My First Million - Are tariffs good or bad for founders?

Episode Date: April 11, 2025

💰 Steal Shaan's [free] Episode 696: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk about what they’re doing about the tariffs.  — Show Notes:  (0:00) Intro (3:13) Tariffs (22:00) Medieval Times (27:48) Shaan's process for finding edges — Links: • Shaan's $20M Pitch Deck: https://clickhubspot.com/uve • Medieval Times - https://www.medievaltimes.com/  — 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 — 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

For all of my friends, this is their only business. This is literally their lifeline. And so I find it very not cool is my official diagnosis. Super uncool by the orange guy. 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, Sean, Mahalo. My first question is, what's it feel like to be an extra? on the set of White Lotus. As long as I'm not the guy who dies, I'm good. All right. So that's my white lotus game plan. I thought I'd be festive for you. I think you look good.

Dude, I was, as you know, I don't leave my house. And took the family on vacation. So we're in Hawaii. And I texted, man, I go, dude, I'm getting recognized left and right. And he goes, really, that's awesome. Like, how many times? Like 10, 11? And I go, no, dude, too, left and right.

Like, it happened twice just out. Had it texts you right away. This is amazing. Where did you get recognized at the airport? Dude, someone voice recognized me. I was, like, coming around the corner somewhere. I'm talking to my kids. And some guy just runs around the corner.

He goes, hey, are you Sean? I go, did you just recognize my voice? He goes, yeah. I listened to the podcast a bunch. Dude, there's been so many times where, like, I've met someone and I'm like, we should hang out. And then they text me. You want to get on this flight?

Yeah. Do you have a ticket? Well, like, if I'm, like, flying home and, like, someone's sitting near me, I'm like, do you want to, like, be friends and, like, get together sometimes? And then they'll message me a week later. I'm like, what was they doing? It's like going to the grocery store hungry. Like, I'm just, like, making bad choices.

Can we talk about tariffs really quick? First of all, I want to let people know. I don't know anything about this. Like, I'm not, like, an economist, which everyone is all of a sudden. But I want to know, did you go to Hawaii because you were sweating and you're like, I need to find peace or, or. what? Dude, the last time I came to Hawaii, I don't if you remember this, was in 2020. Wasn't it like some crypto thing? Like you crashed. Yeah, I landed and the same day I landed,

crypto had the biggest crash. Like Luna basically went broke and it brought down Bitcoin with it. And I basically landed and then lost a million dollars and it was just trying to hang out with my wife and just be like, okay, cool. I'm just not going to mention this, like how expensive this vacation just got. And the worst part was because I was on. On vacation, I didn't have like any of my normal like computer hardware or anything. Your gear. I could sell. Your gear.

I could do anything. Yeah. So I was basically stuck. And then to this time, same thing, went on vacation. Oh, the S. S.P 500 has had the worst like three day losses since like the bubonic plague. And I was like, oh great. Here we go again.

I'm not coming to Hawaii anymore. When I've been going through this, as everyone knows, I'm heavy on index. When I have been going through this, I've just, I just don't look. I just, I just, I just, I just, I just, I just, I don't look. I just, I pretend it doesn't exist and I don't look. Although I did, I, I invested a little bit more than normally I do every month and I went a little bit heavier, but I just didn't look. I just, I can't log in.

It, it makes me too anxious and it really ruins my day. Yeah, I, well, I ask a simple question, am I going to do anything? Is my plan? Do I have some trade I'm trying to make right now? Is there some, some genius move? Am I just trying to panic cell? No, okay. If not, then there's really no.

point in even looking. It's just going to ruin my vacation. So I don't look. But when I landed, there was something I had to look at, which is these tariffs. So not only to the stock market crash, or maybe because of this, the stock market has been crashing, which is that Donald Trump has created a new holiday, Sam, liberation day. Yeah. Happy Libs. Happy Libs. Somebody was like, maybe he met Liberation Day in the sense of liberation, like the Buddhists think, where we are being liberated of all of our possessions. And we just aren't going to. own anything anymore. I don't have any material goods anymore.

Thank you. Thank you. So he came out and he has this giant poster board slam to every country. That's basically like his slam board where he's like, China, you're getting tariffed. Everybody's getting tariffed. And then since then, so he came out with like a 50% or whatever. It was like a 35% plus 20% tariff on China. So it's like, wow, 54%.

That's going to be crazy. and then since that he added another 50% on top, so now we're at 104, and I suppose there's just no upper limit as to how high this could go, because this morning, as of this morning, China retaliated with its own escalating retaliation,

80-something percent tariff. So we're in a trade war. And does that mean for you as an e-com owner, when you buy $10,000 worth of goods from China, if you do buy them from China, that now you're going to pay $20,000, $8,000? Yes, exactly. Okay, so it's as simple as that. Got it. It's as simple as that. So basically, and the reason to talk about this is not because I'm a terrific expert, which I'm not,

but because I have an e-com store, and I have a lot of friends at e-commerce as well. And for all of them, I mean, this is like D-Day, basically. So most of us, manufacture in China, not because we're like, oh, I really want to have the lowest cost goods from China. That wasn't really the impetus. In fact, when I started our company, we first looked at manufacturing the U.S. We were like, oh, that'd be great. It would be great to manufacture in the U.S. It'd be a great story to tell to customers. Also, maybe we'll be faster lead times because we're not having to put every item on a boat and sail it across the sea.

So I called all the manufacturers I could find in the U.S. And I was like, hey, like, do you think you could do this? And most of them were just like, no. And one guy in L.A. was like, oh, yeah, we could do this? Do you want it for double the price, half the speed at half is good? Is that your sales pitch? Yeah, that sounds great. I'm just being honest with you.

He's like, because if you're comparing factors, you're going to find this. He's like, I was like, how could it be half the speed? There's no boat. There's no sitting on a boat for a month. And when he explained us, he was like, number one, all of the inputs to anything you're going to make. So even if we make it, we're going to import all the parts. So we still have the parts on a boat for a long period of time.

Secondly, we don't have the labor that's skilled at doing this. Third, we don't have the machines. He was like, actually, it's the machines, not the labor. That's the problem. He's like, basically when we kind of deindustrialized, all of the best machinery to do this work went to China. There's only like so many machines that do this right now to get a new machine, takes like a year and blah, blah, blah, it costs a bunch of money. And so we don't even have the machines. And I was like, okay.

Dude, how does this guy answer the phone? Is he like, F you, this is Derek? You know what I mean? Like, I don't want your business. How are you? Is there anything I cannot get for you? Yeah. Like, all right, have a good day.

Bye, now. Go after yourself. Like, that's just how they answer their phones. Honestly, a great gig. As far as I'm concerned, like, maybe he's like a retired guy. And he just wanted to keep that going. I feel like my dad would like to do that in retirement. She turned people down all day.

And so, what are your friends thinking in the industry? Because it seems, dude, you guys just get beat up constantly. You know what I mean? Just get punched all the time. Yeah, it's like, okay, make America great again. Where's the great part? What's happening? All we're doing is putting like all these small businesses out of business and

raising the price on consumers, right? So here's what's happening. So just to give you a scenario, I have a friend who is doing really well with this business and the business has been growing. And so prior to Trump taking office, he's, you know, he was growing the business. Trump takes office. He says he's going to have a tariff. He says it's going to be a 20% tariff.

So we're like, okay, mental. totally prepared for 20% tariff. So he places an order. Now, just to give you a sense, like orders have like a, forget about moving your manufacturing, which is a multi-year process that may not even work, by the way. Just like changing your like sourcing from one place to another is, you know, six months to a year to get it up to scale. This guy, you know, basically he's operating on a four-month lead time, meaning from the day

he knows he needs an order, he has to place it four months in advance. So he placed it four months ago. Now, four months ago is basically, you know, before Trump even took office. Right. So he placed that order. And now as that order is, he's got five containers out at sea about to land. It's like on the ship and they're like. Yeah.

It's 100% tariff now. So he has to pay a million dollars in tariff. He doesn't have a million dollars. So he's like, dude, I literally don't know what I'm going to do. I don't have a million extra dollars lying around in my business that I can. just pay this tariff. I also have five containers. I have thousands of units just sitting there. They can't be rerouted. I can't tell them to go back to China. I can't, I can't, he's like, what do I shut down my business? He's basically like totally screwed. And so, and this is common.

There's a lot of people are dealing with this. You and I have a mutual friend. He said the same thing. He was like, he's like my container, you know, the price per container got screwed during a bunch of stuff in the last two or three years. There was so many different things. There was the Panama Canal, or Suez Canal. I forget, whatever. There was the ship got stuck. Yeah, ship got stuck. Then there was this and there's that. And then now he's like this thing.

He's like, I don't have enough money to buy the goods that I have coming in because I placed the order like a month ago. Like all like it was like in transit, it changed the price. It's sort of it's like when a parent's like, oh, you say no the word, five more minutes to time out. Oh, there's five. What? What did you? Yeah. Five more.

Five more. You just got yourself five more. Totally. In fact, I'm going to start calling it tariffs with my kids. I'm just going to start using that lingo. Maybe it'll be fun to be on the other side of the tariff for once. And there's a little bit of, so now people are trying to find, you know, whether it's workarounds or, you know, try to figure out, hey, does this apply? Because it's kind of unclear even how this applies.

You know, does it matter if I got my goods on the boat beforehand? Either way, whether this shipment gets tariffed a million dollars or not, point is, it's very hard to survive as a business when you're, you operated, let's say, an e-commerce business that has a 10 to 15% profit margin. if you're doing things right, you know, 20, if you're really kicking ass and you've been in business for a long time and you have economies of scale and you have a large returning customer base. But like 10 to 15 percent profit margins and then your cogs go up by 100 percent is not going to work. Like, they're going to go broke. And so the only alternative is you have to pass that to the customer. So now you have to tell the customer, hey, what this means to the customer, the math is if a normal, let's say a unit of your thing cost a dollar.

and now it's going to cost $2. Well, before you sold that $1 thing for, let's say, $3 or $4, let's say $4.00, a 4x market, right? So your cogs was 25% of your revenue. Forex is, I would imagine, is very normal, yeah? A standard markup, let's say. And that sounds like greedy. Oh, you're already marketing and marketing and advertising and your staff and the

fulfillment and all this other stuff. You end up with a 10% to 10%, 15% profit margin by the end of it, which is like restaurant territory. And so, you know, it's not some, we're not some fat cats over here in the ecom land. Go look at e-com. You just see a bunch of tired, scraggly fools who, like, are just playing the wrong game. And so you take that dollar item now it's $2. Well, that means you have to raise the price instead of being, instead of a big four originally.

Now you've got to raise it to five to make up for that. Right. So you're, all your goods are going to go up by 25 to 30%. So that's inflationary, right? So if you thought, you know, inflation was bad before, the price of eggs and all the stuff. Well, wait until Christmas. comes and nobody could buy a toy because all the toys are made in China, right? Like, this is things, all the shirts are made in China.

All the toys are made in China. And if they're not made in China, they're made in Vietnam, which also got tariffed. And so it's like, you know, there's a few countries that make all the stuff. And this plan really doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Now, maybe I'm just being sensitive because I have a business in the space. This is your life line. Yeah. Yeah.

So, well, less so for me because I have a lot of businesses. But for all my friends, this is their only business. This is literally their lifeline. And so I find it very not cool is my official diagnosis. Super uncool by the orange guy. I think you need to create like a Sean's homie private chat lobby. And you guys could spend literally thousands of dollars to lobby the government to change their opinion. Dude, I'm going to go to the lobby of this hotel and just see if I can get someone to change their mind.

Is that what lobbying means? I just totally lobbying I'm doing. And you'll declare bankruptcy down there by yelling it and declaring it. Exactly. And so, by the way, I don't know if you've read Moulson, who I don't know if you know Moulson, Moulson Hart, he wrote a great post on X and I think is worth reading. And it's basically called, America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back. And he gives 14 reasons about like why, even if he took the generous side of this like,

policy and you're like, oh, you know what? Short-term pain for long-term gain, right? Because I think we can all agree, they're short-term pain, right? The business owners have short-term pain, the consumers who are going to have their prices raise short-term pain, the factories on the other side have short-term pain. The stock market is crashing. That's short-term pain. The four-oneks are going down.

So that part's pretty unambiguous, the short-term pain. The question is, is there even long-term gain? And he wrote a post that basically outlines, like, you know, very thoughtfully why there's some problems with this. And he's basically like, you know, one argument after another. It's sort of like not only does moving a manufacturing plant back to America take a long time, like by the time somebody, by the time a business owner who today is going to hit by these tariffs, assuming they could somehow survive, spend millions of extra dollars opening up manufacturing

in the United States, which is not going to happen. And it's a multi-year period before they get it all online. and then they magically find the labor to do this because we don't really even train people in America to do this type of work anymore. There's going to be a new precedent. And like you don't even know what the tariff situation is going to be. But then it might be a total fool's errand to do it by then.

So nobody's really going to be able to make that move. Most likely what's actually going to happen is like, he's like, you know, we tried to do this in Trump's first term and all we did was make Vietnam great again. Like basically the manufacturer just shifts to one of the other low-cost Asian countries that has lower tariffs. is what's going to actually happen.

They're not going to, like, magically bring jobs back. Oh, and by the way, you don't want to sit there and knit t-shirts either. Like, this is not a job you want. These are jobs China doesn't even want. Dave Chappelle, did you think you want it? Dave Chappelle was like, I want to wear Jordans. I don't want to make them shits. Exactly.

Perfectly said. Like, there's these memes going around of, like, you know, it'll be like, Chama like out of, like, a sewing machine trying to make a shirt. It's so true. It's like, is this what you think is going to happen? Is this America being wrong? great again? I'm not sure. And so, you know, political stuff aside, I think that the the tariff situation is really crazy right now. As a business owner, it is very, very tricky

how to navigate this. Amongst your friend group, is it going to put anyone out of business, or is it just going to destroy their margins? Like, is this like a complete huge risk, or is it like you've just made my life more challenging? It's going to for sure put some people out of business because you had to, like I said, my friend with the stuff already at sea or who's trying to scale their business, they might not be able to sell their product for an extra, let's say there were a $100 product before. And now they're a $140 product in order to maintain, you know, still some profit. So on one hand, demand is going to go down, right? I'm going to have less customers because I had to raise my price. My cost went up. My cash flow that I had in the business went down

and maybe down to a point where I'm needing to borrow money in order to just pay the tariff bills that I have of stuff that I've already in flight. It's a very, very tricky situation. You know, what we did in our business was I was like, okay, here's how you deal with situations like this. You have to create like an immediate SWAT team. And let's open up a Google Doc.

Let's make six bullet points. It's like, what are the six levers we could pull? Okay, so pricing, we're going to have to create some sort of tariff surcharge. And we think it could be in this range. that'll offset some but not all of the amount. Because we can't pass 100% of it to the customer. It'll kill demand.

And so we're going to pass a few bucks to the customer this way. The next thing we could do, we're trying to source for another country. Okay, it looks like, you know, maybe it's Mexico or it's India or it's one of these lower tariff countries. Okay, you're working on that. You over here, you're going to work on, you know, figuring out how we're going to lower our cost. You're going to have to go negotiate with the factory, ask them to share some of the burden with you. You're going to have to look up the, talk to the lawyers and see what's going on with the stuff that's already in flight. Hey, we're going to have to bring down the purchase orders

because we have to be way more conservative. Hey, you're going to have to go secure more debt because we're going to need a line of credit to make sure we can withstand the storm here. And so we created this plan. I was like, we're meeting every day, these five people, like the five core people in the company, whatever other priorities you had, they're gone. This is your priority now. We're going to meet every day and we're going to work on this plan for the next, you know, end number of days until this plan is executed. And I think it's going to take that level of intensity. I think a mistake I made in the past is when things like this happened, and you sort of

take a little bit of a wait and see approach, I think that could be very, every day that you don't act can be very costly as a business owner. And so I think one of the key things to do, and like in our business, we have a CEO, we have a full exec team. But when I heard how they were planning to approach this, it was like, yeah, this is like really important, just like these other four really important things we have. And I go, no, no, no. You need to like have a public, you know, PSA that this is the most important thing you could do. We're going to every morning. There was a, there's a name for this team. And this is the most important thing we're doing.

And this is your top priority. You need to cut off some other shit, right? Like, I think just raising a level of intensity is very key in a situation like this. Or people will go out of business. So you're going to go snorkeling? Yeah. Yeah. And it's so funny. I'm all. I'm always. I'm always. I'm on the call talking about how we have to, like, raise the intensity. And there's literally just like, Aloha. There's like, calming, like, Hawaiian music behind me and, like, clearly, like, palm trees.

And I'm like, guys, guys, this is life or death. And I, like, I go down a water slide on the Google meet. I didn't plan it this way, right? You, you stop, like, mid-talk to, like, get your drink that has the umbrella on it and you're like looking for the straw with your mouth.

That's awesome. Well, that sucks. Is there a world where is there any type? You know how like, what are they, what a George? Is there anything I could do? No, there's nothing you can do. Dude, I met with a guy the other day and I thought, I was like, why do you want to? I never take phone calls with people, but he wanted to talk.

And I thought he was going to end the conversation with like, look, like, you know, I've loved watching you get big. and be on the pod and, you know, is there anything I can do? And I thought he was just like, could do to help. And he said, is there anything I could do to be a guest on the podcast? And I was like, wait, what? I thought you were going to ask me how you could help me. And he just ended it with, is there anything I could do to be on your podcast and to have you promote me?

I was like, no, there's nothing that you could do. Wow. Hell of an ask. Yeah. It was a bold ask. Do you want to talk about something more fun? Please. All right, let's talk about something more fun.

I think this is actually going to be really fun. I'm going to try and take your mind away from the fact that the company that you've spent decades trying to build. I'm going to try and take your mind off of that. Just, you know, four decades you spent building this company, not going to vanish. Never sends Sam to, like, the cancer ward. The bedside manner. We don't have time much. We don't have a lot of time left.

So let's get to it. Sorry, I meant you don't have a lot of time left. So let's let's all get to it. But I did, I did. I read something interesting that when I read it, I was shocked by it. And the reason I read this thing was because my company Hampton, it's basically like an events company. We host hundreds of events a year.

And so I'm trying to learn how other like event-based businesses operate. And I found one that I totally didn't realize. how amazing it was. And I just forgot about it. Have you ever heard of the medieval times? Generally? Yeah, sure. No, the restaurant series, like the restaurant franchise.

No. You've never heard. Oh, my God. You are going to love this. Okay, Google. Is it like Rainforest Cafe, but for like... More. Oh, there's like basically, it looks like a small castle, like the Excalera Hotel in Vegas.

And then inside there's like people on horses jousting. Dude, I always... always thought this was just like a joke. I thought this was a joke in like 90s movies, like for where people were going for dinner. I didn't realize it was a real thing. So let me tell you this story. So medieval times, it's basically dinner theater. And so they do a two hour show where you go with you, your wife, and your two kids and you spend something like $80 ahead. And you see people host a medieval show. There's like 200 actors and they like do jousting. They do like some type of theater stuff. It's almost like circus sale, but it's medieval stuff. And it's like, it's like WWF or something,

like wrestling. Like it's all like acting. I did not realize how big this was. So let me tell you the story. So the guy who started it, his name was Jose. He was a Spanish guy. He had a small restaurant in Spain where he would like have like medieval like circus performers like doing juggling and just really small stuff inside of a barbecue joint in Spain. In the 80s, for some reason, he decides to move to America. And he's like, I want to create what I did in Spain, which was a really small thing. I'm going to do it in America. And he convinces a couple bankers to invest $8 million into his first restaurant. And that first restaurant was in Florida. And he creates what is now medieval's times. And he creates this thing where the idea is we're going to host something like 20 to 40 shows per

month. I'm going to hire 200 actors. He spent a year training these guys how to sword fight, how to joust, how to like be like legit actors. And he's like, we're going to serve you turkey legs and other medieval food, like, whatever like the stereotype, like stereotypical medieval food is. And we're going to create this dinner experience. And that's where he launches in 1983. Well, fast forward almost 40 years now, or 40 plus years, his son has taken it over. And they were recently sued because a bunch of their performers tried to unionize.

And apparently they were preventing them from unionizing. And so there was a ton of articles written about this company. And a lot of people were talking about their financials. They're enormous. So this company does so. So basically they have, it's estimated around 2 to 2.5 million people a year coming to their restaurants. And they make something like $150 to $200 million a year in 10 locations hosting these

dinner theater shows. It's amazing. I had no idea this was this big. And since 1983, they've hosted close to 80 million people at these events. have you ever been to one of these? No, so there's 10 locations, and I haven't lived in any of the places. Dallas, Myrtle Beach, Scottsdale, like places that I haven't really lived in, so I've never been to one.

Have you? No, I've never been to one. Say the numbers again, so how big is this? So just on 10 locations? On 10 locations, during the union lawsuit and things like that, reporters were doing back of the envelope math, and they were like, we think the company did. is between $150 and $200 million a year in revenue. And there's 10 locations.

And each location hosts something like, depending on how popular it is, but the lowest one does something like 20 performances a month all the way up to 60 performances a month. So two a day for 30 days. It's insane how much demand there is. And it was estimated that it was around 2 million people a year attending. And on their official website, they say something like 80, I think. they say 76 million people have ever attended a medieval times restaurant for one of their

performances is that insane so you know 10 to 20 million dollars per location and they might be making you know one to two million dollars a profit per location something like that so that's my guess or more so the way it works is it's not a normal restaurant and so you don't order the food it's all pre-selected and so it's like it's like an assembly line at the same time all 1,000 guys get the exact same food. So, like, there's a lot of, like, maybe potentially significantly more efficiencies than a normal restaurant because there's not, like, you know, a whole menu of stuff to do.

And get this, their performances, they only change their performances every five to seven years. So they spend a lot of time, like, making the performance. And then everyone else just goes and learns it and they perfect it over the course of five to seven years. So they don't even change it that often. And it takes, like, 200 performers for every show. Yeah, it's pretty rough for, you know, night performers, right?

Because you have like the step down between Game of Thrones and the medieval times restaurant, it's so vast. Like the second place is really, it's pretty rough out there. And night's got to do it. No, he's got to do. So this is hilarious because you were like, you were like looking this up as an analog for Hampton. Are you thinking about getting in the turkey leg business? What's going on? Well, the way that we are going to grow is through launching cities.

And I'm like, you know, trying to study like how launches work, how do you have like, general managers of each city, of each region. Do you, I'm just trying to understand like the logistics of it. And I'm looking at a variety of unrelated, but still in the event space just to figure out how do they do it? How do people do it? And so I'm just looking at a ton of different ways. And I was just curious about, for some reason, I came across these guys and I started thinking about it. I'm like, oh, they're at 10 locations. Are they franchises? How do they work? And it just caught my eye. And I was shocked at how big they were. Can I tell you a goofy story that's kind of similar to to what you just described.

So I've been writing this book, like, on the side. I'm not sure if I'm going to actually publish it or not, like, but I kind of got, I went down a rabbit hole. I got interested in it. And it was, it was around how creativity works. So how to be more,

how to be a more creative person and ultimately, like, make hits. So like, where do the hits come from? What's the title? Bad art. Bad art. Okay. Yeah.

So it's like, because there's one of the key, like, obvious, sounds obvious in hindsight, but like, when you go look at the creative process of the world's most successful creative people, you would think, oh wow, the ones who make the hits,

the things that we all love, the high quality stuff, they just nail quality. And if you listen to any of their interviews, you watch their process, they don't give two shits about quality directly. What they do is they focus on quantity and their belief is basically that quantity

is the only way to get to quality. So they play a volume game and they're like, we produce a lot of bad art. And that's where the one or two things, that are real gold come from. If you just sit down and try to make gold, it doesn't work. You actually end up not creating at all.

And so one of the things I've been looking at is like how some of the big breakthroughs came from doing what you're talking about, which is like you learn from an adjacent space. So you go and you, you know, the Wright brothers who ended up creating the first airplane. Dude, George, I read their book and they're amazing, but George Mack summarized their book amazingly in his high agency blog post. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so they, you know, they were, they were not funded.

They had no education. They had no team. They had no specialty, no experience doing this, no nothing. And like, meanwhile, there was a guy over there funded by the Smithsonian, had two million dollars in funding, had tons of engineers and scientists on his team, had all the press and the fanfare. It was clear that he was going to be the win. He was the favorite. So how did the underdog win? Why did the underdog have the creative breakthrough?

And like, one of the reasons why is the two brothers, the right brothers, they owned a bike shop. And so they, they, they, because they had no money, they did like 200 prototypes in the time that the other guy did two. And their 200 prototypes were basically like, they didn't even look like planes. They were just testing like individual parts of a plane. Like they'd make a glider or a wing. And then they would make the wheels.

And they would try to find different ways to test these things out. And even Kiddhawk, even the selection of where to go, they were like thought from first principles, like where should we launch this thing. Like, oh, maybe we should launch it from this spot where we're going to the best way in that, etc. Right? So they weren't like tied to.

anything that was like there was there were not tied to anything everything was first principles thinking similarly i don't know if you've heard the story about the uh the yankees bats have you seen this you'll have to enlighten me but basically the bats are heavier in the area where the ball mostly hits is that right yeah like the story i mean take the physics of it aside like the story is just kind of interesting because here you have baseball this game that's been around for like i don't know hundred plus years or whatever. And then, you know, just kind of in a bit of a high agency way, the Yankees were like, hey, can we just make a better bat?

Like within the rules of the bat, like, you know, we're not going to make a heavier bat. We're not going to cheat. And they hired this MIT guy to think about it. And he was like, oh, yeah, you could just like move more of the barrel to this one sweet spot. And if you hit that, it's going to go way further, way harder. And you'll have less near misses because you're going to have the thicker part the bat right there and you'll have more barrels and sure enough the Yankees start the season off with

like way more home runs than anybody else this year. I don't know anything about baseball, but is it statistically significant or do they just have ballers on their team this year? Is it like it is the bat? I think it's the bat, but I don't know if it's statistically significant. I don't know if you could say that right because it was like they started talking about this when they jumped out to a big lead and home runs like 14 home runs already and it was like nobody else was even close. So we'll see. you know, we'll see if this lands. But the important part, because like, who gives the shit about baseball? The important part was like, dude, if baseball, that's like 100-year-old sport that like, you know,

people spend, the team spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year trying to like find any edge they can, if there's still like an edge like this to be found, it just proves how like so much of the world is like unoptimized and underthought about. And like, if you actually just took a lot of focus and intensity to any one problem and you don't assume that people have already figured it out. that's, you know, one of the key things you need to have a breakthrough. And so, like, the way you're talking about studying these other models, I think it's so important to do that.

I remember when we did our restaurant, this was my first startup, but we did pretty much everything wrong. Like, every, now that I look back, I'm like, oh, my God, so embarrassing. Every, like, the way we did our business plan, we wrote a 300-page business plan. It's like, dude, nowadays I write one page, if that, if that. We literally printed it out in a binder. We were so proud of it. And we thought that that was like, you know, a mark of our.

brilliance when actually it was just a market where stupidity. Our marketing, you know, I used to just go door to door knocking on doors trying to sell sushi like an idiot. Like, I didn't know anything about Facebook ads or Google ads. I didn't know anything about anything. But one smart thing we did was we were like, we were a delivery only restaurant. So today they call that Cloud Citchens back then that didn't exist. Door to door sushi, I think is the worst idea I've ever heard. Right?

But I was like, oh, let's try it. Actually, by the way, who doesn't want to eat this at 1030 when it's 95 degrees in Dallas? No, what we did is I went door to door. I went floor to floor, really. I went into a skyscraper. I went, I just went in the elevator. I pushed a button, one, two, three, four. I'd get out.

And I would just talk to the office manager of each floor. And if I could get her to cater the lunch, it was like getting 50 orders. And it actually worked pretty well. So that was kind of like a bit of example of this of ignorance is bliss. So the other thing that we did was we looked at delivery. So traditional food delivery, like you were talking about city-to-city expansion. We looked at how all the small, all the big.

restaurant change did the delivery. And what they did was they would basically have a delivery driver at the restaurant kind of waiting and waiting for a batch of orders. So you would order, but they wouldn't just take your one order. They wait until there's like five or six orders to go, right? Because if I leave, then with one order that's inefficient. So they would first wait for five or six orders. Then they would drive out. They'd go one place at a time trying to deliver these things. And then they would drive back. And what I was so confused about it was like, how is this restaurant that's one mile away, why does delivery take 40 minutes? It just didn't make any sense. Like, the route is like two minutes. So like, how is it possible that it takes 40 minutes for the

order? And so I watched them and I studied them. And we had our buddy Dan become one of them. And it was like, Dan, you work for noodles and company now? You got to figure this out. Well, you were doing the deal move before Deal did it. You had a... Yeah, we sent to the spy. Yeah, SB and I... All he came back with was just like, do you don't eat the food at noodles. There was so much salt. And we were like, but what about the delivery? He's like, oh, I didn't even get delivery.

I got a signed soup. So I could make a tomato soup. And he's like, so much salt of this soup, it's insane. So, but we figured out a breakthrough. The breakthrough was basically, we realized that it was at, the slowest part of the delivery was not the drive. It was, um, the driver doing that last kind of, not even last mile, like the last 200 feet to your door. So like finding the exact house or apartment and you go there and you knock and you wait. and then they come out and then whatever.

That was the way the slow part was. And so what we did was in downtown Denver, we created something called the drop zone. So in between a whole bunch of skyscrapers, we just had one guy stand there. He was our delivery guy on the ground, and then the driver just kept going back and forth dropping off orders to him nonstop.

And this sped up delivery like crazy. And suddenly our delivery times were like 15 minutes, 16 minutes, 18 minutes. And we were just crushing everybody on delivery. And like the restaurant failed, but the learning of like, you can't really take for granted that like everything's just,

figured out. And if you just do the first principles thinking of like, you watch, you look for the slowest part, then you think, okay, what can we do? Even if it sounds a little weird that we're going to have a, we're just going to put a dude there at the bottom and he's going to stand there holding the orders. The delivery guy is just a stationary dude. But that would eliminate all of the lag of the driver having to wait for that last, you know, to do all those last mile deliveries. That was the key for us. I found when doing this, there's a few hard parts, like just doing the exercise. The hard part one is knowing what things to question and what things to accept. For example, let's say you're creating Tesla and you're like, well, an electric battery,

that probably can go long enough. Like if I look at the math behind it, but they didn't like change the shape of the wheel. That's a very obvious one. But when you're running a company, it's very hard to decide what to question and what not to question. It's also incredibly challenging to get yourself into that mindset of first principles thinking. and more challenging to convince your staff or your coworkers or whatever to just like come with like an open mind and and actually get on board and being open minded to try in this exercise. I found that to be hard. What's hard about it?

And then how did you try to tackle that? For example, just like the people saying like, well, it has to be this way for these reasons. And it's like you have to say to them, I know, but just like I know you think that. But just try to get beyond that just for a few minutes and let's just have a conversation where it doesn't happen that way. what would happen? There's this book called The Six Ways of Thinking for Design. I forget exactly. Do you know I'm talking about that book? No, I haven't read that. Basically, it's like an exercise where there's six different colored hats and you're like, all right, your green hat. When you put your green head on, that means you're just thinking of profit. When you put your red hat on, that means

you're going to come and be very pessimistic and poke holes and everything. Your black hat means you're open-minded. And so it's this way of saying, right now I'm going to put this hat on, which means I'm going to by default. I'm not going to hate on anything because a lot of people default to this is why you can't do it, to I'm going to figure out all the reasons why this could work. Yes. Yeah. And so you did that? You tried that? Yeah. And it helps, but it's still, I guess what I'm saying is, like, no, I didn't have any hats. No, it helps. But there's still like, it's still a challenge to get into that mindset, at least for me and also to, like, convey that to teammates. Having an open mind and questioning everything is actually way harder to do than it sounds.

You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel that people like it. Like so once you give people permission to do it, they actually get excited about it. You're right that you have to sort of like frame it the right way. If you just go into a meeting and your hope and expectation is that people are going to be like open minded and creative and come up with a novel solution. It's like not going to happen at all. Like you have to either tell a story at the beginning that gets them in the mindset. So I've done that before. Which is basically the Yankee bat thing.

I mean, that was pretty good. Yeah, like it'll be one like that or it'll be like I remember back of the day I watched. this thing on YouTube that was like really inspiring to me. I don't know if you ever seen it. It's the IDEO grocery cart challenge. So IDEO, which is this design thinking lab, there's this group. So companies go and pay them lots of money to come up with like novel, innovative solutions and designs.

So I think 60 minutes or somebody went to them, some TV show. And they were like, hey, we want to understand how you guys think. And so we have a challenge for you guys as part of the show. And they were like, we want you to redesign, reimagined. the grocery cart in a day. You have 24 hours, 40 hours to do this. And so they break up into two teams and they show their process of how they do it. Right. So like there's like a process of like fact gathering. So they first go get a grocery cart, right? Or they go watch it in a grocery store. They want to see how the customer uses it. They don't want to take anything for granted. So they're like,

oh, like certain set of customers actually use this as like a kid babysitter. It's like your kid sits inside it. They need a thing to play. And that's like a key part of this. Like if you lost the kid seat, you would lose that mom as a customer. but other people are loading up and they need the two racks and then, you know, so you're seeing how people use it. Then they were like, cool,

and you state those observations, they put them on index cards, you start throwing them on the wall. And the guy sets the tone, he's like, we're in the diverge phase. And basically he draws this little cone. I don't know if you've ever seen it's like a, like a tone going out.

And he's basically like during the diverge phase, it's like whatever. A predetermined set of time, our team knows how to do this, which is when you're super crazy, wacky ideas, free play, what if mode?

And you don't judge, the ideas during this phase. You're trying to riff as many ideas again. And then we're going to switch modes, switch hats, are going to go to converge, where we're basically ruthlessly narrowing down the set of possibilities of where we might go with this. But we distinctly have two phases

because you don't want, in the one phase, the one brave person to be courageous and throw out a half-baked idea. And then somebody immediately, smart guy slammed them and be like, why that wouldn't work. And now nobody wants to suggest ideas that again for the rest of that hour.

So you have to like really explicitly do like what you're allowed to say, during this hour is only, you know, yes ands. And then during this one, it's a no but. And then they end up with this redesigned grocery cart where it's like, it was basically like, I don't know, you could look up the image of it online, but it was like a thing that was designed for a new type of grocery cart. And I thought about that.

I was kind of inspired by that because, hey, I just thought, wow, what a cool job. These guys get to be creative for a living. The top, this video is 15 years old. And it says the top comment is they're still making us watch this for school, by the way, in 2024. for. Yeah, I actually think there should be a Netflix show of this. Like, you know that you have chopped where they give them a random basket of ingredients?

You've got to make a meal out of it. I would love to see like two teams that are like, you know, engineer designer types. And you basically give them like a challenge, like redesign the grocery cart, like redesign, make the inside of an elevator more entertaining and just see what they do. Like I would find that super fascinating as like a TV show. And I think it would inspire a lot of people to become like engineers or designers if you watch that. same way like Shark Tank, although it's like totally like bogus in terms of like the entrepreneurship that they show, it's super accessible and it gets people excited about the idea

of entrepreneurship. This book sounds pretty great, bad art. It sounds like a pretty good idea. It's a great book. I'm excited about it. My only hesitation I had on it was like I feel like I already got a shit ton of value out of it doing the like research and the kind of the prep like of outlining like, oh, here's the big ideas and like crystallizing them in my mind.

So you're going to be like Derek from L.A. and you're going to just say, F you. reader. I don't care about it. Exactly. Do I need to go the extra mile of publishing it for other people to benefit? I'm not sure that I care about that. Like, I'm not going to, I'm not going to make any money off this. I'm not trying to get famous off a book. Why do I, why do I need to do that? So I might publish it. The other problem is like, I'm not sure how many other people nerd out about this idea of making great art, making, making great products, just insanely great things and caring about being, like, wanting to learn the creative process. Because, you know, what I,

what I figured out during this. I mean, that's obviously foolish. What about that guy? Like, that's a feelish thought. I was just fishing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got me on the hook. You got the compliments on the hook. Because what about that Austin guy?

Like, you know, artists, what was it called? Great Artist Steel. Is that what it's called? Do I want to just be that Austin guy? You didn't even know it was the guy's last name. I know the book cover. Isn't it like, what's it called? Great Artist Steel.

Yeah, like I know that a lot of smart people whose books I read, they always say that that, like we had a Jack Carr on the podcast, who wrote all these amazing fiction books I love. and he talked about it. Ryan Holiday talked about it. Mark Manson, who I know you like, talked about that book. Everyone likes that book. That's the thing. It's a lot of author.

Like, I wrote this. I wrote this thing because I was studying how to do this because I wanted to write a book. I didn't want to write the book about this, but that, that's just where I landed. It's for sure super important for anybody who's like an author or screenwriter type of person. It's just that's such a small percentage of population that I'm not sure it's worth the pain of publishing. Dude. I don't know. If the comments on YouTube persuade me enough.

I might be open to publishing this. If Sahel Bloom can convince everyone on Twitter to share his book, you can too. What he's hilarious about Sahel, because Sahel's great. And Sahel's such an achiever. He brought the PE energy to... Totally. He bought the Ivy League energy, right? He, like, he, like, achievered his way into Stanford,

achievered his way to being a good athlete, like a D1 athlete, achieved his way into private equity successfully, achievered his way into a six-pack, Achieve her. Like, he just basically's like, all right, give me a target and like, show me a ladder and I shall climb. And it was like, when we were like, yo, you should Twitter, dude. Like your post are kind of interesting. I think you can do this. He's like, cool, Monday through Friday, 6 a.m.

Get up. Cold plunge, right thread, publish thread every day for the next 900 days straight. And they did. He got like a million followers. He achieved the shit out of Twitter, too. It's amazing. Yeah. Now you're going to have to do the same with bad art.

As Elon once said when they asked him, are you afraid of failure? He said, it is not in my nature. That's how I feel about achieving. It is not in my nature to do this. Is that going to be, that should be the reply to everything, though.

As a great Elon Musk has once said, this is not in my nature. Dude, how sick is that phrase? How, like, timeless an alpha is that phrase? All right, is that it? Are you going to go and enjoy the sand or doing whatever you do. Do you even leave your apartment

when you're in Hawaii? Yeah, dude. I'm in the ocean. I'm at the beach. I got kids, dude. They want to do everything. Are you going to wear a Tweety shirt at the pool?

Every day for six days straight. Like, it's the same day, but they love it so much that I can't help but love it to. All right. That's it. That's the pod. I feel like I can rule the world.

I know I could be what I want to. A's off. On a road. Let's travel. Never looking back.