My First Million - Greatest Hits of 2021 (Vol. 1)

Episode Date: January 7, 2022

On this episode, we bring you some of the best and most popular moments from My First Million in 2021. Let us know how you like the episode and if we should do greatest hits in the future!  _____ * 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: (01:10) - Michael Jordan's house (12:45) - Mob tours (19:00) - Dopamine detox with Andrew Wilkinson (26:30) - Shaan's goal setting framework (30:00) - Betting on yourself w/ Ariel Helwani ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More Clip 1 (1:10) - MJ's house Clip 2 (12:45) - Mob tours Clip 3 (19:00) - Dopamine Detox w/ Andrew Wilkinson Clip 4 (26:30) - Shaan's Goal Setting Framework Clip 5 (30:00) - Betting on Yourself w/ Ariel Helwani

What is up, my friends, and welcome to my first million's greatest hits, volume one. I don't know. It's been a minute since we've done one of these, but for those of you who don't know who this is, my name's Jonathan, Bar Shop. I work behind the scenes here with Sam, Sean, and Ben. And in this episode, we've compiled five of the best moments of 2021 and are going to be serving them to you in just a bit. But first, I just want to give you all a huge shout out for helping us grow the pod this year

from 100,000 downloads in January to over 2 million monthly downloads this past month. So just insane growth. And that's all because the reviews. you all been leaving on Apple Podcasts on Spotify and all the clips that y'all been creating. So we ran a clip contest this past month. And a few of y'all have gone like crazy viral getting millions of views on TikTok. So just nuts. So I wanted to give you all a quick shout out.

Say thank you. But that's not why you're here. You're here for the goods. So without further ado, let's dive into a few the best moments from 2021. So this first clip is from episode 158. I still think this idea has a ton of legs. But the idea is to buy Michael Jordan's home and turn it into a museum. Let's give it a listen.

Sean put something on here that I actually think I was telling a friend as I was researching. I actually think that this is one of the better ideas that we and you you've ever come up with. The Michael Jordan thing. Yeah, you want me to explain it? Okay. So I've been looking at this house for a long time. Michael Jordan's house has been for sale for like a decade and it hasn't sold. And this is his house kind of like in Illinois near Chicago where, you know, Michael

Jordan was on the Bulls and he had this 56,000 square foot home in Highland Park. And so this thing originally, he put it up for sale and like, I don't know, nine years ago for $30 million, $29 million. And now it's, you know, the price has been cut in half and the thing is still not selling. And if you look at the photos, you can just go, it's like on Zillow. So you can go look at the photos. He's got like an indoor basketball court. You know, the gate leading up to the driveway has his big 23.

number like embossed in it. He's got, you know, everything you would want, like huge, you know, closets because he's got, you know, all his Air Jordans or whatever. And so his house is, it's pretty unbelievable, right? There's, there's all kinds of epic shit here. But it's not selling. And it's not selling for, I think, a couple of reasons. It's like, you know, it's very custom to Michael Jordan. Like, it's like, it was custom made in many senses. So, you know, the other rich people don't necessarily want to live in a house that's like made for another dude. It's also, you know, it's very expensive for the area. The property taxes are really expensive, all that stuff.

But I was thinking, okay, the price is now cut in half. Now it's a $13 million house or a $13 million home that you could buy, 13, 14, 14. And now it's in range where maybe there's something fun you could do with it. Now you might be getting a value buy. So I was thinking, all right, there's a bunch of people, obviously, that are basketball fans that love Michael Jordan. there's a bunch of new ways to crowdfund that we've been talking about NFTs or Kickstarter or different crowdfunding platforms. So the question is, should we buy Michael Jordan's house? Should we start a crowdfunding campaign and buy Michael Jordan's house?

So if you could get 5,000 people to each put in $2,500, then you could own a fractional share of Michael Jordan's house. You could own a piece of this history. and we could just buy it out, take it off the market, and we could own this thing. And then the question is like, what do you do with it? And so I wanted to brainstorm with you, A, should we buy Michael Jordan's house? And B, what could we do with it if we did buy it? What do you think?

So the whole NFT thing, I wouldn't do that. I think that I think you've had two ideas here. One is to buy his house and two is to do the NFT thing. One of those ideas is great. I think the other one is over-complicating it. I would 100% buy it. And the reason why I think it's such a great idea is immediately after seeing you write this, my thought right away went to Graceland.

You know what Graceland is? No. That's funny that you don't know what that is. It's because it's such a big deal in my family, or Elvis is at least. So Graceland is Elvis Presley's house. It's in Memphis. It's in downtown Memphis. It's actually in a pretty crappy neighborhood now or the neighborhood is not nice.

And it's like kind of gross, but it's, It's just like a cutesy thing to do if you visit Memphis. And I went and did research on it. And so around 600,000 people a year go to Graceland, which brings in something like where I have the numbers here. Okay, so Graceland, just in attendance, just in ticket sales, brings in $21 million. So it's, yeah, pretty wild, just on tickets. And then... 600,000 visitors a year, $36 a ticket, right?

Yes. And I got interested in this. So I thought, what are the most visited homes in America? So I came up with a few, and I want to fill you in on them. So the White House doesn't count because you can just, I think you can get a tour, but you could also just walk outside of it. But Graceland, 600,000. The second one, you guys are going to make fun of me.

I don't know how to pronounce this. Is it Monticello? I think so. Okay, Monticello, that's Thomas Jefferson's house. And so the interesting thing about this place, as well as a few other I'm going to mention, is that they're nonprofits, which means all of their numbers are public. And so the revenue for Monticello, which includes a ton of investment revenue, was around $200 million in 2010, but around $8 million, 7 million came just from ticket sales. So $8 million a year in ticket sales, which is crazy.

And they have around 500,000 people. Another most visited home is never like homes that people drive by, Neverland Ranch. People don't go there. But the other one, another great one is Mount Vernon, which is, I think, what's our first president? George Washington's house. And they do in food sales alone. This is crazy.

Just in food, $17 million a year. Wow. Is that crazy? The whole operations. And then they do $15 million a year in admission sales. And in total they do about $51 million a year in total income, which includes $10 million from contributions. Is that crazy?

No, that's absolutely insane. So let me ask you, these, okay, so this, all of a sudden, this starts to get really interesting, right? Because I think Michael Jordan is on par with Elvis and, you know, Thomas Jefferson. Michael Jordan's got T.J. beat by a long shot. So, you know, MJ over T.J. I think is part of the slogan that we have when we buy this thing. But if they're doing this much in traffic, I got to know, is there something else? Meaning, like, are these in really, like, popular areas where there's already just a lot of tourists or something like that? and this is just a pit stop because, you know, Michael Jordan's house in a neighborhood,

you'd have to only be going to go to this place. I looked up Michael Jordan's address. Guess how far away it is from Chicago Airport, one of the most popular airports in the world? I'm going to guess 45 minutes. 20 minutes. It's 20 minutes away. Okay? So it's like, have you been in Memphis?

Memphis is like, there's not that much going on in Memphis and all these people are going to Memphis. Chicago is what, the fifth most populous city in America, or maybe third, something like that. Something is interesting here. So what I would do is I wouldn't do the NFT thing. I would raise two or three million dollars from a bunch of rich people, or I would try to use my own money if I had two or three million dollars that I wanted to spend on this. And I would buy it. And then it would probably cost a fair bit of money to get it set up. It would probably cost a lot of money.

another many more millions. But then you'd have to convince collectors to lend you the stuff and you create a Michael Jordan Museum. Yes. And that's how you do this. And the companies that we've just mentioned, Graceland, Monticello and Mount Vernon, so those obviously, those folks lived in the 1700s or died in the 1800s. So they've been around, those properties have been around as tourist destination.

for 100 plus years. But they've done 50 million in revenue, which is a shit ton. But even if you've just done $2 or $3 million in revenue, and you could do that and adjust for inflation for 50 plus years, kind of like Graceland has done it for 60 years, that's incredibly fascinating. Right. Yeah, I'm with you.

So I think you're shitting on the NFT thing a little bit, but it's not about NFT. What I'm saying is crowdfunding. So I think that there's a benefit to crowdfunding, which is that crowdfunding is a way to make, the story more viral. It's a more PR-worthy story that, you know, people from the internet, people from Reddit, whoever got together and bought Michael Jordan's home off the market for $15 million. They raised $15 million and bought the house versus a rich guy, went to his rich friends, raise some

money. The second thing is those become, you know, your evangelist to spread the word and to come make the pilgrimage to go see Michael Jordan's house. And I think you could do two or three things with it. I think you could make it a museum that's like a modern museum that we've been talking about, like the museum of ice cream or something like that, where the tour is very heavy photo-based. And so you're going through and it's all these different photo exhibits of, you know, you in Michael Jordan's bed and, you know, wearing, you know, a pair of his Air Jordan or standing in a pair of giant Air Jordans or something like that. And you make it like a museum of ice cream where you're going to walk out with, you know, 10 photos that are Instagram worthy at the end of it. I also think

give people background on me on ice cream museum. Yeah, Brady, you can pull the latest numbers, but I think these guys raised at like a hundred million dollar plus valuation. And if you, if you ever go to one, they're pretty cool. It's, you know, it's not the most amazing thing. Honestly, I was a little bit disappointed, but the photos do turn out cool. It's a museum that you walk through. So it's like a guided path. And you go through maybe like 13 different rooms. And Every room is something cool and you get a little, you know, you get an ice cream cone of some flavor and then you can take photos next to some like exhibit that they've set up. And the idea is not for you to look at the art like a traditional museum, but for you to like take a photo in the art and post it on Instagram and that's their marketing. That's the free marketing that they get.

And so Museum of Ice Cream, oh yeah, where he has it? They raised $40 million. They raised a $40 million series A at a $200 million valuation last year. And I think this could be bigger. I think this could be much, much bigger as a brand. The other thing that you could do is sports cards are having this incredible boom right now. And I think what you could do is you could have certain collectors put their collection in the house. The house could be basically the vault to store some of the most rare memorabilia in the sports world, signed basketball, shoes, and sports cards.

and that could be part of the museum. And you basically store it and you store it for some of these collectors. So I think there's a bunch of stuff you could do to make this work. But the idea is like, can you buy this thing for $13 million, put another $4 or $5 million into getting it all set up? And then could you make $5 million a year? Could you make $10 million a year like you're saying these other guys do as a pilgrimage for tourists going to Chicago and basketball junkies? I think the answer is definitely yes. and I think it's so interesting.

I found another example of one, and it's called the National Trust for Historic Preservation. And it's a nonprofit, and all they do is buy historical buildings. And I looked at their numbers. They've been doing like 50 or 60 million in revenue for years. And I'm still trying to figure out how to entirely read nonprofit statements. but they have a line item that's revenue less expenses, which I guess that just means profit. I mean, I don't know how they define.

Yeah, it's even though. I don't know how they define either of those. But it was 26 million. And it's been doing that for years. Is that nuts? So I like this idea. I like this idea a lot. And I kind of want to dig a little further into how these homes, home museums work.

Because I think this is pretty interesting. All right. This next clip is from episode 178. and the fellows break down how a retired NYPD cop is making millions through guided tours. A retired NYPD officer will guide you through a walk through New York. And it's a guided mafia and crime walk. I'm like, wait, mafia. I've been warning this for so long.

This is so cool. So here's the description. I'm just going to read it word for word. First, let me say that most gangster tours in New York are total BS. This experience comes right from the horse's mouth. No tour guide, no filter. get real stories while visiting notorious gangland locations as we walk from East Village to Little Italy, experiencing what it was like to be an associate of New York's famous mafia families.

You'll hear firsthand accounts of the New York, New York City Mafia and crimes in New York, and taste local cuisines. So I saw this. I was like, this is such a good idea. I think I saw that this crime walk was making a lot of money. So it was very successful, which is not a surprise to me. I would do this if I was just, you know, in New York. This is great.

But a couple of things, here's the business idea. So first is, this is cool, quick reaction, then I have an idea. Well, on, okay,

so this, first of all, I just sent this to my wife because we're moving to New York for a little while. I said, we're doing this. Second, he charges around 120 to 130,

depending on the date per person. And in the description, he says that he has had 8,000 guests. So $123 times $8,000 is a million bucks. Exactly. So, I think that's what I, That's what originally caught my attention was.

Here's who has built an experience. I think that was my kind of curiosity. Who's built an Airbnb experience that had made a million bucks, right? Because this is a big platform. Certainly somebody's doing well. And so this is kind of how it caught my eye. Okay. So what's the idea?

The idea is I think this is a cool thing for a retired cop to do. Also could be applied to retired kind of anything. Anybody who has a cool job, like whether you're a SWAT officer, you know, military veteran, firefighter, whatever it is. I think there's a lot of people who, a lot of people who are like me, we're like little weaklings that spend all of our days behind a desk. And we want this like safe way to taste, you know,

an adventure and like what the real tough world looks like. And so that's why like Spartan race and stuff, that's why they do well. And similarly, I think that these like kind of crime walks would be, would be cool. So then I took it a little bit further. Well, why don't people do this with more things?

So why don't you take every physical venue where something interesting is happening. Breweries do this, right? Breweries say, hey, we got this brewery, but we also have this side business of people come through. They get a tour of a brewery. They get to see how it's made. They get to taste the beers.

They get to take some photos. They get to buy our shit on the way out. And they've turned brewery tours as a like additional income stream for breweries. So why doesn't this happen for more things? Like when I visited, you know, the warehouse for my wife's, you know, e-commerce business, I was fascinated. It's like this 80,000 square foot place. You get to see all these forklifts.

coming around and how it works, how the fulfillment works when an order comes in, how does it get put in a mailer, how does it get taken out of here? And so I think that for everything, factories, warehouses, police stations, firefighter stations, I think they should all have this as a business. I'll tell you another version of this. That's cool. Are you a basketball fan? Do you know who coach K is? Yeah, Duke guy. I know I'm not an idiot, but I'm not a fan. So Coach K, who is the Duke basketball coach. He's the most famous college basketball coach, probably of all time. And he was the men's Olympic coach for the, the latest dream teams or routine teams, like LeBron and Kobe and all this guys. So he's a pretty popular guy. And he does a thing

every year called Coach Kay's Fantasy Camp. So here's how this works. Coach Kay's Fantasy Camp. You pay $10,000 and you get to go. Who are these people? They are, you know, Duke students who, like, you know, there's a bunch of Duke students who are like kind of investors now, CEO. of companies and they were big basketball fans. Now they got a bunch of money. They're kind of in their 40s or 50s and they pay to go to this thing. What is it? You go for the for I think a five day program or something like that. You go back to Duke campus and you live like a player. So you stay in the dorms, I think, or you know, you stay kind of on campus or right next to campus. There's like a bus that basically brings you on to campus and you come into Cameron Indoor Stadium, which is the Duke

basketball stadium. It's like the hallowed ground. And Coach Kay takes you through a camp. And where you're you know you're on the court you're shooting you're doing the drills that the players do you get the motivational talk that coach k gives he brings in old players to come oh that's carlos boozer oh that's j jratt they play the sounds when you come out and like you know you've got your dad bod like your fat's coming out the side of the jersey and it's oh here comes here comes duke and you get to run out and there's like no fans there because it's not real again um anyways this thing's awesome he must make a ton of money off this thing and i wonder how many more people do this or could do this because it's a very interesting little niche.

Why do you do it for every sport? And I'm so into this. I don't know what I don't know what I could do it with, but I'm on board. Here's a version of this if you're a hustler. Okay, so if you're a hustler, here's what you do. I don't think you could do this with LeBron James necessarily, but I think you could do this with a college football coach because college football coach is like, you know, at every program don't make tons of money.

Or a really famous high school coach. Yeah, exactly. or it could be a CEO of a company or, you know, whatever. And you basically create the same sort of fantasy camp mindset or the 4D tours. And it's like, hey, I will run this whole thing for you. I just want 20% of profits. Okay. So here's what I'm going to ask of you.

When I bring people over at this time every week or once a year or whatever it is, you come out, you kiss babies and shake hands and let me do this. And so it's a way to attach yourself to an influential. program, institution, or person, and create this business line from scratch because really you're just offering this to their fans. All right, shifting gears here a bit. This next clip is from one of our most popular episodes of the year with a long time friend of the show, Andrew Wilkinson.

He comes on the show and talks about how a 30-day dopamine detox completely changed his life. 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. 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. 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 the these interesting people. We bought some great businesses. I didn't die of COVID. 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

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. So anyway, I was totally bummed. And I started, 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 on top of that, I'm, you know, email, you know, checking stats, stocks. If I went to the bathroom without my phone, I'd feel like I was going to freak out,

constantly listening to audiobooks, 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've like and had Donia like I'm just not excited about anything so I just said fuck it I'm just gonna what what what's that word you just said that was a good one I never yeah 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 like 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 was 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, 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, 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.

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, you know, 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. All right. So this fourth clip here is from episode 179. And Sean talks about how he approaches goal setting and self-talk. I have two kind of routines that are like this that I've probably never told anybody about. All right. So like most people write goals, like what they want to achieve, what they want to have, I want to have a mention or I want to hit this dollar amount.

I want to get promoted. And for me, I have a thing that's called, I wrote on it, who am I becoming? And the way I do it is because I think about myself like a every year, it's like a software update, right? What's version I just turned 33? What's version 33 of Sean look like, right? And I literally write this out beforehand. I write out the notes. Like, oh, I used to have this bug where I got jealous about people.

That's fixed. You know, like, hey, I added this new feature. Now I can play the guitar, whatever, right? Like I treat myself like a whole new version upgrades. Anyway, so all those little bug fixes and features, they all add up to something. What am I trying to become? And it's kind of like a root philosophy, which is life is not about what you achieve or what you have. It's about who you become.

And so I said, all right, well, what do I want to become? And I sort of wrote these four things out, right? I said, I want to become a person who is fit through healthy habits. I want to become a teacher, you know, the favorite teacher of millions of people. I want to be, you know, a great family man who lives in a house full of love. And I have like a last one, right? One more after that. So anyways, I have these four things that are like the things I want to become.

And I do this thing in the morning when I like do my kind of morning routine, which is like my reminder for the day. Before I go and start just doing a bunch of work and a bunch of tasks and dealing with all the emails and shit that comes my way, I just walk in a circle in my office, which is a tiny, tiny office. I have like a, I don't know, eight by eight foot office. And I just walk in a circle. And every circle is I'm basically talking like I'm, you know, talking to myself or I'm,

my own coach about those four things. So I'll say like, you know, I'm a great dad. You know, even when things are going off the rails, I'm patient. That's when I get even more patient. I'm poised. I'm a great dad. I'm always there for them. They know I got their back.

I'm a great dad. You sound like Muhammad Ali. Exactly. You know, I said I was the greatest before I am. And so I do that. So I've been doing that now for like, I don't know, probably like a year. And I love it. It's just kind of fun for me.

So that's the first kind of self-talk I do. the second kind of self-talk I do is what I call revision, which is I fall off the horse a lot like most people, right? Like, oh, I'm trying to eat healthy. And then like, fuck, in the middle of the day, there's a bag of chips was there. And I ate the bag of chips. Or like, you know, I say I'm going to be a patient dad,

but then like, oh, like I've just lost it when, you know, she wouldn't let me change her diaper and then blah, blah, blah, blah. And so obviously I'm not perfect. And so the other self-talk I do. is revision at the end of the night. I just imagine that same scenario that happened. It only takes me 30 seconds. I just think back to that moment that I'm not proud of

and I reimagine it in a way that I'm, me acting in a way that I'm proud of. And that's it. I don't like decide I'm going to do things differently. I don't like write it down. I don't like pledge to myself. I'll never do this again. I just imagine it going the right way.

And then I just go to sleep. And that act of reimagining things the way you want to see it is a form of self-talk in my mind. It's just like Rose saying, I'm the best, and imagining herself, you know, knocking out the other girl, that's kind of what I do for, you know, I'm not a fighter. I just do it in my daily life. So this fifth and final clip is from episode 231 with Ariel Helwani. Ariel is one of the most recognized faces in mixed martial arts. And in this clip, he talks about how he decided to bet on himself and jump into a super French sport at the time and how it's paid massive dividends 10 years down the road. You had, quote, unquote, good jobs at each of these stops. And then you see,

said, look, this isn't it. I'm going to bet on myself and I'm going to go independent. I'm going to do my thing. So you have a strong dose of bet on yourself. You've another one that Sam coined, which is niches get riches, which is that I know you're a basketball fan, but you didn't go into the more established field that one that had a career track that you could tell your mom, look, there's other people who have made it in this field. I could be the next whatever in basketball. You went for MMA, which is today fringe, let alone back in, you know, 2006 or whatever, like, nobody was really, there was no blueprint or there was no like success stories doing what you were doing. I don't think at that time.

Like, you are the kind of the success story of that niche. And so I want to hear kind of how you decided to bet on that, even though you have other interests. You have other sports that you're interested in as well. And then the last one is there's this great phrase, which is, you know, you want to do the work that looks like work to others, but it feels like play to you. So like if I was going to interview somebody four hours a day,

I would be exhausted. And I think you get your pickup steam by energy, by hour three, you're like, you're just hitting your groove and it gives you energy. So I think that's another example of where you kind of live one of these principles that we talk about.

But tell me about the niche thing. Oh, why did you bet on this? That spoke to my heart. That spoke to my heart. That's a great line. Nitches get riches, because I couldn't agree with you more.

When I got to Syracuse, for the first time my life, like when I went to Syracuse, I wanted to be the next Costas, Marv Albert, basketball, baseball, football, traditional guy. Hello, welcome to ABC Sports. I'm Mario Hawani World Series Super Bowl. And for the first time my life, I realized, wow, there's a lot of people in this world who are my age, who have the exact same dream as me, who are a little more polished, who have nicer hair, who don't have as big of a nose, and maybe don't have such a foreign name. their name is John Smith and they just kind of fit that Bob Costas mold. And I never like to follow, you know, the pack. And so I remember telling my parents in September of 2001, there's this sport called mixed martial arts. There's this organization called the UFC.

At this point, it's not even eight years old. And I think it's going to be mainstream. And I think in 10 years, there's going to be some executive in some office, some older guy who's like, what is this crazy cage fighting sport? I know nothing about it, but apparently it's very, popular, who's the guy, who's the voice, who's the Howard CoSell of MMA. And I want to be that guy. And amazingly, literally, 10 years later, August of 2011, I was hired by Fox,

and that was like my first big, you know, mainstream gig. And so it kind of worked out in that regard. But I say this to young people all the time when they reach out to me. And they send me, you know, oh, I want to do this, I want to do that. I want to be, you know, Stephen A. Smith and all this stuff. in this day and age you don't want to be a generalist you you're a fan of the New York Knicks

you're fan of the New York Knickabockers I'm not going to go tune in to the radio ESPN Radio now I'm not going to go in my car tune in and say oh I hope you guys talk about the Knicks Celtics game last night I'm going to go on my podcast app and I'm going to go to the New York Knicks podcast as niche as it gets to hear an hour breakdown of last night's game. If I'm a big pro wrestling fan, I'm going to go to my pro wrestling

podcast and listen to MMA podcast, listen to business podcast, the days of sitting in your car and hoping that they talk about something or listening to people just talk about God knows what, those days are over. And so it is actually a lot better, in my opinion, to go into a niche, to be the niche guy as opposed to being the generalist. Yeah, there's a couple of guys who will make it Stephen A and those guys. But for the most part, in my world, it's way better to be the niche guy. And I try to explain that. And within the niche guy, and within the niche, have your own niche as well. And so like my thing, interviews.

I tell other people like find your thing. There was a young guy. I always bring up Mike Bond. He works for MMA junkie and he's a lot younger than I am. His niche that he used to get in the door were stats and factoid. So he would have all these stats about all the fighters. Great. These days, maybe it's betting.

Betting is super hot right now. Use that as your niche to get in the door. So yes, I couldn't agree more with that mindset. And I would urge anyone in this day and age of a la carte, you know, everything is out of cart, right? Podcasts, streaming, all that. The more niche, the better. You'll have way more success rather than being just some guy. Like those days, 50 years ago when you were a calmness for a newspaper, those days are over. All right, that is a wrap. Hope y'all enjoy those clips. If you want links to any of the full episodes, you can go check out the show notes. We got all

the links there. And let us know on social what you thought about this. Do you want more, less? Do you like this short form content? You've been cranking out a lot of these style clips actually on the YouTube channel. So check that out if you want more of this. But anyways, just want to say thank you all again. It's been an incredible year. You got a lot of exciting things in 2022, which will be announcing very soon. But in the meantime, hope you have a great rest of your day and see y'all soon.