My First Million: How To Grow An Audience Without Being Consistent

And that's how we grew.

And that's why I tell people, I say to blog,

I don't actually mean blog, but I meant create.

Bangers.

Text-based bangers on a consistent basis

and get people to love your free content enough to subscribe.

TBB, baby, text-based bangers.

That's been our strategy, right?

Like, how'd you?

I feel like I can rule the world.

I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like days off.

All right, we're live.

Can I tell you about a few interesting pieces of content

I've consumed lately?

And I want to hear what you've consumed.

Yeah, let's do it.

The info diet section.

The info diet section.

Yeah, let me tell you the first one.

So I have been on a Scott Galloway kick.

Scott Galloway has a podcast,

and I think that's what he's more famous for than anything,

but he started a few companies.

But he's got this, like one of his companies, L2,

I think it sold for like 200 million.

It was like nine figures.

Dude, he did this podcast called

Scott's Personal Finance.

I found it on YouTube, where he talks about money

and how much money he has and what he spends it on.

And he's like, this is all gonna sound douchey,

but I'll tell you, he's like, basically,

I'm worth at least $100 million.

He goes, I made it into the nine figures recently.

He said, I'm still incredibly anxious about money.

It stems from childhood.

He's like, we were just poor,

and I'm super anxious about it.

But then he goes, he does something cool.

He says two things that are interesting.

One, he goes, I'm spending between $200,000

and $400,000 a month, and I moved to Europe.

And the guy was like, why would you move to Europe?

He goes, well, America's the best place to make money,

and Europe's the best place to spend it.

Love that, that's great.

Yeah, it was awesome.

He goes, look, what I've realized is that

I'm getting older, I don't have a lot of time to live,

maybe I have 40 more years or something like that to live.

I'm gonna spend it,

and I'm gonna enjoy the hell out of it.

He goes, it feels incredibly masculine

for me to be able to provide these experiences

for my family, and I'm doing it.

He says, I spend around $100,000 to $200,000 a month now

on travel, we fly private, we went to the World Cup,

I brought another couple and their family,

just because I wanted to, and we paid for the whole thing.

And he goes through this really detailed thing

about spending his money.

And another interesting thing he said,

and I wanna ask this about you.

So he has had, I think, three companies

of which one was a very big success,

and it probably made him $50 million.

But he said, I've made more money being on the boards

of companies and the equity that they've given me

than actually building companies.

And what I'm surprised about is what he said is

that I've made more money doing not my main thing,

or at least what I thought was going to be my main thing,

I'm doing these like ancillary things.

Has that proven to be true in your career yet?

100%.

I wouldn't say more yet,

but I've definitely seen examples of that.

So I'll give you a very simple example of my life,

and I'll tell you one that was from a recent episode.

So in my life, I started an e-commerce company,

maybe e-commerce brand three years ago, roughly.

I can't tell you how many hours I've spent

on this e-commerce thing.

Like it takes a lot of time to build a real company

that actually has real revenues,

real profits that are significant,

and there's a physical product,

tons of energy that goes into it.

I have pulled out $0.00 and 0 cents from this business.

Now the business makes a lot of money, right?

We're tens of millions of dollars in revenue,

but I pull out $0.00, it all gets reinvested,

and all my time gets invested into this thing,

and it is very labor intensive.

So I haven't made much money from this,

but one thing that did happen was along the way,

I was like, ah, such a pain, like I'm always on my phone.

You know, like often if you message me, I'll be like,

oh yeah, I'll send it to you when I'm back on my computer.

And I was like, I'm not just like at my computer a lot.

And I wanted to be able to check on my store from my phone,

and the Shopify app doesn't really make that very easy.

Like you can get in, you can maybe see your revenue,

but you don't know how your ads are doing.

You don't know how your Amazon store is doing.

You don't know how your Google accounts do it.

You don't know how your Klaviyo emails are working.

And so meet these two, you know,

two Jewish guys who were like, hey, we made this thing

that's like a mobile way to manage your storefront

for any e-com brand.

They're like, oh, we have an e-com brand.

We built this thing for us.

And I use it, I'm like, oh, this is great.

And I'm like, okay, I'd like to invest.

And they're like, oh, cool.

Like, you know, I think I was maybe the first investor,

maybe second, something like that.

Very cheap, like $5 million valuation

or something like that.

Do you remember what you put in?

$75,000 to a company called Triple Whale.

Was that all your money?

No, all my investments have to go through the fund

unless it's like something that like

wouldn't be eligible for the fund.

But this would, because otherwise it's like a bias thing.

So put it in from the fund.

So put this money in and I'm like, great.

I hope this does well, but I'm not sure.

It seems like, you know, maybe just the analytics widget,

I don't know, might not be the biggest thing in the world,

but I think it's really useful for me.

I think other store owners will find it useful,

start telling other owners about it, blah, blah, blah.

This company is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

So, you know, on a $5 million valuation entry point,

you know, we're up 40X or something like that,

you know, 30, 40, 50X somewhere in that range.

So, you know, take $75,000 and multiply

by let's just take 40X for a second.

It's three million.

Three million bucks.

Now, of course, it's the fund.

So, you know, my carry on that's 20%, you know,

but it's also not done.

This is just like, you know, a couple of years in.

If this becomes a $2 billion company, you know,

it's easy to see that I will have made more.

And by the way, I invested in six other e-commerce SaaS tools.

It's like, oh, sales tax is a pain in the ass.

Cool.

Let me use numeral for that.

This is like a new startup that's doing,

making it easy for e-commerce or just sales tax.

Oh, I need a bookkeeping and accounting.

Let's use Final Loop instead of QuickBooks.

It's like, I started investing in a bunch of these.

Whatever I thought was the best tool

after I did the research, I was like,

well, I'm not just gonna be a user.

I'm also gonna be an investor.

And I just did that across the board.

And a lot of these are huge now.

Postscript for text message.

Like what Ron DeSantis is using for his text messaging.

I don't know what he's using,

but he probably should be using Postscript

because it's like the best way to send SMS marketing.

And you just invest in these because you're a user.

But like, I've made more money investing

in e-commerce SaaS tools than I've made from my store.

And the store took all of my time.

And these other ones took one hour of emails

to back and forth to just do the investment.

And that's like, you know,

not what I would have expected going in.

However, had I not done the e-commerce thing,

I would have never understood the value of these tools

or been able to see them early

or been able to be like, hey, let me in

and I'll introduce you to a hundred other people

that have stores because I'm in that network now.

And so you made money in this like,

not what you plan to make money.

You made money in this other weird way.

Same way, Scott Galloway didn't make,

you know, he makes the money in his company,

but then his reputation is where he gets paid

to be on boards way easier and more money,

especially when you count dollars per hour.

I'll give you another example.

We just did a podcast with Samir from Colin and Samir.

And in that, he talks about like,

they got their start doing something that like,

nobody would look at it like, this is a good business plan.

He was like, we're gonna basically,

I think there were fans of La Crosse

or they were La Crosse players or something

and they created like a La Crosse sports commentary network

on YouTube.

It's like, niche of a niche of a niche.

And they did this pretty early on YouTube.

And honestly, it didn't work that well,

but it did two things.

It taught them about YouTube and making videos.

And now their YouTube channel is like million subscribers.

It's a, you know, it's a multimillion dollar brand easily.

So that taught them that.

But also when they were doing that,

when they were following the La Crosse scene,

they saw this one guy.

He was the best La Crosse player in the country.

And he's like, wanted to go pro,

but there's like no pro scene for La Crosse.

You get paid nothing.

And so he's like, dude, if I go pro,

I make $35,000 a year, this sucks.

He's like, screw it.

I'm gonna make my own La Crosse league.

And this guy created his own La Crosse league.

So guess who became the first investor

in the La Crosse league?

Samir.

Because anyway, he's like, I didn't have a lot of money.

I put in whatever I don't know what it was.

Let's pretend it's 10 grand.

But like that La Crosse league is now worth hundreds

of millions of dollars that he got in the beginning.

So like in this weird way, he's gonna make,

he'll probably have made more from that one investment

than all of the YouTube action he was trying

to do along the way,

but it only would have happened by being in the game

and giving yourself that opportunity to get left.

I think it's called the arena.

It's being in the arena, sorry.

It's hazardous for brown guys like me to say the arena.

I don't want to get caught in that fire.

You could say that.

He's in the arena.

That's good.

And by the way, that podcast was great.

The second thing that I've consumed lately,

I've been reading like crazy.

So you and Andrew kind of got me turned on this.

I don't really love investing,

but I wanted to learn more about it.

And so I read Warren Buffett's biography,

not the one snowball, cause that's too long.

It's like a thousand pages.

This one's called making of an American capitalist.

Have you ever read anything about Buffett?

Back in the day, like 10 years ago, I read a Buffett book,

but I don't really remember it to be honest.

Man, I didn't know anything about,

I didn't really know anything about him,

but there's a few traits about him that are crazy.

The one, like he's got like this all shucks demeanor,

like I'm from the Midwest, like what do I know?

You know, I just-

Super charismatic.

He could be president.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, it's mostly kind of bullshit in a sense.

Like the guy's a genius.

Like he's like the 1%, the 1% in terms of IQ,

in terms of horsepower.

And there's this crazy story where he's like helping to buy,

I think it's Solomon Brothers or no, sorry, it's ABC.

So he's buying ABC for multi-billions of dollars.

And he's sitting at his desk and they're like,

all right, let's work out the deal.

He goes, oh no, let's just work it out right now.

Like, and he's like, well, what about your analyst?

Like where are they?

He goes, I'm the computer.

It's all here.

And he doesn't have a calculator.

He doesn't have anything like that.

He's like, let's just, we're gonna do the deal right now.

And I can just do it in my head.

And he just memorizes all these,

their annual reports and all their numbers.

And then he like does some math in their head.

He's like, if I can't do the math in my head,

then I don't understand this deal

and I probably shouldn't do it.

So his IQ is crazy.

The second thing is that his discipline is super strong.

So before he had Berkshire Hathaway,

he had a fund with like, I think it started with like

a hundred grand or something, not substantial,

but it was growing 30% a year.

And he did that for like 10 years.

And in the sixties, he just shut it down.

And they're like, why are you shutting this down?

He's like, well, I just don't see any good opportunities

right now.

You know, like I said, I'm looking for good opportunities.

I don't see any right now.

So I'm just gonna shut this down.

And so he just doesn't, he quit investing

and had a little mini retirement.

He's incredibly disciplined.

And then the last thing is that he has super high integrity.

So like he's only sued someone one time.

And that time was when he gave a guy a charity, $25,000,

and the guy robbed him of the,

and he didn't actually provide the charitable work.

That's the only time he sued someone.

And there was another time where he was being investigated

by the Senate.

They thought that he was insider trading

because he did a few things that were like smart

and he just made the right calls.

And after investigating him for two or three years,

they're like, hey, do you wanna like join this committee

on like fraud because you're really smart

and you're like the most honest guy we've met.

And he joined the committee.

There's another time where he wants to,

he's like in this country club.

And he's like, hey, why don't we let Jewish people

in this country club?

This is pretty ridiculous.

And he's like, and the guys were like,

look, the Jews have their own thing.

They have their own country club.

It's 100% Jewish.

Let the Jews go there.

So instead of putting up a fuss about it,

he goes and joins the Jewish country club.

And he goes, hey, they integrate

and they let non-Jews into their thing.

I think we should do that to our thing.

And that's like how he goes about doing stuff.

He's like not confrontational, but he's like pretty slick.

And then the last thing I guess is he basically

for the first like 40 years of his career,

he only read annual reports

and that's how he got his information.

So people are like, how are you so good?

And he's like, dude, I just read like five annual reports

a day and all the information that I'm using,

he was like, I don't even have a computer.

I don't have a terminal.

All the information that I use,

any one of you out there can go to a library

and get that same information.

So super unique guy.

So I've been very fascinated with him,

but he's got one downside.

Do you know what is,

you know he's like a shit family man, right?

Right, yeah, he's a very weird,

a strange family dynamic.

So he got divorced, but then...

He didn't get divorced.

So his wife, Susie, she was like a hippie.

And for some reason he was into that.

And they were married and he loved her and everything.

But she was one day, she goes,

you know, Warren, I just wanna go off to San Francisco

and I wanna do my own thing,

but we're not gonna get a divorce.

And he's like, all right, cool.

And she goes, also, I have my friend named Astrid.

She's gonna come over and take care of you.

I thought it was her sister.

It's not her sister, it's just a friend.

It was someone she was friendly with.

Okay.

And so within a week of Astrid taking care of Buffett,

of Warren, they are like lovers and like she moves in

and they like date.

However, like they're all friends with each other.

And so Susie's like, hey, Astrid,

I think you should redecorate the house from when I did it.

It's getting a little old.

Like she gives her tips on taking care of him.

And then like when Buffett has to go to like these big,

like presidential public meetings

where he's meeting with Senate or whatever, Susie comes.

When he wants to go and do like some local stuff

or like some stuff that doesn't require a lot of press,

Astrid comes and they take turns.

And every once in a while, if it's like a really big thing,

they're both go and they'll team up and they'll support them.

It's very interesting and it's very strange.

But he's not a very present father

and he's super fucking cheap with this kid.

So there was a time when his daughter

was living in a really crappy apartment

and she had just had a baby

and this one of Buffett's friends goes to check on her

and the daughter can barely see the TV

because it's a little small black and white TV.

And the friend goes, Warren,

you should buy her a big screen TV, man.

She just had a baby.

She's sitting in the shitty apartment,

just buy her a fucking TV.

And he wouldn't do it.

He didn't want to buy her a TV.

And it like took him convincing to,

he's like, I don't want to spoil them.

And so he's really cheap and like,

it didn't seem like the best father.

I like that.

There's one thing I always remember about Buffett

that are like two things that I really like about Buffett.

I have a whole doc that I keep called Buffettisms.

And cause he has this skill of telling like

these like tiny stories, these little parables

that are both funny and interesting

and then make his point for him.

And I just feel like he's got an arsenal of these.

And so I've been, I don't read a lot of his books

but I watch a lot of his talks

and I watch a lot of their like annual shareholder meetings

to try to find these little phrases he uses

that I am like, oh, this guy is so charming

but also he does a great job of making his point using that.

Another one, another thing I like about Buffett

is he said one thing once that really stuck with me.

He goes, the stock market, like people like,

why don't more people get rich?

He goes, because they don't really understand

how the game works.

He goes, the best rule of this entire game

in the stock market is that you don't have to play.

He's like, most people's problem is that

they just do too many things.

They make too many investments,

they buy and sell too many things

and they feel constantly compelled to like come to an answer

on should they or shouldn't they do X?

And he's like, you really just have to sit

and wait for the fat pitch.

You just don't have to do, you don't have to swing.

That's where you got your fat pitch thing.

Yeah, exactly.

There are no called strikes in investing.

Like you could sit there all day

and just watch pitches go by

and just wait for the fat pitch.

The problem is people suck at waiting.

And that really stood out to me

because I'm somebody who historically is very bad at waiting.

I'm a very impulsive, impatient person.

It serves you well as an entrepreneur to be very impatient.

You take a bunch of action.

As an investor, impatience and impulsiveness

is a terrible trait.

So as I've shifted my career

to go from entrepreneur to investor,

I had to ask myself, what do I need to relearn?

What do I need to unlearn?

What served me as an entrepreneur

that's not gonna serve me as an investor?

And let me make that conscious switch.

And that was one of the key switches

that I realized I had to make.

And I just, and I agree, that's a really good lesson.

And I think he stole that from Teddy Williams,

like a famous baseball player who hit lots of home runs.

And he like, Teddy Williams made this like graph.

He just hits a strike zone.

So it was just a strike zone.

And he's like, look, my batting average,

if I hit a pitch in this bottom corner is pretty low.

I might make connection with the pitch.

It might be a strike, but my batting average is low.

I really shouldn't even swing at that pitch,

even though it's a strike.

He's like, I'm looking for stuff in the sweet spot,

because here I'm over 400, right?

So Teddy Williams has the greatest batting average ever.

And one of the reasons why was he was more disciplined

than others in what pitches he would swing at.

He would really wait for those fat pitches,

whereas most batters get quite impatient

and start just hacking at everything.

But my issue with Warren's advice on that stuff was,

all right, well, what's a good pitch look like?

And so I ordered this book that's gonna,

it's like, they didn't make a lot of copies of it,

but so I had to find it on Amazon.

And it's gonna take like two or three weeks to come, but it's...

Like how you just said, Amazon,

like it's like some niche bookstore you went to.

It's hard to find, I had to go to Amazon.com to find it.

It's this little book, this little mom and pop boutique.

But they analyze all of his deals

and they write out what he saw in them.

Because I'm trying to figure out,

okay, you're telling me what a bad one looks like,

what's a good one look like?

And so that's some of the content that I've been consuming.

It's been good.

I've been reading like a book or two a week.

It's because Kindle, you read on Kindle ever?

Yeah, yeah, that's all I read on pretty much.

I'll, sorry, I start on Kindle.

And then if I like the book, I'll order the hardcover

so that I have it around the house to just remember it,

pick it up whenever I want, but I start on Kindle.

Well, they have this like percentage bar at the bottom

where it says what percentage of the book that you've read.

And I'm like, I'm gonna get through 20% every night.

And it's been awesome.

So shout out to Kindle, you guys.

You nailed it.

You gamified your ass.

Okay, so let me tell you two things that are interesting.

One, the content I consumed.

So I listened to this podcast by our friend, David Senra.

I don't know that well, I hung out with him one time

and he's a total nut in the best way.

Like he's a thousand miles a minute,

but I wanna share with you, he did a pod the other day

and I thought it was really good.

Called, I think it was called

the greatest interview I've ever done.

And it was basically Patrick O'Shaughnessy interviewing him.

They're like, what did you notice about a lot?

That you've studied all these great men in history, right?

You read these biographies

and what are some common things that you see?

He goes, the story of the son,

the story of the son begins at the end

of the story of the father.

So basically like embedded in the story of the son

is the story of the father.

And he's like, this is very, very common.

Whether the father was great in all these ways,

often you'll see the son take a totally different approach.

Or if the father was limiting a hard ass

or really brutal in one way,

the son takes that trauma and basically uses it

in what they do.

And I thought that was pretty cool.

Second thing he said about reading that I really liked,

he goes, they go, do you read books?

And he goes, yeah, of course.

I love rereading books, reread books all the time.

And I think a common thing would be like,

isn't that kind of a waste to like read what you've already

read?

It's like, you've already read that book.

It's the same thing, why not read something new?

And he said it really well.

He goes, I read books like several years apart often.

And he goes, the words are the same, but I've changed.

He's like, I'm a different guy than I was

when I first read that book.

So the second time I read it,

I've had years of life experience.

I've read a hundred other books.

I've had all these things that I've done in my life.

And now the same words mean something totally different

to me or I've elevated understanding

or memory or a different thing stands out to me.

I thought that was a really great insight on rereading

because I'm a big fan of rereading.

Like I'd rather find a great thing and soak in it

versus trying to just move on to the next

and count the number of books I can read in a year.

And I thought that that point he brought up

is one that I really never heard.

I also thought that he did an amazing job

of almost like building his personal story.

So he said it really well.

Why did you start doing this?

Like why did you start this whole thing

where you're reading all these books

and you're doing this podcast?

Like how did you even have the inspiration for that?

He goes, look, man, my childhood was not the best.

Like I grew up and my parents did their best

but they weren't necessarily the best.

He goes, I'm the only person in my family

to ever graduate from high school.

And he's like, I wanted to be successful

but everywhere I looked around me,

all I saw was the wrong answer.

All I saw was what not to do.

I didn't read just as a hobby for fun.

I read because I was looking for the answers.

I wanted to know what to do

because all I saw in my life was what not to do.

That's what led me to reading the biographies

of the greatest people.

He goes, I have spent the last, you know,

whatever 10 years of my life

having one way conversations

with the greatest people ever to live on this earth.

And he goes, that's what I think about reading.

He goes, I think reading is having a one way conversation

with the greatest people on earth.

And he goes, and he goes, and the, you know,

the podcast to people like, why'd you start a podcast?

I don't know, man, I didn't even start it.

He goes, this is just an obsession.

I'm just studying these people.

I needed a way to put my thoughts down.

He goes, this is an obsession disguised as a podcast.

And I loved it.

I was like, wow, these are great little one line.

He's very lyrical with it.

And so I'm very impressed by David Sender.

I think he's doing a great job.

And yeah, there was a fun thing to consume.

I joked with them.

I was like, you know, like David,

I got turned off on reading a lot of these books for a while

because I would listen to him on Audible

and I had my favorite narrators.

And I would go like, oh, I love this guy's voice.

What else did he read this narrate?

And this guy has read like a thousand,

narrated a thousand books.

And I'm like, how the fuck is this guy still a narrator?

What do you think of you like read all these business books?

He would be way more successful.

That's kind of what I'm bringing up here.

Like, I love the way he phrases things.

I think it's really compelling.

I actually don't agree with him that like,

you're not actually having one way conversations

with the greatest people on earth.

It's not like you needed to do all of that to be successful.

Actually, you should probably just get out there

and do some things, right?

Like, I actually could argue a bunch of the other sides,

but what's the point?

The fact that he believes that is gonna lead him

to a really great and successful place.

I don't subscribe to all his thoughts,

but I am a fan of his level of intensity

and conviction in himself and what he's doing.

In California, like I think in the 90s,

they banned weightlifting in the prisons

because they're like, holy shit,

we're building super criminals.

These guys are getting yoked.

They're like too big.

And they're surrounded by other criminals.

They can like talk about like the best way to do stuff

and now they're fucking bench pressing 500 pounds.

These are super criminals.

We gotta get rid of them.

David is like becoming a super criminal a little bit.

He's like one of the guys who's like reading it

and like inviting the stuff.

He's in the yard, just cranking away.

He's plotting.

David's plotting.

Dude, there's a...

I feel like I could be like, hey, David,

he's sitting there reading a book.

I'm like, David, you like that book?

She's like, I love this book.

Are you joking me?

And I'm like, David, in this room right over here,

Heidi Klum is standing there naked.

She's surrounded by all the best desserts

you could ever eat, Michelin Star desserts.

The music, it's the greatest music you've ever heard.

All of the unreleased Drake albums are in here.

It's the best music.

It's the best party.

There's no other guys in here.

Just all naked supermodels.

And David, the best part is when you walk in,

you become a billionaire.

And I think he'd be like,

he wouldn't have even heard anything.

He'd just be turning the page to the next page.

Like this guy didn't want to do anything else.

He would have licked his fingers.

He just looked back down and said, I just heard the page.

The silence chump I'm reading.

And that's the best compliment

and the best insult I can give him at the same time.

Like I think it is amazing that he is that way,

that he really feels like this is the best thing

that anyone could possibly do.

He can't believe nobody else is doing this.

He doesn't.

It's like, this is the peak of the peak of life experience.

I'm inspired by him.

Anything else that you've consumed that you like?

Not a consume, but I have a different.

So in the way that I'm like,

by the way, I hope he doesn't take it fast.

I'm joking about some of these things, but like...

Yeah, I'm a huge fan of David.

I'm a fan of his stuff.

And I think he does an amazing job.

And I have no vested interest in his success,

except for, I think he's really cool.

And I think he does a great job.

I appreciate his craft.

And he's one of the few pods

that I like listened to on a regular basis.

It's quite good.

Yeah, that was like a genuine endorsement.

It's called Founders, by the way.

The pod is called Founders.

So we'll give him some love.

The other interesting experience I had was,

I recognize I'm drawn to people like him.

People who are slightly extreme, who are obsessed,

who have an independent mindedness.

They're deciding how they want to live life.

And their rubric of success is different than others.

That's what I just described about him that I like.

Ben had a meeting with somebody and he comes back.

He called me, oh, dude, I met this guy.

He's great.

He's doing this thing.

And then he just kept saying,

he like said two or three times,

he's a really great guy.

And I was like, man, why is he such a great guy?

Like, you're only there for 45 minutes.

Like, you know, what do you mean by that?

Why did you, he kept saying, I really liked him.

I really liked him.

I really liked what he's doing.

I go, do you really like what he's doing?

Or you really like him?

He goes, I think I really like him.

I go, let me guess.

Was he high energy when he talked?

A nice guy, like simple.

Not didn't intimidate you by kind of being

a hard ass about anything.

And did he teach you one or two interesting things

during the conversation?

He goes, bingo.

I know Ben, because that's your archetype

of what you really like.

That's why you really like me.

I'm a high energy guy.

I'm a nice guy.

I don't like, you know, I don't like kind of push people

into a place that they feel uncomfortable.

And I'll usually, if you talk to me for an hour,

you're going to learn one or two things.

That's why we get along.

And I said, you know, one thing we should do,

as again, how do you become a great,

how do you shift from operator

to maybe spending more time investing?

Is I think we got to investigate

what are our bias and our blind spots?

So basically we made a little list of,

what's the personality archetype?

I am irrationally drawn towards.

For me, it's the David Senra types.

It's the slightly extreme uncomfortable ambition

around their thing, independent mindedness,

obsession with their craft.

I am drawn to that.

I will make mistakes, you know,

it's like a girl who's like, you know, he's a six,

but he's wearing a leather jacket.

And it's like, it just does something to me.

I got to go for him.

Like, that's what I'm drawn to.

And I was like, on the other side, what can't I stand?

Somebody who's just dry.

If you have no sense of humor, if you're dry,

like you could be the smartest guy in the world

sitting on a goldmine of a business.

If you're boring, like within five minutes,

I'm like, this guy sucks, I'm out.

And you know, I'm just like.

Who's an example of that?

Like a famous person.

Well, dude, I'm not trying to make a,

you know, I'm trying to get-

Well, a famous, like a, or like a,

someone who you've read about a public person.

I don't know if the top of my head, do you have one?

Who's just dry.

I mean, there's like a bunch of like famous investors

and shit who like I've read about

and I'm like, this is a snooze fest.

Like there's like-

Yeah, there's probably just like some,

I don't know, enterprise sass,

or these people who are like, yeah,

we just make the best, we're like, you know,

we just provide a solid procurement services to others.

Right?

It's like, I don't know.

Like they don't have a lot of hobbies.

Yeah, I'm like, do you love that?

Like, no, but we service a need.

And it's like, cool.

Like, so like, what are some of the cool growth hacks

you've been doing?

They're like, oh, we don't really need growth hacks.

We grow 17% year over year.

It's like, we just really need to do solid operations.

It's like, oh, okay.

I just, I need to get out of this conversation right now.

Like I'm, I feel itchy.

Like I got to get out of here.

Whenever I read about like hedge fund guys,

I'm like, this is a snooze fest, dude.

You're just like this, like when they do like a lot

of like fast trading-

Unless they're kind of like a criminal

and kind of doing drugs, then I'm in.

Well, yeah.

I'm always down with like, I love a good crime story.

Unless you're driving your successful life off a cliff,

I'm out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I need some drama.

But like whenever I read about like hedge fund guys,

I'm like, dude, you're just playing on Excel all day.

I don't find that enjoyable to hear about.

But I think, I think it is useful.

So it was a useful exercise for us to do, which was,

what are you irrationally drawn towards

that you should probably like dial it down, discount,

be able to apply a discount after the fact

when you're, when, when, when you're out of heat.

And then what do you have an irrational distaste for

where you're going to under price

or underestimate somebody.

And actually you shouldn't be.

People have been talking about like bias and like the stuff.

Like, but like, they almost came at it

from like a diversity and inclusion point of view.

For me, I, you know, like, sure that's fine,

but I've never been like drawn to like, you know,

I've never been drawn to spending a bunch

of time thinking about that.

However, for this, I immediately saw for myself,

oh yeah, I could see myself making mistakes

being overly generous towards a certain personality type.

You say the certain, certain three key phrases

and I'm all in, and I'm, I'm, I'm kind of repelled

from these things, even though I really shouldn't be.

It's actually like, I don't need to be your friend.

I just, like, if I'm investing into you,

I don't need to think you're cool and want to hang with you.

I just need to be able to understand

what you're doing and invest in it.

Do you, do you feel like you had the same thing?

Do you have a thing you're drawn to?

Like, I feel like one of yours, I'll just say it out loud,

is I feel like you're drawn to people

who are very meticulous and orderly

in the way they operate.

Like, if somebody's got like a system

and like, they're a stickler for the details,

I feel like in your, like, they go up 100 points

in your book, whereas for me, that doesn't really do it.

That does it for me because I envy that,

because that's not my natural, you know,

like my wife is like that.

Like I'm drawn to people who are like orderly

and systematic and disciplined,

like people who wake up at five a.m. every morning.

That's not me.

And so like, I'm really fascinated by people

who like grind really hard and are systematic

and are operational and things like that.

I get a lot of joy being around those people

because I'm not like that.

Can I tell you real quick about a cool thing?

Cause I feel like we did a bunch of fluffy stuff today.

Okay, I gotta get a rant off my chest.

People are really drawn to things

that are highly tactical or highly like specific.

Versus and complex versus things that are simple,

but might be a little bit airy.

Let me give you an example.

When I was in LA,

we did a bunch of those dinners with founders.

And I think I said this in my debrief,

but I'll point it out again.

People, the conversation when everybody goes,

like you have a bunch of people who've all sold their company.

Everybody's in the things, you know,

successful by traditional measures.

And the conversation would always gravitate

towards two subjects, like kind of health and longevity,

or just like kind of like being happy,

being a happier person,

some sort of like life quality of life improvement.

Rich guy problems.

Rich guy shit.

Cause like, oh, I've already made it,

but yeah, I just feel like I'm not as happy

as I thought it would be.

So within what, you know, like,

and the longevity health things gives them a new,

like the carrot to chase.

And they kind of feel like they neglected it

while running their company and the life quality.

Everybody actually just wants a high quality of life.

They just don't know how to ask the questions around it.

And what you would see was two things.

Somebody would say something like,

that was just like simple and useful.

They'd be like, yeah, you know, I just like,

you know, before bed, I don't really use my phone.

I just actually kind of review the day

and think about like, you know, how I did and what,

you know, just in general, like my interactions

the day, what I might have done differently.

And like, you know, and I'm like, oh, I do that too.

It's, I have this thing called revision.

And it's like, I just kind of see the day events of my day

and I just go back and just play them out

a little differently in my head.

It's really useful.

And people are like,

the reaction to something like that,

if you just kind of tell people like, hey, you know,

here's a simple thing you could do.

Imagine what you want and what it would feel like to have it

or think about how your day went to just be kind of mindful

and thoughtful about like, you know,

versus just always onto the next thing.

And the reaction I would get would be like, cool.

And the cool is kind of like, cool, good for you.

Like, I ain't doing that shit.

Like, you know, don't tell me to be alone with my thoughts.

And then somebody would be like, yeah, you know,

I really, I was feeling kind of, you know,

I've just been feeling like I'm in a funk.

And so I started taking, you know,

six milligrams of low dose, no trucks alone.

And then people are like, what, what, what, what is it?

What is it called?

And they're like, literally everyone gets a phone out.

They start, what is it called?

How do you spell that?

I'm like, are you just going to take this random drug,

this person you've never met?

And they'd be like, but how many milligrams is that?

Five is five, what do they say?

Where do you get it?

Can I order it right now before I leave this dinner?

And I'm like, y'all motherfuckers are crazy.

Why are people so attracted to the pill,

the complex thing you can't even pronounce

that just might do it for you.

Verse, or, you know, they'd be like, yeah,

I hired this, you know, this functional cognitive coach.

And they'd be like, what's his name?

Does he take more clients?

I'll, here's the money.

And I'm like, bro, have you tried like fucking writing down

like, you know, your thoughts for a second?

Like nobody wants the simple thing.

Like nobody wants the simple obvious thing.

I just thunk it up.

I just thunk in my bed and it worked.

I was like, hey, here's what I do.

You know, when I go into a situation,

instead of just reacting like, oh,

it's kind of cold out here.

So I'm uncomfortable.

Now I feel bad.

I'm a little bit bothered by that.

I just decide before I go in, like, you know what?

I want to have a, I want to have like a playful experience.

I want to have a laughing experience right now.

And then I'll just like, I was like, I decided that.

Then I go in and I have that.

I look for those moments and I create that experience

for myself.

It's pretty amazing.

You could just do this.

You could just decide what experience you want

and then go have it.

And they're like, is it, okay.

Can the next person say like a pill that I could take?

Like some new, new, new tropic that's going to help me.

Like, they're like, all right, all right, Sean.

But can I put that in my body intravenously?

Like, is it coming needles or do I buy them?

I'm just like, y'all are insane.

You're insane.

Or this guy's like, he's like, you know, I,

I really want to like, what's that?

You know, this equipment.

Oh, I bought all this exercise equipment.

I'm like, this, do you walk?

Do you even have like 30 minutes a day?

He's like, no, no, I don't exercise.

I don't have time, but I built a building out this home gym

and I'm building it out.

And like, like, you know, you could just do pushups

on the floor, right?

You don't have to first buy $10,000 of equipment

before you could work out.

Like there's no gate to pass.

You just, you can literally just do 10 things,

10 pushups right now.

In fact, let's do that right now.

And people are not ready for simple action

that doesn't require like a magic bullet solution.

And it annoys the hell out of me.

I'm like, are you guys,

is everybody around me insane?

That's how I feel.

Well, like when people say magic pill,

I definitely automatically get interested

because like I would like that.

Like, why don't they say shortcuts?

Like it's a bad thing.

But it's like, yeah, I mean,

if I can get to my destination shorter and faster, I'm in.

That's pretty funny.

I'm not even sure it's literally this shit

that I was talking about this low dose,

fucking whatever it's called.

No, no, no, no, no, no, I don't know what it was.

Cause guess what?

I don't care.

Don't need it.

But I was like, I was like, so does this work?

Like, have you felt like an amazing difference?

The person was like, no, you have to take it

for six months first for your body.

I'm like, you're getting hosed.

And like, okay.

Honestly, I don't know what this drug does.

Maybe it's useful.

Maybe it's a specific thing.

I'm kind of jokes aside.

But for that person who, you know, got it prescribed,

maybe they needed it.

For the other eight bastards at the dinner

who were like immediately trying to order it,

I was like, y'all don't need this.

Like you don't need that right now.

That is not the answer to whatever hole

you're trying to fill right now.

Like there is no chance

that that is the correct first step you should be taking.

Well, I think we talked about like

the different types of procrastination.

Like there's actually good types of procrastination,

which is like the forgetful scientist

who like forgets to like shower

or like put on the right pair of socks.

He's like, ah, that's all right.

He's doing the big things right.

That's okay.

And then there's like the bad type,

which is like making plans that don't need to be planned

or like buying domain names or like

going back and color coding it afterwards.

Like, dude, it's okay.

Yeah.

Or like in this case, it's like buying pills

when it's like, just 10,000 steps a day

will do the trick as well.

But that's pretty funny.

That's a good story.

I would have liked to have seen you in that room.

Yeah.

I was just like, you guys are nuts.

But okay, now to satisfy this-

I like this stuff.

I like this stuff, by the way.

I like this stuff.

Me too.

I love this stuff.

This interests me most because tactics change.

Strategies don't.

You know what I'm saying?

I like talking about strategy sometimes.

Dude, have you been following the presidential debates

and campaigns stuff that's going on?

Did you watch the Republican debate?

I watched the clips.

So everyone is, it seems like the Vivek is-

Wow.

There's two ways to say his name.

That, and one is the right one, one is the wrong one.

And you just came with a third Vivek.

Holy, holy, wow.

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

Vivek is the way you say it.

So some people say Vivek and you went,

you went, I don't even know where you just went.

Dude, that's like correcting me if I say it like,

Lady Gagah.

Are you a big Lady Gagah fan?

I mean, come on.

He was like the star of the debate

because he's just looking at him.

The guy's like a debate champion.

I was like, what this guy's trained to do.

But he's still polling like, you know,

I don't know, 10% or something like that.

So I think it's all, I mean,

I think Donald Trump's going to win.

But I didn't want to tell you a funny thing

that I remembered when I watched that debate.

You watched it?

Oh, I love watching.

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

I would not have thought that.

I love the debates.

I love the strategy of the debates.

I love watching, it's content creation.

I just love watching the strategy

that these guys take into it.

I couldn't care less about who gets picked.

Couldn't care less about their policies

because they don't care about the policies

as far as I'm concerned.

To me, it's a popularity contest

and I like to see who markets themselves better.

I think there's a lot to learn from that.

But one of the things that I remembered was,

back in the day, I was working at Monkey Inferno.

And I used to work for a guy named Michael Birch.

And Michael Birch is a very interesting guy.

He has built and sold multiple companies.

So he sold Bebo famously for $850 million.

Of which him and his wife owned it.

So they got...

They owned a lot of things.

Yeah, so it was a huge exit for husband and wife couple.

Before that, he had built another social network

sold for a single digit millions of dollars.

So he kind of made one, sold it for a few million bucks.

Then as soon as the non-compete ended,

he created it again.

And he's like, oh, now I know what I should have done

the first time and that became the $850 million exit.

But he also created Birthday Alarm,

which is a company that had millions of dollars

in cash flow every year.

So he had multiple wins.

Very interesting guy.

But ever since the big Bebo acquisition,

he created this idea lab.

But he kind of transitioned to a different phase of life

almost.

He was like, you know, I'm not like, you know,

what do I care?

It's sort of like, yeah, I angel invest,

but like, you know, does it really matter?

Like I kind of already won the money game in a way, right?

He wouldn't say that, but you could just tell it.

It's not like his heart was in that.

Is he a billionaire at this point, you think?

Even that, he's like, I'm not really a billionaire,

but who cares?

You know, like I got, you know, like,

he's at that 510, 511 range.

And like, you know, those guys want to be six foot.

He was like, that's pretty much six, right?

Yeah, with shoes.

So he's like, you know, he's at 800 million

or 900 million or something like that.

He's like, I don't know.

I don't really keep track of it.

It doesn't really matter.

It seems like overkill to care about something like that.

That's a nice billionaire response.

He did two interesting things.

One, he built a private members club in San Francisco.

So he bought a old candy factory

that was 60,000 square feet that was abandoned

because it needed tons of like seismic retrofitting.

Nobody wanted to put in the millions of dollars

it would take to retrofit this place.

He did it and he built a members club.

So if you go to San Francisco,

you can go to this place called the battery.

And it's like Soho house, but for San Francisco

built that thing into a real juggernaut.

Like it actually like totally came to fruition.

This idea that seemed kind of crazy

and he had no experience in it,

never done hospitality, never done any of that stuff.

One time I went there and I saw a booth of three people

and it was a ball, like imagine a monk

wearing like the Dalai Lama like orange outfit.

Like he was bald headed and sandals

with like a black guy that looked like a rapper.

Like he had like gold chains on and like six shoes

and then this blonde haired lady

and they were all leading in having a conversation.

And I was like, this is just the funniest place

I've ever been to.

That's like the start of a joke.

A monk, a rapper and a and Sheryl Sandberg walk into a bar.

No, but that's what I mean.

I saw Leonardo DiCaprio there,

tons of famous Elon Musk,

a bunch of famous people go there.

Anyways, so that was one thing he did.

But he always had these like random ideas.

And once in a while he would just be like,

Sean, I'd like to have an idea for you.

And he would pitch me this idea.

And one of the ideas he had

was around the presidential debate.

He goes, you know, Trump got elected in,

I think what, 2016?

And he was thinking about it for 2020.

He was like, you know,

I think there's a good chance that Trump gets reelected again.

And he's like, you know, if you think about why,

a lot of people in Silicon Valley don't really fully,

you know, they're like, they take these like, you know,

strong stances on what it means.

What, you know, is it because part of America feels repressed

and they're reacting to the liberal neocon,

they start making up all these words.

He's like, I don't know if it's that as much as it is

that Donald Trump was the more charismatic candidate.

And he's like, if you go back and you look throughout time,

he's like, in every debate or sorry, every race,

if you go back to the last like 12 elections,

which is like, you know, 50 years or something like that,

the more charismatic candidate tends to win.

Not always, but tends to win.

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

Yeah, he was just like,

the more charismatic candidate wins.

So it's as simple as that, right?

Like maybe you're charismatic because you're really good looking

and you're, you know, maybe it's that.

Maybe it's that you got the gift of gab

and you're like, you know, maybe an Obama

or Reagan or something like that.

You know, Clinton, you know, somebody who is just seen

as very, very charming.

People, people always felt that about Bill Clinton.

So he's like, you know, the more charismatic candidate

tends to win, even though, you know,

there are other reasons why you might pick,

you know, why pick John Kerry over George Bush.

Actually, George Bush is the more charismatic candidate

versus John Kerry or Al Gore or whatever it is.

And so he's like, you know, I think that

given that that's the case,

I don't think that should be the case,

but I think it is.

I don't think you could be able to change that.

He goes, I feel like what the Democrats should do

is they need to put forward the most

charismatic candidate they can.

And I would say he turned out to be wrong

in that they put Joe Biden,

who's one of the least charismatic candidates

and he won almost because the vote was basically

Donald Trump or not Donald Trump.

So I actually think it was a bit of an omely.

I actually think he was correct.

And you're seeing this right now.

DeSantis has more experience, had the machine behind him,

had the track record, but he's just not charismatic.

He doesn't have that, that's you.

He doesn't have that sauce.

And so a guy like Vivek can come out

and he's a better talker.

He's more, he's got more energy.

He's got better one-liners, zingers.

He's willing to take stands that will draw attention to him.

And he's the more charismatic candidate.

He's driving up.

So Michael's idea was, let's create a TV show.

He's like, you know, just like the way we did

American Idol and we did, you know, The Apprentice.

Why don't, why isn't there a show called The President?

And we literally just cast people

who want to be the president, but we give them an avenue.

He's like, because right now the candidates

all come from the machine.

It's like, you know, the party is gonna kind of push

their favorite candidates forward.

And this is based on, you know,

how controllable they are, how likable they are,

how much time they put in into the party.

He's like, I don't think that's necessarily

putting the strongest candidate forward,

especially if you looked at this most charismatic candidate.

So he's like, why don't you create it?

He's like, why don't we create a show?

That's going to take 12 hopefuls and it tells their story.

The show works almost like a survivor or an apprentice.

Every week they go to a new city,

maybe they go to some coal mining place in wherever,

West Virginia, and they're gonna talk to the coal miners

and they're sort of a challenge.

They have to prepare a speech or talking points

for what they would do to help those people.

And then those people kind of vote off the weakest candidate.

And at the end you're left with the most charismatic candidate.

And he's like, that would be a challenger

to whoever the Democratic party is naturally gonna put up.

And I loved this idea.

I was like, this is a crazy idea.

And he's like, yeah, my friend, Mark Burnett,

who created Survivor, like he could be the producer of this

and we could put this together this way

and even if it doesn't work,

I think it would just be like a worthwhile attempt

and an entertaining way to do this versus like,

if I really want to get involved in politics,

the reason I don't is that's sort of a very,

like it's not, it's a laborious and sort of painful endeavor.

This would be almost a fun version of like a way

to try to bring some influence to it.

What do you think of this idea that I just remembered?

Did it go anywhere?

Or is he just goofing around?

So he wrote a memo.

It was a very well-written memo.

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

Yeah, he wrote a memo.

He showed it to me.

And I'm like, this is great.

And I think he was like, OK, if I'm going to do this,

this is going to take some real kind of like social capital

to do.

And I think he kind of was like, maybe not.

Maybe my life is amazing as is.

That's his version of like when the remote is just a little bit

too far when you're laid out and you're like, ah,

I'll sleep with the TV on.

Yeah.

But I love this idea and I'm saying it because I think that

more business people should apply their kind of creative

and entrepreneurial talents outside of just creating yet

another business.

So I like that he was taking his creative and entrepreneurial

spirit to be like, oh, how could I?

What if I did a TV show that would influence politics?

I thought that was cool.

And I think more people should do that.

The second reason is I kind of wish this idea existed.

And I totally think this would work if somebody created it.

So what's funny is like because you and I've I've I've

complimented you with this, but this is actually a criticism

at this point for this particular point.

This is Sam Park special.

I don't even know what that meant.

So I prepare myself for comfort or insult.

Just tell me that the compliment was that you're worry free

and like you're pretty optimistic and you always like

that's like, oh, that person, they're not trying to do anything

bad comes the bitch lap.

But in this case, when I hear this, I'm like,

but I want like my president to like know what they're doing

and not just be able to like be a good speech giver.

And so, dude, that's what we have now.

You think Joe Biden knows what he's doing.

The guy's not even alive.

Well, I'm not saying what I know works and what I know doesn't work.

I'm just saying that like my romantic view is like, well,

that would be it would be also nice if they knew what they

were talking about rather than just good at talking.

Yet your take on this is like, would it be cool if we just let

the most charismatic person run away with it?

Well, you know, I think you could design the challenges

to actually get them force them to think on the spot or perform

in terms of figuring out solutions to real problems

or like putting forth what their solutions would be in a way

that's not just prepared by handlers who have talking points

and they're going to avoid the issue or false promises or whatever.

Like these people that would be in this, you could design the weekly

challenge to bring out whatever it is that you want.

Obviously, people fall in love with the characters.

That's how all reality TV works.

You fall in love with the characters.

However, you could fall in love with them as they're trying to do certain things

in the same way that the apprentice would test you for.

Can you figure out how to sell?

Can you figure out how to organize a project or manage a plan?

I think you could put people through a battery of weekly challenges

that are not just are you good at kissing babies and shaking hands?

But like, you know, that's part of it.

But there could be other parts of it that, you know, the show decides

is like, you know, what are the attributes that a president needs or the qualities

or what do we wish we could see them doing to be able to assess their abilities?

I think the cynical person would say, well, we should look at their track

records serving in government. Yeah, cool.

But that doesn't happen.

It's not really what it's not really what happens.

It's not really what works.

If that worked, you know, Trump would never have beaten Hillary.

She had spent her whole life in politics.

She was by far on paper the more qualified candidate.

But America didn't get to see that.

They didn't get to appreciate that.

All they saw was what gets put forward today, which is debates

and campaigning on social media or on TV.

There's this funny story about JFK when you remember like what the Cold War was,

you know, it was in the 60s, where like, we thought that Soviet Union and America

were going to like bomb each other. Yeah.

There's this story where JFK, John Kennedy goes to

Soviet Union and he meets with the president or the leader of Soviet Union.

And at the end of the meeting, the leader was like, you know,

you're you're a really nice person.

You kind of remind me of my son.

I guess like we could be we could be cool.

Like, you know, you seem you seem kind.

And I read that story and I was like, oh, I guess like Charisma really does

matter a whole lot when it comes to like diplomatic stuff, like just being likeable

and being like, hey, let's just calm down, be friends.

It definitely is.

Tony Robbins tells the story.

I don't know if this is real or not.

But who was the, you know, who was the president during the Cold War?

Is that well, Kennedy, Kennedy for Cold War was a long period.

But Kennedy was like when we thought that we were literally going to bomb each other.

OK, there was I don't I feel like it wasn't Kennedy he was talking about.

But Tony Robbins tells the story.

He goes, I was I had a chance to talk to former president, whoever.

Let's just pretend I know a chair about presidential history.

Sure. And he's like the Cold War was happening and he went to go see.

I think it was Cold War.

People who actually know what this are going to you have full permission

to beat me up in the comments.

So he goes to see Gorbachev and they have a meeting and the meeting is not going well.

The hope was we could deescalate.

But actually, the meeting was sort of like tension and like neither side wanted to give.

And they were sort of getting more dug in and more stubborn in their stance.

And this is this would be Reagan Ronald Reagan, Reagan, all my married man out there

know when this happens.

You think you're going into deescalate, but actually both sides are what Sam Parkles dug in.

And the tension is escalating.

He doesn't know really what to do.

And he goes, he goes, how did you do it?

How did he say something happened in that meeting that worked?

What was it? He goes, well, we hit that point.

I said, this is not going to work.

And I got up and I walked out of the room fast, stormed out of the room.

And right before I got to the door.

I hit him with a little 360 turned back, big smile on my face.

Said, let's start over.

Smile on his face, shook his hand and said, I'm Ronald.

And, you know, I really appreciate these things about you and he like turned it.

He just basically like, you know, broke the frame for a second and used a little bit

of charisma, a little bit of playfulness in order to reduce tension.

And then they had a conversation.

Now, I have no idea if the story is true.

Tony Robbins told me this.

I believed it in the moment because it's a great story.

And who will I let the truth get in the way of good story?

If it is true, that's unbelievable.

If it's partially true, that's really cool.

If it's totally made up, whatever, you know, it's OK.

Still, the story still serves its purpose.

It is a very useful technique to be able to do this, to be able to use a little bit

of charisma and playfulness in order to diffuse a situation or to to break through

any like deadlocks that that exist, whether it's in business or in personal life.

So either Vivek is just not charismatic or I'm an idiot.

But let me tell you a really quick story.

I have.

So I've turned down two presidential candidates to either come on this pod

or speak at my events.

The first one was Andrew, what's his name?

Yang, the guy, the math guy.

So he emailed me, I think in 2015, being like, hey, I want to come speak at your event.

And I don't know if the podcast existed then, but he's like, or if you guys want

to write about me in the newsletter, I'd love to do an interview.

You know, I run this study test prep company.

It did OK. And now I'm running for president.

And I was like, oh, you're insane.

You're you're like, you're going to make me look like a fool.

Just this nobody guy who run a mediocre business running for president.

I can't interview you.

Like that hurt my my credibility.

Well, turns out he was a serious candidate.

At least he made it in the top 10 or whatever.

The second time this happened was Vivek Vivek.

The big lady.

Kaga, it's not it's not.

Is it now called Pajita?

It's Fujitas, but he does.

So Vivek DM to me on Twitter like a year ago.

And he was like, hey, would you guys want me to come on the pod?

And I stepped on him hard.

I thought this was because he had a really his Twitter picture was him in a suit

with a nice smile, it nerd.

You're not coming on the podcast.

Well, and I think like I was like researching Martin Scurelli and I was like,

oh, this and his bio said he was in bio, like pharmaceutical industry or something

like that. And I was like, oh, this guy's a charlatan.

Like he's so good looking.

He's got a nice smile.

This is like a crypto guy with abs and a Ferrari.

Like I can't take this guy seriously.

And I just said, what do you want to talk about?

Like, and I try to like stiff arm him to like make him prove himself.

And he replied and I ignored him.

Turns out, you know, a year and a half, two years later,

he's actually a threat.

So this is the second presidential candidate that I've had bad judgment on of

whether they're going to be serious and not asking them to come on the pod.

Yeah, yeah, totally.

Totally. By the way, for high entertainment,

do you subscribe to Ron DeSantis's SMS program?

No. So you want to learn about marketing

or you want to learn how the presidential race really works?

Go subscribe to all the candidates, marketing emails and text messages.

Warning. It's fucking annoying.

OK, so that's the first problem.

If I wanted somebody to text me every day, I'd have a girlfriend.

And this guy texts you all the time and they text the dumbest stuff.

So like here, I'm just going to read you the last five texts.

If you think this guy is like some super serious politician

who's really making it a substance of race about the issues.

Here's what he's saying.

And was it like five in one day?

Text yesterday. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yesterday, four twenty one p.m.

New shirts, shirt emoji, new koozies, new cups, new buttons,

new stickers, new hats.

If you haven't seen our storefront,

go get the hottest limited edition campaign merch here.

OK, let's say yesterday. OK, cool.

Let's go back.

Friend, it's Ron DeSantis.

This is now the day before two to eight p.m.

Friend, it's Ron DeSantis.

I want you to know that as president,

I will not let the government weaponize federal agencies

against Americans who dare to disagree.

I'm disgusted by the FBI's Disgraceful Act

labeling Catholics as extremists.

I it's time to fire the FBI director and defend liberty,

religious liberty for all.

Can I have a donation to have your support?

OK, so that's that's the next one. Here we go again.

Let me find it particularly.

He just texted me at seven nineteen a.m.

It's too early for a text from.

Enough with the talk.

Americans need action.

And that's what Ron DeSantis is all about.

I'm the leader you need.

This is the time to act as now.

This can't wait.

Rush your support in.

Link to his donation camp.

Link to his donation.

Then another one.

Hey, like this, like this credential,

and he puts a picture of a like a credit card

that just says DeSantis on it.

He goes, you can have your own all caps

donation with forty seven or more to join my investor team.

If you're an investor in this campaign,

you'll have everything you need to show it off.

Grab your membership card today.

It just continues every single day.

Hey, enter this giveaway to come to the next debate.

You just have to donate and you can win a VIP experience.

It just keeps going like and it'll just be like,

hey, friend, I'm out here draining the swamp right now.

And it's like, dude, just stop like, what are you talking about?

Well, they're building like a billion dollar company

and like 18 months.

They're like a moving company.

You ever notice how like moving companies

like they don't give a fuck about the service

because like you're only going to use it once.

And they're like, let me just get you a boar's gotcha, bitch.

And then there's like, oh, your shit there.

They're like, dude, we don't give it like renewals

are to think here. I don't care.

You know what I mean?

I I hired this service that was like

it was called like muscle head movers or something like that.

And all of the imagery, all of the imagery was just a huge

like buff guys. It was like, hey, we make it easy.

We'll move that couch. We'll move that fridge.

No problem. Just another day.

It's Jim for us.

So I'm like, oh, hell yeah, our muscle head movers.

Three tiny Vietnamese guys showed up and I was like,

and the truck said muscle head movers.

I was like, I got him.

I'm looking at him and I'm just

are you going to say anything?

Are you going to address this friend?

And they did it.

And I didn't because I was like, what am I supposed to say here?

And I was like, what a bunch of grease.

I was hoping and they did the job

like they could move everything because they just use dollies.

And I was like, oh, if I wanted dolly movers, I would have, you know,

like it's different.

It's a different experience than I signed up for catfish.

So stupid.

There is there is one cool thing I wanted to tell you about.

All right, what is it?

There's a guy named Seth Bannon who tweeted this out.

He goes, two million scientific papers are published each year.

That's over five thousand a day.

Even if you're working 10 hours a day, no breaks.

You'd have to read one paper every seven seconds just to keep up.

So we built paper scraper just like basically

programmatically read every paper that comes out.

But not just every single paper.

We prioritize and wait any paper that's

being shared by top scientists on social media.

So basically builds a thing that makes it easier to keep up with science.

And he's the second person I've seen do this.

And I'm actually pretty convinced

this is actually just a good product idea.

So what's the what's the URL?

Do you know, because it's so new, it doesn't show up on Google.

There's not a website for it yet.

He's like, oh, like we built this for ourselves.

But like, I'll let some people in beta if you fill out this type for me.

You know, like that sort of thing, like soft launch.

I would love to see our buddy, Leo, who does alpha signal.

So this guy built like a, you know, like an AI newsletter thing.

But his AI newsletters has one key difference, which is

instead of just telling Jabroni's like what the new chat GPT feature is,

it's basically a AI newsletter that's for technical people.

So if you're a researcher, you're a machine learning engineer,

you're a PhD type person, alpha signal is a newsletter for those people,

which I actually think is a very smart way to approach this

because that's a very high value reader and customer.

And for them, he provides a very simple service.

So he also built a thing like this internally.

So what he did was he goes, all right, every paper has, you know,

a list of scientists that are like the researchers that were involved.

And actually there's a there's a naming convention just like in movies,

the credits, like the stars go first and the people at the back

were like kind of the end credits in research papers.

It's kind of the same thing.

The people at the top did all the work.

The last person is like the the names person who reviewed it

or edited it at the end or stamped, you know, their seal of approval on it

or the lab they're associated with.

So he kind of first created a page rank of researchers and scientists.

It was awesome.

Then he's like, cool.

Now when a paper comes out that has one of them in the name

or those people on social media share a paper,

I immediately know this is probably an interesting paper.

So that first creates a hit list.

He gets alerted like alert.

Top scientists a share of the way page page rank is what Google invented.

It's how they know what to show up on the top of Google.

Page rank is categorized like there's a bunch of different measurements.

The biggest measurement or they don't even tell people, but it's theorized

or maybe they even said this though.

But which is how many people link back to your website?

Yeah, how many other reputable websites link to your.

So every every website has authority.

So let's say New York Times has a high authority compared to Sean Puri dot com.

Right. And so if New York Times links to some other website,

that tells Google that that other website might be

and also a high authority site increases its authority.

If Sean links to it, it increases in a teeny tiny, tiny amount.

And so that's how Google basically figured out what's the right

what's the right web page to show when when you search a question,

who's who has the most authority to give you the answer.

So this guide for Alpha Signaling or did this for for scientific papers?

So he's like, who are the top scientists?

What are they sharing? What are they linking to?

If they're linking to something, that's an important paper or an interesting paper

that you take the interesting paper, feed it through his LLM,

and it gets summarized down into four bullet points.

Like what was the what was the finding?

What was the methodology?

Who are the scientists and what's the kind of like key takeaways from from this?

An alpha signal is only for like AI topics.

Correct. But I'm like, got it.

This is a generalized product that's actually just really interesting.

Like you're I was like, your method to create this newsletter

is more interesting to me than the newsletter itself.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And paper scraper is the same idea just from a different guy

approaching it from a slightly different angle, which was same thing.

Like basically trying to figure out what are the important papers that are coming out.

So of the of the two million papers

or of the five thousand that are published every day,

which three should I care about, which five should I care about?

And then of the five that I care about, what did they actually mean?

And what are they really hard to read?

They're so hard to read.

So I think this is a really, really cool product idea.

And then he also built like a thing called spin out GPT, which was basically like

you can it's like chat, you can ask it questions about things that might like,

you know, could we commercialize this?

And or like, would this work in cell culture or tissue?

And then it'll go look in the paper and find did they do it in cell culture or tissue?

And it'll answer to you that way.

So it's almost like being able to talk to research papers or talk to

talk to a very smart person that read all of the research papers.

And it's like, oh, I see where this is going.

Like, you know, the hustle milk road.

These were like the horse carriages, right?

Like, yeah, we have random humans trying to keep up with what's going on.

Maybe they set up some Google alerts or they check Reddit and Twitter.

And every day they make a list and we talk about it.

And then they read and summarize and they summarize it as good as they can.

And then like, you know, the pitch was like, it's like your smart friend

explaining what happened in crypto that day or yours was.

It's like your smart friend explaining what happened in business news that day.

And this is like, this is like your fucking genius friend

that read every scientific paper ever.

And you can ask it any question in any variation and it will answer.

You're like, oh, that seems pretty powerful.

Huh? We're on our horseback in this.

Like a car just blew by.

Whoa, what the hell is that?

But what about my friend, Greg?

He. No, I by the way, I'm happy.

We I would not want to be in the newsletter business right now.

It's which is so funny because everybody's following us into the newsletter

business now, like now is like peak hype on newsletters.

And also the way that people are acquiring users, like I just subscribed

to Seth Van and Substack and like right after I subscribed, it said,

do you want to subscribe to these 18 other newsletters and it's auto checked

and I almost accidentally clicked like, yes.

It's like, and they're all like, whoa, look at my newsletter growth.

It's insane.

And it's like, dude, anyone on Substack that's talking about your newsletter growth.

You're full of shit is my my answer to you.

Like you are absolutely full of shit.

It's like people think they're filling out a capture

and they're just actually subscribing to 19 newsletters like at a time.

It's insane. That's why you know what I like?

Beehive has a good feature.

They did a feature like that.

That's actually legit, which is their thing was

you can you have to manually be like, who do I want to endorse?

But also they have this thing

we're going to call like sparks or some shit like that.

But it's like you can pay to acquire newsletters subscribers.

Like all of us know the best newsletters subscriber you can get

is somebody who already subscribes to other newsletters that are similar.

But that's really hard to get historically

because you have to advertise in like a hundred different newsletters.

So they created a little mini ad network inside

inside Beehive of all the Beehive newsletters.

But what's cool about it was

you only pay for somebody who's a retained reader.

And I was like, oh, OK, that's actually legit.

So instead of just like this like auto check vanity metric where it's like,

hey, I got more subscribers.

But it's like, are they actually an engaged reader?

You have no idea.

But you're you're excited about that.

Anyways, what I like that Beehive did was you only pay.

It's like, you know, CPA versus CPM or CPC, like CPA is like

you only pay for a reader you actually acquired who's still reading from you.

And and so it enforces quality

because that's the only way you get rewarded in that network.

So I was like, that's smart.

First of all, this Seth Bannon thing is awesome.

I just like the tweet that Sean's referring to is from June 12.

So if you Google Seth Bannon and go to his thing, it was on June 12.

That's awesome.

He filmed the video in like an amazing place.

Like it looks like a TED talk almost,

but like with like an IMAX style screen explaining his concept.

I don't know if that would be a good business.

I'm nervous about people building businesses right now on top of open

AI because I'm like, they're just going to crush everyone and just do it themselves.

But this is awesome.

And second, yeah, to to reiterate, I'm happy.

I'm not doing a newsletter as my main thing right now.

It seems really, really hard.

And like, I remember at the hustle, we had one daily newsletter

and then Morning Brews strategy was to launch more.

But my thing was like, fuck, but if we have more, our main thing was going to go down.

Like they're not going to open two, they're not going to open three.

Now people, if the numbers are true, are subscribing to dozens.

And I want to know is the engagement even remotely the same?

It seems really, really, really hard.

It seems way harder.

Yeah, I think it's a lot like podcasts.

Like how many podcasts do you actually have in a regular rotation at any given time?

Yeah, it seems hard.

I mean, with newsletters, it's easier because it only takes three minutes to skim it.

But it seems really hard to get people's attention with the newsletter right now.

It's just so funny when we so I got the idea for a newsletter

because I had my friend, Neville Madora and my other friend, Noah Kagan,

they were like they had one foot into the startup world,

one foot into like the internet marketing world.

And I was like, oh, this internet marketing world, they love email

and they use it in sometimes shady ways.

But let's just see if we can do it a legit way.

And people are like laughing at that.

Now it's so cool, but also that that people think it seriously.

But I'm so happy I'm not doing it.

It seems way more challenging at the moment.

I it seems really hard.

Yeah, I think the best will still win because, you know,

the best tends to win and everything.

Like, you know, so I say it's not that the door is actually closed,

but it's definitely much harder than when you started.

You know, when did you start 2015, 2016?

Yeah, I got the idea of doing a newsletter and I started it in 2014,

but it became what it was on May 19th, 2016.

A great day in history.

Well, I always remember that because it's the day before 420.

So it was always it was always easy to remember.

But yeah, and it was like I remember like

for I originally started as a conference.

And if I had five, if I had 2000 subscribers

to my conference newsletter, I think I made $50,000 in conference ticket sales.

And then when I had 10,000, I think we did 150,000

in ticket sales, something like that.

And like the engagement was quite high.

And then I remember people back then saying, I think Gary Vaynerchuk,

I talked to him one time, he was like, dude, my newsletter,

we had a 99 percent open rate because no one else was doing newsletters.

Yours is only 40 percent.

It's so much harder.

And I was like, oh, man, I wish it was easier.

Now, I don't know what those numbers would be like,

but I think it would be hard to make that amount of money

with as few subscribers today as it was.

It was easier than, you know, the other thing that's funny is

or I guess the other thing that that kind of rises

is your I wish people would see kind of your early blog posts

or you should we should do kind of like a trip down memory lane

of some of our projects because.

You're incredibly good at creating content and writing.

We like when I see what you did versus what I see a lot of people doing now,

I'm like, oh, there are like many rungs on the ladder above

is where where you were with creating content back then.

Like I remember your early blog posts that were just regularly going viral,

getting millions of hits to the site because they were that good.

Like which ones?

Like when you were doing the got you like first, you had the right concept.

So you were kind of like a YouTuber before YouTube.

Actually, you really should have been a YouTuber.

Like that would have been your calling.

I believe we got we got asked to do it.

Like we were thinking about doing it, but I was like hustle.

I was saying Sam Parr as a YouTuber would have been.

I believe like you would have been one of the most successful

YouTubers on the platform. Let me give you an example.

That's awesome.

You're like, for example, I remember some of your early hustle blog posts

surviving 30 days on Soylent only.

Guess what that sounds like?

Every Ryan Treyhan video, every Mr.

Beast video, like this is the current meta of YouTube.

You were doing this eight years ago.

You know, like it was you were wet.

You did micro dosing LSD.

You did an interview with a anonymous entrepreneur who.

Who he drives his books.

Yeah. Yeah.

You did the the the thing where you were like,

Amazon bestsellers are bullshit.

I'm going to prove it by making an Amazon bestseller

spending only like a thousand dollars.

Guess what? That's a YouTube video.

These are YouTube videos.

They would these videos would still work.

But the thing is

you have to do them with style.

You actually did the thing with style.

Now, your problem was you were locked into this blog world

because those are the people you admired at the time.

But the way I knew how to write, you know,

like writing was my thing.

I wasn't I don't know if I could have maybe you had the visual aesthetic, too.

Like you're good on camera.

You like lived in a freaking you like lived on a motorcycle or something.

I don't know. You're sleeping on a motorcycle.

You're doing some crazy shit.

It's like you had the dog and you had the look and you had the the humor on

camera and you were willing to you liked jackass and those sorts of things.

And I feel like you would have kind of tortured yourself for people's entertainment.

As soon as you got that hit of feedback, you would have gone all the way in.

And I just wish you had kind of gone down that route.

In fact, I still think you should go down that route.

Like, for example, I think I could be successful.

In fact, I'm going to be successful on short form video,

but it's not going to be the way you could have been because you're kind of like

those like, you know, whoever this Danny Duncan and and Ryan Trayhan and and

you know, Mr.

Bees, you're a lot like them in the way that you are as a character

and what you're willing to do and what you were willing to do

and how long you were kind of like I'm single and don't give a fuck.

And like, I don't need comfort and like, you know, oh,

like this firecracker is going to go in my ass.

All right, let's roll.

Like, you know, lights action, right?

Like, I think that you had all of that.

And so anyways, I don't know what I don't wish I would have gone that way.

I don't I think I think I think I probably could have done it.

I think that that's a hard life.

I think it's hard.

Like, I like Danny Duncan a lot, but I'm like, can you do that at 40?

I guess it just has to change.

It has to evolve or like Mr.

Beast, what's he going to do at 40?

He's going to be so wealthy.

It doesn't really matter.

Yeah, you did in the same.

Yeah, but yeah, like our early blog posts were good.

And there was a period where I was writing like five a day.

I would write so many of them.

Not all of them were bangers, but like we would write a ton.

And that's how we grew.

And that's why I tell people, I say to blog, I don't actually mean blog,

but I meant create bangers, text based bangers on a consistent basis

and get people to love your free content enough to subscribe.

TBB, baby, text based bangers, that's been our strategy, right?

Like, how'd you like for me when we wanted to grow on Twitter?

It was like all the advice was you got to be consistent.

Well, guess what?

I'm like the least consistent human being on earth.

Like if you weren't super consistent and a real hard ass about like,

we're going to record this every Monday, every Wednesday, 9 a.m.

Every single every single week without fail, no matter what,

there's no way I would keep up the schedule, right?

Like I only do that because you're my friend.

I don't want to let you down the when I'm on my own.

I'm inconsistent.

And when I wanted to grow on Twitter, I was like, look,

all the conventional wisdoms you got to tweet every day, multiple times a day,

find the right time of the day, be consistent, be on brand, have a single message,

do a call to action.

I'm like, dude, I ain't trying to do all that.

That sounds like hard.

Sounds like the lame version of success.

And I agree, it's probably right, but like I didn't want to do it that way.

And my way was text based bangers.

It's like I basically had like six viral tweets that grew me to like almost

400,000 followers.

So it was literally just six tweets, basically that crazy bulk of the growth.

It's like the clubhouse one, the metaverse one, this one about Elon Musk,

this other one.

And it's just like, that's all it was that that got me like kind of all the growth.

And then there's like several weeks in between posts.

I'm completely inconsistent.

Well, what I told people was like my team and like myself when I was

starting the house, I was like, you know, everyone says it's a marathon,

not a sprint, but you're kind of just telling me that you just don't want to

work that hard.

And if you look at the world-class marathoners, that's going to feel like

a sprint to most people.

So that's just kind of like how we're going to live our life, which is like,

it is a marathon and it's run so fast that it's going to feel like a sprint

to most people.

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

And so we're going on five mile.

My last five minute mile.

Pretend you're this.

Yeah, your last name is Kip Chogi.

You know, you're going to be a Kenyan.

Yeah, you could be a Bekele.

You're an Ethiopian, but you know, like, we're East Africans here, baby.

We're going to run fast.

And yeah, I think, but I actually, I prefer writing.

I think that it's more fun to be in a quiet zone late at night and just

bang it out and it feels a little bit more artful.

It felt like I was in my zone of genius a little bit, whereas with the video,

it feels like sometimes you have to perform and I felt that writing was a

different type of performance that is more enjoyable to create for me.

Yeah, sure.

Dude, surprise, man likes his choices and defends them.

By the way, look at my person.

Things that what they did was the correct thing.

I did live life.

Look at me when I was a fat and sound hot dog, man.

I was about I was about YouTube life.

It just, you know, without the camera.

I was telling Sarah, I was like, I'm nervous about going to Westport or like

Connecticut or like if we're going to move to the suburbs and she's like, why?

I was like, well, one of my favorite things to do is like, so every day,

I like to go to this gas station near my house and get a diet, Dr.

Pepper and loiter.

Like I just like this.

Yeah, I get a slip, Jim and a diet, Dr.

Pepper and I'll like dab it up with like the clerk and then I'll just sit and

see the regulars like, what's up, man?

Right now, what's good?

How are you?

Like, I just like to loiter and like do hoodwretch shit, man.

Yeah.

And I was like, Connecticut doesn't have like hood rats or gas stations.

Yeah.

I was like, what am I going to do?

Like where like, I want to watch people buy lottery tickets and scratch

offs and like, like smoke black and miles.

Like, where am I going to hang out with?

Like I, I need this smell of like the woods.

They call it, you know, like the, the blunts and where am I going to do that?

You know, like that's how you get like good ideas and you like see interesting people.

So yeah, I'm about how many incredible podcasters there are.

That just don't podcast, but they just chop it up, sitting on steps, like all day.

Or people that come by, like, can you imagine how good those people would be

if we just put a mic in front of them?

They just don't know.

Like there's just like, you know, it's like those like kids who are like

incredible basketball players somewhere in Africa that we just don't know.

We haven't found them yet.

Like just imagine the dudes that just stood on the steps all day, just shooting the shit.

That like, Joe Rogan is lucky.

Those guys don't have a microphone.

And they just like sit outside of a gas station, like read newspapers.

I always be funny.

I always thought it'd be funny if you like walk up and you over here,

their conversation and they're like, dog, you better diversify your bonds, man.

Like the Dow's down.

Like just having like the most academic conversations ever

because they read newspapers all day.

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

The slam happy face is initiated.

All right, that's the pod.

All right, I don't want to say this on the pod, but I wanted to revolver

because I just read a book about like Cowboys and Indians.

And I went and bought this gun and it was one hundred dollars.

How much it cost to buy this gun?

I just walked in and I just walked in and I looked at the case and I go,

I would like to buy that.

And they like, I just I just bought it.

It was I think it cost one hundred and fifty dollars normally.

I think I got it for a hundred, literally one hundred dollars plus ammunition.

I walked out with was five hundred rounds and it was one hundred and forty dollars for all of it.

I rode my motorcycle there.

I put it in my motorcycle like bag and I just went home.

And it's been sitting on my coffee table because I just love spitting it

and like like I just like feel this is how the podcast is feeling it.

Sam is the revolver.

Shoots himself.

Do you feel like a man?

No, I mean, I just like I just wanted like it feels good to hold a piece of metal

like in like like a mechanical device that like I just I bought the one

that like I read about in cowboy books and like I wanted to like see it and feel it.

And like, you know, like how they like when they shoot guns, you see him do that.

Like, you have to actually cock it back in order to fire the trigger.

And I was like, oh, that's like a neat like device.

Let me see what that's about.

It was one hundred dollars.

It's called it's called the rough rider.

That's what the guns call. Wow.

The one chooses the wizard after all.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.