Jack Smith On Biohacking, 2 Easy Business Ideas, PLUS Why Procrastination Is Good

26:36It was all on medical tourism, which I didn't know that was a thing. And they got a lot of interested customers. But because they were a startup, they could convince these people to trust them and things like that. But it was actually pretty interesting when they told me this. I was like, there's no way people are going to do that. But there are a lot of people willing to do that. I remember that. John Howard was doing that, right? John Howard. Yeah. I don't remember why it didn't work out. I guess they just couldn't get people over the line. We were in this office where guys were mining Bitcoin and all this shit.

27:03And they were in this little room trying to convince these people to fly to India to get their team. Get like a root canal. Yeah, get like a root canal in Mexico. Like, yeah, you can go on the beach afterwards and just sit there. I know a lot of people that actually do this. And, you know, I think all he missed was it was just a hair transplant in Turkey was all he needed to do. That like, Jack, you got a beautiful head of hair. But have you looked into what can you explain to me what's going on with the Turkey thing? Why is this seems incredibly popular? And also, why Turkey? I'm not sure why Turkey.

27:33What they were saying in India is they're just like, hey, we've got so many people here in India that he's like, if you in America, if you've got some obscure disease, then none of the doctors have ever come across it before whereas in india like there's like 10 other the patient they've had 10 other patients that week with the same issue and it is true a bunch of the doctors in india i was speaking to the guy and they had studied and worked in england they're not like going to some random place he's like oh i studied at this medical university in england so they're saying it's quantity of people i'm not sure what attributes make turkey um the leading bit for hair transplants and stuff all right i'm gonna do a deep dive on the turkey hair transplant thing.

28:11It's insane. I have seen so many people do this. I think it's basically 10 times less or something than in the US. I think there's obviously a cost component, but I just don't know why Turkey. There's this funny photo that this guy shared online where he was on his way back from Turkey on the airplane and he took a picture of all the men sitting on the plane and there was literally 10 heads that you could tell the hair had just gotten sewn in. and so I was like holy shit this thing is big yeah like there's Instagram influencer like transplant daddies that are like the Turkish guys and they're just everyday that's the content that they're posting and it seems like an incredible business for whatever reason you have this thing on here we asked you in advance what you want to talk about you have this thing on here that I thought was interesting and I don't know what exactly what it means but it sounds intriguing you're like there's a counter to founder beast mode What does that mean?

29:09It was funny because at the Camp MFM, I was trying to explain to Mr. Beast the project that I'm working on now. So I was saying like, you know, people working in tech and then they get burned out and so I'm building a place for them to detox from technology and recover from burnout. And he's like, I literally cannot relate at all to this idea because I just don't get burned out. But he has an amazing strategy, but like the thing is 99 % of people can't do this, which is he said, I'm either on 100 % or I'm off 100%. So he said, I'll just work like seven days in a row until I pass out and sleep.

29:46And I'll just keep waking up every day, every day, every day, and just keep doing that. But then when I feel that I'm getting burned out, I'll just do zero work. And I'll just watch documentaries all day and just procrastinate all day. I'll feel better again. And then I'll go a hundred. But it could also be that, you know, he's in his twenties, like he's not super old. I was speaking to this other Portuguese startup here and they're like, yeah, I don't know what burnout is either. They're like 23 and they're just like working all these hours. And I said, one thing, analogy I thought of is like, I went to this thing like Y Combinator, AngelPad, and I've never worked that hard or achieved that much in three months.

30:27It's 90 days. I just worked so intensely and we just got amazing stuff done. We raised 2 million in funding. We came up with a business idea. We managed to get a CTO to join our team. We achieved loads of stuff. But for me, that was a 90-day sprint. If you're just trying to do that endlessly, it's like telling your same bolt, like, okay, great. You just ran the 100 meters. Just keep up that pace. We're now doing a marathon, but just keep up that same pace you ran the 100 meters in. It doesn't work. Like at some point, you might feel like it's going, okay, but at some point, I feel like you are going to burn out.

31:03So for me, balance is important and not having tunnel vision, just be like, I'm being productive, productive, productive. I feel procrastination can have benefits as well. The way we came up with the idea for Vungle is we were just playing around with a bunch of different mobile apps and we wanted to record a meeting with one of the coaches that we had there. So we're like, Hey, is it okay if we just record the meeting to take notes? And so we opened this voice recording app and then it was free and then it started blaring some video ad on like full volume and then that call for like coca-cola or something and actually that's how we got the idea like wait a minute what if these ads instead of being really intrusive and advertising something not relevant to us what if they were advertising based on our uh user profiles other apps that we might like so it's that kind of balance i think yeah i think what you're saying makes a ton of sense, I think about everything in either seasons or gears.

31:59Those are words I use a lot, which is, you know, there are seasons of life, seasons where you're going to sprint and focus, seasons where you're going to explore and wander. I find it very useful for myself to label the seasons, know what season I'm in and embrace that season. Because if you're in the season of wander, it's very easy to feel really anxious that you're not being productive. But you have to remind yourself that's not what this season is. This is a season of sort of exploring, dabbling, whatever. If you're in a season of productivity or focus, you might feel guilty for saying no to go into your friend's thing or to go into this event or whatever.

32:27But you remind yourself that's what this season is. And this won't last forever. The fact that it's time boxed as a season, maybe it's 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, a year is very useful because you know, okay, this is not forever. But for now, this is the right thing to do. The other thing I talk about is gears. I need to have multiple gears like a car that I can shift into and out of. Personal life, I do this with I can be in work creator boss mode. But if I bring that guy to my marriage, it's not a great marriage. So I need to be a different guy when it comes to marriage. When it comes to my kids, I'm silly, playful dad.

32:59And so I intentionally think, okay, I almost visualize in my head, I'm shifting gears now. I'm going to be that other guy. And I want to have a few of these characters that are very useful to me, versions of me that I can say, all right, you're driving now. I'm going to a workout. So it's not silly, playful dad. It's more of the workout, which is like the guy who's willing to push harder to be a little more intense. And so I think you want to have both. I think you want to be able to, when you know what to do, be able to focus. And when something's not working, be able to zoom out and go wider, diverge and dabble and sort of procrastinate and play until you figure out something worth focusing on.

33:34Not everything is obviously worth focusing on. So I definitely agree with you there. I also think that the stage of life matters a lot, right? When I first met Sam and I met you, Jack, I was probably 24, 25 years old. I remember that year I slept in the office, I think, 215 days out of the year. It was a nice office, but still, I was just totally devoted to it. I don't think I was particularly productive. I was just willing to throw everything at this. And when I wasn't at the office, I was doing our mastermind dinners. I was doing other things that I thought might help me be successful because it was really the only thing I cared about at that time was to be successful.

34:07Now I'm 36 years old. I don't have that same burning desire to be successful. I care about other things. And so what today makes no sense to me made a lot of sense back then and vice versa. So, you know, I think I kind of, I agree with pretty much everything you said. I don't think it's at odds with the way that I operate, at least. Well, one bit I did thought was interesting to think about is that for me, actually, people don't put enough time into thinking what they want. And I think, Sean, like us, you just touched on it, Sean, but all of us, I think, did clearly, we knew our North Star, why we're working really hard, right?

34:44and Mr. Beast, I told Sam, I was not joking, but Sam was like laughing off. I was serious. I was like, I think Mr. Beast, if he wanted, he can be president of the US at some point because he just since the age of 15 has just had one goal and it's not changed for 10 whatever years. He just said, I want to be the number one on YouTube. And that has not changed. He's not changed that. And he just decided on that and went all in on that and surrounded himself by other people who were chasing the same goal. But it was just all in on that. It kind of struck me a bit that I think actually a lot of people don't put enough time into thinking what they want.

35:26Yeah, you brought up something that I get pretty fired up about, which is figuring out what you want and taking the time to do it. I think I've been really bad about this. The reason I get fired up is because I look back at years of my life I spent on the wrong things. And that's a very expensive thing. Years in my 20s are sort of like prime assets. That's the beachfront real estate of my life. And if I spent it on things that I didn't really think through or actually in retrospect were sort of obviously dumb things to work on, that brought a lot of kind of like lessons learned for me. What was that lesson?

35:58Project selection is the most important thing. that amongst talented people, the biggest sort of variable that actually happens, assume you're going to do the table stakes, right? Which is you're not going to do the thing Jack's talking about. Like you're not going to just not like take no action on something. I was already past that. I was going to take action. I was going to work like hard enough. Maybe I wasn't going to be the hardest worker on earth, but I was willing to work hard enough to make the thing happen. And again, I'm also like intelligent enough. I'm not the smartest guy, but that's not the reason I'm going to fail is because I just can't figure something out.

36:31okay, so there's me and like, I don't know, everybody I knew, all of my friends, we're all in that same boat. We were all, we all wanted it. We're willing to take action, willing to work hard enough. And we're all about smart enough to figure things out. So what was the biggest difference in, in like where everybody landed and how their life went? And it was project selection. It was, you know, the people like at the time when I sort of started to think about this, I was trying to build a sushi restaurant. And it's like, okay, building a restaurant is probably, you know, on the low end of like poor project selection decisions, especially for somebody like me who didn't have a passion for food, nor was like, you know, that was not my dream.

37:05Like I did not get joy out of making food every day or, you know, bringing to life, you know, a menu or whatever. So it's absolutely the wrong project for me. And then I just sort of made similar mistakes along the way when I even when I had a golden opportunity, where, you know, the Birch family believed in me, they hired me, they named me CEO, they give me a blank check and a team full of engineers. And basically, they funded like$15 million and a bunch of engineers to running this idea lab where I could think of any idea I wanted. But the one boundary box was it had to be kind of consumer. And then he liked social and I liked social and everybody liked social.

37:39And the idea that we could create the next Twitter, next Facebook, that was so sexy. But it was, again, like pretty terrible project selection where, you know, the odds of success, even amongst the most brilliant people, you know, are sort of like point oh, like there's like six people have done it in the last 30 years, period. Six human beings on earth that have made a Snapchat, a Twitter, or whatever. And so again, poor project selection. At a time where what I really cared about was being successful, I was choosing a project that had almost no chance of being successful. And I really wasn't smart enough to see the opportunities around me that were much, much better for me at the time.

38:15But I want to read you this thing. I was reading this essay by Paul Graham. It's called Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas. It talks about this exact thing. You know, before he started Y Combinator, he did ViaWeb. But before he did ViaWeb, have you guys heard of the startup he did before that? No, not that I can remember. It's something called Artix. And so basically, it was like 1995. And they have this idea called Artix. And it's basically to put web galleries online. And he's like, oh, it's great because I love painting. I love art. I'm kind of like a programmer. I understand like this internet thing is here.

38:45And that seems important. So like, what's the internet idea? Oh, I should marry my two hobbies, art on the internet. And he's like, cool. And so he says, in retrospect, I wonder how we could have wasted our time on something so stupid. Galleries were not excited about being on the web, even now, decades later, let alone back in 1995. They don't want to have all their stock visible to some random online anonymous visitor. That's not how the art world works. and he's like basically we couldn't sell the thing like we couldn't get any customers and he's like by the way we're not alone here like Paul Allen and Bill Gates before they started Microsoft they started you know Trafo Data and he's like it was not anywhere near as successful as Microsoft like same talent but working on the wrong project.

39:29Alex Ramosi had a great way of saying this he said when he was doing his gym business he went to like a mastermind and at the mastermind the guy was like cool I heard everything you just said about how you made your five gyms successful. He's like, you're like a nine out of 10 execution on a two out of 10 opportunity. And you're asking us how to execute better when actually you should be saying, you should be realizing that you're only working on a two out of 10 opportunity. For me, that was sushi restaurants. For him, that was running brick and mortar gyms. And once he changed what he was doing, like he didn't have to work 10 times harder, but he could get literally 100 times the level of success.

40:02So Paul Graham says this thing. He goes, so why does this happen? Why do hackers have bad business ideas. Let's look at our case. We had such a lame idea because it was the first thing we thought of. I was in New York trying to be a starving artist at the time. The starving part was easy. And he's like, I was looking at art galleries anyways. And when I learned to make websites, it seemed natural to mix the two together. He goes, if you're going to spend years working on something, it might be wise to at least spend a few days considering different ideas instead of just going with the first idea that comes in your head.

40:28You would think, but people don't. In fact, this is a constant problem, even in just the world of painting. If you want to go be a still life painter, you would sit down in front of your table, with all your materials. And you might spend five minutes thinking about what you're going to paint, but it's hard to spend more time than that looking at the blank canvas. We get so impatient that we just start painting anything. But the problem is painting takes time. It could take days, weeks, months to finish a painting. You're going to go back and wish halfway through that maybe you had thought about what you actually wanted to paint, but it's too late.

40:58You've already kicked it off just because you couldn't sit there for an hour thinking about what to work on. And basically says that this is the same thing they see in YC too, that basically founders will pick an idea because it's too uncomfortable to sit in the not knowing and think about what you actually want to do and what actually might be interesting for you, what actually might be a good idea. And so we just start. And this is what I was guilty of at the beginning. It was just starting. And it seems like, cool, cool. I'll change it later. But once you start, you get wed to it. I remember when we thought about pivoting, we only thought about pivoting to other restaurant ideas or other online delivery things.

41:32It was like we could only think inside this box because anything else felt like admitting failure, giving up, starting from scratch, going back to the bottom of the mountain, even though that might have been the right way to do it, it mentally was far too hard to do that. I think maybe I might have mentioned this on a previous episode, but I can't remember. But actually, Mark Andreessen has something he says, like, the most important factor in determining if a startup will be successful, like a billion-dollar company. He said most investors think like it's the team or the actual product or idea.

42:05Like, oh, wow, that's an amazing team. And he said he thinks it's none of those. He thinks the most important factor is the market, size of the market and growth rate. He's saying if you just have a crappy market, you can have amazing execution, the best team ever, but they're inhibited by into how big a company they can build by the size of the market.

42:52it. that's the kind of banking experience I want. And that's why I use Mercury. So if you're running a startup and you want banking that feels like it's built in this century, well, go to mercury.com and get started in minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Bankless services are provided through Choice Financial Group, column A, and Evolve Bank and Trust members, FDIC. Yeah, there's a funny business school, like, anecdote where a guy comes in and he's giving this talk and he says, all right, business school, you want to create, like, a successful, like, hot dog stand? what's the number one factor of success for a hot dog stand?

43:28And, you know, hand goes up. Location. He says, not location. They say, you know, ingredients, having the highest quality product. You want to have the best product on the market. He says, nope. They say, marketing, you got to be able to get the word out there and spread your story. Nope. He says, the number one thing to make a successful hot dog stand is a starving crowd. And he said, just in general, as a lesson of entrepreneurship, like you should be hunting for starving crowds. Because if you go to a starving crowd, even without the best marketing, without the best product, without the best team or execution, you will still succeed.

44:02And I forgot the phrase here, but it's like when a great entrepreneur meets a bad market, only one of them keeps their reputation. The bad market keeps their reputation. Whereas if it's a great market and you're even an okay entrepreneur, you'll still be successful. It's a very hard lesson to internalize, but it's proven very true in my life at least. It's really hard to pick a great market. We were lucky that we did. And many other companies in the same industry as us also became really big companies, but luck, a big factor there. yeah i remember you're telling a story about um vungle so vungle made like video ads for iphone apps and one of sean's buddies helped start this thing called app loving which became this huge thing and um it's the same type of company and i don't know what it was worth sean like 30 or 40 billion like a huge sum and i remember jack i think you i forget exactly how you phrase this but you're like we only did okay uh and we had a 750 million dollar exit you know we could have been like as big as these other ones because the market just pulled this out of us like people were just begging for this product and like you weren't technical at the time or you weren't very technical your partner wasn't technical i don't think at all uh and i was i'm like how on earth you do this because i think when you had sold there was some article that said vungle was making a million dollars a day so you guys were going to do 360 million dollars the year you sold in revenue and you were just saying you're like people are just begging for this thing and we just got so lucky that we just picked it right when the iPhone came out and we got it was just like it just got we got really lucky with that because we didn't do that good our competitors app loving they were 30 times bigger or whatever the app loving market there are 28 billion dollar company right now yeah and they're like they're literally 30 times bigger and we only did okay but we still made$800 million or whatever.

46:00And I learned that lesson from you about picking the right market. So Furkan, who's my co-founder at Bebo, he was previously the CTO and co-founder of AppleOven. And so when he joined, AppleOven was doing really well back then, but it didn't look like a$30 billion company. It looked like a$1 billion company. But I was like, wow, this guy built a billion dollar company. Now he's sitting here next to me and we're working on the next thing from scratch. It's like, what can I learn from this guy? I was like, how did you guys get that idea? And basically what he told me was a kind of interesting story.

46:31Jack, to your point about procrastination, he was like, two things happened. He's like, the first was when I joined, I wasn't the co-founder or the CTO. I joined as like an engineer. And he's really good. He's like, obviously amazing. And so right away, they were like, hey, we think we have the wrong team. Like we have too many people here. We don't have product market fit. We just have too many people, which is a great like CEO move. Sean, was the Wii even Apple Event or was it some other idea? They were doing a clothing business. It was like Style Page. They're trying to make a Pinterest competitor at the time.

47:03That was like one of the many ideas. So basically they were, I think they were a dating thing first and then whatever. So there was like, they had like 10 or 12 people. He joined and the CEO, Adam, who's proven to be like a pretty like killer guy was like, hey, we don't know what we're doing, but we do know that this is probably not the right team. Can you just basically like restart this. He's like, so just anybody who you don't think is like the like hardcore, just down to figure this out, let's get rid of them and let's go leaner and let's figure this out. So first thing they do, they fire everybody, right?

47:31It's like not what you would consider to be like the, the origin story of a, of a$30 billion company. Then now they have like four or five people. So three co-founders plus for Khan as the fourth co-founder. And I think maybe one other guy and they are like cycling through ideas. And so the founders previously had made like 40 or 50 million bucks doing a, I think like a dating, it was an ad network, but I think for dating sites. And so that's what they knew. They knew ad networks, but it was like for, you know, generation one of the web. And they had money to fund this. I think he put$4 million in to fund the thing.

48:05And then they were like, we're going to create the next Pinterest. They saw Pinterest getting hot. So they tried to create a Pinterest competitor. Then they're like, dude, we're just like four like non-stylish dudes trying to do this. This is not working. Then they created like this Life 360 type of app. and they created like eight or nine ideas. And I was like, so what was it like? You're going in there, you're brainstorming every day, you're doing research. Like, what was it? He's like, no, not really. Like, basically one person would come in with some inspiration, like, hey, I saw this, this is crushing it.

48:29Or do you ever notice this problem? And then we would quickly try to build a prototype, take it to market and see what happens, see if it stuck, see if we got momentum. He's like, but more often than not, he's like, honestly, like, I don't know, like 20 to 30 % of the days we would just come in, we just weren't inspired and we weren't going to work on something that we didn't feel inspired by. So we would just play FIFA for like five hours and then we would all go home. I was like, what? He's like, yeah, we were literally, if we just didn't feel it, like if the idea wasn't solid that we didn't feel like there was something there, we didn't want to busy ourselves and like occupy ourselves with a not good idea.

49:00Cause then that would at least, it's like dating somebody bad and you don't have the door open to meet somebody amazing. And so he's like, we would just play FIFA. And he's like, while we're playing FIFA, we would just talk. Then we would order food that we would talk some more. And we're just giving ourselves like, relax the brain to try to come up with ideas. He's like, then Adam went to a conference and this was like right when like iPhone had like, you know, take taken off. And he's like, came home. He's like, forget it. We're doing an ad network, but for mobile phones. He's like, mobile phones are going to be big.

49:29They don't really have good ad networks. I know how to do an ad network. That's what we're doing. And he's like, because they knew that business. He's like, he knew he told me exactly what to build. It was like, this is a dashboard that I need. This is how this product is going to work. This is the speed that you need to serve the ad in. And if you can't get it under that speed, we got to like figure something else out. And they just executed like crazy at that point. And, uh, and it just took off and they were doing, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars at that time, um, very profitably.

49:56And it was, it was amazing. I'll tell you one other story that, you know, kind of shifted my thinking. That was one about not occupying yourself, not busying yourself in order to let a good create some space for maybe a good idea to land. The other thing that stood out was, uh, somewhere along the way, Furkan likes to take these young engineers under his wing. So he met these guys. They were kind of interesting. He's like, you need to move to Silicon Valley. Come live on my couch. And he convinced them, just come sleep on my couch. Don't worry too much. Just come out here for a few months. And of course, that turned into they just lived there permanently in San Francisco.

50:28They ended up getting to YC. And we let them work out of our office. And you can learn something from anybody. These were 20 year old kids who had never built a business before. But I was talking to them and I learned something really important. They're working on this idea that had started off really strong. What they were doing was they took Bitcoin miners, so anybody who had a bunch of GPU space, and they were like, hey, this machine learning AI thing is going to be big. This was back in like 2016, maybe 2017. They're like, machine learning is going to be big. And these GPUs are really good at running machine learning jobs.

50:58So there's Bitcoin miners who have excess capacity because maybe Bitcoin price would go down and it wasn't profitable to mine. Or they just bought out extra and they were like, wanted something more steady. and he was like, he posted on Reddit, he was like, hey, if you have excess GPUs, if you're a miner, you have excess GPUs listed on our network and we will get machine learning customers for you to run jobs, almost like an AWS competitor. Crazy. And overnight, like, they got like so much supply of GPUs. It was insane. Like, thousands of submissions and one day, people were super excited. Reddit comments were like, oh, this is amazing.

51:32Let me know how I can help. Like, calling him, finding his phone number and calling him and I was like, wow, this is kind of incredible. And then what happened was a few months later, he was kind of down on the idea. And I was like, what happened? He goes, well, the supply side was amazing. It was like, I stepped on a landmine. It just blew up. And he's like, but the demand side doesn't have that same effect. He's like, but because I felt it over here, I kind of realized like what true demand looks like. And I remember thinking like, damn, I have never felt that landmine effect. At that time, I had just never felt it.

52:04I didn't feel that market pull that you were talking about. If you don't know it, you kind of talk yourself into like, maybe I have it. Maybe this is, there are signals of demand. And there's a difference between like, maybe it's there versus, holy shit, we found something. And I wouldn't say you have to have a holy shit, you found something thing right away. But just seeing that in those guys kind of taught me, oh, what I thought was level 10 of what demand looks like for a business, for a new startup, it was actually level six. And level 10 is what these guys experience, where you have like a half-baked Google form, and still people are like prepaying you for the service type of thing.

52:42Oh, okay, that's what 10 looks like. Now at least I know what that looks like. That's what a great market looks like. And what I have right now is a lukewarm market, which is why I ended up having like a lukewarm, you know, success out of that business. Really hard to find that 10 out of 10 market. But yeah, that is what we had. And I think his Mark Andreessen says, if you find that 10 out of 10 market, which kind of a unicorn, right, that the amazing market will pull the right product out of the company. Like, so for us, we just identified mobile apps as the market. That was amazing. But we actually tried out six different business ideas.

53:22Like we created landing pages for each. in the space of something like two, three weeks. We iterated on six different ideas and the right idea, the market pulled it out with us. Dude, that's so good. I love hearing these stories. Jack, I love seeing you. Yeah, great to see you as well. You look good. Thank you. Wait, before we go, Jack, do you have a book recommendation for me? Last time you came on here, you talked about the guy who unschooled himself or was unschooled as a kid. I thought that was a really cool book. Do you have any new book recommendations for me? Yeah, one I read that actually, you could read it in like an hour or so.

53:55And then you guys might find interesting because we just talked about coming up with the business idea, right? And this I think actually is more helpful at our stage of life where you maybe have one success and many founders who've sold their company have a midlife crisis. They don't know what to work on next. And this book is by Deepak Chopra and it's called The Seven Spiritual Rules of Success. And I thought it was really interesting. So it's basically saying that his theory, if you like, he's saying everyone is put on earth for to fulfill some purpose. And everyone has like a unique skill or skills and attributes that they can uniquely use to kind of serve the rest of society.

54:41And he's like, you have found your goal when you blend your talent with service to others. And I thought what's really interesting, And actually, maybe just, you know, if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I had just read Tony Robbins' book, but I did actually feel like Tony Robbins is perhaps the ultimate embodiment of that. Because I didn't know this, but Tony then found he had like a tumor on his brain that has made his body release like loads of human growth hormone. And so basically that's why he's six foot seven. He has, he's just a massive, giant growth spurt, but he also feels like he has abundant energy.

55:19And he's kind of using that unique attribute that it's very rare to have this tumor on the brain. Like the doctor told him, dude, you should act on this and get rid of it. But there's a risk you might then get lower energy. It's like, dude, I'm not having surgery then because this is my unique thing, the abundant energy. And he uses that to do these 15 hour whatever seminars. So that's his thing that's unique to the world. And in his kind of serving humanity in his own way, it seems that he's just really passionate about this meals for America. So I don't know if he's hit the goal, but he was on track to hit donating a billion meals for this Feed America thing.

55:57And during COVID, he donated like$10 million to help it get through that point. So I kind of felt like he was a unique embodiment of that. And then even with you guys then as well, I think when I was talking to Ben Levy, Sian, you're thinking about what attributes are unique to you that you can kind of uniquely serve the world. And so that book I found was interesting and a quick read. What do you think that is for you? Well, for me, I think it is where I've naturally ended up doing this digital detox, whatever, center place, because I have the capital to do it. Like I'm meeting a lot of people trying to do physical projects and then they just fail because of fundraising and capital and stuff.

56:44So I think I have the capital and I have the experience of experiencing burnout. And I'm just uniquely passionate. I've been to this place in Bali, like 10, they basically do this as your second home, like you come here so much. So I just have that unique insight about how this can help humanity. And that's maybe why I'm driving the project. And I'm doing it for kind of helping humanity not profit as number one. So I feel that I kind of just naturally have, through reflection and et cetera, arrived at this place. Deepak Chopra said the way to find your unique purpose, if you're struggling, he said, it comes to you in the space between your thoughts.

57:25And he said like, which is maybe not hard to action, but he's like, if you're really struggling to find your purpose, etc., you should spend more time in nature and just in a quiet environment and just feel and it will come to you but i kind of feel that yeah for me it's kind of organically i'd been thinking about this for many years and arrived at this place that's cool man i'll check that book out thank you dude i'll appreciate you doing this absolutely the best and um that's it 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 my days off on the road let's travel never looking back.

58:11All right, this episode is brought to you by Mercury. They are the finance platform of choice for over 200 ,000 companies. Shouldn't be surprised because I use it myself for not one, not two, but I have eight different Mercury accounts. I have seven for different companies that I'm a part of, and then I have my own personal account because now they have personal banking, which is a really cool feature. I highly, highly recommend it. Like I said, I use it myself. And the reason why is because the way that Mercury works is beautiful. It's very intuitive. And you could tell that it's actually made by a startup founder.

58:38It's an entrepreneur. You could tell it's made by somebody who used other banking products in the past and didn't like all the different rough edges and annoyances and decided to actually fix it himself. And really any type of entrepreneur you are, let's say you're an agency. Well, one of the things every agency has to do is be able to send invoices, easily create them, send them to customers and stay current on your balances with all your customers. Well, you can do that inside Mercury. And so I think that Mercury is great. Highly recommend you check it out. And thank you for sponsoring the show.

59:03For more information, check out mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes for details.