My First Million - $2.4M In ONE Day?!

Episode Date: January 29, 2024

Episode 544: Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (https://twitter.com/theSamParr) talk about Bryan Johnson’s $2.4M dollar day, Pieter Levels investment portfolio, and the $500M exit no one saw coming.  No more small boy spreadsheets, build your business on the free HubSpot CRM: https://mfmpod.link/hrd — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (1:00) Follow Up Boss sold for $500M (4:00) Boring Mattress (17:00) Pieter Levels is insane (23:50) Bryan Johnson: Zero to $200M Hero (34:00) OpenAI's new App Store (38:00) Vertical Google for research papers (43:00) Shaan's season of intentional internet (50:30) Joe Speiser's hyper-growth to failure (53:30 Partnership agreements (59:00) Shaan's nighttime routine — Links: • Boring Mattress - http://boring.co/ • Pieter Levels portfolio - https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1748713482692759647 • Bryan Johnson Blueprint - https://blueprint.bryanjohnson.com/ • Salary.com - http://salary.com/ • Consensus - https://consensus.app/ • Perplexity - http://perplexity.ai/ — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Try Shepherd Out - https://www.supportshepherd.com/ • Shaan's Personal Assistant System - http://shaanpuri.com/remoteassistant • Power Writing Course - https://maven.com/generalist/writing • Small Boy Newsletter - https://smallboy.co/ • Daily Newsletter - https://www.shaanpuri.com/ Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. — Other episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto • #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

So let's do a little public math here. Let's break a rule. He just launched this product. He had more demand than he was willing to let in. He led in 5,000 people. That's 20 million in ARR that he had on day one of launching this product. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days off on a road. Let's travel. All right. What's up? It's me and Sam, two guys you can't live without. You know, I should really think about what I'm going to say before I start. I literally just start talking and whatever comes out of my mouth is fine. And then also, it's 9 a.m. for me, I, you know, I wake up. I don't talk to anyone from 8 a.m.

to 9 a.m. So these are the first words I say, period. And that's what came out. All right. Well, here we are. We both have one topic in both of our lists, which is very, very rare that we have overlap here. We both have this topic because there's a business that's sold for $500 million that is a badass story. and it's called Follow Up Boss. I had never heard of this company before. I find out they sell for $500 million in cash. Tell me about follow-up boss. I think you know more.

You know how I know about them for two reasons. The biggest reason, they're a Hampton member. And so I saw them post that they had just sold. Man, this story is crazy. So I had never heard of this company, have you? Never heard of them until today. So there's not really a reason why we would have heard of them other than we're just business nerds,

but it's a real estate platform. So it's a vertical software. And so basically the gist, of it is that if you are a real estate agent or if you own a company that has multiple real estate agents, you get leads from Redfin, Zillow, whatever else. Ideally, you get thousands of leads per month as well as you have homes that you're selling and people who are buying homes. You have to track them all. It's basically kind of what HubSpot or Salesforce does, but specifically for real estate agents. The guy, Dan, he started it 12 years ago, I think. Do you know how he started

it? That's what's fascinating about it. I don't know how he started it, but you're right. So the The gist of it is it's a niche down CRM. So agents get leads. They need to follow up with those leads. You got to keep track of all those leads. So it's a sort of hub spot for real estate agents, just zoomed in, zoomed way in on that one niche. Has a pretty insane exit.

So how did they start it? So what was the final sale? $500 million. So $400 million up front in cash and then another $100 million earn out. Listen to how this guy started. His name's Dan. He's from Australia. But they live in Wyoming now.

I guess it's technically, it's a remote company, but they're a Wyoming startup. It's going to be one of the bigger tech exits out of Wyoming. Man, listen to this. So he actually went through the foundation. Do you remember that course like 10 years ago? It was like a course to teach you how to start a startup. The foundation? No, I've never heard of that.

Yeah, that's what it was called. And so it's like their greatest success story, I guess. But he went to this thing and he started just trolling Facebook groups. And he was like working a normal job. He was a marketer at a normal big company. And he was like, I want to start a company. I need some ideas. And so he was like, well, I've got a buddy in real estate.

That kind of interests me. So he started joining these Facebook groups for real estate agents. And he just started skimming in all the posts of like, what are people complaining about? What's like a common thing? And he saw this guy complain. He's like, man, I'm paying 500 bucks a month for the software that I hate for tracking all my leads. It kind of stinks. Like, how are you guys tracking your leads?

And he saw like, okay, that's interesting. And so he partnered with a guy who's a developer. a friend of his who's a developer. They build an MVP. They say that it took them like six months, and they only had one customer paying $150 a month. But he said, he goes, man, we built, like, this interview that I read with him is a few years old.

So I don't know if it was true till the end. But he's like, we basically built our entire business on Facebook. But not Facebook ads. He goes, I would just go into all these Facebook groups as the CEO. And I would see them talk about like, hey, what's a good platform for this? And it wasn't even related to follow. up boss, which was his software company. He was like, I was just like being helpful constantly.

And people would click my Facebook profile and see that I was the CEO of this one platform or this one tech company. And then they would click off and buy it. And I would call them and become friends with them. But he became, they found this idea just through trolling Facebook groups. And they would see people complain about stuff. And he would DM them on Facebook and be like, hey, I think I'm building a solution for you. I don't care if you buy it or not. But like, could you just give me 10 minutes of your time so I could figure out, make sure I'm solving the right problem. And he did this so often that that's how they came up with this idea for the software. They bootstrapped the whole company. I don't know how much their revenue was. The only source that I found was a source that

I don't entirely trust online, but it was like 28 million a year in revenue, less than 100 employees, and a huge exit. Don't people have to tell you the revenue when you join Hampton? Don't you just have this? Can't you just take a peek at the quick HIPAA record here? But I would never cite that. And so I'm, so I just Googled like, you know, follow up boss revenue. And I'm just like, what could I see? That's public. So I don't know. Yeah, this is an awesome story and a good example of kind of the niche down, the niche down,

zoom in pivot. And I think that this is a, you know, there's many like business plan blueprints. So for example, those guys from 37 signals, what they're doing is they just go, hey, what's a super popular thing, but has too many features. We're going to make it do less and take up less of your life. And that's like as an example, you know, hey, their email client. They're like, yeah, it's just going to do these things in this way. Less features, the better.

Less clutter, the better. And they're doing it again with once where they're doing software that you only have to pay for one time. No monthly recurring. Right. So their thing is it's the stripped down version of X. I don't know if you saw, well, I don't know if you saw, but the guys who started Tufted Needle came out with a new company. Did you see this?

Crazy. What's it called boring mattress? Boring mattress. So the guys you created Tufton Needle. earlier, part of the DTC, you know, mattresses were like the poster boy of the D2C wave that happened where Casper and Tufts Needle and Purple got big, raised a bunch of money, burned a bunch of money, kind of didn't have a great exit. So these guys came back and now it's just boring.com is the name of their website.

It's like, this is a plain mattress. Our friends told us that we should tell you about all the cool benefits, features that will make this, quote, different and quote, sellable. But we're not convinced. We don't think you'll fall for that. So here's just a really good mattress that'll last you a while, no frills. And it's only $400, right? It's like it's cheap.

Yeah, 500 bucks. And so that's their new thing. And so there's, that's one blueprint in a business is to do the same thing with less, less frills, actually, like, you know, brand, less of a brand pump or, or less features that you needed to use. Trello is a good example of this. All productivity apps had more and more and more features. Trello was like, hey, we're just going to have less features, right?

It's just the equivalent of index cards on the internet that you can move around. There's actually another takeaway here, though, which is how long, so you started an e-commerce company, how long until you hit your first $100,000 in revenue per month? Like three months, probably. Okay. You're involved in Shepard. How long do you think it took them to hit their first $100,000 in revenue? I have no idea.

I'm going to guess six months, yeah. Quick. Okay, six months. So we're talking months. Hampton took a short amount of time, months as well. The hustle, I think it took nine months. Do you know how long it took follow-up boss to get to $100 million in revenue? Sorry, $100,000 in monthly sales.

Well, you said they had one customer for $150,000 like hanging by a thread for a while. So is it more than a year to get to that first milestone? Four years? Four years? Four years? Four years? So I was reading this interview with them. It took them four years.

And they had 11 employees. and they're at 100,000 in monthly revenue. They said around 100,000, so it could have been a little bit more. But what's crazy is these software companies, so I don't know what their revenue was. Like I said, I think it was between 25 and 30

if you just Google like follow up boss revenue. That's what I saw. They sold for 400 to, well, potentially 500, 400, 400 of front. What's crazy is these software companies, you and I both have this thing where we want to go fast. We need to learn and have a little bit of this attitude.

I got zero percent of this. you are more of a stick to it kind of guy. Do you think, I mean, if you're under 100,000 in revenue, four years in, are you doing this still? It's hard. So, like, all right, so I have an audience now. So yes or no. Do you think you could have stuck with it?

It depends where I was in life. If I was, if it was 26-year-old, Sam, 50% chance. If it's where I am now, I would say 5% chance. It would be really hard. It would be hard. I'd have to be going into those meetings and be like, all, guys, we're going to review the metrics today. earmuffs everybody, we're going to say the revenue number

and then everybody has to do this and then I say we're at 42,000 in year four and then I'm like, all right, but there's other things to be excited about. But we talked to Darmesh about this and Darmash is pretty he's pretty low key about it. He's like, it took forever. In reality, Darmash, HubSpot, Darmash is the founder of HubSpot. HubSpot, I think grew like actually a lot faster,

but he was like, man, the first like six years we only got to like $4 million or something in revenue. I forget exactly what he said. But he, like, conveyed the idea where he's like, it's a slog at first. Also, at that time, things just grew slower. Now, things grow much faster, right? The benchmarks and the expectations are way different. But you have to have faith.

And, of course, we're talking about the one that worked. And there's a lot, there's so many more that don't work. But, like, to have that faith of, like, this can work and to stick to it for 10, 11, 12 years, if you have the right, you know, metrics, this shit pays off. These software companies are so much. cooler than what we typically start. So I remember many years ago, I did a fireside chat with Michael Birch, who was at the time was my mentor, he was my boss.

He's a guy who's built four or five super successful internet companies that scale to millions of users. He's basically a billionaire at this point in Silicon Valley. And a bunch of entrepreneurs came over and they were asking questions. One of the questions they asked was, how do you know when to pivot or persevere? Meaning, you hear the stories about follow up boss or Pinterest. where it's like there was it was not taking off for a while and then you know they stuck with it it and then it did did pictures take a long time pictures took a long time um like the graph was you know

not like some explosive social app at the beginning and um and so they and i turned to him because I was like I want to know this answer too this is like this is I want to know what is the guy who's done it in Silicon Valley what does he what does he say and he goes this is the hardest question for any entrepreneur. It is deeply personal and situational. He goes, for every one story you hear of a Pinterest that just keeps going after 12 months, even though there's no signs of life, you know, there's a hundred people that did that and failed.

You just never hear, but they don't get to talk at the conference, right? So he's like, it's super hard because you have this survivorship bias to know which story should you listen to. And so he's like, this is the one where there's no real advice you can get from somebody else, the one thing that we figured out at our company was like, we would set a time box. We think we can hit this milestone by this date. And setting that time box is really important because it keeps you honest. Up front, when you're super optimistic, all right, let's say something then.

We think that in the first, like I set one for this new company. I haven't announced it yet on the pod, but I set one. I said, I think we can get to 500,000 ARR in the first 60 days. So I think it's 500K of revenue in the first 60 days. And I set that. Now, if we don't hit that, doesn't mean, I'm going to like throw in the towel

or shut it down. It meant like, but maybe. No, me, you never know. Life's on the line for these companies. No, but the reality is you set that

so that you have to have a conversation about why you didn't hit your expectation. What were you wrong about? What assumption did you have that was incorrect? Because it might be a fatal assumption or might just be, oh, I was just,

I underestimated how long it takes to do X. And that's okay. You could have that conversation. The thing we did when I worked with Michael was, We asked a question, what metric gives us the most faith? So what metric worries us the most faith? So let's say four years in, we don't have a million or we don't have 100,000 of revenue. That's the one that worries us the most.

We have very little revenue. Okay, but what gives us the most faith? It's, well, of the 52 customers we do have, they love it and nobody's churning, right? Then it's like, oh, okay, what can I hang my hat on to give myself the excuse to keep going? And so I think that's a useful question to ask if you don't know whether I should pivot or persevere. I think what metric is giving me the most faith and what metric is keeping me up at night. And then you can almost kind of weigh the two against each other. If the thing that's giving you faith is like, yeah, that one guy told me he likes it.

It's like, oh, that's not a very strong counterpunch to the fact that the evidence on your revenue and usage side is pretty low. But it feels horrible when you're in it. So I posted a link in our MDB document. Okay, so it goes to a tech crunch. I remember it goes to TechCrunch article, but I remember when we were running the hustle, I looked up to, there weren't that many media companies to look up to it. So I really looked up to Business Insider. And the reason I liked it was Henry Blodgett was fairly transparent about their

traffics. And so Henry Blodgett, they wrote an article. It looks like maybe six years into the company. And he made a funny joke. He's like, we eked out a net profit of $2,100 on revenues of $4.8 million. It's basically enough to buy a MacBook Pro. And he reveals their traffic. And you see that it looks like that.

this nice, like, arc where it's like, or this nice graph where it's like exponentially going up. But I remember when I was running the hustle, I was like, well, their graph looked amazing. Like, it looked amazing. But then I zoomed in on this picture. And you could see that it's broken down by month. And if you really focus on it, what you can see is basically February of 09.

They hit an all-time high. And then they didn't surpass that until something like December of 2009. So basically for a whole year. For 10 months, yeah, the whole year, which I think it looks like they started in 07. So for 10 months, two years into the company, the monthly traffic, which for a site like Business Insider, that's how they would gauge if they're doing a good job. It basically either went down or didn't go up. And when you do that every single day, every single week for 10 months, it feels miserable.

And then you zoom out and you like see like, okay, well, it has gone up. But these graphs are never a smooth going up. And a lot of times, sometimes I imagine for two years, it'll be pretty shit. Three years, for years, there'll be shit. And then after a while it starts picking up if you do a handful of things right. But that requires extreme faith. And it's very, very, very hard to manage your emotions every day when it's like that. I totally agree.

This is a, Tony Robbins said this thing. He goes, the number one choke point of any business is the psychology of the owner. Like, every problem you think your business has, if you do the, root cause analysis, it goes right back up to the root to the psychology of the owner. Right. Let's say, oh, we're not growing fast enough. Why? Because, you know, we don't have our paid acquisition sucks.

Why? Because the guys run our paid acquisition has been doing it for six months in his life. You don't have somebody experienced. Why? Because we're not hiring the right people. Why? Because our owner hasn't made that a priority. It isn't willing to spend money, right?

Or is afraid to spend money on talent. And so everything just goes back to the psychology of the owner, which is both empowering but also I think scary for some people. The empowering part is it's in your control. The scary part is shit. It's my fault. And it goes back. You could also go back to like what inefficiencies or like where does the owner or CEO?

Where do they like suck? So like for example, I remember at the hustle, I was always fearful of overspending. And so I was cheap about shit. And I was actually overly cheap. And when there was times when Facebook ads opened up and it's like, dude, we got to spend more here. Looking back, I should have spent way more. but I didn't because I was being too cheap. And like, why am I cheap?

Well, because of all this other shit that I experienced in life. And so, like, it's basically like, what do they say? Like, a person with money is they, it's just going to like magnify the things that, the traits that they already have or like, you always say that with people when they're drunk, like, oh, you're, the true feelings are just going to come out. Right. It's the same thing as with running a company and you've got to like master that inner game. And it's really hard.

Yeah, for sure. Let's do another one. I want to talk about, let's do, you have a little. this one, Peter Levels is insane. Tell me the Peter Levels is insane one. That's a good headline. I love this guy. So Peter Levels we had in the pod. I think we've only had them once, but he's got an open invitation if he wants to come on again. So Peter Levels, we both love him. He has like four or five different businesses that he runs. I think he's by himself doing it. Collectively, his businesses probably do two million a year in sales. And he's super transparent about all of it.

So he puts his revenue in his bio on his Twitter. He shares everything. Really fascinating, thoughtful guy. Did you see what he did with his stock portfolio? So he basically, so click that tweet and you'll see it. But he basically created a Google sheet. And he can kind of, I don't, he doesn't explicitly say it, but you can do the math. He says, here's how much my stock portfolio made me.

And it was up 32%. So you can kind of like just do basic algebra and figure out how much he has. has in his portfolio, and he reveals every holding that he has. And I think that, A, I'm happy he is doing this. B, I would never, ever do this, though. Like, this is like, his transparency is wild. But it's super fascinating to see what this guy is doing when it comes to, like, sharing his numbers out in public.

It's pretty, pretty fascinating. I got to say two things about Peter. So first, Peter, come back on the pond. We miss you. you've done a bunch of interesting stuff, this plus your new AI stuff that we didn't talk about yet. So I want to do that. Second,

we've had a bunch of people on this podcast, some that have big names, some that have, you know, big track records or billionaires or built this $100 billion company or whatever. Nobody. And I mean,

nobody has a higher approval rating amongst entrepreneurs on the internet than Peter levels. Have you ever met anybody that is not a fan of Peter levels? I've had billionaire friends or associates in a in a conversation and they'll go that guy's doing it right

everyone likes this guy put this guy's profile picture up on the on the fucking screen go to YouTube and just look at this guy's profile picture this is your personal branding seminar look at this guy's profile picture it's him on a couch in the like international pose of like

guy scheming on the internet just messing around having fun on the internet by himself he's on a couch half of his body's dangling off. He's got his laptop. He's not wearing no shirt. He's got his laptop up on a pillow because, you know, the laptop starts to just scorch you after a while. And he's at this messed up angle.

His neck's all messed up. But you know, this guy is a one-man band just having fun. And this is why you're right. CEOs of like, you know, major companies are like, that guy. That guy's doing it right. Because everybody is jealous of being able to be this guy. A guy who's just one man in a laptop,

travels around the world, builds projects, whatever he wants for fun. He builds cool stuff like an artist that whatever he builds tends to have some juice behind it because he's a very creative guy. He's had many failures, but who cares? And he's got a bunch of successes. He's very open about them. He's not trying to sell you anything. Peter Levels is a hero amongst makers.

And nobody, I will contend this, nobody has a higher approval rating on the internet amongst entrepreneurs than Peter Levels. He's great, man. He's great. And I think on this podcast, a lot of people are like, oh, you're talking about just big companies too often or whatever. And it's like, we always reiterate this. It's like we like people who carve their path. And that path could lead to a huge exit. It could lead to something really small.

Like you could just be a great artist. It doesn't matter if it's a big money thing or not. And Peter Lovell is the reason why he's so fascinating is he has carved the hardest path. And he sticks to it. He's very value-based, really, really, really cool guy. he did a tweet that it goes only four out of the 70 projects I've ever done have made money and grown

95% of everything I ever did fail by hit rates only 5%. So ship more. This says 15,000 likes. It is just literally a like a, you know, like a VS code like a screenshot of projects that made money and grew four. He's got nomad list, remote talk, rebase

and the YouTube network. This is before his AI thing. And then here's all of his projects and it's stuff like ice cream chat, tubulitics, gift book, Taylor Telegram chatbot Startup Retreats.com Places to Work, Fire Calculator.

I don't even know what any of these are, but each one of these is like, you know, a great weekend. It's like, you know, a great weekend that was had by him doing these projects. You know that meme where it's like,

babe, wake up. Sean Perry just tweeted again. Or like, babe, wake up, you know, like, Peter levels bought a domain. Yeah. Whenever Peter replies to one of my tweets, It's like one of those.

It's like, babe, wake up. Peter just said he liked what I'm doing. That's how I feel about this guy. Really cool guy. I have a theory that people, ultimately,

what is lacking in most people's lives is that they don't live life on their own terms. And then the way that that expresses itself is you have a lot of fun when you're living life on your own terms. When you're just doing your, not your thing, you're doing your thing. And if you're doing your thing,

you're having a good thing. time. Peter levels, that profile picture of him on his couch, like all crooked just on his laptop, he's doing his thing. And I feel like this is, honestly, it's a bit of why people like this podcast. We're not the most prepared or researched or well-spoken or whatever. But people can tell we have fun in our lives, that we literally just do the shit that we want to do and we're having a good time. And it might be that the things we do are not at all the things you want to do, Sam's like buying a ranch and like, you know, tipping cows and I don't know what all this shit you do. I don't want to do all that stuff.

But I can tell that you want to do all that stuff. And that's awesome. It's great that you want to do all those things. You know, build your like gym and your farmhouse and whatever, all that good stuff. I think that Peter Levels is a great example of somebody who's just living life on his own terms. And that is one of the most attractive traits that people have in general. And it's so funny because what most people do is the exact opposite. Peter Lovellas has a bunch of influence.

But when most people try to become influencers, they strip down their personality and try to appeal to others and people can sniff that out. Yeah, I just think he's the best. And I DM him on a regular basis. He replies to me 10% of the time. So Peter, if this makes it to you,

come on the pod, man. Come on back on. What do you got? All right. Let's do... So another person who is gone from zero to hero, Brian Johnson. Have you seen a T-shirt

that he wears lately. Don't die? Yeah, don't die. Don't die. That's a new brand. You know what I like about it? It's the same look as the Austin 316 T-shirts. Yes.

And I think you should have just done Johnson 316. Don't die. In fact, I might go make Johnson 316 don't die shirts because that's who he should become. All right. So I was looking the other day because I saw that Brian Johnson finally started to sell something. and me and you had made a prediction about six months a year ago we said you know what

I don't think Brian's doing this for the money I don't think he's doing this for the fame although he's going to make a lot of money and I'm sure the fame you know the attention feels good in the moment very obvious prediction very obvious prediction but we said dude is this the greatest

pre like pre launch marketing stunt ever because what he did was he basically turned himself into a character and a lot of people have done this in the fitness niche, but he's not a fitness influencer. He branded himself as a longevity influencer, a live forever, a don't die influencer.

And he spent a couple million bucks on tests and content and building his brand. He came on pods like ours, and you can look at Google trends. You could see the interest in Brian Johnson growing over time. Actually, we should map out when our podcast was with him on that trend because I'm curious where that was. And he has built an amazing following,

and he's doing everything you should do as an influencer. Not that he wants to be an influencer, but he's doing everything you should do. I don't know if you've seen his meetups that he's having lately. These runs that he's doing. Yeah, they look awesome. He's taking people and they chant like, don't die,

and they run up a hill. There was something like that. And then they get at the bottom and they eat like, just there's a pot of lentils and they're all eating lentils. It's amazing. And so he's building his little cult, and it's a great thing. So he came out with his first paid product.

Did you see it? It's the meal service, right? No, no, no. So he came out with like a, it's kind of like a meal service. It's like basically it's a part one of his blueprint diet as a ready to eat sort of like delivery package. I think you pay $330 a month and you get this thing, 12,000 people applied. Wait, wait, wait, but what is it? How is it not?

You said I was, you implied I was a little wrong with meal service. It is a meal service then, but it's just like powder, right? Yeah, yeah. It's not like meal delivery. It's not like blue apron, but it is like, you know, the supplements and the drink and whatever, whatever. It's like some skim-down version of his anti-aging protocol.

Got it. It's the blueprint self-expermentation study. And there's like a level one and there's going to be a level two and level three. So there's 67 interventions in this. And it looks like there's a couple of powders. There's a bottle of olive oil and then there's a bunch of pills. I like all those things.

Powder pills and oils. Send me out. So he got 5,000 people, he got 12,000 people to apply. 5,000 people paid. So let's do a little public math here. Let's break a rule. He just launched this product.

He had more demand than he was willing to let in. He led in 5,000 people. That's 20 million in ARR that he had on day one of launching this product. And 20 million of ARR for a subscription supplements business, essentially, is like a $200 million dollar business. What do you think Athletic Greens is that revenue-wise? They raised that $1.2 billion in... I bet they're at like 100, 150s, my guess, maybe 200.

Wow. Max. Okay. Not, you know, but this is day one. Day one come out the gate with 20 million and this is all. He led in less than half of the demand that he had, right? So he could have been at 40 million if he wanted to. Again, I don't think he's doing this for the money.

But God damn, that's a, that is an impressive start your business. And it shows that I have this phrase now that I say, and my wife doesn't think it's cool. And she's the only one that I've tried it on. But I say this. I say all content is now marketing and all marketing. is now content. And this is what Brian Johnson did. He was putting out content. It happened to be marketing. And that marketing is now leading to a lot of sales for his new protocol. When you say that to your wife, I can just hear the world's loudest eye roll of like, shut the fuck up, Sean. That shit

works on those fucking dorks that listen to you. Take out the fucking trash, Sean. Did you warm up the meck and cheese like I asked you to or not? What are you talking about? This is awesome. It's sort of like, have you seen that, what's that movie where they talk about the biggest short? And Ryan Gossan's character, you know, they're like, what are you getting out of this, Ryan? He goes, look, listen, Vinnie, you're getting the ice cream, you're getting the nuts,

you're getting the chocolate syrup, you're getting the whipped cream, and when this works out, I'm going to get the cherry on top. That's my feet. I just get a little bit of this. That's what Brian Johnson is doing with this business. He's doing everything else, I think, actually just because he's a dork and he enjoys this shit. Then it just so happened that he got famous.

And now he's like, yeah, yeah, that's pretty cool. Okay, fine, I'll do that too. And I dig that. And isn't it weird? Like, why do you think we have so much trust and faith in this guy? Part of it is because he already has like the FU money. And so we think, like, he didn't give a shit. He's just doing this just because.

But the way that he's turned himself in the character is actually really interesting. In his case, there was a high barrier to entry. He spent millions of dollars and seems doing this. He also kind of lived like a hermit for two years to like perfect this. but the idea of turning yourself into a character and then doing it in front of a lot of people, that's actually a really appealing, that's an exciting route to go for a lot of people

where it's just like you change your identity and you go all in on this and you could actually make a great living by doing this. It's the same reason I bought shoes from knees over toes guy. I probably never bought shoes from any brand besides Nike in like 20 years. And then I see this guy who's over 40 years old dunking a basketball.

I see what he looked like before he was doing his thing and how he had knee surgeries. Undeniable proof is a very, very powerful lever. This guy literally just does like a somersault. Then he gets up and dunks the basketball. And he's like this 45 year old white guy. Which shoes? He came out with like a pair of shoes that are like, you know, the knees over toes like thing. Not great shoes, by the way, for the record.

Definitely don't buy V1 of anybody's anything. So, you know, it wasn't great. but I have a high amount of faith and trust in this guy because, again, all contented marketing. So for two years, he was just put out free content, didn't sell a thing. And so for two years, all he did was put out very helpful content and showed an undeniable level of proof that this guy was in incredible shape, that his legs were super, super strong, and that, you know, where he started to where he was is a very powerful transformation.

So anybody who wants to have that transformation will trust him. And then when he comes out with a thing and he says, hey, this is what I use. People will buy it. And it's very, very effective. By the way, I also bought Knees Over Toes shoes. Before he came out with that shoe company, he was always wearing these other shoes, and I also bought them. I also bought them. That white shoe that looks like it's from Japan.

That's like $70 or something, $45. Couldn't even really get it on. I have like a thick American foot or something. It doesn't fit in this European shoe. Dude, I wear the shit out of them. I love those shoes. I remember seeing the picture and like Googling like, what are those shoes? They're not very comfortable.

cool, though. They look great. They're like Fouye or something like that. Like Fugazi or it's like touch with an Fugazis too, man. They were Fugazes hell. Can I do a quick thrill to shill, by the way? Okay, go. All right. So basically at Hampton, we've got access to all this data. And so in order to grow, we decide, I love data.

You know, they say data's the new oil. I already mentioned I love oil. I don't know how to make money off of it yet, but somehow oil is good. We've been doing these surveys where we survey different industries and we get benchmarks for different industries. Right now, we just did one on agencies. And so we did this thing where we surveyed 60 agencies. They gave us all their revenue, all their profit.

And we did like this cool survey where we showed, here's the benchmarks for profit per employee, revenue per employee. You can find it at if you just go to joinhampton.com and then you go to our blog, you'll see the surveys. We did one on wealth. So like people say their net worth, how much money they're spending each month, how much income they're making each month, how much they're working each week. We just did one on agencies.

So if you're an agency owner, check it out. But more so, that's the show. Here's the thrill part. I think, Sean, that if I decide to do this, have you ever heard of the, have you ever, I think this could work. Have you ever heard of like benchmarking? Like I didn't know anything about this industry. Do you know anything about benchmarking? Yeah, of course. I didn't know that people would ever pay for this. And so there's the most common form of benchmarking is salary benchmarking. So there's a company called salary.com and then there's like 10 or 20 other ones who have raised hundreds of millions of dollars, whatever. I think, In a couple of years, if I get enough data, I think I can spin this off and create a data company where I do benchmarking for different industries. And the problem that we'll be solving is, let's say that you're an agency,

let's say your e-com business and you're above $50 million in revenue, you want to know, are we spending the right amount for ads? Are we spending the right amount for employees, whatever? I think we can build a cool data business off of this. So that's the thrill of the shill. But I just wanted to call my shot and say, maybe eventually I think we're going to do this. I don't think it's a calling your shot

if you say maybe eventually calling your shot is I'm going to do this that's like the only requirement of calling your shot is to say I'm going to do this not calling my shot if I so happen to do this which I probably won't

but it can kind of work it's like if Babe Ruth just went like this and said the point you just went like he just went like he just he just wait and say it's like uh Dude, also, you reminded me of something.

I don't mean to rain on your thrill or your shill here, but do you remember, have you seen these leaked? I'm sure you've seen this because we're both internet, like, what's it called? Like the people who look for fossils, whatever, archaeologists. When Mark Zuckerberg had his old, like, aim messages leaked when he was 19 years old starting Facebook. And he was like, these effing idiots are actually.

downloading this. Here's the transcript. He goes, he just dabs a friend just because he can't wait to brag. He goes, yeah, so if you ever need anyone,

if you ever need any info about anyone at Harvard, just ask. I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, social security numbers. And his friend goes, what?

How did you manage that? People just submitted it. I don't know why. They, quote, trust me, dumb bucks. This is Sam and his slack

about Hampton. He's like, yeah, every agency just submitted their profits, their revenues, their growth tactics. They trust me.

For the record, I want to say... You're like the next suck, dude. Dude, I want to say, I have access to zero of the documents that people submit for in order to join Hampton. I've got zero access. I purposely did this. Just like for years, I purposely didn't ask your name of your e-com business. I just like, I don't want to know because I don't want to accidentally say anything.

I have zero access to this. Not only because I don't want to say anything, and also because I just, I just literally don't know how to like use computers and like log in and I don't have a password. That was the equivalent of you know, no, Abla, English.

Like, oh, I got pulled over. I don't even speak. I don't even know how to use my computer. I can't act with the stuff. Trust me. All right, let me stop making funny about that. Let's move on. Let's do another one.

All right. So last year, I invested in this company called Consensus. And they basically, it was like an AI company for research for like scientific research. So if you wanted to like figure out like, Instead of reading individual studies, this website would just tell you in aggregate what many studies would show.

And they were only doing okay. It was basically just two guys, and they were still just trying to figure it out. It was like, this sounds interesting, but I don't even know if this is going to work. Let's see. Well, something happened a few weeks ago that I think is going to change their business, but I think that there's an inflection. So basically, like, when the iPhone came out, the app store happened, and we heard stories about Pandora. So Pandora was a company before they were the music service. The App Store came out and they're like, oh, let's just use our service and pivot and build an app.

They're one of the first apps. That's what made Pandora popular. When COVID happened, there's companies like BetterHelp, which is like therapy online or there's like telemedicine because the laws during COVID change where a doctor can prescribe meds cross state lines. There's been a bunch of these. Right now, one just happened. So I think January 14th. So I think it was January 10th. Open AI created an app store.

They've kind of done this where they've made their own, you can make your own GPT and all this other stuff. But they created an app store. I don't even think they said what the pricing was. So with the iPhone app store, I think the developer gets what, 70% of the revenue, Apple gets 30%. Open AI hasn't even said what it's going to be. So it's still really early.

And so this company that I invested in, they're like, oh, well, like, our thing is going okay, but like, what if we just like went all in on this, like, plug in for Open AI store? And so their version is basically like you just type in, you ask it questions, medical questions, and it just gives you a slightly better answer than Open AI, but it's a lot better or at least enough that you want to pay for. And there's not that much traffic right now or not that many new apps in the Open AI app store, but this is one of those inflection moments. So here's two more examples. So remember Honey, that company that was like, Like, what do they do?

Coupon codes for a website. And then Gramerly did the same thing. They both did that with the Chrome store. You have a bunch of friends because you kind of ran in that world where people did this with the Facebook platform. So Zinga. I don't know how much money they eventually made, but it was at one point a multi-billion dollar company.

I think right now we're going to see like a Facebook store. You're going to see like all these mafia wars, all these weird games. I think you had a buddy. What was the guy's name? Dan who went to Camp MFM who started like OMG Pop or something like that. What was that called? Draw something was the game that everybody played.

And I think he had a multi-hundred million dollar exit. I think this is right now about to happen with the OpenAI like plug-in store. It's really fascinating what's happening. I thought this was interesting. You asked the guy or somebody asked the founder, he said, I think it's going to be something between like more than the Chrome extensions market, but less than the app store. You know, short term, it's awesome for marketing and functionality for users.

And Open AI is footing the bill on a lot of the compute costs. in the medium term we have two X the usage of the next biggest GPT and I think Canva is the next so this is the number one GPT yeah yeah it's taking off and these guys

they're smart guys but it was still when they were starting their company when we invested it was like I don't know hopefully we'll figure it out and there was a time where I was like you guys better figure this out soon like I don't know if this is going to work out and then this inflection happened

this changed happened dude this product is awesome I just went to the site I didn't do the chat GPT thing but just their app is really cool. So you go there, you ask any questions. So I just did, are microplastics dangerous for humans? And then it has all these papers, but then you hit synthesize, which I think is the credits that you have to buy, but you start with 23 credits.

And it says, summary, we looked at 10 papers. The studies suggest microplastics are dangerous for humans and they carry toxic chemicals, contaminating ecosystems, and are linked to various health issues, including cancers and immune system disruptions. And then it says, we looked at the 14 papers. Yes, was 43% of time, possibly 4%. 57% of the time, no 0% of the time. And that was the thing. And then you could see below each specific paper and it's like tag like,

oh, this is a rigorous journal. This is highly cited. And you can kind of get AI to summarize each of those papers. This is a sick product. It's cool. By the way, just like all great stuff, it did not start that way. I'm mad you didn't tell me about this. This is why did I invest in this?

This is great. It wasn't obvious. By the way, it's still not obvious. This company, just like any, any startup. could still totally fail and not work. No, but it's a very interesting bet, right? Like, to do a verticalized Google, specifically for scientific papers, and AI being the why now of what you could do differently than you could do before, this makes a lot of sense.

And it was, I'll give the shout out, it's consensus.com. That's her website. But the point being, A, consensus is great. I think it's actually going to work out. And these guys, they kind of put their head down for like 24 months and, like, are really starting to figure out. there's going to be a lot of stuff just like them on the chat GBT store because I think when we invested in them I don't remember exactly I'm almost positive

the word AI didn't come up one time like it was like we have this like I we know what the outcome that we want to what we want it to be but we're not entirely sure how we're going to come to that and then they start figuring out AI got more popular and then this chat GPD store opened up and they're like boom we found the path and I think that path is opened right now now it's more competitive than than the app store and it's more competitive than Chrome because there's more people who are doing this stuff. Open AI is already huge. But that inflection is happening right now. This is one of those things that's happening in real time. And I wanted to call out because I think Open AI even said, we didn't even know what

payment terms we're going to give these people. They're still all figuring it out. But this is happening this second right now. There's an opportunity here for a lot of different companies. They're like, some celebrity relationship. They're like, oh, we don't know, we don't want to put a label on it yet. We're just exploring each other and figuring out who we are. together and individually. Yeah, it's definitely trying to figure it out. Have you seen perplexity? Have you used perplexity?

I don't like it. I don't know why people are going nuts for it. It's pretty cool. It's just like Open AI, but for some reason it's like as a science bent. That's one of these companies. I don't know. I don't know much about it.

This is an uninformed opinion, but I feel like every VC who missed, like you can't get into Open AI. Or if you could get in now, it's at $100 billion valuation. There's not much money to be made as an investor there. And so all the capital, realized, all the investors realized,

holy shit, this is the big thing. And they're like, what's the next best competitor? And they're like, all right, stable diffusion and it could be. Perplexity, and the next thing, and the next thing, and they get these super inflated valuations. And I don't know, I'm not really a believer in that.

I think those get way ahead of the skis. And I just seen that story many times. This happened in crypto. This happened in, you know, when mobile is happening. And you would get, you know, for every Instagram, you would then get the 10, super funded other apps that didn't make any sense. And yeah, I would take the under or I would short that.

After the pod, go to your email and type in consensus. I'm almost positive that I heard about this company and you were C-C'd on the email. I just want to put that out there. It was 2002, it was two years ago. I'm almost positive. You're like, after the pod, take some lighter fluid, pour it over your eye. Light it back. I hope no one finds out what happens.

We're going to burn it down and hide it. Can I do a rant about something? So I've had a realization that my world, like a lot of the content I'm consuming was algorithmic. All right. That's pretty obvious. What does that mean? Just Twitter, TikTok, whatever?

Everything I was using, you'd go to Twitter. It's an algorithm telling you, Here's the content you need to see. You go to TikTok. It's all algorithm. Tech and business shit. Facebook, Instagram. Yes, all of that.

Even email. Email is not really algorithmic exactly, but it's, you go there and it's here's what other people want you to look at. Here's my problem. Hey, here's my problem. Read me. Right? And then the same thing with, you know, all news.

Go to a news and say, hey, here's everybody's problems on the other side of the world. Here, you know, pay attention to this. I'm calling it the intentional internet. which is I started really being intentional about, oh, no, no, no, no. If I'm going on the internet right now, what is it that I want to see? What is it?

I'm curious about. What is it that I want to learn about? And then I go in and I'm stiff-arming algorithms left and right. You know, I'm Marshaun Lynch on that one run where he just sheds eight defenders. It goes all the way and just rumbles to the end zone. That's me on the internet now. And I think more people should be doing this. join me on the intentional internet where you get on and you don't just you're not just a you know

a little puppy just eating the puppy child that the algorithms give you go on with some intent and say what is it that I'm looking for I want maybe it's I want certain type of entertainment maybe it's I want a certain type of information or I want to be inspired okay so they go look for the things that will give you that but you follow you follow 13,000 people on on Twitter the trick is you don't go to Twitter right what do you do well Twitter's not a great place for this, right? Because if you go to Twitter, you're going to get your first thing,

you're going to start up this is a feed and you're going to start scrolling. What are you going to start reading books? That's very unlike you. So I make a little list. I say, you know what? Curious how this started. I want to learn more about this.

And then I'll go to YouTube or Google or wherever looking for that. But adding that little paper step in between me and the internet has been very, very useful. And I learned a bunch of interesting things in the last three days. I got more out of the internet. So I'm just putting that out there. What's been on your list? I'll give you an example.

I was doing research for one thing, and I saw this name. Do you know this guy, Eric Van Veen? Yes, he's amazing. I have got him. Oh, wait. Are you talking about Ricky Van Veen or Eric? Oh, maybe he's Ricky. Ricky Van Venn.

Ricky. Facebook guy? Dude, dreamy. Super dreamy. This guy's dreary as shit. I've talked to him a bunch of via email. a handful of times. It looks like the internet Pete Buttigieg or something.

No, man, this one, this one's great. So this guy created college humor. Yeah. And then he created a couple of other things. So what did he create? Create college humor. And then he created a few other things like cracked or whatever. Then he bundled it up, sold it to IAC.

He was running media at IAC. And then he... You're forgetting the biggest thing they started. Which one? So at college humor, this was like pre- YouTube days, they create, this was like EBOM's World Days,

they created a better way to host videos. And that's what Vimeo is, which they sold the IAC. IAC spun off and became a billion dollar plus publicly traded company. So creates Vimeo, creates college humor,

goes to IAC. IAC is a super interesting company with like a very cool pedigree of people that come out of it. Like Tinder came out of IAC. You know, there's a bunch of really interesting things about IAC.

They're sort of like, They're the Procter & Gamble of the internet. They're a conglomerate of internet sites, mostly media. Match.com, I think came out of there. Now he's head of like, head of like video or head of creative content at Facebook. And I was like, oh, this guy's interesting. I kind of just noted it.

Because I think I was thinking about college humor. And so who's behind that? What are they doing now? And I think this, what are they doing now has been one of my threads. So I'll think of something that was cool. And I'll be like, where did they go? I haven't heard about their new album.

What are they working on? And I'll go look at that. That's just a very, it's a very useful way to go look at things. By the way, Ricky ended up marrying, and I don't think they're together anymore, but you can just Google like tabloids or whatever. He married Allison Williams,

you know, the famous actress, whose father is Brian Williams, the famous newscaster. And if you Google his name, the guy's just like hanging out with like all these celebrities and stuff. And he's like, seems so cool. Like this guy's dreamy as shit. So he acknowledged that.

So anyways, what's my point? So I'm, I have a list of cool companies or cool things that were built, you know, 10 years ago. And I'm wondering, what are those people doing now? College humor was one of them. So I go look at this guy. And then I'm like, I'm researching Vimeo and I'm looking at him. And then I'm like, he gave this talk in 2008 at this media conference. And then he comes back again eight years later.

I don't if you've ever seen this talk, but it's a, it's a, I mean, it gets no views on the internet. But for nerds like us who create media and content on the internet, it's very interesting. It's very interesting to see what somebody thought in 2008, which is like the iPhone has come out, but it hasn't changed the world yet. And literally the presentation, he's like, yeah,

kids on their Blackberries are not going to be doing XYZ. And back then, you know, when he created college humor, it became the number one comedy entertainment site on the internet, way bigger than Cartoon Network and all these other like incumbents. Okay, that's interesting. Then he comes back eight years later and he's like,

here's what I got right and here's what I got wrong. And one of the things he was talking about on. he's like, he's like at some point people on the internet will stop leaving the internet. Like they won't they still stop using the internet as a springboard to go onto Netflix or on to get, cast into a TV show or whatever. Like they'll realize that their YouTube channel is worth more than than those shows. And they won't want to leave to go do those.

They won't view this as a stepping stone. And that's happening. He basically had like four or five predictions about where the world was going. He put up the all the sites like viral Nova and Upworthy and whatnot. He's like, right now, these are the hottest sites in the world. Their traffic is crushing ours and they're getting more traffic than anybody, more traffic than God. He's like, I think all of this is going to zero.

I think this is highly commoditized and it's not going to work for these reasons. It was absolutely correct. And so it was very interesting to learn from this guy who's kind of a master at what he does. And I've done this before with like when I looked up all the infomercial kings. So the guys who created like, you know, proactive, that acne, you know, medicine. Like, how did that story happen, right? But if I just log on the internet and I just take the last thing that somebody tweeted or the latest TikTok somebody uploaded, you know, I'm playing defense. I'm playing their game, not mine, right?

And so I'm just trying to have a little bit more intention when I use the internet. So, you know, I'm not the type who's just going to go like total digital detox and just not use the internet. But when I do use it, I'm trying to use it in a bit of a healthier way. So Ricky, did he, he predicted that the viral novas of the world, he predicted that it was going to go to zero and they did? Yeah. Did I ever tell you the story about my partner Joe and Hampton and a bunch of other stuff? Did I tell you a story about little things? You've mentioned it before.

He got like really big most trafficked Facebook referral, right? And then he had an offer to sell and he didn't take it or something. Is that the story? So Joe's an amazing entrepreneur. So he started his first company. It was an ad tech company. He sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars when he was like 25. So he just had this like huge success at a young age.

Then his next business he started was called. I forget exactly what it was called. But PetFlow. It was a pet food company. And they started it before Chewy, except he was a little conservative and he was like, we have to spend money profitably on ads. And that's hard to do. And so we're going to go a little bit slower.

Chewy comes in and go, nah, F that. We're going to lose money for the first six or 12 months at a customer. And we're going to do such a good job that they're going to come back. And Joe was like, that's a dumb strategy. Turns out it was right. But in order to make Petflow grow, he created a blog where they just wrote content on pets. and within a very, very, very short amount of time, they started getting 10, 20, 30 million people a month

coming to this blog on pets. And he's like, oh, screw that. Let's just do this blog. And so within four years, they were the most shared website on Facebook, bigger than Viral Nova, bigger than BuzzFeed, bigger than Huff Po, all these publishers that were huge in the 2014-15 era.

And it started getting something like 250 million uniques a month to their website. And they scaled up, I think, to 90 million in revenue in four years. It was a huge company. I called email them. I went to his office. He had these studios and they're like, Facebook Lives is the next big thing. We just built out this $250,000 studio in the Manhattan office. And it's going to be the greatest thing ever. We have 150 employees. This is going to be the biggest thing ever. The problem, of course, that we all know, was Zuck does what Zuck wants. And they built this entire company,

little things.com, on the back of Facebook. And they got an LOI to sell the business. And They were literally three weeks from selling. They were going to sell for hundreds of millions of dollars. Facebook puts out this annual report where they go, we're actually changing, we're pivoting from this thing to this thing. And three weeks away or something like that from this deal closing for hundreds of millions of dollars, the company backed out. And within six months, the business basically laid out for everyone and had to shut down.

All in a matter of like six or seven months of like, we're on top of the world, making a hundred million a year to now we are. or not. And it's a crazy, crazy story. If you Google, like, his name, Joe Spizer, little things, you'll see the story. I think Inc. just did some big story on it, but it's pretty wild. Oh, the lessons we learn,

unfortunately. That's, you know, that's like, it's cool to be like, yeah, you learn so much from failure, but it's like, God, sometimes it's so painful. Yeah, he was basically, I didn't even, he posted this publicly. He was like, I was set to make $50 million, and three weeks away from the closing,

it went away. And I, he has all these crazy stories about that. What's he like to work with? Because you picked him as your partner for Hampton. Why did you pick him? He's the best, man. He's the best. He's a harmonious partner.

He's even Keio. He's very easy. I'm not like the partnership dynamics because you've told me about those. What is he? What's his edge? What's he great at? What is he amazing at? You ever hang out with Israeli guys and like,

Israeli guys have a culture of like, they're quite competent because they served in the military. And they're like, you're really good at stuff. Oftentimes they're good at spotting opportunities because that's also part of the culture of just negotiating well and finding interesting deals. He is so good at spotting opportunities

and he's technical and he's so fast. I've never met someone who's like significantly faster than I am at making stuff and going all in. And like he'll just find an opportunity. He'll build a website for it. And he's like, yep, this is what I'm doing now. And he pounces so fast. I've never met someone who moves faster.

One thing that we did that was so great, Did you ever have this with Ben or any of your partners where you do like a, you're like, look, before we like hop in bed and before we get married here, let's just sit down and map out. What do you want your life to be like? What do you want in five years and 10 years? What do you want on a day-to-day basis? And you like write out like how you want to live, what you're willing to give up,

what you're not willing to give up. Have you ever done that? Not exactly. But, you know, you told me you did that. I think there's a version of that that I do, but I'm not, I think everything changes. So, you know, it sounded really great in theory. and I think it's a useful exercise just to clarify your own thoughts,

but I don't, I think people themselves are quite incongruent in general. Well, yeah, you change. You change, but also you don't know what you want. And also, you say one thing because it sounds good or you think you want it, but then something comes,

something comes up and it's your stated preference versus revealed preference. I think it's very hard to get to people's revealed preferences, their true preferences or their true, their true desires or whatever. And so I think it's a good exercise to do, but I don't put as much weight in it as you did, I think. Well, I think that,

I think that A, it starts a really good conversation. So I was like, look, let's be transparent. Just like you should with like your wife or girlfriend. You're like, let's talk about like what type of life that we potentially want and let's be very open about that. So I think that that like creating that like let's just be very clear about and we'll acknowledge it. it will change. So I think it creates a great version of that. But Joe's also 42, I think. He's older than me. And so I would think that at that age, he has a little bit of solidified the

values that he stands for. And so it was helpful. I think if I did that exercise when I was 24, it would not have been good. In fact, I did do that exercise when I was 24? And it sucked. I said I wanted, you don't want to know what I said I wanted when I was 24? I said, I want 10,000 employees. I go, wouldn't it be awesome? We had 10,000 employees. And then I hired three people. And I'm like, It went out the window. I'm like, yeah, that's a note for me, dog. Like, then we're going to work. So I think if you're a little bit older and you have some experience,

you might know a little bit more you want. But when I was younger, no, that wouldn't have worked. My thinking on this is the Buffett thing of you want some, a partner with energy, integrity, and intelligence. I think that's the like core thing I look for at least, which is basically in order. Energy is the easiest to spot. And it's the easiest one to try to write off.

if somebody doesn't have it. Meaning, seems like a nice to have. It's actually not a nice to have for me. It's a must have for me. And so energy is the first one that shows up, and it's the easiest one that I've tried to talk myself out of with certain people, and that's been a mistake every single time I've done it. Who have you worked with?

That's high energy and almost exhausts you because you're like, I can't keep up. Sully's like that. He's super high energy, but not in an exhausting way. I get energy from that, so it's all good. I don't mean exhausting like they wear you out, but you're like, oh my God, dude. Like you're almost hard to keep up. You move so fast.

That's inspiring. Yeah, everybody that, yeah, but it's in a good way. Yeah, I mean it in a good way. And that they bring their own energy to the table. I'm not bringing it out of them. Ben is a fun. So Ben, believe you, who's my current business partner on the surface when you meet him, he's a more quiet guy.

He's more reserved. He's not like, he doesn't come across like this huge booming personality. but Ben's got that energy where he comes out for him like through text message or through like he'll just wake up and do something or he can't sleep at night because he's thinking about something so energy reveals energy is not just being a wacky flailing arms guy it's do you have the are you driven yourself do you take action quickly do you think about things all the time or are you am I trying to force you to am I dragging your brain into the conversation and do you get excited about things are you when an opportunity rises does your do you shift gears up

So energy is the first one. Then it's intelligence or competence, which is like, what are they great at? Oh, this person's great at selling. This person's great at building. This person's great at just pushing the ball forward every day, whatever it is. And then the last one,

which is integrity is the hardest one to get a feel for, which is how is this person going to treat me when they have the opportunity to be selfish? Will they be selfish when they have the opportunity to be selfish? And it's very, very hard to know that. You can kind of only talk to people they've worked with before or ask them questions and try to see if they're pretty honest about that. and then I just work with them on something first before we commit.

So it's like, we have that conversation, sure, but let's like, and I would always trade an experience for a belief. And if I can have an experience working with you on something for three weeks, that's going to be way better than me trying to take a leap of faith on a bunch of things you said or you wrote down in a Google Doc. Did you just make up that word or that phrase? Tony Robbins special, baby. Oh, I was going to say, that's yours now. Do you, what, how late into the evening are you working on business stuff versus family time or fitness or whatever else there is? I basically, I work out in the middle of the day. I work about 2 p.m.

So it's basically like I've done, I've done enough where I could stop working. I wake up and I work. I wake up, I do my morning routine. Then I work. And then I take a break to work out. And then I'll either just, if I've done enough that day, I'll just play with my kids. I'll start playing with them and just hang out. if I have it, I'll do another hour or two of work.

And then I do family time till they go to bed. So they're usually fully asleep, 830 or 9. And then I chill out slash work one of the two. They're both kind of the same to me. So sometimes it's just like watching a show. Sometimes it's working or reading something. And I'll do that till 11 or 12 and I go to go to sleep. But between that 11 or between kids going to sleep and you go to bed,

are you on the phone talking to people ever? no no no that's me time that's me on the internet I'm not talking to people no I've got a bunch of friends who are like that and they'll like even with my wife she'll try to talk and I will be like I'm doing no talking that's my friend I'm doing no talking right now it's a it's a nice way of saying like I don't want to talk to you

I'm doing no talking there's like this thing there's like this like unspoken rule at my house where like at eight or nine when she wants to like ask me like hey what dates do you want to go to this place and I just mumble. I go, uh, that means like, dude,

I just shopped at IKEA all day. I'm overwhelmed. I can't look at anything. I can't think. Don't ask me a date. I'm not thinking about anything. You know, what we've been doing lately?

It's fucking Legos. Have you ever done Legos? I've never done Legos. I have a whole separate pod topic about adult Legos because I think it's a thing. And you're one of those. So we should actually do a full segment on it. I'm so into it. I'm so into it.

That's all I'll say. I just got into it in November. I'm a Lego guy now. We're going to talk about that next time. I got to jump. This has been good. This is the pod. That's the pod.

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