The 2023 Milly Awards: Part 2

25:05Yeah, exactly. That's super smart. and it goes back to that idea. I think I've talked about it on the pod, but one plus one equals 100. You can take a mediocre business and I think Shepard's a great business, so better if it's a great business. Well, that's not how math works. No, it's not, right? But you can take something, you can take a product and you combine it with an influencer and you can get an incredible outcome because you basically have a free$50 million a year marketing budget as a result. Well, people had talked about this, but when I think of influencer, I think of Kim Kardashian or like, you know, Mr.

25:36Beast. It's like, yeah, obviously, you know, if they promote a product, it's going to go really well. It turns out that there's a thing like B2B influencer, right? There's like a person who is respected amongst business people who is essentially like, you know, I'm not saying my ass is big, but like we're kind of the Kim Kardashian of business influencers, right? Like there's, you can promote to a community that understands what you're doing. And if you, again, if you pick a good product with a good business, it will actually take off. If you have a shitty product or a shitty business, they'll try it and then it'll leak out right away.

26:09And so it doesn't really work. Literally, this is what HubSpot did. HubSpot looked at the hustle and they said, well, right now they're making, call it$20 million. I don't know what the number is,$20 million of ad revenue. But how much are those advertisers making off that$20 million of ad spend? Maybe it's$30 million or$40 million or$50 million. And so they can pay up to buy this business. And then they can just direct the traffic to themselves and make all that money. And I've seen the numbers. I think it's a good, I think it works for them. And let me tell you a crazy thing about this Shepard deal I haven't shared before.

26:41So the way we structured this deal was beautifully done. So I was like, look, the business is good. The business is already spitting off millions of dollars of profit. So it's like, cool guys, I can bring you guys capital, but you kind of already have like a cash cow that's spitting off millions of dollars of profit. So like, I don't really want to, that's not really the value add. Clearly the value add is going to be, that I can help grow the customer base, right? Because of the audience. And so essentially, I put a very small amount of money down and then the company lent me the money to buy my stake in the company.

27:18That's insane. And I was like, what? And I was like, did they type this wrong? They're going to give me the money to buy the business? Give me the money to buy the business? Like, all right, deals, where do I sign? This is easy. And it was a great deal for me. But again, like I said, the valuation of the company has grown over$30 million just in that period of time. And so in less than a year. So I thought, dude, I'm getting an absolute steal here. It turns out they got actually even a bigger steal than I got. It was like a win-win. And so that's deal structure because that's another thing I've learned when it comes to buying companies.

27:52In venture, there's no structure. Venture is you put in money on a safe note or a priced round. negotiating on really the terms unless you're the lead investor and you're doing something really funky, but it's not standard at all. When it comes to buying companies, structure can make the difference between a good deal, an incredible deal, or a terrible deal. And structure really, really matters. I learned a ton about structure this year, negotiating a bunch of these deals. So Shepard kicked ass for you. You did great. Let's move to the biggest L that you took this year. What was that one? Last year, at the end of the year, this time last year, I was like, hey, tax optimization.

28:29Why don't I sell a bunch of my crypto for tax purposes? Because with crypto, you can watch trade. You can basically sell and buy back the next day. You could book the loss because crypto was down last year, let's say. So you could book a loss on any crypto that you had bought higher than that. And so crypto was crashing. Crypto went down to like, I don't know, Bitcoin went down to like 16K. And I had bought a bunch of Bitcoin when we were doing the Milk Road, probably closer to 30K. so I could book a big loss. And then I was like, great, I'm just going to buy right back. I believe in crypto, right?

29:02But there is a funny psychological thing where catching a falling knife, it's like, I could buy back in, but should I buy back in now? Is it going to go lower? Should I just kind of wait this out and see how it goes? Maybe I'll just do this other thing that that thing's hot right now. Crypto is cold right now. So let me just wait. I'm going to do it, but I'll do it at the end of the month. And I said, I'll do it at the end of the month for 10 months straight. just enough time for Bitcoin to rip back up another 35-40 % and I bought back in and my tax savings cost me a lot of money. So that was a big L that I took falling into a bunch of obvious psychological traps that I could have pointed out for anybody else that I fell into.

29:41Now luckily for me, I didn't sell all of it because I bought much lower than that so it wasn't like that part wouldn't have been a tax loss but still dumb. That's the second time you've done that I know of. Buy my course. Sell low, buy high. Right? That's basically what I executed to perfection this year. I have one more that was like a big miss. Wait, what is it? So we talked about angel investing and angel investing, we're talking about like getting returns. Every game of angel investing is you're going to invest in 30, maybe 50 companies and it's going to be one or two that are like the runaway winners.

30:14That's really what you're playing the game for. It's like you're not trying to have a high hit rate. You're trying to have a huge slugging percentage. So a few just absolute grand slams. And I missed two. Two's a lot. Two's the number you need to win. And I missed two. The first is a, the realization here was, it's not about bad investments you make. It's the ones you miss. It's about the incredible investments you miss. And that's, in venture, that's what that, that's how it goes. So I got introduced to a company called Whatnot that I don't know if you guys have heard about this business. We talked about it on the pod.

30:49You were early talking about it. It's like eBay. I talked about it. I believed in it. I was like, dude, I was at Twitch. It's basically live video streaming and it started with baseball cards and sports cards. So basically people would open up a pack live but you would buy the pack. So it's like they're sitting there. They got all these packs on the table. You would buy one. He would open it up and he would be like, you got a Luka Doncic rookie card. Wow. This is amazing. And the chat's going wild. You just keep buying packs. And so it was like this kind of live video, sort of like casino. I like all those words, live video and casino.

31:19So I was like, I want to invest. And the guy's like, I don't know, man. We're like pretty oversubscribed. I'm like, but it's me. It's your pal Sean. We just met. Please? And he was like, all right, let me think about it. And I didn't, he was like, I don't think so. I don't think we have space. Let me, let me go talk to some people, see if I can make space. And I made a big mistake. I waited and I didn't chase. And whatnot is now valued, I think at$10 billion. So that would have been by far the best investment in all of my angel investing. I was there early on and I believed in it and I wanted to invest and I just did not fight hard enough to find a way to get into that company.

31:54And so in angel investing, it's not about, oh, I made this one bad investment and I lost one X. It's that I missed out on a 200X or a 500X return on that one deal. My 150K check that I wanted to get into that would have been like a $30 million position at this point. One question, when was it valued at 10 billion? I think it is it might have been at the kind of peak time July 2022 they raised at 3.7 yeah so okay so maybe it's at 4 billion now instead of 10 so anyways basically that would have been a multi-billion dollar it's a multi-billion dollar company now which is all you're trying to do in investing same thing happened with a company called Shuffle so my former intern who came on the pod I did an episode where I was like my old intern became a millionaire when we were hanging out doing the thought I was like so what are you doing now?

32:47And he's like oh I'm doing this again this crypto casino overseas and I was like I like all those words when it comes to making money that's I wouldn't want to take the risk myself of running that company but if you're going to run that company I think it's a it's a great investment because these things you know we've talked about stake.com that is just this absolute juggernaut stake is you know issuing like billion dollar dividends a year they have so much cash flow and these guys are building like a stake competitor and I wanted to invest and then And our lawyer in back office was like, yeah, but they're based out of this country.

33:16So they're not going to provide the K-1s in time, blah, blah, blah. And I was in a fund and I was like, I can't put my fund money into this because again, it's like this overseas crypto casino thing. And the fund cost me. This thing is going to be a total winner. It looks like their volume is growing like crazy. I think they have like, I don't know. I'll look up the latest numbers. I mean, it's just painful every time he tells me the latest numbers where it's like, every day is their biggest day. and uh you know they're they're doing millions and millions of dollars of daily betting volume and they're profitable and i'm like you know you know what's interesting is like you might feel like you've missed the boat on that but one of the things i've learned is like think about amazon.com right amazon.com launched in what 1994 and you you you know you basically had until 2012 to buy the stock right now obviously it's publicly traded stock easier to get into but i bet you You could go to him and say, hey, remember your old pal, Sean, can I put a hundred grand in or whatever it is and just suck it up, right?

34:16Don't get caught up in the fact that you could have invested at some low valuation. That sounds like it'll be a winner long term, right? Yeah. And I mean, who knows? That's a super high variance bet. Like they get shut down tomorrow if like wherever they're based in some little island somewhere gets like, you know, seized, you know, who knows what's going to happen with that. But that's a roller coaster I wanted to be on. If you're going to do angel investing, you need high variance bets that can become absolutely massive or go to zero. You don't want things that are low risk, low reward. That's not how angel investing works.

34:46Anyways, so those are my two worst investments. They're missed out, not lost money. What's yours, Andrew? So I'm a designer. I like things to look nice. And I think every designer has this dream of building their dream house. And so about seven years ago, I bought a piece of property and I started building an amazing house and I hired amazing architects and interior designers. And I'll just say now, if you think you want to build a house, try it. It really sucks. Everyone has this fantasy, but what it really is, you think it's going to be about approving beautiful exteriors. What it really comes down to is you are choosing where the electrical outlets go, you are proving what color tone all the lights are.

35:34And so you make 10 ,000 decisions and eventually you get decision fatigue and you start making bad decisions. Or if you delegate, you delegate to someone else. Delegation is great in a company, but when you live in this space, the things bother you. And so what I found was because I was building my forever home, I would approve. They'd be like, okay, do you want this marble? Or there's this really, really, really nice marble that you can get where it's got nicer designs or whatever. And I'd always choose the more expensive option because I was thinking, this is my dream home. I only get to build it once.

36:09And so I massively overbuilt. I massively overspent. I ended up not being happy with the actual house once I was done. Wasn't the house like 8 ,000 square feet? It was huge. I had everything I could have wanted, a gym. I had a movie theater, all sorts of stuff. And I ended up not even liking the house when I moved in because I'd just walk around the house going, God damn it. I remember making that decision. Why did I make that beam that height? Why did I put that light there? And anyway, so I ended up getting divorced a year and a half ago, and neither me or my ex-wife wanted the house. And so I had to sell it.

36:42And I took a 30 % loss on this house that I'd spent five years building and spent tons of money on. So that was my big loss and my big lesson is I remember my dad said, you always want to be the second owner of a hotel, right? You want someone else to go crazy and build it out and then go bankrupt. And then you want to come in and own that. I think the same thing is true with houses. Just go buy a nice house that someone else built. That's a great line. You had an even bigger one though, written down here. Yeah. The other thing that happened to me this year. So this has happened to everybody, but no one feels it.

37:18So this year, my net worth got cut in half on paper, right? So I went from my, let's just say what's publicly available. So my tiny stock was worth like $750,$800 million. And today it's worth about half of that. And it's really fascinating. Like when you own a private business or you own a real estate portfolio, you don't have a ticker, right? If you own a million dollar house and all the houses in your neighborhood go down by 20%. You don't see that. You're not reminded of that. And one of the crazy things about having a stock ticker is every day you can see your net worth go up and down in radical ways.

37:55And so yeah, that kind of was a pretty insane experience to see that happening over the course of six months. I would never text you this, but I remember seeing the stock and every once in a while I'd be like, I just want to be like, what does that feel like? You know what I mean? Because there's been days when it's gone way up and there's been days it's gone way down. And I've always curious that I'm like, he knows what's going on. I want to I'm going to stay out of his hair on this one. It's really weird. I mean, Warren Buffett has this great anecdote or metaphor where he says, owning a business is like owning a farm.

38:27Let's say that your farm makes a million dollars a year of profit. And some some yokel comes to your fence. And he starts yelling, I'll buy your farm for 100 grand. If you know your farm is worth millions of dollars, you just ignore the yokel. And so there's all sorts of different people shouting different offers on your farm at all times. And so that's kind of the approach I try and take is I just go like, I know my business, I know what it's worth. But yeah, it's pretty weird seeing big swings like that. My worst thing this year was my biggest L was partially inspired by Andrew. Andrew, you make a huge mistake when you're talking to me.

39:04The mistake is you say, oh, it's just easy. You just hire a CEO and then you miss out on two things. One, it ain't easy. It's always harder than you think. There's always more challenges than you think. The other thing is managing them. How should they manage you? How should you manage them? The thing with my company, Hampton, my CEO, Jordan, he's awesome. But it's heavily based on my reputation and I'm heavily involved in the product. And so when I want to be involved in the product, I've made mistakes where I'll just go directly to certain staff versus understanding the chain of command. And so just understanding how to work with the CEO effectively has been a little bit of a challenge with me.

39:46It's going great and things are going good. And I've made a lot of really good decisions. And he's wonderful. But just learning how to understand that relationship has been a challenge. And I've gotten in trouble a few times. Partially, I take blame for a lot of the instances. But I wish we would have talked more about how to manage them tactically. We've talked a lot about how to hire and fire and things like that, but not how to like work with someone on a daily or weekly or monthly basis. Yeah. And I, lots of learning there. Cause I think it's very tempting to see a mistake and jump in, but it's, it's similar to delegation, right?

40:18When you first start delegating to an employee, you want to correct the errors as you see them. But at the end of the day, the hardest part about having a CEO is that they can ruin the business if they're not careful and you ultimately have to let them make their own mistakes and learn from them. I think I've shared on the pod, like we've had a couple instances where a CEO wants to spend one, two, three million dollars on R &D, and we don't believe it's going to work out. But we let them because we go, if we don't, they're going to resent us. They're going to say, Andrew and Chris were holding us back.

40:49We couldn't make our bonuses because we couldn't execute on the strategy. And so we always say we want non-fatal errors, not fatal errors. We'll intervene when they're fatal. right so i think for you like intervening when it's something that's going to ruin your reputation you should jump on that or ruin the business or imperil it but otherwise the hard part is you just kind of have to watch them make mistakes and realize that over the long term they'll make more um make more good decisions than bad yeah and it's just an emotional these are emotional issues but um that's mine sean what do you want to do now which one let's go to one of my favorites So unsexy business.

41:27So what is a unsexy, kind of under the radar, maybe simple business that stood out to you that you really liked? Let me go first on this one. I've got one that's interesting. So there's this guy I went to high school with named Chris, Chris Hoffman. He just started posting content on Twitter like three months ago. So basically, he posted a story, but I had known what his father did. So his father owned a heating and cooling company called Hoffman Bros Heating and Cooling out of St. Louis, where I'm from. He posted, he goes, in 2016, we took over my father's company. I bought it from him. And it was doing$13 million in revenue.

42:04And he goes through 2016 all the way up to 2013, where he explains the changes they made and how much revenue the business is now doing. So in 2016, it was 13. 2020, it was 40. 2023, it's going to be like$140 million in revenue from an HVAC business that he owns. and he tweets out all these interesting bits of content about things he's doing. Like, for example, we're giving an additional holiday off and here's how I think that that's going to impact the business. Or we created this thing called Hoffman University, which teaches people we had to buy a whole building for this much money. It's been very, very fascinating.

42:39He and Ian Cooley Companies, that's going to be the new storage business. We're going to see lots of people going on and doing that because of this guy, Chris Hoffman. Really fascinating stuff. Yeah, so mine is really, really boring. So in every fashion house or graphic design studio, there's a book of colors called Pantone. So you might see these, they're these big fat books, and you can literally just flip through them. You look at different colors. And what they've done that's incredibly smart is they've trademarked colors. So they have intellectual property where it'll be like burgundy blue, sapphire orange, you know, whatever.

43:13And this company, I found out, makes over$100 million a year of revenue. and one of the most genius things about it is they give you that book and they say you need to buy a new book every year because the colors fade right from being in the sun or whatever and so they're just constantly reselling these books people are licensing these colors and the entire fashion and graphic design world is standardized on Pantone so it's it's just so boring and wonderful

43:44Hey, this episode is brought to you by Mercury. They are the fintech of choice for over 200 ,000 companies. I myself use it for eight different companies. The reason why we all choose it is because it has everything you need under one roof. So like my e-commerce company, it's super important for us to be able to easily wire transfer, pay all our different vendors and suppliers all around the world. And the old way with our more traditional bank that shall now be named, I try it online. It would say no. It would freeze my account. then I'd have to go in, book an appointment, speak to a specialist who would try to upsell me on something I didn't need.

44:14And then finally, after 30 minutes there, then they charged me 50 bucks for the pleasure of that terrible interaction. And now with Mercury, I just go online, push two buttons, and I'm done. It's such a seamless experience. It's very intuitive. Everything's under one place. They basically took all the things any company would need for their financial tech, and they made it super easy to use and put it into one platform. So highly, highly recommend it. If you're not using Mercury, I question your judgment. So that's it. You've heard on my first million for more information check out mercury.com mercury is a financial technology company not a bank check show notes for details well we talked about wgsn their competitor um and how i think it's publicly traded but they're trying to sell it for like i think they're trying to sell it for like 800 million dollars because but i don't think they're competitors dude this is like the lower level this is literally the colors it's not saying which wgsn's like we're going to research and reports we'll tell you which color this is like Like Pantone does that too.

45:09They do like, they'll do like color forecasting and trending and all that kind of stuff too. Where do they make the money? Is it on the books? Is it on the dyes? Or is it on the reports? I think all of it. And then if they use the color, so they'll say like, this color of red is going to be in next season or whatever. And if you want to use it, we have some IP around. So WGSN did 50 million in EBITDA last year. And they've been around for like 30 years. I've been like obsessed with this space for a minute. I remember, Sean, you remember I used to bring this up, I think at our old office. I've been loving this stuff.

45:44Pantone is a good one. And I think it's WGSN and Pantone like own this space. It's basically like when Starbucks is going to come out with their new uniforms or their new like Christmas sleeves or the cups, they refer to each of these companies to figure out which colors are going to be popular in six months. Yeah, it's a really fascinating company. And they've been around for a long ass time to love it. All right, let's do next category. So the next category is content of the year. What are the either books or blogs or TV shows or podcasts? What was the best of the best? We're all inundated with so much content, and we all kind of want a little bit less content, but we still want the best.

46:21So what was the best content that you consumed this year? What was yours? Okay, I'll give you one. So on the TV side, The Bear, Season 2, Episode 7. Have you guys seen this show? stressful but that's a great episode i've tried to watch it so many times side jacks i like breaking bad i love stressful shows there's something about the way that that show is cut where i just can't watch it i get too stressed out and i have to turn it off it's like uncut gems yeah i heard about this for the show so many times i started it i i wasn't stressed i was actually just kind of like cool it's kind of slow you know like i'm not like there's not really that much going on it's like almost so real it's like the you know a restaurant is not that exciting but i kept hearing about this episode.

47:05So I powered through. I watched the whole first season, the whole second season just to get this one episode. And by the time I got there, I was like, there's no way this is worth it. Totally worth it. That is one of the best episodes of television I have ever seen. It is such an emotional high. I love that episode. I remember where I was sitting when I watched that and just thinking, whoever made this, you are incredible. And it teaches you a ton about business. Everyone after watching that episode went and read the book. What's it called? great hospitality. Yeah. On something, unbelievable hospitality or something.

47:41Right. So there's a lot of business takeaways. What was the other one, Sean? I'll give you one more. So I'll give you a book that I liked this year. It's called, have you ever read this? It's called Talk Like Churchill, Stand Like Lincoln. No, what is that? So I go down these random rabbit holes while I try to get better at, let's say, storytelling or public speaking or, you know, things like that. This is one that's on speaking and storytelling that I really liked. Didn't expect to like it. I like the title though. Talk like Churchill, stand like Lincoln. And it's a very simple book. And a lot of it is kind of obvious things, but I found it to be a very useful book.

48:17And it's about how to speak better and how to carry yourself better in different situations. Sam, you'll love it. There's a whole chapter on dress, how you should dress and why you should dress the way you dress. There's a whole chapter on that. And it's very short chapters that are on simple principles with a ton of examples. And it's a very old book. So I don't think a lot of people will read this book in general. And all of the examples are from old presidents and stuff that happened before 1950. So I think it's just like a, I don't know, it's like an old book or uses old examples. But it's a good one.

48:51I recommend it. It's not the best book I've ever read. But again, I just found it a very simple, useful book for anybody that wants to get better at how they carry themselves and how they present themselves. That's a good one. All right. So there's this idea with stoicism, that philosophy of stoicism. I forget the exact term, but basically it's where you imagine all the worst things have happened. They say, you've got cancer, your kid's sick and dying, your parents are dead. Now open up your eyes and none of that's true and you're grateful. I love that idea. And so this year, I went on a spree where I read books about people's hardship.

49:25So I read The Wager, which was a 10 out of 10. It's about a shipwreck and these guys are stranded for two years. And I read like literally four different shipwreck books. I read about Lewis and Clark and how they spent two years going through America in order to find the other side of the country. And all these hardship because it makes my life feel better when I'm just complaining about like a blog post. So another thing that I really got into, it's on Netflix. It's called World War Two from the Front Lines. And there's two things that I've been obsessed with this year. A, hardship. And so seeing like these soldiers and the Jews and what they went through, through the Holocaust and the soldiers on D-Day, it makes me so much so thankful that I don't have to do that.

50:02And I'm like, oh, this shit's easy. This money stuff's way easy. The other thing that I'm obsessed with is charisma, even evil, charismatic people. So I got like I read all these books about Charlie Manson, about Hitler, about Lincoln, about George Washington. And I love seeing this. And you see that in this World War Two documentary. What they do is they take real life footage from that era and they colorize it. and you see like uh you know joseph goebbels one of the um one of the folks and one of the guys who led propaganda for nazis you see him giving a speech and you see all you see literally a million people in the crowd like being convinced to do all these evil things and i find it so fascinating how cult leaders like use their charisma to do to force people or convince people to do bad stuff and so world war ii from the front lines it's on netflix it's awesome that's probably the best thing that i've consumed this year what's yours andrew so um like everyone else i've been freaking out about AI and I go through these phases where I try not think about it too much and then I go down a rabbit hole and I decided to read two books at the same time that kind of counterbalance one another so one book is called The Coming Wave it's by one of the co-founders of OpenAI and it's really fascinating usually you get these kind of like think piece analysis books by academics or professional authors and this guy actually is you know he's been on the front lines for the last 15 years, built DeepMind, and has been at Google working on their AI programs for years.

51:27And he has a very extreme view that effectively AI will disrupt all work and that the second and third order consequences are just endless and we can't really contemplate them. And he kind of argues for regulation and containment. And then on the flip side, at the same time, the counterbalance, the anxiety of reading that. I've been reading Morgan Housel's new book, Same As Ever, which is about how things don't change. What are the things that stay the same over the long term? People still eat the same candy bars. They still enjoy reading a book. They like going for a walk in nature, etc. So those have been two books that I've absolutely loved.

52:06And then I second the book, The Wager. Like Sam, before I go to bed, I always read books about people in terrible situations or in worlds that are very different than the world I inhabit. And the wager is amazing. I'm just at the part where they're going around the horn, so I'm pretty early, but oh my god, it's amazing. It's hard to put down, isn't it? That's one of the only books I've ever read in one sitting. Wow. Sean, you gotta get on that shipwreck train. I've got about three more shipwreck books if you want, Andrew. I've never bought into the stoicism, the negative visualization stuff. I didn't enjoy that.

52:42I do like reading about hardship or kind of like people who went through things just to give yourself perspective uh more than it more than to make myself feel good although that's a good side effect but i think it's more important to have a broader perspective than just the little narrow stuff you see in your day-to-day life um but doesn't that stuff just kind of like bum you out like you know i feel like i get the same effect of feeling good just by um you know being thankful for what's going good and imagining things going well and I can sleep easy doing that. Am I just... One of the most relaxing things for me is when I'm really really stressed.

53:16I watch a show called Survivorman. Have you guys ever heard of this? Yeah, the guy who like just is on his own for seven days and he's got to figure it out. This poor bastard. They put him in like, you know, the Antarctic with no, you know, he doesn't even have a hatchet or anything. He's like a harmonica. He doesn't even have a film crew around. He's got an emergency beacon if he's almost dying, but he films himself surviving. And you see this guy like drinking his own urine and eating rats and digging, you know, digging shelters under the ice and all this stuff. And every time I watch that, I just think how remarkable it is that I live in this amazing warm structure.

53:53And I go to bed very happy. His sleep mask up on his forehead. His toes tucked into the duvet as he's watching Survivor Man. Reading his printed emails. Asking in the glow of my Peter Atiyah red phone. he's like oh shit i saw blue light two hours before bed no

54:15and you're reading the wager and like don't these pussies know that they'll just get they just have to eat a lemon and they won't get scurvy what a bunch of morons um all right wildest predictions um what's yours dude i didn't i didn't do any here Andrew, you got to carry us. Yeah. So mine is that I think assistant and admin jobs could go away or change radically. I think that if you think about a lot of the tasks that personal assistants do, I think a very well-trained Google AI that understands your Google Drive, your calendar, and your email will be able to do probably 80 % of those tasks, maybe more.

54:55And I think that's coming in the very near term. These things are just progressing at such an exponential rate. And so that's something I've been thinking a lot about. And I'm excited. I think it frees up a lot of people to do more interesting work, but it's going to be pretty wildly disruptive. Well, we got to read our predictions from last year, right? I think that's where we got to start for this one. So Andrew, your prediction for 2023 was that we would see a lot of copies slash competitors to GPT-3 slash AI. Correct. You said Google jumps in. Correct. AWS has something and Azure have something.

55:30Azure did the big, Microsoft did the big deal with OpenAI. So you were pretty spot on. Sam, yours was, Elon dies or gets canceled in a serious way. And then you said, OpenAI gets regulated. The inputs happened. The inputs for Elon Musk were there. The output was not. Dude, he's getting kind of like a long, slow cancellation progressively. And by the way, that's my same prediction for the next year. I think Elon will admit that buying Twitter was a mistake. Although I think he's already acknowledged he's like, this is a hardship that I didn't necessarily need. But I think that like with all the advertisers leaving, I've been buying ads on Twitter.

56:08I tested it. Like the cost per click are like stupid cheap. I don't even want to mention that on here because it's going good. Cut that shit out. But basically, I think that the Twitter experiment, I think it's going to live, but not under Elon or something in a drastic way. So I'm extending my 23 into 24. Okay, I like that. My prediction was selfish. I said, this is the year that I turned the corner and actually get shredded up. So get ripped, get in great shape. And then I also said I would start a company that's special or maybe a legacy company. I definitely did not do the second one. But I also didn't.

56:43After that podcast, I stopped thinking about that completely. And I made actually my goal to not start a company this year. And then getting ripped, I actually got to my fattest this year. But then before the end of the year, fourth quarter was, you know, the clock was draining and I came through in the clutch and I'm now down about, let's see, 13, 14 pounds. And I've been eating clean for what? 45 straight days. Like perfect, perfect eating. Exactly what I want to be doing. And to put that in perspective, 45 days probably doesn't sound like much. It's a month and a half. probably the longest I went of actual perfect eating where I'm not eating a bunch of chips or ordering a pizza or something like that one night when I'm tired or stressed.

57:31Probably the last time I did a stretch would have been like seven days. Would have been like the longest I had gone just of actual clean eating. And now I'm at 45. So it's going great. With Ozempic or without? He hates it. No Ozempic, baby. I'm on that no Ozempic plan. Natty. And in the YouTube comments. Every video is commenting either your skin or your look. So it's working. People are loving your glow up. What about coolest moment of your year? I have a fun one. So last year, my coolest moment was all about me. This year, it's all about somebody else. So I have a buddy who I went to college with, my buddy Dan.

58:09And Dan, we started our first business together straight out of college. So we were like the three amigos. But then that company wasn't really working out and two of the three of us went to Australia and had this really cool opportunity but there wasn't really a spot for Dan on that boat meaning like I got a spot and I was able to get one other guy a spot but it was really too much for me to convince this Australian billionaire why I need two of my friends to come with me to go do this thing that was like kind of this unspecified project and I felt bad about that and I felt bad about that for like a decade and I was like damn I really wish like even if he didn't come that we had gotten him into a good landing spot before we made that decision.

58:47I felt like we kind of left, you know, no man left behind. We kind of left a man behind. And I felt bad about that. I carried that guilt. He did totally fine, by the way. He went and got a job at Facebook and he, when he was at Facebook, he went from like the bottom to the top. The bottom was his job at Facebook initially was to like make sure that like no penis will show up on our newsfeed. He's like building like penis detection like systems to like make sure that you know, and by the way, you ever logged into Facebook and see the penis? Never. Dan did a great job. And so while he was there, he went and enrolled in the Facebook developer bootcamp and taught himself to code.

59:23And then he went out in the marketplace, did a genius thing. His job application, he's like, well, I could say that I've been an engineer for two years. That's not really going to get me that good of a job. So he's like, instead, he went out, he reframed it. He goes, I'm a Facebook trained engineer. I know how to do engineering at Facebook. I can make your engineering team run like a Facebook engineering team. People loved it. He got a job as CTO of a startup that went on to raise, you know, B round, C round, D round. But unfortunately, the startup fizzled out. And I catch up with Dan and I say, he's like, hey, man, you know, unfortunately, my options, I thought were going to, you know, make me a bunch of money.

59:59Didn't really work out. You got any other like kind of, I'm looking for a job. Let me know. And I said, yeah, I met this guy, Andrew Wilkinson. And then I met this guy, Saeed Balki. And I've been listening to this podcast that I create. and it's all about, there's a bunch of these people that are buying businesses. I said, Dan, have you ever considered buying a business? He's like, I didn't even know where I would start. And I was like, I'm going to help you. And I was like, I don't know a ton about it, but I know more about it than you do. So let me be a blue belt and help a white belt here. And so I basically helped Dan do this search process.

1:00:27I had no stake in it, no investment in it, except for this is one of my best friends from college. and Dan bought a business. He bought a, so after six to nine months and several like close calls, but you know, last minute we said, no, no, this is not a great business. Don't buy it. He buys this business and he buys this bag manufacturer, a bag like bag sales company. I don't even know how you describe it. They don't make the bags. They get them made, but they sell them to big retailers. So like if you go walk into like a, like an Ulta, all the bags at Ulta, that's my boy Dan's company. And this guy had been running it for years.

1:01:03He had no contracts with any of these companies. He kind of ran it off pen and paper. And so my friend Dan was able to negotiate and buy this business at a great price. And he just texted me yesterday saying that he's only owned this business now for like three or four months. that just in the sort of five months that'll be this year, he will, out of the profit of this business, after paying all the debt that he used to buy the business, he will make more than he made at his highest paying job as CTO already in the first five months. And he's like, dude, the lifestyle is great. He's like, I'm kind of working more, but it's totally different.

1:01:37Totally different feel, right? Like I own my own business. I come in every day. I'm excited. He's like, I see this path where we're going to grow. He's like, I'm Dan the bag man. And he's like, I can do this. and this can be like my, you know, like my asset that I build because like, he's like, you know, even though I'm making more than I did with my job, it's even better because you can't ever sell your job. But with this, I know if I build this business up and it's making more profits, one day I could sell this business and cash out like a life-changing sum for me. And I feel so good that I got to, you know, sit shotgun for him while he went on this ride.

1:02:07Kudos to Dan. What's the name of the company? Can you say? I don't know, but if you email me, I'll return you to Dan. If you need bags for your business, Dan's got you. mine's a bit mine doesn't have any great story so Andrew I saw what you put that is also mine but I'm not going to say that one I'll go to the next one which is actually the most important one I had a kid this year that was my that was the coolest moment this year um I think Andrew you you told me what did you say you said you're going to feel so much in uh dopamine every morning when you look at your kid and I get it now so now it's my turn to gatekeep people and tell people like oh you'll understand when you have kids you'll understand it i understand a little bit and it's been awesome so that's mine but uh andrew you do yours i think i said um it's like liquid mdma gets shot into your brain every time you look at your baby yeah it's awesome and it's and it's brought me closer to my wife too i have more you know i've already i always respected her but now there's more like of a spiritual respect it's kind of funny um but what's yours totally um so yeah we had our first ever live mfm in vancouver uh what was that february i guess uh this year and i kind of put it on like so i i like you know texted you guys and i was like hey we want to do this event let's do it in vancouver we rented this huge theater and i remember getting the photo of the theater and sending it to you and we were just like holy shit like how are we going to fill this thing or i was really nervous about it and uh we i remember we were backstage and we were like peeking out and the entire theater was packed.

1:03:40There was a line down the street. It was really, really crazy. And this was like, it's a massive multi-level theater. What did it see? Like 1 ,200 people? 1 ,200, 1 ,300 people or something. And I remember Sam was like, we're backstage and he goes, I don't use Facebook, but I do today because I want everyone in high school to see that I filled the theater. And he's supposed to photo of us on the theater. I just love that. That was such a great moment there i remember uh sam you posted this photo of alexis ohanian with serena williams and he just looks like a like a like a pasty white nerd with this like beautiful like beautiful uh amazon and you go the nerds win and in that moment i was like okay the nerds won you didn't like when i said that by the way he was not a fan but it was awesome that we sold out that theater that that was a really exciting thing and you did the dumbest thing ever you made people pay, but then you gave the money back if they showed up, people would have just paid.

1:04:36Yeah, I know. In retrospect, we should have charged. Alright, last three categories. Let's go to breakout of the year, Sean. What do you have? Mine's real simple. Breakout of the year, I think has to be Ozempic. I feel like Ozempic kind of changed the world. It's not just like a tech thing or a business thing. like Ozempic is everywhere. And there's, I don't know, the jury's still out on it, but there's a lot of evidence that even if Ozempic has, you know, maybe side effects or you got to stay on it to maintain the gains or whatever, like that people not being obese and people not being sort of controlled by their cravings, whether it's for food or they're even seeing maybe effects for alcoholism.

1:05:24That seems just like a really, really big deal. And I kind of, it's kind of the cliche idea. it's like what if there was the magic weight loss pill and now there kind of is that's mind blowing to me that we did it there is a magic weight loss pill well I was picking between Brett Taylor and Ozempic and so Sean do you remember how you first heard about Ozempic I think it was June of 2022 I texted you and I was like there's this drug called semi glutide I'm in New York and it's like kind of popular amongst like only a small group of like weird biohackers I'm gonna try it and i tried it and i remember messaging you or maybe i even said in the pod i'm like for some you know i've got i had drinking issues a long time ago but i was like for some reason i even feel like i think this might like cure that too you called it you called it a hundred percent not only do you show you you showed me a picture and i'm like wow that's incredible you go um you go i started this semi-glutide thing i was like dude you like never heard of this like yeah yeah i just inject this thing and me and i'm like bro you just inject random shit into you like that's not smart but you were totally on it and then you said the i think this is going to cure alcoholism and i remember literally like i didn't want to laugh in your face but i remember laughing inside being like dude that's just like it sounds like a crazy leap uh you know you can't just say that shit there's no evidence of that i just felt it i could feel it when i so i don't use it anymore but i tested it for a small amount of time and this is semi-glutide that's the name of the drug or the i don't know how you even explain it the the root drug and then there's Ozempic is the brand name.

1:06:54But I remember putting that in my body and I'm like, I think this is going to cure alcoholism because you don't crave anything. And I think what's going to happen is in 10 years, we're going to see downsides to this drug because right now there's very few or at least it's impacting only a small amount of people. So I think that there's still going to be downsides. But I think that what Scott Galloway said, he goes, it's not chat GPT. It's GLP-1. That's the big thing. GLP-1, this drug class is going to be way bigger. than chat GPT. And I agree with them. I think that's the breakout of the year.

1:07:27What's yours, Andrew? Yeah, that's like antidepressants or something. So mine is pretty boring. It's a company called Snipped. And it's a podcast player. And I don't know if you guys have this problem, but often I'll be driving. That's when I listen to podcasts most. And I'll hear something incredible, like a great quote or just a great line or something I want to follow up on later. and until recently I've either um just forgotten it basically it goes out the other side of my head or occasionally I would pull over my car and I'd make a note or something like that and snipped basically solves that so what snip does is it has an AI that basically takes the transcript it does um like voice recognition on the transcript of the podcast it pulls out all the key moments so a let's say that you want to listen to a Joe Rogan interview but it's three hours and you only really want to talk, hear them talk about stuff that isn't MMA, you can jump in or whatever.

1:08:22But then also when you hear something interesting, you can tap a little button in Car Play or on your phone and it'll actually grab the text for whatever was just said. And I've found that incredibly useful. And all my nerdy friends that are into like journaling and read wise and all that stuff are going crazy for it. So I love that product. You're on the homepage, a testimonial from you. Oh, really? Yeah. Apparently, you must have... I haven't invested or anything. You've tweeted it out and they use their tweet. And I think MFM is... Yeah, MFM is on here too. That's pretty cool. Sam, you had a snipped moment last pod where somebody was like, yeah, Varda is this crazy company.

1:09:02And we were like, what do they even do? They go to... Yeah, they're manufacturing drugs in space. Sam goes, He goes, why? He goes, what's wrong with Massachusetts?

1:09:22I still haven't gotten a good answer. I'm sure it exists. What's wrong with Massachusetts? That is incredible content. This is the end of the Millie Awards. Congratulations, folks. This is the end of 2023. It's already 2024, which is crazy. I saw someone say, a professor was like, hey, you can use sources in your paper from the previous century. And this person, the student wrote in and she goes, hey, I was going to do something from the late 20th century is 1996. Is that too old to use? So if you're born in 2000, you're already 24. I can't believe we're going into that year. Dude, that's us now.

1:10:01Too old to use. Yeah, it's crazy. That's it. That's the pod. Congrats, fellas. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.

1:10:21Hey, let's take a quick break because there's a quote that I love I want to read you. It's that we shape our tools and thereafter, they shape us. And, you know, as an entrepreneur, if you're using a bank that was built in the 90s, you're operating like you're in the 90s. And trust me, I've been there. Clunky portals, random holds on your money,$50 wire fees, and then being told, please visit your local branch. Well, that's why I switched to a different type of banking solution, Mercury. It turns your financial chores into a smooth workflow. You can do wires, invoices, cards, reimbursements, two clicks, and I'm done.

1:10:51If you're already using Mercury, respect. If you're still using one of the old big banks, I got questions for you. So go visit mercury.com and give it a test drive. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group, column A, and Evolve Bank and Trust members, FDIC.