The Bossticks - Niel Robertson Founder Of Influence.Co On Problem Solving, Critical Thinking, Success & Failure

Episode Date: December 25, 2020

#316: On this episode we are joined by our friend Niel Robertson. Niel is the founder and CEO of Influence.co, The premier influencers marketing and networking platform. On this episode we discuss how to approach problem solving, critical thinking, and how to navigate success and failure. To connect with Niel Robertson click HERE To connect with Lauryn Evarts click HERE To connect with Michael Bosstick click HERE Read More on The Skinny Confidential HERE For Detailed Show Notes visit TSCPODCAST.COM To Call the Him & Her Hotline call: 1-833-SKINNYS (754-6697) This episode is brought to you by Phexxi Phexxi® (lactic acid, citric acid, and potassium bitartrate) Vaginal Gel 1.8%, 1%, 0.4% is a hormone-free, prescription birth control used only before sex. Phexxi works to maintain the vaginal pH level to prevent pregnancy and you only use it when you need it! Be sure to tell your healthcare provider if you have a recent history of 3 or more UTIs per year. Learn more, including all risks at Phexxi.com This episode is brought to you by No Days Wasted Their hero product is called DHM Detox, which is the vitamin for people who like to enjoy their drinks. It's designed to help you bounce back the next day. Get 20% off your order and free shipping in the US. Just head over to www.NoDaysWasted.CO/SKINNY and use promo code "SKINNY" at checkout Produced by Dear Media   

The following podcast is a dear media production. She's a lifestyle blogger extraordinaire. Fantastic. And he's a serial entrepreneur. A very smart cookie. And now Lauren Everts and Michael Bostic are bringing you along for the ride. Get ready for some major realness. Welcome to the skinny confidential, him and her.

Take a pen and write on the window in the hallway, mathematical view of what being intelligent was. And that's like not how MIT works at all. I actually talked to the screenwriter, and I told them about the first day of stats class and how they taught people statistics. It's something called the Monty Hall problem. So if you remember when you go on to, well, let's make a deal, they say there's three doors. You pick a door. You either win the prize, or if you don't win the prize, you can switch. And should you switch or not?

And everybody thinks it's 50-50, but it's actually statistically not 50-50. They use this kind of example for, like, showing how statistics can be tricky, but you can master them. So I was explaining all these stories, and the screenwriter actually ended up. writing three of those stories. They gave him actually into the script, into the movie. Welcome back to the skinny confidential him and her show. That clip was from our guests of the show today. One of our best friends in the world, Neil Robertson, he's a serial entrepreneur. He's built multiple companies, sold multiple companies. His most recent venture influence, we're going to get all into it for all you influencers out there, aspiring influencers. This episode is definitely for you.

And in this episode, we talk about his involvement in the movie 21. You guys need to listen. It's so good. You also might know Neil from my Instagram story. He is married to my best friend, Faith. And they have a gorgeous daughter named Aspen, who is best friends with Zaza. We're currently recording this on Christmas Eve. So Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates.

We hope you guys have an amazing day. We're going to have some oysters, do some champagne, and have a lot of family time. We're going to sit by the fire, maybe have a hot toddy year five, and just hang out. We hope you guys are with your loved ones. And if you're not, we hope everyone in the community has a beautiful day, today, tomorrow, and a relaxing new year. With that, let's welcome Neil Robertson. He is an entrepreneur.

He's a dad. He's a husband. He's a real smart cookie. Like, he went to MIT, I'm telling you. He is intelligent. And he also runs Influence.com. Let's welcome him to the show. This is the skinny confidential, him and her.

You told me at brunch two years ago. Which could have been any day of the week. Over red wine, because you drink red wine at 11 a.m. for brunch. That you were not going to be married and you were not going to have kids. A lot twist. Two years later. Married kids. I know.

Two dogs, two kids. And asking for more kids. Yeah, living in Encino on the other side of the hill. That's wild. Crazy shit. I feel like we should maybe give some context of who Neil is. Neil, I've told you 50 times. You want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.

Neil's plan. Yeah. Yeah, you want to make God laugh tell faith your plan. Yeah, seriously. Context. We have one of our best friends on the podcast today. We wanted to shoot the shit with him. We'll talk all over the place.

He's very, very smart. I call him pragmatic. He's also very funny. He's one of a kind. He does things that I've never seen another human do. Not just best friends, though. I would argue like also a mentor of sorts. I mean, at least for me personally,

you've helped a lot of, like, and helped me work through a lot of issues. I think that's really tri-directional, bi-directional, whatever it is. I think like we riff between personal and professional and everything in the gray area is so fluidly. It's partially what makes us like a super rare relationship. Yeah, we met, well, I saw you at a club in San Diego popping about 600 bottles of Don Perri on one night and saw who is that? And then years later, we ended up meeting in New York.

Yeah. And you were dating Faith, who's one of my best friends now. And I was immediately attracted to her, like, saw her. And she was so warm and so beautiful. And most of all, so funny and so witty. And we ended up going out to dinner. Shout out to ABC Kitchen. That place is good.

Oh, that's so good. And then Faith and I started talking about vagina rejuvenation. And I was like, oh, my God, I just met my new best friend. And that turned into lunch and rosé. brunch brunch pizza were you drinking red wine because you drink red wine

at like 9 a year what this makes you sound like an alcoholic but like you you like a good glass of red wine when we're all drinking mimosas I'm like an alcohol phaser and so I don't know what phase

I think I was like either in like Picardian diet or like maybe rosé for a hot minute New York when I first met Neil he was in the Jameson phase yeah

which I still have I still go back into that phase pretty frequently yeah that's like the Neil and the Dark Hunter that I go to every once in That was the Neil that was never getting married. Yes, yes.

Yes, my Scottish twin, Jameson. That was pre-faith. That was pre-faith. We just really developed this really fun friendship where it was a couples without kids. No kids, no responsibility. And we ended up going on a huge boat with you guys with a bunch of friends. We had a blast, a little bit of mushroom. Faith actually roofed.

feed Michael with mushrooms in his drink. And then we ended up. I don't get scared to party with people, but I get scared to party with Faith because she gets me going. Oh, yeah. There's peer pressure and then there's Faith. And if you're partying with Faith, you're partying. Faith is the partier.

She's fun, though, man. She's fun. I mean, not to paint us all in a bad light now because now we're all like boring parents, moving to the Valley, settling down, like drink. Like we go to bed at like probably all this like 10 o'clock at night now. But there was a period. I was in bed at 830 yesterday. Yeah, there's a period.

Okay, let's go back here because we can ramble on. And this is my fear about this podcast. We can end up just falling into God knows what kind of conversations. But I do want people to understand you and the context of what you do. So maybe go back a little bit. I'm going to take you way back. What was your childhood like? Would you grow up?

Wow. Way back. I was born in Germany. I was only saying that because born in Germany, but I grew in Scotland. So I was a British citizen for the first 38 years of my life. I moved to the U.S. when I was five years old. My father is a symphony an opera conductor. And so he became the conductor of the Monterey County Youth Symphony, which is why we moved to the U.S. He then went on to conduct New York City Opera and got nominated for a couple Grammys. So he had a pretty cool career. My dad's awesome. And I grew up like in the countryside in Northern California in a little town called Carma Valley, not the San Diego Carmel. The Northern California won by Carmel. And my childhood was pretty, well, it was pretty limited because I was a little town. I'm a little bit limited because of the little town. I'm a little bit of California. I'm a little bit of California. I'm a little bit of California. I'm a little I didn't live by anybody that I knew. And so I actually ended up sort of accidentally getting into computers at a very young age

and spent most of my childhood actually sitting in my room writing software. How old? 11, 12, 13. Not to date you, but like I just wanted you. I'm 75s, right? So that's the end of the 80s, right? Yeah. That will actually date me.

Yeah, I mean, like, I started my first software company when I was 14 years old. So, like, that's what I was doing when I was good. What did a software company look like at 14 years? Like, what were the, you? other companies that people would even remember and know about it that because it was it was young. It was early. Like are we talking Pac-Man? Like we're talking like post-Pakman pre-Microsoft Word.

Right. So this is like you would buy like an Apple 2E or you would buy like a Mac and you would get some like innocuous checkbook balancing piece of software that you like bought in like a Sam Goody or something like that and installed over like 45 floppy disks and it did like three things. The first piece of software that I ever built, which I sold was pre-internet, everybody, the people that were kind of getting online were actually calling each other on modems, right? So if you remember the old like AOL dial tone, that was the modem dial tone. And I built one of the systems for the Apple. And I set up a bulletboard system and then a bunch of people started calling into my system.

And you kind of had like phone numbers written on pieces of scratch paper that you would like sort of pass around. And that's kind of how like you knew the equivalent of websites to go to. And I met a business partner in New York and we decided to take what I'd written and make it a company. Hold on. What do you mean you met a business partner in New York at 14 years old? How did, like, give us the real stuff. He called on his software. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, literally. So I don't even remember where I got the phone number for this bullet board system. I had, this is back when, like, you paid for local telephone calls. Like, that's how old I am. It was, like, not cheap to call New York for, like, 15, 20 minutes. After my parents would go to bed, I would, like, get on the phone line and I would fire up whatever phone number and you would dial in and you would just poke around on these bulletboard systems, which were, like, super, like, low grade text message websites.

And a lot of them, like, had places where you could, like, chat. And I dialed up this one bull and board system. And it turns out it was like another kid who was like 14 or 15 in New York and Buffalo. And we started chatting and we're like, let's start this company. And literally, that's like how I started a company. You wrote a book and published a book when I want to say you were 11 years old. You missed that. Nine. It was nine. Yeah. Who the fuck publishes a book at nine years old? So let me be clear with that. So I mentioned my father was an opera conductor. And along his career, he would take these summer opera gigs all over the United States. stay. It's because opera seasons are usually summer seasons. And so he would have to go away from my family. And because he wanted to see my sister and or I, we would go and stay with him. So I would like spend a summer like in Iowa, in Des Moines for Des Moines Opera or like in Kennebunkport where he was conducting another opera company. And essentially I had nothing to do at all because I was there

and there was no other children there. And so my dad like found me a typewriter and just to like spend time on this, and I just decided I was going to write a book. And so I sat down and I wrote two books that are that then later on, I told my mom and my sister that what I really wanted to do before I was 30 was published a book. And so they actually found the manuscript. I went through and meticulously like copied the manuscript like line break by line break and word for word into a printed book that they published for me. You can still buy it on Amazon for my 30th birthday. What's it called? The first one is called the Crystal Mirror and the Ring of Fire.

And I can't remember the name of the second one. The Crystal Mirror was really my, that was my opus. How does it feel when you're, when you're that young to be that smart? Because it is a very, like, unique trait. You were so intelligent, but when you're- You were so intelligent. Before you drink all the wine and all the Domperion. No, you are intelligent, but you were so intelligent when you were young.

when your friends are out skateboarding and Michael's mooning the principal and sneaking into like a boy's room, like, and you're sitting there writing a book and publishing a book, how does that feel? Did you feel left out? Hold up. We need to talk about my favorite latest hack, something that is going to change the game. And that is no days wasted. Okay. New Year's Eve is coming up.

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slash Skinny and use promo code Skinny at checkout. It's 20% off your order and free shipping in the U.S. That's no days wasted.com slash skinny for 20% off your order. This is the gift that keeps on giving. Give this to your friends. They will thank you. I'm telling you. I feel like I was very lucky because if you tried to do all of those things at a different point in time and from a different location, I would have been like a highly ostracized child. But I lived in the middle of the countryside. I went to a very small private school with 200 people in five grades where that kind of behavior was sort of not frowned upon. It was kind of normal. And then I parlayed that into getting into MIT. And so by the time like I was old enough to realize that that wasn't normal,

I was in an environment heading towards being an adult where like heading into the 90s where all of a sudden like nerds were cool and we were taking over the world and making all the money. If you had done it like 10 years before, it would have been like dazed and confused. I would have had to hazed out of school. Or if you'd done it 10 or 15 years later, I would have just been, I would have been the Star Wars kid like bullied online video. So it was just like, I never thought about it because it was just this perfect confluence of environment that allowed that to be like not that abnormal.

When did you have an epiphany where you were like, oh, I'm really intelligent? Was there someone you were talking to and you thought like, what, what? What was the transition from- Or did you feel like maybe the opposite when you got to MIT because you're with the most- what is that like? It's almost like the beauty queen moves to L.A. and realizes there's 800 beauty queens. Yeah, it's interesting.

So I actually remember very distinctly this moment where like I was, I don't know, I was maybe like 12, 13, 14. I was driving in the car and I was having some conversation with my mom about something and about like someone else. I can't remember if it was another kid like not kind of understanding. And I like couldn't understand why they couldn't understand. And she said, well, like, you're not, not everybody has the same capacity. And that was like a completely foreign idea to me.

It had never dawned on me that there was people that had different like processing capacity. And like, let's be honest, I'm good at some stuff. I'm horrible at other things. And so like that was the first time I remember thinking like, oh, there's like, there's some kind of a level system here. And like, that's interesting. I should lean into that. I think like once you realize when you get to MIT, there's a lot of really smart people.

But the thing that distinguishes the successful from the smart is work. and the people that survived MIT and Flourish with people that just grinded it out. I'm also going to say something else that I think probably made you stand out at MIT. Some really intelligent people have problems socially and you don't.

Like I feel like I could throw you. I've thrown you in with my parents. I've thrown you in with my new friends, Gilling and Maricio, where you like become friends with them instantly. Like I've thrown you into so many different circumstances and you're really good at socially, Why do you think that is?

That's 100% because of how I grew up with my dad and my mom. If you think about what my dad did for a living, you hear symphony an opera conductor, you probably don't think like performer, but that's what he did. He got up and he was a rock star in his world. That was always surrounded by the meets beforehand, the meets afterhand, the business dinner dinners. And so my mom like learned how to be like this incredible social like chameleon where she just really learned how to like sit at any table with any set of people from 85 year old lady in Miami wearing a 20-carat, you know, canary diamond who was a big donor to like an up-and-coming artist and just engage with them. And I was around that all the time. And so it was just like what was normal to me. So like my mom is like a master of that. And I just absorbed that from her. What do you think is more important to instill in your child and in our child? Smarts and intelligence or being a social chameleon? And you need to get really specific on why.

smarts and intelligence or being a social chameleon. Obviously you want to do both, but what do you lean to as being more important as a life skill? You know what? I, well, it's funny because, like, Faith and I would probably answer this question a little bit differently because of our backgrounds.

Like, she would, you can talk to her about that this afternoon. Careful, Neil, careful. Yeah, for me, like, smarts and intelligence matter because it allows you to be intellectually honest with what's going on in your head. And I think if you're focused on that, like you learned very quickly that as long as you're like feeding the beast between your ears like

you can find comfort in anything. So I never needed social. I just happened to pick it up and it was a great amplifier to having the ability to like cover a lot of ground. So you go to MIT. MIT when I was in high school was the gnarliest possible school you could go to. Did you feel like that? I was on the other side. I was one of them. How do you call him now? I think I was one of the dumb kids. Oh. I was, that's what they call them now. I can say that about myself. I thought the other side of MIT was Harvard. My option was like, you are going to the University of Arizona, the Harvard of the desert, or you are going to community college, or you're going back to work at McDonald's. Like that's so, I chose the University of Arizona. Very proud of my regional

development degree. It's brought me a long way. But we called MIT the University of Arizona of the east. You're at MIT and you meet someone there. And, and, you meet someone there. And, And you end up, I'll fast forward and you can give us all the details. You end up being featured in a movie. I wasn't featured in the movie. Well, that's not true. You are featured in the movie. This is true. Okay. So let me give the context for this. And I'm going to fast forward in the story a little bit. I went to MIT. I stayed there. I worked during the summers at a company. And then I spun out of that company, my first company, which was a venture back company. We built that company. We sold that company. It was a right time, right place, internet company. We sold the company in 17 months for $280 million. It was like a huge. outcome. So I was 24 years. Glaze over that real quick. What's the company called? The company was called service metrics. Okay. So I know, of course I didn't own all of that company myself. I had a nice exit there. And so you're 24 years old. You've got some money burning a hole in your pocket.

What are you going to do with it? You're going to open a bar. So I did. I got some friends of mine and we opened a bar in Boston and what used to be called the Combat Zone. It was a red light district. And we kind of were one of the first bars that's open there, which is now like the super hot spot in town. We found some additional investors and one of the guys that got involved, was the guy named Jeff Ma, who's now one of my best friends. And it turns out that Jeff Maugh was a figurehead in this whole storyline about MIT kids playing Blackjack and going to Vegas and beating the system. He kept bringing this guy named Ben Mezzrick along with him.

Ben Mezric was writing a book about Jeff. That book became one called Bringing Down the House, which turned into the movie 21. That's a great book, by the way, too. It's a wonderful book. And Ben has continued to go on and do just block. He wrote the book that became the movie The Social Network. He's done a bunch of other, just kind of really amazing stuff. He's also one of my best friends of love Ben.

So I was just becoming friends with Jeff and Ben during this whole thing. And during the filming of the movie, they needed some insight into what it was like to go to MIT. And so they sent me a very early version of the script. And there was a whole like Goodwill Hunting had just come out. So there was this like take a pen and write on the window in the hallway, mathematical, like, view of like what being intelligent was, and that's like not how MIT works at all. Like people at MIT are actually very well-rounded. And so I actually talked to the screenwriter and I told them about the first day of stats class and how they taught people statistics. It's something called the Monty Hall problem. So if you remember

when you go on to, well, let's make a deal, they say there's three doors, you pick a door, you either win the prize or if you don't win the prize, you can switch. And should you switch or not? And everybody thinks it's 50-50, but it's actually statistically not 50-50. They use of example for like showing how statistics can be tricky, but you can master them. So I was explaining all these stories and the screenwriter actually ended up writing three of those stories. They gave them actually into the script, into the movie, because it was much more resembling how like MIT really worked. I also became friends with a guy named Dana Brunetti, who now was sort of a sion of the movie industry. And he made 50 Shades of Gray and Captain Phillips

and a bunch of other awesome movies. And he just sort of like love my participation so much. that in the movie, the main character is actually getting a scholarship to Harvard and they named a scholarship in the movie after me. So I had heard about this, I thought it was really cool and I expected maybe once in the movie that they would mention it, but for some reason, they kept writing it into the script.

So it's actually mentioned over and over again in the movie. So my name is like throughout that movie continuously. Let me ask you this, because on this show, in front of Lauren and I particularly, in a lot of ways, I don't want to say we're against college. But let me clarify.

I am personally against most people going to college, and I'll say blanket colleges or schools, if they themselves have to pay for it. But I'm not including like, listen, if you can get into an MIT or a Harvard or a Stanford. But in my particular case, like the University of Arizona or San Diego State, not to shit on these schools or good schools, but if you're somebody and you're a young person, you have to take on the debt to put yourself through it. And you want to be an entrepreneur and not a doctor or a lawyer. Yes.

Yes. as we've said a lot of times, like, maybe that is not the best path. You can always go back later, but to have to pay for it, if it's not the schools we've highlighted, because in my experience, like, I remember you. And listen, I remember it very fondly and Lauren remembers her school. And it was great. I'm sure you do remember it fondly. What do you remember about it?

But it was great to the sororities? What do you remember, Michael Bostic? Let me think for a minute. Hold on. Let me take a minute to just. Your eyelids are fluttering. I went to a place. No, but I was lucky enough that my parents paid for, for, for,

school. But I think about that school. I'm like, okay, like, yeah, we learned some things. But it was mostly like what Lawrence says, how to drink, how to party, I'd do certain things. I didn't like feel like if I had to pay for it, I wouldn't have necessarily wanted to take on all that debt. So I was very, very lucky. A lot of people aren't that lucky. How to apply a condom? Yeah. Did you learn that? No, I didn't really learn that school. They don't teach you that there. That came in handy recently, didn't that? Yeah. But I, but I think like if I had the opportunity, even if I had to pay for it to get into a place like an MIT or a Harvard, that's a different thing, because the people you're there with and the people you get exposure to, like, even just look at what the social network, like all the people that came out of that Harvard class or like MIT, all people that came out of years. But in most, I would say 99% of cases, it's not that. And I wanted to get your take on like how you feel about an undergraduate program. If you're somebody, a young person that wants to be an entrepreneur that has to pay for it. Yeah. So I think there's roughly three kinds of schools that matter. I think there's schools that teach you how to think. That's MIT.

I think there's schools that teach you how to network. That's Harvard. And I think there's schools that teach you how to do something. And that's a lot of vocational schools or schools that have like a huge amount of like focus like you see Davis on like agriculture or something if you want to be a vintner. I think you can argue that 80% of schools are not any of those things very well. And so that is I think where a lot of the money gets wasted. Yes.

What you see happening online now is the movement of schools that teach you how to do something online to make it more accessible. I will say as I get older and more curmudgeonly, I really appreciate the framework of teaching people how to think because the only thing that you buy at MIT is a ability to approach any problem with fear and solve it. That's all they teach you. And like that's what they'll tell you. And like that could be like sending a man to the moon if you're an astrophysics degree or could be starting a company. You literally leave the school fearless. That's amazing. I've never heard you say that. I don't know if I ever said it before. Well, that's an amazing, but that is an amazing skill that I can tell you my regional development

degree from UVA did not teach you. Right. So I guess like we could, I get personally some flak sometimes when I, when they say, oh, how could you be against? I'm not against education. I think any form of education is good. I'm against young people taking on massive amounts of debt without understanding fully the education that they're actually going to get in return. So like you get out of school with $100,000 in debt and you don't get the skills that we're talking about. And you go and apply, let's say you go and apply for a job at a place like Dear Media. I'm not looking at the college degree and also like to start at a starting job. Listen, there's further, like to dig yourself out of $100,000 in debt.

Like you have to make so much. You're just, I think like my wife, Faith is Australian. And so it's interesting to look at Australian culture versus US culture. In Australian culture, like, you're taught to buy a house. Like that's the thing that you make an investment in. And you don't really think about like renting. you try to buy as fast as possible. In the U.S., you're taught to get an education.

They actually cost about the same amount of money. But I think a whole bunch of people in the U.S. get an education where they should think about spending that money in another way. Like, you don't, when you're 22, go buy a house, you get an apartment because you don't know what you want to be or where you want to be. You want mobility and flexibility. And, like, our cultural system has valued the investment in education, like the Australian cultural system has valued the investment in houses.

And actually, interestingly, in Australia, it's inverted as well. not everybody goes to college, and it's partially because the vocational jobs have a much higher pay rate. They have their minimum wage is about $25 an hour. So, like, some of the wealthiest people are like electricians and plumbers. They call them tradies. And so you can actually, like, go through a non-educational path and make a really good living in Australia. It's just like it's a funny, like, cultural underpinning of, like, where you put your chips on the table. And I think that's changing in the U.S., just like the housing thing is changing in Australia.

I have a question, and this might sound ignorant. Can you count cards? Like if the cards were on the table right now and it was legal, can you, like, can you do it? I mean, like, I know how to, but that's not really the trick. The trick is counting cards with 55 other things going on. What do you mean? So explain this in like really kindergarten terms. Yeah, so basically like, okay, and I'm going to butcher this.

If Jeff Ma was here, he would be like pushing me out of my chair to explain this. The whole idea is that everybody thinks the games in Vegas are games of chance. And that is true, right? You spin a roulette wheel and the ball bounces around and you don't have any control over that. But it's and craps is a great example, right? You roll the dice and they land what they do. But blackjack is not that because blackjack has memory. So when you sit down at a blackjack table, there's six decks.

It's called a six deck shoe, right? And they do that because they just want to keep the game moving along and they don't want to keep shuffling cards. Well, if you can predict the likelihood of a certain card coming out of the deck, you can make a statistically small change in how you bet to your advantage. And so everything in Vegas is about like the house having a 2% advantage or you having a 2% advantage. So think of it this way. Let's say you had six decks of cards and every single card came out except for every 10 king, queen, jacconies.

That was the last set of cards that you knew were sitting in that shoe. You would bet every single dollar you had on the planet because you were guaranteed to get a 10 or a 21 on every single hand. Now, it never works that way, but you can have these runs of the cards where statistically it's more likely to get a 10 or a Jack or King or King or Queen. So you can get a 20 or 21. And so card counting is about having a very simple system of looking at every card that comes out of the table because they have to play them all up.

And you can say, okay, this is the likelihood of a 10 coming up. And it's getting better and better and better because that 10 hasn't come out of this deck in a long time. And when the 10 doesn't come out of deck in a long time, the odds slowly shift in your favor. And at some point in the time, they shift positively in your favor where you're against the house, where you're beating the house. What happened is, so that's what card counting is. The problem with traditional car counting is that if I sat down at the beginning of a six-deck shoe, I would have to play a ton of hands hoping that the count came in my favor, that I could ratchet up my bet and start making money.

But I'm going to burn a lot of money in that process because I don't have any advantage in the beginning. This is what the MIT team figured out. If you fielded a team of people in a casino, because multiple people sit at a table, you have one person playing like $5 a hand keeping the count when the count got in the favor of somebody because you can come and sit down at a table when half the shoe was already turned. They had signals that signaled someone else on the team to come over and sit at the table and they had verbal system of explaining where the count was. Like what do you mean?

Give an example. So they would say like, it's really cold outside. And cold to mean the account was like plus seven. It was a certain amount in your advantage. And so the person would kind of know where they were in the deck from like a statistical perspective. And they could jump into the table towards the middle or end of the deck and just start up and the best. And just start coming in as the $100 player, $200 player, a thousand dollar player. Because this happens all the time in Vegas. It's about social engineering. In Vegas, you've got like the person that's sitting there drinking drinks, getting free cardian diets. And then you got like the person who just wants to like roll up, swagger up, put $300 in the table for no reason. So it's not abnormal to see someone do that. But you're just expecting that they don't have any information. The MIT team figured out how to give them the information to do that when the bet was in their advantage. So they would go in and they would work a whole casino floor as a team. They would have like someone burning small amounts of money to try to figure out when there was a statistical advantage. And then these big players that had these big personalities they would play that would just like roll up to the table and just put down a bunch of money.

Were they all splitting the money when it was over? Yeah, they worked as a team. So how much would they make on like an amazing night? Well, so it would go way up and way down. I think I don't know this for a fact. And there was multiple teams at MIT doing this. There was one that Jeff was on got kind of written about in the movie. I think that the team that Jeff was on ended up making millions of dollars.

Okay, let me ask you this. I know. With Neil just explaining that to you because I'm not a Blackjack player, you play Blackjack when we go to Vegas. Could you do what he said if you had a team? Could you do what he said? Could you do what you said if you had a team? Quick break because I need to do.

discuss birth control. I've recently had so many DMs from women all over the world asking for more resources and information and discussion around birth control. So I learned recently that there are more than 21 million women who are not using hormonal birth control. And I'm one of them. But now, the FDA recently approved a birth control option that's completely hormone-free. You guys may have seen me talk about this on Instagram already. So it's called fexy. And it's this complex. And it's this combination of lactic acid 1.8%, citric acid 1%, potassium biotrate, 0.4%. It's this vaginal birth control gel that comes in a small applicator like a tampon and it works immediately and can be used up to an hour before sex. So basically you apply the gel before you have sex and only use it when you need it,

but you have to apply it again before each act of vaginal sex. So when you try it, remember, one dose, one hour, one act. And I have to tell you guys how it works because it's insane really. Like, I kind of geeked out when I learned this. And you know me, I had to overshare. We're going to go there. Normally, without Fexe, when a guy comes and semen enters the vagina, it causes the pH of your vagina to increase, which allows sperm to keep swimming and make their way up there to fertilize your egg. Are you listening, Michael and Taylor? So Fexe works by maintaining the vaginal pH to a level that reduces the mobility of the sperm, reducing the chance of the sperm reaching the egg. How awesome is that? While Fexe could be a great option for many women like me who are seeking hormone-free birth control,

it isn't right for everyone. So be sure to tell your health care provider if you have a recent history of three or more urinary tract infections per year. And obviously, as with any new birth control, be sure to check for any ingredients in Fexi you or your partner may be allergic to. The most common side effects reported by clinical trial participants are vaginal burning, and yeast infection. Some male partners also reported local discomfort. And remember, Fexie only works when used before sex and it doesn't protect against STIs, including HIV. To learn more about Fexy, ask your healthcare provider and visit fexy.com for complete product information. That is phexxxI.com. And Michael, don't pop a boner.

The problem is this, like, if you were sitting here and like flipping the card over and I was like, there's a little system for like plus one minus one or neutral and like to kind of keep track of where you are. If you were just handing me cards and I was just saying plus one minus one, et cetera, I could keep count. But you can't do that. You have to like pretend you're not looking at the table. You have to like talk to a girl. You have to order a drink. You guys are all bad multitaskers.

Let's be honest. Yeah. I mean, if you get caught doing this like they, I mean, well, listen, back on the mob brand, they break your fucking hands. But now they just throw you out. Like it's not like, they don't like say like, hey, you're allowed to. See, the thing is it's not illegal. And the reason it's not illegal is the definition of breaking the law in Vegas is affecting the outcome of the game. You're not affecting the outcome of the game.

You're using the history of the game to give you statistical advantage. But they have that their discretion who they can. They can walk you out of the casino. And I've gone with Jeff many times. They know him by name. What do they do? I went there once with him and Kevin Spacey and Kevin Spacey was sitting at the table. Jeff was like standing behind Kevin.

They're like, Jeff, nowhere, 100 feet away from him. Because they just don't trust that he's not passing him signals. Let me, let me, I want to go back. Wait, can I just ask one question before you go back? Hold on. With what you just told me and if you had a team of people, could you go in and do that because you know how it works if you wanted to? You still could, but they practice for like months and months and months hours and hours.

It's not just something you can just walk in and do. No, if you're like autistic or something like that and you like have that capacity. But like they, I mean, they really practiced for for a long, long time. And the thing is, it's a grind because like you're getting like a tiny advantage. And so it's not like you get a fit. 50% advantage. So you might go in there and it could be like really in your advantage and you could put $10,000 and you can still lose. And so you have to play tons and tons of hands. I mean, the casino wins because a million hands are played every single month and they have a

2% advantage. And so like they win some, they lose some, but over a lot of hands, they win money. And you have to like be able to play a ton of hands as a team to make that statistical advantage turn into a lot of money for you. So it's like, it's very hard to do casually, which is why they never saw it coming. And they did this all over the country. in lots of different casinos for years and they just fleeced people. It was awesome. It was very balzy. I want to go.

Okay. I think you touched on something that's really important, especially this year. There's a lot of people that have been driven. I mean, I don't think, there's been different times. I don't want to say that. But in recent memory, there hasn't been as much fear mongering and fear in the world as there has been in 2020. Let's say recent. The world's obviously been in much worse places.

But in 2020, it's a lot of fear. And you said one of the skills that MIT teaches you is how to go through life and get rid of the fear. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? Because I think there's a lot of people listening that are living in a fear-based state and would benefit from understanding on how they can eradicate fear from their minds. Sure. I'll say that, like, in general, MIT teaches a reduction of fear in a specific context, but you can learn to apply it to other things, right? People at MIT are there to solve big problems. And so what usually keeps people from solving big problems is how intimidated they are by them. They don't even know how to deconstruct them. So MIT just sort of teaches you

how to approach problems fearlessly and start deconstructing them. And so that might be like, how do I start a business or a podcast or how do I buy my first house or what other the case may be? So it's that very special kind of fear that they teach you to kind of get around. But I think that can apply to life, right? Because every single day is just a series of decisions, some smaller or some larger. And I think it's a, I think it's an incredibly useful skill if you generalize it to just figure out how to like tackle anything that's in front of you very unemotionally. I mean, like one of the first conversations that you and I sort of deeply engaged in is the whole conversation of stoicism, right? And I think to some extent, stochism is like a

version of this, right? Which is all of like the emotion that we feel is that is us applying some kind of emotion to something that doesn't have any. So like that's a scary problem. I feel scared. Well, it's not. It's a problem. I'm applying the part where I feel scared. You're taking something that has no regard to how you feel and you're actually putting feel. And that's literally everything in life. Problems don't care about you either way. And your wife always talks about how you guys in Michael does this too, how you both of you, when you guys are upset or annoyed about something, you want Faith and I to emotionally match your emotion.

Emotional residence. Yeah. What's emotional residence? So I realize this pattern about myself. And I used to do this like in business a lot more, like especially like as I became a leader and a CEO as I progressed in my career. I constantly was trying to look at myself and see what I was doing right or wrong. And what I realize is that like when I'm feeling a certain way emotionally, like I'm stressed

or I feel urgent or I'm excited, I want. my team to reflect that. And so I want us to all sort of like be like emotionally cycling the same way. And it's the same thing I realize when I was in a deep relationship with faith, like, depending on how I felt I wanted her to like be there. And it's completely and utterly unrealistic because people don't work that way, right? Like people have their own lives. They have their own emotions and they frankly don't want to take your emotional journey with you. I mean, I think part of the thing about being a CEO and being a mom and being whatever is like it's highs and lows and lows and lows all the time and like, that's not a journey you want to take a lot of people on with you. And so I learned to

just step back from asking people to sort of emotionally resonate with me. I will say that faith has gotten really, really good. She knows like when to pick and choose the moments where she does sort of like jump on that roller coaster. And because like sometimes it's just like what your partner needs. But like it's something we talk about pretty, pretty openly. And in my current company, I think I've done a really good job of I introduced Stoicism to the executive team. It's how we interact with each other. Nothing's emotional. It's all. factual. We don't take each other on these emotional journeys. And like we put in our nine, 10 hours a day. No one's working 16 hours a day. And we get more done than when I was 25 working 16

hours of day. So go back because I know, Lauren, like, you're really getting on a tangent. I want you to go back on some of the exercises that help you eradicate fear of that MIT. Like, imagine you're somebody or a young person and you have fear to start a business or a podcast or a blog or you're scared to put yourself out there to create content, whatever it may be. Like what were the tangible exercises that they put you through to in order to. to get rid of that fear so that you can actually execute. Okay, well, so let me give you the, the, all the money that I spent on MIT, probably $120,000, which like these days is like one year, but back then it was four years,

was worth one statement from one professor. I went to this class, I forget what it was. And he said, what's the easiest way to solve a problem, right? Lots of hands shoot up. No one gets the answer. He said, ask someone who already knows the answer. Like, that is the simplest answer to your question, right? And so the way that I work is when I have a problem, the first thing I do is figure out who already knows the answer to that problem.

And now there's a social fear that then gets introduced because you have to go find those people and you have to reach out to them and you have to ask them to get their insight. But I think the world is much more accommodating of people giving you their time if you're asking for a very specific reason. So you learn very quickly, especially in the tech world, to just like go talk to people as your, first point of entry into problem solving. The second tool, which I actually learned later in my career, is something called the double diamond. It's how a lot of people design products. The double diamond is simple. It's when you're trying to come to a decision, avoid feeling like you need to make a decision, go through a process that allows you to be very expansive in terms of how you define the problem, and then slowly you start to contract. And then once you

start to contract, be very expansive and tactically how you implement what you've learned. Give an example. Okay. Like, take, like, you guys just bought a house. Like, explain how, yeah. That is a great, great example, right? Thank you. So we just bought this house in Encino. We bought a house that needed a remodel, right? A face, like, literally didn't let anybody come into the house until we had taken all the floors out of it because she was embarrassed. And like, when you've got a big house and you're going to do a remodel and you've never done one before, like, that's a, a, really. That's a, really, really crazy, complicated anxiety-inducing problem. Like, you don't know how much it's going to cost, how long it's going to take, et cetera. So, like, it's natural to want to try to

get to answers very quickly. What is this going to cost? Can we afford it? Like, how exactly are we going to configure the house, et cetera? But the double diamond philosophy would say, set all those questions aside because you're going to get to them. And first, enjoy the journey of thinking about what it could be. And so you start looking around the house. You start working with your designer. Oh, maybe we could put the kitchen here. Let's put some arches in here. We get sliding doors here.

We can rent and do the landscaping this way. And we just spent a huge amount of time enjoying the expansiveness of like what remodeling a house could be. And then we got to a point where we're like, okay, like we've got enough interesting ideas. Let's now start prioritizing and then putting them into a decision set. But then you get into the next thing, which is like, well, like, how do you find a general contractor and how do you, what's the schedule, etc? That's the tactical execution of it. And you also then have to allow yourself to not have all the answers to sort of like do a lot of stuff and see the interconnectedness of pieces and create a lot of spreadsheets and throw a lot of stuff away. And then you finally come to a point where like enough of it comes together that you have a good picture and you can actually get very, very tactical about how you get stuff done.

The way I describe this, people always ask like, how do I come up with new ideas for businesses? And I say like it's like watching like a pointillist painter making a painting. So pointless painters put little dots and like sooner or later they all join into something. You just have to wait until there's enough dots on the canvas. You have to get enough stories from users. You got to get enough experiences. And like the painting just reveals itself to you. Now, it might not be a painting that's awesome.

And so you might then abandon that and not follow that business. But if you just decide, I have to have an answer to this. And that's the first thing you decide. You don't let yourself go through that journey. It's a design philosophy, double diamond, but we use it in our business every single day. But I'll tell you what's the painter called really quick? It's just a type of painter, pointillus painting. Pointless.

Pointless. I'll tell you like when it comes to, I think you can apply it to business, especially with new business ideas. Like Lauren and I, we'll just take it into this podcast. We sat around in Mexico. I mean, people know this story that listen to the show. We sat around in Mexico drinking margaritas and said, wouldn't it be great if we could do this podcast?

And on the podcast, we could speak to this audience about things we wanted to talk to. And eventually one day, like enough people would listen that maybe we could go and get X guest or Y guest. And we started talking about all the different people. I'm here. You've made it. And we started talking about like all the people that could we could potentially meet doing this and authors that we admire and celebrities and whatever business leaders. And like we talked about all of that stuff about what it potentially could be before we knew how to do any of it. Like in that conversation at that time, we had no fucking idea how to record it. We had no. No idea how to distribute it.

We had no idea how to edit it, no idea where it lived. No idea how to even get it up on the web. But we just talked about all of the possibilities that if we did it. And then like when we got home, we're like, okay, now that we've talked about it and envisioned in our mind, like what it could be, the first thing we could do was like, we were on Google, like, how do you produce a podcast? And we figured out the equipment. And then it turned into like, how do you record it?

And we did. And then after we did it, we're like, how the fuck do you upload it? And we Googled it. It's a pointless painting. But the whole idea was like that. And then later on as it grew and it got bigger and it came to Dear Media was the same thing. Like imagine if we could do what we did for ourselves or other people and help them. And I think that like in a weird way, I always tell my team like I'm trying to live like two to three years in the future.

And when I say that, I don't mean like I'm there. I'm thinking about like what something can be before it's there. Because I feel like if you don't do that, you can't start taking the steps to get you there. So maybe a way to conjoin the two things is the process of. being expansive is one that has no fear to it. Because fear only comes when you're forced to be to reduce. And so when you reduce things, you start to think,

am I making the right choice? Am I not doing the right thing? Did I take something off the plate that's valuable? And so you need a balance of expansiveness, which is the beginning of the process, enter the process, get emotionally engaged and invested in the process when there's no fear involved,

because there's no fear in throwing ideas up on a whiteboard. It's only when someone says, let's not do this or that that it enters. And I think like that's kind of a lot of what they teach you at MIT like, which my process is go talk to people because talking to people is not a fearful thing. It's an amazing thing. You get to learn a bunch of stuff you didn't know. So I think it all kind of is the same thing. But that's, I mean, I think you guys have been so successful because intentionally or not intentionally, you never have any fear when you talk about things that you're doing. Like when you talked about like building a vibrator, I'm like, there's so many vibrators. Like,

how are you going to do that? And like that didn't even cross your mind. mind to think about that, right? It crossed your mind to think about like how you could enter the market with something that was like interesting and different and unique for your audience and you were expansive about the approach to that as opposed to all the constraints that maybe make you not get to that decision. It's very Tony Robbins. Tony Robbins is live in abundance, not scarcity. And I think that that is the theme of this year. It's like how are you going to choose to look at COVID with abundance or scarcity? And I think for me, like I've just tried to look at this year of all the things I can do in the possibility. I want to go back to when you

sold. And I don't know if it was your second company. I think it was your second company and you need a huge buyout. That was the first company. Yeah. No, but. Well, I started my first software company when I was 14. What about, what about Toronto? No, that was a company that didn't work out. We can talk about that too. Oh, well, let's talk about that. Yeah, you got to have some points in the failboard too. Let's talk about the field. I want you to talk about both because I think a lot of people might be listening to like, man, this guy's just hitting. I thought that that did work out. No, and this is important for you because you're an accomplished entrepreneur and you've had many ventures and have a successful venture right now that's also backed. But talk about some of the losses,

too, because I think people, sometimes they'll tune out like, oh, this guy is just winning, winning, winning. It's like, no, there's losses along the way, right? And you've figured out how to continue to keep going after the losses. And a lot of people don't do that. I'll tell you a lesson that I learned after my first company. So I built and sold my first company when I was in my early 20s. The 20s is like a time for hubris, but hubris can kick you in the ass, right? Well, you don't realize after you have your first success is you attribute everything you did to your success. You never think I was successful despite the fact that I did X, Y, and Z. You never like write that down on a piece of paper. I read a book called What Got You Here Won't Get You There. And the whole, I'll

save you the $19 is like when you are successful, think about like how lucky you got because of some really stupid ideas that you had along the way. So what happened is when I went to go with my second company, I just did all the stuff that did in my first company and it didn't work. And I just thought it would work. Do you know there's a name for this? What's that? There's a name. I'm reading laws of human nature by Robert Green. And there, it's called the success delusion. Okay. Yeah, Perfect. Yeah. I was highly delusional about that. And of course, then you, what's really tricky about it is, at least in my experience, and I've seen other people go through this as well, is it's not like your ego doesn't let you come to that conclusion quickly. So like you do your next thing. It's not going as well as your first thing. You can't really understand why. And so you just start like applying these very like root force mechanisms to try to like get through it. Oh, I need to put more money into it. spend more time on it. I need to do all these kinds of things. It takes you a long time to come to the conclusion that there was a fundamental flaw in that business because what you're really doing

is you're unwinding your ego and not the business. Sometimes the business will unwind faster than your ego. But it took me like a good like six, seven, eight years of really pushing hard against a business that just like wasn't going to have the same success as the first one to realize this success delusion, you said, that I had from the first business. I had some other success is on the way and some other failures. And like the stuff that I'm working on now, I think, is trying to take all of that stuff, put it in the hopper and be very like methodical about sort of like steering away from the rocks and being kind of conscientious about not making some of those mistakes. So what is it due to your ego per se when you have a big success and you think

you're on top of the world and you're doing all these things and opening bars and thinking you're under the man? And then you do something in it and you kind of and you fail like you did. Do you start to question like, oh, wait, would I just lucky? Did I, do I not really have this? Like, what does that do to the mind? Or do you just say, hey, fuck that one up and get back on the horse? Well, I mean, I think like entrepreneurs always get back up on the horse, I think, no matter what. So I don't think I ever thought about that.

I think you just, the human mind is incredible at either taking credit for things or blaming things on externalities that have nothing to do with them. Right? Like, those are the two modes. And so. In human nature. It's called grandiose. Okay. This is great.

We have to say, like, grandiose. In the first business, like, I was the genius. Everything I did was smart. We built this business, like, of course. And then all the Sisiqon failures, it was like, oh, it was COVID or it was a bad time in the market or like venture caps didn't understand what I was trying to do, et cetera. And so it takes just a really long time to finally, finally, finally chew to the center of the Titi role and realize that what's in the middle is where you go.

And it took me like, yeah, it took me a decade. And when you have had some success, it's really easy. to play the escapism game from that thought process. Because how many of the like the second six movies did George Lucas make before he finally realized they sucked right at the Star Wars movies? Like I think it was like on movie like nine that people were like seven that people were finally like they're not very good. I don't know if he's realized that yet.

He actually there was an interview I read where he finally realized like on the last three or something. It breaks me heart to. I thought you love it though. I'm confused. I'm going to go on a bit. I'm going to get a muscle here for a second. It breaks my heart to.

And it took me a long time because I waited until episode nine was out to say, they could have been seven, eight, nine. I think Disney did fuck a lot. You told me your upset. No, but you know why? Because I waited. I was like, they're going to redeem it. They're going to, seven.

I get his little reset. He didn't really have a lot to do. Eight out. Eight. I was like, no, trust me. Nine, they're going to redeem it. They fucked it up. Okay.

I'm going to say it. But one, two, three wasn't so bad. No, no, one, two, three was. I mean, like, in terms of chronology. Yeah, one, five, six was the best. The originals were the best. their masterpieces. One, two, three

wasn't as bad and compared to 78. Rebels, what ended up rogue. Okay, I don't know what you're talking about. I have a question for Neil. And Hot Solomon wasn't that bad either.

I was just going to say, though, but what you were doing is you were ascribing the externality phenomenon to George Lucas. Like, there's no possible he could make a bad movie. It must be an externality.

But he didn't make 789. They kicked him out of it. Disney did that. I know. But like he has come to appreciate that he was incapable of hearing from anybody because the movie made a billion dollars,

right? Even though, you know, people didn't think it was very good. Let's talk about now. You are working on such a fucking cool project, something that I want you to share with the audience. Let's talk about how you started realizing that there was white space to have this idea and what it is now. Cool. So Trada, you mentioned that. When Trada finally folded, I was living in Boulder at the time. Boulder is a very small town. I was a known quantity because I had built a big company in Boulder, so people were watching what I did. We also had taken over the largest building in downtown Bolter. on the main street and they literally like, I was there literally like when they craned the sign off the building when we folded. It was a very emotionally challenging thing. It's like something out of a movie when they're taking down the... It was sad. It was sad. And so I was like, I got to leave. I just

need to go lick my wound somewhere. So I bought it one way ticket to Melbourne, Australia. And I got there one day before my 40th birthday. I knew zero people. Literally zero people. You just went alone? Yeah. I didn't know this about. I actually didn't know this. By myself, I decided to like write a book and play some guitar and be very bohemian and and lick my wounds until they were healed. You probably would have annoyed the hell out of me then. Yeah. Yeah, I would have. Yeah, we definitely would end up being friends at certain points in life. Right. I wouldn't want you to be playing guitar and playing bohemia music and licking your wound. I would have been irritated. Yeah, yeah. I'm glad I met you after that. I was still really fun. I did actually introduce Fireball to

Melbourne, so we can talk with that story. When I was there, I just was sort of like poking around and I came across this woman named Kayla and Cines, who I'm sure is this. now 30-something-year-old woman in Adelaide, Australia, who built this body guide, the bikini body guide 90-day. She was kind of the originator of this kind of 90-day format. And I was just in awe of how much of a cult in a community she had built online around this guide, right? And I know you've done some very similar things, and it's incredibly impressive. And I started kind of staring at it, and I'm like, I feel like I could do that. I really. interested to see the power of social selling. And so I came back and I found a trainer here in

L.A. who was a fitness trainer to a lot of Instagram influencers at the time and literally like hired her, taught myself Photoshop, hired a white room, got a photographer and just decided to make one of these things myself. And we made this beautiful 135 page guide and we took us on three months to make it. And we put it out and like, we basically like, you can't sell out of a digital edition, but we basically sold enough to cover the cost. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. And this woman that we hired, her name is Jane Glisten. She's an awesome trainer.

She's a little trainer here in LA. She had like 30,000 followers at the time. And I was like, okay, this is the future. So I started staring at the influencer market in 2016. And what everybody was doing at that time is they were creating these businesses that said, okay, there's these influencers with these big followings on Instagram and there's brands that want to work with them.

Brands know how to do that. So let's sort of like create this company that sits in the middle and let's introduce them and we'll help them run campaigns and we'll take money from doing that. The business trata that you mentioned that I failed at

did something very similar for people that were helping people do ads on Google. And one of the fundamental structural parts of the problems with that business is that we sat in the middle and we helped run the campaigns and so when something went wrong they called us. So it meant that we had to have a ton of staff and we ended up being a digital agency.

And so we realized that all these companies that were helping influencer marketing company, sorry, influencers and brands were essentially going to become agencies. That's fine as a business, but it's very hard to build a high-scale venture business. So we step back and said, like, what's going on in the world that we think is like the under current here? And what we realize is that people were starting to think of being an influencer or creator, blogger, or whatever you want, as a profession. And we thought that this was the first digitally native profession. Like really it's a profession that has come out of the internet.

What year is this? 2016. And so we said, well, okay, so if you've got a whole generation of people coming online that are choosing a new type of career and inventing a new industry, like what's an interesting business for them? And what we realize is that none of them are using LinkedIn. Because LinkedIn is all of the things that influences are not. It's about chronological jobs, not about the projects you work on.

It's very text-based. It's not visual. It's not kind of live and dynamic. It's not collaborative. And so we said, we think there's an opportunity to build a LinkedIn for influencers and creators. We started building that business. It's called influence.com. And now fast forward four years later, you know, especially with COVID, sort of putting

influences and creators and TikTok in front of everybody, I think we can all kind of agree that the influencer and creator profession, path is one that a whole bunch of Gen Z people want to follow. And it turns out that we were right. They weren't doing any of this on LinkedIn. And so a lot of them are doing it on our platform. The thing that we're really excited about by this is that we actually think that everybody that's sort of growing up now is going to have a very different experience of being a professional. And their experience of being a professional is going to be very related to their passion. Sat in my room and made software, but I was kind of a bit of unusual character there.

most people's first job is pizza delivery or working in a movie theater where the case may be. A lot of kids' first job is like selling UGC on roadblocks or making Minecraft stuff. Or like if you've got 5,000 followers and it's clear like where you live, the pizza shop down the road is probably going to give you your first professional job offer to work for them. Like that's the world that Gen Z is growing up in. Their exposure as a professional is people that are working on passion projects. I want to build a podcast. I want to build a website. I want to create content.

It's much easier to say to kids now chase your passion because your passion can manifest itself in so many different ways as a business. When I was a kid and my parents would say that to me, I'd be like, what the fuck does that mean? Like I didn't have, I mean, Lauren's a perfect example. She started at a time with her like, what the hell is a blogger? But she stuck with it and like stayed with her passion. For me, that was always very confusing. And I think for a lot of people that are in my age demo and maybe yourself, like it was

confusing because I'm like, my passion, what does that mean? Like I can either go get a job here. I can work at this car. There was no opportunity to go online and do any of this stuff. Now there is. So now it's happening. There's this massive surge in tools and infrastructure for people that want to monetize their passion. And part of that is finding... It's very realistic now. They can make a lot of money monetizing passions. And they can also find people to work with because sometimes it's more than just being a solopreneur. Like a podcast is a complex thing of editing and content of production and marketing and things like that. There's this whole infrastructure coming up in terms of like tools and things for influencers. But there isn't a professional network that they can join and find other people. Our vision, which is originally for sort of influencers to be successful professionally, has expanded to creators being successful professionally. And we believe is going to spin into a whole generation

of people that work remote, follow their passion, think of their resume as the projects they worked on. Like I was talking to someone today and I realized like I was around before LinkedIn was in existence. And so I remember when LinkedIn started thinking, who would put their resume publicly online? Like that made me bristle. It sounds like, that made me bristle. It sounded weird to me. Now it's totally normal. Think about this, right? In five years, if you're going to get hired for a job, they're going to be like, cool, show me what you've built. Like, because you had better have built a website, a square space, a podcast, an Instagram, right? Show me your digital footprint, for sure. Yeah. Not every single job is going to be like that,

but a larger and larger amount of the surface area of jobs are going to be kind of like content and knowledge working jobs. And so the idea of like what we have as an influencer resume now, five years later, like makes tons of sense. And so we're kind of, we're sort of skating where the puck is, as they say, and we just see like hundreds of millions of people coming online who are going to interface with businesses very different because Gen Z is also going to be on the hiring side of that. So they're not going to care about your LinkedIn resume that says I was director of marketing and XYZ company. They're going to be like, show me the thing you did. And we're the platform where people are building that professional presence and engaging with people.

And it's just like it's been incredible that businesses like Skyrock. What's funny is like there's one of my favorite books of all time is Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. There's a line in that book. It says, like, yesterday's gone down the river and Nate coming back. And I live my life. Like, like, I really, I mean, Lorna will tell you, I look, I very rarely look backwards. I look forward on it. Even if I fuck up, I'm like, well, and in my, honestly, in my family, people get mad because

like, why is Michael not more remorse? I'm like, it does me little good to go look backwards. It doesn't, I don't think it does really any way. I mean, I could acknowledge things that have happened in the past and past mistakes, but I have to look forward. That's just how I live. And, but I'd be lying if there wasn't a part of me that thinks, like, I was that kid that grew up with like Star Wars and X-Men cards opening packs and going to the

car shop. I was that kid that played a shitload of video games. I made my, I think I made my first dollars when I really think about it, like selling some rare card to some older kid in the neighborhood. Sure. And at the time, and this is what I think young people should hear, that was something your parents are like, hey, quit fucking around. Quit playing the games. We're playing with the cards. I was building the Lego sets and Mitch matching them and building some random thing that didn't, like, didn't exist. And like, if you think about that now, there's kids making thousands and thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars, opening packs of cards online, making, making Legos online into something weird, playing video games.

Like, there's people that are multi, multi-millioners from that. And it just wasn't an option. And there's, the point is, is if you are growing up now with this technology, like, you can turn any of those passions that people 10 years ago called, hey, that's a waste of time into something that makes hundreds and hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars. I'm honestly a little jealous of it because I would have been one of those kids. You just said you don't look in the past and you just completely got nostalgic. with us for a minute.

No, I said I typically don't. Okay, that was the lie. Down the river. Down the river. Down the river. You weren't listening. That was a lie. I said I typically don't like in those circumstances.

Little lie today. No, in those circumstances, I do think about it. And the reason I want to point it out is because I think there's a lot of kids that are like you could turn that into a business. Like there's kids right now I see online going live streaming opening packs of cards to pull rare Pokemon cards.

And it's having a huge like there's, their cards are coming back. Yeah. I mean, the kid that makes the most money on YouTube right now is the kid Ryan who does unboxing videos. Good for Ryan. It's insane. Ryan's like eight years old. I'm just jealous of Ryan. I'm just jealous of Ryan. You're going to be doing that. So tell us about influence. Give us, if there is an

influencer or a blogger or a vlogger who's listening, how can they utilize it in their advantage? I think, well, first of all, the platform's free. It's just like LinkedIn. You go in, you set up a profile. And there's a lot of different ways to use it. The most obvious way to use it is look for brands that are looking to work for. With influencers, we have 70,000 brands on the platform now. It's sort of sky. I think there's almost a thousand live opportunities to work with brands. That's a very, like, tactical way to think about using it. But it's very effective for a lot of people that are starting their career to get their first job, to create the first content, to have the first professional experience.

But what's emerging on the platform is influencers are starting, well, I would say like maybe like four or five years ago when we started. I think influencers were a lot more cagey about how they worked. YouTubers, like, tended not to talk to each other and share secrets with each other. or much more siloed in terms of how they thought. It's become a much more collaborative environment. And so we see influencers and creators now finding connection and working with each other. And one of the easiest way to meet someone to work with is if you're both working on the

same brands campaign. So if I'm working on a campaign for Halo Top Creamery, and I know 25 other influencers are working on Halo Top Creamery, I can figure that out and I can reach out to them. We can have to shoot content together or see what they're doing. Maybe they live down the street for me. And so we're creating context for people to start professional networking with people have similar passion. That's what I think is like the most interesting use case happening on the platform now

and that we're really sort of building into the future for. It's a sea change from when we started how much people are. They'll create a little DM group on Instagram and they'll reach out to like a mommy blogger who are like their content. They're like, hey, do you want to join my little group? Like either like a comment pod or even just like basic collaboration stuff. for they're like, which picture do you like better? They're starting to organize and collaborate really well.

We're helping facilitate more and more. We have 200,000 people on the platform all over the world. It sounds like community is the word. Yeah, so we do three things, content, commerce, and community. Those are the three things we do. Commerce is finding work with brands. Community is finding interactions with other influencers. And then we create content for for and about the industry.

We actually hired the editor of Rolling Stone, who was the editor of Billboard, to launch a publication called No Filter, which treats influences and creators as cultural touchdowns. We witnessed during COVID that essentially all of the storylines that were going on were seen through the lens of influencers and creators. And so we decided they needed a very legitimate publication to start talking about them. It's everything from what's going on today with Charlie D'emilios sort of story about launching her TV show to how different.

To Snapchat, we just did something with Quincy, actually. where they launched profiles in Snapchat, which I've been saying for years of something they needed to do. And we did a story on the first big Snapchat influencer who was taking advantage of profiles. It's so genius, though, because I feel like you're one of the first platforms to take influencers seriously. I think. Like you're treating it like Rolling Stones magazine. You just said treated musicians. Like all of a sudden, musicians started to be looked at as not just playing a guitar, but maybe they're selling merch at their tour.

and it was like a full approach. But let me ask, like, this is a question for everybody, for the world. Like, how could people not- Can you get that piece of pepper off your nose? No, I don't have a piece of pepper. Yeah, you do. How could, I don't care? How could people not take people with millions and millions of people watching them?

I've never understood that. I think it's like a resistance to taking, how could somebody make a living, taking pictures of themselves or things they like? Like, that's the resistance. But if I'm a business or a brand or a network or whatever it is, and I see that's where consumer, when I say, consumer customers and attention is. Like, that's an ego thing.

Like, you've got to take those medium seriously. So I think there is a massive shift happening across creation in general, where a decade or two ago, you had to have a high investment in production for people to take the content seriously. And that the production cost has been coming down and down and down and down, right? Everybody from like rappers doing mixtakes on SoundCloud to you guys are producing on podcast here to what's going on on YouTube. And I think it's been hard for the established entertainment establishment. And like Quibi is a great example of like that sort of like old school, new school

thinking kind of hitting a, hitting a conflict there. So I think a lot of people are just dismissive of it because like, oh, you shot that on your iPhone. So how valuable could that be? Quibi was an example of an arrogant person thinking that because they had that experience and production value that they could come in and do it better for that audience in this media. I remember reading it. People might not like that take on it, but it's true. Yeah, I remember You're a billion dollars at it. The success delusion. There we go.

And so what was interesting, though, is Jeffrey Katzenberger. I remember reading an article where he was like, rather than spending a million dollars a minute, we're spending $100,000 a minute. And he was like, that's transformative. I'm like, how about spending $10 a minute? Right. Like, that's what people are doing on TikTok. Or how about spending? Some people are spending nothing.

Something Navy sold a million dollars in 30 minutes with no marketing besides her own platform. Yeah, exactly. So the other thing that's gone on, which is, so one is just kind of like a general like appreciation that you don't need high production costs for it to be quality. The second thing that's gone on is that I think influencers have gone through this journey where they were looked at as a marketing channel for a long time. They were just another form of media. I'm going to buy that billboard. It has those demographics. That's how many people see it.

To an e-commerce strategy to now it's much more of a media and entertainment vehicle. And of course, it's like still the spectrum across that. Broadening it out from marketing strategy. I think has legitimized it culturally in a really valid way. And it's the reason that we hired Nick from Rolling Stone to build this publication No Filter because we want it to be on the forefront of telling stories with that level of seriousness. And now really like there's pretty much nobody that writes about influences and creators the

way that we do, right? The New York Times will write some stuff very once in a while. It's very all-anguard way that you're doing it. Yeah. And it's great. Like we're starting to get recognized by, you know, big talent managers. People are starting to come to us and tell us. in a way, like a lot of publications do in a way where it's like these are like secondary

forms of people. Like these are like people that we don't, that like we talk about, but we don't take as serious as like an A list. And to me, like it's a miss. Like a lot of these big publications are going to regret that decision because they're going to be looked at. If you go back in history, they're going to look and be like they should have taken it seriously the way you are because it's this resistance by establishment people that is going to ultimately be their undoing. I think Nick said to me, the state of the art is what he calls journalistic tourism. So like, just to pick a random example, men's health magazine writes an article on a male fitness influencer. It's one page, but the rest of it is normal men's health stuff.

Like that's journalistic tourism. It's like, oh, that's cute. Everybody look at that what we're driving by on the bus. We're like, no, like that should be what every page of the magazine is about. So that's what we're doing. Let me say this too. There, I talk, this is the example when I'm actually having talked about it in the podcast, but I think you will get this as you operated businesses.

If I tell you as a business, hey, Neil, I want you to put up two podcasts a week. I want you to create unique content every single day with different graphics every week. I want you to have different captions every week. I want a blog post to accomplish that. And I also want a YouTube video every week. How many people you hire for that? Well, if you're Lauren, she just does it herself because she's genius. But my point is, I mean, that's a team.

Okay, that's a team for any business. Same with dear media. Not going to take the success delusion. Here's where I'm going with this. Any company, product-based company, media company, whatever. That's a team.

You just hit it on the head. Same thing with your media. What people need to understand about most influencers is it's them, their iPhone, and their can, and them.

Like maybe they might have a freelancer or might have a corner. And they're creating all of those things themselves. That is a media component, a media entity. Like that is typically, if you want to do that as a company,

you hire a full team. And that's why I think people are missing the mark with influencers. It's like they're producing so much content at such a rapid pace, at such a massive pace with limited resources, limited teams, and that in itself should be taken seriously

because if you can work with an influencer or a content creator to do that, and it's one or two people, as opposed to hiring a team of 10, which in our world is like, what is that, half a million bucks a year in hires, like that's why this medium, and these people need to be taken seriously

because it's just, it's a lot of fucking content and it's impactful. Well, and so cost effective. As the opportunities for distribution scale hugely for influencers, more and more people have to bring on other people. And so back to my original thesis, you've been doing everything yourself and you're like, oh, man, I just need someone to do audio editing.

It's not my forte. Where would you go online right now to find an audio editor? If you were making a podcast in Boise, Idaho, like, would you go on LinkedIn? Like, maybe, maybe not. I'll tell you this, you all, bad luck doing that. We've done that. It's hard. It's hard.

We're creating an incredible density of people that are not necessarily the talent. They're around the talent too, right? Like this is the industry that we're talking about. And what gets really fascinating about this is you kind of like go out a few years. Not everybody's going to be doing it full time. So a lot of them are going to also have regular day-to-day jobs. But all the people that are on the platform, all the brands on the platform now that are looking for, I guarantee you all the jobs that they're hiring for in the next five years are content creation, editing, marketing, digital media. So all the skills that you're learning, doing these

things are exactly the traditional jobs that you're going to have as your day job while you do your kind of like multi-business card passion projects on the side. It's so far. It's so Because when I launch product, I'm going to hire someone to obviously help produce content. And the person that I'm going to hire, I want to be a 19 year old. Because I want it to be someone so youthful that's so on the pulse that sees things evolving. I don't want someone who's even been a practitioner because the 19 year old has been a practitioner of content by just utilizing Instagram every day. So how many resumes on LinkedIn have you looked at? that tell you if that person is a good practitioner.

I would never look on LinkedIn. Zero. You don't. You can't. I'm going to go to influence. But I guarantee you if you take a look at something like Influences version of a resume, it's very visceral. You can very quickly understand the quality of someone's work. It's a genius idea. Let's take a left turn real quick. And I think, and have we not taken 20 left turns this conversation? How many left turns do you want? Because there's a lot of business.

We're literally like in Miami right now. I have the benefit. You have the benefit as well, Lauren, of knowing. Neil pretty well. And so I'm trying to extrapolate a lot of what's in that big brain of yours for this audience because I think there's dying. Stop using big words to impress Neil. I have to. What does extrapolate mean? Bring out like, uh, extract extract. Is that true, Neil? Yeah. Listen, I'm not checking with Webster. I'm not an MIT guy, but I'm not a not some. But you never never, never, never did. Never disagree with the host. Yikes. Yeah. I told you I didn't fall off the fucking. You went to S. X.X university. Yeah, and I got an A plus. Okay.

I want to talk about... Got it off the wait list. There's people sitting there right now, maybe listening and saying, I have this business idea, I have this content idea, I don't have any money, and in order to do this, I need money. And there's a lot of people that think that way, right? They look at your success with influence. They'll look at Deer Media. They'll look at these ventures. They'll look at these ventures.

types of money, whether it's angel venture, and how you think people should go about it. Because I believe that you should hold off as long as you can to bring on money unless X, Y, and I want to talk about the different types of reasons why you should. And I think you've done it so many times that I kind of want you to speak on it so that people that are thinking about starting a venture and bringing on capital. One, they can learn how. And two, they can learn when is appropriate. Because there's nuances there.

Yeah. I mean, so look, I've been fortunate. I think I've raised something like $75 million in my life across different businesses. To me, it's very simple. You only raise money when you know what you're going to do with it. And knowing what you're going to do with it means there's an opportunity in the business to take it to the next level. Businesses are like climbing Everest, right? You don't just like put on an oxygen pack and head up the hill. You go to base camp one. You hang out there for a while. You acclimate. You kind of get used to that. You get to base camp too. And you need more stuff and things. to go from base camp to base camp. If you've identified what base camp one is, like, great, raise some money. That might be like, charge up your credit cards. It might be like get some money from your friends or parents.

Eventually, that turns into doing a venture round, right? Which could be millions of dollars. But never just raise money because it's what you hear other people do. And I think one of the things that you and I talked about a lot when you're raising money is like, figure out like what you want to do with the money first and then raise that amount of money.

Because you should always raise enough money to get you to that base camp, even when some things go wrong. But not never, like sometimes raising a ton of money is just a way to like elbow everybody else out of the industry. But like generally speaking, you shouldn't raise tons of more money than you need because you'll spend way more money because it's sitting there burning a hole in your pocket and then you can't wait too much as your company.

I raise money personally. I don't think I've talked about this for dear media because, well, there's three things. One, I had self-funded it to a point where like if I didn't, I was not going to be able to scale the team where I needed to be to get it where we are now. to the podcast space in general. When Lauren and I first started five years ago, it was like, what the hell is the podcast? What are you doing?

Like it was kind of people, it wasn't so established. It's gotten very competitive. Obviously, everyone's talking about podcasts. And with that, it's gotten more expensive to operate and the competition's gotten fixed. So in order to continue to scale and get ahead,

I knew when we need to do that. And three, like you said, to get to base camp to be able to make the investments into the business that I knew I needed to make both with personnel, with office space, with studio, with content,

with marketing. like we needed to do it for this particular business. But in other businesses we've operated, like for example, Skinny Confidential and things like we've raised zero dollars because we haven't needed to. We could bootstrap and the business cash flows itself and we can get to where we need to go without. And I think it's something people should care about because I only did it because I knew for dear media per se, we needed to do it in order to compete with other businesses and get ahead. But for the other things, we didn't.

And so we don't. I mean, sometimes you have to have scale. So for example, in the actual. advertising world, it gets a lot easier to sell a million dollars of advertising than it is to sell $1,000. And that might seem counterintuitive to people, but any kind of advertising that gets sold comes with effort on the advertiser. They've got to place the order. They've got to look at the results. They've got to calculate how effective it was. And if it's a small amount of money, it's not worth their effort in doing that. For example, getting a bunch of more people onto the

network and scaling up the amount of listeners, things like that, it actually could make it easier for you to go and approach a whole different class of customer that might want to do across the network buys or things like that. And so like sometimes like that's just what the game is. Yeah, you could not go and do a, I won't say the brand, but you can't go and do a million dollar brand deal with six shows because there's not enough scale for that brand to deploy their budget. When you have 60 shows, they're like, it's actually, they'll come and say, hey, like, I need that kind of scale to do. It makes it very easy. And you would spend three times as much as much effort to close $10,000 of advertising as you would to close a million

of advertising. It's like those are good reasons to raise money and to go do things. things if you have the product, which you guys do that people want. But if people are thinking about, okay, so we're going to get in the weeds, but say people are starting out and they're like, okay, I think I have a business that needs some capital. Like where would you suggest people start? Because it's not as easy when you don't know where to go, who to go to, how to go about it, what to do, how to present a business. And I think like you've done it so many times.

And now I've done it that maybe you and I are like, I want to get very, I want to go back to early, early days of like, how do you even think about going? going and finding a way to raise capital. So look, I think what people should not start off thinking about is how to raise capital. I think they should start off thinking about if their idea is a good one to spend their life on. Oh, that's such good advice. So when I started my companies early on, it was hard to validate an idea. It's really easy and cheap to validate an idea right now.

Let me give an example, right? Like let's say you guys want to add a new product line to Wu. You can go on Google. you can write a bunch of AdWords ads. You can run it against a bunch of keywords that you think people would type in. You can send that people to a beautiful landing page that you could build for free in a product, one of 10 products that are out there. And you could offer something that just ask people to like enter an email address to get on the pre-sale list.

And you just run the numbers, go spend 500 bucks. And you'll figure out very quickly if people want that or not. The amount of energy spent building businesses and thinking about like, how do I raise money and who do I hire someone and whatever where like the business is, itself shouldn't even be being built is probably 80% of the energy in the business world. So I think what people don't understand is like we are in just like, and like it's the bell apoc of product testing now. Like you just don't need to spend any money to figure out if people want what you are thinking

about. And like there's nothing disingenuous to not having a product and asking the market to sign up for when you do. It doesn't cost anybody anything to put in an email. I mean, Kickstarter validated that. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's a very good example of it. So that's like I would almost just rebeck to the conversation to like, you know,

how confident are you that the thing you're working on is worth your life energy? Because businesses are hard. Okay. I say you do that. Then like what are the first tangible steps? Are they writing a business plan? I mean like we're putting together a deck. It's hard. Yeah. I think like in the old days you would write like a 20 or 30 page business plan. And these days you write like a 20 or 30 page deck. Right. And the number of words is probably 100 X less. I actually think that it's really useful because human beings are very good at holding like amorphous thoughts in their head and thinking to have them really figured out. And so business ideas are usually like pretty hazy. When you're forced to like write them down into like a coherent narrative on a deck, just writing them down even if you never gave

that deck to anybody is a very like hard process that you'll realize you've got a lot of holes in your plan. Once you write it down, go pitch it to five people, your friends and you're realizing the first three or three pitches that you're really, the things you wrote down still have a huge amount of holes in them, right? Like, like, that's the process that you go through until you finally have something that is like super, super coherent. And that's kind of like when you can start to think about other parts of the business. Just playing off what you said, what I would say, too, is instead of thinking about how can I raise money, I would put yourself out there online and what you said is like getting the consumer feedback. So I would start building your online

profile up on whatever that is. So say you want to be the expert in red wine, because Neil's drinking red wine at 2 p.m. So are we. But. The one's got me a little buzz there. Yeah. So say you want to be the expert in red wine, like start making yourself a resource for red wine. Sure. So when you launch red wine, you've content marketed to be the red wine expert. Like I think it's so important to content market.

Well, I also think two people don't realize that money is not always going to solve the problem. If it's a bad idea or if it's not a viable business, like the money's only going to make it worse in a lot of ways. Yeah. Look, I agree. I mean, I think everybody has something that they're. passionate about. So I don't know if you guys ever talk about like a thousand true fans concept on all the time. I love that article. Talk about that. So the thousand true fans article, which is, I think now a book, was very simple, which said if you can get a thousand people to pay you

$100 a year for whatever it is that you are an expert in, you can make a living, right? It's a $100,000 a year. And like when you think about like finding a thousand people in the whole vast world of the internet to spend eight bucks a month on something that you are knowledgeable about and that you can pay to them, it doesn't seem. like a very complex problem. This goes back to not being fearful about about a problem, right? So if I said, you are into motorcross and you need to go make $100,000 a year for something related to motocross, you might be like, how the hell do I go do that? But if you're like, okay, you only need to get 1,000 people to pay $8 a month for some kind of content you can create

related to motorcross, it starts to become a much more tangible problem. Like maybe you just summarized the races, right? And so someone didn't have to go watch them all or if they missed out of it or maybe like whatever, you research like really cool motorcross tracks all the United States and built an e-book or something. I don't know. I'm making stuff up. I think the Thousand True Fans idea is, was really a mechanism for reducing people's fear of jumping in and figuring how they could turn the thing that they knew about into something

that made them a living. And like most people can probably find off of $67,000, $80,000. So you probably need 600 true fans, not even a thousand true fans. No, I love that article so much. You have like even 500 people at $16. bucks or even if you want to build a million dollar business, a thousand people at a thousand bucks a year. You can get someone to spend a thousand dollars a year through the whole year. Like, no, I love that article. We reference it a lot because I do think it does exactly what you're talking about,

eradicates fear. If someone is a blogger or an influencer and wants to join your platform, how do they do it? Where can they find you, pimp yourself out? That's really simple. Our platform is influence. com.com. And you just come and sign up and site hopefully is no cost to influencers. No cost to anybody. I mean, if you're a brand and you're looking for influencers, you can go sign up for free. You can literally create a campaign saying this is the influencers I want to work with, and you can start reaching out to people for free on the platform. And if they want to work with you, you can work with them for free. Like, we don't make any money off of that.

We only make money when people become power users and they want to message a ton of people or apply to tons of brands or brands want hundreds of applicants and they need our help to kind of like get attention on their campaign. And in that case, they're monetizing as well. Or building a campaign. Exactly. So it's worth their time. It's a very, like, it's just a very fair system, right?

To win, win, win. Yeah, you come in and if you really want to go deep on the platform, you can pay it in it's like, you know, for an influencer, it's $48 a year if you ended up going to the pro version. And for a brand, it's $600 a month. So it's very affordable. I was featured on No Filter. We did an article there.

What is the Instagram handle for No Filter and Influence? We actually have at No Filter on Instagram and on TikTok. We're actually making our first TikToks now, where we summarize Influencer and Creator News. On Twitter, it's Nofilter Pub. And you can just go to no filter.influence.co. Okay. And then influence on Instagram?

Influence Co. And what are you on Instagram if people want to stock you in Faith and Aspen? Home address, social security number? Yeah. What's your thumbprint? Yeah. How big is your personality? Oh, I'll leave them.

Yeah. If you want to see an ode to my wife and to my daughter and to my dogs, you can go to my Instagram. It's Neil R1, N-I-E-L-R-1. Oh, I never know that. I was always like, what's R-1? Wait, what's one, though? Actually, that came from at MIT when I went to school there, you had to pick your email address.

And for some reason, there was a Neil R. And so my email address was Neil R1. And I kept that as my handle for the rest of my life. I love it. You should just call it Neil's drinking red wine before at 9 a.m. Yeah. I feel like I should really start a show where I just like every day at 1.30, I just drink a bottle of red wine. And we talk about what it feels like to drink wine.

No, what it feels like to be as smart as Neil Robertson. Instead of coffee's in car, you could do Merlot in cars. No, he should call it. What does it feel, what it feels like to be as smart is Neil Robertson. No, no. I just surround myself with smart people and I get their shine. Oh, thanks, Neil. You got to do it again, Neil. I'm just kidding. Neil, you can come back anytime. That was so interesting. I feel like that brought the audience so much value and you are a gym. Love your brother. Yeah, thanks guys. Appreciate it. Hope you guys are having the best holiday, a little giveaway. As always, we are giving away some of my favorite beauty finds. I'm going to ship it right to you. All you have to do is tell us your

favorite part of this episode on my latest Instagram at the Skinny Confidential. Please make sure you rate and review if the show has brought in you any kind of value. It takes two seconds on iTunes. And we'll see you as always on Tuesday.