if you didn't make progress in 2025, listen to the first 10 minutes

22:11And almost always in there, the little magic trick you can always pull is you take, you know, let's say they have a, it doesn't matter how many people, It could be like just their top five executives, or it could be, you know, 15 people at their company. You say, Hey, everybody, I'd like you to write down the top three priorities of the company. What actually matters right now? And then you look at the CEO and you see the CEO start to realize like, Oh shit, we are not on the same page. Like I have not done a good job. They don't even forget doing it. They don't even know what we're supposed to be doing.

22:42I have not even successfully communicated the priorities because everybody, what they'll do is basically they will focus on their problems, my little problems in my part of the world or recency. What's the most recent fire that somebody put on my plate? And like, that's just the thing I'm thinking about. I kind of forgot about all the other shit we talked about at that, at that all hands or at that meeting or at that offsite or whatever the thing was where we made our plans. And so this is the same thing. And whether it's a team or it's a sports team or it's a, it's a company. Today's episode is brought to you by HubSpot.

23:15Did you know that most businesses only use 20 % of their data? That's like reading a book, but then tearing out four-fifths of the pages. Point is, you miss a lot. And unless you're using HubSpot, the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business, the insights that are trapped in emails, call logs, transcripts, all that unstructured data makes all the difference. Because when you know more, you grow more. And so if you want to read the whole book instead of just reading part of it, visit HubSpot.com. I heard this story about NASA in the 1960s before we went to the moon.

23:44they had this amazing leader and they're telling the story about how they knew he was amazing and this one reporter sees a janitor uh mopping the floor at the nasa center and he goes sir what are you doing here and he goes i'm helping us get to the moon and that was like the best story ever because like they all knew the mission like we all are playing a part in getting us to the moon right by the way this is like such funny things that happen like uh one kid like came to practice like 10 minutes late and we're like dude you can't be late and he was like um he's like sorry i was at work and then we look at his hands hands are covered in grease like he's a mechanic i guess he's like our point guard's like a mechanic and then he comes to practice and like this other guy you know wait in high school he's yeah they have like jobs you know is his name vinny does he like like our best player is named vinny yes fucking a man yeah vinny's amazing um I'm like Vinny.

24:36Yeah. So anyways, there's all these little things where you're like, oh, you forgot what it's like to be, first of all, like a teenager. But secondly, you forgot like how much of the basic habits have to be installed in somebody that will serve them, not just here, but also like whatever they do. Right. Because most of our guys are not going to be in the NBA. Right. None of them. So it's how do I teach you something that's useful today for you on this team? So we win and have fun. but that's like a master skill that's going to serve you in the future. I'm not doing my Gordon Bombay if I don't actually do both for them.

25:08Do you think how much percentage of a difference will... So let's just say hypothetically, let's say your team is a 5 out of 10, just average. Yeah. Good coaching, what do you think that would change? I think good coaching can take a 5 out of 10 team to an 8. Which is great. Which is dramatic, yeah. I think in my leadership position in my career, I think I've only been average and I've seen great. And I've particularly loved reading military books like about Navy SEALs and stuff like that. And I think I get good examples of what a good leader looks like. And I think the difference with all else being equal, like I've read, like I think Jocko has this story about, he's got this book, I forget what it's called, Something Leadership.

25:56and he talks about the story about how they would, during BUDS or like, you know, the week where you become a SEAL, they have like six different groups of like eight guys carrying the rafts on their back and they have to race and they assign leaders. And all they do is they change the leaders after each race. And what they notice is that the leader determines whether the boat wins or not, not the other seven guys lifting the boat. Right. And when I heard that example, I was like, I'm not that leader at this moment. and I have to become one because I think the difference is not, I think it's more than from a five to an eight.

26:32I think it's potentially like almost a 10 because I just, I just, I just, that leadership is so important and it's just so challenging because it's one of these things where if you're like you and I, you think, oh, I'm charismatic. I'm probably already good. I don't need to, I don't need to learn. Like I can convince people to do stuff or I'm an idea guy. My ideas are good. That's just not the case. Just like basketball, it's a skill. Learning how to get teams to operate effectively, it's a skill. And I'm learning all of this like in real time. And it's been very challenging. I'll give you an example that I took from the pod.

27:05So I think you were on here, you were talking about company values. You're like, oh, at Hampton, we're trying to come up with our values. And you were saying like, here's what I think they're going to be. And then I was kind of pushing back like, you know, I kind of expected it to be like this. And you were like, yes, okay, let me and you were you were working through it. So right after I got off the pod, I drive over to, I grab my whistle and my clipboard and I drive over to basketball practice. And when we get there, I was like, Hey, it's the start of our season. So I'm telling Danny, our coach, I was like, Hey, I think we should install like the kind of two or three things that we hang our hat on.

27:36What are we, what are we all about? And in sport, they call this like your, your team's identity. Right? So there was like all these famous teams that had a real identity. So it'd be like the bad boy Pistons. It was in the name. You already knew they were tough. They were mean. They had a nasty streak. And you could not push them around, right? They would push you around. They were the bad boy Pistons. In the modern day, there's like heat culture is a big one. So the Miami Heat are known to be this team where they have a standard almost like military. So for example, they're the only, I think they're the only NBA team that does this where you get tested on weight and body fat every single week.

28:15And you're either fined or you don't get to play if you are not keeping your, like, it doesn't matter who you are. If you're the star player, like you can't, you know, can't just co-spy on your talent. And so they demand, and they demand it from day one. So it's like, by the time you show up to training camp, you need to already be in shape. You don't come to training camp to get in shape. And that's just a known thing that that's their standard. And so it doesn't matter what it was like, where you played before. When you go there, you already know what they're all about. You've heard the stories.

28:43And so you got to buy in or you're going to be out. It's one way or the other. and so we go there, and our first day, we do it all wrong. We're like, okay, what do we, you know, it's all about playing hard, so effort, effort is going to be one of our things, so we tell them that at the beginning. We tell them three values. Effort's the first one, then we had two others. All right, right, so you get to the end of practice. Coach had to leave, like the athletic director wanted to talk to him, so he's like, Coach Sean, we'll finish up the practice, and I'm like, me? That's me. Wait, I'm Coach Sean.

29:15I don't know what to do here. okay let me let me go ahead and help these guys out so as we're finishing up I just huddle them up and I'm like all right how did we do today on those we started the practice saying we're going to be this is our team identity these three words and I was like who can give them to me couldn't they couldn't even remember right they got one of the three so they got effort as the only one of the three that they remembered and they were like they wanted to remember they just couldn't remember so this is it's like to your to your thing about repetition and reminder right Like it's super important.

29:44So then I was like, so how'd we do on effort? And they were like, you know, some guy was like, you know, kind of like a nod with a shrug, like a pretty good. Another guy just took us head. No, with no explanation. You know, another guy was like, yeah, it was good effort. And then I was like, oh, remember what I was telling Sam, which is like Facebook's value was move fast and break things. It wasn't just like, it wasn't just like speed, which everybody could be like, yeah, we're moving fast. It's like, no, no, no. Are you moving fast? Like, are you moving so fast you're breaking things? Because if you're not, then you're not even playing at our speed.

30:18So what's yours? So I was like, oh, if we just said the word is effort, then like some effort's fine, I guess. Pretty good effort's fine. Like, wait, guys, what is it? Is it pretty good effort, whatever? And there's one kid on the team who always beats everybody in the sprints. He's not the most talented kid, but he plays the hardest. And whenever we make them run, he always finishes first. his name's max and i was like oh perfect i go all right we have a new standard it's called max effort and i was like if you're not playing as hard but like it's like a pun right but i was like if you're not playing as hard as max it's not effort that's not that's not what we do we play with max effort and so that's the only one of the three that's stuck because it was like a campaign slogan and it like worked you know it's like it is actually a bar you could pass fail whereas most of the other values were like yeah like we want to be really competitive it's like all right we were kind of there's no pass fail.

31:09You can't test it. Versus everybody knows, did I actually go at max effort today or not? It's like a very simple pass fail. And so taking these things from one, you know, from business and trying to apply it here has been very, very interesting. Yeah, I think that we, I think that we too often think about marketing to customers when we should be marketing to ourselves and our teams and our families. So like, you know, this sounds eye rolly, but my wife and I are like, should we have values for our family? Like what should we, because we're at the age now where our children are just now old enough where we're able to form traditions.

31:47And we're like, what traditions should we have? You know, what do we like want to teach them? And so I joke with my daughter where we do daily affirmations. I say, repeat after me, I'm bold, I'm tough, and I won't conform to anyone. That's like her daily affirmations because clearly I care about like, you know, that type of stuff. But we had to sit down and we're like, all right, well, what collectively should we care about so we can teach our kids and also like what traditions can we have? And I was thinking, I was like, well, I have these things. I have what I call my four Fs, family, fitness, finance, fun.

32:17And that's like the categories that I value or I weigh myself on. I need to have that for my family and I need to have that for other parts of myself. So if I'm being a weak leader, I need to come up with a cool phrase that I can remind myself in times of like, I want to revert back to old me in order to create change. This whole episode is about change. And I think that something, these cute phrases, I'm telling you, I just dismissed them by calling them cute phrases. I'm trying to make myself feel better here. But they work. They work so much. At Hampton, we have this thing called the three Cs, commitment, candor, and confidentiality.

32:55And so we have to repeat it. We have found roughly six times to our customer for them to understand and remember the three Cs. And so it all has to be in a memorable format. So I was kind of studying this last night. So I was like, how do you actually do it? Because you said that, right? They need to be memorable. All right, Sam, tell me how you make them memorable, right? So it's like, you kind of like, it should be - Well, there's a couple frameworks. Catchy, right? But like, I'm not an expert on that. I don't think you're an expert on that. And we actually care about this and we should be good at this.

33:28We're like actually pretty good at writing and pretty good at talking. It's kind of what we do for a living. And even we aren't like that far ahead. Okay, so who is great at this? Who's, who's in, what group of people is amazing at this? I don't know. Marketers? Marketers. So the people who come up with specifically slogans, right? Another one that's like, where, where is it life or death? Where do you have to be great at this? The military or police? Military and politics. You got to get elected, right? And so make America great again, right? Okay. Okay. That's a, that's a, that's a thing that if he repeated it a thousand times, but it was enough to stick.

34:05It was polarizing. It was interesting. It was repeatable. It was like something you could get behind. So I was studying this last night and there's this phrase called, I don't even know how you pronounce this, chiasmus, C-H-I-A-M-U-S. All right. So here's an example of one. Sam, if I said the following phrase, if I said, ask not what your country can do for you, what would you say next? Ask what you can do for your country. Exactly. And that's a chiasmus. It's basically a sentence structure that is an earworm. I don't even know when, when was that said? When was that phrase said? It was said like, you know, 50 years ago or something like that.

34:47JFK said it in like 1963, I think. Yeah, exactly. So this is, you know, more than 50 years ago. And yet off the tip of our tongue, me and you can say this phrase that was said before, like 20 years before we were alive. That's how powerful that phrase is. Okay. And so what is that structure? and it's basically this like if you break down the sentence it's the they say this a b b a structure so the first part is about asking right so ask not what your and then it's your country can do for you that's the b then the b uh um you know then you switch the order basis ask what you can do for your country right so you're going to switch the center structure and there's these two like overall structures.

35:30There's like a, um, you know, uh, a BBA. And then there's like a, uh, a, uh, sorry, there's a BBA. And then there's like a BAB, right. Or a BBA. And so it's like, there's two structures that you could use. And so what you start to do is you start to find two phrases that individually are valid. Okay. So for example, I don't know if you've seen that, um, podcast clip that goes viral where people, where it's just, people are like, oh my God, I hate podcasts. Or there's that girl trying to be motivational and she says, don't, she's like, don't love your job. Job your love. Oh yeah, the blonde hair lady.

36:09And everyone's just like, ah, it's like the ultimate groan. And the reason why that chiasmus doesn't work is because job your love doesn't make any sense, right? And so you have to find two individual statements that make sense, like asking what your country can do for you and what you could do for your country. Both are individually valid. Then you structure it this way and it becomes incredibly memorable. And if you go look at that JFK speech, there's like three of them that he does have that same structure in that one speech if you go break that speech down. Yeah, here's another one. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.

36:42Exactly, chiasmus. And these sound beautiful. They're very satisfying to the mind. And when you understand how the mind works, you see that the mind loves order. It loves structure. If you look at how, why is a face a beautiful face? Cemetery, right? The more perfect the symmetry of the face, the more beautiful the face to people. Another example of this, the game Tetris. Why is the game Tetris so addictive? Why are games like Candy Crush and Tetris so addictive? Because they actually like tap into this part of your brain that's almost this cleaning instinct. There's a mess and then you put one block in the right place and it evaporates the mess.

37:19It creates order out of disorder and the brain loves that. It just wants to do it again and again and again. And this is the basis of the game design of Candy Crush and Tetris. And so, you know, the brain likes what it likes. And so if you want to, you know, deciding to change your brain, which is this like, you know, multi-thousand years of evolution is very hard. But just changing the structure of how you speak so that you tap into what the brain likes and give it what it wants so that it does become memorable, it does become sticky and it has an effect is obviously the much better way to go.

37:52This is pretty profound. This is very fascinating. What did you read to learn this? When you said last night, you said you're curious about this. Well, I started asking different questions. So I started asking, I think I even said it earlier, which was like, whose life depends on this? So anytime I want to get good at something, I try to figure out who this is a nice to have for me. Who is it a must have for? So let's say you want to lose weight. You would go look at the bodybuilders training for a bodybuilding competition. If you want to know the logical extremes of how you get the maximum muscle and the lowest body fat, go watch what they do.

38:29Yeah. Whose next meal is dependent on getting this right? Exactly. So for example, right now I'm writing the book and I told Diego yesterday, who's helping me, I go, you know, we're doing this process where I write in the morning and then I do a bit of a show and tell with them and I kind of show them what I'm doing and then I get feedback. But I'm like, the problem with our feedback is I want you to like it. So I want to show it to you. And that, but I also want your honest feedback because I want to make this better. You're trying to be polite and not in my feelings because you see that I tried very hard this morning, but you're also trying to help me make it better.

39:00And those two things are at odds with each other. And I was like, so I was like, we don't even know how to give feedback in this way. That's like, look, I need to be able to share so that I can get this better, but I don't need my emotions to swing based on, yay, they liked it. I did a good job. Oh, they didn't like it. I did a bad job. It's like, that's so lame and a waste of energy. And on your end, you don't, I don't need you having one part of your head saying, how do I say this the right way? Cause I'm like, I want to be nice and supportive versus like, Hey, how can I tell you what I'm feeling?

39:33Or, you know, for giving feedback. So I was like this art of giving feedback on art, on something that's subjective. I was like, I don't know how to do this and you don't know how to do this. Who, who definitely has already solved this problem because it's a must have for them. So I was like, oh, let's text like a couple of people who are comedians. Cause like, I was like, I think comedians have to figure out like, oh, is this funny or not? And once I've heard the joke, once I've written the joke and looked at it 20 times, it's not funny to me anymore. I can't even tell I'm too lost in the sauce.

40:01And so I was like, how do they do it? How do you musicians do this? How do they play a song? And I was like, is this a good song? I can't tell. I kind of liked it, but now I've heard it 10 times and I can't tell anymore if this is any good. How do they get feedback? And so now we're going to go find the people. Well, this is a new thing. I got to go find the people to like go learn from the people for whom this is a must have. That's actually, first of all, there's, I keep talking to the listener today, but there's two or three takeaways. The question of whose life depends on this. That's a great question.

40:29And I'm very curious, actually, I want to know the answer because I create a little bit for a living. I want to know how you know if something's hitting. If I had a guest for a comedian, they would probably just say I perform it in small audiences and I suffer the pain of bombing. Right. Yeah. Then that might be it for them. And it's like, oh, cool. So what's my version of open mic with 20 people and testing if it bombs? Can I do that in my world? Is there a way I could set that up? Okay. Maybe if it's not that. How do musicians do this? And you sort of start to figure out, well, how do they do that?

41:00How do they give feedback? What's the language there? Pixar, I think, wrote this book, Creativity Inc., which is very, they talk about the brain trust that they have. of how they show raw, kind of like not even a movie, but like a single scene and how they created a dynamic of trust. There's actually a great story of when Disney bought Pixar. Pixar had been making hit after hit after hit and Disney animation had been just bombing for years. And so they put the Pixar guys in charge and they were like, great, like we'll merge these two companies and then we'll just start making hits like Pixar. Didn't they just like want to fire all the Disney people though?

41:35No, no, no. I think what he did at the beginning the main guy, Ed Catmull, they were like, oh, what a perfect AB test. What a perfect randomized control test here. So what they did was they didn't blend the teams together. They didn't move them together. So what they did was they kept the team separate. And then what he did was he basically took the Pixar method and he went and he taught it to the Disney folks. And he's basically like, if we just took our process, but not our people, could we make those same people who have been failing succeed? Kind of to your question earlier of like, how big of a lever is leadership, is coaching?

42:07Like, can it take a five and turn it into a 10? And they actually started creating hits once he taught them the process of doing this. And for them, I think trust was like the underlying thing, which is like, if you don't have trust, you're not going to share your work at the right times. You're not going to give real candid feedback. You're not going to receive candid feedback in the right way because you distrust what's going on. You think your project's going to get killed if it's bad, or you think this guy's going to come steal your thunder if you let him collaborate on it, right? You have all these fears that are basically a lack of trust.

42:39And once they installed their sort of like trust process, Disney animation started making hits too. Well, and I think one of the other points from that book was he was like, we have hit makers. It was like, we got like these two or three people who are just typically more, they're more right more often than other people. We listened to them. He did like a pretty fun, funny thing about that. We should, okay, so for MFM, we've done like a handful of challenges, like the MFM fitness thing. We should do like a give back thing because tell me about, I haven't like really given my time to give to others, which I don't know if you consider coaching.

43:18Is it like you rescued a dog, but you say the dog rescued you? Is it that type of like, you know, you thought that you were going to go and, you know, do it for these kids. To be perfectly clear, my choice was selfish. I wanted to do it. I thought it would be fun, and it is very fun, and I do want to do it. So it's not like this burden I'm carrying. At the same time, I had recently, like in the last two years, I'd given some money to charity and felt nothing. So maybe I did some good in the world. It's hard to know. You give the money, and it just goes in a black box mostly, and then hopefully someone's life got changed from that in some positive direction.

43:59But I don't know, and I didn't feel anything. so I didn't want to like triple down on that and my trainer has this great thing he says basically he always talks about he's like oh man he's like our economy our economy and I was like why do you talk so much about the economy like Jim Cramer like what are you what are you talking about over here with okay the okay you know Powell you know what are you talking about the interest rates of the economy what do you what are you talking about and he's like no like he's like us he's like me and you and my other clients and which because he trains my mom and then my mom then they refer to another person.

44:31He's like, it's all like a web, right? And so he was like, I'm just talking about like our local economy. Like he's like, I want that little economy to thrive local. Not like, I don't care what's going on in the macro. I want the local to thrive. That's what I can affect. And if that's thriving, like that actually like improves the lives of these people that I can see, feel, touch. And if everybody was just doing that in their local little bubble, then the big picture would take care of itself. Right. I was like, okay, fair enough. And he even like went further, like, again, like the sort of cute thing, like he was like, I was like, so if the normal economy measures GDP, gross domestic product, I was like, what's the, how do you know if your economy is doing well?

45:07He's like, he's like, baby smiles per hour, baby smiles per hour. He's like, he's like, I just want everybody to be smiling. He's like, if I made you laugh and then you carry that vibe into the house with your wife next and with your kids, and then they carry that into school. He's like, that's how it works. Like if you're making people smile by whether it's your mood. It's doing something for them. It's thinking of them. It's having an experience together that has this, this carry on effect. They take that smile onto the next interaction. That's how it spreads. So I started actually like buying into this.

45:35I was like, it is about your local economy. It is about smiles per hour. And so I was like, what do I do? That is a kind of give back, but not the way I did it last year. I put money in some black box into some multinational nonprofit and then it just disappeared. And I don't know what happened. I didn't feel anything. I don't know what happened. And so the idea of like going to a local high school, taking an unpaid job and just go contributing my time, my talent, my effort and affecting like a group of 12 guys, like that sounds small, but it feels very big. The other thing, solving world hunger felt, sounded very big, but felt very small.

46:14Like there's no feeling. And so I don't know. I don't know if this is the right direction or wrong, but that's the one I've gone. I don't, I'm not charitable. I want to be, but I'm like, a little bit, I'm like, I don't know how to be. I don't want to just write a check to someone and not feel anything. I want to be selfish. I want to get value out of this, just like a feeling. And so I talked to, do you know who Mike Beckham is? He started Simple Modern. Yeah, the hugely successful water bottle company. So he told me all the numbers and he told me I could share it. So he's worth$200 million because the company does something like$200 million a year in revenue and does 50 million a year in profit.

46:51His net worth, because he owns half of it, and then with the multiple, he goes, I'm probably worth, this was last year I talked to him. So he said, I'm worth probably$200 million, or he said$190. And he said, I have about, I think he said$3 or$4 million to my name, but I pull$5 million out of the business every year, and I take$1 million of it, and I give away$4. If you guys Google Mike Beckham, Sam Parr, you'll see a post I wrote about it. So I think there's a chance I got the numbers slightly wrong. But basically, he said, I take something like$5 million, and I give the rest away. My family spends$25 ,000 a month, so we take enough for us to spend minus taxes.

47:30And I give$4 million or$4.5 million. I give it away. And I was like, that's insane, man. Why do you do that? He's like, well, it's not generous to do this when I die, because that's not hard for me. It should be some type of challenge. I should feel a little bit of pain. But then he said something really great. He said, the more that I give, the less loud the greedy voice in my head becomes. So he's like, I feel this like greediness in my, this voice in my head that says, make more money, buy more stuff, do this. But the more that I give, that becomes a whisper because I feel what it's like to give away this money.

48:05And it feels significantly better than the acquire a bigger home or another car. He was like, I drive a$30 ,000 CRV because I know that if I bought a$90 ,000 car, that's $60 ,000 less that I can give to people. And it makes me feel good to do that. And so his whole, the whole point of him telling me this was he wanted to, to, to get me to like give now versus when you're old or dead. And I thought that that was very inspirational. It wasn't that inspirational because I haven't done it yet, but, but more admirable. Yeah. Yeah. It inspired me like a, you know, like the Rocky movie, like, you know, I should get into boxing one day.

48:46Totally. But I did think it was really awesome. This is for the folks out there who have a business that does at least$3 million a year in revenue. Because around this point, that's when you're able to look up after being heads down for years building your company. And you realize two things. One, you've done something great, but you're still a long way from your final destination. And two, you look around and you realize, I am all alone. I've outrun my peers. Which means you're now making$10 million decisions alone by yourself. And that is when mediocrity can creep in. My company Hampton, we solved this problem by giving a room of vetted peers of other entrepreneurs who are going to hold you accountable, call you out on your nonsense and help show you the way.

49:30Because the fact is, is that there's only a tiny number of people in your town who know what you're going through and who have been there. And they're hard to find. The biggest risk is not failing. You have a company and it's working, you're going to be fine. But the biggest risk is waking up 10 years from now and saying, shit, I barely grew in business and in life. And for people like you who are ambitious, wasted potential and regret is what we want to help you to avoid. We have made so many of these groups and we have a thousand plus members. And I know this stuff actually works. It can change your life.

50:01It changed mine and I know it will change yours. So check it out, joinhampton.com. You know, I've read this a few times on Twitter where somebody will say, oh, I started either micro dosing or I started taking like, you know, a Zampic or whatever. Hey, I've done all those things. You can just ask me. Okay, so maybe you had this too, but they talk about food noise, which was not a phrase I'd ever heard before. I don't know if that was, is that common? But like, they basically said, the biggest change is not the weight loss. It's the, I don't have food noise. Basically this like part of my brain, this chatter in my brain about the next meal or about should I have this or wanting this?

50:41Let me give you an example. Is this real? Yes. So I have an addictive personality and I had addiction stuff before. And tell me if you've ever experienced this. You get a piece of dessert, like a cake or something. You eat half of it. You put the rest in the refrigerator. And then it's calling you. You go lay in bed. You lay in bed and you're like, but it's still there. And it's uneaten. I think the fork that I use might still be the sink. I could probably just use that. Well, I'll just go off and get a little bit of bite. So you get it in bed and you eat one little bite, you put it back, and then I will do this seven times until it's gone.

51:17And then it goes away and I say to myself this. I say, shit, well, I already did this. I might as well eat this entire sleeve of Oreo cookies. Right. And before you notice, you've done 1 ,000 or 1 ,500 calories of binge eating, but it's all based on one urge. That is the food voice. And when you take GLP-1s, not only does that voice get dimmed, other addictions get dimmed. I noticed I bit my nails less. I noticed that I wasn't craving. Like it used to be where I would smell like beer. If I walked by like a brewery, I'd be like, let's go like see what's up. Not anymore. What is up when you go see what's up?

51:55The secret is you should not go see what's up. But like you smell the hops and you're like, ooh, that's nice. Right. But yeah, so yeah, it definitely turns it down. So I wanted to ask you about this. on the money, the loudness of the money voice, of the more voice in your head. Because a few podcasts ago, we did an episode. I think the front half of it was about something sort of silly, but the back half of it was us talking like we kind of mostly did today. It's just like, what's hard for us in life? What's some of the wisdom that kind of helps? And just sort of like, I don't know, trying to figure shit out, out loud, right?

52:31In front of a bunch of other people, a bunch of other strangers, which is a little bit uncomfortable, but you do it. And in that, I mentioned this thing that had come up. And I had a lot of friends who were basically like, they have all the success and then they go start another company. And it's like, they stress out, lose some hair, gain some weight and try to build another company. And I - Well, you said the best phrase ever too. Yeah, this is the phrase that a lot of people DM me afterwards, which is like, you've already earned the last dollar you will ever spend. So why are you trading good hours for bad dollars now?

53:06and that's something that I had you know thought of for myself and when I saw others but like you know that doesn't mean I'm like immune to it either right like I still I'm in the same boat I think I have it to a lesser degree in the same way that like that food chatter you you were talking about like I got that that guy's got a megaphone in my head whereas I think for other people it's you know a little bit more like a whisper and so I I want to do two things I want to ask you about the voice in your head. And then I want to tell you about a Chad GPT coaching conversation I had about money. I kind of want to read you what it said to me a little bit.

53:40But first I want to ask you, you know, you are also in that boat where I believe you have earned the last dollar you'll ever spend. You're a pretty frugal guy in general. Like you're not like Mike Tyson buying tigers. You had a great exit with the hustle and you have earned the last all you'll ever spend, but here you are starting more companies, maybe making some investments. And, um, you know, every day you wake up and you take your life energy and you go to an office with other people and you do this. And you can always talk about how like, you know, you like working and the mission. I'm not saying it's bad.

54:15That's not what I mean. I guess what I mean is how do you think about money and wanting more? Are you honest with yourself that you do want more? And then how do you square that circle of like, but I don't actually need more because I have already earned the last dollar I've ever spent? Or do you not think that's true? So I just want to hear how you, what's that chatter in your head? How loud is it? And what does it say? I think the, okay, so nothing is all or nothing. There's a priority of lists. So the number one priority for me is like, I just don't know what to do. Like, I don't know how to spend time.

54:46And when I spend time sitting around, I feel like I'm missing out or I feel like I'm not contributing. And that feels bad. And yet, when I spend all the time working some days i have bad days and i'm like what am i doing i should be doing this other thing so that exists but then the the one right below that is um i'm not good enough and i have to and my my self-worth is directly correlated to the success of the thing that i'm working on my self-worth is my net worth basically right yeah yeah yeah yeah you could say that um and so like that that's probably through like years of trauma and like believing something but it's hard to break.

55:25And then the last thing is like more money does feel good. Yeah, it definitely feels good. And what I have to do, I do math all the time where I'm like, I don't need more. Everything that I want, I have, but I can't break that. I guess if you wanted to be like a therapist or a psychologist, you would say like, the reason you don't want to change is, or the reason you don't change is because you don't want to. You know, you like how it feels. Do you like how it feels? I love when things go well at my company, I do feel on top of the world. The problem with building companies is you typically only feel like that 10 % of the time.

56:02You know, like things are bad most of the time. An ineffective way to get that feeling. Yeah. So I say I don't gamble. I don't do drugs and alcohol. And instead, this is like a dopamine slot machine. Yeah. Okay. So it's like, do you like being addicted to gambling? You say, no, but when you win, it's so amazing that it makes you— But at least it's not heroin, is what you kind of just said. Yeah, and then I also justify it by saying— and this is a bad justification, and I'll prove it to you— but you say, I want to— I'll go ahead and do the work for you. You say to yourself, you say, well, I don't want my kids to just see me sitting around, and I want them to see me working really hard, and I want to set a good example.

56:47But then they probably would rather be with you. Yeah, they want to see me. Yeah. And I don't, I think I do good. Like I go to the office from nine to four, nine to five. But then I also say I'm doing this for them. And it's like, what is this? What, you know, like, what is this for them? How does that make sense? You know, do they, they don't need anything physical. They don't, you know, they don't, what do they need that I can't give them already? Right. Yeah, is 50-hour weeks the most effective way to just give them the general principle that you should work hard at things? Yeah, that might not be the most efficient route to that answer.

57:24Okay, so I wrote down three things. I wrote down imagination, which I think is the first part. The first one you said, which is, I don't know what else, I kind of don't know what else to do. I want to do something. And like, I don't want to do nothing. Therefore, I do this thing. And I think about that a lot. I think that Suli came on the podcast a while back and he said something where he goes... Sully being your good buddy who is presumably worth hundreds of millions of dollars is one of the more successful entrepreneurs we know. Correct. He's my great friend, but he's also the guy who I respect and trust the most when it comes to entrepreneurship and like kind of business.

58:03Like strategy, yeah. And I've met a lot of people wealthier than him, but he consistently is the highest signal, best judgment person. and like, you know, just the way he approaches in a tax business, he's just like such a winner. Okay, so he came on the pod and he goes, I used to think I was limited by some lack of resource. Like maybe I didn't have a skill I needed. I needed to learn how to code. Maybe I didn't have enough money. Maybe I didn't have enough time. Like basically he's like, I always just thought, you know, I didn't have the network. I didn't know people. Like I just assumed I lacked some resource.

58:36And he goes, now I realized that all I ever lacked was basically imagination. He's like, the thing I lacked the most was even figuring out what to want, what the possibilities were of what I could do, and how I might be able to go do those things. That sounds kind of like hand wavy, I guess. But the more smart people I meet, and it's almost like the bigger that side of your brain gets where it's like, I am analytical. I am good at making plans and then executing them and operating. And like the better you are at that, the less I've noticed they're disproportionately bad at imagination. And so, for example, it's like, you know, kind of don't know what else to do with my hands.

59:19That's kind of what you said. There's a lot of things. There's actually a ton of things, right? Like the stupid example I gave earlier, and this wouldn't be the right thing for you, but it was the right thing for me, which is like, well, what if you, instead of going and chasing down the next investment or starting another company, and I got a bunch of deals and I got a bunch of ideas, like the right thing, the thing that was fulfilling was, hey, what if you took four months, one season, and you just coached a high school basketball team? That was actually the right answer for me, which totally out of left field doesn't even make sense.

59:47It wouldn't be the right answer for other people, but it's the thing that like totally fills my cup in a way that another business that was successful would never do. Yeah, but I think that you're not, or maybe you are, but it's way harder than you think, or not than you think, but figurative you. I think that imagination game is quite challenging. For example, if you said you have a billion dollars today, what do you want to do? I'm like, I don't have an answer. We might get flamed into the comments here. All we're talking about is this, I call it second mountain problems, but whatever. I was thinking about the, I was like, why do I want all these employees?

1:00:23So we're moving to a new office down the street and we just signed this lease. It's a million dollar lease. So over three years, it's going to be a million dollars. And we're building out this office, whatever. and it's a lot of money. I've never done this before. And I was like, why am I doing this? And I was like, I just, I think, maybe I'm lying to myself again. I was like, I care about capabilities. So what I hate is that you have an idea. So how often do you have an idea for a small project and you're like, now I got to go get the people and then I got to train the people and I don't think they're going to be any good.

1:00:54All the time, yeah. And I was listening to Ari Emanuel talk and he was like, we have this thing and this thing and this thing. And I was like, how cool is it that your company and you have all these capabilities. You have an idea. You say, wouldn't it be cool if this existed in the world? And it's not just a business idea. For him, I think he cares about the show. It's like, wouldn't it feel awesome if at the UFC we did blank or we bought all these tennis tournaments and we offered food at a discount? I don't know. And I love the idea of having lots and lots of capabilities. And I think that's why business building is fun.

1:01:29Yeah, I have that right now. Actually, I forgot to say this, but one of the things I've been talking about for a while on here, but have not executed, right? Like the walk hasn't matched the talk is I had this realization that video is the language of the internet. It's like if the internet was a country and it would be the most important country in the world, it'd be more powerful of a country than America. So it's like a place where you live and you spend time. I think the internet is that. People live and spend a lot of time online. And then you say, all right, well, do you speak the native tongue?

1:01:59Because if you don't, If you come to America, but you don't speak English, you're putting yourself at a pretty massive disadvantage. And I believe that video is the language of the internet. It's how people communicate online, whether it's long form like this on YouTube or it's short form, which is growing, growing more and more popular across YouTube shorts, reels, TikToks, et cetera. It is the way people communicate information. And if you don't have the capability to communicate and tell your story or connect with others that way, you know, you're just not speaking the important language of the important country.

1:02:33In fact, like it doesn't really matter where you were born or what you were doing or how hard you worked. Pretty much if you were born anywhere in the world, the best decision you could make for your like life quality and upward mobility was to move to America and learn English. Even if that meant starting at the bottom, even if that meant being uncomfortable, like in the long term, it was short-term pain, but in the long term, that was the best thing you could do. And it would, there There was no amount of hard work you could do in Somalia that was going to make up for that one decision. Dude, is this the most charismatic and epic way just to say you're going to start posting on Instagram?

1:03:07Yeah. I'm going to start posting on Instagram.

1:03:14Can I not just sell your ass on the fact that I'm posting on Instagram? Dude, imagine your wife at the dinner table.

1:03:26telling this story. Listen, years ago, our grandparents lived in India. The best thing they could have done is learning English. Now, here we are today, the year 2025. Sean, are you going to start posting on Instagram? Yeah, exactly. In fact, I'm going to start specifically just posting a story series about the coaching thing I'm doing. So basically like day one, you know, basically like every week, I'm just going to post like a thing that I sent you. Dude, that was a good video. Do you get inspired by Marshall? No, not Marshall. There's actually these young guys who are doing this. There's this format where…

1:04:11Airbnb? The Airbnb guy. Fire. And the bar guy. His name, I think it's Rajan. I don't know exactly what his first name is. His handle is something. But they're building like a luxury Airbnb in Virginia. There's a guy who's bought an old bowling alley and he's rehabbing it. It's basically like, yo, I'm doing a project for shits and giggles. And like, I want to make it happen. And I'm kind of new to this. I don't have it all figured out, but I'm going to share as I go. And I just like the format. And I think it's fun. And I want to do it specifically on something that's not business. Like, it's very hard for me to get motivated to be like, and now I'm going to give you business guru content.

1:04:46And even if I like business, it's just very hard for me to sit in front of the camera and do talking head content about business or about myself or about some new SaaS company. But I was like, this one I would want to follow. So I'm going to make this content. And so I'm going to make like a coach account. It's going to be like Coach Sean or Coach P or so I'll put the link in the Instagram, but in the comments of this, or I'll put it on the screen. But I want people to follow it because I'm going to post videos on here. And I think they'll be great. That's so funny. I've been doing the Instagram thing.

1:05:17It's pretty fun because you start like trying to, it's basically because we're the old guys now. It's sort of like when people wanted to start newsletters or something and it was like, dude, you're writing way too like tight. You got to be a little loosey-goosey. I've done the same thing on Instagram where I started talking to the camera and I like get official. You're going to have fun. It's very intimidating. Pop those two buttons down. Dude, it's so intimidating. We have, if you go to my thing, I start, I do all of our videos now when I'm holding a spatula as a microphone because we had to like have fun and like listen up.

1:05:50So Gen Z of you? Yeah. And it totally has worked. In your million dollar Manhattan office. Hey, fellow kids. Yeah, exactly. It's so funny that you say that. Your content is pretty good though. The problem with it though, you know, the problem with all social media, like being like, I'm going to try to like post good short form content is it's basically saying I'm going to go to the bar and not get drunk because it's so easy for your mind to get wrapped up in the vortex of like, how many likes did that get? How many views did that get? Is that good? Is that bad? So easy. I don't even know physically, even knowing that, I don't know if it's physically possible to go in and not want that.

1:06:29So I could easily see myself aborting that process six months from now, even though in this case, it's like I'm doing it for just this basketball season, which is just three months, and it's only content about this random side quest that I'm on. It's not like, you know, here's my personal IG. I'm going to create short-form content every day. But let me tell you something I've been telling myself and it's been helping so much. So a few things. One, the algorithm is so good right now on Meta that the right people see the right stuff. Like I'm pretty sure that the camera knows like what I'm wearing and what my background looks like, what I look like.

1:07:07Like I posted a skateboarding video. It knows that I'm like doing a skateboarding thing. it shows it to the right people somehow. I don't know how it does it. And the second thing is that I have noticed, I've only been doing this for a handful of weeks now, and I'm going to be doing a lot more, but people text me when something hits. And that is so much more cool than the number of likes or the comments on the thing. It's just those texts. And the cool thing is once you have a business, which in this case, you're actually probably not going to be doing it for a business, you don't need that many people to watch it.

1:07:37Like I'm seeing, it's changing our company. we're getting customers. I've made a lot of money off of it already in a very short amount of time with very few views. I think my most popular thing is getting like 70 or 80 ,000 views. That's not a lot for Instagram. And the right people are shown the right stuff and you don't need that much to make it cool. There is something weird about Instagram right now. And I know that any 21 year old listening to this is like, yeah, duh. Duh. But if you are above 30 or whatever and you but the stuff, I've never posted on Instagram up until recently. The algorithm is way different than what I used to think it was.

1:08:12That's cool. Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. I think you're doing a good job. I think the spatula trick is a good trick. I like that. Everybody's got to have a shtick. That's yours. You're the spatula guy. Great.

1:08:26That's where we thought we'd land in life. I mean, write that in my diary. Have you ever had the thought, like, what did your grandfather do? Dude, when I think about my grandfather, I think if I was him right now, I'd have like 18 confirmed kills under my belt in World War II. Here I am with a fucking spatula. In an ammunitions factory in India. Okay, so that's my grandfather. His idea of what work is... And you're talking to a microphone with a sheep on it that says, sorry I'm late. My shirt literally says, sorry I'm late. I was dilly-dallying. That's what I wore to work today. Dude, and your grandpa lost three fingers before the age of 28.

1:09:04I was like, Ari, is this shirt too wrinkly right before the pot? And she's like, I think it fits what it says. It's like, oh, yeah, yeah, that's true. But just this, it's a kind of mind-bending thing, right? My grandpa was a sheriff. He was a cop. Okay, so a job that you can buy an action figure for. Yeah. Right? Like soldiers, policemen, a factory worker, construction, doing a real thing that the world critically needs that's hard and completely unglamorous. And then I think about, okay, his son. What did his son do? My dad. And it's like, he sat in a cubicle, like an office, like not a factory.

1:09:40It's like, well, what does he do? It's like, well, he types on this computer mostly. And he like wears a suit, not like a construction informant, wears this like fancy suit for some reason. And he will sometimes fly on an airplane to go meet with somebody, shake their hand, talk to them for a while, come back home and do them. So he does these like business meetings. Okay. That's what I grew up. And that's my, so to my grandfather, what my dad did kind of looked and seemed like a little bit of a joke. And now my dad looks at me and he's like, you're wearing a shirt with a sheep on. It says, I'm dilly dallying.

1:10:13You're talking to your friend on this tiny screen. You're podcasting to who? What? What is a podcast? Do you make, you can make, like, I'll still go to family gatherings and they'll be like, so how do, how do you earn money though? And I'm like, I don't know. How did I explain this? Ads? And they're like, but where and how? I'm like, have I told you about HubSpot? So my uncle has a CRM. I don't know why. But to them, what we do, which is like, yeah, you're talking with a spatula to a cell phone to strangers so that they can join, so that 0.1 % of them will go spend 10 grand joining your membership community.

1:10:56It's like, what is this? and then you think about like what your kids are going to do it's going to be completely unrecognizable work is going to be unrecognizable from one generation to the next is what i'm realizing and i feel like such a fucking pussy doing it like you know our kids are just going to be like live streamers right like you know those like you know that girl who was like as comments were coming in she'd be like woohoo cowboy every time they'll be a cowboy hat gift it's like that's what our kids are going to do something that seems even worse or it's going to be like, you know, yeah, I'm an AI therapist.

1:11:28It's like, what do you mean? It's like, well, I sort of, I talk to AIs to make them feel better. It's like, what? What is that? That's a job? I think about your mom all the time. Well, inappropriate. Well, it could go either way. I think about your mom coming to America all the time, because I think about how, because the way you told the story was really good. And I like, I saw myself in her situation of like, not having a lot, being on a plane for the first time, coming to America, we didn't speak anything. You just dropped off in Berkeley, I think it was. And you're like, what do I do? And I felt a little, not even close, but sort of like that when I moved to San Francisco, but on a much smaller scale.

1:12:02And I think about her all the time. And I think about immigrants and stuff like that who come here with nothing. And I'm like, and I'm complaining about this? I'm complaining that my apartment that's already huge isn't big enough and I want more and I'm sad about it. And I'm going to pay a therapist money where they can hear me complain about this? What? The idea of a therapist is someone you pay money to and complain to. It's so funny. Like, I just think about that. I'm like, how ridiculous is this? Sacagawea carried her three-month-old kid across America for two years. For two years, she carried that kid in a piece of leather.

1:12:47Yeah, but the car rental place only had forward-facing car seats. And I need four strollers? She carried him in a leather sack without diapers. I think about that all the time. I think about this stuff like on a regular basis. How soft are we? It's so funny because, you know, what's that famous like Ernst Shackelford? Like, you know, the journey will be hard. People will die. Like that job posting. What's that famous thing? Yeah, so Ernst Shackelton. Honestly, the greatest book I've ever read. I think I said his first name like he's Ernie from Sesame Street, and then I called him Shackleford. What's his name?

1:13:23Shackleton is his name, right? Or Shackleford. But whatever. He's just like the hardest dude of all time. The book Endurance probably honestly might be the top three books I've read of all time. The story is basically in the early 1900s when he was just in a ship without power, sails around to the bottom of the Arctic or Antarctica. I forget which one. The ship gets so deep into the cold that the lake or the water, the ocean, freezes around it, and he walks for three months to get to the tip of Brazil. So here's the job ad. No one died. Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return, doubtful, honor and recognition in event of success.

1:14:13Ernest Shackleton for Burlington Street. That's the job posting. Dude, such a good book. Our job posting, wanted. Cardboard box cutter. Lots of Amazon packages. Getting a little bit unwieldy. In the laundry room. Take off your shoes when you enter, please. Bring own box cutter. Don't have tools. Softer than cream cheese, man. I'm so soft. I pride myself in trying to be hard. there is no pride there. It's like, why do I smell like chives? Oh, I'm softer than cream cheese. Maybe that's why. This is ridiculous. All right, so we started off talking about Dear Diary. Dude, the softest entrance, the softest entrance, softest entrance, softest exit you'll find in podcasting history.

1:15:04That's the episode. 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 Alright everyone, if you're listening to MFM, you probably want to make more money. Well, I want to tell you about a podcast you might want to check out. It's called The Sales Evangelist and it's hosted by Donald Kelly. Each week, Donald interviews the world's best sales experts who share their strategies to succeed in sales. They share actionable insights and stories that will encourage, challenge, and motivate you to hustle your way to the top.

1:15:37If you're someone looking to raise your income level, check out The Sales Evangelist. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts.