My First Million - Favorite Finds: From McDonald's to Twitter Famous, Pelosi's Finances & How To Close A Deal

Starting point is 00:00:00 He said this line that I love. He goes, that sounds silly. I understand that. That my whole day is just about posting on Twitter. But everybody's just got a thing. That's my thing. Okay? And he's like, we've all got one thing.

Starting point is 00:00:12 That's my thing. I love it. 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. All right. We have a special episode. We're going to talk about cool content that we've consumed.

Starting point is 00:00:28 This might be short. 25 minutes, but you want to kick things off? Yeah, well, I want to say why I think this is a good type of episode to do. We, you know, one of the best ways to change your life is to change like your, if you want to change your body, you'll go change your diet or your habits, your work out habits or your eating habits. If you want to change your mind, you need to change your info diet. And so one of the questions I like asking it, and I know you do too, which is like, you're like, it's like the dorkiest question ever.

Starting point is 00:00:55 We probably should find a better way to phrase it. No, it's a great question. But it's the answer is so good that we don't even care how lame the question sounds. But I've heard you say this before like, so what media are you consuming? So what are you like, what are you like, what are you reading nowadays? Or like, what content do you like to consume, which is. I do that in job interviews and people will be like, oh, I read like the New York Times. I'm like, no, come on.

Starting point is 00:01:17 Like what subredits are you like consuming? Do you use Reddit? What about Twitter on Instagram? Who do you follow? What are you getting it? Who's influencing you? We asked Palmer Lucky this. We were like, what reddits?

Starting point is 00:01:26 What subredits do you go on? because his brain was, and it was like he's firing off all these awesome things and all these different areas. It's like, that doesn't just happen by accident. That happens because he's got a set of interesting inputs that leads to a set of interesting outputs. We as MFM want to be one of those interesting inputs for you so that you become a more interesting, smart, you know, person based off of listening to this, but we're just one thing. So what we want to share is what are the best of the inputs that we read, listened to, or watched this week that maybe you should go check out. So that's the premise of this. I wish more people did this.

Starting point is 00:02:01 Of people that I find interesting, I wish they would be more, I wish they would curate for me like, yo, here's the one or two best things I read or watched this week or listened to just to get my mind going and show me cool things I should go do.

Starting point is 00:02:11 Anyways, that's the spiel. I want you to kick it off. I want you to do it the top two. All three years are good. So why don't you kick it off at the top one? So one of the best things I watched this week is Bill Gurley's talk at all in. Have you heard his,

Starting point is 00:02:26 his talk that he did at the All In conference. Yeah. So he did a talk, I believe it was about Uber and regulation and like some of the surprising things they found. So Bill Gurley was the like lead investor in Uber. And he goes to All In and I expected him to talk about, I don't know, venture capital, uh, business, investing, but he's now retired. He's a retired VC.

Starting point is 00:02:47 So he's like kind of in the no flux given mode, which is great. Like, you know, when you get a really smart person who now feels like they have nothing to lose, they can go off. And I feel like that's the best way to describe this. It wasn't a talk. Bill Gurley went off. And so what he does is the talk is titled, I think it's like 2,851 or something like that, some number. And he's basically the talk is like, that's the number of miles between Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C.

Starting point is 00:03:14 And what he does is he talks about regulation and how screwed up it makes business. And so he goes through example after example. And to me, it felt almost like a John Oliver. You know, when John Oliver does those last week tonight things where he just has a monologue, he's like exposing something that's screwed up or like coffeezilla does this on YouTube where he'll go in and it'll be like, Logan Paul scam people and let me just expose the whole the grift. He exposed the grift of regulation. And he's like, dude, look at this. Like COVID happens. So they pass these laws about COVID testing.

Starting point is 00:03:50 And look at this. The same test in the UK or Germany cost like, you know, seven times less. as it did in the U.S. Why? Because in the U.S. it was mandated that only these two companies tests were going to be allowed. And in Germany, it was a free market. So the test, the cost went way down. Or he would give an example of, he's like, you know,

Starting point is 00:04:09 here's the guy who passed this law. And he says that these are the only three vendors that the government can use. And so they charge this crazy amount. And then guess what? Here's his LinkedIn. Oh, what do you know? Five years later, he's on the board as the chief, whatever, at that same company that he handed this prize to.

Starting point is 00:04:26 And it's like the grift is real. The thing I loved about this, because you're like, damn, that was a great talk. He's like, I've been working on this for like 15 years. He's like basically for the last 15 years, every time I saw something that was just complete grift, I was screwed. So just to effed up part of the system, I wrote it down. I made a note. And so he's like, this talk is basically 15 years in the making of me kind of observing what's screwed up about the way that Washington works.

Starting point is 00:04:51 At the end, his mic drop is basically like, he's like, I called this talk in a 2008 or 51. That's the number of miles between San Francisco and D.C. And when I talk to people in D.C. And they ask, you know, how does Silicon Valley, you know, do so much innovation? It's because we're so fucking far away from Washington, D.C. Like, we're just away from the poison of the way that that place works. And we're the farthest possible place away on the map in the United States from D.C. So I love that talk.

Starting point is 00:05:16 Was there any, like, promising parts of it where, like, this is going to change? Or is it like, this is probably not going to change? Well, at the end, they're like, what do we do about this? Can this change? well, the first thing is this, we have to, like, expose this, right? Like, you know, you got to shine light on it. You know, the bacteria sort of grows in the dark. And the second thing was he was like, you know, it's hard because the incentive is the people who could change the laws that would say, hey, you know, maybe if you write the laws about these companies, you can't trade their stocks, for example, right?

Starting point is 00:05:47 Like, we've said this on the pod. Yeah, but the people who need to pass that law, they're the ones who are profiting from this. So he's like, it's almost impossible to change that incentive. It's like they would have to do that. They need so much pressure in order to make their change is because they're not incentivized to do it. In fact, the opposite. Their entire incentive is to keep the system the way it is.

Starting point is 00:06:06 There's this interesting thing that's going on where I don't know anything about the government. I don't remember if it's the Senate, Congress, whatever it is. But it was like one of the few things that both of handful of like hard right Republicans and hard left Democrats were agreeing on where they're like, all right, we're going to create like a political index fund where you could only have, if you're a politician, You have to, you can have money, but it must be in this particular index fund. And so, like, you can't own individual stocks. You know how Nancy Pelosi is accused of like doing whatever.

Starting point is 00:06:35 And then how I think it was the head of, was it the New York Stock Exchange? There's a, one of the companies, like two weeks before the government shut down with COVID, they sold a bunch of stocks. And like, this all looks suspicious. And so they're trying to like argue that there needs to be a political index fund. It seems like a pretty cool idea, actually. By the way, there's a startup called autopilot. I don't know if you've ever heard of them, but they do like,

Starting point is 00:06:55 like, it's like a automated money management or like, you know, basically it's a way to, what you can do is you put your money in the app and then you could be like, oh, I want to copy the Michael Burry portfolio. And you can just copy their public portfolio. Yeah, it's cool. What they did that was really, so the business was doing okay. And then it's like, growth took off. And I was like, dude, what happened?

Starting point is 00:07:14 Like incredible chart. He's like, we made this Twitter handler called the Pelosi tracker. And they have the Burry tracker, the Pelosi tracker and whatever. And the Pelosi tracker has 339,000. and followers. And it basically every time she makes a trade, they, um, they post about it. And so they just dig through the filings and they post about the things and, and her gains that she has. And like, of course, somehow Nancy Pelosi is like, happens to be, you know, she's, uh, it happens to be up 30% year to date. Like she's outperforming Warren Buffett. She's outperforming your favorite hedge fund guy.

Starting point is 00:07:49 Like, how does this government, you know, official do this? It's like, well, maybe they know, some things before some things. It's insane. That was a genius growth hack that they did. All right, I'll give you one. So this has been going around Twitter, but I went and watched the whole thing. It's pretty amazing. So Dion Sanders.

Starting point is 00:08:08 I'm not a football guy. I'm not a sports guy. You're going to know a lot more about this than I am. Dionne Sanders, he's now the coach of, what is it, Colorado? Yeah, the Buffaloes. The Buffaloes. And he was on 60 minutes, I think, like two weeks ago. It was pretty amazing.

Starting point is 00:08:21 They did like a 12-minute segment on him. And it was really fascinating because I remember, Dion Sanders as being like this like cocky, like showboat guy. And he is still a little bit of that. But he's incredibly insightful. And so basically, what university was at? It was a historical black college. Was it Jackson State where he was?

Starting point is 00:08:38 Yeah. I forgot the name of it. Yeah. Some not very popular school. He gets into coaching. He does a decent job there. Then he gets recruited to go to Colorado, which is a big deal. But what he does is he, he's doing two interesting things.

Starting point is 00:08:50 The first interesting things that he's doing is one of his sons is filming the whole thing. It's like his Gary Vee thing. And so his son is like filming behind the scenes and posting it on YouTube and driving interests. It's really fascinating what he's doing. Have you seen that? It's amazing. So one of his sons is the quarterback, the starting quarterback.

Starting point is 00:09:06 I think another son is on the team too. The other son is like, you know, the cornerback or the, yeah, I think he's a cornerback, which is what Dion used to play. And then the other son, the son that's not playing football is basically the Gary V vlog guy. And he's just in the locker room. He's documenting the whole thing and sharing it on social. as they go.

Starting point is 00:09:25 And they're just doing a better job of it than like, you know, anybody's doing following that stuff. Yeah, it's awesome. And the second thing that he did was his leadership skills are really good. And they're kind of shocking because I just thought that he was just like a meathead and he was just this really cocky guy. No, man, the guy's really insightful. And so basically they show like a clip from one of his first meetings with the team. And he basically, he goes, I'm here to encourage most of you to quit.

Starting point is 00:09:50 The reason being is you guys are, the team's lost so much. I think last year you were like one in 11, so you lost most every game. You barely won a game. And the coaching staff, they're all out. We got rid of them. I'm here. I brought a bunch of my guys here who I know are good. And look, here's the deal.

Starting point is 00:10:06 The coaching staff is to blame, but you know who else is to blame? The kids, because the coaching staff probably recruited a bunch of losers, and I'm here to get you losers to quit. And the guy on CNN was like, hey, man, that's a little harsh. Like, these are kids. He goes, well, look, if you are willing to quit the team, because I said that, you're probably weak and you're not an asset to this company. And if you're going to let words scare you, I need you out of here.

Starting point is 00:10:30 And I need the tough guys to stay. And I need you to be an asset and not a liability. And he revamped the roster. He brought like 40 new players in, which is half of a football team roster. And 50 left. In 50 left, they went into the transfer portal. And he goes, he's like, look, truth is good for the kids. This is what I'm here to teach your football.

Starting point is 00:10:50 I'm going to teach you how to live life and be a good man. and what you guys need is truth. I need to tell you the truth. I need to prepare you for the real world. And we're going to, I want a winning team. And he does this other thing where he goes,

Starting point is 00:11:00 the interviewer goes, so who do you think is the best football coach right now in the NCAA? He goes, well, do you have a mirror that I could hold up so I can see him? He's like,

Starting point is 00:11:10 it's me. He goes, I'm going to be the best coach. But then he does a good job a beat like humble. He's like, well, I learned a lot from Nick Saban. He's forgot more about football

Starting point is 00:11:17 than I'll ever know. And so I'm looking for little crumbs from him. But it was really inspirational because I think that, this type of like pound your chest leadership. The way that he delivered it was really good. It was very inspiring on how to lead a business. Yeah, you know, I'm usually not a, believe it or not, that big of a believer in like the effect of the pregame or half time speech.

Starting point is 00:11:41 Like that seems to be like probably overrated in terms of what a coach can do. And vastly underrated is the systems and like habits and standards that you like enforce and instill. And so what people are seeing a lot, because it's super viral. You share the half-time speech. You share the pre-game speech or the post-game speech. And Dion, I don't know if you know, between football and this, between playing football and this, he became like a pastor, like, part-time. And so he was like very religious and he was like giving sermons.

Starting point is 00:12:12 I remember watching him on TV, giving sermons on a big white suit. But if you watch, one of the other things he does, he set a bunch of standards. So he's like, you know, day one and almost in the like that book. look, the score takes care of itself by Bill Walsh, where it's like, okay, yeah, we want to win, but the score will take care of itself if we do these inputs. And like the famous stories, like he makes the people answer the phone in the front desk appropriately. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:12:36 And John Wooden did the same thing. He's like, we're going to learn how to lace up your shoes. If you can't, if you don't take the time intention to figure out how to lace up your shoes, just to make a point of like, what we do out there is a result of how, of what we put in. Let's, let's understand that. It is a direct result of what we put in. And so we're going to, we're going to monitor that. And so one of the things that they show in Dion's stuff,

Starting point is 00:12:56 and I saw this when I was at Duke with Coach K, is like it's the little things that they set as the standard. So for example, he's like, you know, if you are on the field, he put up, he put up footage from the previous practice. He's like, look at what's happening here. Can anyone tell me what's wrong?

Starting point is 00:13:08 And it's like, I don't know, it's not even a play. What are you talking about? Like, this is just us walking in between the drills. Like, he's like, exactly, you're walking. If we're on this field, we run. We do not walk. And he's like, basically created a new set of standards. And so he's like, if you're in a team meeting, where do you sit? How do you show up? Do you use

Starting point is 00:13:28 your phone? Do you do? And he's just like kind of like instilling new standards. So while the speeches are getting a lot of the the shine, I think the more interesting thing is basically in the how we show up the daily standards of the inputs that go into it. And now, of course, you know, they're undefeated right now and they're doing really well. And I think it's more because of that. Yeah, it's awesome. And he did a good job where he was like, When the guy was like, when he did the whole thing, like, let me hold up the mirror. And he was like, well, look, here's the deal. I tell my kids, I go, I expect you to be the best.

Starting point is 00:14:00 So I'm going to be the best too. And he's like, I think you can win the Heisman trophy. And I think I'm going to be the best coach. And so he does a really good job of balancing this like cocky, we're going to take over the world and also high expectation. So I thought that was really inspiring. What do you got? All right. I'll do another one.

Starting point is 00:14:16 This is in the nerdy realm. So there's a guy who is a Twitter account I really like called CFO Secrets. I love this guy. He has a newsletter that I didn't subscribe to, but I just saw one of his posts that was really great. It was called Uncovering the Mystery of Working Capital and M&A. I was like, okay, that sounds like, you know, boring.

Starting point is 00:14:35 Has a market size of like three people right now. Dude, when I sold the HubSpot, it took me a week for them to explain what working capital was, and I still don't understand it. Read this post. It's really good. So one of the things that I look for is like, you know, you can tell.

Starting point is 00:14:51 when somebody actually knows their shit. And honestly, like, sometimes when I go on Twitter or I go on YouTube, I just want to delete my account because I'm like, it's so annoying that the most vocal people just don't know what the hell they're talking about. And what happens is some people know what they're talking about. They produce content. Everybody loves it.

Starting point is 00:15:13 But then some people, instead of taking that content and going and executing on it, they're like, I too will create content about how to be successful. although I am not successful yet. And then they do it. And then there's like a ladder below that. And they're like, I will tell people how to do sales, even though I've never done sales,

Starting point is 00:15:28 even though I don't know anything about sales, even though I've only sold $10,000 in my life. Right? Like, and it just ladders down in that way. And then those people have the most time on their hand. So they're the most like active publishing stuff. It's crazy.

Starting point is 00:15:40 So seeing this guy's newsletter, I was like, oh, finally somebody who knows what they're talking about. So he has this thing about M&A. And if you ever sold a company, so much of what he says rings true. He's like, so he's like,

Starting point is 00:15:50 the post starts like, this. I'm just going to read you some of the best parts of it. He goes, it always starts the same. We're tired. Everyone's been sprinting to get this over the line and we're sprinting because time kills deals. And he's like, if you've done deals, you know this. Momentum is what oils, the deal wheels. And he's like, there's always a point where the deal is mostly agreed. We've agreed on the headline valuation number. And that took a lot of negotiating. It's tired us out. And now there's only two or three points left to agree in the deal. He's like most of these are boring stuff like reps and warranties in the legal documents, and we want to leave that to lawyer.

Starting point is 00:16:22 There's maybe one commercial point left. And so the other side picks up the phone and they say, hey, we just, we just need to iron out this one detail about working capital peg. And he goes, I'll say something like, oh, thanks for the writer. I've been so busy on the documents. I haven't had much time to give that thought. I'll get back to you tonight. But I've thought about it.

Starting point is 00:16:40 I've been thinking about it. I've been thinking about the working capital this whole time. I'm just setting up my position that way that, oh, I haven't really brought it, you know, haven't put much thought into it. and then I'm going to bring them a very well thought through thing that I think is going to make sense. And he goes, there's one last trade left in the negotiation. In my experience, this is one to three percent of your total enterprise value is just this last thing. And it's a pure win-lose negotiation between both sides.

Starting point is 00:17:05 You're tired, they're tired. Who's going to feel like, screw it, let's just get the deal done? And I'm like, and we just went through a negotiation. So you know this is true. By the way, that's what I learned from you about negotiating. You had a line that actually changed me. which was the person who can be comfortable with the most amount of uncomfortableness

Starting point is 00:17:22 will win. Exactly. Yeah, the short version of that I say in every negotiators is the more stubborn party wins, always. People think that the person who wins in negotiation is the one who has the stronger logical case. Hell no. It's the person who is more stubborn who wins always.

Starting point is 00:17:38 And how do you be stubborn? You need to be comfortable in the discomfort. And I would say honestly, when we did this negotiation, which maybe we should do by the way, a breakdown on the whole thing. one of the one of the things I think we did not do a good job of was this last bit the last point which is that last you know one to five percent of value and we were just so tired we just wanted to get the deal done I don't think we did a good job like four months yeah and I think that the real way to do that is

Starting point is 00:18:05 that's when you need to like dig in the most because it's that last deal point that like you can get and you'll thank yourself later for it even though in the moment you're feeling tired it's like any workout it's like do I push here or do I just say I'm tired and I stop. And like anybody who knows about workouts is like, no, push through. Yes, you're tired, but you'll feel so satisfied. And all the gains will come on that, those last two reps of pushing it. So anyways, he talks about this. And then he gets into the nerdy part where he's like, all right, here's a spreadsheet. Like, you know, you have your enterprise value. And then you have your actual valuation. What's the difference between the two? It's like, well, your enterprise

Starting point is 00:18:39 value includes the debt and the capital that's in the business. And then your valuation, you know, the actual equity value is what's left after that. So I think just, just, a very useful doc, a very useful newsletter for people who are going to go through that or going through that. Probably overkill to read this early. But if you're going to do M&A, it really, really pays to have somebody who's good at M&A on your side. When we were doing our negotiation, I was basically trying to convince you, hey, let's have our buddy who's done more M&A than both of us, like help us think this through at the beginning. You did good. You let that one, and you did really good. And I would say I'm still like intermediate, maybe. I'm at the, I'm at

Starting point is 00:19:17 the early stage of intermediate, there's people who are way more advanced. And so, anyways, this is a newsletter. It's a very nerdy find for M&A. I'm going to read this. I went through this. I went through a deal that involved networking capital. I still don't entirely know what it means. This was very challenging. And the guys, this guy's writing is really good. And he actually sets it up perfectly where like, networking capital was thrown in at the last minute. And I'm like, oh, I don't, I don't even know what that is. I'm dead. I want to get this done. It's supposed to close in eight days. I just want to get this done. Yeah. Hey, guys, really quick. So you may know this, but my beginning in business was being a

Starting point is 00:19:53 copywriter. I'm a self-top copywriter. And what that means is I figured out what motivated people. And then I figured out how to use the written word to get them to do what I want them to do. So that could mean selling them a product. That could mean writing a speech or even giving a speech and giving someone to buy into a particular movement. It could be recruiting. Hell, you could do it for dating. It just basically means figuring out what motivates someone and how to use the written word to take an action, get them to take an action or to think a certain way. And the way that I learned how to copyright was I did this thing called copywork. And copywork is this famous technique that's not really popular anymore,

Starting point is 00:20:24 but it used to be really, really popular. And you basically take writing that is great, writing that you love, and you write it out by hand and you copy it and you make notes of what particular thing that writer is doing that makes it special. This is the exact same way that you learn how to play the piano. When you want to learn how to play the piano, you learn how to play happy birthday. And then you learn how to play like jingle bells. And then maybe like a rock and roll song.

Starting point is 00:20:43 And then maybe like a hip hop song. And eventually you can combine that all together. after a few years and you learn how to make music. That's your own. Same thing with writing. That's how I learned how to write. I locked myself in a room for six months and I just did this for many hours a day. I created a program to make it easy so you could do that. It's called copy that. Copy that.com. You can go there and you can check it out. It's a 10-day exercise to make it really easy to learn how to write. If you want, you can just go do this on your own. You can find great writing and just literally copy it by hand. I know it sounds crazy, but it works really effectively.

Starting point is 00:21:08 But I made something that makes it a little bit easier. So check it out. Copy that.com. And we will talk soon and back to the pod. You want to go to the last one? Oh, yeah. Okay. So do you know this account cultural tutor on Twitter? Awesome follow. Awesome follow. So the story's kind of crazy. I didn't really know about it, but he went on David Perrell's podcast, which I think you were going on to or something. I just recorded an episode with him last week.

Starting point is 00:21:33 So David Perrell, cool guy, lives in, I think, Austin, and he's, uh, teaches people, like, about writing online. He's got a new podcast. So he did an episode and the set itself is beautiful. It looks like they're in like, you know, the Royal Library in the UK or something. Beautiful set. So he has this guy on. I've never heard of this guy. And then I was like, oh, I did see one of his threads go super viral. He did a thread about like why all architecture designs all look the same now. They're all minimalist. And that thing got like a hundred million likes or some shit like that. It was really good. Insanely viral. And it's not even about like a thing you would think goes viral, but it hit a nerve. And so this guy, he does his interview. And I've only, honestly,

Starting point is 00:22:15 I've only listened to the first 10 minutes of this. So like many books I recommend, I got a lot of value in the first 10 minutes and I was sort of satisfied. But he said something at the beginning. So he's like, this guy was basically working at McDonald's. Literally, he was like flipping burgers and doing French fries. And he's like, they had like a mutual friend. This guy Harry Dry, who's cool. And then David, I think David like basically sponsored him. He became like his patron. He's like, you want to write? What if I just paid you to write? So he quits his job at McDonald's. He just decides, okay, I'm going to write every day. And David, like, funds him for whatever reason. I don't know exactly how the shit worked, but like, I'm sure they explain it in the other 50 minutes of the podcast.

Starting point is 00:22:53 But the important part is not that. The important part is this guy then decides, okay, I'm going to write one amazing Twitter thread a day. And he says this line that's great. He's like, he's like, and then David's like, what's your schedule? He's like, yeah, I wake up at like 4 p.m. And then I just start thinking about my thread and I smoke cigarettes. I go for walks. I write. I go for another walk. Smoke some more cigarettes.

Starting point is 00:23:17 And then I, you know, I'll eat some food of somewhere in the middle there. And then I'll just write and then I publish and then I pass out and I do it again the next day. And he's like, that's crazy. He's like, yeah. I don't, he's like, you know, I'm not the guy who's going to tell you my morning routine. Don't follow me. But like, this is what I do. And he's like, I just.

Starting point is 00:23:36 my whole day is about publishing one amazing Twitter thing. He said this line that I love. He goes, that sounds silly. I understand that. That my whole day is just about posting on Twitter. But everybody's just got a thing. That's my thing.

Starting point is 00:23:49 Okay. And he's like, we've all got one thing. That's my thing. I love it. And he's like, what are the results have been so far? He's got 1.3 million Twitter followers.

Starting point is 00:23:58 He's got an insane Twitter following. Like he's built in like a year. Is it making money? I don't know. I don't think it makes any money off of it yet. But he can, right? like, you know, it's not that hard to turn attention into money once you have attention. You know, it's harder to turn money into attention than it is attention into money, to be honest.

Starting point is 00:24:14 He has 1.5 and he has a 100,000 person email list. Yeah, he's doing fantastic. That's incredible, right? So he's doing very, very well for himself, you know. But I just love the intensity this guy was going to bring to something. And I've actually noticed this as a common trait, which is if you bring a level of seriousness to something that everybody else considers not serious, you can actually win much bigger than most people realize. This is how we felt about newsletters.

Starting point is 00:24:40 I was like, well, I'm doing the math. I think this could be a legit thing. And we sold early, but we definitely, the business could make $100 million a year. You know, Morning Brew is close to that. And I always say one of the reasons why is people thought this was silly. But if you did the math, I'm like, I don't know. I think the math is out there.

Starting point is 00:24:54 I think this is going to be a real thing. And I think that's the same thing with my latest business as well, which is we're just taking something seriously that most use as a hobby. Yeah, I don't know if that's true. Is that true? Aren't there like, you know, does YPO not take this seriously? Do those guys not take it seriously? They do, but most, there's a few that do, but many, many, many others in the space.

Starting point is 00:25:13 They think that it's just like a, it's like a small thing that you charge $100 a year for, something like that. There's a lot of hobbyists. The better frame, I think, for what you're doing, to be honest, is just the, we joke about it, but it is the beautifully done. I am trying to do that. Your shit is just more stylish and more cool and more desirable. for a variety of intangible factors ranging from design to people feeling FOMO to content to,

Starting point is 00:25:42 you know, the first 100 members that you added to your thing. Like I remember getting sales calls to join whatever, what a Vistage or whatever the hell. They missed the mark. They missed the mark. Well, what I love guys like cultural tutor because what I do for a lot of my brands is I follow people like him. and I look at like what was cool in the 60s and 70s that I can just reuse today. So for example, our color for Hampton, it's the color of this really cool Jaguar car that was popular in the 70s. And then when I made the branding, I found old Rolex ads because I'm like, what was cool then? That could still be cool now.

Starting point is 00:26:19 There's another example. Have you seen the sunscreen company that's doing that? Vacation, where it looks like an 80s or early 90s like a aesthetic. The guy who did vacation, this guy, Jeremy Summers, he's amazing. did the branding for us for Milk Road. Oh, he didn't make the character, but he helped us develop the whole brand. And then the last bit was, we didn't love the character. And then we had a different guy, do the drawing, the illustration for it.

Starting point is 00:26:41 But he did our branding. Yeah, that for Milk Road. Jeremy did an amazing job. And he's, that's specifically his aesthetic is that kind of like, I don't know if I, I shouldn't say that. He's really good at that aesthetic, which is the like kind of vintage, classy, like, you know, nostalgic, beautifully done sort of aesthetic. By the way, we'll wrap up with a quick story about David Perel. I went to his apartment.

Starting point is 00:27:03 So basically, he lives in Austin. He has an apartment in the building. But then he also rented this other apartment. And when you walk in, it feels almost like an Airbnb or maybe like you're walking into like a restoration hardware store. Everything is perfectly set up. And David is really OCD. And so like he's got this two bedroom or it was a three bedroom apartment. They knocked down one wall. So they went all in on this thing. And then one room is like the studio where we sit and then another room is like the guest room where if you're a guest and you want to fly in and you could stay there. But like there's like a record on the wall or there's books in the shelf. And I'm like, David, all these have a meeting. He goes, of course, you know me. You know every single

Starting point is 00:27:42 here, every single thing here has a purpose and has a story. And so he like perfectly like picked everything in the studio. And what is that? Oh, would you like to see this cream colored book that's on my bookshelf? Does it even have pages in it? Maybe. This book says, I don't think you see that. What's it say? Tango lessons. Tango lessons? Did I read this book?

Starting point is 00:28:07 No. Did I go on Etsy because somebody said, go buy cream-colored books to put in your background and makes you look classy? Dude, everything at David's place is on purpose, and it all has a story. And I sent you a video, and I'm like, we have to step it up.

Starting point is 00:28:22 This guy is so particular. He's the Dion Sanders in my world of podcasting right now. Outrageous comp. All of his standards were perfect. And I saw his trailer. Oh, my God. The guy's sweating the details. David's awesome.

Starting point is 00:28:36 He does a great job. He's gotten way further with a topic that I think is incredibly boring. Like, he makes millions of dollars a year doing right of passage, like getting people to become like fucking novelists or something. I don't know how he does that. That's not even a thing I think people want to do. Like, you know, write long essays. Like, I'm amazing.

Starting point is 00:28:54 Like, to me, that is, you know, 10 out of 10 execution on a 4 out of 10 operations. opportunity. If he was doing like whatever, used card sales, he'd be the, he'd be like a trillionaire, right? Because it's like, dude, he's obsessed with it, though. He loves it. Of course. Of course. He's doing it for the right reasons. He's so obsessed for it. I think he said this publicly. I met him two years ago and he's, he's Jewish. Ethnically, I don't know, religiously. I don't know if he was as well. But he went to a Bible study class every day or once a week. And I was like, why are you doing this Bible study class? He's like, well, the Bible's really important because it's just like part of culture. He's like, I'm just so fascinated with like writing and like I've noticed there's a lot of Bible references.

Starting point is 00:29:35 So we started going to this Bible class. Well, I see him again after about a year and he's like, I've converted to Christianity. They got me. Like, like I just read it so much and I thought, you know, I really want to go one step further and I want to become a Christian and see what this thing is all about. Like he is an academic and like a very, like in the coolest way possible. But he's like bought into this whole thing hard. I was trying to flirt with him. Instead of sending nudes, I just sent him a font. And he was over the moon about it. Loved it. He's like, oh, is that Jaran? That made me weak at the knees.

Starting point is 00:30:09 Let's recap him real quick. So we got the Bill Gurley talk. That's a YouTube video. The David Perrell interview with Cultural Tutor, watched the first 10 minutes. It's great. And what was yours? Yours was the... Dionne Sanders on 60 Minutes. Deon Sanders, 60 Minutes. And then the Secret CFO News. about nerdy M&A stuff. There's like a series. It's like a 19 part series and I read two of them and they're very good. All right. That's the pod.

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