$100M Founder Reveals The Secret To Making Data Profitable

alright what's we got on here people don't know this right before the episode i ask but guess i i was like oh yeah like what's your role now at the company and i always asked this i say how can i brag about you how can i say something really impressive that you've done to give you credibility right away so people know that they should listen and then i was like could we say that your company does over a hundred million dollars in revenue his words were yeah i got in trouble last time i came on for too much info but you could say around what what did you say around the hundred million dollars ish neighborhood yeah around a hundred million number yeah so we'll go with that i feel like i could rude where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road last year you've come on before and i was looking at comments and they were all basically this guy's fantastic love his ideas more of this guy we need a part two we need a part so here we are part two with an the founder of cb insights who has transitioned on to doing bigger and better things now with the company he's he's transitioned don i don't think he's doing bigger and better things though other things but yeah smaller sure actually a smaller and worse things yeah yeah i'm just chronically online on twitter so yeah it's definitely smaller smaller things right now and we don't normally do this but but actually we're gonna make an exception for you i wanna hear the founding story of cb insights because you guys started out selling like pdfs and shit like that and somehow that went from selling pdfs to starting a a you know nine figure company so i gotta hear this story can you take us back to the beginning yeah sure thing so i left american express i work jan one two thousand eight had written a book you a big dog at american express or were you just like a normal guy there was vice president so you know who's funny why my my wife's father was like oh your vice president like next you're gonna be president and she had like no idea like forty thousand other vice presidents that's what i used to think too i i heard vp i was like oh you're next to the line yeah yeah i was like but that's a pretty liberal job title right you're thinking those things out yeah they they hand those out a lot to make you feel like you're you're doing it give people a sense you were making like like two hundred grand a year or something like that is that like roughly yeah two hundred two fifty so you know it it was good living but i was wanna do my own thing left gonna do this consulting financial crisis hits big banks our main customer they basically are worried about staying solvent so they just ghost us and i'm paying two guys from my old team out of pocket and i'm just married so you know we're watching savings go down every week every two weeks and we worked the credit card so we said what could we do in that space and we started calling ex colleagues who worked at like capital one and citi in other places and basically started doing this call it like a sentiment survey you know what do you think about deli and loss rates it's like the the metrics that matter in that space and we'd give it back to them for free and they just liked it because they were like oh am i super optimistic and at all my peers are super pessimistic like i need to recalibrate why did you originally think that that was a good idea like usually i have to see something to even know oh that's a business oh cool like did you see something that existed and you were like we could do that for credit card data no no so i mean in the beginning we just stumbled into tons of things like i was just like i can't keep paying these people out of my pocket so it was like we were doing consulting for a school like we just kept our feet moving and anybody who would throw money at us like we were like yeah we'll do that for you like it didn't matter this was just an area this guy dominic who's my you know my teammate he's like a sa on this stuff so we kinda were like hey maybe we could do this and we like yeah it was just a guess okay so we started doing gl calls you know the expert network calls that was like making a little bit of money definitely not enough to cover costs and then we met this guy at this prime broker and these are the guys who like settle trades for hedge funds and you know he was like hey i think we could sell this because the mortgage crisis was starting to like kinda get you know figured out he's like i think credit cards is what people are gonna freak out about next and nick's like the thing that the beauty of what he saw was like wasn't worried about what his customers cared about today he's like this is what they're gonna care about in the future and so we're like yeah cool like we can't sell it maybe you can we i spam every hedge fund guy who went to wharton that i could find like nobody cared about what we had but what did you have was it literally just like you sent a survey to twenty people yeah it was a pdf that basically showed the trend of how people in the industry thought things were going in certain key metrics but how many people in that industry oh like twenty five and so you're like oh we have vice presidents from am from visa from mastercard whatever and the thing that they wanted was or the import data was basically like our deli are default gonna go up because that's gonna spell that's gonna cause like a bunch of ripple effects and that had just happened with mortgages where if mortgages fail which nobody thought they would fail but when they failed it caused all these ripple effects and banks went under and all the stuff so so as an investor you needed that is that correct so there's that macro view and some of it is like hey i hold a billion dollars of american express stock right and i need to put some number into a model that says how they're gonna do the next quarter it's like a channel check right like you know like people go to apple manufacturers and try to figure out how many you know hard drives or whatever they're shipping out to figure out how many macbooks are gonna be created this is kinda like the the digital equivalent of that so they're trying to like front run the the the quarterly earnings report that's gonna come out later right you're basically trying to get inputs to guess yeah where they're gonna be so that if it's bad news or if it's good news you can adjust accordingly before the rest of the market knows the yeah they're and they're living in like an information vacuum and so this isn't like the number but it's a little bit of in in like leading indicator sentiment that they can use sam he said prime broker do you what a prime brokers i i don't i have no idea sounds sounds pretty sick to be honest yeah it's a pro i'm like prime time like this is awesome yeah so my i still this is my late person understanding so there's people who settle trades for hedge funds so hedge funds buy and sell stock and there's somebody who execute that trade and what they would do is they'd bundle research as part of the trade so they'd be like hey if you trade with us i'll give you all these other research services and so they would call these soft dollars and i think these have been sort of banned and outlawed or changed since but we got at that time they were all this was all kosher and why they're they're they're bam because you're you're influencing people to do stuff yeah i think it was like you know they were the stuff getting bundled was maybe a little dicey and they just said listen just charge him for the trading as if it was trading and don't do all this other got it you know kinda sugar that like you know it sounds like was going on it's like the prime brokers it gets soft dollars it's like oh man these out whose team i wanna be on yeah why is it called to soft dollar what what does that mean i think it's because it's like you're not being charged directly for it like it's bundled in right but you're being charged for the trading gotcha right so so we go to nick and and nick we're like hey twenty five hundred dollars you know a quarter or a month would be fantastic and nick's like no no no i'm not like i'm not interested in that we're gonna price this at twelve thousand dollars fifty thousand dollars and a hundred thousand dollars and we're like hey you know bro it's a pdf and he's like no no the way we're gonna do this is twelve thousand dollars just gets you the pdf fifty thousand dollars gets you the pdf and a call and a hundred thousand dollars gets you the pdf a call and anytime we hear something juicy we pick up the phone for you and only ten of only ten people can hit at that one right so like we get off the like only fans for hedge funds it's like for a hundred gram you get feet and the pee yeah exactly so so yeah so nobody bought the foot package right maybe but he was a great price anchor right and so what ended up happening was a bunch of people bought the fifty k package and the and the twelve k package and you know it was like a build once sell multiple times so that was going really well you know we knew from the get go mortgages had a a lifespan of like the crisis had a lifespan and we knew credit cards would have that too but it helped us put away enough money and got you know me paying the team out of that business versus out savings and then that's what funded cb insights and that was but here's the craziest part to me twenty people is not a lot of people to survey how long did the survey take to complete i mean we would do this survey via the phone right and so like that would take you know i don't know hour and a half two hours per person right because you like wanna get commentary right it's not just you think this is a one two three four five right it was like trying to get you know context around it but yeah i it's not a large sample size i think the big thing here is when you're dealing in big big dollars some information is better than no information right that's right that's insane to me because basically like this so so the hard part is finding a a a problem that needs to be solved where like more information or or a survey could could solve it but basically i could go on gl g i can go on intro dot c i can go on all these websites i could pay someone one thousand or two thousand dollars for an hour or two hours of their time ask some tons of questions aggregate all of that into a thing and then resell it as a research report for a survey and that's crazy to me those companies do that right i think that challenge that you'd have if you wanted to rebuild what we were building was we knew all the people at the card companies right and they trusted us to give us like to to have this conversation right if you just show up sam and you're like hey chief risk officer at capital one let's sit down and talk about what you're seeing they'll be like i can't i'm not gonna i don't know what you're doing with that right so we were able to kinda they knew us so they knew we weren't gonna like do some inc thing with it right it was that we're gonna use this we're gonna package it up into survey it's gonna be an so it's never gonna be a capital one sees weakness or cities like flying on deli right it was always like aggregated and an so yeah like this these are great businesses like they're you know data cooperative or pool data it just trust is like the big thing that you need in order to get people in the industry to open up to you how much does you guys basically think off the d etfs during that one year run we've probably made like seven hundred thousand dollars and what was your reaction at the time i was like i don't have to go back to work at a big company like that was it like it was just relief right and yeah you know it felt in the on prong reflection like we just stepped in shit like we just got super lucky that we met this guy nick that he had the foresight to think about pricing this way so but yeah i i was just thankful to be honest because i was like to go back twenty ten two thousand nine after leaving am like would have been going back sort of tail between my legs saying i couldn't hack it as an entrepreneur like the ego hit there would have been that would that would've been that would have been the worst part that would've been like devastating i think for me so so yeah that was that was just happy jason f said something amazing when he when we talked to him a few months ago he said it's better to be extra weird early on because as a company grows your people that start acting more corporate and so the more weird and unique you start as hopefully it's it's inevitably gonna get watered down hopefully the watered down version is still unique and weird i didn't realize that cb insights stands for chu brain and your original logo basically looks like me as an eight year old holding a brain and the name of the company is called chu brain that is awesome yeah i like the name it didn't work out and yeah we tried to sell chu brain like the service to to goldman and they were like we can't use a service called chu brain and so and you know they they were it wasn't just them being like white toy they're like listen at the bottom of every slide we put source for our data and we can't put source chu brain at the bottom because it kills our credibility and so that night you know john and i kinda went to a bar and we're like we gotta change a name and that's when we became cb insights so that was the that's the genesis story of our name sean had sean and i have an ls llc that hubspot pays us pay this to and i'm pretty sure he wanted to name the llc something like ridiculous do you do you do i don't remember what it was sean but i remember thinking you have like i can't put this on an invoice it's like we're kind hood rad media let's put walk it was hood rat media yes you wanna be call it hood rat media and i was like sean like no one was gonna see hood rat media other than the accountant in the bill and that's like the one person who we don't want to like think this as a scam right the i don't know if this is an pocket story there was some guy selling something online it was like a crappy product and everybody asked for a refund and then he'd send them a check but the check would be from a company called like i like little boys inc and so like nobody would actually cash the refund check because mh they were like i'm not gonna go to the bank with like that that's pretty great banks or like my company on the check so you said after the last episode you said that people reached out to you we're gonna get to like a bunch of different ideas you but you said after the last episode people reached out to you saying like i wanna do this data stuff and you said they're running a hundred miles an hour in the wrong action and you wanted to correct people for who who are interested in this what we're what we gonna say to them those people yeah i think the big thing is folks kinda thought oh i have data it has intrinsic value and that's the problem like data itself is not valuable it's what you can do with data that makes it valuable so the customer doesn't care that you have data they don't care how hard it was for you to get they don't care its proprietary they care you know about what edge is it gonna give them right and so like you have to think about the edge and the outcome you're gonna drive for the customer up front so i i think of it as like three things like i call it like ec so you got your the edge you have to define what that's gonna be if the c is sort of can you collect it and then the o is just the opportunity right and so people would reach out like hey i have data on you know how much media companies spend on their writers right and it was like okay you have it right like who's gonna use it to like i'm gonna talk to like heads of editorial teams and it's like listen media companies one is a target or just a terrible place to sell like these are dying companies and you're trying to sell them stuff so bad thing there now you're trying to sell to a head of editorial who i'm painting with a broad brush probably isn't the most like data curious data aware type of person so it was i think that's like a lot of it is like figure out what edge it's gonna drive and then you know obviously hopefully you can collect it and then how big is the opportunity right financial services ai companies now are big buyers of data tech and then like the sales and marketing ad tech world like those are your big three verticals that you wanna think about generally for you know there are big data businesses in other verticals but if you're starting at level zero and you're building a b to data company think about the vertical and think about what edge you're gonna drive right like nice to have benchmarking data is like a quick way to you know build you could like maybe become like a thousand air off of like that type of company right like you're not going to build like a multi million dollar business selling benchmarking data to unless it's benchmarks that like help you make big decisions you know salary benchmarks awesome right you know how much i pay how much what are my deli versus other big card companies amazing but if it's you know benchmarks on how you much you pay for slack versus other people like nobody cares about that and so what was your checklist do you said so basically who's the buyer like do they have do they have money and do they have do they care about this to what edge does the data give them right that was like number two that's most important thing is there a third and fourth criteria it's really i mean if i'm trying if i boil it down it's the edge it's collection feasibility like how are you gonna actually collect this information and then three is opportunity and on collection the big one is folks sometimes have a hack they're like oh i gotta in with this person and they can give me this exhaust data from their company the problem with companies built like that is like when you lose access to the hack the whole company's dead right it's kinda like supply chain risk in our world like if if we bought all of our data from one provider and they decide to change the rules or go under like you're you're dead in the water so yeah so how you collect the data as the other one so yeah edge collection and opportunity are the three that i would look at and really sc a lot upfront can you explain how how those worked like just to finish the story of chu brain to cb inside successful company what did cb insights do on those three criteria so you know who was the buyer what was the edge you gave them and that what was the collection yeah so the the buyer and it's changed over time initially it was investors and investment banks so i think of like vc investment banks you know they are in the business of sourcing like that's one of their key responsibilities they make their money off of finding and sourcing the right deals and what we saw was there wasn't a really structured way for folks to do that so that was the edge we wanted to deliver is we're gonna give you access to more companies we're gonna get them to you quicker and we're gonna have deeper richer profiles on them so that's the this sort of sourcing edge over time it's it's morph you know the opportunity was in that group to start and i think that's another big thing is like start really narrow you know if i made a mistake along the ways we got too broad so opportunity was in that group the edge was you know a sourcing edge and then collection was in the beginning it was just ground and pound like it was we've had fifty thousand articles about funding and m and a events and me and the guys just went through manually and put in columns in a spreadsheet here's the investors here's the amount here's the valuation whatever we could find then we got lucky and hired some amazing engineers and they basically reverse engineered that process and automated it right and then over time now we do interviews and we do surveys so like there's seven ways to collect that at least the way i think about it now we probably do five out of those seven in the beginning it was just brute force like that's the way and i think like you know henry shu at zoom info like they used to call into company switch boards or whatever and they'd be like hey what's bob's extension and like that's how zoom info would get you know bob at it you know number at extension so a lot of really good data businesses have been built doing really like data jan work in the beginning and then over time they get more sophisticated and all that fits stuff and you've done this like in a really cash efficient way i know that you've raised a series a but i think you've said like you're not even sure entirely if you needed to raise that money do you still own a large percentage of the company yeah yeah yeah that you know so we raised late we boot bootstrap for six years yeah i mean we like we're a very pain tolerant company i would say so we we raised after six years so yeah the team and i own like a like you know a solid chunk of the company so there was an article that came out last year about eight months ago don't have to say if this is true or not i'm just reading the headline of the article and it said it's says cb insights to weigh eight hundred million dollar sale so if that word true which you don't i don't want you to even say if it is or is not true that would mean that you could walk away with potentially hundreds of millions of dollars would you consider that to be a successful outcome given how like humbly the company started or are you trying to go even bigger i mean to say that's not a successful outcome would sound insane so yes that would be a successful outcome i do think there's a massive opportunity in front of the business and you know we hired a a ceo earlier this year and he's a killer hey man and so i think like i think this business especially with generative ai has like a lot of legs to grow but yeah i mean selling for eight hundred million back you know then would have been a fantastic outcome for everybody involved but yeah i think we can get even bigger what are some of the data businesses that you think have so you said a lot of people reached out saying hey i got access to this data and you're like i i don't think you kinda have it quite right are there businesses that you've seen or you you think somebody should go build a data business in i haven't thought a ton about like new data businesses right i think the areas that are really interesting or ones to look at that are doing really well right so was one company i saw recently that was pretty awesome it's called razor edge right and so what they do is i thought their method of doing it was cool so they started they're like a database of of donors right if you're a charity you need to raise from these high net worth folks and what they did was they started off with this database of donors and so you know people like charities and foundations and universities might buy it and what they then grew into as a crm to help you basically manage your outbound and your entire relationship with them so they kinda did i imagine sort of this ground and pound method to capture this data in the beginning now what folks do is if sam running a charity and he uploads his list of donors they'll clean it and organize it and then everybody sort of gets the benefit of that clean data right and so like it's become a like a a pooled data data cooperative and then they've added workflow on top of it so i think that that's in in an really impressive formula going from data to data coop to workflow tool right i think like that's kind of the future right because you wanna get into people's workflow so that's one company i really like that have just kinda come across recently you know the other area that i think is interesting i don't think anybody's doing this right so i think there's a the potential for like a high end glass door right so glass door sort of generates like this you know disinfected like group of people like to bitch online right but like if you're in if you're a hedge fund and do you wanna know like what's going on at the company a lot of that is a function of like how well is the ceo leading the organization and there's really no good way of understanding that so i think and again i haven't validated it is i wonder if you could go out and interview you know maybe you have to pay them a thousand dollars two thousand dollars and say listen i wanna interview execs on the team and x execs and i wanna just you know i'm gonna do is deep interview on like what do people view as the you know the pros cons the strategic vision of the ceo and basically like get kind of a inside view of the quality of and the followers partnership of a ceo which you know maybe an indicator of you know the quality of that business and how it's going to do in the future so i think like that's a that's an interesting idea and you can take these transcripts and use like generative ai to extract structured data from it so that's like one that i about not gonna work on it but i think it could be interesting you know and again it like it hits a a high value segment right it's like the old like why drop the bank because that's where the money is right like you know hedge funds are like hedge funds are great you know a great kind dude that course of that that's pretty interesting to use the transcripts too or also the audio recordings have you ever had like an argument with your wife or something like that where like imagine these peep executives describing the ceo whether you're like hey it was a ceo any good and they'd be like he's good versus he's good do you know what i mean like i like we're gonna look at like we're gonna look at the inflection of your voice yeah i mean would love to go yeah you know what i mean yeah i mean you can do sentiment on it you can you know look at all sorts of things that i think could be interesting and again like it's not gonna tell you to buy or sell that stock but it's another input right and right and then there's these activist shareholders you're right and if you see like hey listen over time you know ex ceo like the team is losing their faith in that person like now this becomes a reason for that activist to come and say hey you know joe who's running x like the he's lost the team and stock performance sucks and they're not doing these things right so it becomes an input and these are people who the buyers here like they're making hundreds of million dollar billion dollar decisions so i think that's another you know interesting vector i don't you know there's probably all sorts of insider or trading sort of complications that you gotta deal with on that one so don't run that when you have check out this razor interesting because i you said that i got fascinated an idea how much money razors edge makes i do not know that so you like this company looks interesting so they're publicly listed their twenty twenty four company guidance over a billion dollars in revenue wow thirty three percent eb about two hundred fifty million dollars of free free cash flow here you go you're ready hear first very impressive sean when you had the milk road because i know we thought about this at the hustle but it i wasn't mature enough to see the opportunity when you had the milk road and even now as you have like kind of a mini media empire have you thought about data monetizing it via data versus advertising i've thought about it but they know it's like asking you know my daughter have you thought about algebra she's like what i think maybe yeah sure it's like i even know what i would have been thinking about me i for example with milk road we did what you're talking about we would go and we would interview wales so we would go to like twenty five of the biggest crypto whales these are guys who are placing tens of millions or a hundred million dollar bets on n t's and coins and now remember with crypto if you're a whale air whales have multiple characteristics first it's a small market second these guys have a big check so big check small market equals they can actually move the market and third they're very influential meaning when they do something everybody else follows in because they have a reputation they became a well because they picked something early on well so everybody thinks this person's is the oracle and we interview them and we talked about how what's your bullish ness what's basically sentiment on the market we asked what projects they're most hit most bullish on so which what their picks are and we had all this info and then instead of selling it to maybe crypto funds or hedge funds or anybody like that we were like this will be a gray lead magnet for free newsletter subscribers let's give it all the way for free as a pdf in order to get subscribers and we did as like a it was a bonus if you referred people for example and that thing was so valuable actually that we didn't even really we didn't really understand the value that we had said it's like somebody who now airbnb b's it makes a hundred k a year off their kids bedroom that's unused and at the time it just seemed like an empty room so we just thought we didn't understand the value of that unused asset at that time i mean i think once you started out business like you are now on a treadmill right like you have to somebody's buying a subscription right so what sean did but smart in the sense of like if it wasn't working he didn't have to keep doing it right but once you sell it to an institution now they're gonna expect it quarterly or monthly and now you sort of are on this you know now you gotta keep doing it right and so so you know it's like you wanna be thoughtful before you jump in that there's mark thought of i'll shoot them at you these are half baked ideas but too that i thought of in the past you tell me if you think they'd be good or bad ideas they're both very similar the first one is head hunting talent so executive talent so all across the tech industry talent is at a premium right so somebody who's let's call it like vp vps sv and up so all the way up to the c suite those people will make seven figures so so millions of dollars if not tens of millions of dollars as their package when they go join a tech company and the way that the whole industry works is you have a four year vest cycle typically and knowing when somebody is ready to look for a new job is extremely valuable knowing where where they're at in their best cycle that they might be willing to hop and switch i think that's you know valuable information that could be used in the recruiting business which is typically just a services business not a a very data driven business and so one idea was to understand the vest cycles of the top one percent of silicon silicon valley talent in order to maybe create a a recruiting either a a recruiting data business or a recruiting service business on top of that data that was the first idea quick reaction to that might be a bad idea i never did yeah i probably i think the recruiting service business is a better idea than the data business i think with data when you have to try to get somebody to do a new behavior that's really hard right and so recruiters who are like used to you know it's really networking and it's very like hey i'll take you to lunch and like that kind of business and then being like hey now we have data right and again there are some ones that are like really data driven but i'd say generally it's probably not their mo and so you know when you're like hey do this thing because it'll make you more powerful that you've never done before that tends to be like a tough held climb but building a services business with this as your edge i think is an interesting could be an interesting idea let me tell you another one that's not exactly data but i'll lump it in here so i saw this business called home options i love the idea of this business so what this guy was doing was he was going to homeowners and he'd say who are not selling their home he's like hey i'll give you a thousand dollars cash today for the right to sell your home whenever you're ready and they'd be like what you mean he's like i'll give you a thousand bucks today you wanna make a new patio you wanna you want to buy a new couch here's thousand bucks a today just to say when it comes time to sell my house i'll use you or one of your partners as my agent and then they would take those options and they would bundle them up and they would go to a broker in the area and they would say hey i have five hundred home options like options to sell people's homes would you guys like to buy these for three thousand dollars or two thousand dollars whatever it was and then i'm making up the numbers here just to to kind of not put this guy's whole biz model on blast but he would then sell it on an up charge to them and they would say great we'll happily take that because when these come to fruition each one of these options when they sell their home is worth ten thousand dollars or twenty thousand dollars whatever it is right so there was like a business model built in and i thought this was genius i was like wow this guy's taking all of this like future leads giving them a no brainer deal today and then immediately flipping it to somebody who's in the business of having those leads now the obviously the timeline is the hard part right when is somebody get think gonna sell the house twenty years from now thirty years from now and i'm sure there's some smart way to like filter for people that might be maybe younger maybe more mobile more willing to move in a sooner timeline i thought there was a similar business somebody could do in the tech world again just back to the world i know which is an not you do cb insights you're leaving you're gonna do a new company let's say as an investor those types of people are very very valuable and i would actually pay found i know vcs would pay founders like let's say sam right they're like sam did the hustle you're great founder before you do hampton if i could just pay for the option the right to invest in your next company and you're get a bunch of cash today that might be runway for you to figure things out might be just go on vacation whatever you wanna do with that cash and you're just saying cool i'll give you guys first look first right over refusal on my next company yeah i like that one i think you know vcs have these e entrepreneurs per residence the which kind of are like that right it's like you know hey i'm gonna pay you and you can figure out your next idea i think the question i'd have is if somebody just had a successful exit is the amount you could give them gonna actually be enough of an incentive but if you can figure that out right i there was a firm that did it wasn't this but they would basically send term sheets to startups they wanted to invest it right they'd just be like hey here's a term sheet here's evaluation and like once you see that it sort of like intercept you like you're like oh i think we're worth that and you might not be worth that but it would start the conversation so i wonder if you could come up with the right number you just send a big mail merge to like all the founders who or meet the meet you know fit the bill and then just see if that generates conversations for you right and in worst case they at least are like they have a they have they like you if you're not like a you know a d bag in the meeting they like you and then when it is time they at least have a good impression of you like yeah it's an interesting deal flow idea now that you're no longer full on full duty at cdn sites i know that you're kinda tinkering around with some other things and you're like in an interesting phase right now where instead of being theoretical on m mfa about which ideas you think are cool you're actually actually you know you're being practical you're like i i actually may pursue one of these things what do you think about doing yeah so yeah i don't think it's a may like i'm am going to do this so what i'm trying what we're working on is building a school of so it's a in person six to twelfth grade school you know you know the g academy right like for sports right like the basic idea is like people go pro and sports at a high school like you should be able to go pro and business i am g if i remember correctly it's like a school built mostly for athletes that are potentially gonna go pro based in florida and it was owned by endeavor which owns u c and tk k and whatever pb whatever else in endeavor owns a large publicly traded company and they recently sold it for i think one and a half billion dollars yeah and it's it's just a high school pretty much right is it a school or is it just a training facility you know it's it's a full school so it's a boarding school in florida it started off as the voluntary tennis academy and then it sort of morph into this and they do all sports you know tennis track football basketball and and they do summer camps like they're big biz their other big business is summer camps right or camps let's call them and dude if they're spending that much money to go to that high school for track field in hopes of getting an roi getting a return under best fit that's like that's not that's like going into a quarter million dollar of debt for art history degree you know what i mean and like that ain't there the thing that they've done really well is you know they recruit really elite athletes and you know those those really elite ones might get a scholarship or you know there's like let's say there's five basketball teams at i g the top team will actually get sponsorship from nike and stuff that'll be used to defer or free you know tuition costs so that really elite athletes maybe get a free ride or close to free ride you know then everybody else who's probably quite good but also might have a parent or parents who think like you know little bobby and little sally are gonna go pro who just have like visions of their kid going pro and something we'll spend a lot of money you know i think tuition is like you know forty to seventy thousand dollars and then the camps are a great feeder for the school but they're also like you know parents want their kids to achieve a lot and they wanna again you know they wanna give them a lot of opportunity and so the camps are you know i i'm paint with a broad brush like you know dad who played baseball who always wanted to go pro can't go pro could could ever make it you know once this son you know you think has a shot and they're like hey i g is the best place to go and it is and then they you know and then they pay a lot of money from this camp so it's a pretty brilliant model they just got acquired by a company that's basically acquiring i think it's european company that's acquiring private schools so private schools are just a giant business and so they're acquiring private schools around the world they're kinda doing a roll up of those but yeah it's a you know i g's you know great brand you know has had really legit athletes come out of it i love the idea of creating a school i love the idea of creating it as a as there's many variations this idea but creating as a boarding school for around entrepreneurship or a different model of teaching so can you just like here's what i want you to do can you give me the two minute imp rant the rant on what needs to change and what you're gonna do what's broken and what you're gonna do about it i want you fire it up for this one alright alright so schools today are about compliance and conformity right that's what they do and if you go back and look at how schools started it was rockefeller in sort of these titans of industry basically trying to create compliant factory workers right and so when you go to it it's hey show up at school on this time sit in your seat we're gonna tell you some task to do when the bell rings get up like a robot and go to the next class and then at the end of the day like you know we're gonna dismiss you with another bill right and so what they've done is create like people who are really good at reading a map you know and it's like a scavenger hunt hey i need some community service on my thing let me go do that i'll start some bullshit nonprofit to look good for college applications i'll play three years of a sport and so this checklist that you have to do you know to to navigate the map and i think what we need is a school for kids who are actually are gonna build the map like for explorers and developers and so that's like with a school of is about which is you know follow your curiosity and build stuff and like learn how to think versus what to think right i think entrepreneurs is a lot like engineering you know even if you decide not to become an entrepreneur like you learn a way of thinking that's gonna serve you well wherever you go but yeah the idea is like you'll go pro in business you won't take eight ap classes there'll be no sat act prep it's going to be about you know learning and building and it's really like experiential right so we're working on like having retail on campus so if you wanna learn geometry you're gonna lay out the floor plan of your retail store and that's how you're gonna learn geometry it's not gonna be you know hey let's learn the p in you're a in class and then your kids like when the hell am i ever gonna use this so so yeah that's what we're doing are you gonna raise money for this thing so we've got you know a few folks already so we've got a decent amount of capital committed this is not like my next startup up in the sense of like you know cb insights is gonna check my significance box or success box this is like my significance box right and so i might start two three other companies like i'm trying to we're trying to think of a engine to like build two hundred thousand companies so this is like my next thing till like you know when i die at my desk like this is the thing that i'm gonna be working on so it's not a it's not like a vc back private school to exit it's yeah and like i think the big thing is like recruiting formidable kids and this is one of the biggest challenges i g as all these stats get know who's the kid who jumps the highest and scores the most points we don't have that so it's like but the kid who has a five thousand subscribers on youtube is probably the kid who should be at this school not the kid who who's like really good at at standardized test right that kidd just sold stuff on roblox or built the lawn mowing business so yeah but this that's that's the vision where's your campus gonna be don't know i think it's you know my partner on this is in la so it's you know the coast would be easy family wise interestingly red states are like much more open to education innovation and so like that's a conundrum we gotta figure out so we're we we had a lot of work to do before we figure that out if i was betting money it's probably gonna be on one of the coast just because it makes logistics of life easier but and what would that curriculum look like to teach a sixth grader to prepare for this stuff but i think it's it's not subject based right it's like competency based right so it's you know critical thinking or it's public speaking or you know having a conversations and so a lot of it is like it's project based and experiential right so you know what i mentioned earlier is like we're trying to figure out how to have retail on with the pool and so the kids are operating and building a company and so in that you know in order to build the company you have to do algebra to build your model right you have to lay out the floor plan of the shelves in the in the retail store and that requires geometry right so i think like you know have a have a daughter who's you know fourteen and like she'll constantly come home and ask like hey what am i ever gonna use this right like that's a common question and so we're we're trying to find ways of integrating it organically into what you're doing so that you never feel like i'm learning something that makes no sense and so that's you know what we're working on now we're talking to some teachers who can help us sort of build out the lesson plans here and and then you know kinda get going from there and the crazy thing about this business or the hardest part in my opinion it's like once harvard becomes harvard it's easy to maintain so like when you think about like all this protest going on people are like oh harvard is going to shit these college is are going to shit in my opinion i hear that and i'm like no it's not it's what's stood so much crap like once a brand is a brand it's really hard to ruin but it's hard to convince your first group of appearance to actually become a customer of yours how are you gonna solve that yeah so i actually don't think that's as hard so i posted this on twitter i got a bunch of inbound from folks who like really like the idea and i'd say it came from two camps it came from like rich tech people and then it came from i'd say generally people in the middle of the country who are like i have a son or daughter who's i think is really smart but who was struggling in the sort of cram exam race model of schools like they're not good at like memorizing fifty state capitals but they're like really good at you know building a audience on youtube or whatever right and they're like i think my kid has more potential than is being realized and i actually think there's a bunch of folks like that so i agree with you sam if i said hey i'm trying to recruit we're trying to recruit manhattan like upper east side parents right who like you know want like that bold model but i think there's a bunch of folks and if you look at the homeschooling statistics and growth like there's a lot of people who are unhappy with how schooling is happening in this country and they're just up out and so i think there's a big segment of people who feel like you know i've got a kid with a lot of potential who's just not with that potential being squashed and so yeah i've had like a lot of good conversations with folks that you know i think the market for this is is giant actually and if we could recruit a hundred formidable kids from each state right like that's five thousand kids you know i think that's very very feasible you have a few ideas on this list i wanna go through can you tell us about these so we'll start with the first one slime museums yeah so i don't know if your kids sean your kids might be old enough like slime is like crack in for kids right so there's this place in new york city called the s institute and my kids wanted to go there is we went on a weekend and we get in there and you know the thing i do when i go to a place when i see a packed i start talking to like the staff and i was like hey how many people come through this place and the woman was like well pre covid it was twelve hundred but right now we're doing like five to six hundred a day and i was like per day we spent forty dollars a ticket and then we spent another thirty for like an so where like they dump slime on your head and they video record it and stuff right so seventy bucks four of us to two hundred eighty dollars you know when you started doing the math on this and then you know and then at the end they sell you slime and so it's like a let's say one out of five people actually buy it right when i so i i came home i immediately went to google sheets i was like i gotta put a model like a model together and i was like okay this one place in new york city probably does like six to eight million dollars of revenue and the beauty of it was that because it's slime like there were like ten people who worked in this pretty big facility because it was really like interactive but you didn't need people to like run the exhibits it was just like the kids would just be like oh this slime smells like this and this slime is like greasy or whatever and so it's was really low overhead so like money printing machine i think i just read that they did thirty million now they have la atlanta a couple other places so i think last year they did thirty million at these slime museums and i think like in general these like kids experiential type of museums if you wanna call it that you know museum of illusions by museum like they all kill it and they've all like got this template where there's very it's very not labor intensive and i think like that's part of the genius so i loved this business and these two women are just killing it which is amazing so that was things a big opportunity there and other experiential stuff i i just wish most of them were good like i we get a bunch of them and like some of them are just like you you're just like g like money grabs and you're like oh man i spent like two hundred fifty dollars for you know this but some of them are like this one were quite excellent so that was one to me these are like the new build to bear workshops it's out of the house it's a kid's activity kid's gonna be super excited about it it could be birthday party it could just be a weekend it could be whatever and as the parent you know you buy the forty dollar ticket but it's never the end they're like the up upsell are too strong in the moment right because you need the video you want the kid wants the slime on the way out it's basically like a a gift shop on the way out and obviously these things have like a craze period where it becomes the thing and it gets written up in all the magazines in new yorker and you see it all all the influencers go and then you know there is some normal on the other side of it but it's interesting to see how people have reinvented the the chuck e cheeses of the world to be optimized around social media meaning how do you do things that are gonna be photo worthy that are gonna be shared inherently by people who are going through the experience and also you need to get kids out of the house off their screens doing things it's yeah as a parent that you there's a there's a huge need for that and there's like kind of like a a bunch bigger hack because even if you do the slime museum once twice a year there's a lot of other weekends that that you could do something so there can actually be many of these in this this model yeah for sure it's yeah and it's pretty genius so that that was that's one area i'm thinking about so the other one i think that's interesting so i ran across this company called zillow and it's like a giant like amazon go store and so what they do is they go to property managers that have at least two hundred peep two hundred like housing units in an area multi family and they'll say listen we're gonna set up this like basically compact convenience store on your in your community and it's like stocked with all the good stuff right and so like you i i live in a city but you know i go visit my mom you know if if we need to get milk it's like i gotta get in the car i gotta drive eight minutes and i basically like spent a half hour of my life to buy something that's like seven dollars so what these guys do is they put this convenience store it's like amazon goes style so it's you know one person goes in they sort of they badge in only one person can be in the store they're on a clock so they gotta get out in a certain amount of time and they just go and buy stuff and then it's just sort of like auto debits their account or whatever and so you know they go to property developer the property manager say listen i'm gonna put up we'll put up the hundred thousand dollars to build this out and we'll restock it and we'll cut you in as a property manager on on some of the revenue you know once we sort of recoup our investment the and so i thought like this is an amenity now that the property manager can offer to their to their tenants it's a revenue stream on top of it and so i thought for for d like i thought this was a really good distribution hack i guess for them and so i really like this idea and then you know obviously oh we had this idea on the podcast like several years ago if you remember this is one of the drunk ideas i believe in the i think it was in the drunk idea episode might have been one of the other ones i was like why isn't there a neighborhood shop that's basically run you know by the hoa in a way or you know by the by the members of the community that and then all you do is wholesale in the the the products if you basically make take the markup of the of the rest and so you have a grocery store that's in the neighborhood basically that's kind of what this is so do they have the tech like amazon go where it auto figures out what you do on the shelf yeah so there's no staffing because that's the big thing here right because with the property manager doesn't want is hey the store is not open because you know person x didn't show up so this is twenty four by seven and you you know it's got the cameras and whatnot and you know again like reportedly and yeah it'll just say you know hey your total bill is x and sort of those convenient store prices which tend to be you know kind of high margin and yeah you'll get billed you know either to some credit card or maybe on your you know your hoa or something and you know the thing they talk about is over time they'll like learn to personalize like what's in the store right so if like you know this community really likes like you know certain type of cheetos like that's what they're gonna see more of so this company looks like it's like brand new and tiny i can't find anything i'm there's no founder there's no ceo i can't find anything it's really yeah so i i was just talking to a friend of mine who's in real estate and property management and so like he was telling me about this and he's like yeah they've got a bunch of facilities and you know i think they're targeting like the sun belt right like because if you're in new york city you can walk to these things right but if you're in most areas of the sun belt the carolina texas etcetera like you just can't do that and so they're trying to solve that problem yes so i think their app their app has six reviews so you have to have their app to get into the store and only has six reviews so i i assume this is either brand new or just not popular yet it's early days i think they have a few facilities up and running right but but yeah i just thought like the way they're going to market you know essentially like they're sort of b to b to c right they're going to the property managers who then are blessing this and then they're gonna you know the property managers because they have a vested interest in making money on this are gonna start promoting it as well to their community it's like a it's smart did you do like the napkin and math on like what you think this could be i didn't do that you know what i was trying to figure out was and my friend didn't know yet because they're in the negotiation phase i was like you know how much do they need to make back before you as a property manager start making money and what's the revenue cut there but i mean this is like a scale play right like can they be the new dollar store in every multi family kinda community out there and yeah i think like that's the angle and then you i don't know if there's in if are there certain large multi family property developers and managers they can go to and get all a sudden you know hey we're now all of a sudden in a hundred you know developments so but i yeah i don't know i i i suspect it's a big opportunity though alright you wanna do one more of these yeah do more two more you just sean just like dance again again put i put another coin in i wanna go again go put another coin then yeah so so my daughter's in the fantasy football and if you watch espn now i think it's like become un watch because it's all about gambling right it's like draft here's the line on this and you know blah and i'm like i don't really want her seeing all this and she'll ask me and you know i'm like i don't think this is a good thing so i started digging into the uk actually kinda did opened up online gaming a bunch of years earlier and if you look at the research there to nobody surprised it has not led to good things right like you know people are addicted and going into bankruptcy and all sorts of good things or pad things and so the us just whatever we do things we do them at times a hundred right and so the us is sort of doing this and so we're seeing this experiment play out that is going to create i think a lot of challenges and so i think the opportunity here is there used to be a business called i think american addiction centers and they were basically for like drug and you know alcohol dependence i think there's a again another offline play in online addiction centers right so parents want their kids off the phone and i'm addicted to porn i'm addicted to draft kings i'm addicted to you know trading naked calls on robinhood like whatever it might be and so you go there and i think the interesting thing here is there's all this commercial real estate that's available you know i wonder if you can get that really on the cheap and this is a group that's a little bit more you know like i i think if you went to a commercial real estate provider and said listen i'm gonna bring in people who are addicted to hard drugs they're be like no no i don't want that right but this is a group like hey i'm gonna bring in a bunch of nerds who can't get off their phone and we're gonna treat them like the the risk to a property owner is a lot less from this group so i think you've got an opportunity to get real estate on the cheap and hopefully do some good in the world i think the challenge with these american addiction center and these other ones was like in a for profit business you always wanna lower the cost and so what ended up happening was like you know people weren't getting good outcomes and service was really bad and know i think there were some really horrible things that happened so i think this is a big like inflection which is gonna happen like we've just i mean i think dave buster now allows gambling on like top shot like you know sean and i are playing against each other like i can literally bet sean like hey i'm gonna get ten and you're gonna get last is pretty ridiculous i was reading about what what's the big one draft kings or whatever they have account managers so if you become i i read about this one woman who is making like hundred and fifty grand a year so whatever that puts her at an terms class but not like crazy wealthy and she's and she lost all of her money and she was five hundred thousand dollars in debt and she had an account manager that was like hey kim we just opened up this new game i know that you're big fan of this type of game you might be able to win all your money back if you try this new one out because it has higher stakes and they had they added an account manager to like get it to start gambling more and it does freak you out and think in fifteen years when the kids who are growing up it does what are they gonna be like and there's actually probably a an interesting case study sean and i both lived in australia and i don't know if you remember this sean or if you were of drinking age when you went there but in all of the bars had they have two things they have a room that has two things in it it's like the main bar and then a different room and the room has poke machines which is basically a slot machine but then it also has tons of tvs with every horse cricket match like a horse racing cricket match i i forget what else they have and you were just sitting there right there gambling you can gamble and get drunk and have a meal and it is like full all the time i wonder what's going what what what they've done to solve that similar problem that we are also going to face they're like well that's for when you're done go there and you'll feel better it's like that's the it's like never restaurants that are like kfc taco bell combined in one it was like the seven deadly sins all under one roof yeah new york city had something like it was called ot off track vetting right and it was like horse races but there was no they didn't they didn't like do the the throat they didn't throw the alcohol grenade in there as well like it was you know new york has a standards right like we're not gonna allow that so so yeah it was just just gambling but i mean yeah now it's just like on your phone so i i think like this is a in you know this is like a mega trend that's gonna come out i i think you're you're definitely on to something this is like the inflection is so real the influx of gambling into sports is like it it happened overnight it went from never discussed to everything is sponsored or integrated in about like if you're watching name nba playoffs it says in the third quarter it's like the the line at the start of the game the current live action line is this and you know every player all the n n deals they can do this now so there's like the flood gets opened as to how much is get it pushed on people as somebody used to gamble a ton i know that for most people it's not gonna work out they're not gonna beat the house they're not gonna gonna beat the market and they're just gonna lose their money and what i don't understand is i guess this is like a naive thing of mind is like the psychology around going to the addiction centers because everybody i knew who was in this space of like your gambling starts out fun then sort of becomes a little bit unhealthy the way it goes i feel like zero percent of those people were gonna go voluntarily like go to driver's ed what i thought you were gonna say is that you can get the companies like unlike the drug industry where you're like there's no there's no corporation that sell heroin right that that's not the there's no there's no one person to target but draft fan well these companies are gonna have a giant target on their back and their money printers and so i thought you were gonna say that they will as a sort of corporate social responsibility like cover your ass type of thing they might sponsor or pay for seats in all these different locations like all these different areas and then you could provide the service for free for people i thought that might be where you were going with that do think that's viable or no i you know i just i i'm not too convinced that like a for profit and you know sam was just talking about these account managers for the whales right like i think they wanna encourage those people to gamble more and like can they talk about you know if you read their ten k's and queues like they have a es g initiative and they do this for people who are but you know i i gotta believe it's like you know kind of putting lip or giving this lip service like i just you know it i i can't believe they would do that i you know i think if i'm draft kings or fan or the thing i do is i have if have a ventures team i invest in this and so then you know i create the problem and then i also benefit from the cure so that's the you know the kind of the evil genius corporate way of doing it but yeah i don't i don't think they're gonna they're gonna you know drive this on their own i one other question for you it says your friend what what stuff are you really into right now are you like really digging any books shows you know random rabbit holes that you're going down is there anything that you're super interested and fascinated by right now yeah you have the free time i'm pretty laser in on like youth development right now right in education like that's where i'm spending all my time so there's a great book called weapons of mass instruction and it's basically like you know it's a i've never it's like a book it's the only book i described is aggressive and basically like talks about like how schools are totally broken and it's actually by next teacher so that one's i thought was really good that i'm i really like that one yeah that's a big area the other area i'm spending a lot of time on is i'm talking to lots of professional sports coaches so a big part of schooling is motivation and so i've talked to i've gotten into like the texas rangers and a couple college for football team kind of coaching networks and these guys they're yeah mostly guys they're amazing like i do a thirty minute zoom with them and i'm like wanna run through a wall after talking to you right and and i'm trying to figure out if what they do for athletes you could you know could you could you implant them in a school and could they do that same kinda motivating thing for young people in a different domain that's that's so good what do they do on the call that's so awesome i think what they they're really good at figuring out what when they talk about you know young people which is who they're generally coaching right they really like think about what they care about at you know the beauty of it is it's actually not very complicated right they think about like what does that person care about so one of them is a coach on a minor league team and he's like listen that kid doesn't care if we make it to the world's series of like aaa a he's like that kid wants to get to pros the pros right and so he's like i gotta work on i get everything i do has to ladder up for him to help him get there and you know the odds are very low right and so they're very selfless in the sense of like as the coach it would actually be better if that kid played his hard out and we won the world series of aaa but the reality is if he does a really good job that player he's actually gonna get called up and they're actually gonna lose them so i like they've just got this like way of thinking about you know like what motivates people and like how to get into that and then they think a lot about like the team dynamic really a lot and i i really have found that really interesting and then there's a great book i read about the d las sal high school football team so it's like the winning high school football team in history it's out in california i think and the coach wrote this book and like half of it's like what drills do the safety do and stuff like stuff i don't care about but there's like an upfront part about leadership and motivation and creating accountability that i actually think like anybody in a company should read like it is unreal because these kids aren't responsible to just the coaches or their school like they feel a really deep sense responsibility to each other and i actually think like that's something we need more of and i really like there's i think there's a lot of lessons that i can be applied from youth development and sports to other domains you know whether it's corporate life or whether it's a school that we're trying to build what's the name of that book chasing perfection you know the the d all football way or something i think if you read the first half of the book before they start getting into like you know what line drills they do and stuff it's really really good sounds similar to like the score takes care of itself is that the bill wall bill walsh book yeah so you know same thing super successful football coach it's a football it's a sports book a football book but it's not out at the same time it's a program building leadership book actually and it's an entire philosophy of like focus on the inputs the outputs will always take care of themselves if you got the inputs right yeah and and how he'd kinda turned around a losing program into a winning one yeah i think the other thing he talks about a lot is like subtraction right like we're she's like you he needs like a lot of teams wanna add new things they like wanna add new plays he's like we have three plays on special teams we do like that's it right and so they like really minimize and like it's actually like if you have young kids you ever seen those stride bikes yeah right like the brilliance of that is they just subtracted pedals out right like it's like and it actually helps kids learn how to ride better and i don't think people think about subtracting stuff out they like always wanna add and i actually found like there was a certain genius of how this cog and his team or his coaching staff thought about simplifying a lot and subtracting complexity out and so yeah there's it's like a very profound book on many levels i i just think it's like it's a it's a really good one so that's another if you're at the talent code now you're write that down that's a good one for you in general you should check out my college remain who's one of my best friends scott trevor reagan he has a pretty fascinating story where he was like from a tiny town in wyoming and when i got to duke they were like your roommate he's like trying not for the basketball team so i'm like sweet i'm looking out for you know a six six black dude i'm like that's gonna be my roommate and instead this five eight you know white kid from wyoming shows up and i'm like you're the guy who's trying out for the team like what how is this gonna work and he was an incredible basketball player the best basketball player in wyoming his dad is both his parents were teachers and coaches and he always just thought okay i'm gonna play sports and then i'll go be a teacher and coach too someday and what he did was when he went back to wyoming he hosts he started with a summer camp and he was like alright i'm gonna teach basketball and he he also like he was a manager on the duke basketball team do basketball teams probably the most you know prestigious program in college basketball so he like took what he learned there but he was like you know what what do i wish i had when i like what would have made me a better player because he almost made the team with the last guy cut and he's kind of a kind sat with him of like could i have done anything differently i thought i worked super hard so could have worked smarter in any way was there anything that in my training protocol would have led me to actually make the team versus being the last final guy who didn't make the cut because it killed him to not be on the team that was his dream and like it's like you don't watch that story you don't watch the rudy movie where you he doesn't get to play but that was what happened in his life and is like damn that sucks because i didn't even really believe that that was a possible outcome but it was and so he when he went back his summer camp he's teaching me i i don't know seventh grade girls and they would be doing a lay job but he put a giant tv screen with a ti like kind of instant replay of what they were doing so because he's like one of the things is you never as a youth player you never get to see yourself doing anything like the the or the feedback loop is there's like a huge gap between when you're playing in the gym to when you finally might one day see like some film of you that then then you'll be told hey you should do this differently next time and then another three days goes by before you're back in the gym doing that thing so instead he like shorten the feedback loop he started and then he went and studied all these coaches he wouldn't hung out with pete carroll he went hung out with the best like he would find that the women's olympic volleyball team the us dominates so he went and studied under that coach to be like how does he run his program he would just like he'd run camps the summer which is only three months and then nine months out of the year he would just go learn and i thought it was fast he did that for like know seven years so now he has this he puts out free content that's like in in his thing called the learners lab which is basically it's like how the the science of learning how do you become a better learner and he started with with sports but then he realized like pretty quickly oh this applies to everything like business schools school whatever and he gets brought in by all these sports teams and big companies to give talks to like how do you actually teach people how to learn better do you create a a environment like basically his theory is almost like if the soil is good the plants will grow and like if you're wondering why your plants aren't growing have you ever looked at your soil maybe your soils messed up like maybe the the setup the culture the environment that you're you're setting up your is not gonna lead to that type of growth and so he's put out a bunch of fascinating stuff that i haven't really heard anybody else do i you should check it out one of the genius things he did was like hub men he went and read all the white papers about learning and mode like motor development and all this stuff and then he's like dude this is gold it's just buried in old scientific white paper that was made by an old white scientist who doesn't know anything about social media or how to get the message out there so he would go read all these and they need turned it into like an animated video and put it up on youtube and these videos that seem so niche can get like a million views because it's actually interesting content but it was just stuck in science world which was not like applicable to where most people go look for information or entertainment yeah i should check out trevor stuff like he sounds like he's doing sort of god's work there which is awesome but yeah there's a ton of like amazing research about youth development education learning that like people just ignore like it's like proven stuff that says you know if you want a young person to like learn something you should quiz them daily like it's shown to work but like if you talked i've talked to probably seven or eighty teachers not a single one can does it and part of it is like it's logistically very challenging so i understand that but but there's so many things at work and like we still treat education very art right it's like you know it's like everybody's an artist like oh sam likes teaching history this way and sean likes teaching it this way and on and likes teaching it this way it's like hey just go and like do like improv you know and instead of being like oh what sam does works like sean and on like follow the script because like the kids love it and like it works and you can color outside the lines a little bit but you can't like go rogue and just come up with your own thing so yeah i think i'll check i'll check that out but yeah there's a time like really smart people who dug into this we just for whatever reason we just seem to ignore it in that von b interview we just did he said something he's like the like the something like the neurons in the brain and normally i'm like you're an investor what do you know about the neurons to the but i was at his and like one whole wall was all just science books it's like there's like an investing book there's a huge section of just science books either psychology or biology or physics whatever it was and he was just telling me about all these different books he was reading and what what he liked in each one and one of the things he was saying was between the age as of probably would said like ten to nineteen or something like that like eighty ninety percent of the neural connections formed during that time and it's basically the peak time to specialize hey it's like if you look at all the great ones whether it's like you know the great musicians whether it's warren buffett you know buying his for stock at age ten it's like the great ones at every field during that key golden period they begin to like really go deep on an area and become great at that and not everybody should specialize but the people who really wanna become the outliers and do great like that is the the golden era and i'm sitting there i'm like oh i guess yes i missed the most i don't know i don't know what i doing there at that time but it wasn't and he's like well you always got kids you know to try yeah for sure yeah i mean you know i spent eight years in spanish and like i can say mai on way alba ban which is like my name's ana where's the bathroom right and so like that's a waste of time for everybody involved right and spanish for three years i it's just no h that's all my i got got it strong each in that hobby and and jody you could say what you don't speak you're just like i don't speak oh yeah yeah so we got your neurons working on that which was know so i think like there's a lot of like yeah wasted potential wasted time here and yeah that neurons thing the thing you said about you know if somebody has a lemonade stand or in life like that's a great sort of indicator like yeah i i gotta believe that certainly like a sign of somebody who's formidable that is you know could do great things yeah and so yeah i think we gotta tap into that a lot more thanks for doing this dude round two done right cool yeah well do you want people to follow your anywhere or get more of you on any any platform yeah on twitter or my name on linkedin i'm i'm on linkedin voice or something so you know i don't mean to brag but that's a that's my thing so yeah while i don't think that's a brag it is it is for the record that that is a full on brag right i'm pretty being on linkedin is actually i i it i framed my i framed my thing it's it's in our bedroom do you make your wife look at that before do you realize the tries that you got yeah it's a big it's a big thing whenever we get in into fight i'm like let's go into the room and look at the the linkedin influencer thing i got you play the cards you're dealt i suppose alright this is been fun man alright thanks alright see you i feel like i could rule where to i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a goal travel never looking back