Ex-Founder Michia Rohrssen: “I'm an adventurer!”

0:28Welcome to the Exit Paradox Podcast. to build the lifestyle of his dream, master investing, and find his new purpose. I've known Mikhail Rochson for long enough to vouch that it's the real deal. Raised by divorced hippie parents, he once relied on a soup kitchen, but grew up to become a world champion in three martial arts and built and sold the business for$100 million by the age of 34. Mikhail is here to share his secret of post-exit happiness and ongoing success. Mikhail, thank you so much for joining me today. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm very flattered. I'm very happy you're here. Thank you.

1:02Thank you. My first question is about Prodigy and why you even started it. I had started this company when I was 17 that basically sold DVDs of software online, teaching self-defense. And I had grown that to like six figures a year and then kind of watched it collapse, left it behind, started a marketing agency, also grown to six figures a year. and then sort of watch that collapse. And so Prodigy was me realizing, I know I want to make money, but what I'm doing is not working. And for the first time, rather than just saying like, let me just do what seems to be in vogue or online. So let me just look at how other young people have become successful.

1:49Facebook had just acquired Instagram for a billion dollars and the founders were like super young. It was a team of like, I think 16 people. Snapchat turned down$4 billion. WhatsApp gets acquired for$16 billion. All in the span of a couple months. And I was at the time, I would have been in South Carolina, and I was like, what am I doing here? Basically broke, running these failed businesses. I just need to move to Silicon Valley and start a software company. So if we dig a bit deeper into your personal reasons to start the business in the first place, what drove you? Why starting a business rather than getting a job?

2:24I've only had jobs my entire life for nine months or less. I don't love employment. Just because there's something about like the upside is just not, I lose interest in it really quickly. Whereas starting a business, it was clear to me that I could 10x, 100x every year, sort of my income net worth. And that became really interesting. going into my backstory a little bit like growing up poor not able to afford food family declaring bankruptcy things like that my parents divorced when i was four so when i was with my dad we would go to the soup kitchen and we'd wait in line for food um so you don't fully recognize the like socio-economic status that you're in but you recognize it's not normal it's not what your friends are doing.

3:17I think you feel like it's your fault in many ways. And to me, a lot of that shame was associated with not having money and just not being able to afford the things that friends had that normal people in life seem to have. It became clear to me that I do need that 10x or 100x income growth potential to make it out of the situation that I'm used to. So entrepreneurship was not the only way, but like one of the very few ways to do that. It was just where I wanted to be. It sounds like money was the main motivator. Money was a motivator most of my life. Would you say that you were trying to move away from that shame and that pain and that suffering?

4:01When I was a kid, I was always trying to achieve things that I would, now looking in hindsight, say would make me feel worthy enough just to find my existence. You know, I feel like I don't have this sort of like giant chip on my shoulder. I was competing in the Junior Olympics in judo when I was 13. I was a world champion in karate, kung fu, and taekwondo when I was 16. And then again when I was 17. and so I've always had this sort of like chasing external validation to feel worthy enough as just like part of my background around when I was 17 I started to dream of what like what could life look like and I came up with this big vision of like I want to own multiple homes around the world I want to have this amazing wife I want to travel all the time I want to be able to earn money without working and that became sort of this this uh pull so I had like the the negative self doubt sort of as this like pushing force pushing me forward and the vision for my life sort of pulling me forward and I think the combination of those two things really explains a lot of my 20s where I was just like constantly dreaming and working towards these goals and now you know you know me well so like you know that I do have those multiple homes and travel and like get to do this stuff so i actually cannot describe in words how strange it is to be in my own shoes today because every single aspect of my life is literally just what i wrote down in journals in my early 20s saying this is what i hope life one day looks like where do you do you think you got these ideas that traveling having a wonderful wife and multiple homes is the dream?

5:51I think a lot of it is just society's conditioning and programming like for sure this is sort of like the James Bond-esque lifestyle that I'm living now but also there was a book that was really influential in my life probably one of the most influential books ever was The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss just had this incredible life. Like he had tango danced in Argentina and I think he actually like won the world salsa dancing championship. He was a national kickboxing champion in China. He like lived in Taiwan for a while and actually almost opened a gym. So he had all these like really amazing experiences.

6:34And I grew up in South Carolina. most people in South Carolina basically are born by the house next to the house they were born to live there and die and like maybe one in every 10 people gets a passport like it's not normal to travel and see the world so I didn't really have any role models and Tim Ferriss kind of became like my role model of like what I would love to do is he still your role model you would say? I am so proud of who I've become and I've tried to carve out this uniquely Micaiah identity where it's not just copy paste Tim Ferriss's life onto my life I've taken things from Tim Ferriss but also other people that I say like I like what you're doing in life but I don't like other aspects so let me take the aspects that I do like discard the aspects that don't serve me.

7:29So you feel you have all the freedom you ever dreamt about right now? Yeah, it's actually the paradox of choice is really hard. And probably the biggest thing that keeps me up at night now is like, where should our homes be? What should we like, where should we travel to? Now that we have the full freedom and flexibility, it's almost a challenge in a way. But you also get, you're in full control of the pen. You get to write exactly what your life looks like. And going back to like the thing about money, money is ultimately the thing that enables that. I have a complicated relationship with money.

8:12I think the pursuit of money beyond freedom is a sort of wasteful pursuit. Yeah, I've met quite a lot of founders who exited their companies and were shocked that freedom is actually a big challenge. and that it's so hard to channel your energy anywhere and you procrastinate and just waste time and become very unhappy. But I think you're quite unique in that you've found a way to channel your energy, which brings me to my favorite topic, which is your amazing YouTube channel, Ask Micaiah. Not only I watch it all the time, but as you know, my teenage children are addicted to it. So I would really love us to talk about it, how you came up with the idea, how it affects your lifestyle, why you're doing it.

9:05That's the big question. Yeah, yeah. First, when I sold the company, everyone online said, when you sell a company, you're going to make a bunch of money and you're going to get depressed. And it's just, it's the classic, you know, tale as old as time. That's just what happens when you sell the company. So I was very aware that this could happen. And I really tried to convince myself I wouldn't be that guy or gal that like sells a company, gets depressed, but it happened. You just lose your purpose. You lose your sense of identity. And so for a long time, I was really struggling with like, what's next?

9:40What do I do? Do I start another company? Do I start consulting? Do I start doing like advisory or venture like angel investing? and I think about maybe a year into selling the company after I sold the company I really sat down one day and I was like so frazzled and stressed out and I said I'm just going to give myself permission to take time to figure this out I looked into angel investing I looked into taking consulting roles or advisory roles and those things didn't really hook me they just weren't that interesting to me and then separately I have been obsessed with YouTube basically since it came out like I've been I love film I love photography I I already film a bunch of our travels and like when me and my wife travel we like travel travel with multiple cameras multiple lenses the drones the whole nine yards like you would think we're a video company but we just don't even post a lot of it we just film it because we love doing it but I never believed that I could be a YouTuber I always thought I would sort of be maybe helping YouTubers launch businesses or you know just meeting cool YouTubers like I wanted to be in that I mean and then when I was in Zurich I don't know why but like one night something just clicked in my brain whereas like I have maybe it's going back to like the feeling of being unworthy I felt like selling the business sort of flipped the switch where I was maybe worthy enough to talk about my own experience so I said what if I was the YouTuber and like once that seed became planted and that was when I knew like this is what I want to do so I filmed my first YouTube video in Sylvania actually that I never posted just to be like let me get in front of the camera and practice that I was so excited about it and and then became the the bigger challenge around well how do I actually start this because I was still at upstart and I was in my earn out and the earn out was structured in a way where it was like it was a three-year earn out the first two years were interesting they were both um low seven figures uh for me to earn what I was and it was just time based but the third year was four million plus like an extra call it 600 ,000 plus salary and bonus so like it was almost probably 4.8 4.9 million dollars to stay that third year and that became a real challenge because I was like I really want to be doing this YouTube thing but I could earn a lot of money that is still meaningful to my net worth today like it's not a trivial amount of money if I stay and just work at Upstart.

12:35And I met with a bunch of folks in the Tiger 21 community, actually, and basically said, here's my circumstance. And basically everyone said, you would be really dumb if you stayed for the money. Stay if it's your passion and you really feel like you can do something here, but otherwise you have enough money. Just leave the money because you may never get these years back and go do your passion. So then I was like, okay, I got to do it. And walked away, left the full earner on the table. I didn't get a single dime of that third year and started making YouTube videos this year basically to try to help other entrepreneurs that want to live the life that I'm living and just teach them the lessons I had to struggle to learn.

13:25Like I had a lot of hardships, but also a lot of chance encounters and luck and great mentors along the way. And I recognize not everyone globally will get those same chances, but they can all globally access my YouTube. So if I can just bring some of that to them, man, I wake up every day and I'm super fulfilled in a way that I never was, even when I was making the money. Why you don't start a paid online course? I think that the make money space, the make money online space, the be an entrepreneur space, is uniquely crowded with basically fraudsters. These people say, buy my course and you'll get rich.

14:10And it turns out they have never actually made any money in business. They've only made money selling courses. Listen, I don't want to be in the category of those people. I don't respect them. I think they're basically taking advantage of poor people, which I think is like one of the lowest things you could do is take someone who spends their last dollar on your course to try to get themselves out of a poverty situation. And then you teach them nothing of value because you haven't actually done it. I'm very against selling courses, but I'm very pro buying courses for myself. Like I've spent, I have thousands and thousands of dollars of YouTube courses that I've collected over the last year.

14:55And they've been amazing. Like they've really helped me. They've changed my life so much. And I go through them and I'm serious about them. And I went through my receipts when I was running Prodigy. Between the equity that we gave out and the direct fees that we paid for advising from like different mentors, I think I paid close to, call it$770 ,000 in consulting, advising, and mentorship fees just for myself. And my co-founder also had his mentor, so maybe it's closer to over a million when you add it all up. I always felt secretly when I was running this startup that everyone in the company is sort of on a mental health journey with me.

15:36but youtube and and content is such a public thing where it's like everyone here is on the micaiah evolving thoughts journey um and you can hop off the train whenever you want but like if you're gonna follow my content and absorb it like i am still figuring out who i am and what kind of content i want to make um but my guiding principle is i only want to do things that collectively make my audience more money so if somehow selling a course I felt collectively made them more money than giving a course away for free then I would feel like I have a moral obligation to sell them a course if that makes sense but I haven't landed on that conclusion yet I think there may be other non-scalable things like one of the things that people ask for a lot is mentorship i get like dms every day of people who want mentorship and i just don't have in no way in my dream life that i wrote out was it like taking 30 hours of calls a week to mentor people like that just doesn't align with how i want to live my life but if there was a way to sort of somehow scalably mentor people um through some sort of online platform and bringing in other people, I've thought about doing something like that.

17:01Like the more money coming in for my content, the more money I can invest into the content. Because there's a certain, there are certain things that I think would be really cool that I just don't really want to self-finance to the degree that I want to. The thing that I'm probably most excited about right now is this sort of scalable mentor model. And I'd love to build a community around that where it's like, I'm one of the mentors, but I'm also getting other amazing mentors, potentially even paying them. And to do that, you have to move beyond just me making YouTube videos and having an editing team.

17:39You need a community manager and an admin to schedule all that. So that is something that I probably couldn't do for free. But I'm in no rush to do it. But it's sort of one of these, like maybe 2024, I'll think about trying to some way scalably mentor people if you think about more long term a few years from now and you absolutely have to choose between the path of building another business or just teaching or doing some form of philanthropy because you're now also talking about more philanthropic venture with your mentorship program what would be the path that excites you most? Building a business is absolutely not it, just to be clear.

18:30I think the stress of doing that is not in the cards for me again.

18:37As far as, I guess, like, yeah, creating content, selling stuff, or really philanthropic, I do have this sort of, I've never really told anybody about this, but this dream to, in my head, I call it giving away a billion dollars. But to be fair, it's not my money. I would love to help people collectively, if I'm my audience, sell businesses for over$10 billion and just ask them, like, don't give it to me. Congrats, you earned it. But could you consider giving 10 % to a cause that is meaningful to you? That would make me feel really cool. And I think it's maybe it's an ego thing. Maybe it's a like I think a lot of philanthropic adventures on some level are selfish just in a different way.

19:34I can keep moving the needle, but it's for such a healthy purpose that I don't feel stressed out about it. I'm not relying on putting bread on the table. If we donate a billion or two billion, like it's it's just a thing to sort of chase. and a lifelong dream um and because there's no finish line and so besides the stress caused by the idea of finish line yeah in prodigy what else caused you to feel depressed you know we talked about earlier about how i didn't like being employed because it was clear to me that my boss was never going to come and be like that's 10x your salary you're doing great i think it's worse if when you're running a business five years seven years in it turns out at the end of it you took a lower than market salary the whole time you worked double triple normal hours and then it all failed for not kind of and so I think a lot of the stress was this feeling of I could be wasting my life here.

20:45This business might never work.

20:51When I left, we had almost 200 employees. These people believe in me, trust me, and rely on me. They're in the midst of COVID and layoffs and everything else. People are feeding their families with the salaries that I can provide them to this company. And I just think the weight of having to be responsible for the outcomes of so many people, plus knowing that you yourself might have wasted your precious life doing this, really eats at me. And now my goal is to keep any, I have no full-time employees, but I do have full-time freelancers that work dedicated for me. But I want to keep that team as small as humanly possible.

21:40I think my mental health is pretty solid, but I don't know that it's so solid that I can be a therapist for 200 people. Can we go back to Prodigy? Yeah. Because I want to understand a bit more how this particular business model and the particular idea was formed and why. Yeah. So Prodigy's sole goal was to start a business with the highest likelihood of a life-changing outcome. But it wasn't designed to be a Facebook$500 billion business. That was very clear from the get-go. So we said, okay, what are the goals? For me, my goal was$5 million personally. I figured I could live off that for the rest of my life if we achieved that.

22:33And so based on that, what size exit do you need? And then based on that, what's the right business model? And two things emerged. First is just like what I would consider the three fundamental principles for any business idea that became really clear to us, which is one, you need a large market. But for us, a market that generated at least a billion or$2 billion a year in software sales is what we were looking for. The second thing we looked for was some sort of change that was happening in the market. I often call it a wave, which was what wave of change is happening in the market that creates an opportunity.

23:11If nothing's changing, there's a good chance people have already built software that solves all the needs. and as we dug into car dealerships, we realized people really for the first time wanted to buy cars online. And then the third thing you have is the gap. The wave is happening. What gap is being created by that? Well, when we started Prodigy, basically 0 % of people actually could buy cars online. So half of the country wants to buy cars online, 0 % can, and we know they're spending billions of dollars on software. I had no experience working in car dealerships And we had really no passion for building software for car dealerships.

23:51And I was very transparent with my team with this. And then that iterated many, many times along the way. But eventually became the business that we sold. Okay, let's talk about that. How your sale went. The sale was very unexpected, actually. because just for a little bit of context, we sold in 2021. And so in the middle of 2020, we were getting low on cash. European car market was down like 98%. So the venture capitalists in the US said, we think what's happening in Europe will happen to the US and you won't have a business. So I pitched like 50 VC firms, all said no. So I said, okay, no one's going to invest in the business.

24:34Even though it's doing really well, we were growing really fast, millions of dollars a year in revenue. So I said, well, let me go try to sell it. So I went and talked to, I want to say like 13 bankers. 12 of them said, no, we won't take on your business. We think no one will buy your business. And the one that said, yes, we can help you sell your business. For sure, someone will pay a bunch of money for this business. They had never sold a software business before. So I was like, okay, the only people that would take our business just don't know what they're doing. Basically, no one wants to invest in our business no one wants to buy our business and I was so stressed out I actually just took a week off and I just left the business I said I hey guys I told my team like I just need to go clear my head refocus and I went to Bend Oregon with my wife and we just like no phones no emails no texts just disconnected on the way back I had an idea to really pivot the business and lean more into this financing aspect of our business so just a quick context our business was selling software to car dealerships but the long-term business model was to make money on the financing of the cars and i was trying to raise the series b to unlock that business model and i went back to the team after my trip and said no let's unlock that business model now and then we'll be able to raise a series b much easier and we'll do it next year when the markets cool down.

25:58So this was around August when we started implementing this financing aspect of our business. And it started really working. And all of a sudden, my opinion about the business went from like, I hate this business. I just want to sell it and no one wants to buy it to all of a sudden, hey, I think we have a real like future here. This business could be really good. And because of that future and just like the momentum and energy in the company, our sales also started really taking off and it was right around this timing when six years into the business for the first time it felt like everything was really taking off that upstart came to us and said we'd be interested in buying your business so it was really awkward timing because if they had just come like a couple months before i probably would have sold it to them for far less but because we made these changes and with a clear head had built a much better business they came at a time when it's like i don't really want to sell at all and it was january 2021 and i had planned to go out and raise our series b for the second attempt in probably march april so i was like two months out from a fundraise roughly and when i met upstart they were like listen we want to buy you because we want to plug your software into our financing business to allow us to lend to auto what would it take like we're pretty interested they looked at all of our competitors and basically narrowed it down to two and i said well we'd probably raise our series b at you know market valuations which would be somewhere between 80 to 100 million dollars so if you can just you know match or beat that like we'd be open to taking it conversation but if it's going to be way below that like don't waste our time because we can just go raise the private market and keep running this business um and that was mostly true but there was probably like if they had come in a little under that range I might have been like oh this is still life-changing money um and I'm not taking a big salary so maybe this is like worth considering but to my surprise that was on a Monday when I met with them Friday they offered me 110 million for the business uh which was 10 million higher than my range and so they kind of called my bluff and I was like well we have to take this now because it's like it's more than I thought we'd get um and it's it's objectively life-changing money for me for my co-founder and for many of our early employees like this is real money um and I still remember getting the term sheet uh I I read it briefly before Janice my wife snatched her laptop out of my hand and she actually read the whole thing before I could um and she was crying on our couch on our$600 couch in our apartment um because she just knew like this this was what i'd been dreaming of like for all those years and it was finally going to come true uh and so that was on a friday or the offer was on a friday the term she actually came on that monday so seven days from the first meeting um we sold it three months later for the full 110 which was uh still i mean it's crazy to even say it out loud what are the biggest lessons you've learned from it if i had to summarize the biggest lessons from the exit first and foremost would be really falling in love with your customer not your product um so that's probably like lesson number one lesson number two and the lesson that cost me the most time to exit.

29:38I tried to scale things before I really understood the fundamental principles. So an example would be, we hired, I don't know, four, maybe even five, I'd have to count them all up, different VP of sales throughout the company history. And every time it basically failed. And when I fired my second to last VP of sales, I said, I'm going to run the sales department myself for like six months and figure out exactly how to sell our product. Then I'm going to hire my VP of sales and I'll know what kind of VP of sales to hire because I'll know exactly the job that I've been doing. I figured out sales for the first time I started working.

30:21Then I hired my VP of sales. We basically went from, call it 45 customers to about 900 in three years. And only the CEO can do that because you have more context and more knowledge and more just care than any of your employees. The third thing that I would say was a big lesson and something I've taken away from it is I prioritized being liked over doing what was best for me and I think in hindsight I actually would have been more liked and maybe had more respect if I had done what was right for me the biggest example for me is my equity when we sold the business I'd been running it for six years and uh when you when we found the company our equity was set up so that our equity would invest over the course of four years after four years the company's doing well you would ask for an equity refresh because you've been diluted i had asked for one um and the board was like i don't know like they make less money if they refresh your equity i just wanted to be liked by them and so i did say no i was like listen it's important to me but like okay like let's do it it later and that like very black and white probably cost me three four million dollars and that's been a very important and powerful lesson for me yeah and I think I've gotten more out of life that I need as a result of it so if you met someone today who is about to exit their business what advice would you give them I would say manage your emotions during the process similarly manage your emotions on what you sign up for I think if I had pushed back I could have gotten a two-year earn out just very naturally i would say reduce the earn out also reduce or eliminate any performance goals i think time-based earn outs are fine performance-based earn outs you should never sign up for because the acquiring company can totally screw up your business and then you don't get paid so i think it's an easy way to not pay you what you're worth you will feel this immense sense of pressure to find what's next naturally if you are driven enough to build a startup to exit you will now feel that drive saying what's next what's next what's next give yourself permission to not know and then the final thing on just like the well two more pieces of advice actually one tax planning should be done before the sale not during uh but also once you have the money there's no rush to deploy it i think this is the biggest thing i learned from talking to people that have been down the path it's fine to take a year to get your feet on the ground and get settled into a strategy before you start deploying um so just yeah i don't know how many pieces of advice that is but uh those are all like the key lessons that i've learned from it yeah um lots of us um when we after we sold our companies we face the problems of saying no to people a lot you know friends who want to invest us to invest in their businesses or relatives who want loans and gifts and whatever how do you go about it how do you say no family money thing i think i've been quite fortunate and that no one has really seriously asked um and i've been generous with some family members so like sort of preemptive there but on the investment side it's very clear black and white for me because i have an investment policy either the investment fits in my thesis or it does not a clear example where it does not fit in my thesis actually was angel investing in people that worked for me if they were doing businesses I didn't understand that would sort of be outside of the thesis and so I did go back and amend my thesis and say if I really believe in this person and the life that I'm living today is a result of sacrifice they put in for me then I will invest in them but you explain your thesis to people.

34:31This is how you say no. You say, this is my thesis. Yes. It's because, listen, it's not because I like conflict. It's just like I promised myself I wouldn't do this. And I know I have a tendency to do this. Therefore, I demand this. Yeah, I think people understand it when you say I've thought about this a lot. And here's the conclusions that I stick by. How did you feel the moment you realized that your dream is becoming reality, at least financially? There were there were two moments i'll say the first moment was when we signed the term sheet and i had been advised very strongly by friends and advisors that somewhere between 40 to 50 percent of term sheets don't go through on advisor or on acquisition deals and i was really paranoid about this because i was like if i get so excited about this sale and then it falls through I don't know that I'll be able to like mentally pick myself up from this like I was very very worried about spiraling into a pretty dark place if the sale fell through so it was a roughly a three-month process from signing the term sheet to actually closing the deal and during that time every day I basically battled with this like super excited micaiah and this very pessimistic micaiah that I was trying to cultivate saying remember there's a 50 % chance this thing doesn't go through.

35:54And if it doesn't go through, you've still got to run the business and like raise a series B. So I really tried to guard my emotions from getting dreaming of what could be, you know, the houses, the cars, all that. Like, let's just heads down, just focus on the process. When the deal actually closed and the money hit the bank account, that was when I first allowed myself to celebrate um and I think we went out uh you know we've I think we've still been learning how to spend money um so I think we probably went out for like a big spendy dinner which was probably like a hundred dollars total for the two of us um I'm pretty sure we went out for sushi and San Francisco and it was like it wasn't even like a Michelin style place but it was like this is a big deal for us.

36:43But the deal was very tied up on earnouts. It was tied up on earnouts, but also it was 85 % stock. So even the stock that I got at close, I couldn't sell for six months. And Upstart stock to this day is one of the most volatile stocks on the planet, really. when we signed the term sheet that the stock was at$60 a share. When we closed it, it was at$120 a share. Six months later, it was at$400. Six months after that, it was at$30. Today, I think it's back to$30, but earlier this year, it was$11. So I didn't actually feel very certain of how much money we had, even after the deal closed. I think that's been healthy.

37:31I've sort of had a a slow glide into where I'm at today, where now, because the stock has fallen so low, I still own a bunch of upstart stock, but it represents, I'm just doing the math on today's numbers, definitely less than 10 % of my net worth. How long ago was it? The deal was January 2021. We closed April 2021. So that was two years, six months from today, basically. Okay. Yeah. So you are still in the beginning of the journey. Yeah. You can say. definitely and you know and now because we're effectively retired i'm i just turned 34 hopefully i live another 60 70 years so i'm i'm it's i consider myself extremely early early in this sort of like future wealth money journey like i'm less than two percent down the journey really how your feelings changed between um that first excitement when the money hit your account I started to get not depressed the way I was when I was like in the low moments of the business I would say I had a feeling of a lack of purpose you know I was actually at church and one of the the pastor described what I was feeling really accurately not knowing he was speaking to me but he described it as basically slowly fidgeting around through life until death and that's kind of what I was feeling like I wake up I don't really have much to do if I leave if I leave upstart I don't know what I would spend my time doing maybe I'll watch Netflix maybe I'll play some video games but like what am I really doing I'm sort of just killing time until I fall asleep every day I landed is saying no give yourself permission you're not you don't have a lack of purpose you just haven't found it yet and that really gave me comfort um and now that I've found that purpose with YouTube, who knows, maybe it'll change in five years.

39:30Like I give myself permission for that too. And often these days, the hardest thing is convincing myself to get good sleep and not just work on this stuff 24 seven. But it's because I like it, not because I have some fear around not being able to afford things or things like that that used to drive my work. You basically have this dream to travel around the world to have homes and all of it before you sold the company yes then you could do it you could enjoy it and you actually started enjoying it and yet you're now saying that this fulfillment and happiness comes from your youtube channel if someone told you say two years before you sold the company that that actually is what will become the most important and fulfilling thing for you as opposed to the dream you had would you believe it no but i should clarify actually i think the thing that really drives my fulfillment is the fact that i get to consciously decide to do youtube while having multiple homes and traveling the world it's not that the youtube is the sole fulfillment It's this combination of my day, my week, my month, my year is basically exactly how I hope it would be.

40:53But I think that's the dream for me is I just get to do what I want. It sounds like you really designed your lifestyle very deliberately. Can you tell me more about it, how you did it, what the principles behind the design were? the process started with getting in a state of mind this is a man do every year where i can really dream big once a year me and janice my wife we leave sort of our home because we just don't want to be like in the same place same environment and we go somewhere really inspiring really beautiful so one year we did mexico and we were in tulum and we went to this like beautiful like beachside villa essentially like watching the waves crash in let's see we did Costa Rica and sort of a solo like villa in the jungle but you always go to these beautiful places and in that experience when I'm in a beautiful place and this is what works for me I kind of feel like the world is mine like I can dream anything I journal everything that I could possibly dream.

42:05And I usually categorize it as like personal goals, money, professional goals, and then thing goals. So personal goals might be I want six pack abs. That's been on the list for a while actually, every year and still haven't really gotten that one. Money goals are usually how much money I want to have in the bank, how much money I want to have be earning, how much net worth, things like that. And then things goals are, as they sound like, I want this car. And then based on all my goals, I kind of then go through them and filter out things that I just wrote because I was like bored, like what I really want on this list.

42:48And then from there, I'll usually just write a paragraph or two describing what does my life actually look like. So these, it's usually about two paragraphs. And over time, I've just tried to basically write out what does my dream life look like and then backwards map what do I need to do to get to that dream life this concept that I came across recently is basically math problems versus art problems this is the way someone described it and in school you you learn how to solve math problems so one plus one can only equal two and all other answers are wrong most problems that you're taught to answer in school have one answer otherwise they wouldn't it'd be hard to grade questions with multiple answers um art problems on the other hand are like what color red should we use for this person's lips in this painting there's no right answer there's sort of just what fits the artist a lot of life is actually art problems but we approach it with a math problem mindset so like even uh should i live where should i live in in europe i initially approached as a math problem like there's only one right answer on what city i should have as a home base in europe and then i lately have said no it's more of an art problem there's multiple right answers just sort of what fits right for me this moment and london happens to be that for now and this is how you also think about sort of more material things and more immaterial things so for example when you approach your decision about business or investing is it more of a math problem for you or in investing it's also more about intuition or how you feel i think using intuition and investing is probably the worst mindset you can have for investing if i'm being honest i am by nature and this is one of the reasons i have to remind myself some things can be our problems.