Big Fish In A Small Pond, LIV Golf, And Financial Freedom

Have you heard of this thing called Live golf. I think it's called Live. I don't know how you pronounce it. L I V. No, I don't what's live golf? Live golf. Okay, so

You know about the PGA tour, it's like the the main thing, right? No. Golf. So So Live Golf is a competitor to the PGA that just emerged out of the Saudi Arabia fact. Exactly. It's a Saudi backed rival. And

These guys are basically trying to It's like they're trying to spin up a new league by brute force. They're investing hundreds of millions of dollars. I think they pledged Yeah, yeah, me too. Big big swing. So this is not this is the opposite of SPS, right? So this is uh B D E. Yeah. So so basically they They they put the the Saudi public investment fund put in

They pledged four hundred million dollars to start the league. I think they've even committed more than that now. I thought they offered Tiger Woods like Five hundred million or something crazy. News came out, yeah, they offered him eight hundred million dollars and he said no. Which is like just kind of an insane thing. So But they have signed other huge stars. So Phil Mickelson

uh you know, Dustin Johnson, this guy you know, Brooks Kefgar, whatever, who who recently won the the he w he won like four majors or whatever. Um, Cameron Smith, who's like this young star. He signed a hundred million dollar deal. Dustin Johnson, hundred twenty five million dollar deal. Phil Mickleton two hundred million dollar deal they offered Tiger and didn't get him yet. All right. What's going on, dude? Um

How are you? Fantastic. So I have something that I've been thinking about that I've been wanting to talk to you about. Have you ever seen That video of Adolf Hitler

Uh The bird the German Olympics in nineteen thirty six when he's watching the Olympics and he's like rocking back and forth. Have you ever seen that? Bro, you can't be blonde haired, blue eyed, and coming on here starting off saying, Have you ever seen my favorite video of Hitler? No. No. Have you ever seen it? Up the charts, bro. We're trying to go up. Have you ever seen that video of him like so he's like basically he there's this video that I saw a couple uh weeks ago where he's at the Olympics and he's rocking back and forth and he's very clearly on drugs. Like some type of Coke or something. Like he's on drugs. And I started Getting curious about it and I started looking into this

And Someone in the comments said that there's this really good book called Blitz, so I bought it. It's right here. It's called Blitz. And basically it's a it's called Blitz. Drugs in the Third Reich. So basically Uh after reading it Hitler

And a ton of the Nazis, as well as just a ton of Germany, starting in the nineteen thirties, like Uh uh morphine. heroin and meth. was invented and they used to think that it was like a miracle drug. Doctors were like, Take this meth, it makes you feel great. Um it's like this It's like a it's like a it's like a miracle drug. Like you get euphoria, you want to stay up all the time, you'll eat less. It's this wonderful drug. And like it was a legal drug. That bear, you know, B A Y E R, the drug company now, they were like selling the shit and they would even put it in chocolates and there was like a chocolate that you would eat that had a little meth in it and it was like

always satisfied or something like that. And like it was so common And turns out Hitler was a junkie. He was getting injected with meth. uh for years and that's one of the reasons why, you know, like when they were getting bombed the very last minute, he was like, Oh no, we're doing great Because he had like these like you know he was like hallucinating, you know, he had like thoughts of grandeur, typical meth shit.

And I started thinking about this. What other stuff in history was supposed to be one way and be happening like one time, but turns out it was for a totally other reason. And I started looking into it. So for example, Henry the Eighth, he was the k have you know what Protestants are?

No. Thousand times. I knew you wouldn't. No. So like there's like the Catholics and then there's the prot uh the Protestants. It's basically like if you're like an evangelical Christian, if you're a Baptist, if you're like all these other different types of Christian religions, you're probably a Protestant. Maybe by definition you are. Anyway. Someone came up with it, like Martin Luther came up with it and

And and in the fifteen hundreds, the king of England, he basically like had like eight divorces because he couldn't have a kid. Like it was it was him. He was infertile and the Pope was like, Hey, you can't have these divorces anymore. This is bullshit And he's like No, fuck that then. We're gonna switch to Protestant'cause that allows like you know, me to get a divorce and I can have all these kids. And so now like there's a billion Protestants in the world because he just turns out like Want a divorce. And then like there's this like m there's this like story that you you ever know how Barcelona people say Barcelona really funny, like

Barcelona. Yeah. There's like this urban myth that the uh king of Spain had a lisp. And someone's like, Hey, you know what's pronounced Barcelona? And he goes, No, from now on it's Barcelona. Because you know, that's just how I say it. Yeah. Yeah. It's like you'll have Mike Tyson rule the world. And just thinking about like what other stuff. Did we think that was gonna be like you know, was for this like grand reason, but it's really just like, you know, like

The guy's dad said something like like George Bush invading, like you know, looking for weapons of mass destruction because like his dad was like, You know, you're not strong like your brother. And like he or you know Because he couldn't find the remote one time. You know, like what else like what else in history has been done just for like Totally the opposite reason. I don't know, but I bet there's so much. Like I think about this with food all the time when I See oh, you know, uh

Yeah, w people are like oh you know. that the c active ingredient in Advil or aspirin comes from this like oak tree and like blah blah blah I'm like Yeah, but how do we figure that out? Like who was just gnawing on trees and was like, you know what, this one, I had a headache earlier and now I don't have it anymore, right? Like All foods where it's like oh this one kills you, this one's good for you. It's like Uh okay, but like you know, who were the testers? Who was figuring this out?

Along the way. I actually think that that was probably Like what's the most fun time to be alive was then, when nothing when no one knew anything about anything. Like you didn't know what was food and what was not food. Like how much just random soil has been eaten. By somebody being like, this has to be food. And then somebody else is like, you know, sees a chicken running by is like, No, I think under that fe under those feathers there's something there, there. Dude, there's all stories like that. And I never research it. So like have you heard about like the invention of LSD? No.

The guy, uh he it was a European doctor. He was trying to like? Yeah, he was just trying to make like a I forget what it was, but some type of antibiotic, like just something normal. And he got a little bit of the shit in his skin, like he like touched it funny. And he was like, Oh my God, this is awesome. And then he like starts tinkering with it even more and he goes, All right, let's try this. And he gives himself a huge dose and he starts riding home on his bicycle. He's like the nothing's happening. Like this didn't work. And then all of a sudden it hits him and he like has the biggest trip of his life and then he like, you know, it changes everything. Yeah, I feel like penicillin, there's a whole bunch of drugs that were discovered by By accident for sure. Um Yeah, it's it's

I mean I don't know. Where you wanna go with this topic, but I don't wanna go anywhere. I just thought it was an interesting th this book. Like I've just been reading this book about drugs and like the Nazis and I was like It's crazy. Like the book says that s they at the time In the thirties and forties when World War Two is happening, that something like sixty percent of German doctors were addicted to morphine and they are the ones like you know voting on what the laws were gonna be around, you know, how these controlled substances are handled. It it's it's it's crazy. It it it changed my persp well, I guess it didn't change my perspective, but you know what I mean? It's just like a a an interesting read.

Let me tell you a uh interesting story. Have you heard about this math teacher? In Florida. No. No These stories can go one of two ways. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Did dog was he on Dog the Bounty Hunter? I I'm not I mean this could go a bunch of different ways. Yeah. Is there a funny like viral video of him and a seven eleven? No, so get this. So so um

So Brandon was telling me about this. This is kind of amazing. So there's this guy. Okay, so you know like Um Yeah, those like kinda like school competitions, whether it's spelling bee or math competitions or whatever. So there's this math competition. And there's this kind of strange thing going on where one small school is not a private school.

has one like Fifteen out of the last seventeen of these math competitions. And people were like, God, what is going on at like Buckholes High School? And the story is kind of amazing. So there's this guy, Will Fraser. He's a He starts as a banker on Wall Street.

And he's doing like bond trading or something like that. And the guys you know, this is like in the he the eighties. He's like, you know, this is the heyday of Of of where you know You've ever read those books like Liers Poker and things like that. It's like the heyday of Wall Street, people making tons of money. Um He retires by twenty seven.

So he's made a bunch of money. He's like, dude, this is too stressful of a lifestyle. How much should he make? I don't want to do this anymore. Uh, don't know exactly how much you made, but enough to retire at twenty seven. So let's assume it's you know, like I would say ten million at least. Okay. That's my guess. So he buys a Ferrari, he drives down to Florida, he's like just dreaming of like a slower, calmer life. He's like, You know what, I'm just gonna go to Florida.

Bought the S Ferrari. I'm gonna just play a bunch of golf, play a bunch of basketball, and I'm just gonna hang out. Do Ferrari. Yeah. F for for a decade. He's you know That guy you see on like Tuesday at one PM just like hanging out at the park and you're just like

How you know you don't have a job? Like what's going on? He's that guy and he does it for ten years, no income, ten years, he's just chilling. And he plays a bunch of golf, and along the way, he's sort of like, Yeah, you know what, like I'm feeling a little uh aimless, don't have a great purpose in my life at this point. So he's like uh he reaches out to a local high school and he's like, Hey, um Can I teach golf over there? They're like ah sure. And he comes over and teaches golf. He was like I like teaching actually. Even on Wall Street I actually I I liked

Teaching the young guys. What what else? Can I teach like a finance class? You know, I'm a former Wall Street guy. made it big, retired. Can I take a fine no, we don't have finance, but uh You can become a math teacher if you want.

And he's like, All right, I'll do it And so he goes and he becomes a math teacher and he walks in on day one and he's like Listen, let me tell you this right now. I don't need this job. Yeah, you guys gonna be any shit? This will be my last day. And they're like, Okay Uh you know respect. And so

Yeah. One day he's like checking his mailbox as a teacher and he sees this math competition coming up. He's like, Oh like that's cool. Let's try this. So he enters into the math competition, they go there and they get Smoked. They get fifth out of sixth uh place. So this they're second to last. And um and he's like, dude, I couldn't even solve some of these problems. Like this was hard.

But like The flip you know, the switch got flipped. The competitive switch in him. Gets flipped and he's just like Actually I liked that competition. I missed the competition of Wall Street. Where it was just like completely doggy dog and you're like high intensity and so he decides

To do it again. And again, and again, and he bec and he he He goes and he they get fifth the next time. Then they get third. And the so on and so forth. And he be b basically decides that we are going to dominate.

These competitions. That's exactly what's happening. Dude, isn't that the best when fifteen out of seventeen. The fifteen out of seven. Isn't that the best when someone just like sees like a small opportunity and they're like, No one takes us as seriously as we're gonna take this. Let's do it. You know what I mean? I love it. Just like that cheerleading movie that we watched, uh on Netflix. That the it's like they just like take it Yeah, they take it to the the the highest degree discovered. Yeah, the one that you made popular. So the so the guy the so people were like, dude, what's your secret? What are you doing differently? Blah blah. He's like Oh, I just took a different level of intensity. He's like it's just um insane hard work. He goes

You know, um average math teacher gets seventy two hours of classroom time. with their students per semester. Um, and then they hope that after school some of those kids come and they learn for an hour, uh, you know, once a week or whatever. That's what they're putting in. He goes. Oh, I just switched it.

First I took all the good math kids, I put'em in the same class kind of like almost like you know, the like blended of age. But like he's like, I put all the best people in the same class that they would compete with each other. Then we used our class time To start preparing for these competitions. Then I could start creating summer camps.

Where we could get eighty hours in four weeks. So the equivalent of a full semester of teaching. In this high intensity thing. He's like, and I just developed a program because they're like, Are are you the best at math? He's like, No, I don't even teach the advanced math stuff. Like one of my former students teaches like The hard stuff. I just build the program. He's like

I put the high school students with the middle school students Um and that because the middle school students sort of idolize the high schoolers and they teach down and then the the the middle schoolers rise up. Exactly so I built this program where one alumna basically like the older kids teach the younger kids, the younger teach kids get the even y teach the even younger kids. And we just put in way more time. He's like, then I started scouting like this is like, you know, Alabama football. So he'll go and he'll look at the scores of other schools. And he'll find the high performing kids and he'll recruit them to his program. And then the reputation got built where they started winning. So now parents are coming inbound and being like, please take my kid.

Uh and he's like, We only have so many spots, I'm sorry. And so he's built this like talent pipeline. And not only that, they actually The talent pipeline goes even further. Now companies like McKenzie and the big banks, Wall Street They come recruit from his high school. The big schools Ivy League become recruit from his high school

Because they want his students now. So he built like a a a platform for where they can go, which helps him recruit even better students. And so like when Covid happened? What's that? The I think they so it's been in just like the local Florida news for a while and then I saw something in the Brandon Summit article. Who's Brandon? No, he sent this article from the Wall Street Journal or something. It was like paywall, so I only got the first paragraph. I'm too cheap to pay for it. But I was like

Oh, what's the story? And then I found all these local Florida papers that had that had the the rest. And so um They said like during Covid They were like, Oh, you gotta teach remotely and he's just like Oh oh okay. Yeah, we're gonna downgrade the intensity he's like

Hell no, I resign. And then he went to a church, rented out the church, and was like, Hey If you guys want to come and train here, we could do this. And a hundred forty kids went and trained daily in his church during COVID when everybody else was low had to lower their intensity. He ratcheted. How old is this guy now? So now he's like in his sixties. And so he he's been doing this now for like, you know, a number of years. So he took he was basically twenty seven, he took ten years off, so he's closer to forty, ten, eleven years off.

And then basically from forty to sixty, he's just been dominating. This one thing. Uh i isn't this incredible. This is incredible. This is incredible. I think there's a few things. One, just the intensity. Number two, I think sometimes if you pick Like A lot of people, including me, we want to move to San Francisco, New York, LA and try to become like a medium sized fish at a big pond.

I think there's so much to be said about being the best or a big fish in a little And Like you can make a name for yourself and have a way better life. Like This random dude is having so much more impact. Bye.

creating a m being like the guy for like this very small math contest versus You know Uh rich he's probably way more fulfilled than being just like another hundred million dollar banker. Dude, I I want to get diagnosed with a bad case of SPS. I want small pawn syndrome. And like I I I am a huge believer in this.

Dude, when I so I lived in Houston. Uh in high school. And Houston, uh I went to a big public school, five thousand kids. and kids from all over Houston and basically Um

I my life was basketball. I loved basketball. And I remember a game in ninth grade. Um the varsity coach I was on the ninth grade team and I, you know, the the goal would be to someday be on varsity. The varsity coach Watching her game. And for some reason I think I scored like two I I had like two threes to start the game.

And then all of a sudden the most athletic kid on their team decided like Nah, this guy's not gonna like see the hoop again. And he starts picking me up full court. Basically like from the moment I can move, this guy's like in my shirt. And um you know And I I can't I literally can't get by this guy. Like I'm trying to go left, I'm trying to go right.

I cannot get by this guy. And I don't know what to do and I'm just basically like getting frauds. So coach calls timeout the the coach calls timeout. The varsity coach walks into the huddle. And I think he's gonna give me this like epic advice, maybe like that varsity advice. How am I supposed to get by this guy? And he just goes. You will never

play varsity basketball. Oh my God. I was like, what Thanks, Coach Hollingsworth. And he's just like If you can't handle this guy, you will never like 'Cause he's like, I thought you might be and now I see no as like some motivational thing. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Like I'd like to report a bully. Yeah. Yeah. Is there a checkbox for faculty?

But but he was right. And in in the Houston pond, I was nowhere near athletic enough. To be whatever. Now, luckily my parents uh my dad gets a job in in Beijing. We've moved to China in the tenth grade. I go to China. First day I start playing basketball.

These kids don't get protein over there. Yeah, these kids don't get protein. Everybody's scrawny. I'm blowing by everybody. Varsity coach walks over, he's just like, Hey, what's your name? Uh I end up being captain of the varsity team, you know I got a girlfriend. Like my life changed for the better. Like oh everything got better. Because I caught SPS. I got small small pond syndrome.

And I was able to go be a var city player over there, captain of the team. The captain of a fo of a football key uh of a football team in rural Alabama with a hundred students. They live the life. Screw the big city. Live that life. You know what I'm saying? And there was a part of me, a foggy part of my memory that remembered like You ain't shit. Do the main thing quickly got washed away. It quickly got washed away and forgotten. And then I thought it became like you're the shit. You're the shit. You're the shit. And th that's what you want to do in life. Uh this guy this guy's doing it right. I actually have this dream too. I was like I just kinda want to retire and coach high school basketball. So it'll just be a lot of fun.

And um And and yeah, you know, this small pond thing, I I think we're on to something. I I've thought about this for a long time. I thought about moving back to Saint Louis for a minute, but my wife wasn't down, but I was like, dude, I could just be the man here. Uh you know, I could buy a million dollar house and it would make the news. You know what I'm saying? Like a million dollars in San Francisco or New York is a studio.

But I was like it would be it would be one of the biggest purchases of the quarter. I would make the news. It would be awesome. But Then I realized I You know. I don't wanna do that. Bro, what else you got? I have straight fire today, if you want uh if you want more than it's like. I've got fire too, I think. Did you see what I have in there?

Uh no, I don't even have the thing open. Fuck. Um Well you could screw it. Well, okay. I spoke like

a a bunch of different companies. And They gave me all the revenue, all the profit. And a few of them are interesting. And I could just like bullet point and quickly go through a few of them. You wanna do that?

By the way, explain why does somebody why does somebody just give you all the revenue and give you all the profit, as you say. Uh because it sounds like A, unrealistic and B Like you sort of like tricked them, but that's not the case. So what's actually going on? Okay, so um I've got this like uh community that I'm running that I'm not gonna talk about yet. But it's like a CEO community. And when they join, they tell me all types of interesting information so we can place them in the right group. And I

Messaged. eight of them and I said, Hey, can I talk about you on the pod? And can you answer these questions? And am I allowed to reveal all of your information? Well Oh if I am I allowed to reveal the information that you gave me? And they said, Yeah, sure. So that's how I got it. So N nothing like crazy.

Um which one you wanna do? Alright, I got a couple of them actually. Give me the most interesting one first. Let's do Uh okay, well here's one that's actually not on I don't even think I put it on here. But have you ever seen those pedal taverns in um like Nashville and Denver, it's like the bars that you like pedal with like a bit they're they're honestly pretty obnoxious. But you know I'm talking about

No, pedal what? What do you understand? It's called a pedal tavern. So basically is it a bus? Like a never see I guess you don't like leave the suburbs of San Francisco, but in a lot of other cities, Denver, Austin, Nashville, like these like style cities, there's these things called pedal taverns. They kind of look like um Imagine a bar. In the middle, and there's eight people sitting on one side, and eight people sit on the other side. Now imagine that being on top of a four wheeled platform. And you're peddling that platform while you're drinking booze. You've never heard of that? But you're outdoors, right?

Yeah, yeah. So Yeah, it's like a some party thing. Yeah, gotcha. The guy who created one of the first ones is in the group. And his name's Pete. And his business does he bootstrapped it from nothing, just out of school. He it's getting close to eight million a year in revenue. And just the pedal taverns do about five million a year in sales. quite profitable. And they're using the profits to buy

The real estate. That their Pedal taverns stay in overnight. That's a pretty interesting business. Um

Let's see. Another one is uh have you heard of um Let's find another one. Have you heard of uh you probably never heard of this. So here's an interesting one. There's this business called The Peak. It's ran by this guy named Brett. So it's a daily newsletter. So just like the hustle, morning brew, whatever. Mostly bootstrapped, only in and it's in Canada. And so it every day it gives you the news you need to know about Canada. Can't Canadian news. Uh only a team of ten.

Ninety thousand new sub newsletter subscribers. Not that much. And doing about three million revenue with thirty with a million in profit. Pretty good business. A small team of ten, ninety thousand subscribers, fifty three percent open rate, sixty seven thousand monthly podcast listeners. The guys were like kind of good. uh writers but not really that good. And they just started like

writing and cold emailing people and hiring writers and after two or three years it's already uh about two or three million in revenue. So what are they doing differently?'Cause that's more revenue per subscriber than most, I think. So Yeah, it's pretty good, but basically he they just said that uh Um with in Canada, like there's not that many there's not as many publications and B2B advertisers, soft software companies, they don't have that m money places to advertise. And so these guys have just d done a really good job of getting the banks, the telecommunication companies

Um, B to B software companies, all these like high end enterprise companies to advertise with them. Gotcha. That's pretty good. Um Okay.

Uh fine, you can go. Okay, okay. Okay, I want to tell you about a company that you may have heard of. Have you heard of this thing called Live golf. I think it's called Live. I don't know how you pronounce it. L-I V.

Or live. Wait, L I V? Yeah, just I like it. No, uh what's live golf? Live golf. Okay, so You know about the PGA tour, it's like the the main.

No. Golf. So So Live Golf is a competitor to the PGA that just emerged out of the U.S. Saudi Arabia fact. Exactly. It's a Saudi backed ri rival. And these guys are basically trying to It's like they're trying to spin up a new league by brute force. They're investing hundreds of millions of dollars. I think they pledged.

Yeah, yeah, me too. Big big swing. So this is not this is the opposite of SPS, right? So this is uh B D E. Yeah. So so basically they They put the the Saudi public investment fund put in They pledged four hundred million dollars to start the league. I think they've even committed more than that now. I thought they offered Tiger Woods like Five hundred million or something crazy.

News came out, yeah, they offered him eight hundred million dollars and he said no. Which is like just kind of an insane thing. So But they have signed other huge stars. So Phil Mickelson uh you know, Dustin Johnson, this guy you know, Brooks Kevka or whatever, who who recently won the the he w he won like four majors or whatever. Um, Cameron Smith, who's like this yet, young star. He signed a hundred million dollar deal, Dustin Johnson, hundred twenty five million dollar deal.

Phil Micklinson two hundred million dollar deal. They offered Tiger and didn't get him yet. But um and Phil can only be on it can only be on Live and not PGA. Exactly. So it's a competitive thing. So PGA is like There's like, I don't know, uh sixty events a year or whatever.

And then there's like four majors. What these guys are doing is like there's eight events and they all matter. They're going for more of like the f NFL model. uh versus baseball, right? Baseball has hundred you know Almost two hundred games a year. And you know, uh they don't really matter, but there's sort of sort of always something on. Whereas the NFL is like There's like seventeen Sundays.

Yeah, eighteen Sundays and like they e each one is gonna matter. So that's what these guys are trying to do with the golf model. Um, and to like put this into context, you know, Tiger Woods yeah has earned 121 million dollars in all of his PGA winnings. Like over time. Uh you know, obviously he makes more through sponsors and and you know, um other sort of like paid events and things like that. But

Just from the PGA, his lifetime, I think, earn earnings are a hundred twenty one million. So one Live is coming out strong and basically giving these guys like Tiger Woods lifetime money? as a guaranteed contract instead of the way the PGA works is it's like

There's a prize pool for every tournament. There's nine million for every tournament. The winner gets three, everybody else gets like a a piece, depending on how you finished. And they just do that over and over and over again. And so they do forty eight events a year. And um

And and so Liv comes in and they basically are giving guaranteed money away instead of saying you have to win in order to be there. And so PGA makes like A billion and a half dollars revenue? One point five, a little over one point five. And you know, eighty five percent of that is like their their tournaments and the media rights and ads and all that stuff that comes from that. They have like a nine year in year one of a nine year contract. And then Miss to steal your girl.

comes in and is starting to just take these stars away. And uh and basically is is trying to, you know, compete with them. They also have like prize prize money as well. And so they need Yeah, uh they would need to generate like a billion as well to sort of like have like a similar Economics.

But what's the play here? I I don't know if that's why, like maybe uh Like you know, there's like that weird thing where like Russia really loves like women's basketball.

I don't know if you know that. Like if you're a great women's basketball player, you play college in the United States. Then you try to make it to the W N B A. And the W NBA pays you basically nothing. Like you know, you'll make like seventy, eighty K. Yeah, like a shoe salesman salary. And then you'll get like three hundred, four hundred K for playing the off season in Russia. Yeah.

And everyone's like, Why does Russia care this much about women's basketball? Like nobody has questions and like yeah, it's a little bit whatever. I don't I don't know exactly what's going on there. But Um But that's like you know, th they disproportionately like that sport. And so maybe there is something in in uh Saudi Arabia for this. Or it's just they have a huge amount of money and they see the business opportunity where PGA basically had a monopoly on this. And if you can create a successful sports league,

These are worth billions and billions of dollars. Like we both love the UFC. UFC sold for I think four point two billion dollars. Um, which in my opinion is now like very low. Undervalued for where it is. And that's like U C is like fringe compared to NBA, NFL, like these major

Major fr uh major lead. What's more popular, uh golf or P or or UFC? Gol, right? I think golf is not more popular, but it generates more representatives. But what's more lane because it's like sort of the wealthy Ha ha Who beats up who? A golfer with their club or a UFC figh with his hands? I I fucking hate golf.

I hate golf. I cannot stand golf. Golf's not a sport, golf's an activity. Honestly. How much Uh You're thinking

At the end of the day, it boils down to who could beat up who. Most. Most. I think that I think That's like something that we're all like, uh Like we're all afraid of. Like the guy who at the end of the day is like, Oh, I can kill anyone in this room with my bare hands

He is Uh you know, he's the true the true dog. You know? He has nothing to fear. Somebody said this once. I was reading like a NFL scouting report. It's like there was a draft of four quarterbacks. They're all like top prospects. It's like who's gonna go number one, who's number two. And the guy who does like the draft, he said this line that I thought was so badass, he goes If they were all on vacation and going for a road that you know, they they were walking out to go to the car.

They would all throw the keys to Mark. Like they would check the keys to part. Mark's driving. And they it was like this like alpha male thing and I was just like What was this analogy and why did I love it so much? Like it Th if you just said if it was like hey, Elon, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates go out to dinner. Uh.

Yeah. Who ordered the Uber? Yeah. Do you uh when you're in a room, like at a restaurant. Who suits aisle. How how what percentage of the time when you're at a restaurant do you look around and be like Whose ass can I kick and whose can I not? Zero. Really? But I know that you do, which is why I asked you this question, because it's hilarious. Zero. Zero percent of the time. Dude, I can I cannot stand golf. Any sport that you wear khaki pants.

to to like play. It's not a sport. That's not a sport. It's an activity, it's a hobby. It's checkers. But it's not you know Like It's barely a job if you have to wear khaki. Barely a job. Like sport is sport is out of the question. Khakis in a collared shirt.

That is not that's I mean, that's not a sport. Like you y you don't sweat. It's an activity. It's a hobby. Uh this is amazing though. I I I don't Like let's get rid of the Saudi Arabia thing. Uh I think it's pretty cool. But if you're Phil Mickelson and you have fuck you money hardcore

And Saudi Arabia, who has, you know, a lot of human rights issues. offers you this, what do you do? Do you take it or not? So you double your net worth probably if you're him. So I think you can't take it alone in a vacuum. Cause you're not trying to go sit on an island. Doing nothing.

uh by yourself and like lose all your relevance. You lose your future earnings if you do that. But you say but I do is I say to them Look. I'm in if you can go get forty percent Of this list. To join.

And you could tell them. That fills in if you're in. And I would basically say you need to sweep. The and a critical mass of us said that this is relevant, that this is considered The top class. I'm not gonna go play in the B League or the D League.

Uh by doing this. And I would tell them that and I would say I'll do it. You're gonna have to cut The fattest check of your life.

And you gotta go get forty percent of this list. So there's a fact, there's a price that you would take for sure. Oh, of course, of course. If y you know, if somebody said, Hey You gotta go do this podcast on on Android. And I'd be like Andrew even is there a podcast player on Google and they'd be like Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's w we're putting a lot of investment into it. I'd be like

Alright. Alright, I'll do that. Uh I'll take this podcast to SoundCloud. I'll I'll take it to the to the Google Play store. What I'm gonna need to see Seven and a half million dollars. That's what I would say about this podcast. I would I would move this podcast for seven and a half million dollars. That is my price. There's there's a price to pay to be a whore. I'm down. But uh

So we actually were gonna do this. So at one point in time Uh I had a startup that was based on uh like streaming uh video games. And Twitch was the like nine hundred pound gorilla in the room. That was like

It was the big streaming platform and we were just like I w we were trying to build a tool that worked on top of Twitch. Like streamers could use it when they use Twitch. And it was working and every day we'd come into work and we'd work really hard on this tool, but like there was definitely a part of us that was like Dude, how did we end up here? We're making this like tool for Twitch streamers.

that like is free and then we're hoping that we can like after they all use it, then we might be able to monetize this other way. We're just like this guppy and this like In the in the In the ecosystem of this food chain, we're like that little fish that like swim in front of the whale's nose, like whatever that thing is called. Like we're that. And I was like

I like the fur kind, I was like, Man. Don't you just want to be the whale? And he's like I just so badly wanna be the whale. And I'm like, Yeah, so What can we do? He's and we just like mate we went to the room, we just whiteboarded, we're like How would you

I compete with Twitch itself. How would you just beat Twitch? And I was like Just look at the numbers. So we like ran the numbers we're like. Twitch has this insane power law where you can see that The top, you know.

X hundred streamers. We take the top three hundred streamers. All the viewership. All the m all the meaningful viewership. Like yeah, I don't remember what the exact ratios were at the time, but like any power law, it's like Yeah, the top one percent or whatever make up a very significant portion of viewership. So let's just make up some numbers. Let's say

The top three hundred made up fifty percent of the viewers at any given time. I was like So Twitch is worth Twitch sold for a billion dollars like a decade ago or whatever. Yeah, seven years ago, it's probably worth five, seven billion dollars now. You're saying

that if we could take, you know Half of that half. If we can get to a quarter of that. We'd be worth a billion you know, we might we might have the equivalent uh twenty five percent of the traffic would be worth, you know, a quarter of what they're worth, which is like a billion dollars today. How much money would it take for us to throw at those people? Right, go get twenty five percent of that three top three hundred. How much money would it take for us to go through at them?

To be like, come join our new thing. And we like game theory the whole thing out. We're like, all right, this guy makes this much today. We basically need to offer him like ten times what he's making today. How much to come move how much do do some of these guys make? Just on Twitch. So shortly after that, the contracts exploded. But like at that time

The top guys were making uh like single digit millions uh per year off Twitch. So like let's call it between one and five million. Uh plus there's some endorsements you don't really know how to track and you know, they they sell some amount of T shirts, it's hard to know. Uh and then it sort of exploded. Guys started signing like, you know, 10, 20 million dollar uh deals. But they're they're they're like multi year deals, three year deals or something like that. So you know, they're making Six million guaranteed or something like that, five million guaranteed, ten million guaranteed. So

Uh that was like the kind of like our what our estimates were for the very, very top guys. We thought okay. So how much would we need? And it's like we basically did the math and we're like, Okay, I think you need I don't remember what the number was today, but let's call it. Let's just pretend it was a hundred fifty million.

We need a hundred fifty million dollars to go throw at them, but it's like If I told you you could go raise one hundred fifty million dollars then you're saying you needed a hundred and fifty million dollars in order to pay The streamers and tell them bail on Twitch, come to our platform. And when you come to our platform, you're gonna bring your audience and we're gonna make all this money eventually through other people coming. You get this much guaranteed. All you have to do is just continue to stream and you have to promote it in this way and you let us promote you. Can I make a prediction five million to build this platform? My prediction is that would never work. I don't think that works. Okay, so tell me why. I'll tell you how how it obviously it didn't happen. So yeah, you're probably going to be able to do it. I think it could tell me why you think. Well, I know that you didn't really try to do this, but uh or I don't know in in earnest, I don't know if you uh uh you didn't raise the hundred and fifty million dollars. I think maybe the P GA tour could work. Maybe.

But doing this for consumers You need to have like a brand and you need to have some magic about it. It's kind of like You know even if you put all of like the resources into creating a boy band, like sometimes that shit just don't work. Even though like everything Like everything on paper, it's like, Well, we got the the blonde hair kid, we got the mixed race kid, we got the uh the dancer, we got the singer. Like on paper this checks out. You know, like this should work. You know what I mean? We should be popular in Korea by this point. And it's just there's there's just no magic, right? It th it shit just happens. And then like you have some like

You know, kid who just like sings a funny song and makes a joke about like wearing a cowboy hat and he gets hugely famous, like little Nas X or something. It just shit just happens. And I think that there's like a bit of magic that probably would be missing out when you're'cause with consumers, it's quite challenging to like grab their attention. It's like getting a a cat to play with something. It just sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Mm. Right. So so so I do think that that that's part of it, but there have been instances where people have thrown money at the problem and it actually worked, right? For every Quibi where you just raise a bunch of money and you go try to do the thing and it doesn't work.

For every one of the or every ten of those, there's one where you're like No, actually they did kinda just brute force their way in. I don't know if you remember this, but When TikTok first launched TikTok was lame as hell, dude. TikTok was lame as hell. It was pigeonholed as like The lame version of Musicly, which was a pretty lame thing, it was like twelve year olds lip syncing videos.

And now TikTok is huge. And one one thing that happened in between, I remember Meeting a guy and he was like Yeah, you know TikTok is gonna spend a billion dollars marketing the app. 'cause I was like, dude, there's billboards in San Francisco, like at bus stops to download TikTok. I was like, do they really think this is gonna work?

And we had an intern, uh not an intern, like a kind of just like a junior guy working for us. He was in ninth grade and he worked at our company. And I was like He he started mentioning TikTok and I was like Is TikTok actually a thing? He's like Yeah, you know, we just kept hearing about it, kept hearing about it, kept hearing about it, and then they started just paying all of the top YouTubers and fine people.

To just make TikToks. And like it worked, you know, eventually it just worked. Like it's like we all think it's lame, but like we all kinda started to use it. And then sure enough, the lame thing fell away too, right? By the end of it, and it like, you know, it became like a pretty mainstream thing. Like TikTok really did brute force. They're wow, they did a bunch of other things, right? Good product. great algorithm. They did a bunch of other things. I'm not saying they didn't do that. But it's not like they started with this like brand love and like

Loyalty and things like that. So let me tell you how this uh twitch thing played out. So I had a hunch that you might be right. So I approached Discord. And I said Hey Discord, do you want to buy us? And they're like, uh maybe, who are you? And like, what do you want to do what do you do? And I was like, Oh, we do this thing today.

But here's what we would do with Discord. We would help you compete with Twitch. You have brand love. Like Discord is one of the most loved brands in gaming. It's like you have the brand you have brand love. But you don't do this today. We will build the platform and like we can use this strategy to do this. And they were like, Well, okay, this is just kind of like a

Crazy big pivot idea. Like respect the audacity. Who did you email? What role? I don't know. See ya. And you said, Hey CEO, I'm Sean, this is what I do. Can I come to your office and pitch you? And then you went to the office and told them that or you told them this all

Exactly. Exactly. Why did he take your meeting? He at the end of it at the end of it, his his take was basically like we will acquire you if you want. Uh I don't know if we'll pay the most. So you know, that's that's I don't know if the deal will happen. Um and I don't know if we would do this. But the fact that you can come in here and whiteboard this on a wall makes me want you to like come here and do things. And like and take over. That's the biggest bullshit artist thing I've ever heard of, and you almost pulled it off. What was the guy like?

He's amazing. He's a young guy, right? He's like a young nerdy too. Jason Citron, yeah. I was like I I never met Zuck, but I was like the way he talked about their product and strategy and like his like calm like confidence. Like quiet, nerdy confidence. I was like Oh, I don't want to compete with this guy and I see why they've kicked everyone's ass. Like this is like this guy's really smart and just really uh

Like has a point of view about the way this needs to go. And Like It's just simple, it's understandable, it's different. Why do you think he took feel like he's gonna execute on that?

Um I think I had gotten a warm intro through his investor, his lead investor. I told his lead investor, Hey, we're thinking about selling, but I I went to him and I was like Hey, we're thinking about selling, would you do this deal or not? And he was like, Well, you should first talk to the Discord guys and I was like, Great. You know, that's exactly what I was hoping for. You know,'cause I'd I just need to create a bidding war of some kind to get the, you know, best deal possible. So can you make that intro? So he just emailed him and was like

Um you guys should meet. Uh, you know, here's his email. He's like, Yeah, I think he warm introduced, You should meet. And then I just said, Hey I'd love to come by the office today and like Uh, you know, forty minutes, I'll sketch out what I have in mind and like, you know, you can decide if I'm so nuts. Or if uh uh I'm genius or I'm not, said you can decide for your first time. But you respected it. I don't know what I said. Yeah, he was just like you know.

Mm. Would you like to come like be one of the like C suite type people. 'Cause I don't think we're gonna do that plan that you outlined. But I like you.

Uh I don't we didn't get that too. Dude, this is how you can be able to do. Everyone needs the confidence of a Sean Purry. This is a great story. This is um Proof that you can just create. Shit out of thin air. Value. Yeah, you can create value out of it.

At my last startup, the the best thing I did ultimately in that in that company was I did write by the team and the shareholders of like at the end I put my best foot forward to try to get us the most value we could. Um That was like you know Of all the things I did, that was the best one. And like I tried to do many other things well, tried to find product market fit, tried to scale, tried to hire a great team.

And I pr did some of those okay, some of those poorly. The one thing I did great was this this process. Let me let me finish the story here. So then So I'm like, okay, these guys don't want to do it, but maybe we could still do it. And so we start trying to set up a meeting and I I realized pretty quickly, Oh You have to do this as one

You have to do this as like a coup. 'Cause it's kind of like a rebellion. And the t I was like, We need to do two things. We need to wait till people are pissed off about something that Twitch does, which Big companies will shoot themselves in the foot. They'll come out with policies, they'll They'll make some statement, they'll change some feature, they'll change the revenue split and people will get annoyed.

I was like, so we need to s capitalize on that. And then secondly, we need to get everybody all at once. You know that movie that's out that people like every everything everywhere all at once. That's how I was like, that's how we need to do this. We can't just get we can't just slowly negotiate one by one. It won't feel like there's enough momentum. And so I was like We need to do this at

Twitch's big conference where all the streamers will go to all the big streamers go. Cause most big streamers they don't leave their house. They're like They're like me, but they actually have like, you know, they're actually fa you know, rich and famous from their streaming, but they can't leave their room. That's like their job. And so they they go on vacation very little. They take very few days off. The one thing they do is they often go to TwitchCon'cause they can meet their fans and it's the big event.

So I was like, we need to do like a dinner the day before the day of or the day after the conference. Probably the probably the day before. I was like, you know, this might be the worst time'cause they're gonna be up and, you know, the Twitch kind of like Ecosism, but it's the only time we can get them all in the same room. I was like And we'll lay out our case.

Which is basically look, you guys are gonna make stupid money. If you all are in, there's no risk to any of you individually because you're if you're all there, this will actually work. And see, like you don't have to p play by Twitch's rules anymore, like you have a say in this thing. Yeah. 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 spreadsheet or dueling databases. HubSpot Grow Better.

Dude, there's this like uh there's this like famous meeting that happened in in Atlantic City in like nineteen thirties and that's when they it was all all the mafia guys that got together and like Al Capone and all these guys, and that's when they like formed like the syndicate or whatever, you know, like the mob and like you know, it's us versus everyone That that's basically what you did. You had like your little mob meeting and That sounds awesome. I didn't do it. I wanted to do this. I didn't even get there. Why? Because there was one thing that happened and when we ended up getting acquired by Twitch

Uh Emmett was like, Hey, let's grab a drink, we'll celebrate. So we go to s the the first time I met him like out outside the office. We go to this bar and you know, we're talking about stuff and I was just like, You know Uh I was like, What do you think how would somebody beat Twitch? He's like hmm. He's like thinking he's like Pretty hard. We do have like a pretty good

business and like you know It's hard to compete against these like marketplaces once they get big. No no so I go I go I go we had an idea. Uh, I don't know if this would have ever worked. We got very close and we didn't pull the trigger ultimately. Uh but I always wondered like would this have worked.

And I told him the idea, he goes. He goes, Yeah, we've thought about that. Like that I don't wanna quote him, but like the the i g gist of what he said was If you were gonna do it, that's the only way to do it. But we knew that.

And that's why we started signing exclusive contracts with all these guys and specifically exclusive contracts that don't line up. So we would make one expire in June and another expire in January, another one expires and The year following year. He's like so that nobody could ever like the all off cycle payment off cycle contracts. So that nobody could come and like

Oh, they're all gonna be four right away. Tiny detail, right? And I was like, wow. And then sure enough, this actually did end up tr somebody did try to do this. So Uh, Microsoft came out with this thing called Mixer and they went and they tried to get the top streamers. They gave Ninja like, I don't know, some stupid twenty, thirty million dollars to come stream on Mixer, he said yes. He's like, dude, if I'm making four or five on Twitch And these guys will give me thirty guaranteed.

Um To go sit here for two years. All right, I'll do it. And they tell me like this is integrated with Xbox. It's gonna like drive me a bunch of new viewers. Cool. And then they tried to get Shroud and try to get a bunch of others, but they did it too slowly. And so um so this attack did actually end up happening when it was out of business, didn't it?

Yeah,'cause they couldn't get the critical mass. They couldn't get enough people to say yes. Um But like this did happen. Like the Chinese streaming platforms tried to do it, like a whole bunch of people tried to do this against Twitch at the same time and And Twist did a you know a fairly good job. Of not only this off cycle contract thing, but also figuring out

It was crazy. There was like this This uh Just like Theory which was How many of your favorite streamers need to move before you move?

And so they looked at like, okay, if I'm a viewer, if I spend a hundred percent of the time just watching Sam and Sam leaves, okay, I have a high likelihood of leaving. But as long as I can get you to watch like four people. The odds of all four leaving are very low. And if if one leaves, I'm like ninety five percent chance to just stay. How about the fact that they probably hired some like MIT like rocket scientists? And he's like thinking for years like I'm gonna I'm gonna help get man to Mars you know, I'm gonna help I'm gonna be part

Of saving the world. The human race. I'm just a little small part of this, but I'm helping. And He gets his job offer from SpaceX and it's a hundred and thirty five thousand. And then he gets his job offer from Twitch and it's like one hundred and forty thousand and he's like

Yeah, they got free lunch though. Uh like you know, like it's it's like the office is down the street from my house. Um I can do I this this space thing will always be here, you know, like Um The their office is beautiful. And then they take that Twitch office. And then they spend the next eight years of their lives

And the only point is figuring out how to make it so a streamer can click a button and like a cat pops up on their shoulder like like an emoji. You know what I mean? Or it's like, how do I just make it so like on Monday night football, the first yellow the the down line, the yellow line moves perfectly with like the how do I do that? You know, space will always be there though, but like how do I get this like first Yeah, just imagine someone like dedicating their lives to that. That I that sounds horrible to me. That is um not

Far from the truth. And in fact some people Try to use that to their advantage. Um like You know, Steve Jobs did that thing where he's recruiting John Skilly or whatever he's you know. When are you gonna stop selling sugar water to kids and come like help change the world? And uh

Uh Scott Harrison, the CEO of Charity Voter, he's like I remember he came to Silicon Valley he was recruiting for charity water and I was like How do you recruit from like Google, you this I'm trying to hire somebody from Adobe, I remember. He's like, Yeah, she makes four times as much as I'm gonna offer. I'm like, how why would she take a Like a huge pay cut like that, like four X plus he's like

I just gotta hope that she wants to do something that actually matters. I was like well, okay. And he actually did succeed in recruiting a bunch of really interesting people. Um But yeah, you know, it does happen. Like when you're at these companies, it's like What percent of your life

Goes. Towards like being like Mm. You know, can we get You know, chat engagement.

Up by point two percent. Like can we get The uh you know If I add this emoji of this like, you know, bouncing cat. Like are you thirty four percent more likely to come back next week? Like you know, there's a lot of life that comes down to you. If you work a big tech company, you're working inside of a slot machine.

And you're looking at this like person sitting down on the stool and you're like Can I get another four quarters out of'em? What do I need to Let's hey make that light flash over there.

A cherries, you got a flash. Yeah, that'll do it. My wife, you know, went to this fancy uh Ivy League school. She's this brilliant woman and She was at Facebook when we started dating and She was telling me what she does she's like I'm a P M M, what's that stand for? Product marketing manager. And I was like, What's that mean? She's like, Oh well, we just help people Um

Like we want more people. to use Facebook. I'm like, Oh, are you guys like the thing that puts like the jet above India so like they get free internet access? She's like, Oh, no, not really Um well do you do? She's like You know, I create um different products to help people to use Facebook. I'm like, Okay, but what do you really do? She's like I'm uh making it so you could put a sticker on your picture and more people will spend just a little bit more time on this app. And I'm like oh okay

Yeah, y you should quit, right? And like that's when she quit. She's like, Yeah, and went and did something that actually she cared about. But uh yeah, I remember hearing about them like Oh, that's why you went into debt for all these universities. And that's why you did all that. Was that you can You know. walk around the Facebook campus for like three hours a day and make like a sticker of like Poochine the cat or whatever the fuck that thing was called. Do you remember that thing Poo Jean or what was that thing? It was like a it was like a Japanese cat. No idea what you're talking about. It it was called like Poo. Remember how uh Facebook like f they would have all these like uh Japanese cartoons. There was like that dog with his tongue hanging out. I don't remember. It was a thing. It was like Poo Jean. It was like a cat that was Asian

And like it was like a series of stickers that Yeah, it's it's the thing in Snapchat that hot that dancing hot dog, which has been seen more than like any cartoon or animation ever. I think it's seen like ten billion times. Something like that. It's like this hot dog is actually more popular than Mickey Hills. Just like the stupid ways of time. It reminds me of on the TV show Silicon Valley, one of the apps that they said was amazing was Nipp Alert and it uh alerts you of erect nipples uh in your vicinity. I'm like ah, this sticker thing, that's nipple alert, sounds good. Honestly, when I was there, when I was I I I didn't think it was like, you know, a waste of sort of time and energy in that sense. Like I don't know, maybe I think that's the one. Twitch is actually okay because Twitch is like this is like this cool subculture. We're nerds, no one likes us, we finally have a space that we can do this stuff. Facebook I think is different.

And I respected the game theory of it. I was like when this whole like contract thing was going down and they were like You know, how m w basically the question of how much should we bid, I was like I don't know, you know like It's like in sports there's like this money ball movement where you're trying to figure out the value of a player and if you can accurately

Forecast the value of a player. You have an edge in winning in the in the in the league. The same the same thing is true now for all these like big media platforms that are like in in Twitch case, you know, they were bidding for content. So they're bidding for for this. And you know, I went and met with people or like, you know, talk to people who were at Netflix and it's like, Hey, how do you decide how much To spend on the production of this or how You know, how do you figure out if it was worth it to spend, you know, whatever a hundred million dollars on house of cards?

And like and you go there and you'll meet you know, you meet the guy who's doing the same thing, right? Like the brilliant data scientist. whose like job is to like A B test The thumbnails. of you know, like the the new Garfield movie to figure out. Which one is gonna lead to higher engagement, like lower churn.

And it's like y yeah, you know you're you're A B testing thumbnails for for you for for Netflix and YouTube and all this stuff like Yeah, that's like It kind of feels like You know, bringing a gun to a knife fight type of thing. Like you're you're you're Mm-hmm.

Damn, like really this is where all the shit is. I know, but there is it's a scale. It's not binary, it's a scale. You know, and so for some companies it's like Oh no, this is just way too lame. For others, it's like uh this got a little pinch of lame, a little half a cup of lame, but like it's mostly pretty cool. You know I'm saying. Netflix, I actually think that's cool. It's like oh I'm giving the world a little bit of entertainment. Facebook, it's like I'm just making people hate themselves. Yeah, the thing that I the way I ended up thinking about it was um

Like Do I matter here? Like uh if I left Hm. Huh. Like who cares? I I call this the Jenga Law. Like if you remove this block from the Jenga Tower, uh tower's still there. Okay, I guess that wasn't a key block. Like, you know, sure we'd love to have it there. It's more it's better if it's there, but like

Nah, nobody really cares if it leaves. Like if if I don't really matter here, then like it's very hard for me to get excited. And that's kind of an ego thing, but it's also like An impact thing. Like if I At a start up like I can I can just by myself create a product.

Give value to customers that didn't exist. And I can capture a huge amount of the value. And at a big company I'm neither the key person creating the value, nor the key person nor the person who captures any of the value, right? Like Your value capture inside of a company is is is fixed. Like you you get paid what you get paid in most cases, you know, aside from like maybe a bonus that you could get. Um whether your product succeeds or fails.

Which is why a bunch of products. fail or go really slow inside these companies'cause it doesn't matter. You don't get you don't get a prize if it works. Uh you know, you get you get praise. And so and then and then the other side, which is like Yeah, does this matter. And I think there is a counter argument. Like I talked to um

Yeah, Josh Elman and uh uh uh and actually even the the chief product officer at Twitch this guy Dan. Like Dan, why why do you always join you know worked at Google, worked at Nextdoor, worked at not Twitch? I was like, Why are you doing these big companies? Like, have you ever wanted to go do your own? He's like Yeah, but I wanted like impact scale. And I was like I was like, Oh, that's weird. Like in my head, it was always if I'm at a small company, I have a bigger impact because I am big relative to the company. He's like,

Yeah, but that's not how you think about it. Like Here if I can improve one product that Ten million people use. Or Google, uh you know, a billion people use search. Uh you know, every single day.

And so if I can make that better, he's like I created the book search, you know, feature. I was you know the on the books team. We created that project. So now you could like search for books and like a bunch of people on earth do that. Not a startup, but it'd be very hard for me to do that. And I was like Okay, like that is the counterpoint is like

If you're if you're working at Apple and you're working on the App Store Like you know, the app store If a billion people use it every single day, I guess like making that better reaches a billion people, you know, making their life one percent better or whatever, you know, that that day is is higher impact than than at a startup. But it doesn't feel that way. The action doesn't feel the same to me. No, I agree.

You wanna do another topic? Can I give you a framework that I think is uh Pretty dope that I that I heard. Mm-hmm. So I was talking to somebody about like, you know, um I can't really say what I was talking about. Uh but I was talking about something like

You know, it's the say the topic of money. Like you know. Should I do this should I do this? It's gonna yield this amount of money or not? And the person was like, Well, the way I think about money is um You know. Because the value of money is

What can you say no to? If you have this money. And I was like What do you mean by that? That's interesting. I started he actually he didn't even respond, but I was like, uh In my head I was like

That's interesting. I've never heard that before. And so like I started thinking about it and I go That's true. Like People always say, you know, I want financial freedom, I want freedom, uh you know I don't care about money, I care about freedom. That's like a common thing you'll hear.

And it's like what does that actually mean? I was like, Oh, it's actually not the freedom To do something, it's the freedom from having to do something. So it's like What can I say no to? So let me give you kind of like so I started thinking about my own life. I was like When I had twenty five thousand dollars in my bank account, I could say no to a really shitty job. Like I didn't have to go flip burgers or be a janitor. I could I could pay my like monthly bill.

Uh and I could do that for like, you know, six to twelve months and like Cool. That means I didn't have to go get a bad job, a shitty job today. Then at like a hundred K in the bank, you can say no to like a shitty manager. It's like okay, I don't I can't just retire, but I can like quit this job, take a gap and like find another job and I don't feel like this like financial stress in doing that. So Hunter K lets me say no to a shitty manager.

I was like half a million, that's when he I could say no I don't have to work for a couple of years. I could just say no to work for a little bit, temporarily say no to work. Six to twelve monthly. Yeah. Yeah, I could go for a year, I could try a start up or go trap back backing or whatever. Like I could pursue a passion of some kind. So that's a new thing you could say no to. It's like work for a little while.

Then at kind of like I would say three million You could just say no to jobs. Like Uh I'm only gonna work for myself. I can bet on myself and and give myself enough time to figure stuff out without having to stress about it. At ten million, I think you just say no to working in general. It's like uh like my money makes enough money.

I just don't need to use my time to make money if I don't want to. And then it kinda goes on and you say no. Well at like I I've been thinking about this as well. Um at like between some number, maybe around a hundred You say no to having to be in one location. So for example, right now I rent.

A place in one location and I own a place in another location, if I had a hundred million dollars, I'd probably own three or four homes and it's just like, hey, let's just go from Place to place to place. I don't have to spend any time organizing a rental or or anything. And then maybe around like two or three hundred, it's I'm gonna say no to wasting time at an airport. I'm just we only You know, we only fly for I I think it's that, but the numbers are a little bit less. I said at fifty, I think you could say no to any inconvenience that money can solve. You could.

I think you could. But you could fly private at fifty million you don't have to own the jet, but you could fly private. For sure. You can hire assistants to do anything you need. You can hire, you know, chefs and drivers and and and you know errands and and accountants and anything you don't want to do, you don't have to do it. Once you get to sort of fifty million range. I talked to a guy the other day who owns a jet and it he said it it's it's about two and a half million a year. Um and expenses. Right. He owns it. Uh if you want to rent it, I think you could go most you can go to a lot of places and spend half a million dollars a year.

And if you have fifty million, that's that that's doable. But you can't own like An eight million dollar house in Brooklyn and then a three million dollar house in Austin and then a five million dollar house in LA. But you could own pretty nice shit in those places. Right. And so and you know, like the top ladders, you you get to a hundred million and I think you could say no to the way the world the world works, you get to change some rules. And at a billion, I think you say no to like politicians, you say no to the police, you say you say no to a bunch of people, uh when you get to a billion because

You have the ability to kinda fight back. Uh you they Uh they kind of th there's a there's a different level of respect. So to me, I liked this framework of What does this m amount of money allow me to say no to? that I want to say no to. Did you um what would what hourly rate would you say no to right now for a for a project that you don't want to do?

For a one hour phone call, what would you have to accept? Uh, so like I think they I there's like what you say and then there's like what you actually like what the market clearing price actually is. So you would you right now I charge two thousand dollars an hour and I take about two hours a week of phone calls. Um, would you do that or not?

So that's the exact borderline. So on GLG, that's like What you could the max you can set my rate to is two thousand. And If I get a if I get a bid. And I'm like, uh this phone call doesn't sound like it's gonna be a lot of fun.

Um It's like right at that borderline where I feel like Kinda should. Like Uh for an hour. I I should I don't take and I I I don't take the calls because I need the money. I take the call because I feel guilty saying no.

And so it's the same thing, right? Like uh feeling like I should means Feeling like I I wanna say no, but I don't think I should. And therefore, if I say no, I kinda feel like I've made a m you know, I'm guilty, right? Like, I've used the app intro and I just Like for example I'm flying down to your event and then I'm flying to LA. I um

I schedule it so I know when I'm gonna be well, I know when I'm gonna be in the Uber. And I just make my availability there. So I'm like, sick, I'll just take this in the Uber and now I can afford Like I could justify a two hundred dollar Uber Black because I'm making two thousand dollars in this hour And so I'm gonna be comfortable and I'll order even early. So if I arrive early at the airport, I can just sit outside of the airport and finish this call. So that's kinda how I've been justifying it now. But

Right. It feels weird selling time per hour, and I don't even know if I like that in general. Yeah, exactly. So I would say my true answer is If I don't want to do it. Right now

I think that the number is something like two or three thousand dollars for an hour. If I d if I just If I if I don't want to do it, I actually just don't do it. But if it's like borderline, if I'm not sure if I want to do it or I don't think I would like it, but it's not so painful. I think that's my current thing. Uh, but I'm I'm actively trying to get away from it. Like um

Uh what was it? Something came up yesterday that was like this. And I was like I was by default I was just gonna say yes and I was like Should I say yes to this? Let me just like recheck. What I wanna be saying yes to.

Because I think that You know, one of the most important decisions in your life is what are the things I'm gonna say yes to and what are the things I'm gonna say no to? So there's your default box. Oh I I obviously say yes and no to these things. Then what are the non obvious things? So it's like

I wanna be saying yes to things that I know will be fun and help me grow. But scare me a little or put me out of my comfort zone. Right. So it's like I know I want to say yes to that. I know I want to say yes to Uh

If my friend is in town, I wanna go pick them up from the airport, or if my mom needs to get to the airport, I wanna drive her there. Like I wanna say yes to tasks that like Um I don't want to do, but I actually want to be the person who does those things. So I'm just like I'm deciding consciously, what are the things that are like What what should I be moving into the yes box and what should I be moving into the no box? What's some shit I do today that I should be saying no to you have a polite way of saying no to all the inbound or do you just ignore?

I used to just ignore and then I realized like It's totally fine to just say Um hey, this sounds cool, but um I just got my hands full I don't want to do anything else. Or like Hey this uh you know

Um Hey, you know, uh thanks for reaching out. Um, I don't wanna do any more phone calls than I'm doing right now, but if that changes, I'll let you know. Yeah. And like I'll just say something and I think you know, people A, they just appreciate a response more than a blow off. And B I think there's some level of respect for um

Thoughtful you might. For you know, somebody just being honest and like just saying look I I don't like I don't want to do that. Um you know. I I've decided I want to travel less, you know. Um

So I'm gonna say so I'm saying no to Trump. Dude, I had this guy messaging me saying he wants to come on the pod and I was just like I ignored it. I ignored it because I hate when people ask to come on because I'm like dude Why are you gonna make me say no? Like we say I say no to everyone practically, even good friends. Like we just say no to most everyone. And this guy, he was like, uh he was like, Can I come on? I'm a huge fan, and I just had like Thanks for reaching out. Like I didn't even I tried to avoid it. Like it was quite obvious. And he's like, uh Hey, so can I come on? And I go, You know, this isn't a good fit, but I really appreciate you listening. And he was like Um Can I get some feedback? I was like, it's just not a good fit And he goes, Okay, but why?

And I was like Oh okay,'cause you're not interesting and you're not that successful. And uh he was angry at me. And I was like, dude, what what the hell? I mean, I was trying to like You know, make a point of like avoiding this topic and being kind, but you if you're gonna ask for feedback, and I'm gonna tell you, you know, w what what what it's about. Don't get angry. Right. What's not interesting about it, he said, I go

It it just there's uh uh you know, I just don't care about you. So m my my my Goldilocks thing here was I was too cold when I just blew people off'cause they didn't like that. And then they would just stop like, you know I I found I would miss opportunities because I wouldn't reply to things. Uh missed opportunities I cared about, uh in in the long run. Then the too hot was I would just be like

I don't do phone calls. I was like, Okay. you know, you're an a you're sort of a jerk for just being like uh I don't do phone calls or like I don't meet with people I don't know. Or like, you know, I I I don't do this. It's like too hard of a rule. And I found that the the sweet spot was somewhere in the middle of just saying Uh you know.

Hey, thanks, but uh but you know, I'm trying to do less of this right now. Or Or sometimes I'll say like Um they'll be like, Hey, did you want to do this? And I'll be like Um You know, I haven't decided and uh you know, like I don't know. I don't I don't even know what I want yet. So let me get clear on what I want and then I'll come back if I if I you know, when I get clear if I ever get clear on it.

But like it's not about you. I just don't know exactly what I want to do right now. And like I'll just say like something honest like that and I found that that that tends to work. Um a little bit better. Hitler To Saudi Arabia.

Uh Saying no to people. Mental models. Yeah, mental models. Good pod. Um You uh I'm gonna be in LA on Sunday. You're not coming, right?

To LA on Sunday? No, I don't think so. But then I'm gonna see you in what are you gonna like? I told you about it. I'm hosting an event there. Dude, for the New York event that I'm hosting, we've got like thirteen hundred RSVPs. I'm eager to see how many shows you gotta cut that down, right? You can't you can't do it. You're gonna do a thousand person event? No, that's how many people said they're coming, but it's free, so like maybe half will come. Uh but we put up ten grand. You gotta do a six hundred fifty Person event.

Dude, it's all guys by the way. It's all guys. I like scroll through. It's all dudes. I could smell that event already. It's fucked up, man. So many chads are gonna be there. And then I'm doing the same thing in LA and that one has like five or six hundred RSVPs. Um I just uh you and I were talking about an event and I was like Kinda like actually this is like a toilet decision and I just wrote it on Eventbrite on my phone and just posted it right away and people signed up and it said we're committed. So we're doing that. And then I'm gonna be good and then we're gonna go to uh the Carolinas for uh the thing you're organizing, which

Everyone's been reaching out to me. Did we talk about it last part? Yeah, we mentioned they had a last spot. Dude so many people reach out. They want to come Uh they basically people wanting to come and I'm like I this isn't no No, sorry, it's not my thing. But so I came up with a uh I was like, What do we call this? And I was like, I wanna call it

Camp M F M. So it's Camp M F M and I was like, We could do these a bun we can do a bunch of these. We could just do like adult Summer caps, basically. Great idea. What is something that's really fun?'Cause I don't want to go to something that's like like even this like thousand person meetup, like I'm sure it's cool and there's cool people. It's a party versus uh an experience. Yeah, so I wanna have

Experiences. You know when you were like I'm a fucking artist, man. Yeah, tha that's how I have, like I don't have experience. This is gonna be a good one. Now we gotta come up with another one. Let's go to like hopefully. And so some of these will be like this one, which is like ultra like More like Super exclusive, right? There's only there's only supposed to be twelve people going, it's expanded to twenty four.

And um, you know, that's a lot. I I wanted it to be more like twelve. But I'm like there'll be those and I think we should do some that are for like Dude, if you can like If you know the phrase, you know, we don't do public math, manifest cowboys, you know, uh, Sam wants to own a lake. Like if you know the inside jokes of this pod, Then

You that's your admittance into the to this this camp. And I was like, I think we should do these like twice a year. Um that are just like fun and awesome and get people together. And I was like, I think Camp MFM should be the thing. I never wanted to do the work for this. Um, and neither do you. And so that's like, you know, one of the challenges, but But it wasn't a lot of work for this one, was it?

It is. It's a lot of'cause as soon as I try to do something, I'm like Well let's make it fucking awesome, then. Like, you know, so like all of a sudden, like for this basketball thing, we got like Nike's giving us all like like sneakers like from like one of their players and like we're getting like custom swag. We rented these like dope Airbnbs, we got like a chef, we got like all this stuff coming together. I was like, Well if we're gonna have good people, let's get like I'm like

Good names in here. Let's get like some people we're excited to meet. And then it's all coming together and like but like each one of those now I'm like now I want it to be like awesome if we're gonna do it we got we why not have like we know we can get a experience. We can get a sponsor to say like all right, you get a you get Three hundred thousand dollars a year to do cool shit. But we get to be there at all the events. Yeah. Okay. If somebody wants to do uh sponsor Camp Camp M FM, you can do this. All the money will go to basically

Hiring a planner to actually like do these things for us. And uh and secondly to uh To you know, the the venue and logistics of it.

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