My First Million - Dopamine Fasts, Cruise Ship Investing, and Elon Musk vs. Jeff Bezos Feuds with Andrew Wilkinson, Co-Founder of Tiny

Episode Date: October 19, 2021

Andrew Wilkinson (@awilkinson), Co-Founder of Tiny, joins Sam Parr (@theSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) to talk about how he found joy through a four-week dopamine fast, why it can be better to make safer “cruise ship investments” rather than startup investments, how Andrew’s last appearance led him to start a D2C maternal healthy company, and much more. --------- * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. --------- Show Notes: * 00:20 - Andrew’s monk-like retreat from technology * 01:45 - What triggered his “digital meltdown” * 09:20 - The power of a 4-week dopamine fast * 22:40 - Why Andrew bought Aeropress * 30:45 - “Cruise ship investing” vs “speed boat investing” * 37:30 - The benefits (or lack thereof) of being famous * 39:33 - How coming on MFM led Andrew to be able to start a DTC pregnancy health company * 49:15 - Readwise and the Feynman method for learning * 52:41 - The pitfall of constant optimization * 01:07:35 - When Andrew met Steve Jobs * 01:17:32 - Elon Musk & Jeff Bezos’s Twitter beef --------- Links:  * Tiny * JoelOnSoftware.com * Wanting * Readwise * Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage * Elon Musk & Jeff Bezos Thread

Because I was like pipe that content into my ears, baby, while I'm falling asleep. Like, I don't want to fall asleep. I want to be entertained and pass out. 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. Andrew, what's going on?

Yeah. What's up, Andrew? What's up, Andrew? What's up, Andrew? Yeah, man. You went off the deep end. At this spirit, I became a monk, pulled to Matthew McConaughey. Did Matthew McConaughey do that?

It was awesome. Yeah, apparently Matthew McConaughey, when he wanted to write his book, he drove into the desert, like four hours into the desert. And he literally lived in a shack for two months and wrote his book. Did you read it? I read that book or I read part of it. If you read it and you use Matthew McConaughey's voice while you're reading it, it's actually pretty entertaining because it's good stories. But also it's like just stories about his life that like I'm not sure I care that much about Matthew McConaughey's life. Why wouldn't you just listen to the audible book then if you wanted to hit voice to read it?

I think he created it. I'm not smart enough to think that already exists. That would have been way better. Yeah, it should have done the audible book then. Yeah, just honestly, did think about it. It sounds like a good idea. I should probably do that. So you, uh, Andrew basically, uh, we'll do the intro now.

Andrew has, is a great friend of ours, has this big business called, tiny where they own a bunch of different businesses north of 100 million-ish or so in revenue, took a company public. Whatever, you're successful in terms of career and traditional sense of successful. You're a good friend. You normally come on a lot, but you just tweeted how you kind of like took off for all of August and you kind of bailed because you were kind of having a meltdown in which we all have had before, like a digital overload meltdown.

And you just bailed, right? Totally. It was really, it was bad. I mean, it's interesting to think about like, I think this happened to everyone over COVID. Like their life just shifted in a weird way. And my life just became crappy over COVID, which is weird because I had this amazing year. Like we took a business public. We raised a big fund.

We got to work with all these interesting people. We bought some great businesses. I didn't die of COVID. Like all these great things happened. And yet I was totally miserable. And when I look at it, when I kind of zoom out, my old. day. I don't know if you guys, you guys know, but I live in Victoria, Canada, and I didn't even have an office. So I actually liked just working out of cafes. I would just go to the same cafe

every day, and I'd sit there with headphones on. Three or four of my friends would always work there, so it was kind of like cheers. There's always like interesting people to talk to. And my day was just broken up into a bunch of chunks. So any given day, I wouldn't really be on the computer or in one place for more than an hour or two. And my day went from that to sitting in a house, on my computer all day on Zoom and doing email. And it just kind of made me miserable. And so I, you know, when I look at like what I love about business, I don't actually love, you know, doing business is great, doing strategy, coming up with ideas, all that kind

of stuff. But the cool thing about business is you get to meet interesting people. Like business is just a hack, right? So like if you're interested in health, you figure out like a health business, you suddenly can meet all the most interesting people in that way. world. And I'm an extrovert. So anyway, I was totally bummed. And I started, you know, going on Twitter a lot because I was craving, socializing. And I went from like 20,000 followers to 170,000 followers. So I got totally hooked into that. And like a good day would be like,

I have a viral tweet or I go on your podcast or something, something exciting happens. A bad day would be, I say something on Twitter, I get dunked on, I got missed on, I got missed. understood or it doesn't do well. Like what a ridiculous thing. Like I'd tweet and it would only get like 50 likes instead of 5,000 likes and it would like throw my day off. So I got to a point where I was just like Jesus Christ, like this is totally ridiculous. I'm thinking about Twitter constantly. I'm checking Twitter constantly. And on top of that, I'm, you know, email, you know, checking stats, stocks. If I went to the bathroom without my phone, I feel like I feel like I'd feel like I was going to freak out, constantly listening to audio books, constantly listening to podcasts, no silence. So I just like hit this weird breaking

point August 1st where I woke up and I was like, I'm not stoked to get out of bed. I'm not depressed. Objectively everything is fine. I'm like I'm just like, I have like Anhadonia. Like I'm just not excited about anything. So I just said, fuck it. I'm just going to. What's that word you just said? That was a good one. And Haddanya. It means like an inability to feel pleasure, right? Like nothing. Nothing would get me pumped. Nothing would give me a hit. Like, you know, you know, when you're always, you go on Netflix, you're like scrolling endlessly for the perfect thing.

You just can't find it. That's how my life felt. And so I basically, you know, it's the middle of August. I live in British Columbia. It's super beautiful. And so I just said to my wife, you know what? I'm out for the next month. Let's just go off to our cabin.

We'll, you know, we'll go on some trips. And I'm just going to totally check out. And I said a couple rules. for myself. I was like, no phone, no email, no computer, no podcasts, no phone calls, no social media, no news. I couldn't even read nonfiction business books, right? So it's pretty extreme. And I put on my Apple Watch, which has, you know, cellular. So I was like, okay, if there's an emergency, I can get a phone call. And I put my phone in a drawer. And I just disappeared. I went up to my cabin and hung out with my kids. And honestly, for the first like three or four days,

it felt like there was like a bug in my brain. Like I was just like so, like something I, itch I couldn't scratch. Like just so irritable as being a huge asshole. I was like slapping my pocket every five seconds to check stuff. I'd be sitting on the beach with my kids and I'd constantly be like, oh, I need to text this to a friend. I got to take a photo of this, right?

So it's really weird, horrible withdrawal. But then after like three or four days, I was like, holy crap, like, this is really interesting. I started reading fiction books and just sitting for hours, you know, enjoying a sunset, taking a silent drive, doing all this stuff. And I think it's kind of like if you eat junk food all the time, like you're drinking Coke and having burgers and stuff all the time and then you eat broccoli, it doesn't taste that good.

Your brain is primed for like these extreme flavors. And then if you switch to broccoli, you know, you don't eat those things for a month. Then you eat broccoli. Broccoli is like orgasmic. It's amazing. And so anyway, I did this for four weeks and I was feeling really good. And I came back to life. Like I kind of reintroduced myself into society and started going out and working and stuff. And it was really bizarre. Like I, you know, would listen to a song that was playing in a cafe and it'd be like the greatest song I've ever heard. I'd read some random article and it would be like fascinating. and I'd just be completely like just, you know, engaged with it.

And then problems I had to solve that would have pissed me off, like seemed like no problem when I was excited to solve them. And I was kind of going like, man, why did that work? Like, what was it about that? And at the same time, like around then, I started listening to podcasts again. And I listened to this podcast by Andrew Huberman, Huberman Lab, which I'm sure you guys have listened to. He's amazing.

Yeah, he's coming on the podcast. Oh, amazing. That's awesome. So he did this deep dive on addiction. And he did it with this woman, Anna Lemke, who's a Stanford addiction doctor. And I was like, oh, this will be interesting. It'll be about like heroin addiction or something and how they treat alcoholism. So I'll start listening to it. Those other people who have those other bad problems. Yeah, I'm not one of them. It's fun. It's fun to read about them. Totally. I was like, I was like, oh, this will be, you know, maybe philanthropic. You know, I can. and help fund the heroin addiction center in Victoria or something. So anyway, and as I listen, I just go like, oh, my God, like, you know, this is not, this is universal. Like, basically the chemical of dopamine, the neurotransmitter, is the thing that makes

you feel craving and pleasure when you do things and it motivates you to do things. And I realized, you know, basically like she said, you know, something along the lines of, If you eat chocolate cake once a month, it tastes amazing. And you don't really crave it that much. You don't really think about it that much. It's very pleasurable. If you eat it once a week, it's still enjoyable, but it's not as good. And you start having cravings.

You start wanting chocolate cake. If you eat it every day, your brain literally craves it and you're in pain until you eat it. And when you eat it, it's not even that enjoyable. It just makes the pain go away for a little bit. And she compares that to like heroin addiction or anything. And so, you know, here we all are. We're stimulating ourselves with social media 24-7. We're constantly taking these hits.

And the hits become less and less enjoyable. And she talked about, you know, she's at Stanford, so she's treating students. And she talked about these kids that would come in and they're addicted to social media and video games. And they have no motivation. And so she said, look, I basically recommend a dopamine fast for four weeks. They can't do any of that stuff. They got to go walk in silence, drive in silence, have quiet moments, not avoid those things. And I realized that, you know, I'd basically done that for myself.

And that's why I felt better. And I, you know, I was an addict. It's crazy. How do you propose doing this, though, given, like, I hear everything you're saying. And I think, oh, I actually, I'm sure I have the exact same problem. But I'm like, I've got to record this podcast. I've got to text. I mean, I guess I don't have to.

but you know it's what's the practical solution right like right for somebody who's listening or even most people i would say the practicality of detaching for four weeks um it's hard oh yeah and i think um my my version of it was extreme but there's many different forms of it i mean it could be as simple as you just wear your apple watch and you don't text and the only way you text is crappily on your Apple Watch. You take calls on your Apple Watch and you know, you do Zooms on your laptop, but you just don't have that constant 24-7 eye message coming in. Or maybe you just screen-time your phone super aggressively. I mean, how do you not eat junk food all the time and have a good diet? Don't keep junk food in the house. Don't keep booze in the house, right? Self-bind yourself.

So, I mean, I just basically like screen time the hell out of my phone. And like today, for example, I drove to my office. I just have my Apple Watch. I don't have my phone. So I know if my kids fall down and hurt themselves, my wife can call me, but otherwise I'm not really texting. Do you do that, Sean?

Because I think of you, Sean, as someone who is connected a lot. I am connected a lot. I've consciously picked two parts of my day where I'm like, these are my, like, disconnect days. You know, like, if I disconnect hours, at least.

Because I think about it very much the same as Andrew. I heard two things that that kind of shifted my view on this. So the first was Naval had this great thing he used to say where he goes, the ancient struggle was scarcity. You know, the ancient struggle was we just didn't have enough. We didn't have enough food. We didn't have enough water.

We didn't have enough, you know, access to medicine, entertainment, whatever. And the modern struggle is abundance, which is we're overloaded with cheap dopamine. And like, and then that idea of cheap dopamine is something that literally last night, I was listening to Huberman, a little clip that came up on my YouTube feed of Andrew Huberman. And it's funny, by the way, because it's like, I literally, I have, it's like, the addict is, like, learning about rehab while, like, shooting up, basically, because it was 3 a.m. I had just, I was going to bed. I had to stay up way too late already. And I'm the type where, you know, if I get, like you said, I'm going to the bathroom and I don't have my phone

with me. I'm like, oh, I'm going to miss out on, like, my entertainment. Like, I, right now I could watch something, listen to something, do something while I'm just peeing or whatever, like brushing my teeth. And I had literally bought this, uh, headphone that I can wear to sleep because it's comfortable. So it's like a headband. It's like a soft headband that has small earbuds baked into it. So you could sleep with headphones because I was like pipe that content into my ears baby while I'm falling asleep. Like I don't want to fall asleep. I want to be entertained and pass out. Like that's kind of the way I was sleeping. And so even last night, I was doing that my bad habit. and which is like, you know, ultra-connected, two-connected.

And I started listening to this Hooperman thing, and he goes, he said something that really struck with me. He goes, it goes, one way to think about addiction is it's a progressive narrowing of what gives you pleasure. So it's a, it's a, you are narrowing the things in your life that will give you this rush of pleasure. So, Andrew, when you, when you, when you dopamine fasted, you started getting pleasure from silence in the car, from the sunset, from fiction books, but, but, but,

Before that, it's like Twitter was this cheap, fast, instantaneous, guaranteed source of pleasure. And so it was narrowed the number of places you were going to get that pleasure to like this most convenient. It also. It also became more painful, though. More like when I first started doing Twitter, it was pure pleasure, so fun. And then over time, it took more and more of a hit to satisfy me. The numbing. Yeah, you get numb to the sort of like you build up tolerance, right?

Like you would with alcohol or anything else. And of course, you had to turn your experience into a thread, which probably became one of your most reached things. Totally. Totally. Well, and this is the debate, right? Is do you want to engage? Like, okay, like, obviously it's a good thing that we can all use IMessage and use these devices. Like, they're a bicycle for the mind.

There's all these amazing things you can do. You can meet all these amazing people. But the question is how to use them in a responsible way. So, like, with Twitter, I have a one-way Twitter client. that I'm using, so I don't actually see the results of my tweets, right? Although in this case, I'll admit I did go and look. But my goal is actually fully screen time on every device so I can't access Twitter, only the API.

I think here's a good way to look at it. So have you guys heard of this person named Earl Nightingale? So basically, he probably died in the 60s. Maybe he died in the 70s. And he was famous in the 50s and 60s. And he basically was almost like a Tony Robbins of that era, but he was a little bit more well-known as like a writer. He was like a, almost like a like a like a Dan Rather's meets Tony Robbins mainstream famous guy. And he told this famous story on this, on his radio broadcast where he talked to a farmer.

And he went to this farmer's house. And this was right when the telephone got popular. He went to this farmer's house and he's talking. And they're just having this conversation. And the phone starts ringing. And the farmer doesn't flinch. He just keeps making eye contact and having the conversation. and about five minutes later the phone rings again and just the same thing he keeps making eye contact

and then a few minutes later it rings one more time and the guys the guests go earl goes hey do you need to answer that and the farmer goes what that thing no no no that's just there for my convenience uh i i answer that whenever i want and whenever i heard that story a couple years ago i was like that's how i'm going to treat my phone it is there for me and so i don't feel guilty about clicking ignore deny or don't not replying it is this this thing this phone it exactly exist for my convenience, not the other way around. I own it. Well, the other thing is, you know, do you ever think, well, like the 1950s? So in the 1950s, if you're an executive at a business, you would, A, have a secretary, right?

And the secretary would be keeping everyone away from you. And then you'd get your mail once or twice a day. And so you'd batch it, right? So you'd get 100 letters, half of them would be done by your secretary. You get 20 or 50 of them or whatever. And you just do that over an hour. You write all your letter responses, then you're done for the day. Whereas what we have is a mailman who's coming to the door every five minutes, knock, knock, knock, here, throwing a bunch of letters in there. And you're kind of doing it in the middle of everything. So I think like batching also is incredibly helpful.

The other thing is like, you know, people who talk about being friends with their family with an alcoholic, they talk about how the alcohol will actually, if someone gets in between them and the alcohol, they will always choose. the alcohol. And I think the hard part is, you know, you think about, I think about all the arguments I've had with my wife, where if I don't get to follow my routine, my dopamine routine of, well, I like to listen to that podcast in the shower, and then I like to do X and Y and Z, and I've got my whole routine and process, if she would mess with it, like, hey, I've got, I need you to go and do this or whatever, I would like rage, right? And I just thought I was an

asshole or OCD or something. And then now being off of that, I'm not raging and getting frustrated in that same way. So it's really fascinating. All the addiction stuff just really flows through this. I've created basically two windows in the day. So exercise is one. Exercise is beautiful because, you know, I have a very low urge to check my phone when I'm working out anyways.

So that becomes a full kind of like almost 90 minutes of not looking at my phone. and I don't care what's happening and I don't care who's I don't care how much sales we have I don't care who's mentioning me I don't care who's emailing me slacking me and so Sam I think you probably have the same where when you work out I don't think you are checking your phone during yeah I don't I it means nothing to me I do look at it to mark down what I'm doing but typically what I've been doing lately is I'll mark down on a not pad my workout and then I transfer it after the workout specifically so I don't touch my phone you guys listen to music while you work

because one of the things Huberman talks about is you don't want to dopamine stack. So people work out to experience pleasure and dopamine. But if you start stacking it, so you say, when I work out, I watch Game of Thrones and I get a smoothie after and and and you start to not enjoy the actual workout. Whereas if you do it for intrinsic reasons, you can actually train yourself to enjoy it. Right. I hate that because I listen to music too. And I like I love the like that's I feel like that's music listening time. I'm not the opposite.

We're basically I'm training I am getting to love one your addiction. You what Sean? Sorry, go ahead. That's funny. Andrew Sam, I'm getting between you and your addiction. Sam raged out immediately. You know, the I'm doing the opposite where like Dan Ariely, the kind of like famous behavioral economist, he was talking about this thing where he had

this medicine he had to take because he has really bad burns. really bad facial burns. You have to take this one medicine all the time or apply this ointment and burn. It was like really uncomfortable. And so he was like, instead of trying to wrestle the brain and convince the brain through logic that this is a good thing for me, when the brain is just saying, ew, I don't like the way this medicine makes me feel. Don't take this. He's like, I just attached a really, a thing I really loved to taking the medicine. So every time I take the medicine, I would take it during the intro of my favorite movie and I would watch my favorite movie or my favorite show. And he's like, that helped me stick to my routine of

taking the medicine and actually get healthier. And so for me, that's almost like working out where working out wasn't something I found super pleasurable. That's why I didn't work out for so long because it kind of felt like work. And so I had to retrain myself using music, having a great trainer who I like hanging out with, you know, like doing different types of workouts that are more sporty so that I would actually get pleasure from working out. So I would actually like it. So I stacked it intentionally. I stacked things I knew I loved onto working out so that I started to love working out because I only got to do those things when I worked out. Yeah. And I'd also say though, Andrew, well, you're taking this stance, but I don't know if you actually feel that way. Is addiction

necessarily bad? Like, all right, so I had, I've talked about this one. I've had like alcohol problems. And then I started like going to cigars. Like one way that I got off it is I started smoking. And then like after smoking, I like started doing sugar or something like that. And I went to the doctor and she's like, I was like, you know, I'm eating so much sugar. And she's like, well, is it helping you not drink? I go, yeah. And she goes, oh, fuck it. Just do it. And I'm like, yeah, why wouldn't I just do that? And so some addiction, I'm, whenever I think of like, I'm like, just, it's not necessarily bad. Like, so like, if you're addicted to one thing or the other, well, is that, is that, is that like, does it kind of make you a little bit happy, you know,

I think actually some addiction can be okay. That's kind of, there's, there's a lot of different levels to it, right? Like I think obviously heroin, alcohol, drug abuse, that leads to a life of guaranteed misery very quickly and you die young and you're depressed and everything else. But the fundamental question is if you're addicted to work and it's making you depressed, then, you know, just because you're objectively achieving, what's the point of achieving if you're depressed, right? So I think that's the way I would think about it. What's the highest order bit, right? If the highest order bit is that I'm feeling good on a daily basis, I enjoy my life.

I feel good. Then cool, whatever your system is is serving you. But as soon as that spirals out, and it might start that way. The same behavior might start feeling that way. And then all of a sudden, you stop feeling that. That's what kind of happened with you, Andrew. It's like, let's say, like, at first you were getting this great pleasure and rush from connecting with people on Twitter and sharing your ideas.

And that's fun. And you were helping people. People heard those ideas and took them for their own. And then, like, you know, everything in excess sort of has. the cons will sort of reveal themselves over time. Totally. Well, the other thing that's interesting is like, I'm the kind of person where I'm always hacking everything, right?

So I was like, okay, if I do the dishes, I've found a way to enjoy the dishes. So I'm stacking on, I've got my podcast, I've got my music, I get my treat after, you know, all those things. And recently what I've been trying to do is just do the best job of doing the dishes I possibly can in silence. It's almost a meditative practice. And what I've noticed is, again, the first couple times I did it, I was raised. I was like, this fucking sucks. I don't want to do the dishes. You know, this is BS. And then after a while of just silently doing the dishes, I started really enjoying it. And now when my wife says, can you do the dishes, I don't get irritable and I'm not expecting a treat. And I'm doing it because it's intrinsically enjoyable feeling the hot water and washing the pan and doing a good job, which sounds ridiculous. But it's no different than gardening or any other thing that people like. It's just tuning your brain for it. So can we talk about something that doesn't seem similar, but kind of is. But basically, Andrew, you bought this company AeroPress, which is actually like, in my opinion,

probably one of the best companies that you could own if you are trying not to get addicted to fast Twitch notifications, alerts, because it's been around forever. Do you guys even sell anything? Do you even sell it online, really, other than Amazon? A little bit. Only I think it's like 3% of sales are online right now. So like it's a pretty like low stress like because you haven't built anything new or aeropresses. It's basically if you don't know what aeropresses, it's a coffee maker that's been the same way since the beginning.

Is that right? Yeah, it's been around since I think 2006 and it's like this. It looks like a PVC tube and you press down. You put some coffee in the bottom of it. You put some hot water and you press down and it makes like a concentrated coffee. And it's been around yeah for for a long time. and it was started by the guy who made the Arobi Frisbee. He's like a serial inventor.

So those like neon pink frisbys from the 80s. Yeah, it's an amazing product. Can you say what you bought it for? The deal was $70 million to buy it. And can you say how big it? I mean, what can you say about it? It wasn't for sale or this was one that you were like, let me see if they're willing to sell?

So, I mean, basically the story is, four or five years ago, I was making coffee. I'd be using Airopress for years. We had one at our office. Someone brought one in like 10 years ago. And I looked down at it. And I was like, oh, man, I wonder who owns this. So I started Googling.

I realized the founder still owned it. And he's this 80-year-old serial inventor who lives in Palo Alto. So I sent him an email. I looked up his email on Walla and Norbert. And I said, hey, can I come to Palo Alto? And, you know, would you ever explore selling? And he said, I don't know if I want to sell, that I'm happy to meet you.

And so I flew down. And Chris and I spent a whole day with him just kind of talking about the business. And there's just so much to love about this business. What was he like? He was like this really funny old guy. He reminded me a little bit of my grandpa. You know, he had hearing aids. He like just clearly loved inventing and coming up with ideas.

And he started walking me through, you know, all the different inventions and ideas that he had and things he wanted to make. Did he actually work there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he really, like, ran, he was really responsible for inventing in the product. And then he had a president who was running the day-to-day business. And so, you know, this is, like, it's such a crazy business. So there's zero marketing.

So they spent absolutely nothing on marketing. It's sold in pretty much every single gourmet coffee shop in the world. Like you walk into anywhere, blue bottle from down to, like, little independent ones. everyone sells it. It's very, very, like, it's like, it's a category owner, I would call it, right? So if you think about like a commodity product, even like Kleenex or Band-Aid, right? It is the, it's the category defining brand, right? So no one searches like pneumatic tube coffee maker. They just search error press. So, and it's literally written on grinders, right? So like one of the settings on the grinders error press. So basically, this is an opportunity for us to buy a category of, like, making coffee, a way of making coffee.

And, like, people are fanatical. There's, like, world aeropress championships. Buristas get, like, tattoos of aeropresses. Like, it's totally nuts. So anyway, I spent four years trying to convince him to sell his business. And I literally emailed him every single month for four years. I'd call this the Dennis the menace. Just like, I have an email reminder in superhuman and I just kept asking.

And then finally, you know, over the last six months, we negotiated a deal and got it done. And the idea is very simple. I mean, this is an incredible product. It's really just about selling it in more places. And they really just didn't have a DDC strategy. So we're basically coming in. We're going to focus on D to C and keep the business as it is otherwise and just scale that channel. So we're super excited about it.

What you just said reminded me when I think he said this on the podcast. I think I could share it when Moise Ali was selling native. And native at the time was just a just a deodorant. That's all they sold. One product with a couple of scents or flavors. And so it was like a, you know, here's this paraben-free, aluminum-free deodorant. And he's going to be selling. And like part of the sales pitch of like how to get more upside in the deal was, hey, right now we're doing so well with just deodorant.

imagine if we expand it or whatever. That's kind of like the high level idea. But I thought the way he said it makes a big difference. It was wonderful. And this is like, I call this out because, you know, when I teach his power writing course, it's I live for these phrases, these, let's take the same information. Let's say it two different ways and watch what happens. And so, you know, one is there's lots of room to expand into other product lines. Okay. Emotionally registers as a one. And then the way he said it when he was a meeting with somebody, they were like, well, how big can this do you don't think be and like you know what's the upside here for us he goes he goes do you know how to write the word native on other bottles he's like like if could you write that on a

shampoo bottle could you write that on a toothpaste bottle he's like that's your upside and it's like you know obviously kind of a funny asshole thing to say but it really like hits home and so when you when i was hearing about the aeropress thing it reminded me of that which is like you know do you know to make a website because right now if it's all if it's all done not through d to c not done online it's like it doesn't take a genius to make this like the genius thing was buying it not making it better and bigger than it is today and that's like your sweet spot right is you're not looking to be a genius yeah there's this period where factories went from being steam powered to powered by electricity right and you could basically go and you could buy a factory and convert it there's a lot of money

being made to be made in just electrification in factories or products or anything. And this is one of those things, right, where you find a business that's using a legacy sales process via retail, which we're going to keep. I mean, it's an amazing advertising mechanism and we love all the distributors and everything. But at the same time, it's like, hey, we can also sell us DDC. Awesome. And it's such a simple insight that we don't need to be geniuses.

A, even if we don't do as great as we think, we'll still do fine. We'll have a great business. And if we do well, we're going to blow the doors off. And one more point on that, that you bought it for $70 million. What is the annual roughly the annual marketing and advertising spend that has created this business that you bought for $70 million? Is it more or less than $1,000? Yeah. It's like $20,000.

Exactly. So, I mean, here's the other one. If you include salaries, there's a few people in the marketing, but let's call it, if you include salaries, maybe let's call it $15,200 grand. How many people work there? Why do you have a marketing person if you're spending $20,000? Yeah. Why does there a marketing salary? than 10. What they do do do is lots of like, I wouldn't even call it influencer, but like they do a lot of PR and outreach and that.

But the company, the company, this company is, it's like, it's like fucking Carmex or something. It's like, you made it one time. And then like what when I imagine a business like this, what do the people do every day? Like do you have like, like, you know roughly how many orders. For the hustle, I used to be like, why do you have 25 people here? You write one email. And you're like, yeah, it just takes a lot of people to like, you know, make this. email great and like have ads. Well, for us, for us, it was redundancy. You needed redundancy because because it was a digital thing that people made every single day. And I actually think you could run the whole business with 15 people or less.

But with Arrow Press, you probably could, did you only need like 10 or five or how people do you do? I think there's sub 10 in place. Wow. And they're managing the distributors and making sure manufacturing is good and all that kind of stuff. That's crazy. And so a five or 10 person company for $70 million.

That's freaking awesome. That's so cool. Like, you know what Carmex is, Andrew? It's the like the chap. Oh, the lip bomb. Yeah. Yeah. This is like, this is like one of those you, I think you up here, you call it a cruise ship. This is one of those things where it just does, it does the same thing. Like you guys didn't create anything new after the initial thing, right? No, no, we haven't done anything. Explain this cruise ship investing framework. What is this? Well, okay, so I think when I talk to any young person and, you know, myself and. included, I really glorified startups. Right. And I like to kind of turn these into like analogies or whatever just so they're easy to explain. And I was like, oh, you know, a startup is really like a speedboat, right?

It's exhilarating. It can go anywhere. But at the end of the day, you know, you're driving over waves. You're getting your, you know, body destroyed, you're freezing cold. You might hit a rock. You might get drunk. You really have to be white knackling and pay attention. and you're constantly worried you're going to run out of gas, right?

So I was like, okay, so that's a startup. A cruise ship is slow and steady. It moves on a straight course. So you can pretty much estimate where they're going. You can make an educated guess that you'll end up in Hawaii versus Antarctica based on where they're going and what their course is. And you can get a comfortable sleep, lots of amenities. There's very low odds of failure.

It's not dangerous at all. And best of all, you don't have to buy the whole boat. You just buy a ticket. And I was saying, you know, a stock certificate, right? So essentially, just as a mental model, I go, when I look at a business, I go, is this a speedboat or a cruise ship? Do I need to be white-knuckling less? And do I need a, you know, amazing captain? Or can I just go and board a cruise ship that's already doing really well?

And it's much more boring to write a cruise ship. No one's going to give you an award or write a book about you for having an amazing crossing of the Atlantic or whatever on a cruise ship. but it's very comfortable and enjoyable. So I've just been using that example when I talk to young entrepreneurs. There's a similar example to that. So this guy named Joel, what's the guy who started? Joel on software. Yeah, Joel on Software.

What does it call? So what's the thing that everyone knows? Trello. Stack Overflow. Yeah. So this guy, he's amazing. So his name's Joel and Software. His blog, if you want to read good writing, it's this guy.

It's called Joelandsoftware.com. It's amazing. And he's got this amazing blog post where he talks about different strategies. And he basically calls it the Ben and Jerry's or the Amazon. And so with Amazon, it's new competition, or sorry, new technology and there's very little competition at first. And you basically need to go balls to the wall like a speedboat. You need to go as hard as you possibly can early on to grab as much market share. You're okay with losing a lot of money. And you know, it's, and you've got to go fast. Otherwise you're going to lose and it's a zero-sum game. Or there's Ben and Jerry's where there's already a lot of money. lot of ice cream competition. You can go to a bunch of different ice cream places throughout the

week and it's no big deal. And if you do a good job, this could last for 50 or 100 years. And that's kind of like the different strategies, although I would say that the cruise ship analogy is probably even better. Totally. I wanted to ask you, you said something about the cruise ship thing, which was like, you know, you don't get to be the hero because you didn't, you know, white knuckle and like survive the crazy storm and come out the other side, which is like, you know, startup founder who pulls it off and disrupts the industry and blah, blah, blah. And you had a thing on here, which I think is more related to your Twitter stuff, but I think they're both the same. They're both related, which is, what's the perfect amount of notoriety? So what's the perfect

amount of fame? And to what extent do you do things in order to build your profile, build your fame, right? So what are your kind of like most up-to-date thoughts on that? Because I think you've done a good job, right? You do have a high profile. You have a higher profile. You have a higher profile. than, I don't know, 99% of people who do what you do, which is private equity. And, you know, so you've done a good job in that. I think that's paid work dividends. And it's probably had fun, you know, ego dividends too, where you feel good about it. But, you know, there's downside.

So what do you think now? What do you think is the perfect amount of notoriety? Well, this one I'm trying to figure out. And I don't really know if I have the answer. And I think you guys have probably gone through this exact same thing as I have. I mean, I was sitting at a cafe. My wife was like, hey, you know, go take a couple hours to yourself. And so I went and I sat at a cafe and I was reading a book.

And a friend showed up. I started talking to him. Hold on. Your wife just said, go take a couple hours for yourself. Could I just, the MVP of what's going on? I didn't tell my wife this is a thing. This is because I haven't been irritable, right? Because I'm not an addict right now.

So anyway, so I'm sitting there and chatting with my friend and, you know, I'm sharing personal stuff and, you know, talking about what's going. in my life. And maybe 20 minutes into our conversation, there's this guy who's sitting to our left. And he goes, hey, I'm really sorry to interrupt, but I heard you on my first million. I've bought a business over in Vancouver. And that was so cool, right? Like, that's, I'm sure you guys have that too. Every once in a while, someone will stop. Is that a, is that a real story, by the way? Yes, 100% real. That's awesome. There's the guy, I'll mention the guy. He runs a, he runs the best gourmet coffee shop at UBC, which is a big university in Vancouver. it's called Bulldog Coffee.

And I was like, wow, that's actually genius. You've basically got to capture, you've captured a market. That's smart. But anyway, what was going through my head after that is, oh, my God, what did I say? Like, you know, here's this person who heard what everything I was saying. I don't think I said anything bad or, you know, overly personal. But there is this sense of like, oh, there's a loss of privacy. And not only that, but you have to be consistent.

So if I go on this podcast and I say, I'm about X and Y and Z, now every time I talk to someone, if I change my mind or I want to be kind of a chameleon and just be a different person or whatever, like, they almost like call you out or whatever. So it's just, it's, it's very interesting. And some of the other downside is that I'm sure you guys have had is consistency and commitment bias, right? So one example is I talked about the sugar-free bakery thing I was doing. And we ended up getting, we weren't legally allowed to use a key ingredient in Canada until it's approved. So I was like, okay, I have to shut this down. But I didn't shut it down for like two months longer than I should have because I'd gone on here and made a public statement to everyone.

Hey, everyone, look, I'm doing this thing. And I felt ashamed. So it was like in a logical thing. There's this great quote by Bill Murray. And I said, if you think you want to be rich and famous, try being rich first and see if that covers it. And I think that that's really interesting. And I think like you want to be respected in your world. You want to be like in film. You'd want to be like the Cohen brothers, right? Where it's like no one knows what the Cohen brothers look like. But if they're at the Academy Awards, they're like ballers and they can get the attention and do whatever they want.

I don't think, do you know who daf punk is? Yeah. Oh, dude. Dude, I was like, they've got the best job because, I mean, they don't even have to show up. And they probably make 10 million each a year just help these concerts because the EDM or whatever the genre is, they're huge concerts. I'm like, they didn't even have to show up.

They could be anyone underneath that mask. They could be anyone. Totally. I think it's super smart. And I don't know. What do you guys think? Sam, you've shared some stories about being stopped in the street and stuff. Yeah, Sean, do you get stopped.

I get stopped probably once or twice a week. I don't think our audience is big in the suburbs of California. So, you know, my neighbor's average age is like 70 probably or something. So I don't think these guys are listening. But what's cool is like my trainer. He came to me the other day and he's like, I met these two guys in the gym. They're like 21, 22 years old. And they were telling me like, oh, dude, you got to listen to this podcast.

It's like, we're hooked on it. And they're like, we're getting so many ideas. We're going to quit our job. We're going to do this stuff. And, and they were like, what's the podcast? And it was like, my first million. He's like, bro, that's my buddy. That's why, Tray, I'm going there right after this.

And they're like, no way. And so it's more of these like secondhand stories that have either, A, happened to me or B, like kind of light me up a little bit. Like I mentioned my cousin's name on the last podcast because Jack, Jack, who was on the podcast had invested it. in him. And he's like, dude, he's like, I know you do a podcast or I know you mentioned me in the podcast because I'll just get a bunch of messages being like, oh, somebody, you know, he shouted you out or can we invest in your thing? He's like, it's amazing how much instant like kind of,

you know, love I get if you just say my name or say our company's name on the pod. And those are cool moments. Yeah, the serendipty. Like, I talked about this idea. Sam and I were riffing on like, you know, what business would you start if you could start anything today or just throwing ideas and one of them was DDC pregnancy health. So how do you build a super baby using supplements and blood work and all that kind of stuff? And now I'm in partnership with this woman named Katie Dewhurst and we're working on this business together and it's been super fun and I never would have been able to do that and I literally met the best possible person for that idea. I never would have been able to do that. So it's like the pros are huge but then the cons are those kind of odd

things or for you guys I would assume you're probably addicted to your podcast stats right oh where are we ranking on the iTunes no our well our well I would say we do I'm more addicted to Twitter I think so like I was like oh I'm I'm gonna be slick and turn off my notifications but what I do is I search the Sam Parr my Twitter handle like I search that and then type in latest so it's like I see my notification I'm like yeah like I'm like so that kind of like that's stupid I'm the podcast is not Podcasts is not designed to be addictive. Because you don't get these like viral spurts. It's slow and steady compounding with no immediate feedback.

You don't get comments after every episode. And that makes it suck. And there's a lot of bad things about that. But the good thing is it's very zen. And so like of all the things I've done, newsletter, Twitter, and I've like tried to be successful in them, try to grow them. Gotten some growth. Gotten success. Got made money off of them.

And they all, I like, fade out because I'm like, you know, I don't like what this does to me. You know, I think one of the most toxic things you can do is care too much what other people think of you. And it's fundamentally the loop of what social media is, is you post something and then other people react to your, either your photo, what I look like, what I sound like, or what I said or what I thought, right? And so, you know, I hate tweeting something and then wanting to go check the mentions, check the reaction to it. because fundamentally I'm putting all my awareness and attention to what do other people think about me. And that doesn't have to be. That doesn't have to be bad. So let me give you an example.

Andrew, you probably don't know this, but I'm a fitness influencer now. I've got 4,000. So I kind of did it as a joke, but kind of not. So basically, this, the year of 2021, I wanted to work really hard to get very, very, very fit. and I hit a little bit of a plateau and I was joking with Sean but I kind of wasn't joking I was like I'm just going to start posting on Instagram constantly and just become I'm going to change my identity to become a fitness person and I've been doing it lately and it's obviously it's not a big deal like no one actually watches but it's made me not eat certain foods because I'm like I said I posted that I was going to hit this weight and these people are like it's not real but in my head these people are expecting me to do it I have to come with the results. so I can make this story complete and be like the love of their lives and like get their attention. And is that unhealthy? Kind of, but I'm getting a great result.

Well, I think we got to talk about this book I read called Wanting. Have you guys heard of this book? No. No. So, have you ever heard? So Peter Thiel talks about memesis or memetic desire. Have you guys heard about this concept? Yeah.

He talks about like, was like René Jarreard or whatever. René Jarreard. I buy the books and I'm like, I can't fucking read this. It's so dense. I know. It's like a French poetry or something. David Perel did a bunch of articles about it. And even then, it's just too dense.

It's too academic. I didn't get it. And finally, you know, one of my friends who's like super into Peter Thiel gave me this book wanting. And it was kind of a revelation for me. So the idea is basically that you want the things that are modeled to you by other people. So, you know, you meet a friend at a bar. You want a beer. He orders a martini.

Maybe you go, oh, maybe I do want a martini, right? So that's, like, the most generic example of, like, a meaningless thing. What about if your friend tells you he just raised around from Sequoia Capital, right? You start asking yourself, why didn't I raise from Sequoia? Why don't, you know, why does his startup have more employees than mine does? Why didn't I get that job title? He has a sailboat. Why don't I have a sailboat?

Why don't I have a Rolex? He moves to Brooklyn. Why don't I live in Brooklyn, right? So basically, when you surround yourself with peers, you start competing with them and you start wanting those things. And, you know, I see this in my own group of friends. You know, when one of us buys a new car, within a year we've all bought a new car, right? There's these waves. Or the other thing you see is mirroring.

So, you know, let's say I buy a Tesla. My friend might say I'm buying a classic Ford Mustang and I'm going to constantly talk about how much I love the rumble of the engine. or working on it, right? It's like this like counter mirror. So it's super interesting because you don't actually want these things. These are not real desires. These are modeled to you. And so in this book, they talk about thin desires. So these are like extrinsic things coming from the modeling of others, right? So wanting a Rolex because people, you know, that are your peers value Rolexes. And then there's thick desires, which are intrinsic. They come from inside of you. So you enjoy. So you enjoy. working in your garden. You don't need to tell anyone. You don't post about it. It's not part of your

identity. You don't do it to impress anyone. It's just something you quietly enjoy. And so I think the big thing is coming up with what are my thick desires, what are real versus what come from wanting to be like my heroes or my friends or whoever it is. Because if you're not careful at pruning this, you will become this. And if you spend too much time around people who want things that you don't actually want, you will still desire and achieve those things. So I love what you're saying. Keep going. So you read this book and there's like the question of what are your models, who are your models? And what did you take away from this? So yeah, I mean, like are you jealous of Jeff Bezos? No. Jeff Bezos is not someone that you compete with. Jeff Bezos is often this celebrity world,

right? Jay-Z, that's not someone you compete with, right? The people you compete with are people within your bubble like it could be each other us three maybe there's other things that there there could be other things that people are more jealous I I guarantee you anyone who's on Twitter for example anyone on Twitter in business you know you and the morning brew guys like it doesn't matter if you like them or anything you're still in a memetic competition when I see Sam post as a fitness influencer you bet your ass I work out harder that day totally well and exactly he now values health so that's that's good if you want to be healthy hang out with Sam will probably make you healthier over time, right? So that's a good thing. But so, you know, and there's so many different

bubbles. There's so many different worlds. So for example, if you live in San Francisco, the thing that everyone wants is, you know, fundraising and valuation or who your investors are. If you're in New York, it might be about your wealth, your art collection, or your fashion. In L.A., it would be, you know, what awards have you won? Where do you get restaurant reservations? You know, athletes, it's Olympic medals, chefs, it's Michelin Stars. Comedians, it's Netflix special. You know, you name it. So the way to figure out who your models are as well is actually to ask kind of an odd question.

You say, who do I not want to succeed, right? And maybe it's deep within you, right? But it might be that guy on Twitter who, you know, you're friendly with and everything's fine, but you kind of, he bothers you or he's maybe a little ahead of you, has maybe 10,000 more followers. You just don't want him to succeed. That's probably who you're in memetic rivalry with. And so the real question.

question is, you know, how do you, A, align with people who will lead you down a path of this memetic copying that will actually make you happy? So that's spending time with people who are actually similar to you and want things that are your thick desires, right? Being healthy, being safe, gardening, you know, whatever that is. And then the other question is, how do you opt out? And really, that's pruning. You know, what do you read? Who do you listen to? Who do you spend time with? And, you know, for an example I thought about for myself, you know, I was spending all this time reading about Warren Buffett. I've idolized Warren Buffett forever. But when I think about, you know, what is Warren Buffett actually do in his day? He's a guy who can sit there and read all day reading annual reports. That's what his life has set up for. I would kill myself. Like I have no interest in doing that. And I think I'd be very bored. So I have to be very careful not to overindex on Warren Buffett. The other thing you can do is you can opt out. So you can say, you know, I'm going to be like Dave Chappelle, I'm going to move to Ohio, where I'm just, you know, a redneck and, you know, in a small community or whatever. For me, I live in Victoria. You know, I'm not as exposed to this

as other people. And there's this great story of this guy who's a Michelin star chef. So you think about chefs. The ultimate is you open a restaurant and a really high end restaurant, you get a Michelin star. This guy, Sebastian Brass, did that. All he wanted was to get a Michelin Star and he got it. And when he got it, it didn't actually make him happier. He just wanted a second star. Then he got a second star. Well, it didn't make him happy either. And he just lived in fear of losing it because they just come and inspect you. You know, it'll be like they'll come to your restaurant and if the tablecloth isn't perfectly clean or the food is in a certain way, you know, you get rejected. And so you end up living your life by these arbitrary rules that don't actually make you

happy and you fight for something that, you know, is not what you actually want. So this guy is a baller. He just said, Michelin, I want you to remove my star, take me out of the guide. I'm out. Right. So you can do stuff like that, but that takes like brass balls. That's very difficult to do. Why did you mention read-wise? I mean, you're talking about reading and everything. And I want to ask you what you're reading. Why did you mention read wise on your document? Well, I think like, you know, I'm like you guys, I just read all sorts of random stuff and I'll read all these books that'll make a huge impact on me. But then I'll forget everything, right? And so I use this tool called read-wise. where my Kindle highlights basically get emailed to me once a day at random.

And it's like there's like a memory thing called spaced repetition. And so it basically sends you, you know, every week, every month, I'll get all these ideas back, boom rang back to me. And I just kind of am reminded of some of these things I've read. When you're reading, do you just read book after book? Yeah, usually. I do that as well. I'm thinking that's actually really stupid.

If I find a book that has a big impact or has a ton of learnings, I should probably reread that every handful of months or something. Like, you know, you should do whatever it takes to really understand and grasp and assigned reading, not as much like go from thing to thing to thing. You know what I mean? Do you know what the Feynman method is? No. You read the thing and then you teach it and you can't truly understand it until you teach it.

So like a way of remembering really well would be go on the podcast and in a very cogent way, summarize what you've learned and then keep bringing it up for yourself. Right. Like I mean, you know, just even writing out some notes for this podcast, it forced me to actually go, what did I learn in this book? And I'm sure it'll actually hammered into my head better. That's how I used to be in college. I didn't know that that was a technique, but I figured out pretty early on that the way I could get better grades. It's like I wanted to have good grades, but I didn't want to keep studying as much. I felt like other people studied so much.

They spent so many hours in the library and I just didn't find it. I didn't want to do it. And I was like, well, here's what I'll do. I'll basically quickly skim the material and then I will lead a study group where I'll teach it to that group. And in that process, I was like a horrible teacher for the first like hour when I was doing it because I don't know the material yet. I actually don't even understand it. I barely remember half of it, but I remember half of it.

And by teaching it, I remember that half and I quickly figured out the other half I didn't know. And I just remember, like, that's how I studied for every final when I was in college. And it was pretty amazing because I could study half the time as other people because what they would do is they would try to just ingest it and just keep ingesting it. They would just try to keep reading it and rereading it and writing notes and rereading it. And they would never try to articulate it off the top of their head to anybody else or answer a question in public with a. anybody else. And so they never did that and they just tried to like solidify it in their head. But it never really did, you know, for them or it took way longer to do it. It's such a hack, right? To be able to summarize it in one sentence or have a, you know,

have a metaphor or, you know, whatever it is that helps you remember it. Can you do that just by writing a blog post about it? Or do you actually have to speak about it? No, you could do that. I used to run this thing called the anti-MBA and it was a weekly book club. Basically, we would read a book a month and each week we would divide that book into quarters. So we'd talk about a book every week. And I would basically be leading this and we would have 10 or 20 people show up and I would lead it. And I remember I learned like crazy every book. I was like mastering it. But I wasn't sure if I could do that now just through blogging or if I actually had to like organize and talk to people about it because that'd be a pain in the ass. One thing I've seen is my, I don't know, this is kind of

unpopular way to think or something. I don't know. I don't think this is the, this is how most people think. But listen, like, Andrew, so I think Andrew, I think you're super smart and amazing and great. And I love them when you bring these ideas because it makes me be like, it brings all these new thoughts into my head. But I think you and I think Sam to an extent do something that I used to do, that I'm trying to stop doing. And that is like, this constant optimization. And so like, you know, this idea that I'm going to read a book, I'm going to find a, great book. And then Sam's like, I'm going to reread it because I want to sink in. I'm going to drill it into my head. And Andrew's like, no, what I do is I highlight using this tool and I set

up an auto trigger to email me back the best highlights. Like old me would have been like dope, love that. That's going to be my solution to this like underlying ever present problem. I'm going to keep seeking these solutions that are like new hacks, new optimizations, new like kind of techniques and solutions and methods. And, um, and the one like realization I've had, by talking to some other people outside of this. My trainer is really the one who drilled this in me because he would be talking to me during a workout. He would say something to me.

I would go run to my notepad. I'd write it down because he said this really wise thing and it was so good. I wanted to remember it. It was a nugget of gold. And he told me he goes, he goes, you know, you won't have to write these down. And I go, what do you mean?

Also, how nerdy of you to be writing this down? I would literally stop a set and I would drop the weight and I would go write the thing down because I'm like, you just said it so perfectly. And in my head, I'm like, I'm going to know this. I'm going to remember this. I'm going to tell other people, I'm going to say this on the pod. It's going to look great.

My head actually is silently thinking all these other things. It's like trying to like achieve some stupid goal because I'm like, this is the answer. This is the nugget that's going to be my next hit, my next tweet, my next whatever. That's going to be great. So that's like, you know, a lame thing to admit. But that's true. That's where my brain was going. But I was like, what do you mean?

I want to write these down. Like, you know, I'll just remember it. And he's like, you won't feel like you lack something. and so you'll stop like trying to catch everything and grab everything and hold on to everything and learn the next new thing. What you'll realize is like you already know the answers. He's like, you know, it's like a thin book. You didn't like imagine a book that ended in 20 pages and it's like, you know, for a diet book, right? You can keep searching for the next fad diet, you know, the Atkins diet, and then the slow carb diet and then the carnivore diet. And you're

you're just cycling through all these different diets trying to find the next. solution and read the next thing. And in reality, you kind of know the answer. The answer is, you know, don't eat too much and eat like, basically like eat real food, mostly plants, and not too much. Three lines. That is the answer. But instead of actually just sitting in it, you want it to be more complicated than that. You would like it to be that actually there is more. I need to go learn and find and try and buy this, you know, get this app that's going to do my intermittent fasting and then put this ketone drops in my drink and then wear a patch that measures my glucose monitor and like all these optimizations. And so I've actually spent so much of my life trying these different

optimizations. And I've really, I'm just saying this as almost like a public service now. So if that's you, if you've done a bunch of these optimizations, you kind of have on this endless path of optimizing. And you do get results. It's not that you don't get any results. But like I've now found this like other way that's a lot more peaceful and a lot more fun. And it's basically, get rid of the underlying feeling of lack and doubt that you have that's causing you to constantly chase the next best method and solution and answer. I think that really resonates. And one of the things I didn't talk about was my routines and how that was making me miserable. I think often routines are great and best practices are great, but they end up creating conditions under which you can have a good

day. And if you don't follow the conditions, your brain starts saying, oh, it's not a good day because I didn't get that workout in or I didn't get, I didn't do my cold plunge. I didn't do my Tim Ferriss tea in the morning. I didn't do my Evernote, you know, journaling routine. I didn't do a gratitude journal. I didn't use this app, right? There's endless things. And I totally resonate with that. Like, one of the practices for me was like, how do I not check my aura ring? How do I not check my blood glucose? All these stupid things that are giving me, they're tickers. Yeah, there you go. Like there are tickers for life and tickers make you miserable.

You know, look at a stock ticker, look at KPIs, look at revenue day to day, hour to hour, and you're miserable. You shouldn't have those for your life. Yeah. And I should say it's bad for business for me to say this because this podcast and all of my content and everything I put out is optimizations, hacks, shortcuts, you know, ways to be better, ways to better yourself and this constant curiosity about what are some other things I could try to better myself? What are some other areas I want to be better? and what are some ways I can be better? And so I'm like juggling these two things that are almost complete like opposition. And like, you know, and I'm not perfect on it either, right?

Like I still wake up, swipe over and check the Bitcoin price. Even though I know it's this roller coaster. And like when it's red, I'm starting my day off with like a, you know, a tiny jab. And when it's green, I start my day off with this, this great little delight that like I don't control. And so now my my first mood is up to, you know, the conditions of like, you know, fucking crypto prices, which is silly. Totally. Sean, what do you think?

What do you think people are going to think of an episode like this? I'll be curious. I'll be, because I, sometimes I get nervous about talking about this shit because I'm like, I don't want to pontificate too much. I don't want to, like, act like our way or my way or your way. It's necessarily better than any other way. I get nervous about, like, having like a guru productivity vibe. I get nervous.

I'm like, and then I also get nervous. I'm like, these people just want like money-making schemes. Let's just give it to them. I'm very like think about like Chimoth right why is Chimath interesting he's interesting because he goes you know he goes on CNBC he talks about all this crazy investing stuff and then he goes with Kara Swisher and he like pours his heart out and he's interesting and empathic and well yeah and like he doesn't give a fuck yeah you do a disservice if you don't show the negative side of all this stuff at the same time because

people will just blindly think you know oh yeah these guys have it all figured out and we don't so I think we're all as miserable as anyone else I think two things are what you said. I think you're not giving the audience enough credit. Like the people who really listen to this podcast, they know this is not money-making schemes. We just, like, we are shooting the shit about business stuff and we're kind of business nerds. And that's what they like. So it's not actually that they're looking for.

Oh, God, I came to this to find my next million-dollar idea. That's the, like, surface-level thing. And then when you get through the door, you realize that's not it. The second thing is, it's just like, like, this feeling you're having it, like, what are people going to think of this episode? I'm ridding myself of that question. That question doesn't come into my brain anymore. Why? Because who cares?

Really? Not at all? I'm active. Sean's going to be wearing red robes. He's going to have his head shaved next episode. Dude, he already does. She shows up to the podcast half the time wear to robe. Exactly.

I'm not saying I have rid myself of it. I'm saying I am trying to rid myself of that question. Right. And it's coming up less and less. Why? Because two things. A, I don't want to be that way. I don't want to sit here.

and be the dancing monkey performing on the stage just for their entertainment. I want to be here from my entertainment. And like, who are the people who are going to love this podcast, the people who love what we talk about, period. So if we're talking about something we are interested in, that they're always going to be into it. And if we just keep that as the method, right? Who are my customers, the people that love what I do, that becomes the sort of like the,

the most joyful way to do, you know, any kind of business or any kind of product because it is just you push. out. And so then you don't have to worry about what are they going to want. Did they like me? Did they not like me? Is this good? Is this bad? You know, I liked it, but are they going to think this? It's like those questions just disappear if you commit to who are my customers, the people that love what I do. So same thing for this. Who are our listeners, the people that like what we talk about, period. So then I don't need to work. If I like what we talked about, then I don't need to worry about it. And that becomes a very simple filter that's internal and not like seeking

kind of what are other people going to think about this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and, and you and I agree on a lot of stuff about how we feel about the audience. I guess sometimes I think of it like I'm going to do whatever the hell I want to do. And other times I do think I am here. I exist to serve like others. Right. So like you could say like well, just don't give a fuck. Don't give don't care about what other people think. Yeah. But what if I phrased it of like, well, I'm, I'm here to service other people or you, you know what I mean? It's like that. And that's a fine line. Andrew's saying, well, one of the things one of the talk is being you. You know, that's the service. The service.

as being you in public, in public transparently, you know? Lately, I've been watching all the Dave Chappelle stand-up comedy from Netflix. I just kind of like rediscovered him and watched them all. And if you watch the first one, it's kind of like a generic, dirty stand-up routine. Like his old ones, you mean? Or? Yeah, his old one from like early 2017 or whatever. And then as you watch them, they get more and more introspective and darker and longer stories and different style.

And it's cool to see someone evolve or see some, you know, deeper. emotional range or whatever. So I don't think it really matters. Like at the end of the day, yes, you guys, you know, this podcast you do, I listen. I have to treat it like crack, right? When I listen to you guys, I get so fired up. I'm always in the shower and I'm going, fuck, why don't we do that business or I should start this or, you know, I love it.

But and that's, that's the, that's what people love about the podcast. But at the same time, like, yeah, I think talking about this stuff is fine. I think it's interesting. Look at a couple of the bigger podcasts. that are kind of like people we like to listen to sometimes. So look at Rogan. Do you think Rogan gets on the pot every day and say, like, do you think he's thinking, all right, you know, what do the people want?

Like, what does the audience want? How do I make this conversation entertaining for them? Like, I think that's so far back in his mind where it seems to me, like he's just having a conversation with somebody he finds interesting. He talks about what's interesting to him in that thing. But you know what? If Rogan came on and he said, I had a big fight with my wife this morning. And he started talking about that for 30 minutes.

didn't let the guest talk. Yeah, he's broken the format. Yeah, but also with Rogan, like, you'll notice he, like, for example, um, he'll say stuff like, uh, he changes his words. He's like, well, like, and I agree with this. He'll be like, well, you know, I'm not informed on that topic, so I don't even want to rant about it. Of course. Or he'll say like, uh, you know, I, um, like I'll notice he'll use certain words to be respectful. Um, and he, and he's like, well, you know, and people have asked him, he's like, well, I just didn't know and I know that I influence people so I just want to keep in mind that I don't want to you know say something incorrect and so that's keep so I don't think you have to entirely tell people to uh that you don't give a fuck about their

I guess what I mean is like Rogan's format where he's like yeah I'm going to talk to an astrophysicist one day and then I'm going to talk to an mMA meathead the next day and then I'm going to do a drinking podcast with my buddies while we watch some other shit that you don't get you're not looking at I'm just looking at I'm going to talk out loud and I'm going to do it for I'm going to do three hour long episodes yeah Yeah, dude, but Rogan's a fucking comedian. His whole schick is that he gets in front of people, and, like, comedians are inherently, like, the most neediest people. He gets on a stage and, like, it needs them to laugh and reply. And if he bombs, he feels bad.

And so I agree with what I'm saying is his show broke a bunch of rules that other people would have had. Our episode should be one hour. You should have, like, this, you know, like, this intro, you shouldn't one day be talking about one topic. And then the people who want to hear Neil deGrasse Tyson don't care about Brendan Shaw or whatever else. Sure, sure, sure. And then you have, like, Lex Friedman, huge, huge podcast, huge channel he's created. And the guy's talking about the nerdiest of the nerdiest subjects in the most, like, monotone voice. Right.

So it's like, he's not Mr. Charisma. He's not talking about pop culture and like other topics. Because he's not, he found the balance of doing what's interesting to him in his normal personality. And I just think that's just like a better way to go than trying to be here. Yeah, I'm just trying to say, don't act like Rogan's not human and has the same instance. securities and like saying, well, I want to please people. I want to look. Oh, wow, Bernie did really well. I should do Bernie more often. You know, like shit like that. Yeah, I don't buy. I don't buy that you don't care. Like I think everybody cares. You can say it. And I, I get what you mean. Like, you know, that should be the attitude going into it. But it is unavoidable. Sure. I think like, well, we all give a shit how we're perceived and we'd all be choked. If, you know, I made that tweet the other day. And I got a, I got a message from a friend that said, are you sure you want to tweet that? Right. Because. he'd gotten some messages from people saying, oh, my God, Andrew's having a mental breakdown on Twitter. He said, are you sure you want to tweet that?

Yeah, and he said, are you sure you want to tweet that? And I was like, oh, my God, have I made this terrible? Yeah, bitch. That's why I tweeted it. Yeah, I know. Yeah, it resonated with lots of people. It got lots attraction. It got lots of nice notes about it. But, um, you know, it's, it's scary putting, putting this stuff out there. Yeah, I, I don't find that stuff to be scary, but that's weird. When someone says, I hate, I would hate that interaction, are you sure you want to tweet that? Yeah, dude, I just, like, it took me like an hour to write that. I'm fucking sure. That's a double down for Sam.

It's like, you know what? Like, I'm going to double down on that now. Yeah. I want a friend to text me that if they actually think that, though. Like, I think that's a valuable service, right? No, I don't. But that's okay. Different breads.

I, like, also if I have a friend, my friend Jack, sometimes I'll tweet stuff and he'll, like, reply, like, that's not true. or like, what are you? Like, he'll, like, argue with me and I'll tweet, I'll text him. I go, Jack, don't argue with me in public. Like, don't, don't you dare. Like, what time? He like, brothers do that sometimes drives me crazy. Oh, dude, I'm like, we're family.

This stays in the family. Don't you, don't you fucking, you defend me. You laid out in traffic for me as I will for you. You don't talk, you don't argue with me in public. He always fucking does that. Like, once I tweeted out the numbers of the podcast and he was like, but like megaphone is wrong or he said something like uh he's like oh but you count youtube that kind of like uh that's not really a doubt or he said something like that i don't even remember what it was

and i'm like oh what the fuck jack just like shut up i'm like just text me but we're not going to argue in public you're you're supposed to i don't even know how we got on that but anyway my point was not bringing up that we shouldn't do this stuff i'm just curious is to hear what what the feedback is we care about feedback i care about i'm speaking of my spell i care about feedback tweet at us and you can test me and see if I respond to any of it and fail my I think so how often are you keeping this how often do you hold in your phone how often do you use in your phone well I'm basically I'm down from six hours a day of screen time to two just over two hours and I'm basically just around random days I've just been taking my Apple Watch so if I have a Zoom call or

something I'll take my phone but if I don't I'll just bring my Apple Watch and it's been strangely freeing right because you look I can still see the text and I I can get the calls. But is it Apple watch to AirPods? Yeah, Apple Watched AirPod. And if I'm texting, I've got to do this stupid scratch or Siri. And so it's just not fun to text, and so I just don't do it. Andrew, one of the other thing, you met Steve Jobs?

Yeah, I met Steve Jobs. Tell me what that was. What happened? Well, so a lot of people don't know this, but when I was 15, my very first business was a website with an incredibly embarrassing nerdy name. It was called Macteens.com. And it was me and a kid from Hawaii and another Canadian kid. And we all made this tech news website.

And we started writing, you know, reviews and news and all that kind of stuff. And we started getting a lot of traffic and like breaking Apple rumors and stuff. And I ended up getting invited to go to Macworld as like a member of the press. And, you know, I got invited to this tour of the Apple store in New York when that was a, you know, it was brand new. It was the first one, I think. And so I walked into this tour. think like we're just going to get some PR flack touring us around and I'm standing outside waiting

and a limousine rolls up and it's steep jobs and he gets out and he shakes my hand and I'm you know 15 the guy's my hero I've read every single biography of him I'm like a quivering mess and I spent the next hour me and like five other journalists getting toured around the apple store with steve jobs and I just asked him a bunch of questions about you know about the products they're releasing it was like a PR thing. So it's not like I got to ask him deep questions, but it was pretty freaking cool on the bucket list. What was his presence like? Or how did he treat people? What did you kind of take away from just being around him? Well, I mean, you got to remember he was he was in Steve Jobs PR, you know, Mac World CEO mode. So he was just incredibly polished. I remember he was talking about

the CD burner in the 17 inch IMac. And I was like enraptured. It's a fucking like OEM CD burner, right? But he's making it sound like it's the greatest thing in the world. I mean, you know, the reality distortion field is obviously real. And yeah, he's just an amazing, amazing guy. And it was cool to me. Did you read this story that this guy tweeted out yesterday? I thought you might have a story related to this guy. This tweet kind of went viral about he was trying to sell his company to Steve Jobs and he fucked up. Did you read this? No. Like I said, the guy who was the CEO of I like, which was like a kind of like a music discovery service, kind of like in the early, you know, like startup days.

And it was like a popular service. And it's like Apple wanted to, Apple was interested in acquiring them. And he's like, perfect. Like Apple would be my dream place to get acquired. And they go and he gets to have a meeting with Steve Jobs. And he sits in the meeting with Steve Jobs. And he's like, you know, I started off a little rough because I was so nervous to be in front of Steve Jobs. He's like, but we kind of hit our groove in the presentation.

We hit our demo. Like, you know, like first he's like the demo kind of went off the rails first because the executive suite, Wi-Fi was down. And it's like, oh, shit, how are we, we're not on the internet.

How do we do our demo? Well, we were, like, we're covered. And Steve asked a few questions while we were talking, but we had great product answers. And you could just tell, he was digging it.

And so his story is basically that at the end of the, the meeting, he was like, look, like, I think you guys are great. And I think you built something, something good here. You know, we'd like to buy your company.

I'm going to, you know, like, I'd like to buy your company. We're, I'll talk to Eddie and we'll figure out, you know, Eddie will take it from here. He'll deal with the details. And, and then he's like, the guy, like, kind of didn't want the meeting to end right there. He's, you know, first he's like, that's amazing.

But he's like, you know, like, what, what range, you know, would you be thinking about for, for price for an acquisition? And then, like, Steve, kind of like, the dial, the dial, like, turns up a little bit. It's like, this conversation gets a little more serious. We're talking about the price now. He's like, he's like, what's your revenue and how much did you raise, what was the valuation at your last financing? And the guy's like, oh, like, you know, revenue, like, we haven't, we're pre-revenue, we're super small right now, but, you know, we raised at a $50 million dollar valuation and we've added like, like millions of users since then. I think he said 50 million users since then, which is some absurd number. And Steve Jobs, like, we probably acquire it for 50 million.

And then the guy's like, went from this high of like Steve Jobs just said he wants to buy my company to like, oh, shit, we've been working like since the last. round we raised two years ago we've been working at quite all these users i'd have to go to my team and be like hey you've created essentially no value between last valuation and and the exit here um so he's like you know doesn't want it to just leave it there and he's like um he's like uh you know i just think i don't think my team will be uh i don't i don't think my team or the investors would uh you know that would be acceptable to them and then he's like he's like we'll make it he's like we'll like we'll convince them like that was like steve jobs will something like that. And the guy's like, you know, I just feel like, you know, I think we're

worth more than that. I think we're, I think we're worth 150 million. And he like, pause for a second. He goes, actually, like, I know we're worth. I know we're worth 150 million. And he's like, jobs got like, pissed. He's like, you know, do you have another offer on the table? Have you been offered $150 million? Is that how you know that you're worth that? And then the guy's like, just paused for saying. He's like, bullshit. He's like, you're a liar. And he's like, I don't, he's like, forget this. We're not doing this deal. And basically like walked out. And then he's like, we tried to salvage the deal. Like we tried to like with Eddie. Eddie tried to like make it all good. He's like, Steve Jobs called him later. It was like, I don't trust you. I don't trust you. I think

you're a liar. You know, over, you overstated like, you know, every, you overplayed your hand, basically. And I was like, we're not doing this deal. Oh, I love that. That is awesome. Who wrote that? Oh, wow. What company? That is an awesome story. This guy, let me pull up his name. So his name's Ali. Partavi. So his Twitter handles APA, A part OVI. So AP A-R-T-O-V-I. What ended up happening to his company did itself? So I think, let's see, what ended up happening? So it's... What a baller story. I think that's a great movie. He's like soon after that, Apple released the iTunes Genius sidebar. It was a rip-off of their thing. Facebook copied their thing,

and they sold the company for a loss within a year. That was the sort of like the... Oh, my God. to the story. The other good one is Drew, the story of Drew Houston going into, they were talking about dropping drop off and Steve Jobs just starts saying, feature not a product. You're a feature not a product. We can just rip you off. And I mean, in some ways, Steve Jobs is right. I think that criticism is fair over the next decade. Couldn't rip them off though. It could be irrelevant. But at the same time, Drew Houston went on to become a billionaire and build this great public company. Dude, I actually, I love stories where Steve Jobs is wrong because the guy, it was like a fucking asshole like you know he fuck that guy was he a brilliant yeah but like i was thinking the other day um where he like had this quote where he goes to that guy who uh who was selling pepsi and he was like do you just want to sell sugar water your whole life or do you want to come

and change the world and i'm like part of me's like badass that's awesome steve good job yeah soda sucks whatever you're doing is doesn't suck and then i'm like dog what you've just created is fucking candy bar for the brain. If we hate, if I'm supposed to hate Zuckerberg, I should dislike you too. Like, you're selling the crack pipe. He's selling the crack. What's the difference? And so, you know what I mean? Like, it's like it's the same. It's like it's the same thing. Like so, so anyway, whenever I hear these stories about him and being arrogant, I'm like, yeah, you're badass. You're awesome. You're always right. And then also like, eh, you're a dick. Shut the fuck up. Like, I was, I was, as a CEO, I was terrible because I couldn't do that.

Like imagine Sam, you're hiring someone and you say, like, do you want to change the face of publishing forever? Right? You just sound like such a doucheek. But you talk to most Silicon Valley CEOs and they say something like that. I just could never bring myself to say that. Well, part of me is envious. I'm like, oh, wow, you actually believe that you are doing something. And then part of me is like, you're full of it.

I just read this book called Endurance. Have you guys heard of this book called Endurance? Oh, my God. It's amazing. You ever want to feel like your life is good? Read that. Oh, my God. I couldn't put it.

down. Sean, do you know what it is? I haven't read it, but I've seen the cover. I know the cover in my brain. So basically, in the early 1900, it's probably between 1900 and like 1925. It was called like the heroic era of Arctic Expedition. So they had steam engines and they had combustible engines, but it was still, they still had sales and they didn't have radios. And so these guys would sail from England all the way down to Antarctica, the very southern part of the world to try and figure things out. The world wasn't really well mapped out, but it kind of was. So basically, it was kind of safe, but mostly not safe. And this guy named Ernest Shackleton basically led this expedition of 30 people, and they got stuck in Antarctica. And it's basically the story about their two-and-a-half year or maybe two-year expedition to survive.

And what I learned reading that book is basically the pack, the people you're leading, they mimic the behavior of the leader. And so for a while I was against this like, we're going to change the world or like, you know, I should be vulnerable and I should let people know like, you know, things aren't going that good. But now after reading that book, I'm like, no, fuck it. You've got to like convince everyone that it's going to be okay no matter what. Totally. It's an amazing book too. When I get stressed out at work, one of the things I love to do is to watch, what is it called? Alone.

Have you guys seen that show? They literally dump people in the middle of nowhere and it's a competition to see who can survive in the wilderness. all by themselves for the longest. Oh, my God. You know, you're watching people eating rats and, like, trying to catch fish in the freezing cold. How long do they last? Cuts his leg open with a hatchet or whatever. You know, usually it's like some people go like three months, four months, six months,

but a lot of people are out pretty quick. And the Shackleton book is exactly like that. I watch it and I just feel so relaxed because I'll be cozy on the couch and warm in my bed reading the book. And it really makes you appreciate just how comfortable our lives are. read that book, Sean, so we could talk about it because it, like, I read it over two days, I think. It was, it's riveting. I post really, it was crazy. I can't believe that that people survived that. And it made me feel thankful. And it showed me that like, in order to be a leader, you do need to convince people out and yourself that everything's going to be okay. When I read that, I was like,

I don't want to be a good leader. I'm not willing to do what this guy was willing to do. Am I willing to go this far? Something funny just happened on Twitter. So speaking of distractions and all that good stuff. And speaking of the memetic kind of like, who are your models and then who do you want to see, who do you not like to see when? All right. So, so, Bezos just tweeted out this thing. He goes, he goes, you know, you should listen and be open, but don't let anybody tell you

who you are. This is just one of the many, this was, and he posted a photo of a Barron's article, of a headlock, of a front page of Barron's, which says, Amazon. Dot bomb. And it's a picture of Jeff Bezos's face on a bomb. And it says that the title is, the idea that. Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos, has pioneered a new business is silly. He's just another middleman and the stock market is starting to catch on.

The real winners is in like the early 2000s? Yeah, this is in, I don't know when. Sorry, go ahead. 99-ish or something like that. Oh yeah, this is 1999. He goes, it says the real winners on the net, and it's like apostrophe net, like internet. The real winners on the net will be firms that sell their own products directly to consumers. Just look what happened to Sony and Dell.

That's what's going to happen to Amazon. And so Bezos was basically saying, Like, you know, people told us we were going to. There's one of many things where people told us we were going to fail. And he goes, today Amazon is one of the most successful companies and has revolutionized two entirely different industries. And then Elon Musk tweeted out and replied with just a silver medal with a number two on it, like the emoji with a second place metal. You got to give because Elon's currently richer than Bezos. Either because of that or space.

Atec game better than. No, I think I think it's the rich thing, which is dushy. If it's a space thing, that's not dushy. If it's a rich thing, that's dushy. But it's so funny, because you were saying that's a metic, right? Those guys are in a rival. Yeah, you were saying, like, to us, Jeff Bezos is not really the rival.

We don't really root for his, you know, whatever. It doesn't, like, hurt us personally when Jeff Bezos wins a little bit more. But for these guys, these are their memetic rivals, right? Like, these are their peers that they sort of are in competition with. Dude, also, this is, I do want to see Elon lose a little bit because he gets too smug with his upgrade he is. because he is in fact amazing. But how baller is that tweet?

It has way more lights on the first one. You said earlier, you said, you know, you said fuck Steve Jobs. And I think in order to be that successful, you have to have some kind of personality disorder. Oh, yeah. Or like trauma or something. And you look at Musk or Bezos or if you read more about Bezos, I think he's a really difficult person to work for.

Like all these guys are so complicated. And a hundred years ago, you just wouldn't know. There wasn't Twitter. You just wouldn't see this. This would all go on behind the scenes. And it's crazy that we get to see stuff like that. Well, I don't even think it's that complicated. Musk is really successful because he's incredibly smart and has a complex because his father probably didn't love him.

Like it's probably quite simple. But it works, right? I'm thankful that. Well, you say this thing that's great. I think I don't know where you got a phone, but you know, show me a great man and I'll show you a bad man. What is that quote? Well, I always say, I don't know if I got it from anywhere or not, but all men are also. evil men.

All great. Oh, great men. Something like that, right? Yeah, great men are bad men. Yes. And in order to be great, you have to do bad stuff. Or you may not think it's bad, but like, let's say that like 60% of Americans think Obama is a saint. Well, like the people who he droned, they don't think he's a saint.

I've got Afghani friends and they'll be like, oh, I fucking hate Obama. You know, he drone my family. And so, but like, so in order to be like do great shit and be loved by at a large scale, you're going to piss off a lot of people. The way I would put it, it would be better might be all great men are sad men, right? So they have a sadness or a trauma. Don't want up me, Andrew. Don't want up me. Or a disorder that's driving to do this because why else would anyone do it, right?

Talking about the Shackleton expedition. These guys are the Shackleton expedition of business. Why would anyone choose to do that unless they have a personality disorder or like deep trauma? Right. Mimetic rivalry. Andrew just won up to you. Perfect. Yeah, like, actually, I think your example of like Obama drone striking people is a little too extreme.

I think it's more like Elon Musk is a great inventor and businessman. That doesn't also mean he's got great views on the vaccine and he's not a great husband maybe. Yeah. You know, we will praise somebody for an aspect like on this podcast. I will happily praise somebody for an aspect of something they do that's interesting. Like this is like the Jake Paul tweet I did where I was like, Jake Paul is a great marketer, a great self-promoter. Like I don't even think that's arguable. Like I think he's clearly a great self-promoter.

that is how he is so famous as he promoted himself into fame. And, like, people are like, yeah, but he, you know, he's accused of assault on this girl. And, like, he's a jerk. And, like, haven't you seen these videos where he makes these crude jokes? I said, oh, like, sorry, did I say he's my, like, he's my hero? And that, like, he is a great boyfriend. Like, I don't think I said that. I think I said he's a great marketer and self-promoter.

You can learn from that and appreciate that. And that's the way I take it, which is, um, You know, anybody that you praise or you call out for being awesome or call out for being bad, it's not, you're not saying they are either all great or all bad. It's like they are great in ways and bad in ways and everybody is that and it's not even that interesting to say at that point. You can like how he builds cards, but not how he treats his marriage. Right. Yeah.