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- [00:00]
A
Most people are telling you this is a really dumb idea.
- [00:03]
B
Every failure you've ever had gave you more life than it gave you death. In business life, there's so much compulsion to just move. And we confuse activity with achievement. How do I build the biggest thing possible? I was drinking so much caffeine that it sent me to the ER with a heart condition.
- [00:17]
A
I remember you calling me, being like, dude, I almost died.
- [00:20]
B
I almost get emotional thinking about surrender into a duty bound existence and immediate peace falls. One of the best questions anybody can ask themselves is when? Where can you be most uniquely useful to those around you? Every one of us has a battle within us that we're avoiding. When I was a kid, I thought hakuna matata was a good thing. That's hell dancing around, going from fun thing to fun thing while the people you love are suffering because you are absconding from your responsibility. There's no greater tragedy for every community around the world than not rising to your duty to your community.
- [00:58]
A
Should we start with the cheers?
- [01:00]
B
Yeah, let's do it. Cheers, buddy.
- [01:02]
A
Cheers. We're drinking a Magic Mind, no caffeine.
- [01:06]
B
Yeah, we're doing the Magic Mind free right now. Sipo part three on three.
- [01:12]
A
One, two, three.
- [01:19]
B
So fun to podcast with you. Thank you for delicious.
- [01:23]
A
Thank you for having me out to the boo.
- [01:25]
B
Thank you for proactively wanting to wear Magic Mind swag on the pod. Maybe, maybe it's because you just want to stay warm.
- [01:32]
A
I'm early.
- [01:33]
B
Thank you. I know. I remember drawing it out on a whiteboard in your office. I don't know if you remember this, but in Dallas. You had an office in Dallas at the time. Still remember where you hid the key. And you're like, if you need to get in, here's where I had the key. Like in the stairwell. And. And yeah, it was like drawing on a board. A whiteboard in your office.
- [01:55]
A
How did you decide that you were gonna start that? Because early on, most people were telling you, this is a really dumb idea. It's an energy drink. It's hardware.
- [02:06]
B
Yeah. Out of curiosity, what did you think when I first told you about the idea? Real honest, I don't. It won't bother me one way or another.
- [02:13]
A
Well, okay. I had something. I had a little bit that a lot of people wouldn't have known, which is I knew you had had major health issues, like almost a heart attack in San Francisco. And when I would go hang out with you, we were pounding six Red Bulls a day. I mean, we were on like a mission. To see how much Red Bull we had.
- [02:32]
B
That's so funny. I remember you being in the conference room and you had not just seven drinks around, you had seven different kinds of drinks.
- [02:41]
A
I still do it today. I have an iced tea, a water, a coffee. I mean, we have these YPO meetings that last like four hours. And so by the end of a four hour meeting, I've created like a wall of drinks and they're all different. It's so fun. But when I'd go to sf, I'd walk into the TILT office, There would be those huge, huge refrigerators. Refrigerators, like, filled with energy drinks. And then I remember you calling me, being like, dude, I almost basically died. So fast forward to Magic Mind. I think the craziest thing I thought about it is when the name Magic Mind in general, I'm like, this is going to be kind of weird. And you had, I think had you created the book at that point?
- [03:22]
B
I think I had. I was just finishing the book. Yeah. Beyond coffee. Okay.
- [03:26]
A
Because I think it gets into what we were talking about at breakfast. This business, like, pulled you in. Like, this was not a. I'm just going to go down the list of ideas and like, solve the world's problems. You were like, I had a major problem. I'm going to start this.
- [03:38]
B
Yeah. I was saying no to it over and over and over again.
- [03:42]
A
So why'd you say, like, what eventually were you like, okay, I'm going to give this a shot?
- [03:45]
B
Well, I can tell you how I started businesses early on in my career and realized that I don't think is a good way of starting businesses. And, and what comes to mind, and we talked about this a little bit at breakfast early on, I was what I call, like, concepting big ideas on a couch with a notepad, thinking about what could be a big idea. And it was really just like, no treasure, Matt. But where could the treasure be? And how do I engineer a way to find myself in the midst of financial milestones or egoistic milestones, shortcuts in a career, be my own boss. Instead of. I think one of the best questions anybody can ask themselves is, where can you be most uniquely useful to those around you? So if we start at the end of where I today think is the best way to start a company is ask or surrendering into any duty around your community is asking yourself, where can you be most uniquely useful to those around you? And maybe that comes up in, like, what is the community around you asking of you that you're maybe not taking seriously or not listening to or being like, that's a tiny thing. I want to do this other thing. But your community keeps asking you about this thing over here. I think it's a phenomenal way to discover where maybe there's somewhere where you can contribute to your community versus sitting on a couch being like, oh, Facebook is that's like the coolest startup out there. Biggest company, $100 billion company. Well, a social network around money. Well, shit, that would be even bigger. I shouldn't cuss because my 8 year old's right here. But there is an aspect that is really unhealthy, selfish, self serving of how do I build the biggest thing possible. And there's an aspect that's, I think there's a noble aspect, a higher ideal aspect of scratch your own itch. Where can you be uniquely useful to those around you? But I actually don't even mean it in terms of like higher ideal, although I could talk about that kind of stuff all day long. I actually mean it just from a practical perspective. If you're scratching your own itch and your community's asking you to do that thing, there is so much dynamic info built into that interaction. One, if you're scratching your own itch, then you obviously have a problem that you have not found a solution for. It's a problem that you, that you are already intrinsically looking for a solution and you haven't found one for it. Two, if you're scratching your own itch, you already know the competitive landscape, so you already kind of know where things are. There are gaps where things aren't serving the market. Three, you already know the community. You probably already know other people that have the same problem that are also underserved to where you could tinker with an idea and get feedback from people like, let's say you have an idea and the real estate space. You're already going to know a thousand people to say, what do you think about this idea? Or hey, here's the first version of something. Can you give me brutal, honest feedback on this or that? So there's so much built in. And then also the last, and I think a really killer piece is you're your own best quality assurance. Like you'll know if version 0.1, version 0.5, version 1, version 71, whether it's doing it or not.
- [07:12]
A
All right, y' all have heard me talk about better pitch for years on the podcast. I'm super proud of their founder, Nico, who is a great friend of mine. He's one of the best young entrepreneurs I've come across. And in just two years he's built an incredible company that is now rebranding as collateral partners. And honestly, it makes perfect sense. From single family investment decks to complete brand overhauls, ongoing partnership support to market research, they deliver institutional grade work that actually moves capital. Think of them as the difference between looking like a startup and operating like an institution. They're really your entire institutional marketing department. The team you wish you had in house but can't justify hiring. Ex Goldman directors who understand your business, ex PE associates who craft your narrative, and world class designers who make it all look effortless. Go check out collateral.com and mention the Powers podcast and they'll give you a complimentary one pager. Enjoy the episode.
- [08:14]
B
If I was out there building like software for doctor's offices to manage patient records, I would be like, hey, I'm 13 months in, is this working? I have no idea if this is satisfying the actual customers versus if you're scratching your own itch, you know, like, well, this is terrible. This isn't there yet. So there's a lot of great practical reasons. And then you add in uniquely useful to the community around you. I think you get into a really boundless energy generating aspect of an exchange in business where you're uniquely useful. Only you could do it.
- [08:56]
A
Yep.
- [08:57]
B
And your community is giving you the feedback that. Cool. Chris, this is so awesome. And dude, when you go to the local watering hole and friends are telling you how much they love what you're doing, that's more, you know, this, that's more valuable than any compensation.
- [09:18]
A
So all that was lining up. But you also had an approach that you were going to go into this, that was also a new approach based on the experience you had just had.
- [09:28]
B
Yeah, I wanted the first two years go slow, make sure that the world really wants this, invest my own money.
- [09:34]
A
Was that because you had changed your strategy? Was that because you didn't really know if you wanted it to be a business yet? You were tinkering like what was the go slow for two years aspect of it?
- [09:46]
B
Well, I had two ideas that kept, that I kept saying no to, kept coming back in that vicinity of like just I would, I had, I had done so much research on the fact that. And we touched on it. I was drinking so much caffeine that it sent me to the ER with a heart condition, the condition I still have to this day. And I had to do all this research on how do I get through the day, on my limitation of half a cup of coffee. So how do I get through a day of running my last company with 100 employees and 15 meetings, 15 to do list items every day? And I was like, how do I do this on half a cup of coffee? Because, like a true addict, I was like, there is no effing way I can get through the day on half a cup of coffee. But my doctor, to his credit, he was like, well, have you ever tried green tea? It has this compound in it called L theanine that extends your body's absorption of caffeine over a longer period of time, and it dials down your body's stress response to caffeine. I was like, wait, caffeine is spiking my stress? And I could add this lthea stuff to it to make it last long. So I was like, well, what else could I add? My engineering brain just went crazy down the rabbit hole of what else could I add to my morning routine to get the most out of that half a cup? The first two or three years, I was like, this will never be as good as my addiction of coffee. And then probably by year three, I was like, singing from the mountaintops of, like, people that are just drinking coffee. I promise you're doing it wrong. Add these things to it and see what happens. So then that I became like a nootropics expert at Airbnb, where we had barely, with the skin of our teeth, sold our company. And then Silicon Valley and Y Combinator. So all of these founders that were all just wanting each tiny little optimization to get more out of their day was like, those 12 things. Oh, my God, changed my life. So then I was like, okay, this is knocking at the door. My kind of like, I don't know, entrepreneurial antenna is going off. There's something here. But I also had this other idea that that was kind of software build out that was going to just, I knew was going to be really hard, maybe three or four years to know if there's anything there you have to raise. Sometimes in software, you got to raise 10 or 15 million just to see if there's. And work for three years to see if there's something there. So I was talking to my executive coach, Peter, about these two ideas, and he was like, well, with magic mind, it sounds like, you know, because at that time, I called it Tongue in Cheek James Magic Potion. And so that's all I called it at that point in time. And I was like, peter, I got these two ideas. One, people already share this Google Doc of 12 things. I already kind of.
- [12:24]
A
I remember you had the Google Doc.
- [12:26]
B
Uh huh. And I was like, I already kind of know what the brand universe could be. And it'd be a small little shopify thing and I could spend a year or two not needing it to be anything because I was angel investing at the time, easiest gig in the business. And then I was like, but there's this other idea calling. And he told me, he's like, look, the last idea, these are so hard and it almost killed you. Maybe go with a smaller idea, the James Magic potion one. And that danced around in my head. And so yeah, for two years I was like, let's see if there's something here. Mike Maples, one of the greatest seed investors of all time, he wrote me a check, God bless him. He was like, you might spend all this money. He goes, no. I was like, I don't know where this is going to go. I have no, no real long term conviction that there's something here. But this is a question that my community is asking me about that I would have never, in terms of like financial optimization, chosen this, but keeps coming back. Maybe there's something here and I'm going to put 500k of my own money into seeing if there's something here. He's like, just please. Kept texting me. He's like, I don't care what you do with this. I just have a feeling if there's product market fit, then you'll do something with it. So that investment in my own capital and it was like two years of patience. When people ask on my favorite ingredient of magic mind, the answer I usually give is my favorite ingredient of the whole thing was time, was the patience of it not needing to be a company in the first several years when it was just a solution for my own need. And then the first two years, which you saw my 20s, the alternative where it was like, we gotta go, go, go, go, go and we'll figure it out later and like let's raise money and then we'll solve all of our problems and then we'll raise more money and really, you know, solve the next set of. But this was like, now let's take our time and see if the world really wants this.
- [14:22]
A
Okay, so is there a through line there though that for every company you start going forward, you need kind of two years to tinker? Or did you learn something in that two years that if you were to go start the next thing, which we'll talk about, you can now do in six months? Or does it, is it always two years of Kind of tinkering. Does that make sense?
- [14:41]
B
Yeah, I am not too formulaic but I do think that having that R and D time, is that what you call it?
- [14:50]
A
That's what the two years was.
- [14:51]
B
It's so critical to, we were talking about this earlier of like it's business is, is a lot like surf surfing. We're here in Malibu and, and love to, to surf and one of the most interesting insights I, I've ever heard from any individual was this pro surfer, Koa Rothman. Great pro surfer investor, magic mind actually. And got to know him over the years because he was drinking magic mine and, and wanted to invest and I was like hell yeah. Because he's amazing big wave surfer. And I was chatting with him and I said what's the number one insight that 29 year old Koa, he's 29. When I asked him this 29 year old Koa would tell 15 year old Koa now that you have all this experience in surfing and he said oh, that's easy. The number one thing I would have told younger me was it's all about wave selection. And I think about that all the time. I think in business, in life there's so much compulsion to just move, move your feet, move your feet. And we confuse activity with achievement so often, especially as entrepreneurs. Like standing still is awful for us in the moment. But if you're running 100 miles an hour and you're going in the wrong direction, not only is it detrimental, but it is the exact opposite of what you're looking for. The exact opposite. And you might think we're going fast, this is so great, the wind's in our hair. But it's not just detrimental, it is the exact opposite of what you really want. So sometimes stopping is the. And standing still, waiting for the right wave is the difference between catching wave of the day or wave of the year or wave of. I mean some waves make people's careers. And jumping on a wave and feeling like I'm doing it right, but you end up getting detonated and maybe it destroys you for a few weeks or months because you're injured because you took the wrong wave or you take the wrong wave, maybe even worse than getting injured, you look back and you're like, oh shit, that was the wave.
- [16:59]
A
Yeah.
- [16:59]
B
And you actually hear this like surfer vloggers where like they'll be like no, I took the wrong way. Or you HEAR like their GoPro, they film the right wave, the best wave of the day and sadly they're not in the right spot.
- [17:14]
A
So would you say at the end of that two years it had become apparent to you that magic mind was. Yeah, what happened over that two years?
- [17:22]
B
Yeah. So that's about three years ago
- [17:25]
A
is
- [17:25]
B
when it started to really take off. And, and what I saw was really simple things. The retention was really strong. So the head of growth at Facebook at the time, now he's the cmo, Alex Schultz, awesome friend, mentor, and he would come and give advice to us on Howard street, which he went to that small little office, dingy office. It was a lot of like a lot of unhoused urine and feces around it in San Francisco. Small little office. He's coming from like Facebook's mega complex and he's coming to our little office giving advice and so thankful that like he took us under his wing. He said this thing one time, he's like, well, retention is king. Give me retention over growth all day long. That consumer customers that are retained so much more valuable. The metrics and the graph, like you want to see people retain much more than you want to see a graph going up into the right because up into the right. But you're churning through customers. Honestly, like, the saddest graph in the world is not a flat line. The saddest graph in the world for a business is it goes up and then down. Because you just went through all of your first 1,000, 10,000 customers. You're never going to get those people back. And those were the ones that were like the most valuable because they're the first. The first. Perhaps they're the mavens, the influential people that would tell everybody in their community. So we never over pressurized growth for Magic Mind. And we're waiting for these retention curves to come in. Twelve months in, were people still drinking these little shots every day and finding value in it and paying. It's a premium price point. And so if people are sticking around paying three, depending on how much you order three and four dollars a day for 12 months, then that was a really strong sign. Started to see that two years in, probably on version three, which is really like version 75, but version 3.0, it started to really take off and the retention was really strong. That's when we knew, okay, now you add to the top of funnel and you add growth in the acquisition of more and more customers.
- [19:41]
A
Was it just you the first two years?
- [19:43]
B
No. Well, myself and then a great branding mind, Will McQueen that I recruited to help design and help get the brand off the ground. And then we got to about a million in sales With a handful of agencies but no full time employees. And me and Will McQueen kind of guiding things and being the editors of all these, the web design agency and the web development agency. And then I reached out to Bradley Hicks, one of our friends from Texas, his younger brother William, who was in cbg. And I didn't really know anything about cbg. I knew a lot about E commerce and a lot about software and things online, but not much about consumer product goods companies and retail and margins and supply chain management. So I knew William knew a lot about that stuff. He was an early customer of Magic Mind. He's like, hey, you should be an advisor to us. But it's like my favorite way to recruit is advise us. Let's see how insightful your advice is. But also get to know the company and reach out to him with the idea of like six months in, I would love for this guy to come on as the GM of the business and then said, hey, I've got no attachment to these three letters of CEO. And if we're successful, this is going to be a retail operation. Ten times the sales happen in the grocery level for food and beverage as they happen in E commerce for food and beverage companies. So it's far and away still very much an offline grocery type of distribution. And I didn't know anything about like managing retail supply chains and managing like going in and making sure that, you know, everything is stocked beautifully. And so I didn't know anything about that. So I reached out to him, I said, hey, after six months of advice and great advice like, hey, if this is successful, it's going to be a retail operation. So what do you think about coming on as gm? But what success would look like is you being the CEO in two years. We're not going to talk about it for 23 months, but that's what success would look like if you crush it. And this is still so embryonic. I think we're at like a million in sales, but it was still so embryonic. And you can. There's this great adage of you can have anything in the world if you don't care who gets credit. And so I didn't care who had the three letters. As CEO, you and I have had those letters to our name and I kind of exhausted the need for those three letters. I just wanted to contribute where I was good and get out of the zone, the zones that I wasn't good at. And I think the future is going to create this new lane that you could call like the Palmer Lucky Lane.
- [22:39]
A
Okay.
- [22:40]
B
Where that's the highest profile, you have
- [22:42]
A
to have a mullet Hawaiian shirt.
- [22:44]
B
Where you have a mullet, a goatee Hawaiian shirt.
- [22:47]
A
Okay.
- [22:48]
B
Even that's it. Even better tied to a company or not, you're just walking around with a Hawaiian shirt and a mullet and kick ass goatee. That's my answer.
- [22:57]
A
That's your answer?
- [22:58]
B
No. So I think that there's this Palmer Lucky lane where you have the old model. Where you have the old, old model and you have Hewlett Packard in it. They traded off leading the company and they're the founders and CEOs and they're maybe untouched, unprecedented, still untouched. Track record of 40 years of dominance. And so you have Hewlett and Packard in that model and then you move away from that for some reason even though it works so well. Where you have.
- [23:26]
A
And real quick, I think a lot of that is because VCs started demanding that they're like these founders are renegades. We got to put professional management in quick.
- [23:34]
B
So. And it could be convenient to, to point to the VCs. Could also be some really outlandish wild founders were not responsible enough to, to, to really own the reins. So then they switched to a professional CEO. That becomes the norm for a while. Then you have intel and Bob Noyce and, and this movement back towards nope, the engineers should be running the shop. The product designers, not professional CEOs. Then you have Google and it goes back to professional CEO coming in Eric Schmidt. Then you have Zuckerberg and Facebook and it goes back to no founders should be the leaders. And I think there's this third model that's so great and maybe only possible in the last few years where you have the Palmer Lucky Lane where Palmer's the most people think he's a CEO, but he's the founder, the founder, chairman and they have a CEO. And I think knowing your zone of genius and everybody's got their zones that they have an outsized return on their unique skills. Knowing those, leaning into those and then having the security and the trust from the team that and really having the skill to really be strong in those areas then gives you the flexibility. And again you got to have the security and you've got to be really good at those skills to say, you know what, I don't need to like have some agreement that the team will never bench me. I just got to be the best point guard or the best shooting guard I can possibly be. And if I'm doing that then they're going to put me in the game. And I don't need to run everything because a lot of founders run everything out of insecurity or out of insecurity if they really aren't that great at many areas and don't have a commitment to becoming great at those areas. Some founders like, no, I'm going to become great at all those areas I'm not great at. Some founders are like, I'm going to hire a professional CEO and then kind of like exit the operations. And then I think there's this third lane where you can be in the details. Be hardcore in the vision strategy, but. And be in the details in certain areas, but give up the details and the operations for areas you're not great at.
- [25:50]
A
So describe this. I don't even know if it's an agreement or if it's just an understanding. What's your setup with William at Magic Mind? Because the through line here is also. You're gonna. You've done this on multiple things. So where does your job end? Where does it begin, where does it end and where does his beginning end to? Where there's not two leaders of the company, founder and CEO. Well, there are lead there. There's two leaders.
- [26:17]
B
Yeah. There's two co founders. So. And I think it starts with a lot of trust and a lot of security. Trust, security. And then actually bringing a lot of value in the two areas. My two areas, product and brand. So every single ingredient that goes into the bottles of Magic mine, it's going through. How do we make this the best morning ritual?
- [26:38]
A
That's your job.
- [26:39]
B
Yeah, that's my job. And making sure that there's no input from some outside or inside voice of like, hey, we could really improve our margins if we went with this crappy ingredient. And William has that same commitment too. But, oh, we get emails, 100 emails a week from suppliers being like, we could get you matcha for $0.01 instead of $0.17. Yeah, it's like, we want premium ceremonial grade matcha from Japan. It's a first harvest. Amazing. A grade ceremonial grade matcha or any that's like with the matcha that goes for all of our ingredients and we're not going for the cheap version. That's something that I'm like, I think I need to be involved in that. Just to make sure from the quality perspective or for the. I just wrote a book on this whole world of all these ingredients that nature and science give us for. For finding a groove in our days. So there's the expertise, but there's also the commitment to quality and then brand is. So there's a domain expertise in the product that we still consult with. We have a scientific advisory board that's got almost 100 years of research in this space that I'm consulting with constantly. And then we've got team members that care about the right product too. But it's like the buck's gonna stop with me making sure that it's the best possible.
- [27:53]
A
You take full accountability.
- [27:54]
B
Right?
- [27:55]
A
Okay. How is the company set up and run today?
- [27:57]
B
I wanted because so fun to talk about this. I have a war on so many conventions within team dynamics. Take the VC model for example. Venture capital models. Most of them are built off of law firm models from the 70s. And so that's why they have partner meetings on Mondays. And having strict rigid structures where let's say you have to get 12 different partners to be on board with an investment. You get consensus in an industry that is all about finding non consensus views. I mean once something's obvious, all of the yield is gone. 12 out of 12 people think it's a good idea. The yield in that space or that company is probably gone. You're investing in like the fifth version version and you missed out on the first dude. I would love to talk about my Mrs. By the way.
- [28:50]
A
We're going to do that.
- [28:51]
B
Some pretty epic ones, but the conventions that get borrowed, we don't even realize where they're coming from. And we're just copying and pasting. So like, hey, we've got this big decision, so we should have a meeting. And I just started to think about that. And this Airbnb was a good example of this. It was death by a thousand meetings. So many meetings every single day. And everybody talked about it that then it became a convention of no meeting Wednesdays, no meeting Wednesdays, no meeting Wednesdays to where in Tuesday nights would be. I'd be like an eighth grader, you know, on a Friday night. I was so pumped for Wednesdays to actually get deep work done that with Magic Mind. I was like, hey, the default is going to be no meetings. Because the first principle commitment is to the best communication possible. Not only are meetings a drag on your calendar, but if your commitment is to the best communication possible, that's why you'd have a meeting. We want the best decision possible. When I thought about it, it's like, well, a meeting is a pretty shitty form of communication. You have you and I carving out time to talk about this, this idea or this decision. And we're going to set up a meeting in four days. Because our schedules are so busy because we have the default of everything else is meetings too. It's four days from now. Meetings should be seven, you know, 10 minutes or they should be two hours. The idea of like 30 minutes is just total frickin made up finger in the air like let's make it 30 minutes, let's make it an hour.
- [30:25]
A
And you Outlook Alex defaults an hour.
- [30:27]
B
Yeah, exactly. That sounds like a human default. We are getting to spend two days together.
- [30:33]
A
If you give people an hour, guess how long that meeting is going to go till? Yeah, an hour.
- [30:37]
B
An hour. And how many meetings have you been in where it's like within the first eight minutes, like oh this should have been an email.
- [30:45]
A
How many meetings have you been in where just walking into them you're just already dead. Your energy is zapped. Zapped.
- [30:51]
B
How many meetings have you had? Charles Dickens has a great quote of Even the presence of a single event on the calendar can ruin a whole day. So how many meetings have you had like at 11am and then you're like at like 9:45 you're just like well I can't really get into deep work because of this thing at 11 and I'm gonna have to leave here at 10:45 to get over there. And you're like that took a whole morning. Paul Graham also is a big influence here. I've got a essay on asynchronous working. That's what I call it and it's one of my more read essays and is on hacker news for a while but it cites in the very top. Paul Graham has a great essay on maker Schedule manager. Schedule managers, their job is to get status reports. So they just started in the 90s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s doing all these meetings. But then email comes out in the 90s and the early aughts then you have the ability to now you could text or use magic. Mind is built on loom videos. Now we actually really like roam. Roam is a cool tool for distributed teams but videos presenting. Hey Chris, here is the idea for the new Bottler. We're going to go with. Here's the compromise. Longer lead times but it's going to be lower price and they actually have a much better microplastic option, blah blah blah. So I could present that to you and then you can think about the trade offs if it's a meeting, not only a meeting. And then at most meetings are a poor form of communication because at Most you have 13 seconds before you got to respond Hey, I went through the seven Slides and Chris, what do you think we should do?
- [32:43]
A
Like, whatever answer I can give you to get out of this meeting.
- [32:47]
B
Exactly. And so you've got 13 seconds instead of. I remember hearing these stories of like Bill Gates would stop a meeting. He's like, I need a few hours to think about this and then come back. I was like, well, yeah, a lot of big decisions should take a few hours to think it through. Maybe a day or two, sleep on it. And so when I thought about, all right, the meeting is going to take four days and then it's going to be suboptimal because I'm going to have 13 seconds to decide. Because just think about, you presented something and then someone now is like, I'm done presenting. What do you think? And maybe you like, push it off.
- [33:22]
A
Even the social pressure.
- [33:23]
B
Yes, the social pressure of like, okay, Chris, what do you think?
- [33:26]
A
Our culture says we're driven. Yeah, we got to make this decision
- [33:31]
B
and think how painful it is in these social conventions just to wait 13 seconds of thinking about it. So you end up saying something after seven seconds versus okay, they're asking me for a decision on this. I watched the video. That was great. Let me digest it and think about it overnight. Tell everybody, okay, let me think about this. And then you send a video back, maybe asking the insightful questions before the decision that you wouldn't have thought of on the fly in the meeting, but now you're asking the three follow up questions that sleeping on it gave you the great patience to even realize would be the insightful questions. And then you come back, you get those questions and then they send you the answers to those. You sleep on that, two days later you got an answer and you give it in two days versus four days to have the compromised version of this communication of the meeting that gets on your calendar on Friday morning because you're busy from now Monday until Friday. So it's a poor form of communication and it's not as good as being able to sleep on things. Understand, oh, I should have asked this question or that question. But then you get back to the first principles, the highest form of communication. And then you think about, I think about meetings and decisions in terms of software design. The best software is going to be a function of its release cycles. How quickly is it released? America Online was like released twice a year on CD ROMs. Facebook probably has 150, if not 1000 deployments every day. That software is going to be much faster because of its iteration speed, the communication. Imagine mine is going to be much Faster because Chris in Austin working on an ad can shoot me a note. Hey, James, tell me again why Ashwagandha lion's mane? Why turmeric is so tell me how you set it in, you know, five, boom, give him the answer back in an hour and then he's putting it into that ad. That iteration speed, or hey, these bottles. What do you think about this new bottling partner? That iteration speed of 2 days instead of 4 days. Company Quality is built on iteration speed in the same way software quality is built on iteration speed. And when you go to asynchronous, when you go to a meeting default, you end up with slower, poor quality communication. When you go to asynchronous, email looms, text and voice notes.
- [35:58]
A
No slack.
- [35:59]
B
F. No on slack.
- [36:01]
A
Oh, no.
- [36:01]
B
Teams and war on slack.
- [36:02]
A
War on slack too.
- [36:04]
B
War on slack. Because the downside of Slack is that you think everybody's in the water cooler. Water cooler is great for the, I don't know, 27 minutes during the day where you kind of bump into people and have spontaneous conversations. But the idea that everybody's like in the water cooler, even at 8:30, I could write this note to Chris or Brian Chesky. Everybody's on slack at Airbnb except for Brian, who's never on slack. Brilliant, by the way. Great CEO. Amazing CEO. And he was never on slack because he didn't want to be available 24 7. He wanted time for deep thinking, like one of his heroes, Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett carves out four hours a day for just thinking and being available in Slack all day long. Or even the convention that the team thinks everybody's available. Hey, you got a sec? Like every interruption costs me about 20 minutes to get back into flow into like deep thought on some big strategic thing. So yeah, Slack, I think is. It just sets the default. Everybody's at the water cooler. Interrupt everybody anytime versus texting. Texting is like, this is Chris's personal phone. I don't know, maybe I should default to email. I don't want to blow up his phone. And I compare it to like, it's like a close, closed door office. If it's really important, I'm going to knock on Chris's door. But otherwise his door is closed and he's doing deep work. I don't want to interrupt.
- [37:32]
A
So if you get a text, how quickly should you respond versus an email?
- [37:36]
B
Well, in an asynchronous world, I tell people, I'm more available than your mom and dad.
- [37:41]
A
So if I were to start tomorrow at the company, would I be trained on how to be asynchronous?
- [37:45]
B
Yeah, it's all in our onboarding. And the default is asynchronous. If you need a meeting, go for it. Everybody is. It's maximal agency. It's maximal agency. So if you want to break rules and break conventions and you're just like, no, I love meetings, go for it. But there'll be a voice in your head of like, is there a better way of doing this?
- [38:06]
A
So what do I get at onboarding then?
- [38:08]
B
You have a notion.
- [38:10]
A
It's a notion.
- [38:11]
B
And William. So this is our great division of labor. William is phenomenal at process on the management of teams, understanding of the process. For we have a convention within magic mind of the time to competency. Should be three days time to competency. Three days. If we just spent six months recruiting you from our VP of sales came from a big beverage company called Olipop. And if it takes him like seven months to learn. And this is blessing of. I've never worked for anybody outside of small nonprofit. When I graduated college and worked in poverty alleviation and worked for my dad growing up here and there. But working for Airbnb for two years, dude, I saw big companies process gone wrong. Brilliant, amazing CEO, brilliant and amazing business. But dude, meetings out the wazoo and eight months in, I was still like, dude, this thing is all tribal knowledge. Who is the actual decision maker over here on this marketing team? Because I would have thought it was this person and it's these other two people who is the actual decision maker on this team and this team. It was like total tribal knowledge to where with magic mind, I was like, there should be a time to competency of three days where someone can join our team after. If we're going to recruit them for six months, we're not waiting around seven months for them to understand where everything is. They should be competent within three days. And we don't hit this ideal by any stretch, but the ideal is make Scott, coming from Olipop, know everything organizationally in three days. And so then everything's. If he has to ask questions, that's in tribal knowledge of people's heads, then it needs to go into a notion. If he has to. If he finds something out in three weeks or three months, like, wait, what? That's where we have all of our assets for this. And it wasn't in the onboarding and the notion if we didn't set up the right structure of an onboarding buddy, where you have this onboarding person where in our core values we hammer our core values home. And do I love talking about our core values at Airbnb. Do the core values are like bolted on year 10. Year. What was it Year. Yeah, it was about like year nine. Rediscovered the core values and already had like 5,000 plus employees. And so with Magic Mind, me and William do our core values. We've got to really believe in them and they're how we're going to hire, manage, let people go, hold ourselves accountable to make it to where it's the North Star. It's your compass on a Tuesday night if you don't know what to do. And it's the dao of the Tao of Magic Mind. Taoh. The Tao of Magic Mind to where this goes to Eastern. I love Eastern philosophy and it's technically pronounced dao, but it's often spelled tao. But it's the Tao of. Which means the way. The way of Magic Mind is think like an owner. Dude, I already know you're like, dude, I don't want to talk about core values.
- [41:27]
A
No, I'm.
- [41:28]
B
But these are. I love talking about these things.
- [41:31]
A
I'm here. I want to hear how you run your company. It's unique.
- [41:34]
B
So think like an owner. So it's maximal agency.
- [41:37]
A
Okay.
- [41:37]
B
We're not. We don't manage people. Management is an employment structure of a default of distrust.
- [41:44]
A
Such bullshit.
- [41:45]
B
Sometimes it is a. In a management management and a manager. That is a employment structure with a default of distrust. I don't know if Chris really knows how to do his job, so I'm going to manage him. Everybody is a senior. What they do has been doing it before. And we have a handful of 14 team members. We got 10 employees, took us to 50 million in revenue and profitability. And I had not seen that in a company that I was involved in as an investor in 100 plus companies. And it was. Warren Buffett has a great line and I'm sure you see this all the time in your career that it's. He said this great line of I'm a better businessman because I'm an investor. I'm a better investor because I'm a businessman. So investing in a bunch of companies, seeing how companies do it and building and doing everything wrong over and over again and getting PhDs and how not to do it. With MagicMind, I was like, let's keep the team really, really small. And people that basically everybody's a co founder. So the first core value. Think like an owner. Run you however you want to run you. We're Gonna have a minimum viable culture. Like we're not trying to be everybody's like, church, you don't have the slack
- [43:07]
A
channel for family photos over the weekend.
- [43:09]
B
Right, Exactly. We're not. Everybody's like, and I get this. And we tell people in the onboarding and, and in the recruiting, like, this isn't for everybody. But if you're a senior expert at what you do, you won't be roped into company drinks all the time. You're not gonna be roped into a bunch of pickleball Fridays. Yeah, exactly. It's not gonna be like, we're not the church and the block party and your social structure and all those things. We really want to be more like an art studio. It's like come in and do kick ass art. Create the environment where if you have a big wingspan, fly 600 miles in the direction you feel like is going to be. As an owner of what we're building, it's going to benefit the business. Don't like, hey, I know you got this big wingspan, but like stick into the fold of what we're doing and how we're doing it and bring 15% of yourself to what we're doing. Bring 100% of yourself. But dude, go clock out. If you did all of your stuff you need to do today, clock out at 3pm but think like an owner. All the hard things the right way, take pride in doing it the hard and right way, knowing that it's going to be way harder in the moment. But I've never had a sleepless night about magic mind. We've almost gone bankrupt. We've almost, you know, lost. I put seven figures of my own money. I almost lost it. We've had moments where it's been like, oh, how are we going to get out of this? Never lost sleepover. Because we, I almost just trusted. No, we did all these hard things the right way and it's, it's, there's a buoyancy here. Over communicate. And that's why I'm bringing up the core values is on the onboarding, we tell people over and over again these core values. But one of my favorite ones is over Communicate. Over Communicate. Over communicate. If you don't know where something is, over communicate. If you're a onboarding buddy for somebody and you're their lead for getting them up to speed, ask them the questions. You know where this is freaking. Give them pop quizzes. What are our core values? Like if you have a thought, are they really grokking all this? Ask them the Question. I can give you the rest of the core values, but we can also jump into anything you want. The last ones are obsession over the entire customer experience. And then the final one is honest ears, honest voices, honest ingredients.
- [45:44]
A
All right, you said at dinner last night you're on your fourth iteration of having to crack the algorithm online.
- [45:53]
B
Yeah.
- [45:54]
A
Facebook, Instagram, do they just like, it's been. It's been 18 months. Let's shuffle the deck again and piss everybody off. Like, is there a method to the madness or is it a black hole that nobody knows?
- [46:06]
B
Dude, there. They are such a well run company that I think there's immense method.
- [46:13]
A
They're playing chess somehow.
- [46:14]
B
Yes.
- [46:14]
A
Okay.
- [46:15]
B
If I were to guess. Total guess. This is just James guessing. They favor different. I was telling you this, by the way. You were saying earlier today when we were, I think, on the mountain bike ride, saying that you'll have guests coming to the podcast and they'll say something during lunch before. And then give you a completely different answer. God, those people are ruining the world. I think our gospel to our community is being who we truly are in every scenario.
- [46:47]
A
Give me the true answer.
- [46:49]
B
I think Facebook, which owns Instagram, the best marketing tool that's ever existed, I think they favor certain sectors in sequential order. Knock you off to where you invest everything and you're just like, we gotta stay, we gotta figure it out. And then once they know, you're almost like, dude, f Facebook, we're out of here. They like give you a little bit more and they see it in the metrics. I also think that their business model is. And a lot of people think this is to exhaust every single penny of profit you have. They know that oh, so and so is willing to pay 15 bucks per customer. Let's see if they're willing to pay 17. Oh, they backed off. Okay, the 15. 16. Ooh, 16 worked. Oh, they must have changed their margins because when we made them see if they could do 17, now they can get to 17. Oh, 18. Okay. Now we back off and before you know it, you're paying $27 a customer. Barely getting by on your own margin. And the payback periods and things like that. And Facebook's like, we figured it out, they could go up to 27. They acted like they couldn't for a while, but we just, we wait. It's like the frog in the boiling water. We got them there. And then you, like go out of business and you max out your margin and they don't care at all because new businesses jump on their platform the next day. So I think they're in the business of finding out any margin you got and taking it all.
- [48:20]
A
And do they send a notification that the algo's changing, or one day you just get on and your ads aren't working well anymore?
- [48:25]
B
Some days, sometimes they do. They make a pretty material change every 12 to 18 months. Okay. The latest one is called Andromeda. That was like a known thing. Sometimes it's. It's some outside thing. IOS14 changed, and then they had to change their algorithm based on. On certain things, and you don't really know what they did or. And they don't give a name to it.
- [48:49]
A
And do y' all have a process for how you begin to re. Crack the code again? Like, what do you go? Is it, is it a blank slate every time? Or at this point you're like, all right, we have an 80% idea of how we're going to crack it again, or is it all hands on deck again? Start from square one.
- [49:05]
B
The process is the people.
- [49:08]
A
Yeah.
- [49:08]
B
Relentless, maniacal execution. Yeah, there's. It's, it's kind of like there's no
- [49:15]
A
playbook on how to restart thinking about how to crack the algorithm again. You're like, well, we know we got to do something viral in the first five seconds. Because that's always the thing.
- [49:24]
B
Yes. Each one you hear different breadcrumbs of, all right, I think this is. And we're all in different groups of different founders and different CMOs and different investors that get these breadcrumbs. So it's like, all right, now try this, try this. And we work with a handful of partners that are great agencies that kind of like, let's try this. But we're all figuring it out together. And then sometimes you figure out things that, like, this is working. Let's not tell anybody. Yeah. God, this was so hard to earn. Like, I remember someone asked me, who do you. Who do you all get for your conversion rate optimization agency? I was like, man, we went through like five different agencies to find this amazing one. Probably spent 3, 4, $500,000. I was like, do I just give this away? My default is to give it away. But we. It's a lot of this. Hard earned insights. And some of the best. Some of the best solutions are just like some guy, some gal on their own freelancing from Omaha, and they're like, really wizards? And you're like, I don't know, I want to just like, hand this information out. Because it took us 14 months to find this, this person. Candidly, I. I want to. If that partner's so good, I want them to crush it. So I want to give the name out. But yeah, it's a lot of just finding the right wizards that figure these things out and then you hand the problem to them. Or honestly, we're all wired to be these relentless, maniacal executors that are like, try this, try this, try this. And sometimes we re crack it in three months, sometimes it's seven months, but we always re crack it. And that's not a process thing as much as it's a.
- [51:16]
A
And the final ad, the types of ads you're putting out every time you re crack it, are they wildly different than how you envisioned it being? You're like, I cannot believe these are our ads.
- [51:26]
B
Now that's more like on a weekly basis for years because no one knows what's going to win. So we do about 35 tests a week with totally different directions. And then we're like, that worked. All right. That's what we're doing now. I'll say that's part of the solution, is we're testing things like crazy, which you could say that's part process, but I'd say that's even more the people. We're all so aware that we don't know anything that we're just gonna have to test so much that then you build a process of like, well, let's just test dozens and dozens and dozens of things every five days. And one might surprise us.
- [52:07]
A
Okay. So the obvious question then becomes, like, are the best CPG companies just the best at figuring out online? Or like, how do you break through to where you're not dependent on just relentless rethinking of the algorithm? Is that getting into brick and mortar? Is that.
- [52:22]
B
Yeah, well, the food and beverage is specifically really unique in that you can scale from. You have to scale beyond e commerce because like I said, once you have this insight of Facebook is just going to eat away all of our profits. Like, that's their whole business model. Oh, my God. This is sitting in plain sight. And I never saw it. Then you're. And Google, same thing. SEM, YouTube marketing. So then you're like, we're going to have to graduate beyond this. And from the get go, I wouldn't have done magic, mind, if I didn't know that it could graduate beyond because I had invested in a handful of e commerce companies that could not scale beyond it and won't even name one of them. But they got to 200 million in sales and now they're valued at maybe 20 million because the graph started going in the wrong direction. So I learned up close like do not be addicted to performance marketing. And they were a product that could not scale into a distribution channel beyond E commerce, beyond online, like hardware. Today it's really difficult for a hardware device to go into another distribution channel because people aren't going to Best Buy very often. You're going to have to stay online primarily. But food and beverage, like we were saying earlier, 10x the amount of sales for food and beverage happen offline. So I knew if we could get the ball rolling and build a brand online, then we're going to be able to graduate into the real holy grail, which is winning and grocery.
- [54:03]
A
All right, we're going to move the conversation. You got magic mind, right?
- [54:06]
B
We'll see. Story's still being.
- [54:08]
A
I was doing research and Angel List said you're the number two angel investor on Angellist. And you've talked about how being a good investor makes you a good business owner. But you have to tell the story of one of your biggest whiffs.
- [54:26]
B
Yeah. Which we've talked about before.
- [54:28]
A
But I don't know if you've said it publicly and I don't even know if you fully told me the whole story. You've just kind of said you had every chance to be in this thing at day one and just like, nah, this thing's not gonna work.
- [54:39]
B
Well, it's funny cause I love thinking about this because it's the more truth you can eat each day. It's like the more take a little bit of poison each day and you become immune to it. The more truth we can eat each day, then the more we can look at it straight in the eye. So I think about this example pretty often because it is just kind of insane that we can devote our full time attention to something. I was a full time angel investor. It would be one thing, it was like side hobby, full time angel investor. And. And at that point, this is 2016. So at that point I was like four years into it and I had a few unicorns, a few wins and I was working with Sam Altman on a YC research project for Universal Basic Income. So seeing with a 50 million grant, $50 million worth of grants, Universal Basic Income to people, what is the real economic impact of this? And helping design the study, helping fundraise for the study and meeting on this regular basis in the conference room of pretty dingy, like kind of just nonchalant conference room of a company called OpenAI I'm full time angel investing at this point, and they're working on AI. I'm like, no way, this ain't gonna work. And I won't even say, like, the things that they had come up with at that point because they're confidential, but it was nothing. It was not impressive at all. And so this is 2017, and they're about year and a half in and they're already kind of conversations of, well, we might fundraise and spin out non profits can start for profit aspects and we might spin something out. And as an investor, the best yields, best investments come from seeing someone smart working on something and going to them proactively and be like, I want to invest. I was lucky enough to invest in a few different companies right in the very beginning. First conversations around it, and I have no idea how Angellist compiles their data or anything, but Mercury was one of them. And Ahmad and I got to chat about Mercury over lunch at Airbnb. Crazy, huge buffet. And we're sitting down, he's like, I have this idea. And I said, don't do it,
- [57:20]
A
don't
- [57:21]
B
do it, don't do it, man. You're gonna fail. And just. I'm so wrong so often. And so that was. But what. That was one of the. Luckily, I still was like, dude, your friend, I'm still going to write a, I don't know, maybe 20k check or something. Still going to write a check. But I don't know if I. Or I. I knew don't do this. But I was like, he's so smart, he might pivot into something else. But for Sam, it was like, this is AI. They already have a team. And I was like, dude, we're not. We are 20 years from figuring out AI because historically we've been, quote, unquote, working on AI for, at that point, 50 years.
- [57:57]
A
Yeah.
- [57:57]
B
I was like, where is so far? And Marc Andreessen talked about being brilliant, but also he was just very wrong because he would joke about, like, talking about the problems of AI and AGI is like talking about overpopulation of Mars. Like, that's just so far off. And by the way, the best investors in the world, like Marc Andreessen was our board observer for Tilt. Unbelievable in so many ways, but the best investors in the world are wrong all the time. He says it all the time. He's really wrong on certain things. Really right on certain things. So I always. Everybody should really embrace that. He embraces it so often just talking about how wrong he's Been so anyhow, he's like, you know, hero mind. He's publicly saying AI worry about the problems. AI is like talking about an overpopulation of Mars. It's just so far off. And, and I'm really kind of buying into that. And I don't ask Sam to invest turns it into the, the seed round which I think, I don't, I never remember the numbers of these things. I think it was about $50 million valuation and maybe it's, maybe it's 80. And he has like this whole non profit for that had that other weird wrinkle to it.
- [59:22]
A
That is weird.
- [59:22]
B
Yeah, that other weird wrinkle to it. And I was like I got to see some of the other research projects from YCN and I was like, ah, they're just throwing, kind of throwing things at the wall. I don't think I'm gonna back this.
- [59:37]
A
So in hindsight if you re looked at it, would you have made the same decision again? I know you know what it is today, but what did you miss then?
- [59:44]
B
Oh my God.
- [59:45]
A
What's the lesson? No, the lesson again today.
- [59:48]
B
The lesson is crazy smart people doing ambitious things never say no because the idea is so ambitious. That is like the number one reason to not say no. Because the ambition. And now just nine years later, older me is there's that. I think it's a Rockefeller quote of no small aims for they do not inspire the soul. The bigger the idea, the more odds they have of building something awesome because they're going to recruit the best people. No small aims for they do not inspire the soul. The bigger idea, the more it's going to inspire their own enthusiasm. Each day they'll pivot into something else. I mean if they have crazy horsepower, maybe they're going in the wrong direction. But if they got crazy horsepower and a crazy strong network around them helping refine ideas. Dude, so, so dumb. The only other time I've shared this was on the TVPN podcast and we on air, we like calculated it or I think Jordy calculated it and he was like dude, that's the equivalent of 30 Googles missing. 30 Googles.
- [60:56]
A
When Google IPO'd, you've run tilt, you had started Magic Mind in kind of your own unique way. You have full time angel invested. You've kind of built this multi dimensional career. And then you were sitting at the Heathrow airport a year ago, this was seven years ago now, seven years ago
- [61:19]
B
that you had the idea before starting Magic Mind. Yeah, I mentioned I had two ideas
- [61:23]
A
I want to hear about this coming to be, but I just want to make the statement, what I found, like, most interesting and even what we've been talking about out here is you've designed a life. That one. You have a lot of margin and flexibility in, but you're able to do. I mean, you. You do music, Angel Invest. Run Magic mind this new company and this new company.
- [61:48]
B
So three little daughters and.
- [61:49]
A
And three daughters and a wife and two or three horses and a pony and a couple pigs. How did this latest business come to be? And what do all those experiences we've talked about to date on the pod lead into? Like, how you got this one going.
- [62:04]
B
I'd love to ask you how you've made decisions on things to work on in the past and how that's shifted over. If it's shifted over time.
- [62:13]
A
Well, I think one of the things I'm learning from you in real time is you've found a way to be, like, all in on something. I get so all in on things that when I imagine doing them, I'm like, I'm not going to have time for much else. I haven't thought about getting involved in things the way you have. And so when we were talking about the Palmer Luckey model, some of my best years at Fort were when I had created this effective role. It was called executive chairman, where I did have a lot of margin. I could actually be very way more effective. The more margin I had from the business, the more effective I was for the business. And I'm like, just.
- [62:50]
B
Did that surprise you?
- [62:51]
A
Huh?
- [62:52]
B
Did that surprise you in the moment?
- [62:53]
A
I didn't really realize it was happening. As I look back, I'm like, oh, my gosh. The results were incredible. That as I think about this next leg of my career, it tracks very well to the way you've set up yours, which is like, I want to give all of myself to something, meaning I can be super effective. But that doesn't mean it's 80 hours of my week and I'm toast on everything else. And so I. The third lane that you mentioned of the founder, executive chairman role, whatever it's called, resonates a lot with me. My ambitions going forward are to build this podcast into something great. But I've been doing it for seven years. It's kind of. It's kind of your magic mind. It's been brick by brick, like, I'm not in a rush for it to be the greatest thing. Maybe it never will. I just want to keep taking the next best step and let the chips Fall and let the chips fall as they may. And anybody that comes to me like I'm starting a podcast, I'm like, okay, call me after like a hundred episodes, call me after 50 episodes and I'll maybe take you seriously. Call me after 400. And you're now in the 0.1% of people. And maybe the first 400 haven't even been that great. Maybe the next 400, like I'll look back and be like, man, those first 400 suck. But I don't really care. I just keep laying the next brick. As I take that attitude into business and understand maybe some of the influence that I've built to date, the skills, the access, the network. I'm now coming to a realization of the goal of I want to co found a few things over the next 10 or 20 years. I don't want to be in a lot of things. I do want to really go all in on the things I'm in, but not in the degree of I'm going to be back into 80 hours a week and meetings, just pulling my hair out. I think I'll be way more effective as an entrepreneur this next season of my career. And some of that's earned right. You can't. Like there's just some things you got to earn. Your, your stripes. Yeah, I'm not saying I've earned them. I'm just saying I think I'm a lot more effective at 39 going into the next thing than I was at 19. Start starting the first thing. So as I think about this next leg, what I'm most interested in that you've done is you've been able to do a lot of things really well by giving the perfect amount of yourself to each thing, but not too much to where it's like an ego thing
- [65:14]
B
when you're starting something. And I think each founder listening to this will resonate. And for non founders, you think the world encourages startups and it's like, oh, the idea is so good, dude. When you start something, the world wants you to fail. Yeah, the world, that conversation, that coffee with the investor that is auditing you and coming at it with like a magnifying glass. That's the 50th interaction you're gonna have that day of someone not being encouraging. Yeah, the other 30 in the morning might be with customers. They're like, dude, this is broken. I ain't gonna buy that. Potential customers that don't buy it. The other 10 are with investors that say no. The other nine are the investors that say yes. But they say emails about, like, what about this? What about this? So they're the 50th interaction in the day. That's not encouraging. And people that aren't founders don't realize that to where you could be a glass of water in the desert. If you come into the conversation like you did with these two founders and you're encouraged that, man, I love this idea. I needed something like this. And as a founder, you also know, like, the biggest thing I can do right now is encourage this thing that I want to exist.
- [66:37]
A
Yeah.
- [66:39]
B
And I know that I'm probably going to be the only one that's going to be enthusiastic. And oftentimes it's just our wiring. You and I are both wired to get enthusiastic. Freaking jazzed by other creators putting themselves out there to create something. Because we just love seeing that we love. Lights me up to no end. So, like, when I see it, it's not even like a calculation of I got to be an encourage. It's like, oh, my God, I've needed this for. I literally, six weeks ago, I was telling myself, someone needs to start a company. It does. I cannot believe you're doing it. And then they get off the zoom. They're like, that's my favorite investor. Yeah.
- [67:19]
A
I want to go run through a wall. And the truth is, that idea is going to morph. Like, it's not about telling them they had the great. It is literally giving them the encouragement to just go take the next step.
- [67:29]
B
Yeah. Did you know in research study in the last year came out that said you can improve the quality of output by using the word great was summoned. Tell someone like, dude, that was a great way that you used this gradient in the design on the homepage. Could we do that in the other parts of the website? I learned that. And then Chaney and I, my wife that you've known longer than I have, she and I, every Tuesday night, religiously, we get for 15 years. It's date night. Monday night's the night that I can go really late. By the way, we're talking about flow in life. I don't know If I work 20 hours a week or 120, because it's a huge part of this, foundationally, is finding what you're wired for and doing that. In Indian philosophy they call swadharma your nature. Find your nature and then do that. An albatross can fly hundreds of miles on a single flap of its wings because it's doing what it's wired for, and it's wired to Understand wind patterns, barometric pressure. It's wired to understand all these things. A lot of effort to learn how to fly in the beginning, but once you know how to fly, it's wired to glide. And I think all humans are wired to glide for what they're wired for. And if you try to force it in something, you're not wired for. People listening to this, maybe they're perfect at being that the person to take something from 1 to 10 or 1 to 100, but not 0 to 1. Maybe they're perfect at being number 15 and they just want to know something is already at 0 to 7. Maybe they're trying to be a CEO, but they're really great at being a CTO. Maybe they're really great at COO and doing all the external key relationship management of CEO is so draining for them, they don't care who gets credit. They can have anything they want in the world. And if you find and surrender into your nature, you're gliding. And if that same albatross is trying to paddle 500 miles, maybe dies of a heart attack 17 miles in because it's paddling and not flying like business should be like the. I think my 20s was thinking, it's rowing. You got to row harder. And I'm going to do the unthinkable. I'm going to row from Los Angeles to Tokyo. Business, life, relationships. It should be like sailing, where you learn the patterns, you learn a skill, but let the wave you're on the wind that you're catching, the instruments that you're using that you even learn to know to use, take you all the way there. So when I'm surrendering into what I'm wired for, it's designing products, understanding brand universes, building those I love building brand universes. You're so good at getting out of the way. That one was a recognition early on in my. Or recognition kind of later of basically I've had to try everything the wrong way, give up too much control over things and realize, oh, actually I was really good at that. And it's a disservice to the organization
- [70:54]
A
real quick because you read all these business books and they're like, delegate everything. Yeah, you should do nothing.
- [70:59]
B
Right. No, it's. And you should delegate much of perhaps over time, if not everything. You're not good at some businesses when you're getting going, you just got to do a lot of paperwork, got to do a lot of things that you're not good at. But like the albatross, learning to fly once you Are once you get your wings going, you know how to fly, find the zones that you are really wired for. And again, I think everybody has those zones. Those zones might be to like Chaney. She took APT AI the this world's first AI powered personality test, aptitude test and career coach that you're investor in this. Is that the second idea? And I remember her being like this says I should be a bus driver or Uber driver. And she was like, I actually really do like taking people where they want to go. So this idea that is like there are jobs out there that nobody wants. There are a lot of bricklayers that love being in. I mean that's almost as meditative as it gets. People crocheting work that we do with our hands. Neuroscientifically, we know that neuroscientifically the optimal states of satisfaction, which is not just dopamine and serotonin. Dopamine you can get from working out. Serotonin you can get from eating chocolate. But dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin comes from work that we do with our hands. So you have people that are like, duh, construction. I actually like, please do not give me a 2x better paying job in an office with fluorescent lights above me. I want to be working with my hands. So there are people that are like, I friggin love driving Uber. Many people that don't and they should go to APT and take the quiz. But the design aspect was probably handing off too much. And this man. The most nutritious thing that anybody can do to learn what they're great at is try a bunch of things and fail a bunch. The most nutritious thing that anybody can do to find success in entrepreneurship is get the first 2, 3, 4 bad ideas out of the way. Like the first pancake is always the messiest. Get it out of the way, start it early, get it out of the way. It's your burner brand. Get it out of the way. And it was a $27,000 MBA that you just got so beneficial. But the, the design thing was after trying a few different things, I realized, man, I love design. Designing websites was something I did early in 17, 18 years old drawing when I was 6, 7 and then realizing, oh, this has been my. My grandmother is an artist, My mom is a clothing designer. She designed her own clothes. And so it was like three generations of design. So it's kind of like with Magic mind or other things. I love that aspect. I want to be involved in the brand universe.
- [73:53]
A
Okay, you Talked about Apple. But I think the best part is the story of how it came to be. You left this one on the shelf for seven years. Yeah.
- [74:02]
B
I was sitting at Heathrow Airport and I had a four hour delay. And this is seven years ago. So this is like 2019. And I hadn't started Magic Mind this morning, 2018. And I was like, even with Magic Mind, I still was like, maybe I should just be at Airbnb and land in milk and honey. And I was like, I'm never starting anything ever again. Probably it's too hard. I got this little magic potion thing, but I'm never gonna start anything. It's too hard. But I got a four hour delay. What would be the biggest possible ideas I could ever Biggest possible problems that are hiding in plain sight? Founders out there or potential founders. You'll really start with scratching on an itch or where you can be useful to your community and start with being obsessed with problems. By the way, I'm just playing the hits of other smart people that say these things, but I love this convention within Silicon Valley of become obsessed with problems, not solutions. So I was thinking through what are the biggest possible problems in the entire universe that I could think about. And one of which like kept coming up in these four hours, which was there are 8 billion people on the planet and we all trial and error. What we work on Magic Mind came up of like, we've been drinking the same black soup we've been drinking for 400 years. We don't do anything we're doing 400 years ago. When it comes to productivity. We're not riding horse and carriage, we're not sending telegrams from 200 years ago, but we're still drinking the same thing we're drinking 200 years ago. So that was one of them. Elevate humanity through getting people into a groove with the best ingredients that we know of scientifically on the planet. And then the other one was 8 million people. And we trial and error what we're going to do. And man, at this point, I was early 30s and even 10 years in. All of my peers have no idea what they should be doing with their lives. Everybody listen to this. You and I both dj, our producer, they've thought to themselves, there are very few things I can feel confident saying everybody's had a thought around. But this one I feel pretty confident about. Every adult has had the thought and many kids, what should I do with my life? It's tragic what we as humanity have done on the other side of asking ourselves that question over the last couple
- [76:30]
A
hundred years, being a professional co founder or going into it with that mentality isn't something a lot of people have thought about or done. Like it's a. Again, it's the one. It's probably less than 1% eventually get to that path. But if I look at the design setups of your life, there's a few other people that have set up what I'd call more of a platform. You kind of have a platform. That's what I want to build.
- [76:58]
B
There is a. I think anybody can build a platform if they surrender into what they're wired for in service of.
- [77:04]
A
Okay, so you asked like, what am I wired?
- [77:05]
B
Tony Hawk is a. As a platform, you know, it's. And it's vastly different. I actually never think about extension or expansion. It's much more of like, how can I find and go narrow and deep into what I'm.
- [77:20]
A
Well, so the other thing, maybe I, I actually going to contradict what I said. I don't really think about it like I'm going to build a platform. I already have a platform.
- [77:30]
B
Right?
- [77:31]
A
Yeah, that just. But I never thought about it that way. And so now I'm going to lean into that as opposed to be like, I'm going to just stop doing everything I'm doing and go down the list of problems I could solve in the world and like put my life on hold to go do that. The way my life is designed now, I'm just going to kind of keep living out of it, which is I want to grow this, this part of my life, which is the podcast. Whatever that takes, looks like over the next 10 years. Like I said, I want to keep putting one brick in front of the other and I want to work with exceptional expert domain or experts in their domain, true CEOs, and help them co found businesses and provide capital and support and relationships and network. And the way I think about it is as the podcast and my network expand and grow, it's just an unfair advantage to the things that I choose to get involved in down the road.
- [78:26]
B
But
- [78:30]
A
the caveat to that is having built something for 20 years and studied a lot and seen people that have done great things. It's not like I want to go be a co founder to 50 companies. I want to go really deep in a few and be really valuable. I want to be excellent in the things that I do and build a framework to where I can't overextend myself in any one direction to where everything just becomes kind of watered down. Lukewarm, just so that I could walk around and say, I'm in a lot of stuff.
- [79:00]
B
Can I ask you another question?
- [79:01]
A
Sure.
- [79:02]
B
How would you book a hotel for you and your wife in Cabo for a four day weekend?
- [79:10]
A
Right now, I would hire my travel agent and have her send me four options and I'd pick which one.
- [79:17]
B
And how would you do it? Maybe 10 years ago, I would go
- [79:21]
A
and look for the cheapest hotel I could find, the most value, for the cheapest amount. Go online.
- [79:28]
B
We have more information on how to. In everything that you just said. It highlights this idea that kept rolling around in my head where you wouldn't book a hotel for Cabo. Where it's like, I'm gonna go talk with the seven friends that have been to Cabo. I'm gonna ask them about where. What do they like, what do they not like? I'm gonna. I'm gonna think about it. I'm gonna go on walks, I'm gonna journal. What do I like? You go online if you got the means, you have a travel agent. But we have more information at our fingertips to choose where we're gonna stay in Cancun or Cabo for the weekend than we do for what we're wired for and what jobs are out there that are there waiting for us for our unique wiring. My experience was very similar. Executive coach, a lot of internal dialogue. And so I thought to myself, what would the world look like if 8 billion people are doing what they were wired for? Kind of thought about like a physical board of round pegs, round holes. And I was like, what if? So my dad, who is kind of extends from my dad's career, he's been in a placement, he's owned a placement recruiting agency for 52 years, oldest one in Texas. And like 11 years in a row was like the highest billing recruiter in the country. Phenomenal at recruiting. But he would tell us this stat all the time. 4% of people love what they do. You got to work your ass off to figure out how to be part of that 4%. Trial and error a lot. Go try a bunch of different things and relentlessly, do not relent. Relentlessly push yourself until you find what you love to do and you become part of that 4%. What's so sad about that status? 96% of people do not love what they do. Recent survey showed that 7 out of 10 are actively suffering in their current jobs. There was these stats that were rolling around in my head around this. I was like, that's like, that's a lot of wasted resources around the world. The most valuable resource is human capital and 70% are actively suffering and don't want to be doing what they are doing. It's like, what would the world look like if you slightly shuffle the board and all the round pegs and the right sizes fit flush in the round holes that they're wired for? And had no idea what the solution would look like. In fact, I think the reason I thought it was going to or the reason I pushed it off so long is I was like, oh, I can't even if it's successful. Running a thousand person software company at 100 people. That nearly killed me. Airbnb is 8,000 people and still just getting going. Like the day they went public, 12 years in, there was still like time to start over.
- [82:26]
A
Yeah.
- [82:27]
B
And so I was like, I just can't. I don't want to do that. So I kept pushing off, pushing off and then years and years. So it was like seven, eight, seven half years ago. And then three years ago, ChatGPT 3.5 launches within two weeks. I was like, oh, f. This is gonna be a tidal wave that's going to erase jobs in a matter of a few years. Like, this is. This is just beginning. This is like splitting the atom in terms of like, people forget how big of a moment that was. But that was March three years ago. Nuts. And so I see that. I'm like, God, if people are searching for what to do now, in a few years, it's going to be insanely disorienting with the tidal wave that's coming. And just being founder, thinking about the future, seeing these things and the writing on the wall. And then I'm reading the Bhagavad Gita for the umpteenth time. This Indian poem, it's the dopest poem for any entrepreneur out there to read. It's a 2,500-year-old poem, 30 minute read. And it's this dialogue between a warrior prince and it's the coolest setting for like a philosophical text I've ever come across. Warrior prince, most famous warrior prince in the world having a dialogue with his charioteer right before the biggest battle of this civil war is about to happen. And he has this absolute meltdown. He wanted this war for 13 years. Now it's about to happen. The biggest battle of the war. And he sees just how outnumbered they are. He wanted it when he thought they were going to win. Now he's like, oh, we might lose. He's like, take me to the middle of the battlefield. Krishna and I want to survey both sides. They go to the middle of the battlefield, throws down his bow and arrow, and he's like, we shouldn't be doing this. Falls to the ground. He's like, he can't get up. He's so distraught, disoriented. By now it looks like he's going to die. This thing he was so gung ho about, and he tries to avoid the battle. Every one of us has a battle within us that we're avoiding. Maybe you're gearing up for it and preparing, and that's phenomenal. But sometimes you convince yourself and your preparation is just a savvy way of avoiding. And this, this warrior prince comes up with. It's not like lame ways to avoid. He comes up with really savvy excuses of why they shouldn't be doing this and they should go to the forest and study philosophy. This is a philosophical text. And yet his charioteer, who ends up being this more than his charioteer, ends up being the symbolic embodiment of. Of God. It's philosophical. It's not supposed to be taken literal. It's just symbolic. And this charioteer is like, no, you shouldn't be retreating to the forest. You're a righteous warrior. That's unrighteousness over there. You've been given a righteous war. Get up and kill all of them. That's like a contextual world I've never even visited in terms of philosophical depth, of like, I'm coming up with really savvy ways to avoid the battle, avoiding my duty. And if I don't do it, it's kind of like Lion King, where the Lion King starts with Simba singing. I can't just. I can't wait to be. Can't wait to be king. I just can't wait to be king. Singing about it, thinking it's going to be one thing. Then he spends the majority of his life avoiding it. The thing he couldn't wait to be king because he thought it was going to be like rainbows and wedding cake every day. He realizes, oh, to be king, I've got to kill unrighteousness, put myself in harm's way where I might die. The thing that killed my father. I'm going to have to go and confront that and I might die. And he chooses not to. And he lives in the jungle singing Hakuna Matata. When I was a kid, I thought Hakuna Matata was a good thing. That's hell dancing around, going from fun thing to fun thing while the people you love are suffering because you are absconding from your responsibility, because you're avoiding your duty. There's no greater tragedy for every community around the world then the person listening to this and speaker included, as I say this, not rising to your duty to your community. And that scene where his mom is like in abject horror of what the pride lands becomes, that's what happens when we let unrighteousness when. And we tell ourselves, well, I think I'm just supposed to be part of this big company because it's safe. Yeah, I get to make the soccer games on Saturday. It's comfortable, it pays the bills. It's too risky to go out there. And not only is it soul crushing work if you're not wired for that, but your whole community is missing out on what could be provided. If you are singing as you head to work every Monday, if you're thinking TGIM instead of tgif, if you're rejoicing because of the work that you get to do, your kids get to see that or they see the alternative. Your community gets to benefit from that or they see the alternative. I mean our gospel to the world is being who we truly are. And when you do that, you give permission to everybody to your left and right to be who they're supposed to be, who they're wired to be, who they know. They have a heed this call to adventure and call to their duty and call to a battle that they're avoiding whatever that battle is. And the battle is not out there, it's within us. So I was saying no to this thing for years and years and years after studying and loving these philosophical concepts. Like if you grow up in the west and we go to church here in Malibu and you say like, yeah, Christ really showed us the way. And then you're like avoiding showing other people the way. If you're avoiding, as Christ says, empty thyself if you're. I think it was Peter that says to him, hey Christ. Right before they go into Jerusalem, hey Christ, hey Jesus. If what you say is going to happen is about to happen. If we go in there, we shouldn't go in there. Let's bounce. And he says, get thee behind me, Satan. You're thinking thoughts of man. I'm thinking thoughts of God. We're the ones that should be inspired by that. And all the disciples were. I mean, the way that they died, it was just as, if not more horrific in many cases than Christ. And if we're like going to church on Sunday, yeah, this is the ideal. This is what we revere, praise. This was the example. The disciples took it really seriously. But like, ah, I don't have to, I'm just checking the box over this hour on a Sunday, like that's. You are a shell of what you could be, or a shell of what we are, a shell of what we're called to be. And what's sad is our community becomes a shell of what it could be. Because we're not dying unto ourselves. Going into Jerusalem, going into the battle, when we do surrender, it's like Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. He's like, and it's so weird that I never came across this until I was like, 30. Yeah, 30. Because it's such a powerful story. But when he says, okay, fine, by the end of it, 18th chapter, surrender unto a duty bound existence and immediate peace follows. Surrender unto a duty bound existence and immediate peace falls. When we surrender unto our duty bound existence, he goes into the battle completely peaceful with whatever happens, life or death ends up living and they end up winning and he saves the entire kingdom. And I think that's what happens for each of us, even if a part of us dies, even if you have a failure, like every failure you've ever had gave you more life than it gave you death. Obviously we wouldn't be talking about Christ if he didn't have this pivotal moment in his ministry of death. Even in death, you might give life to the thing you care about in a way that you would have never been able to if it like went your way, if it was your will versus thy will be done. You know, Socrates, we're talking about him 2400 years later, went into death. It's like, give me the cup of poison. And they were like, no, no, no, no, we didn't actually meet it. You can go into exile. He's like, no, if you say that I needed, if I'm. If I am corrupt in the youth and you say the punishment is poison is death, give it to me. No, no, no, just go into exile. He's like, no, give it to me. And that's what we're called to do, either philosophically or maybe it's perhaps your major world tradition, whatever it is. So I'm reading the Gita for the umpteenth time, 18th chapter, surrender to a duty bound existence and immediate peace follows. And I just had never felt peace with this idea of like, I'm avoiding this because a thousand persons start, this would suck. And even the problem is going to be, maybe it's going to be so much bigger because of AI, but I don't care. But I'm like, all right, eff it, I'm doing it. I've been pushing off for years, year after year after year and has not given me peace. Let me try this other thing that seems to be 2500 year old concept of immediate peace on the other side of surrendering into a duty bound existence. 30 minutes later I chat with this founder, Tomas. Like what do you think of this idea? He's like, dude, I need that. He's one of my favorite founders in my entire portfolio and you know him as well and really smart, Harvard grad. And I knew that he'd be a great complement too on the design, product kind of vision side. But he'd be great on day to day execution. Kind of like William with magicmind. So then I'm like, okay and all right, well I'm doing this and it's going to be thousand people. And then I have another conversation with Ajay who you also know there's another just encouraging voice like what do you think of this idea? And he goes, oh my God, dude, that is a great idea. And well obviously you should build that on GPT and dude, you can get that going with like two people. And I was like, whoa, oh, duh. Like this should be text based. I'm not gonna have to build all this software from scratch. Visual software, the way to test a lot of aptitudes, like rotating images, things that can be really complex software. It's like, oh, we can see if there's something here with like one or two engineers. 45 minutes, here's the conversation after Tomas. So 45 minutes after deciding to do this, dude, I had this like immediate peace of like, oh, this is, this is what it feels like when you surrender in what you know you ought to do. Nothing feels as good as doing what you ought to do in life. Pure indulgence is not through doing what you know you shouldn't do. It's pure indulgence. It's not a philosophical, spiritual, religious ideal. It's just do what you know you ought to do and see how you feel 15 minutes later. Could be a cold plunge, a gym workout, or surrendering into a battle you've been putting off.
- [94:03]
A
I love you buddy. This is awesome.
- [94:06]
B
I love you buddy.
- [94:07]
A
That was so good.
- [94:09]
B
People can go to app now it's three years later and it's pretty fun to see is over a million people have used it. You're an investor. And now and you can go to triad AI and and in 10 minutes you get all major personality test results back. One quiz to rule them all. Enneagram, Myers Briggs Disc Holland code big five. And then all the science behind and then top 50 jobs that you're wired for. And then all the open roles around the world, around the country, around your region that you're wired for in minutes. It's what I always wish existed.
- [94:40]
A
Thank you for doing today. This is awesome.
- [94:42]
B
Thank you for what you put out into the world with such spiritual we're
- [94:47]
A
going to have Magic Mind links app triath.
- [94:50]
B
I'll give a promo code for people to use. We'll make it Powers50 all one word to get 50% off of APT and 50% off of Magic Mind. Powers50 thank you, buddy.