them.

Yeah, you know, me and Sam just, we're just like guys. We're just like, yeah, um, nice job with the thing. All right. Uh, let's move on. You know, girls are like, oh my God, congratulations. I'm so excited for you.

Wow.

How, oh my God, you look, you're glowing, Sam. You look amazing. And I was just like, hey dude, um, good shit about the, you know, you know, all right, let's talk about business.

The, the, your stuff's working. Congratulations. We, um, Well, I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure like what I wanted to put on the internet.

Mm-hmm.

And I haven't actually made my decision. What, uh, shirt—

Oh, you made your decision. Sam posted a shirtless picture of himself to celebrate the baby. I was like, oh wow, that is, that is unbelievable combination there. Like that's a, what an upsell you created in this photo. That was best bump announcement. Sam with the shirt off flexing.

It's a year and 8 months in the middle of my stomach.

She's like half cropped out. Of the photo. It's like, oh yeah, by the way, there's a baby over there.

Hey, that's the only reason why we did the whole thing. Uh, do you, uh, do you put your, do you put your kid's face on the internet? I don't think you have. Maybe on Facebook, Sean. Have you, Jack? No, I haven't. But you only do it on Facebook, right? Where it's just like friends.

Well, my wife does on her own Instagram. So, you know, that's like, but you know, it's just her friends.

So yeah, I'm trying to decide what to do. I think I don't mind, but I don't know. Anyway, I'm still like working through that.

Let's go through some of the things you did on the parenting side, Jack. So. The naming thing, Sam talked about it. Yeah, let's do that. Let's finish that one. So how'd you come up with that idea? Do you think it was a good idea? And eventually, how did you actually end up naming her besides baby?

So basically, again, coming, like, basically I think one of my values maybe is I don't like being told what to do. And relating to what we were just talking about, I also like to question norms. So preparing to give birth. Or maybe even, yeah, yeah. Preparing to give birth, what I read online and the midwife, et cetera, was saying is you have to pick a baby's name before you leave the hospital so we can put it on her birth certificate and health stuff. And so, and I was like, but why do you have to do that? Like, that's quite a short deadline that you have to pick a name before you leave the hospital after you go through this traumatic experience.

Yeah.

I was like, I don't really like being told to do that. Like, does she really need a name? Or he or she, like, just been born? Like, do you really need a name? You don't really need. And so basically, I researched, and it varies state by state. But I found that as long as both parents consent— this was in Hawaii, where I was— as long as both parents consent, within the first 12 months, you can change a baby's name. Without having to go to court or anything like that. You just fill out a form. And as long as both parents consent, we just had like a notary come to our house, you can change the name pretty easily. So I was like, okay, well, I'll— I mean, the first conclusion was I don't want to have to pick a name before leaving the hospital. That's too much rush for me. And it's also telling me what to do. So my wife, the last name was more important to my wife, because She's Korean and in their culture they have like a book of last names and whatever. And so, and we kind of made a deal, okay, the baby can have your last name, but I get to take the lead on the first name. I wouldn't pick it by myself, but I get to take a lead on what is it. And so then I was like, okay, well, we'll just have the first name as Baby. And so, um, that is what we did at the hospital, like, uh, on the birth certificate, etc. So submitted it. And then I did get a call from the Department of Health or whatever, like a week later. And they're like, okay, we just want to confirm. I understand you've had a recent birth, just want to confirm the name. And I was like, yes, it is B-A-B-Y. And they're like, okay, so just to clarify, it's Baby? The name of your baby? And then it kind of surprised me was I was like, yeah, that's correct. And then the guy was like, okay, that's cool. I mean, actually I've worked here 10 years and there has been one or two other people who've done this before as well, actually. And I was pretty surprised by that. But anyway, and then I also thought like, um, in Southeast Asian culture, like China, Korea, maybe some other places, they have this kind of just for fun, they have this ritual when the baby is a year old or so, they put it, the baby on the floor and on the other end of the room, they put down like a stethoscope, a law book, stuff like this. And they just let the baby crawl and whatever it picked is like, oh, it picked a stethoscope. That means you are gonna be a doctor. And then it's just for fun. Yeah. Like they do this.

Indians do that too, but it's just 3 stethoscopes.

Yeah.

Oh, you, you're supposed to pick up all of them.

Exactly.

Yeah. Except like 50 years ago they started adding like little motels that you could pick, you know, they're like, oh, nice. An econ lodge. All right, sorry, go on.

And for my bit then I was like, all right, what if we actually did that, but we just have different names so then she can pick her own name. Cause I also remembered that when I was, when when first joining high school, like the first day of school, they were like, all right, everyone go around the room and say an interesting fact about yourself. And I remember I couldn't really think about an interesting fact about myself. And I was like, oh, well, if I do this, then she's always going to have an interesting fact about herself, right? Like I picked my own name. It's pretty interesting. So I was like, that's pretty cool.

And this like product obsession, you've done this with babies. So Jack's actually the best gift giver of all time. So what he does is Uh, like for my big, my big life events, he'll, um, like one time when we got married, he sent me this, maybe like 3 really big boxes. I bet you there was like $3,000 or $4,000 worth of products in there. And he'll send me like a variety of products. And then he sends you a list of a paper that's like 3 pages long. And it's a detailed description that says like, this is blank. The reason why it's the best. And he like explains it and it's like, sometimes it's really random. For example, he was like, these are the best bath towels because they have a little bit of copper in them, which prevents molding. Or he even like, my wife uses lotion all the time. He's like, this is the best lotion. It's the best because it uses this vitamin or whatever. And it was like crazy. Or it was even like, these are the best, um, gummy bears because they're low in sugar, but they still taste sweet, but they only use stevia. And you did it with like, Maybe 50 items. And then when I told you we were pregnant, you sent me this box, but it was all baby stuff. And you're like, this baby formula, it's meant for babies that are 3 months old, but I actually think it's best for newborns because it's the same thing as the newborn one. But like, there's this small, very, I forget exactly everything, but it was like this massive list. And you're doing now, are you doing that now with all the baby stuff where you're just like literally analyzing every product?

Um, yeah, I test out quite a bit. I mean, the reason that I gave it to you as a gift is because you and Sarah had told me like, Oh, you should create a business like Jack, Jack's Box of like your favorite stuff. I didn't actually want to do it as a business because I don't think it would make that much money and quite a bit of effort. But I wanted to do for you guys, you kind of come up with the idea. I research different products now.

Do you publish your research?

Well, not for baby products yet. I was actually thinking maybe to make like a baby book or ebook. Um, just with different recommendations you've seen, um, on my, as my pinned tweet on Twitter, I have my favorite products, um, just random products. So I have whatever favorite, I don't know what I've got on there, but I've got like 20 products I shared as my favorites on Twitter.

And you're, uh, Jack Smith. That's your thing. Uh, let's talk about some of the other crazy things you're doing. So you have a guy, uh, watching your baby on baby camera and Pakistan or something like that. What's going on? So you, what, what are you doing with this baby sleep monitor thing?

Yeah, I mean, I kind of feel bad because, you know, when, when speaking to new parents or if someone says like, are you having a baby? Like people say like, oh, prepare to like never sleep again. You're never gonna be able to sleep. And I kind of don't say anything, but inside I'm like, dude, I'm sleeping better now than I was before having a baby. And that's due to setting up various things. But one of those is that, I mean, you have to have a house big enough for this. But basically, we put my daughter a few doors down. And so initially, if she would wake up and cry in the night, we found that, you know, she would wake up, cry for like 5 minutes, then often go back to sleep. So she only really needed help if she's crying like longer than that. And I actually got the idea from Jonathan Swanson, who's the founder of Thumbtack, And he called it like digital night nanny. I called it like Deep Sentinel for babies. I know Sam invested in Deep Sentinel. And basically what it's doing is having a virtual assistant I have in India. And basically, he just watches my baby cam all night. And he basically has specific instructions, like, okay, if the baby wakes up and starts crying, you start a timer. And if she just cries for like 3 minutes and goes back to sleep, don't do anything. But if she cries for like more than 7 minutes, then call me and wake me up. And we have like, you know, I have a special phone for that. And we have a backup phone in case that one broke or something. So basically, we only get woken up if our daughter is crying longer than 7 minutes. And then so now, I would say, only have to tend to her, she's 2 and 3 months, 2 years, 3 months, she now only wakes up maybe once every 2 months, we have to go to her. Otherwise, we don't have to do anything. So that was one Jonathan Swanson came up with. It's been really good for me.

What does that assistant say? That Indian person say like when you're like, yeah, here's the job? I mean, are they? That's a pretty odd request.

Yeah. Well, one of the guys actually, it was I'd been working with this guy as a virtual assistant. And then he's, he's like, oh, my brother's in India. He speaks a little bit of English, but not perfect English. He's looking for a job. Do you have any tasks that I can give him? And then so I was just like, alright, you can just do this. So I think for him, pretty awesome job, because he can be multitasking, he can be doing whatever else. I mean, the downside is that I don't know how they're working this, but He actually doesn't take off a single day in the year. He's working 365 days a year somehow. So I guess he's having like Thanksgiving and Christmas and the baby monitors on loudspeaker with his family.

I don't know.

So he doesn't take any time off.

Yeah.

He's just not there, Jack. He hasn't looked at the camera in months. He's like, this baby's 2 years old.

He's going to, your baby's going to have some horrible separation anxiety. I feel like it's going to be crying for like 15, 30 minutes and like nothing ever happens.

Yeah.

Your baby's like his Twitch stream.

So, um, what about some of these other things? So you said, uh, I don't think that universities will exist in 20 years and don't plan to send my daughter to school, let alone college. Okay. A bunch there. Say more.

So what I'd read this book, somebody on Twitter had recommended it and, um, it's called like, Don't Tell Me I Can't. And it's written by this guy, a kid who was like 14 and he it's, it's this trend at the moment. It's, it's trending now, but he's, he's talking from his perspective that he was doing this since 3 years old or something, how he was brought up, that he was not homeschooled. Like homeschooling has been around a long time, right? He was what they're calling unschooled. And this is actually a trend at the moment. And he described how it worked for him. Basically how it worked for him is like his family was super poor and also his dad was an army veteran, like injured in the army. And so was in a wheelchair and stuff. And so he was always kind of having to help out his dad and be self-sufficient. And so, and the local school was like the worst in the country or something, and they didn't want to send him there. So initially, they were like, alright, we'll just try homeschooling you. And so he was homeschooled for like 6 to 12 months. But it didn't go that, that well. And one day, his dad, he said, normally they were more encouraging, but for whatever reason, one day, He just asked his dad like, hey dad, how do people, how do people get rich? And his parents were like really poor. So maybe also touched on an insecurity. His dad is just like, oh, why don't you just figure it out yourself? You know, why don't you just watch some videos of Warren Buffett? Because I don't know, we're not rich. And then he did that. He went and listened to loads of Warren Buffett stuff. And it actually spiraled from there. So unschooling is the concept that homeschooling is trying to replicate the school curriculum, right? Like, all right, math, science, and you still have to do the tests and all that. Unschooling is, there is no, there is no curriculum. The kid just learns whatever they want to learn and whatever is useful. So he was saying from around an age of like 5 to 7 years old, he was repairing their car and doing things like this. And he'd grown up in a poor family, but he actually started his own business. And by the time he was 13, he like parlayed it. Like, so initially he bought a tiny piece of land and got some animals on it and like sell the produce in his local town and stuff. Then he got, he built, he bought a super rundown house that was falling apart. And the seller, they'd built the house themselves. And so they didn't want to sell it just for money, but he's like, hey, look, I'll buy your shack that's falling down and I'm a kid and I'm going to put all, dedicate all my time to repairing it. So it's restoring your legacy. And so they really liked that and they sold it to him for cheap. He repaired it and then flipped the house. By the time he was 13, he had something like hundreds of acres of land he was managing. And he said one time when he was about 12, he went out with some friends and they were complaining about what they were learning at school. They're like, oh, we had to learn the names of the planets in alphabetical order. When the hell are we going to learn that? You wouldn't need to use that in life. You know, they asked him, they're like, hey, Cole, what were you learning at the moment? And it's like, oh yeah, well, I've just been looking into recently found it kind of interesting how rich people generally have like a pass-through LLC and then a C corp and then they can deduct this from their taxes on this. And the other kids are like, what the fuck are you talking about? You know, he got so not like crazy rich, but he got— he was only 100,000 aside. He actually was like, loaning money to his parents. He's like, they never asked me for money. And I never asked them for stuff. But like, in tough times, like I loaned money to my parents, I bought our car from them just to help them out, you know, stuff like that. And then for me, I was thinking back in school, Like I learned piano in school, I had some piano lessons, and then at some point had to do like grade, you had to do, you know, playing chords and I had an exam and then it was just so shitty, you know, it was not fun. Like I don't want to learn how to play these chords and music theory and stuff to pass an exam. And I'm like, this sucks. And then I'm just looking now, especially nowadays. Kids learning piano, they'll do it by just seeing what's their favorite song and they'll just learn to play the song. And that's just really fun. And I think that exams and stuff just ruin the fun and curiosity of learning skills. And so for me, my daughter, I'm just like, how can I ensure that she's just having fun for as long as possible? And, um, and like this kid said that was unschooled, he said like he didn't learn traditional math. But just whenever it seemed that he had a need to learn a skill, a skill, obviously he would then learn it. Like he's doing his taxes, so he has to learn math to do his taxes, but it's not because they're like, oh, learn the Pythagoras theorem and you have no idea when you're gonna use it. He identified himself, I need to do my taxes, so I need to figure out how to do math. And I think that's just a philosophy that I subscribe to a lot. I mean, is wacky, obviously. But when you look, like Elon Musk, he created his own school for his kids. Jeff Bezos created his own school for his kids. I think he only has like 7 kids. I think that you don't have to be billionaire to take this approach. Like billionaires seem to be thinking the school system is kind of fucked up. You don't have to be a billionaire.

You could make it work for poor. What are you going to do then? So, so fast forward, she's 6 or 8 years old. What are you going to do?

Well, at the moment she goes to this thing, it's called— it's another trend. It's called Forest School. It's actually nothing to do with school. Basically, they just go to a forest, a bunch of kids, and you're just playing all day. Like, you have a fake mud kitchen, and you are like picking oranges and turning it to orange juice, and you shear sheep and shit. I'm planning to just create my own thing like that. But going to a bigger age, I'm just like, let's just bring a bunch of kids. Anyone in the local school thing can come around. And also I feel like instead of teaching them like how to write and studying, whatever, I'm like, wouldn't it just be awesome? Like whatever topic they, they can pick the topic, I can suggest some. Wouldn't it be awesome if I just ping my buddy and be like, hey Sam, could you just teach the class a lesson on copywriting? Or I kind of feel if they just ping someone on Twitter, if someone pinged— if someone is— if a 10-year-old kid pinged me, like, hey, I unschool myself. And I've decided I want to learn business. Would you mind doing a lecture to my class? And we'll have my parents will bring us to you. I would totally do it. Yeah, so I'm kind of thinking stuff like that.

So I love this. My sister actually runs a school like this called Nature Kids. And basically they're just outside all day, just walk around, they go on trails. If they find something, they like learn about it. And if they want to go climb trees, they climb trees, whatever. And it's basically has two, two things. One, uh, so she has a traditional school and she has this nature school and the nature school, the kids are like, by the end of the day, the traditional school kids are like dead. They have like no energy. They're like ready to go home. And they kind of like want to just watch YouTube and whatever. And the Nature Kids kids, Even though they've been out walking around all day outside, they have like way more energy, which is like kind of counterintuitive. That's the first thing I noticed. The second thing is, yeah, like they know a bunch of things that are interesting to them versus like in school, it's sort of like, you know, you're forced to learn something that's not that interesting to you and you sort of begin to associate learning with boredom, learning with sort of like, you know, being forced to do things. Versus on the other side, uh, you know, with self-driven, it's great.

And exams, right? Yeah.

The pressure of that. Now the, the, and I love the story you told about that guy, but my question would be, I think, I think unschooling or sort of self, self-driven learning is awesome when you're driven. So what happens if your kid is not trying to like, you know, flip a house and learn through, learn about pass-through LLCs? Like, I guess like the fear I would have, and I think most people would have is your kid doesn't really have any interest. They kind of just want to, you know, sit around and do nothing or, uh, you know, they're, and so now you, you're unschooled, but you're not really having this kind of like awesome, you know, self-driven curiosity. Do you like, are you worried about that? Or do you think like, no, I can create that or this situation will, will, will mold a person to be more that way.

And also on the other side, what if she wants to be a doctor or a lawyer where you need, uh, you need to learn how to write. Credentials. Yeah. And you need credentials.

Yeah. I mean, great questions. I mean, at first sight, I definitely agree with you, Sean. And it's one bit my wife has said, like, you know, some kids are not like you, Jack, wanting to— I was trying to make money when I was really little and stuff, and might not take that approach. I think just have to see how it goes as we go along. One other bit that was interesting is I visited a local Montessori school. And so Montessori, studying a bit, we're learning these different things, just my wife and I, just out of interest. But one bit they had, which is awesome, is exactly as you said, Sean, school finished. And we went there at the end of the day. So whenever school finishes, 4 PM or something, actually, there was a bunch of kids still there. And they have a farm outside. And the head teacher was giving us a tour just because my wife made friends with them. With her and she was walking around speaking to the kids about what's going on in the farm, but she was not telling them anything to do. The kids were just giving her an update. So she's like, oh, I see the rabbit cage is broken. Like, what's going on with that? And the kid was giving her like a detailed plan. Like, oh yeah, we've seen this broken and we've come up with a new roofing method that we're gonna implement, et cetera. The kids run the farm. And I was like, that's awesome. What if you just have that, but just scrap the school part? And this school was also quite religious. So we're like, what if you just scrap the religion part as well. Um, Sam about the bit if she wants to be a doctor. Um, I mean, yeah, I guess one approach is that could just like go, yeah, shit out of luck, or take the total opposite approach and just hire loads of tutors and be like, all right, if that's the approach you want to take, then okay, I guess we're gonna have to get you up to speed faster than other kids. Um, and I don't know how much you actually learn when 5 in school anyway. So maybe just like, all right, you've got, if you want to do that, you're going to have to be super smart and skip a bunch of grades then. We'll help you do it. But I don't know.

I just, I love hearing your stories. I mean, we could, we could do this all day. I don't know. What do you think, Sean? How do you feel?

Yeah, I've had a few times, Jack, where I just call Jack randomly and I just ask him about something. And I think you are kind of more of a one of one, at least in my life, of people who are very I don't know. Independent-minded is kind of like the best way I would put it. I think you choose to lead your life how you want. I think that's inspiring. I also think that you are extremely, like Sam said, sort of curious. And I think you're a great competitor when you need to compete in something, but you're not constantly trying to compete when unasked for. And that's a very Silicon Valley trait. People are trying to compete in times that are— what are you competing on? Why are you trying to show that you're the smartest? You're the richest, you're the most whatever. It's an annoying trait and I think it's great that you don't have that. So I don't know, it's good to talk with you as always. Do you leave us with either a book or product recommendation? One of Jack's finds that you think people should check out that you're passionate about, something you think is awesome.

Well, the book that I mentioned, I guess the book that I talked about unschooling is like, Don't Tell Me That I Can't. And to, I guess like spoiler alert, like the kid, it really sucks because this kid was building something amazing. He actually drowned and died right after he wrote the book. Kind of sucks, but it's a really short book.

You probably should have listened to Lifeguard on that one. Probably should have told him not to go in there. That was the plotter on that one.

Yeah. Sick way to end it. A good time to end the pod, you moron. So what's the name of it?

Don't Tell Me I Can't. And then it's just a short book. You can read it in 2, 3 hours and Challenges a lot of assumptions you might have about education and stuff. And so for me was like really inspiring seeing this book.

I'm looking at your products on your Twitter.

Did you just say, wait, Sean, did you just say he should have learned, he should have listened to the lifeguard? Yeah.

Yeah. The lifeguard was telling him, don't go in. And he, he, he's like, yeah, have you read my book? I'm going in.

You're an asshole, Jack.

I'm looking at your Twitter list of products and you have this buckwheat pillow. I think I bought one of these. Are these like hard as a rock? Aren't they just like super, super dense?

You can adjust how much buckwheat is in it. And then I also have a pillowcase that divides it into 3 sections so you can adjust the depth.

Why do people love these so much?

They, you need to get used to it a little bit, but actually it cured my neck pain and I can't sleep on another pillow. And I think Sam, you said as well, some of your friends even ship the pillow to the hotel before they arrive.

Nick Gray does.

Yeah.

Nick Gray is, have you heard of this? Nick Gray, our buddy Nick Gray. Literally every time he goes to a hotel, he has his assistant send this pillow to the hotel and then he just leaves it there when he is done every single time. And sometimes if he is going to stay at a place for more than I think like 4 days, he ships them a mattress.

A mattress?

I swear to God, you could, if you Google Nick Gray, you have a message from the hotel.

Google Nick Gray pillow. And he'll tell you the story. And I have been to mall, like whenever he, if I'm in a city and he's visiting, I go to his hotel room and he always has that pillow. He gets it shipped there every time.

How would you get rid of the mattress?

Yeah.

Well, I don't, but I don't know what he does about the mattress, but if you Google it, I think he has a blog post on it. But I, but it's not just talk. I've like, I'll, whenever he is staying somewhere, I'll go to his hotel, just hang out with him. And the pillow's there every time.

This is so funny. Wow.

So, so basically it's the best for neck pain. A pillow normally is like, you know, it's a rectangle. And then, but ideally you actually want your head to have less support than your neck because otherwise it puts your head at a weird angle, you know? So with this, you can pull the buckwheat to one end. And so it's giving a lot more support to your neck, whereas your head is a bit lower. And so it allows you to kind of be laying completely flat. And so you're not kind of cranking your neck and waking up with like neck pain the next day.

I was listening to this podcast of Derek Sivers on Tim Ferriss and Derek Sivers, he's an interesting guy. And he was, they were like, oh, you do this one. He has this one business. I think it's like web hosting or something like that. And he was describing it and Tim was like, why did you decide to do this? He goes, you know, sometimes I'll pick a project. I'm paraphrasing here. He's like, sometimes I'll pick a project because I think about who's my customer and do I want to, are those my kind of people? And he goes, This is a business that lets you host your own personal website. And I just realized that people who have their own personal website for no reason, like just their own name.com, those are my kind of people. And I was like, oh, that's really great to figure out your filter for like, what's a simple heuristic where like, not everybody you like does this, but everybody who does this, you kind of like. And I think this like, try every product to try to find the best quality of life levers. I think this might be one of those things, because everybody who I've met that does this, I like that person. And, uh, you're— you do this, Nick Gray does this, and, uh, it's kind of amazing.

Do you still have a sheet? Are you still tracking everything?

Um, not really a spreadsheet, no. I mean, for example, with the baby box I sent you, I just looked around my house at like— like, I just kind of anecdotally buy a bunch of stuff, try them all out, and then send back ones that I don't like and then just keep the best. So I wrote it down for you. So I don't have a fixed sheet. As I said, maybe I might turn it into a baby book, but haven't yet.

He had this closet at one of his houses that I used to go to, and it was like, again, a walk-in closet. And it literally had, I bet you it had $30,000 worth of supplements in there. Like it looked like a phar— it looked like a pharmacy. It was like any bottle you could imagine. And I was like, does any of this do anything? He was like, Nah, not really. You can't really feel. He goes, except this one thing. And he had like a Ziploc bag and it had like tar in it. It looked like it was like, I was like, is this like heroin? What the hell is this? And he was like, yeah, it works.

Yeah.

It was like, he's like, this is like Himalayan something. And if you just take a little dab of this, it gives you some, what, what was that?

It's called Shilajit. Haven't consistently found it repeatably amazing, but yeah, Himalayan Shimejat. It's like an extract from a volcano or some crap.

Dude, it was like, I swear to God, it looked like a pharmacy.

It consistently impresses anybody that you tell about it. That's what it does.

He had like scales and it had like white powders on it. I mean, it looked like a drug dealer. And I was like, does any of this do anything? I don't know how much money you spend on all this. It was tens of thousands. And you were like, this one thing is the only thing that like is amazing. And it was like a Ziploc bag of just this like Tar.

Amazing. All right, Jack, we gotta wrap it up. This was fun. Uh, thanks for coming on. We should do this again.

Thanks so much for having me. Love the podcast. Listen to it and, uh, don't listen to any other podcast, to be honest. I just listen to it in the car. So thanks again so much.

Thank you.