Buffett’s Money Wisdom, Galloway’s $100M Advice & Why Newsletters Suck

28:10Well, yeah, I'm always down with like, I love a good crime story. Unless you're driving your successful life off a cliff. I'm out. Yeah, yeah. I need some drama. But like whenever I read about like hedge fund guys, I'm like, dude, you're just playing Excel all day. I don't find that enjoyable to hear about. But I think I think it is useful as it was a useful exercise for us to do, which was what are you irrationally drawn towards that you should probably like dial it down discount, be able to apply a discount after the fact when you're out of heat? And then what do you have an irrational distaste for where you're going to underprice or underestimate somebody?

28:43And actually, you shouldn't be. People have been talking about bias and the stuff, but they almost came at it from a diversity and inclusion point of view. For me, sure, that's fine, but I've never been drawn to spending a bunch of time thinking about that. However, for this, I immediately saw for myself, oh yeah, I could see myself making mistakes, being overly generous towards a certain personality type. You say the certain three key phrases and I'm all in. And I'm kind of repelled from these things, even though I really shouldn't be. It's actually like, I don't need to be your friend. I just, like if I'm investing in you, I don't need to think you're cool and want to hang with you.

29:25I just need to be able to understand what you're doing and invest in it. Do you feel like you have the same thing? Do you have a thing you're drawn to? Like, I feel like one of yours, I'll just say it out loud, is I feel like you're drawn to people who are very meticulous and orderly in the way they operate. Like if somebody's got like a system and like they're a stickler for the details, I feel like in your like there go up 100 points in your book. Whereas for me, that doesn't really do it. That does it for me because I envy that because that's not my natural, you know, like my wife is like that.

29:58I'm drawn to people who are orderly and systematic and disciplined, like people who wake up at 5 a.m. every morning. That's not me. And so I'm really fascinated by people who grind really hard and are systematic and are operational and things like that. I get a lot of joy being around those people because I'm not like that. Can I tell you real quick about a cool thing? Because I feel like we did a bunch of fluffy stuff today. Okay, I got to get a rant off my chest. people are really drawn to things that are highly tactical or or highly like specific

30:35versus and complex versus things that are simple but might be a little bit airy let me give you an example when i was in la we did a bunch of those dinners with founders and i think i said this in my debrief but i'll i'll point out again um people the conversation would inevitably go like you have a bunch of people who've all sold their company. Everybody in the thing is, you know, successful by traditional measures. And the conversation would always gravitate towards two subjects, like kind of health and longevity, or just like kind of like being happy, being a happier person, some sort of like life, quality of life improvement.

31:09Rich guy problems. Rich guy shit. Because like, oh, I've already made it, but yeah, I feel like I'm not as happy as I thought it would be. So then what? You know, like, and the longevity health things gives them a new, like, carrot to chase. and they kind of feel like they neglected it while running their company and the life quality. Everybody actually just wants a high quality of life. They just don't know how to ask the questions around it. And what you would see was two things. Somebody would say something like, that was just like simple and useful. They'd be like, yeah, you know, I just like, you know, before bed, I don't really use my phone.

31:40I just actually kind of review the day and think about like, you know, how I did and what, you know, just in general, like my interactions the day, what I might have done differently. And like, you know, and I'm like, oh, I do that too. I have this thing called revision and it's like i just kind of see the day events of my day and i just go back and just play them out a little differently in my head it's really useful and people are like the reaction to something like that if you just kind of tell people like hey you know here's a simple thing you could do imagine what you want and what it would feel like to have it or um think about how your day went to just be kind of mindful and thoughtful about like you know versus just uh always on to the next thing um and the reaction i would get would be like cool and the cool is kind of like cool good for you like um i ain't doing that shit uh like you know don't tell me to be alone with my thoughts and um then somebody would be like yeah you know i really uh i was feeling kind of you know i've just been feeling like i'm in a funk and so i started taking you know six milligrams of low-dose naltrexalone and then people are like what what what is it what is it and they're like getting their every literally everyone gets their phone out they start what is it called how do you spell that i'm like are you just going to take this random drug this person you've never met and they'd be like how many milligrams is that five is five what they say where do you get it can i order right now before i leave this dinner and i'm like y 'all motherfuckers are crazy why are people so attracted to the pill the the the complex thing you can't even pronounce that just might do it for you verse or you know they'd be like yeah i i hired this um you know this functional cognitive coach and they'd be like what's his name does he take more clients?

33:13Here's the money. And I'm like, bro, have you tried fucking writing down your thoughts for a second? Nobody wants the simple thing. Nobody wants the simple obvious thing. I just thunk it up. I just thunk in my bed and it worked. I was like, hey, here's what I do. When I go into a situation, instead of just reacting like, oh, it's kind of cold out here, so I'm uncomfortable. Now I feel bad. I'm a little bit bothered by that. I just decide before I go in, like, you know what? I want to have a... I want to have a playful experience. I want to have a laughing experience right now. And then I'll just like, I was like, I decide that.

33:48Then I go in and I have that. I look for those moments and I create that experience for myself. It's pretty amazing. You could just do this. You could just decide what experience you want and then go have it. And they're like, is it? Okay, can the next person say like a pill that I could take? Like some new nootropic that's going to help me? They're like, all right, Sean, but can I put that in my body intravenously? Does it come with needles or do I buy them? I'm just like y 'all are insane you're insane or this guy's like uh he's like uh you know I um I really want to like what's that you know this equipment oh I bought all this exercise equipment I'm like this do you walk do you even have like 30 minutes a day he's like no no I don't exercise I don't have time but I'm building out this home gym and I'm building it out and like like you know you could just do push-ups on the floor right you don't have to first buy $10 ,000 of equipment before you can work out.

34:41Like there's no gate to pass. You just, you can literally just do 10 things, 10 % right now. In fact, let's do that right now. And people are not ready for simple action that doesn't require like a magic bullet solution. And it had no ways the hell out of me. I'm like, are you guys, is everybody around me insane? That's how I feel.

35:06well like when people say magic pill i definitely automatically get interested because like i would like that like why don't they say shortcuts like it's a bad thing but it's like yeah i mean if i can get to my destination shorter and faster i'm in that's pretty funny they're not even shortcuts literally this shit that i was talking about this low dose fucking whatever it's called nut nut nut no drax alone i don't know what it was because guess what? I don't care. Don't need it. But I was like, I was like, so does this work? Like if you felt like an amazing difference? The person was like, no, you have to take it for six months first for your body to acclimate.

35:43I'm like, you're getting hosed. Honestly, I don't know what this drug does. Maybe it's useful. Maybe it's a specific thing. Kind of jokes aside. But for that person who got it prescribed, maybe they needed it. For the other eight bastards at the dinner who were like immediately trying to order it. I was like, y 'all don't need this. You don't need that right now. That is not the answer to whatever hole you're trying to fill right now. There is no chance that that is the correct first step you should be taking. Well, I think we talked about the different types of procrastination. There's actually good types of procrastination, which is like the forgetful scientist who forgets to shower or put on the right pair of socks.

36:22It's like, ah, that's alright. He's doing the big things right. That's okay. And then there's the bad type, which is like making plans that don't need to be planned or like buying domain names or like going back and color coding it afterwards like dudes okay like yeah or like in in this case it's like buying pills when it's like just 10 000 steps a day will do the trick as well um but that's really funny that's a good story i i uh i would have liked to have seen you in that room yeah i was just like you guys are nuts uh but okay now to satisfy i like this stuff i like this stuff by the way i like this stuff uh this interests me most because tactics change strategies don't you know what i'm saying like i like talking about strategy sometimes dude have you been following the presidential debates and campaign stuff that's going on did you watch the republican debate i watched the the clips the so everyone is it seems like the vivek is uh wow there's two ways to say his name that and one is the right one one is the wrong one and you just came with a third vivek holy holy it's v-i-v-e-k right vivek is is the way you say it so some people say vivek and you went you went i don't even know where you just dude that's like correcting me if i say it like lady gaga

37:42are you a big lady gaga fan i mean come on he was like he was like the star of the debate um because he's just look at the guy's like a debate champion. I was like, what this guy is trained to do? But he's still polling like, you know, I don't know, 10 % or something like that. So I think it's all I mean, I think Donald Trump's going to win. But I did want to tell you a funny thing that I remembered when I watched that debate. You watched it? Oh, I love watching. I don't care about politics, but I love watching fights. I would not have thought that. I love the debates. I love the strategy of the debates.

38:15I love watching. It's content creation. I just love watching the strategy that these guys take into it. I couldn't care less about who gets picked. Couldn't care less about their policies because they don't care about the policies as far as I'm concerned. To me, it's a popularity contest and I like to see who markets themselves better. I think there's a lot to learn from that. But one of the things that I remembered was back in the day, I was working at Monkey Inferno. And I used to work for a guy named Michael Birch. And Michael Birch is a very interesting guy. He has built and sold multiple companies.

38:51So he sold Bebo famously for$850 million. Of which him and his wife owned it. So they got the whole thing. Yeah. So it was a huge exit for husband and wife couple. Before that, he had built another social network sold for a few, you know, single digit millions of dollars. So he kind of made one, sold it for a few million bucks. Then as soon as the non-compete ended, he created it again. He's like, oh, now I know what I should have done the first time. and that became the$850 million. But he also created Birthday Alarm, which is a company that had millions of dollars in cash flow every year. So he had multiple wins.

39:24Very interesting guy. But ever since the big Bebo acquisition, he created this Idea Lab, but he kind of transitioned to a different phase of life almost. He was like, you know, I'm not like, you know, what do I care? It's sort of like, yeah, I angel invest, but like, you know, does it really matter? Like I kind of already won the money game in a way, right? He wouldn't say that, but you could just tell it's not like his heart was in that. Is he a billionaire at this point, you think? Even that, he's like, I'm not really a billionaire, but who cares? You know, like, I got, you know, like, he's at that 5 '10", 5 '11 range.

39:55And like, you know, those guys want to be six foot. He was like, that's pretty much six, right? With shoes. He's like, you know, he's at 800 million or 900 million or something like that. He's like, I don't know. I don't really keep track of it. Does it really matter? It seems like overkill to care about something like that. That's a nice billionaire response. He did two interesting things. One, he built a private members club in San Francisco. So he bought a old candy factory that was 60 ,000 square feet that was abandoned because it needed tons of like seismic retrofitting. Nobody wanted to put in the millions of dollars it would take to retrofit this place.

40:27He did it. And he built a members club. So if you go to San Francisco, you can go to this place called The Battery. And it's like Soho House. But for San Francisco, built that thing into a real juggernaut. Like it actually like totally came to fruition. in this idea that seemed kind of crazy and he had no experience in he'd never done hospitality never done any of that stuff one time i went there and i saw a booth of three people and it was a ball like imagine a monk wearing like the the dalai lama like orange outfit like he was bald headed and sandals with like a black guy that looked like a rapper like he had like gold chains on and like six shoes and then this blonde haired lady and they were all leading in having a conversation and i was like this is just the funniest place i've ever been to yeah that's like the start of a joke a monk a rapper and a and cheryl sandberg walk into a bar no but that's what i mean i saw leonardo dicaprio there uh you know tons of famous elon musk but a bunch of famous people go there anyways so he that was one thing he did but he always had these like random ideas and once in a while he would just be like sean i'd like to have an idea for you and he would pitch me this idea and one of the ideas he had was around the presidential debate he goes you know trump got elected in i think what 2016 he was thinking about it for 2020 he was like you know i think there's a good chance that trump gets re-elected again and he's like you know if you think about why a lot of people in silica valley don't really fully you know they're like they take these like you know strong stances on what it means what you know is it because part of america feels repressed and they're reacting to the to the liberal neocon they start making up all these words.

42:05He's like, I don't know if it's that as much as it is that Donald Trump was the more charismatic candidate. And he's like, if you go back and you look throughout time, he's like in every debate or every race, if you go back to the last like 12 elections, which is like, you know, 50 years or something like that, the more charismatic candidate tends to win. Not always, but tends to win. And they're usually like tall, not ugly people. Yeah, he was just like, the more charismatic candidate wins, it's as simple as that, right? Maybe you're charismatic because you're really good looking and you're maybe it's that.

42:42Maybe it's that you got the gift of gab and you're like maybe Obama or Reagan or something like that. Clinton, somebody who is just seen as very, very charming. People always felt that about Bill Clinton. So he's like, the more charismatic candidate tends to win, even though there are other reasons why you might pick, you know, why pick John Kerry over George Bush? Actually, George Bush is the more charismatic candidate versus John Kerry or Al Gore or whatever it is. And so he's like, you know, I think that given that that's the case, I don't think that should be the case, but I think it is. I don't think you're gonna be able to change that.

43:18He goes, I feel like what the Democrats should do is they need to put forward the most charismatic candidate they can. and I would say he turned out to be wrong in that they put Joe Biden, who's one of the least charismatic candidates, and he won almost because the vote was basically Donald Trump or not Donald Trump so I actually think it was a bit of an anomaly, I actually think he was correct, and you're seeing this right now, DeSantis has more experience had the machine behind him, had the track record, but he's just not charismatic he doesn't have that he doesn't have that sauce, and so a guy like Vivek can come out and he's a better talker, he's more energy, he's got better one-liners, zingers, he's willing to take stands that will draw attention to him and he's the more charismatic candidate.

44:02He's driving up. So Michael's idea was, let's create a TV show. He's like, just like the way we did American Idol and we did The Apprentice, why don't there a show called The President? And we literally just cast people who want to be the president but we give them an avenue. He's like, Because right now, the candidates all come from the machine. It's like, you know, the party is going to kind of push their favorite candidates forward. And this is based on, you know, how controllable they are, how likable they are, how much time they put in into the party. He's like, I don't think that's necessarily putting the strongest candidate forward, especially if you looked at this most charismatic candidate.

44:42So he's like, why don't you create it? He's like, why don't we create a show that's going to take 12 hopefuls and it tells their story. The show works almost like a survivor or an apprentice. Every week they go to a new city. Maybe they go to some coal mining place in wherever, West Virginia, and they're going to talk to the coal miners and there's sort of a challenge. They have to prepare a speech or talking points for what they would do to help those people. And then those people kind of vote off the weakest candidate. And at the end, you're left with the most charismatic candidate. And he's like, that would be a challenger to whoever the Democratic Party is naturally going to put up.

45:18And I love this idea. I was like this is a crazy idea and he's like yeah my friend Mark Burnett who created Survivor he could be the producer of this and we could put this together this way and even if it doesn't work I think it would just be a worthwhile attempt in an entertaining way to do this versus like if I really want to get involved in politics the reason I don't is that's sort of a very like it's not it's a laborious and sort of painful endeavor this would be almost a fun version of like a way to try to to bring some influence to it. What do you think of this idea that I just remembered?

45:54Did it go anywhere? Or is he just goofing around? So he wrote a memo. It was a very well-written memo. Is that the rich guy version of Biden the domain name? Yeah, he wrote a memo. He showed it to me. And I'm like, yeah, this is great. And I think he was like, okay, if I'm going to do this, this is going to take some real kind of like social capital to do. And I think he kind of was like, maybe not maybe my life is amazing as is um that's his version of like when the remote is just a little bit too far when you're laid down and you're like ah i'll sleep with the tv on yeah but i love this idea and i'm saying it because i i think that more business people should apply their kind of creative and entrepreneurial talents outside of just creating yet another business.

46:47So I liked that he was taking his creative and entrepreneurial spirit to be like, oh, how could I, what if I did a TV show that would influence politics? I thought that was cool. And I think more people should do that. The second reason is I kind of wish this idea existed. And I totally think this would work if somebody created it. So what's funny is like, because you, and I've, I've, I've, I've complimented you with this, but this is actually a criticism at this point, uh, for this particular point, this is a compliment. I don't even know what that meant. Should I prepare myself for a compliment or an insult?

47:18Just tell me that. The compliment was that you're worry-free and you're pretty optimistic and you always default to like, oh, that person, they're not trying to do anything bad. Here comes the bitch slap. But in this case, when I hear this, I'm like, but I want my president to know what they're doing and not just be able to be a good speech giver. Dude, that's what we have now. You think Joe Biden knows what he's doing? The guy's not even alive. Well, I'm not saying what I know works and what I know doesn't work. I'm just saying that like my romantic view is like, well, that would be it would be also nice if they knew what they were talking about rather than just good at talking.

47:57Yet your take on this is like, wouldn't it be cool if we just let the most charismatic person run away with it? Well, you know, I think you could design the challenges to actually get them, force them to think on the spot or perform in terms of figuring out solutions to real problems or like putting forth what their solutions would be in a way that's not just prepared by handlers who have talking points and they're going to avoid the issue or false promises or whatever. Like these people that would be in this, you could design the weekly challenge to bring out whatever it is that you want. Obviously, people fall in love with the characters.

48:31That's how all reality TV works. You fall in love with the characters. However, you could fall in love with them as they're trying to do certain things in the same way that the apprentice would test you for. Can you figure out how to sell? Can you figure out how to organize a project or manage a plan? I think you could put people through a battery of weekly challenges that are not just. are you good at kissing babies and shaking hands? But like, you know, that's part of it. But there could be other parts of it that, you know, the show decides is like, you know, what are the attributes that a president needs or the qualities or what do we wish we could see them doing to be able to assess their abilities?

49:08I think the cynical person would say, well, we should look at their track record serving in government. Yeah, cool. But that doesn't happen. That's not really what happens. It's not really what works. If that worked, you know, Trump would never have beaten Hillary. She had spent her whole life in politics. She was by far on paper the more qualified candidate. But America didn't get to see that. They didn't get to appreciate that. All they saw was what gets put forward today, which is debates and campaigning on social media or on TV. There's this funny story about JFK. Do you remember what the Cold War was?

49:41It was in the 60s where we thought that Soviet Union and America were going to bomb each other. there's a story where JFK, John Kennedy, goes to the Soviet Union and he meets with the president or the leader of the Soviet Union. And at the end of the meeting, the leader was like, you know, you're a really nice person. You kind of reminded me of my son. I guess we could be cool. You seem kind. And I read that story and I was like, oh, I guess charisma really does matter a whole lot when it comes to diplomatic stuff. Just being likable and being like, hey, let's just calm down, be friends. It definitely is.

50:16Tony Robbins tells the story. I don't know if this is real or not, but who was the president during the Cold War? Is that Nixon? Well, Kennedy. Cold War was a long period, but Kennedy was like when we thought that we were literally going to bomb each other. Okay. I feel like it wasn't Kennedy he was talking about, but Tony Robbins tells the story. He goes, I had a chance to talk to former president, whoever. Let's just pretend I know or care about presidential history. Sure. And he's like, the Cold War was happening, and he went to go see, I think it was Cold War. People who don't actually know about this are going to, you have full permission to beat me up in the comments.

50:54So he goes to see Gorbachev, and they have a meeting, and the meeting is not going well. The hope was we could de-escalate, but actually the meeting was sort of like tension, and neither side wanted to give, and they were sort of getting more dug in and more stubborn in their stance. And this would be Reagan, Ronald Reagan. Reagan all my married man out there know when this happens you think you're going into de-escalate but actually both sides are what Sam Park calls Doug in and the tension is escalating he doesn't know really what to do and he goes he goes how did you do it how did he's like something happened in that meeting that worked what was it he goes well we hit that point I said this is not going to work and I got up and I walked out of the room fast stormed out of the room and right before I got to the door, hit him with a little 360, turned back, big smile on my face, said, let's start over.

51:47Smile on his face, shook his hand and said, I'm Ronald. And I really appreciate these things about you. And he just basically broke the frame for a second and used a little bit of charisma, a little bit of playfulness in order to reduce tension. And then they had a conversation. Now, I have no idea if this story is true. Tony Robbins told me this. I believed it in the moment because It's a great story. And why let the truth get in the way of a good story? If it is true, that's unbelievable. If it's partially true, that's really cool. If it's totally made up, whatever. You know, it's okay. The story still serves its purpose.

52:25It is a very useful technique to be able to do this, to be able to use a little bit of charisma and playfulness in order to diffuse a situation or to break through any deadlocks that exist, whether it's in business or in personal life. so either vivek is just not charismatic or i'm an idiot but let me tell you a really quick story i have um so i've turned down two presidential candidates to either come on this pod or speak at my events the first one was andrew uh what's his name yang the guy the the math guy so he emailed me i think in 2015 being like hey i want to come speak at your event and i don't know if the podcast existed then but he's like or if you guys want to write about me in the newsletter i'd to do an interview.

53:09You know, I run this study test prep company. It did okay. And now I'm running for president. And I was like, oh, you're insane. You're like, you're going to make me look like a fool. Just this nobody guy who run a mediocre business running for president. I can't interview you. Like that hurt my credibility. Well, turns out he was a serious candidate. At least he made it in the top 10 or whatever. The second time this happened was Vivek. Vivek. Vivek. Lady Gaga. ah it's not it's not is it not called fajita it's fajitas fajitas um so vivek dm'd me on twitter like a year ago and he was like hey would you guys want me to come on the pod and i stepped on him hard i thought this was because he had a really his twitter picture was him in a suit with a nice smile stuff it nerd you're not coming on the podcast well and i think like i was like researching martin screlli and i was like oh this and his bio said he was in bio like uh pharmaceutical industry or something like that.

54:07And I was like, oh, this guy's a charlatan. He's so good looking. He's got a nice smile. This is like a crypto guy with abs and a Ferrari. I can't take this guy seriously. And I just said, what do you want to talk about? And I tried to stiff arm him to make him prove himself. And he replied, and I ignored him. Turns out, a year and a half, two years later, he's actually a threat. So this is the second presidential candidate that I've had bad judgment on of whether they're going to be serious and not asking them to come on the pod. Yeah, yeah, totally. Totally with you. By the way, for high entertainment, do you subscribe to Ron DeSantis' SMS program?

54:45No. No. So if you want to learn about marketing or you want to learn how the presidential race really works, go subscribe to all the candidates' marketing emails and text messages. Warning. It's fucking annoying, okay? So that's the first problem. if I wanted someone to text me every day I'd have a girlfriend and this guy texts you all the time and they text the dumbest stuff so like here I'm just going to read you the last five texts if you think this guy is like some super serious politician who's really making it a substantive race about the issues here's what he's saying and was it like five in one day text yesterday yeah exactly yesterday 421 p.m.

55:26new shirts shirt emoji new koozies new cups new buttons new stickers There's new hats. If you haven't seen our storefront, go get the hottest limited edition campaign merch here. Okay, let's see yesterday. Okay, cool. Let's go back. Friend, it's Ron DeSantis. This is now the day before, 2.08 p.m. Friend, it's Ron DeSantis. I want you to know that as president, I will not let the government weaponize federal agencies against Americans who dare to disagree. I'm disgusted by the FBI's disgraceful act labeling Catholics as extremists. It's time to fire the FBI director and defend liberty, religious liberty for all.

56:00Can I have a donation to have your support? Okay, so that's the next one. Here we go again. Let me find a particular. He just texted me at 7.19 a.m. It's too early for a text, Ron. Enough with the talk. Americans need action. And that's what Ron DeSantis is all about. I'm the leader you need. The time to act is now. This can't wait. Rush your support in. Link to his donation campaign. Link to his donation. then another one hey like this like this credential and he puts a picture of a like a credit card that just says desantis on it he goes you can have your own all caps donation with 47 or more to join my investor team if you're an investor in this campaign you'll have everything you need to show it off grab your membership card today it just continues every single day hey enter this giveaway to come to the next debate you just have to donate and you can win a vip experience it just keeps going and it'll just be like hey friend, I'm out here draining the swamp right now and it's like dude, just stop what are you talking about?

57:08Well, they're building a billion dollar company in like 18 months, they're like a moving company you ever notice how moving companies they don't give a fuck about the service because you're only going to use it once and they're like let me just get you on board, gotcha bitch and then there's like throw your shit there they're like, dude, we don't give it renewals aren't a thing here. I don't care. You know what I mean? I hired this service that was like it was called like muscle head movers or something like that and all of the imagery was just a huge buff guys. It was like, hey, we make it easy.

57:43We'll move that couch. We'll move that fridge. No problem. Just another day at the gym for us. I'm like, oh, hell yeah. Three tiny Vietnamese guys showed up And I was like, and the truck said muscle head movers. I was like, I'm looking at him and I'm just, are you going to say anything? Are you going to address this friend? And they didn't. And I didn't. Cause I was like, what am I supposed to say here? And I was like, I wanted a bunch of greased up punks. And they did the job. Like they could move everything. Cause they just use dollies. And I was like, oh, if I wanted dolly movers, I would have, you know, like it's different.

58:22It's a different experience than I signed up for. I catfished. That's so stupid. There's one cool thing I wanted to tell you about. All right, what is it? There's a guy named Seth Bannon who tweeted this out. He goes, two million scientific papers are published each year. That's over 5 ,000 a day. Even if you're working 10 hours a day, no breaks, you'd have to read one paper every seven seconds just to keep up. So we built Paper Scraper to basically programmatically read every paper that comes out. but not just every single paper. We prioritize and weight any paper that's being shared by top scientists on social media.

59:01So he basically built a thing that makes it easier to keep up with science. And he's the second person I've seen do this. And I'm actually pretty convinced it's actually just a good product idea. So what's the URL? Do you know? Because it's so new, it doesn't show up on Google. There's not a website for it yet. He's like, oh, like we built this for ourselves, but like I'll let some people in beta if you fill out this type form, you know, like that sort of thing. like soft launch. I would love to see that. Our buddy, Lior, who does Alpha Signal. So this guy built like a, you know, like an AI newsletter thing.

59:31But his AI newsletter has one key difference, which is instead of just telling jabronis like what the new chat GPT feature is, it's basically a AI newsletter that's for technical people. So if you're a researcher, you're a machine learning engineer, you're a PhD type person, Alpha Signal is a newsletter for those people, which I actually think is a very smart way to approach this business because that's a very high value reader and customer. And for them, he provides a very simple service. So he also built a thing like this internally. So what he did was he goes, all right, every paper has, you know, a list of scientists that are like the researchers that were involved.

1:00:06And actually, there's a naming convention, just like in movies, the credits, like the stars go first and the people at the back were looking at the end credits. In research papers, it's kind of the same thing. The people at the top did all the work. The last person is like the names person who reviewed it or edited at the end or stamped, you know, their seal of approval on it or the lab they're associated with. So he kind of first created a page rank of researchers and scientists. This is awesome. Then he's like, cool. Now when a paper comes out that has one of them in the name or those people on social media share a paper, I immediately know this is probably an interesting paper.

1:00:43So that first creates a hit list. He gets alerted, like alert, top scientists have shared a paper. Page rank is what Google invented. It's how they know what to show up on the top of Google. Page rank is categorized. Like there's a bunch of different measurements. The biggest measurement, or they don't even tell people, but it's theorized. Or maybe they even said this though, but which is how many people link back to your website? How many other reputable websites link to yours? So every, every website has authority. So let's say a New York times has a high authority compared to Sean Puri.com.

1:01:17Right. And so if New York Times links to some other website, that tells Google that that other website might be also a high authority. So it increases its authority. If Sean links to it, it increases it a teeny, tiny, tiny amount. And so that's how Google basically figured out what's the right, you know, what's the right web page to show when you search a question, who has the most authority to give you the answer? So this guy for AlphaSignal, Lior, did this for scientific papers. So he's like, who are the top scientists? What are they sharing? What are they linking to? If they're linking to something, that's an important paper or an interesting paper that you take the interesting paper, feed it through his LLM and it gets summarized down into four bullet points.

1:01:56Like what was the, what did the, what was the finding? What was the methodology? Who are the scientists? And what's the kind of like key takeaways from, from this. An alpha signal is only for like AI topics. Correct. But I'm like, got it. This is a generalized product. That's actually just really interesting. Like you're, I was like, your method to create this newsletter is more interesting to me than the newsletter itself. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Paper Scraper is the same idea, just from a different guy approaching it from a slightly different angle, which was same thing, like basically trying to figure out what are the important papers that are coming out.

1:02:29So of the 2 million papers or of the 5 ,000 that are published every day, which three should I care about? Which five should I care about? And then of the five that I care about, what do they actually mean? And what do they say? Yeah, they're really hard to read. They're so really hard to read. So I think this is a really, really cool product idea. And then he also built like a thing called spin out GPT, which was basically like you can it's like chat GPT. You can ask it questions about things that might like, you know, could we commercialize this? And or like, would this work in cell culture or tissue?

1:03:02And then it'll go look in the paper and find, did they do it in cell culture or tissue? And it'll answer to you that way. So it's almost like being able to talk to research papers or talk to talk to a very smart person that read all of the research papers. and it's like oh i see where this is going like you know the hustle milk road these were like um the horse carriages right like yeah yeah we have random humans trying to keep up with what's going on maybe they set up some google alerts so they check reddit and twitter and every day they make a list and we talk about it and then they read and summarize and they summarize it as good as they can and then like you know the pitch was like it's like your smart friend explaining what happened in crypto that day or yours was it's like your smart friend explaining what happened in business news that day and this is like this is like your fucking genius friend that read every scientific paper ever and you can ask it any question in any variation and it will answer you're like oh that seems pretty powerful huh we're on our horseback and just like a car just flew by the whoa what the hell was that but what about my friend greg he uh no i by the way i'm happy we i would not want to be in the newsletter business right now it's which is so funny because everybody's following us into the newsletter businesses now like now it's like peak hype on newsletters and also the way that people are acquiring users like i just subscribed to seth bannon substack and like right after i subscribed it said do you want to subscribe to these 18 other newsletters and it's auto-checked and i almost accidentally clicked like yes it's like and they're all like whoa look at my newsletter growth it's insane and it's like dude anyone on substack that's talking about your newsletter growth, you're full of shit is my answer to you.

1:04:42Like you are absolutely full of shit. It's like people think they're filling out a CAPTCHA and they're just actually subscribing to 19 newsletters like at a time. It's insane. That's why, you know what I like? Beehive has a good feature. They did a feature like that that's actually legit, which is their thing was you can, you have to manually be like, who do I want to endorse? But also they have this thing where it's called like Sparks or some shit like that. But it's like you can pay to acquire newsletter subscribers. Like all of us know The best newsletter subscriber you can get is somebody who already subscribes to other newsletters that are similar.

1:05:12But that's really hard to get historically because you have to advertise in like a hundred different newsletters. So they create a little mini ad network inside Beehive of all the Beehive newsletters. But what's cool about it was you only pay for somebody who's a retained reader. And I was like, oh, OK, that's actually legit. So instead of just like this, like auto check vanity metric where it's like, yeah, I got more subscribers. But it's like, are they actually an engaged reader? You have no idea. but you're excited about that anyways. What I like that Beehive did was you only pay, it's like CPA versus CPM or CPC.

1:05:43CPA is like you only pay for a reader you actually acquired who's still reading from you. And so it enforces quality because that's the only way you get rewarded in that network. So I was like, that's smart. First of all, this Seth Bannon thing is awesome. I just, the tweet that Sean's referring to is from June 12th. So if you Google Seth Bannon and go to his thing, it was on June 12th. That's awesome. He filmed the video in an amazing place. It looks like a TED Talk almost, but with an IMAX style screen explaining his concept. I don't know if that would be a good business. I'm nervous about people building businesses right now on top of OpenAI because I'm like, they're just going to crush everyone and just do it themselves.

1:06:25But this is awesome. And second, yeah, to reiterate, I'm happy I'm not doing a newsletter as my main thing right now. it seems really really hard and like i remember at the hustle we had one daily newsletter and then morning brew's um strategy was to launch more but my thing was like fuck but if we have more our main thing was going to go down like they're not going to open two they're not going to open three now people if the numbers are true are subscribing to dozens and i want to know is the engagement even remotely the same it seems really really really hard it seems way harder yeah i think think it's a lot like podcasts.

1:07:04Like how many podcasts do you actually have in a regular rotation at any given time? Yeah, it seems hard. I mean, with newsletters, it's easier because it only takes three minutes to skim it. But it seems really hard to get people's attention with the newsletter right now. It's just so funny when we so I got the idea for a newsletter because I had my friend Neville Medora and my other friend Noah Kagan. They were like, they had one foot into the startup world, one foot into like the internet marketing world. And I was like, Oh, this internet marketing world, they love email, and they use it in sometimes shady ways.

1:07:31But let's just see if we can do it a legit way and people are like laughing at that now it's so cool but also that that people take it seriously but i'm so happy i'm not doing it it seems way more challenging at the moment i uh it seems really hard yeah i think the best will still win um because you know the best tends to win and everything um like you know so i say it's not that the door is actually closed um but it's definitely much harder than when you started you know when did you start 2015 2016 yeah I got the idea of doing a newsletter and I started it in 2014 but it became what it was on May 19th 2016 a great day in history well I always remember that because it's the day before 420 so it was always it was always easy to remember but yeah and it was like I remember like at for I originally started it as a conference and if I had five if I had 2 ,000 subscribers to my conference newsletter, I think I made$50 ,000 in conference ticket sales.

1:08:37And then when I had 10 ,000, I think we did 150 ,000 in ticket sales, something like that. And the engagement was quite high. And then I remember people back then saying, I think Gary Vaynerchuk, I talked to him one time. He was like, dude, my newsletter, we had a 99 % open rate because no one else was doing newsletters. Yours is only 40%. It's so much harder. And I was like, oh man I wish it was easier now I don't know what those numbers would be like but I think it would be hard to make that amount of money with as few subscribers today as it was it was easier then you know the other thing that's funny is um or I guess the other thing that that kind of reminds you of is you're I wish people would see kind of your early blog post or you should we should do kind of like a trip down memory lane of some of our projects um because you're incredibly good at creating content and writing um we like when i see what you did versus what i see a lot of people doing now i'm like oh there are like many rungs on the ladder above is where where you were with creating content um back then like i remember your early blog posts that were just regularly going viral getting millions of hits to the site um because they were that good like which ones like when you were doing the guy you like first you had the right concept so you were kind of like a youtuber before youtube actually you really should have been a youtuber like that would have been your calling i i believe we got we got asked to do it like we were thinking about doing it but i was like hustle i was saying sampar as a youtuber would have been i believe like you would have been one of the most successful youtubers on the platform let me give you an That's awesome.

1:10:15For example, I remember some of your early hustle blog posts. Surviving 30 days on Soylent only. Guess what that sounds like? Every Ryan Trahan video, every Mr. Beast video. This is the current meta of YouTube. You were doing this eight years ago. You did microdosing LSD. You did an interview with an anonymous entrepreneur who... Plagiarizes books. Yeah, you did the thing where you were like, Amazon bestsellers are bullshit. I'm going to prove it by making an Amazon bestseller spending only like$1 ,000. Guess what? That's a YouTube video. These are YouTube videos. These videos would still work.

1:10:55But the thing is, you have to do them with style. You actually did the thing with style. Now, your problem was you were locked into this blog world because those are the people you admired at the time. But the reality was... Well, and I knew how to write. Writing was my thing. I wasn't I don't know if I could have maybe I could have had the visual aesthetic to like you're good on camera you like lived in a freaking you like lived on a motorcycle or something I don't know you're sleeping on a motorcycle you're doing some crazy shit it's like you had the dog and you had the look and you had the the humor on camera and you were willing to you liked jackass and those sorts of things and I feel like you would have kind of tortured yourself for people's entertainment as soon as you got that hit of feedback you would have gone all the way in yeah and I just wish you had kind of gone down that route in fact I still think you should go down that route like for example i think i can be successful in fact i'm going to be successful on short form video but it's not going to be the way you could have been because you're kind of like those like you know whoever the danny duncan and uh and ryan trahan and and you know mr b you're a lot like them in the way that you are as a character and what you're willing to do and what you were willing to do and how long you were kind of like i'm single and don't give a fuck.

1:12:06And like, I don't need comfort. And like, you know, oh, like this firecracker is going to go in my ass. All right, let's roll. Like, you know, lights action, right? Like, I think that you had all of that. And so anyways, I don't know what I don't wish I would have gone that route, by the way. I don't I think I think I think I probably could have done it. I think that that's a hard life. I think it's hard. Like, I like Danny Duncan a lot. But I'm like, Like, can you do that at 40? I guess it just has to change. It has to evolve. Or like Mr. Beast, what's he going to do at 40? He's going to be so wealthy.

1:12:37It doesn't really matter. Yeah, I think you would have done the same. Yeah, but yeah, like our early blog posts were good. And there was a period where I was writing like five a day. I would write so many of them. Not all of them were bangers, but like we would write a ton. And that's how we grew. And that's why I tell people, I say to blog. I don't actually mean blog, but I meant create bangers. text-based bangers on a consistent basis and get people to love your free content enough to subscribe tbb baby text-based bangers that's been our strategy right like how did you like for me um when we wanted to grow on twitter it was like all the advice was you got to be consistent well guess what i'm like the least consistent human being on earth like if you weren't super consistent and a real hard ass about like we're gonna record this every monday every wednesday 9 a.m every single every single week without fail no matter what there's no way i would keep up the schedule right like i only do that because you're my friend i don't want to let you down the when i'm on my own i'm inconsistent and when i wanted to grow on twitter i was like look like all the conventional wisdom you got to tweet every day multiple times a day find the right time of the day be consistent be on brand have a single message do a call to action i'm like dude i ain't trying to do all that that sounds like hard sounds like the lame version of success and um i agree it's probably right but like I didn't want to do it that way and my way was text based bangers it's like I basically had like six viral tweets that grew me to like almost 400 ,000 followers it was literally just six tweets basically that the bulk of the growth it's like the clubhouse one the metaverse one this one about Elon Musk this other one it's just like that's all it was that got me like kind of all the growth and then there's like several weeks in between posts I'm completely inconsistent well what I told people was like my team and like myself when I was starting the hustle So I was like, you know, everyone says it's a marathon, not a sprint.

1:14:25But you're kind of just telling me that you just don't want to work that hard. And if you look at the world-class marathoners, that's going to feel like a sprint to most people. So that's just kind of like how we're going to live our life, which is like it is a marathon. And it's run so fast. It's going to feel like a sprint to most people. It's a marathon, not a sprint. But we're Kenyan. And so we're going on a five-minute mile. Pretend you're this. Yeah, your last name is Kipchoge. you know you're gonna be a kenyan yeah you can be uh bakeli you're an ethiopian but you know like we're east africans here baby we're gonna run fast and uh yeah i think um but i actually i prefer writing i think that it's more fun to be in a quiet zone late at night and just bang it out and it feels a little bit more artful uh it felt like i was in my zone of genius a little bit Whereas with video, it feels like sometimes you have to perform.

1:15:21And I felt that writing was a different type of performance that is more enjoyable to create for me. Yeah, sure.

1:15:32Surprise, surprise. Man likes his choices and defends them. By the way, look at my shirt. That what they did was the correct thing. Shocker. I did live life. life. Look at me when I was fat and selling hot dogs, man. I was about that YouTube life. It's just, you know, without the camera. I was telling Sarah, I was like, I'm nervous about going to Westport or like Connecticut or like if we're going to move to the suburbs. And she's like, why? I was like, well, one of my favorite things to do is like, so every day I like to go to this gas station near my house and get a Diet Dr. Pepper and loiter.

1:16:08Yeah, I get a Slim Jim and a Diet Dr. Pepper and I'll like dab it up with like the clerk and then I'll just sit and see the regulars like what's up man right now what's good how are you like i just like to loiter and like do hood rat shit man yeah and i was like connecticut doesn't have like hood rats or gas stations yeah what am i gonna do like where like i want to watch people buy lottery tickets and scratch-offs and like like smoke black and miles like where am i gonna hang out with like i i need the smell of like the woods they call it you know like the uh the blunts and uh where am I going to do that?

1:16:42You know, like that's how you get like good ideas and you like see interesting people. So yeah, I'm about how many incredible podcasters there are that just don't podcast, but they just chop it up, sitting on steps like all day. Can you imagine how good those people would be if we just put a mic in front of them? They just don't know. Like they're just like, you know, it's like there's like kids who are like incredible basketball players somewhere in Africa that we just don't know. We haven't found them yet. Like just imagine the dudes that just stood on the steps all day just shooting the shit that like Joe Rogan is lucky those guys don't have a microphone and they just like sit outside of a gas station like reading newspapers I always be funny I always thought it'd be funny if you like walk up and you overhear their conversation and they're like dog you better diversify your bonds man like the dial's down like I mean like the most academic conversations ever because they read newspapers all day

1:17:37alright I think we've crossed the threshold the slab happy face is initiated all right that's the pod

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