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- [00:01]
A
I can't believe we just agreed to do public math. Like, we only have, like, two rules here. One, don't get canceled. Two, don't embarrass yourself by doing public math. And we did it.
- [00:12]
B
We did it a bunch of times. Frankly, I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it. Like, days off on a road. Let's travel. All right.
- [00:23]
A
I got a business that you're gonna love. Okay, so this is a business that in 10 months has gotten to 10 million in ARR.
- [00:33]
B
I think I know what you're talking about.
- [00:35]
A
Okay, so it started by this French guy, and the business is called time Left.
- [00:40]
B
Yep. I had it on my topics list too.
- [00:42]
A
Okay, so check this out. You.
- [00:45]
B
I don't know.
- [00:46]
A
I don't know. How deep did you go? Did you go into the backstory or.
- [00:49]
B
I know. It took a lot longer than it appears.
- [00:52]
A
Yeah, exactly. It's a multi year overnight success, as they tend to be. Right. You've heard the word, the phrase, like, ten year overnight success. It's kind of like that. So I want to show you some things about this guy. So the first thing is this graph. Here's the revenue graph. And if you're listening on audio, you should go to YouTube so you can actually see what we're showing because it's way more fun. And you can also see what we look like. And by the way, I'm Sean. This voice, this is Sean, the Indian guy. Sam, talk. You're the white guy. You should talk now.
- [01:25]
B
It's like they think that I would talk like a white, like, alpha jock because of the way that I look and I talk like an Indian nerd. And they think that you would talk like an Indian nerd, but you, you talk like a white bro. Alpha jock, so.
- [01:39]
A
Exactly. And we need the record to be. To be clear on that. Okay, who's who? All right, so check this out. So this is the revenue graph. Already impressive. You can see it kind of starts super, super flat and then gets to now, you know, over a million dollars a month that the. This business is generating. And what does it do?
- [01:56]
B
What month did it describe that graph.
- [02:00]
A
Okay, so this is basically, if you start in January of last year, it's like zero. You get to January of this year, and it's still, you know, the ARR is still under, I don't know, tens.
- [02:15]
B
Of thousands, maybe a month.
- [02:17]
A
Exactly. And now as of October, November, it's over a $10 million annual run rate. It's crossing 12 and a half million. And so in 10 months to go to do greater than 10 million in ARR is great. He said it took seven months to reach 1 million and then another seven months to get from 1 to 10. Right. So crazy growth. Okay, so what's growing like crazy. What is this business even? So Time Lift is a business that's is just gets people together for dinner. It is a solve for the loneliness epidemic that is everywhere. And so if you go to their website, it just says, every Wednesday night, strangers meet for dinner. Book your seat and meet five strangers over dinner, all matched by our personality algorithm. Book your seat. And in, you know, hundreds of cities every Wednesday, people get together for a dinner with a bunch of strangers that are kind of curated by this, by this app. And so you pay something like 20ish bucks a month to be a part of this club, be a part of this supper club. And every week on Wednesday, they're going to set up a dinner and then you go, then you pay for the dinner separately. While you're there, they book the restaurant, they book the table. You show up and it's supposed to be a bunch of other people that you should find interesting or get along with. And then, and then you split the bill at the end.
- [03:34]
B
And they claim, and they claim that they have an algorithm where it's like you, are you logical? Are you more emotional? Are you this, are you that. That helps match?
- [03:42]
A
Yeah. Roughly what age are you? Are you, you know, kind of single and looking to mingle like, kind of what, what, what are you all about? And you say, you take this little quiz and you do that.
- [03:54]
B
All right, so when I ran my company, the Hustle, I think we had something like 2 million subscribers. And we made money through advertising. We didn't actually make that much money per person reading the newsletter because advertising in general is kind of a crappy business model. And so I remember sitting down and I'm like, what are all the different ways that I can make money off the Hustle that aren't advertising? And so to make sure that you don't make this mistake, Sean, me and the HubSpot team, we went and looked at a bunch of different ways to monetize your business. And we put it all together in a really cool document where we lay it all out along with our research. And we call it, very appropriately, we call it the Business Monetization Playbook. Go to the description of this episode and you're going to see a link to that Business Monetization Playbook. It's completely free. You just click the link and you can see it back to the episode.
- [04:45]
A
Now the backstory. So I first, I found it pretty fascinating that this business, which is so simple, a dinner club with strangers, is scaling so well. And this is not a new idea, obviously. Like people have been doing this not even as a business for a long time. I remember when I first moved to San Francisco, I used to use this app called I think let's Lunch it was called and it was same idea every. You would just agree, hey, I'm down to get a lunch with a random person who's also in the tech industry. And I used it when I first moved there and I knew nobody. I used it to meet some cool people and it's kind of a hit or miss first date without the romance.
- [05:18]
B
Do you remember Grouper? Before that? I loved Grouper. Grouper was a great. It was you and two friends go on a group date with three other ladies and they tell you where to meet and you have a, you have a blind date. A three way blind date, I guess a six way blind date.
- [05:34]
A
Right. Okay, so now here's the backstory that I find interesting. So let me just get you interested in this guy. And I know that there's really only one way to get you interested in a guy. Do you know what I'm about to show you?
- [05:44]
B
What's his calves look like?
- [05:46]
A
I'm going to show you a body transformation.
- [05:48]
B
There he is.
- [05:50]
A
I'm going to show you what this founder looks like without his shirt on. All right, so not only did he transform his business in 10 months, I think this is also like a 10 month body transformation where he went from the skinniest he ever was.
- [06:01]
B
Did he have, was he sick?
- [06:03]
A
He was trying to run a like ultra race or whatever. So he got to like less than 10% body fat. And then he was like, cool. Now I'm going to try to become the strongest I could ever be. And in 10 months he kind of transformed his body too. So this guy's pretty fascinating before doing all of this. So here's, here's his story. So this guy starts out and he's a nightlife promoter, which ding ding, ding is a bit of a pattern. Scott Harrison from Charity Water before he, you know, went to save the kids in Africa nightlife nightclub promoter in New York. There are several people who have the same sort of background story before they make it. So it starts off as a nightlife promoter. Then he's, he decides to start a media company. And so like you like I did. We start. He started a media company. Now his media company was. The twist was, I'm only going to say good news because the news is always bad news. If it bleeds, it leads. Instead, I'm just going to tell uplifting good news stories every single day. And they did it. He grew the business to 90 employees, sold or kind of got acquired by this larger French broadcasting company and went through that whole process.
- [07:06]
B
What was that called?
- [07:07]
A
I think it had like a. It's called Buzz. Like buzz something. Millennium buzz, something like that. I don't know. I don't know the exact name of it. And they, and he's written about it because they got acquired and they merged, but they had this horrible deal structure, it sounds like, which was, it was a three year earn out. But the way the earn out worked was year one, we're going to make all these changes and invest in the business. Year two, we're going to continue with those changes and invest in the business. It's going to be losing money. And then year three, if it hits, if it performs, you get this big payout. And if by year three we haven't done that thing, you get nothing. And he basically, that was too aggressive of a plan, too risky. They did not hit the three year plan. It's kind of a messy divorce. He gets ousted by the majority shareholder and he basically walks away with nothing. It sounds like, I don't know the exact details, but it, it didn't end well for him. I think they ended up settling and he got a little something out of it. But it wasn't the thing that he wanted out of this whole thing. Okay. And this was after creating kind of like this video first online only news company that was doing hundreds of millions of views a month. And he was getting excited that, hey, we've, we've built something here. That's the future. And this, this traditional company was buying them and it's know one plus one is going to equal seven. Right. And it, it sure didn't. So he goes through that experience and he says, okay, he gets the settlement. So he finally leaves and I think he's got, you know, some money, but he's got a lot of time. And so he goes and he decides to travel. Now this is right when 2020 happens. Covid hits. And this guy, basically, while everybody else is locked at home, he's traveling solo. He planned, I think, to travel for 30 days solo. And it ended up being 700 days because he was like, Covid happened. He's like Well, I might as well just kind of travel around to different, different, you know, locations anyways, rather than being boarded up at home.
- [08:52]
B
How old is he?
- [08:54]
A
He's I think 30 years old at the time. And so he, something like this, 30 something years old, early 30s. He, during this time he's posting on social media, he starts getting some pushback and people are like, dude, like there's a pandemic going on. I'm stuck at home. A lot of people are kind of miserable right now. And you're out here posting pictures of you on a beach in Australia or SC scuba diving or doing these like kind of fun, exotic solo travel things. And so he meets somebody and a friend suggests to him, hey, you should, you should do a little shake up, you should have coffee and meet with a hundred strangers, do a hundred coffee meetings with strangers. So he does and he does. He accepts the challenge. He does 100 coffee meetings. And something that happened in, that changed his life. He's meeting with these people. And what he realized is that the common denominator amongst 100 strangers was like, man, what stood out to him was I meet these people and I asked them what they're excited about and what they dream about. And their dreams have been snuffed. Jeff Probst at the Tribal Council has snuffed their torch. Basically. They've forgotten how to dream. They've been suffocated by everyday life and they don't really even have like a compelling vision or dream for themselves. And so he decides to make his own bucket list. And you could see his bucket list on his homepage. He's got 100 things he wants to do before he dies.
- [10:15]
B
What's his name?
- [10:16]
A
Maxime Barbier, I think is how you say his name. French guy. And if you go to his blog, Daily Max, you can see a hundred things that are on his bucket list. Things like swim naked in the ocean, number one crossed out. Participate in a protest, do a live DJ set at a festival, you know, things like that. So he's got this reach 12% body fat, he's got this bucket list for himself. He decides he's going to make an app. So he says, okay, I got it. I got my new company, my new company. And this is kind of like idea one in 2020, he says, I'm going to create a app that lets people create their bucket list to create and share your bucket list. So he sets out, he draws the wireframes, he finds a coder, he hires a guy, they make the app and people upload Thousands of their dreams to this, but kind of goes nowhere after that. So he says, okay, strike one. So he says, okay, maybe I'll try something different. You know, what was the problem with this one? I got people to create a bucket list, but they're not doing anything. What if I connected people over their dreams? So it'll be like Tinder for bucket lists. And so now this is 20, 21. So year two, he says, I'm going to make a dating app that's not dating. Meaning you say what your dream is, I say what my dream is. If I swipe right on a dream and both you and I share that, it'll connect us over our shared dream. And maybe we could actually go and do it together. Right. So that's aspirational people message, but they don't actually go do anything.
- [11:37]
B
And this is still under the same. All under the same name of time left.
- [11:42]
A
Yeah. Oh, I should explain that. So why is it called time left? It's called time left because when he was traveling and recharging his batteries after that acquisition and the kind of messy divorce and the settlement, he ends up doing some math. And he goes, okay, I'm 30. I forget he's 36 years old or something like that time 35, maybe. He goes, so if I'm going to live till I'm 80. And he did the math. He goes, I have 600 months left in life. And he goes, that's my time left. And he read that blog post on wait, but why? Which was your life in weeks, where it kind of prints out a poster that visualizes the number of weeks left. And he created that. He put it on his wall, and every week he would take a black dot and he would mark out one week gone. And he just had this urgency around himself about, how much time do I really have left and what do I want to do? That's what spurred the bucket list. That's what wanted other people to realize how little time they have left. And he loved that quote, which was, I forgot who says the quote. But it's. You know, every man has two lives, and the second begins when he realizes that he only has one.
- [12:42]
B
Does this stuff inspire you as you're talking about this? I can't decide if I am, like, all in or if the old man in me is like, that's a lot of work. But, like, I'm pretty sure I'm like 60 to 70% on the side of like, this is inspiring. I need to have a bucket list.
- [12:57]
A
Yeah, I get what you mean. It's like I saw these kids that were like skateboarding and doing tricks by my house and I was like, this is awesome. This is great. Look at what they're doing. They're having so much fun. They're doing their thing. And then I was also, like, kind of out of breath from watching. And I was like, okay, I should probably just move along with my days. You know, it is a lot of work.
- [13:15]
B
His list is inspired by it. Yeah. Like, he wants to go for a run around Paris. He wants to get his boating license. Some of these aren't crazy. But then he likes I want a world record.
- [13:24]
A
So, by the way, sick thing for personal website. I'm going to steal this, put this on my site, which is write your bucket list and start crossing them out publicly on there. I think it's great. And he links to the story behind each one. Once he does it, it's great. So anyways, he names the company time left because he realizes he's got about 600 months left in life. And he starts doing this bucket list thing. Bucket list doesn't. So app one, create a bucket list fail. App two, connect people over shared dreams. Now they can message each other. Also fail. Now it's year three. And he says, okay, here's what we're gonna do. I'm gonna connect two people so you have the same. You want to do the same activity. I'll actually, like, connect you and get you to go do the thing in real life. Let me get you off your phone. The whole point is find somebody to do the thing with. And it starts off okay, but then he realizes that women don't feel safe doing one on one stuff with strangers. Right. So this is kind of like why Grouper worked. So that's 2022. Another year. No traction. 2023, he says, okay, forget the one on one. Small groups doing an activity in the city you love. And he gets small groups together. And he has one feature on there which is like you upload a photo of who you are so that you. When other people are trying to create the group, they can just check you out before they do the thing. Trying to make people feel comfortable. But what you realize is talking to users as soon as you put photos in the app. Very thought of it like dating, even though it wasn't a dating app.
- [14:45]
B
Yeah.
- [14:45]
A
People immediately wanted to gravitate towards certain people. They started judging people. It's like, this is not at all what I wanted to do. So 2023 goes by, third year of no progress and he can't cross off.
- [14:56]
B
Have a winning app on his bucket list. You know, it's just sitting there uncrossed.
- [15:00]
A
2024. This year, finally, he. He realizes, okay, this company's called time Left. Well, I got nine months of cash left. So now Cash Left is sitting there, realizing this doesn't work. He had raised $2 million initially back in 2020 for this idea. Nobody wanted to invest anymore. So he said, I had an honest conversation with myself. And by the way, so many conversations, so many success stories start with this. I had an honest conversation with myself. He says, do I want to continue? And if I do want to continue, more importantly, what do I no longer want to continue doing? And so he realized he made some rules. He goes, I want to do an idea that I can launch in two weeks or less without any technical team. So I. No code, no coders needed, and I can launch this thing in two weeks. Number two, I want to actually make some money. It's been three years. I've made zero dollars in the lifetime of this company. I want to make some revenue. It goes three. I want to have it be a group thing connecting people over an activity, but it's got to work without photos, meaning I can't have it be where people won't need to check out the other person to be willing to go do the activity. So he comes up with this idea of time left as dinners with strangers. So in three weeks, he launches this thing. It's the first time left dinner. There's four tables of six people that he launches with on that Wednesday in his city, and he makes $110. And at the time, he does it with just. He makes a type form. So he just. A form you fill out using type form off the shelf. A WhatsApp account. That's how he coordinated all the dinners. And a stripe account for how you pay. And he was able to spin that up in three weeks. And he was doing all the matching manually for three months. So he himself was the algorithm, no code. He was just figuring out who should I put together at these dinners that I think will work. And then he starts to move it to low code, and eventually he's getting 300 people together every Wednesday, and he makes 20. 20 grand. But he does the math. He says, all right, I still don't have a lot of cash left here. I'm default dead. I'm dying slower than I was before, but I'm still going to die unless I figure out how to do this in a more. In a. In a more scalable way. So he quickly builds a simple app and he makes one shift.
- [17:11]
B
He goes, does he have any employees?
- [17:13]
A
It's just him and a co founder. And so he goes, I'm going to figure out how to do these without having to book the go visit the restaurants in person. Because what he was doing was he was doing this in his city. And he would go to the restaurants, he would talk to them, he'd say, hey, there's going to be a group of six strangers. They're going to come to a table, you need to seat them, you know, make it comfortable for them. And then they need to split the bill at the end and don't make that awkward for them. Okay? And he was checking out each restaurant himself. He says, I got to figure out how to scale this. So he takes a leap of faith. He says, we're going to do this without doing that, that pre step. I'm just going to book the restaurant, book the table and see what happens.
- [17:48]
B
Do they have like, I guess like an automatically used like a handful of like popular booking platforms or something like that?
- [17:55]
A
Yeah, you know, open table type of things to book these restaurants. And so he does it like that. It works. On that Wednesday, he says, holy shit, this is going to work. So now he starts opening up more cities, not just his city that he's in. He's like, I could do this without geographically being in a place. I was being too precious about that. That was a sacred cow that once I slayed that sacred cow. Oh, the, the, the ceiling for my business, you know, got removed and I could explode this thing. So now he opens up hundreds of cities.
- [18:20]
B
How are people hearing about it?
- [18:21]
A
Ads. So he's advertising about it and people are talking organically about it. And he's getting a ton of free press. So he's been written up in 400 free press outlets because the narrative fits the zeitgeist of today, which is that people feel that people are too alone, they're too depressed. It fits the trends of people, you know, not getting married. If it's the trends of people being sad after Covid of people being incels of all this stuff, right? There's all these other stories that you could piggyback and newsjack on. And on top of that, it's just a feel good mission, right? I'm getting people together in person, not on social media, not on their phones, but actually in real life.
- [18:56]
B
Listen to the working the ad from Facebook. It says dine with five strangers, all matched by our algorithm every Wednesday night in Your city. That's all it said. It's nothing very simple.
- [19:07]
A
And if you go look at their TikToks, go look at TikTok content about them. It's really cool. You could see what's going on. And so in one year now, he's exploded this thing. So it's now in 300 cities. It's. The app is translated in 18 languages. He's got 70 employees that are all ops people organizing thousands of dinners, 18,000 dinners a week. They have to plan what he did, you know, over a million dollars. By November, their IG exploded. They now have a million IG followers written up in 400 articles. And the reason why, he says, is because I tapped into a simple, universal, multicultural need. People want to get together and they enjoy eating at a restaurant. And I love the way he talks about this, by the way he goes, I realized that dinner is a technology that if I wanted to get people together to actually have a good time, dinner is a piece of tech that just works. It makes that whole meeting new people thing just work, because we all know how to do it already. It's an activity every single person knows how to do. So there's no skill required. It has a natural flow that we're all familiar with, has a natural start, you know, beginning, middle, and end. And at the very least, you're going to break bread and eat good food. At the very best, you might actually meet a couple of cool people that you want to have, you know, ongoing connection with. You met some cool, cool people in your city. And how amazing is this dude? How amazing is this business?
- [20:28]
B
All right, my friends, I have a new podcast for you guys to check out. It's called Content is Profit, and it's hosted by Luis and Fonzie Cameo, and it's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. After years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like Red Bull and Orange Theory Fitness, Louise and Fonzie are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue. In each episode, you're going to hear from top entrepreneurs and creators, and you're going to hear them share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit. You can check out a recent episode called the Secret to Content that converts and they break down our buddy Alex Hermos blueprint for effective video production. So you can check out Content is Profit wherever you get your podcasts. This is great. How did he hire. I'm looking at his jobs page. How did he hire all these people that fast?
- [21:24]
A
He's. He's. Like, I'm hiring. Every week I'm hiring people. I'm interviewing everybody myself. And the job is pretty simple, which is like, it's all ops. It's all ops and user experience. So he's like, you know, we take the dinner and we try to break it up into moments. A dinner is not a single thing. A dinner is like Scott Harrison said on this podcast, it's the moments between the moments that matter. So you think it's just about the dinner? Well, break the moments down. So there's the greeting, the sitting, the connecting initially getting to know each other, the sharing of information and food. There's the bill and the awkwardness of the, of that at the end. And he's like, basically, how can we make each one of those steps a little bit better? And if we could do that, we can make the user experience better. We don't measure clicks and daily active users. We measure, you know, how many people had a great dinner this week, and that's the KPI.
- [22:10]
B
Will this last?
- [22:12]
A
Yes, I think this will last. I think that some ideas just take like the time. When the time is right, the time is right. So in the same way that Calm the meditation app went from this kind of fringe behavior that not a lot of people were going to do, it seemed like outside of the mainstream. You know, we all had a buddy who meditated, but like, you know, it wasn't a behavior everybody did. And then only when we all got too hooked to tech technology did the need for calm break through. And all of a sudden calm headspace and these apps became mainstream. And I think that this like, getting together with strangers thing, people are lonelier than ever. They're more addicted to their phone and technology than ever. And, you know, whether it was Covid or was other things that, that accelerated the need for something like this to exist. And so I'm a believer in this. I think this is like the new meetup.com I think this is going to scale and I think that you could build a kind of ritualistic thing. And I think there's going to be a lot of churn in this business. But it's a huge tam. Everybody needs this. And it's inherently viral. You're going to tell people you were doing this?
- [23:16]
B
Well, it's, it's. They're charging now on a monthly subscription. It's not a month. It's not going to be a monthly subscription business, but it's still going to be an awesome company. I think, I think they're branding is fantastic too.
- [23:26]
A
Yeah, exactly. I think this is like an inspirational company that a lot of people are going to rally behind. And you could see like that's why the traction is what the traction is.
- [23:32]
B
I went and read a bunch of reviews on Reddit. They're overwhelmingly positive. People love it. They'll say like, we met up. I was so awkward and uncomfortable at first, but we hit it off and it was great. But then what they said was after their dinner, let's say their dinner went from like 7 to 10pm At 10pm they said that there was like, I guess there's 8 people at dinner. So there must have been 10 other dinners happening in that city that night because 70 other people met up afterwards at the after party that was also arranged by Brian left. And they were like, it was a little too crowded, but it was awesome. Like I got to meet these people and I ended up leaving early, but I had a fantastic time. And then there was even, I, we have a text group now and there was even an after after party where people were hanging out till 4am and I'm going to do it again. And so it sounded like people absolutely loved it.
- [24:24]
A
Yeah, exactly. And this is a big city problem. Like, dude, it's so hard to make friends when you become an adult. Like once you're out of college, you don't really realize this till you leave college, but you're like, man, my number of new connections that I just get to stumble into per week drops dramatically because you're at home, you know, alone or with a couple of roommates. You have work, which is a static number of co workers. And then you might go to like a bar or go to a, you know, go to some place where people, you don't. People. It's not clear that people default, want to meet you. And it's so different than when you're in school. And I think that, yeah, particularly men shocks a lot of people.
- [25:02]
B
Men just like won't talk to anyone. I was reading this thread where it says like, what's something that women should know about men that that would surprise them? And the top comment was most men never get a compliment. And I was. And I thought that was pretty funny. Yeah, it's always saying a story about how, you know, they're with their boyfriend or something and someone else just like said they smell nice or I don't even remember. Just some like random compliment. And the guy was like very affected and the woman was like, why, why are you like that? He's like, I haven't had a compliment in like eight months. Like no one said anything nice about me in so long. And then. So it's like complimenting.
- [25:39]
A
Should we change the world right now?
- [25:42]
B
You look great today.
- [25:44]
A
Should we create. Yeah, exactly. Thank you. I love your, love your jacket. Love your Inspector Gadget outfit. Wait, did it wrong. Should we just start like, you know, a. You know, like a no nut November? Should we start a new trend? Should we pick a month? And it's basically just bros complimenting bros. And it's like, hey, every day your job, you got to, you got to give another guy just a solid compliment.
- [26:06]
B
Yeah.
- [26:09]
A
A one way flight to feel good. And that's, that's what, that's what, what month has like nothing going on.
- [26:16]
B
Just like, just a bunch of guys being dudes. Every May.
- [26:19]
A
Yeah. The march of men. It's like, yeah, here we go. Every march, every day, 30 days. Got to give another guy a compliment.
- [26:28]
B
That's actually a great idea.
- [26:30]
A
This is also what I wanted to do with like, you know, people were hosting these MFM meetups in every city. This is kind of what I wanted this to be. Which is like, I would love it if we could do this with like, if we could basically have time left, create like an mfm, an MFM button or whatever or like, or I don't know, somehow somebody create this for our listeners. Which is like if it was, you know, on the first of every month and it's always on the first of every month, there's a dinner in hundreds of cities around the world where you're going to meet with five other people, six other people who listen to the podcast.
- [27:03]
B
We're going to have to call it like more than a nod. Because that's basically like my interaction with most every man ever is just a nod. And it's like, so are we going to, are we going to do more than a nod to each other now? Is that. Yeah.
- [27:15]
A
Yeah, exactly. The nod is pretty effective, to be honest. I see you.
- [27:19]
B
Yeah, it just nod.
- [27:20]
A
I see you and I respect you. Yeah.
- [27:24]
B
Can I ask you a question about your weekend? You. I have a strong. I have a strong opinion about something, but I have nothing to do with the industry and you do. How is you are working the E. Com world was Black Friday and I guess Cyber Monday is still for you, miserable or awesome?
- [27:41]
A
Well, for me now I have a full team in place, so it was awesome. I didn't have to do a thing. I didn't. I just looked at the app and I said, wow, that's a, that's a Great number right there. It was not resp. I was not on the hook. You know, it's like the perfect thing. I'm not, I'm not on the hook for the inputs, but I get the outputs. Now, to be clear, I sweated this business for, you know, three, four years to be able to get to that spot. But like, now it's great. Before that, I will say very stressful. And it's stressful in the same way that I don't love birthdays. I don't like forced fun, and I don't like high expectations based, you know, events where it's like, you, you need this to go well, you want this to go well. It seems like it's going well for everybody else because you'll just see screenshots of people just crushing it. And I remember in the first couple of years I was so underwhelmed and disappointed by Black Friday, which was a combination of me not knowing how to do it. But really, when you start a, like, Black Friday is basically people who already know about your brand, who kind of wait around for discounts, who like your brand to come back, which for a new brand you just have a very small pool of people that already know and care about you, that want to shop, that are, you know, have been waiting to shop with you for your discount. So the first couple of years just sucked. And now it's amazing. Now I get why they call it Black Friday. You know, why it's called.
- [29:01]
B
Yeah, let me tell you the background really quick. But Basically, in the 70s, originally Black Friday was negative. It was called Black Friday because for some reason there was a. What was it, army versus Navy football game.
- [29:14]
A
It was. The Philly police called it Black Friday. They hated it. They hated the Friday Thanksgiving.
- [29:19]
B
This is the day that all the bad people come in town and it's just to be crowded. And then retailers also use Black Friday because they're like, this is when our employees never show up because it's day after Thanksgiving. Like, Black Friday sucked. And then like in the 80s or 90s, you know, it kind of got shifted to where Black Friday now means we're going to change it from. This is the. Your business, your retail business is in the red, meaning you lose money all the time. This is the one. See the beginning of the season, the first day of the season where you're going to switch to black and you're finally going to make a profit for the quarter.
- [29:50]
A
Exactly, exactly. They flipped it on its head, right? They lemons and lemonaded it. Where this Bad day where, oh, there's going to be a huge rush in the city. Everyone's going to try to do their shopping at once, going to create traffic. Then there's going to be a bunch of drunk people because of the game. And they turned it into this shopping event now that the retailers love.
- [30:08]
B
And then in 2005, a consort, there was, like, a trade group that included, like, Google and Amazon and a few other online retailers. They said, hey, this Black Friday thing, like, that's. That's pretty good, but, like, we need our own thing. And they come up with Cyber Monday. And so they, like, collectively agree to do Cyber Monday together. And then once Amazon gets even more famous and more big, they kind of are like, you know, pushing it forward to where Cyber Monday is huge. And now all the other retailers are doing it. But as an outsider, my opinion, and it's not entirely rooted in data other than there are. There are numbers where, like, if you discount something like, you know, 20% and you only have a 40% gross margin, you got to sell, like, two times as much. If you discount it 30%, you have to, you know, sell three, three times. Like, the stats are pretty crazy how much more you need to sell for each 10% discount. But from an outsider, I hate Black Friday. Like, I just think that it, like, ruins people's brands. Like, to me, like, everything eventually is going to turn into J. Crew, where it's like, I only buy it when inevitably they have their 50% off sale.
- [31:15]
A
Well, actually, it kind of works the other way, which is every brand wants to discount but doesn't want to dilute the brand. Why do you want to discount? You got too much inventory left over, and that's just cash that's tied up, sitting on your shelf. Maybe it's expiring, maybe it's just out of season, but it's definitely cash that's tied up in inventory. So every brand is not perfect with inventory. That's the first problem. The second is if you want to juice your numbers. So if you have a way to juice your numbers, you would love to have more revenue, more profit if you could. The problem is if you just start discounting, you sort of train people to shop with discounts. Like you said, the beauty of Black Friday is it gets every brand air cover. It says, all right, we're all going to do it. I'm not less of a premium brand because I'm doing this right, I'm going to join in. And so you get the kind of middle set of brands, right? You in Every like category, you're going to have the low end that are always trying to compete on price, they're always trying to lower the price, they're always trying to discount. They're known as discount brands. You have the mid tier which is trying to find that balance between still value, still a value purchase, but maintaining some brand premium.
- [32:20]
B
Would you say that that's like a J. Crew?
- [32:24]
A
I don't shop J. Crew, so I couldn't tell you anything about J. Crew. But that's like a Nike for example, right? Nike's not Louis Vuitton. It's not truly luxury scarcity, but it's also not trying to be 32 degrees. You know, the Costco Athleisure wear brand. Right. And so you, you have that middle group and that middle group, they want to participate in a Black Friday because it gives them air cover to do the discounts like the cheap brands without being seen as a desperate cheap brand. Because it's like, well, today is the day we all do it. Right. And so I think it's really important for them. And then you have the luxury brands who can go the other way and they could say 0% off. In fact it's 10% more expensive today. Right. Because they're going to use this as a branding moment. They're not going to sell high volume anyways. So they use this as a moment to reinforce their position as luxury. So it kind of works for everybody.
- [33:11]
B
I think I prefer the last one. Like I would hate to have to do this. I've been friends with you and I've been friends with, you know, dozens of other people who have startups in the ecom space, not established yet brands, some established, but. And like their Fridays are miserable and it seems like their entire year kind of is made. It makes or break this two weeks. Does that seem like accurate?
- [33:36]
A
It is for a lot of people. It's not. That's not the case for us. Like I saw somebody who does their like 50% of their revenue for the year in this like 8 week sprint or 6 week sprint between, you know, Black Friday, the start of your early Black Friday sales to the Christmas shipping cutoff. By the way, can I give you two funny things? One is Jack Butcher used to do this great reverse Black Friday sale. Do you remember this?
- [33:59]
B
He always did some crazy stuff. He's great man. He's an artist. What? Which one?
- [34:03]
A
So he's an artist and he knows that kind of, that positioning and positioning is all counter positioning, meaning you position yourself relative to the position of other Things. That's how positioning works. It's all a relative exercise. And so he gets that. And so what he did was, I think he had like a course or something like that. And he would do a reverse Black Friday sale where he would start the price at a certain thing and then they would just go up in the, like, two weeks leading to Black Friday. Every day the prices are going to go up. So if you want to buy it, buy it now, because for the next two weeks, prices will go up every single day. And it wasn't even really that. That was that effective of a sales tactic, but it's like rather than do nothing or dilute your brand, he decided to use it as a branding moment, which I thought was cool. We also talked about the. I don't know if it was Brooklyn and who started this, but it was the old leaked email, Chubbies.
- [34:50]
B
Well, I. I did it and I stole it from Chubbies. Did they also steal from Brooklyn?
- [34:55]
A
I think they also. I think they also stole it. I've seen like a ton of people do the same trend, but we talked about on the pod.
- [35:01]
B
That seems beneath Brooklyn.
- [35:04]
A
But most consumers don't know. They don't care.
- [35:06]
B
They don't.
- [35:06]
A
They have no idea. They fall for it. Right. That's kind of the point, which is you send this email out to your user base that looks like it was supposed to be an internal email where someone on the marketing team is like, hey, just doing the testing, final testing for Black Friday. I have it. You know, the code is X. You know, go test it out and see if it works. And then you send a follow up. Oh, my God. Whoops. That was not meant to send to everybody, but we're going to honor it. They're not fired. Yeah. Or, you know, whatever. We'll deal with Jacob's, you know, mess up internally, but, you know, whatever. Have at it. Well, we're going to leave it up for 24 hours and then people go crazy because they feel like they got access to a leaked discount code. And it works, by the way. I did that too. It was super effective.
- [35:46]
B
I did it in 2019. Yeah. Right before we sold. About a few months before we sold. And I did it in 19. And we did it for Trends Co, which was a digital product, which is like the best Black Friday deal ever. I don't have to fulfill anything. And it's 100% profit. And I don't remember exactly, but we made something like a million dollars in profit in one day, right?
- [36:08]
A
Yeah.
- [36:09]
B
From that email.
- [36:10]
A
So you love Black Friday, what the hell are you talking about?
- [36:13]
B
Well, I guess, like, if I were to own a brand now, like a, Like a particularly. I think Black Friday is mostly clothing or furniture, something like a normal retailer. I don't think I would do it, but I would be tempted to.
- [36:26]
A
You're like those people who live in a gated community with 12 foot fences around their house and then want like an open border. It's like, bro, your house doesn't even have an open border. What are you talking about? It's like, you're like, oh, I hate Black Friday. After you, like, you know, totally leaned into Black Friday and did the like.
- [36:42]
B
Yeah. Once I got rich off of it.
- [36:45]
A
Yeah, exactly. It's dumb and beneath me now.
- [36:49]
B
Yeah. Oh, you used to do that. Yeah. No, it's. I. I. Do you. Did you buy anything yesterday?
- [36:58]
A
No. By the way, I found it so funny. There's a great meme that was like, Thursday. Everybody's like, I'm so thankful for everything that I have. And I just feel so full. My cup is so full with all the love and. And everything. That's my life. My life is so, so full. I'm so thankful for everything. So grateful. And then Friday, you're like, I need more or shit. I don't have any. I don't have anything. I need. I need. You know how much stuff I need right now that I don't have. It's like literally the clock strikes 12 and everybody's attitude flips.
- [37:25]
B
Dude, you want to do it? All right, you were talking about challenges. How about this challenge? What if you try to go one week, so seven days without spending a cent on a consumable. So, like, your mortgage or rent is okay. Daycare is okay. But like coffee, food, like, no, it has to be. You can't eat out. You know, you can't eat out. It's just like what you bought the week before at the grocery store. You think you can go seven days without spending a cent, so you can't buy anything extra.
- [37:55]
A
Can I? Absolutely. Will I. Absolutely not.
- [37:59]
B
I think I'm down. I want to do that as the MFM challenge. You know, we get a whole week of not buying anything. They do, you know, dude, look, people do fast. We got to do a money fast.
- [38:12]
A
I'll tell you what I wanted to do that you're not. I'll tell you where I'm going to get your butt to clench. So I was pretty inspired by Burning man and everybody.
- [38:20]
B
You've never gone to Burning man, have you?
- [38:22]
A
No, but I'm it's like a movie is based on a true story. So everybody. If you live in San Francisco, people will make you nauseous telling you how amazing Burning man is. And what they're trying to do is convince me to go. But what they don't know about me is I'm like a cat where you. The more you try to pet me, the further I run away. So you telling me to do something only makes it less cool in my books. And so by this, at a certain point, I was like, I'm definitely just not going. Why? Because I'm stubborn.
- [38:53]
B
You're dug in.
- [38:54]
A
I am what the French call dug in. But I was like, oh, what's cool about it? And I was like, I do like the idea of, like, you go to this deserted place, you basically build a town. It's all barter and free love and, you know, all that good stuff. And then they burned this thing at the end, and it's sort of symbolic in this way. And I thought, what's my version of that? And I came up with this idea, and I pissed at this dinner. And this. This guy was like that. So here's the idea. I go, we should do a money burn. I was like, so much of our life is based around money and wanting money and this attachment to money, and people have unhealthy relationships with money. And money has this power over you. And I felt it on me. Money has a power over me. It gets me to do what I don't want to do sometimes. It gets me to act in ways that are. I'm ashamed of sometimes. It gets me to. It just takes up so much of my mind space that it really shouldn't. That. That portion of my mind could be used on other things. But money has this power over me. I go, you know what we should do? Once a year, we should do this thing where you take some amount of money. Then for everybody, it's different. You come with an envelope, and it's an amount of money that hurts you to burn.
- [39:59]
B
Oh, my God.
- [40:00]
A
And we burn it. And I was like, think of, A, how it would feel, B, what it represents. See how polarizing and how angry this would make people, how much. How much news and buzz this would create and how much of a conversation this could create. I go, imagine if the sort of, like, tech head up their ass, you know, elites in San Francisco do the most obnoxious thing possible. They go, and they literally light money on fire. And they say they're doing it for this reason, but it's Going to piss off a bunch of other people. It's to inspire a bunch of people. I was like, this is actually a tremendous idea. And my friend was like, dude, this is one of the best ideas you ever had. I'm hooked.
- [40:37]
B
Who? Which friend said this was a good idea? I have to make sure I never listen to their opinion ever again.
- [40:45]
A
I'm not going to say their name because I don't want to out them on this. But they were like. And for years, every year they text me the same thing. When are we doing the money burn? And I don't do it because I'm like, I literally already feel anxiety over that idea of, like, taking, I don't know, $7,000 and just burning it. Just some amount of money that would feel horrible to burn. Like, what is that minimum?
- [41:06]
B
How are you gonna say that you're willing to burn $7? But I'm just saying don't spend, like 150 bucks in one week on coffee.
- [41:13]
A
Well, because I think it's like, if I'm gonna do it, might as well do the more dramatic, impactful version of it. You know what I mean? How good of a story is it if I'm like, yeah, and then for one week, I didn't drink coffee outside the house? Like, nobody gives a shit, right? It's like, okay, it's like doing a fast where you still eat sandwiches. Like, okay, well, that's not really that impressive. So if I'm going to do something, I'm going to do something that makes for a better story than your, like, consumables fast, which is not catchy and not. Not buzzworthy and not brag worthy.
- [41:43]
B
Yeah, I mean, that sounds like a horrible idea, but I think you should do it.
- [41:47]
A
I would love to imagine there was the money burn. Would you do it?
- [41:51]
B
No. But I would love to watch you do it. What?
- [41:57]
A
Yeah, I'm still too scared to do it. All right, let's move on.
- [42:04]
B
So I'm obsessed with being transparent about money, particularly with ultra high net worth people. The reason being is that there's not a lot of information on this demographic. And so because I own Hampton, which is a community for founders, I have access to thousands of young and incredibly high net worth people. We have people worth hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of dollars inside of Hampton. And so every year we do this thing called the Hampton Wealth Report, where we survey over a thousand entrepreneurs and we ask them all types of information about their personal finances. We ask them about how they're investing their money, what their portfolio Looks like we ask them about their monthly spend habits, we ask them how they've set up their estate, how much money they're going to leave to charity, how much money they keep in cash, how much money they're paying themselves from their businesses. Basically, every question that you want to ask a rich person, we went and we do it for you, and we do it with hundreds and hundreds of people. So if you want to check out the report, it's called the Hampton Wealth Report, just go to joinhampton.com, click our menu, and you're going to see a section called Reports, and you're going to see it all right there. It's very easy. So again, it's called the Hampton Wealth Report. Go to join Hampton.com, click the menu, and then click the report button and let me know what you think.
- [43:13]
A
Yeah, by the way, I did a great chat GPT prompt about Black Friday. I just want to share this Prompt prompt hack. Prompt hack is. So I go to ChatGPT and I'm like, hey, tell me about Black Friday, the origin and anything interesting, blah, blah, blah. And then it's like, oh, the Philadelphia Police Department did the thing, right? So me and you both did the same thing. Here's the prompt hack. Then I went and I said, it says something about the Macy's Day Parade. I go, tell me about the Macy's Day Parade. As if you were Malcolm Gladwell teaching me about it. What would he say? Because I just use Malcolm Gladwell as this like, yeah, guy who gets interested in the things that we all overlook or the things we've all already accepted and then turns it into, like, a bigger story. So he goes. So he just goes, a tipping point for American consumer culture. And he talks about how the Macy's Day Parade was started by this immigrant and how it was the employees that were dressing up almost like clowns and cowboys and knights. They borrowed live animals. And Malcolm would say, this is how all great, great movements began. Messy grassroots and deeply personal. And then it talks about how each symbol of it, right? Like the balloons or why the balloons were a genius thing over the live animals. And just using this, how Malcolm Gladwell would explain X. Or you can, you know, switch out Malcolm Gladwell, but you can be like Richard Feynman. How would he explain this scientific topic is such a prompt hack for ChatGPT. It makes ChatGPT talk to you in a different way.
- [44:35]
B
Our friend Sahil, he had a tweet and he said, what's the best one shot prompt that you've Made in the last 30 days. It could be for a recipe, a front end developer, an image generation. The more specific the better. The best answer gets a thousand dollars. And it's all these pretty good like prompts that people have submitted that were amazing. Like the simple one that I actually liked, which is based off of everything that you know about me. Suggest three to five books that you think I'd enjoy reading. It was, that was pretty good and I went and did that and it suggested a book that I'm going to start reading. Another one was, you are a lawyer that specializes in working with startups. Review this legal document that was sent to you by your client and summarize each section in plain English and determine if that's good or bad. For me, that's actually a pretty good one too. Uh, but there's like, this is good.
- [45:27]
A
Today has been chaos. Ask me questions to help me figure out what to do next. Don't stop asking until you are fully sure you have all of the context of my situation and can generate an actionable plan for me. I use Chat GPT this way too. I use, I tell ChatGPT often to ask me questions. So say I'm your role is this. I'm trying to figure out X. I don't know where to start. Start asking me questions and don't stop until you feel like you have enough necessary information to give me to give me useful advice or ask me questions. And I just, I keep saying, yeah, ask me more questions. I'll answer parts of their questions along the way. And it's such a useful thinking tool this way versus just searching and getting an answer. If you try to say, hey, how should I do X? It's going to give you a generic answer. But if you say, ask me the questions that you would need if you were my coach who has tons of experience in this subject in order to get me to figure out the answer to this, it forces you to think about it better.
- [46:20]
B
Are there like deep questions? It could be like marriage advice or could it be like, what do I do with my life advice? Or like I'm struggling with this person, Help me solve it? Like things like that?
- [46:31]
A
Yeah, because any of those, any of those personal things, I've used it with tax things because if you ask it a tax question or a legal question, it'll give you a generic answer. But there's high risk, right? Like it doesn't have all your context because you don't know how to give it everything you need. So it just gives you kind of A general answer, which could be totally misleading when it comes to tax or legal. But instead I say, here's my situation, ask me the questions that you would need to know if you were my lawyer. So then it asked me the question, then at that point, now it has the context. Then I say, give me an informed answer based on what I just told you. And then it knows, well, you could do X, but since you said you're incorporated here, blah, blah, blah. Right. And it can give you a smarter answer that way.
- [47:10]
B
Oh, that's pretty good. Have you used it for any other prompts that like, are helping you solve, like, just like life problems, where it's like a, like a therapist would help guide you or like an executive coach?
- [47:23]
A
Yeah, I use it, I tell it it's my coach or it's my therapist, or it's my strategist or it's my analyst, and then I'll either, you know, ask it the questions or I'll tell it to ask me the questions. By the way, that's one of the useful things about ChatGPT is tell it the role upfront. So the prompt structure that works is role, goal. And then I think context. And so you go role. You say you are my research assistant. Your job is to find examples that support the ideas that I'm going to present you goal. I'm trying to write a really persuasive blog post about X. So I need to come up with great examples and counter examples and then I'll give it the context. The context is blah, blah, blah. And then it knows the role, it knows the goal, and then it has the context in order to actually do the job.
- [48:05]
B
Dude, that's amazing. I love ChatGPT.
- [48:07]
A
That's why I got my AI tutor every, every week to teach me how to actually use these tools better.
- [48:11]
B
I, I have a friend that works at OpenAI and apparently he was able to sell some of his shares and he was like, do you remember when I told you I was starting to work there and I told you, like, if things go well, how much money I think I could, I could make, add a zero to that and that's how much, and that's just a percentage of the shares that I sold to achieve that number.
- [48:33]
A
Wait, can you say like, roughly the. Roughly the level of seniority of this person and roughly the amount of money they made and roughly what time?
- [48:41]
B
I'm going to be very vague on purpose. I'm going to say, let's say they've worked there for two to three years and I think according to the news, like if Business Insider, they just did an article and they said the average pay all in Pay was like $800,000. So if you're making $800,000 three years ago, let's say that's 400 cash, 400 equity. So you're expecting 400 a year in equity. I don't know how much their value has gone up in three years, but I think 10x.
- [49:07]
A
Yeah.
- [49:08]
B
So if you're expecting 4, 400 grand a year in equity, you now have $4 million a year in equity. And if you've been there for three years, that's $12 million.
- [49:18]
A
Nice.
- [49:19]
B
That's crazy, right? And that's like not even all your shares because I think like they do, like they're known for paying people even more now that there's even more competitors.
- [49:29]
A
And you didn't even invent artificial intelligence, right? Like, you didn't even have to do the incredible thing at that company in order to do that. You did good work. And I mean this in a good way. You didn't have to pull off a miracle in order to get incredibly well.
- [49:44]
B
And you were like the 1000th employee, like, which is why people should listen.
- [49:48]
A
To our Sarah's List episodes. And whether you believe that the companies we picked are right or not, you should do that. If you're going to take a job, might as well take a job on a rocket ship, right? Like, might as well take a job where your equity is going to appreciate this like absurd rate or has like a realistic chance to. The problem is most people have no ability to assess that.
- [50:08]
B
And it's not always obvious. For example, I think OpenAI raised money at $120 million valuation recently. Is that right? 120 billion. Sorry, 120 billion. And I would imagine the majority of people listening to this are saying that's outrageous. But in five years, there's definitely a world where we look at back and be like, that was a steal. How did I not put my whole life savings into like, there's a real. There's a world where that's, that's definitely a possibility.
- [50:37]
A
Yeah, yeah. There's still a 10x jump from here for, for an open AI. They can be open AI could become. Has a legitimate. A realistic chance of becoming a trillion dollar company. I think I can only say about a handful of companies.
- [50:49]
B
I was listening to this thing about Facebook and this guy was talking about working there and he was like, when I joined, it was worth $78 billion. And I thought like, is his peak. I'm selling everything. Like, I gotta get out. Facebook's now worth 1.5 trillion. And so these numbers, they're really hard to comprehend. I mean, dude, have you ever thought about a trillion dollars? How much is it?
- [51:15]
A
Honestly have it.
- [51:17]
B
A trillion dollars is 1,000 billion dollars. That is like an insane number.
- [51:23]
A
They should call it that. They should call it 1000 billion and not even trillion. Trillion actually doesn't even do it justice.
- [51:28]
B
That's so. And you know what? In about five, is that even right?
- [51:31]
A
Is that a thousand billion or is it a hundred billion? No, it's a thousand billion.
- [51:35]
B
It's a thousand billion. Is that insane? Is that insane? That's insane. Not only is that insane, there's a world where in 10, for sure, 20 years that a human being is worth that. Because I think. How much is Elon Musk worthy now? 200. 200 billion. So if it just. If he just has a 7% annual growth rate, that's gonna double in 10 years and then double again. So you're looking at 8, 800. Like, that's just so much money. 1,000 billion.
- [52:04]
A
He's the betting favorite to become the world's first trillionaire.
- [52:07]
B
That is so. So which would I think he said.
- [52:10]
A
That he thinks Putin might already be that, or he said that he's the richest man, but he's not on any of the lists.
- [52:16]
B
So that would be like, let's say if you're worth the difference between. So a hundred million divide. So that'd be like the equivalent of a 100,000. So a trillionaire to a billionaire is the same thing as a hundred millionaire to a 100,000. There. Does that make sense? Yeah. That's insane, right? That's insane. So, like, the $100 billion person is someone worth $100,000. They're not in the same ballpark. Like, their lifestyles are like, drastically different now to a billionaire.
- [52:46]
A
Billionaire, yeah.
- [52:47]
B
Trillion. That's the.
- [52:48]
A
That's how different it makes a billionaire. Like just like a six figure. Like W2.
- [52:54]
B
Yeah. Like. Like. Like one bad medical bill knock you out.
- [52:58]
A
Yeah.
- [52:58]
B
Or it's like, you know what I mean? Like, you still use wow.
- [53:01]
A
Airline.
- [53:01]
B
And you only did it because you got the voucher for 250 round trip. Like, it's like, ridiculous that I was thinking about, like that. That math, it's crazy. And the reason I was thinking about it is because Warren Buffett just did this big speech or this big letter where he wrote that he, dude, he's such a good writer. He was like, father time always wins. And father time, he's a mean son of a bitch, and he, like, that's basically. Yeah, like he said, like, father time's always wins, and he's, like, a real fickle guy. And he took my wife Susie, before me. And our plan all along, we just assumed. Because, you know, he eats horribly, we were like, we just assumed that I was going to die first. And so the plan was that it was her job to give away all the money. Unfortunately, she died. And then we also gave the money to our children. But you know what's crazy? Our children are in their 70s now, and they are not going to live long enough to be able to give away all of our money. And so when Susie died, they each got $10 million, and Warren Buffett's currently worth 150 billion. So 10 million is nothing. But they each got $10 million, and now it's their job when I die to give away the money. I don't think they're going to live long enough to be able to give away this much money. And the future generations, I don't know them as well as my current kids, and I cut. I trust my current kids, but, you know, it's hard to say with my future generations. And so they have this monumental task to give away all of this money, and if they don't, it has to go to this foundation where everyone has to vote on it. Because this way, each of the children, as well as the grandchildren have an excuse to say something like, well, my brother doesn't think that's a good investment, so I'm so sorry. I got to pass on you. And so he wrote this letter explaining a bunch of tips and tricks. He's like, even if you're rich or you're wealthy, my opinion is you should discuss your will with your children before you die. It's a great way to bring the family together. Like, he. And he also says, that's so funny, by the way.
- [54:44]
A
Isn't it funny that will is, like, the surprise?
- [54:47]
B
It is weird. It is weird.
- [54:49]
A
It's like, ooh, let's open up the time capsule, see what was in it. Like, why is it a surprise? That doesn't even make sense, dude.
- [54:54]
B
There's so many issues with wills that, like. That I've learned about, because we're setting up estates. Like, for example, a lot of people. And he talks about this, but I've read about it constantly, and I know friends, their wills aren't equal. So. Particularly women. So. And then, like, Vanderbilts did this Whereas, like, The women get 400,000. The men each get $10 million. And it creates, like, all this, like, anger amongst siblings, which ruins families. And he talks about that in his letter. And so it was a really good letter that he just released, like, last week about how he's.
- [55:25]
A
Didn't he sign the, like, giving pledge, though, Right?
- [55:28]
B
Like, yeah, but he pledged. I don't think he pledged a percentage. I think he pledged an amount that he said in the letter. And he's like, but the amount is now huge, so I need to give more. And so, yeah, he's giving it all away.
- [55:41]
A
99 of my wealth will go to philanthropy during my lifetime or at death. Maybe it's just that the 1% is now huge. Is that what this. Is that the issue?
- [55:50]
B
I didn't understand. Well, I didn't understand because in the letter, it was like, I am now gifting 150,000 shares of Berkshire Hathaway. Previously, we did this, but now we need to give more. That. So he didn't reference the giving pledge. It was, like, an absolute amount, not a percentage amount, other than saying he gave each of his kids $10 million. And he's like, that's all I gave them.
- [56:11]
A
So he's selling these gifts. I'm making today reduce my holdings of Berkshire shares to 206,000, a 56% decrease since my 2006 pledge. So he's cutting it in half. And so how much is that 206,000 shares?
- [56:28]
B
I think it's a $1.5 billion that he just gave away.
- [56:33]
A
I think it's more. Dude, how much Berkshire a stock is? 700 grand a share. So 700 grand a share times 250,000. Just to use round numbers is almost. Sorry, wait.
- [56:46]
B
It's like, dude, my calculator. Yeah.
- [56:49]
A
How many commas is this? Is that 200? Almost 200 billion.
- [56:53]
B
Oh, yeah. Well, that's a lot of money.
- [56:55]
A
What's happening?
- [56:58]
B
The numbers are so grand that it's, frankly, incredibly hard to comprehend. But basically, he's making, like, the largest gifts of all time.
- [57:07]
A
I can't believe we just agreed to do public math. We only have, like, two rules here. One, don't get canceled. Two, don't embarrass yourself by doing public math. And we did it.
- [57:19]
B
Yeah, we did it a bunch of times, frankly. But, dude, that's. It's a good article, right? You gotta. You. You'll have to read that.
- [57:25]
A
Yeah.
- [57:25]
B
Buffett talking about giving away $150 billion, but he doing. He's doing it in a way that we can easily understand by saying everyone should read their will before they die with their children.
- [57:33]
A
Dude, Buffett doing anything. I'm in. I'm so in. On Buffett telling any story or talking about any subject of his liking. He is absolute blank check of attention from me. Right?
- [57:46]
B
Yes, yes.
- [57:48]
A
Like, Bill Simmons had this thing that he coined once called the Tyson zone about Mike Tyson, where he goes, the Tyson zone is when somebody reaches a level of crazy that somebody could tell you anything about Mike Tyson and you would believe it. Like, if it was like, oh, Mike Tyson got arrested because he's been eating sharks every morning. It's like, fuck, that's crazy. You know, he bit an ear. He. He's going to jail. It's like, there's no story that is out of bounds on Mike Tyson. And I feel like the. The Buffett zone is basically somebody who. You have my undivided attention at will whenever you want it for however long you. If he's like, I'm doing a 16 hour live stream, I'd be like, okay, well, I guess I. I guess I better, you know, like, get a comfy chair because I'm gonna be here for 16 hours today. You know, like, there's no. There is no nothing Warren Buffett could do that I would not be interested in. If he was just like, I'm gonna live stream myself that, you know, like, doing asmr. Eating soup. I'd be like, all right, I'm in.
- [58:38]
B
I'm going to start just like, attributing facts and stats to him. Well, you know what Buffett says? He says, yeah, Buffett says is the.
- [58:46]
A
The new Harvard study.
- [58:48]
B
Yeah, right.
- [58:49]
A
Yeah, there was a study at Harvard to support whatever point I'd like to make. And similarly, you know, Buffett once said x. Oh, really?
- [59:00]
B
Quick, can you tell me if this is true? Is this Enron thing a joke?
- [59:06]
A
I think it's real, but I'm not sure. All right, which is. I hope it's a joke. Which is. What is it? What's the story? Someone bought Enron, is relaunching it as a crypto token. It's worse than a bad Silicon Valley plot.
- [59:21]
B
I don't know if the story is out, but the Twitter handle Enron, which Enron, if you are, you know, under the age of 28, you probably don't even remember this, but Enron is like.
- [59:34]
A
Oh, FTX for oil.
- [59:36]
B
Yeah, it was like an oil energy company in the 90s that was one of the biggest companies in the world. And then in a month's time it went bankrupt. And it turns out because the executives had all committed fraud and a bunch of them even killed themselves before they got sentenced. And a lot of them got went to prison. Whatever. Horrible. On Twitter, somebody is now tweeting from the Enron Twitter handle with their logo saying, we're back. And they are talking about their new decentralized product. And no one online knows, is this real or is this not? But it's the perfect way to say fuck you to the crypto crowd, because that's basically what they're doing, where they're just sitting there, sitting in a room. They're like, should we name our new crypto scam after a scam? Do, do do two do two wrongs to make a right. Like, this is like when a rapper.
- [60:23]
A
Samples an old song and they're like, yeah, it's like one. A new fraud sampling an old fraud.
- [60:30]
B
Yeah, they're remix fixing crime.
- [60:34]
A
Dude, can I just give you one rant real quick? I was watching this video that was like, it's called. I was on YouTube, it's called the Elon Musk Learning Method. I was like, all right, click.
- [60:42]
B
That's like another Warren Buffett says.
- [60:45]
A
Yeah, exactly. Elon explaining how he does this or like, you know, some. Some backstory about Elon. But one thing he says in it, which I think is just. It just struck me, this is an obvious point, but I guess the implications of it really just, like, slapped me in the face. He was like, people say like, you know, we have to give people better access to education. He goes. He's like, that could not be further from the truth. He's like, you can literally learn anything. Everything you want to learn is available online at a world class level for free to anyone who has an Internet connection, which is almost everyone. And he's like, basically, there is no lack of access to education. And it's so true. Like, I. If I want. If I was like, oh, man, I wish I could have gone to Harvard. Okay, just Google it. Watch. Every Harvard lecture you want is online. You can sit there, you could get a Harvard computer science education today for free in your underwear at home. And nobody does it. And that's like the second.
- [61:44]
B
I spent hours this weekend learning how different magic tricks were done on YouTube. Hours. I can't be fooled.
- [61:55]
A
Oh, not even learning how to do them? No, just learning how they're done.
- [61:58]
B
I just needed to confirm that David Blaine was just a human. Yeah.
- [62:07]
A
Dude. That when that show came out, Magicians Greatest Secrets Revealed, do you remember that?
- [62:10]
B
They're so pissed.
- [62:12]
A
I was. I remember literally thinking to myself, I was like. I was like, tnt, you sure do know drama. This is an amazing premise. They were like, this magician has to wear this mask because if his peers in the magic industry knew what he was about to tell you, they're going to kill. Would be killed. Ostracized. He could never show his face in a magic room again. I was like, oh, holy shit, mom, mom, where's the remote? And I was like. It was like, pre recording. I was like, got a notebook out. And I was like, oh, my God, how do they do it? And he just showed you every magic trick and how they do it.
- [62:45]
B
The greatest. It's the greatest.
- [62:47]
A
Absolute great, greatest. That's what I do.
- [62:50]
B
That's what I do on YouTube. Like, you're telling me he didn't actually bite that quarter in half?
- [62:58]
A
Oh, it's so insane what we said.
- [63:00]
B
About Elon, though, so doesn't matter. That's the pot. All right. That's it. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it. Like days off on a road. Let's travel. Never look looking back. Hey, everyone, a quick break. My favorite podcast guest on my first million is Dharmesh. Dharmesh founded HubSpot. He's a billionaire. He's one of my favorite entrepreneurs on Earth. And on one of our podcasts recently, he said the most valuable skill that anyone could have when it comes to making money in business is copywriting. And when I say copywriting, what I mean is writing words that get people to take action. And I agree, by the way. I learned how to be a copywriter in my 20s. It completely changed my life. I ended up starting and selling a company for tens of millions of dollars. And copywriting was the skill that made all of that happen. And the way that I learned how to copyright is by using a technique called copy work, which is basically taking the best sales letters. And I would write it word for word, and I would make notes as to why each phrase was impactful and effective. And a lot of people have been asking me about copy work, so I decided to make a whole program for it. It's called Copy that, Copy that. Com. It's only like 120 bucks. And it's a simple, fast, easy way to improve your copywriting. And so if you're interested, you need to check it out. It's called Copy that. You can check it out at copythat Combination.