My First Million - 4 dumb ideas that made people rich

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

Get a list of 100+ side hustle ideas to make $: https://clickhubspot.com/dha Episode 788:  Sam Parr ( ⁠https://x.com/theSamParr⁠ ) and Shaan Puri ( ⁠https://x.com/ShaanVP⁠ ) talk about simple $1M businesses that anyone could do.  Show Notes: (0:00) Fun Party Hats (7:58) Star Registry (18:29) 10-hr fireplace (26:39) Don't get bored of greatness (36:23) Receiving feedback (42:46) Billy of the Week: John Catsimatidis, Supermarket Baron (55:14) the billionaire tax (1:00:18) Shaan takes his son courtside — Links: • Foam Party Hats - https://foampartyhats.com/  • Star Naming - https://star-naming.com/  • Brain.fm - https://www.brain.fm/  — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com  • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies! Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC • I run all my newsletters on Beehiiv and you should too + we're giving away $10k to our favorite newsletter, check it out: beehiiv.com/mfm-challenge — 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 • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano /

Sam, I have a list of what I'm calling dumb ideas that made a million dollars. These are obscure lists that really only people like you and me would ever even keep. But I have a list of dumb ideas that actually worked. 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. I say dumb, not because I think they're dumb. I actually think they're genius because I think being clever and doing simple things is actually a form of genius. but I think other people would call these dumb ideas.

So I want to run through them with you. And I want you to give me your reaction to each one. All right, let's hear it. All right. First one came up. I was watching the NFL playoffs, which were on this weekend. I don't know if you've paid any attention,

but like the Chicago Bears, who have sucked for a long time, are in the playoffs. And Chicago has this rival, the Green Bay Packers. And the Packers have been great for a long time, and the Bears have sucked for a very long time. And so it's like kind of a rivalry

just by, like, location, but they're not really, they're not really like close rivals. And so I'm watching the game and I look and in the crowd, I just see a ton of people wearing, like, I don't know how much you know about football, but do you know what the Packers fans wear on their head? Yeah, cheeseheads. Cheeseheads. So what do the Bears fans wear? I don't know. Helmets? Cheese graders. And so I see all these fans wearing this like silver cheese grater hat. And I'm like, oh, that's clever. Like, we're about to shred the green boot packets.

We're going to shred the cheese heads. And I'm like, this is really smart. So I'm starting looking at, what's the story behind this? And the story behind this is kind of crazy. So if you go to foam party hats.com, this business started in 2017. So Grace Rojas and her son Manuel Rojas, they create this thing.

And they had actually for like, you know, 15 years, they had just for fun, been making, like, fun party hats. Like, I think for their own daughters, like, party, they made fun party. hats for all the guests, people loved it, and they kind of gave it up, and then they moved, and then they, like, started again. And they're like, we're going to make these foam hats for special events, parties, occasions, and sports. And so they've been kind of like trucking along. They got on Shark Tank, and they gave up 25% of their company for 100 grand, right? So, like,

did they really? Yeah. And, you know, birthdays, wedding, corporate events. They had all these, like, novelty hats. and then came the boom. So this greater head thing has just taken off and become this viral frenzy. So like basically the Bears, they have this coach.

I don't know if you've seen this guy, Ben Johnson. He's kind of got like if San Paul was into football energy a little bit. He's basically this young coach who's supposed to be really, really smart.

He's super like ripped. So every time in the post game he'll like in the locker, he just like rips off his shirt, which like most of the old, like 70-year-old coaches would never do. And he gets his team like really fired up. But he gives the game ball to this guy who comes out,

and I don't know if he can see this, but he's getting this wide receiver DJ Moore. He's wearing the hat. And so he's wearing this. This guy, DJ Moore, and he starts dancing. The whole team starts chanting, go DJ, go DJ. There's a little Wayne song. He starts dancing.

This clip goes viral, right? This has 2.2 million views. And suddenly, these hats are flying off the shelves. And they do like 10,000 orders in a week, which is like half a million. in a week. They have this huge wait list now, the huge backlog, because they make these by hand, apparently. And this idea of, like, team-specific novelty merch. Because, like, sports fans, like when I went to that Warriors game, I walked out, I bought my son a jersey, a little ball,

but it's, like, all so, like, vanilla. It's all cookie cutter. It's like the same things over and over again. But with social media, the teams now have little, like, trends, little meme moments. and if you can fast follow those meme moments and create stuff that's going to like kind of make somebody laugh or be worth sharing on social media, you can actually get a lot of spread. And so that's what this company's been doing

with these hats and going viral. So they've built basically a million dollar plus business now off of these like novelty foam hats. Isn't that wild? They do a really good job of making me into the story. Like it looks like it's a like a Hispanic like family and looks like the son is kind of the CEO and the mom is like one who is the brains

and kind of came up with the idea and originally made it. It looks pretty awesome. Yeah, but I think if somebody takes this idea, there was another company, like a T-shirt company. I can't remember the name, but they were doing this for sports teams where they realized like the drop shipping infrastructure has become so good

that if anything happens in the game like last night, within an hour after the game, they can have the store up for that product, for that slogan for that thing. Linsanity happens in New York. And then they go, they have like the Linsanity line ready to go. And so I forgot what the name of this company is,

but they're basically like rapidly, like much faster, like orders of magnitude faster than the typical like merch industry, creating team specific moment specific merch. And I just think that's like a, it's not the best business, not a business I would want to be in. But it is like a simple man's business.

Like anybody can understand what they're doing and be able to like try to replicate that. And if you niche down, even all the way, forget T-shirts like to giant oversized foam hats. It's like there's a million-dollar business sitting in oversized foam hats, which is pretty wild. All right. Ready for the next one? Yeah, that was a quotable last line. There was a million-dollar business sitting in an oversized foam hats.

All right. So a lot of people watch and listen to the show because they want to hear us just tell them exactly what to do when it comes to starting or growing a business. And really a lot of people who are listening, they have a lot of people who are listening. a full-time job and they want to start something on the side, a side hustle. Now, a lot of people message Sean and I and they say, all right, I want to start something on the side. Is this a good idea? Is that a good idea? And again, what they're really just saying is just give me the ideas. Well, my friends, you're in luck. So my old company, The Hustle, they put together a hundred different side hustle ideas and they have appropriately called it the side hustle idea database. It's a list

of a hundred pretty good ideas, frankly. I went through them. They're awesome. And it gives you how to start them, how to grow them, things like that, gives you a little bit of inspiration. So check it out. It's called the side hustle idea database. It's in the description below. You'll see the link. Click it. Check it out.

Let me know the comments, what you think. All right, here's the next one. So, as you know, a long time ago, I was running a business called birthday alarm.com. This was a business started by Michael and Zocchi Birch. It had been going for 20 plus years, printing millions of dollars a year. It was one of the earliest viral businesses ever. So I think Birthday Alarm has had like 50 million plus members with zero marketing spend because Michael is one of the pioneers of viral marketing. And so he understood how to how to get this business to grow virally.

How much revenue has this done over the course? It's 20 years old. Yeah, I think he says more than that. It's probably 25 years old now. And so has this done like 100 million over 25 years? Probably not 100. Probably like over 50. So maybe 75 million is my guess.

Wow. So, and hyper profitably, by the way. Like, that's like, that's not just, revenue is profit for a business like this.

So three million every year for 25 years, ish. Not exactly, but yeah, average. Let's say average two to three. Okay.

Wow. Amazing. Because the business model is very simple. So it's reminders for your friends and families birthdays. Fantastic. And then I was like, but that the reminders are free.

So you make the money when people pay to send a card. And I remember when we were trying to like grow the business or revitalize the business. I was brainstorming ideas with him and I was like, you know, I try not to be too smart. So I always just like, what's already working or has worked in the past or is working for other people? And so that was my first question. Before I tell you any of my bad ideas, tell me about some

things that are already proven to work. And he goes, you know, at the beginning, these guys approached us with this goofy idea that I thought was a total scam. He's like, but I think they've actually made even more money than we did without the 50 million members. And I go, what is it? He goes, it's this thing called the International Star Registry. Oh my gosh. I have heard of this. And so he goes, they let you for like a special occasion for your friend, you know, a friend's birthday or whatever. You can gift them their name on a star.

You can name a star in the universe after your friend. It'll tell you the star. It'll tell you the location of it. And for the low price of $25, that star is yours. Technically, not technically yours at all. Not even officially named. Just named in our book. that we're going to keep in our office.

And so these guys have been printing millions of dollars for also 20 plus years, just naming stars after people. And this got popular. It was like it's been referenced in movies. It was like in a walk to remember. They like someone is dying. They name a star after her. Like it's this emotional, sentimental thing.

And I love it because it's a pure play marketing product. There is no product. Like you don't get to have the star. They don't, you know, there's nothing, nothing changes hands. It's literally not even officially naming the star after them. It's literally just we are going to write it down in our book permanently. It's like something I would trick my kids with. What's really funny is if you Google Star Registry,

you can see they're buying ads against each other. There's like dozens of these companies, which begs the question like, you know, like whose book is like the more permanent book? But is this the one that was founded in 1979? Yeah, 1979, when like kind of space was hot and the moon. and all that. So you get a certificate, you get a map of where the thing is, and you get to have that forever in their book. And so the funny thing is like they are like kind of the details of this,

which I think are like pretty funny. You know, think about it from a marketing point of view. How do you legitimize this, you know, frankly, illegitimate thing? And what they did was they basically like, they made their book so official. They're like, it's placed in the library of Congress. and we store the official book in a Swiss bank in a vault. And you write like just leveraging like prestige. Like are any of those things impressive? Like how do you get a book into the library? Like you probably donate a copy.

Like one of my favorite copywriters, Joe Sugarman, wrote this famous ad for Cassio watches. And he asked the guys who made the watch, who was like, explain to me how this watch is made. And they say, well, we use a quartz movement. And then we use this type of aluminum. And he goes, hold on. Did you say quartz movement?

and they go, yeah, it's like a movement that every $10 watch uses. He's like, but tell me more about quartz. And he finds out what quartz means. And then he's like, tell me about the steel. He's like, yeah, or this metal. He's like, oh, it's just aluminum. It's just like, you know, we use it. This pen company uses it.

Hell, even like NASA uses it. Did you just say space grade aluminum? And so if you read this old ad for the Cassio watch, he was like made with the same aluminum that space grade. Or it's like, it's space-grade aluminum. It is called that because NASA uses it on their rocket ships to make it so strong. With the quartz movement, which is the most precise movement, it's the same thing that Rolex uses or like something like that.

And so he like took like a truth and made it sound a lot cooler than it is, sort of like in a Swiss bank account. It took a fact and he made it value. By the way, I think this is the, what's that thing called the Rorschach test, or whatever, the ink blot, and you're like, is this a buddy rabbit or a serial killer, right? Like, to me, that's, what you just described is the thing for this podcast.

It's like, if there was, like, a speakeasy and you had to come in and, like, we had to decide who gets in and who gets out, I'd tell this Joseph, this Sugarman story, and I'd be like, do you find that amazing or repulsive? They're like, well, that's bullshit. And you're like, cool, you should, you should just head to the next bar.

And if they're like, that's amazing, how do I do that? Like, come on in. Welcome to MFF. That's pretty good. How long, do you ever look up who owned this company? Do they have like some crazy story like Michael Birch? Yeah.

So it was owned by this Canadian advertising executive, but only for like a year. I think he like passed away two years later. And then this mom of 12 who gifted a star to her husband loved it, finds out that like the business is like, you know, for sale. She buys it. And then they've grown it as a family business. Now her son is the operator of it or something like that. So this mom of 12 did it Which by the way, if you're a mom of 12

You're hired You're capable of doing anything If you can be a mother of 12 I don't know what Navy SEAL training is like It does not compare it to being a mother of 12 Dude on their On their on their It's called starregistry.com on their about us page

They explain how they're democratizing The Cosmos and all this stuff And then they have a line that says Do not be fooled by the impostors And it's this those other guys. It's this big paragraph that says in the vast experience of celestial

naming, there are also imposters seeking to capitalize on the allure of the stars. Numerous companies have attempted to copy us and they go on to say why they are the more official one. It's pretty funny. Snake oil salesman says other guys' oil is terrible for you. Yeah.

Did I tell you how he came up with this idea? No. Michael had a, they were both, I think, working at an insurance company. And he's like, we were making really good money because he's like, computers were new. And like not many people knew how to do programming for computers. The internet was new. Insurance companies needed somebody who could do like database programming or whatever. So he's doing that.

I think he told me they were making like a really good salary, like maybe like 200 grand a year, maybe combined. Maybe the two of them. I don't know. They were doing well. So the internet boom starts. It's kind of like 1998, 1999. and he's like, what am I doing sitting here at an insurance company? I got to be a part of this, which I'm sure today many people feel that way about AI and,

you know, the way the robotics and the way the world is going. So his friend sends him a site a link to, you know, some friendster or something like that. He's like, wow, this is incredible. I got to get in there. I got to start doing things. And so he decides, I'm going to create a self-updating address book. So like, you know, today, this is still an unsolved problem, by the way. Sam, you move.

I don't have your new address. I have to keep asking you for your address. I don't know when you move. So he had this idea. Well, the way it should work is when Sam moves, he changes his address once and it changes automatically. And anybody who he's already accepted, like to have his address,

like it changes for everybody. A great idea. Still a great idea. This is the idea that he had many, like Sean Parker, you know, who's famous from the social network and, you know, Facebook. He tried to start a company doing this too. Like a bunch of smart people have been like,

we're going to solve this problem. It just turns out people don't really care enough to do it. But he's building this thing. It's called Lemon Link. He's like, you know, the best thing that ever happened was he's like, we had no money. So he's like, I'm the programmer, I'm the designer, I'm the product manager, I'm customer service. I'm the janitor. I'm everything, right?

Because there's nobody else. And he told his wife, when he quit his job, he's like, give me three months to try this computer thing and like this internet thing. And like, if it doesn't work three months, I promise, like, we'll go back to having a job. Because I think they were like pregnant with their second or third job. kid. And so it was like, you know, not not super like stable time to just quit your job. Well, two years goes by and he's like, I'm so close. I just keep, I need another three months. I just let me keep going. So he's still trying. He's doing customer service and Lemon Link is not growing. He's like, the only thing I'm getting in customer service is basically like shut down my

account. I don't need this. Or, hey, thanks for that birthday reminder. You saved my butt, you know, because he's like, I added this one feature in addition to the address thing, like, oh, by the way, like save their birthday too and I'll tell you when it's their birthday. That's a good feature. And he's like, I kept seeing that. And this was pre-Facebook so people didn't have

an easy online way to know when their friend's birthday was. And so he realized, oh, this is a thing. And that's, that was the, because he was doing customer service and because he finally faced reality, which is like, nobody wants my idea, but they do seem to want this. Then, you know, overnight he creates birthday alarm.com. And like, within a couple of weeks,

weeks, he gets like 10,000 members. And he's like, oh, my God. He's like, this was, because he figured out a viral loop. And he's like, there's, he's like, to this day, you know, that was still the best feeling that, but even before we made any money, getting to 10,000 members. Like, that was, that was crazy. It's pretty crazy he had the audacity to stop working on that and work on Bebo. Like most everyone else would say, all right, birthday alarm. How do we make anniversary alarm? How do we do this? How do we do that? It's working and it starts making a little bit of money, not much, but a little bit of money. and his friend Morgan sends him a link to Friendster at the time. And he's like, oh, of course.

People are going to want to like, this internet thing, it's not just looking up information. They're going to want to like talk to their friends and post photos about each other, you know, like stuff like that. Like that makes total sense. So he created a, before Bebo, he created a Friendster like product. It goes viral again because he really understands virality. But he's losing money because,

the more members that sign up, the more his bandwidth costs. And at the time, social networks didn't have any way of making money. Like today, Facebook is known for like Facebook ads. There was no ads at the time.

And so there was no ad network. Nobody had ever done that before. Nobody knew how to make money off of those things. So he went to a meetup and he sold the business to James Courier for like two million bucks. And he was like, and he went and worked for them for a year.

And then kind of like as social networking was maturing, he's seeing what MySpace is doing. He's like, oh, okay, I think I know what I should be doing. I learned even more about virality here. Now I'm going to go start Bebo. Then he started Bebo. That was the one that took off.

And that was like in two or three years, he grew it from nothing to like an $800 million exit, right? I'm not sure how many years. Yeah, three, four years probably. Like very short. Yeah. What a baller. Damn.

And now he's just the sole proprietor of a little birthday alarm.com. Just a mom and pop shop. Yeah, just trying to make it, make a end's beat. Today's episode is brought to you by HubSpot. know that most businesses only use 20% of their data, that's like reading a book, but then tearing out four-fifths of the pages. Point is, you miss a lot. And unless you're using HubSpot, the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business, the insights that are trapped in emails, call logs, transcripts, all that unstructured data makes

all the difference, because when you know more, you grow more. And so if you want to read the whole book, instead of just reading part of it, visit HubSpot.com. I have one more, very dumb idea that I admire for its simplicity. So, you probably are a subscriber to this YouTube channel. Can you just type in 10-hour fireplace? Of course. I mean, everyone is, aren't they? So what you will see, describe what you see when you type in 10-hour fireplace and then click their YouTube channel. They have done a very good job of naming it. So I see, oh my God, I didn't realize it was that big. Okay. Holy moly. Okay, so obviously it's what you guys expect. It's a 10-hour video of a fireplace with 157 million views.

Exactly. There's how many videos on this channel, Sam? So they posted this 10 years ago, and shockingly, they have 120,000 subscribers, and there is one video. And it is, it's so funny. There's, like, points in the video that, you know how when you scroll over YouTube, there's points where it spikes? Like, where the viewers are, like, why is this? Or the viewers are just loving it?

Yeah, like, why is it? So I don't look at the most replayed section. Oh, they don't even add logs. They don't even add logs to the fire. It must be like a 30-second loop just down over and over and over again. Like there's parts where it spikes. You see the part at five hours and 55 minutes? Thrilling.

Everybody knows about that part. Oh, the top comment, bro's a millionaire. Bro is a millionaire because this guy is a channel was started by one person in Romania. It's a channel with one video. So this guy just hit it and quit it. This is the one-hit wonder of the business world. he posted one video of a 30-second loop of a fireplace, or I don't know if it's a 30-second loop,

but a 10-hour video of a fireplace crackling, and this guy made a million dollars in Romania. And did he try to follow it up with another video and then turn it into an empire and then create it? No, he just put the video up and let it run, baby. I admire this, I admire the restraint, maybe more than I admire the ingenuity. Dude, have you noticed on YouTube what's been going on

with these types of things. So I don't know. I guess what can call it an ambient channel. Let's call it these. Let's categorize them as ambient channels. I like, I love ambient channels. I listen to like the weird music.

Yeah, it started as white noise. There's this company called Brain FM. Do you know Brain FM? Yeah. I love Brain FM. So they make some of my favorite noise. Just great noise. I was a paying subscriber to Brain FM years ago.

Oh my God. So I love Brain FM. But then I started going down the rat hole of other music. So there's like, they call it like, is it like Lofi Mac Miller? It's basically just Mac Miller. For some reason, I don't know how I got to. I like, I like Mac Miller, but not enough that I would think you'd start popping up on my channel. So it's tons of like lofi Mac Miller, which I love. But what I'm noticed is that there's basically like a quadrant or like a huge graph where it's like let's do old money. Let's do 1980s. Let's do this. And then it's like now select country. So for example, I keep getting targeted with old money Brazil or 1980s finance or like it's like and they create the best AI thumbnail. So type in old money Brazil music. Old money Brazil music. Trust me. It's so strange. All right.

I see this gentleman in this nice suit with a cigar and old money Brazil, elegant boss an nova, timeless luxury instrumental playlist, 74,000 views. I get targeted with so many of these. There was another one where it was like... You get targeted or you select? You beg for them. You make the algorithm. So, yeah, like, if I see that image, it might click. First we shape our algorithm, then our algorithm shapes us, the old Winston Churchill.

But then there was, like, there's even crazier ones where it's like greedy American Revolution. Like, I don't know, like, like, locked in American Revolution or something like that. Like, it's like, it's crazy how, like, specific they get, but they basically just take, like, like... You're joking. This is real. 90 minutes of American War Revolutionary Music. Liberty song, playlist.

And they like, do you see like a good one? Oh, define good, bro. I've never going to click any of these. Like, the thumbnails are so funny. Like, I'll have to find a different one, but the thumbnail. I tweeted out the other day. I was like, the thumbnail gods have been smiling. on me. And it's like an American Revolution

like music, but the best thumbnail ever. And I keep getting targeted over and over and over again. These guys are must be doing well. You you've never seen these? Well, I've seen just a normal low-fi, so like Lo-Fi Girl, for example. Lo-fi Girl, I think, is probably the biggest

channel in this category. 15 million subscribers, two and a half billion views on the channel. making about a hundred grand a month on this channel right now and that's just that's like one channel.

Right now she's live. There's 30,000 people just listening to this right now while we're recording this. It's the best. So look at the... Why don't we just do this? It sounds awesome.

Why are we talking? Look at the thumbnail that I sent to you. Oh, this is incredible. What is this? Explain what you see. I mean, I don't even have a word for this. It looks like, you know, like, what's the painting at the top of the Sistine Chapel where like the naked man's reaching out to like God and their fingers are about to touch? It looks like that guy, but he's got his dukes up like he's about to fight and he's like a hairless naked man with like half a mullet and it just says classical music that goes hard.

Yeah, or I'll see them where it looks like paintings like that and they're giving like the shocker sign. And so I just get like so many of these. And I think it just there's like this weird underground world. There's that underground world and there's the underground world of the comments. So if you look at MFM's comments, people can't see this. But on the back end, we've tried to ban them where it's like, I can't believe no one has been why hasn't anyone blessed me before? Like they've just blessed me after I read this book called like, you know, Millionaires Are Us.

Like, or it'll be like, I totally agree with this video. And it's so funny that this video that you guys start making these points because I read, I read about this exact thing and the Millionaires Are Us. book by this person who's a total saint. Dude, this is, I, those guys are like the bane of my existence, by the way. Same. It's the worst.

I just sit there and, like, manually try to get rid of them. Have you seen this guy, uh, Yang Munn on Instagram? It's like an AI monk. And he's got this, like, healing guide. He's got a million people. I'm so into it. He's got, like, one to two million followers.

And it's a monk who's just doing, like, talking head, um, advice videos. And then he sells a healing guide. And again, it's like, you know, it's a guy who's like, you know, it's a kid who's 17 with like the broccoli haircut who had just moved to Miami and he's in a house with seven other guys and they're all creating these accounts that are like, there's one of just elderly. It's sold on whoop. You know, what's that thing called Wop or Wop where you buy like financial newsletters? If you go to his, if you go to Yang Mun's link tree, you click off. Because that's what a monk would do, right? He would be on Wobb. The ebook, time to heal, young man. I thought it's like things you might love, that it's like newsletters that it's like 10x your wealth with this stock tip. Yeah, but people are doing this.

They're doing this with fake grandparents. So they have like an account that's like wisdom from like grandparents, but they're all AI. And it's like what I wish I knew when I was younger. Like the one thing, you know, the love that got away and they just post content like that. They're just printing views right now. Dude, this stuff gets me every time. It sucks. I love this stuff.

I fall victim to this worse than like. a grandparent falls victim to like buying the top listing on an Amazon like like every birthday for every like every like every gift giving experience at my house right now from grandparents it's like you guys all just typed in by kids bike and bought the exact same thing. All right. I got to show you one more. This is the best one. All right. So I'm on YouTube the other day. And you know when the algorithm just like has a commissional and five star, you know, experience for you. So this is one. The most intense shoe salesman you'll ever. meet. It's a CBS News archive from 1983. There's shoe store here in Sharon, Pennsylvania is just, you know, a shoe store. Oh, no. That's the playing field of a champion. Here he comes now, out of the bullpen, the hottest pitcher of a retail shoe game today.

Big number one, Larry Jolton. 11 C, come on up. All right. So this video is of this guy, Larry Jolted, who was the number one shoe salesman in America. And he sold, this is back in 1983. He sold $400,000 worth of shoes at this physical shoe store himself by hand. It's in Pennsylvania. It's some like Raers or some like that. It's a famous shoe store. And so he was the number one hustler. And this video is amazing because they just show him. I want to see. The hook is great. I'm in. I'm bought it. Here you go.

I wouldn't go any big on that. That's a nice dress, you're 20% off. Like a light better? I do too, especially for the summertime. Listen to me. You order the two shoes, whatever color you want. If it comes in, it don't fit it. You don't like it.

You're not obligated to take. Big day, clean it up. Larry Jolten is the sigh young of his time, the best of the big league shoe pitchers. There are only 38,000 feet in Sharon, Pennsylvania. Last year, Larry Jolten sold 423,000. thousand dollars worth of shoes. It's going to be busy today, fellas.

I can feel it. I can feel it. It's going to be busy. His stats make him the MVP, the officially recognized champion shoe salesman. It's not bad to one, I thought. All right, so watch this. So they show him doing his thing,

and there's a couple of amazing parts. There's, all, I'd say, one is, he's like, I'll, he's like, he's like, the worst thing in the world is someone leaves without a shoe. He's like, that's not going to happen on my watch. So he's serving like four or five customers at once. And he's like, he's basically like selling him on like, it's about not about the size.

It's about the fit. He's got all these like go-to slogans. And he's like, that's a good looking shoe right there on you. And then he'll, he'll like deliver them to their house. He's like, I'll deliver to your house. I'll deliver to your office. I'll find you on the street. I'll give you the shoes. Don't worry. And he's like, if you have a problem, you just give right back to me. I'm Larry. And then he, they show like he never takes a lunch break. He's eating a burger. You have to keep up your strength because sometimes the game goes into actually. trannings. He's just eating a burger in the back. He stores it. He just has a burger in the shoe rack where he finds the sizes. He just takes bites as he's running back and forth to get customers the shoe size. This is awesome. He's like, and then he's like, you know, he's like, he's like, he's like his sales philosophy. So he's like, you don't want to be the nice guy. He's like, you know, you got to, some people just want to be told. They want to be told what they need. And he's like, you know, they come in. They think their shoes is size eight and a half. They're walking around with cramped feet all the time. He's like, you got to give him a size 10. He tells the story about this guy, like, didn't know what he wanted.

He's like, the customer doesn't always know what they want. You got to help him. And he's like, yeah, that's the art of shoe sales. But just his overall energy. And when he's, like, walking around the bullpen, like, he's like, got to be big day today, boys. Got a lot of shoes we got to move today. And, like, all the other shoe sales have been, like, clearly don't care.

And, like, this is a very inspiring video about just, like, being the best. Just championship mentality in anything you do. Dude, so he died this year, which is, uh, He died this year in his obituary. It goes in depth about how he was on that show and a bunch of other shows. And he said he was the National Shoe Retailers Association named him Salesman of the Year in 1983, 84, 85. They say he was a larger than life figure.

This guy's awesome. He's incredible, right? I love this guy. I love this man. Larry's a Salt of the Earth type of guy. If you're going to do anything today, you bring that Larry Jolton, energy, that championship mindset to whatever you do. You'd sell whatever you sell the way Larry sold shoes today, all right?

That's the final word here. Have you ever studied sales? Like, I imagine, if I had a guess, you did something, you and I have behaved similarly, which is like, we're pretty charismatic that we think. That's all it takes. But then I've hired salesmen before and sales women before, and I've, like, seen the difference between a really, like, a winning one and a pretty good one. And it's just like a total, like the greats have both the talent and this thing that I'm going to

describe. But the second thing that they all have to have is process where, like, They know that saying this gets that. It's like such a mouse in it, finding a cheese type of energy where it's like the really good ones just kind of blindly, oh, that worked. No ego. I'm just going to do that. Oh, I just threw that thing out there.

That caught. That got a laugh. Doing that one. Like they follow like this process. Guys like you and me actually suck at sales. And the reason we suck at sales is because we want to use charm, charisma, charisma, talent, whatever. And they, you know, people, the best people, you know, the best people, you know, use process. And even the reason we actually suck isn't even because we can't adapt that.

Because over time, we're like a problem solver. Like it's a puzzle. Oh, I got to do this. And then that gets me the solution I want. We would get bored doing that. The most impressive thing of this guy isn't that he sold $400,000 shoes, is that he just kept doing it year after year after year. He never got bored of it. I have this phrase I say now because every day when I do my workout, we start with this 10 minute routine where I basically like loosen up my IT band. it's like I do like a fascia release on my IT band, which is painful. It's boring.

It doesn't look cool. You don't feel like you're getting any stronger or more athletic. It's like the opposite of what you want when you go into a workout. But I need it. I need it because like I've had any injuries and I got to keep doing this. And you can't do it once twice. You can't do it for two weeks. You basically have to just constantly do this if you want to stay healthy.

If you're like if you're got sort of my leg condition. And now every day when I go in us, all right, boys. we're not getting bored of greatness today. Let's not get bored of greatness today, right? The Larry mentality of like, you can't get bored with doing the thing that leads to great results, even if it's the same thing you've done. You can't get bored. You can't become sort of nonchalant about it.

You can't become autopilot with it. You can't, like, cut the corner or cut it short because you already've done it before. Like, you have to do this. And that's when I'm coaching my team. It's the same thing. Like, we played a game the other day. And the warm ups, I knew we're going to kick this team's butt because their warm-up was so sloppy.

I was like, if they warm up like this, they're not going to be able to play at some high level because this tells me everything I need to know. I don't need to do a scouting report. It's over. And sure enough, we beat them by almost like 50 points. And it was, yeah, they didn't have a lot of talent, but they were shortcutting the process.

And so, and like, I just feel like that, like, getting bored of what gets great results is a real problem. It's been a real problem for me in my life. And I know that, like, for other people, if you're sort of like smart and talented, you get off on solving new problems and new puzzles.

it could become an Achilles heel. Dude, I'm always, I'm the big as a victim of these stories where, it's like a company does the small things right and it like levers up or levels up to the big thing. So, for example, have you heard of Rakuten? Yeah, I know them well. So Rakitin's a Japanese company. I think they're like the Amazon of Japan, right, ish. Yeah, it's kind of, it's retail, but then there's also like a big like discounting kind of component to it that I think,

like deals component to it that I think that Amazon doesn't really have. Yes, but it's just like a multi-billion-dollar huge, massive thing, whatever. And for some reason, I came along the founder, and I started reading about him, and they have a book because they're famous for having a culty culture. So the culture is, and he released a handbook on what their culture and what their values is. It's one of these things where it was supposed to be internal, and it was a hit, so now everyone reads it, or a lot of people read it. And he has, like, 30 rules or something of rackettin. And, like, rule number one is every Tuesday from three to four. everyone at every office throughout the world, you stop what you're doing and we clean. And we

refuse to have cleaners, hired cleaners. And his reasoning was that if we keep our desk clean, it's the same thing. You can, you already know what's going to, I'm going to say, you keep your desk clean. And you have a clean desk. You're going to have a clean mind. It's going to keep your discipline. Same thing. Like, you know, general, I forget what the general is who had the famous speech. Make your bed. Yeah. Yeah, was make your bed. And then there's all these other famous stories of like a coach of Indiana basketball or something like that who turns around the general. team and he's like, I started by teaching the front desk, kind of answer the phone. Tide the shoelaces, yeah.

Yeah, it's like these stories over and over and over again. I love all of them. I'm always, I'm always, I'm always into these. I don't know how often they are true, but I buy into it. Have you ever tried one of these things with your, I mean, it sounds like you're doing it with your basketball team, warming up, right? Yeah, we try. I mean, the hard part is to have the courage to actually live by it, right?

You could read the story back, ah, that's great, and that makes total sense. then you get into an environment where you've got all these people who they're not as bought into it they don't really care and are you going to really force it and are you really going to enforce it and how much of a standard really is it

and how many exceptions are you going to create and are you going to let your best player not do it or are you going to let a meeting get in the way of it right? It's all the compromises is where things get interesting and I have never gone to the extent where I'm like truly hardcore about it because I think it takes like

just a different level of leadership and courage that I personally don't possess. Let me reframe it for you. So in high school, I tweeted something the other day, but in high school, my freshman year of high school, first practice, I went to an all-boys school, first practice for cross-country. The coach gets up and he goes,

and it was like, I remember the Titans moment. He was like, I'm going to teach you guys something. We're not going to, I'm not here to teach you how to be the best runner. What I'm here to do this year is I'm going to teach all of you boys how to become men. And we're going to do it by learning how to run better. And he goes on to say, like, you know, we're going to like show up earlier than we anticipate.

We're going to like run when we don't feel like it. We're going to like go through the pain no matter what. We're going to stick around until the last person's finished because that's what we do with our teammates, you know, that the whole thing. And at the time, I kind of like laughed a little bit about it. But then I started buying into it. And it brought us all together. Our team did. And the cross-country team, my high school slew, you know, it's a nerdy sport, but we won all the time.

We always won. And he used to have this idea of like being great in how you're going to be a great man just via running. and we're going to teach you to do all these little small things, and it totally worked on our team. And it was awesome. And because of that, this coach has a very cult personality. We used to have this phrase, it was, tradition doesn't graduate. That was like, I still remember. Like, tradition never doesn't graduate. You know, like that.

He was like, I've been doing this since the 80s. Tradition doesn't graduate. You guys are going to graduate, but we've been doing this the same way, and it works. And I just remember all of these, like, culty lines. And we're talking high school across country. Nothing like significant, but it like meaningfully impacted me. And it was awesome. And so this type of like inspire you to be a better human being by teaching you how to work better or clean your desk better.

I love that story. My buddy Jason told me an amazing story like this. So Jason Hitchcock, I think you know Jason. He used to work at Bebo. And I was pretty hard on Jason or like I would give him feedback all the time. Like, hey, you got to do this. You got to do this. And like maybe it's because he was one of the non-engineers.

So I felt like, you know, there's only a few non-engineers. I'm going to tell you what I think. The engineers I don't really have as much to say because that's not my domain. and I noticed he took it really well, always, like incredible attitude. So I was doing a one-on-one with him, and I gave him credit for that. I was like, man, I think that you have just like a 10 out of 10 attitude at life and at work. And I just really respect that. And I know that, like, I give you a bunch of feedback, but you take it so incredibly well.

Like, you know, whatever. And he was like, I receive it. I go, what? And he goes, I don't take it. I receive it. And he goes, can tell your story? Like, where that comes from? I said, yeah, sure.

He goes, my freshman year, I'm a high schooler. and I wanted to play water polo. My brother was the captain of the water polo team, my older brother. And I thought I was like as good as him are going to be better than him. So I'm feeling myself a little bit. I'm like a hot shot.

And he's like, we get in the pool. And I guess like for water polo, like you're basically treading water while you're playing the sport, right? So it's kind of a hard sport. So during the warm up, you're probably not going as hard. So he's being a little sloppy

in the warm up where he's treading, but he's like, when he's throwing the ball, his like arm is like skimming the, it's like in the water still. It's not out of the water. Like you would want to, it to be if you were really playing in a game. And so the coach, the varsity coach walks by, he goes, Jason, get your arm out of the water. Keep your arm out of the water. And Jason's like,

yeah, yeah, thanks, coach. Keeps going. A couple minutes later. He's like, you know, being a little lazy again, does it again. Jason, keep your arm out of the water. And he's like, yeah, coach, sorry, I will. I'm just getting warmed up. He has something to say back to the coach. Coach blows the whistle. Everybody comes over. He goes, hey, everybody. I'm coach. I just want introduce you to Jason. Jason is a freshman. Jason is too good for feedback. Jason takes the gift of feedback and he does not care. He doesn't want it. He doesn't want your feedback. All right? And he basically pulled him aside. He like embarrassed him in front of everybody. Like Jason is too good for feedback. And he's like, look, Jason, feedback is a gift. If I'm going to give you that gift,

you got to receive the gift, right? Don't, don't just throw the gift away when I give you that gift. He is think of what it takes to give somebody feedback. You have to be kind of vulnerable. You're risking conflict. You have to care about making that person better. These are what it takes to give that gift. And so he was like, feedback is a gift. And so like at the whole company, that became like, you know, a mantra for us,

which is like feedback is a gift, which is really important because otherwise you can create a kind of defensive mentality or people shy away from saying something to somebody else. They'll only do it as a last resort. And that's not good. And so the feedback is a gift thing. like changed us. And it was a lesson from his high school water polo coach. But the story with the lesson is what we needed for like people to get it. I love stories like this. They always like get

me going. I, uh, you know, I distinctly remember we did a podcast a year ago where we were talking about, I think I was actually like motivating you. I think like you had said something like I haven't done anything like world changing, but I've been doing this thing. And I was like, whoa, whoa, why are you saying that? Like, who cares like if it's world changing? Like, you know, just just creating a small game that makes someone just a little bit happier is worth it. Like that's not, it's not necessarily less meaningful than anything else. And I sort of have grown to believe that to like work where high school sports are very insignificant. And yet it's like such a world changing experience for many kids. And I think that we need to take that same energy to work, which is like, you know,

we're making a podcast. That's fine. But like, let's even go something way less glamorous. We're making like B2B software. Like it's not that special. But like, You can learn how to be excellent here. You can learn how to follow through here. Like, you can learn how to, like, say you're going to do what you say and whatever. You can learn how to have this unearned pride where you make these tough decisions when no one is looking. And so I think that, like, that has carried over to, like, employees and how I've been working with my team. That's cool.

I like it. Sam's in his leadership arc. That's definitely the season you're in. You got to, like, start going by, like, Samuel or something. I feel like we need to upgrade the name. Everything. I think you need to reinvent your. yourself here actually. Father. Just father. So work everyone calls me father.

Told me called Sam. The just the same way the stargazing thing exists. There's this thing called Universal Ministries.com where you can sign up and get ordained as a minister. And I've had to do that. I've had to do that because I've officiated a couple weddings before. And it's all obviously a crack of bullshit. But I am a minister. So we could if we could go by a minister. So we could go by a minister. I am a legal witness. So. All right, let's take a quick break because I got to tell you a story. Let me tell me about the first time I tried to run payroll for my team. I was using a traditional bank and you know the type.

It's got a janky interface. It's built like a 2002 tax form and it was open only during business hours. And I hit send and it froze. They flagged the transaction. They locked my account. They put me on hold for 45 minutes and then they told me I got to visit my local branch. And that was the day I started looking for a new bank solution. After asking a few founders what they were using, I found out about Mercury.

And so now my payroll. is two clicks. I can wire money. I can pay invoices. I can reimburse the team all from one clean dashboard. That's why I use it for all of my companies. And so do 200,000 other startup founders. And so if you're looking to level up your banking, head to mercury.com and apply in minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group, column N.A and evolve bank and trust members FDIC. All right, Sean, I want to show you someone who's in the aviation business, in the grocery to our business and actually had a pretty important character in a movie Marty Supreme,

which recently just came out. Okay, I haven't seen the movie yet. Okay. Well, you know what it is, right? It's like the biggest movie going on right now. Timothy Salome and ping pong? I don't really. That's literally the only two words I know. That's it. Or as Adam Sandler says, Timothy Shalema. Like he like, have you seen that when he does that so good. Okay. So Google John Kat meadondis. All right, John the Big Cat. Here we go. Who am I looking at? American, okay, here's just the quick description.

American billionaire businessman and radio talk show host. He's the owner-president chairman and CEO of grocery chains. Gristeads. I've never heard of that. Di Augustine, the supermarkets and Manhattan. Okay, go ahead. $5 billion network. Yeah.

You never heard of this guy, have you? No. But he's a, this guy is the famous actor? Like, why does this guy look so familiar? He's a familiar face. He's one of these guys. He's sort of like the character in the dark night. who plays a police chief where you're like, you're like, I've seen this actor everywhere.

Well, what's his name? He's sort of has that type of energy. So here's the story. So I think he's 80 now. So he was born, I guess that would mean sometime in the 40s. And he immigrated as a baby from Greece. He came to New York. I believe he moved to Harlem. And then he was an okay student. Went to Brooklyn Tech, which I think New York is a pretty good school. But eventually actually got into West Point. So he's clearly smart, but didn't go, didn't decide not to go to school. And instead, he bought a small grocery store. So at the age of like 20, he convinced a failing grocery store to sell to him at like an owner financing type of setup where he didn't have to come up with a lot of money. But do you know anything about grocery stores?

They're like the hardest business to run. It's like no margin business, right? Yeah. It's a commodity. There's like there are no margin. So if you look at like the biggest grocery stores or at least some of the midsize grocery stores, like the regional giants, they do like three. percent margins. It's incredibly challenging. You have food that's going to spoil. And particularly back in the 70s when he was doing it, you don't have the most like the best systems to like make

sure your food's not going to spoil. Very hard. But he's a he's a dog. He's got that immigrant hustle and he's able to grow this business. I think it's something like seven years. So the time he's only 32. He has this cool quote that I found in newspapers.com in this old article where he grew the business to the point where he was making something like 40 million year in revenue had like 12 or 15 locations and he goes, I'm now paying myself at the age of, and this actually, he said this at the age of 28. He was like, I'm paying myself a million dollars a year. So through like just hustle and grind, like he kind of makes it work. And he does like a lot of like stuff that we take for granted now. Like his grocery stores, they were called Red Apple. They did free cash checking. They did free delivery.

It was a discount store. Like a lot of stuff that isn't particularly groundbreaking now, but he just like provided like a pretty simple service, but he did it really well. Now Red Apple, which is, I think they have like 100 locations in the city. They own Gristidis. Have you heard of Gristidis? No, is that like a New York thing? Yeah, these are all local things. But here's where it gets weird. So he does two interesting moves. So at the age of 32, I think it is, he was like, well, I was going to get into West Point. My dream was to be a pilot. I've never been able to do that. Gets his pilot license as an activity just for being for fun. And he does this move that I've actually heard Richard Branson do as well. He buys a jet and it's like kind of interesting and kind of fun. But then he's like, I got to turn this into a business.

I got to do something. And so he buys one plane, like a relatively small plane. He has a biography and it was just a Cessna, like nothing fancy. And he starts allowing customers to charter his plane from New York City to Atlantic City. And this is like in the 70s and the 80s. So like the airlines are still a little bit nascent, but it's still like pretty complicated. But he pulls it off. And he's able to.

So now officially he's in the aviation business. And like one thing leads to another. And it grows for like eight years. And eventually becomes like a fleet of like. 40 planes and jets, which eventually he sells to Warren Buffett. Yeah, Warren Buffett. And that is like one of the beginnings of net jets, which is one of Berkshire Hathaway's like Crown Jules, I believe. And so he was doing it as private charters, not like an airline like Branson. No, private charters. But he tried to get into the actual airline business and I don't think it worked out. Now, while all of this is going on, he's still

only like 33, 34, 35 years old. He does another crazy thing. He hears about an oil refinery, going out of business in Pennsylvania. And the grocery store business, it's a commodity, lots of unions, very low margins, 24-hour, like you have to be working 24 hours to make it work. And somehow, which I never would have thought this would have been the thing, he made the leap that they are comparable, and he gets into the oil business. And he finds an oil refining company, which do you know what that means? Not, I mean, not really.

They are a middleman in the oil process between drilling for the oil. and selling it to the end customer, is my guess? Not exactly. It's so, these are all very vague terms. So I had to like figure out, like, what exactly is oil refining? Basically, if I had to dump it down, they do two things. One, they have a massive pool or tank in the ground that can store tons and tons and tons of oil. So you drill the oil, it goes to this thing.

And it's not particularly useful. You can't use it. And so there's this process where you have to refine it. And you could take parts of that crude oil and turn it. into oil that you could use in cars, oil that you can burn as kerosene. You know, oil can turn into multiple products along the way. And that's what he did,

was he bought a business that did that, which is actually kind of ridiculous. Like, you never would have thought that that would have been a thing, but it works. And by the way, when you're reading about this or watching whatever you watched for this, is it, is he just like a gunslinger? Like, why is he going into all these different spaces?

He can't help himself? Does he have some aspiration? is he just, you know, he's just wired that way? Like, what did you get there as a sense of, like, why is this guy doing all? Why is he bouncing from, from totally different hard thing to totally different hard thing? This is why I wanted to bring him up. And so I think you and I will get a kick out of, like, people like him.

But let me just add that the last thing, he does two things now in his six, I think he's close to 80 now. In his 60s, he does two other wild things. One, he starts an AM radio station, political, like weekly radio. show, which he still is the host of. You can't find it on YouTube and you can't find it on Spotify. You literally only get this on AM radio and he records every single Sunday. And I have listened to it and like his co-host is this like Long Island guy who's like, hey, John, what do you think about this mom-doney guy? Like, it's hilarious. Like he's a very unrefined billionaire, I would say. And I mean

that in a cool way. And the second thing, the reason, or the second thing, or the second thing that he did was he ran for mayor in 2012, I think, and he almost won. And he was like, I'm going to be a mayor for the people in Harlem and the people in Wall Street. So he's this very, like, sort of salt of the earth, immigrant energy type of billionaire guy. But the reason why he's interesting is, A, what did that, what's that word that you have been obsessed with, generative? Yeah. He's very generative, but he does this in a way. You know, like, the charm that when Donald Trump is being like a nice guy, you know like the charm that he has where he's like, ah, screw it, let's just do it.

You know, what's money amongst friends? This like old-timey, like, like, what's a little? Like, you know, I'll take a little, you take a little. We all win. Like, this type of energy. My word is my bond. My word is stronger than oak.

This guy is actually that. He has that energy with him, but it's not, he doesn't, he's not hateful at all. So he's a Republican, but he talks very fondly of Obama and Hillary. Like, he's not a hater at all. And he's got this very folksy types of vibe.

And when you hear him, talk. He's got this thick New York accent, but it's very much a spit on my hand, shake your hand, type of energy. And I have found him very fascinating because that. And also, now his company, it's called Red Apple Polling Company, I think. They have like 8 or 9,000 employees. His family runs it. And I believe him and his kids, they own a building in New York City. They all live in the same building. They run this company together. And he's still like incredibly active, even at the age of 80. And he just constantly doing stuff. He's very interesting to me. And also, he looks very funny. And then he was just an actor. He just had a cameo. Was he playing himself? Or he was...

Listen to this. So, Marty Supreme, which is the hottest thing going. I went in salt the the other day. How is it? Like must watch. Okay. Where are we at? Did you see Uncut Gems? Loved Uncut Gems? Then you'll like this. So if Uncut Gems is a nine out of ten on the stress scale, Marty Supreme is an eight out of ten. And for people like me, if you're in my boat, you'll I hate it. I hated Uncut Gems and I hate Marty Supreme. Too much stress. Yeah, all the characters are pretty evil and there's no like redeeming qualities of any of them. But he, this guy, John, has like a pretty like interesting, like not minor character in Marty Supreme. And so I was like, this guy is everywhere. He's a man about town. He's just always doing stuff. And he just seems like sort of in that Jesse Itzler category of people who have fun while winning and doing well. And he's just a really fascinating guy to me. me. Dude, I'm reading this guy's Wikipedia and I'm like, wow, that's really amazing. Oh, that's really amazing. And then it's like, he gave a speech at the Stern School of Business expressing his unease about his daughter's graduating class. He said, 480 of the 580 kids are Asian, including

Indian. And that's scary when you think about it. We're going to deport most of these kids. So then I was like, oh, well, that may not be so amazing for, you know, like kick me right off this podcast. Did he really say that? I mean, I don't know, it's on the Wikipedia page. I didn't see that one, but I did see other things where I'm like, I couldn't tell if you were trying to be funny and it reads stupid or what. Right. Right. Yeah. It does, he does seem like he's an 80-year-old New Yorker who has a little bit of a big mouth. But my vibe, my read on him was that he was an all right guy.

But maybe, maybe I could be wrong. Well, we're swel assembling this list of what you call Capitol Men. And I feel like he would be one of the Capitol Men where he just takes money. goes into these sort of mavericks into new spaces creates new investments, new entities and a whole new industries and wins more off than not.

Doesn't win every time. You actually can't be a capital man if you have a perfect record. It kind of means you didn't not you weren't playing as as rough as you should have but wins more often than not. I feel like this guy's in that bucket. Yeah, I was reading his book and there seems

like a common theme. A lot of these guys there's one point in their life where they're just, what was the phrase, will you use? They're leveraged up to the tits. Like, they're just like crazy amounts of debt. What's the scientific turf? Derek from more plates, more dates, more plates, more dates. He always says, this guy's juice to the gills. And when I was reading about old Johnny Katz, I was like, this guy's, this guy's leveraged to the tits.

He's leveraged to the gills. And so, yeah, you have to pay the price to do a lot of this stuff. I love these young guys who are like have this gun slinging energy. So he is your, your Billy of the Week? Yeah. So the whole anti-Indian thing, I didn't know about that when I got into this. So this is a little, this is. Start to throw you.

Yeah. So I should have done a little capital J journalism. Otherwise, I was going to say we should invite him onto the pod. But I think, I think that probably won't be happening. Hey, we can still invite him. Let's see what happens. You should ask him about that quote. We'll just make sure we do it remote.

I don't disclose my location. I didn't realize he said that. What other dumb stuff did he say? He said a few dumb things. There's something about like, something about Hitler. I don't know. Oh, man. Classic blunder.

He compared raising taxes on the wealthy to how Hitler punished the Jews, which is. Yeah, that's probably not the best place you go to. A trap we've all fallen into. Yeah. I did read that line and I was like, oh, dude. Like, we have seen time and time again. that type of comparison, just people have tried to make it. Literally not once, has it ever worked.

Dude, I might end up being the richest man in California. Have you heard about this billionaire tax? Yeah, so is the gist of it that net worths will be taxed at 5%? Yes. One-time tax of 5% for billionaires. So all the billionaires are leaving, which will mean they'll just be like, okay, we'll move to the next class of people. Soon enough, I'll be the last man standing in California.

Yeah, I think that's a pretty stupid law. But at the same time, I'm like, isn't it crazy how little power a billionaire has if they have to leave their home? Roe Kana can bully you? Yeah, like, do you really have that much power? It's like another dark night reference. Have you seen when Bain is talking to the guy doing construction? And the little guy's like, I'm in control. And Bain puts his hand on his shoulder.

He goes, do you feel in control? Because, like, Bain is about to, like, snap his neck. That's sort of like. That's the 850,000 votes it takes, put this on the bill. That's sort of the energy that I'm feeling right now, which is like these billionaires being like, you know, where the big shots is like, you don't look like the bill is big shot. If you have to flee your home, that said, it is kind of a stupid rule because so like the analogy that I always use is let's say that you buy a Picasso painting for $5 at a garage sale. And turns out you didn't realize it, but you bought like, you know, a one of one rare piece of art. now your net worth is hundreds of millions of dollars or whatever the painting is worth.

How are you supposed to pay taxes on that assessed value? Yeah, it's complicated. I mean, you don't even have to go as far as the finding a Picasso at a garage sale example, which is, you know, that's more of an edge case. But like, you're a founder of a startup in San Francisco. You're on paper net worth is $200 million. But that's just because you just got a, you have an AI company that was hot and you raised around. doesn't mean you have that money.

That doesn't mean that that money is anywhere close to guaranteed for you, but you would be on the hook for the taxes the following year, which is pretty wild. All it'll do is just obviously going to drive the wealthiest people out, obviously drive the startup founders who want to get wealthy out, because why would you start here, and literally like, you know, strangled the golden goose of California. It's like, oh, yeah, you know, what did you achieve?

What did you accomplish with that? I read that, like, it said like 20 or 30 families have left, like prominent families. You should make a, like a public announcement. Oh, I'm leaving. The 31st. Yeah. Oh, what a great idea. That's hilarious.

That's like that one time that I tweeted that I was buying Bitcoin. And then it somehow got picked up by all the Bitcoin, like, magazines and newspapers. And there were like, executive, Sean Puri says he's moving 20% of his net worth into Bitcoin. And I'm like, I don't. think y'all know how small that net worth is. You know, like that, that's not magazine worthy. This has escalated far too quickly for me. I saw some guy on the line announced that he was leaving and everyone was making fun of them and they're like, you know, you're not, you're not important enough to like for us to care. Yeah. You own two duplexes. You didn't qualify for the

bill. All right. Is that what it is, by the way, a billion? Well, there was a proposal for 50 million. That didn't make it. Then they went to the billionaire tax because it's like, who's going to not vote for that? And so that's the one that's currently proposed. But people have done the math, like, even if you tax the billionaires, even if you took all the billionaires money, it doesn't like plug the whole of the California spending. It's like basically it's setting precedent for, it's kind of like income tax, right? Income tax I think was supposed to be this one time. What was the first one? Like 3%. It's like, there's a one time only 3% tax on income. like, don't worry, guys, it's okay.

And now, like, everybody pays income tax, you know, 20, 30, 40%, 50% of your income every year now. And so the idea would be once they set the precedent that they could just tax you on your property that you have not realized any gains on, then that's a problem. And if they could set the bar at a billion, then they could easily change it to change it or add. Well, also, if you're over $100 million, then you pay this. And also, if you're over $40 million, you're going to pay this. you know, they could sort of just continue on from there. I've always found it interesting how people come up with round numbers to make as the threshold. Like, so if I remember correctly, like I think like in the 1910 or 1920s, this idea of a millionaire

kind of came to be where like people were using the phrase millionaire, like, you're a millionaire, you've made it. And it's kind of funny that 100 years later, we still use that as like a threshold because a millionaire in 1920 would be something like 20 million today. I think it was 18 or 20x or something like that. And then billionaire, like, people are like, billionaires shouldn't exist. And I'm like, okay, but why one billion? Why not 800 million?

It just, I've always found that to be interesting how we like have settled on this perfectly round number. So yesterday, I took my whole basketball team, like the team I'm coaching to the Warriors game. And I like wanted to make like a special thing. So like after they won their last game on the locker room, you know, normally we're just sort of like saying like, you know, you did this well. you did this poorly. And then I was like,

want to do something for you guys. It's your birthday coming up. You guys want to go to a Warriors game. And then we went as a group and they got to go courtside and see Steph Curry. Like, it was cool. And you've just ruined all of their eligibility for going to NCAA by providing. I accidentally violated like HIPAA. Wait, how did you get courtside?

You just knew a guy, knew a guy? I don't know if he wants it to say. So I won't say his name. But yeah, no guy. He's with the team, ex-player. And so he was like, he just, just literally like waved his hand. He's like, I'll, I'll let them come down. And the security guards like, I guess if he's waving his hand, you can go. And I was like, yeah, me and these other

18 guys. And so we all went. But the anyways, it's part of a story. I had one extra ticket. So I took my son, who's four and a half years old. And, you know, taking a kid to a game like this, like his first basketball game, you know, we have to leave after the, you know, second quarter because it's like bedtime and I got to drive him back home. But on the drive back. So I'm hoping I'm going to have this amazing father-son time bonding. And I'm like wanting him to love him. Like, watch, that's the greatest shooter ever. Steph Curry.

Like, that's the closest we've ever been to God right here, this five feet away. And he's like, trying to care, but he doesn't really care. He's like, can we get his candy now? And I'm like, okay, I got him some M&Ms. And I'm like, every time the Warriors make a shot, you get an M&M. Now he's like locked into the game. And so then finally we leave. Of course, the drive home was this like amazing moment.

Basically, I put Tesla in like self-driving. I just talked to my son for like an hour. And it's like a one-on-one because I have three kids. So normally it's not one-on-one, but I got to talk to him. So he told me, he goes, you know what I want to be when I go up? I want to be a builder. And I was like, amazing, builder of like what? And he's like, do I have to pick?

And I was like, no, I guess not. And so I'm telling him about builders. Like somebody built this bridge, somebody built this building, somebody built this car. And somehow I start explaining to him who Elon Musk is. And I basically took a podcast episode for him. And I'm like, you know, rockets? This guy builds rockets that land themselves. And he's like,

what did they do before they landed themselves? And I was like, honestly, I don't know. Maybe that's actually hype because, like, people went to the moon and came back. So I don't know. They come back. They do come back. Anyways, don't ask too many questions. So I'm telling him about Tesla.

And he's like, did he start it? And I'm like, no, not technically, but let's not get into those details. So I'm telling him about Elon Musk. And I tell him he's the richest man in the world. He's got, you know, money? He's got the most money in the whole world. And he's like, how much money does he have? And I was like, he's got like $300 billion, $400 billion or something like.

that. He goes, he's like quiet for like 30 seconds. And then I'm like, did you hear how much money he had? Like, I'm not trying to go, are he still there? Did you fall asleep? What happened? He goes, can it even fit in his wallet? And I was like, no. He goes, so we used to use a grocery cart? I was like, no. And I'm like, explaining the concept of banks. And so anyways, I have this long conversation with him about, about money and about like, you know, these, like the sort of the builders and the prolific people that sort of make all this happen. And it just reminded me like, I don't know. By the way, did your son have a take on the simulation?

We didn't get there. That would be the next time. He does have a lot of questions similar to that. Like, you know, like, where did the earth come from? And then I'm like, yo, honestly, like, we're very much past the edge of my understanding of, like, I don't know, to be honest. And, like, who's older, the earth at the sun? There's a lot of questions that are pretty tough. But the good thing is in the car, they have, like, AI built in.

So you just, like, if I don't know, we just turn on AI and that. AI and the AI tells us. Anyways, so that's that. All right, 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.

All right, my friends, I have a new podcast for you guys to check out. It's called Content is Profit. And it's hosted by Luis and Fonzie Cameo. After years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like Red Bull and Orange Theory Fitness, and Fonzie are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue. In each episode, you're going to hear from top entrepreneurs and creators, and you're going to hear them share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit. So you can check out content is profit wherever you get your podcast.