The Annual Milly Awards: The Winners, The Losers And Everything In Between - With Andrew Wilkinson

All right, so this is the third time we're doing this. It's the best part of the year. The season finale. It is called The Millie Awards. It's our annual awards show. We did it the first time, I think, improved.

Uh or like pretty pretty close to it. We did it just like kind of on a whim. People loved it, so we brought it back and now we're bringing it back again. And it's basically Uh it's our awards, so we do categories like Billy of the year, breakout company or person. Uh our favorite unsexy business. Uh our own best investments and our own worst investments, things like that.

Um So I'm excited. I already got the uh sort of season finale vibes. And uh I'm I'm excited for this. You wanna say anything strange? You you look like you drive a white G Wagon right now. I can't believe how fast you've gone from Indian to Persian. I look like my mistress drives a white G Wagon. Uh you went from nerdy Indian to alpha Persian with just one jacket. And that's kind of amazing how that's happened.

I have never sold a rug, but I feel like I could right now Yeah. And uh you guys let's see, you Sam, you didn't get the memo about dressing up. Andrew, are you uh your mic is blind. Did you guys like it? I'm wearing a carnigan, bro. Oh you always wear a cardigan. You always have like you know modern grandma style. But I'm uh I'm I'm I'm at a a guest place, you know. I'm I'm on an Airbnb. I gotta do what I gotta do. I didn't bring up bring I didn't bring my Persian apparel, I'm sorry. All right, well guys, cheers to A great year.

Uh a crazy year. I have I don't know what what what's in everybody's cup here. So Sam, you're you're a classic Midwestern Cola. Kinda guy. You probably stay cola, don't you? No, but I am drinking a Coke.

Th there's that great map where it's like some people say pop. Some people say cola, some people say you know soda or something like that. I feel like you might be a pop guy. Uh Andrew, what you got in the cup? I've got a aeropressed

Uh coffee. In a tiny mug. Bro, you just Brought to you by you just sponsored this whole pod just now. That was slick Um

I have a uh very frigid cold water with Fresh lemon juice inside. Maybe I'm starting to cleanse. I saw a great tweet you goes. I don't cleanse, I clog.

And I thought that's pretty that's pretty good. Alright, so cheers to you guys. Uh twenty million downloads this year for the podcast, which is I think six times bigger than last year by or m maybe four or five five times. I might might have my math wrong there, but I think YouTube's up six X and the pod is up four X or something like that. Um

Big year. Big year for us, which is which is fun. And Andrew, you were the most frequent guest. You're the most favorite guest, and so it is only right to have you here. All right. So Without further ado, should we jump in To the categories. We're gonna go Uh, I'll announce the category, I think, and then we go kind of round Robin.

Um Last year we did it where We kinda picked who had the best answer after each one. I don't know if you guys want to do that or Uh any any adjustments to the to the format here? Well, I think by the way, I your order was a little off. So for example, if we're gonna start with Billy of the Year, then that has the next person because it's uh also a per the the next category should be craziest person of the year as well. Okay, okay. Well let's do it this way.

Um We'll take turns, just you uh me and you Sam of just picking categories and then uh you can go whatever order you want. So Okay. Let's start let's start with Billy of the Year. Uh so for those who don't know, we do the segment called Billy of the Week. Where we typically will feature

A billionaire. Or somebody who maybe's not actually t technically a billionaire, but they carry themselves with that billionaire energy. And uh Somebody who's just doing life in an interesting way. So Sam, who is your Billy of the Year?

Ah, mine's so boring. So Uh uh I my border answer. is Zuck because he's proven that like He's actually pretty good. All the everyone else this year ha that's been in his category has gone fucking insane.

Bezo's got a divorce. Elon's crazy. All Zuck does is box. That's like his version of Crazy. Like he's turned out to be okay. So I would say he's probably like the bully of the year emotionally stable, huh? Yeah, he's done all right. But if I had to pick another one, it would be this guy named Brad Adcock. Bret Adcock is this guy I met about six months ago. He basically is only thirty four to thirty six years old. He's a young guy. He made a lot of money when he sold his company called Vetery for a hundred million dollars. Then he created

Veterans like a recruiting company. It's not sexy. But then he created a flying drone company that he took puc public called Archer. It was worth two or three billion at its peak. Now he told me that he's uh took roughly two hundred million dollars of his own money, which I think was like the majority of his liquid net worth, other than the house that he owns. And he's piled all of it into bootstrapping a new robotic company called uh where they make humanoids. And that guy's pretty fucking insane. And I love crazy people like that. That's a great one. Andrew, who you got? Billy of the year. So mine mine is actually a MFM guest, Palmer Lucky. I feel like You know, it's a little obvious, but I feel like um

Y you see so many of these billionaires who They make all this money and then they get very focused on PR and they're very safe. And they won't put their money where their mouth is. And what I loved about him is that A, he's actually taking his own capital and investing it in Andrew and doing something that is actually important in the world or what he deems important. And he actually just like calls people out. Like he's honest. He's not a politician. And I think

Most of these billionaires you talk to, they are very political. They have a PR team. He obviously does not. I thought that was so awesome when he went to the uh, what is it, the all in conference and just roasted Calcanis for like an hour. Um so yeah, Mad respect. I think he's awesome and I thought that was one of the best interviews of the year. That's a great one. Um I love that one. I th I considered Palmer lucky as well. I decided to go with somebody a little more under the radar

Not a billi not a billionaire. But somebody who lives Like I think a billionaire should. So it's this guy who came To Camp MFM. Which was our kind of like private retreat of twenty or thirty badass people that we did.

Who Al? No. Sai. Said. So

Said is a guy I didn't know much about. You had mentioned him before. I didn't I never met him. He might be a billionaire. He might be, but uh but it it doesn't matter. He lives like one. So when we met him at the camp I was like so what do you do? First of all, he just had the most chill energy. He was not stressed.

He was not worried, he was not Seeking attention, he wasn't he had none of those small boy traits. And instead he was relaxed, he was having fun, he was asking people questions, and I asked him, I said, So what do you what do you do? And he's like, Well, you know, I And He started to explain and somebody else cut him off and was like let me brag for you for a second here.

So what Said owns. It's basically the largest collection of WordPress websites and tools. So If you search for WordPress like uh yeah, WordPress powers like thirty or forty percent of all internet websites. And so people are often searching, how do I do this on my WordPress site?

You'll land typically on one of his websites like W P beginner or WP engine or whatever. And From there, it'll say, Well, if you wanna capture emails of people who come in using WordPress like a uh email capture pop up. Use opt in monster.

Owned by Also Said. And so he basically has the landing spot where people come, he's got the number one search rankings. Then he owns the tools that he refers And so he turned his random curious traffic into SA subscribers. He basically built an empire. He's telling us about the gas stations he owns and all the other crazy stuff he does with his money. And

His work style was was one that I envy. He's like well Here's my month. The last week of the month, I do all my meetings with the operators of my businesses. I was like, so what do you do the other three weeks? And he's like

One like one to one and a half weeks we travel. So we just go to Costa Rica, then we go to Egypt, then we go to wherever, like me and my family, we just love to travel. And then I read and I just Chill out, I think. Uh the other the other week and a half I play with my son a lot. We play basketball. And I was like wow, this guy is dominating his business niche, but he's also Checking the box on family, he's checking the box on travel. He's got it going on. So I was really impressed by Sae this year. He's also d very very uh giving too. He he gives away a lot of money too.

Yeah. Amazing guy. So uh so he's mine That's uh all right, so those are the billies of the year. I I'll just put it out there. I think Palmer was the right answer. What do you think, Sam? I agree.

Palmer was the right answer. You're if you haven't seen the clip of him going to Jasanis' conference, like going to someone's birthday party and roasting him. Uh that was epic. Andrew, did you hear on our pod when we asked Palmer if he could kick Jason's ass? Mm. Yeah, when he was talking about his scare his like how tall he was inside of it.

Yeah, he was like, Well You know, if you look at the physics of this I I I forget exactly how he explained it, but he was of like a very engineer. He goes like six one. Yeah, he said something like that. Like it it was pretty funny. All right. Let's go to the next category. Sam, you can pick one. Um let's say talk about the biggest L we each took this year. Okay, Andrew You go first, Adrian. And by the way, th this category, the biggest L so it's the biggest loss you took, but it can be It ca it doesn't have to be like a big serious thing. It it's just a it's just a loss that you put in the in the loss column, however big or small it was in your life.

Yeah, so I read this book about fifteen years ago by this guy Ramit Sethi. Uh he's got a website, I Will Teach You to Be Rich, and he's got a book called I Will Teach You to Be Rich. And at the time I knew absolutely nothing about personal finance or finance at all. And he had this really great section where he says People think they need to save money on latte.

What they actually need to save money on is percentages. And so he's talking about Interest rates on credit cards, interest rates on mortgage, uh fees in real estate transactions, like the difference between two percent and two point five percent is like twenty thousand dollars and people don't think about that. He says, uh he goes, Don't worry about three dollar problems, worry about worry about thirty thousand dollar problems. Exactly. So I had one of those. Um, so you know. Maybe like two episodes a you know, a couple of interviews ago, I talked about um, you know, interest rates and the risks there.

And this was very top of mind because we had a piece of debt in the company that Uh I wanted to lock in the interest rate on And so we were gonna buy all these hedges and in order to do that, I had to sign all these documents. And I'm kind of lazy. I hate signing documents. And so These documents were sitting in our office and I was like, Oh, I'll do it tomorrow. I'll do it tomorrow. I kept putting it off.

And then finally I signed it and I realized that between the time that I it was sitting there for a week. And In that week. The interest rate went up by like one percent.

And that represented like five hundred thousand dollars or something insane. And so just me being lazy and not signing that document and not thinking in percentages cost me like five hundred grand. Uh huh. Uh Sam, what you got? Um

This year I met a guy who had a app called Intro. It's a great app and I agreed to do it because he was like, Hey Come try this. And I did. And it was one of the big

Bigger mistakes of the year that I made. So basically I'm on this app called Intro, where for a little while people get- you you were bragging about how you were crushing it on intro. How is this the L? Mm. That's such a Weak move on my part to do it. So this app I got on there'cause I was like, oh, you know, and honestly, it's fun.

It is quite fun to use. It's fun to like meet new people, but people pay me for my time. And it's quite addicting because It's really you can a make a substantial amount of money doing that, but If I'm supposed to be such a

big swinging dick. If I'm supposed to be a hot shot, like I wanna be I shouldn't be selling my time. Or at least I shouldn't be selling my time and keeping the money. I should just give it away. And it was that was a big uh that was a weak move on my part to uh be selling my time and I regret doing that. That's a that's a great one. I was making fun of you for that and uh

And then I was also kinda like, Wait, should I be doing that? That is a lot of money. And then I was like No Don't sell your time. Don't sell your time. It's such short term thinking. And you know who really changed my opinion of it? Who actually could be Billy Beer? What's the guy, Brian Johnson. Brian Johnson from um Uh brain treat. He like kinda like didn't mean to do it, but he like was rasomy on using it. And I was like, You're right.

What did he have to do? What did he say? Well, he told a story, uh he didn't he wasn't d directing it towards me, but he told a story about how he was like instead of like getting this job, like I should just put more effort into my company. So then in three years, this won't even be a problem instead of right now, I could just make this money that could temporarily fix this. No, I should go for the long term fix and make it so like I don't even have to budget ever again. Yeah. I see a lot of so I think like all three of us kind of probably grew up not having a ton of money.

Um And really, really valuing like every dollar. Right. So like I remember Um you know, a thousand dollars was like a crazy amount of money to me because I could buy an iMac. And if I bought an IMAC then I could have one of my staff do all this work and I could make like twenty thousand dollars from it. And so I feel like I still

If I I'm not careful, I think in those terms. And when someone comes along and offers you a thousand dollars an hour, it's like completely Insane as an opportunity. Three grand an hour. Or four grand an hour. It is crazy. It's amazing, but you get and I know all these people that are like

I know guys that are worth fifty million dollars and they still manage their own Airbnb bookings and they'll be like, Oh, sweet, I tweaked this, I made an extra three hundred dollars in cleaning fees or whatever. And I always think like You guys used a quote before, but it's like you're playing you're playing a pennies or sorry, you're you're saving pennies in a dollar's game. Like it's just ridiculous. Yeah, that's uh Yeah, but uh uh I some people enjoy that. Like Nathan Barry Uh, Nathan Berry owns Convert Kit. He's probably worth 200 plus million dollars based off the valuation of convert kit. And he's still, I'll be with him and plot his phone and he's like messaging Airbnb guests. I'm like, why are you doing this? He goes, I love it.

And so in that case I'm like, all right, cool. I don't like taking intro calls necessarily. Sometimes I do. But uh Yeah. Yeah, there's a there's a good test. I remember I talked to this guy

When we got acquired by Twitch, I talked to a guy who had been acquired by Twitch three years ago. And I was like, Yeah, let's break lunch. So we go out for lunch. And I'm like, um he's he's like, Yeah, you're gonna love it, you know Yeah, but watch out for this. He's like giving me a bunch of tips. I'm like, Okay, great. Um

Let me give you a tip real quick. Uh yeah, I just got here, but let me give you a tip. I was like, why are you still here? And he's like oh dude, um I really like my job actually. You know, I I I didn't think I would stay here, but I really like it. You know, it's it's fun. I just Blah blah. You tell me how great it is.

But I had kinda seen him in a couple of meetings at this point. And I was like, these meetings aren't fun. So like, you know, I I don't know what you're doing the other hours a day, but I saw you for like half a day last week and that that didn't seem fun at all. Um, I said, Okay, well maybe it is fun, but I s let me just ask you something. Um You made, you know, he probably made like ten, twenty million dollars on sale. I said, uh

I said so you don't need this job, but uh but but you're not at the point where for you you're just gonna stop working all together, blah blah blah. And I said uh I said if you had a hundred million dollars in the bank Like literally like if I open up your bank account right now, it's a hundred million dollars just sitting there. Would you come in to work tomorrow? Like would you

Would you Would you do this just for fun?'Cause at that point You know, what you're making here every year is a is a rounding error. It's a You j you just make that in In interest, uh if you were uh if you had a hundred million dollars sitting there.

He's like, Well, no, then I would go do XYZ. And I was like, Okay, cool. So just as long as we're just being honest, like I'm not saying you're miserable here, I agree. But the stories we tell ourselves In order to justify doing something that we're actually doing for the money. But we don't wanna say we're doing it for the money. We wanna say we're doing it For all these other reasons, there's a very simple test. Imagine you had all the money.

Would you still do this thing? And like the The dangerous thing about that logic So Ryan Holiday has this great Daily Stoic podcast and re recently he had um A excerpt from Steven Pressfield's book. He's got all these books about kind of discovering your thing and your mastery and art and all this kind of stuff.

And he talks about how People get addicted to patterns. So people can be addicted to Um love. They can be addicted to money, they could be addicted to you know any almost anything. And the question I always ask myself is

I might love designing the website, or I might love going into the Shopify stats and seeing the sales or doing the Airbnb management. But is that just me addicted to those dopamine hits, distracting myself from my greater purpose, right? From doing something where I have mastery that's new. Am I just going back to the same thing, right? Like you guys know the joy. There's this amazing confirmation bias joy of reading a book and hearing something you already know confirmed. Over and over and over again. I'll do this with like uh value investing books, right? And I'll go, Oh, I already know that. I do that. I feel good. Right. That's actually a waste of time. And so that's the flip side of it.

Yeah. My buddy told me this when I when I'd been working on my startup for six or seven years. And he was like He told me he's like, you know, I just don't get what you're doing. I was like, Well what do you mean? I s I can explain it and he's like, No, not the logic of it. He's like I just feel like

Let me ask you a question. If this all went away. Is this what you would sign up to go do? Like would you basically like like take the example of the guy I was talking to. If you got if you weren't doing this job, is it would you just apply for this job here? No, you would

Go do something completely different. Like you're here because you got acquired, and they're you're here now. Fast forward three or four years later, you're still here doing the same job. But if I took this job away, you would never go to a job posting and apply for this job. And he's and so he was explaining that he's like, you know, inertia is just a bitch. He's like whatever you're an object in motion will stay in motion. Whatever you're doing, you're probably most likely you're doing it because you were already doing it. Not because you think it's the thing you actually should do in most cases. And so you gotta be really aware of that. All right.

Um what's yours? Oh okay, so uh w wait, what is the category even? What are we in? Your biggest L. Oh, my biggest L. Okay, I have one that's sort of like yours. I was chasing pennies in a dollar game, so I recently moved. And uh your boy rents. I'm a renter.

And so I moved from one rental to another. uh new house and I Was like, Oh, I love this. I could just like move whenever I want, don't have to worry about anything, just call the movers. I broke my lease, I just moved. But um my landlord came in and uh First you know, did a walk through of the place when I was there.

You know. We talked about his his you know, his his family, his history in this house, shook hands in the garage, said, You know, it's been nice having ya. All right. See you later. You know, don't worry about all the stuff, everything looks fine. Two weeks later he hits me with like a

twenty or thirty thousand dollar bill. And um And he gets me with the extra twenty thousand dollar bill on the move out. For like, you know. Scratches and like you know, stuff like that.

No, he was not right. It was a and he had he's a lawyer. So we had baked into the lease that like, hey Anything that's associated with the move out is your cost. Like for example If I fly to California. To observe the move out.

You have to pay for my flights, my hotels, my food, my this, my like There's a shit in there that was like not like I didn't damage the property. It was just like extra stuff. But He had put it in the lease. I had signed the lease because Like you know, like Andrew, I don't really I

I don't really read it, or if I read it, I'm not gonna read it. I'm optimistic at the beginning of things. I'm like, this is gonna go great. He's gonna be a chill dude just like I would be. Well, he's never gonna hold me to any of these things. And like, sure enough, he held me to the letter of the law on every single thing. And so he So I decide

To do something that we talked about on this uh on this podcast. I decided to take him to Petty Court. And so a lawyer a guy who listens to the pod who's a lawyer reaches out, he's like, Yo, I heard about the landlord thing. I'm ready to fight to the death on this for free and I'm like, let's do this. And so in my head I was like, I'm gonna fight this twenty grand.

Got this lawyer now, it's got Troy you know, he's a great dude. Um, got to know him a little bit through this process. But we try fighting back. We and The problem is I'm going against An eighty seven year old retired lawyer who's got nothing not but time on his hands. He this is probably the biggest thrill he's had in thirty seven years.

To fight. And be and you know, like look up every California statue and he sends me these packets of like 47 documents. He sends me CD ROMs full of photos of the property. I'm like, dude, I don't have a CD player to put this in. What am I how am I supposed to see these photos? And he's just sending me letter after letter and he's

I took a guy to Petty Court. Who is like the king of Petty Court. And in the end, I end up paying the full amount just by saying F it and I'm like,'Cause I'm like Dude, I'm wasting my time. I'm wasting this lawyer's time. I'm gonna say this old guy's time, but he's got infinite time.

And uh he is built for this, whereas I should have just wrote this twenty K check and just moved on with my life. Five weeks ago. And I knew it because at night But before I was going to sleep. I was um I was like, Oh shit, I didn't respond to that fucking subpoena he sent me, basically. There's like giant packet of letters. I was like Okay, I'm gonna s call him, I'm gonna say this, that he's gonna say that. And I was like imagining this whole debate in my head and I was like

Dude, what a waste of mental space. And once I finally had that realization that I was playing a small boy game. By losing my mental My my mental space in my head that could be done used on productive things in order to be in petty court.

I wrote the check and I moved on with my life. Dude, I think it's worth fighting those things, by the way. No. No. Going to war for the sake of war is worth it. I had the Sam on my shoulder, and I had the Andrew on my shoulder, and I listened to the Sam and I should have never listened to the Sam. I wasted four weeks of my life. That's like you're you're like a bull in a china shop and there's this tiny little fly buzzing on you and you just have to ignore it. There's a great quote on this that someone said to me once. When I was going through something similar.

And the guy said, Never wrestle a pig. You'll both get dirty, but the pig will enjoy it. Yeah, there's no exact there's no phone. Yeah, but I'm the pig here. I'm the pig here. Yeah. Well I I had and Sean, I had the y you know my situation. I I had something like this go on this year too and I texted Andrew, I go, What do I do? And he said the same thing. He goes, Don't wrestle with pigs or whatever this fucking biblical shit and I bought into it.

And it eats me it eats me every night that someone that someone got someone I got got. You there's what's the Charlie Munger calls it, um the rats in the granary, right? If you own a granary, you have a big warehouse full of grain. There's gonna be rats. You can keep killing them over and over again, but they're gonna always come back and it's better to just accept that there's rats out there. We got rats at your granary, bro. All right. Let's do the let's do the new plan. Let's go to the next one.

Okay, cool. Um Alright, let's go to the next category. Let's do We're gonna do breakout company, which is sort of the sexy one, and then let's do the unsexy business of the year. So we'll do We'll do both. First let's do the uh the breakout company of the year. Uh Andrew, you want to go first?

Yeah, I mean this is so obvious, but I and I I came up with a few others, but I just feel like we're the one that's obviously. Open AI Open AI GPT three is shocking. I think this is like a watershed moment. And uh I there's nothing else. I've I haven't seen anything like this in probably ten years. I have two words for you guys that that will change your opinion. Yeah.

Liver King. What This guy called his shot, man. That's a true bra You're gonna tell me that that w dude, when you have Elon Musk and Sam Altman and ten billion dollars, that's not a breakout company. That's not a breakout. That's just that's a company that th they are who we thought they were. They did exactly what we thought they were gonna do.

That that doesn't count as a breakout. You're saying you expected you expected like when I I remember a friend of mine called me about a month before they released the chat. And was like, Oh my God, it's amazing. And I kinda rolled my eyes, uh you know, I didn't wasn't super excited about it, but I have not seen anything this crazy in a very long time. I mean obviously Dolly and stuff is insane too, but the chat, it's just nuts. I've actually stopped using Google a lot of the time and started using the chat. D well, look, they you took the nerdiest of nerds, the smartest guys on earth, and you gave him ten billion dollars and you locked him in a room for six years. Yeah, but like if you think they're friends like

If it was nineteen forty five and you're like, What's the breakout project of the year? And I'm like, It's the Manhattan project and you're like, Oh, well, they got billions of dollars and whatever, it's still fucking crazy. They made a nuclear bomb. It's crazy. This is like a nuclear bomb moment. It's just like my expectations. They met my expectations. Like if this were if this were like uh if this was like a second grade report report card, it would definitely be like Met expectations. There would not be there would not be like Yeah, there's this is not an exceed. I kinda felt like it was a goofy project. I was like oh you know Google, Apple, all these other people, they're gonna do this for, you know, they have a huge incentive, profit incentive. These guys are going like nonprofit when they first started and it's kind of like all about openness and whatever. It's morphed into something that I didn't didn't expect.

And I certainly didn't expect it to do as well as it did given all the star power. I think often think about like super groups. Supergroups are usually not that good. It was like a supergroup. Yeah, I mean the Avengers worked out. But yeah, I feel you. I I feel you. Sam, your your breakout person or company is Liver King. Night, call this shot.

I mean Yeah, or Andrew Tate, but yeah one of those guys. We did an episode where we detailed the the leaked emails from the Liver King where he's like, yo I'm gonna take a bunch of steroids, I'm gonna build this brand, and then I'm gonna sell like hundred million dollars worth of products. That's what I'm gonna do, and then he did it. So that's so much more dope. All right, let me merge the two. So Sam, you like the call your shotness. Andrew, you're like wow, open AI, Sam Altman, you guys have done something magical. I'm gonna give you a called shot that I think is

Kind of unbelievable to be honest with you. Okay, so Paul Graham is gonna win my award here for calling it the the the call your shot moment. So Back in two thousand and nine. Paul Graham wrote a blog post. So this is now what, like thirteen years ago or something like that.

Paul Graham writes a blog post. It's called if you go to Paulgram.com/slash five founders, the number five in the founders, he he says Inc.com recently asked me who the five most interesting founders are in the last thirty years. He goes, How do you decide who's interesting? I I think it's influence, you know, who are the five who've influence me the most. Who do I use as examples when I'm talking to companies that I'm funding? Who do I find myself quoting a lot? And it's everybody you would expect. It's Steve Jobs is number one. He's got Larry and Sergey from Google.

He's got like his buddy but uh Paul Bukite who Uh invented Gmail. And also wrote the first prototype for AdSense and gave Google the mantra of don't be evil. Okay, everything's expected so far. And number five, he says Sam Altman. He goes.

I was told I shouldn't mention I Who at the t who at the time, by the way, was twenty two, I think, right? Yeah. Exactly. At the time is probably twenty one or twenty two years old. And he was wearing He was wearing double pop c neon collars with Steve Jobs. Exactly very embarrassing. Put up a photo of of him doing this Uh Uh announcement at the at the Apple conference where he's wearing A double polo neon popped collar.

Uh it's it's really incredible. You wouldn't think that that guy's gonna rule the world, but he but Paul Graham knew that he would. So he's here's what he wrote about Sam Alwin back in two thousand nine. He goes I shouldn't mention a Y C founder. Um but Sam Albman cannot be stopped by flimsy rules. If he wants to be on this list, he is going to be.

Honestly, Sam is along with Steve Jobs the founder I refer to most when I'm advising startups. On question of design, I ask what would Steve do? But on a question of strategy or ambition, I ask, what would Samba do? Uh w when what I learned meeting Samu is that The doctrine applies a the doctrine of the elect applies to startup. It applies in a way that

L It applies. Way less than most people think. Startup investing is not about picking winners you think might win a horse race because there are a few people with such force of will That they are going to get whatever they want.

And now you fast forward to thirteen years. the guy, you know, basically creates this, you know What's gonna be a uh mul probably a multi hundred billion dollar company, open AI. And brings you know, one of the most magical Technical like magical

Yeah, technology experiences, which is if you're if you're using Dali or or GPT three. And he wasn't even that successful back then, by the way. I don't think he had I think he I think he had sold a company, but he sold it even less than they raised. I don't think he sold it even at that point. So let me see. It was looped. Um and I think they made they sold it for about forty three million dollars. He sold it three years later. So this was he was at the beginning of Loot. He sold it for forty three million and uh And I think and I I I remember reading about the sale. There's some there's some interesting stuff about how he uh Like

They sold it for less than it Then it it was funded for, right? Which is like, you know, considered an L. Uh but he But he sold it in a way that he was able to pocket a few million bucks. He then invested in Airbnb right away. And was the first seed investor in Airbnb. He's got this like you know, he went on kind of an epic run post that.

Um Yeah, he's a crazy guy. I think that's uh that's gotta be the breakout is I agree, maybe Sam Altman this time can beat the Liver King. But it's close. We can all agree. You know Tomato Tomato. The most impressive thing about Liver King is he's not a good looking dude. Like so many of these guys you see and they're influencers and they're like super jacked and handsome. He's not a good looking version of it. He's my example uh when I say I I I told Sahel Bloom this,'Sahil Bloom is like the good looking version of me. I was like, hey, if I can't be good looking, I'm gonna be interesting looking.

And uh that's what the liver king did. He's not good looking, but he decided to be really fucking interesting looking, and that works just as well. Uh I then we'll have to go with Sam Altman gets it this time. Alright, let's do unsexy. business. Um Oh, I didn't even know what you meant by that. Well, you go first.

And unsexy business is like when we do our our blue collie uh blue collar Billy of the week what do we call that shit? The blue collar side hustle. Uh it's like a a business that's not artificial intelligence or flying cars or whatever. It's just like A boring, unsexy business.

How are you confused by this? This is like the premise of our podcast, but podcast? Uh so what's yours? All right, I'm gonna go with Um I could go with uh egg cartons, but I think I've kinda beat that one to death. The eggcartons.com if you haven't Heard me rant about that. That is Honestly, that is the most remarkable one, the woman Sarah Moore.

But If not that, I'm gonna go with one w we haven't talked about that much on here. It's called Aunt Flow. Have you have you heard of this business? No. So what aunt for you. Are you saying the word aunt?

Like ant. I'm saying ant flow. Yeah, ant flow. Okay. Uh you could say it your way, sorry. I just wanted to make sure that the what it's the word that we're using. Okay. Yeah. So ant flow. So Ant Flow is A business that is basically Um

It's Period products. I don't know how I'm supposed to say this, but for uh It's period product. So basically you go to a public restroom inside of any university, a stadium, whatever. In the women's restroom, they uh should have and and now in many states they are mandating that you have to have

You know, tampons, pads, products for Women and so Um normally these were coming in a dusty, raggedy container Uh with like really poor hygiene, you gotta like open the thing and everyone's like trying to use toilet paper to like touch the thing to open it and it's like really gross.

I mean this is like you know, there's like Literally like blood on these products. It's not not something that you want to touch. It's not a sexy experience. And what she did was she brought

A sexy experience to a very unsexy industry. So if you go look at their dispensers They basically made like the Tesla of of dispensers and they install it on the wall. It's got this great brand. She's this great founder. And they are just cleaning up. So they are getting contract with

Universities with what and these are multi year contracts. It's installed on the wall. This thing is never gonna get changed. There's gonna be no churn is my prediction. And it's sort of like they they installed a dispenser and then they you have to buy the products as they as they're used or as they've run out. And um And she calls herself the CEO, the chief estrogen officer. She's just gone all in on like Building this company as a woman led company that's like making this one kind of crappy experience better.

And I asked her, I was like, Did you invest in this? Yeah. I was like, I've never been in A woman's restroom before uh What's the occurrence like Who's the incumbent? Who who are you competing against? And she's like literally it's a guy named b like a brand called Bob and Rick.

And like Bob and Rick's dispensers are like the thing and you know, it's this terrible experience and we're making it better. And so they're at like You know They're definitely sort of like high seven figures, uh uh run rate where they have all these great contracts and

They're you know, they're they're the official dispenser for all the Apple stores. And for like, you know, the whole state of you know, I don't know, Utah or whatever, some state that's like mandated this can happen. And I think once one state does it, all these states are gonna do it. So I think they're very well positioned. And she's a teal fellow. Only twenty five years old. Yeah. Claire Coder, I think her name is.

That's right. That's a good one. Do you have one, Andrew? Yeah, okay so um Hotels are constantly trying to save money.

Especially chains. And I don't know if you've ever gone to like a hotel chain, you'll notice that on the wall if it's like a cheaper one, they'll have like dispensers for shampoo and soap and it's all refillable. Right. So the idea is like you used to go to a hotel And there'd be a bar of soap in a box and you open the bar of soap and you use it to clean your ass and then they have to throw it away.

Right. So um it's a huge waste. They're constantly throwing money away. And so hotels have moved to these refillable things. But one thing that Um they can't do is toilet paper. So when you go and there's a full roll of toilet paper and you use some of it, you know, no one wants to go into a hotel and be like, oh, what the heck? There's like a little bit of toilet paper left. There's obviously someone just here who used it. And so there's someone, I just heard about this business. It hasn't launched yet, but I thought it was fascinating. Basically It's a dispenser for toilet paper. So it's on the it go actually embeds in the wall and you basically pull out almost like you would Kleenex.

Perfectly portioned. Um toilet paper. And I don't think this would necessarily work at like a four seasons or a high end place, but certainly for like a Marriott or a Hilton, I think they could save tons of money. So I thought that was just incredibly boring and Uh quite interesting. That's a great one. There there was one that got big doing that with uh with the shampoo bottles back in the day. They would take the once used shampoo bottle and they would recycle it basically and they they were just like hey

Hotel will pay you nothing for it, but we'll come collect it for you. We'll just take it off your hands. Because you're just This is just trash for you. And they create a view out of that. So have you guys invested in any boring businesses? Like I you know, I gave Nick Huber a little bit of money, I think you did as well. What else what other boring stuff have you guys done?

Uh I'm in in green. So they buy. You know, a lot of kind of burnt boring businesses. I mean like I mean like brick and mortar. D uh development of real estate. Like

Pound hole. I feel like we it's weird because I feel like uh half of what we talk about on this podcast is like These boring brick and mortar businesses and yet we like and we like fetishize them. We don't own that many of them. Like I've started look Yeah, I own a um an air uh air ambulance business. Um I you know, I own a Deli and bakery. bunch of kind of restaurants and that kind of stuff. Wait, what the but I want to get air ambulance. Oh, like helicopter. Air ambulance. So if you're like in Mexico and you need to be brought home and you've you've had a surgery or something, we facilitate that.

Um it's a very good business. But I really want more of those things. Have you guys ever thought about like starting like a fund around that or something?'Cause I feel like I like to visit. I don't want to live there. Well you don't have to operate. You don't have to operate it's just invest in all these cash flowing, boring businesses. Where do you find that? Like like do you go into ebay? Like where do you like where do you find this air ambulance thing? You know what I mean? Yeah, it was like we had to we met someone through a friend of a friend. It's always like someone's dad, right? It's like, Oh, you know, his his dad wants to retire and the kids don't want the business or something like that, or these things happen at the golf course.

Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I should never know. I should be doing that. I I I think I got like really tech brainwashed'cause I basically I started a sushi restaurant, then I moved to Australia and did like a biotech thing, but then I moved to Silicon Valley when I was twenty four and that was like Basically I just got like really Deep in the Silicon Valley. kind of ethos and game, and that was my that's my network and that's my my skills were around internet companies.

And so I think it was kind of the right move to go deep there and try to like win in that world. Um 'Cause I think you don't have to win in all games. So like you know, I have a fund to do startup investing. I if I do good with if I do great with startup investing, I'll do great. I don't really need to also do great with a very different style of investing. So I I think I'm curious about it, but

Um You know, do I wanna like sort of restart the learning curve in a new Wait. One, you know, you guys have this crazy advantage of, you know, I think your your rolling fund does well because of the podcast, right? So if you guys go on and you say, Hey Who has a granddad or a father or a mother who owns this family business that wants to sell?

I feel like you'd get mobbed. There's there's something Sean at SeanPuri.com. All those leads can go to me then if you guys don't want to let's let's see what comes in. I'll I'll share all the interesting I'll filter all the interesting ones uh for you, Andrew. So Sean at SeanPuri.com, email me Your your dad, your granddad, your uncle's business. That we could either take like a minority stake or maybe looking to retire itself. Let's see let's see what we got. Um Okay.

Um Dude, you know I I did it but I I was reading about CoffeeZilla going deep on Andrew Tate's thing. Do you guys know how Andrew Tate makes money? I do, but go ahead and basically.

He has this well, okay. Fine. You got that smug look on your face. It's like a camgirl's business, right? Like it's the definition of a sexy person. No. No, the real way that it makes money is Yeah, he's got this fucking Discord that's fifty dollars a month in order to like join and there's like channels on like copywriting. It's basically just the same shit that you and I, Sean, have done, like screwing around. Except do you know how big it is? It's like No no no no no like a million members. Oh wow. Like we're talking nine figures in revenue.

And Coffee Zilla like did it. He's like look, here's all the members. If you multiply that by fifty and then you could even add a discount to it. It's like we're talking about a h north of a hundred million in revenue and it's just a discord with volunteer with volunteer community like chairs, like community leads. Freakin' crazy. And uh I considered saying him for breakout person, but I you know, he's obviously pretty controversial, so I didn't want to like

I'm The breakout is I've never seen somebody go from nobody To everywhere. All the time. In your face.

The way this guy has. Like he built a brand. And like Seven months or something like that. Like Had you ever heard this word before, Andrew Tate? Last year like that.

I think he was the g most Googled person on earth. This year. That's crazy to me. Is that crazy? And he says it and when he when he does his interviews, he goes He goes Mr Beast has to spend

five million dollars and blow up a f blow up a bus. In order to get ten million views. I said I'm not going to be able to do it. Yeah. And it's true. It's true. The guy's way of speaking and the the things he says Are so compelling and then he built this viral engine where his

All Hustle's University is is basically Yo post Cut. Cut up clips of Tate. Everywhere.

And then go comment and basically in the comments Revere me. And that's how you know and then everybody who signs up for the Professor University, you're gonna make money doing that. Like that's basically the core job is like go promote me. Um It's crazy, man. It is crazy. It's a multi-level marketing scheme. Promoting him. He is the product.

It's wild it. All right. So what's uh do we vote on that one or just move to a different topic? Uh yeah, vote. I forget the I never remember. Let's just move on. Andrew's toilet paper thing, let's say. Okay, let's do best investment. So the best investment you made

And and then we're gonna do worst investment also. So let's start with uh let's start with best investment. Let's go, Sam, what was the best investment you made twenty twenty two? Financially Fucking none. This year was in terms of money, this was uh horrible. Uh the two best uh investments I made were getting fitness coaches, so nutritionist and a and a and like a a lifting coach, a fitness coach. And then also this pod. This is like The first time, Sean, this year where like and this is actually one of my most proud moments where I've been walking around and I get noticed maybe one to three times a day. And this is the first time that I'm like, Oh wow, Sean, the work that you and I have done over four or five hundred episodes, it's like Properly paid off. Yeah. So uh th that's this part is this this year w felt different. Has it ever

Has ever been annoying or weird. Yeah, one time like it's there's been multiple times where Sarah and I are are having like a serious conversation or we're arguing or we're having like a contentious conversation and someone pops up and like you gotta like be like oh hey, yeah, hi, hi and you gotta like turn it on. And that kinda sucks. It's like you know, like when you and your wife get in a fight, but then you gotta get in the car together to go to like the your friend's house for dinner and you gotta put on like the performance of the century. That's kinda like how it feels sometimes. There's a there's a uh what's her name from the Hunger Games, Jennifer Now. Lawrence, she talked about how she can be nice to a thousand people, but if one time she's fighting with her boyfriend and she's kind of a bitch to somebody, they'll go on Reddit and post about it. And she feels like you basically always have to be that person and it's only a matter of time until you snap. Knowing you, it's only a matter of time. One time we were at um You know, we're we're exploring the pregnancy thing this year and one time we were at the baby uh baby doctors and someone in the waiting room said something to me.

And uh I I was a I was I didn't w I was rude. I'll I I'll take your I accept your apology there. I'll do a quick one. Okay, so best financial investment. I invest in this company called Triple Well. That's basically like a uh it's a tool for Shopify store owners, so it helps you Like see your dashboard and

uh make sure your ads are working well and they have like a bunch of different features. Uh, I invest in this thing'cause I I was like, Oh, I I like this. I wanna use this for my e com store, maybe I should just invest in it. Really didn't think this was gonna be I thought if I if you and I did this, by the way, I took my portfolio and I ranked like What do I think are gonna be the breakouts and what do I think are least likely to be the breakouts?'Cause I I suspected I might be surprised.

I was very surprised. I think our seventy five thousand dollar investment in Triple Wheel is currently worth three point three million. And so uh that's been the the biggest breakout from the fund so far and it's Would have been one of the five that I did not guess would be

This explosive rocket ship. Cause like that's just not how I thought about it back then. Like when I saw it. look like this cool analytics tool for ecom, you know, shopping by stores. I don't know how big that is, I don't know how fast it'll grow. It's been insane. That's my financial one. And then I'll also say

Um We did camp MFM and that was an amazing investment. I'll tell you a little little story about it. So We did this camp. Twenty, thirty people, we go to North Carolina. And we fly in this NBA trainer, so we pay for his kind of him and his buddy like their their uh

Flights and hotels or whatever, we rent these Airbnbs. We do the camp, it's great. Everybody chipped in, I think like Uh a thousand bucks or fifteen hundred bucks. Two grand or something. Yeah, I thought I thought that would cover the cost. Didn't quite cover it. I think we're in the whole like fifteen grand or something like that. No problem. A amazing experience just for the basketball, the fun, meeting people, all that good stuff.

But something kind of crazy happened. Um We tweeted out. That we were hanging with Mr Beast or something like that, or that uh that maybe the pod we have we recorded with Mr Beast. And a guy saw that started following Ben Levy.

Ben Levy then checks out this guy's profile. Um Oh, this guy's in the crypts. DMs him. Oh let's talk, you know, maybe they'll advertise with us. We end up getting an acquisition offer from this person. That's not the the deal we ended up going with, but it gave us the leverage in the deal we did end up going with. Uh and like open this door into acquisition and it's all

Like If we hadn't tweeted out that thing That we were doing with Mr. Beast. I don't think this person would have followed and then I don't think that conversation would have happened. And so the world works in these really funny ways. Where this like kind of amazing acquisition we had this year.

I don't know, but it could have just as easily not happened or been for a lot less. Had we not Like just done this totally unrelated thing. That's good. Good things happen to get well.

All right. Andrew, what you got? Best investment. So mine mine's actually a an investment I made a couple of years ago, but it's taken a while to play out and it's very small. Um but I really like this one. So Um you guys know Soph Amaroso. I think she's been on the podcast before. Um I met Sophia like

five or six years ago and she just had the experience with nasty gal and she's like I'm trying to figure out what to do next. I've written this book called Girl Boss. And I've kind of built this community around it, this social following. I'm gonna turn it into a business. And I said, Like look You know, I think you should bootstrap this. But she got mobbed with

uh VCs. And so it was easy money, great valuation, raised like 10 million bucks or something. And because she took VC money, she had this really wonderful Business. Um, but she had to turn into a billion dollar thing. And this is girlfriend. This is Girl Boss. And so she uh you know, raised all this money. And she's like, I'm gonna build basically like LinkedIn slash like a social network for female entrepreneurs.

um to connect them, which we all know is like the world's biggest lift. It's like almost impossible to start a social network. And so she ended up running out of cash, getting exhausted. She sold it to um attention capital. And they basically were just like fuck, we don't know what to do about this. Like we we shouldn't have bought this. And so they reached out to us And we were able to buy it for really, really cheap just'cause the business was totally distressed. Um And so, you know, we looked at it and we're like, okay, like let's just go back to basics. This business has almost two million social followers and email subscribers. Um, and we just did basic stuff. We built a daily email newsletter.

Uh we sold ads, we did social ads, we did affiliate. Uh we've rebooted the podcast, brought on a great CEO. And it's just been this phenomenal base hit. And I just got an update from our CEO. Uh Lulu, who's like freaking amazing. And

Basically now the business is I won't say numbers, but it's making as much as we paid for it every year in profit. I think it's probably five or ten X more valuable than what we paid for it at least. Um so I I just love that kind of stuff where we're able to take a business that shouldn't have raised venture or you know

kind of failed in venture land and actually make it a sustainable business that'll be going for five or ten years at least. That's crazy. Yeah, that's really cool. I like those and I think there's gonna be a bunch of those venture businesses that fail. That's another one. If you're a venture business and you're not gonna be able to raise the next round'cause the whole market has turned or whatever. Uh, it's not over and there's like a way to structure these deals. I think most founders just throw in the towel, don't know what to do with that asset. But uh again.

There's a lot. There's a lot of these businesses where You Let's say a business gets to five or ten million dollars of revenue. And they're burning You know, a million, two million a month'cause they're like venture backed or whatever.

To the founder, you know, they're just like okay, well, this is worth nothing, you know, let's go sell to Facebook and we'll take an Aqua hire and they actually will throw out their existing business. That business has value and people like us and enduring Well buy it and turn it around and make You know, make it into something that'll actually make them proud. Um so yeah, I mean it's it all is not like during did that with up council.

That's what that was the example I give. Totally. Can we um We gotta do worse money payment. My worst one?

Is uh personal real estate. Like I bought real estate over the last two years. And I'm in I'm I've made money on on all of it so far. And like technically speaking, like it's all like gonna beat the stock market. Well, that's easy because the stock market sucks. But like some of my investments, like my Airbnb, it's still like a eight percent return or something like that.

But it's just a fucking headache, dude. I regret buying real estate. I wish I didn't own any real estate and I wish I just invested in other people's funds. Yeah. That's my worst investment. It just it's caused me a disproportional amount of headache. Yeah, that's a good one. Uh all right. Mine is uh Mine's really hard to choose. So many losers to choose from this year. So Uh so people know.

My my portfolio is essentially tech stocks and crypto. Um Tech stocks down somewhere between forty and eighty five percent this year. Crypto down seventy five percent this year, or sometimes a hundred percent in certain cases. Uh, I think Luna has to be my pick'cause it went to zero.

Um And so that was just like, you know, a w a one hundred percent loss that happened in like three days. So Last year, this episode last year Here's here's Sean's company to watch. Terra slash Luna. That was his answer, but company to watch. Give me some entertainment. You watched it go down. And then his prediction was that the V Winkel Vie twins, the the Winkle Voss twins are gonna be richer than Zuckerberg. So that that that is a long term prediction.

But you you bet on Luna. So So you're gonna double down. This is the question, are you gonna double down on your Winklevi prediction? And what's the timeline and what's the punishment if you lose the No. Things I think are going to happen. They're sort of like far fetched predictions. No, I don't I don't want to double down on that.

I would say that's w looking way less likely now than it did Then Um But you know, it's basically like I Facebook's dot got crushed a little bit this year too. I I had calculated that I think I forgot what it is now, but I think Bitcoin would have needed to be at

If Bitcoin got to two million dollars a coin, then the winkle and and Facebook had like, you know uh, you know, kept as value or something like that. Based on how much Bitcoin they owned, I thought okay at that point they'll have surpassed uh Zuck assume but the hedge was always if Zuck owns any bitcoin then they can really never pass him. Um you know if he if he put a minority stake in. But I don't think

I don't I I don't think that's a concern of his. So what's what's yours, Andrew? Um, so mine is really just venture in general. So We I've been doing angel investing for Ten plus years.

And I think I've done well. Um On a cash basis, I've got A lot of money back. But I haven't actually like if I think about it.

Um Even if I've made fifteen to thirty percent a year. I haven't had access to that cash the entire time. Whereas in my main business When I buy a business and I make

twenty or thirty percent return. I'm actually getting that cash and I'm compounding it and then I'm investing it and doing more and more and more And I think psychologically there's a big difference between owning a whole bunch of businesses and doing fifty million dollars in EBITDA versus Uh

owning a bunch of stakes that are illiquid in a bunch of venture businesses where maybe you'll get your money in ten to fifteen years. And so I don't think that it's necessarily saying I don't want to invest in venture go forward. But it's just been

I think it's been a bad if I think of it as if my goal is to maximize my capital and feel rich. It's not the best way to do that. I think that I'm much better off Incubating businesses. And uh buying businesses.'Cause it's a very steady 15 to 30 percent cash return and I feel it. I feel the win.

In a much bigger way. And I think that Like anyone over the last two years, there's some businesses where I look at the valuation I invested and I I knew it at the time. I sucked it up and was like fuck. You know, this is just the world we're in. But there's some businesses with like now maybe like four million dollars of revenue and they raised it like a hundred million dollar valuation.

And I'm just like, okay, that's just gone. Yeah. Well That sucks. Yeah, I don't know what it's up. We all just we all just said horrible things that we did this year. I don't know. Look at you know. You're gonna

You can't have a a non error rate. You know, like You can't be an investor and not have a portfolio of bad investments, of bad decisions, right? Like that is There's not really a thing if you're gonna do this. uh and you're gonna take, you know, the appropriate amount of risk that would get a reward.

you can't have a zero percent error rate. And so I I don't think it's anything to be shy of also You know, I think uh a lot of people Yeah, or have portfolios that are down this year just by the nature of like what's going on in the There's that uh there's that logic brain coming in to save you. Yeah, no I mean that that but that's like a

That's where the logic brain is actually like useful. All right. Like I learned this in poker too. Like you're Oh, I I had pocket aces and I lost I literally know people that will fold pocket Queens or something like that in poker. Why?'Cause they're traumatized from the bad beat they got one time. And they're oh jacks, I hate jacks. Like you what do you mean, you hate pocket jacks? Why? Um like why don't you you know, just'cause you got your money in good, but it turned out not the way you wanted.

Like you know, being able to Assess the decision and not the result is so key. When I'm making fun of myself for for FOMOing into investments, it's because I think my decision was bad. Sure, the result was bad, but my decision was bad.

I have many investments where I think the decision is good and the result might be bad for a period of time. That's okay. Uh, but being able to separate the two is is super important. I can find this client info. Have you heard of HubSpot?

HubSpot is a CRM platform, so it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out-of-sync spreadsheets or dueling databases. HubSpot, grow better. Um Sam, what topic do you want to go to? Which category? Book of the year and favorite podcast or news person newsletter or person you subscribe to. So I wanna like we'll we'll do a few actionable things, like best things that we um Like best bit bits of content. W for favorite person I started favorite person is it's two. You already named one of them, Paul Graham. Dude.

Paul Graham is such a beautiful writer. I started reading all of his work again this year. He's such an awesome writer. Talk he talks about m money, living, happiness, raising a family. He's a really good writer. I love reading him. The other one is Cultural Tutor. Do you guys know who Cultural Tutor is on Twitter? Never heard of it. So it's this person um who the I don't think they're crazy popular. But I'm gonna give you an example of a thing that they tweeted. So it's called it's called the the cultural tutor, a beautiful education. That's their thing.

And so They'll do like posts about like um Uh I'll f I'll I'll let me find a good one. But it it's all about culture. So basically Right now. Uh minimalism is a thing. So if you look at like a lot of new building, minimalism is a thing. And the cultural tutor will do this thread saying

Uh this is actually pretty lame about this architecture. It's pretty boring. Here's the ornate stuff that we used to do, and here's why we used to do it, and here's why we do minimalism now. And it makes you like question uh certain things that we're doing. Or another one could be um Um Here's like a famous uh piece of art. And it was actually revolutionary. Uh and here's or here's why Mona Lisa uh here's why it looks like her eyes are following you. And this doesn't seem interesting now, but it was interesting because back then here's how they used to do things, and here's what was actually revolutionary about that painting. Things like that. I love the cultural tutor. It's a really good follow. That's a good one. Um you said you were gonna combine that with Book of the Year? Book of the year. Blitz.

Have you ever read Blitz, Andrew? It's about the story of drug use during World War Two. Frame breaking book. It's I mean you you've got meth and you've got Hitler. I mean what could go wrong? It's a frame breaking book. Basically the whole hypothesis was that during World War Two, you know how like they gave soldiers like pieces of chocolate and cigarettes to keep them happy? Well, in in Nazi Germany era, they gave them meth. And one of the one of the reasons it says Hitler was being crazy and making a lot of the decisions that he did, not only was he like a a hateful, crazy person, but they're saying it was also because he was on met the whole time and he was going nutty. And one of the reasons why he killed himself was he basically ran out of drugs in the last two weeks in his bunker. What do you got there, Sean? Is that Blitz right there? No, this is it's not Blitz. I'm looking at uh the book I think I'm gonna choose. But Andrew, go go next.

So my favorite podcast, I'm absolutely obsessed with founders, which is by David Senera. And what he basically does is he reads business biographies. Um, and then he summarizes them really, really well. So there's a lot of I've read a lot of business biographies. I really enjoy them, but there's a lot of them where I'm like, I just I'm not gonna spend fifteen hours of my life learning about JFK's dad, right? There's this there's there's always books on my bookshelf that taunt me. And so I read that book he's a patriarch you should read it. It's really it's fat it's I read about a quarter of it. It was great.

But but um he he'll do like the one one and a half hour summary. And so A, it's a great way to remind yourself. Like I I read Titan a couple of years ago about John D. Rockefeller. And I re-listened to it. It reminded me of a lot of the lessons. And then B, it'll actually tell me, do I want to read this book? Is this person actually interesting? Or just give me a cursory understanding of that person. Um, so I absolutely love that one. Um in terms of books

Um The one that I loved over the last year. is the operator, which is about David Geffen. The guy is a absolute lunatic. It's fascinating. Like the picture of him. Um, you know, why is he the way he is? Deep dive on his childhood. David Geffen started Gap Gep

He started Deaf and Records. I mean this guy this guy was like um he's touched so many industries, you know, huge musicians, but he's a movie guy too at this point. Like Yeah, I mean yeah, fascinating career, but also an incredible investor. Um and capital allocator and stuff. But What a fascinating book. And it's one of those ones where

It's very unflattering. But it's incredible. Okay, that's it's worth like five or ten billion dollars at this point. I mean he's like a big deal. Alright, I'll do um book. I'm gonna have

I got two two picks that I thought were good. Uh I only read probably three or four books this year, but Uh this one. So Think on These Things by Krishna Murti. That's like a uh Life philosophy book.

That uh Bro I love you said that was your favorite book one time and I asked you how far into the book you've read and you said you're on the first three pages. Yeah, actually uh I'm only about thirty pages in now. Uh so I've gone from three to thirty in a year. I think this might have been my pick last year, too. Um it's got like uh let me see how far it's gonna be a little bit more. Dude, it's not fifty pages. Um so I'm a hundred and ten pages in and uh It's a it's a it's an amazing book.

The second one is uh Andrew, you probably read this, Richer, wiser, happier. Mm. It's a great book for anybody who likes investing. Um And basically yeah. It's a great book for anybody who likes investing. I think it's a it's a It's a fun read. So uh those are my two favorite books that I read this year.

And then Podcast, newsletter, or person, I'm gonna give Two kind of shout outs. A person one that's uh a little under the radar. is called Ten K Diver. Do you follow this guy on Twitter?

So K Diver the bio just uh. It's it's the literally it's the number ten then K diver. Uh it says I help people understand The fundamentals of finance and investing.

And um I think it's called ten K Diver'cause it's like the form ten K, like the the f the That's like the the name of the form or whatever. So uh he just gives really great threads about like Very basic Fundamentals of finance.

And I find myself reading these and thinking, Oh, surely I know. you know, about whatever topic it is. Certainly I know about stock based compensation. Certainly I know you know whatever cash flow And then you read it and you're like, I always learn something from it. And I think he's a great writer, he's very clear, he's very helpful. Um I just think it's a great Great one to follow. It's like, you know

There's a lot of junk food on Twitter. And I would say that 10K diver is not junk food. I even took his like Maven course. Um But did you really? Yeah, I I only attended like half of the sessions just because like, you know, it's hard to make that much time. Um

Super interesting dude. And uh and I you know, I I I don't know, the course wasn't like mind breaking for me, but Um I don't know. It's it's all good stuff. It's all good stuff. And so I really I really liked uh I really like the way this guy thinks. Um okay, so that's the the person one.

And Okay, book. So I did book. All right, we're good. We're good on those. We did we all all three did ours? Yeah. All right, cool. Yeah. What uh what topic you want to do next? Wild predictions? Okay.

What you got? Mine's easy. I think you want me to read your wild prediction from last year, should I read our predictions? Yeah. All right. Our predictions from last year, Sam's was Um

San Francisco's gonna be cool again, I think. San Francisco will be cool again. You think you hit that or no? No, but I don't think I'm s I I I I'm I think I'm not off by prediction, but I'm but uh yeah, I'm I'm a little early. It it's gonna come back, man. San Francis I went back there, it is awesome. San Francisco is awesome. Yeah, you said something about the YouTuber Meet Kevin and that uh He will be like his company's gonna break out or something like that. I don't know what that prediction was. Oh yeah, I totally m was wrong. Uh home diagnostics, you said was the industry to watch. Yeah, nothing happened there. And then you said overrated the uh creator economy slash web three.

Mailed it. Yeah, you nailed that one. Andrew, your predictions were that high inf high salary inflation is not here to stay. Companies are gonna outsource and off shore um talent. What do you think about that one?

I still think it's right. I think that it just took I think we're just seeing it now, basically, as these tech layoffs happen, I think they're gonna go global. Right. Um and then you said overrated, you said NFTs. Um I think we I think we structured this differently last time. We did like Companies to watch, overrated thing to watch. I said overrated was spacks. I think that was right.

Um I said company to watch Terra Luna, that was way wrong. And my crazy prediction was that the book of I will end up z richer than Zuck, which is you know early, like we already talked about. Okay. So This year, what do you got for a prediction or predictions for twenty twenty three? So we structured it differently, but let me say mine mine two,'cause they're fast. One, Elon Musk either dies Or he's or he gets canceled. Or he gets canceled in an incredibly like serious way. And Tesla stock completely tanks.

The second thing is so open I open AI. Um, something involving regulation's gonna happen. Because like there's already been little bits of pieces, like if you Google or if you use open AI and you ask them about coal, they say like, you know, we think that uh gl uh climate change is wrong, yada, yada, yada. Or if you ask them about uh Uh race. Um they say something like, you know, race is a social and cultural construct and the you we don't we don't want to give it a our opinion on this. Like they kinda like but they actually do insert their opinion

Um, and I think that there's gonna be some weird shit going on where like right now, like like for example, they'll like say like, hey, we'll give you a hundred thousand dollars for ten percent of your company if you build on top of our platform and there should be all these new tools and but it's all gonna be underlined with this like potential massive bias that open AI has. And I think there's gotta be some type of regulation around it. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Andrew, what you got? Predictions.

And by the way, these are supposed to be we said we said wild predictions. So again, we're not saying We're sure these are gonna happen. These are like sort of interesting predictions. Yeah, so remember like five years ago, everyone was saying Apple doesn't innovate anymore, they can't do AI. And what was happening is that Google

at least historically has innovated in public. So they're constantly constantly releasing new features and showing off these kind of half baked ideas. that are in their R and D labs, whereas Apple has always been very opaque. They'll work on something for seven years, they won't share it, and then all of a sudden they'll release it. And I think that same thing is happening with GPT three and AI. I do believe that While right now I can say I'm using GPT three instead of Google, I think Google has probably been working on something similar.

For years and years and years, and is probably very far ahead. Um maybe not ahead of GPT three necessarily, but that they have their own offering. Um and so I just think it's a uh those there there's gonna be a lot of Uh a lot of other players in that space coming out over the next probably three to six months. Um and that it will be there's gonna be an ecosystem of offerings similar to AWS and Azure and Google Cloud. I think it'll be the same thing with GPT three, Google, uh maybe Microsoft. I don't know who else.

Well Um Sam, I agree with your Elon one. That's one of my predictions. I think he he gets canceled in a big way. Or one of his companies. I think that is a uh a good wild prediction.

Um But I'm actually not gonna predict. Yeah, he he he he's gonna get me to I think. Yeah, I feel he already has and somehow. Didn't he already? I mean he already did. I mean Yeah. I think he's uncancelable kind of given all the stuff. I think people think that and then it's gonna get happening. I think he's gonna can't they're gonna cancel the uncancelable. Um

But I'm not really gonna predict anything that's like The macro,'cause A, who the hell knows? And B, who the hell cares? I'm actually gonna take a page out of Uh out of the book of uh Of something we respect highly here on MFM.

Calling your own shot. So my predictions are about myself. So here's my here's my predictions about about myself. Uh I predict that this is the year. Then I get ripped.

Uh I predict that I turn the corner. And the And then not like oh I get back in shape. No. You boys never been. In this kind of shape. So I I'm gonna get I'm gonna get ripped for the first time.

And uh I also believe that I'm gonna start a company that is um special. I don't I don't wanna put a dollar amount'cause it these special things take time. So it's not gonna happen in one year. But I'm gonna do I'm gonna start the thing. That will be my kind of like um

The thing I'm known for for a very long time. The legacy thing or the thing that you know builds the the the big the big wealth, the big empire. I think it's gonna happen this year. So those are my predictions. Uh For myself for twenty twenty three.

Well, I'm happy you called your shot. I actually agree with you. I think you're gonna do that too. I think you're you're more than likely gonna create that company than you are get ripped. But uh You're just giving me that fuel. Thank you for the fuel. Are you willing to take drugs to get ripped? No. I'm all natty. Uh

Okay. Well then yeah, then I think that you're well, dude, getting ripped is hard, man. I'm I'm pretty ripped right now and everyone keeps asking me what I did. And you know what I did? I just didn't eat. And It's really, really a pain in the butt. I don't really like doing it. And so I don't know, like

I don't think you need to be that ripped. What's your definition of ripped, I guess? Visible abs. Yeah, you gotta get to what is it, twelve percent body fat. Twelve percent's not. You can live a good life and be at twelve percent.

But below ten where I am trying to get it it it sucks. I'm just hungry and cold. Yeah, I'm not gonna do that. But Uh it'll be it'll be visible. Let's do another one. Uh coolest moment of the year for you.

What was the coolest moment of the year? Uh Personally, if you had. Dude, mine is like it kinda felt like we crossed a chasm for like Kinda like this podcast being well known. And like that's a little I didn't want to do a selfish one. Honestly I almost said you selling

Yeah. Uh I almost I wanted to say you selling the milk road. I actually did think that was cool. Um uh the the seeing you do that, I got a lot of joy out of and a lot of like, even though I wasn't involved, it was like I felt a sense of pride of like we came together. So you know. You were involved. Yeah, so F feel free to send me some money. But uh Uh No, I think like us getting popular this year, like it it really felt like this is the first time it happened.

I agree. Uh it something has changed. Uh Andrew, what about you? Coolest moment of the year for you. So I've talked about this before, but I feel like what I actually if I really I'm honest, what I like about business, aside from making money and not making my life easier, is meeting interesting people. And uh You know, I got I got to know uh Andrew Huberman this year and we ended up partnering. So basically like I've got a foundation, I've been giving a bunch of money away to science.

And so I met Huberman maybe a year or two ago. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Just science. But but um I met Huberman like a year or two ago and basically we did this thing where When people subscribe to his premium podcast, a bunch of the money goes to um basically funding science and research that he wants to fund. And I basically said, look, I'll double, I'll double every single dollar that you donate. And so we've got this partnership. And I just love that kind of stuff where I can work with someone who I respect and do something that I think is good. That's a that's a cool moment. You you've become a benefactor. What what's the what do you mean? Like a patron of science? You get to use one of these words that's like from the eighteen hundreds when you do things like that.

Yeah, it feels good. It's fun. Dude, it and plus you have an excuse now to hang out with the dreamiest guy on earth, Andrew Huberman. Yeah, totally. Sam jealous anytime you want. Um For sure. My coolest moment of the year was You were there for this, Sam. When

We were at Camp M FM. And we got to go do a tour of uh of Duke's uh basketball stadium. And we're in there. And then we uh were sitting down gave they gave us the talk. It was an R it was a good experience at that point, but we we had a

There's a moment that made it a good experience to a m like a keystone memory, which was When I bet Mr Beast. Ten thousand dollars that I could hit a Uh shot from half court. And I hit it.

And the whole thing On number on number five or something. Yeah, like the third attempt hit I was like I'll be I'll again hit this before you. The third attempt I hit it. Doug Carbry, it was it was an amazing, fun moment. It made that Yeah. trip a little bit more more special and memorable. Did he ever pay you? This is where it comes this is where it gets interesting. It's also actually my biggest L of the year. Because He didn't pay me.

And then I had to follow up. And I followed up two times. Three times. And now I'm basically begging for the money for the third time you go from like First time you kinda crack it you you're busting balls a little bit, like hey bitch, baby

And then the second time you're like, Hey man, uh Didn't pay. By the time it's the third one now, this awesome dope moment. Has turned into an L. Because now I'm having to go. Yeah, I think I think I think you need to take him to small things. Exactly. That's how I've I'm doing that via iMessage and I was like

We have it on video. This is we have the bet on we we dude, we have the bet on video. I know, I know. And so this this this baller moment of confidence of being like hey bet you ten grand I can hit the shot and then actually Hitting it? Uh with you know e everybody there in the center of you know Cameron Cameron Stadium, Cameron Indore Stadium. Turned into a bit of a a small boy moment of being like hey hey um

Did you have a chance to Hey just I know you're busy. Just uh I think you can. I s I'll send the details again. Maybe maybe it's on my end. Dude, is he lying about every other uh donation he's ever done? Coffeezilla, get on it. Thousands of victims like me.

Ha ha ha. That's crazy. I can't believe he didn't pay you. He doesn't seem like someone who would do it. He blamed his assistant. He's like, Oh fuck, sorry, my assistant did I mean I'm gonna uh uh oh I'm gonna have to yell at him. Yeah, okay. Let's do um Let's do the craziest, most delusional person of the year that we met. This one's for for us, it's probably easy. It's Billy McFarlane.

Did you hear that you hear that interview, Sean or uh Andrew? No. I did I didn't hear it. I don't like when you guys interview people like that,'cause I I know I know it's like interesting and stuff, but I feel like If you If only even if only five percent of people hear that and go, hey, he actually sounds like a good guy. I just think like

He's gonna go and fuck more people over. I don't know. What do you guys think? I I didn't and I took Andrew punishes and they do those bad things. He goes and listens to all in instead. He doesn't listen to the episode, he goes on strike. Sean wholeheartedly disagrees with you, I think. Yeah, I totally disagree. I think uh you know This podcast is our vehicle to have conversations with interesting people. And everybody's an adult. They should judge for themselves whether they think this person's full of shit or deserves a second chance or whatever. On the pot itself, he told us what he was doing. And literally

With a one pause I just go. That's a horrible idea. And I I actually felt bad that I was that brutal about it. Uh But it really was, I thought, a horrible idea and I felt the need to just like say it. So um I think it's one thing if you invite them on and they just like

Like I see this sometimes. People just like suck up to people. And the other is to be like, dude, what the hell were you thinking? Or they're like, Oh, you know, I just thought this. Like are you serious? Like Really? You d like are you gonna Look at me with a straight face and say

That this was all just an honest mistake, like you had to have known, right? So I think As long as you Are real with your questions. Uh, then it's all good. But that's my you know. My opinion. I just think I just think it's like um

It's giving airtime to Bad, right? Like I would say Billy McFarlane is probably a psychopath. But the Bernie May documentary on Netflix coming out in three days. Are you gonna watch that? Bernie Madoff is dead. So what there's been a If I if you had if you had Bernie Madoff on your podcast and you were like

Hey, so like what happened? Tell us your story. And even if you kinda call him out, if he's like a belief like a a real psychopath is like pretty charming and like believable. And you listen to them and there's gonna be A percentage of people that hear that. And the difference with Madoff is he's in jail. Right. The f then

Like Billy McFarlane, I think I have no idea. You know He he served his time, sure. But like he's probably gonna go on and do more sketchy shit or I don't know, any of these people who have a pattern of behavior of doing psychopathic, fraudulent stuff. I just don't think they should get any airtime, frankly. Yeah, okay, fair enough. I think there's a lot of people who would agree with you. Uh I don't personally, but M most most probably do, but I actually uh I'm I'm partially on Sean's side. I am mostly on Sean's side, but I I do feel guilt sometimes. Like there's another person who Sean wants to have on that I think

There's not a chance we should. Uh but uh But so imagine here's here's how I would tell you to think about this. Like Imagine that you so you know, Sam, you've told me stories of guys who I remember you told me there's some advertiser who is fucking you over and not paying you And you felt very cheated.

And Sean, I mean that guy that you sued who you felt like was chiseling you, the landlord or whatever. Now let's say I have a podcast and I say, Well, there's two sides to every story. And he's fascinating. I'm gonna go have that guy on my podcast. As the victim, you'd be like What the fuck. I would say ask that question. As long as you actually ask the questions and you uh you're not just giving them a like

A chance to Lie or say BS in a way that's like It's obviously BS, but you let them skate on it. Um like that's what happened with like the Sam Bakement Freeze. Yeah, but look at look at Ty Lopez. Look at Ty Lopez. Ty Lopez got legitimized by being on MFM. A lot of people heard him and went, you know what? He's not a bad guy. And you know, Sam kind of likes him and whatever. And like what has he been doing over the last year. Wait, wait, wait, what did I do? I didn't do anything hard to do. You said you're you were like, Yeah, I met him. I met him in a hotel and he was actually a really nice guy, right? And it's like Of course he is. He's a psycho and he's charming. I like everyone.

I just respect the audience. And meaning I believe that it you should have the opportunity to hear it. And make your own decision. I don't pretend that I'm your parent and I'm legitimizing them or I'm telling you they're good or bad or whatever. I'm just

Letting you see them. And if you see them and you decide that they're great, great. If you decide that we didn't ask tough questions and you can't make a decision, but Andrew You promote uh you promote Bill Ackman. Sure. Like I absolutely do. He's my business partner. And I'm not saying I actually don't know all the detail. How could you put him in the same category?

Well, a a lot of I'm not saying I do, but a lot of people do, don't they, Andrew? Like that's objective. You can actually and you can at least say that a like a lot of people do think that he's uh What did Bill Ackman do that's on on considered controversial? Yeah, what did he do exactly that would be like fraudulent or something like that? I mean, Bill has made some investments that have turned out badly, but he's never I don't think he's predatory in any way. I think Bill has the biggest criticism I've seen that person, you know, legitimate is when he went on. What's the MLM and he was like I uh the market whole market's cr he basically was like Hell is coming, blah blah blah, but didn't disclose that he had basically a giant short position. Yeah. Maybe caused a panic, maybe didn't.

No, but he he had already if you actually look, he he wrote a letter about this, he'd already sold almost his entire position. He had like one or two percent left. And I spoke to Bill. Two weeks before that and he was freaking the fuck out. Like similar to that C A B Call of the freaking out of the benefit greatly if people started selling. Right. He p he but he had a giant shortly made a bunch of money. He wasn't No, no, no, no. That I think it's a big misunderstanding. If you actually look at the timeline, he'd already sold out of that position when he went on CNBC. What about um Herbalife? He was called Herbalife. I mean Urb Erbalife, he went out and he said this is a multi-level marketing scheme.

And what ended up happening is the FTC investigated it and they gave them a two hundred million dollar fine and they got up to the point of saying Hey. Is this an ML they settled with them for like two hundred million? It was the largest uh FTC fine ever. And herbalife. The FTC commissioner was asked.

Is Herbalife a multi level marketing pyramid scheme and she said It's not Not one, right? Because she was legally bound by not calling it that. So basically Bill was right. And that was an instance where he lost a shitload of money. Trying to fight a bad guy.

Did that really happen? I looked at it. By the way, I I'm not saying Bill Ackman sucks. I think I'm I'm I like Bill Ackman. But you're not you know him. No, that's not that's not what I'm implying. I'm I'm saying that some people maybe think that he's full of it, right? I I think yes, absolutely. There's people that are critical. I think there's a great quote on this. The tallest The tallest blade of grass is the first to get cut. And I think Bill is very loud. And he is always confident and he's usually right, but not always. And so someone like that I think when they're not right, everyone loves to shittle over them. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not saying that's the one. I don't think he's in the category where he's got like, you know

Th I don't know of any accusations about stuff like that. I think some people are just like He's not as good he loses money, he's not as good of an investor as he says or his his fame would lead you to believe that's a criticism, but that's like any that's like Merci. Criticising someone's skill LeBron James is not as good as Michael Jordan or whatever, right? Like

That's different than saying somebody is, you know, a lot of it. I think it's like it's like fixating on Warren Buffett, buying Dexter Shoe. And it not working out and then saying or you know, Warren Buffett did some deals in his early career where he bought a business and he ended up having to lay a lot of people off, right? Now you could build a narrative that Well, Warren Bu everyone says Warren Buffett's so great, but what about this and what about this? But if you look at it and there's a hundred investments and ten of them didn't go well. You know, you can fixate on the ten, but you can look at the long term performance. Bill's compounded it.

twenty plus percent, I think twenty five percent or something crazy. Uh, maybe not quite that, but something exceptional. So again, like He's my business partner, obviously I'll defend him. I'm not uh by the way. But yeah I wanna I don't think he's anywhere near those guys. I'm not saying crazy. I'm not saying I think he sucks. I actually like him a lot. From what I read about him.

I I'm just saying my point being is a lot of people a lot of g awesome people have haters and just because you have a lot of haters doesn't necessarily mean I don't think you should we shouldn't have you on. That's my whole point. But imagine okay you guys have a newspaper. Right, effectively you guys own the New York Times of tech startup bros, right? Like that that's what that's what MFM is. You guys have this huge audience. Would it be ethical for the editor of editor of the New York Times to put an op-ed from Bernie Madoff on the front cover? It's an interview. It's it's a big big difference. Again, I hear I totally I totally agree. I hear you guys. I know you want to like stir the pot and it's good

Good listening. I just For me, like I just hate when these weasels get air talking. Okay, let's get back then. Yeah, let's let's move on. All right, Andrew. Who's the most delusional person you met this year? So okay, so it's a delusional person who I think is amazing. Um you guys probably will say the same person. It's Brian Johnson.

Uh I met Brian. Almost a year ago, and I remember sitting down with him and looking just looking at him, he's like a translucent glowing twilight vampire. Like he just looks if you cut his arm off, there's circuits under there. I d I and he's so incredibly well spoken and like like you I Sam, I think you said he's like the The Elon, but like behind the scenes and quiet, right? So I think he's amazing. Uh I think he's like He's like dedicating his life to basically being a test, uh, you know, a test case for the rest of us. So I really admire him. Uh and I think he's really.

She almost looked a little ill, like he was so skinny. Yeah. He was so pale that there was no pigment in his skin. Like literally like literally looked like Um both that movie Uh With the fuck, what is it?

Uh The the robot guy. Alien. Alien with the robot guy. Like just totally pale humanoid. That's uh that's my pick too, uh Brian Johnson for the for the exact same reason. So we'll we'll we'll we'll move to the next one. Uh he was he was you're right. Crazy and delusional.

In the best way possible. Um yeah, as a comp I meant mean that as a compliment. Um Okay, did you guys have another category that you really like your answer for? Does anybody like think they got something good? Cause we can just go to those. The the relationship hacks and the um relationship hack.

What you got? So Um, they always say like the best first date. Is an adrenaline kind of event, right? So like you want to go on a hike.

You wanna get your heart pounding. Maybe you go and do like a rope, you know, those uh what are they called? The like rope swings through the forest, whatever, like something that gets your heart pounding because When someone associates you with a peak experience, like a physical feeling of peak experience, that's very positive and it bonds you. And the same thing is true with alcohol. So I I kinda stopped drinking Um Maybe like seven or eight years ago.

And I've kind of mourned the ability to go and, you know, down a pint with someone because They always end up telling you everything. They tell you about their business and the problems they're having and you know what's going on with their wife. It's like hanging out once drunk is like hanging out ten times sober. And so what I've been doing is I've bring been Inviting people that I would otherwise have like a meeting with.

Over to my house. And we'll do a really long sauna and a cold plunge. And I've been finding like I just feel so incredibly bonded to people because I'm having like my my body is pumped full of all these endogenous drugs. Uh, and it's been really good. It's been kinda like drinking with someone. Dude, can I tell you what mine was? Here's I'm gonna read let me word read read it word for word. Invite people Have'em come over for dinner and cook for them and we take ice baths together. Ha ha ha.

After dinner? Before dinner? What are you doing? Before you tell them like the trunks or how how do you prepare you just spring on them, or or sometimes sometimes I just spring it on them and I have a towel already and I have shorts and and it's so funny. That that's exactly what mine is. Another relationship ha hack that I have is I bring my wife to almost everything. So so it feels like a family gathering and also she's like s like hot and like well like well read and like can have a discussion. So it automatically makes me seem better. Oh, you're the guy with the hot look smart wife? Oh, yeah.

And then uh Uh yeah, so Andrew, we I had the same thing. Another thing that I that I typically don't do and I and I think this is the worst way to hang out is while exercising. I hate when people say, Let's go get a workout together. I'm like I don't want to. I never want to do that ever. I will never do a work out and hang out. Yeah, I want silence. Same. I'm the opposite. I love love a workout together. That's a great that's a great idea. I've had multiple pe listeners from the pod be like, Hey, I'm in town.

uh winter workout. Like I'll just come swing by and we'll just do it together. And I was like, Oh, that's perfect. I don't want to separately beat you. And uh I'll learn so much about you just seeing how you work out. That this is uh like how you deal with like you know, adversity, like, you know, how you're How are you as a hang, you know? Do you work out? Like all these things. It's a it's a great tell.

Alright, I got Two little hacks. The first is a principle that I've had for a long time. It's called don't attend the party, host the party. This is my um I have a rule. I don't

attend other people's events typically. Unless it's a real good friend who really wants me to. But I will host. So um I think hosting is it is

Let's say Five times the work? But I think it's five hundred times the payoff. uh when you actually host the par the the event. So We uh Camp M FM is a perfect example of this.

Uh and when you host it. Um the other the other hack in this is Make it epic because it's going to be more fun for you to it's like All the logistical work is kinda the same. But if you just use your creativity to make it more interesting.

People will come and they'll have like a whole memory to r you know, a whole experience uh with you. So with Camp M F M The way we did it, where we flew to this place, we had the basketball trainer, Mr. Beast, and Hassan Danaj were there, like interesting people were there. We all stayed in, you know, an Airbnb, a giant house together. Like that was Mm. Instead of just doing a networking event.

We made it fun. And we made it different. And I think and you get a bunch of benefits of being the one who hosted it. So that's the first one. The second one I would say the actual relationship act with with my wife is So I'm a pretty chill dude, but I do I do have one Achilles heel, which is I'm very, very, very impatient.

And what that means is like, you know, my wife is like slow to leave the house, trying to go somewhere. It's like, Oh, dude, why did this take so I feel like I've wasted half my life. Waiting to leave the house. Um Yeah, you know, just with kids it gets like really slow. So I've always had this impatience thing and I've tried to be like, All right, I'm gonna be more patient, I'm gonna be more patient.

And I realized But that was actually a fool's errand. That the way to be more patient. For me. is to get in a fight in the morning.

And what I started doing was I hired this MMA trainer and I would wake up early, I do my workout in the morning and I would spar. And what I found was that if I spar in the morning I've gotten a really hard, strenuous, like endorphin kick, you know, done. The rest of the day I'm just sort of like Yeah, it's whatever. Like I I can wait. Yeah, oh you're gonna take take an extra ten minutes.

Uh you wanna change your shirt,'cause maybe this one's a little maybe it's a little too hot as it Go ahead. Go change your shirt. Yeah, no problem. I'll be here at the front door. Chilling. And I have become such a more patient person.

Just by doing a sparring session in the morning. It's a pretty extreme step to take. But it is so far the only thing that has gotten me to change this like really terrible personality trait. After so long. Nothing like getting punched in the face. I was I I think I told you that.

You did tell me that. And I the other experience I had like this was I even skydiving once in the morning and the rest of the day, you couldn't stress me out if you tried. I was im I was uh completely immune to stress. And so I think there's something to this like having a very exhilarating or adrenaline kick in the morning. It just makes the rest of the day completely non stressful.

That doesn't mean you don't do anything, it just means you don't stress while you do it. We were talking about the cold plunges and um I was just listening to a Huberman lab and he was talking about this exact thing. So when you're in cold, it obviously stresses your body. You get a huge dopamine spike and you get uh adrenaline or epinephrine, all that kind of stuff. And he was saying that if you do stressful things while you're in the cold plunge, it adapts you to dealing with stress better. So you should definitely get a cold plunge and then argue with your wife while you're in it or something.

Sounds smart. Uh so that's Best Relations Pack. What's the what was the other one you said? Uh oh favorite tool or product. Under what it's favorite? uh tool or product under a thousand dollars. What you guys got? So

I always have this problem. Um I'll travel to a city. And I'll try and think of, you know, I'll be like, okay, I'm going to New York on this day. Who do I know in New York? And it'll be whoever's top of mind, whoever I've just been texting with or something. And I'll go and I'll have a couple of meetings and then I'll leave.

And then I'll remember, you know, it's like when you leave the grocery store and you realize there's like three or four important things you forgot. I always realize, oh shit, I forgot to meet all these people. I really wanted to see. And so um I've tried a couple of different tools for this, but I found one I really liked. It's this one called Clay. It's a personal CRM, which we all hate. I know it's like a horrible business. But um they do a really good job of basically tapping into your Twitter, your LinkedIn, your iMessage, all the pla your email, all the places where you contact people and building.earth. Clay. Yeah. And so basically it's a huge database of all the people you know. And so what I do now is I go in clay and I'll just be like I'll type in New York.

And it'll show me everyone in New York. And then I don't miss people. Uh and that's been huge. This is a beautiful website. Yeah, I tried it. I turn right away because I was just like uh same problem with all CRMs for me where Like you get out what you put in and I'm just not willing to put it Put in enough.

But there's no the I don't use it. Like I don't use I don't update it. It's just when I go traveling. It's just a database of people I know and where they live. Can I uh Mine is my body tutor. And I don't know if Sean that if that's yours as well, but have you heard about my body tutor, Andrew? No. Very simple.

All right. Here's what it is. I spent six hundred dollars a month. And every day. My coach, her name's Heather.

Calls me and says What are you gonna eat today? And I tell her and she says, Yesterday, according to your My Fitness pal, you ate this, this, and this. This thing was bad. How'd that make you feel? And I say, I feel horrible. I'm not gonna do it again today. And she just shames me. Or educates me on why I made a good or bad decision. And we like work backwards from whichever goal I want. It's it's a five minute phone call.

Uh that's been the bit the best tool I've ever used. That's a good one. That's all it is. So I'm a pretty disorganized guy. So my favorite tools or products have been the one that helped me get organized. And I got two that kind of saved my ass. This year. Um

I don't know Sam, uh did you when you were at the hustle, did you ever have like a bookkeeper? Yes. And Do you remember Life Before Bookkeeper and a Life After Bookkeeper? Before it's stressful.

And Like Now I know that like I didn't know what the difference between revenue and cash flow was and I didn't like understand like that like you take expenses and you like um amortize them. I didn't understand all of that stuff, so it was as if I was driving at nighttime without headlights on. Perfect way to describe it. That's how I've been my whole life. And

I would always wonder Man, how do these other people have their shit together? How is it you know, tax season comes around, I I'm just like scrambling And it's like the worst version of cramming for a test. And so this year I basically Totally revamp my

financial like hygiene game. With A bookkeeper and a tax person that I love. And I'm gonna shout them both out because they're amazing. Uh they were they were so amazing. I did invest in both of the companies because I was like, I have to Like you know, the I I believe in this, uh, you know, because they save my ass. So one is called kick.

So I think it's kick duck. How is the URL? And it's basically if you go to the website, I like their tag. It says self driving bookkeeping. So basically what they do is they just say, Connect your bank credit cards and it's like everything. It's like your Amazon. You just click connect, connect, connect, connect, connect. Boom, it's all your books. And then they have bookkeeper and she calls me.

And she's like Here's how you're doing. Like here's how you're pacing. Here's what we you know, here's some things you should be thinking about. Here's how we can save you money. Um yeah, blah blah blah.

Not like spend less, but more like tax wise. Like here's some things that you could do. And so Bookkeeping was the first one. Uh and then all my books are together. It's super cheap. It's like I don't know, it's like Ninety nine dollars or hundred dollars, hundred ninety nine dollars a month or something like that. It's like

If anybody if you're a cre like the one big thing is They they do this for like kind of like small b small businesses, like sort of like L C types, S Corps. Or um creators. So like if you're a YouTuber or Twitch creator or podcaster. Uh

Most of them have don't treat their creator business like a business. And you totally should. It is a business. And I think also the law has now changed. So starting next year I think they have to do like the quarterly estimated taxes and things like that. Like Dude, ninety nine percent of the creators have no idea what this stuff is or how to do it. And so um

So I love this thing. This has been like kind of uh a game changer for me out of having my My PL, my cash flow, my balance sheet, all of it just like very clean. And then Then that gets handed to the other service, GELT. And so what Gilt does is kind of amazing. I don't know how much of this I'm I'm supposed to say or allow to say it. I don't even think they want me shouting it out because it's like list only. I just signed up

I just signed up with Gell. Uh are you on the wait list or are you you have to start using it? I DM'd him and I have a call set up with the guy Tal is this incredible guy. He's an entrepreneur So but for the best thing. So I've I've met many I've had many like kind of accountants and tax strategy people And I literally walked in and I felt like I was walking into a meeting like

You know, i with CIA or something like that, with IRS. It's like And and and Nick Huber said this right, he goes, Yeah, dude, ninety five percent of accountants and tax strategy people They're like they act like government agents. And he's like, You can't even he's like, You're just asking questions of like how should I structure this differently? In order to The they won't.

Well it depends. First of all, so they're not Even giving you ideas. It's like if you have the idea, they can say yes or no. But it's like, dude, where am I supposed to come up with all these ideas from? Uh so like they don't give you ideas, first of all. And secondly They're like

Well, did you spend more than twenty two hours doing this? It's like, dude, I don't know. I didn't I wasn't keeping track of that, but like If I say yes, what happens? If I say no, what happens? I need to understand like Can you just disarm this. It's not even like help me cheat. It's like literally just Don't make this stressful.

Has been my my big problem with this. And so Geld is kind of amazing because Tal's an a he's a founder, he's an entrepreneur, he sold his last company. And he's like, dude, I just like he's like personally, I just hated taxes. And so I decided to create like the tax firm I wish existed. And they're amazing. So the same thing. They take your books and then what they do is they're more like Yo.

Have you thought about structuring your corporations in this way? Because then you can get the advantage of QSPS while still maintaining this advantage. And like They they do everything clean, they do everything by the book, but they are They feel more like your friend helping you do this than the other way. And so these guys probably save me I don't know, m

I don't know how much it's me, but it's I wouldn't be surprised if it was seven figures of what I've saved using this thing. Um And it's the first time I've been not stressed. On the subject of

Fin like bookkeeping and taxes. And so like That has been like a a very nice feeling for me to have. versus like this scramble and always feeling like There was some adult class that I missed. I slept through.

And now here's the test. Like that's how that's how taxes always felt for me. It was I slept through the class And everybody else took it, everybody else is prepared and I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. And now finally I feel like okay, I I have my notes to take this test. Dude, I feel like it's one of the one of those things that's shocking how many business people just don't know how to read a balance sheet and a P and L and cash flow statement. And it's If you want to learn. Khan Academy has an amazing introductory course. Takes about an hour.

And you'll learn everything you need to know. Of new eighteen thousand or something. Like eighty thousand or or more. I I don't know, like IRS, hiring New agents. I think they hired eighty thousand Um Eighty seven thousand new hires.

And so I think there's gonna be a shitload of audits, which is why I wanted to be like Super buttoned up with everything. Um Just because oh man, that's another time suck if you get audited of like dealing with all that crap. So uh you know, I don't think they hire these people to do nothing. It's eight eighty billion

Eighty billion in new funding. And eighty seven thousand tax agents. Isn't that insane? That's fucking crazy. They're gonna have a lot of work. Um

I think we should almost wrap up. We have we want to do one or two more. What are your favorite ones? Let's do one. What's a really good one? What about biggest change adjustment you're making in twenty twenty three? Go go, Sam. So um

For I have a new thing that I'll launch. Th it's live, but I'll announce it later. Um I'm hiring a CEO for it. I've already like done that. And I've never done that early on.

I also am doing close to like I'm being less of a dictator. And I'm also being less metrics driven. This sounds like the Freaking doucheest thing ever, but I'll say it. But more like vibe and energy driven. Uh basically with the hustle and like my last company, I was like by the book where it was like all right, I want to see projections, we're gonna nail it, we're gonna like

The the metric say this. Therefore, like I can see you putting a metric on the vibe too. We're an eighty seven on vibe this week, guys. Well, like on my last like uh for all my companies, I'm like look, we've got to do this many outbound calls. Like we're gonna like whatever the A B metric is, this is what it is. Uh like we're going with the A, that A one. And I just filed the data and I was like, I don't care and then it was very much a dictatorship where I said my rule or my way or the highway. And I'm trying to be a little bit calmer for my next thing and I think I'll make way more money that way. That's a great one. Great adjustment. Uh, Andrew, what you got? Biggest change or adjustment you're making in your business life twenty twenty three.

Yeah. So last year, um, I don't know if I said this, but my big goal was conquering email. Like I just I was overwhelmed by it. It was stressing me out. And so now I've built a system, I've fully delegated it, I've got someone dedicated to managing my email. And so I really only get 10 or 15 emails that I have to respond to and everything else is triaged and responded to and dealt with. So I've conquered email.

The problem is Now I get a lot of I messages, like text and stuff, and I'm going I don't know how to conquer that other than changing my number, which seems Fucked up. Um

I'm trying to figure that out. If anyone has any ideas, please tweet at me because Um, there's it seems like there's no way if someone has your number, they're gonna get to you. And I have a really hard time not responding to text. I feel kind of guilty. Um so I'd love to hear just getting like cold text from strangers. Is that the problem? Dude, I get so many of those. Not that it's just there's I mean, I get cold text for sure, but it's more just like there's so many people I've given my number out to. And if someone doesn't get an email response to me, sometimes they'll try and go there. I think like some people have found my number online. Like it's just it's just becoming too much. And I'll be like

With email you can kinda turn it off. I'll be putting my kids down for bed. And like reading a Kindle book on my phone. And I'll be getting hit up with text and it's just the ability to break into your consciousness. Would you just get a new number? Yeah, I was thinking about it, but I've had my number since I was like fifteen. It feels messed up to do. I know, but I've thought about doing that as well.

Sam, uh okay, so you did yours, Andrew you did yours. My biggest adjustment Um You knowing when to use my impulsiveness. So I'm an extremely impulsive person. Um

And that works in like Eight out of ten situations. One of the situations it doesn't work in is I'm very impulsive with picking businesses to start. And I will just like start a business like instantaneously and I will go and I'll start making it happen.

And it's really fun. And that wave and that thrill is so addictive. And then Eleven months later, I'm like Okay, now I have this business.

Um, was this the business that I wanted to have? Was it'cause like I can't do that many of these at the same time. Uh so is this the right Are you happy you started your e com thing? Um no. If I could go back and just pick a different project, I would.

Um Same thing with the milk road. Part of the reason I sold it was I was like, I don't think this was the project that I want to work on every year. Um, you know, for the next three years. And so if I don't want to work on it for the next three years, I should just sell it now and like, you know Uh if I have a good offer, like take it. Um

But that's kind of a shitty feeling. Like there's a celebration in selling. But there's also a bit of a failure. It's like I've been saying this for a while. I wanna work on a project that I don't want to sell. Like this podcast. Time has flown by. We're this is the third year we're doing the milli awards. That means this podcast is at least three years old. Um

I could keep going. I would do this for free. I was doing this for free. I w I was gonna do this at a loss. So this is the right type of project for me to do. It's one that I would literally do if there was no money involved. I don't count the days or the hours. I'm not stressed about the metrics. I know it's gonna keep going up'cause we'll just keep trying to do a better and better job. I have fun doing it and it's not a not a drag on my lifestyle, right? Like Perfect project. This has been the only project I've selected correctly on. I would argue every single business I've started since the age of twenty one.

was the wrong pick and it was always just the impulsive pick. It was Someone should do this. Dude, I bet I could do that. Dude, I would just do this, this and this. All right, let me just do it. And I would just do it. And then, you know, sure enough, I'm look looking for the exit later because It wasn't really the right project. So

I'm trying to find the big change is I'm gonna find the project that's in my zone of genius. Um, that is the perfect project for me. It's one I enjoy doing. Um And I'm not

Building it for some Future payoff I'm building it I'm doing it because I like doing it, that it is the the project that's you know, I'm most interested in. And uh if that changes later, okay, that's fine. I'm not saying I have to do it till I'm ninety nine years old. But um I'm not doing it just kind of like on a whim. So I'm gonna be patient and select the project.

Properly. That's good. It's about time. I've been telling you that for ten years. The best lessons are the ones that take you that you have to relearn ten ten times over. So the other one was best business idea you wish someone to end up starting. Do you guys want to do that?

Yeah, let's end on the Tell me why. Your washer and your dryer are two different machines. Ha This is the craziest thing ever. W why do I have to get out of bed? And remember to put my

Wet clothes into the dryer. It's ridiculous. This needs to be worn. That's on honestly, that is It it's it's crazy to me. It's crazy to me that that it's two different things.

That actually exists. Yeah, but they kinda sort of No, it's in it's in Best Buy Home Depot. They're not that great yet. They're not that great yet. Like I use them in Europe and they're only okay. But they need to be the norm. This needs to be the norm. Yeah. Yeah, if you're working on AI or crypto or uh self driving cars.

Quit. And figure this one out. Like we gotta put we gotta have our priorities in order. You know how many people are Wasting time on laundry? Dude.

But Look at James Dyson. Look at James Daseon, he's worth eighteen billion dollars and he just was like vacuums are terrible. I'm gonna rethink those. He could have been working on AI, but no, he chose something like a wire machine next door dishwasher machine. Thank you. I agree, dude. Like some of the or like uh

Or like have you ever noticed how the inside of a refrigerator, no matter how rich you are, it always looks like shit. Like we need like a better organizer or something for like so some of these like day to day problems I think need to be improved. Particularly it will start with the washer and dryer. It needs to be one machine. Okay. I like that one. Andrew what you got? Um I tweeted about this. Um So There's all these private jets out there flying around.

All over the world and I've been. Um people People will. People will fly somewhere. and they don't need a return flight. Or they're gonna go there for two weeks or three weeks or whatever. And so the plane actually flies back. Empty just with the pilots on it, right?

And I think this is truly insane. This is like billions of dollars Getting lit on fire. Every month. Of just jet fuel and empty planes and stuff.

I don't know what the solution is. I know there's people that have tried this. Um But it seems like a cr incredibly inefficient, disjointed uh world and someone needs to crack this and create a central database. of basically every plane that's available because let's think about who owns

Private jets. It's very, very rich people. Very rich people are usually business people and are logical. Do they care about having someone else fly back if it pays for all the fuel and stuff? Probably not. Maybe maybe I'm wrong. But is it kinda like Gucci where it's like, Well I don't want to like sell my unsold Gucci clothes. I'd rather just burn them to keep the value up. Sure. Yeah, I don't know, maybe.

But anyway, I do think there's a lot of people who would certainly uh want to get compensated for that if it was easy. And I think someone needs to crack this. Yeah, that's a that's a good one. Um Okay, I'm gonna go with The school for the starving artists. Okay, so I've met a lot of people in life who like to do different artsy

Things, you know, photography, film, uh, you know. Met somebody who was like, you know, they like they were like, Oh yeah, I fell in love with the photography'cause I would Hang up the frickin' Prints and like let them dry, like whatever, you know, whatever that shit is. Uh c you know, coloring, you know, blah blah blah. Drawing. There's all these art. Art artistic things.

And I would say most people give up on those passions or things because it's really, really hard to make a living doing it. Or is it? That's what I want to answer. Because Now that I'm doing this ecom thing, I now pay a lot of money to photographers. It's just that They had to be branded as photographers who understand how to do product photography.

Or commercial photo shoots. Um my wife When she was in business school was just doodling on her paper board. And somebody walked by and luckily they saw that and they go, Did you draw that? And she was like, Oh yeah, sorry, uh I I

I'm paying attention, I promise. He's like No, I don't care like But if you can draw that I have a job for you. It's called graphic facilitation. You can make a thousand dollars a day. Just by going to these

Meetings and conferences for these businesses. And you draw on a giant whiteboard. what they're talking about. So they have a visual takeaway at the end of it. And she made more money than me for a long time. Doing this thing.

She would have never known how to turn her art into Money. And so I think somebody should create an art school. For people who have artistic talents but want to be rich. Uh, for who have artists and talents, but they want to make a living doing it and not just be a starving artist for their whole life.

I think you should create a specific school for this and all the courses are things where you take an artistic trait, but you teach them how to do it in the commercial way. And they can make money even while they're in school doing this. Like You know how big of a shortage there is of video editors now that YouTube and TikTok are so huge? Or Yeah, again, commercial photography or drawing or all these different

different uh artistic things. So I think somebody should create The school for the starving artists where they're no they're not gonna starve anymore. And uh get the get the artists that are willing to sell out like Twenty five percent. And just like do this. Like you see this girl on TikTok?

She'll take like a d uh like Dr. Pepper will pay her like A million dollars to do this TikTok where she does these like Crazy slow mo zoom in, water dripping on the side, and she makes this epic Like

Like video trailer of a Doctor Pepper. She makes a Doctor Pepper look like It's the unveiling of a new, you know, rocket by SpaceX. And she's just really talented at that and brands are willing to pay her for that type of marketing. Yeah, there's a lot of people out there who could do that. They just didn't connect the dots.

Well what are you gonna call it? You gotta have some cute ass name. Don't have it yet. That's the only hold that's the only hold up and I'm not gonna I'm not gonna start to like the perfect name, you know me. Do we uh Andrew, I uh you look like you just got your first communion. Uh you just like you you have you have an an an angelic face and an angelic look. It doesn't matter how rich and successful you become.

You uh you still look like this little perfect communion boy. Oh, thank you. I'm working on becoming a Twilight Vampire like uh Brian. That's my other goal this year. I got it what what's the thing he eats every morning? The figy pudding or whatever. Yeah, nutty pudding. That's your face looks more trim.

Oh, thank you. I feel like you say that every time I come on maybe I'm wasting just like a crazy tan. Have you just ever come back looking Puerto Rican? My my problem is I I tan really, really well on my arms and face, but I'm like I cannot tan on my body. So I have a have you ever done a farmer tan. Have you tried taking off your shirt? Uh no, this is yeah, sure. I should do that. I want you to come on everybody. And I want you to look like, you know, Ricky Martin. So yeah, just like you need to come back At least like a third Colombian in your tan next year. Next time. Okay, here's here's the deal.

Here's the deal. Okay, you and I'm serious. You get to Uh eight percent body fat. I will go to a tanning salon. I will go in one of those stand up tanners. And I will uh I will get really tanned and come on if the shot of the five. Okay. Well no eight twelve. Twelve twelve is like twelve is like soft abs. I want like crazy shredded.

Yeah, like twelve minutes. I'm gonna have to like sacrifice my life to do this. I think twelve is a more than fair deal. Okay, this is a deal. What's the what's the timeline? Is this within the year or when is a lifelong bet. If I ever get there. If I ever send you picture. You got to get it. We gotta talk about that meetup we're doing in Vancouver. I will we'll do a shout out next time at the beginning, but we'll also do it now. So we're doing uh a meetup. Sha Sean, obviously you're invited, but I doubt ever I doubt you'll ever You guys know me so well that you didn't even invite me. That's I appreciate that you know me that well. Yeah, we're doing a meetup. We have to pick a date, but it's gonna be mid February in Vancouver, right?

How many peop how many people signed up or like gave interest? I think it's we already have we already have six hundred people, so it's gonna be a big event. We gotta figure that out. Yeah, we have to pick a venue. We just put a Andrew put a type form. He didn't even ask me. He put a type form and he said uh Sam and I are doing a meetup. Sometime in February, TBD on all the details, sign up here. That's pretty cool. I'll go. I'll I'll do it. We got people. There's people on it.

You wanna come? Yeah, come. It'd be awesome. I think Sahel said he would come too, and I just followed up with him on Twitter. I don't know if he's responded, but We gotta get Salhill out. All right, guys. Another successful Milli Awards of the books. Thank you, and we will see you next year.

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