The Man Month, Shaan's Feud with Jason Calacanis & Elon vs Zuckerberg Fight

He needs a hold me back guy. You're at a hold me back guy. You're in a fight and you're like, Hey listen, I'm gonna go after these guys. I need you to hold me back. So I'm not I'm not actually trying to fight this guy. I need it to look like I'm trying to fight this guy and I need you to hold me back and I it's gotta be off these guys weren't holding me, I would have kicked your ass. He needs to find a hold me back guy. I think Elon's hold me back guy.

gonna be a hard sneeze. He's one hard sneeze away from getting like a back smasm. You know what I'm saying? Like I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to I put my all in it like my day's all on the road, let's try to get it. Alright, we are live. What's going on? Dude, amazing hoodie.

Security. You like that? Hampton. Yeah. That is very nice. Team off site. We had all of our employees get get together in Brooklyn and the CEO, my CEO, Jordan, organized this lovely

event and he gave us all hoodies that say Hampton and then our city that we live in. You're um you're a stressful dude to organize an event for. I've never had to do it, but I've been a part of events Where people are organizing for us. And I'm like they're like oh yeah, by the way, it's Everything you know, the venue changed and we forgot, you know, there's only one chair on stage. I'm like, it's cool. All right, no good, no problem. And then you're like, what the hell? And so I would be very stressed if I had to throw a offside or an event.

Where you were my like kind of core customer of it. Is that fair? Yeah. Yeah, that's fair. But let me explain my reasoning behind that. And this is very business related. Number one. I believe The way you do one little thing is the way you do everything. It so what that means though is if you've proven to me that I can trust you, I'm all in and I don't question anything.

And so until you've proven that to me, I question everything. And if there's not a good answer behind it, I doubt you. And once we get past that stage. I'm good. The second reason There is no second reason I actually forget what that is. Oh, the second here's this here's the second reason.

And we could actually talk about this for a second if you want, but basically the second time around you've done something. Everything is so much calmer. because now my entire reputation My entire net worth. It's not tied up into this one entity, which is what many things I've done in the past have been.

So I'm much calmer. I'm way more s subdued. this time. Yeah, I think that's true for sure. I and do you find yourself thinking bigger? as a kind of like the now this is you've got one win under your belt. What was the phrase that Justin Mayer said? Do whatever you gotta do to get your nut and after that go for your noble mission.

So you know, you've gotten your nut now. You know, you you're you're financially secure, you're safe. Not only are you calmer, but are you more I don't know. Ambitious or long term oriented in some way? Yes, one hundred percent. I used to criticize founders if they would sell secondary. So you'd read about this a lot. You you you typically only read about it when it's done in a bad way, of which it's done in a bad way many times. You'll see this company, which is gonna go bankrupt, the founders took fifty million dollars off the table and it didn't work out. The reasoning behind that I think is great still, which is you give an entrepreneur five or ten million dollars and they're like wow, I I can

I can live a really nice life. Now I think bigger. That's definitely the case with me. I think significantly longer term. So I think like What's this like in twenty or thirty years as opposed to next quarter? And I don't care if it fails, which is actually a good thing, meaning I'm able to try more within it. I

Well what have I said, treat'em mean, keep em keen. It's like that with with trying to find a date and make money. It's so like You the less I care, the more it happens. Yeah, I th I the way I think about it is like'cause you see examples on both sides. You see when somebody had no other option back against the wall, that's when they when they when they rose to the occasion. And you can also hear the other other scenario, which is Because I was secure.

I was able to play a long term game and I was m less emotionally Invested in the ups and downs of it. Therefore I was able to make better decisions. And blah, blah, blah. And you could see both examples. So which one is it? And I actually I think the reality is that Success is not based on either one of those. It's not based on how much money you had in your bank account, when you had zero or when you had a bunch. People tell themselves stories about it either way. I think fundamentally

If a person is driven. Intrinsically driven. It doesn't matter whether that fuel is because They're a technologist and they just love technology. They're trying to make something good for humanity, or they're insecure. Because, you know, in seventh grade, Rachel dumped them and it's like, Well, either way, it doesn't matter. You know, like it doesn't matter what your driving force is, as long as you have a driving force. And it's different for a whole bunch of people. There's uh there's examples of people on with all kinds of you know chips on their shoulder. I think

You do need to be driven and it's just a question of By what? And I I think everybody's got a different by what. Are are are you more calm? Now that you've had success. I'm definitely more calm, but I was pretty calm before. I said calm, I would say is not really the word. I guess the way I would put it is I'm less desperate. And I think that has ups and downs. Again, like I said, like

When I was desperate to prove myself. Like Uh you saw that I worked in that really fancy office. I also slept in that office, I think basically it was like one year was like two hundred and seventy five days out of the year. I slept there and like

It was nice to sleep there. It's really nice. They had an apartment built into the office, so it wasn't like the it's not like I was sleeping under my desk on the like concrete floor. But nonetheless, that just sort of means you I just didn't have a life. I didn't want to have a life. I didn't want to ha care about friends and dating and other things. I cared about Just making it. I just wanted to be successful really badly and I was like It's not even that I was super productive all those hours, but I was like

Look. I'm gonna throw all my hours at the problem. I will sleep here. I will wake up here. That just seems more efficient. I'm just gonna do that. I did that for several years.

But Now I would say that desperation has been replaced with You know, a different asset. Okay, I lost the desperation which was serving me. What do I have now, which is like I can operate more

out of a like I can choose things that are like I'm I'm actually driven towards like that have a purpose, even if there's no short term offensive as well. Yeah, there's no short term path to like right now, for example, I'm writing this newsletter every day. I write this thing every day. There's no ads. I subscribe. No small boy. Yeah, just small boy that small boy. And I'm writing this thing. There's no ads.

There's no premium, there's no upsell, there's no business model. So why am I doing it? And I'm like Because I really like writing and more than I like writing, I like Finding interesting shit to write about things that you know scratch my curiosity. So I'm able to do something and then as I'm doing this thing that has no business plan.

That has no whatever. I'm seeing all these extra opportunities open up. Because That I that I couldn't have seen at the beginning. And so just by doing the thing I really kind of I'm drawn to, I'm most interested in, I'm doing my best work. And when I'm doing my best work,

These unforeseen things start to open themselves up and I'm like, Oh. I would have the twenty four year old me would have never been able to do this because twenty four year old me was desperate and needed I needed a payoff quick. Now I don't need a quick payoff and so I'm able to do things differently. And I think that has a different advantage.

Can we talk about Is there a new chip on your shoulder now? Well, you tell me, is the feud that you're experiencing right now, your internet feud, is that has that even made it to the point where you bring it up at the dinner table? No, no, no. But my wife is not aware of it, but she's like, hmm, how come he's looking at his phone for like an extra thirty seconds longer and it's because I'm coming up with a A badass slam in my head. I'm wordsmithing a seventh grade insult right now. And I don't know. What what does my kid want? What do you want? Hold on, daddy's busy. I'm I'm coming up with a Y'all Mama joke to Jason Calicanas right now.

background of this is there's a podcast called The All In Pod. They're great. I think they're good, but they're different than us. And A lot of people We'll listen to both of ours. So maybe there's a little definitely some competition in there, but we can all win. And

Last podcast Sean challenged them basically to a hundred thousand dollar Poker Bet. Heads up poker, but there was some more uh there's a more detail behind it. But I shared that on the internet. And Jason Calcanus

I thought he was coming hard at me too, but he came hard at he said, Sam, you're great. Sean, you'll still learn. And he gave you a head pat. And he said, Smart of you, Sean, to punch. Well I don't know if he so so the the background is while we were I forgot what we were talking about. I think we were making fun of him a little bit because he um In the Rogan debate, people were like, you know, it's raised two million dollars for this the scientist to come debate this guy, like a kind of a a a famous internet challenge here. And he's like I'm in for ten K which is funny because the answer to the record doing was a hundred K plus.

I've never made fun of Jason. If it comes down to it, I you have my loyalty. I will I'll die for you. But I've so far, if you want me to, I'll I'll I'm gladly hop in. I've stayed mostly neutral. This is a you thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, c yeah, that's fine. I by the way, I like Jason. For the record, I have nothing against Jason Calcadis. I've listened to This Week of Startups for a long time. I don't listen anymore, but I used to listen like back in the day. I like the all in podcast. It's sort of like two thoughts.

That are both true. I Like their content. I have nothing against them personally. I've I've met him a couple of times in passing. No ill will there. Also

I think some things he says are funny and cringy. Like funny kind of laugh at you, not with you type of thing and cringy. Like when the thing I I think the joke I had made that he didn't like was that I said, All in is billionaires talking about billionaire shit, MFM is millionaires talking about millionaire shit, and somebody goes Actually it's more like three billionaires and their friend Jason Calcanis. And he goes he came in for his own defense and goes Actually I'm a centimilli sentionaire I just thought that was Cringe as fuck. Which

Objectively and scientifically it is. And so I think he might have might have taken offense to that and he didn't he didn't fully like it. But I would say my poker challenge to them is only for fun. I just think it would be a fun thing to do. I think it'd be a fun thing to watch. I'm just looking for some action. I love playing poker. They say they're great at poker. Okay, let's do a little celebrity uh celebrity challenge. Nothing's been settled. You're not doing it yet. Well, they didn't take the bait. I think you know, he was sort of just like well

Y you know, you're not famous enough for me to do this challenge. I have more to lose than I do have than I have to gain out of doing this was sort of the the vibe I got. Which honestly The problem with that is that That's not entirely true. Does uh are they are they more popular? You could argue that for sure. For sure. But but there there's a ballpark.

And you know, it's there. I'm in the stadium. Yeah. It's not like calling a you know, what do I say? It's not like calling a f a five ten guy tiny. You know what I mean? Like you gotta be at least five six to get that nickname. You're you're five ten here. You know what I mean? Not small enough. Yeah, yeah. But The funny thing is, as I was talking about, yeah, we should Like on the podcast I was joking, I was like, Oh, wait, is this Fake internet beef?

I would love to have some fake internet beef. That's you know, this is how rappers for generations have been getting famous. You know, they did they just have fake beef. We should do this as podcasters with other podcasts. And so I think that was the the fun behind it. We got one up big time. Just when I thought me and JC Calcanus were getting some some fake internet beef, Paul Merlucky comes. Off the top rope, the founder of Oculus and Andrew comes off the top rope and just body slams Jason. People love that. And then while that's going on. Elon Musk.

challenges Mark Zuckerberg. To a fight. And now I don't even give a shit about my own poker match. I need to see these guys fight. Let's break this down. I we ha we have to do this story.

Yeah. So Basically I don't actually don't know how it started. Do you know how it started, but what what I do I'll I'll fill in when Facebook actually Facebook officials replied with a beautiful response. Well there's there's a few steps to it. So I think the first thing was I guess the old I think the origin of this was A presentation leaked out of

Facebook. I was talking about the Facebook's coming out with a Twitter competitor. I think it's called Project Ninety Two or something like that. And it's a Twitter competitor. And their pitch was sort of like, Yeah, it's a Twitter competitor. Instagram people will be able to immediately have their Instagram following on this. So if you wanna if you're already famous on Instagram, you could just start sharing short form text like Twitter.

On our new thing. And you know, it will be run by like it run in a sane way. Like it'll be managed in a sane way, I think was the s something something with the word sane in it. And so essentially implying that Twitter is sort of insane. And e the way Elon's running it is reckless. So that got out. That that present internal presentation leaked. Maybe intentionally, maybe not, I don't know.

So Elon started making fun of of Zuckerberg. He's saying like, you know, Zuck my blink. You know, like you know, he's just sort of like, you know, tweeting stuff like that. And then somebody somebody was like, you know, watch out, Zuck's been training, and he got and Elon replies and says I'll fight Zuck in a cage match. So he says this. And Zuck screenshots it.

And post on his Instagram story. With the Caption Send me location. Which for those who don't know is a iconic

UFC slogan by Kabib. I think one of the greatest of UC fighters of all time. Who was when he was fighting with Connor McGregor and McGregor was like oh he's scared, he doesn't want to fight me, blah blah blah. And Habib just goes, Brother, I'm not scared.

You wanna fight me? Okay, just send me location. Just send me location. Like basically, where do I need to go? I'll fight you anywhere. And so Zuck hits Elon with the send me location. And this triggers a chain of events that I thought was a joke. So I thought First of all, I've never seen Zuck talk trash. That was already kind of an amazing moment. He he he he w did a heel turn, which is awesome.

The second thing is I was like, Okay, well there's no no way this is serious. And then Elon. Sees that tweet and goes or sees that story and goes. I'm serious. I'll do it if he's down.

And then people are like, Wait, what? I don't know if you saw this today, Sam. Do you see that Dana White's involved? So Dana White, who's the president of the UFC comes out. 'Cause again, I'm sort of you know. My greatest fantasy would come true if this if randomly two tech billionaire CEOs

Went and decided to do a U of C match. That's my two worlds colliding. All of a sudden Dan White comes out and he says I talked to Mark and Elon last night. Both guys are absolutely dead serious about this. He goes, This would be the biggest fight of all time. Floyd and and Connor

Was one of the biggest fights of all time. This, I think, triples it. There is no limit on how much this could make. He said it would be in Las Vegas, it would pay per view and it would be about a hundred bucks pay per view. And uh you would have fifty one year old Elon Musk against I don't know, like thirty nine year old Mark Zuckerberg, who's a hundred pounds lighter than him.

And uh dude, what is happening? Is this Is this real and then The Verge reached out to Facebook and a Facebook official, which is replied and they just said Yeah. And they go The story speaks for itself, which is another like basically there's a guy in the UFC that always says

It is what it is. And that's exactly what what Facebook just said. They said we're it is what it is. It sounds it it sounds serious. And I thought that was a pretty baller move. I think this is hilarious. I think this is awesome. I love a freak show. A sign me. All right, so I have I have some rapid fire questions. Topic number one. Most importantly. Do you believe this will happen?

Yes or no and why? Um I believe Zuck will do it. And I And I and I think he would do it. I think there's not a chance that Elon would do it. I think Elon would get very hurt just training for it, and I don't think there's a there's a there's not a world where Elon does it. So you think it's a no? A no because Elon. Yeah. I hundred percent agree with you.

I hope it happens. I'm not saying it won't happen, but I would just if I had to guess. I had to guess, I would say. It doesn't happen. Because Elon realizes that he's gonna lose a lot. He's gonna lose, first of all, if he does this. He's gonna get destroyed. He's gonna get destroyed. I think he realizes that it's a pretty bad look for him to lose to Zuck. His cool factor is really high.

And he needs to find a uh wiggle app. He needs a hold me back guy. You're at a hold me back guy. You're in a fight and you're like, Hey, listen, I'm gonna go after these guys. I need you to hold me back. So I'm not I'm not actually trying to fight this guy. I need it to look like I'm trying to fight this guy and I need you to hold me back and I it's gotta be off these guys weren't holding me, I would have kicked your ass.

He needs to find a hold me back guy. I think Elon's hold me back guy It's gonna be a hard sneeze. He's one hard sneeze away from getting like a back smasm. You know what I'm saying? Like He's not the guy's not fit. You know, he he's a he's a ch he's a Charlie horse away from quitting. Winner by noogie. Mark. How do you think let's say

Let's say our dreams do come true, this fight does happen. What do you think would actually happen? Like predict the actual fight. What would what would happen? Fight starts, what happens? Z look, so I box for fun and I spar and what I've learned is it doesn't really matter that much. It matters a bit, but it doesn't matter how in shape you are. It doesn't really matter how tough you are. If you don't practice that skill set and you go against another person that doesn't have that skill set.

Yeah it's just it's just w you're light years away from one another, just being comfortable getting hit. I think Zuck would finish him within two minutes. He'd probably get him on the ground and Elon would tap from getting his arm. injured or something like that. Yes. Now the counter argument would be but Elon could train. Are you counting Elon out? This guy's proven he could do anything. He could train. What's the counter to that? Uh he won't I don't think he'll train. And I don't think any amount of training look, you can't make a overweight fifty one year old

Fit in any amount of time. The magic powers of Osempik. He's already on Osempic. He's already lost like thirty pounds on Osempek. It it it's it it doesn't matter. Keep in mind, Zuck's still only thirty nine, I think. Or thirty eight. No, I I don't think that Elon can train and I don't any no amount of training will get him to the point where he's gonna be a good thing. People were on Twitter were like, Elon, we love you, but man, I

I think Zuck would handle you. Here's what Elon said. Three things that he said. Oh, I saw them. I don't work out. Except for sometimes when I pick my kids up and throw them in the air. So he doesn't work out at all.

He doesn't exercise. Yeah. Forget about fighting. The guy doesn't exercise. Secondly He's like, I'm so much bigger than the guy. You know, just for reference. Elon's like six three. Two hundred plus pounds? You know, Zuck is probably five nine, I think. Five

Five eight, five nine, maybe five ten max. And uh it's probably giving up easily fifty pounds in a in a fight here. So weight classes do matter. Anyone says Uh, I have this move called The Walrus.

Uh yeah, I'm just like a walrus. I just lay on'em. They can't do anything. They're just pinned. This is this is his plan. None of that matters. Jujitsu people want to start on their back with you on top of them. It doesn't matter. Uh I I'm not a practitioner of Ji Jiu Jitsu, but I've watched it enough that I feel I feel confident, at least in this call, it is so one sided.

It does. And by the way, training, like if you're a beginner in jujitsu, you can go to a jujitsu gym for Six months? And you'll still be getting your ass whooped by like, you know, people who are just like, you know, one year ahead of you because The learning curve is very steep to actually get good at this stuff. Like you You don't pick up boxing or jujutsu very quickly. Boxing I don't even think would be a factor.

I think the fight's going to the ground. Both guys are too uncoordinated. Nobody's knocking anyone out. Both guys I think would look very unathletic. And would end in Zuck tapping him out. By the way, do you see this picture I put in the doc? Look at this this picture of Elon Wrestling a suma wrestler. Have you seen this? Uh.

Yeah. He said he's briefly done Karate. briefly done s judo and and done a little bit of jujitsu is what Elon has said in in the past. If I had to bet on Elon versus Mark on most

Everything. I think I would Cheers. Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah. Like whether business or fighting. I think both A good hang. I think Zuck would be a better hang. I think Zuck it would trump him in and just about everything. Don't you agree? I mean good hang, I think a lot of people would pick Elon. I think Elon's looser and m more fun and

It's like oh he he smoked weed with Joe Rogan. He must be awesome, right? Like this is like how most of his work I I think he would be an awkward hang. I think it'd be very uncomfortable. I don't think I think Zuck is is just Zuck Dude, they're but they're both podium on the in the awkward Olympics. I mean i let's let's be real here. Yeah, but Zuck Zuck like, you know, he reads books on where to place his hands when he meets people. Like he's like place on shoulder. You know what I'm saying?

Like and he actually like studies it, you know, I I think that Zuckw is gonna win in it in every aspect. Do you agree? I agree. I really hope this happens. There's uh this Dana White thing gave me uh a slight hope, but there's a famous People don't know this. Dana White is a like He's a world class liar. In fact, if you ever go into like the UFC communities on on Reddit, whatever, like the one of the most famous like tag lines of the community is

Don't believe his lies because he'll tell you he'll sell you anything. He's a promoter. Um he will he will try to drum up interest. Doing whatever he's gotta do and and and try to pull things off like that. This might be, by the way, this might be the Hail Mary safe Twitter thing, you know, like Mayweather McGregor. Did like five hundred million dollars. If he thinks this is gonna do triple that, let's let's just pretend Dana White's not lying for a second here.

If this fight did like a billion dollars and Elon took home, you know, two hundred million dollars out of that net. Hey, that's yeah, just another few months of runway for Twitter, which is currently Unprofitable and you know, depending on who you believe, could be could be bleeding advertisers. I I have to imagine that there's also like a life insurance policy that these guys have. Like I wonder if it's like you have to have security with you. You can't you can't ride a motorcycle. Dude, they're just gonna do what billionaires do. They're gonna just send in like a proxy. It's like here's my bodyguard versus yours, right? Like in history, isn't this how like conquerors fight? They don't go fight themselves, they send in their best gladiator.

Like the top engineer at Facebook and the top engineer at Tesla need to go in and fight for their own. I would still I would still bet on anything Zuck does. Do you wanna um Can we talk about beehive? Yeah, let's do it. Tell me a little bit about the background beehive. Alright, so what is Beehive?

Beehive is a piece of software. If you want to create an email newsletter Beehive, in my opinion, is the best way to do it. I'm biased because I invested in it, but I also used it before I invested in it. We used it for the milk road. We built our whole business off this. I basically saw What you had done with the hustle, what the morning group guys had done and you guys had all done Almost like what I'll call like the homebrew version of Beehive.

Which was like when I asked you, I said, Hey, what should I use for this? You're like, Well You know, you're gonna here's some things you care about. You care about deliverability, you care about How easy it is for your writers to write. You care about a referral program, blah, blah, blah. There's five tools. And what Beehive was was

And it's complicated. And it's complicated. And it's expensive. And what Beehive did instead was The guy worked at Morning brew. And he built out their like referral and growth program, I think. He left and he basically was like, How do I productize the internal tech?

that we kinda had at Morning Brew, so that it makes it easier for anybody To create a newsletter brand. So and this is a constant discussion that we had at the hustle. And my constant answer was

No, let's just focus on this one thing. And that's true. I made the right decision because it's so challenging for a media company to be a software company and vice versa. It's hard uh it when you're doing one thing to like I had ad salespeople. I'm like, you guys can't sell software, it's just different. And he has proven that I actually predicted. I was like, no, because we're not we we need to focus and

Also because I don't think there's a market for it. So far, I think I have been proven wrong. But I I haven't been proven wrong. Totally. We'll see if it actually works. He are so he creates Beehive. It's basically you go on, you click a few buttons, you got a newsletter, you got your templates, you can create segments, you can do all the features of a newsletter. Great.

It's Good we use it for the milk road. We build our whole business off this thing. We sell milk road after a year or so along the way. I got pitched by him, probably when you did. It was like hey I'm thinking about this behive thing. We're raising money. Big fans of you guys. Would love for to have you involved.

And I I had the same opinion as you. I was like I don't know. It seems small. It's like I think I think there's some newsletter brands that will be big. But I don't know if their underlying tech is gonna be that big. I don't know if there's I don't know how big that platform would be as a as software. So I I we passed and I think the first valuation we looked at was maybe ten million ish. You passed too at that time, right? Same reason? Market might be too small.

And at the time I was saying no to most stuff, but really I also thought I I don't think this can work. I don't think it's I don't think it can work at a venture scale. And there's a classic lesson here, which is like somet there's such a thing as knowing too much. Often the people who know the most about an industry are Either A, too much scar tissue. They just don't want to be involved with it anymore. They just want to go do other things. They just don't want to think about that'cause there's too much like I spent seven years, I left a piece of my soul over there and I'm I I don't really wanna

Wanna worry about that again. And the other is You get too defined by like, you know how things are and you don't really see you're almost too too deep in. You don't see where it's going. This is why very few breakthrough innovations come from

traditional industry experts. They come from often beginners. And why why would a beginner be able to create a breakthrough and not an expert? Because they come in with a fresh perspective and a blank slate. They don't they're not limited by, you know, the prevailing wisdom. So That's that's happened many times over. So we pass, we start using it though. I'm like, oh, be a user.

So Yeah that I There's that. I'm not gonna invest, but I'll be a user. So we start using it. And what did you think of the product? And at first it was good, but I kept running into these limitations and I would be like, Hey, oh my God, they don't even let you filter by X or Wait, you don't even have analytics for my growth side or

The referral program only does this, you know, like I'll I would find these I'd bump into the limitations'cause it was very early on. We were like one of their first users, I think. And his reply, I bet, was the best reply on earth. It was the perfect reply as always, which is I hear you? We agree? Already working on it.

But let me see if I can get you something a little sooner. Yeah, we're planning to release this in two months, but let me see what I can do here. And what they would do is either he would manually do a workaround for us. It'd be like look. We don't have this analytics thing yet, but here's what I'm gonna do. I put a button on your dashboard, it's ugly, it's gray, nobody else can see it.

It just but it's an export. It'll email you a CSV. And then could you just run the run the analytics yourself for now until we build it? So he would give me a uh He would take three hours and just make my life better? He would understand he would also ask me a bunch of questions, like, So what are you trying to really do here?

And let me just confirm I understand this. Like a good product person would do. He's trying to really understand the needs. The second thing he would do is then They would actually ship the feature. So when he'd say That's two weeks away. I remember telling Ben many times. Then be like

Oh yeah, they said they're coming out in two weeks. I was like, dude. Are you a rookie? Like No way. Startups say anything. They don't like no what engineers ever hit a timeline like this never happens. Sure enough, two weeks later. Hey.

They would proactively reach out. Hey, the future's out. Test it out. I want you to g uh I th I think it'll work for you guys now. And we would go do it. And he just did that three times. So over the course of about three or four months I was like Change my mind, call Tyler, we need to invest in this thing. I was like, but what about your concerns about the market? I was like, I don't know, still might be true.

But here's what I do know. This guy's an animal? He's making a product that's really good. And uh you know what? This might be an example where The market is bigger than you think, which has been the case for many big winners. Like, you know, what's the market for, you know, private black town car on demand or

crashing on someone's house as an Airbnb, right? Like these things can become a lot bigger than you sort of initially look at. If you sort of squint. I've heard so many people say the same thing about him, and I've noticed because I found him online, I've only talked to him once or twice. I've noticed online of him changing, like quickly, moving quickly, changing the product quickly. And whenever I saw that, I I thought Damn, he's gonna do it. He's he's gonna I don't know how big

But something's gonna get pulled off here. That's that's I you could tell that right away. And this is uh so two things on this. One, there's a framework that we had at my very first startup. We realized this, we were in the we were doing the sushi restaurant and in the restaurant industry there's this weird phenomenon which is Provide what's expected. No points. Mess up their order. Minus ten points.

But fix the mess up. Plus five points. So it's like I was like, Hold up, if we had just given him the right dish They don't care. They just uh move on as expected.

If we mess up their order, they're angry. But if we fast fix And we not just fix their order, but we give them the freebie with it. Or we ex Yeah, we we really make come back and make sure that they're all good or we take it off their bill.

All of a sudden they had a tremendous experience with us and they'll go tell their friends. And I was like, what's with that? And I was I came up with this sort of like the fix it theory of restaurants, which is actually Mistakes? They're gonna happen anyways. And actually what you need to train instead of a mistake minimization, it's how fast and how fast. Like thoroughly, can you fix it? Because that actually creates like a

A net higher net promoter score. That's beautiful. This guy's doing this with software, basically. Did you make this up? Yeah, I'm sure there's um some name for this. I don't know. This is like a whatever, or you know, discovered by some hard way, but like I'm sure there's a fancy name for that. Oh I I just called it the fix it theory, right? Like if we fix it, it's it's all about how you fix it and the fix it's where you get the like diehards. So It's a very good I noticed that. And so he was doing that. I'll give you one other little beehy story, which is like I don't know a little dark, maybe doesn't want me to share this, but like Do you know at some point his CTO passed away.

So we were I a biggest jerk of all time. He says the two week thing. Something didn't happen in the two weeks one time. And I was like, dude, come on, you said whatever Where's that feature? We really need it. Don't you understand how important my newsletter blah blah I'm being like, you know, I didn't say those words, but like I'm playing it up in in a way here.

We were we were just like oh God complaining like it's not ready yet. He's like, I'm so sorry, we're just dealing with something right now. His co founder or CTO had passed away. During the start and they were you know, that's a very hard thing for any entrepreneur to deal with. Yeah. He handled that.

Like as well as a human being can handle it, meaning was totally, you know. like gracious and empathetic around what was going on. But also understood that like, you know. I he's gotta he he he's gotta keep moving forward in some way, and he's gonna have to figure this out. And it's not an easy thing to figure out. I mean like

All kinds of great you just don't know the passwords to half the things, right? Like it's like all kinds of stuff that you don't even really think about because knock on wood this never happens. But you know, just seeing how somebody overcomes adversity and deals with really tough situations is another thing where you sort of see Yeah, characters revealed in moments of difficulty and adversity. You see how somebody handles something, you think, You know what? I think they're gonna figure things out.

Fast forward to I think he's really young too, right? He's like twenty he's he's in his Probably twenty seven. Yeah, something like that. Yeah. I don't know. I'll tell you.

Two other interesting things. So yesterday the reason why we're talking about it is yesterday they announced we should probably should have led with this. Yesterday they they announced uh they raised a series A, twelve twelve and a half million dollar series A. From light speed. At like a fifty million dollar valuation, I think, uh is what an article said. Yeah, I think a little more than that. So they they raised this money. I and they he posted a graph of their ARR, so their annual recurring revenue.

And it's uh hockey stick curve, it's three million in AR and like I don't know how long. Let me let me check. I think it's sort of like yeah, through three million AR in like twelve to eight like eighteen months maybe, something like that. Just really really, really impressive. And so the run rate's I think four million. He's like and he said in the thing, We're trying to end the year at twelve million. Super impressive.

And the and this year? So go go from four to twelve? That's what he's for that's what he's trying to jump. He says currently at a four million dollar run rate. They have three million of recurring revenue from their subscription product plus another million of revenue from their like because they'll help you, let's say you want to sell ads. Or you wanna monetize your newsletter, they'll help you monetize your newsletter too. So they have like other products now. Mm.

And it says, Yeah, I forgot he boasts of the chart, but I think it's like roughly eighteen months to two, you know, maybe twenty four months at the max. Uh that it did that. Oh, you got a call out in the in the TechCrunch article, it said used by Milk Road. Hell yeah. That's right. I'm in the ballpark, baby. Um so you know, you know, I think that this is a an interesting example. I'm curious to see how this plays out. I could see this still honestly going one of two ways, you know.

I'm an investor, but I I could totally see this being A great business that wasn't venture scale, meaning like He might sell this thing for a hundred they might get to twenty five million in in revenue and sell for two hundred million dollars. I think that could be

That's probably the expected outcome, to be honest. Would that be would you be happy with that? Yeah, I'd be happy for them. Yeah. I mean we would we would make some money. It wouldn't be like the type of return we would Like you know, that you would Like in a startup portfolio, you're obviously looking for these like billion dollar plus outcomes.

But hey, you know, like that's a a win's a win and I would be really happy happy for their team. So, you know, I think that would be life changing money for him. It'd be a great outcome. I think that's like That's like the the Do you like If they do well if they execute well, I think that's on the table. I think what's

The question is. How big does this kind of newsletter media thing get? Can this get to The scale where Okay, if they're if they're trying to get to ten million AR this year, they're at four, trying to get to ten.

If they get to a hundred, right, if they ten X once from the if they ten X from there over the next, you know, five years That's now a billion dollar company. The question is like can it become that? What would they need to do to do that? I think that's gonna be the be the be the challenge of the big question for them. I don't think that's gonna happen. If I had to bet, I think that there's a nine figure exit. That's gonna happen here that will make them wealthy and be a huge success.

I don't think a billion dollar company is gonna happen. I think it's too challenging I think that I'm an investor of Convert Kit. If you Google Convert Kit and then the word bare metrics, you can see all of them revenue and the churn on convert kit. Convert Kit's been doing it for eight or nine years, I think. And

You th they're a little bit more focused on small businesses as opposed to Beehive, which is like Freelancers turned one man, two man companies. And you can look at their churn. Of convert kit, and I would think it's better than Beehive. And it seems very challenging to get to a hundred million in revenue in a s venture time.

Yeah, I think that's I think that could be totally totally totally the case. So on convert kit Their MR right now says Basically three million a month. So thirty six thirty thirty six million a year. Yeah, thirty six.

And w look at the churn. I think it's four percent a month. Yeah, three point five percent a month. So does that mean that Most people churn out after one year. Is that what that math means? No.

I don't know, I don't know. I can't math. Definitely don't definitely don't try to do monthly compounding into into extrapolated that for twelve months. That's not easy for me. But I think three you know, th three and a half month percent churn per month is You know, obviously not great, but It's also not like bleeding in in in SAS metrics. No, not at all. And I think that I would rather be Nathan Barry and own ninety percent of that company.

Of course, Nathan probably had money or had some income coming in, so he had like the the ability to do this and Like you said, everyone's gotta get their nut and get it how you can. Yeah. So I think it's gonna be massive success. I just don't know if it's gonna be a billion dollar company. But I think that the takeaway here for myself, for you, and for the listener is the speed of shipping new stuff and making iterations and more so talking to your customer constantly and hearing what they have to say and asking them why, not what do you want, but why and I'll come up with a solution. I think that's the takeaway here. I think the fix it menu thing is or the fix it

Framework is really, really, really good. Is that what you call it? Yeah, I'll give you I'll give you two other little frameworks around this. So one is from Paul Graham. Paul Graham wrote this essay once where he goes, A thing I've noticed like you know in successful entrepreneurs, Paul Graham created YC. So he saw Yeah. Whatever, thousand plus try to come through there and picked. Picked very well.

He goes, one of the things I would say is most commonly linked with like success. He goes, Can you describe this person as an animal? And what that means is not Oh, he's like a giraffe. He's got a long neck. No, it means Could you just be like, dude, that guy's an animal? Right.

She's an animal. It's basically just just just just describes the sort of tenacity. intensity and speed with which somebody moves and just Figures things out and gets through obstacles and breaks through. Plateau.

And that one piece of like kind of like investing advice. has really stuck with me and like served me well. Because It's really easy to get analytical about the market. About the product, about the industry, about the competitors, and you should. That's f that's good. Look at it from all angles.

But whenever I'm like This person's an animal? I'd make a bet. For better or worse, I'm just like I'm just gonna err on the side of betting on people when I think when I can describe them as an animal. Because

That type of person could figure things out and I think on balance. It's just a higher predictor of like outsize success. And also the opposite is true. I've had I've made some mistakes in investing when I'm like, Oh, love this market, love this product, and I'm sort of projecting. If somebody was just a beast and took this on, they would just crush it.

And I kinda overlook the fact that the person going after is sort of soft and timid and Seems to lack aggression and doesn't seem to know their shit. They don't really know their numbers about well. When I ask about the customers, they don't post. Yeah, they they keep wondering about stuff. And when I ask them what's going on three weeks later, they don't really have clarity on like what's changed, what's better, what what they're focused on. Yeah, when they hit they get overwhelmed easily.

And it's like I've done I've also talked myself into market, you know, market investments. And I I guess for me early stage investing. I think that the that Is the person an animal is just a very important test. That's one. I gotten an update from a company I invested in.

And they're talking about their new like LinkedIn Content series. And that was like the main thing. And I and this is a software company. And I was like Okay. How about revenue, profit, and like how fast like you know what I mean? I was like

I I don't care. Also, I don't care about the new hires, frankly. A hundred percent I'm gonna shit on my own portfolio this way. I would s I I said this the other day. I said to to my investment partner, Romine, I go, Romine man, like I feel like

Maybe fifteen Best case twenty percent of our our portfolio. Writes good updates. I said. That makes me worried. Cause I was like

Really, there's two buckets. There's people who just don't write updates at all, or they're inconsistent. Yeah, they pop up when things are good or they need something, and then they disappear for nine months when things are going tough. And program also was written about that, which is When you stop talking. Is when things go bad. Like the people who survive are the ones who continue being in communication, even when things are tough.

And when you omit information when it's like hey, so why didn't you just put how much you you told me how much your burn was and your law why don't you put your cash balance in there? Exactly. Like like you know, I can do the math. We invest in one company early on, that's a Pretty famous company in Silicon Valley. It was really hot for a period of time and now it's like people have gone sour on it. And they said they like would write they would first when they were when it was really hot, they would write these very surface level updates like Oh we hired this VP and this person and this person and we brought on this new investor. It's like cool, but what what about the business? How's the business going? And you're almost like,

It's almost like don't ask about the business. It's like what's going on? Why why is that the feeling? And then Sure enough, eighteen months later. Oh, bad news coming out. We had to do layoffs and there's bad hit press article and all the stuff and We're just you know, we re need to raise money, but it's not looking good. It's like

What's your burn rate? Oh, we burn three million a month. I was like, dude. What? And why haven't you been saying this, right? Like it's a unbelievable

And then and if you ask them like okay, what's the problem right now, it's like oh the problem is, you know, the funding market right now and this, that's like no, the problem was you were burning three million dollars a month. For a long period of time. without the corresponding like, you know, reward for that burn, you know, you weren't growing in proportion to that burn and you were reckless with money, right? Like that's the the reality, that's the honest lesson out of it. You might be telling yourself some other story. Similarly, with our portfolio

I would say about twenty percent are are writing good updates, and a good update is I might actually just release a template for all on this, but it's basically Hey guys. As a reminder. We are

Hampton. What we do is this. Right. Like first just like say what you do. Not that like your investors forget, but It's in general. You're not top of mind for people and you should have a real clear punchy thing that you're Drilling in this association.

Whenever this whenever you think of this word, think of us. Whenever somebody has this problem, think of us. And so like first start with that. Then say Last month was And your answer.

A great month. Good. Or bad. Answer that question and then write the KPIs. And the KPIs gotta be. Revenue.

active users or active usage, active customers in some way. The the negative of that, some some churn or you know, cost number associated with that. Net burn, maybe. Cash balance, you know, how much cash do we have on hand? And then you want to Write the number for we have to write the number for what it is. In parentheses you want to write

How much is that up? Month over month, and what is your goal? Right. How are you doing against your own goals? Because our annual goal is to get to 10 million in revenue or get to 100 million in revenue. And to do that, we need to be doing X, and we're actually either above that, below that, or on track. That's the honest way to start an update. Below that, you can write whatever the hell you want, to be honest. You got to write that part first.

The next part you should write is Why that happened. So Revenue's down because blank. Revenue's up because We tried this affiliate thing and it's actually working pretty good. We're gonna double down on it. Revenue's down because

Blah blah blah. Users is flat. Because You know, we didn't do XYZ or we are doing XYZ and it's just maintaining we're gonna figure out how to get to the next level. So you have your your sort of two sentence commentary on the metrics. Then after that you could put your ask like here's what I need from you.

And below that you can put in whatever the hell updates you want. Honestly, I don't But the fluffy stuff. Yeah. What you don't want to do is what a lot of people do. Hey, um we have this article. Can you share? That's the you know the the start of the update. Just a quick update on our end. Good month for us. We made these four hires. I want to welcome, you know, Steve. It's like what why are we talking about Steve, your VP of marketing?

You know, th they just go on you know, Steve used to work at Visa, but now he's over here and that's really great. Blah blah blah. Oh, on the product side, we released these new updates. It's like, dude, this is not where you put patch notes. Like your investors care about something. And you don't want to go over here and wave your hands about all this other shit that's not actually like core the core relevant information. And I think it's just wild to me that people don't get that.

I I have refused to I I'll die on that hill. That's how investor update should be written. And it's crazy to me that people don't just do that consistently. Yeah, when I see that I just think you're lying about something. This is goes back to what I said about the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. If you're not honest if you're not honest about it. I think that you're lying about other stuff.

And I just and so I think it's really important to do these things really in the the right way. I used to do this all the time at the hospital. I felt I think you used to you used to send me your updates and they were phenomenal. They were perfect. It was exactly in this format. And you were like, you know You just The University of Common Sense. It's not like you were like

Getting mentorship or advising or you guys' fifth startup. It was just like All right, what are people gonna care about? Like obviously the key metrics How I think how it's going, what I think about those key metrics, or what we're gonna do next. That's what that depends on what your update was. I think what I understood is that like People basically wanna get rich, they wanna get laid, and they wanna have power. Like most of my things in life are rooted in like knowing those three things.

And the problem with a lot of Silicon Valley companies is they think that like the answer of but I learned a lot Is good enough. No, man. I give you my hard earned money. I expect a return. And you need to be a uh what are they Scott Belsi told me this he goes, You need to be a steward of capital and I heard that and I was like, Oh my hand, you'd make it sound so official. I I sound like a night.

Like I'm just like deploying like money. I'm like a I'm like a knight in shining armor. To do this. And so there's like that and it's basically like I'm a small business owner. Trying to make money and my business is investing in your company. You just took money out of my family's mouths and, you know, food off our table. That's how I feel.

And so if a person isn't doing everything in their effort to give me a return on my investment, I get fucking pissed. If they do really hard, if they work really hard and they fail, or if they make errors, I I'm cool with that'cause I knew that I'm playing the lottery here. But if they do this soft shit and they don't aren't honest about it, it kills. Kills me, it kills me, it kills me. In the sense of lying, I actually think that's the m minority. case. I don't think people are actively lying. I think P if they're lying to anyone, they're lying to themselves. I think what's what actually it's it's lying through omission. It's lying through omission is what it is. So so I think it's There's three scenarios.

Either. You know the situation. And you don't wanna say it. Bad. Yeah.

You just don't even know the situation. You're not on top of these things. Really bad. It's usually the first. Or you know it. You don't want to say it. And you're intentionally withholding the information in order to mislead or misrepresent or whatever.

The worst. And so it's really bad, bad, or badder, right? Like you know, like bad, badder, or baddest. It's it's like Th there's really not a good explanation. The only good explanation that I will accept. Is that there are some companies That are doing so phenomenally well. And they know that investors are actually kind of a leaky

A leaky bucket? And they don't want They want to get ahead. They want their rumor mill to go ahead. Now let me tell you the number of times it's that out of a hundred is one out of a hundred. I had that happen to me. Did I tell you have I told you about this? So All right, so the hustle was supposed to sell. The deal was supposed to close on February, let's say, fifth.

February fifth was their earnings call was also supposed to be on February fifth. And that's a big deal for a variety of reasons, but there's like legal implications here. uh, you know, the SECs involved. So it could be it's uh as simple as like if I told someone that we were about to sell. Our deal wasn't big enough to do this. It it did happen, but it wasn't because of us.

But where the stock price can change significantly at the announcement. And if I told someone and they make a big trade, which has happened multiple times, not with us, but multiple times. There there's insider trading. That's against the law. You go to jail. That didn't you know, so there's like that implication there. And there's also like other implications around like, you know, it's just not like cool. It's it's not like it makes you look bad. Well, anyway, we were supposed to close on let's say February fifth. Someone told Axios on February fourth. I get an email from Sarah Fisher, I think her name is. Someone

Linked it to her. I had only told I told a small amount of people who were helping me. I think I told you who are like guiding me. And I also had to get like some people to sign some paperwork. And I explicitly said, Don't tell anyone this is a big deal. I think I told them this will ruin the deal if you tell people, which isn't true, but you know, I told them I could have. And February fourth, the day before we're supposed to announce it, I get this email from Sarah.

And she goes, I have a source saying that you guys are so selling. And she told me a bunch of facts about the deal that I was like, How on earth do you know this? And it did in fact it leaked. And I have We're not a big company. Like we're not we weren't big enough that this is like I don't I don't know why this should be gossip. But it happened and it freaked me out.

big time. And so I understand that perspective of not telling people certain things with my company now with Hampton. Things are going well. I'm not gonna talk about it too much. When things are going well, shut up. I think that you should shut up. Yeah, shut up and push the Yeah. So I understand that perspective, but it happened to us and it It drove me crazy. And I was I I have I suspect it was one of three people. To this day I hold a grudge with that against with all three, just as preventative measures. Just preventative. And I just stare at what they do and I'm like, I'm plotting.

I'm plotting to A, get a to find out Intel that they did it. And B, I already have my revenge planned and I'm just waiting. And I check it. I check what I check up on them constantly. And those people probably know who they are because they see me looking at their LinkedIn all the time. I wanna like I want them to know that I see them. I love us, you know, keeps he always keeps tabs on me. What a good guy. Oh, I'm looking. I'm looking a lot. And so I have a feeling who who it was. But uh can you tell me about this black rifle story because I have a little bit of information about them too. Yeah, this is kind of fun moment. So we so a few episodes ago we did this. What's black ri say what black rifle coffee is. Black rifle coffee it's a Coffee brand. So it's a coffee brand that I would describe as like It's

Like kind of patriotic. It's like an Americ it's like has an American vibe to it. And the customers are mostly middle ish America or Southern and They they they are probably right of the way. Sake. Started by veterans, I think. So it has to be a lot of things. Three of the four guys or four of the five guys were former, you know Military, Marines, whatever, something like that. And so they And they're Hampton members, by the way.

Oh. There you go. So they s they start this thing and there's a kind of interesting origin story to this. It becomes a it becomes a a really popular brand. In fact, like not only do they sell a lot of coffee, They sold enough uh they sell enough product that they basically they went they've gone public. So let me see if they're stock. I think it's three or four

billion dollar market cap. I think it's a little less now. Maybe the whole market's gone down. So Current market cap is One point one billion. So They built a billion dollar D D C brand, basically consumer consumer package. And do you know do you know how they started? One of the owners had a bunch of Facebook pages. I think he had like thirty Facebook pages ranging like it was like

s shit for moms to like veterans. And he started selling a ton of stuff. He was like looking all the stuff they were selling and they were like Damn, we should make our own thing. And that's how the coffee business, uh I believe that's how it started. So I did a call with him. One of the one of the guys. Which one? Um Richard. And so he's I think he might be in Hampton too. So he he had said something slightly different. He didn't talk about Facebook pages, he talked about YouTube. So he was like I was like, What's your story? He's like, Well, I was like, you know, he's like wanted to be an actor, goes to Hollywood It's like whatever, it's not really working out exactly great. He's been in a couple of things, but he teaches himself to code. He starts making iPhone apps really early on in the iPhone app store.

Does pretty good with that. Ends up getting hired by like Verizon or something like that to do like Something on the marketing side for them. And along the way he starts doing YouTube. fairly early on. And so he's doing YouTube videos And for the brand, but and also for himself, like personally doing YouTube videos.

And he starts building up pretty big YouTube following. And then him and his buddies start trying out different products. And they're trying out You know, this and that and oh should we do a I d I don't know what the examples were, but it's like you know let's just pretend T shirt brand and shoe brand and you know this this thing and that thing hats. And then coffee was one of them and the coffee one took off and that's kind of like how they

They rallied around Black Rifle Coffee. To this day, I think they do like tens of millions in merch sales. Not The coffee, but just like people love the brand so much, they'll buy the T shirts. And so tens of millions of merch that There's T shirt company, there's fashionies that do tens of millions.

And that's their whole business. This is like their their spin off business. That's like how strong the the brand is. In fact, when I'm on the zoom call with them. His background I'll p I'll put a picture up on the YouTube channel, but it's just like a great example of like How to Like that's kinda like the subtle branding that exists today when you're on a Zoom call. It's like

Your background, your clothes, like says everything about you, because that's how we meet now, right? So you can actually bring a full story in about your home and everything. And he's got like, you know, on the wall, he's got his his camo thing, he's got his gun, he's got his like He's got all the stuff that's kinda like that same vibe that you know, like Kind of you know, the American tough guy, military veteran, uh, you know, like that sort of vibe. So we're talking, he's telling me this great story and the reason why why we're talking is because

He's like, dude, I was listening to the pod and I heard you talk about the total man thing. He's like something just hit me. He's like, I just love that. I love the total man thing. I went on, I saw that somebody had the domain and I bought it. And I was like, Oh, cool. Like it was I didn't I was like, I swear I looked and the domain wasn't available. He goes, Oh no, no, I bought it off somebody. Like, I think he bought it for like ten or twenty grand. And he's like He's like, I just wanna gift it to you and like if you wanna do something with it, great, that'd be awesome.

Um write this off or something, but you know, I just wanted to do this. I was like A? baller move. It's like when Darmesh, I think, has done that for you. Like on your birthday he bought you your Like a twenty thousand dollar domain. It could have been more. Right. But it was copy that dot com. He bought it from me. So baller move. And just and I was like, What resonated about the Total Man thing? He's like, I don't know, man. He's like I just felt like

The way you talked about like The way you and Sam talked about just like Look, it's important to me. That I like stand for something. My own c I live by a code.

I care about fitness. I care about these things. Like I care about being a man. And like that's important to me. And like You're right, that society has really Like pushed this thing that is if you're trying to be a man, you're It's like toxic masculinity.

And it's like doesn't have to be. Like you don't have to be a jerk. Or you know, like rude in any way. But like why is it bad to like want to be Manly. And I think it just kinda like resonated with him. And so we bought this thing. And we got a lot of ship for that. You see people some people were angry about that. And that's why. I think there was an understandable reason that they were angry, which is We gave it and in we when we were talking about it, we were like, you know, I think you're seeing the craving for this type of content and this movement.

embodied in people who take an extreme version of that, like Andrew Tate or stuff like that. And people like People just immediately s they hate Andre Tate so much they got blinded by rage and they're like, You guys are saying Andrew Tate's awesome and this Total Man thing is about Andrew Tate. It's like no no no, I'm just saying like When you look at objectively that this guy's extremely popular, he's the number one most Googled man in America right now. It it it's all under an umbrella. And we're saying what is the appeal, I think part of the appeal, not the whole thing, but part of the appeal is that this guy preaches

That you need to live like a like a fucking man. And he's like, you know, be hard. Don't be soft. Like mentally be hard, be tough. Physically Be hard, be fit. You know, in your relations with people, don't

Mm. know be a softy don't get pushed over don't keep apologizing and grovbling like you know carry yourself Like a man. I was like And I was like, you know, what we had said was that I think the pendulum has swung too far in one direction.

Where a lot of people are preaching like a a sort of like I don't know what you would call it, almost like a soft or sort of like a genderless like i identity thing where it's you know, it's not cool to be a man. And I think that's building up a craving for people to want to be a man. And so Uh whatever. Something resonated with that. He bought the domain and I was like Yeah, we should do something. We should Try to just make it an open source movement of

And uh and when I mapped it out, I I did a little five minute brainstorm the other day with Ben. And I was like, Yeah, what does it what does a total man mean? I was like, This is a good little branding lesson. I was at first I w I I went down the path of like What matters to me, but like what matters to me is like I like to have I care about like

Freedom? Like financial freedom. I care about fitness. I want try to get more and more fit. I want to be somebody who is free to move their body in certain ways and it is is

A a very fit individual. But I also f care about family and whatever and I was like Oh, I think I just described something generic. I said, what's the real appeal of this total man thing? It's not this well well rounded.

Appeals to actually nobody. I said Sam said something once on the podcast that made me laugh. But I kinda like I wanted to make fun of him and I also kinda liked it. I was like jealous and I wanted to make fun of him at the same time. What was it? You you said this thing. It's gonna sound so simple, it's gonna sound dumb, but you you said

It's important to me to be a fucking man. Like what? What are you what are you even saying? Isn't that obvious? You said that and you go, Yeah, it's just important to me. Like To be a man and like

To be like you know I don't even know how you explained it. Maybe you didn't even explain it. But I s I I say it to Sarah all the time. I go, I take care of business. I go, we we take care of our business. You know, like all and that doesn't mean money. That means you know, look, I'm gonna Provide emotionally.

Financially, spiritually, I got you. Like we I take care of business. Whatever you need, I got you. I'll I'm here for you. Yeah. And uh it's like I'm not gonna I'm I'm gonna try my hardest not to get too emotional. If you're emotional, I'll I'll be a rock. I'll treat you with respect. I'm gonna take care. I'm gonna handle business. That's all we do. Exactly. And I was like I think it's more that it's basically I I was like, I don't think it's about this well rounded, blah, blah, blah, because it dilutes the message. Well here, and I also said and then you I'll let you go. I said, When I like to exercise, I wanna be able to

Outrun. Or what did I say? I thought it either kill and eat everyone in the room. Or outrun them. I I stole that from Galloway from Scott Galloway. Don't you feel that way? And I was like, Hell no, I don't feel that way. What are you talking about? It's a ridiculous thought. You took your most ridiculous thought and then said, Don't you feel that way sometimes? No, I've never once in my life looked around a room of men and been like I could eat and kill ever all these people or outrun them. Not once.

But when you said it It stuck in my head. It was provocative. I wanted to make fun of you. But I was also like, you know, there is a negative truth in this madness. And that is where a real brand is built. And so that was my my my little branding revelation to myself when I was doing this exercise around the what what should we do with this total man domain.

I was like Honestly, it's real simple. It's about being a man. Being it's about men who want to be Be a man.

What does that mean? We don't need to explain it. It's somebody who handles their business. You can come up with all the examples you want. It's not a checklist. That's not the total man attitude. Is uh having some some predefined criteria checklist. No.

Mm. In all situations. Be a man about it. And that's what I was like that's take care of babies. That's the brand, baby. Be a man about it, no matter what the situation. Be a man about it. And I was like, that's the total man philosophy.

You could apply that to whatever situation you're going through in life. But what are you gonna do with it? So is this gonna be I know Jesse Isler, who we're gonna have on soon. I've been emailing with him. He's got this really cool thing where it's like you run up this mountain a bunch of times and that's like climbing Everest. That's kinda cool. Yeah. I mean, an event is the is the obvious one, but But you can go a bunch of ways.

Here's here's here's the idea. Fresh off the dome. You just said, What do you want to do with it? You asked a great question. My brain came up with an answer. It's inspired by seventy five heart. Which is also a very total man. Exactly.

And it's great. Total men don't know don't join movements. Sometimes we create them. So we're going to create our own version of this, and it's going to be the man month. And what is the man month? It's basically thirty days. Where you commit. to to working towards

being the total man in these like, you know, couple ways. And it's like For thirty days. We're doing cold shower. We're doing fifty push ups right when we wake up, or a hundred push ups right when we wake up, first thing. It doesn't mat you're Oh, you're late?

All right, you're ten minutes more late. Go. Right. Uh oh, you can't do a hundred push ups? I'm waiting. Keep going. We'll stay here till you're done. All right, so All right, so push ups and cold. Push ups and cold, I think is two. We just need a third. And it's gonna be you do these three things, you're just gonna do'em for thirty days straight, and we're just gonna harden you up.

Just gotta harden you up a little bit. And so what's the third? What's the third in this thing? Well Is this too soft? You gotta t you gotta you gotta tell the you gotta tell the woman in your life how you feel. Or the man. Or the man in your life. You gotta tell you to be kind.

You gotta tell someone how you feel. It can be kind. It can be Oh, you've been avoiding confrontation? It's time to say.

Oh, you really appreciate somebody? You better show it. Right. And so you're gonna send a message, voice memo, text message what To your mom, to your co worker, to whoever.

We're gonna do that every day. You gotta have a tough combo. We're gonna do that every day for thirty days. A tough conversation. A tough shower. A tough morning. All right. Well, you gotta call it total, right? A total conversation. Total. Yeah. Total one. And so I think it's good. I I my my feedback, you need to add two more things. My critique of my own thing here.

It's a little too easy. I think it needs to be a little bit harder, potentially. It's got it has to be So hard that you're like Ugh, I can't believe I'm doing like the seventy five hard thing.

It's pretty hard. And people have to look at you and be like, Are you nuts? Yeah, the cold thing the cold thing s uh y you're you're on to something with the cold thing. That is quite challenging. But Yeah. You gotta have a few more hard things. Fifty pushups. If you're fit, I could do fifty push-ups in one sitting. Yeah. Uh more. The the original thing I was thinking about, because I was like, what would it mean

'Cause a lot of this is also inspired when Zuck did the Murph thing. And I was like Oh. Stuck kind of been a man right now. Like what's going on? This is uh that's pretty cool.

Could I do that? I don't Think I could do this. I can't do a hundred pull ups. Like this is something I can't do, right? All right. So I started working towards it. So the next morning I woke up. And I did my little quarter murph. I I ran the oh, he runs a mile hard. I'm gonna run the quarter mile. I'm gonna do a quarter of the push ups, quarter of the pull ups, quarter of the squats. Hard right of the run run again.

And I'll do it again until that's easy. When that's easy I'm gonna make it harder, right? I'm just gonna keep inching it. Forward until I could do the full thing. And I was like Yeah, that's the way to go. It's progress, right? Like it's about progress. And so I think you're right. I think we kinda need to workshop the actual difficulty level because I think it To hit the brand right.

It's gotta be something that other people think you're crazy for doing. Yeah, I I think that's great. It can't be reasonable. You could also be a little self serving and make it like a post on social media, so you get that little hashtag going around. You know, you gotta share the results. When I charge money. This isn't a program you buy.

It's just a movement. You're either in or you're out. That's it. That's it. You're in, if if you're in, you gotta do it. If you're out, stay out. When So I've known you for close to ten years now. Did you ever think that ten years ago you'd be about this life? Never. Never.

It feels good though, right? It feels good to be a man, yes. It feels good. I agree. I think it feels great. I when I I remember when I moved to San Francisco, I felt really like nervous. I was like people would call me a redneck because I had moved from Tennessee. I remember when I when I first got like in San Francisco when you moved there, you'd have to interview for an apartment'cause they had so many applications. I remember going to like one of these interviews and people being like

This was in two thousand twelve, right, I guess, right after Obama was there an election in two thousand twelve. People were like Who'd you vote for? They asked me who I voted for in order to like get this apartment. And like so I I was like I gotta hide like which I I think we voted for Obama, but I had to like hide a a bunch of shit about myself. Not anymore. Things have changed, my friend. The the i this stuff is actually a lot more popular. If you go to San Francisco, things are a lot different. Muscles are are not quite in, but they're more in than before. And fitness is more in than before, and hard conversations are more in before. So I think it's good that you're Kind of capitalizing on that.

We're not chasing trends here. This is timeless. People have been trying to be People been trying to be hard for their whole like you know for since the beginning of time. In fact, the only thing that turns me off is if this is a trend. All right. Total man. All right. You're you're sounding harder already. Do you have to wrap up now? I see you're looking at your phone, by the way. I'm gonna do it with my Elizabeth Holmes and start talking with a deeper voice on purpose.

Dude, people make fun of me on our YouTube. They say I've got a high voice. Yeah and the uh so so now I'm like thinking in my head I gotta talk lower too. Dude, I think that's why Mike Tyson became Mike Tyson. I think he had to overcompensate for his voice and just turn into an absolute savage. Oh, so you're agreeing I have a high pitch voice. It's not low. Oh my God. That's ridiculous. That is ridiculous. That is ridiculous. Alright, that's the part.

I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to I put my all in it like my day's off On the road less travel never looking back

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