My First Million - The Annual Milly Awards: The Winners, The Losers And Everything In Between - With Andrew Wilkinson

Episode Date: December 29, 2022

Episode 401: Sam Parr (@TheSamParr), Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Andrew Wilkinson (@awilkinson) present the annual Milly Awards. The most notable Billy of the Year will be named... as well as best and worst investments, favorite breakout company of the year, coolest moment of the year, best content, and so much more. And one side note, if you want to sell your boring business email [e-mail]. ----- Links: * Cultural Tour Twitter * Blitzed book * Founders podcast * The Operator book * Think On These Things book * Richer, Wiser, Happier book * 10k Diver Twitter * clay.earth * My Body Tutor * Kick * Gelt * 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: (04:10) - Billy of the Year (10:30) - Biggest Loss of the Year (24:50) - Breakout Company of the Year (32:00) - Unsexy Business of the Year (42:15) - Best Investment of the Year (49:40) - Worst Investment of the Year (55:15) - Content of the Year (01:01:25) - Wild Predictions for Next Year (01:07:50) - Coolest Moment of the Year (01:12:15) - Craziest Most Delusional Person of the Year (01:22:40) - Relationship Hack (01:36:50) - Biggest Change in 2023 (01:42:10) - Best Business Idea for Someone Else ----- 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

All right. So this is the third time we're doing this. It's the best part of the year, the season finale. It is called the Milly Awards. It's our annual awards show. We did it the first time I think improved or like pretty pretty close to it. We did it just like kind of on a whim. People loved it. So we brought it back and now we're bringing it back again. And it's basically it's our awards. So we do categories like Billy of the Year, breakout company or person. Our favorite unsexy business. Our own. best investments and our own worst investments, things like that. So I'm excited. I already got the sort of season finale vibes. And I'm excited for this. You want to say anything, Sam, before we start? You look like you drive a white G-wagon right now. I can't believe how fast you've gone from Indian to Persian. I look like my mistress drives a white G-wagon. You went from nerdy Indian to Alpha Persian with just one jacket And that's kind of amazing how that's happened I've never sold a rug

But I feel like I could right now And did you guys Let's see Sam you didn't get the memo about dressing up Andrew are you Your Mike is lying in blazer Yeah you're blazered up Did you guys bring

I'm wearing a carnigan bro bro, you always wear a cardigan. You always have like, you know, modern grandma style. But I'm, I'm at a guest place, you know. I'm on an Airbnb. I got to do what I get to do. I didn't bring my Persian apparel. I'm sorry.

All right, well, guys, cheers to a great year, a crazy year. I have, I don't know, what's in everybody's cup here? So, Sam, you're a classic Midwestern cola kind of guy. You probably say cola, don't you? No, but I am drinking a Coke. there's that great map where it's like some people say pop some people say cola some people say you know soda or something like that i feel like you might be a pop guy um Andrew what you got in the cup i've got a aeropressed uh coffee in a tiny mug bro you just brought to you by you just sponsored this whole pod just now that was slick um i have a very frigid cold water with fresh lemon juice inside maybe i'm starting to cleanse

I saw a great tweet. He goes, I don't cleanse. I clog. And I thought that's pretty good. You're on a cheese cleanse. I'm on a cheese clog. All right. So,

cheers to you guys. 20 million downloads this year for the podcast, which is, I think, six times bigger than last year. Maybe four or five times. I might have my math wrong there. But I think YouTube's up six X and the pod is up four X or something like that.

Big year. Big year for us, which is fun. And Andrew, you were the most frequent guest. you're the most favorite guest, and so it is only right to have you here. All right, so without further ado,

should we jump in to the categories? We're going to go, I'll announce the category, I think, and there we go kind of round robin. Last year, we did it where we kind of picked who had the best answer after each one. I don't know if you guys want to do that, or any adjustments to the format here?

Well, I think, by the way, your order was a little off. So, for example, if we're going to start with Billy of the year, then that has, the next person, because it's also a, the next category should be craziest person of the year as well. Okay, okay. Well, let's do it this way. We'll take turns.

Me and you, Sam, of just picking categories and then you can go whatever order you want. So, okay. Let's start with Billy of the Year. So for those who don't know, we do the segment called Billy of the Week, where we typically will feature a billionaire or somebody who maybe is not actually technically a billionaire, but they carry themselves with that billionaire energy. And somebody who's just doing. life in an interesting way. So, Sam, who is your billy of the year?

Oh, mine's so boring. So my boring answer is Zuck, because he's proven that, like, he's actually pretty good. All these, everyone else this year that's been in his category has gone fucking insane. Bezos got a divorce. Elon's crazy. All Zuck does is box. That's like his version of crazy. Like, he's turned out to be okay. So I would say he's probably like the billy of the year. emotionally stable, huh? Yeah, he's done all right. But if I had to pick another one,

it would be this guy named Brett Adcock. Brett Adcock is this guy I met about six months ago. He basically is only 34 to 36 years old. He's a young guy. He made a lot of money when he sold his company called Vetri for $100 million. Then he created, Vetteri is like a recruiting company. It's not sexy.

But then he created a flying drone company that he took public called Archer. It was worth $2 or $3 billion at its peak. Now he told me that he's, took roughly $200 million of his own money, which I think was like the majority of his liquid net worth other than the house that he owns. And he's piled all of it into bootstrapping a new robotic company where they make humanoids.

And that guy's pretty fucking insane. And I love crazy people like that. That's a great one. Andrew, who you got? Billy of the year. So mine is actually an MFM guest, Palmer Lucky. Oh, good one. I feel like, you know, it's a little obvious,

but I feel like you see so many of these billionaires who they make all this money and then they get very focused on PR and they're very safe and they won't put their money where their mouth is. And what I loved about him is that, A, he's actually taking his own capital and investing it in Andrewill and doing something that is actually important in the world or what he deems important. And he actually just like calls people out. Like he's honest. He's not a politician. And I think most of these billionaires you talk to, they are very political. They have a PR team. He obviously does not. I thought that was so awesome when he went to the, what is it, the All In conference and just roasted Calcanus for like an hour. So yeah, mad respect. I think he's

awesome. And I thought that was one of the best interviews of the year. That's a great one. I love, that one. I considered Palmer Lucky as well. I decided to go with somebody a little more under the radar, not a billionaire, but somebody who lives like I think a billionaire should. So it's this guy who came to camp MFM, which was our kind of like private retreat of 20 or 30 badass people that we did. Who, Al? No, Saeed. Saeed.

Saeed. So, Saeed is a guy I didn't know much about. You had mentioned him before. I never met him. He might be a billionaire. He might be. But it doesn't matter. He lives like one.

So when we met him at the camp, I was like, so what do you do? First of all, he just had the most chill energy. He was not stressed. He was not worried. He was not. seeking attention. He was, he had none of those small boy traits. And instead, he was relaxed. He was having fun. He was asking people questions. And I asked him, so what do you, what do you do? And he's like, well, you know, I, and he, he started to explain. And somebody else

cut him off and was like, let me brag for you for a second here. So what Saeed owns is basically the largest collection of WordPress websites and tools. So if you search for WordPress, like, WordPress powers like 30 or 40% of all internet websites. And so people are often searching, how do I do this on my WordPress site? You'll land typically on one of his websites like WP beginner or WP engine or whatever. And from there, it'll say, well, if you want to capture emails of people who come in using WordPress like email capture pop up, use Optin Monster, owned by also Said. And so he basically has the landing spot where people come.

He's got the number one search rankings. Then he owns the tools that he refers. And so he turned his random curious traffic into SaaS. subscribers. He basically built an empire. He's telling us about the gas stations he owns and all the other crazy stuff he does with his money. And his work style was was one that I envy. He's like, well, here's my month. The last week of the month, I do all my meetings with the operators of my businesses. I was like, so what do you do the other three weeks? And he's like one to one and a half weeks, we travel. So we just go to Costa Rica. Then we go to Egypt. Then we go wherever. Like me and my family,

we just love to travel. And then I read and I just chill out. And I think. the other week and a half. I play with my son a lot. We play basketball. And I was like, wow, this guy is dominating his business niche, but he's also checking the box on family. He's checking the box on travel. He's got it going on.

So I was really impressed by Saeed. He also very, very giving too. He gives away a lot of money too. Yeah, amazing guy. So he's mine. That's, all right. So those are the billies of the year. I'll just put it out there.

I think Palmer was the right answer. What do you think, Sam? I agree. Palmer was the right answer. If you haven't seen the clip of him going to Jason Calicanus's conference, going to someone's birthday party and roasting him. That was epic. Andrew, did you hear on our pod when we asked Palmer if he could kick Jason's ass?

Yeah, when he was talking about his, like how tall he was and stuff. He goes, yeah, he was like, well, you know, if you look at the physics of this, I forget exactly how he explained it, but he was like a very engineer. He goes, like, you know, I'm six one. Yeah, he said something like that. Like, it was pretty funny. All right. Let's go to the next category.

Sam, you can pick one. Let's talk about the biggest L we each took this year. Okay, Andrew. You go first, Andrew. And by the way, this category, the biggest L, so it's the biggest loss you took, but it can be, it doesn't have to be like a big serious thing. It's just a loss that you put in the loss column, however big or small it was in your life. Yeah.

So I read this book about 15 years ago by this guy, Ramit Sethi. he's got a website, I will teach you to be rich. And he's got a book called I Will Teach You to Be Rich. And at the time, I knew absolutely nothing about personal finance or finance at all. And he had this really great section where he says, people think they need to save money on lattes. What they actually need to save money on is percentages. And so he's talking about interest rates on credit cards, interest rates on mortgage, fees in real estate transactions. Like the difference between 2% and 2.5% is like $20,000 and people don't think about that. He says, he goes, don't worry about $3 problems.

Worry about $30,000 problems. Exactly. So I had one of those. So, you know, maybe like two episodes ago, you know, a couple of interviews ago, I talked about, you know, interest rates and the risks there. And this was very top of mind because we had a piece of debt in the company that I wanted to lock in the interest rate on. And so we were going to buy all these hedges.

And in order to do that, I had to sign all these documents. And I'm kind of lazy. I hate signing documents. And so these documents were sitting in our office. And I was like, oh, I'll do it tomorrow. I'll do it tomorrow. I kept putting it off. And then finally I signed it.

And I realized that between the time that it was sitting there for a week, and in that week, the interest rate went up by like 1%. And that represented like $500,000 or something insane. And so just me being lazy and not signing that document and not thinking in percentages cost me like 500 grand. That'll do it. Sam, what you got? That's a great one. This year, I met a guy who had an app called Intro.

It's a great app. And I agreed to do it because he was like, hey, come try this. And I did. And it was one of the bigger mistakes of the year that I made. So basically, I'm on this app called Intro where for a little while people could... Dude, you were bragging about how you were... We're crushing it on intro. How is this the L? That's such a weak move on my part to do it. So this app, I got on there because I was like, oh, you know, and honestly, it's fun.

It is quite fun to use. It's fun to, like, meet new people, but people pay me for my time. And it's quite addicting because it's really, you can make a substantial amount of money doing that. But if I'm supposed to be such a big swinging dick, if I'm supposed to be a hot shot like I want to be, I shouldn't be selling my time. Or at least I'm. I shouldn't be selling my time and keeping the money. I should just give it away. And it was, that was a big, that was a weak move on my part to be selling my time. And I regret doing that.

That's a, that's a great one. I was making fun of you for that. And then I was also kind of like, wait, should I be doing that? That is a lot of money. And I was like, no, no, no, don't sell your time. Don't sell your time. It's such short-term thinking. And you know who really changed my opinion of it?

Who actually could be Billy the year? What's the guy? Brian Johnson. Brian Johnson from BrainTree. He kind of like didn't mean to do it, but he like was razzy me on using it. And I was like, you're right. What did he say? That wasn't in the pie.

He was telling us. Well, he told a story. He didn't, he wasn't directing it towards me, but he told the story about how he was like, instead of like getting this job, like I should just put more effort into my company. So then in three years, this won't even be a problem instead of right now. I could just make this money that could temporary fix this. No, I should go for the long term. from fix and make it so like I don't even have to budget ever again.

You know, I see a lot of, so I think like all three of us kind of probably grew up not having a ton of money and really, really valuing like every dollar. Right. So like I remember, you know, a thousand dollars was like a crazy amount of money to me because I could buy an IMAC. And if I bought an IMAC, then I could have one of my staff do all this work and I could make like $20,000 from it. And so I feel like I still, if I'm not careful, I think in those terms, And when someone comes along and offers you a thousand dollars an hour, it's like completely insane as an opportunity. Or like three grand an hour or four grand an hour.

It is crazy. It's amazing. But you get, and I know all these people that are like, I know guys that are worth 50 million dollars and they still manage their own Airbnb bookings. And they'll be like, oh, sweet, I tweaked this. I made an extra $300 in cleaning fees or whatever. And I always think like, you know, you guys used a quote before, but it's like you're playing, you're playing a pennies or sorry, you're saving pennies in a dollar's game.

Like it's just ridiculous. Yeah, but I, some people enjoy that. Like Nathan Barry, Nathan Berry owns ConvertKit. He's probably worth $200 plus million based off the valuation of Convert Kit. And he's still, I'll be with him. It'll pull out his phone and he's like messaging Airbnb guests. I'm like, why are you doing this? He goes, I love it.

And so in that case, I'm like, all right, cool. I don't like taking intro calls necessarily. Sometimes I do. But, yeah. Yeah, there's a good test. I remember I talked to this guy when we got acquired by Twitch. I talked to a guy who had been acquired by Twitch three years ago. And I was like, yeah, let's get lunch.

So we go out for lunch. And I'm like, you know, he's like, yeah, you're going to love it. You know, yeah, but watch out for this. He's like giving me a bunch of tips. I'm like, okay, great. Let me give you a tip real quick. Yeah, I just got here, but let me give you a tip. I was like, why are you still here?

And he's like, oh, dude, I really like my job, actually. You know, I didn't think I would stay here, but I really like it. You know, it's fun. I just blah, blah, blah. he's telling me how great it is. But I had kind of seen him in a couple meetings at this point. And I was like, these meetings aren't fun. So like, you know, I don't know what you're doing the other hours a day.

But I saw you for like half a day last week. And that didn't seem fun at all. I said, okay, well, maybe maybe it is fun. But let me just ask you something. You made, you know, he probably made like $10, $20 million on sale. I said, I said, you don't need this job. But, but you're not at the point where for you, you're just going to stop working all together, blah, blah.

And I said, if you had $100 million. dollars in the bank like literally like if i open up your bank out right now is a hundred million dollars just sitting there would you come into work tomorrow like would you would you would you do this just for fun because at that point you know what you're making here every year is there's a rounding error it's a you just make that in in an interest uh if you were uh if you had a hundred million dollars sitting there he's like well no then i would go do x y z i was like okay cool so just as long as we're just being honest like i'm not saying you're miserable here i agree but the stories we tell ourselves in order to justify doing something that we're actually doing for the money,

but we don't want to say we're doing it for the money. We want to say we're doing it for all these other reasons. There's a very simple test. Imagine you had all the money. Would you still do this thing? And like the other the dangerous thing about that logic. So Ryan Holiday has this great daily stoic podcast. And recently he had an excerpt from Stephen Pressfield's book. He's got all these books about kind of discovering your thing and your mastery and art and all this kind of stuff. And he talks about how people get addicted to patterns. So people can be addicted to love. They can be addicted to money.

They can be addicted to almost anything. And the question I always ask myself is, I might love designing the website or I might love going into the Shopify stats and seeing the sales or doing the Airbnb management. but is that just me addicted to those dopamine hits distracting myself from my greater purpose, right? From doing something where I have mastery that's new. Am I just going back to the same thing, right? Like you guys know the joy, there's this amazing confirmation bias joy of reading a book and hearing something you already know confirmed over and over and over again.

I'll do this with like value investing books, right? And I'll go, oh, I already know that. I do that. I feel good. Right. That's actually a waste of time. And so that's the flip side of it. The other one is my buddy told me this when I,

when I'd been working on my startup for six or seven years. And he was like, he's like, he told me he's like, you know, I just don't get what you're doing? I was like, well, what do you mean? I can explain it. And he's like, no, not the logic of it. He's like, I just feel like, let me ask you a question. If this all went away, is this what you would sign up to go do?

Like, would you basically like, take the example of the guy I was talking to. If you got, if you weren't doing this job, is it, would you just apply for this job here? No, you would. go do something completely different. Like you're here because you got acquired and then you're here. And now fast forward three or four years later, you're still here doing the same job. But if I took this job away,

you would never go to a job posting and apply for this job. And he's, and so he was explaining that. He's like, you know, inertia is just a bitch. He's like, whatever you're, an object in motion will stay in motion. Whatever you're doing, you're probably, most likely you're doing it because you were already doing it.

Not because you think it's the thing you actually should do in most cases. And so you've got to be really aware of that. All right. So what's yours? Oh, okay. So, wait, what is the category even? What are we in? Your biggest L.

My biggest L. Okay, I have one that's sort of like yours. I was chasing pennies in a dollar game. So I recently moved and your boy rents. I'm a renter. And so I moved from one rental to another new house. And I was like, oh, I love this. I could just like move whenever I want.

Don't have to worry about anything. Just call the movers. I broke my lease. I just moved. But my landlord came in and first, you know, did a walk through of the place when I was there. you know, we talked about his, you know, his family, his history in this house, shook hands in the garage, said, you know, it's been nice having you. All right. See you later. You know, don't worry about all the stuff. Everything looks fine. Three weeks later, he hits me with like a $20,000 or $30,000 bill. And, um, at least $20,000. He gives me with an extra $20,000 bill on the move out for like, you know, scratches and like, you know, stuff like, like, was he right. No, he was not right. It was, and he had, he's a lawyer. So he had baked into the lease. So he had baked into the lease. that like, hey, anything that's associated with the move out is your cost. Like, for example, if I fly to California to observe the move out, you have to pay for my flights,

my hotels, my food, my this, my, like, there's a shit in there that was like not like, I didn't damage the property. It was just like extra stuff. But he had put it in the lease. I had signed the lease because like, you know, like Andrew, I don't really, I don't really read it. Or if I read it, I'm not going to. What are words? Yeah.

It's like, you know, I'm optimistic at the beginning of things. I'm like, this is going to go great. He's going to be a chill dude just like I would be. He's never going to hold me to any of these things. And like, sure enough, he held me to the letter of the law and every single thing. And so I decide to do something that we talked about on this podcast. I decided to take him to petty court. And so a lawyer, a guy who listens to the pod who's a lawyer reaches out.

He's like, yo, I heard about the landlord thing. I'm ready to fight to the death on this for free. And I was like, let's do this. And so in my head, I was like, I'm going to fight this 20 grand. Got this lawyer now. guy, Troy, you know, he's a great dude, got to know him a little bit through this process. But we try fighting back. And the problem is I'm going against an 87 year old retired lawyer who's got nothing but time

on his hands. This is probably the biggest thrill he's had in 37 years to fight and be and, you know, like look up every California statute. And he sends me these packets of like 47 documents. He sends me CD ROMs full of photos of the property. I'm like, dude, I don't have a CD player to put this. What am I how am I supposed to see these photos? And he's just sending me letter after letter.

And he's, I took a guy to Petty Court who is like the king of Petty Court. And in the end, I end up paying the full amount just by saying F it. And I'm like, because I'm like, dude, I'm wasting my time.

I'm wasting this lawyer's time. I'm wasting this old guy's time, but he's got infinite time. And he is built for this, whereas I should have just wrote this 20K check and just moved on with my life five weeks ago. And I knew it because at night, before I was going to sleep,

I was like, oh shit, I didn't respond to that fucking subpoena he sent me basically. This is like giant package of letters. I was like, okay, I'm going to call him.

I'm going to say this. He's going to say that. And I was like imagining this whole debate in my head. I was like, dude, what a waste of mental space. And once I finally had that realization that I was playing a small boy game

by losing my mental, like my mental space in my head that could be done, used on productive things in order to be in petty court, I wrote the check and I moved all of my life. Dude, I think it's worth fighting those things, by the way. No, no.

It's 100, dude. No. Going to war for the sake of war is worth it. I had the Sam on my shoulder and I had the Andrew on my shoulder and I listened to the Sam and I should. I never listen to the Sam. I wasted four weeks of my life. That's like you're like a bull in a China shop and there's this tiny little fly buzzing on you and you just have to ignore it. There's a great quote on this that someone said to me once when I was going through something similar and the guy said, never wrestle a pig.

you'll both get dirty, but the pig will enjoy it. Yeah, that's no point. Yeah, but I'm the pig here. I'm the pig here. What I had, Sean, I had the, you know my situation. I had something like this going on this year too. And I text it Andrew, I go, what do I do? And he said the same thing, he goes, don't wrestle with pigs or whatever,

this fucking biblical shit. And I bought into it. And it eats me, it eats me every night that someone got, that someone, I got, I got, Got you there's what's the Charlie Munger calls it um the rats in the granary right if you own a granary you have a big warehouse full of grain there's going to be rats you can keep killing them over and over again but they're going to always come back and it's better to just accept that there's rats out there say you got rats at your granary bro yeah all right let's do the stupid let's go the next one. Okay, cool. All right, let's go to the next category. Let's do, we're going to do

breakout company, which is sort of the sexy one, and then let's do the unsexy business of the year. So we'll do both. First, let's do the breakout company of the year. Andrew, you want to go first? Yeah, I mean, this is so obvious, but I, and I came up with a few others, but I just, this is the one that we have. I feel like we're both going to say the same obvious thing. Where everyone's going to say the Slope and Shlay-Eye. Open AI. Open AI, GPT-3 is shocking. I think this is like a watershed moment. And there's nothing else. I haven't seen anything like this in probably 10 years. I have two words for you guys. That will change your opinion. Yeah. Liver King.

This guy called his shot, man. That's a true brain. You're going to tell me that, dude, when you have Elon Musk and Sam Altman and $10 billion, that's not a breakout company. That's not a breakout. That's a company that they are who we thought they were. They did exactly what we thought they were going to do. That doesn't count as a breakout. You're saying you expected, you expected. I remember a friend of mine called me about a month before they released the chat and was like, oh, my God, it's amazing.

And I kind of rolled my eyes. I wasn't super excited about it. But I have not seen anything this crazy in a very long time. I mean, obviously, Dolly and stuff is insane too, but the chat, it's just nuts. I've actually stopped using Google a lot of the time and started using the chat. Well, look, you took the nerdiest of nerds, the smartest guys on Earth, and you gave him $10 billion and you walked him in a room for six years. Yeah, but like, if it was like, if it was 1945 and you're like, what's the breakout project of the year? And I'm like, it's the Manhattan Project.

And you're like, oh, well, they got billions of dollars and whatever. It's still fucking crazy. They made a nuclear bomb. It's crazy. is like a nuclear bomb moment. It's just like my expectations, they met my expectations. Like if this were, if this was like a second grade report report card, it would definitely be like met expectations.

There would not be, they would not be like, yeah. Yeah, this is not an exceed. They met my expectations. I kind of felt like it was a goofy project. I was like, oh, you know, Google, Apple, all these other people, they're going to do this for you know, they have a huge incentive, profit incentive. These guys are going like non-profit when they first started, and it's kind of like all about openness and whatever.

It's morphed into something that I didn't expect. And I certainly didn't expect it to do as well as it did. Given all the star power, I think often, think about like supergroups. Supergroups are usually not that good. It was like a super group. Yeah, I mean, the Avengers worked out. But yeah, I feel you. I feel you.

I mean like in music. The Sam, your breakout person are, company is liver king. Right, call this shot. Not AI. Yeah, or Andrew Tate, but yeah, one of those guys. If you want to know how he called a shot, we did an episode where we detailed the leaked emails from the liver king where he's like, yo, I'm going to take a bunch of steroids,

I'm going to build this brand, and then I'm going to sell like $100 million for the products. That's what I'm going to do. And then he did it. That's so much more dope. All right, let me merge the two. So Sam, you like the call your shot. this, Andrew, you're like, wow, open eye, Sam Altman, you guys have done something magical.

I'm going to give you a called shot that I think is kind of unbelievable, to be honest with you. Okay, so Paul Graham is going to win my award here for calling it. They call your shot moment. So back in 2009, Paul Graham wrote a blog post. So this is now, what, like 13 years ago or something like that? Paul Graham writes a blog post. It's called, if you go to Paul Graham.com, slash five founders, the number five and the founders.

He says, ink.com recently asked me who the five most interesting founders are the last 30 years. He goes, how do you decide who's interesting? I think it's influence. You know, who are the five who influenced me the most? Who do I use as examples when I'm talking to companies that I'm funding? Who do I find myself quoting a lot? And it's everybody you would expect it's Steve Jobs is number one. He's got Larry and Sergey from Google.

He's got like his buddy, Paul Bukite, who invented Gmail and also wrote the first prototype for ad, sense and gave Google the mantra of don't be evil. Okay, everything's expected so far. And number five, he says, Sam Altman. And he goes, I was told I shouldn't mention. Who at the time, by the way, was 22, I think, right? Yeah, exactly. At the time, he's probably 21 or 22 years old.

And he was wearing, he was wearing double pop neon collars with Steve Jobs. Exactly. Very embarrassing. Put up a photo of him doing this announcement at the Apple conference where he's wearing a double polo neon pop. copped collar. It's really incredible. You wouldn't think that that guy's going to rule the world, but Paul Graham knew that he would.

So here's what he wrote about Sam Aldman back in 2009. He goes, I shouldn't mention a YC founder, but Sam Altman cannot be stopped by flimsy rules. If he wants to be on this list, he is going to be. Honestly, Sam is, along with Steve Jobs, the founder I refer to most when I'm advising startups. On question of design, I ask, what would Steve do? But on a question of strategy or ambition, I ask, what would Samma do? What I learned meeting Samma is that the doctrine applies, the doctrine of the elect applies to startup.

It applies in a way that, that it applies way less than most people think. Startup investing is not about picking winners you think might win a horse race because there are a few people with such force of will that they are going to get whatever they want. And now you fast forward. It's a great sentence. The guy, you know, basically creates this, you know, what's going to be a, probably a multi-hundred billion dollar company Open AI and brings

one of the most magical, technical, like magical technology experiences, which is if you're using Dolly or GPT3, he created that. And he wasn't even that successful back then, by the way. I don't think he had, I think he had sold a company, but he sold it, I think, for less than they raised.

I don't think he sold it even at that point. So let me see. It was called Loot. Yeah, it was looped. And I think they sold it for about $43 million. He sold it three years later. So this was, he was at the beginning of Loot. He sold it for $43 million. And, And I remember reading about the sale.

There was some interesting stuff about how he, like, they sold it for less than it, than it was funded for, right? Which is like, you know, considered an L. But he, but he sold it in a way that he was able to pocket a few million bucks. He then invested in Airbnb right away and was the first seat investor in Airbnb. He's got this like, you know, he went on kind of an epic run post that. Yeah, he's a crazy guy. I think that's got to be the breakout is I agree.

Maybe Sam Altman this time can beat the Liver King, but it's close. We can all agree. Tomato. The most impressive thing about Liver King is he's not a good looking dude. Like so many of these guys you see in their influencers and they're like super jacked and handsome. He's not a good looking guy. He's my example when I say, I told Sahel Bloom this because Saehoe Bloom is like the good looking version of me. I was like, hey, if I can't be good looking, I'm going to be interesting looking.

And that's what the Liver King did. He's not good looking, but he did. decided to be really fucking interesting looking. And that works just as well. I then we'll have to go with Sam Altman gets it this time. All right. Let's do unsexy business. Dude,

I didn't even know what you meant by that. You go first. An unsexy business is like when we do our blue collar, Billy of the week. What do we call this shit? The blue collar side hustle. It's like a business that's not artificial intelligence or flying cars or whatever. It's just like a boring,

unsexy business. How are you confused by this? This is like the premise of our podcast. I don't know. All right. Well, what podcast? And so what's yours? All right. I'm going to go with, I could go with egg cartons, but I think I've kind of beat that one to death. The egg cartons.com. If you haven't heard me rant about that, go look up that episode. That is honestly, that is the most remarkable one, this woman Sarah Moore. But if not that, I'm going to go with one. We haven't talked about that much on here. It's called Aunt Flo. Have you heard of this business? No. So what on?

Are you saying the word ant? Like aunt? I'm saying the word, like Antflow. Yeah, Antflow. Okay. All right. You could say it your way.

Sorry, I just wanted to make sure that it's the word that we're used. Okay. Yeah. So Antflow. So Antflow is a business that is basically, um, it's period products.

I don't know how I'm supposed to say this, but for, uh, it's period products. So basically you go to a public restroom inside of any university, a stadium, whatever. In the women's restroom,

they, should have, and now in many states they are mandating that you have to have, you know, tampons, pads, products for women. And so normally these were coming in a dusty, raggedy container with like really poor hygiene. You got to like open the thing and everyone's like trying to use toilet paper to like touch the thing to open it and it's like really gross. I mean, this is like, you know, there's like literally like blood on these products. So it's not like a very, it's not something that you want to touch. It's not a sexy experience. And what she did was she brought a sexy experience to a very unsexy industry.

So if you go look at their dispensers, they basically made like the Tesla of dispensers. And they installed it on the wall. It's got this great brand. She's this great founder. And they are just cleaning up. So they are getting contracts with universities with what. And these are multi-year contracts. It's installed on the wall.

This thing is never going to get changed. It's going to be no churn, is my prediction. And it's sort of like they, they install the dispenser. And then you have to buy the products as they, as they are used. used or as they've run out. And she calls herself the CEO, the chief estrogen officer. She's just gone all in on like building this company as a woman led company that's like making this one kind of crappy experience better. And I asked her, I was like, did you invest in this? Yeah, I was like, I've never been in a woman's restaurant before. What's the current? Like, who's the incumbent? Who are you

competing against? And she's like, literally it's a guy named like a brand called Bob and Rick. And like, Bob and Rick's dispensers are like the thing. And, you know, it's this terrible experience and we're making it better. And so they're at like, you know, they're definitely, you know, sort of like high seven figures, uh, run rate where they have all these great contracts. And that, you know, they're, they're the official dispenser for all the Apple stores. And for like, you know, the whole state of, you know, I don't know, Utah or whatever, some state that's like mandated this is going to happen.

And I think once one state does it, all these states are going to do it. So I think they're very well positioned to take a very boring niche and build. a pretty badass business. And she's a teal fellow. Only 25 years old. Yeah. Claire Coder, I think her name is. That's right.

That's a good one. Do you have one, Andrew? Yeah. Okay. So hotels are constantly trying to save money, especially chains. And I don't know if you've ever gone to like a hotel chain. You'll notice that on the wall, if it's like a cheaper one, they'll have like dispensers for shampoo and soap and it's all refillable, right?

So the idea is like you used to go to a hotel and there'd be a bar of soap in our box and you open the bar of soap and you use it to clean your ass and then they have to throw it away, right? So it's a huge waste. They're constantly throwing money away. And so hotels have moved to these refillable things. But one thing that they can't do is toilet paper. So when you go and there's a full roll of toilet paper and you use some of it, you know, no one wants to go into a hotel and be like, oh, what the heck? There's like a little bit of toilet paper left. There's obviously someone just here who used it. And so there's someone, I just heard about this business. It hasn't launched yet, but I thought it was fascinating. Basically, it's a dispenser for toilet paper. So it's on,

it actually embeds in the wall and you basically pull out almost like you would Kleenex perfectly portion toilet paper. And I don't think this would necessarily work at like a four seasons or a high end place. But certainly for like a Marriott or a Hilton, I think they could save tons of money. So I thought that was just incredibly boring and quite interesting. That's a great one. That's a good one. There was one that got big doing that with the shampoo bottles back in the day. They would take the once used shampoo bottle and they would recycle it basically. And they were just like, hey, hotel will pay you nothing for it, but we'll come collect it for you.

We'll just take it off your hands because you're just, this is just trash for you. And they created a business out of that. So have you guys invested in any boring businesses? Like, you know, I gave Nick Huber a little bit of money. I think you did Sam as well. What else? What other boring stuff have you guys done? I'm in enduring.

So they buy, you know, a lot of them. kind of boring businesses. That's kind of tech. I mean like, I mean like brick and mortar. Development of real estate, like town homes. I feel like we,

it's weird because I feel like half of what we talk about on this podcast is like these boring brick and mortar businesses. And yet we like fetishize them. We don't own that many of them. Do you own any of them? Yeah, I own an air, air ambulance business.

I, you know, I own a deli and bakery. bunch of kind of restaurants and that kind of stuff. Wait, what the? Air ambulance? Oh, like helicopters. Air ambulance.

So if you're like in Mexico and you need to be brought home and you've had a surgery or something, we facilitate that. It's a very good business. But I really want more of those things. Have you guys ever thought about like starting like a fund around that or something? Because I feel like every tech entrepreneur who's made money. It's kind of like cash world. I like to visit.

I don't want to live there. You don't have to operate. You don't have to operate. it's just invest in all these cash flowing, boring businesses. Whenever people talk about that, I'm like, where do you find that? Like, do you go into eBay? Like, where do you find this air ambulance thing? You know what I mean?

Yeah, it was like we had to, we met someone through a friend of a friend. It's always like someone's dad, right? It's like, oh, you know, his dad wants to retire and the kids don't want the business or something like that or these things happen at the golf course. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I should be doing that. I think I got like really tech brainwashed because I basically, I started a sushi restaurant. Then I moved to Australia and did like a biotech thing.

But then I moved to Silicon Valley when I was 24. And I was like basically I just got like really deep in the Silicon Valley kind of ethos and game. And that was my, that's my network. And that's my, my skills were around internet companies. And so I think it was kind of the right move to go deep there and try to like win in that world. Because I think you don't have to win in all. games. So like, you know, I have a fun to do startup investing. If I do a good, if I do great with startup investing, I don't really need to also do great with a very different

style of investing. So I think I'm curious about it, but, you know, do I want to like sort of restart the learning curve in a new way? One, you know, you guys have this crazy advantage of, you know, I think your, your rolling fund does well because of the podcast, right? So if you guys go on and you say, hey, who has a granddad or a father or mother who owns, this family business that wants to sell. I feel like you'd get mob. There's something there. Let's see.

Sean at Sean Puri.com. All those leads can go to me then if you guys don't want them. Let's see what comes in. I'll share all the interesting. I'll filter all the interesting ones for you, Andrew. So Sean at shonpuri.com. Email me, your dad, your granddad, your uncle's business that we could either take like a minority stake or maybe he's looking to retire and sell.

Let's see, let's see what we got. Okay. So those are the unscited. Wait, I got to say my business. Dude, you know. I was reading about Coffeezilla going deep on Andrew Tate's thing. Do you guys know how Andrew Tate makes money? I do, but go ahead.

He basically, he has this, well, okay, fine. You got that smug look on your face. Well, isn't it a sexy business? It's like a camgirls business, right? It's the definition of a sexy business. No, no, the real way that he makes money is, yeah, he's got this fucking discord that's $50 a month in order to, like, join. And there's, like, channels on, like, copyrighting.

It's basically just the same shit that you're, and I, Sean, have done, like, screwing around, except, do you know how big it is? It's like $1,000,000 of members. No, no, no, no, no. Like, a million members. Oh, wow. Like, we're talking nine figures in revenue. And Coffeezilla, like, did it. He's like, look, here's all the members. If you multiply that by 50, and then you can even add a discount to it. It's like, we're talking about north of $100 million in revenue. And it's just a discord with volunteer, with volunteer community, like, chairs, like community leads. Freaking crazy. And I considered saying him for a breakout person, but I, you know, he's obviously pretty controversial.

So I didn't want to like, I'm the breakout is I've never seen somebody go from nobody to everywhere all the time in your face the way this guy has. Like he built a brand in like seven months or something like that. Like, had you ever heard this word before Andrew Tate last year? Like, no. No. I think he was the most Googled person on earth this year. that's crazy to me. Is that crazy?

And he says it and when he does his interviews, he goes, he goes, Mr. Beast has to spend $5 million and blow up, blow up a bus in order to get 10 million views.

I said, I just talk. Yeah. And it's true. It's true. The guy's way of speaking and the things he says are so compelling.

And then he built this viral engine where his all hustlers university is is basically, yo, post cut, cut up clips of Tate. everywhere and then go comment and basically in the comments revere me and that's how you know and then everybody who signs up for the Russell University you're going to make money doing that like

that's basically the core job is like go promote me it's crazy man it is crazy it's a multi-level marketing scheme just promoting him he is the product it's wild all right so what's uh do we vote on that one or just move to a different topic uh yeah vote i forget the I don't remember. Let's just move on. Andrew's toilet paper thing, let's say. Okay, let's do best investment. So the best investment you made, and then we're going to do worst investment also. So let's start with best investment. Let's go, Sam. What was the best investment you made 2022? Financially, fucking none. This year was in terms of money. This was horrible.

The two best investments I made were getting fitness coaches, so nutritionists and like a lifting coach, a fitness coach. And then, And also this pod, this is like the first time, Sean, this year where like, and this is actually one of my most proud moments where I've been walking around and I get noticed maybe one to three times a day. And this is the first time that I'm like, oh, wow, Sean, the work that you and I have done over four or 500 episodes, it's like properly paid off. Yeah. So that's, this pod is this, this year felt different. Has it ever has ever been annoying or weird? Yeah, one time like, it's, there's been multiple times where Sarah and I are having like a serious conversation or we're arguing or we're

having like a contentious conversation and someone pops up and like you got to like be like, oh hey, yeah, hi, hi. And you got to like turn it on and that kind of sucks. It's like, you know, like when you and your wife get in a fight, but then you got to get in the car together to go to like your friends house for dinner and you got to put on like the performance of the century. That's kind of like how it feels sometimes. There's a, there's a, what's her name from the Hunger Games? Jennifer. What's her name? Lawrence. She talked about how. She can be nice to a thousand people, but if one time she's fighting with her boyfriend and she's kind of a bitch to somebody, they'll go on Reddit and post about it. And she feels like you basically always have to be that person. And it's only a matter of time until you snap. Knowing you, it's only a matter of time.

One time we are at, you know, we're exploring the pregnancy thing this year. And one time we are at the baby doctors and someone in the waiting room said something to me. And I was, I was, I was rude. I'll take your I accept your apology there all right I'll do a quick one okay so best financial investment I invest in this company called Triple Well that's basically like a it's a tool for Shopify store owners

so it helps you like see your dashboard and make sure your ads are working well and they have like a bunch of different features I invest in this thing because I was like oh I like this I want to use this for my ecom store or maybe I should just invest in it really didn't think this was going to be. I thought if I,

and I did this, by the way, I took my portfolio and I ranked like, what do I think are going to be the breakouts? And what do I think are least likely to be the breakouts? Because I, I suspected I might be surprised. I was very surprised.

So us, I think our $75,000 investment in triple whale is currently worth $3.3 million. And so, uh, that's been the, the biggest breakout from the fund so far. And it's would have been one of the five that I did not guess would be the explosive rocket ship because like that's just not how I thought about it back then like when I saw it

it looked like this cool analytics tool for ecom you know shopify stores I don't know how big that is and all fast it'll grow it's been insane so that's my financial one and that I'll also say we did camp MFM and that was an amazing investment I'll tell you a little little story about it so we did this camp 20 30 people we go to north Carolina and we fly in this NBA trainer so we pay for his kind of him and his buddy like their their uh flights and hotels or whatever we rent these air bs we do the camp it's great everybody chipped in i think like a thousand bucks or fifteen hundred bucks two grand or something yeah i thought that would cover the cost didn't quite cover it i think we're in the whole like 15 grand or something like that no problem amazing experience

just for the basketball the fun meeting people all that good stuff but something kind of crazy happened um we tweeted out that we were hanging with mr beast or something like that or that uh that maybe the pod we recorded with Mr. Beast. And a guy saw that and started following Ben Levy. Ben Levy then checks out this guy's profile. Oh, this guy's in the crypto space. DMs him. Oh, let's talk.

Maybe they'll advertise with us. We end up getting an acquisition offer from this person. That's not the deal we ended up going with, but it gave us the leverage in the deal we did end up going with and like opened this door into acquisition. And it's all like, if we had to tweeted out that thing that we were doing with Mr. I don't think this person would have followed, and then I don't think that conversation would happen. And so the world works in these really funny ways where this kind of amazing acquisition

we had this year, I don't know, they could have just as easily not happened or been for a lot less had we not like just done this totally unrelated thing. That's good. Good things happen to good people. All right. Andrew, what you got? Best investment. So mine's actually an investment I made a couple years ago, but it's taken a while to play out. And it's very small, but I really like this one. So you guys know Sophia Amoroso. I think she's been on the podcast before. I met Sophia like five or six years ago, and she just had the experience with nasty gal. And she's like, I'm trying to figure out what to do next. I've written this book called Girl Boss. And I've kind of built this community around this social following. I want to turn it into a business. And I said, like, look, you know, I think you

should bootstrap this. But she got mobbed with VCs. And so, it was easy money, great valuation, raised like 10 million bucks or something. And because she took VC money, she had this really wonderful business, but she had to turn into a billion dollar thing. And this is girl boss? Suddenly, this is girl boss. And so she, you know, raised all this money. And she's like, I'm going to build basically like LinkedIn slash like a social network for female entrepreneurs to connect them, which we all know is like the world's biggest lift. It's like almost impossible to start a social network. And so she ended up running out of cash, getting exhausted.

She sold it to attention capital. And they basically were just like, fuck, we don't know what to do about this. Like we shouldn't have bought this. And so they reached out to us. And we were able to buy it for really, really cheap just because the business was totally distressed. And so, you know, we looked at it and we were like, okay, like, let's just go back to basics.

This business has almost two million social followers and email subscribers. and we just did basic stuff. We built a daily email newsletter. We sold ads. We did social ads. We did affiliate. We've rebooted the podcast, brought on a great CEO. And it's just been this phenomenal base hit.

And I just got an update from our CEO, Lulu, who's like, freaking amazing. And basically now the business is, I won't say numbers, but it's making as much as we paid for it every year in profit. And I think it's probably five or 10x more value. than what we paid for it at least. So I just love that kind of stuff where we're able to take a business that shouldn't have raised venture or, you know, kind of failed in venture land and actually make it a sustainable business that'll be going for five or ten years at least. That's crazy.

Yeah, that's really cool. I like those. And I think there's going to be a bunch of those venture businesses that fail. That's another one. If you're a venture business and you're not going to be able to raise the next round because the whole market has turned or whatever, it's not over. And there's like a way to structure of these deals. I think most founders just throw in the table.

I don't know what to do with that asset. But again, there's a lot of these businesses where you, let's say a business gets to five or ten million dollars of revenue and they're burning, you know, a million,

two million a month because they're like venture backed or whatever. To the founder, you know, they're just like, okay, well, this is worth nothing. You know,

let's go sell to Facebook. We'll take an aqua hire. And they actually will throw out their existing business. That business has value and people like us and Enduring, we'll buy it and turn it around and make it, you know, make it into something that'll actually make them proud. So yeah, I mean, it's, it all is not lost. Enduring did that with up counsel. That's what that was the example. Yeah, totally. Can we, we got to do worse. Let me put my worst one is a personal real estate. Like, I bought real estate

over the last two years. And I'm in, I'm made money on, on all of it so far. And like, technically speaking, like it's all like going to beat the stock market. Well, that's easy because stock market sucks. But like some of my investments, like my Airbnb, it's still like a 8% return or something like that. But it's just a fucking headache, dude. I regret buying real estate. I wish I didn't own any real estate. And I wish I just invested in other people's funds. Yeah. That's my worst investment. It just, it's caused me a disportional amount of headache. Yeah, that's a good one. All right. Mine is, uh, mine's really hard to choose. So many losers to choose from this year. So people know my portfolio is essentially tech stocks and crypto.

Tech stocks down somewhere between 40 and 85% this year. Crypto down 75% this year or sometimes 100% in certain cases. I think Luna has to be my pick because it went to zero. And so that was just like, you know, a 100% loss that happened in like three days. So last year, this episode last year, here's Sean's company to watch, Tara slash Luna. That was his answer for company to watch. To watch. And it sure did give you some entertainment. Yeah, you watched it go down. And then his prediction was that the Winkle Vye twins, the Winkle Voss twins are going to be richer than Zuckerberg.

But not in one year. That is a long-term prediction. But you bet on Luna. So you're going to double down. This is the question. you're going to double down on your Winklevi prediction? And what's the timeline and what's the punishment if you lose? No, no. These are wild. These are supposed to be crazy predictions. These are not supposed to be things I think are going to happen.

They're sort of like far-fetched predictions. No, I don't want to double down on that. I would say that's looking way less likely now than it did then. But, you know, it's basically like Facebook stock got crushed a little bit this year too. I hadn't calculated that I think, I forgot what it is now, but I think Bitcoin would have needed to be at if Bitcoin got to $2 million a coin, then the Winkle and Facebook had like, you know, kept his value or something like that. Based on how much Bitcoin they owned, I thought, okay, at that point, they'll have surpassed Zuck. Assume, but the hedge was always,

if Zuck owns any Bitcoin, then they can really never pass him. You know, if he put a minority stake in. But I don't think Zuck cares if the Wickevire are rich or not. I don't think that's a concern of his. So what's yours, Andrew? So mine is really just venture in general. So I've been doing angel investing for 10 plus years. And I think I've done well. On a cash basis, I've got a lot of money back. But I haven't actually, like if I think about it, even if I've made 15 to 30% a year,

I haven't had access to that cash the entire time. Whereas in my main business, when I buy a business and I make, you know, make 20 or 30% return, I'm actually getting that cash and I'm compounding it and then I'm investing it and doing more and more and more. And I think psychologically, there's a big difference between owning a whole bunch of businesses and doing $50 million in EBITDA versus owning a bunch of stakes that are illiquid in a bunch of venture businesses where maybe you'll get your money in 10 to 15 years. And so I don't think that it's necessarily saying I don't want to invest in venture go forward. But it's just been, I think it's been a bad, if I think of it as,

if my goal is to maximize my capital and feel rich, it's not the best way to do that. I think that I'm much better off incubating businesses and buying businesses, because it's a very steady 15 to 30 percent cash return, and I feel it. I feel the win in a much bigger way. And I think that like anyone, over the last two years, there's some businesses where I look at the valuation, I invested at. And I knew it at the time. I sucked it up and was like,

fuck, you know, this is just the world we're in. But there's some businesses with like now, maybe like four million dollars of revenue and they raised at like a hundred million dollar valuation. And I'm just like,

okay, that's just gone. Yeah. Well, that sucks. Yeah, I don't know what it's up. We all just said horrible things that we did this year.

I don't know. It's a hard to. Just bask in the, in the, in the, look, you know, You can't have a non-error rate.

You can't be an investor and not have a portfolio of bad investments, of bad decisions, right? Like that is not really a thing if you're going to do this and you're going to take the appropriate amount of risk that would get a reward. You can't have a 0% error rate. And so I don't think it's anything to be shy. I'm also, you know, I think a lot of people, you know, have portfolios that are down this year just by the nature of like what's going on in the the market. There's that, there's that logic brain coming in to save you. Yeah, no, I mean, that's like a, that's where the logic brain is actually like useful. All right. Like, I learned this in poker too. Like you, oh, I had pocket aces and I lost. I literally know people

that will fold pocket queens or something like that in poker. Why? Because they're traumatized from the bad beat they got one time. And they're, oh, Jacks, I hate Jacks. Like, you, what do you hate pocket jacks? Why? Like, why don't you, you know, just because you got your money in good, but it turned out not the way you wanted. Like, you know, being able to, assess the decision and not the result is so key. When I'm making fun of myself for for fomoing into investments, it's because I think my decision was bad. Sure, the result was bad, but my decision was bad.

I have many investments where I think the decision is good and the result might be bad for a period of time. That's okay. But being able to separate the two is super important. I can't find this client info. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform. So it shares its data across every application.

Every team can stay aligned. No out-of-sync spreadsheets or dueling databases. HubSpot, grow better. Sam, what topic do you want to go to? Which category? Dude, I want to combine book of the year and favorite podcasts or newsletter or person you subscribe to. So I want to, like, we'll do a few actionable things, like best things that we,

like best bits of content. Mine, well, for a favorite person I started, favorite person is two. You already named one of them, Paul Graham. Dude, Paul Graham is such a beautiful writer. I started reading all of his work again this year. He's such an awesome writer. He talks about money, living, happiness, raising a family. He's a really good writer.

I love reading him. The other one is Cultural Tudor. Do you guys know who Cultural Tudor is on Twitter? Never heard of it. So it's this person who I don't think they're crazy popular, but I'm going to give you an example of a thing that they tweeted. So it's called the Cultural Tudor, a beautiful education. That's their thing.

And so they'll do like posts. about like, let me find a good one. But it's all about culture. So basically, right now, minimalism is a thing. So if you look at like a lot of new building, minimalism is a thing. And the cultural tutor will do this thread saying, this is actually pretty lame about this architecture. It's pretty boring. Here's the ornate stuff that we used to do. And here's why we used to do it. And here's why we do minimalism now. And it makes you like question certain things that we're doing. Or another one could be. here's like a famous piece of art

and it was actually revolutionary and here's or here's why Mona Lisa here's why it looks like her eyes are following you and this doesn't seem interesting now but it was interesting because back then here's how they used to do things and here's what was actually revolutionary about that painting things like that.

I love the cultural tutor. It's a really good follow. That's a good one. You said you were going to combine that with Book of the Year? Book of the Year. Have you ever read Blitz, Andrew? It's about the story of, of drug use during World War II.

Framebreaking book. I haven't read it, but it's, I mean, you've got meth and you've got Hitler. I mean, what could go wrong? It's a framebreaking book. Basically, the whole hypothesis was that during World War II, you know how they gave soldiers, like, pieces of chocolate and cigarettes to keep him happy? Well, in Nazi Germany era, they gave them meth. And one of the reasons that says Hitler was being crazy and making a lot of the decisions that he did,

not only was he like a hateful crazy person, but they're saying it was also because he was on meth the whole time and he was going nutty. And one of the reasons why he killed himself was he basically ran out of drugs in the last two weeks in his bunker. What do you got there, Sean? Is that Blitz? No, this is not Blitz. I'm looking at the book I think I'm going to choose. But Andrew, go next. So my favorite podcast, I'm absolutely obsessed with founders, which is by David Senra. And what he basically does is he reads business biographies. And then he summarizes them really, really well. So there's a lot of, I've read a lot of business biographies. I really enjoy them. But there's a lot them where I'm like, I just, I'm not going to spend 15 hours of my life learning about

JFK's dad, right? There's this, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, he's a patriarch. Yeah, it's so good. It's really it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, I read about a quarter of it. It was great, but, but, um, he, he'll do like the one, one and a half hour summary. And so, A, it's a great way to remind yourself, like I, I, I read Titan a couple years ago, about John D. Rockefeller. And I re-listen to it. It reminded me of a lot of lessons. And then B, B, it'll actually tell me, do I want to read this book? Is this person actually interesting? Or just give me a cursory understanding of that person. So I absolutely love that one.

In terms of books, the one that I loved over the last year is the operator, which is about David Geffen. The guy is an absolute lunatic. It's fascinating. Like the picture of him, you know, why is he the way he is? Deep dive on his childhood. David Geffen started, he started Geffen Records. Geffen Records. I mean, this guy was like, he's touched so many industries, you know, huge musicians. But he's a movie guy too at this point. Like, yeah, I mean, fascinating career, but also an incredible investor and capital allocator and stuff. But what a fascinating book.

And it's one of those ones where it's very unflattering, but it's incredible. Okay, that's good. He's worth like $5 or $10 billion at this point. I mean, he's like a big deal. All right. I'll do book. I'm going to have, I got two, two picks that I thought were good. I only read probably three or four books this year.

But this one, so think on these things by Krishna Morty. That's like a life philosophy book that I love. You said that was your favorite book one time and I asked you how far into the book you've read. And you said you're on the first three pages. Yeah, actually, I'm only about 30 pages in now. So I've gone from three to 30 in a year. I think this might have been my pick last year, too. This book is so heavy, man.

It's got like, let me see how far. Dude, it's not. That's like 250 pages. I'm 110 pages in. So I'm 110 pages in. And it's an amazing book. The second one is, Andrew, you probably read this, richer, wiser, happier.

It's a great book for anybody who likes investing. And basically, yeah, it's a great book for anybody who likes investing. I think it's a, it's a fun read. So those are my two favorite books that I read this year. And then podcast, newsletter or person, I'm going to give two kind of shoutouts. A person one that's a little under the radar is called 10K diver. Do you follow this guy on Twitter?

So 10K diver, the bio just is literally the number 10, then K diver. It says, I help people understand the fundamentals of finance and investing. And I think it's called 10K diver because it's like the form 10K, like the, that's like the name of the form or whatever. So he just gives really great threads about like very basic fundamentals of finance. And I find myself reading these and thinking, oh, surely I know, you know, about whatever topic it is. Certainly I know about stock based compensation. Surely I know, you know, whatever, cash flow.

And then you read it and you're like, I always learn something from it. And I think he's a great writer. He's very clear. He's very helpful. I just think it's a great one to follow. It's like, you know, there's a lot of junk food on Twitter. And I would say that 10K diver is not junk food. I even took his like Maven course.

But did you really? I only attended like half of the sessions just because like, you know, it's hard to make that much time. Super interesting dude. And, you know, I don't know. The course wasn't like mind-breaking for me. But I don't know. It's all good stuff. It's all good stuff.

And so I really, I really liked the way this guy thinks. Okay, so that's the person one. And, okay, book. So I did book. All good. We're good on those. We all three did ours? Yeah.

All right, cool. What topic you want to do next? Wild predictions. Okay. What you got? Mine's easy. I think mine's easy. You want me to read your wild predictions from last year?

Should I read our predictions? Yeah. All right. Our predictions from last year. Sam's was. San Francisco is going to be cool again. Yeah, San Francisco will be cool again. You think you hit that or no?

No, but I don't think I'm... Early, not wrong. I think I'm not off by prediction, but yeah, I'm a little early. It's going to come back, man. San Francisco, I went back there. It is awesome. San Francisco is awesome. Yeah, you said something about the YouTuber meet Kevin and that he will be like,

his company's going to break out or something like that. I don't know what that prediction was. Oh, yeah, I totally was wrong. Totally at-home diagnostics, you said, was the industry to watch? Yeah. Nothing happened there. And then you said, overrated the creator economy slash web three.

Nailed it. Yeah, I nailed that one. Andrew, your predictions were that high salary inflation is not here to stay. Companies are going to outsource an offshore talent. What do you think about that one? I still think it's right.

I think that it just took, I think we're just seeing it now, basically. As these tech layoffs happen, I think they're going to go global. Right. And then you said, overrated. You said NFTs. I think we structured this differently last time. We did like

companies to watch, overrated thing to watch. I said overrated was SPACs. I think that was right. I said company to watch, Tara Luna, that was way wrong. And my crazy prediction was that the book of I will end up richer than Zuck, which is, you know, early like we already talked about. Okay. So this year, what do you got for a prediction or predictions for 2023? So we structured it differently. But let me say mine too, because they're fast. One, Elon Musk either dies or he gets canceled or he gets canceled in an incredibly, like, serious way. And Tesla stock completely tanks. The second thing is, so open AI, something involving regulation is going to happen.

Because like there's already been a little bits of pieces. Like if you Google or if you use open AI and you ask them about coal, they say like, you know, we think that climate change is wrong. yada yada. Or if you ask them about race, um, they say something like, you know, race is a social and cultural construct. And we don't, we don't want to give it our opinion on this. Like they kind of like, but they actually do insert their opinion. Um, and I think that there's going to be some weird shit going on where like right now like, like, like, for example, they'll like say like, hey, we'll give you $100,000 for 10% of your company. If you build on top of

our platform and there should be all these new tools and but it's all going to be underlined with this potential massive bias that Open AI has. And I think there's got to be some type of regulation around it. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Andrew, what you got? Predictions. And by the way, these are supposed to be, we said wild predictions.

So again, we're not saying we're sure these are going to happen. These are like sort of interesting predictions. Yes. So you remember like five years ago, everyone was saying Apple doesn't innovate anymore. They can't do AI. And what was happening is that Google, at least historically, has innovated in public. So they're constantly releasing new features and showing off these kind of half-baked ideas that are in their R&D labs. Whereas Apple has always been very opaque.

They'll work on something for seven years. They won't share it. And then all of a sudden, they'll release it. And I think that same thing is happening with GPT3 and AI. I do believe that while right now I can say I'm using GPT3 instead of Google, I think Google has probably been working on something similar for years and years and years and is probably very far ahead. maybe not ahead of GPT3 necessarily, but that they have their own offering. And so I just think it's like those,

there's going to be a lot of, a lot of other players in that space coming out over the next probably three to six months and that it will be, there's going to be an ecosystem of offering similar to AWS and Azure and Google Cloud. I think it'll be the same thing with GPT3, Google, maybe Microsoft.

I don't know who else. Cool. Sam, I agree with your. your Elon one, that's one of my predictions. I think he gets canceled in a big way, or one of his companies goes broke. I think that is a good, wild prediction. But I'm actually not going to predict.

I think there, yeah, he's going to get me-toed, I think. Yeah, I feel like he already has and somehow. Isn't he already? I mean, he already did. I mean, yeah. I think he's uncancellable, kind of, given all the stuff he's done and said and then it's going to get the number of fans do it happen.

I think he's going to, they're going to cancel the uncanceable. but I'm not really going to predict anything that's like the macro because A, who the hell knows and B, who the hell cares. I'm actually going to take a page out of the book of something we respect highly here on MFM, calling your own shot. So my predictions are about myself. So here's my predictions about myself. I predict that this is the year that I get ripped. I predict that I turned the corner and they're not like oh I get back in shape no you've always never been in this kind of shape so I'm gonna get I'm gonna get ripped for the first time and I also believe that I'm gonna start a company that is special I don't want I don't want to put a dollar amount because these special things take time so it's not gonna happen in one year but I'm gonna do I'm gonna start the thing that will be my kind of like um the thing I'm known for for a very long time,

the legacy thing or the thing that builds the big wealth, the big empire, I think it's going to happen this year. So those are my predictions for myself for 2023. Well, I'm happy you called your shot. I actually agree with you. I think you're going to do that too.

I think you're more than likely going to create that company than you are get ripped. He was giving me that fuel. Thank you for the fuel. Are you willing to take drugs to get ripped? No. I'm all nat. So you're unwilling to take drugs?

Not like the Liver King. Okay. Well, then yeah, then I think that you're... Well, dude, getting ripped is hard, man. I'm pretty ripped right now. And everyone keeps asking me what I did. And you know what I did? I just didn't eat.

And it's really, really a pain in the butt. I don't really like doing it. And so, I don't know. Like, I don't think you need to be that ripped. What's your definition of ripped? guess. Visible abs. Yeah, you got to get to, what is it, 12% body fat?

12% is not. You can live a good life and be at 12%. But below 10 where I am trying to get, it sucks. I'm just hungry and cold. Yeah, I'm not going to do that, but it'll be visible. All right. Let's do another one. Coolest moment of the year for you.

What was the coolest moment of the year personally that you had? Dude, mine is like, it kind of felt like we crossed a chasm for like, kind of like this podcast being well known. And like that's a little, I didn't want to do a selfish one. Honestly, I almost said you selling. Yeah. I almost, I wanted to say you selling the milk road. I actually did think that was cool. Seeing you do that, I got a lot of joy out of and a lot of like, even though I wasn't involved, it was like I felt a sense of pride of like we came up together.

You were like the key advisor. So, you know, you were. involved. Yeah, so feel free to send me some money. But, no, I think, like, us getting popular this year. Like, it really felt like this is the first time it happened. I agree. Something has changed.

Andrew, what about you? Coolest moment of the year for you. So I've talked about this before, but I feel like what I actually, if I really am honest, what I like about business, aside from making money and that making my life easier, is meeting interesting people. and you know I got to know Andrew Huberman this year and we ended up partnering

so basically like I've got a foundation I've been giving a bunch money away to science and so I met Huberman maybe Is that who you wrote the check to? You wrote the check to science? Yeah, yeah exactly just science but I met Huberman like a year or two ago and basically we did this thing where

when people subscribe to his premium podcast a bunch of the money goes to basically funding science and research that he wants to fund. And I basically said, look, I'll double, I'll double every single dollar that you donate. And so we've got this partnership. And I just love that kind of stuff where I can work with someone who I respect and do something that I think is good. That's a cool moment. You've become a benefactor. What do you mean? Like a patron of science. You get to use one of these words that's like from

the 1800s. Would you do things like that? Yeah, it feels good. It's fun. Dude, and plus you have an excuse now to hang out with the dreamiest guy on Earth, Andrew Huberman. Yeah, totally. I'm jealous anytime you want. For sure. All right, my coolest moment of the year was you were there for this, Sam, when we were at Camp MFM and we got to go do a tour of Duke's basketball stadium

and we're in there. And then we were sitting down, they gave us the talk. It was a good experience at that point. But there was a moment that made it a good experience to a Keystone memory, which was when I bet Mr. Beast, $10,000 that I could hit a shot from half court, and I hit it. And the whole thing. On number five or something.

Yeah, like the third attempt hit, I was like, I'll again hit this before you. The third attempt, I hit it. It was an amazing, fun moment. It made that trip a little bit more, more special and memorable. Did he ever pay you? This is where it comes. This is where it gets interesting. It's also actually my biggest L of the year because he didn't pay me.

and then I had to follow up and I followed up two times three times and now I'm basically begging for the money by the third time you go from like first time you kind of crack it you're busting balls a little bit like hey bitch baby and then the second time you're like hey man

didn't pay by the time it's a third one now this awesome dope moment has turned into an L because now I'm having to go I think I think you need to take him to small claims. Exactly. That's how I'm doing that via I message. And I was like,

we have it on video. We have the bed up. Dude, we have the bed on video. I know, I know. And so this, this baller moment of confidence of being like,

hey, bet's a 10 grand. I can hit this shot. And then actually hitting it with, you know, everybody there in the center of, you know, Cameron Stadium,

Cameron Indoor Stadium turned into a bit of a small boy moment of being like, Hey, hey, did you have a chance to, hey, just, I know you're busy. Just, uh, you think he can, I'll send the details again. Maybe, maybe it's on my end. Dude, is he lying about every other donation he's ever done? Coffeezilla, get on it. Are there thousands of victims like me? That's crazy.

I can't believe he didn't pay you. He doesn't seem like someone who is. He blamed his assistant. He's like, oh, fuck, sorry, my assistant. I'm going to, I'm going to have to yell at him. Yeah, right. Okay. Let's do let's do the craziest most delusional person of the year that we met. This one's for us, it's probably easy. It's Billy McFarlane. Did you hear that? Did you hear that interview, Sean? Or Andrew? No, I didn't hear it. I don't like when you guys interview people like that because I know, I know it's like interesting and stuff, but I feel like if you, if all, even if only

5% of people hear that and go, hey, he actually sounds like a good guy. I just think like he's going to go and fuck more people over. I don't know. What do you guys think? I didn't, and Sean Drew punishes us when we do those bad things. He goes and listens to All In instead. He doesn't listen to the episode. He goes on strike. Sean wholeheartedly disagrees with you, I think. Yeah, I totally disagree. I think, you know, this podcast is our vehicle to have conversations with interesting people. And everybody's an adult. They should judge for themselves whether they think this person's full of shit or deserves a second chance or whatever. On the pot itself, he told us what he was doing. And literally, with a one part,

I just go, it's a horrible idea. And I actually felt bad that I was that brutal about it. But it really was, I thought, a horrible idea. And I felt the need to just like say it. So I think it's one thing if you invite them on and they just like, like, I see this sometimes. People just like suck up to people. And the other is to be like, dude, what the hell were you thinking?

Or they're like, oh, you know, I just thought this. Like, are you serious? Like, really? Like, are you going to look at me with a straight face and say that this was all just an honest mistake. Like, you had to have known, right? So I think as long as you are real with your questions, then it's all good. But that's my, you know, my opinion. I just think, I just think it's like, it's giving air time to people that are bad, right? Like, I would say Billy McFarlane is probably a psychopath, right? The Bernie Madoff documentary on Netflix coming out in three days. Are you going to

watch that? Bernie Madoff is dead. That's the difference. If I, if you had, if you had Bernie Madoff on your podcast and you were like, hey, so like what happened? Tell us your story. And even if you kind of call him out, if he's like a belief, like a real psychopath is like pretty charming and like believable. And you listen to them. And there's going to be a percentage of people that hear that. And the difference with Madoff is he's in jail. Right. Then like Billy McFarland, I don't get, I have no idea. You know, he he served his time. Sure. But like he's probably going to go on and do more sketchy shit or I don't know any of these people who have a pattern of behavior of doing psychopathic fraudulent stuff I just don't think they should get any air time frankly

yeah okay fair enough I think there's a lot of people who would agree with you I don't personally but most most probably do but I actually I'm partially on Sean side I am mostly on Sean side but I do feel guilt sometimes like there's another person who Sean wants to have on that I think there's not a chance we should but uh so imagine here's here's how I would tell you to think about this like imagine that you so you know sam you've told me stories of guys who I remember you told me there's some advertiser who is fucking you over and not paying you and you felt very cheated and Sean I mean that guy that you sued who you felt like was chiseling you the landlord or whatever now let's say I have a podcast

and I say well there's two sides to every story and he's fascinating I'm going to go have that guy on my podcast as the victim you'd be like what's the fuck. I want you to ask that question. I would say ask that question. As long as you actually ask the questions and you're not just giving them like a chance to lie or say BS in a way that's like it's obviously BS but you let them skate on it. Like that's what happened with like Sam Bankman Free.

Yeah, but look at, look at Ty Lopez. Ty Lopez. Ty Lopez got legitimized by being on MFM. A lot of people heard him and went, you know what? He's not a bad guy. And you know, Sam kind of likes him and whatever. And like, what has he been doing over the last? Wait, wait, wait, what did I do?

I didn't do anything wrong with that. You said you were like, yeah, I met him. I met him in a hotel and he was actually a really nice guy, right? And it's like, of course he is. He's a psycho. And he's charming. I like everyone. I like everyone.

I just respect the audience and meaning I believe that you should have the opportunity to hear it and make your own decision. I don't pretend that I'm your parent and I'm legitimizing them or I'm telling you they're good or bad or whatever. I'm just letting you see them. And if you see them and you decide that they're great, great. If you decide that we didn't ask tough questions and you can't make a decision. But Andrew, you promote Bill Ackman.

Sure. Like I absolutely do. He's my business partner. And I'm not saying I actually don't know all the details. How could you put him in the same category? Well, a lot of, I'm not saying I do, but a lot of people do, don't they, Andrew? Like, that's objective. You could actually, and you can at least say that a lot of people do think that he's a chariote.

What did Bill Ackman do that's on, on considered controversial? Yeah. What did he do exactly? they would be like fraudulent or something like that. I mean, Bill has made some investments that have turned out badly, but he's never, I don't think he's predatory in any way. I think Bill is a great investor. I've seen this legitimate is when he went on TV.

And he was like, I, the market, whole markets, he basically was like, hell is coming, blah, blah, blah, but didn't disclose it. He had basically a giant short position, you know, maybe caused a panic. Maybe it didn't. No, but he had already, if you actually look, he wrote a letter about this, he'd already sold almost his entire position.

He had like one or two percent left. And I spoke to Bill two weeks before that. And he was freaking the fuck out. Like similar to that CNBC call. He was in a position to benefit greatly if people started selling. Right? He had a giant short. No, no, no, he wasn't.

That's how he made a bunch of money. He wasn't. No, no, no, no. I think it's a big misunderstanding. If you actually look at the timeline, he'd already sold out of that position when he went on CNBC. What about herbal life? He was a lot of.

There's a lot of... He was calling Herbalife. Herbalife, he went out and he said, this is a multi-level marketing scheme. And what ended up happening is the FTC investigated it, and they gave them a $200 million fine. And they got up to the point of saying, hey, is this an ML?

They settled with them for like $200 million. It was the largest FTC fine ever. And Herbalife, the FTC commissioner was asked, is Herbalife a multi-level marketing pyramid scheme? And she said, it's not, not one, right? Because she was legally bound by not calling it that. So basically, Bill was right. And that was an instance where he lost a shitload of money trying to fight a bad guy.

Did that really happen? Look, I got to find that. By the way, I'm not saying Bill Ackman sucks. I think I'm, I like Bill. But you're not not saying it. No, that's not what I'm applying. I'm saying that some people maybe think that he's full of it, right? I think, yes, absolutely. There's people that are critical. I think there's a great quote on this.

I'm not saying he is. The tallest, the tallest blade of grass is the first to get cut. And I think Bill is very loud and he is always confident and he's usually right, but not always. And so someone like that, I think when they're not right, everyone loves to shittle over them. Yeah, I'm not saying. I don't think he's in the category where he's got like, you know, I don't know of any accusations about stuff like that. I think some people, or just like he's not as good. He loses money. He's not as good of an investor as he says or his fame would lead you to believe. That's a criticism.

But that's like, that's like, that's like criticizing someone, LeBron James is not as good of Michael Jordan or whatever, right? Like that's different than saying somebody is, you know, a con artist. It's like fixating on Warren Buffett buying Dexter shoe and it not working out

and then saying, or you know, Warren Buffett did some deals in his early career where he bought a business and he ended up having to lay a lot of people off, right? Now you could build a narrative. that, well, Warren, everyone says Warren Buffett's so great, but what about this and what about this? But if you look at it and there's 100 investments and 10 of them didn't go well, you know, you can fixate on the 10, but you can look at the long-term performance. Bill's compounded at 20 plus percent, I think 25 percent or something crazy. Maybe not quite that, but something exceptional.

So again, like, he's my business partner. Obviously, I'll defend him. I'm not, by the way. I want to be clear. I don't think he's anywhere near those guys. I'm not saying, I'm not saying I think he sucks. I actually like him a lot from what I read about them. I'm just saying my point being is a lot of people, a lot of awesome people have haters. And just because you have a lot of haters, doesn't necessarily mean I don't think we shouldn't have you on.

That's my whole point. But imagine, okay, you guys have a newspaper, right? Effectively, you guys own the New York Times of tech startup bros, right? Like, that's what MFM is. You guys have this huge audience. We can quote you on that. Would it be ethical for the editor of the New York Times to put an op-ed from Bernie made off on the front cover, right?

It was not an op-ed. It's an interview. It's a big difference. Again, I hear, I totally agree. I hear you guys. I know you want to, like, stir the pot, and it's good, good listening. I just, for me, like, I just hate when these weasels get air-time. Okay. Let's get back. Yeah, let's move on. All right, Andrew.

Who's the most delusional person you met this year? So, okay, so it's a delusional person who I think is amazing. You guys probably will say the same person. It's Brian Johnson. I met Brian almost a year ago. And I remember sitting down with him and looking, just looking at him, he's like a translucent, glowing twilight vampire. Like he just looks, if you cut his arm off, there's circuits under there. And he's so incredibly well spoken.

And like, Sam, I think you said he's like the Elon, but like behind the scenes and quiet. Right. So I think he's amazing. I think he's like, he's like dedicating his life to basically being a test. you know, a test case for the rest of us. So I really admire him. And I think he's really interesting. How did you look at person?

Did he look, uh, on our pot? He almost looked, he almost looked a little ill. Like he was so skinny. Yeah. He was so pale that there was no pigment in his skin. Like literally like literally looked like, um, what's that movie? Uh, with the, fuck, what is it? Uh, the robot guy.

Alien. Alien with the robot guy. Like just totally pale humanoid. That's a, that's my pick too. Brian Johnson for the for the exact same reason. So we'll move to the next one. He was, you're right, crazy and delusional in the best way possible. Yeah, as a, I mean that as a compliment.

Okay, did you guys have another category that you really like your answer for? Does anybody think they got something good? Because we can just go to those. The relationship hacks and the, um, let's do relationship hack. What you got? So, um, they always say like the best first date is, is an adrenaline kind of event, right? So like you want to go on a hike, you want to get your heart

pounding. Maybe you go and do like a ropes, you know, those, what are they called? The like rope swings through the forest, whatever, like something that gets your heart pounding because when someone associates you with a peak experience, like a physical feeling of peak experience, that's very positive and it bonds you. And the same thing is true with alcohol. So I kind of stopped drinking maybe like seven or eight years ago. And I've kind of mourned the ability to go and, you know, down a pint with someone because they always end up telling you everything. They tell you about their business and the problems they're having and, you know,

what's going on with their wife. It's like hanging out once drunk is like hanging out 10 times sober. And so what I've been doing is I've been inviting people that I would otherwise have like a meeting with over to my house and will do a really long sauna and a cold plunge. And I've been finding, like, I just. feel so incredibly bonded to people because I'm having, my, my body is pumped full of all these endogenous drugs. And it's been really good. It's been kind of like drinking with someone. Dude, can I tell you what mine was? Here's, I'm going to read, let me word, read it word for word.

Invite people, have them come over for dinner and cook for them and we take ice baths together. After dinner? Before dinner? Before. Do you tell them like bring some trunks or how do you prepare? You just spring it on them? Or sometimes, sometimes. Sometimes they just springing on them and I have a towel already and I have shorts. And it's so funny. That's exactly what mine is. Another relationship hack that I have is I bring my wife to almost everything. So it feels like a family gathering.

And also she's like hot and like well like well read and like can have a discussion. So it automatically makes me seem better. Oh, you're the guy with the hot, look smart wife? Yeah. And then, yeah. So, Andrew, I had the same thing. Another thing that I typically don't do, and I think this is the worst way to hang out is while exercising. I hate when people say, let's go get a workout together.

I'm like, I don't want to. I never want to do that ever. I will never do a workout and hang out. Yeah, I want silence. Same. I'm the opposite. I love a workout together. That's a great idea.

I've had multiple listeners from the pod be like, hey, I'm in town. When's your workout? Like, I'll just come swing by and we'll just do it together. And I was like, oh, that's perfect. I don't want to separately beat you. And I'll learn so much about you. just seeing how you work out that this is like how you deal with like you know adversity like you know how you're how are you as a hang you know do you work out like all these things it's a it's a great tell

all right i got two little hacks the first is a principle that i've had for a long time it's called don't attend the party host the party this is my i have a rule i don't attend other people's events typically unless it's a real good friend who really wants me to but i will host so um i think hosting is it is let's say five times the work, but I think it's 500 times the payoff when you actually host the event. So Camp MFM is a perfect example of this. And when you host it,

the other hack in this is make it epic because it's going to be more fun for you. It's like all the logistical work is kind of the same. But if you just use your creativity to make it more interesting, people will come and they'll have like a whole memory to, you know, a whole experience with you. So with Camp MFMFM, the way we did it where we flew to this place, we had the basketball trainer, Mr. Beast, and Hassan Naj were there.

Like, interesting people were there. We all stayed in an Airbnb, a giant house together. Like that was a, instead of just doing a networking event, we made it fun and we made it different. And I think, and you get a bunch of benefits of being the one who hosted it. So that's the first one. The second one, I would say, the actual relationship hack with my wife is, so I'm a pretty chill dude, but I do, I do have one Achilles heel, which is I'm very, very, very impatient.

And what that means is like, my wife is like slow to leave the house, trying to go somewhere. It's like, oh, dude, why did this take? So I feel like I've wasted half my life waiting to leave the house. You know, just with kids, it gets like really slow. So I've always had this impatience thing

and I've tried to be like, all right, I'm going to be more patient. I'm going to be more patient. And I realized that that was actually a fool's errand, that the way to be more patient for me is to get in a fight in the morning. And what I started doing was, I hired this MMA trainer and I would wake up early.

I do my workout in the morning and I would spar. And what I found is that if I spar in the morning, I've gotten a really hard, strenuous, like, endorphin kick, you know, done. The rest of the day, I'm just sort of like, you know, it's whatever. Like, I can wait. Yeah, you're going to take an extra 10 minutes. You want to change your shirt? Because maybe this one's a little, maybe it's a little too hot.

Go ahead. Go change your shirt. No problem. I'll be here at the front door. chilling. And I have become such a more patient person just by doing a sparring session at the morning. It's a pretty extreme step to take. But it is so far the only thing that has gotten me to change this like really terrible personality trait after so long. Nothing like getting punched in the face. I was I think I told you that. You did tell me that. And the other experience

I had like this was I had been skydiving once in the morning and the rest of the day, you couldn't stress me out if you tried. I was in I was completely immune to stress. And so I think there's something to this like having a very exhilarating or adrenaline kick in the morning, it just makes the rest of the day completely non-stressful. That doesn't mean you don't do anything. It just means you don't stress while you do it. We were talking about the cold plunges. And I was just listening to a Huberman lab and he was talking about this exact thing. So when you're in cold, it obviously stresses your body. You get a huge dopamine spike and you get adrenaline or epinephrine and all that kind of stuff. and he was saying that if you do stressful things while you're in the cold plunge,

it adapts you to dealing with stress better. So you should definitely get a cold plunge and then argue with your wife while you're in it or something. Sounds smart. So that's Best Relations Pack. What was the other one you said? Oh, favorite tool or product.

The product. It's favorite tool or product under $1,000. What you guys got? So I always have this problem. I'll travel to a city and I'll try and think of, you know, I'll be like, okay, I'm going to New York on this day. Who do I know in New York? And it'll be whoever's top of mind, whoever I've just been texting with or something.

And I'll go and I'll have a couple meetings. And then I'll leave. And then I'll remember, you know, it's like when you leave the grocery store and you realize there's like three or four important things you forgot. I always realize, oh, shit, I forgot to meet all these people. I really wanted to see. And so I've tried a couple different tools for this. But I found one I really liked. It's this one called Clay.

It's a personal CRM, which we all hate. I know it's like a horrible business, but they do a really good job of basically tapping into your Twitter, your LinkedIn, your IMessage, your email, all the places where you contact people. And this is clay. com. Clay.

com, yeah. And so basically it's a huge database of all the people you know. And so what I do now is I go in Clay and I'll just be like, I'll type in New York and it'll show me everyone in New York. And then I don't miss people. And that's been huge. This is a beautiful website. Yeah, I downloaded the app.

I turned right away because I was just like, the same problem with all CRMs for me where like you get out what you put in and I was just not willing to put it, put in enough. But there's no, I don't use it. Like I don't update it. It's just when I go traveling. It's just a database of people I know and where they live. Can I, uh, mine is my body tutor.

And I don't know if Sean, if that's yours as well. But have you heard about my body tutor, Andrew? No. Very simple. all right here's what it is i spent six hundred dollars a month and every day my coach her name's heather calls me and says what are you going to eat today and i tell her and she says yesterday according to your my fitness pal you ate this this this and this thing was bad how'd that make you feel and i say i feel horrible i'm not going to do it again today and she just shames me or educates me

on why i made a good or bad decision and we like work backwards from whichever goal i want it's It's a five-minute phone call. That's been the best tool I've ever used. That's a good one. That's all it is. So I'm a pretty disorganized guy. So my favorite tools or products have been the one that helped me get organized. I got two that kind of saved my ass this year.

I don't know, Sam, did you, when you were at The Hustle, did you ever have like a bookkeeper? Yes. And do you remember life before, a bookkeeper and a life after bookkeeper? Before, it's stressful. And like, now I know that, like, I didn't know what the difference between revenue and cash flow was. And I didn't, like, understand, like, that, like, you take expenses and you, like, amortize them. I didn't understand all of that stuff. So it was as if I was driving at nighttime without headlights on.

Perfect way to describe it. That's how I've been my whole life. And I would always wonder, man, how do these other people have their shit together? How is it? You know, tax season comes around. I'm just like scrambling. And it's like the worst version of cramming for a test. And so this year,

I basically totally revamp my financial, like, hygiene game with a bookkeeper and a tax person that I love. And I'm going to shout them both out because they're amazing. They were so amazing. I did invest in both of the companies because I was like, I have to like, you know, I believe in this, you know, because they save my ass. So one is called KIC. So I think it's kick.com is the URL. And it's basically, if you go to the website,

I like their tagline. It says self-driving bookkeeping. So basically what they do is they just say, connect your bank, your credit cards. And it's like everything. It's like your Amazon. You just click connect, connect, connect, connect, connect.

Boom, it's all your books. And then they have a bookkeeper and she calls me. And she's like, here's how you're doing. Like, here's how you're pacing. Here's some things you should be thinking about. Here's how we can save you money. You know, blah, blah, blah. And not like, not like spend less, but more like tax wise.

Like here's some things that you could do. And so bookkeeping was the first one. And then all my books are together. Super cheap. It's like, I don't know. It's like $99 or $100, $199 a month or something like that. It's like if anybody, if you're a create, like the one big thing is they, they do this for like kind of like small businesses, like sort of like LLC types, S corps or creators. So like if you're a YouTuber or a Twitter or a podcaster, most of them have, don't.

treat their creator business like a business and you totally should it is a business and I think also the law has now changed so starting next year I think they have to do like the quarterly estimated taxes and things like that like dude 99% of the creators have no idea what this stuff is or how to do it and so so I love this thing this has been like kind of a game changer for me on I'm having my my P&L my cash flow my balance sheet all of it just like very clean and then then that gets handed to the other service gelt and so but gelt does is kind of amazing. I don't know how much of this I'm I'm supposed to say or allowed to say it. I don't even think they want me shouting it out because it's like, dude, I just signed up. I just signed up. I just signed up. I just signed up with gelt. Are you on the wait list? Are you you actually started using it? I DM'd him and I have a call set up with the guy. So the guy, Tal is this incredible guy. He's an entrepreneur. So for the best thing. So I've, I've met many, I've had many like kind of accountants and tax strategy people. And I literally walked in and I felt like I was walking into a meeting like, you know, with CIA or something like that with IRS.

It's like, and Nick Hoover said this right. He goes, yeah, dude, 95% of accountants and tax strategy people, they're like, they act like government agents. And he's like, you can't even not. He's like, you're just asking questions like, how should I structure this differently in order to. They can't answer it. It's like they won't.

It depends. They're like, they're not creative, first of all. So they're not even giving you ideas. It's like, if you have the idea, they can say yes or no. But it's like, dude, where am I supposed to come up with all these ideas from? So like, they don't give you ideas, first of all. And secondly, they're like, well, did you spend more than 22 hours doing this?

It's like, dude, I don't know. I wasn't keeping track of that. But like, if I say yes, what happens? If I say no, what happens, I need to understand like, could you just disarm this? It's not even like, help me cheat. It's like literally just don't make this stressful. It's been my big problem with this. And so, Gelt is kind of amazing because Tals, he's a founder.

He's an entrepreneur. He sold his last company. And he's like, dude, I just like, he's like, personally, I just hated taxes. And so I decided to create like the tax firm I wish existed. and they're amazing. So the same thing. They take your books. And then what they do is they're more like,

yo, have you thought about structuring your corporations in this way? Because then you can get the advantage of QSBS while still maintaining this advantage. And like they do everything clean. They do everything by the book. But they are, they feel more like your friend helping you do this than the other way. And so these guys probably save me.

I don't know. I don't know how much to save me, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was seven figures of what. I've saved using this thing. And it's the first time I've been not stressed on the subject of like bookkeeping and taxes. And so like that has been like a very nice feeling for me to have versus like this scramble and always feeling like there was some adult class that I missed.

I slept through and now here's the test. Like that's how that's how taxes always felt for me. It was I slept through the class and everybody else took it. Everybody else is prepared and I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. And now finally I feel like, okay, I have my name. notes to take this test. Dude, I'd just. I feel like it's one of those things that's shocking how many business people just don't

know how to read a balance sheet and a P&L and cash flow statement. And it's, if you want to learn, Khan Academy has an amazing introductory course. It takes about an hour and you'll learn everything you need to know. By the ways, you guys hear this, the IRS hired like some like some absurd number of new auditors. Was it like 18,000 or something? It's either like 80,000 or more, I don't know, like IRS hiring. new agents. I think they hired 80,000

87,000 new hires. And so I think there's going to be a shitload of audits, which is why I wanted to be like super buttoned up with everything. Just because oh man, that's another time suck if you get audited of like dealing with all that crap. So, you know, I don't think they hired these people

to do nothing. It's 80 billion in new funding and 87,000 tax agents. Isn't that insane? That's fucking crazy. they're going to have a lot of work to cut out for them. I think we should almost wrap up. We want to do one or two more?

Yeah, let's do one or two more. What are your favorite one? Yeah, let's do one. What's a really good one? What about biggest change adjustment you're making in 2023? I have one. Go, Sam. So, for, I have a new thing that I'll launch.

It's live, but I'll announce it later. I'm hiring a CEO for it. I've already like done that and I've never done that early on. I also am doing close to like I'm being less of a dictator and I'm also being less metrics driven. This sounds like the freaking doucheous thing ever, but I'll say it. But more like vibe and energy driven. Basically with the hustle and like my last company, I was like by the book where it was like,

all right, I want to see projections. We're going to nail it. We're going to like the metric say this. Therefore like I can see you putting a metric on the vibe too. We're in 87 on vibe this week, guys. Well, like, for all my companies, I'm like, look, we've got to do this many outbound calls. Like, we're going to, like, whatever the A metric is, this is what it is. Like, we're going with the A, that A1.

And I just filed the data. And I was like, I don't care. And then it was very much a dictatorship where I said my rule or my way or the highway. And I'm trying to be a little bit calmer for my next thing. And I think I'll make way more money that way. That's a great one. Great adjustment. Andrew, what you got? Biggest change or adjustment you're making in your business life,

2023? So last year, I don't know if I said this, but my big goal was conquering email. Like I just, I was overwhelmed by it. It was stressing me out. And so now I've built a system. I've fully delegated it. I've got someone dedicated to managing my email. And so I really only get 10 or 15 emails that I have to respond to and everything else is triaged and responded to and dealt with. So I've conquered email. The problem is now I get a lot of eye messages like text. and stuff, and I'm going, I don't know how to conquer that other than changing my number, which seems fucked up. I'm trying to figure that out.

If anyone has any ideas, please tweet at me because it seems like there's no way. If someone has your number, they're going to get to you. And I have a really hard time not responding to text. I feel kind of guilty. So I'd love to hear any ideas there. You're just getting cold text from strangers? Is that the problem? Dude, I get so many of those.

Not that. It's just there's, I mean, I get cold texts for sure, but it's more just like there's so many people I've given my number out to. And if someone doesn't get an email response to me, sometimes they'll try and go there. I think like some people have found my number online. Like it's just, it's just becoming too much. And I'll be like, with email, you can kind of turn it off. I'll be putting my kids down for bed and like reading a Kindle book on my phone and I'll be getting hit up with text. And it's just the ability to break into your consciousness. Would you just get a new number? Yeah, I was thinking about it. But I've had my number since I was like 15. It feels messed up to do.

No, but I've thought about doing that as well. Sam, okay, so you did yours. Andrew, you did yours. My biggest adjustment, knowing when to use my impulsiveness. So I'm an extremely impulsive person, and that works in like eight out of ten situations. One of the situations it doesn't work in is I'm very impulsive with picking businesses to start. And I will just like start a business like instantaneously. and I'll go and I'll start making it happen.

And it's really fun. And that wave and that thrill is so addictive. And then 11 months later, I'm like, okay, now I have this business. Was this the business that I wanted to have? Because I can't do that many of these at the same time. So is this the right? Are you happy you started your e-com thing? No.

If I could go back and just pick a different project, I would. Same thing with the milk road. Part of the reason I sold it was I was like, I don't think this was the project that I want to work on every year, you know, for the next three years. And so if I don't want to work on it for the next three years, I should just sell it now. And like, you know, if I have a good offer, like take it. But that's kind of a shitty feeling. Like there's a celebration in selling, but there's also a bit of a failure. It's like, I've been saying this for a while. I want to work on a project that I don't want to sell. Like this podcast, time has flown by.

This is the third year. We're doing the Millie Awards. That means this is at least three years old. I can keep going. I would do this for free. I was doing this for free. I was going to do this out of loss. So this is the right type of project for me to do.

It's one that I would literally do if there was no money involved. I don't count the days of the hours. I'm not stressed about the metrics. I know it's going to keep going up because we'll just keep trying to do a better and better job. I have fun doing it. And it's not a drag on my lifestyle, right? Like perfect project. This has been the only project I've selected correctly on.

I would argue every single business I've started since the age of 21 was the wrong pick, and it was always just the impulsive pick. It was someone should do this. Dude, I bet I could do that. Dude, I would just do this, this and this. All right, let me just do it. And I would just do it. And then, you know, sure enough, I'm looking for the exit later because it wasn't really the right project.

So I'm trying to find the big change is I'm going to find the project that's in my zone of genius. That is the perfect project for me. It's when I enjoy doing. and I'm not building it for some future payoff. I'm doing it because I like doing it, that it is the project that's, you know, I'm most interested in. And if that changes later,

okay, that's fine. I'm not saying I have to do it until I'm 99 years old, but I'm not doing it just kind of like on a whim. So I'm going to be patient and select the project properly. That's good. It's about time. I've been telling you that for 10 years. The best lessons are the ones that you have to relearn 10 times over.

So the other one was best business idea You wish someone to end on Yeah Do you guys want to do that? Yeah, let's end up Tell me why Your washer and your dryer are two different machines

This is the craziest thing ever Why do I have to get out of bed And remember to put my Wet clothes into the dryer It's ridiculous This needs to be one That's honestly That is one of the smartest thing

That is actually a really good point It's crazy to be It's crazy to me that it's two different things. That actually exists. In Europe. In one washer dryer. I'm just looking at us up. No, it's in Best Buy Home Depot.

They're not that great yet. They're not that great yet. Like, I use them in Europe and they're only okay. But it needs to be the norm. There needs to be the norm. Yeah. Yeah, if you're working on AI or crypto or self-driving cars, quit and figure this on out. Like, we got to put, we got to have our priorities in order.

You know how many people are, wasting time on laundry? Dude, like, it's like... Look at James Dyson. Look at James Dyson. He's worth $18 billion, and he just was like, vacuums are terrible. I'm going to rethink those.

Imagine if he could have been working on AI, but no, he chose something... Do a dishwasher machine next to our dishwasher machine. Thank you. I agree, dude. Like, some of the... Or like, have you ever noticed how the inside of a refrigerator, no matter how rich you are, it always looks like shit?

Like, we need like a better organizer or something So some of these day-to-day problems, I think, need to be improved. Particularly, we'll start with the washer and dryer. It needs to be one machine. Okay. I like that one. Andrew, what you got? So mine, I tweeted about this.

So there's all these private jets out there flying around all over the world. And often, people will fly somewhere and they don't need a return flight. Or they're going to go there for two weeks or three weeks or whatever. And so the plane actually flies back empty just with the pilots on it, right? And I think this is truly insane. This is like billions of dollars getting lit on fire every month of just jet fuel and empty planes and stuff. I don't know what the solution is.

I know there's people that have tried this, but it seems like an incredibly inefficient disjointed world. And someone needs to crack this and create a central database of basically every plane that's available. Because let's think about who owns private jets. It's very, very rich people. very rich people are usually business people and are logical. Do they care about having someone else fly back if it pays for all the fuel and stuff?

Probably not. Maybe I'm wrong. But it's kind of like Gucci where it's like, well, I don't want to like sell my unsold Gucci clothes. I'd rather just burn them to keep the value up. Sure. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe. But anyway, I do think there's a lot of people who would certainly want to get compensated for that if it was easy. And I think someone needs to crack this. Yeah, that's a good one. Okay, I'm going to go with the school for the starving artist.

Okay, so I've met a lot of people in life who like to do different artsy things, you know, photography, film, you know, met somebody who was like, you know, they're like, oh, yeah, I fell in love with photography because I would hang up the freaking prints and like let them dry, like whatever, you know, whatever that shit is. You know, coloring, you know, blah, blah, blah, drawing. There's all these art, artistic things. and I would say most people give up on those passions or things because it's really, really hard to make a living doing it.

Or is it? That's what I want to answer because now that I'm doing this e-com thing, I now pay a lot of money to photographers. It's just that they had to be branded as photographers who understand how to do product photography or commercial photo shoots. My wife, when she was in business school, was just doodling on her paper board and somebody walked by and luckily they saw that and they go did you draw that and she was like oh yeah sorry i'm paying attention i promise he's like no no no i don't care like but if you can draw that i have a job for you

it's called graphic facilitation you can make a thousand dollars a day just by going to these meetings and conferences for these businesses and you draw on a giant whiteboard what they're talking about so they have a visual takeaway at the end of it and she made more money than me for a long time doing this thing, she would have never known how to turn her art into money. And so I think somebody should create an art school for people who have artistic talents, but want to be rich, have artistic talents, but they want to make a living doing it and not just be a starving artist for their whole life. I think you should create a specific school for this. And all the courses are things where you take an artistic trait, but you teach them how to do it in the commercial way. And they can make money

even while they're in school doing this. Like, you know how big of a shortage there is of video editors now that YouTube and TikTok are so huge or, again, commercial photography or drawing or all these different artistic things. So I think somebody should create the school for the starving artists where they're not going to starve anymore and get the artists that are willing to sell out like 25% and just like you do this. Like you see this girl on TikTok. She does these.

She'll take like a, like Dr. Pepper will pay her like a million dollars. She does this TikTok where she does these like crazy slow-moes. zoom in, water dripping on the side. And she makes this epic, like, like video trailer of a Dr. Pepper. She makes a Dr. Pepper look like it's the unveiling of a new, you know, rocket by SpaceX.

And she's just really talented at that. And brands are willing to pay her for that type of marketing. You know, there's a lot of people out there who could do that. They just didn't connect the dots. But what are you going to call it? You got to have some cute ass name. Don't have you yet.

That's the only hold. That's the only hold up. I'm not going to start until I have the perfect name. You know me. Do we, uh, Andrew, you look like you just got your first communion. You just like, you have an angelic face and an angelic look.

It doesn't matter how rich and successful you become. You still look like this little perfect communion boy. Oh, thank you. I'm working on becoming a Twilight vampire like Brian. That's my other goal this year. What's the thing he eats every morning? The figy pudding or whatever. It's like nut pudding.

I get on that whole thing. Yeah, nutty pudding. Your face looks more trim. Oh, thank you. I feel like you say that every time I come on. Have you ever gotten just like a crazy tan? Have you just ever come back looking Puerto Rican? My problem is I tan really, really well in my arms and face,

but I'm like I cannot tan on my body. Have you ever done a fernas tan? Have you tried taking off your shirt? No, this is, yeah, sure, I should do that. I want you to come on next time and I want you to look like, you know, Ricky Martin. So, you know, just like you need to come back at least like a third Colombian in your tan next year, next time. Okay, here's the deal. Here's the deal.

Okay, you, and I'm serious, you get to 8% body fat. I will go to a tanning salon. I will go in one of those stand-up tanners, and I will get really tanned and come on. No, he's got to get the 12%. You got a deal. Okay. Well, no, no. 12.

12 is like soft abs. 12. 12 is like soft abs. I want like crazy shredding. He will look shredded because he's dark. You just have to go tan for like 12 minutes. I'm going to have to like sacrifice my life to do this. I think 12 is a more than fair deal.

Okay, this is a deal. What's the timeline? Is this within the year or what is this? Whenever I do it, there's a lifelong bet. If I ever get there, if I ever send you a picture, Sam, we should, we got to talk about that meetup we're doing in Vancouver. I will do a shout out next time at the beginning, but we'll also do it now.

So we're doing a meetup. Sean, obviously, you're invited, but I doubt you'll ever show up. You guys know me so well that you didn't even invite me. I appreciate that you know me that well. Yeah, we're doing a meetup. We have to pick a date, but it's going to be mid-February in Vancouver, right?

How many people signed up or like gave interest? I think it's, we already have, we already have 600 people, so it's going to be a big event. We got to figure that out. Yeah, we have to pick a venue. We just put it, Andrew put a tight form. He didn't even ask me.

put a tight for him and he said, Sam and I are doing a meetup. Sometime in February, TBD on all the details. Sign up here. That's pretty cool. I'll go. I'll do it. We've got people.

There's people on it. You want to come? Yeah, come. It'd be awesome. I think Sahil said he would come too. And I just followed up with him on Twitter. I don't know if he's responded, but we've got to get Sahil out too. I've got some doctor's appointments in February.

I've got to work around. So let me figure out when those are and then we'll pick a date. All right, guys. Cool. Another successful Millie Awards of the books. Thank you, and we will see you next year.