In Search Of Excellence - Interview: Spencer Lodge w/ Randall Kaplan | E49

Episode Date: February 22, 2023

In today's episode I’ll be the one being interviewed! I had the absolute pleasure of speaking with Spencer Lodge, host of The Spencer Lodge Podcast. Spencer is a leading sales trainer in Dubai and across the Middle East known for interviewing some of the most amazing guests ranging from Tony Robbins, Marisa Peer, a NASA astronaut, and so much more.In this episode you’ll learn all about my upbringing, some of my earliest achievements, and my career path. From my early days as a failed lawyer, to finding my true purpose through the impact of the work I found myself doing shortly thereafter.You’ll also hear all about my approach on “Extreme Preparation” – a characteristic that has been the core to my success. I’ll be talking about just how I prepare for some of these events and show you the steps on how to work wherever you would like (despite your experience).Make sure to tune into the full episode today as you’ll get a ton of take aways and insights on how I truly went from having nothing to becoming the serial entrepreneur that I am today.Tell us what you think about this kind of episode, do you want to hear more from me?Please show support for Spencer's podcast by following and downloading his amazing interviews here!Sponsors:Sandee | Bliss: BeachesWant to Connect? Reach out to us online!Website | Instagram | LinkedIn

Welcome to this episode of In Search of Excellence. I'm super excited today to be sharing an episode from the Spencer Lodge Show. Spencer has the most popular podcast in Dubai and was kind enough to have me on the show a few months ago. We had a phenomenal conversation. We talked about all kinds of great topics, including what it means to be an entrepreneur, what does a venture capitalist do, and of course, one of my favorite topics, extreme preparation and what it means and how critical it is to our success. Please comment on at Randall Kaplan and at In Search of Excellence podcast on Instagram. I'd love to hear what you think of the episode. For those of you who have not listened to the Spencer Lodge show, he's a phenomenal podcaster and has some great guests

on his show. I hope you enjoy my fascinating conversation with Spencer. First of all, thanks for coming to join us on the show today. It's good to have you here. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. How many times have you been a guest on a podcast? This is my fourth. Okay. And how did the other three go? I think they went okay. The first one, I was a little shaky, a little nervous, then I became more of myself on the other one. So hopefully this will be my best one. We'll keep our fingers crossed. Now I'm here in LA and this is your hometown and it's very, very different here to, to the Dubai where I live and the environment that I live in. I, I find the United States is that

people have a kind of different mindset in general, but when you come to LA, particularly to this part of LA, you see a lot of what you don't expect from the great America. You know, you see a lot of homeless people around and you see poverty, which we don't really expect to see. Has that got worse over the course of the last few years? Or has that been like that for a long time? I moved out here in 1993. And when I came out here from law school, I knew nobody out here. And I didn't see a single homeless person out here. But homeless population has gotten a lot worse here. Los Angeles is a homeless, popular, the homeless capital in the United States is 60 to $80,000, 60,000 people a year homeless in LA right now living on the streets. It's become a serious problem. We live in a suburb which is very residential. It's affluent and there's homeless

on the streets. There's homeless people in regular neighborhoods here. Someone went into a store in West Hollywood last year. A homeless person on meth went into the store and stabbed and killed a 26-year-old woman from Brentwood who was working there part-time after she had just graduated from college. So things are definitely getting worse here, and it's become a very, very serious issue. I still think Los Angeles is the greatest place in the world to live. I love living here. And as my wife and I have looked around, we have a lot of friends who have moved to Austin, Nashville, Miami, where it's considered, I guess, a little safer. They want to get out of the rat race in LA, or they don't like the taxes here, or they moved to Dallas. We looked around and thought there's nowhere else we'd rather be.

So we'll take Los Angeles for what it is. we love it here and we're not moving ever that's really interesting i look at it just it came out in the press last week that california as an economy overtook germany recently as one of the largest economies in the world if you took california as a country i think it's the fifth largest economy in the world which is any state or. So that's nuts. Yeah. So you think about that, that's just mega, but yet you've got so many problems that money can solve. Who's going to pay for it? They keep increasing our taxes every year. And I think they're going to keep increasing it until the point where they take 90% of our money. And I still don't know if we'll be able to solve all the problems. Well, you know you see some of these big big um tech businesses that have got so much money and have

done so well for themselves that could solve these kinds of problems we saw um over the last couple of years companies like klana and whatnot bringing these these payment structures in where people can buy products and pay over three or four installments these what are they called payment service payment plans payment, payment plans. And yet we saw today Apple announced that they're launching that exact same service to their customers where they've got 1 billion customers

and interest-free people can make four installments. So there's definitely these big behemoths of businesses that actually, if they put their mind to it, could probably solve a lot of the problems that exist in these places where they've made so much money and done so well for themselves. It'd be amazing if they could do that. A lot of these are public companies. They have fiduciary duties to the shareholders and it'd be somewhat unusual. I think it'd be great if they could do it, but I don't know how they would say, Apple, we're going to give a billion dollars in Los Angeles to solve the homeless problem. It'd be amazing if someone were to do

that. What I'd rather see is someone worth $100 billion or $50 billion who has some kind of love for a city where they grew up and say, all right, I've signed the giving pledge and I'm going to give $10 billion to solving the homeless problem in Los Angeles, New York City, whatever the case may be. So I think that's a way where companies wouldn't have to do it. The governments aren't going to do it, but you could really make a huge impact with those kind of gifts. We haven't seen those yet, but I hope they come. Yeah. Well, I look at it and I think that can these types of problems be solved with money? And often they can't. A friend of mine made a documentary in the UK where he lived on the streets for two weeks in the UK.

And whilst living on the streets, he was an independently wealthy guy. He was in the military, came out, started a small construction company and did well for himself. And he started to get to know the people on the streets in the city he was staying. And towards the end of the two weeks, he offered them work. He said, I'll give you accommodation. I'll give you full time, full pay, work that you can do. I'll give you a 12 month contract so you don't have to worry about unemployment. And they didn't want it.

These people didn't want to take this opportunity to solve their problem. Because they'd created this security almost or in the environment they had you know everybody had shunned them so much that they were outsiders and the homeless people were together and they were kind of safe in that community and so going out and doing something else they couldn't be sure if they could trust someone so maybe it's not just money that solves it there's a lot of a lot of development work that has to take place as well as that well there's two things about that I want to say first. Part of the homeless problem,

you not only need to find the beds, you need the mental health facilities because a lot of these people have mental health problems and you can't solve one without the other. So we need to find the beds and that's a very tough thing to do, especially in Los Angeles where property values are incredibly high. So it'd be very expensive to create those homes. Rick Caruso is running for

mayor here. He said he's going to establish 30,000 beds in the first 10 months. He's in office. Don't know if he'll win, but those kinds of plans are phenomenal. I started an event in Los Angeles eight years ago with my friend, John Terzian in New Orleans Night Clubs that benefits the homeless. So we take families in transitional homelessness. We give them housing, training, medical care, financial planning. In a homeless situation, the shelters don't usually take the whole family. So the parents go one way. The kids go another way. They're just not take the whole family. So the parents go one way, the kids go another

way. They're just not equipped for a family. So we keep all the families together. In a homeless situation, kids usually don't graduate high school. They almost never go to college. They end up, a lot of the women get pregnant early. They don't use birth control. They end up on the streets themselves, on welfare, a lot of them on drugs, in prison or dead. And it's just a horribly sad cycle of poverty that you just, it's very, very hard to fix. The organization that we raise money for keeps families together and does all these things for each other. So when we started fundraising for them eight years ago, we had eight families go through the program that year.

And now we have over 300 families. We just had our function two months ago. It was phenomenal. We raised $600,000. It was phenomenal. We raised $600,000. It was amazing. Imagine LA is the name of the organization and the Imagine Ball is our function. Cool. And it's super fun. So one family at a time. When you think about it, you make one family, you take one family out of homelessness and you change the trajectory of their lineage forever

and that's very rewarding to be able to do that hmm you've been arguably a mega successful entrepreneur you've got a backstory that that people look at and and can identify with because some people would have been on partially exposed to similar parts of that journey themselves. But you've gone on to do well for yourself. But is business what matters to you? Are you kind of like a business first or does something else matter to you more? People ask me what I'm most proud of and is making a difference in people's lives. So when I was 27 years old, I was a very unsuccessful lawyer. You and I were talking before the show.

So I came to LA. I had $3,000 in the bank. I was laid off after five and a half weeks on the job. I hadn't even passed the bar exam yet. I was waiting for the results. I passed. But I had to find a job in Costa Mesa. I was living in Westwood.

I never heard of Costa Mesa. Orange County, never knew what that was either. I would wake up at 5.30 in the morning, get there by 7, usually come back 11 or midnight every night. I was miserable. So after six months, I went to the managing partner downtown, said, I want to move. He said, no, you need to move there or leave. So I was looking for three jobs in eight months and just was miserable. I went to law school for the money. I wasn't passionate about that, but I came across a nonprofit called Bedstead Legal Services, which provides free legal aid to the poor, sick, the elderly, and homeless in Los Angeles. I

thought, all right, there we go. There's an organization. These are lawyers who are doing good. They're not doing it for the money. They're not charging whatever they charge. Charging the clients, by the way, to learn on their dime is the most crazy thing I've ever heard. I mean, you get out of law school, you know nothing, and you're put on some kind of a case, and the firms are billing you out at $300 per hour. Now it's $500 per hour. I mean, that's nuts. So I came across the organization, Bed, Set, and I thought, all right, there's a great organization that's helping real people. And I went to a black tie fundraiser and I said, and that fundraiser has historically raised 3 million in one night. All the law firms give, the investment banks, these are managing partners on

the board of this nonprofit. And I went there and I said, you know what? I'm looking around at a thousand people. They raised $3 million that night. Boring. You're in a tuxedo. I thought, why don't we do a fun one of these? We'll have a concert. We'll do it at the House of Blues. That was a very cool venue. So I came up with the concept for the Justice Ball. And at age 27, called the House of Blues, the CEO, Greg Trojan, took 12 phone calls to get him to meet with me. I went in with the head of BetSedic. And I said, I want to do this event. And he said, never going to happen. Why not? Because young people don't give, they're not interested in charity. And I said, I don't believe that's true. You have to give them the access to do that. And so he gave us the venue for $22,000 on the night they were

closed. We had a minimum food bar bill that we had to do. And we sold out that first night. It was a lot of work. We raised $96,000 that first year. And by year five, we had Billy Idol playing and had 3,500 people at the Museum of Flying in Santa Monica built the stage. It was crazy. I mean, it was like a concert going to Staples Center. It was so cool. So that event now is, I think, in year 26 or 27. I think it's raised $8 million for Bed, Set, and Ec. I ran it for 10 years. Then I did our new event last eight years, the Imagine Ball. But the most enjoyable part of my career has been the ability to give back and make a difference in people's lives. And that's the greatest good that I think you can do.

And, yes, I've made money and I've been successful. I've had a lot of failure too, and I hope we get to talk about some of that. But to be able to make a difference in someone's life is giving me more joy than anything I could ever think about except my kids. This episode of In Search of Excellence is brought to you by Sandy.com, S-A-N-D-E-E.com. We're a Yelp for beaches

and have created the world's most comprehensive beach resource by cataloging more than 100 categories Sandy.com. We're a Yelp for beaches and have created the world's most comprehensive beach resource by cataloging more than 100 categories of information for every beach in the world, more than 100,000 beaches in 212 countries. Sandy.com provides beach goers around the world with detailed, comprehensive, and easy-to-use information to help them plan their perfect beach getaway at home and abroad, and to make sure you're never disappointed by a beach visit again. Plan the perfect beach trip today by visiting sandy.com. That's www.sandee.com. The link is in our show notes. Stay sandy, my friends. Are you looking for your next great gift to surprise a friend, colleague, or loved one? Bliss Beaches makes the perfect gift. This

best-selling bright and beautiful coffee table book by Randall Kaplan features stunning drone photography from exotic beach locations around the world. It's the perfect housewarming gift, a great addition to any home or office, and a fun and creative alternative to bringing a bottle of wine to somebody's house for dinner. Bliss Beaches is available for purchase on Amazon, where it has glowing reviews and a five-star rating. Get your next amazing gift and order a copy of Bliss Beaches by clicking the link in our show notes. Don't you think that life deals strange hands to our psychology? Because what you described then started at what age for you? When did that make an impact in your life?

How old were you? You know, I used to watch the Muscular Dystrophy Telethon. It's a thing in the united states where uh jerry lewis who's a comedian singer i think he just passed away last week would raise money it was on labor day so people would go to um channel 2 news station you'd raise money locally and then you would dump the money inside a bin so my brother and i were doing that at eight years old, nine years old, 10 years old. We had a lemonade stand in the neighborhood and we would give, I think one year we gave $37

and one year we got up to $52. And that was really cool. And my mom was a part of that and we watched it and we just said, gosh, this is so cool. Why can't we do that? So it started at a young age. My grandmother turns 104 years old in a few days, two days from now.

And- Your grandmother's 104? Yeah. In two days. In two days. That's amazing. Yeah, I'm flying to Detroit tomorrow and her birthday is November 2nd.

So she volunteered for an organization, I forget what it's called, in Detroit for 40 years, visiting sick people in the hospital. So I got to watch her as well. Wow. Great influence. See, I see that most people, it's kind of, traditionally in the UK, we start off with something called the round table. And the round table is for young guys to try and do something positive towards a charitable cause of some sort. And then you get to 41 and you're no longer allowed to be in the round table. So you have to go in something called the 41 club for a couple of years before you become a Rotarian. And you move into the Rotary Club if you want to be in that kind of world.

But what I've noticed over the years is lots of young people, they don't get involved in something where they're giving back a lot. The vast majority are kind of head down, tail up, wanting to go out there and smash it and become mega successful. And whether that's the bling watch, the bling house, the bling cars, whatever that may be, it's the bling life that they want to live. And for me, it was like as i got a bit older i started to realize what mattered and what didn't matter i started to look at things that money could buy as becoming less and less significant as time went by you and i both sat here with our fancy sneakers on and uh and um when when when you know that's about that's about the stretch of my spending when it comes to fashion, you know.

It's like, I don't even have the fancy, what is that I've got on anymore? I just literally, okay, do this. But for me, it was kind of like, go hard, make loads of money, try and be really successful. And then realizing that actually, that didn't really matter so much. And spending your time trying to help others live a better life or trying to solve the problems that other people had gave me a real selfish, I suppose, payback, a real reward myself when people used to say, oh, you're doing such a good thing for others. I'm like, I'm doing a really good thing for me. Trust me. And so I just wish I'd have learned that when I was younger. And I just wish most people that were out there trying to pursue success could incorporate that into their success at an earlier age. I know you did it at a young

age, but is your experience with most people the same as mine? I think your experience would have been different if I had brought you the opportunity to get involved in the Justice Ball. Because I think that it's not in people's mind. It's not on the forefront of their mind. And I think you're right. They're heads down. They're focused on their career. They work really hard. They don't have a lot of free time. When you're younger, you want to hang out with your friends. But young people, if given the opportunity to give back, I think most people would do it. Obviously, you need to pick a cause that speaks to you. but I think there's plenty of those to go around. And so, um, I still find that young people will get involved if you give them the opportunity. Okay. So try to give them the opportunity, give them the opportunity, show them something that

you just figured you just triggered something for me. I mean, now I'm now what's going through my mind is people that I know that are young, about how I can present the opportunity to them. And I hadn't probably had that perspective on it before. You have the scale. You have the audience. You could host some event for young people. They'd love to meet you.

You could get 500 people there. You could call it a networking thing for kids in college or grad school or under 30 years old. And I'm telling you, if you presented them the opportunity, and you could even have five or six different nonprofits there, give their pitch. But the nonprofits have to make it a little bit fun. And I think that's the key. Not too stuffy, yeah.

Not stuffy, not boring, lively. Give them examples, do things a little different than they have done them before. Okay. Let's move on to business for a second. I want to kind of pick your brains. First of all, just so that the audience and everyone watching here right now understand, you're the most prepped person in history and you're proud to be that person that preps. And I'm the guy that does, my consumption of content isn't is not through reading it's through through listening and watching and so i'll go out and since i arrived on saturday afternoon here i've listened to as much content as i could and walked around this

city with you in my ears okay while i've been trying to learn about you and that's that's the kind of level of depth i go to for me but you go to a whole nother level of debt that that's got to have come from business and how you understand business and what's important in business tell me about your journey to success tell me about those that i know you work for sun life sun america sun america sorry yeah so there you go you got you you got that right and i get it wrong sun america is a life insurance company yeah it's a financial services company that was sold in 1998 for 18 billion dollars to aig which was at that point the platinum insurance company of the world so insurance is at the heart of sun america and their beginnings um in their beginnings. Eli Broad bought the company in 1990, sorry, in 1988.

Renamed it, he combined it with KB Home, Coffin & Broad. At that point, he was only one of three people who had started two Fortune 500 companies, KB Home, Coffin & Broad, and then Broad Inc. He combined those two companies. Sun America, he's the founder of as well. So those are the two, um,

he combined those into Broding. And then he separated them again, I think in 1991, uh, Bruce cares took over and ran KB home. And then he took over at, uh, Sun America.

Okay. Annuities are what they sold. Right. So you don't wake up. I come from that world. Right. so that's why it resonates with me you know the stuff that you've done it really resonates with me we'll talk about beaches in a while because that resonates with me too but it resonated me that your your

journey was was essentially at the beginning there because i was i was the life assurance sales guy right now i was the guy that was going out there selling you know savings plans for people's education and universal life and stuff like this and i know you weren't a sales guy you were you're a lawyer there well everything we do is sales related and i do a lot of coaching and teaching so interviewing at work in your personal life everything we do is selling so i wasn't selling policies but i think you always have to sell yourself. And I think extreme preparation is part of that. People react to it. So my journey was, I grew up in Michigan, divorced parents, raised mostly by my mom, struggled financially when we were younger. And I saw that and I didn't like that. I didn't want to be that.

So I wanted to work hard. So for me, the grades were my ticket to success. And there was an aha moment in sixth grade where we actually had letter grades for the first time. And I saw, holy cow, I had a three, eight something. And I didn't even know what that was. So I had all As, one A minus. I thought, okay, that's interesting. This is something I can control the outcome of.

And so I did well at a private high school. I graduated magna cum laude. I went to University of Michigan. I graduated top 1% of my class. I went to Northwestern Law School. I was somewhere in the top third of my class. Definitely more competitive there with a lot of really smart people there. And I definitely wasn't even near that. And by the way, if you're the smartest person in the room, I think you're in the wrong room. And I've said that. I always want to be the hardest working, not the smartest person. But came to LA, lost my job five and a half weeks after moving here, had $3,000 in the bank, got my third job and then said, gosh, I hate this. And I started plotting my way out. So I had loved reading profiles about successful CEOs

from time I was 14 years old. And I'd always wondered what it would be like to work for one as a right-hand person. So I went on LexisNexis, there was no Google then, I researched them and I did a ton of research. I wrote 300 letters. I had a two bedroom apartment. The second bedroom was a letter writing factory. And I printed out every one. I highlighted the articles, the jobs they'd ever had. And I got 80 meetings. People said, these people are never

going to meet with you. You're crazy. You do the research, you do the homework. The letter was meant to blow them off their chair, who wrote this letter. And they all wanted to know. Every single person said, I've never taken a meeting from a cold letter in my life. So a long story short, Eli Broad received a letter. I did a lot of research. I blew him off his chair. And this is something that I coach a lot on. Write thank you letters. I know, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I finished the interview. He said he wanted me to take a class at UCLA. Finished the interview, ran to get my car in the parking garage across the street, drove to UCLA, double parked, ran around campus like a crazy person trying to get a catalog,

raced back to the apartment, typed my thank you letter, dropped off the catalog and my thank you letter with the receptionist, 57 minutes as I walk out of his office. Now, you could have written a thank you letter the day before or one day later, two days later. The ROI on a thank you letter and the timing and the form and shape is something that people completely overlook. You know, my daughter goes to Cornell. They tell her you should write a thank you letter with one or two days of the meeting. And I told her, Bianca, that's the worst

advice I've ever heard in my life. That's a killer. But I ended up working at Sun America for three years. It was amazing. I was a junior guy in a very senior team, just keeping my heads down. And after a couple of years, I met some guys, very smart tech guys. And we started a company that basically reinvented how content was served on the Internet. Faster, cheaper, more reliable. Back in those days when there was a news event, something called a flash crowd would happen. So they would provision for bandwidth like this, but the bandwidth they needed, for example, when Princess Di was killed, every news site went down because they didn't have

the bandwidth. If some farmer in Kansas cut a line with a backhoe, half of the country would go out as well. So we had new technology. We solved that problem. There were four founders, I was our VP of biz dev. And interesting, everything we do is built on something else. So you think about the future, you think about all these people. Someone said to me, when I was going through all these meetings, you're only going to get one shot to meet these people, ask for the order. And I didn't ask for the order. I said, oh, geez, you know, they're taking their time and they're really busy. So you just want to meet with them and see what happens. And I took that advice. I said, well, that can't be true. I want to keep the relationship going and build it and build them. So we started our company and then I wrote

to the CEOs who became beta customers who I had a relationship with. I got the job at Sun America. I wrote all the CEOs I met with, here's the job. I got some incredible notes back. I still have them, all my mementos. And we use those relationships to get meetings with the large media companies who became our beta customers and the company's biggest clients. The company did really well. This is kind of crazy. We filed to go public a year after the day that we started the company, incorporated. That's crazy.

It will never happen again in history. It's just a crazy time. The company did well. I left. I started my own VC firm. It's kind of a crazy model, Spencer, which you know. Eight out of 10 deals go to zero. And the ones that win, you hopefully will have a good weighted average return. So I've been doing that for a while. I have a real estate company. I started a podcast, as you know.

I'm writing a book on extreme preparation, and I'm going to be doing some paid public speaking on extreme preparation as well. But extreme preparation has been the core to my success. I've never had a meeting where I wasn't the most prepared person in the room. I've never had a podcast where I wasn't the most prepared person that they'd ever talked to. And interestingly, in college, I went to a very good school, top 25 school, and there were only five tests in four years I went into, not knowing if I was gonna get an A.

There were only five you went into that you didn't know there was gonna- I didn't know I was gonna get an A didn't know I was going to get an A. Not that I wasn't nervous for all of the tests, by the way, because I was. Yeah. Right. My podcast, I'm super pro. I get nervous for every one. And I said, I have to calm down, just meditate for five minutes. Do you get nervous coming on here? No, because we had a great conversation for 40 minutes before we got going today.

That was totally cool. I mean, yeah, this is great. But no, you do the work. And it's true in business as well. If you do the homework in advance, you're going to have less anxiety when you're going to that meeting. If you know you're going to be prepared and going to be different than the other people

these people have met with, it doesn't matter, sales, interviews, whatever it is, you can be different and more prepared than anyone else and stand out better than the rest of the pack. There's a thousand people who are qualified to make that sale or to get that job, but you have to separate yourself and be the top person. I think by using Extreme Preparation Playbook,

I think you can do that. I think, yeah. I mean, I don't disagree with what you're saying. It's that level of preparation can never work against you because you don't need to use it. If you've got all of that arsenal essentially in your inside pocket, then you don't need to deploy all of it.

You just have it there. So you can never be too prepared. But for me in business, I agree with you in the podcast that don't, I like getting to know somebody. I like learning and being surprised for the first time. It's almost, I find it sometimes sad that, that I'm going to know the story that I'm going to get to hear the story that i already know and i want to learn i want to learn something new about somebody because i think human beings are fascinating everyone's got some some some part of their story that's that's unique to them and when you hear that part and you feel their emotions and what they've been through and that

you know how they suffered it can really really take you into their life and their story yourself so that you can feel it too. What do you consider yourself? Do you consider yourself as a tech investor, a tech entrepreneur, a business guy, an entrepreneur period? How do you describe yourself? I'm a serial entrepreneur and an entrepreneurial investor. Okay. Let's use this word entrepreneur for a minute. Okay. Because I don't like it.

Okay. I don't like it one little bit. The reason I don't like it is that when I was young, that word didn't exist. Can I ask how old you are? I'm 53. We're almost the same age. Okay. So perfect.

Okay. So we had all the same stuff on TV. Yep. I had some English stuff that you didn't have, but we had most of the same stuff. Yep. So what were entrepreneurs called when you and I were 20 years old? Entrepreneurs. We just didn't hear about it as much. It wasn't as popular. I took... We didn't have that word. I took- We didn't have that word. I took econ in high school and it changed my life. Don Corbin was a teacher and we'd read profiles on these successful CEOs. And yeah, we talked about the GM of companies like Kmart, which ultimately went bankrupt,

but GM and Ford being in Detroit, those were the companies. And then we learned about green mailing with Carl Icahn and the corporate Raiders, but we also read about people who had started companies. And I thought for me, it was all fascinating, but I did learn that word at 15 or 16. I had a business week subscription at 14. And so I was a little unusual that way. So I did, I did. I didn't have one of those,, I did know that word. Playboy subscription. I didn't have one of those, but I did buy a few.

But, you know, it's way more popular today. It's so easy to start a company. I mean, at Michigan. No, no, no, no, no, no. Hold on a minute. I don't want you to go there. Okay. That word to me, entrepreneur, didn't exist. We had businessman and we had self-employed or we had sole trader. I know. And that was, you know, and nowadays all of these, these kind of like these, I'm starting a business from zero gets this entrepreneur hat or tag. And to me, it's not an entrepreneur. If you're a painter and decorators are going to go for me now. But anyway, sorry,

guys. If you're a painter and decorator and you have a small business where you pick up contracts here and there doing people's painting and decorating, are you an entrepreneur? Are you an entrepreneur? And tell me what you believe on this decorating are you an entrepreneur um are you an entrepreneur and and tell me what you believe on this are you an entrepreneur if you started a business and you've looked to raise finance or funding of some sort for that business does that make you an entrepreneur um are you an entrepreneur because you're a driving instructor and you have your car and you advertise on facebook and you get customers that want to get their kids through their driving exam.

What makes you an entrepreneur? Because I just think this is all kind of become entrepreneur and it's dumbed down the coolness of being an entrepreneur almost. So this is like a multiple choice question, whereas A, B, C, D, none of the above, in this case, all of the above, because I think those all count. I think our perception being experienced and reaching a

certain level in our careers is different than most people. So what you truly consider somebody as one and what I truly do is different than I think what a lot of people do as well. I think when you start a company and you assume some degree of risk, then that qualifies. Okay. But I think we're used to reading about people who do start their own companies. I mean, you may start your own PR firm, entrepreneur. You're a plumber and you start your own company, entrepreneur. Now, it's a little bit more basic and simple than you have a tech company, you're going to raise your first round of financing, entrepreneur, obviously, right? I don't think anyone would say you're not at that point. You're leaving a job to start a company, entrepreneur, but is it to start a one person consulting firm?

A lot of people would say, I don't know, but you're gonna start a consulting firm and five people are gonna leave their jobs to start a company, entrepreneur. So I think it all, I think it depends on the audience. It depends on your level of success, experience and where you are in your own life. But I think they all qualify.

I think the term inspires people itself to be successful. Even that plumber says, I've been making, by the way, a starting plumber these days, the average I think is $70,000 a year. People shit all over it. I'm, you know, sorry for the pun, but they make more on average than a lot of kids coming out of Harvard. And they don't have debt, student debt. A lot of students will never pay back their debt or they'll pay it back 10, 20 years in the future. But that person who's been working as a plumber for a large company who then takes the risks, leaves the salary job to go off on his or her own is an entrepreneur. And to call that person one, I think is inspiring. And I think it's inspiring them to think about it in that kind of reframed mind. And I think it will motivate them even more to be successful.

Obviously, no one wants to fail. That's a huge motivator. And two, you have to feed your family and pay your rent. That is also another factor. But just to have that title, I think, inspires a lot of people. Okay, so you've just given me a lesson there. I'll respect that. I now see it differently.

So I appreciate that. Because I didn't before. But you're right. If you can give them something that can inspire them to go on and create something greater from it, then you're inspiring the entrepreneur aspect to their character and personality, aren't you? You know, to follow up on one more thing, that 23-year-old plumber who goes off on his or her own and gets one client. And then at the end of the year, they have 10 clients and then they're working for a local company with 30 toilets in the building and they do well. And then they get a referral job. That plumber who leaves could have a hundred plumbers working for him or her in the next five, 10 years,

entrepreneur, right? That person left and now has created a huge company, a small company. I mean, we don't all have to want to create the biggest company. We don't all have to want to be sent to millionaires or millionaires. I'm not saying we need to do those things. A lot of people are just happy making a living and happy having a home but clearly that person has created a business is an entrepreneur years down the line that's how you get started you brought plumbing up there's a company in the uk called pimlico plumbers and they're in based in london and they became the most successful plumbing business in the uk from a guy that started out as a plumber and he just got hundreds of plumbers working for him and he sold his business last year I think for a hundred million dollars or whatever it was a huge amount of money tremendous and uh as a plumber so yeah okay I'm gonna recap

my words let's just edit all that bit out okay so when you look at your successes and failures in business I I want to know the the painful lessons that you had I, I want to know the, the, the painful lessons that you had, but I also want to know some of the, some of the wins where you sat there and, you know, we sat there on the armchair at home or in the office or even in the car, because the car was where I used to do it. I'd be in the car coming. Yes. You know, yes. And punching the ceiling. Tell me about some of those stories. Um, I like to talk more about my failures than the successes. Well, you can do that on other podcasts, but on this podcast, you're going to talk about your successes too.

Well, sure, but I want to begin with the failures. Please. So like I said before, in the venture capital business, you're going to lose seven to eight out of deals. And I think most firms have that same track record. The batting average is very very low over the years we invested in one company um i'm not going to mention the name but we raised 20 million dollars for that company and we had great vc firms great investors a great board

um the investors you know all the names are four billionaire investors in there maybe five company raised money on a very big projection I was at one point the chairman of the board then someone who was way more qualified than me who had run a public company had a three billion dollar sale knew more a lot about that business than me became the chairman so So we raised all this money. The founder, our number one factor in backing a company is always a founder. So we look for grit, heart, integrity, work ethic, drive, all those things. I mean, obviously the business has to be there.

There were a couple of red flags, Spencer, that in your mind, you convince yourself, all right, they're not a big deal. And one of the greatest lessons of that deal that ultimately the company failed was not listening a little more to the red flags, even though they were microscopic. For example, one, as security to a deal with a young founder, I often want the founder to get Keyman life insurance, which is super cheap. So I always do it in the amount of the fundraise. So I'm not sure what life insurance costs today, but it used to be $600 per million.

So when you have a 25 or 26-year-old founder, the policy is going to cost $6,000 a year or $5,000. So if the founder dies, we get our money back. Well, my law firm did due diligence on the policy, and he asked to pull the policy. So most people would just say, okay, here's the policy. I have it. Here it is.

He said, well, let me look at the policy. The policy was assigned to his wife. And I learned that and I thought, holy shit. Well, that's a tough mistake to make. You got a lot of papers to sign there. And I was unhappy. So I asked the CEO, the founder, and you could tell I was very nervous. That's a mistake.

Blamed the insurance agent. I said, all right, I'm going to get the agent on the phone. The agent was a friend of his, young age. And ultimately, when I look back, and I even didn't trust it at the time, the agent said, it's my bad. And that's something I should have pressed a little more. I should have actually called. The person was in Denver. The founder was as well. The insurance guy was there. And I basically should have flown there or said, you come here because we're funding you. So you look for those little warning signs there. And I missed that one. So number one, if there's a red flag, don't do it. Number two,

don't assume other people have done your due diligence. I've invested small sums of money, $100,000 here, $200,000 there. And again, that's a lot of money, but when a company has a round of $10 million or $30 million, I mean, I'm an ant in that deal. And I just assume sometimes, well, if this A plus VC firm is in there, there's three other VC firms in there. They've done all the work. Well, I did that maybe 10 years ago and before, and it was a mistake. So those are lessons I've learned that I wouldn't do. On the success side, we get lucky. Mark Cuban was on my podcast, and he said, to be a billionaire, you have to get lucky. I think whatever success you have, you have to be lucky. So there is a deal called Kalipa Networks that we put money into

way back in 1999. I can't remember what they did, Spencer, but the company went out of business. They did a equi-hire, which means that a company bought Kalipa for nothing and they hired five people there. We'd given up on this deal. And nine years later, when you get a package in the mail from a law firm, that's a tech law firm like Wilson, Suncini, and Silicon Valley, which is I think the top one of the top VC tech firms up there, that's a good package. That means there's something going on. And Kalipa was sold to another company. And then Google bought the other company for $750 million. We made 11x on that deal, which was a gift. Some of the deals that you think are the best and they can't misses are the worst. And then you feel really, really dumb. But we had some good

ones in there. We had Google and we had Seagate and some other ones, I think we've had at least five, six, seven companies that have exited for over a billion dollars. That doesn't mean we necessarily made a lot of money because we were sometimes the last round of funding where it was a $300 million valuation or $400 million valuation. But we look at a weighted average return in that game. I've been a judge on many startup competitions. I've been pitched many times by startups. Is there, and you've been pitched a billion times by us,

so I know you've done way more than me. Is there something that you've been pitched a billion times by us, so I know you've done way more than me. Is there something that you look for in particular when somebody pitches you that triggers you in the early stage? You know, I'm a sales guy, so I'm a sucker for a really good sale. Right. And so if somebody comes to me and they pitch something and I know that they've thought through the sales process, you know, they've thought about me being essentially the investor and try to understand how I how I tick and how I operate.

And they they present something to me in a way that really engages me. And I know that they're selling it to me. I'm a sucker for having ears and and kind of analytical kind of way and you know tell me about why their business is good rather than get me excited about their business then invariably it switches me off and you know to my own detriment sometimes as well is there a way of approaching you if somebody wanted to raise money that would would would work for you and kind of like feed into maybe some of the softer parts of your personality yeah i mean by the way i do have a softer side of my personality you do i mean i'm joking the interns tell me you're very um intimidating i said really i don't yeah

they think i'm intimidating i I mean, my daughter, I recently met her boyfriend up in college and my son said, dad, if I were her boyfriend, I'd be very scared of you. Why Charlie? You're intimidating. Even if you don't know that I said, I'm, I'm just a softie. Meanwhile, he and I have become buds. We text all the time. And I don't think he ever thought that. But I do know that I can be. And I guess when you're 25 years old and you're coming in to pitch someone who's got a good resume and success,

you're just a little nervous. But I jokingly tell people, I think my son asks, you know, dad, what do you do on a daily basis? And I said, Charlie, my biggest job is I'm a bullshit detector. Because you have all these people coming in and yeah, you get the PowerPoint and they're beautiful and they got all the graphics. And for the resume, they have the logos now.

So I don't really tell you what they do. But when I come in, some of the questions are, so what did you do? I ran the ad business for this division of Fox. This happened one day. These guys had a good resume. And so I said, well, what do you mean you ran it? The guy, I think, was 28 years old. So I'm sitting there, okay, well, that doesn't make sense.

You ran it, what did you do? Okay, well, what was your title? Pause. So I can't remember. I said, all right, if you can't remember, you're leaving the office, right? Because if you can't remember the title

and people, I mean, I've met people with like that and it's over. He remembered and then he was a manager of some level. There was a manager, there was a senior manager, assistant director, director.

I said, how many VPs were in your group? He said there were six. And there were how many senior VPs on top of that group in the ad section? There were two. So the guy was 30 layers down the rung. And that person is finished. And I like to lob the softballs first and then I throw the a hundred mile an hour fastball right down the middle. And that question is, so what are you paying yourself? There's a range. So we had someone come in there and you could tell he, he hadn't really worked in a long time and he came up with something like $200,000 and he was raising $500,000. I said, we want people who, the answer is I want to take as small a salary as possible to support myself, not be anxious, not worry about paying my rent and living and invest all

of the other capital we raise in hiring different people and in the company. That's the right answer. So in terms of what I look for, like I said, it's all about the people first. They obviously have to have a good idea. They have to be well thought out. And sometimes it's not the answers. It's the way they answer the question. We don't know all the answers. I mean, if I go back and I've tried to do this, how many companies have worked that started A and they didn't go to Z? Most don't stay with A. They have to reinvent their business model. Things change. So you have to really kind of know the business and know what you're doing. And again, it's how you answer the questions more than getting the question right.

You see a lot of money seems to be raised what on the surface of it seems quite easily um and the various press releases go out you know picasso is one that sticks in my mind you know 200 million dollar fundraiser one point something billion dollar valuation 18 months in operation yeah and and you have a story like that and you think you know okay majority of it was i think soft bank and that were involved and you have a story like that and you think you know okay majority of it was i think soft bank and they were involved uh and you've got your people that laugh about soft bank because of the errors they've made and people that don't but when you when you see that kind of stuff and you've got your own business and you think you're gonna go out there and raise money you're

like well hey if those guys are raising 200 million after 18 months then then surely you know we could raise five million in you know six months and they get this kind of overconfidence and this belief. There's one prop tech business that I invested in about 12 months ago, which I really believe in the technology. But the relationship I have with the founder has evolved into something has become rather frustrating for me and so when they went for their second uh raise that raise they put a value on that which i didn't agree with and i'm like look you can go out to market and raise the money okay or you've got me that you know has got the money so we will discuss what i think it's worth yeah but yeah but hold on a minute the company's worth this it's worth that i said yeah but you misunderstand that money that I would invest in your business wasn't given to me. I went out and sacrificed time with my kids and my family working my ass off to put that money together. So I will invest that money value that I deem fit, regardless of what you think your business is worth. Now, if you don't want my money, you go out and find it from somewhere else they didn't like that okay and in the moment they didn't like that i thought hold on a minute

here i'm dealing with people that maybe aren't aligned with me yeah and so it's maybe just step back and get very uncomfortable with every part of that a lot of people think that trying to raise money isn't so difficult or shouldn't be so difficult because there's lots of people out there particularly in the tech space where these what we see is outrageous valuations seem to be kind of shouted about you've obviously been in this space i haven't i mean i'm an investor but i've never run a vc or anything like that did is it some of it just outlandish and ridiculous and some of it just preposterous or the lots of them have as much merit as they think they do? First of all, I think it's hard to raise money. I don't agree with the proposition that it's simple.

I think it's very hard. I agree. So that's the first thing. The second thing is i see these rounds and i see seed rounds now of 10 million dollars 50 million dollars we're about to start raising money for my beaches company sandy we're building a yelp for beaches and if we raise 10 million dollars i wouldn't know what to do with it i i would have no idea what to do with it. I mean, we could spend it,

but you have that much money in the bank and you don't need it, you feel pressure to spend it. By the way, if you don't need it, why raise it? It's a dilution and that makes no sense. But it amazes me to see the huge rounds and see the valuations. Now, a lot of that now is a thing of the past, right? A lot of these venture firms, SoftBank,

the other firms are getting crushed. The public companies in the tech space, you have a lot of them that's lost 90% of their value. Even the biggest companies, more than 50% of their value wiped out. I mean, we're talking about a trillion dollars, trillions of dollars in market cap wiped out. So I think you're seeing the valuations come down,

but I do think you're gonna see less and less of that. I think you're seeing a lot of retrench. But I do think you're going to see less and less of that. I think you're seeing a lot of retrenching now because of the tech meltdown. I think though now is a good time to start a company. There's a lot of people losing their jobs. Twitter's about to lay off a whole bunch of people. The startup world, I mean, it took us six months to hire a new CTO. Sandy, I wanted someone to come into the office for the DNA. I think the culture is very important. Everyone wanted to work online, and we had to basically recruit people to come to Los Angeles, and the salaries had gone up 40% in the tech space.

So I think it's going to be a lot more difficult now to raise money. The venture firms, the limited partners in those firms, I think are putting pressure, what's going on, and you're seeing a lot of returns. And I took an entrepreneur of a tea company that I put money into in Chicago to see Sam Zell. Sam is a guest on my podcast. He's a Ford 400 person. He was on the original Ford 400 list in 1982 when it came out. And the entrepreneur was pitching Sam an investment in his tea company. And so we brought in, he brought in six teas. It was hot. He went to the store. We walked into his office in Chicago. Sam is talking to him. And then Sam asked about the valuation.

And the entrepreneur said to Sam, what's it to you? And Sam looks at him. And I thought if Sam's eyes could be flames, this person's entire body would be melted. And Sam said to me, looked him in the eye and he said, never disrespect capital. And I think every penny matters to every investor, to every person, no one wants to lose money.

And so I think people today are being a lot more conservative. We are. The investors I know are. And I think there's been a big pause. The valuations have definitely come down. And I think they're going to remain down till we have the next euphoria. And believe me, it's going to happen.

Okay, last couple of questions. I know we've been sitting talking for a long time but i want to get your views on a few things we'll end we'll end on on on the beach's story okay because i like i like well i live on a beach so i like that story tell me what your understanding is your your relationship is and your feelings are towards the world of crypto and the metaverse i have an intern class every summer of 35 students from all kinds of places around now the world we had a couple people from london this year we've had people from one from dubai we have but most of the kids come from the united states they're, mostly 19 through 20, 21 in some cases. The crypto

craze was happening in 2017. We had a class of 35 kids that summer, and about six of them were into crypto. I knew nothing about it. I thought this is all bullshit. Bitcoin, money laundering. And by the way, I'm still waiting for a legitimate use case for cryptocurrency. I'm still waiting for someone to buy something with it. You know, you have the $500 million pizza that someone paid Bitcoin, $500 million pizza that someone used in, what was it, 2008?

I was eight, yeah, okay. Something like that. And so you had all these kids trading crypto. And one of the students began the summer with $6,000. He ended with $660,000. And I saw the account. I mean, this was not BS. And so I started looking into it at the time.

And again, at that point, it was the last person standing almost. You know, just the hype, and all these people investing, who knew nothing about investing whatsoever. But a lot of these interns made a lot of money, they got me into it. I sat on a couple of crypto advisory boards, I got tokens for that. I learned a little bit about it. I learned a lot about it actually. And we made about six investments in the crypto space. A lot of them ultimately failed, but we were able to sell tokens

just based on the hype going into those. I mean, these were all public tokens at the time. I spoke on a crypto panel at lunchtime at a conference. It must have been 2019, maybe 2018 at one of the largest crypto conferences in Los Angeles. Tim Draper was there. All these people were there. And I said at the lunch panel, 99% of these companies are going to go bankrupt. And there's going to be class action suits everywhere. And I'm not exaggerating. I think there were 1,000 people there.

I was booed heavily. But I had seen the program before and the tech space and the meltdown. I mean, we were a part of it. Our company nearly went bankrupt. It went from a $35 billion market cap to a $99 billion. The last day of trading in 1999, Akamai was worth $35 billion, which at the time was more than Ford, Chrysler, and GM, the market caps combined. At the low, whenever the meltdown was in 2002, something like that, the company had a market value,

I think it was $50 million or $90 million, something like that. So you and I were both 30 years old at that time. I was 34. No, what year were you going? 32. I was 32 or 33 when we went public, so maybe by then I was 35, something like that.

So I had seen the playbook. I believe in crypto long-term. I believe it's here to stay. We're still waiting for actual use cases for it. I still haven't seen any that pop in. In terms of the metaverse, great question. So I honestly don't know what to make of it. There's a tremendous amount of hype.

I mean, non-fungible tokens were all the hype three years ago. Everyone's talking about the apes and all this other stuff, and everyone's hyping it up. And look what's happened there. Destruction. Yeah. So we'll see what happens. I think there will be a market for non-fungible tokens.

We'll see what happens on that one. In terms of the metaverse, who knows? It's in its infancy. You agree that smart contracts definitely have a future, though? 100%. Yeah. There's no way that that's, out of all of it, to me, the most logical part of it. 100%.

Okay. True authentication. Yeah. Okay. Now, I live on a beach. Which one? I live in the desert on the palm jumeirah in dubai okay um i live in the desert though so we've got plenty of beaches where we are um all around the

the area that we are every coastline is a beach tell us about sandy yeah tell us about how it started how it happened what triggered you to get involved in this because i think it's quite interesting that well when i first heard about it on one of another episode where you described it i was like why has nobody ever thought of this i couldn't believe that nobody had thought of this before so take it away some of the most interesting companies are the most obvious just the execution is very difficult to pull off so the the research shows that 99 of the world's population love the beach. And the first time I went to the beach where I was disappointed was after college,

had really no money, went to Europe on a year-round pass, slept in trains, and then we couldn't wait to get to Nice because everyone said the beaches there are super sexy. I was with some friends. There were nude beaches. So we finally get there, we had a backpack, no towel, and we get there and it was a rocky beach. So you can't even lay out.

I'm thinking, gosh, that's ridiculous. Why are we here? We made a special trip there. Years later, I was dating my wife, Madison, and we went on a trip to Greece. We were in Mykonos, we wanted to go to Black Sand Beach. So we were staying at a nice hotel. And I only mentioned that because the concierge at the Better Hotel is no more. And so the concierge whipped out a paper map, one that folded into 32 parts and drew with a black Sharpie a place on the map that didn't even have a road leading there. And she said, when you go out there, I think there's an old barn and you turn left on a road. So it was 90 degree day. We're in a little Fiat convertible or a mini, super hot. We figure we're going to go get

some food out there. There'll be water. We get out there and there's just nothing there whatsoever. There's no food, bathroom, water. And we're thinking, okay. And we finally drive out to what we see is an old barn. There were several old barns. And so I don't know if the audience seen the movie taken with Liam Neeson, where you go to a foreign country and you get kidnapped and they know you're coming. And so we have no wifi, of course, no cell service. We're in the middle of nowhere. And we see what looked to be a road and the road had weeds on top of it, some of which were taller than the car. If you've seen the movie Field of Dreams when you're in the corn stalks, that's what it looked like. And so my wife is more adventurous and younger than I am. And I was

thinking we're going to get kidnapped and murdered. No one's going to find our bodies. So she convinced us to drive through these weeds. We're plowing them down and we opened up to this big expanse of beautiful black sand and cliffs where we're lying out on these shell rocks. It was gorgeous. And that was the aha moment where I said, gosh, you know, there's got to be a better way to get information.

I went back to the hotel. I typed in beach. It said.gr for Greece. I typed in.us for the U.S. search. And there were just all these mom and pop websites. So I said, there's got to be a way to create a database of every beach in the world. So I had a, I'm an intern at the time, worked on it part-time. We found, I don't know, 32 beaches in Greece. And here we are, eight years later, we've cataloged over 100 categories of data for over 100,000 beaches in 212 countries. We think we have now 98% of the world's beaches on Sandia

and it's S-A-N-D-E-E.com. Amazing. And so- 100,000 beaches. More than 100,000 beaches. I think we just crossed 100,000 beaches, Mark. And how long ago did you start that company? Eight years ago.

Okay. But it's grown slowly, meaning that we hired our first tech person in 2016. And that's kind of when it became a company before it was kind of a side project. And you say, gosh, great idea. Why haven't people done this before? Because it's very resource intensive. How do we get the data?

Manually. So there's over 100 different websites we check. Sometimes we go down to the level of there's a beat shack. We'll call the beat shack. A lot of them don't have phone numbers, but we want to know what's there of there's a beach shack. We'll call the beach shack. A lot of them don't have phone numbers, but we want to know what's there. We look at Google Earth. We zoom in. If there's a bathroom, there's a bathroom. Our trademark is choose your beach. So I have five kids. When you have younger kids, you want food, bathroom, and a shower.

Most people want to know is their parking, right? So we have free parking and paid parking as two separate categories. Do you have volleyball? Can you surf? Can you swim? Can you sail? We have seven different kinds of sand. We have seven different colors of sand. There are black sand beaches, purple sand beaches, pink sand beaches. People want to know what's there before they go. So different strokes for different folks.

We want people to have more enjoyable times at the beach, pick the best beach for them and avoid wasting very expensive personal vacation days going to the wrong beach, which is something that I think every person has done. When people go on vacation, do you know who they ask first, what beaches they should go to? The concierges of the hotels. We've done polls of over a thousand concierges and there isn't one we've met in any country who can tell you five categories of data for the closest three beaches.

And then when they say, oh, you got to go to this beach, give me six categories of data, zero, zero, zero. And that's where they're getting their beach information from. Fascinating. And there's a passion project? I mean, entrepreneurs should be passionate about everything they do.

Agreed. So I believe Sandy will be a multi-billion dollar company one day. I mean, when you think about Yelp, Yelp got going in 2004. Restaurant reviews, really? Are people really going to care about that? Well, they care a lot. So our model is sponsorship, advertising, paid listings. We're writing 10,000 descriptions for each beach in the world. 10,000 of the most popular 10,000 beaches we're writing descriptions for, handwritten descriptions, general information, attractions, hotels, and restaurants. And we're going to sell those listings to hotels and restaurants.

We believe that'll be a $50 to $100 million business per year, not including the sponsorships and advertising. We're also going to license our beach data to government tourist boards throughout the world. I met with eight ministers of tourism. These are cabinet level positions in these countries where beach tourism is the most significant or one of the most significant components of GDP in their countries, regions, states. And the first question that I asked Spencer is, do you know how many beaches

you have? And what's their answer? Four words, every time. They don't know. I have no idea. Which is like the CEO of Marriott not knowing how many hotel rooms they have. Yeah. It's crazy. So we think the licensing, our proprietary data

is gonna be a very big part of our business as well. So it's a passion project, but I think every entrepreneur should have a... I think it sounds like a project in the business that should sponsor the Spencer Lodge podcast, if I'm honest with you. I will tell you that Sandy is paying a lot of money to sponsor In Search of Excellence podcast,

but we have a little inside deal where they're paying $0. Really? Okay. Well, I'll gladly be paid in equity. I don't mind. We're raising money. So I'm happy to show you the deck.

Well, look, it's been great chatting to you today. I've really enjoyed getting to know you better, both before we started filming and now. What out of anything are your takeaways from this episode? Is there anything that's resonated with you as we've talked stuff through? Well, I think you've given me a great perspective and advice on how to build a successful podcast. First, congratulations to you on all the things

you've done in your career and in your podcast. But I love the in-person style and I love the conversational content that we've had today. It's a very different format than my podcast is, and you've given me a lot of things to think about here okay this my takeaway from this was something that happened you know you said your daughter's boyfriend could be intimidated by you yeah i could see how you could be intimidating uh i could see that but then you made an excuse earlier for something i can't remember what it was right now but you made this And everything changed with your whole body language in that moment. Everything changed.

And it was almost like, ah, we're the same now. And that was an interesting dynamic shift in that one little moment. You know, you're born with a type A personality and I was born intense. I was born very driven. And my mom used to say to me, and she still says it today,

don't be so serious all the time. And it's interesting, you know, you go to work, you come home and work is fun. I'm lucky. I get to do what I want to do. I'm in that very fortunate position. And, but you're in the zone at work. I'm in the zone. I mean, I don't take any personal calls. When my mom calls or my dad, it's, you know, three minutes. I mean, I'm scheduled some days, 10 meetings a day, where if someone's late, it really messes me up. So I really, in the time where I don't have back-to-back meetings, I try to get work done so I don't have to do it at midnight every night. But I think, you know, you come home and you're a dad and everyone's making fun of you. And it's fun to be made fun of by your family and your friends, by the way. So I don't

take myself too seriously. I like to make fun of myself and I don't mind it when people make fun of me either. So I think it's great. So I appreciate being on your show. I've enjoyed it. I enjoy you. I've enjoyed your show. And again, I'm looking forward to keeping in touch with you. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Randy, thanks for having us, man. Thank you. I appreciate you.

Thank you. Thank you.