$100M Founder Reveals The Secret To Making Data Profitable

25:52I do not know that. So you were like, this company looks interesting. So they're publicly listed. There are 24 company guidance, over a billion dollars in revenue, 33 % EBITDA, about$250 million of free cash flow. There you go. You heard it here first. Very impressive. Sean, when you had the Milk Road, because I know we thought about this at The Hustle, but I wasn't mature enough to see the opportunity. When you had the Milk Road, and even now, as you have like kind of a mini media empire, have you thought about monetizing it via data versus advertising? I've thought about it, but it's like asking my daughter, have you thought about algebra?

26:42She's like, what? Maybe. Yeah, sure. It's like, I don't even know what I would have been thinking about. For example, with Milk Road, we did what you're talking about. We would go and we would interview whales. So we would go to like 25 of the biggest crypto whales. These are guys who are placing tens of millions or a hundred million dollar bets on NFTs and coins. And now remember with crypto, if you're a whale and your whales have multiple characteristics. First, it's a small market. Second, these guys have a big check. So big check, small market equals they can actually move the market. And third, they're very influential, meaning when they do something, everybody else follows in because they have a reputation.

27:20They became a whale because they picked something early on well. So everybody thinks this person's the oracle. And we interviewed them and we talked about what's your bullishness, what's basically sentiment on the market. We asked what projects they're most bullish on, so what their picks are. and we had all this info. And then instead of selling it to maybe crypto funds or hedge funds or anybody like that, we were like, this will be a great lead magnet for free newsletter subscribers. Let's give it all away for free as a PDF in order to get subscribers. And we did as like a, it was a bonus if you referred people, for example.

27:55And that thing was so valuable actually that we didn't even really, we didn't really understand the value that we had. It's like somebody who now Airbnbs and makes 100K a year off their kid's bedroom, that's unused. And at the time, it just seemed like an empty room. So we just thought it, we didn't understand the value of that unused asset at that time. I think once you start a data business, you are now on a treadmill. Somebody's mining a subscription. So what Sean did was smart in the sense of if it wasn't working, he didn't have to keep doing it. But once you sell it to an institution, now they're going to expect it quarterly or monthly.

28:30And now you sort of are on this, now you got to keep doing it. right? And so, you know, it's like you want to be thoughtful before you jump in. There's two that I've thought of. I'll shoot them at you. These are half-baked ideas, but two that I've thought of in the past, you tell me if you think they'd be good or bad ideas. They're both very similar. The first one is headhunting talent, so executive talent. So all across the tech industry, talent is at a premium, right? So somebody who's a, let's call it like VP, SVP and up. So all the way up to the C-suite. Those people will make seven figures, so millions of dollars, if not tens of millions of dollars as their package when they go join a tech company.

29:11And the way that the whole industry works is you have a four-year vesting cycle typically. And knowing when somebody is ready to look for a new job is extremely valuable. Knowing where they're at in their vest cycle, that they might be willing to hop and switch. I think that's valuable information that could be used in the recruiting business, which is typically just a services business, not a very data-driven business. And so one idea was to understand the vesting cycles of the top 1 % of Silicon Valley talent in order to maybe create a recruiting data business or a recruiting service business on top of that data.

29:49That was the first idea. Quick reaction to that. It might be a bad idea. I never did it. Yeah. I think the recruiting service business is a better idea than the data business. I think with data, when you have to try to get somebody to do a new behavior, that's really hard. And so recruiters who are used to, it's really networky and it's very like, hey, I'll take you to lunch and that kind of business. And then being like, hey, now we have data. And again, there are some ones that are really data driven, but I would say generally, it's probably not their MO. And so when you're like, hey, do this thing because it'll make you more powerful that you've never done before, that tends to be like a tough hill to climb.

30:28But building a services business with this as your edge, I think is an interesting, could be an interesting idea. Let me tell you another one. That's not exactly data, but I'll lump it in here. So I saw this business called Home Options. I love the idea of this business. So what this guy was doing was he was going to homeowners and he'd say, who are not selling their home. He's like, hey, I'll give you$1 ,000 cash today for the right to sell your home whenever you're ready. And they'd be like, what do you mean? And he's like, I'll give you a thousand bucks today. You want to make a new patio? You want to buy a new couch?

31:03Here's a thousand bucks today just to say when it comes time to sell my house, I'll use you or one of your partners as my agent. And then they would take those options and they would bundle them up and they would go to a broker in the area and they would say, hey, I have 500 home options, like options to sell people's homes. Would you guys like to buy these for$3 ,000 or$2 ,000, whatever it was? And then I'm making up the numbers here just to kind of not put this guy's whole business model on blast. But he would then sell it at an upcharge to them. And they would say, great, we will happily take that because when these come to fruition, each one of these options when they sell their home is worth$10 ,000 or$20 ,000, whatever it is.

31:43So there was like a business model built in. And I thought this was genius. I was like, wow, this guy's taking all of this future leads, giving them a no-brainer deal today, and then immediately flipping it to somebody who's in the business of having those leads. Now, obviously, the timeline is the hard part. When is somebody going to sell their house? 20 years from now, 30 years from now. And I'm sure there's some smart way to filter for people that might be maybe younger, maybe more mobile, more willing to move in a sooner timeline. I thought there was a similar business somebody could do in the tech world.

32:13Again, just back to the world I know, which is, Anon, you do CB Insights, you're leaving, you're going to do a new company, let's say. As an investor, those types of people are very, very valuable. And I would actually pay founders. I know VCs would pay founders. Like, let's say, Sam, right? They're like, Sam, you did the hustle. You're a great founder. Before you do Hampton, if I could just pay for the option, the right to invest in your next company. And you'll get a bunch of cash today that might be runway for you to figure things out, might be just go on vacation, whatever you want to do with that cash.

32:46And you're just saying, cool, I'll give you guys first look, first right of refusal on my next company. Yeah, I like that one. I think VCs have these EIRs, Entrepreneur in Residence, which kind of are like that, right? It's like, hey, I'm going to pay you and you can figure out your next idea. I think the question I'd have is if somebody just had a successful exit, is the amount you could give them going to actually be enough of an incentive. But if you can figure that out, right, there was a firm that did, it wasn't this, but they would basically send term sheets to startups they wanted to invest in, right?

33:20They'd just be like, hey, here's a term sheet, here's a valuation. And like, once you see that, it sort of like incepts you, like you're like, oh, I think we're worth that. And you might not be worth that, but it would start the conversation. So I wonder if you could come up with the right number, do you just send a big mail merge to like all the founders who are meet the meet you know fit the bill and then just see if that generates conversations for you right and worst case they at least are like they have a they have they like you if you're not like a you know a d-bag in the meeting they like you and then when it is time they at least have a good impression of you like yeah it's an interesting deal flow idea now that you're no longer uh full on full duty at cb insights i know that you're kind of tinkering around with some other things and you're like in an interesting phase right now where instead of being theoretical on MFM about which ideas you think are cool, you're actually, actually, you know, you're being practical.

34:13You're like, I actually may pursue one of these things. What do you think about doing? Yeah. So, you know, I don't think it's a may, like I am going to do this. So what I'm trying, what we're working on is building a school of Entrepreneuring. So it's an in-person 6th to 12th grade school. If you know the IMG Academy, right? Like for sports, right? Like the basic idea is like people go pro in sports at a high school. Like you should be able to go pro in business. IMG, if I remember correctly, it's like a school built mostly for athletes that are potentially going to go pro based in Florida. And it was owned by Endeavor, which owns UFC and TKO and whatever PBR, whatever else Endeavor owns, a large publicly traded company.

34:55And they recently sold it for, I think, one and a half billion dollars. And it's just a high school, pretty much, right? Is it a school or is it just a training facility? You know, it's a full school. So it's a boarding school in Florida. It started off as the Boletary Tennis Academy, and then it sort of morphed into this. And they do all sports, tennis, track, football, basketball. And they do summer camps. Their other big business is summer camps, right? Or camps, let's call them. Dude, if you're spending that much money to go to that high school for track and field in hopes of getting a return on your investment, that's like going into a quarter of a million dollars in debt for an art history degree.

35:38You know what I mean? It ain't there. The thing that they've done really well is they recruit really elite athletes and those really elite ones might get a scholarship. Let's say there's five basketball teams at IMG, the top team will actually get sponsorship from Nike and stuff that'll be used to defer or defray, you know, tuition costs. So that really elite athletes maybe get a free ride or a close to free ride, you know, then everybody else who's probably quite good, but also might have a parent or parents who think like, you know, little Bobby and little Sally are going to go pro, who just have like visions of their kid going pro in something, will spend a lot of money.

36:16I think tuition is like$40 ,000 to$70 ,000. And then the camps are a great feeder for the school, but they're also like, parents want their kids to achieve a lot and they want to give them a lot of opportunity. And so the camps are, I paint with a broad brush, like dad who played baseball, who always wanted to go pro, can't go pro, could never make it, you know, wants their son, you know, they think has a shot and they're like, hey, IMG is the best place to go. And it is. And then they, you know, and then they pay a lot of money from these camps. So it's a pretty brilliant model. They just got acquired by a company that's basically acquiring, I think it's a European company that's acquiring private schools.

37:02So private schools are just a giant business. And so they're acquiring private schools around the world. They're kind of doing a roll-up of those. But yeah, IMG's great brand has had really legit athletes come out of it. I love the idea of creating a school. I love the idea of creating it as a, there's many variations of this idea, but creating as a boarding school around entrepreneurship or a different model of teaching. So can you just like, here's what I want you to do. Can you give me the two-minute impassioned rant, the rant on what needs to change and what you're going to do? What's broken and what you're going to do about it?

37:40But I want you fired up for this one. All right. All right. So schools today are about compliance and conformity, right? That's what they do. And if you go back and look at how schools started, it was Rockefeller and sort of these titans of industry, basically trying to create compliant factory workers, right? And so when you go to it, it's, hey, show up at school on this time, sit in your seat. We're going to tell you some tasks to do. when the bell rings, get up like a robot and go to the next class. And then at the end of the day, like, you know, we're going to dismiss you with another bell, right?

38:12And so what they've done is create like people who are really good at reading a map, you know, and it's like a scavenger hunt. Hey, I need some community service on my thing. Let me go do that. I'll start some bullshit nonprofit to look good for college applications. I'll play three years of a sport. And so this checklists that you have to do, you know, to navigate the map. And I think what we need is a school for kids who actually are going to build the map, like for explorers and developers. And so that's like what the school of entrepreneuring is about, which is, you know, follow your curiosity and build stuff and like learn how to think versus what to think, right?

38:51I think entrepreneuring is a lot like engineering. You know, even if you decide not to become an entrepreneur. You learn a way of thinking that's going to serve you well wherever you go. But yeah, the idea is you'll go pro in business. You won't take AP classes. There'll be no SAT, ACT prep. It's going to be about learning and building. And it's really experiential. So, we're working on having retail on campus. So, if you want to learn geometry, you're going to lay out the floor plan of your retail store. And that's how you're going to learn geometry. It's not going to be, hey, let's learn the Pythagorean theorem in a class.

39:29And then your kid's like, when the hell am I ever going to use this? So yeah, that's what we're going to do. Are you going to raise money for this thing? So we've got a few folks already. So we've got a decent amount of capital committed. This is not like my next startup in the sense of like CB Insights is going to check my significance box or success box, this is like my significance box, right? And so I might start two, three other companies. We're trying to think of an engine to build 200 ,000 companies. So this is like my next thing till when I die at my desk, this is the thing that I'm going to be working on.

40:09So it's not like a VC-backed private school to exit. Yeah. And I think the big thing is recruiting formidable kids. And this is one of the biggest challenges. IMG has all these stats, like who's the kid who jumps the highest and scores the most points. We don't have that. But the kid who has 5 ,000 subscribers on YouTube is probably the kid who should be at this school, not the kid who's really good at standardized tests, right? The kid who sold stuff on Roblox or built a lawn mowing business. So yeah, but that's the vision. Where's your campus going to be? Don't know. I think my partner on this is in LA.

40:44So the coast would be easy family-wise. Interestingly, red states are like much more open to education innovation. And so like that's a conundrum we got to figure out. So we got a lot of work to do before we figure that out. If I was betting money, it's probably going to be on one of the coasts just because it makes logistics of life easier. But... And what would that curriculum look like to teach a sixth grader to prepare for this stuff? I think it's not subject-based, right? It's like competency-based, right? So it's, you know, critical thinking or it's public speaking or, you know, having conversations.

41:24And so a lot of it is like it's project-based and experiential, right? So, you know, what I mentioned earlier is like we're trying to figure out how to have retail on site with the school. And so the kids are operating and building a company. And so in that, you know, in order to build the company, you have to do algebra to build your model, right? You have to lay out the floor plan of the shelves in the retail store and that requires geometry, right? And so I think like, you know, I have a daughter who's, you know, 14 and like she'll constantly come home and ask like, hey, when am I ever going to use this, right?

41:57Like that's a common question. And so we're trying to find ways of integrating it organically into what you're doing so that you never feel like I'm learning something that makes no sense. And so that's, you know, what we're working on now we're talking to some teachers who can help us sort of build out the lesson plans here and uh and then you know kind of get going from there and the crazy thing about this business or the hardest part in my opinion it's like once harvard becomes harvard it's easy to maintain so like when you think about like all this uh protest going on people are like oh harvard's going to shit these colleges are going to shit in my opinion i hear that and i'm like no, it's not.

42:40It's withstood so much crap. Once a brand is a brand, it's really hard to ruin. But it's hard to convince your first group of parents to actually become a customer of yours. How are you going to solve that? Yeah. So I actually don't think that's as hard. So I posted this on Twitter. I got a bunch of inbound from folks who really liked the idea. And I'd say it came from two camps. It came from rich tech people. And then it came from, I'd say generally people in the middle of the country who are like, I have a son or daughter who I think is really smart, but who is struggling in the sort of cram exam erase model of schools.

43:21Like they're not good at like memorizing 50 state capitals, but they're like really good at, you know, building an audience on YouTube or whatever. Right. And they're like, I think my kid has more potential than is being realized. And I actually think there's a bunch of folks like that. So I'd agree with you, Sam, if I said, hey, we're trying to recruit Manhattan Upper East Side parents who want that old model. But I think there's a bunch of folks. And if you look at the homeschooling statistics and growth, there's a lot of people who are unhappy with how schooling is happening in this country, and they're just opting out.

44:00And so I think there's a big segment of people who feel like, I've got a kid with a lot of potential who's just not, that potential is being squashed. And so, yeah, I've had a lot of good conversations with folks that I think the market for this is giant, actually. And if we could recruit 100 formidable kids from each state, that's 5 ,000 kids. I think that's very, very feasible. You have a few ideas on this list I want to go through. Can you tell us about these? So let's start with the first one, slime museums. Yeah. So I don't know if your kids, Sean, your kids might be old enough. Slime is like crack cocaine for kids, right?

44:41So there's this place in New York City called the SLUMU Institute, and my kids wanted to go there. So we went on a weekend and we get in there. And the thing I do when I go to a place, when I see it packed, I start talking to the staff. And I was like, hey, how many people come through this place? And the woman was like, well, pre-COVID, it was $1 ,200, but right now we're doing like$500 to$600 a day. And I was like, per day? We spent$40 a ticket and then we spent another$30 for like an upsell where like they dump slime on your head and they video record it and stuff, right? So$70, four of us, so$280.

45:17You know, when you start doing the math on this and then, you know, and then at the end they sell you slime. And so it's like, let's say one out of five people actually buy it, right? So I came home, I immediately went to Google Sheets. I was like, I got to put a model together. And I was like, okay, this one place in New York City probably does like$6 to$8 million of revenue. And the beauty of it was that because it's slime, there were like 10 people who worked in this pretty big facility because it was really interactive, but you didn't need people to run the exhibits. It was just like the kids would just be like, oh, this slime smells like this.

45:54And this slime is greasy or whatever. and so it was really low overhead so like money printing machine I think I just read that they did 30 million now they have LA Atlanta a couple other places so I think last year they did 30 million at these slime museums and I think like in general these like kids experiential type of museums if you want to call it that you know museum of illusion spy museum like they all kill it and they've all like got this template where there's very it's very not labor intensive and I think like that's part of the genius so I loved this business and these two women are just killing it which is amazing so that was I think it's a big opportunity there and other experiential stuff I I just wish most of them were good like I we go to a bunch of them and like some of them are just like you're just like grifty like money grabs and you're like oh man I spent like 250 $50 for this, but some of them like this one were quite excellent.

46:52So that was one. Yeah, to me, these are like the new Build-A-Bear workshops. It's out of the house. It's a kid's activity. Kid's going to be super excited about it. It could be a birthday party. It could just be a weekend. It could be whatever. And as the parent, you buy the$40 ticket, but it's never the end. The upsells are too strong in the moment, right? Because you need the video. The kid wants the slime on the way out. It's basically like a gift shop on the way out. and obviously these things have like a craze period where it becomes the thing and it gets written up in all the magazines and the New Yorker and you see it all the influencers go and then there is some normal on the other side of it but it's interesting to see how people have reinvented the Chuck E.

47:36Cheese's of the world to be optimized around social media meaning how do you do things that are going to be photo worthy that are going to be shared inherently by people who are going through the experience. And also you need to get kids out of the house, off their screens, doing things. As a parent, there's a huge need for that. And there's kind of like a much bigger appetite because even if you do the slime museum once, twice a year, there's a lot of other weekends that you could do something. So there can actually be many of these in this model. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's pretty genius. So that's one area I'm thinking about.

48:16So the other one I think that's interesting. So I ran across this company called Dillo and it's like a giant like Amazon Go store. And so what they do is they go to property managers that have at least 200 like housing units in an area, multifamily. and they'll say, listen, we're going to set up this like basically compact convenience store on your, in your community. And it's like stocked with all the good stuff. Right. And so like, you know, I, I live in a city, but you know, I go visit my mom, you know, if, if we need to get milk, it's like, I got to get in the car, I got to drive eight minutes.

48:53And I basically like spent a half hour of my life to buy something that's like$7. So what these guys do is they put this convenience store. It's like Amazon Go style. So it's, you know, one person goes in, they sort of, they badge in, only one person can be in the store. They're on a clock. So they got to get out in a certain amount of time and they just go and buy stuff. And then it just sort of like auto debits their account or whatever. And so, you know, they go to the property developer, the property manager say, listen, I'm going to put up, we'll put up the$100 ,000 to build this out and we'll restock it.

49:27And we'll cut you in as a property manager on some of the revenue. once we sort of recoup our investment. And so I thought this is an amenity now that the property manager can offer to their tenants. It's a revenue stream on top of it. And so I thought for Dillow, I thought this was a really good distribution hack, I guess, for them. And so I really like this idea. And obviously - By the way, we had this idea on the podcast several years ago. I don't know if you remember this. This is one of the drunk ideas, I believe. I think it was in the Drunk Ideas episode, might've been one of the other ones.

50:03I was like, why isn't there a neighborhood shop that's basically run by the HOA in a way or by the members of the community that, and then all you do is wholesale in the products and you basically take the markup of the rest. And so you have a grocery store that's in the neighborhood, basically. That's kind of what this is. So do they have the tech like Amazon Go where it auto figures out what you took off the shelf? Yeah. So there's no staffing because that's the big thing here, right? Because what the property manager doesn't want is, hey, the store is not open because, you know, person X didn't show up.

50:37So this is 24 by seven and you, you know, it's got the cameras and whatnot. And, you know, again, like reportedly and yeah, it'll just say, hey, your total bill is X and sort of those convenient store prices, which tend to be, you know, kind of high margin. And yeah, you'll get billed, you know, either to some credit card or maybe on your HOA or something. And the thing they talk about is over time, they'll learn to personalize what's in the store, right? So if this community really likes certain type of Cheetos, that's what they're going to see more of. This company looks like it's brand new and tiny.

51:14I can't find anything on the internet. There's no founder. There's no CEO. I can't find anything. It's really, yeah. So I was just talking to a friend of mine who's in real estate and property management. And so he was telling me about this. And he's like, yeah, they've got a bunch of facilities. And I think they're targeting the Sunbelt, right? Because if you're in New York City, you can walk to these things, right? But if you're in most areas of the Sunbelt, the Carolinas, Texas, etc., you just can't do that. And so they're trying to solve that problem. I think their app has six reviews. So you have to have their app to get into the store.

51:49It only has six reviews. So I assume this is either brand new or just not popular yet. It's early days. I think they have a few facilities up and running, right? But yeah, I just thought like the way they're going to market, you know, essentially like they're sort of B2B to C, right? They're going to the property managers who then are blessing this. And then they're going to, you know, the property managers because they have a vested interest in making money on this are going to start promoting it as well to their community. It's like a smart. Did you do like the napkin math on like what you think this could be?

52:19I didn't do that. You know, what I was trying to figure out was and my friend didn't know yet because they're in the negotiation phase. I was like, how much do they need to make back before you as a property manager start making money and what's the revenue cut there? But I mean, this is like a scale play, right? Can they be the new dollar store in every multifamily kind of community out there? And yeah, I think that's the angle. And then I don't know if there's, are there certain large multifamily property developers and managers they can go to and get all of a sudden, hey, we're now all of a sudden and a hundred developments.

52:57But yeah, I don't know. I suspect it's a big opportunity though. You want to do one more of these? Yeah, do more. Two more. Sean's just like, dance. Again, again. I put another coin in. I want to go again. Let's go. Put another coin in. Yeah, so my daughter's into fantasy football. And if you watch ESPN now, I think it's become unwatchable because it's all about gambling, right? It's like, here's the line on this. and you know blah blah blah and I'm like I don't really want her seeing all this and she'll ask me and you know I'm like I don't think this is a good thing so I started digging into the UK actually kind of did opened up online gaming a bunch of years earlier and if you look at the research there to nobody's surprise it has not led to good things right like you know people are addicted and going into bankruptcy and all sorts of good things or bad things and so the US just whatever we do things, we do them at times a hundred, right?

53:55And so the US is sort of doing this. And so we're seeing this experiment play out that is going to create, I think, a lot of challenges. And so I think the opportunity here is there used to be a business called, I think, American Addiction Centers. And they were basically for drug and alcohol dependence. I think there's, again, another offline play in online addiction centers, right? So parents want their kids off the phone, I'm addicted to porn, I'm addicted to DraftKings, I'm addicted to trading naked calls on Robinhood, like whatever it might be. And so you go there. And I think the interesting thing here is there's all this commercial real estate that's available.

54:40I wonder if you can get that really on the cheap. and this is a group that's a little bit more, you know, like I think if you went to a commercial real estate provider and said, listen, I'm going to bring in people who are addicted to hard drugs, they're gonna be like, no, no, no, I don't want that, right? But this is a group like, hey, I'm going to bring in a bunch of nerds who can't get off their phone and we're going to treat them. Like the risk to a property owner is a lot less from this group. So I think you've got an opportunity to get real estate on the cheap and hopefully do some good in the world.

55:12I think the challenge with these American Addiction Center and these other ones was like in a for-profit business, you always want to lower the cost. And so what ended up happening was like, you know, people weren't getting good outcomes and service was really bad. And, you know, I think there were some really horrible things that happened. So I think this is a big like inflection, which is going to happen. Like we've just, I mean, I think Dave and Buster's now allows gambling on like Top Shot. Like, you know, Sean and I are playing against each other. Like I can literally bet sean like hey i'm gonna get 10 and you're gonna get less it is pretty ridiculous i was reading about um what what's the big one draft kings or whatever they have account managers so if you become i read about this one woman who was making like 150 grand a year so uh whatever that puts her at in terms of class but not like crazy wealthy and she's and she lost all of her money and she was 500 000 in debt and she had an account manager that was like hey kim um we just opened up this new game.

56:10I know that you're a big fan of this type of game. You might be able to win all your money back if you try this new one out because it has higher stakes. And they had an account manager to get her to start gambling more. And it does freak you out and think in 15 years when the kids who are growing up with us, what are they going to be like? And there's actually probably an interesting case study. Sean and I both lived in Australia. And I don't know if you remember this, Sean, or if you were of drinking age when you went there. But in all of the bars, they have two things they have a room that has two things in it it's like the main bar and then a different room and the room has uh pokey machines which is basically a slot machine but then it also has tons of tvs with every horse uh cricket match so like a horse racing cricket match i forget what else they have and you're just sitting there right there gambling you can gamble and get drunk and have a meal and it is like full all the time i wonder what's going what what they've done to solve that similar problem that we are also going to face they're like well that's what the beer's for when you're done go over there and you'll feel better it's like that's the it's like those restaurants that are like kfc taco bell combined in one it was like the seven deadly sins all under one roof.

57:25Yeah. New York, New York city had something like it was called OTB off track betting. Right. And it was like horse races, but there was no, they didn't, they didn't like do the, uh, the throw, they didn't throw the alcohol grenade in there as well. Like it was, you know, New York has standards, right? Like we're not going to allow that. So, uh, so yeah, it was just, just gambling, but I mean, yeah, now it's just like on your phone. So I think like this is a, this is like a mega trend that's going to come out. I think you're definitely on to something. This is like the inflection is so real. The influx of gambling into sports is like, it happened overnight.

58:05It went from never discussed to everything is sponsored or integrated in about, like if you're watching the NBA playoffs, it says in the third quarter, it's like the line at the start of the game, the current live action line is this. and every player, all the NIL deals, they can do this now. So the floodgates opened as to how much is going to get pushed on people. As somebody who used to gamble a ton, I know that for most people, it's not going to work out. They are not going to beat the house. They're not going to beat the market and they're just going to lose their money. And what I don't understand is, I guess this is like a naive thing of mine, is like the psychology around going to the addiction centers.

58:44Because everybody I knew who was in this space of like your gambling starts out fun, then sort of becomes a little bit unhealthy the way it goes. I feel like 0 % of those people were going to go voluntarily, like go to driver's ed. What I thought you were going to say is that you can get the companies, like unlike the drug industry, where like there's no, there's no corporation that sells heroin, right? That's not the, there's no, there's no one person to target, but DraftKings, FanDuel, these companies are going to have a giant target on their back and their money printers. And so I I thought you were going to say that they will, as a sort of corporate social responsibility, like cover your ass type of thing, they might sponsor or pay for seats in all these different locations, like all these different areas.

59:26And then you can provide the service for free for people. I thought that might be where you were going with that. Do you think that's viable or no? I, you know, I just, I'm not too convinced that like a for-profit and, you know, Sam was just talking about these account managers for the whales, right? Like I think they want to encourage those people to gamble more. And they talk about, if you read their 10Ks and Qs, they have an ESG initiative and they do this for people who are, but I got to believe it's like giving this lip service. I can't believe they would do that. I think if I'm DraftKings or FanDuel, the thing I do is if I have a ventures team, I invest in this.

1:00:06And so then I create the problem and then I also benefit from the cure. So that's the, you know, the kind of the evil genius corporate way of doing it. But yeah, I don't, I don't think they're gonna, they're gonna, you know, drive this on their own.

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1:01:24I have just one other question for you. It says your friend, what stuff are you really into right now? Are you like really digging any books, shows, you know right in a rabbit holes that you're going down is there anything that you're super interested and fascinated by right now yeah you have the free time i'm pretty lasered in on like youth development right now right in education like that's where i'm spending all my time so there's a great book called weapons of mass instruction uh and it's basically like you know it's an agra i've never it's like a book it's the only book i describe as aggressive and it basically like talks about like how schools are totally broken and it's actually by an ex-teacher.

1:02:05So that one's, I thought was really good that I'm, I really liked that one. Yeah, that's a big area. And the other area I'm spending a lot of time on is I'm talking to lots of professional sports coaches. So a big part of schooling is motivation. And so I've talked to, I've gotten into like the Texas Rangers and a couple college football team kind of coaching networks. And these guys, they're mostly guys. They're amazing. Like I do a 30 minute zoom with them and I'm like, I want to run through a wall after talking to you. Right. And I'm trying to figure out if what they do for athletes, you could, you know, could you, could you implant them in a school and could they do that same kind of motivating thing for young people in a different domain?

1:02:50What's so good? What do they do on the call? That's so awesome. I think they're really good at figuring out when they talk about young people, which is who they're generally coaching, right? They really think about what they care about. The beauty of it is it's actually not very complicated, right? They think about what does that person care about? So one of them is a coach on a minor league team. And he's like, listen, that kid doesn't care if we make it to the World Series of like AAA. He's like, that kid wants to get to pros, the pros, right? And so he's like, I got to work on, I get everything I do has to ladder up for him to help him get there.

1:03:30And, you know, the odds are very low, right? And so they're very selfless in the sense of like as the coach, it would actually be better if that kid played his heart out and we won the World Series of AAA. But the reality is if he does a really good job, that player, he's actually going to get called up and they're actually going to lose them. So they've just got this way of thinking about what motivates people and how to get into that. And then they think a lot about the team dynamic really a lot. And I really have found that really interesting. And then there's a great book I read about the De La Salle high school football team.

1:04:09So it's like the winningest high school football team in history. It's out in California, I think. And the coach wrote this book. And like half of it's like what drills do the safeties do and stuff, like stuff I don't care about. But there's like an upfront part about leadership and motivation and creating accountability that I actually think like anybody in a company should read. It is unreal because these kids aren't responsible to just the coaches or their school. They feel a really deep sense of responsibility to each other. And I actually think that's something we need more of. And I think there's a lot of lessons that can be applied from youth development in sports to other domains, whether it's corporate life or whether it's a school that we're trying to build.

1:04:53What's the name of that book? Chasing Perfection. you know, the De La Salle football way or something. I think if you read the first half of the book before they start getting into like, you know, what O-line drills they do and stuff, it's really, really good. Sounds similar to like The Score Takes Care of Itself. Is that the Bill Walsh one? Bill Walsh book, yeah. So, you know, same thing, super successful football coach. It's a football, it's a sports book, a football book, but it's not at the same time. It's a program building leadership book actually. And it's an entire philosophy of like, focus on the inputs.

1:05:25the outputs will always take care of themselves if you got the inputs right. And how he kind of turned around a losing program into a winning one. Yeah. I think the other thing he talks about a lot is like subtraction, right? Like where she's like, you know, he's like a lot of teams want to add new things. They like want to add new plays. He's like, we have three plays on special teams we do. Like that's it, right? And so they really minimize. And like, it's actually like if you have young kids, you ever seen those stride bikes? Yeah. Right? The brilliance of that is they just subtracted pedals out.

1:05:56And it actually helps kids learn how to ride better. And I don't think people think about subtracting stuff out. They always want to add. And I actually found there was a certain genius of how this coach and his team or his coaching staff thought about simplifying a lot and subtracting complexity out. And so, yeah, it's like a very profound book on many levels. I just think it's a really good one. So that's another. Have you read The Talent Code? No. I'm going to write that down. That's a good one for you. In general, you should check out my college roommate. He was one of my best friends. This guy, Trevor Reagan.

1:06:31He has a pretty fascinating story where he was from a tiny town in Wyoming. And when I got to Duke, they were like, your roommate, he's trying out for the basketball team. So I'm like, sweet. I'm looking out for a 6 '6 black dude. I'm like, that's going to be my roommate. And instead, this 5 '8 white kid from Wyoming shows up. and I'm like, you're the guy who's trying out for the team? Like, what? How is this going to work? And he was an incredible basketball player. He was like the best basketball player in Wyoming. His dad, both of his parents were teachers and coaches. And he always just thought, okay, I'm going to play sports and then I'll go be a teacher and coach too someday.

1:07:06And what he did was when he went back to Wyoming, he started with a summer camp and he was like, all right, I'm going to teach basketball. And he also like, he was a manager on the Duke basketball team. Duke basketball team is probably the most prestigious program in college basketball. So he like took what he learned there, but he was like, you know what? What do I wish I had when I was like, what would have made me a better player? Because he almost made the team. He was the last guy cut. And he's kind of kind of sat with him of like, could I have done anything differently? I thought I worked super hard.

1:07:35So could I have worked smarter in any way? Was there anything that in my training protocol would have led me to actually make the team versus being the last final guy who didn't make the cut? Because it killed him to not be on the team. That was his dream. and like it's like you don't watch that story you don't watch the rudy movie where you where he doesn't get to play but that was what happened in his life and it's like damn that sucks i didn't even really believe that that was a possible outcome but it was and so he when he went back his summer camp he's teaching you know i don't know seventh grade girls and they would be doing a layup drill but he put a giant tv screen with a tivo like kind of instant replay of what they were doing so because he's like one of the things is you never as a youth player you never get to see yourself doing anything.

1:08:16Or the feedback loop, there's a huge gap between when you're playing in the gym to when you finally might one day see some film of you that then you'll be told, hey, you should do this differently next time. And then another three days goes by before you're back in the gym doing that thing. So instead, he shortened the feedback loop. And then he went and studied all these coaches. He went and hung out with Pete Carroll. He went and hung out with the best. He would find that the women's Olympic volleyball team in the US dominates. so he went and studied under that coach to be like how does he run his program he would just like he'd run camps during the summer which is only three months and then nine months out of the year he would just go learn and i thought it was fascinating he did that for like you know seven years so now he has this uh he puts out free content that's like in his thing called the learner's lab which is uh basically it's like how the science of learning how do you become a better learner and he started it with with sports but then he realized like pretty quickly oh this applies to everything like business, school, whatever.

1:09:09And he gets brought in by all these sports teams and big companies to give talks to like, how do you actually teach people how to learn better? How do you create an environment? Like basically his theory is almost like if the soil is good, the plants will grow. And like, if you're wondering why your plants aren't growing, have you ever looked at your soil? Maybe your soil is messed up. Like maybe the setup, the culture, the environment that you're setting up here is not going to lead to that type of growth. And so he's put out a bunch of fascinating stuff that I haven't really heard anybody else do.

1:09:36You should check it out. One of the genius things he did was, like Huberman, he went and read all the white papers about learning and motor development and all this stuff. And then he's like, dude, this is gold. It's just buried in an old scientific white paper that was made by an old white scientist who doesn't know anything about social media or how to get the message out there. So he would go read all these and then he would turn it into an animated video and put it up on YouTube. And these videos that seem so niche can get like a million views because it's actually interesting content, but it was just stuck in science world, which was not applicable to where most people go look for information or entertainment.

1:10:12Yeah, I should check out Trevor's stuff. He sounds like he's doing sort of God's work there, which is awesome. But yeah, there's a ton of amazing research about youth development, education, learning that people just ignore. It's proven stuff that says, if you want a young person to learn something, you should quiz them daily. It's shown to work. But like if you talk, I've talked to probably 70 or 80 teachers, not a single one can does it. And part of it is like it's logistically very challenging. So I understand that. But there's so many things at work and like we still treat education very artisanally.

1:10:47Right. It's like, you know, it's like everybody's an artist. Like, oh, Sam likes teaching history this way and Sean likes teaching it this way and Anand likes teaching it this way. It's like, hey, just go and like do like improv, you know. And instead of being like, oh, what Sam does works, like Sean and Anand, like follow the script because like the kids love it and like it works. And you can color outside the lines a little bit, but you can't like go rogue and just come up with your own thing. So, yeah, I think I'll check that out. But yeah, there's a ton of like really smart people who dug into this.

1:11:18We just, for whatever reason, we just seem to ignore it. In that Monish Babrai interview we just did, he said something. he's like the like the something like the neurons in the brain and normally i'm like you're an investor what do you know about the neurons in the brain but i was at his house and like one whole wall was all just science books it's like there's like an investing book section there's a huge section of just science books either psychology or biology or physics whatever it was and he was just telling me about all these different books he was reading and what he liked in each one and one of the things he was saying was between the ages of i forgot what he said like 10 to 19 or something like that like 80 90 percent of the neural connections formed during that time and it's basically the peak time to specialize.

1:11:57And he's like, if you look at all the great ones, whether it's like, you know, the great musicians, whether it's Warren Buffett, you know, buying his first stock at age 10, it's like the great ones at every field during that key golden period, they begin to like really go deep on an area and become great at that. And not everybody should specialize, but the people who really want to become the outliers and do great, like that is the golden era. And I'm sitting there, I'm like, oh, I guess I missed the boat. I don't know what I was doing during that time, but it wasn't that. And he's like, well, you always got your kids to try.

1:12:28Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I mean, I spent eight years in Spanish and I can say, me llamo Anand, puedo ir al baño, which is like my name's Anand, where's the bathroom, right? And so that's a waste of time for everybody involved, right? Dude, I took Spanish for three years. It's just no hablo. That's all I got. You got it. You got it. Strong H in that hablo. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. You don't even say what you don't speak. You're just like, I don't speak. Yeah.

1:13:01Yeah. So we got your neurons working on that, which is, you know, so I think like there's a lot of like, yeah, wasted potential, wasted time here. And yeah, that neurons thing, the thing he said about, you know, if somebody has a lemonade stand early in life, like that's a great sort of indicator. Like, yeah, I got to believe that's certainly like a sign of somebody who's formidable that could do great things. And so, yeah, I think we got to tap into that a lot more. Thanks for doing this, dude. Round two. Done. Great. Cool. Yeah, well, do you want people to follow you anywhere or get more of you on any platform?

1:13:38Yeah, Asanwal on Twitter or my name on LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn voice or something. So, you know, I don't mean to brag, but that's my thing. So, yeah, follow me there. I don't think that's a brag. It is. It is a brag. For the record. That is a full-on brag right there. I'm pretty proud. I'm big on LinkedIn is actually a nag. I framed it. I framed my thing. It's in our bedroom. Do you make your wife look at that before we go to bed? I'm like, dude, you realize the prize that you got. Yeah, it's a big thing. Whenever we get in a fight, I'm like, let's go into the room and look at the LinkedIn influencer thing I got.

1:14:15You play the cards you're dealt, I suppose. All right. This has been fun, man. All right, thanks. All right. See you. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off on the road. Let's travel. Never looking back.

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1:15:29For more information, check out Mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes for details.