My First Million - The Man Month, Shaan's Feud with Jason Calacanis & Elon vs Zuckerberg Fight

Episode Date: June 23, 2023

Episode 468: Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) talk about Shaan's feud with Jason Calacanis, who would win in an Elon Musk vs Mark Zuckerberg fight, and the owners of the successful veteran-owned coffee company on being a total man. Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to the MFM YouTube channel here. Check Out Shaan's Stuff: * Try Shepherd * Shaan's Personal Assistant System * Power Writing Course * Daily Newsletter Check Out Sam's Stuff: * Hampton * Ideation Bootcamp * Copy That ----- Show Notes: (00:40) - Sam's Hampton Offsite (02:00) - Why you're better on your second venture (08:05) - Shaan's feud with Jason Calacanis (12:20) - Elon Musk vs Mark Zuckerberg fight (24:15) - Beehiiv (39:10) - Investor Updates (50:40) - Black Rifle Coffee ------ Links: * Beehiiv * Black Rifle Coffee * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. ------ 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

He needs a hold me back guy. You're out of a hold me back guy. You're in a fight. And you're like, hey, listen, I'm going to go out to these guys. I need you to hold me back. So I'm not actually trying to fight this guy. I need it to look like I'm trying to fight this guy. And I need you to hold me back.

And it's got to be off. If these guys weren't holding me, I would have kicked your ass. He needs to find a hold me back guy. I think Elon's hold me back guy is going to be a hard sneeze. He's one hard sneeze away from getting like a back smash him. You know what I'm saying? Like, I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days off on the road. All right. We are live. What's going on? Dude, amazing hoodie. Sick hoodie. You like that? Hampton.

Yeah, that is very nice. I had a team offsite. We had all of our employees get together in Brooklyn and the CEO, my CEO, Jordan, organized this lovely event. And he gave us all hoodies that say Hampton and then our city that we live in. You're a stressful dude to organize an event for. I've never had to do it, but I've been a part of events. where people are organizing for us.

And I'm like, they're like, oh, yeah, by the way, it's everything, you know, the venue changed and we forgot, you know, there's only one chair on stage. I'm like, it's cool. All right, no problem. And then you're like, what the hell? And so I would be very stressed if I had to throw a offside or an event where you were my like kind of core customer of it. Is that fair?

Yeah, yeah, that's fair. But let me explain my reasoning behind that. And this is very business related. Number one, I believe the way you do one little thing is the way you do everything. So what that means, though, is if you've proven to me that I can trust you, I'm all in and I don't question anything. And so until you've proven that to me, I question everything. And if there's not a good answer behind it, I doubt you. And once we get past that stage, I'm good.

The second reason, there is no second reason. I actually forget what it is. That was a good reason. Here's the second reason. And we could actually talk about this for a second. want, but basically the second time around you've done something, everything is so much calmer. Because now my entire reputation, my entire net worth, it's not tied up into this one entity, which is what many things I've done in the past have been. So I'm much calmer. I'm way more subdued

this time. Yeah, I think that's true for sure. And do you find yourself thinking bigger as a kind of like way bigger? You've got one win under your belt. What was the phrase that Justin Merr said? Once you do whatever you got to do to get your nut, and after that, go for your noble mission. So, you know, you've gotten your nut now. You're financially secure. You're safe. Not only are you calmer, but are you more, I don't know, ambitious or long-term oriented in some way? Yes, 100%.

I used to criticize founders if they would sell secondary. So you'd read about this a lot. You typically only read about it when it's done it a bad way, of which it's done it a bad way many times. You'll see this company, which is going to go bankrupt, the founders took $50 million off the table and it didn't work out. The reasoning behind that, I think, is great still, which is you give an entrepreneur five or ten million dollars,

and they're like, wow, I can live a really nice life. Now, I think bigger. That's definitely the case with me. I think significantly longer term. So I think, like, what's this like in 20 or 30 years as opposed to next quarter? And I don't care if it fails, which is actually a good thing, meaning I'm able to try more within it.

What have I said, treat them mean, keep them keen? It's like that with trying to find a date and make money. So the less I care, the more it happens. Yeah, the way I think about it is like, because you see examples on both sides. You see when somebody had no other option back against the wall, that's when they, when they rose to the occasion. And you could also hear the other scenario, which is because I was secure, I was able to play a long-term game and I was less emotionally invested in the ups and downs of it,

therefore I was able to make better decisions, blah, blah, blah. You could see both examples, so which one is it? And actually, I think the reality is that success is not based on either one of those. It's not based on how much money you had in your bank count. When you had zero or when you had a bunch, people tell themselves stories about it either way. I think fundamentally, if a person is driven, intrinsically driven, it doesn't matter whether that fuel is because they're a technologist and they just love technology. They're trying to make something good for humanity or they're insecure because, you know, in seventh grade, Rachel dumped them. And it's like, well, either way, it doesn't matter.

You know, like, it doesn't matter what your driving force is as long as you have a driving force. And it's different for a whole bunch of people. There's examples of people on with all kinds of, you know, chips on their shoulder. I think you do need to be driven. And it's just a question of by what? And I think everybody's got a different by what. Are you more calm now that you've had success? I'm definitely more calm.

But I was pretty calm before. So calm, I would say is not really the word. I guess the way I would put it is, I'm less desperate. And I think that has. think that has ups and downs again like i said like when i was desperate to prove myself like you saw that i worked in that really fancy office i also slept in that office i think basically i was like one year it was like 275 days out of the year i slept there and like it was nice to sleep there so really night they had an apartment built into the office so it wasn't like the it's not like i was sleeping

under my desk on the like concrete floor but nonetheless that just sort of means i just didn't have a life i didn't want to have a life i didn't want to care about friends and dating and other things I cared about just making it. I just wanted to be successful really badly. And I was like, it's not even that I was super productive all those hours, but I was like, look, I'm going to throw all my hours at the problem. I will sleep here. I will wake up here.

That just seems more efficient. I'm just going to do that. I did that for several years. But now I would say that desperation has been replaced with, you know, a different asset. Okay, I lost the desperation, which was serving me. What do I have now? which is like, I can operate more out of a, like,

I can choose things that are like I'm actually driven towards, like to have a purpose, even if there's no short term. A little more offensive as well. Yeah, there's no short term path to, like right now, for example, I'm writing this newsletter every day. I write this thing every day.

There's no ads. I subscribe. No small boy or small boy. Yeah, just small boy. And I'm writing this thing. There's no ads. There's no premium. There's no upsell.

There's no business model. So why am I doing it? And I'm like, because I really like writing and more than I like writing. I like finding interesting shit to write about things that, you know, scratch my curiosity. So I'm able to do something. And then as I'm doing this thing that has no business plan,

that has no whatever, I'm seeing all these extra opportunities open up because that I couldn't have seen at the beginning. And so just by doing the thing I really kind of have drawn to, I'm most interested in, I'm doing my best work. And when I'm doing my best work, these unforeseen things start to open themselves up.

And I'm like, oh, I would have, the 24-year-old me would have never been able to do this because 24-year-old me was desperate and I needed a payoff quick. Now I don't need a quick payoff. And so I'm able to do things differently. And I think that has a different advantage. Can we talk about, is there a new chip on your shoulder now? Well, you tell me, is the feud that you're experiencing right now, your internet feud, has that even made it to the point where you bring it up at the dinner table? No, no, no. My wife is not aware of it, but she's like, hmm, how come he's looking at his phone for like an extra 30 seconds longer? And it's because I'm coming up with a badass slam in my head is what's actually happening. I'm wordsmithing a seventh grade insult right now. And I don't know, what does my kid want? What do you want? Hold on. Daddy's busy. I'm coming up with your mama joke to Jason Calacanis right now. Background of this is there's a podcast called The All In Pod. They're great. I think they're good, but they're different than us. and a lot of people will listen to both of ours. So maybe there's definitely some competition in there, but we can all win. And last podcast, Sean challenged them

basically to a $100,000 poker bet, a heads-up poker, but there was some more detail behind it. But I shared that on the internet. And Jason Calcanus, I thought he was coming hard at me too, but he came hard at it. He said, Sam, you're great.

Sean, you'll still learn. And he gave you a head pat. And he said, smart of you, Sean, to punch. I don't know if he, so the background is while we were, I forgot what we were talking about. I think we were making fun of him a little bit because he, in the Rogan debate, people were like, you know, it's raised $2 million for this, the scientist to come debate this guy,

like a kind of a famous internet challenge here. And he's like, I'm in for 10K, which is funny because the anti, whatever was doing was 100K plus. I've never made fun of Jason. If it comes down to it, you have my loyal to. I'll die for you. But I've, so far, if you want me to, I'll, I'm gladly hop in. I've stayed mostly neutral.

This is a you thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fine. By the way, I like Jason. For the record, I have nothing against Jason Calcanis. I've listened to This Week of Startups for a long time. I don't listen anymore, but I used to listen back in the day. I like the All In podcast. It's sort of like two thoughts that are both true.

I like their content. I have nothing against them personally. I've met him a couple times in passing. No ill will there. also I think some things he says are funny and cringy like funny kind of laugh at you not with you type of thing and cringy like when the thing I think the joke I had made that he didn't like was that I said all in is billionaires talking about billionaire shit

MFM is millionaires talking about a millionaire shit and somebody goes actually it's more like three billionaires and their friend Jason Calcanus and he goes he came in for his own defense and goes actually I'm a centi-millionaire I just thought that was cringe as fuck which objectively and scientifically it is. And so I think he might have taken offense to that. And he didn't fully like it.

But I would say my poker challenge to them is only for fun. I just think it would be a fun thing to do. I think it would be a fun thing to watch. I'm just looking for some action. I love playing poker. They say they're great at poker. Okay, let's do a little celebrity challenge. Nothing's been settled.

You're not doing it yet. Well, they didn't take the bait. I think, you know, he was sort of just like, well, you know, You're not famous enough for me to do this challenge. I have more to lose than I do have to gain out of doing this with sort of the vibe I got, which, honestly, fair play. The problem with that is that that's not entirely true. Are they more popular? You could argue that for sure.

For sure. But there's a ballpark and, you know, it's there. I'm in the stadium. Yeah, it's not like calling a, you know, what do I say? It's not like calling a 510 guy tiny. You know what I mean? Like you got to be at least 5'6 to get that nickname. You're 510 here.

You know what I mean? Not small enough. Yeah, yeah. But the funny thing is, as I was talking about, you know, we should like on the podcast, I was joking. I was like, oh, wait, is this fake internet beef? I would love to have some fake internet beef. That's, you know, this is how rappers for generations have been getting famous. You know, they did they just have fake beef.

We should do this as podcasters with other podcasts. And so I think that was the fun behind it. We got one up big time. Just when I thought me and Jason Calcanus were getting some fake internet beef, Palmer Lucky comes off the top rope, the founder. of Oculus and Andrew comes off the top rope and just body slams Jason, people love that and then while that's

going on, Elon Musk challenges Mark Zuckerberg to a fight. And now, I don't even give a shit about my own poker match. I need to see these guys fight. Let's break this down. We have to do this story.

Yeah, so basically, I don't actually don't know how it started. Do you know how it started? But what I do, I'll fill in when Facebook actually, Facebook officials replied with a beautiful response. There's a few steps to it. So I think the first thing was, I think the origin of this was a presentation leaked out

of Facebook that was talking about the Facebook's coming out with a Twitter competitor. I think it's called Project 92 or something like that. And it's a Twitter competitor. And their pitch was sort of like, yeah, it's a Twitter competitor. Instagram people will be able to immediately have their Instagram following on this. So if you want to, if you're already famous on Instagram, you can just start sharing short form text like Twitter. on our new thing, and, you know, it will be run by, like, run in a sane way.

Like, it'll be managed in a sane way. I think it was something with the word sane in it. And so essentially implying that Twitter is sort of insane. And the way Elon's running it is reckless. So that got out, that present internal presentation leaked, maybe intentionally, maybe not, I don't know. So Elon started making fun of Zuckerberg. He's saying like, you know, Zuck my blink. You know, like, he's just sort of like, you know, tweeting stuff like that.

And then somebody was like, you know, watch out. Zuck's been training. And Elon replies and says, I'll fight Zuck in a cage match. So he says this. And Zuck screenshots it and posts on his Instagram story with the caption, Send me location, which for those who don't know is a iconic UFC slogan by Khabib, I think one of the greatest UFC fighters of all time, who was when he was fighting with Connor McGregor

and McGregor was like, oh, he's scared, he doesn't want to fight me, blah, blah, blah. And Habib just goes, brother, I'm not scared. You want to fight me? Okay, just send me location. Just send me location. Like basically, where do I need to go? I'll fight you anywhere.

And so Zuck hits Elon with the send me location. And this triggers a chain of events that I thought was a joke. So I thought, first of all, I've never seen Zuck talk trash. That was already kind of an amazing moment. He did a heeled, which is awesome. The second thing is, I was like,

okay, well, there's no way this is serious. And then Elon sees that tweet and goes, or sees that story and goes, I'm serious. I'll do it if he's down. And then people are like, wait,

what? I don't know if you saw this today, Sam. Do you see that Dana White's involved? So Dana White, he's the president of the UFC comes out. Because again, I'm sort of,

you know, my greatest fantasy would come true. If this, if randomly two tech billionaire CEOs went and decided to do a UFC match, that's my two worlds colliding. all of a sudden, Dana White comes out and he says,

I talked to Mark and Elon last night. Both guys are absolutely dead serious about this. He goes, this would be the biggest fight of all time. Floyd and Connor was one of the biggest fights of all time. This, I think, triples it. There is no limit on how much this could make.

He said it would be in Las Vegas. It would pay-per-view, and it would be about $100 pay-per-view. And you would have 51-year-old Elon Musk against, I don't know, like 39-year-old, Mark Zuckerberg, who's 100 pounds, lighter than him. Dude, what is happening?

Is this real? And then the Verge reached out to Facebook and a Facebook official, which replied. And they just said, yeah, and they go, the story speaks for itself, which is another like, basically there's a guy in the UFC that always says, it is what it is. And that's exactly what Facebook just said.

They said, it is what it is. It sounds serious. And I thought that was a pretty baller move. I think this is hilarious. I think this is awesome. I love a freak show. I have some rapid fire questions. Topic number one, most importantly, do you believe this will happen?

Yes or no and why? I believe Zuck will do it. And I think he would do it. I think there's not a chance that Elon would do it. I think Elon would get very hurt just training for it. And I don't think there's a, there's not a world where Elon does it. So you think it's a no. No, because Elon.

Yeah. I 100% agree with. you I hope it happens. I'm not saying it won't happen, but I would just, if I had to guess, I had to guess, I would say it doesn't happen because Elon realizes that he's going to lose a lot. He's going to lose, first of all, if he does this. He's going to get destroyed. He's going to get, he's going to get tapped out.

And if he, if he does it, I think he realizes that it's a pretty bad look for him to lose to suck. His cool factor is really high and he needs to find a wiggle out. He needs a hold me back guy. You're out of hold me back guy. You're in a fight. And you're like, hey, listen, I'm going to go out to these guys. I need you to hold me back.

So I'm not actually trying to fight this guy. I need it to look like I'm trying to fight this guy. And I need you to hold me back. And it's got to be off. If these guys weren't holding me, I would have kicked your ass. He needs to find a hold me back guy. I think Elon's hold me back guy is going to be a hard sneeze. He's one hard sneeze away from getting like a back smash him.

You know what I'm saying? Like he's not, the guy's not fit. He's a, he's a, he's a, he's a Charlie horse away from quitting. Yes. Winner by Nuggy. Mark. All right. So that's my second question, which is, how do you think, let's say, let's say our dreams do come true,

this fight does happen. What do you think would actually happen? Like, predict the actual fight. What would happen? Fight starts, what happens? Look, so I box for fun and I spar. And what I've learned is it doesn't really matter that much. It matters a bit, but it doesn't matter how in shape you are.

It doesn't really matter how tough you are. If you don't practice that skill set and you go against another person, and that doesn't have that skill set. It's just you're light years away from one another, just being comfortable getting hit. I think Zuck would finish him within two minutes. He would probably get him on the ground and Elon would tap from getting his arm injured or something like that.

Yes. Now, the counter argument would be, but Elon could train. Are you counting Elon out? This guy's proven he could do anything. He could train. What's the counter to that? He won't. I don't think he'll train.

And I don't think any amount of training. Look, you can't make an overweight 51-year-old fit in any amount of time. The magic powers of Ozempic. He's already on a Zempeg. He's already lost like 30 pounds on Ozempic. It doesn't matter. Keep in mind, Zuck's still only 39, I think, or 38. No, I don't think that Elon can train.

No amount of training will get him to the point where he can keep up. Here's some extra data. People on Twitter were like, Elon, we love you. But, man, I think Zuck would handle you. Here's what Elon said. Three things that he said. Oh, I saw this. Number one, he said, I don't work out, except for sometimes when I pick my kids up and

throw them in the air. So he doesn't work out at all. He doesn't exercise. Forget about fighting. The guy doesn't exercise. Secondly, he's like, I'm so much bigger than the guy. Just for reference, Elon's like 6.3, 200 plus pounds. You know, Zuck is probably 59, I think, 5, 8, 59, maybe 510 max.

And it's probably giving up easily 50 pounds in a fight here. So weight classes do matter. And Elon says, I have this move called the Walrus. I'm just like a walrus. I just lay on them. They can't do anything. They're just pinned. This is his plan.

None of that matters. It doesn't matter when the guy has jih Tijuana. Jiu-Jitsu people want to start on their back with you on top of them. It doesn't matter. I'm not a practitioner of Jiu-Jitsu, but I've watched it enough that I feel confident, at least in this call. It was so one-sided. It doesn't matter. By the way, training, like, if you're a beginner in Jiu-Zitsu, you can go to a jit-sue gym for six months.

and you'll still be getting your ass whoopped by like, you know, people who are just like, you know, one year ahead of you because the learning curve is very steep to actually get good at this stuff. Like you don't pick up boxing or jihitsu very quickly. Boxing, I don't think it would be a factor. I think the fights go to the ground. Both guys are too uncoordinated. Nobody's knocking anyone out.

Both guys, I think, would look very unathletic and would end in Zuck tapping him out. By the way, do you see this picture I put in the dock? Look at this, the picture of Elon, wrestling, a sumo wrestler. Have you seen this? Yeah. He said he's briefly done karate, briefly done judo, and had done a little bit of jiu-jitsu,

is what Elon has said in the past. If I had to bet on Elon versus Mark on most everything, I think I would choose Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah. Like, whether business or fighting. I think both a good hang. I think Zuck would be a better hang. I think Zuck would trump him in just about everything.

Don't you agree? I mean, good hang. I think a lot of people would pick. Elon. I think Elon's looser and for fun. And it's like, oh, he, he smoked weed with Joe Rogan. He must be awesome. Right? Like, this is like how much work. No, I think, I think he would be an awkward hang. I think it'd be very uncomfortable. I don't think, I think, I think Zuck is, is just, Zuck. Dude, they're both podium on the, in the awkward Olympics. I mean, let's be real here. Yeah. Yeah. But Zuck, like, you know, he reads books on where to place his hands when he meets

people. Like, he's like, place on shoulder. You know what I'm saying? Like, and he actually, like, studies it. You know, I think that Zuck is going to win in every aspect. Do you agree? I agree. I really hope this happens. There's this Dana White thing gave me a slight hope,

but there's a famous, people don't know this. Dana White is a like, he's a world-class liar. In fact, if you ever go into like the UFC communities on Reddit, whatever, like one of the most famous,

like taglines of the community is, don't believe his lies. Because he'll tell you, he'll sell you anything. He's a promoter. He will try. to drum up interest, doing whatever he's got to do

and try to pull things off like that. This might be, by the way, this might be the Hail Mary Save Twitter thing. You know, like Mayweather McGregor did like $500 million. If he thinks this is going to do triple that, let's just pretend Dana White's not lying for a second here. If this fight did like a billion dollars and Elon took home, you know,

$200 million out of that net, hey, that's, you know, just another few months of runway for Twitter, which is currently unprofitable. And, you know, depending on who you believe, could be bleeding advertisers. I have to imagine

that there's also a life insurance policy that these guys have. I wonder if it's like you have to have security with you. You can't write a motorcycle. They're just going to do what billionaires do. They're going to just send in like a proxy.

It's like here's my bodyguard versus yours. Right? Like in history, isn't this how like conquerors fight? They don't go fight themselves. They send in their best gladiator. Like the top engineer at Facebook and the top engineer at Tesla

need to go in and fight for their honor. I would still bet on anything Zuck does. Can we talk about Beehive? Yeah, let's do it. Tell me a little bit about the background of Beehive. All right, so what is Beehive? Beehive is a piece of software. If you want to create an email newsletter,

Beehive, in my opinion, is the best way to do it. I'm biased because I invested in it, but I also used it before I invested in it. We used it for the Milk Road. We built our whole business off this. I basically saw what you had done with the hustle, what the morning group guys had done. And you guys had all done almost like what I'll call

like the home brew version of business. Beehive, which was like when I asked you, I said, hey, what should I use for this? You're like, well, you know, here's some things you care about. You care about deliverability. You care about how easy it is for your writers to write. You care about a referral program, blah, blah, blah. There's five tools. And what Beehive was was.

And it's complicated. And it's complicated. And it's expensive. And what Beehive did instead was the guy worked at Morning Brew. And he built out their like referral and growth program, I think. He left and he basically was like, how do I productize the internal tech? that we kind of had at Morning Brew so that it makes it easier for anybody

to create a newsletter brand. And this is a constant discussion that we had at the hustle, and my constant answer was, no, let's just focus on this one thing. And that's true. I made the right decision because it's so challenging

for a media company to be a software company and vice versa. It's hard when you're doing one thing to, like, I had ad salespeople. I'm like, you guys can't sell software. It's just different. And he has proven that,

I actually predicted. I was like, no, because we're not, we need to focus. And also because I don't think there's a market for it. So far, I think I've been proven wrong. But I haven't been proven wrong totally. So he spins it out.

He creates Beehive. It's basically you go on, you click a few buttons, you got a newsletter, you got your templates, you can create segments, you can do all the features of a newsletter. Great.

It's good. We use it for the milk road. We build our whole business off this thing. We sell Milk Road after a year or so. Along the way, I got pitched by him probably when you did. I was like, hey, I'm thinking about this Beehive thing. We're raising money.

Big fans of you guys would love for to have you involved. And I had the same opinion as you. I was like, I don't know. It seems small. I think there's some newsletter brands that will be big, but I don't know if their underlying tech is going to be that big. I don't know how big that platform would be as a software. So we passed.

And I think the first valuation we looked at was maybe $10 million. You passed too at that time, right? For the same reason. Market might be too small. And at the time I was saying no to most stuff, but really, I also thought, I don't think this can work. I don't think it's,

I don't think it could work at a venture scale. And there's a classic lesson here, which is like, sometimes there's such a thing as knowing too much. Often, the people who know the most about an industry are either, A, too much scar tissue, they just don't want to be involved anymore. They just want to go do other things.

They just don't want to think about that because there's too much. Like, I spent seven years. I left a piece of my soul over there and I don't really want to, want to worry about that again. And the other is you get too defined by, by like how things are and you don't really see, you're almost too deep in. You don't see where it's going.

This is why very few breakthrough innovations come from traditional industry experts. They come from often beginners. And why would a beginner be able to create a breakthrough and not an expert? Because they come in with a fresh perspective and blank slate. They're not limited by the prevailing wisdom. So that's happened many times over. So we pass. We start using it though.

I'm like, I'll be a user. So there's that. I'm not going to invest, but I'll be a user. So we start using it. And what did you think of the product? And at first it was good, but I kept running into these limitations. And I would be like, hey, oh my God, they don't even let you filter by X or, wait, you don't even have analytics for my growth side or the referral program only does this. You know, like I would find these.

I'd bump into the limitations. This was very early on. We were like one of their first users, I think. And his reply, I bet, was the best reply on earth because that's what it seems like. It was the perfect reply as always, which is, I hear you. We agree, already working on it. But let me see if. I can get you something a little sooner.

We're planning to release this in two months, but let me see what I can do here. And what they would do is either he would manually do a workaround for us. It'd be like, look, we don't have this analytics thing yet, but here's what I'm going to do. I put a button on your dashboard. It's ugly, it's gray. Nobody else can see it.

It just, but it's an export. It'll email you a CSV and then can you just run the analytics yourself for now until we build it? So he would give me a, he would take three hours and just make my life better. He would understand. He would also ask me a bunch of questions. So what are you trying to really do here? And let me just confirm I understand this.

A good product person would do. He's trying to really understand the needs. The second thing he would do is then they would actually ship the feature. So he'd say that's two weeks away. I remember telling Ben many times, Ben be like, oh, yeah, they said they're coming out in two weeks. I was like, dude, are you a rookie? No way. Startup say anything.

They don't like, no, what engineer has ever hit a timeline? Like, this never happens. Sure enough, two weeks later, hey, they would proactively reach out. Hey, the feature's out. Test it out. I think it'll work for you guys now. And we would go do it. And he just did that three times.

So over the course of about three or four months, I was like, change my mind, call Tyler. We need to invest in this thing. I was like, but what about your concerns about the market? I was like, I don't know, still might be true. But here's what I do know. This guy's an animal. He's making a product that's really good.

And you know what? This might be an example where the market is bigger than you think, which has been the case for many big winners. Like, you know, what's the market for, you know, private black town car on demand? or crashing on someone's house as an Airbnb, right? Like, these things can become a lot bigger than you sort of initially look at if you sort of squint. I've heard so many people say the same thing about him,

and I've noticed because I follow him online. I've only talked to him once or twice. I've noticed online of him changing, like, quickly, moving quickly, changing the product quickly. And whenever I saw that, I thought, damn, he's going to do it. He's going to, I don't know how big, but something's going to get pulled off here. That's, you could tell that right away.

And this is, so two things on this. One, there's a framework that we had in my very first startup. We realized this. We were doing a sushi restaurant. In the restaurant industry, there's this weird phenomenon, which is provide what's expected, no points. Mess up their order minus 10 points, but fix the mess up plus five points. So it's like, I was like, hold up.

If we had just given them the right dish, they don't care. They just move on as expected. If we mess up their order, they're angry. But if we fast fix and we not just fix their order, but we give them the freebie with it, or we really come back and make sure that they're all good, or we take it off their bill, all of a sudden, they had a tremendous experience with us and they'll go tell their friends. And I was like, what's with that? And I came up with this sort of like the fix it theory of restaurants, which is actually

mistakes, they're going to happen anyways. And actually what you need to train instead of a mistake minimization, it's how fast and how thoroughly can you fix it? because that actually creates like a higher net promoter score. That's beautiful. This guy's doing this with software, basically. Did you make this up? Yeah, I'm sure there's some name for this.

I don't know. This was like a whatever, or discovered by the hard way. But like, I'm sure there's a fancy name for that. I just call it the fix it theory, right? Like if we fix it,

it's all about how you fix it. And the fix it's where you get the like die hard. So it's very good. I noticed that. As we was doing that, I'll give you one other little beehive story, which is like, I don't know,

a little dark maybe doesn't want me to share this, but like, at some point, His CTO passed away. So we were a biggest jerk of all time. He says the two week thing. Something didn't happen in the two weeks one time. And I was like, dude, come on.

You said whatever. Where's that feature? We really need it. Don't you understand how important my newsletter? I'm being like, you know, I didn't say those words, but like, I'm playing it up in a way here. We were, we were just like, oh, God, complaining like, it's not ready yet. He's like, I'm so sorry. We're just dealing with something right now.

His co-founder or CTO had passed away during the. startup and they were you know that's a very hard thing for any entrepreneur to deal with yeah he handled that like as well as a human being can handle it meaning was totally you know like gracious and empathetic around what was going on but also understood that like you know he he he's got to keep moving forward in some way and he's going to have to figure this out it's not an easy thing to figure out i mean like all kinds of great you just don't know the passwords to have the things really There's like all kinds of stuff that you don't even really think about because knock on wood,

this never happens. But, you know, just seeing how somebody overcomes adversity and deals with really tough situations is another thing where you sort of see, you know, characters revealed in moments of difficulty and adversity. You see how somebody handles something.

You think, you know what? I think they're going to figure things out. Fast forward to yesterday. I think he's really young too, right? He's like 20. He's in his probably 27.

Yeah, something like that. Yeah. He's pretty baby-faced. I don't know. He seems. seems youngish. I'll tell you two other interesting things. So yesterday, the reason why we're talking about is yesterday they announced, we should probably should have led with this.

Yesterday they announced, they raised a series A, 12, 12 and a half million dollar series A from light speed. At like a 50 million dollar valuation, I think, is what an article said. Yeah, I think a little more than that. So they, they raised this money. And they, he posted a graph of their ARR, so their annual recurring revenue. And it's a hockey stick curve. It's three million in ARR. And like, I don't know how long. Let me, let me check. I think it's sort of like, yeah, three million AR in like 12 to 18 months maybe, something like that. Just really, really, really impressive. And so the run rates, I think, four million.

He's like, and he said in a thing, we're trying to end the year at 12 million. Super impressive. And this year, so go from four to 12? That's what he's trying to jump. He says currently at a $4 million run rate. They have three million of recurring revenue from their subscription product, plus another million of revenue from their like, because they'll help you, let's say you want to sell ads or you want to monetize your newsletter,

they'll help you monetize your newsletter too. So they have other products now. Wow. And it says, yeah, I forgot, he boasted the chart. But I think it's like roughly 18 months to two, you know, maybe 24 months at the max that it did that. Oh, you got a call out in the tech crunch article.

It said used by Milk Road. Hell yeah. That's right. I mean, the ballpark, baby. So, you know, I think that this is an interesting example. I'm curious to see how this plays out. I could see this still, honestly, going one of two ways, you know,

I'm an investor, but I could totally see this being a great business that wasn't venture scale, meaning like, he might sell this thing for a hundred, they might get to 25 million in revenue and sell for $200 million. I think that could be, that's probably the expected outcome, to be honest. Would that be, would you be happy with that? Yeah, I'd be happy for them. I mean, we would make some money. It wouldn't be like the type of return we would like, you know, that you would, like in a

startup portfolio, you're obviously looking for these like billion dollar plus outcomes. But hey, you know, like that's a win's a win. and I would be really happy for their team. So, you know, I think that would be life-changing money for him. It would be a great outcome. I think that's like, that's like the, the, like, if they do well, if they execute well, I think that's on the table. I think what's the question is, how big does this kind of newsletter media thing get?

Can this get to the scale where, okay, if they're, if they're trying to get to 10 million or this year, they're at 4, trying to get to 10, if they get to 100, right, if they 10x once If they 10x from there over the next five years, that's now a billion dollar company. The question is like, can it become that? What would they need to do to do that? I think that's going to be the challenge of the big question for them. I don't think that's going to happen. If I had to bet, I think that there's a nine-figure exit that's going to happen here that

will make them wealthy and be a huge success. I don't think a billion-dollar company is going to happen. I think it's too challenging. I think that I'm an investor of ConvertKit. If you Google ConvertKit and then the word bear metrics, you can see all of the revenue. and the churn on ConvertKit. Convert Kit's been doing it for eight or nine years, I think.

And you, there are a little bit more focused on small businesses as opposed to Beehive, which is like freelancers turned one-man, two-man companies. And you can look at their turn of Convert Kit,

and I would think it's better than Beehive. And it seems very challenging to get to $100 million in revenue in a venture times, an adventure time frame. Yeah, I think that could be totally, totally the case. So on ConvertKit,

their MRR right now says basically $3 million a month. So 36. So it's 36 million a year. Yeah, 36. And look at the churn. I think it's 4% a month. Yeah, 3.5% a month.

So does that mean that most people churn out after one year? Is that what that math means? No. I don't know. I can't math. I don't do public math. Definitely don't try to do

monthly compounding into extrapolated that for 12 months. That's not easy for me. But I think three and a half percent churn per month is, obviously not great, but it's also not like bleeding in SaaS metrics. No, not at all. And I think that I would rather be Nathan Berry and own 90% of that company. Of course, Nathan probably had money or had some income coming in.

So we have the ability to do this. And like you said, everyone's got to get their nut and get it how you can. Yeah. So I think it's going to be a massive success. I just don't know if it's going to be a billion-dollar company, but I think that the takeaway here for myself, for you, and for the listener, is the speed of shipping new stuff and making iterations

and more so talking to your customer constantly and hearing what they have to say and asking them why. Not what do you want, but why, and I'll come up with the solution. I think that's the takeaway here. I think the fix-it menu thing is, or the fix-it framework is really, really, really good. Is that what you call? Yeah, I'll give you two other little frameworks around this. So one is from Paul Graham.

Paul Graham wrote this essay once where he goes, a thing I've noticed, like, you know, successful entrepreneurs, Paul Graham created YC. So he saw, you know, whatever, thousand plus entrepreneurs try to come through there and picked, picked very well. He goes, one of the things I would say is most commonly linked with like success.

He goes, can you describe this person as an animal? And what that means is not, oh, he's like a giraffe. He's got a long neck. No, it means could you just be like, dude, that guy's an animal, right? She's an animal. It's basically just, just, just described.

the sort of tenacity, intensity, and speed with which somebody moves and just figures things out and gets through obstacles and breaks through plateaus. And that one piece of like kind of like investing advice has really stuck with me and like served me well because it's really easy to get analytical about the market, about the product, about the industry, about the competitors. And you should. That's good. Look at it from all angles.

But whenever I'm like, this person's an animal, I'd make a business. bet for better or worse, I'm just like, I'm just going to err on the side of betting on people when I think, when I can describe them as an animal because that type of person could figure things out. And I think on balance, it's just a higher predictor of like outside success. And also the opposite is true. I've made some mistakes in investing when I'm like, oh, love this market, love this product. And I'm sort of projecting if somebody was just a beast and took this on, they would just crush it. And I kind of overlooked the fact. that the person going after is sort of soft and timid

and seems to lack aggression. It doesn't seem to know their shit. They really know their numbers about, well, when I ask about the customers, they don't really know. They post on LinkedIn a lot. Yeah,

they keep wondering about stuff. And when I ask them what's going on three weeks later, they don't really have clarity on like what's changed, what's better, what they're focused on. You know, when they hit, they get overwhelmed easily.

And it's like, I've also talked myself into market, you know, market investments. And I guess for me, early stage investing, I think that is the person an animal is just a very important test.

That's one. I got an update from a company I invested in and they were talking about their new LinkedIn content series. And that was like the main thing. And this is a software company. And I was like, okay. But how about revenue, profit and like how fast?

Like, you know what I mean? I was like, I don't care. Also, I don't care about the new hires, frankly. 100%. I'm going to shit on my own portfolio this way. I said this the other day. I said to my investment partner, Romine, I go, Rameen, man, I feel like maybe 15, best case, 20% of our portfolio writes good updates.

I said, that makes me worried because I was like, really, there's two buckets. There's people who just don't write updates at all or they're inconsistent. They pop up when things are good or they need something and then they disappear for nine months when things are going tough. And Paul Graham also has written about that, which is when you stop talking is when things go bad. Like, the people who survive are the ones who continue being in communication, even when things are tough. And when you omit information when it's like, hey, so why didn't you just put how much, you told me how much your burn was and your law, why don't you put your cash balance in there? Exactly.

Like, you know, I can do the math. We invested in one company early on. That's a pretty famous company in Silicon Valley. It was really hot for a period of time. And now it's like people have gone sour on it. And they said, they like would write, first, when it was really hot, they would write these very surface level updates. like, oh, we hired this VP and this person and this person and we brought on this new investor. It's like, cool, but what about the business? How's the business going? And you're almost like,

it's almost like, don't ask about the business. It's like, what's going on? Why is that the feeling? And then, sure enough, 18 months later, oh, bad news coming out. We had to do layoffs and there's bad press article and all the stuff. And we're just, you know, we need to raise money, but it's not looking good. It's like, what's your burn rate? Oh, we burn three million a month. I was like, Dude, what? And why haven't you been saying this, right? Like, it's an unbelievable. And then if you asked them like, okay, what's the problem right now?

It's like, oh, the problem is, you know, the funding market right now and this. That's like, no, the problem was you were burning $3 million a month for a long period of time without the corresponding like, you know, reward for that burn. You know, you weren't growing in proportion to that burn and you were reckless with money, right? Like, that's the reality. That's the honest lesson out of it. You might be telling yourself some other story. Similarly, with our portfolio, I'll say about 20% are writing good updates.

And a good update is, here's anatomy of a good update. I might actually just release a template for all on this. But it's basically, hey guys, as a reminder, we are Hampton. What we do is this, right? Like first, just like say what you do. Not that like your investors forget, but in general, you're not top of mind for people. And you should have a real clear, punchy thing that you're drilling in this association. whenever you think of this word,

think of us. Whenever somebody has this problem, think of us. And so first start with that, then say, last month was, and your answer, you're a great month,

good or bad. Answer that question and then write the KPIs. The KPIs got to be revenue, active users or active usage, active customers in some way, the negative of that, some churn or cost number associated with that, net burn maybe cash balance you know how much cash do we have on hand and then you want to write

the number for we have to write the number for what it is in parentheses you want to write how much is that up month over month and what is your goal right how are you doing against your own goals because our annual goal is to get to 10 million in revenue and to do that we need to be doing X and we're actually either above that below that or on track that's the honest way to start an update below that you can write whatever the hell you want to be honest you got to write that part first. The next part you should write is why that happened. So revenue is down because blank. Revenue is up because we tried this affiliate thing and it's actually working pretty good. We're going to double down on it. Revenue is down because blah, blah, blah. The users is flat because

we didn't do X, Y, Z or we are doing X, Y, Z and it's just maintaining. We're going to figure out how to get to the next level. So you have your sort of two sentence commentary on the metrics. then after that you could put your ask like here's what i need from you and below that you can put in whatever the hell updates you want honestly i don't but the fluffy stuff yeah what you don't want to do is what a lot of people do hey um we have this article can you share that's the you know the start of the update just a quick update on our end good month for us we made these four hires i want to welcome you know steve it's like what are we talking about steve your VP of marketing you know they just go on you know steve used to work at visa but now he's over here and that's

That's really great. Oh, on the product side, we released these new updates. It's like, dude, this is not where you put patch notes. Like, your investors care about something. And you don't want to go over here and wave your hands about all this other shit. That's not actually, like, the core relevant information. And I think it's just wild to me that people don't get that. I refuse to, I'll die on that hill.

That's how investor updates should be written. And it's crazy to me that people don't just do that consistently. Yeah, when I see that, I just think you're lying about something. This goes back to what I said about the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. If you're not honest, if you're not honest about it, I think that you're lying about other stuff. And I just, and so I think it's really important to do these things really in the right way. I used to do this all the time at the hospital. I felt, I think you used to get mine, right?

You used to send me your updates, and they were phenomenal. They were perfect. It was exactly in this format. And you were like, you know, you were just the university of common sense. It's not like you were like getting mentorship or advising or your fifth startup. It was just like, all right, what are people going to care about? Like, obviously the key metrics, how it's going, what I think about those key metrics and what we're going to do next.

That's what your update was. I think what I understood is that like people basically want to get rich. They want to get laid and they want to have power. Like most of my things in life are rooted in like knowing those three things. And the problem with a lot of Silicon Valley companies is they think that like the answer of, but I learned a lot is good enough when it's like, no, man, I give you. my hard-earned money, I expect a return, and you need to be, what do they, Scott Belsie told me, he goes, you need to be a steward of capital. And I heard that and I was like, oh, my man, you'd make

it sound so official. I sound like a night. Like, I'm just like deploying like money. I'm like a, I'm like a knight in shining armor to do this. And so there's like that, and it's basically like, I'm a small business owner trying to make money and my business is investing in your company. You just took money out of my family's mouths and, you know, food off our table. That's how I feel. And so if a person isn't doing everything in their effort to give me a return on my investment, I get fucking pissed. If they do really hard, if they work really hard and they fail, or if they make airs, I'm cool with that because I knew that I'm playing the lottery here.

But if they do this soft shit and they don't aren't honest about it, it kills me. So you're saying honest in the sense of lying. I actually think that's the minority case. I don't think people are actively lying. I think if they're lying to anyone, they're lying to themselves. I think what actually happens is. It's lying through omission. It's lying through omission, is what it is.

So I think it's, there's three scenarios. Either you know the situation and you don't want to say it bad. Or you just don't even know the situation. You're not on top of these things. Really bad. It's usually the first. Or you know it. You don't want to say it.

And you're intentionally withholding the information in order to mislead or misrepresent or whatever, the worst. And so it's really bad, bad or badder, right? Like, you know, bad, bad or baddest. It's like there's really not a good explanation. The only good explanation that I will accept is that there are some companies that are doing so phenomenally well. And they know that investors are actually kind of a leaky bucket. And they don't want, they want to get ahead. They want their rumor mill to go ahead.

Now, let me tell you, the number of times it's that out of 100 is one out of 100. I had that happen to me. Did I tell you? Have I told you about this? So, all right, so the hustle was supposed to sell. The deal was supposed to close on February, let's say, 5th. February 5th was their earnings call was also supposed to be on February 5th. And that's a big deal for a variety of reasons, but there's like legal implications here.

You know, the SEC's involved. So it could be, it's as simple as like if I told someone that we were about to sell, our deal wasn't big enough to do this. It did happen, but it wasn't because of us. but where the stock price can change significantly at the announcement. And if I told someone and they make a big trade, which has happened multiple times, not with us, but multiple times, there's insider trading.

That's against the law. You go to jail. So there's like that implication there. And there's also like other implications around like, you know, it's just not like cool. It's not like it makes you look bad. Well, anyway, we're supposed to close on, let's say, February 5th. Someone told Axios on February 4th.

I get an email from Sarah Fisher, I think her name is. someone leaked it to her. I had only told, I told a small amount of people who are helping me. I think I'd told you who are guiding me. And I also had to get some people to sign some paperwork. And I explicitly said, don't tell anyone. This is a big deal. I think I told them, this will ruin the deal if you tell people, which isn't true. But, you know, I told them that I could have. And February 4th, the day before we were supposed to announce it, I get this email from Sarah. And she goes, I have a source saying that you guys are selling. And she told me a bunch of facts about the deal that I was like, how on earth do you know this? And it didn't back get leaked. And we're not a big company.

We weren't big enough that this is like, I don't know why this should be gossip, but it happened and it freaked me out big time. And so I understand that perspective of not telling people certain things. With my company now with Hanton, things are going well. I'm not going to talk about it too much. When things are going well, shut up. I think that you should shut up.

Yeah, shut up and push the guys. Yeah. Yeah. So I understand that perspective. But it happened to us and it drove me crazy. And I was, I have, I suspect it was one of three people. To this day, I hold a grudge with that against them. With all three, just as preventative measures.

Just preventative. And I just stare at what they do. And I'm like, I'm plotting. I'm plotting to A, get a, to find out intel that they did it. And B, I already have my revenge plan. And I'm just waiting. And I check it. I check up on them constantly.

And those people probably know who they are because they see me looking at their LinkedIn all the time. I want to like, I want them to know that I see them. They're like, oh. I love those, Sam, you know, he always keeps tabs on me. What a good guy. Oh, I'm looking. I'm looking a lot. And so I have a feeling who it was. But can you tell me about this black rifle story? Because I have a little bit of information about them too. Yeah, this is kind of fun moment. So we, so a few episodes again, we did this. What's black rifle? Say what black rifle coffee is. Black rifle coffee is a coffee brand. So it's a coffee brand that I would describe as like, it's like kind of patriotic. It's like, it's like, it's like,

an American vibe to it. The customers are mostly middle-ish America or Southern, and they are probably right of center, which is like a target. It's kind of like just to put it in a box, which I'm sure they don't love, but like whatever, just for simplicity sake. Started by veterans, I think. So it has like that slant to it. Three of the four guys or four of the five guys were former, you know, military Marines,

whatever, something like that. And so they- And they're Hampton members, by the way. Oh, there you go. So they start this thing, and there's a kind of interesting origin story to this. It becomes a really popular brand. In fact, not only do they sell a lot of coffee, they sold enough, they sell enough product that they basically, they've gone public. So let me see, their stock as a day.

I think it's three or four billion dollar market cap still. I think it's a little less now. Maybe the whole market's gone down. So current market cap is 1.1 billion. So they built a billion-dollar DTC brand, basically, consumer package. And do you know how they started? One of the owners had a bunch of Facebook pages. I think he had like 30 Facebook pages ranging, like, it was like shit for moms to like veterans.

And he started selling a ton of stuff. He was like, look at all the stuff they were selling. And they were like, damn, we should make our own thing. And that's how the coffee business, I believe that's how it started. So I did a call with him, one of the guys. Which one? Richard. And so I think he might be in Hampton, too.

So he had said something slightly different. He didn't talk about Facebook pages. He talked about YouTube. So he was like, I was like, what's your story? He's like, well, I was like, you know, he's like wanted to be an actor. It goes to Hollywood. It's like, whatever. It's not really working out.

Exactly great. He's been in a couple things. But he teaches himself to code. He starts making iPhone apps really early on in the iPhone app store. He does pretty good with that. End up getting hired by Verizon or something like that to do like something on the something on the marketing side for them. And along the way, he starts doing YouTube fairly early on.

And so he's doing YouTube videos. and for the brand, but also for himself, like personally doing YouTube videos. And he starts building a pretty big YouTube following. And then him and his buddies start trying out different products. And they're trying out, you know, this and that. And oh, should we do a, I don't know what the examples were.

But it's like, you know, let's just pretend a t-shirt brand and a shoe brand. And, you know, this thing, that thing, hats. And then coffee was one of them. And the coffee one took off. And that's kind of like how they rallied around Black Rifle Coffee. To this day, I think they do like tens of millions in merch sales, not the coffee, but just like people love the brand so much, they'll buy the t-shirts. And so tens of millions of merch, there's t-shirt company, there's fashion companies that do tens of millions. And that's their whole business.

This is like their spin-off business. That's like how strong the brand is. In fact, when I'm on the Zoom call with him, his background, I'll put a picture up on the YouTube channel. But it's just like a great example of like how to like this kind of like the subtle branding that exists today when you're, on a Zoom call. It's like your background, your clothes, like says everything about you because that's how we meet now, right? So you can actually bring a full story in about your home and everything. And he's got like, you know, on the wall, he's got his, his camo thing. He's got his gun. He's got his like, he's got all the stuff that's kind of like that same vibe that, you know, like,

the American, tough guy, military veteran, you know, like that sort of vibe. So we're talking. He's telling me the great story. And the reason why we're talking is because he's like, dude, I was listening to the pod and I heard you talk about the total man thing. He's like, something just hit me. He's like, I just love that. I love the total man thing.

I went on. I saw that somebody had the domain and I bought it. And I was like, oh, cool. Like I didn't, I swear I looked at the domain wasn't available. He goes, no,

no, I bought it off somebody. Like, I think he bought it for like 15 grand. And he's like, he's like, I just want to gift it to you. And like,

if you want to do something with it, great. That'd be awesome. That's a baller move. I hope I can write this off or something. But, I just wanted to do this. I was like, A, Baller Move.

It's like when Darmesh, I think, has done that for you. Like on your birthday, he bought you your domain. He bought me a $20,000 domain. It could have been more. Right. But it was copy that.com. He bought it for me. And so Baller Move and I was like, what resonated about the total man thing?

He's like, I don't know, man. He's like, I just felt like the way you talked about like, the way you and Sam talked about just like, look, it's important to me that I like stand for something. My own, I live by a code. I care about fitness. I care about these things. I care about being a man. And that's important to me.

And you're right that society has really pushed this thing that is if you're trying to be a man, it's like toxic masculinity. And it's like doesn't have to be. Like you don't have to be a jerk or, you know, like rude in any way. But like why is it bad to like want to be manly? And I think it just kind of like resonated with him. And so we bought this thing. And we got a lot of shipper that.

What's that? You see people, some people were angry about that. I think there was an understandable reason that they were angry, which is we gave it. When we were talking about it, we were like, you know,

I think you're seeing the craving for this type of content and this movement embodied in people who take an extreme version of that, like Andrew Tate or stuff like that. People just immediately, they hate Andrew Tate so much. They got blinded by rage and they're like, you guys are saying Andrew Tate's awesome. And this total man thing is about Andrew Tate.

It's like, no, no, no. I'm just saying like, when you look at objectively that this guy's extremely popular. He's the number one most Googled man in America right now. It's all under an umbrella. And we're saying what is the appeal? I think part of the appeal, not the whole thing, but part of the appeal, as that this guy preaches that you need to live like a like a fucking man. And he's like, you know, be hard. Don't be soft. Like mentally be hard, be tough. Physically be hard, be fit. You know, in your relations with people, don't, you know,

be a soft. You don't get pushed over. Don't keep apologizing and groveling. Like, you know, carry yourself like a man. And I was like, what we had said was that I think the pendulum has swung too far in one direction where a lot of people are preaching like a sort of like, I don't know what you would call it, almost like a softer or sort of like a genderless identity thing where it's not cool to be a man. And I think that's building up a craving for people to want to be a man. And so whatever, something resonated with that. He bought the domain. And I was like, yeah, we should do something. We should try to just make it an open source movement.

And when I mapped it out, I did a little five minute brainstorm the other day with Ben. And I was like, yeah, what does it? What does the total man mean? I was like, this is a good little branding lesson. At first, I went down the path of like, what matters to me? What matters to me is like I like to have, I care about like freedom, like financial freedom. I care about fitness. I'm trying to get more and more fit.

I want to be somebody who is free to move their body in certain ways. And it is a very fit individual. But I also care about family. and whatever, and I was like, oh, I think I just described something generic. I said, what's the real appeal of this total man thing? It's not this well, well-rounded appeals to actually nobody. And I said, Sam said something once on the podcast that made me laugh, but I kind of like, I wanted to make fun of him, and I also kind of liked it.

I was like jealous and I wanted to make fun of them at the same time. What was it? You said this thing, it's going to sound so simple. It's going to sound dumb. You said, it's important to me to be a fucking man. And I was like, what? What are you even saying? Isn't that obvious?

You said that and you go, yeah, it's just important to me, like, to be a man and like, to be like, you know, I don't even know how you explain it. Maybe you didn't even explain it. That one made, maybe it was the beauty of it. I don't remember exactly. But I say it to Sarah all the time. I go, I take care of business. I go, we take care of our business, you know, like all. And that doesn't mean money.

That means, you know, look, I'm going to provide emotionally, financially. spiritually, I got you. I take care of business. Whatever you need, I got you. I'm here for you. And it's like, I'm not going to, I'm going to try my hardest not to get too emotional. If you're emotional, I'll be a rock. I'll treat you at respect.

I'm going to take care. I'm going to handle business. That's what we do. Exactly. And I was like, I think it's more that. It's basically, I was like, I don't think it's about this well-rounded, because it dilutes the message. Well, here.

And I also said, and then I'll let you go. I said, when I like to exercise, I want to be able to. to outrun or what did I say? I said I want to either kill and eat everyone in the room or outrun them. I stole that from Galloway, from Scott Galloway. You told me, you go, don't you feel that way? And I was like, hell know how to feel that way. What are you talking about?

It's a ridiculous thought. You took your most ridiculous thought and then said, don't you feel that way sometimes? No, I've never once in my life looked around a room of men and been like I could eat and kill all these people or outrun them. Not once, but when you said it, it's stuck in my head. It was provocative. I wanted to make fun of you, but I was also like,

you know, there is a nug of truth in this madness. And that is where a real brand is built. And so that was my little branding revelation to myself when I was doing this exercise around what should we do with this total man domain. I was like, honestly, it's real simple.

It's about being a man. It's about men who want to be a man. What does that mean? We don't need to explain it. It's somebody who handles their business. You can come up with all the, examples you want, it's not a checklist. That's not the total man attitude. Is having some predefined criteria checklist? No, in all situations, be a man about it.

And that's what I was like, that's take care of business. That's the brand, baby. Be a man about it. No matter what the situation, be a man about it. And I was like, that's the total man philosophy. You could apply that to whatever situation you're going through in life. But what are you going to do with it? So is this going to be, I know Jesse Isler, who we're going to have on soon, I've been emailing with him. He's got this really cool thing where it's like you run up this mountain a bunch of times and that's like climbing Everest. That's kind of cool.

I mean, an event is the obvious one, but you can go a bunch of ways. Here's the idea. Fresh off the dome. You just said, what do you want to do with it? You asked a great question. My brain came up with an answer. It's inspired by 75 hard, which is also a very total man. Exactly.

And it's great. Total men don't know join movements. Sometimes we create them. So we're going to create our own version of this. and it's going to be the man month. And what is the man month? It's basically 30 days where you commit to working towards being the total man in these, like, you know, a couple ways.

And it's like, for 30 days, we're doing cold shower. We're doing 50 pushups right when we wake up or 100 pushups right when we wake up. First thing. It doesn't matter. Oh, you're late. All right. You're 10 minutes more late. Go.

Right. Oh, you can't do 100 pushups? I'm waiting, keep going. We'll stay here until you're done. All right. So pushups and cold. Push-ups and cold, I think, is two. We just need a third.

It's going to be, you do these three things. You're just going to do them for 30 days straight, and we're just going to harden you up. Just going to harden you up a little bit. And so what's the third? What's the third in this thing? Well, is this too soft? You got to tell the woman in your life how you feel.

Or the man, or the man in your life. How about this? You got to be kind. You got to tell someone how you feel. It could be kind. It could be, oh, you've been avoiding confrontation. It's time to say. Or you got to have a tough conversation.

You might have to have a tough conversation. Oh, you really appreciate somebody. You better show it. Right. And so you're going to send a message, voice memo, text message to your mom, to your coworker, to whoever. We can do that every day. You got to have a tough combo. You got to do that every day for 30 days.

A tough conversation. A tough shower. Do a tough morning. That's how we're doing it. All right. Well, you got to call it total, right? A total conversation. A total, yeah, a total one.

And so I think it's good. My feedback, you need to add two more things. My critique of my own thing there, it's a little too easy. I think it needs to be a little bit harder potentially. It has to be so hard that you're like, oh, I can't believe I'm doing it. Like the 75 hard thing, it's pretty hard. And people have to look at you and be like, are you nuts? Yeah, the cold thing.

The cold thing, you're on to something with the cold thing. That is quite challenging. But you got to have a few more hard things. 50 push-ups. If you're fit, I could do 50 push-ups in one sitting. Yeah. I think it's got to be a lot more. The original thing I was thinking about because I was like,

what would it mean? Because a lot of this is also inspired when Duck did the Murph thing. And I was like, whoa, sucks kind of been a man right now. Like, what's going on? That's pretty cool. Could I do that? I don't think I could do this. I can't do 100 pull-ups.

Like, that's just something I can't do. All right. So I started working towards it. So the next morning, I woke up and I did my little quarter murf. I ran the, oh, he runs a mile hard. I'm going to run the quarter mile. I'm going to do a quarter of the pushups, quarter of the pullups, quarter of the squad.

It's hard, right? The run again. And I'll do it again until that's easy. When that's easy, I'm going to make it harder. I'm just going to keep inching it forward until I could do the full thing. And I was like, yeah, that's the way to go. It's progress, right? Like, it's about progress.

And so I think you're right. I think we kind of need to work. up the actual difficulty level. Because I think to hit the brand right, it's got to be something that other people think you're crazy for doing. Yeah, I think that's great. It can't be reasonable. You could also be a little self-serving and make it like a post on social media.

So you get that little hashtag going around. By the way, you know, you got to share the results. I'm not charging money. This isn't a program you buy. It's just a movement. You're either in or you're out. That's it. That's it.

You're in. And if you're in, you've got to do it. If you're out, stay out. So I've known you for close to 10 years now. Did you ever think that 10 years ago you'd be about this life? Never. Never. It feels good, though, right? It feels good to be a man, yes.

It feels good. I agree. I think it feels great. I remember when I moved to San Francisco, I felt really, like, nervous. I was like, people would call me a redneck because I moved from Tennessee. I remember when I first got, like, in San Francisco, when you moved there, you'd have to interview for an apartment because they had so many applications. I remember going to one of these interviews and people being like, this was in 2012,

right, I guess, right, after Obama. Was there an election in 2012? People were like, who'd you vote for? They asked me who I voted for in order to get this apartment. And like, so I was like, I got to hide, like, which I think we voted for Obama, but I had to, like, hide a bunch of shit about myself. Not anymore. Things have changed, my friend.

This stuff is actually a lot more popular. If you go to San Francisco, things are a lot different. Muscles are not quite in, but they're more in than before. fitness is more than before and hard conversations are more than before. So I think it's good that you're kind of capitalizing on this. We're not chasing trends here. This is timeless. People have been trying to be hard for their whole, like, you know, since the beginning

at time. In fact, the only thing that turns me off is if this is a trend. All right, total man. All right. You're sounding harder already. Do you have to wrap up now? I see you looking at your phone, by the way. I'm going to do with my Elizabeth Holmes and start talking with a deeper voice on purpose.

Dude, people make fun of me on our YouTube. They say, I've got a high voice. Yeah. So now I'm like thinking of my head I got to talk lower too. Dude, I think that's why Mike Tyson became Mike Tyson. I think he had to overcompensate for his voice and just turn into an absolute savage. Oh, so you're agreeing. I have a high-pitched voice. It's not low. Oh, my God. That's ridiculous. That is ridiculous. That is ridiculous. That is ridiculous. All right. That's the pop.

I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no day. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.