3 Anti-Comfort Businesses That Are Making Millions

24:35And the story is basically after World War II, America takes over Japan. The Japanese are like, these Americans are going to come over and crush us. Well, America's rule at the time was we're going to try and be kind, and hopefully we're going to buy some goodwill, and it's going to turn out okay. And they did. And so these Japanese start becoming friends with the American soldiers. They start learning about American culture. And for some reason, this guy named Kensou Ashizu, he creates this fashion brand and he calls it Ivy Prep Fashion. And so he sees old pictures, or they're not old, but at the time from the 50s, of Brooks Brothers ads.

25:11He just sees these because one of the American soldiers has it. And he goes, wow, everyone who lives on Harvard's campus must dress like a brooks brother magazine we're going to make this popular and at the time uh the japanese were very conservative with their dress the prep fashion was considered a little bit less conservative and so he makes this a huge thing it becomes a massive company and that's one of the reasons why in some asian cultures this ivy league prep is popular over there it turns out very popular there but it turns out he ran this business for 10 years without ever going to america so he goes i need to finally get over there to america and see what it's all about he He goes to the campus of Harvard and he walks around.

25:47He's like, you guys are wearing like cargo shorts. Why aren't you dressed like the magazines? And so have you ever like hung out with some of your like Asian friends who just came over and they dress a lot nicer than you? And they like they like wear a better American fashion. That's kind of what happened with this like whole fashion trend was like we took the American style, but we cranked it up to the extreme. So we're now like more American. They're the American caricature as opposed to what they really are. And so at Duke, so Duke is kind of like these like old school, like the campus looks very much like Yale or whatever.

26:19It's like the Ivy of the South. They call it. There was a guy named Bobo and I don't know what his real name was. I think his last name was like Bobadilla or something like that, but everybody called him Bobo. And I think he was in the international dorm, but this guy would always walk around dressed to the nine. So he had like the vest, the blazer, and he was like wearing khakis. He would never wear shorts. He would never wear like athleisure shit. and he had a rolling like briefcase that he would take with him every single class, no backpack. And he had like that, like kind of like the beret type of cap.

26:50And at first we all kind of laughed at him, but by like week three, we're like, the bubble looks pretty fly actually. And we, I think, I think that's what happened. This guy came over internationally was like, I think this is how I'm supposed to dress. That's all he had in his wardrobe. It was amazing. Yeah. And that tends to happen. I've had a bunch of Asian friends who come over and I'm like, dude, you are dressed as if you read an American magazine and think that that's how we all behave and you look way better than us. Well, this gave me an idea, which was like, how do you put a 10 % remix on an idea?

27:21So I don't know if you read my Five Tweet Tuesday thing I sent out, but I had this one picture in there. Do you see the McDonald's merch I put in there? No. So there's this guy on Twitter. He's a great follow. He's, I don't know how you say his name. It's like the most French name I've ever seen. Guillaume Huynh. I don't know how you say it. He's the senior marketing director at McDonald's. He's the ex-head of social. He tweeted this thing out. I'll follow this guy and he's great. He just has like really great McDonald's like marketing stuff that I like to follow. And so he tweeted this thing out.

27:51He goes, the merch from McDonald's France is a big we like a big yes. And there's this jacket that just looks so fly. And I'm like, oh my God, I want this jacket. This jacket looks amazing. I never wanted a McDonald's jacket until now I must have this McDonald's jacket. And it kind of gave me this idea, which is if you take this kind of like luxury, high fashion streetwear type of like designer, but you use them on licensed IP, that's usually pretty low end casual, you get kind of an interesting result. So he did it with McDonald's. When I saw this college thing, I was like, oh, you know, the college gear that pretty much every store sells is the same.

28:27It's sweatshirts, it's hoodies, it's like sweatpants and like t-shirts. And nobody really takes that same IP and does it in kind of high fashion or any kind of like luxury, interesting. Or streetwear. Yeah, or streetwear. And I think that would be a good remix that you could do. I agree. On this. I agree. It's awesome. I totally agree. I actually own four or five different Ivy League sweatshirts because I got so obsessed with this. I took tours of them. I always tell people I toured Harvard once. It's like I bought a Groupon. But I completely agree. I've got my Stanford one. I completely agree.

29:08I'm into this. I really want to do this with company brands. So I want to create a like like a rogue merch company that just does absurd merch for tech companies because for two reasons. One, all corporate merch is the same. It's the same thing. It's all hoodies, T-shirts, backpacks, vests, like the same socks, like the same shit. And it all tends to be pretty cheap. And I just thought it'd be interesting if you did a merch company called the Absurd Merchandise Corporation or the Ridiculous Merchandise Corporation. and so I was like, well, what we would do is you take, first you make categories that are not already made.

29:48So for example, when you were at the hustle and you guys did ad sales, did your sales team have a gong? Yeah. Yeah. And you bought that gong and it's kind of an unbranded gong. You bought it off some Craigslist. Yeah. I think somebody should make like the sales gong, the deal trophy, the like series A ring, like a class ring or an exit ring. Like if you sell your company, you get a ring. Like somebody should make categories that other merch companies don't even touch. You do limited quantities, but high price points. And then the other thing I think you do is you do more unique fashion, super high quality, super high price point of corporate merch.

30:26And that's like that McDonald's jacket. Do the equivalent of that. Yeah, man. Dude, if I could purchase a really cool old Apple or... Remember how Apple used to have the Apple that was a rainbow? Or how Microsoft had the four squares that the retro vintage throwback stuff. I went on Etsy the other day looking for this stuff and I bought a bunch of things on Etsy of like vintage retro tech stuff. There's not a lot out there, but I was inspired because I went out to dinner with our buddy Greg Eisenberg and Greg shows up. I haven't seen Greg in a few years and he's like a cool guy and Greg's very cool.

30:58Greg has Greg is like mood music. Like if you just hang out with Greg, your head starts to nod almost like there's music playing and you're like, why am I just in a good mood? Why is my foot tapping? It's because you're hanging. It's like there's a Greg Eisenberg within 10 feet of you. So I'm hanging out with him and I'm like, is that an IBM jacket? Have you ever seen his IBM jacket? No, but it was at all. So he's got like a 1980s IBM windbreaker jacket. That's awesome. And it doesn't quite fit exactly right. But I'm like, I'm like, where did you get this dude? What is this? He's like, I was in Japan.

31:31And I was like, of course. And so he goes, I was in Japan and I'm on a train and I'm sitting next to this guy. It's older guy and he's wearing this jacket and I'm like talking to him. He's great. We have a great conversation. And at the end of the conversation, he gave me his jacket. I was like, what? Most Greg Eisenberg thing to do, strike up a great conversation with somebody to the point where they're just like, I like you. Here's my jacket. And so he's got this jacket. And when I told Greg, I go, dude, we should just turn this into one of those, like one of those things that exists in the world for no reason, but is awesome, which would be you should.

32:07And next time you have an amazing conversation with somebody, you have to give them the jacket and then they have to give the next person the jacket and let's see how far the jacket goes. And so I kind of want to start this and I want to, so I bought one off Etsy and I was like, I'm going to buy this jacket and I'm going to do this. The next time I have an awesome conversation, I'm going to give it to him and I'm going to say, the next time you have just a lovely conversation that just leaves you lit up with somebody who just spontaneous, serendipitous, not somebody you know, you must give them the jacket.

32:33And let's see. And then when you give them the jacket, I'm going to make like a Google doc, be like, jacket handed to Japanese man on train, you know, with a date. And let's just see how far this jacket goes. You better buy cool stuff. Otherwise, the person will be like, no, thanks. I'm good. No, it's yours. You can keep it. Dude, pick one of these other topics. Some of these, I sound like they might be funny and I feel like laughing. What do you got? Okay, I got a funny one. If you want it funny, I got a funny one. Some people are going to be like, you shouldn't make fun of this. I'm in. This is an honest conversation amongst friends.

33:11Did you see the Marissa Mayer new app launch? No. What happened? Oh my God, dude. Wow. This is insane. Okay, so Marissa Mayer, do you know her backstory, who she is? Early at Google, one of the first 20 Google people climbed her way up, gets wealthy, then becomes CEO of Yahoo. She created the product manager program at Google, which then trained a bunch of people who then went on to go work at Facebook, a whole bunch of product people. It's like this long family tree. And she's famous. She's tested the shade of blue of the Google search button 42 times before finding the optimal shade of blue.

33:49Whatever. She's supposed to be high product chops. Goes and then becomes the CEO of Yahoo. She's this amazing CEO apparently, but then Yahoo falters, so people are like, was she good? Was she bad? I don't know. Maybe it was hard to turn that around. Anyways, I haven't heard from her in a little while. She comes out of nowhere and just posts a Twitter thread and is like, you ever been at a party and somebody says, hey, share that photo with me, and then they don't? Well, I'm going to solve that problem with my new app, Shine. All I want you to do is look at this app. It's 2024. she creates a photo sharing app which is like the most 2012 thing possible that you could do which is the last time anybody heard of Marissa Merritt it's like she was frozen in time and somebody like thawed her out and she popped out and just made the same app you would make in 2012 when the iPhone was like you know just pop in and people were doing photo sharing apps so she posts this thing and you'll see that the thread has like thousands of like you know retweets and whatnot and the reason why is because some people are like, oh, this is cool.

34:56And a lot of people are like, why is this the ugliest app I've ever seen? Look at the design of this app. Just look at the pictures. I want you to give me your reaction, and then I want to read you some of the funny comments that I saw on this. She's maybe past her prime in terms of knowing what's up. Knowing what's cool. Right? I think so. Basically, the thing looks like a test flight app. Everything is rectangular. All the colors, all the buttons are too big. All the colors are too boring. The font she chose for the main thing, literally, like, somebody retweeted this, they go, okay, cool, but why does it look like an Indian wedding invitation?

35:36Which is so spot on. The font literally is the Aladdin font. It's crazy. Why is she doing it? So Marissa Mayer is probably, I bet you, if she's not a billionaire, I bet you she's like, within that ballpark, why is she doing this? This seems like way beneath her. I mean, it's fun to build things. And I think she felt this problem of like, oh, it's hard to do group photo sharing at events. You go to a party and you want to see everybody's pictures and it's not easy to do still. And there was a famous app, Color, that tried to do this way back in the day. Many, many people have tried to do the same app.

36:09And maybe it's time. Or maybe it's time to hire a designer. One of the two things are true and we're going to find out which one it is. I like her. I like this woman a lot. I hope she wins. I'll leave it at that. oh did we do a good cop bad cop thing there i like that that was nice you like her too i mean she seems great i don't know her i don't know her either but her wikipedia left a wonderful impression on the right here's the thing if you are successful and famous and you put out a product and the product looks ugly it's not my personal belief is that it's not mean to say that the app looks really ugly and i'm not the only one to say this there's a lot of people saying this i found I wish her well, and I have nothing against her personally.

36:53I do not know her, and she's obviously very smart, more successful than me, smarter than me, and all those usual disclaimers. All right, you do one more thing. Well, all right, it's time for the thrill of the shill, which, as you know, is when we shill one of our companies. But before we shill, we thrill you with something interesting. All right, so here's the interesting thing. So me and Nick Huber, we're part owners of Shepard, but one of the things we've done that's been pretty cool is we do these like workshops or, you know, haters will call them webinars and our fans call them workshops. So we do this together.

37:24And I thought going in, I was like, okay, cool. So what are we gonna do? Just show up and be like, you shepherd. And he's like, no, no, no. Like, let's add a bunch of value. It's like, okay. He's like, so let's talk about the stuff we're doing in our companies that actually works. That's not obvious. And like, kind of was an unlock for you as a CEO or manager, like your life before you did this tactic was one way and after was better. And so I'm big on that. I'm like, oh, great. I'm going to shine here. And we get on and Nick tells a story that's so good that I'm like, where the hell did he get that from?

37:53That was awesome. And I had to follow that. And I was like, oh, yeah, I do metrics KPIs. Whatever. Nick's thing was so good. I didn't even need to say anything else. So Nick comes in there and he starts talking about a monkey on a desk. Have you heard this story? No. Okay. So he tells the story. And again, it was so good that only recently I heard it again. And I was like, are they talking about Nick's thing? And I realized Nick got this from Harvard Business Review. It is the number one or number two most sold article of the Harvard Business Review. It was this monkey on the desk thing. I'm like, oh, that makes so much more sense.

38:27Still, all credit to Nick for teaching it to me, but it got me thinking, oh, wow, I'm not the only one who likes this. This thing is, if it's a best, it's like the second best seller in all of their articles, then that's pretty good. Well, guys, when it comes to banking, the only time I feel truly happy is when I'm using Mercury. And that's today's sponsor for the show. That is the banking product I use for not one, not two, but actually eight of my businesses. I have eight Mercury accounts. I just went and counted. I use it for every one of my companies. It's an absolute no-brainer. Over 200 ,000 other fast-growing, ambitious companies use Mercury.

39:01It's one place you can go where not only you can, of course, have your money there, but you can send invoices, you can pay bills, you can create reimbursements for your team, pretty much all of your financial needs can be housed under Mercury. And the product is beautiful to use. And the reason why is because it's a product that was not made by finance people. It was made by a founder, Ahmad. He's been on this podcast before. And he used tons of products as a startup founder. And this is the one that he wished he had. And I actually reached out to them to become a sponsor for this show because I'm such a big fan of it.

39:31So if you need a banking product for your startup, use Mercury. You will not regret it. It's amazing. For more information, check out mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes for details. So here's the idea. So it's a rookie mistake that almost everybody makes as a manager or CEO. You build a company or you're in charge. You start to hire people and you're in your mind. You're like, great. I hired these people. Now they're going to take care of all these things. Now I'm going to have less work because I hired these people. Right. But of course, Every kind of like first-time manager, CEO kind of learns, well, we all pretty much suck at delegating at the beginning.

40:09And so what happens is you hire somebody, that person comes in, they're trying to do a good job and they do, he has this analogy of the monkey. So the monkey is like a problem. So he's like, an employee walks by your office and they knock, knock. Hey boss, can I come in for a second? I just, you know, we have this situation. We got this problem. And you're like, oh shit, let's talk about it. And he's like, we have this problem. Here's the situation. This is happening. What do you think we should do? And you're like, okay, it's not an easy answer. So I'm not sure. Let me think about it. I'll get back to you.

40:40Like, let me think about it or send me the info. I'll read it and then I'll get back to you. And what this guy points out is that that sounds very reasonable. But what's happened is they took a monkey. That was their problem that they were responsible for. And now you've said, let me think about it. I'll come back to you with an answer or send me the materials. I want to read them and then I'll come up with a decision. They've given you the monkey. The monkey's on your desk. And the next guy walks in and says, hey, boss, you know, wanted to get your opinion on this. I'm thinking about doing this.

41:09And you're like, no, no, no, I don't like that. Let me let me edit it. Let me let me fix that for you. You don't know what you're doing. Let me fix that for you. And and I'll I'll come back to you again. Monkeys off their plate. It's on your plate. And, you know, let's say you have five direct reports, only five employees that report to you. If even and all of them will usually have one monkey a week of like some unsolved problem. By the end of the month, you have 20 monkeys crying in your office. And you're like, what the hell just happened? I hired all these people, but somehow I have more work than I had before, right?

41:40Because I'm now responsible for solving a bunch of these problems. And so this article is basically talks about how you should handle that situation. It's like how to actually delegate it so that at the end of the day, they own that problem. So it's like, first thing you want to be very clear with them, who owns this problem? You own this problem. I don't own this problem, right? That means you're going to be responsible for ultimately executing it for the results of that execution and for the final decision. If you need help or input, you can schedule a time with me. So you can't just come in and drop this problem off.

42:11And now it's my problem. I got to deal with this now. It's like we will have scheduled time. Well, we will talk about any way that I can help you with your monkey. I can help you feed the monkey. I can help you put the monkey to bed. Whatever you need to do, we're going to have scheduled time. You don't get to just hijack my time with whenever this problem exists, right? There's only rare situations where you need to break the glass and hijack my time. Don't do it as a default. So part of it is like you only help in scheduled times. The second is making sure they understand that this is their problem, not yours.

42:39You trust them with this. Nick's point is he's basically like one of the things people do. They're very scared to do that because what if they mess up? And he's like, well, in the short term, that is painful. But in the long run, it's great because what you're going to find is people will go one of two ways within the first month of doing this. you're going to either find out, wow, this person is really capable of solving that problem. They can take care of this monkey and more monkeys. I should actually promote them. I should invest in them. They're a keeper. And the other is sort of a sink or swim thing.

43:07If they can't handle the monkey when you give it to them, they're not the right person for the job. And you can give them feedback one time of how you think they should have handled the monkey. And if they don't do it the second time, you kind of know, well, this is not the right fit. And it filters them out. And so over time, you only have competent people who can take care of the monkeys themselves. How did he tie in Shepard? Well, he's like, look, you need to hire great people. When you hire them, it's not like, yes, Shepard will help you find great people. That's what we do. We're like, you need a bookkeeper.

43:36You need an assistant. You need a marketing manager. You need somebody to do SEO for you. Whatever it is that you need, we'll find you the person. But if you're not good at actually delegating them, you're not going to ultimately get what you want out of this. You didn't come to us just for the hire. You came to us to have your problem solved with less workload for you, right? To scale your business with less work for you. That's actually why you come to Shepard, not just to hire a person. And so his big thing was like, if we can help people actually learn how to delegate, then they're going to end up hiring more people because they're going to have successful hire after successful hire, right?

44:05You're going to have one great experience and it's going to lead to the next great experience. So that's kind of how he tied it in. But I really like this monkey on the back thing. And I started to see it then. Every time an employee would come in with a problem, I would quickly differentiate between, do we need to talk about this now or should we just have time when we talk about things? And secondly, how do I make sure that they're not just giving me the problem? And my instinct is a problem solver. I'm a doer and I trust myself more than I trust anyone else. So my instinct is just to do it myself just this one time.

44:32But that just this one time mentality never ends. But you... You end up doing that forever. You don't catch me as a regular one-on-one meeting type of guy. But are you? I try not to have regular one-on-ones. So I think right now I probably have one... Two. I have one with my assistant because I'm like, hey what i do with my assistant which is great so i hired my assistant off shepherd uh that's the plug so what i tell her to do i just created a bullshit filter i'm like anything you see that comes into my inbox or anything i say in passing that is non-urgent i need you to put it all together into one doc and schedule one hour with me and we just knock them all out in that one hour of cleanups because like i hate when i have to like stop what i'm doing my big task and like just address this one little thing oh my eyeglasses prescription thing oh my my kid uh their elementary school asked for this or this person's asking for their K1 or whatever it is.

45:24Random requests. This person's asking for a laptop or whatever it is. And so I said, unless it has to be addressed right now, we do them on Wednesdays. We got a cleanup time and there's one doc and we just make a game. It's like, how many of these can we knock out in one hour? I'm just going to make decisions on the fly and it's not going to interrupt anything else I'm doing. So she helps me with that. And so I delegated to her the entire class of things which are stuff that has to get done, but is not important. It's not going to push the ball forward on my hopes and dreams. It's just like shit that's got to get done that I would rather put all together and knock out of one batch.

46:00So I have that meeting and I have one with the CMO of my e-com business where we talk about how it's going. Those are the only two that we have. By the way, I think your deal with Shepard might end up being pretty good. I mean, you already knew that. But did you... I won't even name the names because we'll be a shepherd pod. But one of your competitors just raised money at a$300 million valuation, I think. It was hundreds of millions. And they showed how much revenue they added in the last 12 months. And it was jaw-dropping. Jaw-dropping. It was insane. I had no idea these things could be as big as they are.

46:40I think they had added... Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. All the companies that are doing this, the companies are starting now, I think, are having a tough time or a much tougher time. It's not really going to work out in the long run, but the ones that have been doing this for four, five, six, seven years, they're benefiting from this work went remote. When work went remote, that was a big deal. Having offshore talent is just a smart thing to do. It's just more remote. That's fine. No extra organizational cost to you. right the second thing during the zero interest rate you know period everything was about growth growth growth nobody cared about profits now everybody cares about profits well one of the biggest costs to every business is their labor and if you can basically reduce your labor cost by even you know percentage points that all drops straight to the bottom line and so your your your ebitda goes up when your ebitda goes up the company value goes up like that became the focus for a lot of real companies now um i think the last thing is that i don't know people like me and others have start to talk more openly.

47:38It used to be, and maybe still is, I don't know, kind of a douchey thing to be like, my assistant or whatever. I have an assistant. It's kind of like a thing most people didn't brag about or talk about. But a lot of people are now more open about like, hey, here's what I did. Here's how it's benefited me. Here's the systems I used to set it up so that if you're at a similar position, maybe that'll benefit you. And I think that gospel started to spread. It was also more fringe. So for example, before COVID, it was like, this company's all remote. Wow, that's so crazy. It's almost as crazy as a company serves a lunch.

48:08That's insane. They have free washer. They'll clean your clothes. He doesn't wear a deodorant? Interesting. Old choice. It was insane. And then Shepard and a couple other people actually did a really good job of repositioning it. They packaged it a lot nicer. Because obviously, Upwork has been around forever. But it was still considered low status a bit. Where it was like, oh, I just used Fiverr. I can't believe it actually worked. Whereas now, companies like Shepard, you guys, your team is your team, and it doesn't matter which country they're in. You know what I mean? And so they've done a good job of repositioning it to make it seem, well, it did not make it seem because it is the same thing, but it made it feel better.

48:48If you're not hiring with Shepard overseas, are you racist? I don't know. It's just an open question. Just putting that out there for the masses. Enough of the thrill, enough of the shill. Alright, let me tell you about something. So in 2017, this guy comes to my office. I was currently running the hustle. We had just gotten going. We were probably only a year and a half in, but we had some hype. So people started talking to us. This guy named Caleb reached out to me. Caleb originally was my account manager at SendGrid, which is what we were using to send emails. I get lunch with him, whatever.

49:22I think that he's just going to upsell me on SendGrid. Turns out, he was like, Hey, man, I've been working on this idea. I've been working on nights and weekends on it. But I'm going to make a bed for kids who have autism, Down syndrome, a variety of things like that because they need a special bed. They need a bed that helps with some sensory issues. They need a bed that has a camera that can be tracked more easily. And I was like, all right, Caleb, that sounds cool. Do you have a kid with autism? Is that what inspired you? And I think he was like, no, I'm unmarried. I don't have children. And I was like, well, this is, this is kind of a weird, uh, like problem to solve for.

49:53He's like, yeah, well, I just think it's a good, a good problem to solve. Um, and I was like, well, I just don't ever think you're going to pull that off. So, uh, God bless you. Start a newsletter, nerd. You work at SendGrid. Well, about a week ago, I see this guy who joins Hampton. He reaches out to me and goes, Hey, you remember me? I go, Caleb, of course I remember you. How are you? He goes, Well, that thing you told me that was silly, cubby beds, it's a thing now. And we've done something like$60 or$70 million in revenue so far. And I've bootstrapped the entire thing. And he was like, he sent me the website.

50:28So you guys can check it out at cubbybeds.com. It's amazing. And I go, I cannot believe you pulled this off. And he shows me pictures. He's like, yeah, look, here I am in my garage. We are assembling the piping. No factory wanted to take us on. So I just had to buy a bunch of piping in order to make the original bed, the MVP. We sold a bunch of it. I think the beds cost$5 ,000 to$10 ,000. And people's insurance pays for it. And at this point, he's going to do many tens of millions in revenue this year. And so I think this is just proof that A, I don't know if this guy actually looked up to me.

50:59Maybe he did a little bit because we had a little bit of hype. And I told him it was stupid. So A, don't listen to me or don't listen to anyone. Just do the damn thing. And B, this is just awesome. Yeah, this is amazing, dude. So okay, smart beds for special needs. The thing looks amazing. I don't know why this is special needs. I would love to sleep in something like this. This amazing cocoon of peace and solitude? Why would I not with like padded walls and whatnot? This is amazing. It's amazing. And if you go to the website, it looks awesome. It's like... This is better than Eight Sleep. This is better than the Purple Mattress.

51:31This is better than all those companies. I love this company. And it costs... I don't know the exact price. I actually am not sure if they even put it on there because people's insurance pays for it, which is just a whole another beast. I'm like, how on earth do you figure that out? But I think it costs $5 ,000 to$10 ,000. It's quite expensive. and they are selling the crap out of these. And I was telling them, I'm like, dude, not only is this an awesome business, this is like one of the few things that you can make where you can make a lot of money and I think it's like actually good for the world and everything like that.

51:59Can you believe this guy pulled this off? Like, would you have had the same reaction to me as I did years ago? No, I would have seen the genius in it and I would have invested on the spot and I would have told him, you're a legend for doing this. Well, you and I are not the same. We're a little different. but i want in the future everybody bring your ideas to me not sam he's a hater i gotta give this guy you can go to sam i gotta give this guy a shout out i think it was awesome he told me a story i was like dude i haven't heard from you in like eight years that's so awesome i love i love that it's covered by insurance i'm sure that was not simple to do that to get that done um but now you have this fourteen thousand dollar bed that's uh yeah i just put it in my cart it's about fourteen thousand dollars what are all the features that it has so it has like a camera a camera system that i guess is good and it remote monitoring yeah like the kind of safety kind of like it's like a contained thing that has like soft you know walls and whatnot so you can't get hurt um it's a bed besides that yeah it vibrates it has uh light that come the camera and it has lights that like dim with the sunset and come up with the with the sunrise it has camera or it has speakers in there so it can help with meditation and certain breathing patterns.

53:12It vibrates. It's pretty cool. It's a pretty cool bed and it's been totally bootstrapped. I honestly think somebody should make this for adults. Am I wrong? Should there not be a version of this for the Huberman acolytes who are like, I need to optimize my sleep? Why not? Yeah, I definitely think that this could work. I told one of our mutual friends who is definitely on the spectrum and his immediate reply was, yeah, they need to make these for adults. I want one. Dude, I went to Rob Dyrdek's house and he has this nap pod in his office. And it's like this thing. It's like a giant helmet. So he lays down and his body is out of it.

53:51That's so lame. It's like chest up is in this cocoon. And I don't know if it works. I don't know if it doesn't work. But if there is something like that that works, I would definitely pay. And in fact, I feel like that company should exist. If somebody's making that or somebody has one of these that works, please reach out to me. I want to learn about this. Yeah, I think that nap pot is just absolutely ridiculous. I think a blanket and a couch will suffice. But what the fuck do I know? Clearly, I'm wrong. Congrats on Cubby Beds. Good job. Where do we go from here? Maybe we wrap up. Maybe that's the pot.

54:24All right. That's the pot. 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.

54:41hey 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 you know 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 switch 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.

55:11If 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 N8, and Evolve Bank & Trust members FDIC.