Noob School - Episode 82: Aiming for the Moon with Adam Anderson

Episode Date: June 26, 2023

Today on Noob School, John sits down with Adam Anderson of Ansuz Capital and Hook Security, to talk about many interesting topics. From an Hook Security's innovative approach to cybersecurity, to distilling whisky on the ISS, tune in for a whirlwind of information and some thought provoking things to come. Moonshine from the moon, anyone? Check out what Noob School has to offer here: https://www.schoolfornoobs.com/ I'm going to be sharing my secrets on all my social channels, but if you want them all at your fingertips, start with my book, Sales for Noobs: https://amzn.to/3tiaxsL Subscribe to our newsletter today: https://bit.ly/3Ned5kL #noobschool #salestraining #sales #training #entrepreneur #salestips #salesadvice

Welcome back to Noob School. Today I've got a relatively new friend for a change, Adam Anderson, new friends of the best friends. That's right. Adam lives here in Greenville. He's got a venture company or private equity company called Enzou's Capital, where he seems to invest in and create any company that's interesting to it. I was joking earlier that I was going to introduce him as someone who's got a plumbing company and a construction company and fixes up houses. But that's far from the truth.

We'll get to some of the companies he's involved in. But welcome aboard, Adam. Thank you. Appreciate it. Yeah, I appreciate it. So just background-wise, I know that you were raised in Air Force brat. That's right. It lived all over the world?

All over. We didn't quite move as much as everyone else. My dad was, he was in. in social work. So he was a family advocacy officer on every base because he was attached to medical. We only moved every four or five years. So we did five years in, you know, Ryan Mine near Frankfurt. Did six years in Panama City Beach.

We did a couple years in California as well. So I had the military brat experience being chased by the MPs on base, but I did not, we didn't have that move every two years, one year kind of thing. And as a kid, what was your favorite spot? Ooh, definitely Germany. Germany. Well, shit, I'm lying to you. You can't go to high school in Panama City Beach, Florida during the spring breaks and not love it.

And so, no, it, gosh, man, I guess I love them all. But really, the high school in Florida was great. Punchline, you probably need to leave Panama City Beach after high school. There's not a lot going on back in the, what was. at 84. Yeah. Yeah. So you did all the spring break stuff? Yeah, I worked at Miracle Strip Amusement Park.

So my high school gig was running all the games at amusement parks. And so whenever we go to like a Six Flags or whatever, and I would always impress the young ladies by rolling the bowling mall just right to get the big bear. I'm like, ah, you know, I'm a pro. I do this. It's the best. I've been watching, somehow on my YouTube, it keeps showing me these people that are to and slung this new slingshot ride they have.

You've seen that thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. I think I would have wanted to do that about 15 years ago. Not now. We do a lot of the venture networking. Like, we would fly, we flew stunt planes and dog fought each other.

You had a real pilot behind you, but you're pulling 9Gs on some of these turns. And you can just see in the video of my face going, oh. The guy had four barf bags, doggy bags. I'm like, why do I need so money? He's like, no, you need some money. He's like, no. You need some. So I only got to actually fly the plane for 30 minutes,

and I spent the other 30 minutes in front of the GoPro. They just saw the top of my head. I can't do that kind of stuff. Well, let me rephrase that. I won't. I don't think I'm going to do it either. I'm not going to be either. So that sounds like it was a lot of fun.

But then you went from Panama City to Utah. University of Utah, running youths. Why did you do that? My dad was adjunct faculty. So after spending 20 years starting residency programs, for the Air Force. He went out and started a residency program with Intermountain Healthcare.

And I got in-state tuition and adjunct. So I got half tuition and they gave me a music scholarship. So obviously I'm going to Utah. That's cool. That's cool. And I know you played the trombone.

I wish you had brought it with you today. Well, no, you don't. I gave the scholarship back. I was like, people take this serious. This is not high school stuff. This is for real. So when's the last time you played?

Oh. maybe a couple years ago. Okay. They still have it set out like I know what I'm doing. Yeah. You have to knock the dust off the mouthpiece and it's got the strange smell. If you want to take it back up, we've got a spot for you. All right. Well, as long as you enjoy interpretive music and interpretive dance.

I'm sure you'll be a little outside of the lines. There you go. And outside the key. Yeah. So you, after Utah, you moved to Greenville and you had become kind of a cybersecurity expert. I guess with Y2K and getting ready for all that stuff? Yeah, so I dropped out at University of Utah after about 96 credit hours worth of downhill skiing,

whitewater kayaking, all that stuff. You can't live in that beautiful country and actually go to class, with my opinion. Sure. And the only thing I had going for me was I grew up with a teacher as a mom and we always had computers. So I'm like, wow, there's Y2K things happening. I might as well go and fix the world's banking system

as a 20-year-old. And that went well. And I kind of got introduced to, you know, computers as a business tool and not just something you built to play games on. And it just kind of went from there. And then all those guys who were in Albertsons in Salt Lake City all went over to Royal Dutch O'Hold in Greenville. And when the vice president goes, they bring the director.

When the director goes, they bring the managers. And the managers. So I was one of the peons at the end of the tide. Yeah. But, yeah, a whole bunch of Utah people transplanted all these IT folks into Greenville. So did Albertsons get bought or they just move? We're just done. They just do.

Yeah, one VP got hired away and then they slowly brought their team over there. And that's how we got you in Greenville. I know, it's unlikely, but lucky for Greenville. Lucky for us, yeah. And for me. And for me. I met my favorite wife here. Well, your favorite, so far, so far.

Fair, fair, fair. Well, that's a great story. So you're working for a hold, and then you're doing cyber work or consulting, and then you got hired by IBM to pretty much do the same thing. That's right. And travel around to be a, you know, we used to call them brains on a stick, you know, the real high-priced people who would consult on these issues. And then you decided to, I think, kind of do it on your own?

Yeah, it was exactly the same thing. So I got paid $80,000 a year as an IT guy. And then, you know, IBM turned around and selling me right back to the people I used to work for at $250 an hour. And then one of my customers said, hey, what if you charged me $185 and started your own firm? And I was like, I get that math. So I'm like, but I have this non-compete. So I call up my manager at IBM and I said, hey, I think I can take care of our customers better if I was a business partner, not an employee. Oh, man, I always wanted to start my own company.

Good luck. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. That's nice. Well, let's stop there for a second. Sure. This is your venture and doing your own thing. And it kind of happened, I'm sure they liked you.

You were doing a good job and someone just noticed you. But had you had any, like, would you consider yourself a salesperson at that point? I was always the class clown. I was always an extreme extrovert. And so one of my superpowers was always a few. ability to talk to people. And so while most, you know, the joke is an extrovert nerd will look at your shoes, not his shoes, right?

So I was able to actually have eye contact and talk to girls. So they were like, oh, this guy probably should do some sales. And so what I found was interesting is that doing pre-sales work as a technology person. So at the end of my time with IBM, they would bring me along with the sales guys to talk, shock with the nerds. But that was your secondary, your primary, was to sell to the buyers and the budget holders by giving them confidence that the product does what it says it's going to do. But I never knew I was doing sales.

I was just, you know, flubbing through it. Yeah. Okay, but then once you got your business besides that one customer, I mean, how many hours did they give you a week when they started? They filled it all the way up. You're full. And then immediately three weeks later, they said, hey, we got more work. So I had to hire three more people. But I didn't think I was going to be in business long.

So I called them my monkey minions because the work they could do, a monkey could do by banging on a keyboard. And they just keep that. So by the time it was done, I had 25 employees at that one customer. So sometimes I tell people I didn't have a company. I had a client. And I brought that up to about three and a half million in revenue, 20 plus consultants. And I was working zero hours at that time. And the primary issue I had is I can never escape that customer.

And the punchline is I would spend around $300,000, $400,000 a year to try to fix sales. I didn't understand customer acquisition. Wow, really? Yeah, I would hire people who said they know what we did. Sandler, we did all the stuff. But I didn't understand funnel of, do you have qualified? I hired a guy from IBM, and he'd close the $480 million deal. at Bank of America and I was like, that guy's my boy.

So I hired him up and his first thing he asked me was, where's my leads? I said, oh, dude. Where are the leads at? I was like, who am I going to go see today? Awesome. I'm like, oh, crap. So that was kind of my first window in how complicated sales is. It's not just I'm a charming guy who goes golfing with you and then you sign POs.

When you get outside of those good old boy network relationships, it's a real skill set. And I spent 13 years trying to figure that out before, you know, kind of giving up and selling the company. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. We had a similar experience. Every time we tried to hire somebody from a logo company, we've tried to hire from Oracle. We hired from Dell.

And it was just a complete bust. Yeah. And, of course, you probably know this, but just for the sake of the people listening, you know, if you work for Oracle or Dell or someone, you have this panache where you can just kind of call any company. Yep. That's John Sterling from Oracle. How are you?

Or from IBM or from whatever. And you don't have to really scrap for it. You need a scrapper for a little company like you had. That's right. And I learned those lessons. It turns out you can't just look at the person from a large company, like a logo company. That person's surrounded by a team. Right.

That person, and that was one of the things this gentleman said after we parted away, is he's like, you know what, I thought I was great, and it turns out I had a great team. Yeah. That's what was getting me all the deals. And then, you know, in retrospect, that also means that I had a really crappy team that didn't support him. But to be fair, I didn't even know I needed to build a great team. Right. You just think hire a big, powerful salesperson, and they'll solve all my problems, but that's, like, the worst thing you can possibly do.

Yeah. Rolodex selling is very hit and missed. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, we had a guy on the podcast a few weeks ago who sold a couple of $100 million deal, not that big. And he said 15 different people had revenue credit on that deal. That's right. 15. That's right.

It used to be just like a sales guy and a pre-sells guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 15 people. So anyway, it's true. You know, for business owners looking to hire, I mean, there's very important that you know what you want for what your opportunity. is because it's different. Well, and be okay being vulnerable enough to say, I don't know what I want.

I better go talk to an adult. That's the thing I should have done. I should not have, but I've been nothing but in that for 10 years. I grew a multimillion dollar company. It was very difficult for me to be humble and say, I can't figure this out. And so, you know, that was the downfall.

It's that lack of humility. Well, I think we all, we're fortunate enough to be in that position, we all fall for it. You know, it's hard not to. But there's one test, just for the listeners, that you can do now that I do for some of my clients

that are hiring something like that, very specific, is you not only give the applicant a psychological profile to take, but you would fill it out as if you're answering for them. So you're answering the questions the way you would want your VP of sales to answer it. Oh, so I. And you see what the match is. That's brilliant. Isn't that cool?

That is, I mean, and it should be used as a conversational starter, right? Yeah. But that's cool because you can really sit in front of somebody and say, do our expectations for what this is, Mac, and how we think you should be matched? Yeah. And depending on the data, I guess, you make a decision, right? Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, that's pretty cool.

That's very cool. So good news is sales or no sales, you know, you sold the darn business for a, he, he's a, heap of money and you had a really good experience right here in greenville um i would say some lesson learned lessons learned there is number one you know you you were uh talking to people and networking at the place where you're working as a as a contractor that's right and you obviously did a good job and so and so it's kind of one of those things where the heart you know the more you work at it and the more you try the lucker you get yeah because they could have had that conversation conversation with a lot of different contractors, but they had it with you.

Well, there was definitely sales behaviors in it because we decided that our market wasn't the entire globe. We decided our market was a global company. And at the time, it was a $60 billion company with a $250 million a year annual spend with IT. And ours was a $9 million budget inside of that that other people were hunting for. So when we got really narrowed in on our ideal customer, we realized that we had to get really good at selling to that core customer, but then everybody else's budget. So we basically turned every department and every line of business in this giant enterprise into its own standalone customer that needed its own prospecting, that needed its own

relationship building, they needed all that. And so we got really good at account management. And that's what grew the company. Good. Well, so you took that, that. victory and lessons learned and you rolled it into your own private equity company venture company called Enzuse and what's the what's the genesis of that name? So Anzus is the Norris Rune for Odin and also for the later A and so it stands

for wisdom intelligence and all these things that I thought a cybersecurity you know investment firm would want to be. Okay. How do we see things and then how do we actually wisely about them. Okay. And it's also, like, I got a tattoo, so I needed to justify that. It says, Inzuz on it, or is it? No, it's in Norris runes.

So the word Anderson, which is my last name in tattoos, starts with the Anzuse run. And I was like, that's cool. I'll just go with that. And also, I like a name that's hard to spell and pronounce. Are you Nordic? Yeah, descendant that way. For what area? Norway?

Norway. Yeah, I think so. Is that what Nordic means? I thought, would that be any? It's like Scandinavian. Any of those. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I read the other day that the most happiest country in the world is Finland.

That's right. It's because they kicked me out. Well, I got to go check it out. I do, too. I've never been. The farthest north I've been is continental Europe and England. Well, we should take a business trip over there. Done.

Let's do it. Let's go interview some happy people. Yes, we'll do the happiness project. That's it. Done and done. Okay. Good. Well, that's not even the craziest thing you're going to hear from out. No, but we are. We did just announce a fundraiser for it.

Go fund me. Go fund us. That's right. Go fund the fund. That's right. Go fund the fund. So what kind of stuff were you looking for with your private equity company? So what I did is our first fund, I funded 100% for myself. So I took the exit of the company and I put it in there and then I made some bets and we invested in the company. both companies. And with those, there were really pet projects for me, which were helping me kind of figure out what my investment strategy was. And most of them were in some kind of disruption to education. Because the number one thing I saw with cyber, after 23 years of doing this cyber arms race,

no matter how big of a citadel we built around your company, someone would click on something they shouldn't and invite the bad guys in. And so I wanted to figure out how do we create companies that build resilient humans to. So all of the stuff was around that. And what I realized is that that's great. But I wanted to build a synergistic fund. And what I mean by that is that every company can help each other. So if you have a company that sells to the channel and has hundreds of channel customers and then you invest in another company that's got great technology, but garbage sales.

then the two companies can win together. And so I built, what did I want? I wanted to have deep tech. I wanted to have all of these different things inside of the security. And that kind of got me exploring, you know, cybersecurity for space, cybersecurity for hospitals, cybersecurity. So the great thing about cyber is you can get into any conversation and any business because it's a core risk mitigation concern.

So, yeah, that is basically what ends. has turned into is how do we invest into companies with cybersecurity, sure, being a part of it, but really what is the deep tech kind of thing that it's doing? And then some of our general partners are like, this is stupid. We're getting private equity. So I kind of am on the venture side of it. And then we have another part that is a private equity side that does e-commerce, mergers and acquisitions, logistics.

had no idea how cool global logistics was until we started in deploying capital and buying. And the third wing, we have, so venture capital, private equity, but then the third wing is all about the compliance side of the house. So what we realized we were really good at doing as building funds. And so we decided to start partnering people who had capital, and they knew how they wanted to deploy it, but they didn't want to worry about going to jail.

So we were at one-stop shop for, Do you want to spend up your own fund? Do you want to do private equity? You want to do venture? Do you want to do SBVs, all that stuff? And do you not want to just click on a nameless website to start the whole thing up? And you want kind of some handholding. And so that's kind of what came out of the Anzouz capital.

First fund that we built was a couple of investments, exploring into e-commerce and e-commerce roll-ups, mergers and acquisitions. And then finally a consulting practice where we partner with a few. individual key folks to say, no, we just an hourly rate is not what we're trying to do here. We want to build something that grows and we want to partner. So we, I think, only take two or three customers a year. Well, how long have you had Anzus? Two years.

Two years, that's all. Okay. And you've done so many different companies. I mean, just personally, I'm so curious, and I bet a lot of our listeners are, too, is, you know, the old philosophy, Part of my head trash is, you know, you come up, you start your business, or here's even worse. You know, you know what you want to do. You go to college, you study that area, you go to a good company, you learn more about it. By the time you're 30, you're ready, you buy the business, you start the business.

So you're always doing the same thing. And then for the next 30 years, you run the business. And then you sell it and you make some money. That's certainly a playbook that's been used many times successfully in the past, but you're just blowing that out of the water with all these different things. So, for example, how do you get, when you start one of these things where people are going to pay you to develop funds for them? Who's selling that? Who's actually doing the work?

Because you're not going to have time to do all these things. No, that's why we only could take so many. We have to take limited partners because it's a boutique type consulting service, right? Everything is highly curated. And so it's a trust-based sale. We have not had a customer. It's not one call closed. I'll put it that way.

And it's usually about 12 to 18 months of relationship building before we even get to the 25K upfront fee to do the assessment and all the stuff. Because it's, you know, when people are launching funds and when people are thinking about what they're trying to do, they typically, when they have the capital of the time, do it and they have the thing they want to do often if they haven't already done it and they need us it's because there's some head trash there's some hesitancy yeah to activating yeah and so a lot of

what we do in our relationship building has helped normalize being un-okay right and so um and i don't do i i do some of that because usually we go to events and we meet people or we do retreats and we hang out with people. And we monetize that. But as far as the core business goes, we don't deploy a lot of human resources. What we deploy is, can we help you build a better strategy? Can we fast track some of the compliance stuff and make it even better? And so it's one of the things I like.

You called it the brain on the stick, right? We do the high-end fun consulting to help with all the stuff. And so how are they finding you? Well, that's the problem. Since it's the relationship-based building crap, that's what we call it, you're going to events. Okay. There's no direct prospecting. I found it's very difficult to get someone to call you back when you say, hey, I hear you're rich.

And a lot of people want to give you money and you've got these great ideas. Usually what happens is you're sitting there talking to somebody and they start dreaming out of that with you. And so for our sales efforts, how do we build the trust where someone's willing to dream out loud? Okay. That's good. Dreaming out loud? That's a good phrase anyway. I like that.

And so the first time I knew about you was when my son started working his company, Cloudhound, started working as a partner with Hooked. Yep. And that was one of your invested companies, right? Yep. Actually, that's one of the ones I, so I practiced something called parallel penureship. So we've all heard serial entrepreneur. I build a company, sell out a company. I'm like, ah, I can't.

That's too slow. I like to build a lot of companies. Then I like to find the kind of human being who can run them, and each company requires a different kind of human. And then off they go. So I usually do the first six months worth of work where we do product market fit. We figure out how to sell it. We figure out why they're buying, figure out the product.

And then we bring in somebody who is a true visionary and a true operator to take it to the next level. And that's what happened with Hook. So Hook Security started because I was angry at the rest of the cybersecurity world. I was going to do a different. And I knew what kind of problem I want to overcome. And they were sales problems. So Palmetto's security group was a professional services company with really, really smart consultants. And I only had two problems. They had too many consultants and not enough work, too much work and not enough consultants. And I couldn't scale. And so I was like, well, I never want to do that again. Let's do a software as a service. company that has a really easy to understand pain training your customers I mean training your

employees and better yet if you don't then you're breaking compliance like you're bad ooh you have to fix that um and I could sell it without having to hire an army of salespeople I wanted to sell through the channel and I wanted to sell um you know zero interaction if at all possible a frictionless selling They can buy online without talking to a salesperson. But I couldn't start there. I had to start the old-fashioned way. So I'm owner I started. Badge number one was Brad Powell, cold calling monster.

Citadel Grad. Citadel Grad, you got. So he would, he's probably how John got connected. Brad probably called him. This guy was fearless, right? So when I cold call, the joke was you better have some scotch nearby because to get my mind right and the good thing. No, when he's sad, he makes cold calls.

When he's happy, he makes cold calls. When he had a free minute, he makes a cold call. It's a different game for that mindset. So I love the idea. I like that you can find the right person for the right place and how they're wired. And he is wired to do brute force sales. Let me rephrase that.

brute force prospecting. He's not afraid of the word no. He doesn't hide behind. I'm going to create a sales funnel online, and then I'm going to have pre-qualifications, and I should hire somebody else to do that, so I only talk to people who want to talk to me. He's like, nope, we need to learn things.

So he would, that was our first six months, is him getting told no, and then him being brave and asked, well, why did you tell me no? So we can collect objections, and we can figure out what our sales pitch was and all the things. So to me, it's like,

I'll never build a business again that doesn't have a bulldog salesperson at the front of it to go and learn what we don't know. It's almost like a cheaper, faster way to do market research. Right. Like, I can buy all the reports I want and I can hire all the market researches I want. But, you know, the best way to find out if a customer wants something is to sell it to them and see if they give you a dollar. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

I mean, we have solved a lot of questions over the years. years by saying, okay, let's stop arguing about it. I'm going to go call 10 prospects. That's it. You know, and see, and just see what they say. And again, it's always one of three things. Yeah. It's, my God, I'm glad you called, this is perfect, or crickets, or just kind of something in the middle. And if it's not my God, I'm glad you called. Yeah.

We shouldn't be going forward. No. Or we should fix something. Well, I lost, if you go along through all the sales I've ever done, rarely do I lose to somebody else. Always I lose to customer apathy. Indifference. They don't care.

They don't feel pain. They won't act. I love it angry or a happy customer. Please don't give me apathetic. I had a great sales guy sell me something a couple years ago. And I wanted it. It was like this. It was a SaaS selling consulting program or something like that.

And I was like, okay, God, I want to do it. I need to do it, but I got that, I'm working on the, I was working on my book then. I'm like, I'm working on the book right now, and I just, it's another thing. And he goes, he goes, well, he goes, is this a big thing to you? I'm like, well, not really. Because is it a big amount of money per month? I'm like, not really. He goes, won't we just go ahead and do it?

I love him. He goes, it's not a big deal. Yeah. Let's just go ahead and do it and quit talking about it. Oh, man. I'm like, you know you're right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can stop if I don't like it.

What percentage of your budget is this? Hmm, that doesn't seem like that's really going to be a friction point for you. Why don't we just go ahead and do this? Yeah, and he goes, you don't like it, just stop. I'm like, you're right. Why should we, because we were talking about it every two weeks. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just try it.

You've already spent more hours. If your hourly rate is X, the number of hours we've spent on the phone could have paid for the program for a year. Let's find out. Yeah. It was a good close. That's good close. I love that story. So, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so,

security, by the way, my son's company partners with it and he sells it. And I'll give you my version, my, my dumber version, but it is a way for your company to get some pretend fishing emails sent to it just to see who in your company might click on it. And clicking on that kind of email is the number one way cyber problems happen. That's right. It's not expensive. And again, you can try it. You know, you don't have to buy a 10 years worth. And so Jack, my son, has sold a bunch of this stuff. Yep.

And the clients love it. So give us a little bit more on the hooked. Yeah. So hook security is all about equipping your employees to defeat the number one tool used by hackers. So 90% of all successful hacks. This is when they break in, they get something, there's damages, and the FBI gets involved. 90% of those start with a successful manipulation of your employees. And that's either they send an email that you click on or they send a text message or they do something to manipulate the humans.

So what Hook does is work on this thing called SySec. So after I sold my company, I went to Hawaii for two weeks, hired some consultants and we need a new thing. So you have physical security, guards, gates, guns, things like that. Then you've got cyber security, and that's bits and bites and computers and firewalls. So who's helping the neurons in the bits? We need new science, and that doesn't exist. So SySec, or psychological security, is all about the science behind how the human brain reacts to threats. And it's not really open for training.

Like, we've all tried teaching folks before, and sometimes they get it, and sometimes they don't. And so it's a multi-billion-dollar industry that is, they're just, everyone's doing it wrong. They teach people like you were back in grade school. And I remember, the American education system, 20% of students fail. 20%. That's a big gap for cyber, isn't it? That's really not good.

If 20% of your employees click on a thing, you don't want them to click on it. Well, I mean, when we started with Hook at my company, I clicked on it a few times. I mean, I see something coming from FedEx or Starbucks free gift card. I'm like, well, why not? I'll take it, you know. Yep. I still click on stuff. You do.

Thank you, too. Yeah, I wrote six books on cybersecurity, and I bought a Nissan Ultima off of Craigslist that didn't exist. $1,500. Did they get your money? Yeah, they did. Oh, my gosh. The reason why that they got me, so busy with other things, they didn't care about the car. I was by aunt for our foster daughter.

I just needed that done. And I had in the $1,500 didn't matter to me. I was working on huge deals. And just needed it done. And so I was not engaged. And so that's the problem with cyber awareness training. The way we teach people now, you have to be engaged to apply the tools. Think about being great at basketball, right?

You need to be engaged in the game to win the game, even if you have a natural talent. And so that's what our industry is struggling. with. How do we get the brain to be programmed to subconsciously and to see that risk, even when you're stressed and you're not feeling good and you're busy and all that stuff? And then she's not there, but that's where it's heading. And what we do right now better than anything else is we capture the attention by giving short, fun videos that maybe 30 to 90 seconds long. You don't have to invest your whole time.

And when you are suffering an attack, like when you're... you click on the thing you're not supposed to, you go, ah! Right? That does something in your brain. It triggers fight or flight. Yeah. And it floods your body with cortisol. And you're no longer able to access different parts of your brain. I'm using science talk people. Right? So you can't access creativity, the memory. So what happens is that we try to train people when they're terrified. That doesn't work. So the first thing you have to do before you can train somebody to understand some trauma or something that just happened that triggered that cortisol is you need to drip some dopamine into the brain and have the cortisol no longer be the dominating factor of it all.

And the fastest way to do that is with humor. Actually, no, the fastest way is a hug, but not everybody. There's probably restraining orders that will kick in if we just send people to your place of work, the hug. But you can use humor. You can use things that say, hey, yeah, that was a bad thing. that's okay. Let's learn. Let's do a little bit better. Well, to tangent that a little bit, seems to me that just email in general, whether it's Gmail or Outlook mail, it's just pitiful.

And it's just so not evolved. And I wonder, I always wondered why that is. Because they're not stupid people. Well, the problem is that when you say they're uninvolved, I think you mean by like a cybersecurity point of view. Well, from a cyber perspective, but also just from a perspective of how things work and folders and the fact that it's so difficult to rank your email. Like a spam email would be at the top because it came in this morning. And, you know, how do you sort through your to-do list that they're all kind of jumbled together? So this is what Steve Jobs was great at. When you build computers from the ground up, you think about how all the different parts are going to interact. And with that mindset, how does the electricity move to make the bit turn into a one or zero?

And it goes all the way up to the screen, to the human. You're accessing a user experience, a computer experience, designed for the human to interact with the computer. not for the computer to meet the needs of the human. That's why you can put an iPad in front of a three-year-old and they just get it, right? Because a whole lot of time, effort, money was put into the user experience. When you look at corporate America, which is the driving force of email, and therefore the grandfather of all these other platforms, it was not meant for a human experience. What it was meant for is how do I take spreadsheets, Microsoft,

document, how do I do all these things, and send them back and forth to people. That was the problem they were solving. Not an intuitive. So it's backwards. It's backwards. And we have what I call operational debt. Operational debt is an inefficient business process or system that you've been doing so long that you just say, okay, we're going to do it.

Just leave it the way it is. It's just the way it is. And yeah, maybe it's impacting our business, but it's too expensive to pay off that operational debt by changing to something else, the act of changing isn't worth overcoming the pain that they're in. And so email user interfaces won't change. I'm using Gmail and outlet right now. And going back and forth between them is just such a headache.

It's so different. And they're both not, I don't think they're very good. That's a very interesting perspective. You know, if Steve would have done his own email, I'm sure it would just be brilliant. Well, a lot of people have tried it. But again, I guess my operational debt is so heavy, I have no desire to pay it off. There's so many other things. Do you remember DOS?

Do I? I mean, I didn't know. The green flashy blocks. I mean, you'd have to hold down F3 and the alt key. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's perfect to your point. You were learning how to pull the information from the computer versus vice versa. That's right.

Which is, you know, if you look at AR and VR, you know, how are we going to augment reality? versus how we're going. Like, where people are working on how do we have a more human focus interaction with the computer. But it's also terrifying, too, because when you're working with this computer, it's obvious that it's a tool. When the computer transcends that barrier between, this is a hard tool to use, to this is just an extension of how I already think, feel, act, do all the stuff, that to me is

a little spooky. It's a little spooky when there are very few operational friction points between me and the technology. Because technology can be manipulated against my best interests and all of my defenses are down. And it's just a pass through into my brain. Is that a good thing? I don't know. I don't know. It depends on whose brain it is.

I'm not sure about mine and yours might be in trouble. Well, before we get into AI, let's talk about some. something very, very interesting called Space Whiskey. Yes. One of your latest adventures, I want to hear it. Tell everyone about the Space Whiskey. Once upon time, I thought I was going to have a space hotel. And I just sold my company, and I went to a talk where the commander of the International Space Station just got back.

And he gave us his lecture. It was amazing. If you haven't seen the kind of training these people do to go up and spend time on the International Space Station. It's amazing. The only thing I remember from the talk, though, like he just blew everything out of my head, he said, well, when I got back from space, which is just a really cool sentence, I had my first shower on Earth, and my wife said when I stepped out of the shower, thank God NASA. And I was like, oh, space fat camp.

That's what I need. That's my next business. No, that's a bit expensive. So I began just think I need to do a space hotel. Well, as a gift to myself, my wife and I went to Neckar Island, and we spent a week with Richard Branson and about 30 other just amazing folks. And I'm strutten around like I'm a space entrepreneur now. I'm going to build a space station.

But I kind of in future sensing. So if I think about a thing, I already experienced like I'm doing it. So I might have been posing a little bit. And a nice lady walks up to me and she's like, you're in this, you got a space hotel? I'm a private equity investor. We just invested in six. One of them's attached to the International Space Station right now. It inflates.

Where are you with your project? I was like, ma'am, I'm sorry, I lied to your face. Nowhere near. I have no idea what I'm talking about. So I spent the next three years volunteering and networking and I joined a community called Space for Humanity. Richard Branson gave us two tickets on Virgin Galactic that we auctioned off. And the whole thing is how do we send the common man to space?

And it's fantastic. Going to space for Earth, not the other way around. And so we're there. And I'm meeting all these people. And I realize it's a super huge ineffectual. efficiency with space. Space has a problem. And the biggest problem it has is all the infrastructure to do capitalism, to do product development, to do all that, but only has one customer, super large governments. So I thought to myself, screw that, you know, what we can do? We need to

build cash flowing businesses. So the math was easy. It was like, what can I send a space that I can do some sciencey stuff to or manufacture something that won't cost me a whole lot, but if I bring it back down, I can sell it for, you know, 43,000 times the value. Yeah. And I talked to some alcohol collectors. I'm like, why did you, this bottle was $12 back in the day, and you just spent $12,000 on it. And they tell me all this, I'm like, oh, this is my market.

So by making a hundred bottles of whiskey in space and then selling them at a million dollars a bottle, which is market rate, market rate for a collector's. high-end, people are already doing this, buying a million-dollar bottles of whiskey from Sothebyes. So what happened to that whiskey to get to a million? Why is it so famous? Okay, so the reason why a collector

spends that kind of money is threefold. First one is all the experiences and the story, the rarity, all that stuff, right? And so it has nothing to do with the content. Most people don't even open them. Right. Right? I own a thing that's a million dollars for the Japanese whiskey that's going at this and some of the McClellan's that go for that level

it goes into how long was it aged how rare is it what was the effort put in only 60 bottles produced only 60 bottles produced and it took us 55 years to make it so what kind of so are you going to have a little distillery eventually I'm going to have a distillery on the moon and I'm going to make moonshine on the moon the first legitimate moonshine that's the original idea I found the price tag for that. And I was like, well, maybe we'll do an orbital distillery first. So right now we're talking 60 bottles. It's going to be orbiting in outer space.

Yeah. It's going to make the whiskey while it's out there. It's going to come back and you're going to be able to sell it or auction it or whatever you want to do. Yeah. The idea is they've done this before. We've had scotch and whiskey on the International Space Station. All the way back to 2011, Arbegg Scotch.

put scotch on the International Space Station, put some wood chips in it to see what would happen. Okay. Nothing happened. Nothing happened. Because when you age whiskey, you turn barrels, right? You age scotch, you turn barrels, and the heat and stuff moves the whiskey into the barrel, and then it comes out of the barrel, and that's what gives the taste.

And that's why it takes so long is that we use gravity and the slow turn of the barrel to get the whiskeys and taste great. None of that works in space because there's no gravity. So what you have to do is you have to agitate. the whiskey, if to agitate the liquid, to interact with the other substances. So in our case, phase one of this entire experiment is space aging whiskey. Okay. And you do that with sound.

You shoot sound waves into whiskey, and it then agitates. And what you can do is if you never turn the sound off, in three months of orbiting the earth, you can create a 15-year, 20-year whiskey. Okay. Right? And do we know if it tastes good or not? I know it does. When you pay that kind of money, you never go like, oh, my gosh.

It's going to taste sweet. It's going to be great. So how do you, well, more details. Sure. How do you arrange to get the whiskey on this spaceship? Okay. So you pay people money. Who are we paying?

Elon or who we pay? Yeah. So there's the original business model was to do some stuff on the International Space Station. But what happened, when I said earlier that the space industry is all set up, ready to go, but just don't have customers. I'm renting everything. I'm renting launch. I'm renting manufacturing.

There are at least five different consulting firms out there that will build my orbital distillery for me, right? There are, it costs around $25 million. That's what my budget is. There's launch, the first, all that. And I'm going to make 100 bottles worth. And I'm going to go pre-sell those bottles to, the 1% of the 1% and by the way, the buying triggers of the ultra high net worth are different than yours and mine.

And so we have figured that out. We know we can sell them. And then we use those pre-sells to fund what we're actually doing. So we're looking at a $75 million profit and I'm probably wrong about something. So why don't we just call it a $60 million profit and get myself a little bit of a buffer there. But what I'm trying to demonstrate is that's a cash flowing project. I do that and I'm done in three years or less, which means I just show the world that you can do space-based businesses that cash flow to date,

including our good friend Elon. There are zero space companies have made a profit. It's all burning cash. So his, I mean, he's getting paid to do a lot of work for NASA and people like that. You're saying he's not getting paid enough? Well, we're saying that he's re-investing. Okay. Right?

So it's not that he's not making money. Yeah. It's just that... Like the early days of Amazon. That's correct. Yeah. Right? You burn cash to grow.

Yeah. Virgin orbit right now is having issues. That's Richard Branson's, you know, underneath the plane rocket. Elon's also kind of shown the way on getting those deposits like you're talking about or pre-selling. Think about pre-ordering a Tesla. Virgin Galactic has a waiting list of 600 people. They've done a couple of flights. I swear, I think if you pre-sell it, the customers, like to say, if I bought some of your whiskey or one bottle or whatever,

I'd feel like more I'm kind of part of the whole thing. That's 100% right. You don't, this is not, I'm not selling. a bottle of whiskey to you. I'm selling a membership into an exclusive club. For example, you buy a million dollar bottle of whiskey from me? And I look at you and say, John, don't open that. I've got mine here. Why don't we go get on the planetary space perspective? Let's ride a balloon from Florida to 100,000 feet. It's a luxury balloon. It's like nicer chairs than this. And from Florida, we can see the Aurora Borealis.

Why don't we drink this space whiskey while we're at the edge of space? And we'll drink mine. You don't open yours. That's a collector's item. And then you're going to be on that with 12 other people. And you're not all going to be best friends. And you're not like it. It is the, I do talks for ultra high net worth networking groups.

And it's, the issue is that super success. can break a brain. When you have so much success that you can no longer actually interact with another human being, sometimes you need to be taken out of that world and put into, you know, sometimes you need a friend you can trust.

And so when you are buying a million dollar bottle of whiskey or any of the other luxury stuff, we're actually sending gold to the International Space Station next year to be molecularly changed so that we can sell it in luxury goods. So the actual company's name is stellar luxuries, and we're using high-end luxury brands to make massive profit to fund the space industry. So space whiskey is our first product. But we've got space cigars, we got space schnops, we got whatever.

Space shnots. Space ripple. There it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We keep trying to do space weed, but it's still illegal. Is it really? Yeah. Outer space?

Yeah, well, so. I thought Elon was in charge out there. So there's a company out there called Space Tango, and it's out of Kentucky. And they grew hemp in the International Space Station. And they brought it back down, and they planted it in this greenhouse. And then the pesticide system malfunctioned and sprayed way too much stuff. Oh, no.

And half of, they had a control group. They had non-space weed, non-space hemp, and space hemp. And about three weeks later, all the stuff that didn't go to space died. The hypothesis, and we've got to run thousands of more tests to figure out of the right, the hypothesis is that if you grow something from a seed, and it's subjected to the radiation and the zero gravity and all this trauma, that it creates a stronger plant.

So I need to sell whiskey so I can fund how do we manufacture important things. Space whiskey is not important because they're making whiskey. Space whiskey is important because then I can take the money that we make. I can take hundreds of millions of dollars and put it into a fund. Remember how much of those funds? Put it into a fund. And I can invest in companies that need to do slow capital type deals. Like there's fast capital and slow capital.

Fast capital is like I buy a house and it kicks off cash flow and it's rental money, right? And then I can sell it three years later and I flip it. That's fast capital. Slow capital is space. I put money in and I might get money. money out 20 years later. And so the idea here is that there's not an appetite for funding slow capital things, such as can you 3D print a heart? Can you use zero gravity to do really amazing things? So my hypothesis is if I build enough of these fast capital cash flowing, super profitable

companies, I can invest in making the world a better place by going after an asteroid. How cool would the world be if we didn't have to do strip mining? By the way, the strip miners also don't want that. My buddy, Chris, he had a company that was doing asteroid mining. It's $55 million. 2018, I'll say, cratered. But it was funded from the miners, the mining cooperatives, because they understand that there is more minerals in our asteroid belt that we can get to

than the entire crust of the Earth that we can get to. One asteroid, the right asteroid, is more than our Earth's crust. It's crazy. So we've covered your expertise in cyber, your expertise or burgeoning expertise in space. And that's not even how I met you. I met you. I met you. He was putting on an artificial intelligence seminar.

Man, that sounds good. That I went to. It's like we got our own little Elon right here in Greenville, for God's sakes. Elon wishes he was out of him. That's right. He does. There it is. He'd like to be younger like you are.

That's for sure. I fell on his brother during a zero-g flight once. Did you really? Yeah, that's a different time, a different story. I was going after a jelly bean, and I didn't trust him when they said the gravity was coming back, and I fell six feet onto poor Kimball's legs. Well, anyway, so I went to this seminar. My son, Jack, suggested I go to with him,

and was obviously blown away with what Adam knows about artificial intelligence. And specifically we were looking at chat GPT. And I think you taught me how to write a book while I was during the seminar, which is pretty cool. But yeah, let's just get your take on chat and what people, particularly salespeople, should be thinking about using chat for or at least being aware of what's capable. Yeah. So I love chat GPT because it, um, Microsoft is calling this kind of technology a co-pilot, meaning that it doesn't take away

what you know how to do and doesn't take away the human, but it makes it easier. Right now, I couldn't picture going through the world without being able to Google something. And that's what AI is becoming. It's that side card, that co-pilot, that system that helps you. So from the sales point of view, so I had ChatGBT, GBT, write me a book about how to use this in business. And I went system-based. system. So my first chapter is about customer acquisition because if you ain't got customers,

you ain't got a business. And it went through sales, marketing, and customer success, customer service retention, that kind of stuff. And everyone's heard about the marketing side of the house. Oh, you can create LinkedIn posts. You can create products. So it's obvious how chat GPT can help the marketers. The cool thing about chat GPT in sales is that it can interact with your CRM. You can interact with yourself. It can scan your CRM, figure out, okay, I'm going to talk to John, and he's got this, da-da-da-da-da. And it can write a custom email that will resonate better with you because you give it all the information. John loves ponies.

He's an expert marksman. He spends his time at the jockey lot, whatever, right? And the email, the touches that it can create for you in the cold open. that it can create for you are just absolutely amazing. Yeah. And I think about anything that I don't want to do, chats great at that. So for example, we can write APIs,

meaning that we can write software, that you can talk to chat like you would, an assistant, and you can say, well, I just got off call, or I can listen to the calls too, but let's say that you're just, you're driving down the road, and you're supposed to update documentation, you're supposed to be, and instead of you taking the time to do that, you just tell chat and then chat does all the work for you. It's an assistant in then, right?

Yeah. It's, there's only going to be two kinds of salespeople going forward. There's going to be salespeople who are incredibly efficient and able to do their job at a higher game because they have better information. And then those are going to be guys who are no longer sales guys, right? Because at the end of the day, this is going to be the thing that changes. changes. It's the unfair competitive advantage that you're looking for. Case and point, I'll move from sales over to lawyers. I got a buddy's got to look over a hundred thousand page document. And the way the big firms do it is they hire a whole staff of paralegals to go and read through it. So the law firm that's big enough

that can outspend is going to have the better information to go to court. Now, we won't feed that case study in the chat GPT because it's not appropriate. But we could build his own AI where he can then train it and funnel it in and replace hiring hundreds of paralegals with a 12-cent-hour API call and get his results back in three hours or less. Now, that lawyer can go up against the big guys now. Same thing with sales. Better intelligence, better parsing.

Oh man, I was looking at selling a new product. And I was like, I need to understand my ideal customer better. Like what would, what are the pain points that the chief information security officer of a Fortune 500 company with a focus on the retail industry are interested in? And it's like, thank you for asking that. Here they are. I was like, oh, what are the objections normally a part of these different pain points? Oh, typically these are the objections. Boom, boom, boom.

This is the product that I'm selling and how I'm going about it. What are the best ways to overcome those objections? I did that, you know, 15 minutes is how long that took. Then I got on a call super prepared for that particular guy. So you want to talk about being the most equipped sales guy going into a sales call? AI is going to be the go-to tool for that. Right. And I would contend in that specific –

scenario without the chat tool, odds are the salesperson would not have prepared that way. So they wouldn't be that ready. But if they were, they would have had somebody, you know, for a couple of days. They'd say, hey, Adam, I need you to write up this draft thing for me. And I need to review, you know, in one of those deals. I do the same thing. I need 10 and 15 minutes and I can get pretty ready. Yeah.

With chat. So just for those, for a few people who might not know, it's chat gpt.com. And it's free. You can pay the 20 bucks a month like me and Adam do for the, I don't know what kind of extra service we get, but we get something. They don't turn it off when you hit like a couple hundred thousand words. Right. Like they're like, you're using too much.

You get to use it as much as you want for 20 bucks. But it's definitely, I mean, I would say it's like, you know, Google, the internet, CRM, spreadsheets, Word. I mean, it's just a very, it's a new tool, but it's very important. And it's just going to evolve and change. Yeah. That's one of the reasons. I'm doing all these workshops. So I did a general business workshop and I'm just going to go through every single business

system. Right? So the next one's going to be customer acquisition, probably focusing on marketing. But the reason I'm doing that is because I want to learn it. Those who want to learn teach. And so I have to get really good at it. Like when I wrote a book on neuroscience on how the brain and the human computer and the human brain have a lot of functions and And I needed to teach emotional intelligence to cybersecurity nerds. So how do you interact with humans? And so I had to come up with a nerd way to talk to my nerd friends. And I learned so much about the brain because I knew so much about my subject matter. Right?

And so the thing that is amazing about this is it is taking away. Like I'll sit before, like if I have to write a proposal, man, I'll sit there and I'll think, you know, I got this blank sheet of paper and maybe I've got a template to work off of. but it's that getting started part. And what all I do now is we wrote a proposal for Connemar and proper 12 Irish whiskey to sponsor a space whiskey thing. I was like, let me tell you about space whiskey and write a proposal to Conn McGregor,

and it just went and he created the proposal. And the 80-20 rule is in fact, right? The 20% of the most important stuff is a little. The thing is with AI is that it seems super smart and overconfident, but it's actually still dumb, and so the human has to go and de-risk it. But being able to start, I save hours, days even,

by having a safe place. Say, this is what I'm working on. Help me, and it will help. Yeah. It's so cool. It gets you started. That's great. Well, that's awesome.

Tell us your favorite book of all times. All time. Wow. I think it would have to be, gosh, I might go to a comic book. Okay. Which one? One of the early X-Men comic books, Marvel. So I have ADHD, lots of learning disabilities, and reading wasn't accessible to me.

The reason I love comics was I follow the pictures. And they had big sound effects. It's like, G-O-W. Got it. Right. So that really kind of was my gateway into reading. And now I'll read just, I'm a voracious reader now. Because I've learned that I don't actually read letters.

I see the word as a picture. And I can just read that, right? So my, of all time, the thing I most thankful for are probably being a young kid on Rind Mine Air Force Base, scraping up pennies to buy a comic book. Yeah. and go reading that. That's cool.

And then what about a favorite word? Resiliency. Resiliency. Yeah, we get beat up a lot in this gig, don't we? Yeah. And it's not about, am I smart? It's not about my, what it's really all about is, can I take a hit? Yeah.

And can I get up? Yeah. And am I smart enough to surround myself with people who will help me when I'm. Yeah, and just to, to just, I mean, I tell people, you know, when something happens, it's not what you want, let's say. It's just to say, well, I expected that. I mean, we expect everything to go right all the time, you know. We expected something like that to happen.

Someone quit or the roof fell off the building or something, you know, I mean, something. And we're just going to have to figure out how we just keep going. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't know if you can teach that. I think you can guide that. Yeah.

But telling someone's going to be okay. isn't as good as them going through the fire and coming out the other side and saw that it was okay. Yeah, we're all burned a little bit. It's okay. That's a good word. And then lastly, is there anything of all these different ventures that you want to promote today?

Yeah, we are currently raising money for space whiskey. So if anybody wants to explore, you have to be an accredited investor. Right? It's not a crowdfunding thing, but we are, we did all of our securities right so I can talk about it publicly. It's if you want to invest into this amazingly interesting, crazy opportunity, I can, I can onboard that.

How would they contact you or the company? Oh, they call you. They call me. Call me. I'm now a broker for this. That's right. That's right. He's taking some off the top.

He would go to Stellar Luxuries.com and there's a contact us there. Stellar luxuries.com. Yeah. By the way, Chat GPD named that. Oh, that's so funny. Yeah, we said, give us 10 names for a company that does luxury goods in space. Oh, wow. Awesome.

Everything on that website, Stellar Luxuries.com, written by AI, all the images created by AI. The video explaining what we do, the voice is AI. The only human interaction was me moving things around on the website. We even said, how should we build the website and what pages do we need? You should open with many, many visually stunning things and was like, dang, this is great. It's amazing. So if you want to see AI and at its finest, it's, it's, it's, oh, we showed you the website, didn't we? Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yes. It's interesting. Yeah, so that, that's my, my ask is, you know, we're interviewing investors because this is an interesting thing. This isn't somebody who's like, I don't make a whole bunch of money. Yes, you will. You will make, you know, I can't say that because of. of securities. It's guaranteed.

It's guaranteed. There's a possibility. No, you can't do that. But the right investors, somebody understands that, you know, we're building a community of super high net worth customers and they're on board with supporting doing good in the world and think that space is the way to do it. So I've got a lot of other companies that are much easier to get your arms around. But I think that this one is probably the most important thing I'm working on right now.

Well, we're glad you carved out some time for us this afternoon. Thank you. We appreciate you very much and keep doing what you're doing. Back at you. This is important stuff. All right, man. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it.