Passive Income Expert: How To Make 10k Per Month In 90 Days!

26:37And we did hundreds of thousands of dollars our first 30 days organically from that. How did Bucky's feel about that? They wanted us to make some key changes to the website. They wanted us to like basically put disclaimers everywhere that said we are not Bucky's. We're not affiliated with Bucky's. they wanted us to change the name it had the word beaver in the name that's their mascot they just they didn't want it to be confusing at all so we made all those changes and then we got like the unofficial thumbs up from them they said we're not going to sign anything but like you have our blessing um have fun and did that website make you a lot of money yeah it still is it's been five years we still own it 100 of it and it's going great and it's made you millions uh-huh what can someone listening take from that in terms of applying that to their own life, finding opportunities like that out in the world?

27:29Or is that just a one and done? Is there only one opportunity like that? Okay, so specific, I get asked that question a lot. How could someone do that with another brand? I don't know. If there was another brand out there like that, I would be doing it, right? Trader Joe's is similar, but they're very litigious. I think that was kind of lightning in a bottle for that particular experiment, as in launching an online brand for an in-person business. Okay. But people should not be disheartened hearing that because on a macro level, like people should take their curious ideas very seriously. They need to shorten the amount of time spent between having the idea and doing something about that idea.

28:13because that will strengthen their bias for action muscle, right? We all have ideas. Some of them good, some of them bad on a regular basis. We usually don't do anything about it. It's just a passing thought, right? Whether it's a business idea or a hard conversation I need to have with something, any idea, right? But the more we shrink the amount of time between doing something about that idea and having that idea, the more often we'll do that. And it becomes a self-perpetuating snowball that just compounds. And then before we know it, we'll get more ideas. We'll do more about those ideas. We'll be testing things.

28:49We'll be learning tools. We'll be experimenting and we'll have a whole portfolio of businesses. Is there something in your mentality or perspective there, where you walk into a Buc-ee's and you even think about how you could do something, whereas most people walk into a Buc-ee's and buy their stuff and leave? Like, is there something foundational in the way that you're looking at the world? Yeah, but I don't think I'm any different. I think a lot of people have ideas like that. Like you walk into a Buc-ee's and you see something about something that could be improved. And people have these passing thoughts and they move on.

29:20I think that you become an expert at doing something about those ideas when you do something about those ideas. You get better at what you do, at what you test. because you've built up some kind of muscle which means that you don't really care about it seems failure as much as the average person and also in that particular case the average person might think well i've got no experience in doing that no one has any experience in anything until they do it right like every every expert started out as a beginner right sometimes though people try this and they learn, eh, it doesn't give them energy.

29:58It's not for them. That's okay. Now when they have ideas, they can know, all right, box checked. That's not really for me, that entrepreneurship thing. Someone else needs to do that. And great, good, all the power to them. I just want people to answer that question for themselves. I hate seeing regret in people's faces. Like I have friends that want to start a business. They've always talked about it and I know they would be good at it. And I know it just eats them up. And they have really, really good ideas, objectively. And I just hate seeing them have that question for the rest of their lives.

30:32I just want them to taste entrepreneurship. Is it for everybody, though? You know, you can think of all your friends. You can probably put them in groups of this person should, this person shouldn't. And what defines who goes in which group? To me, it's how far they go in doing something about that idea. Because I will have friends that will text me ideas or talk to me about ideas, and then I never hear from them again about that thing. I don't worry about them, right? I feel like there's a selection bias at play. Like if they really want to do something about it, they would get a little further down the line.

31:11They'd follow up with me. They'd say, I did this thing because I'll always give them tips and feedback. You should do this. You should try this. And they'll follow up. And then, you know, at some point along the line, it'll die. Right. But if they don't get any further than just telling me their idea, then I don't I don't lose sleep over that. So it's kind of survived. It's kind of sort of self-selecting itself anyway. It is entrepreneurship. Yeah, absolutely. But then I have other friends that are like the follow up, the follow up, the follow up. And then and then it dies, which is OK. A lot of my ideas die, too.

31:41And to me, that's a signal that it was supposed to die, right? I'll just move on to the next thing. So it's those people that maybe I'm just biased and they look more like me, you know? Maybe that's not an accurate signal or not. But if they look more like me, then that's a signal that they should get further down the line and actually launch something that gets to revenue. In your head, think of one person you know that should never start a business. Okay. Why did you think of that person without telling me who they are? because they make a lot of money at their job and they like their job well enough.

32:18They're not miserable. And they're in their late 40s and they probably feel like it would be too big of a risk to start something. And do you objectively agree that it would be too big of a risk for them? I do. So you're looking at that on a risk reward basis thinking the reward doesn't outweigh the risk here for you. Yeah. Yeah, because people come to me like hoping that I'll encourage them to quit their job, right? Like begging me to do that without actually begging me. And I don't want to do that. Like I've never had to quit a job. Like I started with entrepreneurship, right? So the thought of being 48 with four kids and quitting my$400 ,000 a year job to test something, it just sounds crazy to me.

32:58On the other hand, think of one person, you know, that isn't an entrepreneur, but definitely should be. But you always think, why don't they do it? Yeah. Wow. Why did you think of that person? Because it's a person that comes to me the most often with ideas. And they're really, really good ideas. He's an engineer. And so he sees the world in that way. Engineers make great entrepreneurs. And he has a great work ethic. And he's like mid-career, but not so far along. And I know objectively that he's not, he's actually quite miserable in his job. And I hate that for him. Because I see the talent that's there.

33:37And I want him, like, I think he would excel. And I want to see that dream come true for him. Why isn't he doing it? I think it's insecurity. Fear. Yeah. Fear of?

33:55Probably fear of just letting go of something certain that's provided his family a nice lifestyle. And not getting that back again ever. I think that insecurities are at the root of our best and our worst selves. And it can drive us to be our best or our worst selves, depending on how self-aware we are about those insecurities. Is there a little bit of a flaw in his thinking in your perspective? Like, why is it you still, even though what he's saying there about, you know, what you think he believes there about security for his family is true, you still think he should. which suggests that there's some kind of flaw you see in it the way he's thinking about it yeah because he doesn't have to quit his job um there's enough time in the day to do this on the nights and weekends to to do enough of it to really prove itself out oftentimes like

34:54whatever our side hustle is uh it has a very low ceiling if we're only working on it after hours, right? Let's say we're spending 20 hours a week on a side hustle and it makes us $50 ,000 a year, but our job pays us$200 ,000 a year. And we spend 40 hours a week on that. One thing that I've noticed, which is kind of contradictory to how I feel about quitting something is when we go from 20 hours a week on the$50 ,000 a year side hustle to 40 hours a week, and we quit the full-time thing, that$50 ,000 a year goes to$500 ,000, right? We double the amount of hours, but we 10 times the amount of money that comes from it.

35:35Because of the fact that we burn the boats, that it has to work. I just, I don't want people to burn the boats too soon, right? Like there has to be a pathway. Like let's say our Facebook ads are converting really well. We've tested scaling it and they're profitable and we know what that would look like. But if we scale it, then we're gonna have more customer service complaints. We're going to have to do more architecture to the website. But we like we see a path to scaling and it's already profitable. And we know that like probably my boss will take me back. Like we have kind of these safety nets.

36:08That's like the perfect time to really burn the boats. Not when like we have an idea or we've tested it a little bit, but not thoroughly. That's too soon, in my opinion. And by burn the boats, you mean the analogy of, I guess, some of the wartime leaders who would pull up on an island that they were invading and burn the boat so that they had no plan B? Mm-hmm. Exactly. Yeah. To quit. Do you think that really matters? The whole idea of a plan B? Do you think people should have a plan B when they embark on entrepreneurship? Can I contradict myself? A hundred percent. All right. So the rational Chris, the Chris with four kids says, absolutely.

36:43Like you got to be a dad. You got to be a husband. You got to provide for your family. Right. And again, there's so many tools out there for testing, for scaling, for outsourcing. We could find a business partner to They help pick up the slack. We can use our kids. We can use our spouse, whatever. There's so many ways to really vet something out before quitting that we don't have to quit. But on the other side of my mouth, there's been two times in my entrepreneurial career when someone burned the boats for me, right? I pull up to an island and I've got my plan B. I'm testing this business. This business is profitable.

37:17It's paying the bills. and then someone else in the middle of the night, they snuck out, they burn my boats and I wake up and I'm like, whoa, where's my plan B? I wasn't ready to burn those boats yet. And plan A just freaking thrives, right? And it's not so much because of the fact that I don't have a safety net anymore, but it's because that event put a chip on my shoulder that makes me want to prove those bad guys wrong, right? To oversimplify. Those guys that burned my boat. Toxic motivation. Exactly. That's a good way to put it. To show them, I didn't need those boats. I'm not going back, right?

37:56This island is better than where I came from. I remember reading about a study on Plan B's where they got a group of students, two groups, and then they told them to do a puzzle to win a treat. And then in one of the groups, they told them that they could get this treat at a vending machine down the hallway if they wanted it after. and the group that didn't understand they could get the same reward from a plan b worked significantly harder to complete that puzzle so there's something in the human psyche of when you know that you could get the reward in another way when you have a plan b we work less hard at the plan a 100 % logically maybe we should you know yeah we're practical and unresponsible remove the plan b from my mind yeah yeah i just like i i can't think of any stories from people in my sphere of influence that have tested something quit the plan a and then plan b just failed and like they just lost everything like surely that's happened right that does happen when people like prematurely quit but in my experience it's just it doesn't happen like it It has the opposite effect.

39:07It becomes this huge motivating factor. And when they quit, I asked them, like, how do you feel? Are you freaking out? And it's always, always, I'm so excited right now. Like, I'm going to go all in on this. Like, this has to work. And it does. It just does. A lot of people are looking for passive income from side hustles. And I wondered what your opinion was on passive income, because it's a word that comes up so often in the comment section of this channel. But when we're doing sort of sentiment analysis on what people are, what they're interested in, passive income seems to be a bit of a buzzword.

39:39Yeah. It's the silver bullet, right? It's like it's the financial Ozempic, you could say. What is passive income? How would one define that? I would define it as income that you receive that you don't have to continually put effort towards, like buying treasuries, earning 4 % on your money, and you don't do anything, and you just get paid. and it's very hard to find, especially early on. Like we have to be willing to create active income, sweaty income, ugly income, like by whatever means necessary. And the more we do that, the longer we do that, the more realistic true passive income actually is.

40:22Sweaty, ugly income. Yeah. Give me an example of some sweaty, ugly income that anyone listening right now could create. What are your favorite examples of non-obvious businesses that people have started that have resulted in passive, sweaty, ugly income? Yeah. I mean, most things that I've started have been just that. I had a concierge car buying business. A concierge car buying business? Yeah. What's that? So picture a traditional car dealership, a used car dealership. You've got to get your dealer's permit. That enables you legally to go to the auctions and buy cars at wholesale. Put them on your lot and sell them.

40:58So I did all the regulatory stuff. I got my dealer's permit. But then I would go to individuals and they would say, I want a 2024 Sequoia. I want it to be blue under 30 ,000 miles. And I would just go to the auction and buy it for them for like$700 fee. So they get wholesale. They save money. I make money. I don't have to bear the inventory risk. And I can buy exactly what they want. This sounds great, right? On paper. People do that business successfully. I didn't invent it. I copied it, right? I hated it. I was breaking down on the side of the road driving these things back from the auction.

41:31I'm not a car guy I don't care about cars. I don't work on cars It's not my passion. That was ugly. It was hot in texas. I was standing out on the blacktop I was making money. It was profitable and I got to the point where I just like Quit it. I just shut it down moved on to something else Um, that was very active It was not scalable on the surface. It was ugly. I hated it And so I pivoted because I had a plan b I didn't have to do that, right? Um, that's one example. Uh, if someone likes cars, it's, it's actually a great business. Like I know a gentleman in Alabama that makes a lot of money doing that.

42:05Right. For me, it was, it was not great. So how important that is passion in this equation? Like how important it is for you to love the thing to be successful at it in your view? I think you need to fall in love with business, with commerce. And if you can love entrepreneurship, turning$1 into two and that, like, if you could focus on that being your passion, than anything that falls underneath that, you should win at, right? But I like to say, follow the profit, P-R-O-F-I-T, until you can afford to follow your passion, right? Because if we're trying to follow our passion from day one, we're probably not ever going to get there because the statistical likelihood that what we love and what makes us money overlaps in the beginning is almost zero.

42:52So ignore passion for a time. Try to build your passion around commerce and then start anything. And then once you're able to have more passive income, then start things that you're passionate about, like in the actual industry that you're passionate about. Persistence. Persistence is obviously going to create repetitions to understand the problem, to learn more. to, you know, so I wonder as it relates to passion and persistence, they seem sort of in strictably linked. Something I'm more passionate about, I'm more likely to continue out even when the rewards don't show up. Yeah. Like my car, my car business, right?

43:30I know passion for cars and I had another business that was doing great. So, so I abandoned that. Um, but people think that like people sometimes look at themselves as lazy or they're not a hard worker. And so they're just, they're not confident that they could do this. But there's like, everyone is a hard worker. Everyone on this planet has the same DNA that enables them to work hard. But the problem is what they're working on probably gives them no energy, right? They're probably not passionate about it. So what am I passionate about? Well, we've got to test everything. We have to try new things.

44:04We have to take that curious question and turn it into a business. Maybe that's fun. Maybe it's not, right? We need more surface area for finding what our passions actually are, because we might think that like, like I love woodworking, right? I don't have to build a business around that because I love business, right? So I can build a business around anything. But if I got super hung up on like, I cannot make a profit from this woodworking business, then I would fail at entrepreneurship if I started there, right? Whereas if I approach this from the angle of, all right, I like woodworking, what else do I like?

44:35Maybe I like running. Maybe I like cooking. Maybe I like short form videos. And I just start trying all those new things. And eventually, I'm going to have enough surface area for testing that I'm going to find things where, have you heard of the Ikigai principle? Right? So what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, and what you can charge for. Right? The overlap of that is the sweet spot. That's what's scalable. That's what you can do until you die. But if you get super hung up on that on day one, like, I'm just not passionate about that. Like, you're never going to find it. Like, you're going to be in that job forever.

45:10my career follows the same same arc which is i tried tons of things and then i built this marketing business and then that became more of a product business and grew and i didn't love it like it wasn't my passion to do um to help like coca-cola sell more cans of coke or like you know uber sell more ubers necessarily that wasn't like my passion in life however it taught me a bunch of skills which then in when i quit that business and i spent some time in psychedelics DJing, building software, web3, you name it. I came out on the other side and could ask myself that Ekigai question, which is of all the things that I have tried, what is the thing that I would do, like really irrespective of money?

45:45Now I had that luxury to do that. And actually in 2020, the answer was this, like this was the answer. This answer was, I literally moved to London from New York and found a place without viewing it properly that looked like this because I thought this would be a good podcast set and moved into that place, called Jack. And then we started about five years ago doing this weekly. And it's become a business off the back of it. Yeah. But I didn't have that luxury at the start. If I tried that from day one, I wouldn't have had A, the skills to know how to scale an audience. I wouldn't have had the flexibility to buy all these cameras, which cost like 50 grand or whatever at the start.

46:24And I do think some people sometimes get that inverted. Yeah, and you're not distracted anymore, right? You're not looking for the next DJ thing or like, you found it, you're here, right? Right now you're focused on scaling this like people get so hung up on focus or lack thereof and they just beat themselves up over it. But in my experience, like a lack of focus is a signal that there's something else out there. Right. That maybe we shouldn't be focusing on that thing because you've probably worked on things that had perfect product market fit and were just crushing. And you weren't thinking about starting a DJing business at that point.

46:57Right. You were all in on this one thing. But in the times when you were working on something, you're like, maybe I'll try this. Maybe I'll try this. and you beat yourself up, you're like, oh, and focus, focus, focus. Like, let's actually pay attention to those signals. Why am I distracted from this thing? So that's, I don't know if that's just me coping with my own ADHD or if that's actually a true principle, but I try to lend some credence to those signals of distraction that I get on a regular basis. Yeah, I have a Sunday shelf, which is just a digital board on my Monday board where when I have ideas that like captivate me at 11 p.m.

47:33at night one night, instead of trying to act on them immediately, because I think I'm in some respects like you, I put it on the Sunday shelf. And I wait and see. I wait and see how much it pulls at me to come off the shelf. And then sometimes it comes off the shelf. I get a little bit of the way down. I discover that actually there's something I didn't realize and then I quit. But then there's this, you know, when you think about the excitement arc of a new idea, you have the initial surge of excitement. Like, this is the best thing ever. I'm going to become a billionaire. Why has no one ever thought of this before?

48:00And then you kind of get into it and you get into that sort of valley of, oh, fuck, this is a terrible idea. I'm an idiot. If I can come out of that valley, if something pulls me up out of that valley, then I think it's worth pursuing. Yeah, that's a good way of looking at it. The valley of despair or something, that's what they call it. Yeah. Yeah. Do you follow a similar sort of path with your ideas? It's funny because my kind of framework is, if I have an idea, am I thinking about it still two weeks later? For whatever reason, that's just my timeline, two weeks. I had an idea yesterday and I was at the airport.

48:37I was excited about it and I was doing research. I forgot about it, right? Who cares, you know? But I have ideas where I just cannot get it out of my head and I'll see something out there in the world that adds to the idea and I tell my friend about it and I send these manic voicemails or these manic voice notes to my friends about it and I'm still thinking about it two weeks later. That's my signal that there's actually something here. You used the word validating earlier on when you're talking about these ideas. And I think this is something that could really, really help a lot of people who have a lot of ideas is this idea of trying to validate your idea as fast as possible.

49:14How might one validate an idea? And can you give me an example of an idea that you have validated? What does validation mean? Yeah. So I like to see people get joy from my product or service. Right. Not just like, oh, that's good. Like, let's say I'm selling a food product. It tastes good. It's good. Okay. People might buy this, but I'm not going to have product market fit. I'm going to be pushing a boulder up the hill, right? But if people are like, oh my gosh, this is the best thing I've ever had. Where did you make this? How did you make this? It lights up in their face. That's an example of a validation in my case, right?

49:52Same industry, food product, completely different reactions, right? So one specific example is my wife has a cookie bar business, right? Square cookies. And they're amazing. And we're not trying to scale it. We don't want to scale it. It's a way to teach our kids entrepreneurship, and we love it. But the best way to validate this was going to our local farmer's market and just posting up and just giving people samples and just watching them, right? What do they say versus how do they react? And is it the same? What do you mean by that? Well, sometimes we try to use the internet in places where it's not needful, right?

50:32She sold these online, right? She shipped them to friends and family across the country. Like, they're great. We love them. Okay. I didn't see you eat it. I don't know how you actually love it. Are you saying that because you're my mom, right? Or you're my friend. But when you solicit feedback on your product or service in person, even if it's like an internet tool or an app, in person makes all the difference. you want to take note of what they say and take note of their body language and how they react when they experience your product or service right and if all three of those things overlap then either they're a psychopath and they're just lying for no good reason or you have something really special on your hands uh and so that's what we did with her cookie bar business and um and they loved it and you can do that with any business it doesn't have to be food and what does validation mean?

51:19It's, it's checking if the market gives a fuck about the thing you're making as fast as you can. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I like to kind of picture a, you know, a boulder up a hill, right? And most people in their businesses, even businesses that are working, there are two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, one step back. And that's okay. Like, that's not a bad thing. But in my experience, 5 % of the time, I'll have a business where the boulder is chasing me. Like I'm trying to not die because this boulder is chasing me down a hill. And that boulder in this case represents customers demand, right?

51:54Like I can't sleep because I'm fulfilling orders. I'm answering emails. Like I'm not getting distracted by the next shiny object. That is validation. That's product market fit in my experience. You don't have to have that to launch. I don't want people to misunderstand. Um, but if you have that, like you have something very special and you need to go all in on that thing. There was a book published several years ago called The Lean Startup, which talks about this idea of just like testing an MVP as quickly as you possibly can. Can you explain that to the audience who probably have ideas, but in their head are thinking, I've got to quit my job.

52:29I'm going to have to raise money. I'm going to have to spend two to three years building something to figure out if this is a good idea or not. What is the alternative approach that you adopt when you're trying to stress test an idea quickly. Yeah. So if I had to pick one tool, I mean, it's one that one in four humans use every day and it's Facebook, right? You've got Facebook groups, you've got WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook marketplace, Facebook pages, Facebook ads, right? Let's just say there's six different meta products, Facebook products. That's everything you need right there, right? Why don't you give me an example of just a random business and I'll tell you or the the audience how they could validate that with a Facebook product.

53:11Okay. I'm thinking of starting a creatine brand for women that has, makes creatine taste good. Okay. All right. Are we talking powder, gummy? What form factor? I don't know. Okay. Well, let's try both. Okay. So I'm going to do something that seems very non-obvious and probably won't work, but it's the lowest amount of friction. I'm going to take a description for that and I'm going to use Nano Banana, ChadGPT, any of the AI image generators to come up with what the product could look like, right? In both a gummy form and a powder form, okay? Then I'm going to go to Facebook Marketplace. You're just going to post a photo?

53:56Yeah, I'm just going to say like, women's creatine brand actually tastes good, right? Like, did you know that creatine improves cognitive function or whatever? just your standard pitch. I could even use AI to generate it. It doesn't really matter at this point. And I'm going to post it to Facebook marketplace simply because that's the lowest amount of friction to get some level of validation or not. Right. Because in my experience, focus is overrated and momentum is underrated. Right. And so you could have told me any idea. And my first step that I tell you to do is going to be something very, very low friction, because I want you to get something back from the world, right?

54:34Because the most likely way to sell that product is with meta ads, right? But there's a lot of friction there. Like it's hard to use. So you're going to be like, okay, you're going to go, Chad, how do I use meta ads? You're going to burn out and you're going to be on to something else by tomorrow. But that might be an amazing idea, right? So I'm going to tell you to go to Facebook Marketplace, even though people don't sell creatine on Facebook Marketplace. And then we're going to see, you know, Facebook gives us like three stats when you post something to Facebook Marketplace. clicks, and then how many people that reach out, and then how many views.

55:04Okay. So I'm going to post one Facebook marketplace ad for the gummies, different picture. It'll look like gummies. Basically same headline, same benefit, same description, post to Facebook in the same local market with the same radius. Don't want to change any variables. And then I'm going to open a Google sheet and I'm going to say how many views, how many clicks, how many messages for that ad. Then And I'm going to do the same thing, take the same features, the same benefits, different picture because this one's powder, post it in the same market with the same radius to Facebook marketplace and have a new column, views, reach outs and clicks.

55:41Right. And then I'm going to watch and I'm going to see what's getting more clicks. And I'm going to know within two hours where there's more demand. Now, does that little sample size indicate like what form factor I should go all in on? Not necessarily, but it's something. It's a relevant data point. Right. there's not very likely to be a large amount of people searching for creating gummies on Facebook marketplace, but it doesn't matter because there's 2 billion people using it. Right? So we're just trying to capture some of that traffic. So I'm going to do that with two ads. And then after a day or two, I'm going to boost those two ads, put$10 behind each of them to see how my results differ.

56:19Does it make any difference? Do I get a lot more clicks, a lot more views, or is it just wasted? And then I'm going to, I'm going to probably post like 10 more ads of like different photos, different headings, different descriptions, different price points, and then put all those in a Google sheet and track it. All right. Now I have a lot of data now concurrently. So while I'm doing all these things, I'm going to go to Facebook groups and I'm going to join Facebook groups like moms who work out, moms who love creatine, moms who love rucking, ultra runner moms, like healthy moms, whatever. I'm going to join all these groups and just start doing searches for creatine, gummies, powders, price points, vendors, websites, and just start like pulling pieces of data out of, out of the atmosphere.

57:05Right. And I'm going to put that in my spreadsheet and I want to wait until the Facebook marketplace tests are done. I want to do that at the same time. Then I'm going to start learning Facebook ads because everything I've told you to do so far takes like two hours. Let's say we have an afternoon to dedicate to this, right? Then I'm gonna learn Facebook ads and I'm gonna watch a YouTube video about how to get Facebook ads up in 10 minutes. How important is it to understand Facebook ads and how long would it take me to get a sufficient understanding of Facebook ads? You could be proficient in a couple of days.

57:35If you had like one thing to sell and you just wanted to go all in on that thing and you actually learned by launching ads and not just learning, not just endlessly watching YouTube videos, you could be fairly proficient within a couple of days. easily. Do you think that's the skill everybody should have? Absolutely. I mean, Facebook ads are like the infinite money glitch. It's just like a magic money machine. It's the reason they're a trillion dollar company. It's like a cheat code. Yeah, it's we should know Facebook ads like we know how to write emails. Like we should know Facebook ads like we know how to build websites or to do anything.

58:11It should be foundational.

58:15I wonder how many people actually have that skill? Very few. That's why there are so many ad agencies charging a lot of money. And then, so you've got the data back into your spreadsheet on this creatine situation. How do you then make a decision whether this is something worth pursuing? Yeah. Then I would go find like a co-packer. That's a co-packer. It's a company that will take my idea and put it into a physical form. Right. I'd find like a supplement company that could actually make this. And I would tell it roughly like what I'm thinking and then ask for samples. And then I would use those samples to go get feedback from people in person.

58:52Right. But I wouldn't get those samples until I got feedback from all these Facebook tests telling me what form factor, what price point, what color, what flavor, et cetera. And then I would go to a farmer's market and actually have people try it. I've had so many founders speak to me and say, why didn't this particular ad that I ran on this platform work for me? Maybe the copy wasn't good. The creative wasn't strong. But usually the problem is they're not having the right conversation because that ad never reached the right person and if you're in b2b marketing that is much of the game and this is where linkedin ads solves that problem for you their targeting is ridiculously specific you can target by job title seniority company size industry and even someone's skill set and their network includes over a billion professionals about 130 million of them are decision makers so when you use linkedin ads you're putting your brand in front of the right people.

59:43And LinkedIn ads also drive the highest B2B return on ad spend across all ad networks in my experience. If you want to give them a try, head over to linkedin.com slash diary. And when you spend$250 on your first LinkedIn ads campaign, you'll get an extra$250 credit from me for the next one. That's linkedin.com slash diary. Terms and conditions apply. I've heard you say that there's various types of entrepreneurs. There's the sort of zero to one entrepreneur who's good at starting things. There's the maintainer. And then there's the finisher. Which one are you? I'm a starter. Yeah. Through and through.

1:00:20I, if I stay in a business too long, it all falls apart. Right. Just objectively. So I need to hand off the reins at a very specific point. Or I need to have a partner from the outset that knows me, my strengths and my weaknesses, that just takes over at a certain point. So I like to say there are starters, maintainers, and finishers. A starter could be called like a visionary. And not as like a backhanded compliment way, but someone, an idea guy, right? Not just a business idea guy, but like a marketing idea guy. Let's change the subject line to this idea guy. Like an idea machine, right? That's a visionary.

1:00:59And then you have the maintainer, which would be an operator. That's a guy that just wakes up every day and loves tweaking little things and making small improvements, process oriented, someone that loves growing something and just fixing little problems all day, right? And then you have a finisher, which is like a deal guy, right? That's the guy that's a super connector. He likes to, oh, you need to talk to Barry. And then he calls him, he connects him. And like, he just gets a lot of energy from connecting deals, coming up with creative deals for an exit, for a sale, putting people together, hiring the right people, seeing something to its completion.

1:01:38But I'm definitely in the first camp. Is it possible to be all three? Yeah, when you're all three, you're Mark Zuckerberg. I mean, truly, like you start something from scratch and you see it to a trillion dollars. There's been like, I think there've been three people on the planet that have brought something from zero to a trillion. Jensen Huang, NVIDIA, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg. I think like even Bill Gates, even Steve Jobs, I might be wrong. Yeah, but even Steve Jobs got out long before they hit a trillion market cap. But a billion. A lot of people get zero to a billion. That's not nothing.

1:02:14Also very impressive. But when you get all three, that's what you get. One of the things that I find really interesting about your story is you've started, what, is it 75, 80 businesses? When I speak to people like Kevin O 'Leary, who have worked with some of the greatest entrepreneurs to ever live, like Steve Jobs, and he's very familiar with Elon Musk, they talk to me about focus. Mm-hmm. And he says to me that the great thing about Steve Jobs is he was 80 % signal and 20 % noise, i.e. 80 % of his time, he was focused on the most important thing, and he was brutal about not entertaining anything else.

1:02:50Johnny Ives has famously said that the one thing Steve Jobs was most known for is his remarkable ability to focus. He would literally ask you, what have you said no to, in order to focus on the most important thing. I think about Mark Zuckerberg and his unbelievable ability to focus. I remember several people at Meta, but also I think it's a public story telling me that when he realized he was late to mobile, he refused to take any meetings about anything other than mobile. Like extreme levels of focus. And then Kevin O 'Leary from Shark Tank said the same to me about Elon Musk. He says, Elon Musk is the only person I think operates close to 100 % signal.

1:03:22And I interviewed Walter Isaacs in his biographer. And he said, Elon will sit in a meeting. And if people aren't talking about something that is the most important thing, he'll completely zone out. and then the minute he hears something that he considers to be the most important thing it's like he snaps into reality and he takes control and he's deep into the detail and i it sits in contradiction to a lot of the the narrative of like lots of side hustles lots of businesses do as many things as you can how do you but you've both kind of you know you've managed to create a life for yourself where you're you're a millionaire and you're free in that regard but when i look at the biggest companies in the world there's this like there appears to be obsessive focus yeah Wow.

1:04:01I love that question. I think that all else equal, the guy who focuses more is more likely to be a billionaire. But back to momentum, right? The person that keeps and has and maintains momentum and gets energy from what they do, they're more likely to be a millionaire than the average person, right? I genuinely have no desire to be a billionaire. Genuinely. If I get there, cool. But I don't want to leave my kids tens of millions of dollars anyway. I know where I get most of my energy from. I have a lot of surface area for this. I've tried the focus. I've tried having a board. I don't want any of that.

1:04:40Genuinely, I don't, right? So if my life with hyper-focused Chris looks like billion-dollar exits, reporting to a board, being chairman of the board, being CEO, sitting in meetings all day, that's miserable Chris, right? And if I don't want to leave a ton of money to my kids anyway, then why am I making Chris miserable so my fourth great-grandkids can be rich instead of just my second great-grandkids? That's genuinely how I look at it. One of my superpowers is my long-term perspective. I think of things on an eternal scale. And if I have to have a miserable life so my kids in year 2300 can still be wealthy, forget that.

1:05:23Like, I don't want them to have all that money anyway, you know? So I want to live an awesome life where I'm a good and present father. And to me, that looks like focusing less, not more. What if you focused for the next 10 years, you made it to a billion dollars on one thing. And then, because you've done that, you can take even more sort of experimental bets with higher risk and more enjoyment and more sort of pleasure-centric bets over the next 40, 50, 60 years of the rest of your life. Yeah. I just don't think that that juice would be worth the squeeze. I think that those bigger bets that I take will just amount to more meetings and more travel and more time away from my kids.

1:06:06And I don't like, it might sound controversial. Like I'm not trying to change the world. Like I want to help people start businesses and I can do that with my iPhone and that will change the world. Right. But I'm not trying to solve world hunger. I think that's someone else's problem to solve. And so I just want to be a good dad and work on really cool things. And it's been a grind to get here, right? Like I've had more years with zero income than I've had up years, right? But my up years have more than compensated for my down years. So what you're looking at today is the end result of 17 years of a lot of testing, like a very patient wife that was unquestioning and unwavering and extremely loyal, which I could not have done it without.

1:06:50And so there were a lot of periods in my life where I beat myself up over that lack of focus. I went and got my MBA because of my lack of focus. I finished my undergrad because of my lack of focus. Like getting a full-time job has never really been off the table until the last five or so years. So I've never been unwilling to get a job or to focus. And I probably did it the hard way, honestly. But I'm to the point now where I don't feel the need to focus all on one thing. Did you ever feel guilty because of the situation you put your family or your partner in? Yeah. More than once. Yeah. More than many times.

1:07:30Give me an example. I spent 18 months working on a project that had no cash flow along the way with the hope of a big payout. And we were making no income. Right. And I was focused on this one thing. And that is kind of the downside of focus. If you focus on the wrong thing, it can really come back to bite you. Right. But to me, this is objectively the right thing. It was showing all the signals it was growing. We had like a few rental homes, we had some assets and I was selling those things so my family could maintain their quality of life. Right. So I felt guilty, but I was also insulating them from feeling the pinch that I was feeling in the office.

1:08:15Right. And then at the end of that experiment, it all went to zero. I was out money. I was out time. I was out everything. And I felt, I felt very guilty. That was one, one example. But thankfully, like we, we didn't have to sell our house. We didn't have to do anything drastic. And what that looked like at home was dad was quiet more often than not. Dad was grumpy more often than not, but dad wasn't really talking freely and openly about the things he was going through because he was trying to, you know, put on a brave face and insulate the family from that. Even when my wife was begging to know more, to get more out of me, I just, if I talk about stressors, then it becomes more stressful to me oftentimes.

1:08:57So I just keep it in. I find the same. I think my partner understands this of me. And I tried to explain to her that I don't like talking about the stress because in this environment, it's actually de-stressing me from not having to explain and conversate about it. So, which is a bit of a paradox because then they don't really understand yeah and if they don't understand they might misunderstand misunderstandments might lead to arguments the arguments create stress and then you're gonna tell them in some sort of like argument yeah what's going on yeah yeah i've lived that for sure i don't know how to navigate that but but it's definitely true that me going through something in work and then having to come home and like go through it for another hour to someone else and stress them out potentially yeah doesn't feel like the right approach no but i don't know what the right approach is because they have a right to know about it as well, right?

1:09:47I think we just need an outlet, whether it's a friend that kind of understands or someone else that, you know, is in our space that we can just talk to about the situation. I think having no outlet is also bad. Yeah. And I'm guilty of that. I find a lot of joy in my work. And so I don't look at it as work often, but it's still work, right? Like it's still taxing. So I need to be better about having an outlet. Have you developed a new relationship with rejection and failure? Because, you know, starting 80-odd businesses, you must have dealt with a lot of failure. And how does that feed into everything we're talking about today?

1:10:25Oh, man, I would, I don't know where I'd be without rejection and failure. I'm not good at sales. So if anyone's watching this and like, I can't start a business, business is all sales. Like, you don't have to be good at sales. I'm not good at sales. I can't think of a business that where I had to rely on like early customers coming from friends and family because I cared a lot about what people thought. I didn't want to post my side hustle number 37 to Facebook because I just thought my friends would roll their eyes. So I created this stupid constraint for me where like I had to launch things without the help of my ever willing friends and family because I was too prideful.

1:10:59Right. So I advise against that, first of all. Second of all, I served a mission for my church. I went to Eastern Europe for two years and I knocked doors in Hungarian for two years straight. I approached people on the street in freezing weather, wearing a big Russian hat. Like I got rejected tens of thousands of times over the course of two years. Being an introvert, staying an introvert, still an introvert, still bad at sales, still hating sales today at age 38, right? But that like changed me as a man, as a person, right? that rewired my brain to just realize that every no is closer to a yes.

1:11:41If my conversion rate is 0.1%, I got to talk to 1 ,000 people, and I will surely get a conversion. If I talk to 1 ,000 and I don't get a conversion, then I'm going to get two conversions by the time I get to 2 ,000, statistically speaking. So I just need to keep getting rejected. And that changed everything for me. I think it's super underrated to give kids a job in, like, cold sales. It's what I did when I was 16. till 19 sounds like it's what you did as a young man. Are your kids going to do that? Yeah, hopefully. And two of my kids are introverts, two are extroverted, but they will, they are selling like they already have businesses, little side hustles here and there.

1:12:21But I am encouraging them to go on missions and to do selling because it's, it's the fastest way to learn. Like it's the fastest way to test. If I talk to a thousand people, then I can have a thousand different approaches. And if my conversion rate is 0.1%, I'm going to get that to 0.5 % over time because I'm able to test and iterate and pivot based on all that feedback I get. What have you learned about team building and business partners through this process? What advice would you give to someone who sat there alone listening to this right now? Do they need a business partner? If they do, who, how, what?

1:12:55Oh, man. Usually people don't need a business partner. If you look at the stats on business failure rates with companies that have co-founders, it's significantly higher than companies that have solo founders. We see their survivorship bias examples, right? The Apples and a lot of companies we can look at that had two co-founders that won, but nobody talks about or writes about the 90, 60, 80 % of companies that fail with co-founders. Think about it this way. When we get married, we'll spend years talking about our potential plans, like big goals. Like where do we want to live? How many kids do we have?

1:13:37My wife and I wanted seven kids when we got married. We settled on four, right? It changed over time. It took years to change. We realized kids are actually freaking hard, right? And we, so then we're like, where do we live? What kind of house do we want? And we spend all this time, maybe while we're engaged, maybe while we're dating, maybe after we're married, but those are big decisions, right? But when we choose a business partner, we go get avocado toast together and we're like, 50, 50. Cool. Sounds good. Let's do this. You know, I'll get the doc signed. It's like, who is that guy? You might've even known him your whole life, but who is he as a business partner or as a business person?

1:14:09I just, I feel like business partnerships are significantly harder than marriages even, but we put 99 % less thought into like the structure of things. And that's a giant failure that I've made over and over again. What do you wish someone had said to you in the situations where it didn't work out with business partners or really like across the board? Cause I read that you'd had what, seven business partners? It says that I've had like 15. Okay. So in those 15 occasions, what is the advice you wish someone had given you before you engaged in those business relationships? Yeah. Well, what do they say about dating?

1:14:44It's like, be a, be a good, like the best way to find a good spouse is to be a good spouse. Best way to find a good girlfriend. You know what I'm saying? You've got to learn more about yourself before you partner with someone else. Most people have no idea like who they are as a business person or as an entrepreneur when they partner. They don't know what their strengths are or their weaknesses are. They sure don't know what the other guy's strengths or weaknesses are. So I suggest people solo found things to start to learn more about themselves. Are they a visionary? Are they an integrator, starter, maintainer, finisher?

1:15:13Who are they? And then when they want to jump into another thing, because inevitably if we launch one thing, we're going to launch more. They know more about what to look for in a partner and they can optimize for that. What about equity? Yeah. I mean, 50-50 is the old standby, right? Could you imagine if you go on a first date and it's like, how many kids do you want? Four. Okay. We'll have four. We'll get married. And that's how many we will have no matter what. That's a 50-50 partnership, right? It's making an incredibly important decision based on, they both equal 100, numbers sound clean to me, but like, what is the statistical chance?

1:15:58This is what needs to be true for a 50-50 partnership to work, okay? They both have to be all in. They both have to always be all in for the whole lifespan of the business, maybe years, maybe decades. They have to put in the same amount of money, same amount of effort, same amount of connections, value, history, background, Also, both of them should be completely selfless, right? And not care if the other one's not pulling his weight. I'm taking a month-long vacation. Cool, you'll make up for it later. They have to be like that chill of a human being. And of course, like they have to be the same as the other person.

1:16:31If all those things are true, 50-50 works great. And they need to develop going forward in the same way because for the next 10 futures. They need to grow at the same rate. Yeah. Yeah, which will never, never, ever be the case. So I like to say like you don't want to DTR define the relationship too early or too late If you sit down at brunch and you're like, let's do 50 50 cool big mistake If you you're two years down the line and you've got all this revenue and customers and you're like, all right We should probably formalize this too late because like that only works if the business just stays at like a steady state forever Which it won't it's going to go up or it's going to go down, right?

1:17:09and like things get really ugly when either one of those two scenarios happen. So the sweet spot in my experience is, listen, this is how this conversation would work. We're going to partner together. Hey, I think you're going to be great for this business because you have a sales background. You're great at sales. You have a lot of contacts in the industry. I don't have any of that. I don't even like sales. I don't know anything about sales, but I'm an amazing engineer. Like I know I can build this thing. You've seen me build other websites, other apps in the past. I already have like a wireframe in mind.

1:17:38Like we're going to be great for this, right? So let's just do this. I don't know how this is going to go. I don't know how much time you have. We both have full-time jobs. Why don't we just get to$10 ,000 in revenue? Let's get product market fit. Let's get some good traction. Maybe we'll get like, you really have to set a defined metric around it. Not like, let's see how this goes in 30 days, but something like a revenue number, number of customers or something. At that point, let's sit down. Let's just like put it in the calendar today and let's have a conversation about what our equity looks like.

1:18:12Because almost every time they're going to be remote just based on the world we live in. Or one person will put in more money or one person has more experience. And all those things are relevant. But you're going to get resentment. A hundred percent. And you're probably not going to talk about that resentment. And it's only going to get worse. Um, it'll only get worse if, you know, things either go up or down. So they will always get worse. But it's, it's hard to define because one person might have 30 years of industry experience and contacts and expertise, and he can make one phone call that changes everything.

1:18:48And the other person might be 18 years old and just a hustler and willing to put in 80 hours a week. So is the level of value the same if the level of hours put into the business, not the same? It's hard. Like it's really hard to say, hey, my one phone call made us 10 millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars, but you've done all the work. You're the operator. So we should be 50-50. They're both going to take issue with that. The only instance I was thinking about all the business partnerships that I'm aware of. So companies I've invested in, there's about 60 or 70 companies I've invested in, and then businesses I've started myself.

1:19:23And the one time I've seen it work to split equally, the two people had known each other for a long, long time. And they were both late in their career. So they're like, you know, when we think about rate of development and potential, not only did they have a strong relationship, they'd known each other a long time. They'd worked together for more than five years together. and they're sort of later in a more mature phase of their career where you know like the kid situations figured itself out yeah they're gonna have kids or not and there hasn't been some of the big life disruptors that sometimes can come along and change things and then i can think of another example where um two people knew each other they were very very young they'd worked together before the contract went in 50 50 although it was never really equal and then their rate of growth changed wildly where one person really just like became a superstar and they look back at the contract and it was 50 50 and i remember being privy to the conversation where that person turned around to their business partner it's like this is not fair yeah this company without me goes to zero without you it keeps growing yeah and there was an adjustment made to the equity at that point which is hard to do because of tax reasons and stuff yeah the one thing i will say about a 50 50 and going in with someone that you've known for a long time or going in with your best friend that can be really freaking fun.

1:20:46Like it can just be the most enjoyable life ever. So it's just very high risk and very high reward. And if you can make it work, like oftentimes the biggest and the best and the most well-ran companies you see were 50-50 partners that knew each other for a long time for that reason. But the rate of failure is higher than average. So in these three suitcases in front of me, I have different amounts of money. and all I want you to do is to let me know if I was giving you this amount of money what business you would start

1:21:23okay so the first one

1:21:29has five hundred dollars yeah awesome so most people would look at this and think what am I gonna do with five hundred dollars it's a lot of money right in in the age of today with 30-day free trials and a lot of Silicon Valley funded companies willing to give you a lot of money to test your product. This goes a long way. So the first thing that comes to mind is probably my favorite business idea of all right now. Thankfully, you can start it with even less than this. And that would be a business that helps implement AI into small businesses, small to medium-sized businesses. So some facts for you.

1:22:04There's 400 million small businesses on the planet. They've surveyed some of these business owners and 77 % of them have admitted that like AI would be transformational to their business. They need AI. It's not a fad. It's not going away. 5 % of them have claimed they're using AI in a meaningful way, right? And define that as you will. So basically we have this knowledge gap, right? We know it's like a business cognitive dissonance, if you will. We know we need to do something and we're not doing it. It doesn't matter how easy the tools are. It doesn't matter how much you can create a new website or an app with one prompt.

1:22:41They need someone to do it, right? I know how to vacuum my floor. I know how to clean my house. I still would rather just pay someone to do it, okay? And so with a fifth of the money, call it$100, I would start learning some vibe coding tools. Replit, Lindy, there's a ton of them out there. What is vibe coding for anyone that doesn't? Vibe coding is the non-technical person, the non-coder such as myself, using their natural language to just say, hey, build me an app that manages customers for dog trainers. You'll have an app, right? Is it fully functional, workable yet? Not quite, but 10 to 20 more prompts and you're good to go.

1:23:18And for anyone that doesn't know, I would suggest, I'm an investor in both Lovable and Replit, so disclaimer, but I would recommend going on Replit or Lovable and typing in any website ID you have just to have that sort of eureka moment of watching it be made in front of you. I think that eureka moment is the moment your mind expands to the possibilities that are currently right in front of all of us. Yes. You know, we think of building websites or apps as exclusive to those that have spent five years learning to code. That has now changed. Yeah, we can all do it. Yeah. And everyone should, like you said, one prompt, develop an app.

1:23:51Oh, what do I prompt? What do I build? Ask ChadGPT what to build. Copy, paste one of those. Ask ChadGPT to prompt it, take it over to Repliter Lovable, paste it and see what it builds. So I would use this as my education and also to build a website, right? Chris'sAIautomations.com, whatever, anything. And then I would take the rest of the money and I would put it into ads, right? Preferably meta ads, Facebook ads. And I would target local businesses. Even though this is a global thing, if I live in Omaha, Nebraska, I could sell this to people in Tokyo. It doesn't matter. I'm gonna put Radius around Omaha and my ads are going to say, I'm Chris and I can help put AI into your business.

1:24:31I'm going to use fifth grade words. I'm not going to use LLM. I'm not even going to say chat GPT. I'm just going to say, I will make your business more money or save your business money with AI, just a service business. And then I'll get on discovery calls with these business owners and I'll just start peppering them with questions about their business. And over time, I'm going to learn based on their answers, what their problems are, what they're struggling with. Is it hiring? Is it payroll? Is it sales? Usually it's going to be sales, right? And then I'm going to take this money over here, this$100 and go back to those apps and start building solutions for them for free just to kind of implement myself as an expert.

1:25:08And what are you going to charge them? I'm going to charge them between$500 and$5 ,000 upfront one time to implement it. And then I'm going to charge them 20 % of that amount in an ongoing basis to maintain it and fix it as it breaks. Let's say there's a gutter cleaning business in Omaha, Nebraska that doesn't want to take calls after hours. He's with his wife watching Netflix and he knows that's a$3 ,000 job. He doesn't want to take it. So he's going to voicemail and they're calling someone else that is taking it, right? So I'm going to build an AI voice agent for him, which sounds really intimidating.

1:25:44It feels like we have to have all these skills. You don't. You just need to prompt a couple tools a couple times. I'm going to build a voice agent for him. And then I'm going to tell him to call that agent as if he were a customer and say, hey, pretend you're a customer that needs gutter cleaning. You're calling at 9.30 PM. And just see how it reacts. He's expecting there to be a delay. There's really not. He's expecting it to be dumb. There's not. He's expecting it to need to know all about his business. It doesn't, right? The AI knows about gutter cleaning businesses. Then he's sold, right? Charge him$3 ,000 for that.

1:26:14You build it and then you charge him, call it 500 or 600 a month to maintain it over time. And then the beautiful thing is you can go to every other gutter cleaning business in Omaha or anywhere and copy and paste that same app and sell it to them. Got you. So selling AI to small business owners who are in huge demand but don't have the time or think they need some sort of incredible, expensive time and resource expensive competence to understand AI when actually AI is really, really simple. And we see this play out over history where there's an initial arbitrage when a new technology comes into play.

1:26:50In fact, one of the call center jobs that I had when I was very, very broke many, many years ago when I was like 18 or 19 was calling businesses from the yellow pages and selling them Facebook ads. I would call a builder on a building site. I'd speak to Dave, who's the owner of the building company, and I'd explain Facebook ads to him over the phone. And then I'd set them up for him and manage them for him on an ongoing basis and just send him the leads because he didn't understand Facebook ads. And these opportunities seem to exist for years when there's a new technology as we're seeing with AI.

1:27:26But the thing is with that idea and with most ideas in my experience, We think there's a very limited time span. But if I were to start that business today, just start calling people, it would work. Yeah, you could still do it, yeah. I might have more competitors, but it doesn't matter. It would still work. Interestingly, the issue back then was people didn't even know what Facebook ads were. So maybe it works to some degree better now. People have heard the word. Yeah, you were pretty early. Yeah, it was 2015 or something. So it was quite rough, but it was a business nonetheless. And there was 40 other people in the room with me in that call center doing it.

1:27:57Wow. So that's the first idea you have. Yeah. What else? $500, what else could you do? Okay, do you want a physical business or an online business? Or does it not matter? What about a physical one? All right. For a physical one, I would... Have you heard of drop servicing? No. So the phrase drop shipping kind of has a bad rap, and some of it for good reason, which is basically buying a product in China, having a website for it, and basically having the Chinese manufacturer, the supplier, ship it directly to your customer so you don't have to take possession of the inventory, right? Drop servicing is doing something similar with a service.

1:28:34Let's call it a home service business, right? So in this case, it would look like a garage repair company that has a website that looks like they have a physical presence in a market, but is really just a lead gen factory, right? And so what you're doing is you're using Facebook or Google Ads to generate leads, kind of like what you were doing on Facebook, for a local business. And then you're, instead of just selling the leads for$20, you're actually doing more of the work. You're subcontracting out the work to a local business that actually repairs garage doors. They're the fulfillment arm of the business.

1:29:09You're the marketing arm of the business. So in essence, you have a garage repair business without actually having one. Like you don't know anything about garage doors. You've never been on site. You're just drop servicing. You're sending all the work to a local company to do it. So I, a car repair company, I put up a car repair website. I use Facebook ads to drive people towards it. When they click to buy my car repair, I call a local car repair person and say, hey, I've got a customer here for you. Can you take them? I book the customer in. They handle the car repair. I take the payment and pay the garage.

1:29:45Yep. Great question. So let's just say in your example, an oil change at Bob's car repair that doesn't have a website is$40, which is a great price. Your website is clean. It's nice. They can pay with a few clicks and it's$80, right? So you call Bob one day and say, hey, congratulations. I have a lead. I don't have a lead. I have a customer. I want to send you$40. Her name is Mary. She's going to be coming in. She has a Sequoia. She needs an oil change, right? And so Mary just interacts with you. She's trusting you with the money. You don't have to trust Bob with the money. You just send Bob the money.

1:30:18You make even more margin than Bob makes, right? It's a higher price service, but what you're charging for is the better UI, the better user experience, and having a cleaner checkout method. And is there particular types of businesses you would target with that approach? Are you targeting ones that have a shitty customer experience, bad website, et cetera? In the home services, like, take your pick. They pretty much all do, right? There are some more established industries like roofing that don't have those issues because they have higher margins so they can afford better websites. But they pretty much all have a bad experience.

1:30:53Any others at that$500 level that stand out to you? Yeah, I love directory websites. What's that? So Travelocity is a directory website. Yelp is a directory website. It's a website with a list of things that helps people find answers to their questions more easily. So another example of a website could be like WisconsinIceSuppliers.com. I don't know if that's a website, right? Where if I need to go buy ice for my party, I'm going to Google ice near me. Some categories are so niche or so unevenly distributed that Google Maps is not a good solution for it, right? So you're directed to these random directory websites that are just lists of other businesses.

1:31:34And what people are doing is they're proactively creating their own directories by scraping, let's say every dog park in Seattle, Washington and putting them on a website. And then they don't even drive traffic to it. There's no paid ads. They just wait for Google and for SEO to do its trick. And it's very much an 80-20 rule. You could kind of build the architecture for a directory website with Replit or Lovable, and then you just copy and paste it, right, in different markets. So the play here is to have dozens of directory websites, and some of them make$0 a month, Some make a few hundred, some make a few thousand, but it's very passive.

1:32:09It's like one of those rare things that's passive, yet also doesn't need a ton of money to get started. Where's the money coming from? Where's the revenue? Great question. You can either do like display ads. What's a display ad? Just a banner ad on a website. And are you having to go and sell that ad to someone that wants to buy it? You would just take Google's like ad network and just put it on your website so you don't have to do anything. so you can just click a button and it'll add adverts to your website which you'll you you'll then paid for yep or you could um you could just aggregate those leads like if we had dog parks in seattle and you know we see on our google analytics that we're driving traffic to this one dog park then we reach out to them proactively and say hey you notice all these customers you've been getting that's because i put you on my website would you like to pay 300 a year or a month or whatever for priority placement right so i like to call this permissionless marketing You're just proactively adding these businesses to a website.

1:33:04They have nothing to lose. You have nothing to lose. And then once you see traffic, then you reach out to them and say, hey, I've been bringing you more business. Would you like to start paying for that? Interesting. And how much money can someone hope to make if they execute that strategy well, in your view? What's realistic? With a directory website, it could be tens of dollars a month and it could be tens of thousands of dollars a month. But we're not talking about building another Yelp or Travelocity. This is a zero-employee business that costs almost nothing, less than$100 to start. But it's just a numbers game.

1:33:36You're not really going to know what directory really hits until months have passed and until you have a lot of surface area for these experiments. I hear a lot of people talking about vending machines online. And I've always been really curious about that. People say you can make money from vending machines. Yeah. Could you do that with$500? Absolutely. So if we were doing another physical business, I would go to Facebook Marketplace and I would find an existing vending machine for$300 to$400, right? That could be a snack or a drink vending machine. Oftentimes, the expensive part of a vending machine is the credit card reader.

1:34:13It can often cost more or as much as the whole machine itself. And then I would use$100 to stock the machine with Costco. Costco or Sam's Club is where all of these operators buy their snacks, believe it or not. And then I just need one business owner to give me a chance to allow me to put the vending machine in his lobby. Let's say it's a car repair business. I can say, hey, I'll pay you a hundred bucks a month or, hey, I'll split the revenue with you. I'll give you 30 percent of the revenue. And then once I have one, that's the hardest part. Now you have a track record. Now you can say, hey, Bob's Auto Repair makes$700 a month passively because he let me put this vending machine there.

1:34:47This is a business that can be passive if you have an employee to restock it. That is the active part of the business is the restocking and the selling of new locations. But if you have an ATM, then that becomes even easier because you can outsource all of the restocking to a cash management company. How much money could one person hope to make from a vending machine business? And have you ever run this business yourself? I have. I've actually been in a different part of the vertical. I've sold vending machines. I posted a video to Instagram that got tens of millions of views. And we started just importing those vending machines that I was talking about in the video.

1:35:20and then selling them to entrepreneurs. But the level of revenue is, I mean, it's as much as you want to scale it. I have a friend in San Diego that makes seven figures a year on vending machines, just snacks and drinks. Is there an art to good vending machine placement or the right things to sell in the vending machine or anything else? Yeah, it's funny that you asked that because he said, you know, I'm in San Diego, people are health conscious here, and he tested all these healthy concepts and they all failed. Like people want Doritos and Coke and Diet Coke, right? So that's all they have now.

1:35:52That's where the demand is. But the biggest needle mover on this is the location. And it's a matter of testing, back to testing, right? Testing what types of locations. He landed on apartment complexes, like apartment lobbies. He tried auto repair shops and they just weren't high volume. But it's the type of business, kind of like directories, where if you have 100 vending machines, you're going to have 20 of them that make$3 ,000 a month each. and then you're going to have 80 of them that make$400 a month each. But once you find out what types of locations are the most profitable, then you just start directly reaching out to those types of locations.

1:36:29I've just finished writing my third book. I haven't firmed up the title yet, but I have started mocking up some different designs and I've been doing this with Adobe Express, which is one of our sponsors. What I love about Adobe Express is that it makes it so easy for me to obsess over the tiniest details, the typography, the font, the color, the text placement. the stuff that might sound petty to most people, but actually compounds to create something that stands out, something that's one better than the rest. And designing my cover art has reminded me of how many creative things I've learned over the year.

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1:37:40and I would say for about 35 to 40 % of my team, they would currently describe this product that I have in front of me called Ketone IQ, which you can get at ketone.com as a game changer. But the reason I became a co-owner of this company and the reason why they now are a sponsor of this podcast is because one day when I came to work, there was a box of this stuff sat on my desk. I had no idea what it was. Lily and my team says that this company has been in touch. So I went upstairs, tried it and quite frankly, the rest is history. in terms of my focus, my energy levels, how I feel, how I work, how productive I am.

1:38:16Game changer. So if you want to give it a try, visit ketone.com slash Stephen for 30 % off. You'll also get a free gift with your second shipment. And now you can find Ketone IQ at Target stores across the United States, where your first shot is completely free of charge. So I have another box here. this box has slightly more money in double okay a thousand dollars what would you do with a thousand dollars all right so for whatever reason when i see a thousand dollars i think um about the wedding rental business do you know anything about that no so believe it or not um weddings are increasing in popularity People are getting married outside more than ever.

1:39:04I think like 75 % of weddings are outside now, which is increasing every year. And that increases the market for these random one-off rentals, right? I read an article on Reddit about a guy that built a wedding arch from his garage with some two-by-fours, some lumber. I think he spent like$200 or$300 to build it. And he rents it out to weddings for like$1 ,000 per wedding. And it's just a piece of wood for the couples to stand under as they say, I do. Right? And so he works with event organizers, wedding organizers to continually rent it to the wedding organizer. Exactly. He doesn't go through the brides.

1:39:42He goes through the wedding planners because surface area. They're touching all kinds of weddings on a regular basis. To find these wedding planners, you go to The Knot, you go to Zola, Wedding Wire, you scrape them. And all of their phone numbers and emails and names and businesses are on the website for everyone to see. and you just start reaching out. And one contact could be one wedding a week. So that could be started. That could be in the$500 box, right? You could spend$300 on supplies. You could spend$100 on scraping all the emails quite cheaply. And then you could spend$100 on gas. And then, or let's say another$100 on renting a truck and trailer from Home Depot.

1:40:27So you have a car. So you don't have a car. Right. You've got$400 left over to go to a nice meal or to or for Facebook ads. So photo walls are very popular. Charcuterie carts where wedding patrons can make their own charcuterie board. You can do like custom pizzas at weddings. You could do wedding arches. There's a lot of different opportunities there. Weddings and funerals. Yeah. Because everything you said there could also apply to funerals. That's true. They don't seem to be stopping either. I guess funerals are going to get more popular with the population continuing to increase. What else?

1:41:09So wedding rentals is the first one you do with$1 ,000. Anything else? Yeah. Should we do an online one? Sure. So there's a lot of people nowadays making money with local email newsletters. Are you very familiar with that? No. So basically what you do, we keep coming back. This is like a big ad for Facebook, right? I swear it's not. But people are using local Facebook ads. Let's say you live in Boise, Idaho. There's 200 ,000 people there. You post a Facebook ad that says, hey, find out what's happening in Boise, Idaho. One email per week in your inbox. You can acquire a subscriber for about 50 cents from Facebook or Instagram.

1:41:48Okay. Let's call it a dollar to be more conservative. acquire a subscriber for a dollar. If you sell ads inside that email newsletter, you can charge about 50 cents per month, um, per subscriber. So if we had a thousand dollars, I would use a free trial for an email newsletter software like Beehive or ConvertKit or any of those. And so I've already spent$0 and I would give all$1 ,000 to meta. I would set a defined radius in a local area, Preferably it's where you live, but it doesn't have to be. It could be on the other side of the world. I've launched this. I tested this in New Mexico, and it worked.

1:42:28I'd spend$1 ,000 to acquire 1 ,000 subscribers. And then I would start sending them weekly newsletters. What's happening in Boise, Idaho? Discounts in Boise, Idaho. News in Boise, Idaho. I would not use ChatGPT to write it. I would write it myself in my own natural language, whether I'm a good writer or not. Why? Because it needs to feel personal. It needs to feel like a local is writing it. Not like an author, not like Chad GPT. And then I would use those same subscribers to source sponsors. So Bob's car repair owner is potentially in your list. There are 10 % of all adults are business owners, right?

1:43:06So if I have a thousand email subscribers, a hundred of them are going to be business owners, are going to be potential sponsors to my newsletter. So after a month or so, I'm going to send out an email that says, hey, your ad here, I'd love to sponsor your business. It's a very relevant market. It costs$500 per send to send your email. So then if I spend$1 ,000 to acquire these customers, I will get that money back within two months because I'm making$500 a month, 50 cents per subscriber, from 1 ,000 newsletter subscribers. And that can scale as much as you want. If Boise, Idaho is only so big, you copy and paste the template in another city or a bigger city.

1:43:47Okay, let's move up then. This briefcase has a lot more money in it. $5 ,000. What side hustle do you start if you've got$5 ,000? Okay. So if we've got a sliding scale of active to passive income, the closer you get to this, to$5 ,000, the more realistic the passive income becomes. Okay? So I'm going to go closer to that. I love RV parks. What's an RV park? An RV park is one of two things. It's a place for someone to live in full time for months or years at a time where they live in a recreational vehicle in an RV. A camper van. A camper van. It could be a fixed income retired person. It could be a blue collar worker.

1:44:38It could be a digital nomad. Right. That's kind of the three categories. The other type of RV park is a recreational, like a more short-term RV park that might be right outside of the Grand Canyon or, you know, a popular tourist destination where people are staying one to four nights at a time, right? This is a business I've been in for about seven years. Now, they have very small RV parks out there that are three to ten pad sites that are about three to ten times more profitable than buying a single family home as a rental, okay? So I genuinely, I don't understand why people buy single family homes because like buying a small RV park costs the same, but is significantly more profitable and more flexible because you have, your risk is more distributed amongst five to 10 tenants, as opposed to one tenant that could go bankrupt or disappear in the middle of the night.

1:45:31So with this$5 ,000, I would call every small RV park in my area, preferably within a three hour drive, I would just find them on Google Maps. This would take a little more time because we can't allocate any of this budget to the finding of the park. We've got to do that very manually with our iPhone and our internet connection, okay? I'm going to find, in my experience, for every 100 parks I find, about two or three of them can be a really good deal, okay? So if I get 100 people on the phone, I know I can find one good deal from that with seller financing because we can't use any of this to buy the park either.

1:46:08I've got a lot of constraints. I'm going to use, let's say, $2 ,000 of these dollars for my due diligence. I've got to get inspections on the park. I've got to get a title policy on the park to make sure it's not a scam, to make sure that the owner who says they own it actually owns it. And then with the remainder of the money, I need some operating capital. I need to be able to pay the power bill to maybe trim some trees to get the park looking nice on day one. And then to actually buy the park, I need to set up creative financing with the seller. And the best way you can do that is by building a relationship with the seller, building some trust with them, showing them that you're going to take good care of the park.

1:46:51Now, the unit economics on this, let's say you buy a park for$200 ,000. In the real estate world, they're valued on a cap rate basis, which is the profit of the park divided by the asking price of the park. So if I buy a park for a 10 % cap rate, that means it's going to make$20 ,000 a year of profit and it's going to cost me$200 ,000. Okay. So that park probably has no website. It probably has way under market rents. It probably has occupancy issues because it has no website. They're not doing anything. So I'm going to get the park to perform by literally posting ads on Facebook marketplace, free ads, making a free website with a vibe coding app and, um, and increasing the occupancy.

1:47:42And that$20 ,000 a year goes to$30 ,000 a year. And the park is worth an 8 % cap rate. You bought it undervalued at 10%. So it's now at 300 and I don't know,$60 ,000 park that you paid$200 ,000 for. So you can either sell it or you can just manage it and enjoy the profits. When you said seller financing, what does that mean? That means the seller is holding the note. They are bearing the risk of you buying the park. But what's in it for them is A, they can get the park back if you default. Okay. So they're not actually giving you the park up front. They're letting you have it today on the basis that you'll pay them in the future with profits you make.

1:48:25Exactly. So you're making monthly payments to them. Because oftentimes they're going to take that money that you give them and they're going to have to invest it in something else, something they don't understand. So your pitch to them is, hey, you know this park better than anyone, right? You know what I can do to fix it. You know what the deficiencies are. If for some reason I'm not who I say I am, you just get it back. You take it back and you where you started and you keep all the money that I paid you so far. How much money have you made from doing this? I've made net profit probably$400 ,000 to$600 ,000.

1:48:58Revenue? I would say between$3 ,000 and$4 million a year. With these RV parks? And mobile home parks as well, yeah. How many of them? I've been involved with 35 or so over the last seven years. Hmm. What about business? No, I mean, you're capitalizing on baby boomers retiring and on millennials traveling and on, yeah, it's just, it's a growing market. People are getting outside more. Yeah, what are the macro things you think about at the moment when you're trying to decide on a new side hustle or a new business to start? Are there like obvious macro things that are happening that we should all be thinking about?

1:49:34You just can't ignore AI. Like whatever you're doing, AI has to be part of it. So I like the framework of implementing new AI tools into old businesses. and I like the framework that 10 ,000 baby boomers are retiring every single day and that will be the case for the next five to 10 years. What's the opportunity there? To either buy the businesses or to implement AI into the businesses. Those are the two biggest opportunities I see, those two. Get them to give you the business and you run it better in a more digital way. Yeah. And you pay them off for that business when you've made profit from it.

1:50:11If you don't make the profit, they get their business back. Yes. Now I will say finding seller financing on a business is harder than on a piece of real estate, but it is possible. Of all the businesses you've started, which one has been most profitable and was the easiest? Oh man. So like what is the winner? I would say either my RV parks business or my Texas snacks business, my e-commerce business. and they weren't easy because they're easy businesses or industry industries they're easy because i had matured enough to a point to find good operators to run those businesses where i had little to no involvement in them that makes sense yeah you found people to run them for you so that as a starter they didn't die the minute you got bored exactly whereas they carried on growing and evolving right whereas those are both quite hard industries E-commerce is quite hard and real estate is as well.

1:51:12But I had good operators. What have you learned about finding good operators?

1:51:20Oh, man. It all comes down to trust. How much trust am I able to put in them? How much trust do I have them? I've found a direct correlation between people I know really well and people that have made really good operators. How do you incentivize them? Directly from the profits of the business. So that they feel more like an entrepreneur. They've got more of a piece of the pie. Yeah. I made the mistake in my 20s of dangling a carrot of equity too often. Genuinely meaning it. But most equity goes to zero. Period. I put a lot more emphasis on cash flow now in my 30s than I do on equity. I think equity is overrated.

1:52:08And so nowadays, I'm less likely to give an operating partner equity, not because I don't think they deserve it, but because it's more likely to go to zero. And I'm more likely to cut them in on the profits so they can get paid ongoing. On an annual basis or quarterly basis, etc. Quarterly, yeah. Interesting. Is there any side hustles that you've heard about that you wish you'd started? It's funny because a lot of the ones that I wish I started, I started. Like a lot of the 80 that I've done, I just, it's something that I thought about for two weeks. I can't get it out of my head and I just, I have to get it out of my head.

1:52:41And so if I start something and it fails, I don't really care because I don't invest a lot of money into it. And I answered the question. I don't have to like stay up at night wondering if that thing would have worked anymore. Sometimes I'll like run these tests on Facebook that show me such amazing results that just kind of unlock an opportunity for me. Can I give you an analogy? Yeah. Have you ever been deep sea fishing? Not deep sea fishing, no. Okay. So here's a real story. I was out deep sea fishing and we were just throwing lures and we weren't getting any bites. And the captain reaches in under the seat and he pulls out straws from McDonald's.

1:53:19McDonald's straws specifically, because they have red and yellow stripes along the side of them. And he pulled out scissors and he started cutting them into fourths. And then he took the hook off the line and he put the string through the straw. and then he tied the hook back on. He's like, I know, seems crazy. Just stick with me. And we cast it out and we started getting bites. And I'm like, what? It was the same place with the same lure, same hook with just a straw. And I'm like, what? Why does this work? And he's like, it's the colors. It's like the white and the red and it just spins as you reel it in and it mimics a fish.

1:53:55And I was like, how did you learn this? Like, what made you think to try this? He's like, I don't know. Maybe alcohol was involved. I don't know. But like that worked. And we started catching fish the rest of the day. So it just got me thinking like entrepreneurship is this massive ocean with millions of varieties of fish, billions of fish, some sharks, some minnows. And so many of us go out there and we cast a few times and we just go back home. We're like, entrepreneurship doesn't work. It's not for me. Back to the nine to five. But we're not testing enough stuff. There's different depths. There's different baits.

1:54:26We could spray something on it to make it smell different. We could put a McDonald's straw on it. and occasionally we'll find something, we'll get a bite. Maybe we won't get another bite for another hour, but the bite is a signal and it's like, oh, there's something there. Okay, let's try that again, but try this. Or maybe let's just cast a hundred more times and then you get a fish and then you get a bigger fish. And like the more you're out there, not just focusing on one type of fishing, but increasing your surface area and trying all kinds of different things, the more you learn, like the more you test and like now you have a bunch of sharks in the boat and you have this and you have this and you have all these options at your disposal.

1:55:00We're eating shark tonight. We're eating grouper. We're eating snapper. You have this amazing life that's dynamic and full of color and all these other awesome things are coming into play because you stayed out there and you didn't just do one thing. You tried all these other things. So that's how I look at business. Like I'm out there on the ocean testing other things. And even if I don't catch anything, it's fun. And I think other people should try that too. A lot of people want sexy stuff, don't they? Yeah. want to build the next Facebook or they want to do a chat GPT or the AI app that does this, that, and the other.

1:55:31Do you think that's in part a trap for the average person to be aiming at sexy? Yeah, because the fact that everyone wants sexy means the fact that the sexy things are the most competitive. It's the exact reason why we should go as unsexy as possible because no one's looking at it. And looking forward, Chris, what is, um, is there anything that you're mulling over now in terms of new business ideas that you could give me? Man, I, lately it's been about like stuff I can launch with my content. Um, I like, I love the phrase unfair advantage, right? I will only start businesses today where I have an unfair advantage.

1:56:11Everyone has an unfair advantage in something, right? Even a 13 year old has an unfair advantage. They might know Roblox better than anyone, right? So unfair advantage is not, you know, only for the rich or the wealthy or the elite or the most experienced or the PhDs, right? So I try to start businesses where I have an unfair advantage. And that might be because I can grow it with my content. It might be because I have a bunch of friends in that space or have a unique knowledge or insight into that space. So if I have a zillion ideas and a spreadsheet a mile long with a bunch of business ideas, the ones I'm most likely to start are the ones where I have an unfair advantage.

1:56:45A right to win. Yeah. I have this phrase called mirage opportunity, which I use when I look at an industry that never seems to work for anybody, but seems so obvious. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, I do. I'm thinking of something, yeah. And this has been a bit of a way for me to know what not to work on is if I see everybody trying to solve this particular problem and nobody's been successful, yet more and more people are plowing in. And yet it seems obvious to me, I just stay away from it. because there's something in my understanding of consumer behavior or current alternatives that i'm like misunderstanding an example i'll give you everyone at the moment is trying to start a so that this is the first sort of first principles they're reasoning up from they're saying people are more lonely than ever before they're saying there's no clear place to organize a group of people.

1:57:42WhatsApp has its limitations, its restrictions, doesn't have the feature set one would like. Facebook groups aren't working for a certain generation of people anymore, for sort of Gen Zs and younger generations, millennials. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to make an app for groups. Your run club, your friends, your piano recital group, your entrepreneurs. We're going to build all the group features into this app and it's going to be dedicated to that. I've heard this pitch over and over again. I've seen all of them and none of them seem to have any traction or work. it's a mirage. Something fundamental about your assumptions is off.

1:58:15Yeah. When I said mirage opportunities, did you think of anything in particular? I stay away from businesses where I don't know why it's not working, but clearly it's not working. Yeah. I think of banking or healthcare, right? Like banking is terrible. Like look at the UI at Bank of America. It's like, it's probably like that for a reason, right? Or like Amazon's UI is terrible. It's like, what is it? It's like, they probably know why it looks like that, right? I assume they're smarter than I am. One idea that I thought of is, like everyone hates typing in their password a zillion times a day.

1:58:46So you have like these password managers, but I've seen a dozen companies that are like gonna fix the password, right? Some like replacement to a password and they've all failed. And it's probably because it's a really hard problem to solve. And I don't wanna try to invest in a person that's trying to solve it because statistics are not on their side. Another one that comes to mind for me is at university, every entrepreneurial college kid decides that they're gonna build a on-campus what's going on app to let everybody know what's going on on campus. And they never seem to work. And I think the reason why they don't work is because both you're losing 33 % of your potential customers every year and gaining 33 % new customers every year.

1:59:23So you have a bit of an acquisition problem. But then also people don't decide what they're going to do based on some notice board. They decide based on their dorm room friends and where they're going and where the girl they like is going. And so it's not really about what's going on. It's like, what does my group of people want to do? I think that's, I think that's the mirage in that. Well, I thought of another example. That's like building apps around podcasting. Oh my God. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I have a friend that he had a podcast. It's a great one. That helped podcasters. Right. And it was great.

1:59:53Like really, I listened to it and he, he realized over time, like I'm selling to a market that quits. Right. I'm asking for customers to pay for my thing that are statistically like 95 % of them are going to quit within six months. So it's just a broken market to sell to. And then the 5 % that are successful, what percentage of them are actually profitable? What percentage of them can afford to pay for an expensive agency or software? Very few. Mirage opportunities. I like that. It's been a really useful framework because it's the obvious ones that no one's doing, but there's clearly a huge opportunity that I think pulls people in the most.

2:00:31But for me now, with the amount of time I've spent starting businesses, is those are the ones that push me away the most. Yeah. Well, it all comes back to the value of just copying what's already working. Amen. Is there anything we haven't talked about that we should have talked about, Chris? For young and old people that are considering starting their own business, their own side hustle, building passive income. Many of the people that think they want to be an entrepreneur, they just like the idea of it. And they think there's freedom in entrepreneurship when oftentimes it's even more of a prison than their nine to five.

2:01:05It can be, at least in the first years. Not months, not years, sometimes decades, right? And so I want people to answer the question for themselves, is this for me? So they don't regret. They need to find out if they love the idea of it or they like the actual day-to-day grind of it. Because they probably won't. But I want them to find out. Such an important point, because the narrative online at the moment is, you know, be your own boss, et cetera, et cetera. And I just, I don't think people, I'm speaking for myself here. I don't want to speak for you, but I don't think people realize how many people I have to answer to.

2:01:41Oh, yeah. I have all of my team members, which is hundreds of people. Then I have my investors. I have my suppliers, my clients. So it's not like I'm living as a free man. Yeah. I'm less free now than I was before. Yeah. Before I started all this stuff. Isn't it nice when someone just also just tells you what to do and exactly what path to take? Yeah. Like my wife does that. She's like, hey, I need you to do this. It's like, oh, it's so nice. I don't have to like think, like, thank you. You know, so I have bosses in other areas of my life and it's really nice. Like there's something to be set for a nine to five.

2:02:14And some people have no desire to even test an entrepreneurship. Great, all power to you, but I want people to test it. And I think, you know, people would look at someone like me or you and think, oh, you know, they've got total freedom, but this is just not the case. Even for me as a podcaster, you know, I'm now kind of somewhat constrained by the fact that I need to publish on a Monday and I need to publish on a Thursday. And that means lots of other work takes place throughout the week. And I can't just go to Hawaii and chill out and spend a month off. And then I've got all my clients now and the team members, et cetera.

2:02:43So I think I'm starting a bit of a war against this idea that independence and total freedom is both something to aim for, but also like realistic when you're pursuing something you love. I think a generation have been sold this idea of independence and I don't think it's gotten us anywhere. Like that's the goal, freedom, independence. Don't depend on anybody. But when I look on your life, you've got four kids. You've got lots of responsibility. You've got employees. You've got businesses. You've got so much dependency. And that's probably the source of much of your happiness. Yeah, exactly. My quote of this year is, there are no solutions, only trade-offs.

2:03:23Entrepreneurship is not a solution. You're trading something for it. The question is, is that trade-off worth it or not? and we won't know until we try it. And what's the trade-off you're making? Stability, lack of volatility, predictability. My life has been volatile and unpredictable. But the more I do it, the more predictable it becomes in a good way. But that's been the trade-off, is the mental load of not knowing where my paycheck's coming from or if it's coming at all. It's not for the faint-hearted? No. Chris, we have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next, not knowing who they're leaving it for.

2:04:03And the question left for you, I love this question for obvious reasons, is during your interview with Stephen today, what is one thing he did that you genuinely appreciated?

2:04:17I would say that I appreciate that the questions you asked me got me to look at the things I've been looking at in one way completely completely different. I came into this conversation, you know, looking at things in a specific way, in ways that I always have. But your questions got me to approach it from a different angle. That made me learn something more about my own story, if you will. And what was that in particular? Was there a specific thing you're thinking about? Maybe just the overall framework that...

2:05:00Maybe it's just recency biased. But just that it's not for everyone. It's not for everyone. And that we just need to learn if the trade-offs are worth it. There's an element of your personal trauma, experiences, upbringing, insecurities, toxic fuel that makes the trade-offs worth it. That makes you in some respect unreasonable, unrealistic, willing to take the risk. And we don't talk about that enough because we're not able to go into people's trauma and the nuance of their life in childhood and what their dad said to them and how they were bullied to be able to transmit into their mind to figure that out for themselves.

2:05:44But I think probably in both your life and my life, I mean, we both, I think, have ADHD to some degree. And we have a brain wired in a certain way. So it can seem like we're making a choice. But it often doesn't feel like that for me. It doesn't feel like I'm making a choice. It feels like there is no other choice. In the same way that one might make a choice to get a nine-to-five job, I think for me that would be a terrible thing. And vice versa probably. Well, what you just said just brought up a memory. I don't know if it's relevant to this or not, but you said ADHD. When I was an undergrad, I got tested for ADHD.

2:06:23And the psychiatrist said, it was a big report. I'm summarizing it to the only sentence that I remember. But she said that I just had delusions of grandeur. Right? It wasn't like an official diagnosis. It was one line in like an eight-page document. But I saw that just like bounce off the page and I was like, how do you know that's a delusion? Right? Like it's only a delusion if enough time has passed so we could look back and say, yeah, he was wrong. He was way off base. By delusions of grandeur, what does she mean? She means like I had unrealistic expectations about how my life would turn out.

2:07:01And that was causing strife in my personal relationships. And I thought it was wrong. I still think it was wrong. But it put a chip on my shoulder. It planted a seed that I never forgot. I have that printed. It's in my drawer at work. What does it say? I just have like literally the report that she gave me back in 2009. it's like highlighted and drawn up in my drawer at work. And I just look at it sometimes for motivation because what is a delusion of grandeur? Like I have plans of grandeur. This is a plan. And so I think about her sometimes. She probably has no idea who I am. She probably forgot all about me.

2:07:41If people want to learn more, where's the best place they should go to check your work out? You've got your podcast on YouTube. It's not necessarily a podcast in the same way that this is a podcast, it's much more sort of practical and specific around specific subject matters. So I highly recommend people go check that out. I'm going to link it below and put it on the screen. But where else? Where's a good place to get in touch with you or to consume your work? Probably tkopod.com. As in the Kerner office. It's just like my main website. And people can sign up here for your newsletter? My newsletter, yeah.

2:08:15One email per week. What do you send out? Like a very tactical guide on how to start X, Y, or Z business. And I ask my audience like what they want to learn about. So they tell me and then I dive deep and then break it all down for them. I'll link that as well below for anyone that's interested. What is the most popular, most frequent request you get through that website? On business ideas to talk about? Yeah. Probably the AI agency, the AI implementation agency idea that I talked about. And what is the most viral video you've ever made? oh man that was about a um this this chinese street vendor that sold ice cream she had this little uh contraption it was like a frozen cylinder that she poured cream over and it would scrape off ice cream in this really visually appealing way and so i basically broke down in 30 seconds like you could pay 200 for this you could post it at any given street corner and you could make a thousand dollars by the end of the day so it's like a b c here's how to get to this revenue um and like 30 or 40 million people saw it i'll put the uh the video on the screen for anyone that's interested in that as well just so you know what this ice cream contraption is yeah chris thank you so much thank you so much for being yourself in every respect you teach me that there's many ways to skin a cat as the saying goes there's many ways to become successful to be happy to be motivated in your life there's many ways to become a millionaire some of it Buck's sort of conventional wisdom of how to grow a business.

2:09:41And I think that is actually liberating to know that your own unique wiring and your own unique perspective and ikigai can drive you to the same outcome of financial freedom. If you do have the self-awareness, if you're willing to work hard and if you can cope with the opinions of others. And also if you're willing to sacrifice tremendously because you have sacrificed tremendously. And especially as someone, as a man that has, a young man that has four kids you've taken on your shoulders a huge amount of risk and i applaud you for both simplifying and demystifying the pursuit of side hustles and business and entrepreneurship for so many people because i think um in the world we live in it's probably going to become more and more important that people have more options agreed um in a world of ai and if elon musk is to be successful in creating the age of abundance that he's describing then uh maybe we're all going to end up as entrepreneurs who knows who knows thank you thank you thank you as well

2:10:36make sure you keep what i'm about to say to yourself i'm inviting 10 000 of you to come even deeper into the diary of a ceo welcome to my inner circle this is a brand new private community that i'm launching to the world we have so many incredible things that happen that you are never shown we have the briefs that are on my ipad when i'm recording the conversation we have clips we've never released we have behind the scenes conversations with the guests and also of the episodes that we've never ever released and so much more in the circle you'll have direct access to me you can tell us what you want this show to be who you want us to interview and the types of conversations you would love us to have but remember for now we're only inviting the first 10 000 people that join before it closes so if you want to join our private closed community head to the link in the description below or go to doaccircle.com i will speak to you there

2:11:32Thank you.