My First Million: How to Interact with Famous People, The In-Person Event Playbook, and More

All right.

Quick break to tell you about another podcast that we're interested in right now, HubSpot

just launched a Shark Tank rewatch podcast called Another Bite.

Every week, the hosts relive the latest and greatest pitches from Shark Tank, from Squatty

Potty to the Mench on a Bench to Ring Doorbell, and they break down why these pitches were

winners or losers, and each company's go-to-market strategy, branding, pricing, valuation, everything.

Basically all the things you want to know about how to survive the tank and scale your

company on your own.

If you want to give it a listen, you can find Another Bite on whatever podcast app you listen

to, like Apple or Spotify or whatever you're using right now.

All right.

Back to the show.

I bet you VaynerMedia makes 200 plus million in revenue.

It's a big-ass company, and you do the exact same thing, but now the new community or the

new social is community.

All right, I want to self-promote.

You should self-promote, too, because you have a thing coming up, right?

Are you doing the writing?

You're doing a different one.

I don't know what I'm doing.

You do yours.

Okay.

I have to promote a couple things.

One, Gagon has been getting on me about talking about it.

I'm doing the ideation boot camp.

It's basically my research course on how I research different business ideas.

I'm doing it with Gagon.

This guy who started Udemy, a multi-billion-dollar company.

If you're interested, go to maven.com.

It's maven, so M-A-V-E-N, maven.com, and you'll see my face on there.

This is kind of a funny thing to promote.

June 1 to September 30, I go and live in New York, and I always rent out my house.

If you're interested in renting my house for that time, let me know.

Also, I got a toothache.

If anyone's a dentist who wants to come over and fix it, you don't have anything to promote?

Not right now.

I have been using this, I could do some work, or maybe I'll just tweet out, does anybody

know X?

You will get to the answer if you just tweet out any question or anybody who knows somebody

who does this.

Once you get to a certain size, you have basically a genie lamp that you can just rub, and they

won't make it come true, but they'll definitely save you a lot of time either getting connected

to somebody or finding out what's the answer to X, renting out your Airbnb, whatever it

is.

I'm going to, I'm taking my mom and dad to Europe, to Paris, and I tweeted out, my whole

vacation has been people saying, hey, I own a restaurant, I'll take you to it, or whatever.

It is pretty awesome.

Wow, famous.

No, but I did, I met a famous person this weekend.

I went and saw Jimmy, is it Yang or Wang, the comedian?

Oh, Yang, or something like that.

Oh, yeah, well, it's Jimmy Oh, I forget his last name, but he's, what was his character

in Silicon Valley?

Jing Yang.

Jing Yang, yeah.

And he's a comedian, and he was an awesome guy, and my friend is dating him, Bree, and

Bree.

Funny in person or not?

Yeah, he's awesome.

He was awesome.

Like comedian, funny, like you just talking to him, or you're like, wow, this person should

be a comedian if they weren't?

No, he was just really insightful, and he had like really good, strong opinions, and he

told stories as well.

I mean, I think you could actually do it.

If you were to sit down and write a bit, I actually think that you have the same traits.

But no, he was just a really nice, thoughtful guy, but he was like legit famous to where

everywhere we went, people would talk to him, and it was pretty, pretty cool to see.

And I imagined quite annoying for him, because the people who are fans of him, because he

doesn't actually talk like that.

You know, he's American, right?

Right, right.

But not fans of him, they're fans of Jing Yang.

Yeah.

Yeah, they are fans of him, particularly the Asian community, they love him because, well,

he's just like, he's like representing nicely.

But basically, they come up to, like a white guy came up to him and kind of said something

a little inappropriate, and it was like rooted in like the Silicon Valley show.

And like they think that he has an accent and things like that, and that's super annoying,

particularly in Austin, where there's tons of like white bros.

So I imagine that could be annoying, but he was legit famous, and it was kind of cool

to see.

And I wonder around people who are like, you know, famous in their world.

Do you, how do you act?

Do you like, do you go door A, treat them like a normal person, in fact, almost disregard

their fame, B, nerd out about, you know, asking them a zillion questions about, you know,

the show and what blah, blah, blah, like, you know, basically to ask them all the questions

they've probably heard before, but with enthusiasm, or C, something else.

What do you do?

So I do, I do be, but I do it in a very direct way, kind of like the podcast where, where

it could tell that I'm like really confident, but I'm asking questions up that everyone

wants to know.

So I'm like, so what's it like, here's a tiny example.

I've got a friend of a friend who had cancer and he lost his leg.

And when I first saw him, I was like, what's going on, man?

Are you crushing it at pull-ups because you're lighter now?

Like how many pounds did you lose off that leg?

But he like really quickly opened up because he was like, oh, you just got that out.

You got it.

We got it all the way.

I'm not saying like it's not here, but you're also not making a huge deal out of it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so that's like how I usually, when I'm with famous people, so I'm like, so what's

it like?

You're pretty famous.

Is that cool or is it bad?

Like just very direct.

And I typically find that it makes people lighten up and they, and they'll, and you,

you are nagging them in a sense, but you're also like congratulating them and they really

will just open up.

They're like, you're better looking in person.

I watched the show.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You're way taller than I thought.

Yeah.

You're not nearly as slight of build as I was expecting.

Yeah.

You're actually funny.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Yeah.

It's like, you know, I don't care what people say.

I think you're great.

Dude, my brother-in-law has the best celebrity move.

He, if he sees a celebrity, he greets them like a long lost friend.

So he'll see like, we saw Mike Tyson and he'll be like, Mike, what's up, man?

How you been?

And he'll go adapt them up and he'll be like, but good seeing you.

He'll just like, keep going.

And they're just like, do I know this guy?

Where did I be like, George, yo, how's Houston?

Ah, George.

And then he'll like, just keep going and like just, he'll just make it seem like they are

just reconnecting rather than meeting for the first time.

And I thought, what a hack.

What an amazing hack.

Cause these people meet tons of people.

So they don't, they don't remember.

And so they'll automatically go with your assumption that the like sort of know each

other or your equals in some way, peers in some way.

You ever, have you ever been to a restaurant and the owner walks around just greeting people

and asking how things are?

Of course.

Yeah.

That is, well, I had a friend that told me he used to pick up women that way where

he was just like, I would approach this with the attitude.

Like, I wouldn't act like I was the owner, but in my head, I would act like the owner.

I was doing here.

Yeah.

And I was just, and I had that energy and I was able to meet so many people with that

energy.

Yeah.

That restaurant owner energy dude.

That's so good.

It's a good one.

That's so good.

And so I like at HustleCon when we're hosted, HustleCon or when you and I are hosting one

of our events, like you, you kind of know everyone knows who you are and so you kind

of know that you have the feeling where you can just walk up to talk to anyone and they'll

know what's up.

Right.

And they'll see when you're trying to meet girls and it's the best.

Right.

Dude, that's so good.

Like, I'm just going to start wearing like a small dish towel and my waist and go to

restaurants and then just, yeah, just, just walk around, just have a drink and just be

walking around, you know, greeting each table, making sure everything's going smoothly for

them.

Yeah.

And you're not lying.

You're not telling them.

I never said it.

Never said it.

You assumed based on my big restaurant energy here.

All right, bro.

I got a few interesting things to run by you.

You had it.

Did you have a lot left over from last time?

Yeah, I kind of do.

Can I tell you about one?

Yeah.

I don't know, like business slash idea, this niche that's like got my attention right

now.

So, um, I did I talk about this the other day I went to that, the Blippi show that I tell

you about this.

No.

All right.

So, so do you know who Blippi is?

Have you ever heard of Blippi?

I don't know what that is.

No.

All right.

So like, remember like back then we had Barney or like, you know, like Peewe Herman or whatever

he's like, it's like, it's a dude, so he kind of looks like Peewe Herman or whatever.

But he's more like a Barney or, you know, um, Sesame Street style show.

So basically there's a guy who went on YouTube, created this brand called Blippi and he, um,

he's entertaining.

So he'd be like, oh, and by the way, the funny thing that he does is there's no like set.

He just goes into like, um, hey, we're at the aquarium, but they just go in like after

9pm.

It's like closed down.

And so it's just, they have it all to themselves like, Hey, we're here in Las Vegas at this

rock climbing studio.

And so he just uses that to film this thing, but he gives it a shout out at the beginning

of the video.

The video gets like 40 million views.

So it's like, oh, well, you know, it's worth it to let these guys film there.

And he just like goes around and he'll basically just play with toys.

He'd be like, I'm at an abandoned Chuck E. Cheese and he'll go play with a bunch of

toys and there's like music and whatever overlaid.

And it's the same guy.

I'm looking at him now.

It's the same guy every single time.

It is except for as he blew up and got famous, then they switched him out with just a stunt

double for a bit.

And so like that guy's like a substitute teacher sometimes.

And then sometimes when Blippi comes back, but like the main guy is the main guy.

He wears this outfit.

It's like this blue outfit with this orange glasses.

He like always looks the same.

So anyways, my daughter love Blippi.

We used to watch a ton of Blippi.

And all of a sudden we see this ad that says Blippi, like the live show is coming to Oakland.

And so we were like, Oh shit.

And so instantly my wife buys tickets for all of us in the family.

We go to this thing last weekend.

And it's, it's at the same place you did hustle con.

So it's at the Paramount theater.

And it is packed like, you know, hustle con was like, you know, sold out ish.

This was like sold out, sold out, like all the, even the back shitty seat is like sold

out.

And it's full of parents and their kids.

And then there is this like, this, they basically just created like a little play, like a little

mini musical one hour, because kids don't have that long of an attention span.

And it's just kind of like music and, and like, you know, lights and colors.

And he's, oh, dinosaurs, oh, rocks, oh, how much did it cost?

So every ticket I want to say was that venue seats, maybe like 60 bucks a seat, something

like that.

So that venue seats between 2,500 and 3,000, I believe.

Yeah.

So I think there was 2,000 there.

And I believe the tickets were, were something like something like 50, 60, 70 bucks, something

like that.

So we're in like 120,000.

And he played four shows in a row that weekend and then he went to the next city.

So it was like, no, he had done eight shows or he's doing something like that.

So it was like some crazy like thing where I was like, oh, wow, this weekend they made

whatever 800 grand.

And yeah, the tickets, tickets basically range from like, you know, 60 bucks to 90 bucks.

And, and the place is lit, by the way.

So like, you know, he comes on stage, kids go crazy.

He's like, you know, he'd be like, you know, what does the bubble do?

And everyone's like, pop.

And he's like, when I say pop, can you say pop?

And like, so it's like not like a quiet show, like, because kids are loud anyways.

So some kids are just not paying attention.

Have to like, my daughter during intermission was like, I want to watch Blippi on YouTube.

And so we like had to open up YouTube on our phone and give it to her during intermission

because she couldn't like go five minutes without stimulation.

And so it's, and then they have like the merch and the, like the concessions, they have like

all that shit.

Right.

So it's like pretty dope actually.

And I was like, wow, this is kind of genius.

They just took YouTube IP and this is this guy who was there was not Blippi.

The guy on stage was just some, you know, theater kid who like didn't make it.

And so he's like, all right, plan B, I'll be, I'll be Blippi.

And so it was like, they took the IP, but they made their own show out of it.

And so I started looking into this and there's a company that does this called V-Star Entertainment.

Awesome.

So V-Star, what they do is they go license these kids brands and then they put on kids

Broadway basically, and they tour around the country.

Awesome.

And so, and Blippi is just a guy with a guitar, right?

Or was there more instruments?

No guitar.

He just, just him.

He just, so were there any instruments or was it just like a soundtrack?

Just soundtrack and like lights and like stage props.

So like, you know, so he, he only has like a crew like, you know, if they came out as

sharks, like a bunch of like little backup dancers came out as sharks and then they would've

like, that's awesome.

So many theater show, right?

And so V-Star Entertainment, they do another brand that you've probably heard of cult or

you may have heard of called Paw Patrol, especially another kid's cartoon.

So guess how much, this is my like kind of triangulation.

Guess how much they sold in Paw Patrol tickets last year.

Just take a guess.

20?

20 million?

$40 million.

$40 million in event tickets?

In event tickets for, and that's just the tickets.

Not the merch.

And that was just last year in 22?

I don't know.

It's like, this is like the, just before COVID numbers.

So like, I don't know, 2019, 2020, something like that.

Wow.

So they got bought by Cirque du Soleil.

So first, so the backstory is some guy decides, oh, you know what, like he's watching Sesame

Street.

He's like, Sesame Street should do a live show.

And he goes and he basically raises 500 grand from this guy.

He mortgages his house.

It gets an extra 25 grand out of his home equity.

So he's got $525,000 and he goes and he gets the license to Sesame Street.

He started with the Sesame Street show and then Muppets and like, you know, he did a couple

of...

But that must have been years ago.

This was like 1980, something like that.

And then this other guy was doing it, they merged and then that whole thing gets bought

by Cirque du Soleil last year.

Is it Cirque du Soleil?

By the way, like, guess how much Cirque du Soleil revenue was?

Have you ever been to a Cirque show?

No, I've not, but I do know that the guy who started it is a Canadian guy.

He's a billionaire.

I read Damblazerian's book and they talk about that guy a lot.

I think he's like, I mean, he started a circus.

Yeah, he's really eccentric and wild and everything.

So it made him a billionaire.

How much revenue does it make?

Ben, have you been to a Cirque du Soleil show?

Cirque du Soleil did a billion, does a billion dollars a year in revenue, which is insane.

10%, a five or 10% of all Las Vegas tourists go to a Cirque show when they're in town.

Is that what it, what's that at Cirque?

Is that the, is that like the name?

They have like 10 shows, right?

It'll be like, they have, oh, and then they have zoom manatee and they have like, whatever.

And the Beatles.

Yeah, I know all about it and I'm into it and it's publicly traded or at least it was

before it was acquired by private equity, right?

Private equity owns it now.

And, and it's a pretty bad asbestos.

The idea was do a circus, but no animals.

So it was like only human performers and to do that, they did like crazy acrobats and

like great costumes.

It's basically its own genre at this point though, right?

And so he built that thing into a real juggernaut.

And so Cirque then bought blue man group and V-star entertainment.

And so they got blue man, which is like an added, they, what they had said was like,

we do 10 million in ticket sales a year for Cirque du Soleil, blue man adds another two

million and then, and then V-star adds another two million, but they're all like different

ticket prices, but like they do 14 million in tickets sold per year.

And so this, this like live entertainment thing really has caught my attention because

I think as the world moves more and more digital, the, the, like the demand for like these one

off experience is like, Hey, let's get out of the house and go do something.

I think it's just going to keep going up.

I think festivals, that's a winner.

And then there's like, I think plays and musicals are going to be a winner.

I think they're going to be bigger than they were before, even though the world moves digital.

And in fact, because the world moves digital, what do you think about all this?

I 100% agree.

And so earlier today, I sent you a notion doc of some of my notes on, I'm interested in

peer businesses, which is basically like you pay money and you're part of a club and you

meet up with them.

And I, I can't talk too much about what the name of the companies were, but they were

doing like, uh, one of them does a hundred million a year in profit and they, it's basically

two or three meetups a year and there's executives paying $50,000 a year to be part of them.

And I think actually these are going to completely boom.

I think conferences right now are interesting, but those are really hard.

This actually seems way easier to pull off.

Um, all types of meetups, Airbnb's, I'm 100% on board that I think that in person is, is

the move.

Yeah.

And I think that, so then I started thinking like, what are the other opportunities?

And so I think A, you could just like go compete with these guys on like either the same brands

or another brand.

So like what they did was the V star guy took TV IP, turned it into a live show.

The blip with the blipping guy is doing is taking YouTube IP and turning it into a live

show.

And I think you could just even do this for more.

So like, I think you could even do like, we've talked about religion, which is the greatest

free IP in the world.

So I think if somebody could do this for religion, which would make a extremely kid friendly,

in fact, kid focused, like Christianity show, basically, I think you could do this for dinosaurs

or science as a generic genre.

Cause like if kids love trucks and dinosaurs or whatever, and you could just basically create

the like the, the show, you know, day with the dinosaurs or something like that.

And once you get like, if you have a certain level of quality, moms will spread this and

they will talk about it and they will like in their mommy groups, they will help you

sell these tickets.

And um, and I just feel like there's a, like, it's not that hard.

Like you build one show and then you sell that one show a thousand times, right?

Like the show goes on tour.

Mama Mia has made like, I don't know, some stupid amount of money, just being the same

show on tour with replacing the, the low cost actors.

Yeah.

And I'm trying while we're talking, I'm trying to find the numbers.

So we used to, so we did events, but we would do like these, this thing called hustle con,

which was like our big one where like thousands of people would come.

But then we do this thing called two X and two X was basically from like seven PM to

like 10 PM.

And it was basically, we got 15 or 10 women, all who were in tech and business, not that

many of them were like, well known, but they would have 10 minutes to like tell a story

and we would charge like $25, but then we would get tens of thousands of dollars in

sponsors.

But we got to the point where we could pull this off like kind of like almost weekly in

other cities.

And when we started doing this, the hustle wasn't that popular, but we were making like,

I think like 30 grand a night when we were doing it and we had one employee running it.

And she would use a team of contractors and then we wouldn't supply anything.

Like I think we had free wine, but I don't know, I don't even think it was free.

I like, we wouldn't supply anything.

But then when we have corporate sponsors and we crushed it and in my head, I'm like,

I can always fall back on this to make a living because it was so much easier than people

thought.

Right.

Yeah.

Well, that's pretty good for a tech bro, a tech bro business.

Like all of you, you were running one of the best like women's entrepreneurship events.

Yeah.

Because you got labeled wrong, dude.

I did.

Yeah.

I'm like an onion man.

There's layers.

So, but basically like we used to do this thing called pizza in forties where we would

do a meetup and I would interview someone and they would drink a 40 ounce and when the

40 ounce beer was done, the talk was done.

But then like women were like, this is like, there's all dudes here.

And so we created like a, like a wine version and that had like way better.

It was like calling cheese and wine.

I don't even remember, but that had way better engagement.

And so we're like, oh, like let's pursue this vein.

Like this, there's clearly an opportunity here.

And so we created two X, which comes, it's like two X chromosomes, which I thought was

clever.

I stole it from Reddit.

But anyway, we would do, I think we did 10 or 12 in one year and every single time it

was like 20 and 30 grand and the cost, the cost was nothing.

The cost was renting the venue, which costs like $3,000 and we would make like 20 grand.

And you also had, you had readers in every city, right?

So that's how you sold the tickets.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But we weren't, basically the speakers sold the tickets.

The reason why we had 15 speakers was I was like, I bet each 15 will get 25 people to

come plus our like a little bit of our engine.

Like this is easy.

And you weren't making the money off the tickets, you're making off the sponsors really anyway.

The tickets, the business model was the tickets paid for the event.

And then the conference was all, or the sponsors were all the profit.

But when it's, there's two things going on.

One, like women.

So whenever you have like an underserved community, like sponsors definitely are willing to pay

more.

And two, it was like a B2B component.

So it wasn't kids component, which I think would alter the economics.

But my point of it is that I think that it was far easier than people thought.

And it was way more rudimentary and raw than people thought.

And it worked.

We just used Splash that.

I think if you Google like 2X the hustle, you'll like see like the, Splash that is basically

Eventbrite.

It was nothing special.

And it freaking worked.

That's dope.

All right.

What else we got?

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All right.

Let me...

I just got kicked out of the document.

All right.

I got it.

So, one thing...

Tell me what you think about this.

One thing that I've been doing as I'm now starting to get back into the game or thinking

about it.

So, I've been setting up calls with bankers.

So bankers, which I didn't even know what those were.

So, when Sarah and my wife went to Penn and she and I would always make our friends were

like, yeah, I'm a banker.

I work at a bank.

I'm like, oh, which branch?

And so, bankers are basically people who help people sell companies and help people buy

companies.

And when you sell a company for anything north of probably 50 million, they likely have a

banker.

And I've been contacting bankers and my pitch to them is this, hey, I'm thinking about starting

a company in this space.

You sold a few companies in this space.

Tell me everything about why this company was bought as well as what the opportunities

are that the buyer, what they were looking for.

And maybe in five or 10 years, I'll let you sell my company.

And I've been able to line up meetings doing this.

And it's...

By the way, genius.

And I've been a part of one or two of those types of conversations and I was like, oh,

wow, these guys are like vaults filled with gold.

Dude, so much.

Dude, bankers need podcasts.

Like, why are these guys not talking?

Well, they can't.

They have so much info.

No, but they talk like generally speaking, they can't talk about any specific deal.

But like, they know a lot, dude.

And they actually...

They know everything.

It's like your accountant.

It's like accountants and bankers and everything.

They know everything.

Yeah.

They know everything.

And they've been telling me so much information.

So I like, basically they'll say, here's why this company was doing well.

Here's why it was succeeding.

Here's why they bought it.

And I'm like, all right, great.

But what other companies was that buyer trying to buy?

And why?

And they're like, well, they always struggled with blank and I'm like, boom.

Thank you.

And then I'll say like, you sold three businesses in the same space.

Which one was more fun to run?

And so like, for example, I'll give you a concrete example.

The business that I'm interested in now, we've talked about a bunch.

It's like a Vistage, which is basically a peer group.

So companies that it's like a group of 10 or 40 people who all have a similar job title

and they meet together and they discuss their problems and it's like a safe space to discuss

shit you can't talk about on the internet.

And some of them do huge.

One of them, I can't say which does over a hundred million in profit a year.

And they're just like meetups in real life.

And I'll just be like, well, what job titles was Gartner or whoever buys these companies?

What job titles are they trying to get to?

And they're really struggling to reach.

And they'll just tell me.

I'm like, oh, great.

I can create a community around that.

And I think I could build it to sell it, which what I want to know from your perspective,

is that even a good plan, building to sell?

So part of me is like, yes, it's clear path to make money.

I know the part is like, it's kind of lame though.

Yeah.

Well, I think where you're at now, let's take three options.

Build to sell.

Which is basically optimizing for like, oh, is there a sort of like a flip?

Is there a is there a buyer on the other side of the business like this?

Another one is build to win, which is basically like, for example, when I talk to these bankers,

what I'm trying to figure out is what which of these businesses is like not a special

snowflake where it's like, oh, that's actually like a rinse and repeatable model.

Like I didn't like that founder didn't like catch lightning in a bottle at the perfect

time and it's their perfect background and they got really lucky about this one thing.

It's like, oh, those I don't want to emulate.

I want to emulate the one where it's like, I think somebody could start that same business

today and do equally well or do just do just as well in this one adjacent space.

And like, you don't need to be a genius with that.

And so that's the second part of it, which is like build to win is like optimizing for

something that's going to work.

And then there's the last one, which is sort of like, you know, build for fun or build

for mission, which is like, go for something that like you something you would never want

to sell that you're willing to do even if it's low likelihood of success.

I think we all know the answer is to do that bucket, right?

Like I think the question is like, how many, how much security do you need before you go

do the thing, you know, you should do?

Well, or it could be a combination of all three, like it could be like you enjoy winning

or you enjoy this space and you want to make it successful.

But there's a great clip from you and what's a free what's what's all in David Friedberg.

There's a great clip that I shared that you and him had where he basically said that

founders always sell themselves short and they go for these small ideas because they

because they think it's more reasonable.

But when doing that, they kind of screwed themselves because it's actually easier sometimes

to do much a grander, bigger ideas because that attracts the crazy types of people who

you want to work with, you track competitive because nobody else, no, not every Joe is

going to try to, you know, do it like, you know, going and trying to, you know, start

a railroad business or whatever versus an FBA business.

It's like, well, they're both going to take all your time.

So that's equal money.

Well, you're going to have to go raise money from investors.

One will let you just raise, you're still going to get the money you need from investors.

Just one, you may maybe raise more at a higher valuation and the other one you'll raise less

at a lower valuation.

Right.

Like, but did you agree?

Do you agree with him?

I do agree with him.

And I've thought this for a very long time.

I remember back in the day, did you ever hear about this thing called the unreasonable

Institute?

I don't even think this is around anymore.

That's a great name.

It's sort of like the same guys who did summit.

It's not, it's not actually the same guys, but it's the same.

It was like the same idea.

It was like the unreasonable Institute was basically this like, it was based on this

one word unreasonable in the way that the hustle is built on this one word hustle.

And trends is built on one word trends.

And so the unreasonable, so it was exactly that.

It was like, it's going to take unreasonable people to do unreasonable things for the world

to move forward.

And it was like very inspiring and then they met with all bunch of people, you know, a bunch

of people who did that, the sort of Elon Musk types who went and did unreasonable things.

And then you start to look at it and you're like, you know, all things equal, um, you

know, I guess like your inputs are sort of the same.

It's just your time and energy.

And then like the outputs can be very, very different because the inputs, the inputs aren't

the same because it is possible to build something pretty cool and not work that hard, but it's

kind of impossible to build something huge and not work very hard.

All right.

I know.

And let's do real examples.

I'm not saying it's not true, but who do we know that's building successful, awesome

businesses without working too hard?

Well, how about Suley?

I actually don't know what's his schedule.

Does he grind constantly?

He works hard.

Yes.

He works hard.

So then no one, you don't, we don't know anyone, but you and me, like maybe I'll give you

one nuance on it.

He got there faster than the normal person.

So it looked like it came easier, but that's just cause he was better.

It wasn't cause he worked like he, he wasn't putting in a 10th of the hours.

He was putting in the same number of hours and getting there 10 times faster, which is

I just think that like there's a world where you have business a and it doesn't grow nearly

as fast and you're working 40 hours a week and then you have business B that's growing

significantly faster and you have to work a hundred dollars a week.

Like that, that is a reality.

Yes.

That's true.

That's what I'm talking about.

Very little, I'm talking about normal versus not normal.

There's also things like this podcast or like people who have like newsletters or blogs

or something like that where it's like, are they teach a course?

It's like, you know, like, like let's take your buddy, Neville, right?

So Neville, I don't think you and me, well, but I'm doing multiple things, right?

So it's like on each one, I'm not putting in as much time, but like overall I'm working

harder.

And if I didn't do those other things, that one thing would just expand in time.

I would just do more.

Wait, how often are you working now a day?

Normal work hours?

Not normal hours, but I work like a, the equivalent of eight hours a day.

Got it.

Just not all to you.

Not all continuously.

All right.

But back to, what was the original point?

So my point was like, is it, is this really true that you can kind of like chill and win?

And like,

No, I didn't mean, I didn't mean to chill.

I mean, chill less or sorry, chill more, work less.

Wait, so then bro, if you agree with Friedberg, which I think I do, why are you not going

after like one big grand thing?

Like I started a newsletter.

That's not exactly like, you know, that's not like world changing entirely.

It's neat.

But I would put it on a six out of 10 in terms of like, maybe a five in terms of like big

ideas.

Right.

Yeah, I agree with you.

The reason why is because to me, it's not a bigness contest.

It's a, do I have a clear picture of what I want to, like my life to be and then can

I like, do I have a crystal clear picture and then can I make that happen?

And it's like knowing what I want and then getting what I want.

And so what I wanted was not to work the hundred hours, right?

Even though I, even though I agree, like that's cool, it's fun, and if I did do it, I do think

there's all these extra benefits.

You would get amazing talent to come join you, you'd make a bunch of money, you'd have

a bunch of fun.

Like there's, there's great benefits if I did the big one, the big, big, big one.

But I decided that like what I wanted, yeah, what I wanted more was more like the 40 hour

a week, but hours spent on doing these types of things.

Like I love teaching.

And teaching is not the most, it's not the most like world changing, unreasonable institute

style, you know, like let's go land a rocket on Mars type of idea, but I have the most

fun doing it.

So I'm just optimizing for like a different thing rather than a bigness.

I'm optimizing for like, you know, my own enjoyment.

And so that's why I'm not going after that.

So I need things that are sufficiently interesting so that I'm interested and big enough so I

don't feel like I'm wasting my time, but like it's not maximally big.

Right.

I feel you.

Well, to wrap up the bank thing, I think it's, it was, it's been kind of interesting.

I'm going to continue doing it.

Maybe I'll, I didn't ask these people who I spoke with today if I could talk about what

we discussed.

So I'm not going to break it up, but very useful.

I sent you the notes.

They were cool.

They're great.

And also this technique, whether it's a specific technique or a similar technique, it's like

there are people who just know a lot of things, you know, people who invest other people's

money, accountants, bankers, people like VCs are like this.

They see, they see hundreds and hundreds of businesses a year.

And so it's like those people, if you want to like speed dial your learning, you can

go to them and you can get basically free learning off of, off of them.

Yeah, I agree.

What do you, what, what topic do you want to go to?

Let's do.

Okay.

So this idea is called Milo again.

What is Milo?

So Milo is a company that got started back in the day that a guy who came on the pod,

Jack Abraham started.

Yeah.

And what Milo did was a very simple thing.

Milo said, if you, if you said, oh, I need to go buy scotch tape, it would say you would

just type it.

It was a search engine for finding where you can go buy a specific product in person.

So you'd be like, I want to buy, uh, you know, whatever, like, um, whatever, Phillips razor

or something like that.

You just type it in and it would be like, it's in stock at this target near you.

So it took where you are.

And then it knew all the stores inventory and it just told you if the products in stock

right there and like there's like the world is moving towards e-commerce, yes, but there's

still like a very healthy slice of people that go shop in real stores and or they want

something now today and they don't want to wait for it to be delivered in an X amount

of time.

And so this idea of Milo, Milo got bought by eBay for like 75 million after like a couple

of years.

And then it kind of like, you know, like many acquisitions have just sort of faded away

and disappeared inside of eBay.

But this idea is still a great idea to like completely agree, man.

I tried buying something the other day, like some chairs or something and I had to go to

like eight different like Home Depot dot com, TractorSupply dot com, Lowe's dot com, Walmart

dot com.

Even when you go, you're seeing the generic thing.

You're not seeing like, you're seeing like, does Home Depot carry this?

Okay.

Yeah.

Now let's go to store locator.

Type in my thing.

It sucks.

And then I have to go to each one and do that.

And it's like...

It sucks.

I completely agree.

I needed kids cough medicine.

And I was like, dude, I just need to know, do you have kids Robotesim or not?

And then like usually like CVS or Home Depot or ever, they, you type something in and they're

like, this isn't near you. And it's like, oh, well, because up here it says my zip code

is like, you know, eight hours away when I was on vacation, you don't have like an easy

way where it's just like searching.

You know what I mean?

I completely agree.

It takes forever.

And I was trying to do this the other day.

It's a pain in the back pain in the ass.

I was using Google shopping, but it's not easy.

Exactly.

And I know it's also hard to build, right?

Because you have to have like real time inventory of physical stores.

Yeah.

But that's not that hard.

If you go to Target and ask for like a vacuum, they go to Target dot com and like, that's

type in like that vacuum to figure out where it is in the store.

Right.

So it's in some system.

So you would need to build like integrations with like the major back end inventory systems

in order to be able to do this.

And you have a really strong reason why they should give you that access.

It's like, hey, dude, I'm going to send you a customer and I'm going to send you foot

traffic to your store.

Like is there anything a store wants more than foot traffic to the store?

I don't think so.

So, you know, like to me, Milo is an idea.

And by the way, this just general thing, which is companies that go get it, that get acquired

and then like kind of like dissolve in the big company, just go restart those companies

like three years later.

Yeah.

I actually think that's a really fantastic idea.

That's one of, so that business model, I have said that I hate the advertising business

model.

I don't entirely hate it, but I do hate that when you're a publisher and you have to say

stuff that you don't really want to because of an advertiser.

But it's, I don't love that model, but I love non publishing business advertising models

because it's the perfect alignment.

So basically with Milo, you have a site that gets lots of traffic and then you allow someone

to pay money for a per click or a per view basis and it's very fair.

It's the easiest sales process, I think I'm all about that.

Right.

Okay.

I got some more random ideas.

Keep going.

These ideas, by the way, they're a little bit more like the, the tipsy, the drunk ideas.

The, so this might be another drunk idea segment.

I might have to take a fake shot here and we might do drunk ideas because these are,

these are, you know, very, very loose.

No.

Milo again is all right.

Good bad ideas are bad ideas, but they're the good version.

Like I'm giving you a good, bad idea.

Did, have you ever asked, did you ever ask that guy, Jack, uh, what he, if you could

read, we could just email him and be like, is this cool?

Was it, would this work again?

Oh no, I didn't ask him.

Yeah, we should ask him.

We'll see what he says.

But also the people should know this when a founder goes into a space, they can tell

you a lot of things about it, but they have so much scar tissue about that space that

they will always tell you like nine times out of 10, I should say the nine times out

of 10, they're going to tell you don't do it because they have trauma.

And like, you shouldn't necessarily listen to the, don't do it.

You should listen to all the reasons why they say don't do it and then assess, are those

still true?

Or do I have a compelling reason why those are no longer true?

Um, but yeah, we should, we should ask him.

All right.

So here's my, here's drunk idea.

Number two, you take zoom calls, right?

What's the experience like?

Okay, let's say you had a meeting with me before the era of zoom, we were meeting in

person, you come to my office for a meeting.

What's that experience like while you're waiting for that meeting and just in the three minutes

before the meeting, what do you get?

So lately nothing, but I recently did something where they had an ad on zoom and I thought

that was intriguing.

No, no, no.

In real life, what do you get?

What's the best version of a real life before your meeting?

You show up at the building.

You've done this.

Water.

Yeah, water.

You've been to a few places, you've been there with someone attractive, greet you.

They ask you if you need anything to drink, they give you the drink that you have a seat.

You look around.

They got art everywhere.

Yeah.

You start to feel like, wow, this company's pretty cool.

Huh?

Like, yeah.

I'll look at that.

They got that wall over there with all the like cool, you know, little hands that they

want.

Yeah.

You know, I went to one the other day and the bathroom sign of, by the way, there's another

drunk idea, but this is coming next, coming next drunk idea.

The bathroom sign of this thing was, uh, it didn't say men.

It said Batman and they had like a cape on the guy.

That's pretty hilarious.

And I was like, ah, these guys, they like to have a good time.

These guys got a great sense of humor.

So I got all this, all this information, all this persuasion before I even went into the

meeting.

Which, where, which office is this?

I can't say, but we, um, but zoom needs this zoom needs a waiting room experience.

This is a feature for some product manager at zoom.

They need a dope waiting room experience or even, even it can be built off zoom, right?

There's like, whatever, a trillion zoom calls a day.

Give me a dope waiting room where I can send somebody that's connected to the zoom call

and then when they're ready, they can come in.

But before that, they get a branded, they get a branded experience, a virtual office,

a virtual vibe of who they're dealing with, what that person's all about.

And create a little, a little website, a little website space for them to, uh, to hang out

and have some fun, have a drink, enjoy yourselves.

I did this call with a company, I forget what they're making.

Maybe they're making a game and I logged in and I was like a little bit early and they

had like a teaser video, like a one minute long teaser video.

And because they were the host of the zoom, it automatically played.

And so when I got to have the meeting, I was like, pretty psyched up.

Yeah.

I was psyched up.

It was awesome.

It was really cool.

And it almost felt like they were like, but I was like, is this, what is this new feature?

Is this, was that an ad that you paid zoom to play and they're like, no, they have this

new feature where they allow you to show like an amp up video, like a video prior to the

meeting starting.

And it was really cool.

But dude, how about the fact that zoom has been, we've been in a pandemic for three or

two years and it's like the same shit over and over and over again.

Yeah.

No features and the stock cut in half.

What's going on?

Yeah.

This is not good.

I'm more mad about one of those than the other.

I'll let them figure out which one is actually bothering me.

There's so many people that go to that landing page where it says like, click here to open

up zoom.

And it's just a blank.

Yeah.

It's a blank page.

There's so much real estate there.

I get there when I've already clicked a zoom link.

Guess what?

I do want to open zoom.

You didn't have to re ask me.

Dude, I just means yes to zoom on similar web zoom.com gets 1.7 billion visits a month

and it's the 26th most popular website in the world.

And that page is just this blank page.

I cannot believe that they can make maybe hundreds of millions of dollars a year just

in like an ad.

Yeah.

Just like the new Batman movie needs to play like a 15 second trailer to everybody today.

That's what needs to happen.

For real.

I do think that that's like so much wasted space.

Yeah.

I'm more in the meeting room, the waiting room bucket.

I want you to be able to like say something about who you are by showing what, you know,

you could decorate it.

You could put your little drinks there, a little interactive thing.

You could play Jenga.

You could do whatever you want.

Right.

So that's what I did.

The second one is what I teased a second ago.

It's called I don't have a personality.

Give me one.

Or I'm not funny.

Make me funny.

It's a it's a store like Spencers back in the day.

Remember Spencers?

I just went to Hot Topic.

I just went to one the other day.

Hot Topic.

Yeah.

It's awesome.

All right.

Dude.

That's the actual joke.

For me and Sarah, we had like a date night on Friday and we're like, you want to go walk

around the mall and go to the food court?

So we did.

And it was awesome.

It was awesome, man.

It was so much fun.

So Spencers is still a thing?

Yes.

And Hot Topic.

We went to both of them.

And this shirt that I'm wearing, I bought it from Abercrombie.

Dude, Abercrombie is cool right now.

I believe you.

I believe you.

So my idea is it's the B2B version of Spencers.

So it's just shit for you to put around the office that's going to make your office more

fun and interesting.

I think we should workshop that name a little bit though.

What was your name?

I don't have a personality.

Please give me one.

Yeah.

Maybe there's an acronym in there.

Yeah.

Like we want, like it needs to be a word that's like Botox, but it's for injecting personality

into your company instead of like filler into your like lips.

So basically, this is Botox for your company, what it's going to do is it takes all the

common items of an office, of any office.

So bathroom door plaque, bathroom door signs, the exit sign, the emergency exit sign, meeting

room things, little trash keys on the table for meetings, like your welcome desk sign-in

mat and like little bell, it's just all items like that.

And then it'll make you seem like the fun, interesting version of your company because

we just have them, we take the common and we do it uncommonly.

And that's what we do here.

We have this exit sign.

Do you remember this?

We had this exit sign at the dojo where over the exit side, someone wrote IPO because that

was, that was like, that was the goal.

The goal exit was an IPO.

So we had an IPO sign instead of an exit sign.

It was pretty awesome, but I completely agree.

Like office toilet paper, opportunity, opportunity in that toilet paper role.

There's an opportunity in the bathroom mirrors.

There's opportunity everywhere in your office to demonstrate a little personality.

One time when I went to VaynerMedia, they had Vayner branded bottles of water.

It was awesome.

And I still remember it.

It stuck out.

Have you ever been to a company that has a head of their own branded bottles?

It was just...

No, but I also, I don't feel like I would have thought that was awesome.

Why'd you think that was so awesome?

Was the label like just look amazing or something?

I just, it was weird.

I thought it was cool.

It was quirky.

I mean, it was just a normal cheap Costco bottle of water and somehow some company,

they probably paid a quarter per bottle and they just wrap, they just had their label

on it.

I thought it was neat.

I remember when I went to Twitch for the first time when we were trying to sell the

company and they were like, you want anything to drink?

You know, here's the little fridge.

And I opened up.

It was my first time I ever seen boxed water.

And so I was like, huh, boxed water, fun.

I got that was like their gimmick and I was like, that's cool.

I picked it up.

You ever drank boxed water?

Tastes nasty, by the way.

It doesn't taste good.

Tastes disgusting.

And also you're drinking from the old school like milk carton.

Yeah.

It's like drinking orange juice out of like a thermal, like a metal thermos.

It just doesn't taste good.

It doesn't, doesn't taste right.

And then it doesn't even look right or feel right.

So now I'm in this meeting trying to sell my company biggest day of my life and I'm

like a toddler drinking from this like carton of water.

And like the thing was just getting all wet and disintegrating.

And I was like, God, do you have a, do you have like a dumpster that can go throw this

away and cause it doesn't fit anymore with trash can.

It's like a paper straw.

All right.

Here's my next drunk idea.

Sean's like, fuck them turtles.

Shoke on these.

I don't want to choke myself to save the turtles.

That's what was happening with the boxed water.

I have moved straight to the end.

So the, the next one is, I don't know what I need to call this.

I need to catch a name.

I'm going to call it discord property managers because I can't think of a name.

Okay.

So basically there's a ton of discords out there now.

Basically this is like community managers is a job title, right?

A lot of people have communities.

Communities are all the rage now and there's a ton of discords, especially in the crypto

world.

There's a ton of discords.

You can figure out that are just like noisy, there's spammers and scammers and then there's

new people coming in.

They never use discord.

They never use crypto.

This is a confusion all around.

I think somebody should build the best property management company for your discords.

Just be like, dude, we are the best at managing discords and we will manage your discord for

this flat fee and just build a brand around being an amazing property manager for your

digital property, for your digital spaces.

That's a great idea.

So VaynerMedia, we'll talk about them again.

When they started, their whole thing was like social media is new.

We're like the guys, we know how to handle it.

And basically most of their job titles were called community managers or early on a popular

job title at their company was a community manager.

We basically just met will comment on everyone's comment.

If you're Oreos and someone like makes a comment on about Oreos, we just reply.

And I actually think that and they got big that way.

I bet you VaynerMedia makes 200 plus million in revenue.

It's a big ass company.

And you do the exact same thing.

But now the new community or the new social is community.

And I think that you know, David Spinks.

Yeah, of course.

He was way early.

He was just early dude.

He just if he started that like two years ago, instead of seven years ago, that would

be like a hundred million dollar company right now.

And he was just a little too early.

He was early.

Make it all the way.

David Spinks had this company called CMX Summit, it originally was a conference for

community managers.

Then it was like an online community and everything.

And he sold it.

I don't remember who.

The big idea was like, you have a you have a CEO that you have a CTO.

They handle there.

They are in charge of the technical part of things.

You have a CIO, they're the chief information officer, CSO, CMO for marketing.

So you have all these C suites and that his belief was that community is going to be a

big part of companies.

So you're going to have a CXO, I think it was the thing they were going for, which is

like a chief community officer or some shit like that.

I don't know why it was X, CMX, I don't know what they were trying to do.

But like, basically it was this is going to be a job title at the C suite level.

And then you're going to have then like a senior community manager and then like a junior

community manager.

And like, this is a whole new job function.

And he was right.

Don't know how to do it.

And he was totally right.

And totally early, which is the same thing as being totally wrong.

Yeah, he was totally right and totally early.

I completely agree.

He was on that like, it felt like 10 years ago.

Yeah.

But I think this is a good idea.

It would be a pain in the butt to run an agency, but I think this is an agency that

could crush.

Let me give you a, okay, can I give you two ideas?

So there's a guy, I'm going to, these are, these are 100% stolen from another podcast

I heard.

So I listen to Bill Simmons podcast, sports podcast.

And Bill has his buddy, Kevin Wilde or wilds, something like that.

He comes on and he does half baked ideas.

And he is, he is like, we need to get him on this pod because his half baked ideas are

like, he does drunk ideas and he's been doing this for years and it's just a running bit.

He only comes on like twice a year, but when he does, he's got these amazing ones.

Can I give you the two most recent ones he did?

And he's by the way, he's amazing at pitching them.

He's even better than me at pitching these, these drunk ideas.

All right, so first one is called fit furniture.

Okay.

Fit furniture.

You might be wondering what is, what is fit furniture, but hearing a lot about it lately.

Do we make the highest quality furniture?

No, we do not.

Do we have the best prices?

Sure don't.

Do we have furniture that fits their doorways?

You bet your ass we do because moving furniture is a requirement of furniture and all furniture

is built as if everybody's home has just open walls that you could just drag these things

through.

So fit furniture is furniture optimized to fit through the standard doorway width.

That's you know, do you know, uh, love sack?

You remember love sack?

Yeah, of course.

So they're huge beanbags, right?

Yeah, but their new shtick is furniture that fits through a door.

It's modular.

Oh my God.

It's like, it's like, it's a couch that you take apart.

And I try so at my Airbnb, the way it works, these guys are idiots.

They put a spiral staircase going up and you on the second floor and that's the only stairs

and you can't carry anything up a spiral staircase.

So I was like, I can't get a couch unless I can take it apart.

And there was this company in Texas and they're the couch guys and they take apart your couch

just for this problem.

They take the whole thing apart and they rebuild it wherever you want it.

And I was like, all right, well, I can't do that.

So I looked at, I looked at love because it's an Airbnb.

I don't want to fancy couch.

I don't want to love sack.

They're interesting, but it's like three grand for one of their couches or four grand for

one of their couches.

So I ended up going with a futon because I can build a futon upstairs.

But dude, it was such a pain finding a couch that could fit into certain doorways that

wasn't like over $5,000.

I completely agree.

If you want to pay five star prices for that college experience, Sam short-term rental

scotch covered sleep on a futon, well, so stars, no, we don't call it a futon because

it we call it a pullout couch because it's like crazy comfortable.

It's basically like a mattress that you can sit on sometimes.

But yeah, I didn't, I was embarrassed to call people.

I was embarrassed to call it a futon.

That's for sure.

That was your nickname in college, right?

Yeah.

Let me give you a second idea.

His second idea is called bulletin board material.

So this is for, this is for, I think this is for you.

I think you are the target market for this.

So it's for somebody who, you got a little chip on your shoulder and you like it.

That chip on your shoulder has made you who you are today.

There would be no hustle if there weren't any doubters and haters and skeptics.

Chips on shoulders create chips in pockets.

Exactly.

But what happens if you grew up around nice people, you don't have a chip on your shoulder

or maybe you had that chip sold the hustle and now everybody tells you, you're so great,

you don't have that same thing.

You're the only one lucky that you had a healthy father and a healthy mother who treated you

well.

Like, you know, like you can do anything at such a disadvantage because I grew up in an

emotional, emotionally healthy household.

The biggest disadvantage there is the biggest money.

We help solve that problem.

We are for the healthy middle class family who has lost their edge and what bulletin

board material is, is it is haters as a service.

And so what we do is we go and find the people, oh, my first love the podcast, every day people

love the podcast.

But guess what?

In some corners of the internet, there's people who hate this podcast.

And so what haters as a service does is it compiles that information and it takes out

the real toxic stuff that's going to, you know, give you nightmares at night.

So there's some filtering and it just drips to you a little motivation every week that

just reminds you that some people believe you can't do it.

That some people say you're not so prepared for this podcast.

Some people say, Sean, your camera's not working and you know, you got to get that sorted.

And so it just gives you that healthy dose of hatred.

It's like we are best and we just hire a bunch of immigrant mothers who children are grown

and they have some free time and they'd like, well, you know, your brother's a doctor, Sean,

you know, I actually know two women who could run the service single-handedly.

I'm not going to name any names.

So they can serve thousands of customers.

Well, you know, it's not too late to go back to school.

So haters as a service.

What do you think of that idea?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm down.

We'll just call it like it has to, it just, you're just nagging people all day.

Yeah, exactly.

And it's for the immigrant mom.com.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Live like an immigrant.

Yeah.

There's a reason why immigrants are always the best.

Immigrantmedality.com.

All right.

Yeah.

Those are, those are my drunk ideas.

You got any drunk ideas?

I feel like I'm not creative like you.

All my ideas are just like legitimate money making ideas, you know?

It's hard for me to come up with bad ideas.

How do you do it?

Yeah.

I'm like the Lady Gaga of ideas.

There are no deep hits or there's no deep tracks.

It's only.

That's it.

That's the episode.

I feel like I can rule the world.

I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like my days off on a road.

I know I could be what I want to

I put my all in it like no days off

On a road let's travel never looking back like

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.