My First Million - What It’s Like to Spend 24hrs with a Billionaire Who Plays Full Out

Episode Date: July 24, 2025

Steal Sam's playbook to turn ChatGPT into your Executive Coach: https://clickhubspot.com/ebm Episode 728: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk about hanging out with billionaires. — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (3:56) Hayes Barnard (23:15) Sasha Koehn (29:27) Alex Hormozi (39:24) Wade Foster (45:38) Eric Glyman (49:33) Sanjiv Chopra — Links: • Buck Mason - https://www.buckmason.com • Zapier - https://zapier.com/ • Ramp - https://ramp.com/ • Acquisition - https://www.acquisition.com/ • Rhino - https://rhinoinvestmentsgroup.com/ — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies! Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

I have felt like a little bit of a like pinch me moment where I've realized a little pinch me. Just don't say that one. Pinch me. Yeah. I will pinch you if you ever say that again. And I'll just say, ow. 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. What's going on over there? What has been going on? We haven't seen each other in seven days, and we've both talked to a bunch of interesting people. Have you enjoyed your time away? I have. By the way, people are like, why do they do these separate?

And it's like, dude, we live on the other side of the country. I live in California. Sam lives on the far east coast. And so for us to do it in-person recording, it's like, hey, would you like to fly across the country for this day, today, just to record this podcast? And both of us have little kids. Neither of us want to do that. So if you see us doing one-on-one interviews with people, don't worry. Me and Sam are still good.

We just, we live really far apart. Okay, so here's the deal. In the last 10 days, both you and I have gone and dead podcasts that have not come out yet. I think this will come out before those with guests who are incredible. So I think all of them are either billionaires or soon to be billionaires. But the money is almost the least interesting thing about each one of them. Like what they did and how they roll, how they live is more interesting. And we did them in person.

So, for example, I went to Las Vegas. I went to Tahoe and I'm basically staying at the person's house and I'm hanging out with them all day. And then the podcast is just kind of like a one or two hour recording in the middle of that day. But I'm spending 12, 24 hours with this person. And when you do that, you pick up a lot. And neither you or I have talked.

But both you and I are kind of students of the game of life. And one of the ways you be a student of the game of life is you don't just try to do all the experiments on yourself, right? that's a pretty slow and painful way to do things. A faster, easier way is to go and get a little Costco sample of somebody else's life. I've never had a fig before. Let me try go. Let's go try a fig.

Oh, almond butter. Is this something I like? Am I an almond butter guy? And so I went and sampled these people's lives and you did too. And so what I wanted to do, if you're down for it, is I think we each have three names of people we hung out with. And I want to take the one thing that stuck with you that was not in the podcast. Man, we get to hang out with so many amazing people, and it absolutely wears off on you.

Our world is business, but frankly, I find just the money part to be a little bit empty, and I think you agree with life is more rich than just money, but it just so happens that we like being people who are experts at their field, and the field is business. And so there's probably only 3,500 or 4,500 billioners in the world. And I feel like every year we get to hang out with like 30 of them. And again, the money is not the important. part, but the fact that it's just like, if there's only 4,500 people of all the people on Earth who are in this category, it's pretty exciting to be around someone who's the best at their field. And it 100% wears off to you, wears off on you, where you start normalizing being in the

1% of whatever activity you were trying to be in. Totally. Yeah. And your money point is right, which is even if we were just like, if I ran into Kobayashi on the street, I'd be like, this guy is the great, I'd be like, honey, this guy's the greatest hot dog eater of all time. Now, she wouldn't care, to be clear, but I would be like, it would be like meeting Kobe, right? He's the Kobe of eating hot dogs.

And so, you know, excellence in any form is interesting to me. And anybody who gets an outlier result in a field that many people go try to choose because it's always interesting. How did you get that? Because if you're interested in becoming an outlier in your field, you can actually learn from it in any field. Anyways. So you're right that our quote unquote job gets us access to this.

Now, the giving part here is we don't want to be selfish. should just kind of keep for ourselves, you know, what we picked up. So let's jump in. All right, so I go hang out with this guy, Hayes Barnard. Most people don't know who Hayes Barnard is, but his story is pretty crazy. So the short version of his story is guy grows up, single mom, kind of, you know, from the dirt in, actually in Missouri. And he ends up sort of hustling his way into a job, a sales job, then a tech sales job,

then he ends up at Oracle. And he works for Oracle in the 90s. when Larry Ellison was, you know, basically he was flip-flopping between Larry Ellison and Bill Gates is like the wealthiest man in the world. And so he becomes basically a competitive salesman. And so he becomes a top sales guy at Oracle just by like working harder than everybody. So he's like, I would just get in earlier. I would stay later. I would work every weekend.

Those guys, you know, most of the sales guys who were doing well by 3 p.m., they would leave. They'd go play basketball or tennis or racquetball. And I would just stay the extra three hours. and I say the extra four hours, and I would just do that every single day, and it just added up. So he ends up becoming a top guy at Oracle, but he sees that some of the other top guys at Oracle

go leave and start these huge companies. So Mark Bennyoff leaves and go start Salesforce. This other guy leaves and goes starts this other company. And so he starts to think, hmm, maybe I'm like them, right? And maybe I should go do that. And so he leaves and he starts a mortgage company where he's like,

maybe the same way I could sell complicated enterprise software using a call center and some online ads, maybe I could sell a mortgage, right? Most people at the time felt that mortgages were too complicated. Like, you needed an in-person, you know, a local bank branch with a local banker who's going to talk to you and hold your hand and all this stuff. And he's like, I don't know, I think with like radio ads

and a call center in Sacramento, I think I could just sell mortgages over the phone, the same way I've just been selling Oracle databases. Did he know anything about mortgages or? No, but his friend from childhood is like best friend from like fourth grade or something like that. He kind of knew a little about mortgages and Hayes knew a lot about selling, so they leave to go start this thing.

In the 08 mortgage crash, he survived because they had been underwriting conservatively. So they were the one mortgage company that was like not giving out subprime loans. So they survived the mortgage crisis. But during that time, he diversifies because he's like, instead of just selling mortgages, what if I go into the energy business? What if I branch? What if I diversify? Instead of just selling mortgages, could we sell solar?

and help people with their utility bill. So what if I gave you a thing that's cleaner for the environment, saves you money on your electricity? So he starts a company that does that for solar. Now, that solar company gets bought by Solar City. He ends up driving. He's not actually installing the solar. So like, you know, Solar City would actually go install the solar.

If you don't know, Solar City was started by Elon Musk and his cousin. And so he was selling the solar and then Solar City would go install it. At one point, I think they made up like 50% of Solar City's revenue. It was like insane. He was driving so much revenue for them. And so Solar City acquires them. Solar City that ends up getting acquired by Tesla for $2 or $3 billion. And then, you know, Tesla's gone on this crazy run and like, you know, whatever, 30x incentive.

So here's this guy Hayes, who is, you know, he grew up nowhere in Missouri. He has dyslexia and a form of dyslexia where he ends up flunking out of the first grade because he can't read properly. He works on a farm. He's a subway sandwich artist. And somehow this guy's now one of the wealthiest men in America. Okay. He's a self-made billionaire now. So I go, I want to do a podcast with Hayes. So I hit him up. I'm like, Hayes, would you do this? I know you don't do a lot of these. Would you do this? He says, yes, sure. No problem. Now, the thing about Hayes, though, is that Hayes does not do anything at like a chill level. So like... He was the most unchill person I've ever been around. Well, he's fun to be around. He's actually extremely fun. Like, he's very funny. he's fun. But like, if he chooses to do something, he doesn't have to do anything. You know, he's only, and this is his thing. He says, he's like, we play full out. So, Sam, normally when we book a guest, especially like, let's say one of the, like, more on the higher end of the range of success of guests, what is the normal prep experience like maybe a week before? Just walk, walk through that. Well, so sometimes we want to do a call

with them, but then other times that someone's really successful, you're, like, embarrassed to ask them, like, can I spend like an hour of your time just brainstorming? And And so sometimes Ari will call, sometimes one of us will call it, depending on how successful they are, to not disrespect them. And so it's quite challenging. The more successful they are, it's like, can I waste an hour of your time? Like, does it prepare? Or do I just show up with stories that I ask your friends? And hopefully it goes great. Yeah. And sometimes we send them like a doc, which is like, hey, here's some, can you fill this out? This will help us. And then I would say half the time they do fill it out, but half the time it's like they give us either nothing or half filled out, something like that. and we just show up, we say, all right, we got to make it happen.

We understand. And we hope it works. This experience was completely different. Hayes not only calls me, he calls Ben two or three times before the podcast. And he starts discussing, you know, what can we talk about? Tell me what you think is going to be interesting. How do we make this amazing? He just keeps asking this question, how do we make this amazing?

So instead of just saying, what are we going to talk about? That's the average question. His was, how do we make this amazing? And he keeps calling back, and he's basically like, when he says this, he's like, I don't say yes to many things. things. But if I do say yes, I go all out. And so first in the pre-pod prep, he's, you know, really active. And he keeps asking how it's going to be amazing. This idea he comes up with he's like, you know, most of the time you sit down and people ask the same five questions about,

like, how'd you do it? You know, what do you think about AI, blah, blah, blah, like these same questions. And you get these robotic tech answers from these, like, you know, these tech people. And he's like, let's do it different. So he's like, why don't you just come out to Tahoe? come to my house and let's spend the whole day together. Come do my morning routine with me. It's amazing. You're going to love it. It's going to be great. All right. A few episodes ago, I talked about something and I got thousands of messages asking me to go deeper and to explain. And that's what I'm about to do. So I told you guys how I used chat GBT as a life coach or a thought partner. And what I did was I uploaded all types of amazing information. So I uploaded my personal finances, my net worth, my goals,

different books that I like, issues going on in my personal life and businesses. I uploaded so much information. And so the output is that I have this GPT that I can ask questions that I'm having issues with in my life. Like, how should I respond to this email? What's the right decision? Knowing that you know my goals for the future, things like that. And so I worked with HubSpot to put together a step-by-step process showing the

the software that I used to make this, the information that I had chat GPT asked me, all this stuff. So it's super easy for you to use. And like I said, I use this like 10 or 20 times a day. It's literally changed my life. And so if you want that, it's free. There's a link below. Just click it, enter your email. And we will send you everything you need to know to set this up in just about 20 minutes. And I'll show you how I use it again, 10 to 20 times a day. All right. So check it out. The link is below in the description. Back to the episode. And so we go to Tahoe. And we're like, cool. We'll be there Tuesday. We'll see you Wednesday for the recording. And he goes, awesome. Be at my house at 5 a.m. Oh, my God. What are we doing here?

So we show up at 5 a.m. And he's like, boys, good morning. He's already like, I'm like rubbing the like boogers out of my eye. And he's like awake. And he goes, let's go down to the lake. Okay. So we go down to the boat. And we take this boat out for two minutes into the middle of Lake Tahoe. It kills the engine. And we're like, okay, what's happening? It's completely dark. out, by the way. The sun hasn't even rose yet. He's like, so we're going to do my morning routine. He's like, you're going to love it. He didn't just say, like, I hope you guys like this, or thanks for, you know, like, thanks for coming. Like, I hope you have a good time. He was just like, you're going to love this. This is going to be amazing. He basically brainwashed me

before I'm even out there of like, I do love this. This is kind of amazing. He was so charismatic. He was just having a good, he was genuinely excited. That's the thing. He's not like trying to sell us on anything, right? Like, he's doing us a favor, inviting us into his life. But he was genuinely excited for us. And he's like, my friends. route here, this is great. You're going to love this. So he kills the engine. He turns on, he's like, there's a little woo-woo, but just, are you guys willing to play ball? Like, just let's do this today, and you'll like it. So he puts on this breathwork routine. And he's like, I met this guy, you know, on an island with, from the guy who, you know,

the guy who started a Cirque de Soleil, Ghee, or whatever his name is. He's like, I met this kind of breathwork guru on his island, and he's amazing. I've been doing this for like 20 years since then or something like that. And so he, we do this 15-minute breathwork. And then he's like, all right, boys, stand up, let's go. We jump in the lake. And we're like, we do this kind of like cold plunge in the lake, basically. And Lake Tahoe in the summertime is still freezing. Yeah. So we jump in, immediately, like, you know, lose all feeling in my body. And then he's like, okay, we're going to go down to a breath hold down underwater and for a minute. And like this is going to be great. It's going to feel like you're in space. Open your eyes. Like, I don't have goggles.

He's like, open your eyes. I was like, okay. And so we go underwater, I open my eyes, and it literally looks like you're floating in space. He's right. By the way, can only hold my breath for no joke, seven seconds. I don't know what happened. Yeah, well, when it's freezing, it's hard. So I immediately go down and I'm like, nope, I'm done.

And I pop back up. He's underwater, so he comes up. He's like, okay, let's do that again. I was like, okay, yeah, I need a redo because that was pretty short. So we do it again. And then he's like, you know what? I heard this thing. This is an amazing thing.

And it said basically that, like, you know, as you get older, you really want to make the most of your life. You guys are still a little bit younger than me. You'll feel this too. Like, you get the sense of urgency about like, you realize, you know, your friends start getting sick. You know, your parents are getting older. You realize that, you know, time is not, you know, time is really precious. And there's a time hack. You guys want to know the time hack?

We're like, yeah, for sure. But what's the time hack? And he's like, if you do something new every day, you sort of mark the day. Because, like, you know, if I ask you, Sam, what did you do five days ago? It's probably pretty hard to remember what you did five days ago, even yesterday. It's pretty hard to remember. And that's because when we're in these routines and routines do serve us, but they, it causes all the days to blend together. But if you do one new thing a day, it sort of marks the day.

You're not going to remember every single day, but it makes that day more memorable. So he's like, let's figure out what we could do new today. And we're like, we're like back on the boat, shivering. And he's like, you see those rocks? I always see those rocks when I do this routine. but I've never gone out there. You guys down to swim out there? Oh my God.

Yeah, let's go. I'm not going to say no. So we jump in the water and we start swimming. And he's swimming like, you know, a shark basically out there. We are like, I'm like dying basically. And behind me, I'm like, I don't even know if Ben can swim. I look back at Ben, like, his glasses are like foggy. I'm like, well, I don't know what's going on.

Diego has like shoulder dislocation problems. I'm like Diego's for sure going to dislocate his shoulder and just sink like a rock to the bottom of Tahoe. We're all dying. and he were swimming from rock to rock like little kids. He's like, playing tag basically. He's like, let's go over there. All right, race you to this one. And we go and he wants to get to the big.

He's like, look at that big rock. Let's get to that big rock. We go to the big rock. He ends up getting to the big rock. Jump off the big rock. I had this great moment. Come back to the boat. And this is all like before 8 a.m.

And he's like, I do this every day. And I remember just having this feeling, which is like, this guy basically lives his life at a level. He plays at a like a, like a, a, like a, full out level. He plays with a level of intensity on everything that he was doing, whether it was like the podcast, his morning routine. Like each of the things I would do at a seven, he just does at a 10. And if you think about that, like, how does that stack every single day, right? Like, that extra three units of intensity that he puts in. And by the way, it's not like he's,

not like hard work in a sense. Like, he's just like, he just goes for it, right? He's having more fun. He's willing to play more than us. And we went and played pickleball with him. We did whatever we did that day he was like. Whatever we did. He's not. He's just like, he just goes for it. He's like this. And he told the story during the podcast of this where, you know, he was a certain way, but he's like, once I worked for Elon and he worked for Elon for 10 years, he's like, it broke my frame of reference. Because I was telling him, I was like, you kind of broke my frame. Like, I have a morning routine, but it's not like this, right? Like, I have a, and I was like, by the way, it's not the money. Like, yes, you've got this beautiful. Was it a sick house? Oh, my God, dude. Unbelievable.

And to the point where he was like, he's like, yeah, I prefer not to film this. you know, I'm not trying to show off. I'm like, yeah, the people who try not to show off have the things worth showing off, of course. And so I'm like, um, it's even if I had that house, would I act, like, this is an honest question I had.

I was like, even if I had this house and I had that boat and I had this little, like, you get in this like, freaking like Willy Wonka elevator to get down from the house to the boat. And I'm like, would I wake up at 5 a.m. every day and do this? No chance. I'd be cuddled up in bed with, you know, like, I would be the, the little burrito tucked in

with just my eyes peeking out of the covers at 5 in the morning. But he does it, right? That's like kind of the difference between him and me is that he plays full out. And so that was this the big takeaway for me from that whole experience was...

Do you want to live like that? Like I think... So when I'm around, I've been around people like this. Like, they're crazy people. And I think I admire so much about this and I want to take a little bits, but I don't want to replicate that. Like, I'm not...

a high energy person like that all the time. I'm only a high energy person like that some of the time. Hayes was like that all the time I was around him. He's energy rich. Yes, I do want to be like that. Because I think that, well, first, the feeling I had by 8 a.m., I was like, oh, so I've conquered the world already. Like, what could you do to me today? That's going to make me feel bad, right? Is anything really going to mess with my mood or myself today? Like, it's pretty hard to do that when you, like, conquer the morning like that. But like, forget, the morning routine. I'm like, freaking up at 5 a. That's sort of secondary. The point was, if you're going to do something, like, just actually like do it fully. And the thing you,

the prerequisite for that is to be energy rich, to not be energy poor. Like, I went there because I'm like, oh, this guy's so successful. He's money rich. And when I walked away, I was like, the money rich thing is a byproduct and a complete secondary footnote to being incredibly energy rich. And two of the guys said the same thing. I don't know if you remember this. I said this when we went hung out with Mr. Beast. I was like, this guy's like the energizer bunny. And we were talking about like literally when he walks, his walking pace is faster than the average human being by like,

you know, two notches. The two of the guys that came with us, they're like, do you see how fast hayes walk? God, it was like hard to keep up with them. He's like just literally has a pep in his step. And I think just,

I think being energy rich is one of the more attractive things. Like you see people who are contact rich. It's like, oh, wow, they know all these famous people. You see people who are money rich. Oh, wow, they got all these dollars in the bank account. To me, energy rich is. very, very appealing. To give like an example of this guy, Hayes,

he's not talked about at all. He's very under the radar for how big, a big of a big shot he is. We're with you and me and a bunch of people were with Jesse Edselor, who is a very gregarious, loud personality in a great way. Like he is also energy rich.

And I remember being in this room with these guys, in Asana, actually. And Hayes took over the room because of his stories and his energy. And one thing led to another, And they are apparently Hayes' hobby is that he used to be into hip hop. And he loves to freestyle rap, which is a very strange thing because this guy is like a, he looks like me, but like 55.

He's just like a blonde hair, Missouri guy. And he is an amazing freestyle rapper. They went in freestyle rap and he was beatboxing for like six or seven minutes. And they went out, they went and did this thing. It was so good. And I remember talking to him and being around him. and I don't think I've ever met someone whose oven burns that hot.

Like, he was on fire the whole time. Yeah, exactly. He's an incredible dude. The other amazing thing, by the way, hung out with him maybe 12 hours straight. And... Did he work? He literally...

He's taking the day off. So he was like... He's like, dude, he's, you don't got to do this, man. Like, I appreciate it. But, like, you don't have to... You know, it's not like normal for a podcast to do this.

He's like, no, you guys came all the way out here. I want to make the... time. I know you guys took time. I want to make the time. He's like, I thought this would be I thought that would be so rude. If I just show up or we record and then you leave, like, I know, I want to make the time. One thing that he that stood out, he did not check his phone a single time in 12 hours. And I told him at the end, I was like, is that normal? Like, I know you're getting emails. I know you're getting Slack messages like just like all of us, right? Like 10 times more than all of us. You run a 10 billion dollar company. He's the CEO of a 10 billion

company. And he did not check his phone a single time. And he's just like, well, you know, like, if I'm with you guys, I want to be with you guys. And if I'm working, I'm going to be working. And I was like, well, if you say it like that, then yeah, I guess I'm a little bitch for, yeah, let me put this away then. Dude, no amount of people or stories that I can tell, or probably you also can tell from that is going to beat the Hayes Carl Hanks session. That was really good. Did Ben and Diego have a great time, too? Oh, I think Ben is at home making Valentine's cards for his right now.

He's just like, I love that man. I was like, I do too. Honestly, I do too. What a guy. If you Google his name, too, this is all public. Like, his side hobby was, there's a famous hotel in Tahoe or maybe Reno. I forget exactly where it is. And he owns it.

And he was telling me about the renovation and everything like that. And it was like an epic thing. I forget exactly. So the story is this. He's in the lake doing the morning routine. every day. And he's like, I didn't think about like manifesting. I don't even know what that word really means.

But he's like, I was in the lake and I was thinking about my life and like, you know, what I wanted. I was full. I was just filling up with kind of like the feelings that I wanted. He's like, and there's this hotel. And there's this hotel that was kind of like on the, you know, over the hill a little bit. It was on the other side of it.

He's like, and it's two, it's literally like one minute from his house. And he sees that hotel while he's in the, while he's doing his cold plunge in Lake Tahoe. and he just decides looking at it. He goes, I'm going to buy that hotel. I don't know how, but I'm going to buy that hotel. And then he starts working on it. He finds out it's owned by Larry Ellison, his old boss. That's right.

His old boss is boss's boss or whatever. And he goes and he purchases the hotel and they're turning it into a proper hotel in Tahoe. And he walked us through the construction of it or whatever. And even that, you know, he's architecting his life. It's not like he's doing it to make money. He was like, we're going to put pick a ball career, pool here, this here, this here, all these activities. He's like, I want a place to do it.

activities. I want a place for my friends to come and stay during the summers. Like, this will just make my life so much better if we generate this, if we make this happen. Incredibly generative guy. Cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible, but that's exactly what Sandler training did with HubSpot. They use Breeze, HubSpot's AI tools to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch. And the results were incredible. Click-through rates jumped 25% qualified leads quadruple and people spent

three times longer on their landing pages. Go to HubSpot.com to see how Breeze can help your business grow. All right, let's do the next one. All right.

Man, this is going to, you start up really strong there. It's hard to follow. All right, this person I actually just hung out with that. I didn't do a pod with them yet because they refused to come on.

So I'm going to say a little bit of information about them, enough to make it awesome. None enough of them. I would totally blow off their spot. But have you, You heard of the company Buck Mason? Buck Mason.

I've heard of it. What do they do? Is that a jeans company now? What is it? Sort of. Sort of. So they started in 2013. And they started in 2013 selling something very simple, a t-shirt.

And their goal was just to make the best t-shirt. I'm actually wearing one of them right now. And they tried to raise money. He was like, I tried to raise as much money as I could that I got lucky because I was horrible at fundraising and I could raise no money. And so they bootstrap this company. I think it actually started with like a Kickstarter or some type of auction like that, like a pay and then we'll make it type of vibe.

And they build this company. And over time, they've grown it and grown it and grown it. And I suspect he didn't tell me, but I suspect that they do somewhere in a $150 million a year range. And he has 42 stores now. So when you go to buck Mason.com, what do you see? Yes. Well, I see this is like this nostalgic. I see this, like, video of these guys from, what is it, maybe like the 80s?

I don't know what era this is. It's like a California cowboy 80s vibe, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I see a bunch of T-shirts and colored shirts and jeans, pants. So I love this brand. And I became friendly with him because I've DMed him to get him to come on the podcast. And he refuses to come on. And I ask him why.

And he says, I just want the brand to be the face. I don't want to like it too popular. I don't want to be the face of the brand. I want to be the face of the brand. brand, which is always like, whenever I hear someone say that, I'm like, oh, you're the best. You're going to win. So you're amazing. Yeah.

Like, oh, so you're, yeah, whenever you hear someone say that, it's like, okay, so you're absolutely going to win and you have the right attitude. And so he started this company in 2013 and clothing companies are a pin in the butt. You and I know people in this industry. We know e-com guys. It's really, really hard. And it takes a long time, I think, to figure it out. But basically they got to the point in 10 or 15 years now, it's 2013, so 12 years, where it's really starting to fire on all cylinders.

He's grown into 52 stores. And I started talking to, about the history and everything like that. And I started realizing, it's not that crazy to do this. Like, it's really hard. But I was thinking about every project that I've started since 2013. So in 2013, I had just graduated college. You remember where you were, it was 2013 sushi era? No, no, that's when I moved to San Francisco, Monkey Inferno.

So what was sushi era? 11. Yeah, 2010 and 11. So imagine you starting the sushi store in 2011 and you just, you were chained to that company, and you just had to stick with it. You had no other options. You just had to. I have a feeling it would be a huge success. And I have a feeling that if I had done the same with whatever I was doing, that there's definitely a world where,

I would be five or ten times more successful than I am now because of just compounding, of sticking with something. And I sort of felt, first of all, 12 years, it sounds like not a long time. But when I thought about, well, where was I in 2012, 2012, 2013, and what all have I jumped from thing to thing to thing? And should I have just stuck to one thing and done that the entire time? And where would I be now? Because he was telling me his story. And I love, where this guy, Sasha, I was named Sasha Cohen. I love to hear. the story where he is now, which is like, I've got this amazing team. We're firing on cylinders. I just get to like work on the really exciting projects and it's just going great. Cash flow is not an

issue, whatever, et cetera. It doesn't feel like that leading up to it, obviously. It's really, really hard. And the majority of the time, I would think you'd want to quit. And the majority of time, I would think a guy like him, he didn't say this. I'm guessing. If someone offered to buy the company from him at different weeks throughout the year, I bet he would have said yes, just because it's really freaking hard. But I just remember thinking, like I wish I had the foresight to stick with it. Yes. Like I wish I would have, I regret that a little bit when I see where I'm like, I don't,

I don't exactly want to pay the price that you had to pay because that was really hard. But when I see where you are now, it seems very attractive. Yeah, that's a great one. Honestly, actually, that was pretty common amongst all the people I've met with. Actually, two of them even said this. They go, I have very high pain tolerance. And the reason why they were saying it was actually not as a brag. They were like, you know, one of the problems is I have a really high pain tolerance.

So I will keep doing something. Even when it's not, you know, quite right or not obvious, there probably was a better way or a better idea I could have done. I don't know. I'm just, that's who I am. I just keep going. Hayes even said this kind of off the record. I was like, dude, what do you think is the difference about like, you know, you and a bunch of other people are like, you know, what I was really interested in was, and I probably didn't say this right. but when we were talking about the morning routine,

he said he has a different friend come and do it with him every morning. And so he was like, yeah, yeah, whatever, it's like, Tony Gonzalez did this with me yesterday, the Hall of Fame, tight end. And then he was like, oh, yeah, over the week, he's like, oh, he had this thing on his knee. And I was like, what about your knee? Like, you got cut up there.

He's like, yeah, I was mountain biking with, I think his name was Lyndon, like the Elon's cousin from Solar City. He's like, we were mountain biking yesterday. We went, you see that mountain? We went all the way over there. I was like, God, this guy's so active. He's unbelievably active. This man.

But also, like, he's hanging out with Hall of Famers. He was talking about Elon, and his son went and worked at SpaceX, and he's like, I was like, oh, you didn't have him come work with you? And he's like, no, I wanted him to go see what it's like to work with Elon. He's like, I just wanted him to go, like, it took me a while to go see what the, the hardest working person who tackles the biggest problems on Earth, you know, I worked 10 years in my career, 15 years of my career before that happened. I wanted my son to see it, like, right away.

But yeah, just incredible stick to it as. for all of them because I'll do my next one. Yeah. So the next one is Hormozi. So I go to Las Vegas and I hang out with Alex Hormosey. And a lot of people know Hormosey because he makes so much content. I don't think, I actually think Alex Hormosey doesn't get enough credit. Every time I hang out with him, I think, dude, you're, you're really wise.

Like this is not a facade. Yeah, he's actually very legit. So, okay, so I have a bunch of things that I could say as my takeaway, but I promised one. So here's my one of Hormosey. student of the game. Okay, so what does this mean? We're talking. And I asked him, I said, you know, I get a lot of emails, but you put out so much more content, you have a much bigger audience.

You must be getting 100 emails a day from entrepreneurs who want some advice from you or want some help or want you to invest. And then he does these workshops every weekend with 100 entrepreneurs. So I was like, so you're saying another maybe 500 plus, maybe 1,000 plus entrepreneurs in your workshops that are in person. and then you have all the deals that you look at, maybe another few thousand deals that you look at. He's probably meeting, I don't know, 5,000 entrepreneurs a year, of the minimum. And I was like, what do you think is the mistake,

the biggest mistake you see them make? I ask him this. And he says, they're only studying their business. They're not a student of the game of business. So what do you mean? He goes, well, when you start a company, you're very, like, narrowly focused on your business, your industry, your business model.

So he's like, you know, Sam, you're doing a, you're doing the hustle newsletter. You probably knew a ton about newsletters, right? You know everything about other newsletters and you knew everything about maybe the media industry as a whole. And I think you're very good about being a student in the game, but I would say most people were probably, you know, even one tenth as curious as you.

But then you might also have gone and looked at the events business and then the SaaS business and other businesses to try to understand like, oh, is that a better business to be in? And actually you started in the events business. Then you went into the media blogging business. And then you found your way into the newsletter business. And you were like, that's a better business to be in.

And now you're in a paid community business. It's actually a better business to be in than even the one before. And the reason why is because you're a student of the game of business, not just your business. And Alex basically was like, I made this mistake. You know, I was basically a gym operator. I had one gym and then I had two gyms. I had three gyms. And I was going to own and operate gyms.

And I got really good to owner operating a gym. but the best thing he did was he went to this mastermind. And I think Russell Brunson was there. And they basically were like, you're a 10 out of 10 entrepreneur going after a 2 out of 10 opportunity. Like forget opening and running gyms. It sounds like you're amazing

at getting a gym to have no members to go to like a ton of members. Why don't you sell that? Create a, sell the ability for any gym to fill up there, to get more members. And so then he's like, ah, okay, that's smart.

and he goes and he learns about other business models, he realizes that he should do this thing called gym launch, where he would fly to a gym, and he would basically say, hey, look, if I can get you 500 more members, can I keep the first month of their membership, and then you are, you know, the six weeks of pay that they're going to pay up front, and you get to keep all the recurring membership behind that.

They're like, all right, sure. He's like, had no risk to you. You pay me nothing. I'll run my own ads, but I get to keep what I kill. And so that became gym launch, and that became the thing that was really, really successful. And now he's in a better business. you know, like, let's say, private equity, and he's buying SaaS companies.

So he's gotten into an even better business than that, right? Private equity is a better business. And so he's like, I think most people aren't a student of the game of business. And at the end of, we basically talk for, I don't know, two and a half hours. We do like a two-part episode. And he had, before that, he had done two podcasts. So this guy's done like, you know, basically eight hours straight of talking. And where I think most people would be like passed out on the floor or just ready to go,

home or just want to go eat or just be like, can you guys get out of my office now? He was super curious still. And he's asking me a ton of questions after the pod. And he asked me a question. He's like, you know, what would you do differently if you were me? And you know, me, I can't like hold my tongue. So I'm like, yeah, honestly, like, I think this. And I give him a very blunt and honest answer of like, I think you're amazing at this, but I think this part of what you do doesn't do you justice. I think it actually makes you look, it's like bad for your brand. And I think you're, you shouldn't be doing that. How did he receive that? extremely well. And this is kind of like kudos him for A, being curious and then B being not defensive.

And so he texts me the next morning. I didn't even give him my number, but he gets my number from somebody. And he says this, he goes, I just want to say thanks again for the pot. I've been thinking a lot about what we talked about at the end. Then he goes, it's Hormozie, by the way. And then he goes, I'm going to make some change some content changes. I appreciate you caring enough to say something. I thought that was just like a really kind message, but also like, you know, a testament to him for being extremely open-minded and being a student of the game and being like having that mindset of I'm here. I'm going to try to learn something for every single person I meet that's just such a positive attribute to have in general. I'm good friends with a guy who bought

one of Alex's company. So Alex started this thing called Allen Software. My friend was the buyer of it. And that is an interesting place to be in. So the person who you buy a the buyer of your company, they know all of your, they know the truth. They know all your dirty secrets, yeah. They know all the dirty, they do everything. And I was like, Lloyd, this is when Alex first started getting popping before we ever even had him on the pot. I was like, Lloyd, is this guy legit? Like, this seems too good to be true.

And to this day, Lloyd is like, he's the smartest person I know about business. Like, he, like, knows everything about Alex. That's what due diligence is. And he is, knows everything. And he still is like, this guy's the best. Right. When I need advice, he's my best. It's like your doctor's giving you a colonoscopy.

He's like, yeah, he's got a great gut. Yeah. And so that, like, tells a lot about him. And what's funny is Alex comes off as a very serious guy, and he is a pretty serious guy, but he's a lot more fun. Like, I'm able to have fun with him whenever I'm with him. He's way more fun than he gives off. That was one of the things I told him.

I was like, you come off so serious. But you're actually, you have a great sense of humor. You should show that and show yourself having fun. and not just like I paint the windows black and I grind, right? That is part of you, but there is another part of you, and I think you don't really do yourself justice and like not showing that side. This is so funny.

As we were texting, my friend Lloyd just texted me about Alex, a compliment about Alex, the same guy referring to this. Just out of the blue just now? Out of the blue, 1249. It's 1252 right now. He just texted me a thing about how Alex, just giving some great advice, which is pretty funny. That's hilarious.

That's pretty awesome. Did you, their seminar business, so basically, a lot of people don't know this, but acquisition.com either buys or invest in companies, whatever, pretty normal. But they also have like a seminar business, which is like on paper, if you were to think about it, like the worst business to be in. You're selling your time for money, yeah. Yeah, they own UFC's old headquarters and people spend five or $10,000 to come for a three-day, like seminar. And

according to Alex, but also I just like ran into math and you could like see like the schedule how full it is. I think that thing is killing it. So that was my runner up takeaway, which is turn your, there's a business, a more practical business lesson. Turn your cost centers into profit centers. So he said two things about this.

The first is the, on the workshops that you're talking about are the seminars. So he was like, well, we're doing acquisition.com and we're, because of that, that we're talking to all these companies and we're diligenting all these deals. And I'm basically, that's a big cost to me, right? I'm paying, I have a team of people that's diligenceing all these businesses. We meet the entrepreneur. We ask them a bunch of questions. We dig into their

business. And, you know, we're only doing one deal out of every so many, right? So he's like, all the others are just the cost of doing business and it's costing me a few million dollars a year. So he has the idea, like, how do I turn my cost center into a profit center? So he's like, well, let me just try this. So he says, all right, I'm going to invite whatever, 50 entrepreneurs out to our headquarters, come spend two days with us. We will dig into your business. We'll learn what's working, what's not working, and we'll help you sort of unblock. And like, you know, maybe if you're a great fit, like, you know, we should have a conversation. But like, this is really about understanding what's going on in your business, how to unblock you. Okay, so that's what they did. And basically,

he turned a thing that was losing him a few million dollars a year of people cost into, I think, like $10 million plus a free cash flow. And he said the same thing about content. He goes, I don't make contact because I enjoy it. I make contact because it builds my brand. And I was like, I do it because I enjoy it. I like, I like, I like, I like, the way I think about it is this. The old, in the old world, let's say the TV era or the radio era, you had to spend millions of dollars of your money to build your brand in the consumer's mind. The crazy thing about social media is you get paid to build your brand. So he's like, yeah, like I make all this content. I'm building my brand, but I'm making money doing that. So again, he turned a cost center into a profit

Center on the content side too. And he loves it, by the way. He absolutely loves it. I think you and Alex actually have very similar attributes, which is you both like teaching. And so like I've been talking to him. I've been buddies with him for a little while and we'll just be talking about what's up, what are you doing? And he's like, oh, I'm making a Google document for my staff on how to sell better or how

to do this. Like he loves process and he loves teaching. Yes. Yeah. That's the part I think he really loves. writing, like actually like writing out the stuff, like almost in textbook style. All right. You want to do another one or you want me to go?

All right. Here's a quick one. Do you know the company Zapier? Yeah, I do. Zapier was founded in 2011. Another company, by the way, that was founded way, it's way older than I thought. So Zapier is a company that they, now they're basically an AI company. Like they make ways for you to connect different AI stuff.

So like if you're chat, GPT, you can be like, you know, make a whenever I get a calendar invite do this and use chat chad tpd to do it whatever they started 2011 now I think they do something like 400 or 500 million dollars a year in revenue and they've only raised a million dollars of funding and they founded the company out of Jefferson City Missouri which is the capital of Missouri near where I'm from the smallest town you could think of it's like nothing it's like when you think of in the middle of nowhere in Missouri you're going to think of Jeff City. And I met Wade because years ago, I used to host this event called HustleCon and you spoke there, a bunch of other people spoke there. And Wade showed up, Wade wasn't supposed

to speak until like 2 o'clock. And he showed up at like 8 a.m. And him and I sat backstage the entire time. And we, for two days, actually, it's a two day event. He sat with me the whole time. And the reason he sat with me is I would have all of the speakers come to the green room two hours in advance. And I always lied to them. and I think you know the story where I would say you have to come for mic check. But of course, there is no mic check. The mic works perfectly. But we just wanted to hang out.

Like, there's no mic check for a conference. Like, you just put the lapel on and it works. It works. I would tell people, oh, you have to speak at three. Make sure you hear at one for mic check. The reality was is I just wanted to hang out with them backstage. And there was one time, like, I distinctly remember. It was like Casey Nystatt, the founder of WeWork.

It was Wade from Zapier. And then like the founder of Class Pass and Tucker. Max, if you know Tucker Max. And we were like all at a room. And I was like, how wild is this? And I wouldn't say a word. I would just listen to all these conversations people were having. And Wade was the one guy who stayed the entire time with me. And we just sat and listened to people talking. And it was so fun. And that's how I got to know Wade. I had him on the pod last week because I wanted to see how he's using AI. And it was crazy this guy because he's, Wade's a billionaire. So Wade is probably 35 years old. I think he started the college. the company when he was a senior in college, and I think he graduated college in 2011. Zapier, they did a funding round, I think, three years ago, a six or seven billion dollar valuation. I asked them where do they think they're going to be in five years. He told me a billion in revenue. So I don't know what that means the company's worth, but I know that it means that on paper he's a billionaire. And I was like, why are you living in Jeff City, Missouri? He was like,

well, it's one of my family lives. And I like it here. And I was like, wait, does anyone know, know how big of a big shot you are there? He's like, no, the people here don't use Zapier. Why would, like, so they have no idea. And I was like, well, do you have like a fancy house? Like, do you stick out? He's like, no. Like, no one has any idea. Like, I'm just like a guy. And I thought that it was so cool to see because I was hanging out with Sasha, this guy he started Buck Mason, a very cool brand. I was hanging out with Eric, who is founded Ramp and is the hottest thing going. And everyone knows in the tech world what ramp is. And it's one of the fastest growing companies. And people know Zapier and everything, but they don't know Wade,

the founder. And it was so interesting how he was just a guy. It was, and he was just, he was just guy. That's all he was. And he very had that every man mentality or every man vibe. And he came on the pod to talk about AI. And he was just like Darmash. He was a nerd. Like he was in the weeds. He and he loved it. And he was incredibly passionate. And he didn't have a fancy webcam. It was him. And it looked like a small, very small office. And his, house and it was just totally unassuming and I loved it and so I think my biggest takeaway with him was how passionate he was about this game that he turned into a career and how inspired I was that he was not flexing and he truly like it was the opposite of Hayes where not that Hayes flexes I mean

where Hayes is just full of energy and he's like I want to manifest. want to do this. This was the opposite. It was an introvert, nerdy guy who just did what he loved, and it just worked out, and he just was really happy, go lucky. And it was really fun because I'm used to these haze guys. I'm not quite, but like these like alpha, like let's get it. Let's get after life. Let's manifest. Let's have fun. Let's do this. And it's awesome to get the opposite of that because I think when people listen to this podcast, I hope one of the takeaways is that there's a million ways to get done what you want to get done. There's a million ways to achieve your dreams. There's a million ways to get rich. There's a million ways to go to where you want to go.

And where you want to go can be anywhere. And there are maybe some best practices, but I can give you tons of examples of people doing the exact opposite and they're just as happening and just as effective. So that was my big takeaway with Wade. I like that. Yeah, there's a, you know, you get to create your own little heaven on earth. And that's one of the cool things when you go and you meet these people, you get to sample what they chose for themselves. And you pick up like, oh, I really want that. Or in some cases, ooh, I really wouldn't want that. You know, there was one guy who won't be, won't be named,

not in this trip, but in previous one, where this huge house and fancy cars and all this stuff, but also like huge headaches with all of that. Oh, I got to get this repaired and this. And then that car got a scratch and then this has this. And it was like,

man, you own these things and then they own you. And it's like, oh, wow, definitely for me is a total, that would be a total trap to fall into. Good. I'm glad I saw it firsthand so I can avoid that.

whereas with other people, for them, that is their heaven on earth. They want that. They actually prefer that trade-off. And so you want to, it's good to sample the different sort of styles. So you can get a feel for what you think is going to work for you. Because I think people have this idea of like, oh, you just got to do what you want. Reality is you don't know exactly what you want until you're even exposed to certain things. And then you sort of develop taste about what it is that you like and what it is how you want to be.

You can sort of, you can modify yourself based on, you know, what you're exposed to. So you guys know this, but I have a company called Hampton. Joinhampton.com. It's a vetted community for founders and CEOs. Well, we have this member named Levan, and Levan saw a bunch of members talking about the same problem within Hampton, which is that they spent hours manually moving data into a PDF. It's tedious, it's annoying, and it's a waste of time. And so Levan, like any great entrepreneur, he built a solution. And that solution is called Mouku. Moku uses AI to automatically transfer data from any document into a PDF. And so if you need to turn a supplier invoice into a customer quote or move info from an application into a contract. You just put a file into Moku and it auto fills the output PDF in seconds. And a little backstory for all the tech nerds out there. Slavan built the entire web app without using a line of code. He used something called Bubble I.O. They've added AI tools that can generate an entire app from one prompt. It's pretty amazing and it means you can build tools like Moku very fast without knowing how to code. And so if you're tired of copying and pasting between documents or paying people to do that for you, check out MOLQ. Check out

Moku.aI. M-O-L-K-U. Dot AI. All right, back to the pod. All right, so let's do, I'll do Eric Lyman. So for those who don't know, Ramp is a company that does credit. It's like basically a credit card for startups. They're worth something like $10 billion. And I think they do $800 million in revenue. Eric, who's the founder and CEO, is 35 years old.

And it's just absolutely breathtaking, how fast they've built this company because I think the company is only four or five years old. Like, it's brand new still. And my biggest takeaway, I had two takeaways. The first is that he was so nice. So if you Google Eric Glyman, nice, there's all these posts that talk about how nice this guy is. But it's very strong. Did you go home and do that?

Did you Google Eric Glemmin nice? Well, I was like, surely everyone talks about like, he was the kindest person I've ever met. Like, when he looked at me, it was like, like I was the only one in the world that mattered at that moment. And like I talked to Ari, I go, Ari, who, Ari only talked to him on the cell phone. And I go, Ari, was this guy the nicest guy you've ever met? And he goes, when he talked to me, I fell in love. Like, I, like, I wanted to keep talking to him. He felt, it felt like I was the only one that mattered to him at that moment. And he did such a good job. And, like, he wrote a follow-up email. And he wrote, like, I was truly blessed

by our conversation. I am so thankful. Whatever. He was so nice. But what I found strange, was you don't meet people who are nice and intense. And so I asked him a question about something. He goes, look, Ramp is 2,053 days old. And we're only just now. And I was like, wait, what did you just say? He goes, yeah, ramp is 2053 days old. And I was like, you know exactly to the day how old ramp is.

He goes, yeah, of course. Like, I'm trying to get this done by this amount of time. Like, I know exactly to the day. And I just found it very strange that you can be both incredibly intense at having a company and intense about life and also a very generous, kind, nice person. Those two things typically are not in the same package. And so my big takeaway with Eric was how you can be not a jerk. You don't have to be a big pumping your chest, big ego, highly confident guy.

You can be very soft. You can be very kind, but also a complete killer and savage. It's a weird dichotomy, but you can be both. Yeah, I talked to before. I think I've told the story before. I met him many years ago before he ever started Ramp. And also, super sweet guy. And then what they,

the other thing I've said before is I can't believe Ramp won in that same way. Because at the time, I remember that Brex was, Brex looked like the runaway winner. It was the YC company. It was based in Sivocan Valley. It had raised a bunch of money. I think it launched earlier than Ramp.

And it just seemed like Ramp this company out of New York. It just seemed like the natural second place winner. And instead, had ramp has crushed it. And actually Brex is the second place winner in that space or third or whatever. And he had a whole answer to that. So most people, when they start a company, it's like it was cool or I had this problem or whatever. He had a four point list where it was like, well, because I asked the same question.

I was like, you know, Brex was already around. This was already around. Whatever. And he's like, well, the Frank Dodd act or something like that was passed, which meant this, this and this. And that also meant. And then he had like, it was a four point list. and it was incredibly intentional.

And he's like, I saw at Capital One, it took this many days to approve an account. I figured if we could reduce that to only 7.3 days, and since there's this many potential businesses in the world, if we do that and we do this many businesses per day, it was like incredibly detailed and exact and precise way, which isn't typically how I think about building a company. A lot of times it's like off energy or like vibes, like this feels a certain way. He did not have that at all. It felt like everything was like, and it was very intense. Amazing.

All right. Let me do one now. This is a more practical business one, I'll say. Was this with your brother-in-law? Yeah, is my brother-in-law Sanjeev. Okay, so this episode, I think this one will have come out already. But in the middle of it, he tells the story where, okay, so the headline of this is this guy, basically, my brother-in-law has built a real estate portfolio.

He owns basically over a billion dollars of real estate that he accumulated in about 10 years with no outside money. And so no, like he had like lenders, but no, no investors at the time. He's incredible. He's just like an absolute animal at what he does. And I always knew he was smart. And I always knew he was like really like ambitious and was like, you know, he's just a winner. That part I know. I've known the guy for 10 plus years. So like, I mean that part. But the fact that you're as successful as you are and you're, you're your second place in your own family. Maybe third. I think my wife's dad is a pretty amazing guy too. So, you know, he wins. and not just the success way, but the guy's a saint.

So he wins it in his own way. All right. So what is it about this guy that I picked up? So the short version of this story is he goes to law school, gets his MBA, first interns with a lawyer. So he's working on actually the Scott Peterson case, like the Lacey Peterson or whatever. And then he meets, but he also intern, he has two internships. So that's one internship. He has second internship with a real estate guy.

He's like, the real estate guy is always, you know, he's at home. at a good time. He's in his kid's life. He's got passive income. Like, this seems like the better model. I'll go towards that. So he goes to real estate. He has no money. And so he can't buy any real estate. So he starts off as a broker. You know, he does his first deal, make 60K. But by the time he's like 25, 26, 27, he's making millions of dollars a year as a broker. He would like, he'd be like, cool, you got this empty space. Let me lease it for you. You want to sell this? Let me buy, let me be your buy side broker and your sell side broker and I'll lease it for you. I'll get all three. I'll bag all three commissions.

Somewhere along the way, he basically makes a mistake. And he's like, yep, this is where, you know, youth cuts up. Youth and, like, you know, ego catches up with you. So there's one guy who's like, expand. He's like a jack-in-the-box franchisor. So he's got like, I don't know, 30 jack-in-the-boxes or something like that. And so my brother-in-lawson jeev is doing deal after deal with him. And so finally the guys is like, are at some point, instead of just leasing the place to him,

the guy would say, I want to be over there. So he's like, okay, cool, I'll buy it. I'll build it for you, and then I'll sell it to you. So I'll buy, I'll develop it, and I'll sell it to you. And the guy's like, cool, I want these 20 locations. So he goes and he takes out $15 million of debt to go buy 20 locations. Like, you know, three days after it closes, you know, that guy gets popped for like, he didn't pay his payroll taxes or something.

He goes to jail. And so now my brother-in-law is on the hood. He bought, he borrowed $15 million and now has these like 20 locations or whatever that need to be jacking the boxes, that the deed is tied to that guy's name. that guy's now in jail, he can't develop them. So he's basically kind of screwed. And he doesn't want to declare bankruptcy, so he decides he's going to try to pay off $15 million,

even though he has nothing. And so he's like, okay, how do I do this? So he's depressed. And his wife is like, you know what? Like, I don't know, I've never seen you like this. You need to go to the gym. I don't know what we're going to do in business, but just go to the gym so that you, you know,

get out of this funk. And he goes to the gym. And when he's there, he always used to see working out there. at night. He used to work out of like 11 or midnight at night because like after work he would go there. But today he went there into daytime because he doesn't have shit else to do. And the guy who he always sees working out is like behind the desk. He's like, yo, you work here? He's like, yeah, dude, I own the place. He's like, what? And he's like, yeah, come check out the office. And when he's there, the guy tells him like he's ready to sell. He actually wants to sell the business. And my brother-in-law works out a deal to basically buy the business from the guy with no money down because a little bit of money down. He pawns his wife's wedding ring. and they go all in. At this point, they're living in their parents, like his old childhood bedroom,

and they owe $15 million. And they're like, I don't know how we're going to get out of this pickle, but I'm going to basically, I'll use the cash flow from this gym to just pay the monthly thing we owe, and then we'll try to open up a second gym maybe and we'll figure out how we do this.

Anyways, he ends up building, like, the largest private gym chain, 82 gyms in California. Otherwise, your brother-in-law, like, really, is he jacked? Yeah, he was one of the first, like, Indian bodybuilders, basically, in college. He was going to go pro, and then, like, you know,

but he decided not to, like, go full on. But, yeah, he was huge before. He's big now, but he's like, oh, this is the deflated version of me. And I was like, wow, that's crazy. So, again, whatever this guy chooses, he does with, like, crazy intensity. So with real estate, I was like, so how did you, okay, all that you told me so far is the gym business. Like, how did you do the real estate side?

So this is the business lesson. So he's like, you know, along the way, when I would go lease these gyms, I realized I had a little bit of leverage, right? I'm coming in. I'm as the big tenant in the shopping center. And so I just added to the lease an option to buy. And he's like, I just added a no risk option, whereas I have the option to buy within five years or whatever,

I can buy this at $4 million. And at the time, that sounded like a high price for the guy, so the guy had no problem putting it in free option. And he's like, and by the way, I have no money and no plans of how I would ever buy this place, but why not? Why not take an asymmetric bet where I have no downside, but I have possible upside?

And so his start in real estate was he's working at the gym and a guy comes in to buy the building. And the guy assumes that he owns the building, which he didn't. And he's like, we would make an offer somewhere around the ballpark of $7 million. Oh, got it. And so he's like, oh, amazing. And he's like, cool, I have an option to buy this before. But I don't have any money. So I actually cannot physically buy this.

But I'll do a double escrow. So if you agree to buy it on this date, it basically is like, I'll sell this to you for seven. I'll take the seven. I'll give this guy four, so I'll own the place, and then I'll buy this, and then I'll sell you this thing, and I'll keep $3 million as by profit. It's the old, hey, mom says I can go if you say yes, or she'll say yes if you say yes. Right. Exactly.

And so he got his, the entire empire that he built was because he baked in one asymmetric bet, one, no risk option. I thought that was kind of inspiring. Like, you know, by the way, he probably had 10 of these that didn't pan out, but the one that did got him his start. He took that $3 million, and then he used that to buy and buy and flip, buy and flip, buy and flip, but he compounded that over 10 years into a billion dollars of real estate from that one option.

And I just thought that was just like an incredible lesson our takeaway to have. And by the way, now, so I invest with him now. So I'm able to, like, it's probably my biggest investment of the past two years has been investing in his deals. And I'm just getting incredible returns. And one of the reasons why is because he keeps doing the same model. So he just, he's the master of, de-risking. So he goes into a, let's say there's a shopping center with like, you know, two big

vacancies. So while he's putting it under purchase contract, he already has leased it. He has a signed lease and assigned purchase contract. So the same day we buy, he has the tenant in place and he sells the thing. And so we get these incredible returns because he's derisking all these properties so far in advance. It's like a, like the same, it's like, you know, you find one unfair advantage and then you just keep playing it. Does he have an awesome house? Oh, he's got a crazy house. His house is crazy.

Real estate guys always have obviously amazing houses. There's one other little hack that he had that I liked. I think there's another tidbit I think people can take. So I was like, when he's doing these things, I'm like, dude, how do you do this? Like you were buying these properties. They're, you know, maybe there's a vacancy or whatever. And like, how are you cutting these deals beforehand to get them, you know, oh, I know the buyer at Trader Joe's.

I know the buyer at, whatever, Chipotle, I know the buyer, the real estate guy at this place, and I'll get it under contract. And he's like, oh, it's such relationships. And he always just said this vague work. Oh, real estate's a relationship business. And I hate answers like that that sound like general. And so I dug in with them.

And I was like, tell me how you approach this idea of relationships. And he said this great thing. He was like, you know, if you think about the word commercial real estate, it sounds like this vast universe, like this huge industry, right? he's like the trick is how do you make a big thing feel small? Like how do you break it down into an achievement, like into a chunk that you could actually, you know, you could actually digest. So he's like kind of, he's like, one day I sat down with piece of paper and I realized, all right,

who do I, who's my ideal person to know? He's like, well, it's a national retailer who's still expanding and growing and they don't want to own their own real estate because I'm a developer. I want to own the real estate. I want to lease it to them. And he's like, once I did that, I realize there's actually like, I don't know, 150 names. And he's like, I took this big idea of commercial real estate.

It felt like an ocean. And he's like, I turned it into like a little goldfish pond. 150. He's like, I could fit 150 people in this room. I could meet 150 people over the next two years if I tried. And I could form a relationship with them. And I could, I could get so that they know me and I know them and I'll call me and I'll call them when we have something that fits.

And that's literally what he did. And I just thought that was like a great like, I don't know how, I don't know where else you could do that in other business. But I suspect that that idea of taking something big, but then of reframing it and realizing it's actually much smaller and more achievable than you think is probably something that applies to a lot of businesses. Is he a billionaire or billionaire-ish? I would say like ish, not there himself, right? Because, you know, if you own a billion dollars real estate, in his case, I think like 40 or 50% is equity and the other half is like debt. So, you know, on paper, you know, that's whatever.

That's, let's say, $500 million. I don't know. I don't know his actual thing to be clear, but like hundreds of millions of dollars net worth. Of the six people that we talked about, five of them are there or give or take, give or take there. And I just think that that's, I think it's crazy. I think it's crazy. I don't know how many billionaires are in the world, five or 10,000. I'm not sure.

Whatever is like Forbes has, I would like multiply it by like some number. And it's crazy that over the past 10 days, we hung out with five of them. or something like that and get to learn from these people. And again, I don't, I'm almost embarrassed when I say the name, my first million, because what I tell people, I'm like, you know, it's actually, it's not always about money. It's actually about, like, things greater than that. And because I do think life's richer than just money. But it is interesting to be able to rub shoulders with people who are in the 0.001% of their

field. And it's, it's, we're lucky. Yeah. And also, like, I think now we're a little bit like, oh, you know, it's not about the money, but like us 10 years ago, very much one of the main goals was like, yo, get that money. Get that money and then figure out that money doesn't make it. Sure, I believe you, it's not the end-all be all, but I still want it. I'm still going to try to get it. I'm still going to try to make it happen. It's definitely, yeah, exactly. It definitely seems pretty great to have, but I'd rather have it than not have it. And so, you know, I think as much as we're like,

oh, you know, like, I think both are true. Like, it is true that there's a lot more to life, but also to these people and like, you know, you pick up a bunch of different things. But also, it is kind of crazy to make that happen. And it's fun also to make that happen. You know, if business is your sport, well, Howard points tallied, they're tallied in dollars, right? There's a guy, I don't pay attention to golf, but I'm sure you do. But do you know, Scotty, is it Schaefer? Schaeffler.

He won, what did he win this weekend? Do the U.S. Open or something? I think the U.S. Open, yeah. I don't know anything about sports, but I know that I saw, like, his one-year-old kid, like, crawling up the green to give him a hug in a kiss after he won. So I guess Scotty like won, he set the trophy on the ground and his kid crawls up to play with the trophy.

And Nike took out this amazing ad. The best ad it was a two page ad or two like swipes on Instagram. The first one says a picture of Scottie holding his son and it says you've already won. And then the second slide is

but another major doesn't hurt. Doesn't hurt. And I think that's that's kind of like the takeaway here is like uh yeah it feels good to like i've won already like i have a loving family i feel secure but don't hurt to you know succeed a little more and i thought that was such a great ad and i thought that was kind of a representation of this episode that was a beautiful ad wasn't it oh my god like Nike is at the top of its game when it does stuff like that uh that was pretty good um all right that was a good episode that's it that's the pod All right, my all in it like no days off.

On the road, let's travel, never looking back. All right, my friends, I have a new podcast for you guys to check out. It's called Content is Profit. And it's hosted by Luis and Fonzie Cameo. After years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like Red Bull and Orange Theory Fitness, Luis and Fonzie are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue. In each episode, you're going to hear from top entrepreneurs and creators. And you're going to hear them share their secrets and share.

strategies to turn their content into profit. So you can check out content is profit wherever you get your podcast.