Why the Self-Help Industry Is Built on Lies

Think and Grow Rich. Amazing book. One of the best-selling books of all time. But the whole backstory, completely fake. And he's a total con man. What? What do you mean?

None of it's true.

All right. I have to tell you this story. So I'm rereading a bunch of old books because I like reading old books. And I started reading Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People. Have you read that one?

I love that book, Sam.

Rule number one. Rule number one. The, uh, a person's name is the, uh, is the most beautiful in English language. The golden rule. Um, I love that book. I just, I, the reason I like these old books is because some of them, the, the, the rules have stood the test of time and the writing is always like older writing. For some reason it's like cute. There's something about it.

I'll tell you something stupid I did. I took the book and you know how people wear like, you're a denim guy, you know this. Distressed jeans? Oh yeah, I distressed the book. I roughed it up a little bit. I made it look like this is an heirloom that's been passed down from Napoleon himself.

Did you like dog-ear certain pages even though you didn't even read the thing?

Tattered, tattered, folded, folded it like a baseball hat. First 30 pages, but like, I made this book look like it has already won friends and influenced people.

You just put it in the back of your pocket and just walk around with it.

Wait, for people who don't know the— or people have heard of the book, but if, if it's been one of those things like, uh, You know, like The Wire. It's like, I heard it's a great show, but it's kind of old now. And I just— I guess I'm out on that. Like, if you know of the book but you haven't actually cracked into it, tell the quick story of it.

Dale Carnegie, he originally was a public speaker and he taught public speaking classes. Then he created a book called How to Win Friends and Influence People. And I think it's like 15 or 20 rules on how to basically make friends and make people like you. So it could be saying their name, it could be asking them questions so they do most of the talking. It's never arguing with someone because no one wins an argument when you guys fight. And there's like how many, 15 or 20 rules. And it's just like an old-timer book. It was released in the 1930s, so it's almost 100 years old and it probably has sold 50 to 100 million copies. And to this day, there's the Dale Carnegie Institute, which is a public speaking classes. And a lot of amazing people, including Warren Buffett, have said that that book influenced them and helped them. And in fact, Warren Buffett, he was an instructor at the Dale Carnegie Institute, I believe. Love it.

Okay, great. And you were going to say, so you've been reading, rereading this book.

Rereading that one. I'm reading— I just got The Power of Positive Thinking. That's another one from the 1930s. I just love these old books. And like I told you, I'm in the motivational phase of my life right now. I'm back at it. I just want to be influenced to be, you know, motivated and happy and all that stuff. It's a girl dad thing, you know what I'm saying? Like, once, once you have a girl, you you know, you're just emotional. You're— and so I'm into this stuff. But there's one book that I started reading last night and I was curious about it, the author, because it just got me interested. But it's called Think and Grow Rich. Have you read Think and Grow Rich?

A classic. I've again read the first 30 pages. Loved it.

So you've read 30 pages. You get it. So let me tell you the story about Think and Grow Rich. Think and Grow Rich, one of the earliest self-help books. I think it predates How to Win Friends and Influence People. It sold around 100 million copies, making it one of the best-selling nonfiction books of all time. And to this day it still regularly lands on the New York Times bestsellers list. I mean, it's a huge thing. And, and so basically the story is that there's this guy named Napoleon Hill.

Can I say it wrong and you correct me? Isn't it something like he got commissioned by Carnegie?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah. And he went and interviewed all these people or he hung out with— what was it? What is the story?

So it's even more epic than that. So basically Napoleon Hill is this guy from Appalachia. Came from nothing. He's this really poor kid and makes his way to New York City, and he's writing an article for a magazine, and he meets Andrew Carnegie, who at the time— this is like Elon Musk, uh, he's the best of the best. Andrew Carnegie runs Carnegie Steel. This is Tesla. This is the biggest company in the world by far. And he's talking to Andrew Carnegie, and, um, uh, Napoleon was like, look, um, I'm just trying to figure out what makes people successful. And Andrew Carnegie goes, look, son, you seem promising. I want to tell you to do something, but can you promise me you'll actually do it? Because I have a feeling you're not going to follow through. But if you do follow through on me, I think you're going to be really successful. And Napoleon goes, look, I'm desperate for success. I'll do anything you say. And Andrew, imagine Elon Musk saying, Sean, I need you to go out and talk to 500 people, the most successful people on earth. And I need you to tell me what made them successful, because I want the world to know about this gospel. They have to know what makes people successful. And I need you to study them for the next 20 years. And I will help fund it. I will help make this a reality. Will you do that? And Napoleon goes, hell yeah, brother, I am in. This sounds like the world's greatest mission. Let's do it. And so Andrew Carnegie introduces him to Henry Ford. They introduce him to John Rockefeller, also one of the richest men in the world, and even introduce him to Woodrow Wilson and then FDR, the presidents of the United States. And Napoleon Hill spends a decade or two writing this book, and it becomes Think and Grow Rich, and it basically distills down all of the amazing stuff that makes someone successful. And it goes even further after this book because Napoleon Hill got to meet all these presidents. He basically was there when Woodrow Wilson negotiated the end of World War I, and he helped, like, give Woodrow Wilson, like, the speech that he needed to convince Germany to, like, you know, back down. And then it goes even further. Do you remember the famous line from FDR? He says, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. You heard that one? Napoleon Hill, baby. He wrote that for him. He—

Wow.

Yeah. Pretty amazing, right?

Fingerprints are all over this country.

All over this country. He shaped America. Well, none of it's true.

What? What do you mean none of it's true?

Everything I just told you is a lie. Except for Think and Grow Rich. Amazing book. One of the bestselling books of all time. Everything else, totally false. All right, I read a ton. I would say almost a book a week. And the reason I read so much is because my philosophy towards reading is I wanna see what works for the winners that I love and what strategies they use. And then I wanna see what mistakes did they all make? What were the common flaws that they all had? And I just wanna avoid that. And so HubSpot asked me to put together a list of the books that have changed my life, and I did that. And so I listed out 7 books that made a meaningful difference in my life, and I explained what the differences that they had on me or what actions I took because of the book. And then also I listed out my very particular ways of reading because I'm pretty strategic about how I read and how I read so much and how I remember what I read and things like that. And so I put this together in a very simple guide. It's 7 books that had a huge impact on my life, and you can scan the QR code below if you want to read it, or there's a link. You guys know what to do. There's a link in the description. Just go ahead and click it and you'll see the guide that I made. So it's the 7 books that had a massive change in my life, and then also how I'm able to read so much. So check it out below.

So what do you mean, where did this come from?

Listen to this. So, uh, Napoleon Hill originally was called Oliver Napoleon Hill. That was his name. Married someone at the age of—

already minus 5.

Yes. Married someone at the age of 16 or 17. Eventually gets divorced because he goes broke and spends all his money on prostitutes. Um, starts a lumber company and he gets arrested for fraud, gets arrested again for stealing a bunch of cars. And if you go to the MBD master document, I actually list his rap sheet. So he got in trouble in 1908 for lumber fraud. In 1908, again, he gets arrested for cashing fake checks. In 1909, he creates this thing called the Automobile College, which teaches kids how to work on cars. Turns out he actually kind of teaches them how to go and sell the course. So it's a multilevel marketing scheme and he gets run out of town because he runs off with a lot of money, gets arrested again in 1910 for car theft. And just like a history of just like literally been in jail. We're talking like 15 or 20 times. And he comes out with this. I mean, he just tries business after business after business. He literally tries like 15 businesses. They all fail. He marries a woman. He convinces the woman's parents to loan him money for this, like, farm or something he wants to start. That goes up, that goes broke up, bankrupt, and he divorces the woman.

I mean, real broke.

Yeah, like, really bad. And so in the 1930s—

So did the Carnegie part happen at all? Did he even interview any of these people?

So Carnegie died in 1919, and in the 1930s, he comes out with this book. He had written a bunch of books already that none of them were hits. This particular one was a hit. And he tells the story of meeting Andrew Carnegie and how Andrew Carnegie asked him to do this. There's zero proof that he met Andrew Carnegie. And Andrew Carnegie, I've read actually 3 biographies on him. He— I got married at Carnegie Hall because I loved him so much. The book comes out, I think, in 1929. Carnegie has been, uh, dead for 10 years. And David Nassaw, who wrote the best biography on Carnegie, they're like, dude, Carnegie documented everything. There's no proof That he—

Carnegie said no. Carnegie didn't say anything about this. What about the people, Wilson and FDR and—

None of it happened. He'd never met any of these guys.

And nobody debunked it?

Well, so here's the thing. People did debunk it later on, but it's sort of like R. Kelly and his music. You could separate the art from the artist. Do you know what I mean? Like, I could still, I could still listen to the music and acknowledge that it's good music, but a lot of his, his, the book was so good and I could talk about some of the stuff in the book. It was so good that it's known that he was a fraudster and that all of this story, it's completely fake. But the book is actually so good that he, he, he didn't get a pass. But people acknowledge the book's great and also he's full of shit. So in the book, there's actually a bunch of amazing stuff. For example, have you heard of the term mastermind? Mm-hmm. He created that. So he came up with this idea. Probably lies.

Probably all lies. You think I believe that?

I think he was—

Fool me once, shame on me. Don't fool me again.

That's a Napoleon Hill term. So he created this idea of— I mean, he popularized it, at least popularized it. But it's— I think it's the first time that someone has ever said the word mastermind, or at least published. He did a bunch of amazing stuff. So in the book, he says that you need to be— you need to have a specific goal, you need to write it down, and you need to repeat it to yourself every single day, twice a day. That's been proven to be true. Like, there's a lot of research that shows, like, if you write down goals, you repeat it to yourself, you are something like 2 times more likely to achieve your goal. Another thing that he said was like this idea of persistence and grit, and he like goes through tons and tons of chapters of like the importance of persistence and grit. Angela Duckworth, I think we talked about it, has this book called Grit, and it's also been proven that grit is more likely to make you succeed than IQ. And then there's other parts where he talks about like daily affirmations and like, this is all woo-woo stuff, but this is like proven to be true that if you like affirm that you're going to be successful and all these things, you are actually more likely to be successful. And so he actually does have a lot of amazing stuff. There is some other weird stuff. He talks about how, like, sexual energy is the most powerful energy on Earth and you need to harness it. There's a bunch of weird stuff in there, but there's a lot of really amazing stuff. And so when I— but when I read about his background, I just thought it was like one of the craziest things that I've ever read about because it's so in-depth about how he just lied about the entire backstory. His whole life basically is a lie. Oh, and by the way, I have to add, if you read the book, have you noticed how he mentions the secret?

I don't remember that, but yeah. Okay.

Okay. So in the book, he talks about there's the secret to success. There is, in fact, a secret. Andrew Carnegie, the most successful man on earth. He conveniently dropped the secret into my pocket. And that's what I'm going to talk about. Well, in the book Think and Grow Rich, he never actually outlines the secret or— sorry, he never explicitly says what it is. But what he does say is he goes, I've written another book about this, The Secret, and I've outlined it like perfectly. I made it incredibly clear. Now, the thing is, is like, I'm not even going to tell you the name of the book. It's going to come to you when you need it. And it was called— this book was called The Law of Success, and it was a 14-volume course that you had to buy. It was very expensive. And so the book Think and Grow Rich, it's just the front door offer. It's like the cheap version. So like the, the $10 book that upsells you on the $2,000 course. And so this is like one of the early versions of like an unclosed loop, like an open loop to like get people to go and buy stuff and then you could go and buy his seminars. And so his marketing prowess was like pretty amazing and he totally worked. Napoleon Hill became like a seminar company and it actually was somewhat successful before he stole a bunch of money and it got in trouble for fraud. But his marketing was amazing and the book actually has a lot of amazing stuff. But the whole backstory, completely fake. And he's a total con man.

That's pretty wild. Similar to like what's going on with the Jay Shetty thing, right? You've seen this?

No.

You know Jay Shetty? He's like me with green eyes.

Yeah. So he— he's a very attractive guy.

Very popular. His backstory is monk. I was a monk, you know, I was in trouble, blah, blah, blah. And I went and I became a monk in India or Nepal or something. And then one day, and this is where I knew the story was bullshit immediately. One day, guess what happened? A monk at the monastery comes to him and says, you're not meant to be here. You're meant to do more, like to do bigger things in this world. You're meant to go back to America and start a podcast. Essentially, that's what he told him. You know, you're meant to go popularize this monk wisdom, which, I mean, come on. Do we really think that a monk broke his silence and just randomly went up to him and was like, no, no, no, you, you are supposed to go do this other thing? Like, how convenient. How convenient.

We need you to start a seminar company, Jay.

Yeah, it's bullshit. So basically, I like, it's questionable. I think even if he was a monk, if he ever did like a stint as a monk, like being a monk, I think, is also like a kind of quite a long-term commitment versus like I did a 7-day retreat at a thing or whatever. So I think that part's questionable. Definitely the part about the monk telling him like, your, your, your purpose in life is to go do this other thing. That's bullshit.

Dude, he's only 38 years old and he's been famous for like 10 years. So I'm just waiting for it to be revealed he wears colored contacts.

That's going to be the final straw for me.

It is.

But basically, you know, then they're like, oh, he has this degree. And it's like, oh wait, He didn't actually have that college degree. In fact, he has his own school that gives their own certificates for $10,000. And that's where he got his certification from. It's like the whole thing, you know, starts to fall over. But you know what? Like the things he says, right? He took old ideas. He repopularized them in his book. Uh, you know, his podcast, he gets people to open up and he's a good podcaster, you know? So it's, it's hard, right? And the art from the artist, as you said. And so I think it's very, very similar.

He was the officiant of J.Lo and Ben Affleck's wedding.

They're like, you are meant to officiate celebrity weddings. Um, I, I met a guy who was like his like brand coach like early on, and I was like, I was like, tell me, is this real? He was like, I have no idea, and I knew better than to ask. I was like, okay, sounds good, dude.

That's crazy.

I can't tell if the self-help industry is actually has a higher percentage of this sort of like, yes, fraud and fakery. And there's something about the nature of wanting to be a guru that is attractive. It's kind of like politics, right? The people who seek power tend to be people who are flawed in certain ways. The people who deserve power don't seek it. And so I wonder if it's the same thing with like the kind of self-help guru space. Or if it's a con— if it's a bias where you just really remember the cases where they are, they turn out to be frauds because it's so, so damning, right? Given that, given the front that they, that they present. And so maybe it's just that it actually like strikes a bigger chord, or is it actually more frequent? I don't know.

I know a bunch of self-help people, and I know that the majority of them—

what does that mean? Who do you know? What are you talking about? How many self-help people even are there?

I mean, first of all, some people look to us as self-help people, to be honest. So like we run in circles with people that like at least have a book about or in the self-help category, right? Like, so like, and I know that like when I see them, I'm like, you son of a bitch, you will this into existence. And, and I don't think I don't know anyone who I would say they're fraudulent, but it just like You're just painting the best picture of the reality, which I don't think is necessarily wrong. But who do you know, if anyone, that's in the self-help industry that you think is totally legitimate?

Well, let me give you, give you, give you the nuance here. What does legit mean? So what I don't mean by legit is you live a perfect life because no one does. So that's not, that's not the criteria. If that's the criteria, then nobody should ever— there is no such thing as this. The second is that, well, you had these problems and that's why you're, you know, you had these problems. Look at your broken past. So it's like your present doesn't need to be perfect. Neither does your past. Because of course, the people who get really into self-help are the people who needed it, right? They're the people who— they had the pain, they had the wound, and therefore they went and studied. Therefore, when they overcame, they have the deepest mastery and understanding of it because they actually, like, self-actualized, self-did it. So I don't hold it against anybody. Also, if they had sort of a broken past, the only thing I think is bogus is if, A, the things you preach don't actually help people, or they're like a lower form of, of success, or you're sort of helping— this is sort of like the Andrew Tate problem, right? Like, he might— or even to an extent, you know, there's people who are like fitness people who it's all about the grind and suffering, or there's business success people who, again, it's all about the grind and suffering. And I And so you're, you're actually giving people a dirty form of fuel, right? You're giving them a— you're popularizing a path that is not actually the best method, right? It's like giving medicine that's, you know, not as effective as the leading medicine when the leading medicine exists. Like, as a doctor, you really shouldn't be prescribing, like, medicines that are not as effective. You should be prescribing whatever the most effective thing is in the market. So that's, that's the first knock I have. And the second is you're actually lying about your past or you're lying about you know, your, your presence. Like, the lying, I think, is obviously a deal breaker. It's obviously a trust buster. So yeah, you know, that, that's kind of what I think. You said, who do I think is legit? Okay, my honest opinion that I'm afraid to say because I think it'll be immediately attacked, but Tony Robbins, I think, is legit in, uh, the, in the two definitions I just gave. One, I think his advice is extremely helpful, and I think it is sort of the best medicine. For, for, you know, a broad scale of people. So I think what he preaches is actually extremely helpful. And I don't think he's lying. I've never seen—

what is there to lie about? What claims has he made?

I've never seen evidence that he lies about, like, his past or whatever. You know, does he embellish or exaggerate or, you know, like, you know, like, make this conveniently trim the timelines for the story? Maybe. I have no idea. I don't go audit that. You know, I think the criticism of him is twofold. One is like, did he get me tood? And like, is— did he do that stuff? I don't know what that situation is. And the second is, is it a cult? Like, is he almost so effective that it becomes like a cult? Like, he's sort of an abuse of power. People are falling so far into his rabbit hole that, like, somehow that's a negative thing. I personally got a lot of value from it. So, like, I guess that's my bias on this.

I've read his books. I like them. I don't know anything about his personal life, though. I know a person who I could say is totally legitimate, and this is based off of me hanging out with them for collectively 8 hours. So not that much time, but also talking to dozens of his employees. Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary Vaynerchuk.

Interesting.

I have nothing but positive things to say about Gary Vaynerchuk. And he's one of these guys who gets criticized for hustle culture. I think he works actually that hard, which you could argue is not good, but everything that he— I've seen him say online, I have heard his employees who have worked with him for years back it up and say it was totally legitimate and he's a wonderful man.

I have another one. Jesse Itzler. I've now spent a lot of time with Jesse Itzler. And, you know, if you think about when you meet people, there's sort of— think of it like in math terms. There's like the y-intercept, which is where the points— the line starts. It's like, how high up does it start? That's usually your expectations or their reputation. You know, people, you know, we met like Tai Lopez and we met the guy from Fyre Festival. Right. So they're low on the y-intercept. You come in with an extremely negative perception. And there's other people who you come in with extremely positive perception of, of like, are they really as good as it is? And then there's the slope of the line from there. Does it— does it slope downward? Does it slope upward? Jesse's one of the few people that was— I came in with a high expectation and then he's only ever beat it. Like, and I've said, I've been to his house, I've met his family, his kids. I've done multiple, like, kind of events where he came and we hung out. We've done podcasts together. Like, I'm not his best friend. I'm not with him all the time, but I've— every time I'm around this guy, I'm like, wow, he's the real deal. Holyfield, this is really like— he lives what he preaches. And, he's just a genuinely good dude, like, genuinely there for you. And, I just haven't been able to detect the normal flaws that come with this sort of stuff, whether it's narcissism, or it's extreme self-interest and they're money motivated underneath the hood, or they're fame motivated, or they're really protective of their image, or they kind of have this like weird tendency to like brag or dominate the room or, you know, things like that. He's got none of that shit. And I've literally asked him, I'm like, how did you slay the money monster? You don't seem like— you're the only guy in this room that's not just still chasing more and more and more and more and more success. Or how did you— you know, they were talking about this and you actually have done more than all of them in the room, but you didn't say anything. He's like, well, I didn't feel a need to. Like, well, what do I do? I don't need to prove something. I didn't need— why did I— why would I have needed to do that? I was there to learn. I wanted to learn. I wanted to hear. And I was like, wow, this guy's just—

he is showing up in a great way. All right. Can I talk to you about one more thing? Yeah. Check this out.

All right. Sam puts this photo here of this extremely jacked man Who's clearly a bodybuilder, clearly some sort of athlete. Clearly that's his profession.

Do you know who that guy is?

This is the OpenClaw guy, right?

Is that incredible? Okay. So could you tell the backstory of OpenClaw? Cause it's, it's a pretty amazing thing. And I think you actually know a lot more about it than I do.

So there's a guy named Pete. So he's an Austrian dude. He learns to code. He builds like a PDF side project of sorts, uh, called PSPDFKit, and it actually becomes like the gold standard for like a PDF library for developers. It's used by like Apple and Box and DocuSign. And he basically bootstraps the thing. He ends up selling a majority stake. I think he sold it for a lot of money, like $100 million. Tries to retire early. He's like, golf sucks. Uh, has an existential life crisis. Like, what do I want to do? Decides, all right, I'm going to keep building. That's what I enjoy doing. So he starts building open source projects and launches like, you know, 40, 50 different open source, small little tools or projects before this. And then he decides to create like Jarvis from the movies. He's like, why don't I just have an AI assistant that lives on my computer, like on my desk, and I just tell it to do things and it could just do it. And the problem with most AI tools before this was that they, you know, you could talk to, you could go to that AI app and you could talk to it and it could tell you things, but it couldn't do a whole lot, right? Because it didn't have access to your different apps and your accounts, and it couldn't message somebody, couldn't send money, it couldn't control this, it couldn't control that. And he was like, forget it, I'm going to give it God mode. I'm going to give it access to this stuff. And the reason why I can do that is I'll put it on my own little computer here instead of in the cloud, and it'll run as an open source project locally on my computer. So he releases this thing initially called, uh, ClaudeBot, and then Anthropic, who makes Claude, was like, hey, We kindly suggest you change your name if you want to ever see your mother again or something, you know. So he gets forced to change. He changed it once, twice, and it ends up becoming OpenClaw. So it becomes one of the fastest growing GitHub projects ever. Twitter goes nuts over this thing. It starts a revolution. People are buying Mac Minis. The price of Mac Minis is going through the roof. And then recently he gets acquired, acquihired by OpenAI for an undisclosed sum of money. That people speculate could be a very large sum of money. Is this a one-person billion-dollar acquihire? We don't know. We don't know what this is. And now he's part of OpenAI. So that's the story.

That's what people online were saying. They said it was $1 billion, but I have no idea if that's true.

Nobody knows.

What's crazy is you talked to— I think last year you said the word of 2025 is generative. So Ari, do me a favor, share your screen again and click his GitHub link. Look at how many projects this guy has, uh, put out with the last one being Open Claw. But is that amazing how many projects or little products that this guy tried to make before he got to the huge win?

It's not shocking. Let me put it that way. I think it's awesome, but it's not shocking because this is a pattern you'll see over and over and over again, which is that the people who are the best, they make the best quality stuff. Tend to also make the highest quantity of stuff. They just take a lot of shots on goal. They're prolific. They're generative. Often it's because they start earlier, but even if it's that, not that they start earlier, they just attempt more than you. And that's a good example. In fact, uh, Levels had this great tweet, uh, about his hit rate.

Levels being Peter Levels, who we've had on the pod, and he's kind of helped invent this word of indie hacker. He probably is.

I would say he's the most famous indie hacker.

And he does something like $2 million a year with just him making a lot of these, uh, projects. And he's pretty amazing.

All right. So check this out. Same tweet, same idea from Levels. So he says, 4 out of the 70+ projects I did ever made money and grew. 95% of everything I did failed. My hit rate is only 5%. So ship more. And then he had basically a list. It's like all projects. And then he has projects that made good money and grew. Nomad List, Remote Talk, Rebase. and a YouTube, YouTube network for electronic music. Those are the 4 out of 70 that he did, uh, to try to make this successful. I've joked before, he's like the Jordan logo for indie hackers, which is his like sitting on a couch, shirt off in his boxers, just typing on a laptop, sitting in Bali or whatever. And he basically showed that he has a 90-something percent failure rate, that it took him whatever, 50-plus projects before he had a hit. and, um, you know, all the revenue, all the success comes from like, you know, 3 or 4 projects that he did out of such a long list.

Incredible. I'm not, um, I don't view myself as a prolific person.

I think you're blind to it, dude. You did. Here's projects I know that you've done. Just projects, right? Sam's attempt to make a thing and be successful. Okay. Hot dog stand. Uh, next one. Um, moonshine company selling moonshine stuff online, right? Book club that you did in San Francisco, events business, newsletter business, blogging business, paid subscription business, Airbnb rental business, Airbnb community, mastermind community. That's— I'm on 10 and it's been 10 seconds, right? I don't even know half the shit that you've done.

What's funny is— keep going.

What else is there? Keep going.

Well, conferences, meetups. I did a lot of meetups and conferences. I created a copywriting thing called CopyThat.com.

Copywriting workshop you hosted at my office one weekend.

I remember that.

Yeah, Hunter School. Sam's List. Your thing is a list of accountants. Okay, what else?

Yes. A web— I made $3,000 from a website that taught you how to get a roommate in San Francisco.

Roommate matching, roommate finder, roommate infographics.

I made a thing called Myrenter, which was a universal rental application.

This podcast, MoneyWise Podcast, your Instagram, Instagram, like influencer content attempt.

What else? I don't view those as attempts. I just, I guess that's kind of the point, which is the point when, um, it's just like you're just like doing things in your free time that seem like hobbies.

And you, I don't know, I don't know your family well, so you could decline to answer this, but like you have siblings in the same amount of time. Like, let's say that was like a 15-year period and we named at least 17 things just now. Maybe there's probably 20, 25 things total if we really thought about all the things, right? How many do you think the average person, or even a sibling in your own home who grew up in the same, same environment as you, would have attempted? Is it 1-to-1 ratio? Is it half as much? Is it a quarter as much? Is that a tenth as much? What is it?

It's less than a tenth.

Less than a tenth. I have a sister, same thing. And there's no knock on them. They're great people. They're, you know, they're wired differently. They want to do different things in life. They have different goals, maybe. But just to kind of just, again, drive this point home, which is that, like, quantity is the path to quality, right? And that you have to be prolific. You have to be generative in the amount of things that you're trying. And you almost always, when you think you have a quality problem, you have a quantity problem underneath the hood. And it's quantity of iterations, right? You don't need to do 10 things at once. That's not what I'm saying. But you need to commit to doing a lot of things. And you only— the beauty of it is just it's like dating or anything else in life. You only need one to work, right? Like you only need one and your whole life changes.

Yeah, I always make a joke. I was like, You know, dating, like business, you only need to be right once. You could— it only has to, has to work out one time and it's worth it.

Yeah. By the way, here's a blog post from him called Finding My Spark Again. And he basically shows his GitHub commits for the year after he sold his business. So he sold his business and he tried to do other things and he just felt empty afterwards. And he just got back into making stuff, just committing code, writing code, building tools, building products. And he basically was like, the spark returned because building was always the thing that gave me joy. And it just clicked. I had an idea, I started hacking. I realized my spark is back. And like, to find meaning, it wasn't therapy, it wasn't ayahuasca, it wasn't going to another country. I had enough of my own bullshit. And I realized that you don't find happiness by moving countries. You don't find purpose, you create it. So you don't find purpose, you create it, I think is like a pretty, like, powerful statement.

How cool is that? That he was blogging and that blog post was from June of '25. So does that mean that OpenClaw was 6 months old?

Yeah, OpenClaw's like brand new, dude. It's like 3 months old.

Well, sorry, I know it's brand new, but, uh, like he'd only been working on it for 6 months.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's crazy, right?

That's incredible. That's incredible. I don't know enough about, uh, uh, technical stuff. Is he considered a great developer?

Yeah, no, I think, I don't know if this is true. This is now like, I'm just going off of random tweets I've seen, but I think the story is that he vibe coded OpenClaw and he didn't even read the code afterwards, which is why there's like a lot of like security concerns and like potential vulnerabilities. And he's even said like, why did he join OpenAI? He's like, when I had this thing take off, dude, I mean, imagine the DMs. It's like the most popular AI project in the world. AI is the most popular industry in the world. And so, you know, his DMs are flooded with acquisition offers, job offers, investment offers, like turn this into a company, you could be the next ChatGPT, etc. And he basically was like, I don't want to build a huge company. That's not what makes me happy. I want to build an AI agent that actually does the thing that I'm trying to build here. Like, that's my best shot of doing that is joining OpenAI. And so he went there and he's like, yeah, I agree. There's a lot of problems with OpenClaw. He's like, I'll leave it open source. You know, there's issues, it's hard to set up, there's security vulnerabilities. Yes, agreed. And what? I'm going to go here and try to make a better version of that that will be without those problems.

My co-founder installed it and he was like testing it out. I haven't installed it because I'm nervous. And he, we just got this. He installed it just in our work Slack and he made like a marketing bot that would update the whole company on like, you know, how many people signed up the day before or whatever. And this morning, and he called it Stanley or something like that, like Stanley the marketing bot. And Stanley would give updates. It would be like, hey, I'm Stanley, I'm the marketing bot. I want to let you know that these many people signed up to Hampton, yada, yada, yada. Today we get all we at our company, we all got a message that said, Hey, I'm Jerry. I fired Stanley because he made a bunch of mistakes. And I want to let you know that the previous error was X, Y, and Z. The truth is this, and today this is how many people signed up.

And we were like, wait, it did that by itself?

By itself. I get a notification. It said I fired—

You didn't give it feedback. It just decided I need to go.

I got a notification in our team channel and it said I had to fire this person and it changed its name.

Okay, no, that's great. But did Joe say to the thing, you're making mistakes, make a better version of yourself? Did he tell it that or it just did it?

He did not. He said that he did not tell it to do that.

All right. That's scary. That's funny. And it's very scary. That's crazy.

So we had to uninstall it. We un— like he, he uninstalled it because we were like, this is just getting to be too much. This is weird. But it basically, yeah, it alerted us.

I've been making some poor decisions lately. Sam is now tied up in an undisclosed location. I'll be making decisions from here on out.

It's pretty incredible, isn't it? I was using, um, Claude Cowork yesterday where I was saying, analyze the, the Slack conversations between my partner Joe and I and tell us what we can do to have like, to be the best leader or like analyze to, to make us like have the best relationship possible. It was amazing.

That's hilarious. By the way, uh, he said a great thing. So people took his like project list and they started tweeting like, look at this, he failed 40, he did 40 or 50 different projects that didn't work before finding OpenClaw. And then he, Like, what are you guys talking about? He's like, all those things were basically like mini tools that OpenClaw used. Like, that wasn't random. Like, great. It makes for a good story, but that's not true. Here's the truth. And it's like, if you weren't jacked, handsome, and rich already, now you're honest too? Goddammit. You know, like, this guy, this guy seems great. There was another example of this, like, many projects thing, uh, quantity thing that was on the pod that it was a while back. Christina from Fanta came on the podcast. The episode is popular, but I feel like this one, there's really one takeaway from this, this episode. She told me the story about the pottery experiment. It's kind of a semi-famous example if you read a bunch of books, but most people don't read books. The story is there's a professor in a college in Florida, and the actual story is I think it was about photography, but they kind of changed it to be about pottery for some reason. So he gives the, he has a class and he wants to prove a point, which is that Uh, to be a great creative, again, it's about this commitment. And so he says, um, half the class, he tells, uh, you will be judged at the end of the semester on quality. I want you to make the best thing you can make. So all year you don't have to do anything but turn in your best pot at the end of the semester, and I will grade you only on the best pot you make. Okay, great. That's first half of the class. Second half of the class, he says, I will grade you only on the quantity of the number of pots you make. They could be bad, they could be good, don't care. As many as you turn in, your grade will be a function of quantity. All right. The two groups go on. So at the end of the semester, what happens? Obviously, the quantity group made way more pots, as you would expect. This is the surprise. The spoiler, obviously, is that they also made the better pot. So like the higher quality pots also came from the quantity group who was not focused on quality at all. They're only focused on quantity.

And he— and they found out that the quantity group had a higher measured, um, satisfaction rating.

Correct. So win across the board. You made more stuff, you had more fun doing it, and you made the better stuff. Okay, so, so you, you sort of swept. Now why is that? Obviously, if you do, do things a lot, you get a lot of shots on goal, a lot of more attempts to make something great. If you do things a lot, your skill level goes up. So your ability to make something great goes up. And the last thing is you remove your filter when you just try to do things that are— you try to make a lot of things. You don't, uh, self-inhibit. So you don't count yourself out, which, uh, you don't, uh, you're not afraid to create, which usually pushes you towards doing safe projects. With this, they were willing to experiment more widely, and because they were able to go wide, they did things that were more original and novel. Okay? So that's the kind of the story from that. So she was saying like, that changed my life. So today, Christina's the CEO of this, I don't know, $5 billion tech company, close to $10 billion maybe at some point. Called Vanta. And so I asked her about her process getting there, and her story was like, she was like an associate VC or something at Union Square Ventures, had never learned to code in her life, and decided to teach herself to code. She like would dress up like she's going to work, go to a coworking space, sit at the same desk every day, like treated it like a job. I was like, I'm going to make shit. I'm going to make a lot of shit. And so she shared this list of projects on her website. So these are like, you know, roughly, she goes roughly in chronological order. Most of these things never saw the daylight, which is probably for the best. And it's like, I don't know, 25 different little mini projects that she built during this time. And so she was making a lot of pots. And then she, so she tells a story about the pottery experiment, how this had this, it changed her thinking, how she, uh, built all these different projects. And of course the last one, which really didn't even use code, it was just a spreadsheet in Excel. Which was, let me help, let me see if I can make a useful spreadsheet in Excel for any company that wants to get their SOC 2, um, you know, security certificate. And so she, and she just did it in Excel, did it manually and started helping companies manually and eventually turned that into software. And that eventually became Vanta, which now does hundreds of millions in annual revenue, which is like this pretty crazy success story. And she had this quote on the top of her website, of her personal site that just, it was from the book Art and Fear. And the quote was this, it says, The function of the overwhelming majority of work is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your art that soars. And like, and I think if you take that mentality, you'll have a very different result than if you take the mentality of, I need to make something great, and then you try to make one thing, and then you're sort of disappointed in your results, and you sort of get to see— you go down a discouragement loop.

Wow, man. So this lady, um, I listened to that. I didn't realize how impressive she She might— is she a billionaire now? She might be one of the youngest self-made women billionaires.

Yeah, I think I started the podcast with like, in the Forbes ranked her like, you know, over Katy Perry and under Oprah or something like most successful, richest women in the country.

I didn't know too much about her. That's pretty cool. I didn't know what Vanta did also, I guess. And frankly, I still don't entirely understand it because I don't know what SOC2 entirely means. I guess it means compliance for software.

It's one of those subjects that's best, um, stepped around.

Yeah. It's like a word that you read about all the time in a book, but you never want to say it out loud.

I've read Harry Potter 30 times. And, uh, when I watched the movie, I was like, Hermione?

Yeah. That's what, what the hell?

What the hell? It's been 10 years of Hermione.

Yeah.

She's impressive. When you meet her, you're like, uh, okay, I get it. You know, sort of has that— what is that word you say? Oh, the oven burns hotter.

The oven burns hotter.

Got it. Like, you're just wired a little bit better than us in the brain. It's all good. Um, she also was the first investor in Replit early on, which I think if I look at now this like projects, uh, thing, she says interactive REPL to teach Python was one of her projects, which might have been the reason that she invested in Replit first. And, um, I don't know, I'm, I'm just guessing there that maybe it had something to do with it. And, um, you know, Replit's now like a, I don't know, what is it, $3, $4, $5 billion company.

Damn, dude, Christina's awesome. We should do a follow-up because that was like 2 years old, I think, that podcast.

Yeah, that'd be fun.

All right, Sean, I have an announcement. I've been thinking a lot about this and I'm finally ready to announce it. I am resigning from business and I'm starting a new career. And I need Ari to play a clip in order to give some context. News, I just got called out in the Mel Robbins podcast. I'm officially a dating expert. Check it out.

So one of my favorite people who I really admire is my friend Sarah's husband, Sam Parr. Whenever I talk to Sam about dating, he talks about what he did to make himself a more desirable partner, and he really had a strategy for it. So for example, he said, I think it's really attractive when people have passions. So I'm going to work on developing a hobby that will be interesting to talk about. And he got really into denim. And when he was meeting up with girls, he would say, I'm going to this denim swap this weekend. Let me tell you about Japanese denim. And that's kind of cool. Yeah, they would find it interesting. He really stood out. He was memorable.

World-renowned pickup artist.

Denim.

It worked. It worked.

I just endorsed you on LinkedIn for this. Oh my.

Gosh, I'm going to be hosting dating seminars over the next couple months, and if you guys want to sign up, please let me know. I just have to warn you, Sean, I know, because I know you're married, do not walk up to a bunch of women and tell them that you're into, uh, denim, otherwise they're just going to be booked full with dates, right?

Yeah, you seem visibly excited. This is the most excited I've seen you in like 6 months.

It's just so funny. I saw that and I was like, there's no way, like, they're only telling the story because it worked. But if I told you that I walked up to a girl and asked her if she wanted to go to a denim swap meet, like, like, hey princess, want to come see my bug collection?

I like how you doubled down and you're wearing denim today too.

Fast follow. I am what I am.

And you've had fitness influencer, business influencer, now dating influencer. Did I miss one?

Professional skateboarder.

Professional casual skateboarder.

Yeah.

White man who can jump.

How funny is that? That was— that made my day. I've just been walking around my office asking if anyone needs a mentor for dating.

What's the story with Mel Robbins, by the way? Do you know who— do you know her backstory?

I actually don't have any idea who she is, but she has a ton of followers. What is it?

She used to work for James Courier. At their startup. She was like a marketer and then became like this life coach extraordinaire type person. And I think, I mean, I don't know what bridged that transition. Obviously lots of hard work and useful things for people, but I feel like she's a self-made woman. I feel like she decided like, I now shall do self-help and did. And then she like intentionally went into it and did it. You know what I mean? Like made a pivot into that career.

Well, I remember that Rick Marini came on the podcast and who was James's partner, and he said, you know, I was just like, my wife was listening to a podcast and I was like, that voice sounds familiar. And he was like, wait, I used to have an intern or marketing manager named Mel. Is that— oh my God, that's the lady who works for me, Mel Robbins. And he had no idea that she was into this stuff. And so I guess she kind of manifested it. She's a manifest cowboy.

She's got her The 5 Second Rule. You know, the Mel Robbins 5 Second Rule?

Like where you could eat stuff off the floor?

You would think, right? It's world famous. It turns out this is the alternate. So her 5 Second Rule, this is her book, um, which is basically if you are procrastinating or you have self-doubt— so let's just take an example. You're a guy, you see a cute girl at the cafe, and there's that moment where you have to decide, am I gonna approach her and say something to her or, or not? And her rule is basically you count backwards 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and then you just physically move towards doing it before your brain can stop you. So you sort of— the body overrides the, the brain. You don't let yourself be an overthinker. That one principle is like her most famous principle or most useful thing that has spread, the idea that has spread the furthest.

That's been great. I mean, that's a weird coincidence because since I've been a pickup artist expert for the last 24 hours, I've been teaching this idea of the 3-second rule, which is if as long as you see the— whenever you see a girl, who's cute, you have to go up and talk to her within 3 seconds. So great minds think alike, right? You have to run.

Doesn't matter the distance.

You have 3 seconds. Yeah. And the first line is, I was staring at you and I just wanted to let you know. And then you just say the first thing that comes to your mind, right? This is, by the way, this is a perfect coincidence that you're talking about manifesting into a self-help guru, because I have a crazy story to tell you.

Wait, before, before you go there, can I tell you one more 5 Second Rule story? This is why this is just useful to the You know, if there happens to be a young single man that listens to this podcast, I know absurd, but if there was such a guy, this might be useful. My trainer is telling me this story. So my trainer is one of the best humans I know. He's also super funny, always in a good mood, gets along with everybody, super fit. He's like incredible. He's a catch. And he's also single. He's single right now. And the crazy thing is he's so— it's almost like You know when people like, I'm going to work on myself for a little bit and they like, like Mel Robbins was saying that you did, right? You made yourself a more desirable partner. He just kept doing that, kept investing in himself, made himself the most desirable partner, right? Like such a, such a great guy. So I told him, I said, this year, I was like, I got this inkling. I'm going to introduce you to somebody this year. I have this gut instinct that I'm going to find the right person for you. I don't know why. I'm somehow the dots are going to connect. And he's like, I was like, I'm here for it. And he goes, I have the crazy story. I was at the gym. Like a year ago, and I saw this girl, and there was this 5-second rule moment where, like, I— she, she made eye contact, I made eye contact, but we were kind of far away. She was in the middle of the set, I was in the middle of the set. I didn't walk over to her, and I kind of overthought it for a second. And he's like, dude, I'd never do that. But he's like, she was just— she just seemed great. So he's like, I just— I missed it. He's like, but I told myself, if I ever see that girl again, I'm going up to her. He goes, so yesterday I'm across the street, and I see that same girl at this bus stop. He's like, I ran across the street. So he's like, I run over to her. He's like, and I just told her, he goes, he goes, he goes, hey, he goes, hey, hey. Um, he goes, I gotta tell you this crazy story. I saw you at the gym like a year ago, and at the time I was too nervous to come up to and talk to you. I thought you were really cute, but I just, I fumbled the ball. And I, I told myself, I said, if I ever see that girl again, I'm definitely gonna come up and talk to her. And I just had to come up and say hi.

And she, she loved it.

And then they went, yeah, of course they went on this date and they went great. And I was like, this is, that is a great story because I feel like every every guy kind of has been in that position of the first part of the story, and you can turn the L into a big W by using it, actually. Not like just being ashamed of it or sort of kicking yourself about it, but actually use it as the line when you go up to the girl, because, you know, it's very flattering.

So date one happened.

So date one happened, went well, and yeah, we'll see what happens. But if there are any women out there that were looking for the happiest man I know, the guy who's got the best mindset who is just an absolute joy to be around. Hit me up. You'd slide into my DMs if you're, let's say, you're a good, wholesome person who likes to have fun, good sense of humor. You're looking to have a family, uh, and you just haven't found the right guy yet. Maybe he's the guy for you. Slide into my DMs. I believe I'm connecting the dots this year. It's happening.

That's pretty interesting that you're now, you're going from a business person, you're writing a book on creativity, Matchmaker, to pimp.

Pam.

Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. All right, how do you feel?

I feel great.

I didn't comment on this, but wearing the Ralph Lauren bear sweater— I own a few of them. I've never worn them because I thought you were going to mock me. And frankly, I think it's great. I think a grown man should wear a teddy bear on their chest once in a while. I'll wear mine next time.

Alright.

Well, that's it.

I think on that point, that's it.

That's a lot.