Why You Should Spend 5x Your Budget on an Engagement Ring | My First Million #201

I don't care if I only had $100,000, I'm spending $50,000 because this is the whole point of working really, really hard is spending my money on stuff that will make my family happy and they'll talk about forever.

I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off on the road. Let's travel, never looking back.

All right. Welcome to the episode. We actually talked about like maybe 8 legitimately wonderful ideas. We talked about privacy startups. We talked about Ghost.org, which is a WordPress competitor that we actually think is gonna be a $100 million plus company. We talked about Burrflow.io, which is a new business that just started like 2 weeks ago. That's quite interesting. What else did we talk about?

Uh, we talked about IKEA hacking, which is the art of souping up and upgrading your basic furniture into something dope using IKEA parts and what, you know, that little trend that might actually be something that you could, uh, build a little bit, build a business around.

This is gonna be an interesting episode because we actually rattled off a ton of stuff. It just went from thing to thing to thing to thing.

Uh, and Sam tells you why you should be spending 3 times as much on your engagement ring as you're planning to.

5 times as much, 5 times as much. And I don't regret it at all. And I actually think everyone should. So listen to the end. That's the, uh, that bit's at the very end at 54 minutes, I think. Give it a listen and also go and click that subscribe button on iTunes and that follow button on Spotify. Cause we're going to be launching some more episodes that are interesting next week and go subscribe to the YouTube channel.

We just had our first video that had 100,000 views on YouTube. So we're getting big over there. Let's do it.

All right, Sean, grab your iPhone for me. I'm going to talk to you about something, but first I'm going to show you. So, all right, go to your iPhone, go to Settings, type in privacy and click privacy.

Type in privacy. All right.

All right. And if you're following along on an iPhone, do this for me. This isn't like privacy. This is like a real thing. All right. Click location services. And then scroll all the way to the bottom where it says System Services.

Yep.

All right, after you click that, scroll halfway down to where it says Significant Locations. Do you see that? Yeah, click that and it asks you for your password.

Probably it just Face ID'd me.

All right, all right. Now your latest location, it might say Vegas or Nevada or something. Click it.

Yep.

So what you're gonna see is my precise location. Your precise location is tracked forever. So since you use your phone and you could clear your history, but you, you see how it's like tracking all your stuff.

By the way, I clicked it, it says arrived via a 27-minute drive. It's like it knows exactly when I arrived and how I arrived because it used Apple Maps or like it uses a bunch of stuff.

It'll tell you like how you got there. It'll tell you what apps you were using when you were getting there. It'll tell you all types of interesting stuff. Now The reason I'm talking about this is I want to tell you a story about privacy and I wanted to show you like why this is crazy because you like knew that like if I told you like intellectually you'd be like, yeah, of course.

Oh, your iPhone tracks you. Yeah, of course.

So I just wanted to show you.

It is weird to see it like that.

It's weird to see it. And the reason I'm bringing this up is I read this story about this guy named Kyle McDonald. And in 2011, he basically did this story where he, well, actually, let me tell you this first. So he was interested in. In privacy. And he thought— he read this line and it said, can you imagine living a life without any private information, where with no private bank statements, no private files on your computer? Um, it's hard to understand, right? But what if you actually ask that question a little bit differently? So do you trust the government? Do you trust large banks? Do you trust Facebook? Do you trust Google? Do you trust these large entities with your information? Because that's kind of like the same thing, but just asked a little bit differently. And so he did this first test where He created this thing called Key Tweeter, and every 140 characters on his keyboard automatically tweeted. Uh, so like there, there was no privacy cuz he wanted to see what was the world like without privacy. And he took it a step further. And so he went to an Apple store in Brooklyn and they had 50 computers and he installed an app on all 50 computers that automatically took a picture every like 30 or 60 seconds. And anytime it detected a face, it would send him the pictures and he published it as like an art exposit, uh, an art thing of like, Look at what people look like when they're looking at computers at a laptop in Apple. And after publishing that, the Secret Service raided his home, uh, and Apple, Apple contacted the Secret Service. They raided his home. They took his computers. They did a thorough investigation. They declined to prosecute, but they definitely could have done something. And I thought that that was amazing. When I started thinking about that, I'm like, isn't that crazy? That I am, I would be, I would be upset too. If someone took my picture, I wouldn't be upset to call the police, but I would be upset. I wouldn't like it. Isn't that crazy that I'm upset about that, but I like type in all my information, uh, throughout the web, or I let someone track me. And it's quite an interesting way. And I thought, what's another way? And so I discovered this little hack. I'm like, when I see that, it actually changed my perception. And so there's this issue going on where I actually think these privacy startups are going to be huge in 10, 20, 30 years. Now, my problem that I'm having personally is I'm actually struggling to find different solutions that need to, like, different ways to solve, or different problems that need to be solved. But I agree with this general premise of, like, when I just did that experiment where I showed you your tracking stuff, and when I just, like, read this guy's, uh, art story, I was like, yeah, I'm totally not okay with that. I don't like that.

Right. But you tweeted something out that was like this. You go, say your tweet. You go, imagine if you walked into— go ahead.

Yeah, so let's just say that you're walking around the street and a company walks you into their office and they go Hey, uh, check this out. And they give you a file cabinet. You open this file cabinet and there's 10,000 pictures of you and your family taken throughout the last 5 years. And you had no idea that those pictures were being taken. How would you feel about that? Of course you'd feel violated. Now they would say, they would say, look, you were in public. And I would say, yeah, I know. I, I was in public. I can't be too angry, but I still don't feel right about this. Now that's exactly how, what happens with your data. Uh, you know that you're opting into things, you know you're, you're consenting, but sometimes you don't realize what you're getting into. And you, if you actually truly knew what was happening, you might regret it. And I think that the next generations of humans, uh, like the guys who are 5 and 10 years old now, I actually think that they're not going to like this stuff. And we're going to see a lot of products that come out that fight it, because I think that, like, when you think of, like, oh wow, you used to be able to smoke in a restaurant in the 1990s. I mean, I remember when I was a kid, I could smoke in a restaurant, or you, you'd be smoking in a restaurant. Now we think that's asinine. I think that the privacy stuff now, we're actually gonna look back in 20 years and be like, I can't believe that that was, you were able to do that. So anyway, I wanted to start it off with that experiment.

I like that. I like that story a lot. And I'm with you. We've talked about different quote unquote privacy-focused startups ranging from like privacy.com to DuckDuckGo and how that's actually like—

I love privacy.com, by the way.

Become like a real kind of like sort of competitor to Google. Obviously in a niche, but hey, it made it, it made it out after, you know, 10 years against Google. And we've talked about different, different versions of this, whether it's browsers, phones, a lot of the crypto stuff is based on these, these same principles, right? Like, you own your data, and you decide, you custody it yourself rather than trusting this like kind of central company to do to hold it for you. And so I'm definitely with you that I think that some really big companies can be there because people really give a shit about this. And you could tell people give a shit about this, like I think it's ironic you were saying go to your Apple iPhone settings because if you go down the street in San Francisco, you're going to see huge billboards and it just says privacy and it's just Apple and there's a phone blocking out your face like this, like somebody holding a phone and you can't see their face. And that's their whole ad and that's their differentiation. That's their shtick about like what they care about. At the Super Bowl, they had that ad of somebody just looking at their phone, like typing it, like kind of like a text message to somebody. They're just laughing uncontrollably, but they never explain what it is because it's like, hey, that's your information. And, um, and so Apple is like basically bet the farm on privacy as like their core attribute that they're going to be providing to customers, um, like the number one value prop now. And, um, but you know, here you go, you go into, you go into your phone settings and it's like, hey, yeah, we've tracked your location and you can share that. And here's, here's all the different services you've shared that with, um, you know, here. And they are trying to fight back, like you've, you've probably heard the Facebook stuff that happened, but If you're not advertising on Facebook, you probably don't realize how big of a deal it was.

You should explain what's going on because even I, I don't own an advertising business anymore, but I did. And even I was a little bit undereducated, but it's actually an incredibly big deal. And this is an incredibly big deal for a consumer, but also as business people. Last week we talked about this inflection with the NCAA athlete thing. This is actually a new inflection. It actually helps guys like me who owned an advertising business, but I don't, not anymore.

Right. Yeah. So basically Facebook's this, you know, obviously it's the advertising juggernaut. It's Facebook and Google. And with Facebook, Facebook relied on having obviously detailed targeting information about you. People always said, oh, it's creepy. You know, your iPhone, my iPhone's listening to me. And by the way, do you know the explanation, the real explanation of why, of how that works? It's like, dude, I was just talking to my friend about this. And then, you know, And now it's showing up in my Facebook ads. And like, the reason why is because your, your friend has searched for a thing or interacted with a product, and then they know that you were close to your friend, your phones are in close proximity. And so they start showing you ads that have been like your friends, that your friends have been interested in, because they know that that works. And there's a chance that you had talked about it. And then, you know, out of 30 times that you didn't talk about it, you just saw an ad, it just went by you. And then the one time it's the thing you guys were talking about, it stands out and you remember that and you think Facebook's Listening to you. But nonetheless, Facebook basically had the biggest targeting machine in the world, right? You could segment by state, by religion, by whatever. And then they've slowly stripped away some of those things as they got in trouble for, you know, like privacy with the election about what sorts of things you can target on. But fundamentally, Facebook knew more about you than you knew about yourself. Facebook knows before you're pregnant, right? Facebook knows you're pregnant before you know you're pregnant. And it knows based on your behaviors. It knows based on your interests and knows based on many things, you know, a lot of stuff about you. And so what happened is Apple basically stripped the one thing Facebook needed. Um, it lets you— Facebook basically lets you opt out of data tracking. So when you update to the new iOS— or sorry, Apple did— when you update to the new iOS system, it says, hey, do you want to share all your data? So you're just like, no. And that one no took away Facebook's entire, like, kind of like knowledge about you as a customer. And so you've opted out of this tracking. And so now when you go visit websites, Facebook doesn't get that data back to it, or it doesn't get that information back. And so as a Facebook advertiser, if you're in e-commerce right now, all the numbers just sort of changed overnight. Like even when you send a— show a Facebook ad to somebody, they click it and they go buy a product from you, Facebook's only catching like 60% of those conversions. It doesn't know about the other 40% 'cause they've opted out of tracking or it didn't work. And so, Facebook all of a sudden is kind of like scrambling to figure out, all right, how the heck are we going to like deliver the same value to our advertisers, which is our main business model, without the— it's like, you know, fighting with one hand tied behind your back now, uh, halfway through the fight. And so that's, that's sort of what Apple did to Facebook. And Facebook tried to fight it in court, and they tried to do all this PR where they're like, you're hurting small businesses. And in reality, they are hurting small businesses.

You are, yeah.

But, you know, net-net, it's good for the consumer to not have Facebook just build this like super rich profile of your every move and your every taste and your every tendency, uh, just so that businesses can advertise to you better.

So if you're listening and you got a privacy or something like related to this idea, I would like to learn about it.

Reach out to us.

I'm interested. Um, I got a, I got a few more ideas. You want to go? You want to go after one?

Uh, yeah, go for it. You do one.

All right. I'm going to tell you one interesting one. I'll tell you two. Um, the first is called Ghost, ghost.org. Have you heard of ghost.org?

I've used Ghost.

Yeah.

Okay. So I'm interested in this Ghost. It's a WordPress meets Substack is the best maybe explanation. So it's a WordPress site. Uh, it's its own platform. So it's a WordPress competitor, but they offer a handful of features. Like you can accept money for a paywall, uh, article. They have a few more features. I actually don't know all the features that they have and why people love it.

So let's say the use case is you want to spin up a website for yourself. You can use Ghost. You want to spin up an email newsletter that's either free or paid or both. You can use Ghost instead of Substack, or you can want to spin up a community, a paid community. You can use Ghost. And so basically Ghost is this open source version of Substack. It's this low cost instead of, let's say, Substack, they take 10% of all your revenue. Ghost just says, hey, pay us $10 a month and we're happy. And so they don't take, they don't take a percentage of your revenue. So for a lot of people, that could be thousands of dollars a month. That you're saving if you use Ghost.

And they have different tiers. So $10 a month, $30 a month, $80 to $200 a month. And so there's a few interesting things about it. But first, like, the guy behind it is intriguing. So he launched it as a nonprofit, which I actually think is stupid, but it probably was good for like PR. And a lot of people actually worked on it for free to help him. I think definitely he should switch, but it's actually making $3.5 million a year and he uses a ton of people like free labor, like people who just want to contribute. And I think he actually has, um, staff, but what he does is if you go to ghost.org/about, you can, he actually reveals all of his revenue. And I think that's interesting because I was going through this and I, uh, I'm a, uh, an investor in a, in a, in a company called ConvertKit. Maybe you are too. I don't remember. But, uh, this company called ConvertKit, they do something like $30 million in recurring revenue right now. They're in the value of, uh, like you, you could say that maybe they're worth $230 million based off of like public comp. So 10 times revenue-ish. And I was looking through Ghost.org's numbers. They're very similar to what ConvertKit was about 4 years ago when they just got started. And so my prediction, and I want to go on record by saying this, is A, I think this is awesome. And B, I actually think that this could be a multi-hundred million dollar company in the making. And you could watch this guy build it in public. And I think it's interesting. Also, he had one major quote. So typically people who build these types of things are kind of like nerdy and engineer-like, and which means they're sometimes like reserved and held back. And I, which I, which I like. But he had a great quote that I read. He goes, someone goes, what's your major advice for people getting started? He goes, honestly, my single biggest piece of advice would probably be to stop looking for so much advice and shut the fuck up and go build something. So what do you think about this company? Do you agree in my prediction that this could actually could be a multi-hundred million dollar business?

Okay, kind of boring, but I agree, right? It's more entertaining when we disagree, but I totally agree. I used Ghost for many of the reasons you talked about. A, I was intrigued. I thought their story was interesting. I liked that they're kind of like pirates. They were sort of like just going against the grain on a bunch of stuff that they were doing. Product is good. Not super simple to use. It's kind of like, I also find, you know, frankly, I find WordPress to be a little bit confusing if you want to actually—

WordPress is incredibly confusing.

Yeah, like it's kind of like easy to get the first thing going and then to get it to do what you want takes like a lot of stuff. Um, I'm surprised this is as small as it is. So 3.7 million annual run rate. I'm surprised it's that small because Ghost has been around for a while.

4 years.

So I don't think that's— I don't think it's that impressive where it is, but it's sort of like a DuckDuckGo, uh, where I'm like, I believe it. I first, I believe that these guys are not going to quit. So I think that's like, you know, the first thing these guys aren't going away. And when they don't go away, they are very differentiated and uniquely positioned where they're going to pick up like 10% or so of this entire wave of like self-publishing that's going on with Substack and others. And I'm more excited about this business than I am about Substack.

100%. I completely agree with you. And the reason I'm bringing this up to listeners is not necessarily this is a new idea that they can go and do, but if you want to go and watch this person build, he updates the blog every month and he reveals most all their revenue. They're also a nonprofit. So if you dig around, if you Google like Ghost Foundation 501, you probably can see their total financials because nonprofits disclose that. But really cool company that you could watch being built. It's still small now, but it's going to be fun to watch this become huge over the next 4 years.

Yeah, I'm with you on that.

All right.

I got some ideas. So one is from trends, actually, this IKEA hacking thing. So, yeah, so, so I saw this in in y'all's Trends, like whatever the weekly newsletter thing that you guys put out. And, um, I thought this was pretty fascinating. So what is IKEA hacking? IKEA hacking is when you buy something that's sort of like a basic looking piece of furniture, and then because IKEA is like, uh, what's it called, totally modular store, like any piece of, any piece of furniture, it's like all the wheels are kind of like, they accept this one, like one peg, so you can go swap 50 different wheels onto the same piece of furniture, or same thing with the handle or the facade or the, like, you know, the top, the tabletop, the glass top, whatever, right? So it has like this uniform nature to it, which lets you just swap parts almost like Minecraft or Roblox or something like that. And so IKEA hacking is the art of taking something that's sort of a simple, plain Jane looking IKEA piece of furniture, and then you go to the store and you just buy different little upgrades, you know, like you're souping up a car on Pimp My Ride, but you're pimping out your dresser or your desk or whatever it is, and you make something that looks pretty sick. And actually, it was just like $180 worth of random IKEA parts that if you assemble them correctly, they take you from this before picture to this after picture. If it's the YouTube video, put up the before and after that's from the trends thing. It's awesome. It just looks so simple, like very basic looking thing to a really cool looking thing. And this was all just done using IKEA parts. So I have some ideas around this, but did I first, did I even accurately describe it?

Yeah, you described it correctly. And the way that we discovered this, or I think, I mean, I used this 4 years ago when we first started our company. Basically, I found this subreddit called IKEA Hacking. And what I did was I bought a $150 kitchen countertop. It was basically like a really nice wood block. That's all. I mean, that was like a countertop, but I, and then I just went and got some legs from a, from like a whole totally different thing. This countertop you're actually supposed to lay on like granite or like a, like a, like a countertop. And I just, but I just screwed legs on it and I put it in the middle of our room and that was like our kitchen table at our office. And that's, and I think I started talking to Steph about IKEA hacking. It's very fascinating. I don't know what the business ideas are though.

Okay, so here's the business idea. So first it's r/ikeahacks. It's got 78,000 members on Reddit. So back to the episode we did with Greg Eisenberg where he talked about unbundling Reddit. This is a classic example, so shout out to Greg. Basically, I would look at a community like this and I'd say, huh, these people are pretty passionate about what's, uh, what they're doing here. And like, these photos are kind of amazing. These would make for great ads. This would make for great content, just seeing, uh, seeing this, right? And so I would just go to r/reddit.com/r/ikiahacks, and then I would sort by like top, top posts, you know, for the year or something like that. And just go get a sense of like what's there.

So I think— And then click comments and read all the top comments of all the top posts.

So I think you could do a few things here, right? I think you could do what you— so I would then take many of the proven business models and then I would like apply them here. So if I was getting started, what would I do to start? I would start by saying, look, I don't know the exact business model, but what I do know is that this is great content. So I would create an Instagram account right away, right? Because the first thing that you gotta know is that most people don't, bury their head in Reddit. They're not going to find all these new subreddits. Even someone like me who uses Reddit every day, I didn't know about this subreddit. And so let alone my sister who will never use Reddit and she'll only use Instagram. And so the first thing I would do is I would immediately create an Instagram account that's just posting the IKEA hacks, the best pictures from Reddit, and basically just plagiarize it and just put it there and then just credit the username from Reddit in every photo as a photo credit.

Just, just, just so you don't get in trouble.

Yeah, just so I would say, what are you talking about? I was giving credit right there. And it's like, dude, you're ripping this off. So that's the first thing I would do. I would try to get that to like 50,000 to 100,000 followers on Instagram, because that's now my asset. That's my audience that's interested in this thing that I can then leak out different products. So it could be a course, like a simple, like $100, $200 course that's like your guide to IKEA hacking. It could be like individual courses. It's like the bedroom course, the home office course, the home garage, you know, the garage gym course or whatever, right? Like maybe different modules that I would do. So I would maybe think about courses. I would think about maybe I could sell these as kits. So like maybe I could save you the hassle of having to go to IKEA, buy, like figure out, oh, I need this knob and then this little paper thing and then this other thing. And then those 3 together are what you use to like make this vintage looking dresser. Maybe I would just sell the vintage looking dresser kit and it might just be as simple as a recipe. Walk into IKEA, go to the section 198.C and go pick up this item. Right? And so it might be something like that. I don't know what I would do, but I do think there's like a small bootstrap business and this is a good business for somebody who is genuinely passionate about this, right? So like, how do you take what I'll call your like, okay, this is not meant to be offensive, but like there's a lot of hobbies that are like basic bitch hobbies. So what's a basic bitch hobby? Basic bitch hobby is a hobby that you think is unique to you.

It's like saying like No, you're fucking disgusting. No offense.

Like, anytime you say no offense, it's like, what it means is brace yourself for some offense.

Yeah.

No offense. I fucking hate you.

No offense.

So, so, so the no offense here. So like for guys, the basic bitch hobby is like sports. Oh, bro, I love, I love the NBA.

Yeah.

You and like 80 million other people right now. Right. So it's not like a unique hobby. So you can't— how do you turn your passion into business? Well, it's not a unique passion, so you're probably going to have like a me too business. Unless you think of a new angle. And so another basic bitch hobby is like, oh, I love interior decorating. It's like, cool, you and like 90 million other people who like to watch HGTV and just judge stuff, or like you're happy to scroll on Instagram, pretty looking things and push like. Well, I think that's why if you, if you look at it from this angle with like IKEA hacks, you're finding a niche and you're building your own audience on that, on that like that one kind of trend. And then maybe you can release some kind of subscription product, education product, D2C product, like something to that audience. And now you've turned your basic bitch hobby into a business.

We already talked about the basic bitch version of this for us, which was the knees over toes guy. Um, another, another example of this—

I love working out, dude.

Yeah. Another example of this is Philips Hue's, Philips Hue's light bulbs. Crazy subreddit that is like, has a rabid fan base. I've actually—

like lighting or something, right? What is it?

Is it Philips Hue's? It started as just a bulb. That was— and you would say, Alexa, make the bulbs, or, you know, make the living room purple. Um, but then they have like 50 other products now, and people like have all these blogs, and they're actually making good money. I bet you like Apartment Therapy or like one of these bigger brands actually owns one of these blogs. I'd have to scroll down and look at who the copyright— owns the copyright. But basically it's blogs on where to put the lights like under the bed in order to make it feel cool, right?

An example of who did this well is House of Highlights. I don't know if you follow them on Instagram, but they're their big— basically they took ESPN SportsCenter, which was like this 30-minute television show, highly produced, and all it was doing was showing you the best highlights of the day. And so back in the day, sports would happen all day, and then the evening or the morning, the next morning, you would watch SportsCenter to catch up through the best highlights. Right? It's like just the sugar. And House of Highlights smartly realized, hey, we could just post those as 10-second clips on Instagram as soon as they happen all day. And I can basically have 2 people, 2 people who like the NBA just run this account and this account can grow to like a million people. So the guy like Omar created this thing.

I think Bleacher Report owns it.

Yeah. So he ends up selling it to Bleacher Report and runs it there. They run it now. I bet you whatever he sold it for, he sold it for way too little. And so like, you know, Overtime did kind of the same thing. But anyways, that's like an example of taking these, like, how do you take this content that's not your content? It's not original content. It's in this like kind of basic bitch hobby and then you turn it into like a media, a media property that you own and then you own that audience and you can figure out what you wanna do from there.

So there's this couple who, uh, they got popular because right before the pandemic started, it was a French guy and his American girlfriend who are now husband and wife and they started baking croissants in their apartment and then they brought it to work and they like sold them to their friends or their coworkers. Uh, and then eventually they created an Instagram and they went viral. And the apartment that I'm staying in right now bought, like, pre-order— you have to pre-order 8 weeks out because they're sold out for weeks and weeks. And they're just baking this, these croissants and cookies out of their apartment. And the guy who owns my apartment got them and then ended up going out of the country. And he's like, hey, you can actually have my order. It's like $90 of like these fancy croissants. And so on Sunday, I'm going to get those fancy croissants. and I invited Dave Nemitz, the founder of Bleacher Report, and his wife to come over and eat these. Like, I was like, hey, you want to come? These are like fancy girl croissants. Like, I don't understand. At the time, I didn't know the story, but like, for some reason, I think this is a big deal. Do you want to come over and eat these with your kids? So I'll be eating croissants with the founder of Bleacher Report on Sunday, and I can ask him the story about House of Highlights.

That's— yeah, please do. It's amazing buy by him. Like, mad credit to them for picking this up before ESPN or anybody else. I think, by the way, he listens to the podcast, or at least he talks to us on Twitter a bunch. And so he seems great. And Bleacher Report, I saw his talk at HustleCon. Very impressive of the way they kind of won and they survived. I just remember this one anecdote he told, which was he was like, yeah, we basically like every other content site was kind of like, okay, I might butcher this just because I'm trying to remember a talk from 3 years ago. But here's what I remember him saying. Every other sports news website was just talking about whatever was interesting to them. They're all kind of putting out the same content. He's like, we needed to be smarter, right? We needed to say every hour a writer is going to spend, we don't have the same number of writers or budget, so they need to spend writing articles that are going to get more traffic than anybody else. And so he would just reverse engineer it. So they would just study Google searches and they would say, oh, everybody's searching what time is the NFL draft? Is like, so we would immediately like have like the number one ranking thing on Google for what time is the NFL draft, where to watch it and how to watch it and what's going to happen in the draft. Just like this kind of filler content on a website. And he's like, people really like the draft. Okay, we're going to go like all in on the draft and we're going to write 10 times more content about the draft because that's what there's a big appetite for that ESPN is like underserving. And so I thought it was pretty awesome how they took kind of like a supply demand approach to it instead of like artsy right, like an artsy approach of like, oh, you know, this is what— this is— we're a journalistic publication and we should, uh, we should write the hard-hitting pieces about whatever, or like, you know, well, here's what I'm passionate about. It's like, no, they like took a science approach to it, which I liked.

And then the other founder went and did that. He had a non-compete after he sold Bleacher Report, so he couldn't do sports anymore, but he started a media company called Bustle, which is like women's content. So all types of articles, but like an example of his long tail search strategy, he deployed the same strategy. So like if you Google like, what happens when I get my period while I'm on the beach? Like Bustle will show up number one. It's like there's only gonna be like 100 people a month or something that search for that. If I, I have no idea, but like that, I think I had heard through him that was one of the examples. Or if you Google things like that, you'll come across Bustle and they do like over $100 million in revenue. And so it still works.

Right. And by the way, one, just pivoting off the Instagram thing, we talked about this in the past, but there's some new news, so we should bring it up. We talked about this, um, this woman who's an influencer. She's a fitness influencer on Instagram. Kayla, I think it's Itzines or something. I don't know exactly.

I think it's— it's— every woman listening to this is just gonna be like, what the fuck, guys? I think it's— it's new.

What's— there was something else we, we tried to pronounce that we just like couldn't. It was just like a— like, I don't know, some, some fancy luxury brand, uh, for, for purses or something.

Like Hermès.

Yeah, yeah, she wears Hermès bags. Anyway, she has this app. So she basically took this Instagram following and was just posting like workout clips on Instagram and stuff. Her and her boyfriend, I think, or her husband, I don't remember who it was at the time.

Well, before the app, they were just selling a PDF. Sarah, my wife, bought it.

Exactly.

She bought it for $29.

My sister-in-law has the PDF and she was just using this PDF for like, is it like the Beachbody or I forgot what it's called. It's like some kind of like 30-day program. Yeah. That's our 30-minute workout that was like, you know, from this girl and she was buying the PDF. Then they turn it into an app, right? So they turn it into an app. App starts doing great. My wife is a subscriber. You pay $100 a year and then you open up the app and it's basically like, from what I remember, you open up the app, there was like 5 women who are like the trainers and it's like one is like very muscular, one is like very just like thin, one is like half kind of like toned or whatever. Another one has like a huge butt. It's like, which body do you want? And go follow their program. And so you would just pick it and then you would get like daily workouts, kind of like a video that was like very good. And so anyways, that app was doing like, I think they had done over $100 million revenue. I don't know if that's annual or cumulative, but they just sold. So I don't know if you have the details in front of you, but they just sold for like $400 million or something, right? Like they just exited, exited the app this week.

Yeah, for $400 million, they sold to this company called iFit, which is about to go public. They said they're doing $100 million in revenue. Pretty amazing. No-brainer to buy. Definitely worth it, I think.

And it's pretty weird that $100 million— if you're doing $100 million in revenue, you, uh, you know, you sold for only $400 million. So it's a pretty low multiple for like a digital product, but, uh, they're probably spending a ton on marketing.

Okay. Um, yeah, I, I maybe, maybe not. I mean, she had 13 million followers and it is based on her, uh, thing on her, uh, on her following. Um, can I tell you about an idea that someone just sent to me and I thought it was pretty amazing? Okay. Look at the thing called BerveFlow in the docs. So it's called berveflow.io. Did you click on that?

I saw you text me about it this morning, but I haven't checked out. So tell me about it.

Okay. So this guy sent it to me. He goes, hey, I had this like software company and it was trying to do all these problems and solve all the, like, it's called Crowdflow or something like that. And he's like, it's a, I spent 3 years working on it. And then I just said, fuck it. I'm just going to create a really micro small app. I'm going to build it in 2 weeks. It just does one thing really well. It's called Birdflow. And if you click it, it says marketing automation for Twitter. But basically, I'll tell you, like, it does 3 different things. But the main thing is everyone who clicks follow on your profile, it automatically sends them a message. And you could say anything in that message like, hey, thanks for following, or hey, thanks for following, check out my website. And I installed it. He's charging $29. I installed it and it's awesome. It's awesome. It's awesome. I love these little micro SaaS tools. I think it's so neat. This is exactly how Buffer got started and that's a multi-hundred million dollar business, right?

Yeah. I like the micro SaaS tool that does one simple thing that helps you win on a platform you're already like trying to win on. That's the key, right? So like I'm already trying to win on Twitter, I'm trying to win on Instagram, trying to win on Reddit, whatever. And if you could build the micro SaaS tool, it's like, here's, uh, you know, other examples of them. There's— what's it called? Jungle Scout, which is for Amazon. So let's say you're trying to win as an FBA seller on Amazon. So you're selling a product on Amazon. Jungle Scout is this app you can use. And basically when you're searching any Amazon, like, search, search result, you can use— you can open up Jungle Scout and it'll basically tell you how much that product is worth, how much, how much search volume there is for it, how competitive it is to be in that niche, and how much money they think that product is making so that you can find winning products that are like high demand, low competition. And then you could build an FBA business in that niche. And so it's a simple SaaS tool. I think Jungle Scout does some stupid amount of revenue too, because they were recently partially acquired by PE in the hundreds of millions of dollars valuation.

Greg Mercer is good friends with Neville and in Austin and he like this is, I guess, public. I mean, he's got like a plane and shit. so whatever it was sold for, like Neville will post pictures going to like Telluride in a private jet. And I'm like, dude, whose jet was that?

Is he the guy or he's the Jungle Scout guy?

The guy who sold part of the company who started it.

Gotcha. Yeah. So, so super simple tool that just helped you win there. And they just built, they just kind of like dominate that one niche of like FBA, you know, FBA selling, or in this case, Twitter automations. Right. So, oh, somebody found, and so I like this a lot. I need something like this, uh, for me because I'm trying to basically grow my audience on Twitter and then cool. The less work I can do, the better, right? Like, I love digital salespeople, or a digital salesperson. That's what I think about when I think about landing pages or like this, like little like automations. That's a digital salesperson. That's somebody who's going to work 24/7 for me for zero cost, or, you know, in this case, whatever it was, $29 a month. That's their salary. And they're going to do exactly what I say every single time predictably. And they're just going to generate more value for me. And so I look at my landing page like a digital salesperson. I look at my automations like ConvertKit, things like that as digital salespeople. And, um, yeah, this is a really cool one. I like this a lot. Now I can see this getting really annoying. I mean, people hate getting these auto DMs, but, uh, it still will work.

Yeah. Yeah. It might be annoying, but I actually just made mine. It just says, hey, exclamation point. Thanks for following. Now here's the problem that I already found. So I, it's already sent out a couple hundred messages for me. I guess I get maybe 500 to 1,000 new followers a day. This, uh, I feel like a douche saying that this— a couple women replied.

Yeah.

So a couple of like really attractive women applied and replied saying like, hey, what's going on? You know, like your work.

Basically they applied.

Yeah. So like these like attractive women replied and I was like, fuck, I don't want like anyone to get the wrong idea and to think that I'm hollering just at them or that I'm hollering at all, you know? And so I didn't reply to them. but I was like, oh my gosh, like, let's see, I actually might be able to— this could definitely get me in trouble a little bit. I could totally see it, right? When that, when that kind of— I sent you that message, it was kind of weird, right?

It was hilarious. Um, yeah, I could see, you know, same thing with somebody else pointed this out too, which is like, let's say you write a thread that goes viral, you might get 5,000 followers. You're going to send out what, 5,000 auto DMs and then get like 2,000 random replies back. It's going to like kind of ruin your inbox and maybe get you banned from Twitter. I don't know. Cause it'll just rate limit you. So, so I think there's some problems with it. Maybe Maybe this guy's built in some rules. Like for me, I would only want to do this. I would only want to DM somebody who has over X followers or that I, you know, I already follow or something like that. So then it kind of like limits the number of people this does it to.

I think you can.

You need it to be like, hey, you know, only if it's a, you know, farmer looking white boy, then send this so I don't get in trouble with my wife. You know, like I need this to be like, this guy needs to have like, you know, Patel or Gupta in his last name if it's going to send this auto DM so my Indian fanboys can, uh, can get these messages from me, but not everybody else.

Yeah, I could see it getting me in trouble. All right, you want to do another one?

Yeah, let's do one. Okay. Little idea that I think is kind of interesting. I don't have a ton to say about the business, but it's more like this is a cool way to get ideas. So this is my first time traveling with, with babies and traveling babies. It's like, you know, all the things you would expect, like on the plane, you know, kid pooped through his clothes, had to change it. you know, like on a tray table because we couldn't stand up because the fasten seatbelt sign, the person next to us looking at us like we're gross.

And that is disgusting. I mean, you are gross.

Exactly. I know, I know, I agree. Um, but there's a bunch of problems. So like we had to take our car seats, right? Because you can't just like be like, oh, I'll get there. You know, I used to pack light. I used to be like, cool, I'll get there. I just need my phone. I'll call an Uber, get to my hotel. If I'm missing something, I'll just buy it there. And with this, with kids, it's like the opposite. It's like can't even get in an Uber because you have to like have a car seat, all that stuff. So I saw this business called BabyQuip that I thought was kind of cool. It's again, one of our like telltale signs is any business that shows up at the top of a Google, a popular Google search, but the website looks like it was last updated in like 1996. Those are businesses that print money. And so it's like, congratulations, you've identified a money printer. And so I don't know how successful BabyQuip is, but I would suspect it's pretty good as a bootstrap business. And what it does is it's basically a marketplace. So I could say, hey, I just landed in Las Vegas, I need 2 car seats. I don't want to lug 2 car seats, check them in, you know, like on the fly, like, you know, drag them to the airport, check them in, take them home. Like, just meet me at the airport with a car seat that I can just install into a rental car or I can install into an Uber or whatever. And then like, let me rent it for 4 days. And then when I'm leaving, come pick it back up from the airport. And so that's what Babyquip is. It's baby equipment, but it's a marketplace where people will bring you what you need. You need a stroller? I got a stroller for you. Don't lug that heavy thing around. Just use mine when I'm here.

How did you find this?

People are making a lot of money just Google searching. I was like, I was Google searching. And again, it's a very good content play. I was Google searching baby travel packing list. So I was like, ah, what do I even, what am I forgetting here? And so they had a blog post. I was like, here's all the things you need to pack for your baby. And then at the bottom it's like, by the way, if you don't want to pack your stroller and car seats because they're heavy as hell, like, you know, you could just use BabyQuip and get it when you're there. And I was like, click through. And I was like, this is cool. And so I just thought this is like a very clever business that is a look for problems, look for annoyances, look for inconveniences, and then those become your opportunities if you can design a solution around them. So I just thought it was a clever little business.

This is awesome. So BabyQuip is actually— it's a peer-to-peer marketplace. So I don't think you actually said that. I thought it was the company that would give you stuff.

No, it's just like Jane, whose kid outgrew her car seat, and she realizes she can make, you know, $200 a month just renting it out to people if, as long as she's willing to go drop it off and pick it up from the airport.

I have these guys raise money.

They've been around for a while. They haven't— it doesn't look like they've raised money. Um, but yeah, they, you know, they are basically like just kind of like a, uh, It looks like a bootstrap business from everything I could tell. It launched in 2016. They've had over 30,000 orders. Uh, I think they did a crowdfunding campaign at some point. So maybe there's more data.

And they're on Shark Tank. This is kind of interesting. Now I, I'm not convinced that this is gonna, this can be a huge, huge thing, but what is actually, what is actually interesting is let's go to New York. It tells you how many reservations someone has ever had. I bet you that there could be like some mom who's just dominated like a LA or a New York scene. Like can just rank really high in all the, uh, all the big cities and lend out all their stuff. And so what it does is it tells you how much it— so what basically what happens is you land in New York, you, but before you land, you tell Babyquip, you hire Camila Shannon, who's the top in New York. She's rented her stuff out 773 times and she'll bring you any gear that you need. And you could see all the gear that she has and she costs $40 to $60 to deliver the stuff to you. Plus there's gear for, there's a, a car seat for $10 a day. There's a playpen for $40 a day. There's 15-pound dumbbells for $5 a day. There's a— this is crazy. This is awesome. This is awesome. This is a great find.

Yeah. So another example of this, by the way, have you used or probably not used, but you're familiar with, I'm assuming, Teachers Pay Teachers?

No. What's that?

You've never heard of Teachers Pay Teachers?

No.

What? I mean, I don't have kids.

It doesn't matter. This is just like one of those things that you know about because it's just awesome. And so Google Teachers Pay Teachers. So what this is, is, oh my God, if you remember, like a teacher spends a huge amount of time, every teacher spends a huge amount of time like creating their lesson plans and quizzes and tests and they have to like keep recreating like content basically for their little classroom of 30 people. It's pretty inefficient, right? So you go, you teach kids all day, already kind of an exhausting thing. Now you go home and you, you have to grade papers, you have to come up with tomorrow's lesson plan, and then you have to design the quiz for Thursday's quiz. Then you have next Friday's test. So you have all this stuff. You're just constantly on this content treadmill. And what Teachers Pay Teachers did that was genius was they said, look, that's a lot of effort and you may not be the best person at coming up with the lesson plan or the quiz for this science topic. So why don't we just create a marketplace where any teacher can list their lesson plans, their quizzes, their tests, and you can just find— go instead of just making your own, go on here for $10 and go buy the best science thing for a 4th grader trying to learn about geology right now. And you just go buy the thing for $10 and you saved 4 hours of time. And so it was like a great trade. So Teachers Pay Teachers is a marketplace doing this. Some teachers were making millions of dollars just creating their— putting their content up for sale here. The business itself does, I think, $300+ million a year in revenue.

In gross.

Bought out by PE.

In gross revenue. Yeah.

Yeah. It was bought by a private equity firm. And like, just look at their traffic on this thing, man.

It's like over 30 million hits a month or something.

Yeah.

Holy cow.

So it's an insane business. Um, beautiful business too, because it's like, wow, you turned some teachers who created amazing lessons and amazing tests and quizzes, you turned them into stars and millionaires, which is Fantastic. I think the best teachers should be millionaires in the age of the internet. There's no reason not that they shouldn't be. On the other side, you saved a bunch of money and a bunch of— sorry, you saved a bunch of time for all the other teachers so that they're more rested and can go into class and perform instead of being kind of falling behind constantly on the content treadmill. And so I thought this is an amazing idea. It reminds me of the BabyQuip thing. Obviously, this is much bigger, much more successful, but it's like these niches, kind of like pain points turned into, you know, marketplace solutions.

This is badass. Maybe you could also do this for speeches. I remember doing my brother John gave a really good wedding speeches. He gave a great best man speech and he had a great idea. 3 people paid him money to write their speech. And I think that you could do that for— I think you could start with just wedding speeches. But eventually do all other types of speeches.

Dude, that is hilarious. Somebody absolutely do that because there's a ton of Googling, right? Like when you have to give your speech, you're like, oh God, pressure super high. Like how many reps have I had doing this? Zero. Okay, let me go to Google and let me try to get some inspiration. Let me try to get the ball rolling. And people go to YouTube and they try to watch like, you know, best, best man speech ever, right? Best bridesmaid speech ever. And then you're like, okay, like, what am I going to do? Copy this? Not quite. But if somebody created these templates, that could be pretty good. I like that.

Yeah, I actually think you do that. There's this company called Book in a Box started by Tucker Max, who is one of my investors. Before it was— when they did Book in a Box, they would— you'd pay them any number from $20,000 to $100,000 on a bunch of different options, and they would write a book about your life so you could like get speaking gigs or you could give to your kids or like whatever for any different reasons. So you look like an expert, be a thought leader. And then a lot of their authors started getting speech offers. You know, they would— someone would pay $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 to have someone come and talk about like best practices in meetings because some guy had wrote a book on how meetings suck and how to make them better. And then they created a new subsidiary that would write your— do your PowerPoint and presentation for you and you'd pay more money for that. And I was like, that's cool. That should probably be the business more so than just the book thing.

Right.

Uh, and so I think that actually teachers paying teachers, you could also do speakers paying speakers. I mean, you could do the same thing.

There's another angle to this, which is I think that teachers are sort of this extremely— teachers and nurses, they're these two workforces that are very, very large. They have a unique set of problems. They're extremely like kind of word of mouth heavy. And I don't think that the existing solutions were great for them. So on the podcast a long time ago, we had the founder of like Incredible Health come on, which is basically like a kind of like a job marketplace thingy, like a kind of LinkedIn-ish thing for nurses.

That was right before COVID How'd that do?

Uh, they raised a bunch of money. I don't know if they're doing well or not, but I can't really say. But, um, but they've raised a bunch of money because the opportunity is large, meaning there are so many nurses and there's a shortage of nurses and there's a high demand for nurses. So there's nurses, so there's a lot of, uh, fees paid for placements. So nurses want great jobs and then hospitals and clinics basically are happy to pay to place nurses. And so there's a lot of money to be made if you can build the right network there, if you can build a vertical LinkedIn for just nurses. And I think there's a similar opportunity for teachers, not in terms of placing teachers, because it's not the same level of demand for like hiring teachers. Or pay. I do think that, I do think that if you built like a professional networking thing for teachers, that's better. They don't necessarily want or need to use LinkedIn. I think you could build a custom solution that is for teachers. It's like, how do teachers, how are teachers going to engage with like kind of like their peers? All right, what do they need to do? Are they going to, do they need to share tips? Do they, are these job opportunities? Is it content like Teachers Pay Teachers? I think if you did a brainstorm, if you were in— if that's, that's the niche you were in, I think there's a lot of opportunities for teachers just because there's such a huge workforce and the generic solution like LinkedIn is not going to be tailored to them.

How much do you think Teachers Pay Teachers got acquired for?

I would say if I was going to guess, I would say $500 million. Yeah, I would, I would guess $400 or $500 because it is kind of a monopoly in its niche.

Or more, or more even. If, or rather, if you said it's worth more than that now, I wouldn't be surprised.

Yeah. And we can research. I didn't research. I didn't plan to bring it up, but, but we can look it up. It might be, it might be out there publicly.

Uh, you want to do one or two more? Uh, yeah, I don't have much more. What do you have? I blew my load early.

I have one. Uh, okay. So we can, we can end on kind of like this life wisdom thing. So, so last night, uh, we're hanging out. We're talking, uh, you know, I'm hanging out with, with some other folks who are traveling with us. And I asked a question, uh, yeah, family members. And so I, I was— I asked this question. I said, all right, um, I said, what do you think? I said, let's take— fast forward, you're— so I don't know, how old are you, 31, something like that? You're 31. I said, all right, fast forward, you're 90 years old, and, um, let's say your life— like, you, you have your life as it's gone so far, and then let's just kind of like project forward, like it just keeps going the way that things have been going, like the track you're on. Let's say you continue on the track, you end up at 90. What do you think, if you look back, you're going to be most happy with the way you lived your life? And then what do you think you're going to regret the most about the way you lived your life so far? And so I was curious, after I asked that question, I got some answers from the group. I was curious, I was like, I'm going to ask Sam this because I don't know what he would say. I think it's a hard question, to be fair, but I'm curious what comes to mind for you.

Um, I would say that I let my temper control things. You know, I, I lose my temper easily sometimes, you know, you've seen it sometimes when I get mad at you or when I get mad at Dan or someone else and it's like, it's sometimes they've actually done something that is warranted. Oftentimes it's like, it's not that big a deal. And so I get super fucking frustrated and I'll hold grudges over like a relatively small frustration and I let my emotions control some of my decisions. And, uh, I've lost a lot of money and a lot of friends because of it. So that's what I regret is that, and I work quite hard to fix it, but I wish I would have been even more aware of that early on. What else do I, do I regret?

That's a great answer.

Do I think that I'll regret? Um, I, I wish I didn't spend years neglecting my health, thinking like, oh, I can get to it. And then, uh, later on, like I should have fun now. I wish that when I was a kid, um, my parents instilled, uh, healthy eating habits. Because I think that like that still kind of fucked with me, right? Like eating a lot of bad sugar. What else?

What about the— what about the— what about the flip side? What's the one thing you're going to look back and you'll be like, you know, glad, glad that you lived that way or you did that thing or you made those choices?

Starting at age 20, I wrote this down. I said by 30, I want to— I want to have started and started something that will make enough money that when I have children, I won't ever have to worry about how to give them what they need. And also I'll be able to spend time with my family, even though I didn't have a family or anything like that. I was like, that's what I think I'm going to want by the time I'm 30. So I'm going to work against that. And I achieved that. And so, um, I'm most proud that I now can, can only worry about the emotional aspects of the family, even though I don't even have a family.

Right. Okay.

I'm most proud I got that problem out of the way. The financial problem.

What do you think of that question? Is this a good question or is it—

it's a really good question. I actually changed it around. I ask myself this all the time. Well, it's quite similar. I go, I think like, what can I do today that will make my future self proud and not regretful?

Right.

And so in a way, thank myself for— and, and I say 10 years, but I would actually change it to 6 months because oftentimes how many times— and the other question I ask myself is, In 6 months, will you wish that you have done this or wish that you had started trying to do blank? So it's like losing weight. Exercising is a really good one. In 6 months, will you look back at yourself and be like, fuck, I wish I already had started learning how to speak Spanish. I wish I already would've read these books. I wish I already would've done this. So just fucking do it. Make your future self proud. So, um, that's the question I asked. I think it's a great question. And what, what was your answer? What, what do you regret and what are you proud of?

So I had trouble with the regret side. I was thinking about it and I was like, okay, I went through some— I said, okay, I couldn't think of an easy answer. So I said, okay, what happens when you can't think of the answer right away? You, you just start throwing out what might it be, right? So that it doesn't have to be this, but what even comes to mind? And so I was like, oh, well, I regret kind of like spending too much time working. Okay, it's possible.

Um, no, I don't think so. I mean, I think you got— you're, you're pretty healthy with that. You worked really hard when you were single or not married.

Yeah, I worked like 3 times harder than I work now. So I think I made that shift well. I was like, will I regret working on the wrong things? Like, oh, you just worked on this. Like, right now I'm building this D2C business. It's like, oh, well, frankly, this is a business that's meant to make money. It's not like the joy of my life. Like, this podcast is more like the joy, right? This is the fun, and it's building up into something that's big. But like, The business I'm doing is I'm doing it as a business. So maybe I'll say, why didn't I go try to change the world in some bigger way? Maybe I'll say that. So I started brainstorming these, and what I realized was that the only things I think I'm going to regret are either going to be health related, but even then, by the time I'm 90, I don't know how much I'm going to care about that if I got to 90. So it didn't quite work. But I think if I asked that question for like 50 or 60, I would say definitely one of the top answers would be taking care of my health better, just prioritizing that number one. Number two was like any— I think when you're 90, you're short on time. So I'll probably look back and think, fuck, I pissed away a bunch of time on the wrong stuff. And so that's the second category is like, where am I pissing away time that when I look back, I'm going to say, I can't believe I wasted those precious years on the wrong stuff or on the wrong things, caring about the wrong things. Or even in the moment focusing on the wrong things. The last one is relationships. I think ultimately, so my answer that I came to in the end was I'll probably regret not having more kids because I think the older I get, the more joy I'm going to have. The most value and joy in my life is just going to come from my kids. And I know right now it feels like, oh my God, I have two. I couldn't possibly have another because it's already so hard with two.

How's your wife? She's young. She's 30.

It's not the, it's not the biological clock. It's like the workload. It's like, oh my God, like, how am I, how do I have another kid with these two kids, with the business stuff, with the podcast, with the 10 things that I do, you know?

And in two years you can. Sure.

I'm not saying I don't. I guess what I'm saying is I think that's the one thing, if I look back, I'm probably going to wish I had more kids because it's probably going to be from age 65 to 90. It's probably going to be the number one thing. Number one source of fun in my life is going to be my kids.

I think you should, uh, you should address that. I told Sarah I want 5, and so we froze our embryos. Listen to this, we froze our embryos and I've got 6 kids. The reason, uh, I don't want— Sarah's got this, Sarah's got this thing, Sarah's got this thing. There's just a genetic component that we made sure we didn't want to pass on so the kids were healthy. And, um, I got 5 kids, all girls. And so, uh, I'm asking her if we can go and do it, do it again, because I would like to have 2 boys, 2 girls.

Right.

Um, and so I've got 5 kids waiting for me, but they're all girls. So anyway, um, I actually think that that's a good one. I asked my Twitter following, how many of you, uh, how do you feel about kids and age? And you almost unanimously, the people who had— so this is like a biased survey, right?

So it's like, what do you mean, how do you think about kids and age? What does that mean?

Uh, I forget. Well, I forget the exact way that I asked it, but I said, do you wish that you'd had kids sooner or later in life?

Okay, gotcha.

And, uh, and Of course, like there's like a bias here of like people who are already bought into one category will likely answer and support that category or support that decision. But almost unanimously, I feel like the answer was, I wish I had my kids sooner in life. And that actually shocked me because particularly in New York, Silicon Valley, LA, the coastal bigger cities, it's actually versus like Missouri where I'm from, it's actually more normal to get married and have kids at 21, 22, 23. Whereas on the coast, coast, it's like 31, 32, 33. And you're constantly told, you know, just wait, just wait. Even like Andrew Wilkinson told me, a couple of my friends told me, and I guess you're, you have kids now, you could actually give your opinion. Most everyone said, I wish I had kids sooner. And one guy actually changed my perspective on everything. He, I go, why, why do you think that? He goes, because now I'm just going to die sooner. And I wish I could have spent more time with them.

Yeah. I don't, I don't know the answer. I think whatever, I think it works either way. It's not really. I don't really think there's a right answer there, but kids are great. The kids are really great. So I like that question. I like the one you had too. So I guess like if I was going to do— I recommend people do this after the podcast. If you've listened this far, I would basically write down both. I would say, what's the thing I'm going to thank myself for? And what's the thing I'm going to regret when I'm 90 about the way I'm living my life right now? And if I just project it forward. And then there's the one you said, which is 6 months from now, what's the thing I'm going to wish I had started doing now or stopped doing now? Yeah, because there's a lot— I'm still going to wish I'd done it then.

There's a lot you could do in 6 months. And now you're not going to maybe have a life-changing thing, but like you can lose 60 pounds in 6 months. Maybe you can, um, learn a little bit of a language enough to like go and speak maybe at a, in a different country. And you could read a bunch of books. You can learn a new, you can learn how to play the piano in 6 months. I mean, you could do a lot of like interesting stuff. So.

Yeah, you could go, uh, you know, repair the shitty relationship you have with your dad or whatever. You know, you could do, you could do many, many things. Uh, I guess that's the other one I thought about for, for, for the regret is like, uh, not having maybe spent more time or being kind of like just like nicer to my parents. Like, I know I'm gonna miss them a lot when they're gone, and they're gonna go, like it's gonna happen. And once they do, I'm just gonna— I think that's probably gonna be one of the things I'm gonna wish. Why didn't I Why didn't I, you know, talk to him more or spend more time or, you know, tell him, you know, thanks, you know, something like that is probably going to be one of my answers for that.

So I'll wrap this up with a quick story that hopefully will change people's perspective. So do you know who Ramit Sethi is? Sethi? He's got this business book, business slash book, a huge brand called I Will Teach You to Be Rich. He's a good friend of mine. Whenever I have money, like, doubts or questions, I call him and he kind of like— so for example, and he always, like, thinks about everything, like, very thoughtfully. And I was talking to him about buying a ring for my wife years ago. And I go, how much should I spend? And he goes, like, I told him I wanted to spend $5,000. And he was like, no, no, no, no, no. And he, like, told me a budget way higher. He goes, trust me. And he explained his reasoning. And I listened to him. I went and bought a ring that was I spent $27,000 on the ring and I didn't have that much money at the time.

What was his reasoning though?

His reasoning was like, first of all, it's your wife. Like whatever she wants, like what's the point of working hard? It's to make someone like your wife proud and happy. And she's going to want to show this off. So just make her happy. Second, if you're going to be married to her for potentially 80 years, who gives a fuck over $20,000 divided by $80,000 or 80 years? Um, and he goes, just don't be cheap on the stuff that actually matters. This probably really matters to her. Now, some people it doesn't matter, but then the second thing was I I called Ramit and I go, hey Ramit, you took your family to Europe one time, to Italy. He goes, yeah, uh, you want me to plan yours for you? And I go, well, yeah, but what do you mean? He goes, well, like, I love doing this and I'll plan yours for you, but I only have one rule. I said, what? He goes, I'll plan it for you, but you have to have an unlimited budget. I was like, what the hell? He goes, dude, the whole point of traveling with your family, like, you're very— so I'm taking my mom and dad and my wife to Italy. My parents have really never been out of the country other than one time. To visit me in Australia. And he goes, I'm going to get— you got to give them on a limited budget. I was like, dude, I was going to spend like $15,000 maybe. And he goes, no, no, no, no, no, we're going to spend $50,000 at least. And I was like, that's so much money. He goes, dude, you're never going to go out of the country again with your family. And I've done it before, like one time. It's the one thing that they will never stop talking about it. And I don't care if I only had $100,000, I'm spending $50,000 because this is the whole point of working really, really hard is spending my money on stuff that will make my family happy and they'll talk about forever. And I was like, you're right. I need to quit being a cheapskate. I'm going to just— what? So I bought my mom and dad first class. They've never been first class. First class tickets to Europe. Um, we're going to like have a great time. And it kind of changed my perspective on spending and being tight. So that's my quick little story.

That's amazing. I love it. All right. We should, we should end on that. Uh, all right. Good episode. Dan, what do you think? This was good. I'll give you guys a 9.5. Okay, good.

I'll take that. Last one was an 8. But— or an 8.5. All right, that's the episode. Uh-huh.

Yeah. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.