These old school businesses are making millions

And so it's like, damn, you have written off the most obvious growth channel with this internal narrative of we tried that, it didn't work. It didn't work is a sentence I'm very skeptical of now. Here's what I got for you today in this podcast. I have a story about two kind of like blue-collar founders who just got their business off the ground, and I met up with them. And, uh, they asked me these questions and it was like, it was a set of mistakes that I think everybody makes. And so I think it's worth talking about. So I want to talk about what the 3 things these guys said. And then I want to tell you about this business that's really fascinating. So that's a small business. Then there's a huge business that's fascinating me right now. It's so new and interesting that like, I just kind of want to talk about it with you. And the last is I have like a, um, a marketing principle, a little framework that I saw, a great example that I saw, and I want to share that as well. So I got 3 things for you.

All right. I have a couple things for you as well. Maybe we'll go back and forth. You want to start with your favorite one?

Yeah. All right. So I went to Utah last week to do a podcast with, um, this guy Ryan Smith. He owns the Utah Jazz and he's like, he started Qualtrics. Um, and so anyways, that's going to come out. It's a good, good, it's a good episode. He's a crazy dude. While I was there. And one of the reasons that happened was Ryan plays pickup basketball at 6 in the morning, and there's a guy who's in his regular run. He's been doing that for like 16 years with the same group of guys in Utah. Very like honestly aspirational thing. I was like, oh man, I kind of want that. That sounds kind of great to have. One of the guys in the run had DM'd me like 2 years ago, and he was like, hey, I play pickup basketball with this guy Ryan Smith. I told him the podcast is great and he should come on. And he was like, if you guys come to morning basketball, I'll do the podcast. And we're like, done, we'll be there. We play basketball, we do the podcast, all this good stuff. He tours us around the stadium and all this crazy stuff. We're just hanging out. We're just getting a meal before we head to the airport. And so I invite those guys, the guy who put in the good word. I was like, hey, you should come hang out. You kind of made this whole thing happen in a way. He probably wouldn't have done it. Had you not, you know, told him, hey, this is something worth doing, come hang out. And so he comes and he starts telling me about his business. He's got this business called Mobile Emissions. So the idea is like, you know how you have to get like your smog check? You have to get like an emissions check for your car every year.

They do it at your house?

They'll come to you. That's the idea. Okay, great. So normally you go to some like dump of a mechanic place and you wait in line or whatever, you book appointment, you go, These guys will come to you for like $50 or $60. Okay, cool. And so I'm like, how's the business going? He tells me how it's going. It's going great. You know, blah, blah, blah. And then he, he, he, he basically says 3 things that like, I just thought were such, such typical traps that every founder falls into, myself included. That's, you know, if you spot it, you got it. That's how I even noticed, oh, that's that trap. I've been in there before. My, I got some scars on my ankles from stepping into that one. So the first one is, you know, he's asking about growth. And naturally, Sam, when somebody asks you like, you know, what do you think we should do to grow this thing? What's your first question? I'm just curious if you have the same first question I do.

What have you tried? What's worked? What's like the one thing that's actually going well? And what's like the 10 other things that you've tried that aren't going well and stop doing them and start doing the one thing?

Exactly. So it was basically, it's like, where are the customers coming from today? Let's start with that. Okay. So how do you get customers today? And then they said, oh, you know, Google search results. And I was like, oh, so Google Ads? And he goes, no, no, no, like just Google search results. I go, oh, like why aren't you doing Google Ads for when somebody searches like smog check near me or whatever, right? Emissions testing near me. And he's like, oh, we tried that. It didn't work. Uh, so we're really thinking about, you know, we're thinking about this and this and this and like fancy new cool things.

And you're like, well, tell me about the try.

Exactly. So I'm like, tell me like, I was like, that's interesting. It didn't work. What part didn't work? Tell me more. What was the data? And then suddenly cat's got the tongue. Don't know that. Don't know the data. Don't know what happened. Oh, it turns out actually what the— what actually had happened was Google gives you like a couple hundred bucks of free Google ad credits.

Yeah, yeah.

They had spent it. They didn't have tracking set up. And then like anecdotally, they were like, oh, I think we got like lower quality leads. Like some people were like, the price is too expensive. So, you know, it didn't really work. What was the ROAS on it? I don't really know. We, I mean, you know, we didn't have it set up properly. And so it's like, damn, you have written off what's probably the most obvious growth channel with this internal narrative of we tried that, it didn't work. And then it didn't work is like, I'm a sentence I'm very skeptical of now. I think, 'cause I think so few people truly try things to the point where they got a definitive answer. And the answer was clear and they actually had iterated on it and tried it enough times to really know that that was like, let's say, trap number one, looking for the new fancy whatever thing when the obvious thing hasn't been done properly yet.

I make that mistake all the time. I've made it previously, like with The Hustle, we grew via Facebook ads and I got really lucky the very first. So, so The Hustle was my daily newsletter. In year one, it was 0 to 100,000. Year two was 100,000 to 500,000. Year three was like 500 to 1 million. And at, at the end of year 1, we hit a little bit of a plateau and I said, let's try Facebook ads. We know how much we make per subscriber. Let's just spend a little bit of money. And the first ad that I made on Facebook, we ended up spending collectively something like $8 or $10 million over the lifetime of the company. And that trained my brain that I, I, I still struggle to break it, which is if it doesn't work in the first couple tries, it's just, it won't work. And the reality is, and I've since have— I have examples of where this is true. You really need to do like potentially 50 to 100 reps. If you're talking about an ad, it could literally be your 100th ad that like changes everything because this one ad that we ran, it converted. I think we acquired a customer for $1.50. Everything else was $3. It was literally 2 times better, which is a big deal. It changes the business. So I understand exactly what you're saying.

And by the way, there's a fix for this trap of thinking, which is, uh, you also can't just stubbornly do things forever either, right? So that's not the answer. Write everything down. So when you write down what actually happened, you will realize how flimsy of a grasp you have or how flimsy the attempt was. Because, uh, and the way I do it is almost like the Socratic method. Like, I, by the way, I literally do this. It's not a, uh, it's not like a metaphor. I open up a Google Doc and then it's basically me. And then there's like smarter, wiser, older me, right? Smarter, wiser, older me basically asks a question. I put that in bold and then my answer I unbold and I just type right underneath and I just advise myself because I have the full context. I'm sitting right here. I have infinite time to do this for myself. So let me go ahead and ask myself a question. So I'll be like, what's already working? Cool. Can you do more of that? What would it mean if you did more of that? Is there a way to double doing just the same, without finding a new thing? Do you think you could double with just that? Or, okay, what's the next most likely thing to work? And then you answer, oh, maybe it's Google Ads. Cool. Did you try them? Yeah, we did. Was it a real try? What happened? And then you sort of have to write it down and you have to go look up the data and you have to do, and you basically writing is sort of like an, it's like an exposing function.

Writing forces clear thinking.

It forces clear thinking and it just highlights sloppy thinking because you can't fill in the gaps. You can't just say like, it didn't really work. If you just sit there, you're like, well, if I read this, I'd be like, what does that mean? Is, you know, like, just provide the actual answer instead of this like hand-wavy way of saying it. And so anyways, that's the force of those. All right, that's trap number one. Trap number two. So I was like, okay, so what's next for you guys? Which by the way was a trick question because already we had already figured out like what's next for them is to do Google Ads properly.

All right, so a lot of people, they'll talk about how you need $1 million and 3 years of experience to start a business. Nonsense. If you listen to at least one episode on this podcast, you know that is completely not true. My last company, The Hustle, we grew it to something like $17 or $18 million in revenue. I started it with like $300. My current company Hampton does over $10 million in revenue. Started it with actually no money, maybe $29 or something like that. Nothing. And so you don't actually need investors to start a company. You don't need a fancy business plan, but what you do need is systems that actually work. And so my old company, The Hustle, they put together 5 proven business models that you could start right now today with under $1,000. These are models that if you do it correctly, it can make money this week. You can get it right now. You can scan the QR code or click the link in the description. Now back to the show.

Second trap was not dogfooding your own product. So one of the great, like, simple tests with everybody, when you meet a founder, you could spend like 45 minutes talking about the business, but the better way to do it is to take out your phone or your laptop right then and just mystery shop the product. And so I just, I was like, yeah, like, um, I was like, yeah, you guys should do Google Ads. I was just checking, does anyone run Google Ads for that same search? Nobody was running it. And then I was like, guys, you said all your traffic comes from organic. You're not even on the first, like, you're not even in the top section of Google. Like, you're like, you know, in the middle. And I was like, but this top section, it's not SEO. It's like, you know, like the Google, like, business results, like where it's like a, it gives you like a map and a phone number to call of like the business that thinks you're trying to find.

I see them there. I see them there.

And I was like, but they were like, you know, even there, they were like lower and they didn't have as many like reviews. I was like, also, like, it seems like your value prop is that like you save people a bunch of time. You don't really write that there. And I was like, then I go to your website and then I see this. And I was like, you gotta walk through your product from the eyes of a user and face the pain. And, uh, we used to use usertesting.com for this, but there's a bunch of different ways to do it. Usertesting.com is very good.

I love usertesting.com.

You basically pay some, I don't ever know what it is now, but like, let's say it was like $10 to $20 a test. And basically it just sends a user to— a user goes to your site and it screen records what they're doing and they're talking. They have to talk out loud while they're using it.

Didn't your mom do that for a long time and they gave her stock in the company when it went public?

Yeah. That's awesome. My mom made like $100 grand off this company because she, she started as a tester and then became a, like a monitor of the testers, like a quality control. And like, she got like a stock grant and then the company ended up going public. That's awesome. It was like kind of amazing. That was like, you know, I got my, my parents on, I got my mom on that and I got my dad to Airbnb his house and like that's become their like last 15 years of retirement is doing this business.

That's awesome. You know, that's so, I love that story.

So anyways, face the pain. I think most entrepreneurs don't actually face the pain. They think the problem is elsewhere. Like the problem is most likely right there on your site, in your core flow that users are going through where you're just not clear enough or you're not compelling enough or you're not visible enough. And it's like one of those three problems. If you just say, how do I become more visible? How do I make my proposition more compelling, like more juicy? And then how to make it more clear. And so I just thought like that was like thing, thing two. And thing three was they were like, should we expand? We're only in two counties right now. Should we expand to like a third, a fourth? We can get into this one, or should we like focus on like fixing the funnel, like the core first, right? And I think this is like the constant debate that people have. And my, you know, obviously my advice was like, fix, like, make the system work and then replicate it is like always going to work better than spread yourself out, make your system more complex and not really— while it's not really working very efficiently, I think is like typically it. But I would say there are so many of these fork in the road decisions of like, do we go left or right in entrepreneurship? And I think there's a simple heuristic, which is which one seems easier? To you, like, meaning like which one is a lower perceived pain or difficulty? Because if you think there's two equal options, but one, one feels like it's less pain, it's actually a worse option. It's just being boosted by the fact that you're trying to avoid pain a little bit. And, and so therefore it's like it's become a 50/50, but it's not truly a 50/50.

One of my favorite quotes that I heard when, when Charlie Munger died, I went and researched a bunch of his stuff and he had a quote that I actually think about almost all the time, which is, um, a smart man does first what a dumb man does last. And I've made that decision incorrectly so many times, which is I'll do it this easy time, this one time, and then eventually I'll do this. Or like, I can't start this way because you need scale, you need this, you need that. Uh, so like an example would be like, had I known what I know now about Hampton, I only would have done New York in real life and then very slowly scaled from city to city to city. But that's not fun. That's not fun because I can't scale quickly. That's very slow. And there's just been so many examples of where I've taken— I mean, everyone does it— where I've taken the easy route first when I should have taken the hard route first. One of my favorite books when I was in high school, I ran cross-country, track and field, and I ran in college and I was, and I was pretty decent. And there was a book that changed my life. It was called Train Hard, Win Easy. That's the same phrase where I think about that all the time. Train hard, win easy.

Yes, exactly. I think most people will realize that your judgment, ultimately your personal judgment, the judge in your head with the gavel who's deciding go left or go right, go up or go down, start or continue, start or stop. All those micro decisions obviously become your destiny. And the question is, how do you make that decision-making function better? And I don't think most people will invest in making their decision-making function better. They'll invest in a lot of other things, but they don't invest a lot in that. And I think there's like a few, like kind of short list of tools that you should be doing regularly, exercises you should be doing regularly to work out that decision-making muscle. And, you know, one of them is basically the thing we talked about earlier, writing. Another one is understanding your biases. So like, I bias towards things that sound easy or sound fun or sound cool to others. And so therefore those are getting like overweighted in my, in my decision-making versus these other things. And so there's just a few, few ways you can make better decisions. Another one, by the way, if you can't tell, I'm a little bit under the weather or have been sick for about a week now. And dude, making decisions when you're sick, just my entire thought process when I'm sick is probably, I don't know, 5 times worse than my thought process when I'm healthy and I'm feeling active and energized and like, anything is possible. And I'm the same guy. I didn't read any new books. I didn't like— nothing changed except for my actual energy levels, my fatigue levels. And I'm a totally different person. So I literally abstained from making like any decisions.

You know, like when you can't, you can't text your ex when you're drunk.

Exactly. Exactly.

It's like I can't make any decisions while I'm sick. I do that all the time.

Fatigue makes cowards of us all. It's like, you know what they say in, like, you know, in fighting. I think there's that. I think. And that's another one where I had the realization. I was like, man, okay, today I'm on the extreme end of the spectrum. It's very obvious, right? Like, if I'm this sick, I already— my mind, my mood, my mindset is in such a shitty state that, like, this is not a good time to be making good decisions. This is not a time where I'm going to make good decisions. It's not a time when I'm going to be, like, super creative or productive or any of those things. Okay, that's extreme. But on a day-to-day basis, like, I don't really do as good of a job as I should of first getting into a great state of mind before then going and trying to perform whatever the performance is, whether it's being a good dad or being a good CEO or being good at anything. And I was like, and I'm in probably the top 0.1% of people who think about this. Most people don't even have the word state in their vocabulary. And I'd like have practiced this for years with the Tony Robbins stuff. Like, that's a thing for me. And I still am like, I don't know, pretty average at it.

No, I don't think you're average at it. I definitely don't think you're average. I actually think you're great at it. There's a book called The Triple Package, and the author claims to have analyzed incredibly successful groups of people, ultra-successful people, and she narrows it down to 3 reasons as to what are 3 things they all have in common. The first is a superiority complex. So they feel that they are born to be better. You know, there's a lot of people listening to this podcast and you look around at your job that you hate and you think, I, I was destined to do something greater than this. I have it inside of me. I'm special. I can do it. That's trait one. The second trait is conversely, or very interestingly, an inferiority complex in the sense of I am not good enough. I'm not where I need to be. I am shit. I need to improve. And that creates urgency and that creates like a fear, which is actually quite good, of like, I have to work to be better in order to get to where I think I'm destined to go. And the third one, impulse control. Can you control your urges and your impulse? And an example of this is like when you wake up at 6 a.m. and you said you're going to go to the gym, it's like you're— I think the story you have to tell yourself is like, my emotions don't dictate whether I go or not. The alarm, the alarm clock dictates whether I go or not. And it's the same thing with making business. I've made so many decisions impulsively. It sounds like you're trying to prevent yourself from making a decision while being emotional. And that ability to put the gas pedal on and off, and control your impulses a bit is incredibly valuable.

I would agree with all three of those. And I would just say like even, I don't know, the bigger picture takeaway for me is, man, this seems like an underinvested area for myself, but generally at large is one of the most important things that it doesn't seem like is talked or taught anywhere.

Yeah, just a reflection. I think Chris— what's Chris Spaulding?

Spaulding.

Yeah, Spaulding. He said something to you, which you told me, which was amazing, which is someone was telling him a story and he's like, well, but at least I, I learned X, Y, and Z about my company going out of business. And Chris looks at him very sternly and goes, are you sure that's the right lesson that you should take away from this situation? Did you learn the right thing? And so constantly, what did I learn? What's the right thing that I learned here is actually a really good thing.

Yeah, oh, I learned so much. Okay, what'd you learn? Oh, what, what, what? Well, it's like, oh, that didn't seem like you've actually had any clarity of thought around that. And then, and then a lot of times the things they learned is like, I learned, you know, you really can't trust people. It's like, whoa, that's the takeaway you had of this whole thing?

Like, yeah, that's a wrong takeaway.

You know, like how many times do people actually have the right takeaway? Becoming very skeptical of this thing that we all nod and agree with. Like, yeah, well, you learned, you know, it's like, no, you probably didn't learn. Actually, actually, in my experience, most people who think that they learned at the end of the thing didn't really learn. Or if they learned, they learned some, you know, the wrong, the wrong lesson that's probably not even going to help them. They did not actually have the right takeaway from the situation. Once you realize that, it's sort of like, you know, like a red pill moment.

Can I tell you a couple businesses that are fascinating to me right now? And I think, I think you're going to get a kick out of the first one.

All right, let's go.

So I'm interested. So you actually posted something.

You said, I don't like running, I don't care about running, don't follow running, but there's a story right here in this picture that I want to talk about.

And what was it? It was Cameron Haynes, his son, Truett is a beast right now. He basically is running marathons at a wicked fast pace, like 2 hours and 30 minutes, which for anyone who runs a marathon, that's— he's— that's A, that's fast. B, he's like 220 pounds. He's like huge. And C, he's doing it in blue jeans. Is that right?

That's exactly right. There's a guy who's running long races, marathons, ultramarathons. He's running them fast and he's running them wearing like jeans, not shorts, not jean shorts. Like full jeans.

And so the re— and you're like, that right there is a purple cow. And Purple Cow is a book by Seth Godin. And it's one of many books that basically say the same thing, which is like, in order to stand out, you have to have— it's better to be different than it is better. And I've been thinking about that a lot lately. I've been thinking about that a lot lately because we had a guest on and he said something like, if you split test everything, you're just going to have porn. And it was basically, I think it was George Mack. And it was like this idea that like—

I don't even know if he said that, but that's great. I think I—

he either tweeted it or he said it to us.

The— if you just start A/B testing your website and you just run an infinite number of A/B tests, you end up with Pornhub. That, that's got to be it, actually. That's so true.

Yeah. If you split test everything, it just ends up in porn. But at one— at some point you need to take a stand and you want to be different and you have to stand out. And it doesn't make sense why you're doing that, but it's just cool. And the market tends to adjust and like recognize that that is badass. You know, there's a billion examples that we could go on what that means. But let me give you two that interest me right now. The first. So you're familiar with The Onion, right? The, the comedy news website.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, of course.

Okay. So The Onion was founded in 1988, and it's kind of funny. It's gone through so many different owners. I think it was started at University of Wisconsin as just like a newsletter. So it was originally founded as a funny newsletter that made fun of like campus life. And over the years it's become like a popular magazine and then now a digital magazine. Where they make fun of shit and it's hilarious and very like, it's kind of interesting that it's been owned by like a variety of people. I think in like 2003, some rich fund hedge fund guy bought it and then they were sold and bought again in 2013. I think if you remember, like GeoMedia, it was called— they own like Gawker, like a bullcrap media company, bought it and it wasn't working out. And then eventually in 2024, Jeff Lawson, the founder of Twilio bought it. So it's kind of been like one of these things where like wealthy people feel like they need to be like the patron and like steward it, like, you know, like, and be the steward of like making fun of stuff that deserves to be made fun of. And that's pretty cool. But last year they did something very interesting, very purplecali. They brought back the, the print magazine and they went really hard on the print magazine. And within a year they already have 53,000 paying subscribers. I think it costs $10 a month and they're expecting from that something like $6 million in revenue this year. Last year they did less than $2 million in revenue. So a print magazine 3x'd their revenue. And I think that is so cool. I think I've talked about magazines on this podcast a couple of times, but I think magazines are incredibly interesting. Do you subscribe to any?

You know, I've been playing with this, so there's a couple of people that are doing this. So I currently have an Arena subscription. Colossus.

So, uh, awesome.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy, awesome, who has a podcast basically sort of like expanding his media empire, whatever, whatever you want to call it, uh, with long-form journalism, like old-school print magazine, you know, oh, it's really good, your story on this person. And it's like beautiful photography, really long-form, uh, stuff. And it's good. I like, I, I like the quality of the product on that side, but I don't subscribe to the physical thing. I, I think they have one.

Yes, they do. It's new. I think it's only on edition number 3, but it's, but it's new. So you just subscribe to 2, is that right? You anymore?

I mean, that's a lot. 2, 2 is way over the, oh, the, the Vegas overline of what they thought I had here, uh, for a magazine subscription.

I subscribe to 2 actually, uh, Popeye magazine, which is a Japanese magazine actually. And it's called, it's like, I think the tagline does it. It's kind of a gay translation. It's city boy life. But it's like, it's sort of like GQ for Japan where they talk about like clothing and coffee and like urban culture.

Gotcha.

Which I love. And interestingly, I don't know if all Japanese magazines are like this, but it, it, it reads backwards. So it doesn't like, you don't fold it like this. It's like upside down. So you like go to the left and that's, and that's kind of interesting. And then the second one is Thrasher magazine, which is like a skateboard thing that I had when I was a kid that I love. But I just think that magazines are so interesting. And so can I tell you what I would do? I thought about doing this. I read the biography of JFK Jr. That was John Kennedy's son. And he actually had a magazine in the '80s. And I went and bought the first edition. This is what Sidney Crawford— it was a very— it's a very famous magazine cover. It's what Sidney Crawford dresses George Washington in. And it was cool and everything. But what I would do, I would call it a newsletter, not a magazine. And I would literally do it on white paper that is stapled together with like 10 or 20 sheets. And put into an envelope. And I think that I can do something. I've thought about doing this. I think someone could create some type of wealth or like for high net worth people or for tech companies and sell it for around $1,000 a year and only do 4 to 8 editions per year. And if I did it on wealthy people, it would all be getting like tips and tactics and strategies and stories on what high net worth people are doing. Or if I did it on tech companies, I would sell it to the tech company and I would list as many names of the tech companies and explaining what they're doing in a particular industry as like a roundup, sort of like a high school newspaper.

Yeah, that's interesting. So you're just saying physical sort of takes you into a new category?

Physical. So yeah, so, uh, I guess I didn't like round that out, but like the purple cow here is no, no digital, only physical. I think nostalgia is like a thing. I think you and I have talked about our own habits about how we're getting sick of digital. I think everyone is experiencing that. And I think that someone could actually build a great business. I think what a lot of people do though, is they tend to go flashy, shiny, premium. And I would argue you should go the opposite. You should go like homemade mom and pop, almost like a punk rock zine, what it used to be. Exactly what you're pulling out right there. If you put it in a folder like that.

So this, I think I've showed you this before, but my guy Diego basically delivers me these. I don't know if you can see, there's like tabs on the side, right? So he basically prints out this thing and it's a collection of like the best things to read. So it might be like, oh yeah, Howard Marks put out a new memo this week. It's like, we should read that, we should really digest, we should slow down and read that. Don't make it just Chrome tab number, you know, 93. Oh, that's open alongside Twitter and a bunch of other dopamine, you know, fast food dispensing, you know, like Chrome is basically like, you know, that Coca-Cola Freestyle machine. That's what basically what my internet browser is. That's what my phone is.

Unlimited options.

It's unlimited options of syrup and water, you know, like syrup, water, and bubbles. And that's not really what I want to be having. And this is like when somebody gets a coconut and they just chop off the top, they give, put a straw in it and they're like, here you go. And you're drinking out of a coconut. And so he delivers these to me basically like once a month. So like, you know, for example, in the last one it was Brent Beshore had wrote an annual letter about his private equity fund and it was basically like the performance of the fund. So he knew I'd find that interesting, like, oh, what have they invested in? How is that fund actually doing? Is, you know, are they doing really well? Okay, what's, what's going on? And then he also has like his, like, you know, he gets his like Warren Buffett on in that where he's like very philosophical about life or the markets or whatever, you know, in there. So he knows I enjoy reading that.

I think you can charge a lot for that.

He'll put in like a science thing. So it'll be like, oh yeah, these guys are working on, uh, there's a lot of people out there trying to study the, um, the genes for short sleep. So there's some people like Trump and, uh, I think Clinton before this, like people who genetically only need 5 to 6 hours of sleep. And what an advantage basically to, to, you know, have 3 extra hours a day, but still be at full energy. And that there's people actually trying to figure out, like, the way we did Ozempic and we were able to limit your need for food, like, make you not need more food. Could we make you not need as much sleep if we studied this? Like, oh, that's fascinating. So I'm reading, you know, there's like a science thing in there, a briefing. It's a brief. And so like, if I just productize that thing that he's already giving me, it's basically what you're talking about, right? It's all in the curation, right? It's like you have to— it would have to be somebody who is like, I trust or knows my taste or, you know, like, is genuinely— because if the first thing I open, if it's like, meh, I'm out. I'm out on this altogether, you know?

But you can tell a story as to why something should be important. So, for example, like the sleep thing, that's not like inherently important, but you think it's important because of X, Y, and Z, and you tell that story about why it's important. And what I would do is in the first page, I would put directions on how to read. Which is if you have children, it's after your kids go to bed at 8 p.m. What? Don't turn the TV on and sit there and read this in your living room. If you don't have kids like this, don't go out. And on a Thursday, read this for 1 hour and your life will be better. Like you give like these like really intimate instructions to make someone feel good. And I think that this could be a hit. I sent you a link to my friend. I think I've talked about this before, but, uh, NeVBox. So my friend Neville Medhora, He did this thing years ago where he sent people 3 boxes and he called them 3 important copyright— copywriting lessons that you need to know. And it was literally just a UPS box with 3 envelopes in there that had paper, like printed paper. And it was awesome.

So should we just do this as MFM? Like basically me and you curate like, you know, 2 to 3 things each that we think is whatever with our little editorial note on top of why, you know, the sticky note of like why I think this is worth paying attention to.

It could be awesome.

So, you know, 1,000 fans who are willing to pay $1,000 a year to have like proper info diet, right? You know, like I pay a lot of money to have a proper diet of what food goes in my body. And I know people that go to an extreme, they'll go straight farm to table. They have their favorite ranches that they source meat from and they'll get vegetables from certain areas at certain seasons. And like people have realized, like, it matters what you put in. Changes whatever, you know, what's going to happen inside your body. But our minds were just like, no, no, go ahead, pour like social media sludge right on, right on top. Yeah, go ahead. Just top, top me off. It's okay if it overflows. I'll just let it—

there's all these good analogies for how to sell it. Like there's a lot of like ammo here to like sell this.

I don't know. This would actually be kind of fun to do. You know, I think this would be fun.

It would be fun.

You know, I— this is something I like. I get these binders every month. Like this— one of the best things in my life is getting that. And so I guess like, why would I not just share a version of that with other people? It doesn't hurt me to share that with other people. In fact, it would help me, I think, because I think these are cool ideas, cool, cool things worth sharing.

So let me tell you the second one. You're the son of immigrants, so I don't know if this is going to hit, if this experience is going to hit the same. But in the Midwest, in Missouri, where I was raised, one of the greatest things, uh, like that I got to experience as a kid was getting milk delivered to my home once a week in a glass bottle. Did you ever experience this as a kid?

Never. Never.

Okay, so there's this company called Oberweis. It was called Oberweis Dairy. So Oberweis was started as a dairy farm in 1915, I think in Missouri or Indiana, but it was very Midwestern. And they eventually started— they sold their own milk to like their little small town and expanded and expanded and expanded. And it's mostly regional in Missouri and Illinois. So I think they have them in Chicago and St. Louis. But as a kid, this is where we would get our milk. We would also get our lemonade from there and our ice cream. That was like their, their thing. And it felt amazing. Well, this company kept growing and growing and growing. Started in 1915. It was now on its fourth generation of family ownership and peak revenue, I think in 2020 or '21. Was $120 million in revenue. So it was good top line revenue, but it's a hard business. It's, it's low margin. And because of a bunch of silly decisions that the management had made in 2024, it went bankrupt. And a guy who we talked about in the podcast, his name was Hoffman, and in fact, one of the early podcasts, pre-pandemic, back when we were in the office, he ended up buying the company. And I think he bought the company for $21 million plus I think he said he was going to invest another $15 million into it.

Who's Hoffman? Who's this guy? David Hoffman, maybe?

Is it David? Yeah, I think it's David. Um, he started a recruitment agency that after 20 years was making so much money that he started buying businesses. He bought like a boat cruise business, which is basically like, um, what are those like things in San Francisco that are like Swan? Like, uh, or what are they called? Where they like boat cruise. It's not like a real cruise. It's like a, like a tour in the Bay type of like. Uh, like, and then he bought like, uh, blue collar businesses like that, I believe. And he eventually, uh, Oberweis, which David Hoffman, he's based in St. Louis. So for all St. Louis folks, this is like an interesting brand, but I saw that they went bankrupt and I saw that he bought it and I thought it was very fascinating. And the reason I think it's fascinating is I think Oberweis milk delivery, I think that could be a thing. I think that you could do, you could absolutely make this a wonderful business. That people our age, so in our 30s and 40s, people who have children grew up with something like this. And it's not part of the experience that you and I have at all anymore. You know, we probably just go to Costco or get something like Instacart or something like that. But I actually think that oat milk, almond milk, I think those non-dairy milks, I actually think those are like trending downward right now. And dairy is up, which it like took a hit over the last decade. And glass and nostalgia. And I would have an entire campaign around something like making it now like it used to be made way back when, when it was made better. Like I would lean super hard into that and I then I would upsell with better eggs, better for you, all types of products, eggs, whatever, hopefully higher margin things. But I think, I think the milk delivery business and when I was thinking of like nostalgic things, I think that could be really fascinating. Where's that land with you?

Less good. Um, partially because I'm like, cause when I'm looking at their thing, they have like, they have the dairy delivery, but then they're like breakfast and snacks and dinner and desserts and juices.

Like, that's not what you do. That's not how you do it.

They expanded into everything, but I can see why you would need to, right? Like what, how much money could you really make just delivering only milk, right? Or only like core dairy, milk and eggs. Like it's just doesn't seem. Doesn't seem like it's big enough. Doesn't seem like there's enough, uh, you know, average order value basically to make the whole like logistics worth it. I do think that just building a premier dairy brand, so not like the home delivery part, but being like, yo, okay, all of you guys went anti-dairy, got it, cool. But if you like rich, good dairy, we got you. And so like, you know, when I go to the grocery store, there's these brands, I don't even know if they do anything differently, right? Like Alexander's, they're like, oh, we have like 6% milk. I'm like, I don't even know what 6% is, but like, gimme that. What is that?

3 times better than 2%.

And then they put it in a different shape bottle. And then there's like, what's the other ones? Like Strauss Farms or whatever. Like there's these, it's just, you know, like, like every category packaging. But like, I think just tripling down on like rich dairy and like actual high-quality dairy. I just feel like the grocery store is, like, there's still shelves that need that sort of, that need that sort of stuff. And but the trick is, if you actually are operating a farm, it's very different than the kind of like D2C, D2C repackagers of stuff, you know what I mean? And so if you actually have a story about your, you know, your farm and where you're at and why it's better and like all that stuff, whether it's for, whether it's for beef, whether it's for chicken. Uh, I think somebody came on the podcast, they pitched us this for chicken. They're like, you should just make— the world needs like a better chicken brand. And, um, like, what is the— what's the like Snake River Farms for chicken type of thing? Um, I think there's, there's that for dairy and for chicken and for beef, for all these staples, you know?

Did you see what Cracker Barrel did?

So they changed their logo, right? Is that the—

more than that. More than that. They made the inside look like a Chipotle.

So like overnight or they've been doing that for a long time and people just started paying attention.

You know, I haven't been to a Cracker Barrel in a very long time, but it's like I didn't even—

is it Cracker Barrel or a restaurant? I thought it might be like HomeGoods. Like, is it like a hybrid?

Cracker Barrel. It's like my— when we take— it's our road trip destination. It's like when we take road trips, it's where we stop. But it's basically a— so it's a huge chain. It's publicly traded, billions of dollars. And it's a It's a restaurant that has like chicken and dumplings. It was like their famous thing. Um, but it's definitely like disgusting.

Chicken and dumplings? Like Asian dumplings? Or what do you mean chicken and dumplings?

Brother, no, it's like, like it's basically like Bisquick, you know, remember Bisquick? Like it's like chicken, uh, basically biscuits and gravy, sort of. It's sort of like biscuits and gravy. And they, uh, but then they have like a huge store where you can buy like crap you don't need and just junk. So you can buy like suckers.

Part store, part restaurant.

Yeah, it's like half more like gift shop. It's like, it's like borderline gift shop on the edge of store. But, but like, and restaurant. Yeah, that's right. So it's like the idea is like they always have a wait because they're crowded and you just go in there and you buy like tchotchkes, basically. Like the optics of it. I'm not saying what the reality is. The optics are that this young, like 40-something, 30-year-old woman who's now the CEO, she appears as though she's like a yuppie New Yorker. Which is the exact opposite of who the clientele is of Cracker Barrel. It looks like she just kind of came in and like behaved in such a way where she's out of touch with the average Cracker Barrel, the average Cracker Barrel. She's out of touch with the average cracker who goes to Cracker Barrel. Yeah, yeah.

A lot of barrel, no cracker.

Yeah, she does not own like one pair of overalls. So like, it— I'm not— again, I don't know the reality. I'm just saying that's what it looks like. And there's this The stock just like crashed after she made this announcement. And, but there is something about that where it's like, dude, don't, don't fix this stuff. It's supposed to look disgusting. That's a feature. That's not a bug. It's supposed to look like a filthy restaurant.

Right, right. Worse is better here.

All right. What do you got?

All right. So before this podcast, I spent probably the last hour reading a profile on Alpha School and What's his name? Joe Lamont.

Dude, we were on that early, but we didn't have a lot of information on him. And, and they explained why. Joe Lamont hadn't done an interview in 25 years.

So there's more info out now about Alpha. So, so what I basically— this isn't like— this is— we're now treading in the waters of the unknown a little bit because it's a little bit mysterious. Plus there's just— it's new. Plus you haven't been there in person. Plus who knows?

Well, say who Joe is. All right.

So Joe Lamont is basically like a software entrepreneur who's super, super successful, like $10 billion net worth type of, type of situation. He dropped out of college his senior year at Stanford, I believe. He starts Trilogy Software. Trilogy Software was basically like an enterprise sales system of some kind.

I still don't entirely know what they did after all my research on them.

Yeah, it's like before my time. It's like, all right, cool.

Like, like the analogy that I think I heard is like, if you're an airplane company and you need to buy lots of parts to build your airplane, it would help you decide which which components to purchase. That, that's, that's the best I can tell. But it became huge. And he— it was basically like him and Microsoft were like recruiting the best talent. Him, Microsoft, and Dell. They were— he was the type of guy— he was— when he was like 28, he was on the Forbes list of richest Americans.

Exactly. So he was the youngest guy on the Forbes list, Forbes 400. He was worth like $500 million at that stage. He then also creates a private equity firm. Called, I think, ESW Capital or something like that, and basically starts buying small, small software companies, uh, that are cash flowy type companies. And then similar to Constellation Software, basically bought like hundreds of these, uh, companies.

And then, you know, that's now a big deal, which I think, I think, I think he's, he has a lot of mystery because allegedly one of the tactics is that he would buy dying software companies, fire everyone, outsource it to India, and just acknowledge that it was dying and not invest in it and hire the cheapest people, which is not inherently wrong, but it's not maybe the thing that you want to brag about all the time.

Software hospice.

Yeah.

Um, so, okay, so, so, so whatever. He's, he's obviously mega, mega successful. Um, again, worth sort of like tens of billions of dollars. One of the richest guys in the world. He, um, recently his thing that he got obsessed with is called Alpha School. So the story here is that, um, from what I can understand, there's a woman who used to work for Trilogy Software. She and her husband, um, I think her name is Mackenzie Price, uh, they create a school first for their own kids, um, and they kind of are like inspired, they're kind of motivated because of the following problem, which I agree with the problem statement entirely. So, uh, you know, if you look at the world's greatest, you know, the greatest people that, that, um, that have accomplished things in the world. So whether it's like, you know, Mozart or Beethoven, they're composing symphonies at age 5, right? Or it's Alexander the Great, he like conquered most of the world by the time he was 22, started at 16. There's many, many, many examples of people who at a very young age were capable of doing a lot. And so, you know, there was a central question of like Why don't we have more Alexanders? Not like conquerors per se, but people who at a young age are able to do a lot. And if you look at Einstein, you look at Alexander, you look at like Marcus Aurelius, one of the things about a lot of these sort of great achievers is that the way they learned was not in a traditional school, but was through direct one-on-one tutoring from a sort of wise mentor. So like Socrates, Plato, you know, that, that sort of that, that lineage of one-on-one tutoring.

Like a, like a, like apprenticeship.

A little bit like apprenticeship. They're not working for the person. They're just daily study, daily tutoring, one-on-one with a master. And, um, there's all these studies that have happened over the years of what is the best way to teach. You know, like, I think we would all agree we would love education to be more effective. We'd all love to improve education. It's like super high leverage. If you can educate people better, you know, the world prospers. So how do you do it? And for a long time there's been this thing called the 2 Sigma problem. Have you seen this? Bloom's 2 Sigma problem?

According to Wikipedia, it's the 2 Sigma problem. This one-on-one mentorship, about 90% of tutored, tutored students attained a level of achievement reached by only the highest 20%. So basically you are almost guaranteed to be in the top 20% if you use this one-on-one tutoring methodology.

Correct. And so for a long time, it's been the case. All right, now what's changed? AI has changed. So now with AI, the idea is any kid with a tablet, an iPad, you know, whatever, can have a tutor that is fully designing custom lessons plans on the fly for each student, perfectly tailored to their current levels of expertise. So there's other, there's other parts of learning science, you know, for example, You want to not pass people until they have mastery of a concept because otherwise they don't have a, they have a shaky foundation. So the problem with traditional school is you pass if you get a C. A C is about, you know, 70% or better. Well, what they've shown is that if you get a person to 70% or 72%, basically their rate of learning as they progress will always like decrease because 70% was actually a bit of a shaky foundation. They didn't actually understand it. So when they tried to learn the next thing and the next thing, it was too wobbly of a foundation and it collapses. Whereas if you get them to 90% mastery of subject, they'll do really well. So one thing is like classrooms today, it's taught to get everybody to 70, you know, at least 70 to move forward. But the problem is you actually want people at 90 to move forward in terms of percentage. The second part is like, you know, you want people to be tested at a level that is, you know, not so easy that it's boring. It's too not challenging enough. But not so challenging that it's too hard. I don't even understand. I'm drowning. Right. And so finding that, like, you know, that peak middle zone where I'm being tested enough but not pushed so far that I'm going to, you know, go over the cliff, that would be great. But you can't do that in a classroom because every kid's at a different spot. So, you know, you just sort of, you sort of keep everybody comfortable. Now, that means that the smartest kids are not challenged, and it means that the kids that are the furthest back are just utterly confused. So you're kind of going for this like average, um, you teach sort of the average or lowest common denominator. I'm just like oversimplifying everything, but this is the, this is the complaint of normal school. Okay, so what is Alpha School doing? Basically, it's a school in Austin where K through 8, you go and you do 2 hours on an iPad. And the idea is that your 2 hours on an iPad with your AI tutor will teach you not only everything you needed to know as that for whatever grade level you're in, but you'll learn double that. So you basically are doing— you learn double but in only 2 hours. Okay, so that's the, that's the promise. And then what do you do the rest of the day? They basically just have like random life skill workshops. So go rock climbing, hey, build a piece of IKEA furniture.

So they say, um, life skill means public speaking, entrepreneurship, outdoor education. These experiences build grit, creativity, and adaptability.

Yeah. And so like, for example, they, they did this thing where— and they called the teachers guides. So the guides were like, they had a group of second graders and they go, all right, let's come up with 5 impossible things, impossible for a second grader to do. So the first one was to run a 5K. In under 35 minutes, I think it was. So it was like, run a 5K in under 35 minutes. So it was like, can your second grader even run a 5K? Like, most second graders could not even run a 5K. That's a pretty long run for a second grader. Second grader, you know, is a 7-year-old. Um, and so they asked all the students, do you think you could do it? Nobody raised their hand. They asked all the parents, do you think they can, your kid could do it? Nobody raised their hand. And so that became one of the missions, one of the workshops, one of the impossible missions.

We're going to train like a 7-year-old how to run a 5K. That was it.

So what they did was the first day they just walked the 5K. They said, all right, you've, you've completed it. You at least know that you can go the distance. The distance is a manageable distance. And so they did that for like a couple of days. Then they just said, all right, cool. We're going to, we're going to try to run the first quarter mile or for the first quarter of it. And then we're going to walk the rest. Great. They did that for a couple of days. Then they did half of it running, walked the rest, set 3/4 of it running, then walked the rest until they could run the whole thing. By the end of the couple months, not only did one second grader do it, every single second grader did it. And some of them did it in under 30 minutes. And basically they were like, here's the, you know, so they had these like 5 impossible challenges. They made them want to do it. And the reason they're able to do this is because they're doing all their learning in just a 2-hour window so they can spend the rest of their time doing things that are, you know, interesting life, life type stuff for themselves.

Well, and they're teaching them how to like break down a problem 35 minutes. So we'll start small and build up confidence. Yeah, I mean, I see— I— that's amazing. I totally see the value.

Seems kind of amazing right now. Here's some more just things that are just fascinating about this. So Joe Lamont pulled out $1 billion. I saw that from his companies. To invest in Alpha School. He then said, this is the best product I've ever built by far, better than anything I ever did at Trilogy, better than anything I've ever done since. This is so much better. And it's this app that he's building called TimeBack. And so it's basically like a custom AI tool that basically you are on your iPad, you're learning, or your little, your tablet, laptop, you're learning. And it is doing two things. One, there's a little waste meter in the corner. So just because the camera's watching you and recording the screen at all times. So it sees if the kid just leaves, just like gets up and goes.

Which is what he used at his companies.

It's what he used at Trilogy, right? Like at his, uh, or when he would like buy these companies, he was known for having like pretty extreme, uh, like keylogger monitoring, productivity monitoring stuff, like controversially extreme, right?

That's awesome. This is so cool. I didn't real— I saw the article and I started reading about his— I wanted to know about the business stuff and the article was like, Joe's not going to talk to you about business stuff. Stuff. He, uh, he doesn't want to talk about Trilogy, EWS. He doesn't want to talk about any of that, but he will talk about Alpha School. And I was like, well, shit, that's like what I want to know. Um, and so when it started getting into school stuff, I, I was like, I don't know if I want to read that, but this sounds so much cooler than I thought. I didn't realize how big this was going to be. And I'm on their website, and my kid isn't school age yet, but I'm thinking I would absolutely want them to go to this. Would you send them yours?

Dude, I wish this was around us because, um, so I'll just give you like my little side, side stories here. All right, just like personal, personal life experiences. So my kids were home this summer and it was our first summer break. Like, my daughter is, uh, she just did what they call TK, like pre-K. So she just finished that. She's going to be a kindergartner this year. And my son was about to be a pre-K student. And then we have a baby who's small. But I had this mission. I was like, okay, 3 things I'm going to do this summer. We're going to take, uh, 2 epic trips with their cousins, because I was like, that was always like core memory for me.

Yeah.

I'm going to teach them to swim because they love to do it. It's summer anyways. Plus it's like a good life skill to have. And, you know, I haven't like taken the time to like actually teach them to swim, but I can do that. And then I'm going to teach them to read because I noticed I was like, all of the like schools we send them to, like school is a very generous word for what's actually happening, right? Like it's a It's by and large babysitting, daycare. And I think this is true, you know, for generally for most schools, like, you know, even through high school, college, like there's a lot— that's a big aspect of what school is. But when they're little, it's very much that, like, you know, I would ask them kind of like what they've learned. It's like, well, they mostly just like played and then they'll learn like one thing. But like, you know, they can't do math or they can't read. And I'm like, are they teaching you that? They're like, no, no, no, they're just doing letters. I'm like, but you know the letters, you know all the letters, you could write already. And they're like, yeah, but, you know, they're just teaching at that pace. If I want you to learn anything, I'm gonna have to do it outside of this. So I discovered this app called Mentava.

Mentava.

Go to mentava.com. Now, this is a learning app that was so expensive, I was just actually offended by the price when I saw it. I don't know if you've ever, like, downloaded apps for iPad for kids stuff, but it's usually like, I don't know, $5 to unlock the thing. Maybe it's like a like $7 a month, you know, if it's like really good, like, you know, oh my gosh, I just saw this is a $500 a month per kid size. So I'm paying $1,000 a month for this app. And what this, but this app has a very simple promise, which is we could teach any 3 to 5 year old to read if they just spend, I don't know, 15 minutes a day doing this thing for a couple months.

Dude, talk about value pricing. Your old boss, Emmett Shearer, he's an investor. Emmett is, you got to ask for that discount code.

So I was like, wow, this is incredibly expensive, but I'm incredibly intrigued. So I, I get my kids on it. They've been doing it all summer. And sure enough, it actually is pretty effective. And like, I would say the app itself is incredibly janky. It's like the polish is janky, the animations are janky, like everything's janky. It's not like the best app, but the core idea, which is like, it's a simple value prop. I can teach your kids how to read if they do this thing. For like 10 to 15 minutes a day. And like, they just broke down reading. Because if you think about what is reading, I think there's like 45 different like sounds you need to be able to make. So it's like 45 sound combinations, which is like, you know, you have to learn that like, you know, A is ah and B is buh. And then you have to learn that like CK is k together. You have to learn like those sounds first. So first they teach them all the building blocks and then they show them how they work when they're put together in words. And like, sure enough, both my kids are starting to read now. I'm just like, you can't— you don't get cartoons or anything else till you do your reading today. Right? Really very simple trade. And they like doing it. It's kind of a game and they enjoy doing it.

And by the way, the investors, if you go to their investor page, it's like, like literally everyone who's been on this pod— like every investor has been on our podcast.

Yeah, I know. It's $500 because he's comparing— I don't know, they wanted it to be is the real answer. It doesn't need to be $500. But they're comparing it to like, uh, tutoring, human tutoring. So they're like, oh, this is 5 times cheaper than a human tutor. It's like, okay, cool. But it's also 500 times more than, you know, a normal learning app on the iPad, which is my frame of reference coming into this. But I, I've now seen the value of this type of like personalized learning. Cause let's say they're go, they're playing this game. If they don't understand that, um, you know, SH is sh sound, if they fail, like If they get the, get it wrong 3 times, they lose that little game level. It knows that, okay, you just don't understand SH. So don't, you don't just replay that level. You hop back 3 levels and I'll reteach you that building block to make sure that you understand it. And I'm going to get you to repeat it, you know, in these 4, I'm going to use 5 different games as spaced repetition to teach you these same, you know, same few, few concepts.

But it makes me nervous to have my kid on an iPad.

Not, I mean, sure, maybe it's a personal, personal thing, but, um, Dude, my kids are on devices all the time. I've, I've, I've let go of that rope. That, that rope is like, you know, what is it that like, that horse is out of the barn already. So now it's just a question of like, how bad is it? You know, what are you doing with your time there?

And so what, okay, bring it back to Alpha School. What are you saying?

I believe that they're going to be able to do this. I believe that they're going to be able to, if somebody actually with like the guy took a billion dollars out and he has, I think a 300 person like AI lab that he's building, his own little OpenAI that he's building to basically like custom train these models, build applications on top of them. And I think this is an insane thing that's going to happen. And I think it's going to take over is my, my, like my unhedged, my unhedged true belief is that something like this is going to exist. And this is the best bet I've seen so far.

I don't think it's going to take over. I think it's going to be a massive success. I see like so many reasons why someone would protest this, which like there's what we've talked about going the opposite of AI and technology. There's a massive contingency of people that will go to that category. One of our good friends sends their, their kids to a new thing that I've never heard of called Nature School. Have you heard of Nature School?

My sister runs a nature school.

And I don't entirely know what it means other than you're outside and it involves nature. I guess that's it. But there's, but there's like an entire contingency of people that want to go that route. but I do think that Alpha School will be a massive hit. And I am interested in, like, when I was reading it, just while we were talking, I'm like, I am open to this. This sounds very intriguing. Does it help you get into college, or are they like anti-college, or do they even get to that point yet?

No, it does. They're high school. They have a high— they go all the way up through high school, and they're like, yep, our high school students like crushed the SAT and ACT compared to— they like, basically they use these like, um, pretty standardized metrics called MAP. About like basically how much you learn. So let's say it's like, uh, you do a test and it's— let's say the average third grader is at like a 100 score in math. Well, by the end of a normal semester of school, they would have gone up 7 points, but with Alpha School they go up 15 points. Well then, well, but of course that compounds because they did that in, you know, a shorter amount of time, plus then when they enter the next level, they'll grow again. So they're growing like by a bigger amount and at a faster rate. And so, you know, obviously that compounds the longer you would do it.

Dude, you know how like, you know, I don't know if this is true, but the story is like Magic Johnson became a billionaire not through basketball, but through like franchising McDonald's. You said you wanted to open up a school, like you could be the biggest franchise.

Well, I don't even know if you have to franchise. I think you just literally license the technology.

Um, similar.

Yeah. It's just, do I want to do it for young kids versus like college? You know, like I'm more interested in college, but because young kids have their own set of problems.

You know, it's really complicated. Well, yeah, but I mean, like, that's super rewarding. I mean, that's like a life well lived, I think. What's super sort of scary is I feel like you and I— so we're both in our mid-30s— it sort of feels like one of the last eras in which high school was the same way that it was for like the trailing 50 years. And that now the current high school, it's radically different. So I remember when I remember, I think I was a sophomore in high school when the iPhone came out. And if you, the teachers didn't even know to ban it because no one, no one even had one. And I think Facebook came out when I was, I think in high school or maybe like in 8th grade. And so none of these problems were particularly like problems, like online bullying wasn't a thing. And it, when I see what high schoolers are like now, I do not envy them. The way that children are going to be raised from like 5 to 18 years old, it's significantly different than how the trailing, let's say, probably 60 or 70 years were raised. And I think that we don't give them enough credit because I think that the systems that they have to go through now is significantly more difficult. And I'm very eager to see how like some rat— like if you told me about this school 12 years ago, we would have said, you're insane. What are you talking about? Like, you know what I mean? And so I'm very eager to see how parents are going to deal with not being able to empathize with what their children are going through. Do you know what I mean? Like, we all had the same thing going to high school. Our parents, when we had— well, being an immigrant, maybe it was slightly different, but it was like your parents could kind of guide you on what to— how to act. But now it's way different.

I think for me it already was different. You know, my parents had an arranged marriage, right? So like Imagine, like, their relatability to, like, the dating scene and high school prom, you know? Like, do they— did they understand any of that stuff? Like, not really, right? Um, do they understand— like, you know, they grew up in India, so it's like everything was different for how we were growing up. So I guess, like, that is just sort of the immigrant experience. I don't know, you just sort of do your best to hang on. Um, check out these two pictures I just texted you. I want to tell you about one more example of this, like, alternative schooling.

Okay, so, um, You just sent me a photo of— it looks like a warehouse. Someone's building something and then it's a bunch of kids just hanging out in a field, right?

Yeah. So the first picture of the warehouse. So this is basically my brother-in-law, Sanjeev, who was on the podcast recently. When I went to visit him in Vegas this summer, I'm like, okay, great. And he's been in just commercial real estate for a long time. He's a builder and he's been doing that. He's tremendously successful. And he's like, yeah, you know, I did something that's kind of crazy. And I go, what? He goes, So I just bought this building in downtown Las Vegas, like a $10 million building. And I'm going to— he goes, basically had this experience with his oldest son where he was like, you know, my son, he's really smart, but he's bored at school because again, like, he already knows the stuff they're teaching. And so he just, he just disengages because it's like not that interesting. And he really loves baseball. He's on like the national— he got picked for like the national team of his age. And he's like, but because he's at school for, you know, like 8 hours a day, by the time he gets off school and it's time for baseball practice, he's like kind of tired. He just does it for an hour or two and then he like comes home and he wants to just chill, eat, play video games and go to sleep. And so he's like, we are going to homeschool him this year. But he's like, instead of homeschooling where he's just sitting at our house, uh, you know, he just rolls out of bed and it's like, hey, I'm at school now, whatever. And like, we're busy parents. What are we going to teach? How do we do this? He basically created like a WeWork for kids to homeschool. So check this out. So what he's doing is called the Grind Academy or something in Las Vegas. Basically a sports prep school where you homeschool your— so the kids who are— the kids are homeschooling, so they go to this, they go to the— the idea would be that they would go to the school, they'd spend, I don't know, 2 to 4 hours a day on like the education, all using like Alpha School type of software. Right. So there's, they're all doing, they're all doing their, their curriculum, you know, on their computer or their iPad. There's a teacher sitting there who's there to help in case you don't understand something. There's like a tutor available that will help you get unstuck. And then when you're done with your work or like, you know, but when you start your day, you go there, you do like a morning condition, like a morning workout. So you get like a, a morning workout in, then you do your school stuff. You grab your smoothie, your protein shake, you go upstairs, you do your school stuff. And then you have your afternoon skill-specific, sports-specific training. You're getting like 2-a-day stuff. You got like pro coaches and like top-level, like strength and conditioning coaches to come in and be like, that's crazy doing this for kids.

It's like IMG. Is that what it's called? Yeah.

So he's basically building IMG, but just as a private school for like, you know, middle schoolers, like youth sport, you know, youth athletes. And I was like, this is a crazy move. And he's like, I would, I would never do this. Because he had actually been in the gym business. He had built an 82-store chain. So he's already been in the gym business for— and he's like done well in that, but also knows all the pains of scaling a gym. He's like, you know, I didn't just want to like create a gym for kids or create a gym at all. He's like, but you know, for my kids, he's like, I just got tired of like the stuff they're learning in school was too slow, too boring, and too not relevant to like what's going on in the world today. He's like, you know, I would rather them come in here. They would learn their math, their reading, their writing. And then take like a workshop on starting a YouTube channel or a podcast or, you know, learn like, you know, what's going on with AI, like what, what's going on with drone tech? How do you do, what is that stuff? How do you, how do you learn about that? Like where the future is going, like marketing classes, business classes, like open up a lemonade stand. He's like, I don't know. There's other ways you can learn outside of just this, uh, you know, like the traditional sort of school model. And so he's like, dude, I think that model's dead. And so he's created his own private school. And the two photos I sent you, that's in 30 days. So. I went there and I was like, oh wow, this is like a kind of a raw building. And he's like, yeah, I'm opening up in 30 days. And I was like, what?

Does he have anyone who's enrolled?

Yes, 40 kids are enrolled right now.

How much does it cost?

Uh, it's, I don't know how much it costs exactly. I think the first cohort is like a, you know, whatever, like more like $5,000 to $7,000 a year. Um, but it'll get up to like, you know, when he, once he has the full school built out rolling. And he's like kind of proven his model, it'll be closer to like a $20,000 a year, you know, basically prep program.

This is crazy. This is crazy.

Is that— is that insane?

My kids aren't there yet. This is overwhelming. Like this whole idea of like guides. I've heard this so many times. Ramon sent his kid to a school where they had a guide, right? And I found it very— I'm not open to things. Very easily, but there could be a better way because like the current way isn't great. It's very— this is, this is a very scary thing because it's, it's your, it's your children and it's very overwhelming to like learn about all this. And I don't know what the right way is, but there has to be a better way to do this.

You look visibly stressed out right now.

Yeah, I'm stressed out about— does this stress you out? Because obviously you care about this more, but like you're A/B testing. You should send one kid one way and one kid to the other way. Just, just test it.

Special layers. But But it— yes, it's an— it's like a super important thing. But first of all, like, none of these things are permanent, right? Like, our friend who sent their kid to like one of these alternatives, you just took them out like after a semester if he didn't— like, he didn't feel like it was working for him, right? It's— it's— yeah, it's not the end of the world. I—

one— we have a kid, uh, we have a buddy who went to one of these schools, and I asked him, I go, hey, are you, uh— he was in 8th grade— are you gonna ask any girls out? And he's like, they're all non-binary, so, uh, they're not. And I was like, oh my God, man, I'm so happy I don't have to deal with this. This is a very stressful, a very stressful situation. I found it very stressful. I was like, oh well, I don't have any advice. I'm sorry. Like, I don't know what to tell you, dude.

The, the bar is so low. Once you realize, like, the, like, once you just go sit in the, the current, like, status quo, you're like, okay, what's my real risk here? Like, my real risk is so low because this current experience, you know, it's not like I'm trading something that's really good for something that might be better. It's something that is pretty dissatisfying. And there's like, well, do you want to try something that could be better? That sort of logically makes more sense.

Dude, I went to a— do you have you, you have you ever been around Catholic stuff? Have you like hung out with a nun?

Have I? No, dude. Why would I?

I went, I went to Catholic school, my boy.

Is that something people do if they're not like Catholic?

I went to— well, you like see, you don't even see them anymore. They're like rare. I went to Catholic school. I had nuns. Teaching me and like they were the convent and like it was Sister Mary, Sister Teresa. Yeah, they were all like Sister Mary, Sister Teresa, Sister Catherine. And they would hit me if I misbehaved.

And yeah, that's a pretty, that's a much more radical experiment. It's like, we're going to—

That's not radical. That's just how it's been done. It's not radical in the sense that it's not new.

Yeah, it's not that it's new. I guess what I'm saying is like, dude, I loved it. I went to an all boys— If that's acceptable, then I think this should be acceptable. You know, I went, oh, I agree.

I went to an all boys college. College prep school, like a high school, a Catholic school. It sounds fancier than it is. It was, it was like very blue collar.

Was it called— or something like that?

No, no, no, no. It was called St. Louis University High School. It was an all-boys school, and, uh, it was fantastic. I loved it. I can't say enough good things. I enjoyed my experience so much. And I would have— I was a jerk. I was a jerk in high school. And I would have a teacher kind of get in my face and yell at me if I did something wrong, and it was exactly what I needed. I loved that strict disciplinary, uh, experience and it, and it had a big impact on me. So I, my, the reason I don't have too much empathy for wanting to change is because I enjoyed my experience. Had I gone to a public school, I think it would have been a lot different. I can't imagine a public school with 5,000 or 6,000 kids that I feel like I would. I'm so intimidated of that, of the idea of that.

Right. I mean, I went for, I went to a high school in Houston, Texas that was like that, 4,000 kids. I remember like if you just walked into the bathroom, there was like an ear piercing parlor basically.

Was there really?

They would just give piercings in the bathroom. It was insane, dude.

It sounds like prison.

There was like, yeah, there was scheduled fights of like, which, like, there's scheduled fights. It's like, oh, these guys are going to fight these guys today. And it's like, that was just like a pretty weird, like UFC 202. It's like, all right, it's happening this week, dude.

My experience was so harmonious.

Halfway through high school, my parents shipped me off to China. We all moved to Beijing and I finished high school in the International School of Beijing. And now I'm in a 150-person expat-only international school. So I could have had like two totally different experiences.

You know, was the second one good?

Oh, it was amazing. Best thing that happened to me was to have that. Yeah.

Why?

Well, first I needed a fresh start.

It was Chinese kids or Americans?

No, it was mostly like, it was a mix because like you, you, you had to have a foreign passport to attend. Got it. You couldn't be a Chinese local and attend no matter how much money you had. You had to have enough money where you had dual— you had a passport of Singapore or somewhere else to come. So a lot of the kids were Asian because maybe it was like Korea, Japan, whatever. A lot of, you know, Australians, you know, Europeans, Americans, whatever. And, um, it was— I mean, it was great for me only because like a change of environment, even if the environment is not better, is great just because it gives you a blank, like a clean slate.

It's also probably intimidating, you know, to to just be like, oh, okay, cool.

Like, socially, I was like this before, but now I could be different. Sports-wise, here's what I was doing before. Here's what I'm doing now. Whatever. You could do it all there. Plus, I don't know, it was just a better school overall. There was just no— I don't know how to explain it. It was just like a higher quality everything. The food was higher quality. The teachers were higher quality. The classes were higher quality.

Yeah, you were with a bunch of— it was a rich kid school.

It was a rich kid school. Like, what do you want? It's going to be— it's going to be that, you know, and all the companies pay for it. So the parents don't usually pay for it. Like when the company moves you, they're like, all right, we're taking your kids out of like, you know, American public school or whatever. We'll have to give you an equivalent of an English schooling experience over there. So the companies pay for it.

That's pretty sick. I would, I've dreamed of like moving away for a year or two with my, with my children. I think that'd be awesome. That's pretty badass.

I would highly, highly, highly recommend it. I think it's one of the best things anybody could do.

China's not on the list. China's down the— China's down. That's not on the list. But, you know, like Paris is pretty dope or something like that. What did Scott Galloway said? America is the best place to make money. Europe's the best place to spend it. Yeah, that sounds pretty good. All right. That's it.

That's it.

All right. That was a great pod. Someone in the comments said, Sam and Sean, we're so— we like these guests and all that stuff, but we just want brainstorming. We just want old school ideas, old school episodes. That's what this episode was. Hope you enjoyed it. All right, that's the pod.