$2.4M In ONE Day?!

24:47And he has built an amazing following and he's doing everything you should do as an influencer. Not that he wants to be an influencer, but he's doing everything you should do. I don't know if you've seen his meetups that he's having lately, these runs that he's doing. Yeah, they look awesome. He's taking people and they chant like, don't die, and then they run up a hill. or something like that. And then they get at the bottom and they eat like just there's a pot of lentils and they're all eating lentils. It's amazing. And so he's building this little cult and it's a great thing. So he came out with his first paid product.

25:14Did you see it? It's the meal service, right? No, no, no. So he came out with like a, it's kind of like a meal service. It's like basically it's a part one of his blueprint diet as a ready to eat sort of like delivery package. I think you pay$330 a month and you get this thing. 12 ,000 people applied. Wait, wait, wait. What is it? How is it not? You said you implied I was a little wrong with meal service. It is a meal service then, but it's just like powder, right? Yeah, yeah. It's not like meal delivery. It's not like Blue Apron, but it is like the supplements and the drink and whatever. It's like some skimmed down version of the of his anti-aging protocol.

25:54Got it. It's the Blueprint Self-Experimentation study. And there's like a level one and there's going to be a level two and level three. So there's 67 interventions in this. And it looks like there's a couple of powders, there's a bottle of olive oil, and then there's a bunch of pills. I like all those things. Powders, pills, powder pills and oils. Send me up. He got 5 ,000 people. He got 12 ,000 people to apply. 5 ,000 people paid. So let's do a little public math here. Let's break a rule. He just launched this product. He had more demand than he was willing to let in. He let in 5 ,000 people.

26:28That's $20 million in ARR that he had on day one of launching this product. $20 million of ARR for a subscription supplements business, essentially, is like a$200 million business. What do you think Athletic Greens is at revenue-wise? They raise that at$1.2 billion in valuation. I bet they're at like$100, $150 is my guess, maybe$200. Wow. Okay. This is day one. Day one, come out the gate with$20 million. And this is, he let in less than half of the demand that he had, right? So he could have been at 40 million if he wanted to. Again, I don't think he's doing this for the money, but goddamn, that is an impressive start to a business.

27:08And it shows that I have this phrase now that I say, and my wife doesn't think it's cool and she's the only one I've tried it on. But I say this, I say all content is now marketing and all marketing is now content. And this is what Brian Johnson did. He was putting out content. It happened to be marketing. and that marketing is now leading to a lot of sales for his new protocol. When you say that to your wife, I can just hear the world's loudest eye roll of like, shut the fuck up, Sean. That shit works on those fucking dorks that listen to you. Take out the fucking trash, Sean. Did you warm up the mac and cheese like I asked you to or not?

27:44What are you talking about? This is awesome. It's sort of like, have you seen that? What's that movie where they talk about the biggest short and Ryan Gosselin's character, you know, they're like, what are you getting out of this, Ryan? He goes, look, look, listen, Vinny, you're getting the ice cream, you're getting the nuts, you're getting the chocolate syrup, you're getting the whipped cream. And when this works out, I'm going to get the cherry on top. That's my fee. I just get a little bit of this. That's what Brian Johnson is doing with this business. He's doing everything else, I think, actually just because, because he's a dork and he enjoys this shit.

28:15Then it just so happened that he got famous and now he's like, yeah, yeah, that's pretty cool. well, okay, fine, I'll do that too. And I dig that. And isn't it weird? Why do you think we have so much trust and faith in this guy? Part of it is because he already has the F you money. And so we think he didn't give a shit. He's just doing this just because. But the way that he's turned himself in the character is actually really interesting. In his case, there was a high barrier to entry. He spent millions of dollars, it seems, doing this. He also lived like a hermit for two years to perfect this.

28:47But the idea of turning yourself into a character and then doing it in front of a lot of people, that's actually a really appealing, that's an exciting route to go for a lot of people where it's just like you change your identity and you go all in on this and you could actually make a great living by doing this. It's the same reason I bought shoes from the knees over toes guy, right? I probably never bought shoes from any brand besides Nike in like 20 years. And then I see this guy who's over 40 years old dunking a basketball. I see what he looked like before he was doing his thing and how he had knee surgeries.

29:21Undeniable proof is a very, very powerful lever. This guy literally just does like a somersault then he gets up and dunks the basketball and he's like this 45-year-old white guy. Which shoes? He came out with like a pair of shoes that are like, you know, the knees over toes like thing. Not great shoes, by the way, for the record. Definitely don't buy V1 if anybody's anything. So, you know, it wasn't great, but I have a high amount of faith and trust in this guy because again, all content is marketing. So for two years, he was just putting out free content, didn't sell a thing. And so for two years, all he did was put out very helpful content and showed an undeniable level of proof that this guy was in incredible shape, that his legs were super, super strong and that where he started to where he was is a very powerful transformation.

30:05So anybody who wants to have that transformation will trust him. And then when he comes out with a thing and he says, hey, this is what I use, people will buy it. And it's very, very effective. by the way i also bought knees over toes shoes before he came out with that shoe company he was always wearing these other shoes and i also bought them i also bought those that that white shoe that looks like it's yes and that's like 70 or something 45 couldn't even really get it on i have like a thick american foot or something like it doesn't fit in this like european shoe dude i wear the shit out of them i love those shoes i like i remember seeing the picture and like googly like what are those shoes?

30:42They're not very comfortable. They look cool, though. They look great. They're like Fouye or something like that? Like Fugazi or it's like such an F. I love the Fugazis too, man. They were Fugazi as hell. Can I do a quick thrill to shill, by the way? Okay, go. All right. So basically at Hampton, we've got access to all this data. And so in order to grow, we decide I love data. You know, they say data is the new oil. I already mentioned I love oil. I don't know how to make money off of it yet, but somehow oil is good. We've been doing these surveys where we survey different industries and we can get benchmarks for different industries.

31:13Right now, we just did one on agencies. And so we did this thing where we surveyed 60 agencies. They gave us all their revenue, all their profit. And we did this cool survey where we show, here's the benchmarks for profit per employee, revenue per employee. You can find it at... If you just go to joinhampton.com and then you go to our blog, you'll see the surveys. We did one on wealth. So people say their net worth, how much money they're spending each month, how much income they're making each month, how much they're working each week. We just did one on agencies. So if you're an agency owner, check it out.

31:39But more so, that's the shill. Here's the thrill part. I think, Sean, that if I decide to do this, have you ever heard of the... I think this could work. Have you ever heard of benchmarking? I didn't know anything about this industry. Do you know anything about benchmarking? Yeah, of course. I didn't know that people would ever pay for this. And so the most common form of benchmarking is salary benchmarking. So there's a company called salary.com, and then there's like 10 or 20 other ones who have raised hundreds of millions of dollars, whatever. I think in a couple of years, if I get enough data, I think I can spin this off and create a data company where I do benchmarking for different industries.

32:20And the problem that we'll be solving is, let's say that you're an agency, let's say you're an e-com business and you're above 50 million in revenue. You want to know, are we spending the right amount for ads? Are we spending the right amount for employees? Whatever. I think we can build a cool data business off of this. So that's the thrill of the shill. But I just wanted to call my shot and say, maybe eventually I think we're going to do this. I don't think it's a call your shot if you say maybe eventually. Call your shot is, I'm going to do this. That's like the only requirement of calling your shot is to say, I'm going to do this.

32:51Not call my shot. If I so happen to do this, which I probably won't. But it can kind of work. It's like if Babe Ruth just went like this. It's at the point, you just went like... He kind of shrugged. He just waited to say it. He's like, Dude, also, you reminded me of something. I don't mean to rain on your thrill or your shill here, but do you remember, have you seen these leaked? I'm sure you've seen this because we're both internet, like, what's it called? Like the people who look for fossils, whatever, archaeologists. When Mark Zuckerberg had his old, like, AIM messages leaked when he was 19 years old starting Facebook.

33:37These effing idiots are actually downloading this thing. Here's the transcript. He goes, he just DMs a friend just because he can't wait to break. He goes, yeah, so if you ever need anyone, if you ever need any info about anyone at Harvard, just ask. I have over 4 ,000 emails, pictures, addresses, social security numbers. And his friend goes, what? How did you manage that? People just submitted it. I don't know why. They, quote, trust me. Dumb bucks. This is Sam. It is slack about Hampton. It's like, yeah, every agency just submitted their profits, their revenues, their growth tactics. They trust me.

34:10For the record, I want to say... You're like the next Zuck, dude. Dude, I want to say I have access to zero of the documents that people submit in order to join Hampton. I've got zero access. I purposely did this just like for years. I purposely didn't ask your name of your e-com business. I was like, I don't want to know because I don't want to accidentally say anything. I have zero access to this. Not only because I don't want to say anything, and also because I just literally don't know how to, you know, like use computers and like log in and I don't have a password. That was the equivalent of, you know, no habla inglés.

34:48Like, oh, I got pulled over. I don't even speak. I don't even know how to use my computer. I can't act with this stuff. Trust me. All right. Let me stop making fun of that. Let's move on. Let's do another one. All right. So last year, I invested in this company called ConsenSys. And they basically, it was like an AI company for research, for like scientific research. So if you wanted to like figure out like, you know, instead of like reading individual studies, this website would just tell you in aggregate what many studies would show. And they're only doing okay. There was basically just two guys and they were still just trying to figure it out.

35:18Like it was like, this sounds interesting, but like, I don't even know if this is going to work. Let's see. Well, something happened a few weeks ago that I think is going to change their business. But I think that there's an inflection. So basically, when the iPhone came out, the App Store happened. And we heard stories about Pandora. So Pandora was a company before they were the music service. The App Store came out and they're like, Oh, let's just use our service and pivot and build an app. They're one of the first apps. That's what made Pandora popular. When COVID happened, there's companies like BetterHelp, which is like therapy online, or there's telemedicine.

35:50Because the laws during COVID changed where a doctor can prescribe meds across state lines. There's been a bunch of these. Right now, one just happened. So I think January 14th. So I think it was January 10th. OpenAI created an app store. They've kind of done this where they've made their own... You can make your own GPT and all this other stuff. But they created an app store. I don't even think they said what the pricing was. So with the iPhone app store, I think the developer gets what? 70 % of the revenue. Apple gets 30%. OpenAI hasn't even said what it's going to be. So they're still really early.

36:27And so this company that I invested in, they're like, Oh, well, our thing is going okay. But what if we just went all in on this plugin for OpenAI Store? And so their version is basically like you just type in... You ask it questions, medical questions, and it just gives you a slightly better answer than OpenAI, but it's a lot better, or at least enough that you want to pay for. And there's not that much traffic right now, or not that many new apps in the OpenAI App Store. But this is one of those inflection moments. So here's two more examples. So you remember Honey, that company that was like...

37:01What do they do? Coupon codes for a website. And then Grammarly did the same thing. They both did that with the Chrome store. You have a bunch of friends because you ran in that world where people did this with the Facebook platform. So Zynga, I don't know how much money they eventually made, but it was at one point a multi-billion dollar company. I think right now we're going to see a Facebook store. You're going to see all these mafia wars, all these weird games. I think you had a buddy. what was the guy's name? Dan who went to Camp FM who started like OMG Pop or something like that. What was that called?

37:29Draw Something was the game that everybody played. And I think he had a multi-hundred million dollar exit. I think this is right now about to happen with the OpenAI like plug-in store. It's really fascinating what's happening. I thought this was interesting. You asked the guy or somebody asked the founder. He said, I think it's going to be something between like more than the Chrome extensions market but less than the app store. He goes short term, it's awesome for marketing and functionality for users. and OpenAI is footing the bill on a lot of the compute costs. In the medium term, we have 2x the usage of the next biggest GPT.

38:06And I think Canva is the next. So this is the number one GPT. Yeah, it's taking off. And these guys, they're smart guys, but it was still, when they were starting their company, when we invested, it was like, I don't know, hopefully we'll figure it out. And there was a time where I was like, you guys better figure this out soon. I don't know if this is going to work out. and then this inflection happened. This change happened. Dude, this product is awesome. I just went to their site. I didn't do the chat GPT thing, but just their app. It's really cool. So you go there, you ask any questions. So I just did, are microplastics dangerous for humans?

38:35And then it has all these papers, but then you hit synthesize, which I think is the credits that you have to buy, but you start with 23 credits. And it says, summary, we looked at 10 papers. The study suggests microplastics are dangerous for humans and they carry toxic chemicals contaminating ecosystems and are linked to various health issues, including cancers and immune system disruptions. And then it says, we looked at the 14 papers. Yes was 43 % of the time, possibly 57 % of the time. No, 0 % of the time. And that was the thing. And then you could see below each specific paper and it's like tagged like, oh, this is a rigorous journal.

39:09This is highly cited. And you can kind of get AI to summarize each of those papers. This is a sick product. It's cool. But by the way, just like all great stuff, it did not start that way. I'm mad you didn't tell me about this. Why did I invest in this? This is great. It wasn't obvious. By the way, it's still not obvious. This company, just like any startup, it could still totally fail and not work. No, but it's a very interesting bet, right? Like to do a verticalized Google specifically for scientific papers and AI being the why now of what you could do differently than you could do before, this makes a lot of sense.

39:44And it was, I'll give the shout out, it's consensus.app. That's their website. But the point being, A, Consensus is great. I think it's actually going to work out. And these guys, they kind of put their head down for like 24 months and are really starting to figure out. There's going to be a lot of stuff just like them on the ChatGPT store. Because I think when we invested in them, I don't remember exactly. I'm almost positive the word AI didn't come up one time. It wasn't like... It was like... We have this... We know what the outcome that we want to... What we want it to be, but we're not entirely sure how we're going to come to that.

40:14And then they started figuring out. AI got more popular. And then this ChatGPT store opened up and they're like, boom, we found the path. And I think that path is opened right now. Now it's more competitive than the app store. And it's more competitive than Chrome because there's more people who are doing this stuff. OpenAI is already huge. But that inflection is happening right now. This is one of those things that's happening in real time. And I wanted to call out because I think OpenAI even said, we don't even know what payment terms we're going to give these people. They're still all figuring it out.

40:43But this is happening this second right now. There's an opportunity here for a lot of different companies. They're like some celebrity relationship. They're like, oh, we don't want to put a label on it yet. We're just exploring each other and figuring out who we are together and individually. Yeah, it's definitely trying to figure it out. Have you seen Perplexity? Have you used Perplexity? I don't like it. I don't know why people are going nuts for it. It's pretty cool. It's just like OpenAI, but for some reason it has a science bent. That's one of these companies, I don't know much about it. This is an uninformed opinion, but I feel like every VC who missed, like you can't get into open AI or if you could get in now, it's at a hundred billion dollar valuation.

41:22There's not much money to be made as an investor there. And so all the capital realized all the investors realized, holy shit, this is the big thing. And they're like, what's the next best competitor? And they're like, all right, stable diffusion and perplexity and the next thing and the next thing. And they get these super inflated valuations. And I don't know. I'm not, I'm not really a believer in that. I think those get way ahead of the skis. And I've just seen that story many times. This happened in crypto. This happened when mobile was happening. And for every Instagram, you would then get the 10 super funded other apps that didn't make any sense.

41:59And yeah, I would take the under or I would short that. After the pod, go to your email and type in consensus. I'm almost positive that I heard about this company and you were CC'd on the email. I just want to put that out there. It was two years ago. I'm almost positive. You're like, after the pod, take some lighter fluid, pour it over your body, light it back. I hope no one finds out what happens. We're going to burn it down and hide it. Can I do a rant about something? So I've had a realization that my world, like a lot of the content I'm consuming was algorithmic. All right, that's pretty obvious.

42:48What does that mean? Just Twitter, TikTok, whatever? Everything I was using, you'd go to Twitter, it's an algorithm telling you, here's the content you need to see. You go to TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, yes, all of that. Even email. Email is not really algorithmic exactly, but you go there and it's, here's what other people want you to look at. Here's my problem. Hey, here's my problem. read me right uh and then same thing same thing with you know all news go to a news website hey here's everybody's problems on the other side of the world here you know pay attention to this i'm calling it the intentional internet which is i started really being intentional about oh no no if i'm going on the internet right now what is it that i want to see what is it i'm curious about what is it that i want to learn about and then i go in and i'm stiff arming algorithms left and right.

43:43I'm Marshawn Lynch on that one run where he just sheds eight defenders. It goes all the way and just rumbles to the end zone. That's me on the internet now. And I think more people should be doing this. Join me on the intentional internet where you get on and you're not just a little puppy, just eating the puppy child that the algorithms give you. Go on with some intent and say, what is it that I'm looking for? Maybe I want a certain type of entertainment. Maybe it's I want a certain type of information or I want to be inspired. Okay, so then go look for the things that will give you that way.

44:16Dude, but you follow 13 ,000 people on Twitter. The trick is you don't go to Twitter, right? What do you do? Well, Twitter's not a great place for this, right? Because if you go to Twitter, you're going to get your first thing. You're going to be served up as a feed and you're going to start scrolling. What are you going to start reading books? That's very unlike you. So I make a little list. I say, you know what? Curious how this started. it or I want to learn more about this and then I'll go to YouTube or Google or wherever looking for that. But just that adding that little paper step in between me and the internet has been very, very useful.

44:50And I learned a bunch of interesting things in the last three days. I got more out of the internet. So I'm just putting that out there for anybody who... What's been on your list? I'll give you an example. I was doing research for one thing and I saw this name. Do you know this guy eric van veen yes he's amazing i have got him oh wait are you talking about ricky van veen or eric uh oh maybe he's ricky ricky van ricky facebook guy yeah facebook dude dreeby super dreeby this guy's dreamy as shit i've talked to him a bunch uh via email a handful of times the internet pete budaj or something no man this one's great so this guy created college humor yeah and then he created um a couple other things so what did he create create college humor and then he he created a few other things like cracked or whatever then he bundled it up sold it to iac and he was running media at iac and then you're forgetting the biggest thing they started which one so at college humor this was like pre-youtube days they create this was like ebom's world days, they created a better way to host videos.

46:01And that's what Vimeo is, which they sold to IAC. IAC spun off and became a billion dollar plus publicly traded company. So creates Vimeo, creates college humor, goes to IAC. IAC is a super interesting company with a very cool pedigree of people that come out of it. Tinder came out of IAC. There's a bunch of really interesting things about IAC. They're the proctor and gamble of the internet. They're a media and then match.com i think came out of there now he's head of like create head of like video or head of creative content at facebook and i was like oh this guy's interesting i kind of just noted it uh because i think i was thinking about college humor and um so just who who's behind that what are they doing now and i think this this what are they doing now has been one of my threads so i'll i'll think of something that was cool and i'll be like where did they go i haven't heard about their new album what are they working on and i'll go look at that that's just a very it's a very useful um way to go look at things so by the way ricky ricky ended up marrying and i don't think they're together anymore but he like if you just you could just google like tabloids or whatever he married allison williams you know the famous like actress whose father is brian williams the famous newscaster and if you google his name the guy's just like hanging out with like all these celebrities and stuff and he's like seems so cool like this guy's dreamy as shit so we acknowledge that strategy of facebook so anyways what's my point?

47:25So I have a list of cool companies or cool things that were built, you know, 10 years ago. And I'm wondering, what are those people doing now? College Humor was one of them. So I go look at this guy and then I'm like, I'm researching Vimeo and I'm looking at him and then I'm like, he gave this talk in 2008 at this media conference and then he comes back again eight years later. I don't know if you've ever seen this talk, but it's a, I mean, it gets no views on the internet, but for nerds like us who create media and content on the internet, it's very interesting to see what somebody thought in 2008, which is like the iPhone has come out, but it hasn't changed the world yet.

47:58And literally the presentation, he's like, yeah, kids on their Blackberries are not going to be doing XYZ. And back then, when he created College Humor, it became the number one comedy entertainment site on the internet, way bigger than Cartoon Network and all these other incumbents. Okay, that's interesting. Then he comes back eight years later and he's like, here's what I got right and here's what I got wrong. And one of the things he was talking about and he's like, at some point people on the internet will stop leaving the internet. They'll stop using the internet as a springboard to go onto Netflix or to get cast into a TV show or whatever.

48:34They'll realize that their YouTube channel is worth more than those shows and they won't want to leave to go do those. They want to view this as a stepping stone and that's happening. He basically had like four or five predictions about where the world was going. He put up all the sites like Viral Nova and Upworthy and whatnot. He's like, right now, these are the hottest sites in the world. Their traffic is crushing ours and they're getting more traffic than anybody, more traffic than God. He's like, I think all of this is going to zero. I think this is highly commoditized and it's not going to work for these reasons.

49:05He was absolutely correct. And so it was very interesting to learn from this guy who's kind of a master at what he does. And I've done this before when I looked up all the infomercial kings. So the guys who created Proactive, that acne medicine, how did that story happen? But if I just log on to the internet and I just take the last thing that somebody tweeted or the latest TikTok somebody uploaded, I'm playing defense. I'm playing their game, not mine. So I'm just trying to have a little bit more intention when I use the internet. I'm not the type who's just going to go total digital detox and just not use the internet.

49:40But when I do use it, I'm trying to use it in a bit of a healthier way. So Ricky, he predicted that the viral novas of the world, he predicted that it was going to go to zero and they did? Yeah. Did I ever tell you the story about my partner, Joe, in Hampton and a bunch of other stuff? Did I tell you a story about little things? You've mentioned it before that he got really big, the most trafficked Facebook referral, right? And then he had an offer to sell and he didn't take it or something? Is that the story? So Joe's an amazing entrepreneur. So he started his first company. It was an ad tech company.

50:08He sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars when he was like 25. So he just had this huge success at a young age. Then his next business he started was called... I forget exactly what it was called, but PetFlow. It was a pet food company. And they started it before Chewy, except he was a little conservative. And he was like, we have to spend money profitably on ads. And that's hard to do. And so we're going to go a little bit slower. Chewy comes in and goes, no, F that. We're going to lose money for the first 6 or 12 months at a customer. And we're going to do such a good job that they're going to come back.

50:38And Joe was like, that's a dumb strategy. Turns out it was right. But in order to make PetFlow grow, he created a blog where they just wrote content on pets. And within a very, very, very, very short amount of time, they started getting 10, 20, 30 million people a month coming to this blog on pets. And he's like, screw that. Let's just do this blog. And so within four years, they were the most shared website on Facebook. Bigger than Viral Nova, bigger than BuzzFeed, bigger than HuffPo, all these publishers that were huge in the 2014-15 era. And it started getting something like 250 million uniques a month to their website.

51:15And they scaled up, I think, to 90 million in revenue in four years. It was a huge company. I cold emailed them. I went to his office. He had these studios. And they're like, Facebook Live is the next big thing. We just built out this $250 ,000 studio in the Manhattan office. And it's going to be the greatest thing ever. We have 150 employees. This is going to be the biggest thing ever. The problem, of course, that we all know, was Zuck does what Zuck wants. And they built this entire company, littlethings.com, on the back of Facebook. And they got an LOI to sell the business. And they were literally three weeks from selling.

51:49They were going to sell for hundreds of millions of dollars. Facebook puts out this annual report where they go, we're actually changing. We're pivoting from this thing to this thing. And three weeks away or something like that from this deal closing for hundreds of millions of dollars the company uh backed out and within six months the business basically laid off everyone and had to shut down all in a matter of like six or seven months of like we're on top of the world making 100 million a year to now we are not and it's a crazy crazy story if you google like his name joe spizer little things you'll see the story uh i think uh ink just did some big story on it but it's pretty wild.

52:27Ah, the lessons we learn, unfortunately. That's, you know, that's like, it's cool to be like, yeah, you learn so much from failure, but it's like, God, sometimes it's so painful. Yeah, he was basically, he posted this publicly. He was like, I was set to make$50 million and three weeks away from the closing, it went away. And I, he like has all these crazy stories about that. And by the way, what's he like to work with? Because you picked him as your partner for Hampton. Why'd you pick him? He's the best man. He's the best. He's the best. He's a harmonious partner. He's even keel. He's very easy.

53:00I like the partnership dynamics because you've told me about those. What's his edge? What's he great at? What is he amazing at? You ever hang out with Israeli guys and Israeli guys have a culture of they're quite competent because they served in the military and they're really good at stuff. Oftentimes, they're good at spotting opportunities because that's also part of the culture of just negotiating well and finding interesting deals. He is so good at spotting opportunities. And he's technical. And he's so fast. I've never met someone who's significantly faster than I am at making stuff and going all in.

53:35And he'll just find an opportunity. He'll build a website for it. And he's like, yep, this is what I'm doing now. And he pounces so fast. I've never met someone who moves faster. One thing that we did that was so great. Did you ever have this with Ben or any of your other partners where you do like a... you're like, look, before we hop in bed and before we get married here, let's just sit down and map out what do you want your life to be like? What do you want in five years and ten years? What do you want on a day-to-day basis? And you write out how you want to live, what you're willing to give up, what you're not willing to give up.

54:04Have you ever done that? Not exactly. But you told me you did that. I think there's a version of that that I do, but I'm not... I think everything changes. So it sounded really great in theory, and I think it's a useful exercise just to clarify your own thoughts. But I don't I think people themselves are quite incongruent in general. Well, yeah, you change. You change, but also you don't know what you want. And also you say one thing because it sounds good or you think you want it, but then something comes up and it's your stated preference versus revealed preference. I think it's very hard to get to people's revealed preferences, their true preferences, or their true desires or whatever.

54:48And so I think it's a good exercise to do, but I don't put as much weight in it as you did, I think. Well, I think that A, it starts a really good conversation. So I was like, look, let's be transparent, just like you should with your wife or girlfriend. You're like, let's talk about what type of life that we potentially want, and let's be very open about that. So I think that creating that, let's just be very clear and we'll acknowledge that it will change. So I think it creates a great version of that. But Joe's also 42, I think. He's older than me. And so I would think that at that age, he has a little bit of solidified the values that he stands for.

55:23And so it was helpful. I think if I did that exercise when I was 24, it would not have been good. In fact, I did do that exercise when I was 24 and it sucked. I said, I wanted... You want to know what I said I wanted when I was 24? I said, I want 10 ,000 employees. I go, wouldn't it be awesome if you had 10 ,000 employees? And then I hired three people and I'm like... It went out the window. I'm like, yeah, that's a no for me, dog. Like, then we're going to work. So I think if you're a little bit older and you have some experience, you might know a little bit more that you want. But when I was younger, no, that wouldn't have worked.

55:51My thinking on this is the Buffett thing of you want a partner with energy, integrity, and intelligence. I think that's the core thing I look for at least, which is basically, in order, energy is the easiest to spot and it's the easiest one to try to write off if somebody doesn't have it. Meaning, seems like a nice to have, it's actually not a nice to have for me. It's a must-have for me. And so energy is the first one that shows up, and it's the easiest one that I've tried to talk myself out of with certain people, and that's been a mistake every single time I've done it. Who have you worked with that's high energy and almost exhausts you because you're like, I can't keep up?

56:33Sully's like that. He's super high energy, but not in an exhausting way. I get energy from that, so it's all good. I don't mean exhausting like they wear you out, but you're like, oh my god, dude. You're almost hard to keep up. You move so fast. That's inspiring. Yeah, everybody. But it's in a good way. Yeah, I mean, in a good way. And that they bring their own energy to the table. I'm not bringing it out of them. Ben is a fun... So Ben Levy, who's my current business partner, on the surface, when you meet him, he's a more quiet guy. He's more reserved. He's not like... He doesn't come across like this huge, booming personality.

57:07But Ben's got that energy where it comes out for him through text message or through... He'll just wake up and do something or he can't sleep at night because he's thinking about something. So energy reveals, energy is not just being a wacky, flailing arms guy. It's, do you have the, are you driven yourself? Do you take action quickly? Do you think about things all the time? Or are you, am I trying to force you to, am I dragging your brain into the conversation? And do you get excited about things? Are you, when an opportunity arises, do you shift gears up? So energy is the first one. Then it's intelligence or competence, which is like, what are they great at?

57:41Oh, this person's great at selling. This person's great at building. This person is great at just pushing the ball forward every day, whatever it is. And then the last one, which is integrity, is the hardest one to get a feel for, which is how is this person going to treat me when they have the opportunity to be selfish? Will they be selfish when they have the opportunity to be selfish? And it's very, very hard to know that. You can kind of only talk to people they've worked with before or ask them questions and try to see if they're pretty honest about that. And then I just work with them on something first before we commit.

58:10So it's like, we have that conversation, sure. But let's like, I would always trade an experience for a belief. And if I can have an experience working with you on something for three weeks, that's going to be way better than me trying to take a leap of faith on a bunch of things you said or you wrote down in a Google Doc. Did you just make up that word or that phrase? Tony Robbins special, baby. Oh, I was going to say, that's yours now. how late into the evening are you working on business stuff versus family time or fitness or whatever else there is I basically I work out in the middle of the day I work about 2pm so it's basically like I've done enough where I could stop working I wake up and I work I wake up and I do my morning routine then I work and then I take a break to work out and then I'll either just if I've done enough that day I'll just play with my kids I'll start playing with them and just hang out if I haven't, I'll do another hour or two of work.

59:06And then I do family time till they go to bed. So they're usually fully asleep, 8.30 or 9. And then I chill out slash work one of the two. They're both kind of the same to me. So sometimes it's just like watching a show. Sometimes it's working or reading something. And I'll do that till 11 or 12 and I go to sleep. But between that 11 or between kids going to sleep and you going to bed, are you on the phone talking to people ever? No, no, no. That's me time. That's me on the internet. I'm not talking to people, no. I've got a bunch of friends who are like that. Even with my wife, she'll try to talk and I will be like, I'm doing no talking.

59:45That's my favorite. I'm doing no talking right now. It's a nice way of saying like, I don't want to talk to you. I'm doing no talking. There's like this unspoken rule at my house where like at eight or nine when she wants to like ask me like, hey, what dates do you want to go to this place? and I just mumble. I go, that means like, dude, I just shopped at Ikea all day. I'm overwhelmed. I can't look at anything. I can't think. Don't ask me a date. I'm not thinking about anything. You know, we've been, you know what we've been doing lately is fucking Legos. Have you ever done Legos? I've never done Legos.

1:00:20I, I have a whole separate pod topic about adult Legos because I think it's a thing and you're one of those. So we should talk, we should actually do a full segment on it. I'm so into it. I'm so into it. That's all I'll say. I just got into it in November. I'm a Lego guy now. Okay, we're going to talk about that next time. I got to jump. This has been good. This is the pod. That's the pod. That's the pod. 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.

1:00:56Hey, let's take a quick break because there's a quote that I love I want to read you. It's that we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us. And as an entrepreneur, if you're using a bank that was built in the 90s, you're operating like you're in the 90s. And trust me, I've been there. Clunky portals, random holds on your money,$50 wire fees, and then being told, please visit your local branch. Well, that's why I switched to a different type of banking solution, Mercury. It turns your financial chores into a smooth workflow. You can do wires, invoices, cards, reimbursements, two clicks, and I'm done.

1:01:26If you're already using Mercury, respect. If you're still using one of the old big banks, I got questions for you. So go visit Mercury.com and give it a test drive. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group, Column 8, and Evolve Bank & Trust members FDIC.