3 killer businesses hiding in plain sight

guess how much monkey cost i don't know one thousand dollars almost twenty thousand one monkey is twenty grand i feel like i could rude to where to know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a road less travel before we start can i get a can i get a wellness check on my hair dude i just feel like i feel like i might have hit the point where i gotta like start taking something you know what when i'm getting the hat on every day i feel like that's i'm way i'm literally waving the white flag with this hat that like maybe maybe we're getting a little thin on top what's the thing that you would take it starts with an r like is it it's the r word nut oh yeah well there's like a generic name for them and then there's all the branded ones but like med something something does that sound right that sounds like something one of the downsides on one of them i think is limp limp wiener right well that might be two for one i'm done having kids so so you know i i i was thinking about the v effect maybe we don't need to do that it's so funny did ben as you know he's you'll never catch ben without a hat you know for for similar reasons and he met a guy and he was like oh i gotta i'm on a hair protocol from this guy and i'm like what like what you got turkish guy who you got he's like no no it's my friend he's got me on this protocol and you know protocol just become the fancy thing since he i'm in brian johnson like what do you mean these gave a pill is that a protocol and he was like no i got a like red light therapy do this put this serum blah blah blah okay so i was like how's it going and he's like oh he's like i don't know man you you tell me when you see me so i just saw him yesterday he's got a beard now oh thanks beard he's got a beard but his hair looks the same so something's kinda working hilarious beard looks great i gotta give him that have you seen there's this app out i i've been targeted by like crazy it's cove dot com so it's q o v e s dot com i've been getting targeted like crazy by this app and i bought it it's a hundred and fifty dollars the ad worked improve your looks without surgery and then there's a woman posing life changing transformations we're look back we're looks maxing is that what's going on here it's not even an app really but and i don't even know if it's ai or if it's some like filipino who got a criticized beat because when you sign up it takes three weeks for me to get my results so i feel like there's gonna be like you know a bunch of guys in the background like make it fun of me did you get like no i just signed up for i got the ad while i was in san francisco instant conversion did you just stop on the middle of the street sit down and and download this well they had an instagram that has a million followers and it basically like tells you like what people can do to improve their looks and it was at a beautiful instagram and a lot of my hot friends also follow them so i figured let's give it a shot but i i don't know if you ever heard of this so who your hot friends alright i think we need to let the comments predict before your results come in where you're gonna score so here's some of the things cheek activation zero a hundred facial femininity that's gonna be a tough one yeah homo average ness is that good or bad that's good right categories themselves are cutting wait do i wanna be more homo homogeneous i think you wanna be more homogeneous okay well dude i guy i called ugly when i was in the second grade by this girl i liked i like this girl and she was sitting in the front of class and my friend who i think really knew what he was doing he was stirring the pot here he's like dude let me go tell her you like her and then maybe she'll and then he goes up to he tells you like her and i see them both smile and then he comes back to me and i'm like and and he goes she thinks you're ugly and i was like oh was like wasn't gonna a yes or no just she thinks early that was the end of it i was like son no then and he's like i think no what's really recovering from that i think those my earliest memory millie was her name nelly you asshole who's remembering alright i'd like to talk to you about the wild world of lab testing on monkeys buddy so i didn't realize i never really thought about it you know like when you hear about a drug oh it's in phase one clinical trials phase two clinical but this is all mean and what what's actually happening along the way of like a a medicine a cure a vaccine and whatever it is coming to market i didn't really realize how much medicine gets tested on monkeys and how big of a business that is and also how big of a kind of like weird ethical thing that is so can i just tell you about like a little bit about this yeah and what's the scale i i i'm i have no idea alright so basically more than twenty percent of all drugs are tested on monkeys and and what's a monkey like what is it the same breed is it all like our like a couple that they like like they they are used specifically for this so like the long tailed you know i don't know how you say like a they call like a sin c y n o like the sino whatever it's like the the long species name is the like the ideal monkey to test and then it's kinda sad because it's like the ideal monkey because it's like smarter and like more close to a human and so like if you look at these monkeys like in the wild they're known for like they'll steal your phone and take a selfie with you so you know they'll they'll they'll like grab your hat and won't give it till you give them food you know they like kinda know how to play the game and so this this crazy business where look i get it like you know you don't want a medicine to go and be tested on humans right away you'd want it to start mice and rats and and but like eventually the closest proxy is monkeys and so what happens is every year you know tens of thousands of monkeys around the world get imported so the us will import let's say twenty thousand monkeys and each monkey costs guess how much of monkey cost a thousand almost twenty thousand one monkey is twenty grand they used to be two grand a monkey when covid happened prices shot up because they needed to test for medicines of vaccines why whatnot so it got to twenty thousand fifty thousand per monkey and then what happened was at the time china supplied like sixty percent of the world's what they call hp non human primates they do everything china does everything they breed them they were spine them china just went cold turkey they just went cold monkey they just stopped exporting they were like look we're gonna keep them all for ourselves okay and so there was this huge supply shock prices suit up to fifty thousand per monkey and cambodia steps in and vietnam steps in and the m malicious whatever that is ireland step in and they start providing these monkeys so the us kinda needs and there's these big businesses in the us so this is one business called charles river labs have you ever heard of this business charles river labs it sounds like a venture capital firm well there is charles river ventures so not to confuse them so charles river labs is like in boston or something like this they do this as like research testing as a service for all the biotech companies so they don't have to do it themselves okay so they basically have all the like the the mice and the rats and the dogs and the monkeys all there and they do this testing they work with like eighty percent of biotech companies like it's crazy like the scale is pretty crazy even i think it's like eighty percent of drugs that go to market get tested with them like they have this absolute monopoly they do four billion a year in revenue yeah it's a publicly traded company they bought a monkey breeding business like a supply like part of the bun supply chain because they were like so dependent on these wild swings they bought one for five hundred million dollars just to control the supply better to gear make sure that they were not gonna like lack lack the supply of these what's a monkey breeding business hey i wanna tell you about something pretty cool we have a database of all of the business ideas that have been discussed on this podcast so hundreds of episodes the team at hub hubspot went through they pulled out all the simple relatable interesting profitable ideas that we have brainstorm and are all available for download for free just click the link in the description below thank you to our friends at hubspot for sponsored this podcast and putting together this free resource for you guys back to the show so it'll be like in cambodia it'll be in vietnam and they basically so they they they they certify that they basically they breed these four testing they don't take them out of the wild and then they like kinda tag them they like track them whatever but they've gone wrong so the there's just a story in fortune magazine of this guy see this guy in the blue shirt here with the glasses is so he's like the director of wildlife in cambodia and these are like monkeys in a cage right here coming out of this pickup truck and they're being transported and so this guy goes into us for like you know a a business trip it just gets detained you know and they have a warrant for his arrest because they feel like that monkeys from the from wildlife were being passed off as like lab testing monkeys bread bread monkeys and we're being renamed re tagged and being sold and so he got jailed for like a year who's was like house arrest for us you know year waiting trial in america in america yeah and and the doj kinda like imp him which is pretty crazy so this is this wild world did have you ever even thought about this and no but imp is that the is that your new term i that they can say that that wasn't name the fortune magazine they they they should've have put them in a monkey cage they told them yeah exactly so so it's crazy like it just another reminder you the one thing this podcast has done a lot for me is it rewire my brain to understand that when i look around the room nothing is here by accident nothing just appeared you know like the the little like the lead that goes in this this mechanical pencil there's a company that makes that there's a guy who you'll meet on a boat somewhere whose business is just to provide busy lead and he knows everything about the lead business and he goes to meet and meetings and they talk about three millimeter lead and six millimeter lead and everything is a business it would not exist if there wasn't entrepreneur behind it making it exist and the world is full of these projects in bigger than you think and it's always bigger than you think it's always bigger can you imagine someone making five hundred million dollars by creating a breeding monkey and when you looked at the photos it it looked like a huge shed almost that photo that you showed me it's crazy and you know you i remember meeting people who were like the richest guy in my neighborhood growing up what do you do what's your job and he left he's like no there's no job he's like i sell you know in a factory when there's like a conveyor belt or like you know he go through tsa there's like a conveyor belt he's like the tread of that conveyor conveyor belt we make the tread i was what how what how'd do you even start that where does that even come from you know like i own an almond farm a mushroom farm i met a guy who makes the dye that makes the color blue because blue is not really a naturally occurring you know a substance you find you have to like make it he's like i make blue it's like well i love lamps sir i don't know what you're talking about and there's just like richer than you'd need everything did you another thing that i've noticed is that there's companies that do things that i had no idea that they that they still did it edit potentially makes a lot of money so for example i'm reading for the first time i'm reading snowball warren buffett biography and i find you had reference us but i didn't quite know what you were talking about and i didn't wanna ask i didn't wanna look stupid but it's the soybean oil shortage and basically the idea here is that one of warren buffett best trades ever was american express because at the time there was this whole scheme where basically there was a a scam artist and he realized that he could get loans against his soybean oil inventory and so basically what this guy did was he had i don't know if it was hundreds or dozens of massive tanks where he would store that oil and let's say that oil was worth five million dollars in aggregate he could get a four million dollar loan against that oil and he actually went to i think fifty different banks and got a bunch of different loans which is fraudulent but then he did double w fraud because he got in order to get the loans he hired american express to verify that the oil that he said was in the tank was in fact in the tank but what he noticed was that when they checked there was a way that you could kinda like scam them and eventually he filled these huge tanks with sea water saltwater right and it was fake the oil didn't exist and for a variety of political reasons a deal fell through with russia where they're gonna import or sell them a bunch of oil america said nope we're not gonna do business with the ussr therefore the price of soybean oil went down and it crashed and all these lenders said hey soybean guy you us you owe us our money and he was like well the thing is is that none of the soybean oil actually exists therefore i can't pay you and because american express was the gu they the company that promised that the amount of soybean be being oil promised to the lenders was there they were the ones who had to pay this massive fine and warren buffett goes around and he was like you know american express stock is down right now and a lot of people have no idea that they even like we're in the soybean oil checking business right i have a feeling based off of going to restaurants and i'm talking to waiters i have a feeling that the people who are using american express don't really give a shit about this they still trust that american express is good for you know credit cards and i was reading about this and i was like oh that's a crazy story but b american expresses in the soybean oil checking business and you'd have no idea how many strange variety businesses exist and by the way it was like a multi hundred million dollar year business to like be in this soybean checking oil business and it was one of those moments where i'm like i can't believe this as a thing i never and i think that crisis was so big that i don't think it brought down the economy but i think it like i think it hurt a lot of companies to the tune of like many tens or hundreds of billions of dollars yeah it's all hidden plain sight and the more of those you sort of download two things happen one is it rewire your brain to realize like it's just the world is full of gaps and then founders who plugged them and so you start to realize up that was a gap and someone unplugged it that was a gap and so someone unplugged it so you start finding gaps and thinking could i plug that and and it changes you that's what an entrepreneurs brain really like comes down to is seeing the world not as this like set fix solve thing that mommy and daddy have like they'll take care of but like no no there's tons of opportunity you can go and just change it you can literally just bend the world and make it make it a new and then the on the other side you realize like wow there's a lot of business in the weird nooks and cra of the world there's a lot of money to be made doing things that are just off the beaten path because there's this arbitrage between what smart people learn about in their day to day life or school which is why you'll see a lot of programmers who will build to do list apps and you know dating apps and things that it's like what's a problem that every smart person runs into you simply wanna just stay away from that and go into things that they just haven't heard about they don't know too much about you know what mean like go into a a category that is just not ripe with really smart you know high agency people and you're playing against weak competition how do you think you do that because that's really hard it's hard to find problems worthy of solving that are one hundred percent outside of your of your of your realm for example we met a guy in san francisco who had a business with dentists it helped it it it was dental back office so it's called day day dream dental what they're doing was your dentist your back office you got debbie sitting back there and she spends most of her day calling insurance companies reading out billing codes trying to get the claims filed accepted checking patient insurance and that entire process is kind of the revenue lifeblood blood of the business and guess what there's a lot of times where things get either rejected build the wrong way cash not delivered that sort of thing and so you know there's a it's a very loss part of the business you would think you go to the dentist you pay money and then that's it it's over but that's not really how the dental industry works and so what he was doing he goes to dentist and he says hey let us take over that function for you we will use ai and smart people and computers to basically do a better job of that than debbie can so you don't you don't have to employ a bunch of people and have a bunch of overhead to do that we will employ the people we will specialize in that function for you and will collect fifteen percent twenty percent more revenue but you're just leaving on the table that's the pitch and he was doing i think in year two close to ten million revenue something like that you guys can listen the so to get all the all the details but we're like how did you get this idea because he was a he's either stanford grad or stanford dropout he's like this guy who like you would think like my yeah he was like not hanging around a bunch of dental offices mean he had great teeth but he didn't look like he was like doing this like dirty work and he was like oh my mother was a dentist yeah he was like my summers when i was a teenager i just worked in the dental practice yeah and i was like the greatest gift that and your mom gonna rubbing your face but the greatest gift financially that you've been given is the fact that your mother was a small business owner and you got to see firsthand these problems and how lucky are you that you were you know born in the situation where you are just your eyes are open we had another guy who had a business servicing generators so basically like a nursing home who has an industrial size generator they can't go out for even an hour because you know that's that's a huge deal or a hospital you can't have your hospital generator or you can't have the hospital power go out in the middle of heart surgery his job with installing and servicing generators and this business might eventually become a hundred million dollar maybe billion dollar company and he explained the story how we got into it and it was like this like winding row of like i worked with this company that like one time we did a consulting project with this thing and i got into that which then i got introduced to this other guy and this other thing and i just was asking myself how like i was en of like people who do these like dirty tech ish jobs and they discovered these problems that i had no idea what even a think it it's the art of noticing i told you i spent like a bunch of months looking up how some of the world's most creative people work how do the best writers work the best musicians the best filmmakers because you know i spent so much of my life studying how great entrepreneurs work which is a lot of brute force a lot of high agency a lot of scale thinking a lot of hustle and you know you there's obviously creativity involved but i thought well let me go study the people who specialize in this if you go listen to like what rick rubin says what the great comedian say it's all about noticing it is actually why comedian when they get rich and famous they fall off because it's the struggles of the everyday person that led them to an insight that when they set it in front of a crowd everybody connected with it but when you're flying private and you're you have four na and you have a chef and you have this and that well you don't really encounter the same struggles that they have every everyday person does so that you stop coming up with the genius insights that make that resonate like a truth that you set out loud to the audience and so you have to really like create a system where you are gonna be exposed to interesting things and then a habit of noticing them of paying attention to them of writing things down of slowing down of not being too busy not being too distracted of being more present and that's where the great if you if you look at like a remember mark manson came on the podcast and he's got this crazy hit book right you made like one of the best selling books if i'm non fiction in the history of the world is the subtle art of not giving a and he wrote that book and it's like he was blogging he wrote know thousands of blogs but nothing really resonated that one that one or nothing resonated the same level as this idea did and where that where that name come from and he was like oh i actually really liked this band and the band had a song called the subtle art of something it was something it was like the last part was different he's like can i just noticed like i just really like that name and i remember i couldn't tell you the other fifteen songs on the album but i remember that one so then i wrote that down and i that became the book title and it's like noticing is such a superpower it's the super superpower for entrepreneurs programmer or at this essay called how to do great work and what he describes is like a few step system and i'll just it's like a three thousand word s it's probably one of his most important s what is so long in it he basically says look like here's the formula you want to first just follow the path of most excitement so most interest to you and he basically says look this is twofold one is that being really interested in something is highly motivating so you'll work more than other people you'll have more endurance than other people it goes two it's differentiating because what exactly what an interests you is not what interest most people and so you have a specific like flavor palette for what you like and if you follow that truly you will end up in a place of less competition so he says for let your excitement or your interest be the motor of the boat as well as the rudder so it's like it's the motor that motivates you and it's the rudder that guides you of which way to go he goes okay so now you took that boat and you just let it go and you just follow it and you follow it all the way to the edge of the frontier of whatever industry you're in whatever field you're in whatever technology you play in go all the way to the frontier if it's led for this pencil it's led for this pencil if it's the conveyor belt thing it's conveyor belt thing whatever it is and he goes when you're at the frontier when you're far away from the frontier the the frontier just looks like a like a circumference like a like a continuous line but if you get all the way out there you notice oh shit you gotta kinda step over these gaps that exist people don't know this they don't do they don't know how to do this oh you gotta do this manually yourself nobody does this for you it's kinda tedious it's pain in the ass and it's only when you're in the frontier there that you will find the gaps and then use the internal step to just decide to fill one of those and starts with noticing that's a that's a very good summary of that article paul graham is another guy who's like i don't know if he might be an artist i don't know what he considers himself i think he does actually i think he's i think in terms of traditional but also like when he writes stuff it's pretty amazing how he takes something that it's sort of like how to win friends that influence people where he tell they tell you certain stuff in the book and you're like that's obvious but the way that you put it makes it seem so much more important and insightful than i previously thought and it is important and insightful right and so i've been i have been wondering how to stay as eddie murphy calls it sensitive i told you what eddie murphy said right he had my documentary and he was i'm a great comedian for much of reasons one of them is that i'm super sensitive to stuff if i give the valet my car and he comes back with the car and it just slightly smells different i can make that joke about that slight smell or if i know it's a slight dent i can just make a i'd remark about that faster than other people because i noticed it better than they do and they're just not sensitive enough yeah jerry seinfeld has this book called is this anything have you ever read it no it's it's so jerry seinfeld has this daily writing habit every morning first two hours of the day he sits down with a legal pad and a pencil and a coffee he just writes he just writes jokes and he's like you know writing is the game and so he's been doing that for forty years so what he did was he piled all of those yellow pages of just half jokes which in the book is called is this anything because like most of jokes don't go anywhere and he's just asking himself like is there something there is there anything is that is this something and so he put them all together in a book and one of his jokes is he just noticed that like have you ever been on a phone call and it drops and the other person calls you back and they're like hey yes he hey sorry i don't know what happened he just noticed we always say that and he goes you know i everyone know say i don't know what happened of course you don't know what happened i don't know what's don't know what's happening right now with this phone call do you think i could explain what went wrong i couldn't even tell you what at this just right i don't know how phones work and so you just noticed how silly it is that we say i don't know what happened as if you had any power or control or knowledge into the way my phone is magically connecting with yours anyways and so the reason i get excited about this is that nobody will ever practice this nobody will ever say they're doing this it doesn't sound cool so there's a few of these kind of traits where there's like high alpha because they matter a lot but everybody else brushes them off or doesn't even know what to do with them so they just don't try and so imagine like you know if you wanna be the best fortnite player in the world you're competing against tens of millions of other kids who spend every day doing this you're entering just such a competitive field but imagine there was another game that had the same price pool as the world fortnite championship but there's only seven players you know that's that's what happens with some of these traits like noticing i've said another one is enthusiasm enthusiasm is such an underrated trait everybody knows and that that it's better to work with somebody who's enthusiastic everybody knows that enthusiasm is a positive attribute to have but it's something that smart people feel stupid when they do it like it's a low status thing for a smart person to do is be enthusiastic and you seem sort of like dumb like a golden retriever well guess what everybody wants that person around we love golden ridge retriever and it's actually a very use full trait for going and doing something hard is to have enthusiasm every day versus just being beaten down by the reality of your situation so there's these like handful of traits that smart people refuse to work on which makes it like an an un competitive playing field you could just go dominate with very little effort hey let's take a quick break you know that feeling when strategy is done the brief is written everyone's aligned and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content that someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow well the breeze assistant from hubspot can help it works right inside hubspot you can draft campaign copy blog posts emails all in your brand voice all using your actual customer data so you don't create just content you create content that converts check out hubspot dot com the agent customer platform for growing business this is something that i think about all the time and i've never come up with an answer that has been truly effective for me but how to find a thing that you love so like you were talking about like this is the step before all of this stuff but like whenever i read about jerry seinfeld and he you know i've known about his writing habit each day i'm like how lucky are you that you at a young age you discovered something that you're obsessed about and often i ask myself how do you find something that you're obsessed about and also can anyone be obsessed about any like anything at all like i get obsessed with something for a short time but i'm not like but anything that i've been interested in for twenty years i would say that i'm like a forty hour a week obsessed you know i could like i'm a pretty pretty i'm mildly interested for a log period of time but i'm not obsessed i'm not obsessed you really feel that way you really feel like you don't have things you get obsessed about i think you're the exact opposite do you i get obsessed about obsessed with fitness you got obsessed with if you've denim you got obsessed with the media business you got obsessed with researching businesses how we're almost at a thousand episodes of this podcast there is no way that you've talked for a thousand hours about niche business ideas trust me you're obsessed with those it doesn't feel obsessed like i don't know i just like when i see the other p it's sort of like oh man they have it and i don't and of course i can like look at my my past actions that i and i could argue otherwise but i'm just saying generally speaking for the average person have you thought about how to find something that you're obsessed with or even can you become obsessed i do think everyone is capable of it but very few people ever do it i think there's two two interesting things i can say about this the first is look into your childhood yeah that's what robert greene says yeah so if you read about people who suggest how to do this a lot of the times they say look to your childhood or pay attention to what you did in your free time rather it's your free time as an adult as adults are free time sort of shrinks in smaller and smaller segments and you know you feel your free time with errands or things you should do but when you're a kid you don't really think about what you should do you just simply think about what you wanna do and so when you're a kid you get obsessed with different things you go into these different rabbit holes in these different phases and then you grow out of them but they often have like similarities so you know i got obsessed with one video game but then i outdoor grow out of that but then i got obsessed with online poker and oli online poker has a lot of similarities to that video game if you think about it but i didn't consider online poker to be a video game and i got obsessed with business and now i'm sort of obsessed with investing and they're all the same through line right of it's sort of this game there's points whether the points are called stars or points or money or roi whatever it is right like irr there's a different score board but it's the same idea and as a game there's competitors a strategy and it's hard to win but it's fun to win and like you got a trial and error and try to figure it out so like i like strategy games and i've always liked strategy games i always it's very easy for me to get obsessed with a strategy game are you like a board game guy yeah like i'm i love board games i love i love social strategy games i love watching survivor i love playing card games where you gotta lie and you gotta do you know you gotta sort of bluff that's poker but there's also other social card games like that know so so you start to notice patterns and you gotta think back so there's a great story of dan brown you know dan brown the author of the davinci code which is like one of the best selling mystery thriller books ever and like demons and angels he's gotta he's got a bunch of books like this so the guy's an amazing writer of these kind of like treasure hunt books where the heroes trying to find something that's a race to find the thing is he's getting the clues and he's figuring it out he's unveiling the mystery well when he was kid his dad did something really wonderful for him and sparked this like passion in him every christmas instead of presence under the tree his dad would put a treasure map it's baller and so he would wake up and like every kid goes and then just un unpack the gift his gift was here's a map go find it and he had a scavenger hunt to go find his gifts and he's and so guess what like that like kind of keystone memory in moment like really like triggered a spark inside him of loving the idea of a treasure hunt and if you look at the vinci code what is it's a treasure hunt story and he just tells it better than anyone else on earth he he paid attention to the things he was interested and loved as a kid what happens is we find these things that we're interested in but we blow we blow them off we just brush them off as if they're sort of trivial they're meaningless they are irrelevant or they're childish or they're silly or they're not serious i should do a serious thing but it's the people who pay attention to these things that are you know on the surface somewhat serious but they take a simple idea they take it seriously and they turn it into something that actually matters i'll give you that actually it's perfect example is i just took a trip to a toronto and i went to toronto and i i was there to celebrate because we just had this huge win huge business win i'll talk about that later someday when i can kinda be a little more public about it but we just this biggest biggest win in my life in the world of business and so we flew our team out you know me the ceo and ben we flew out together we're like let's celebrate elaborate but our first thought was let's go to vegas and i was like just the thought of it it's not just a lot of vegas like induces like like fatigue in my body you know like i don't i don't wanna drink i don't wanna a party if we were at the club the three of us it would be the three s you know one guy doesn't even drink and so we went to toronto one of the reasons we went is because we we're were like we had this wonderful day where we played like patel which i had never played love patel immediately was like oh new life hobby unlocked we went to this escape room that's unbelievable it's like a castle there's actors in it i never experienced an escape them like this like they escaped i've even can it's like a small box with like you know toys inside i love those but dude i love to escape rooms and so guess it's like that same thing this strategy mystery like unlock the puzzle type shit is what i like and that was what i chose to celebrate with and so know thy myself but what where the other guys like sean we'd rather have gone did a strip clubs we're just gonna play settlers of katana and try to escape this room well no that's kinda the beauty of it is if you do the shit that's the the most you you will only atrial repel people who wanna be at the strip club and you will attract people who are like you those will be the people who you end up working really well with right because like you will attract you will attract like minded people it becomes a honey pot so what's the second thing though you said so just one is one is pay attention to your childhood notice what you love then the second is don't sort of brush it off don't don't you gotta be a bit shameless about it and so i'll give you also so why did we go there well our buddy who came on the the show el lee lee was one of the creators of the exploding kittens board game it built it enormous i don't know if he said the numbers publicly but absolutely ga business in the business of board games and card games if you walk in the aisle of target in the board card game aisle he's made like seven of the top ten selling games in the world you know like dominant monopoly well what is it so i went to his house he he's got a house in toronto i think he was like telling us that he was building it he was like showing photos is it like a dream house well this wasn't the dream house this was like the house he's living in while the giant dream house is being built and i go up to his office and his office is like a kid's toy store not only does have all his games but then there's like these insane lego things that he's building and he's wiring led lights into them and he he's like this unbelievable construction like he's like a kid right he's just still doing the shit he loved as a kid he's still doing now he had a dinosaur egg like an actual dinosaur egg a fossil dinosaur egg and he's like if you kiss it or lick it you get to sign the book so i kiss the dinosaur egg i'm signing the book and i'm like this is like worth millions of dollars he doesn't have it like in this display case he's like how boring like the eight year old version of me would think how lame i don't get to touch it eight year old me would wanna touch it and show my friends so he's got the egg out he's letting his friends touch it kiss it and lick it and then he's he shut there's this xbox sitting there and he's like that's the first xbox i'm like dude how'd you how much was that you he's like i got that one they gave it to i'm like well how did you do that he goes well i designed it awesome he's like my first job was xbox you know microsoft handed me a bunch of money and a to a team and was like design a competitor to the playstation so that's the first prototype xbox we ever made i'm real proud of that one wait really quick to to give perspective on this guy he i he's wildly wealthy like nick who knows it could be a billionaire dollar company who knows let's just say he's in a hundred millionaire billionaire status he goes to us a group of guys twenty of us he goes do you guys wanna see my new game and he gets on his hands and knees and he pulls out these glasses bridge trying to like look he's like alright he pulls all monica what you what do you call a mono when there's two of them no okay so these are glasses these are the sticks right you need these stay on your face he had glasses that are just two lenses yeah and they were like breasts on his nose in a perfect balance and he was wearing like sweatpants pants and socks like it was like he was basically what i'm trying to get a he was like an old man kid he's not actually old but like he's a girl man kid and he's on his hands and knees and he's like alright so you just got this card i think that's what what it means is you have to do in his pocket a empty deck that he could just take a sharpie and make a game up on the spot that's kinda what he was doing for us and and he was like testing to see and he was like this means to do this and he was seeing if i would actually go and do it and if i was happy about doing it and he was like prototyping on us like he was getting our reactions like being a comedian and throwing out jokes to see if they're in any good and it was so funny that he was doing this like it was very natural to him and i found that to be very inspiring and so if you think about like you know that guy he's he's still like he didn't brush those things off as like yeah i like that but now it's time to get to work he just kept doing that until it became his work and he became the best in the world at doing that at making games playing games making games that people love so he didn't like brush it off and when we were hanging out he telling me about escape room so i thought i like escape rooms and i thought us going there to go to an escape room was like a pretty indulge thing in the sai passion of mine dude he travels the world with a group of like fifteen neck beard guys testing every escape the whatever the best escape rooms in the world are he travel he goes on like like a bachelor party every couple years testing the world's best escape rooms and trying to escape them with his friends and that's like how he vacations that was like one of the things he does and i was like wow this guy is if you took the governor off or the filter off of like yeah that's me but that'd be a little too weird so let me just keep a little bit of that in it's like no dude well what was it it you used used to say it's your office let your freak flag fly baby exactly and that's what he does and i think that's the second part notice what lights you up and then let it fly this this that's so cool thanks podcast is brought to you by my friends at mercury they make the world's best banking product i think you know this already i used mercury for all my businesses i think i have like maybe seven or eight businesses we use mercury as our business banking across all of them and now they actually just launched a personal banking account so i have my personal account there i moved off of wells fargo in chase i'm just all in on mercury why i like products that are easy to use i like products that get me and the problems that i have so like it very easy to make a joint account with my wife very easy to spin up virtual cards one click and i get savings yield it just has all the stuff that i need in one place so if you're looking for the best banking product on the market it's definitely mercury i will fist fight any way to who disagree disagrees me on that go to mercury dot com slash personal and learn more mercury is a fintech not an fdic insured bank banking services are provided through choice financial group and call them an a members fdic dude alright so i just got back from a seven day trip in san francisco can i tell you one of my biggest takeaways so please you you did this with new york you had a bunch of them i had one major one so okay san francisco is the best city on earth in my opinion to induce the emotion of awe so the definition or the pair para the definition it's basically experiencing both vast ness which means something that's really large something that feels like endless or incredibly old while also being a thing where it sort of breaks your mental framework your mental sc and so it basically your brain has to do the thing called accommodating where you have to change how you think in order to fit what you looking at into your your sc and it's sort of like we use the word frame breaking and it can't but it can't be just like impressive you know it can't be something that's just big it has to be so big or so epic where it's different than from what i were used to and how i define how life is and that is the emotion of all well i just looked up the i have the exact definition it's just very much what you said but with a little extra so it says all a strong feeling of deep respect wonder and amazement often mixed with a bit of fear or nervous dread which also happens a lot in san francisco yes and i felt that but i wanna explain why like i felt all in the good way because that all is bad like you can be in awe of like an atrocious act like when you read about world war two you can be in awe and it's not necessarily good but basically all is interesting because i have found and i think that i can't i've read about a little bit about this but also some of this is my opinion is that it reduces anxiety and depression because it creates the self diminishing emotion so a lot of times anxiety and depression it exists because you are the center of all your problems it's basically me me me and you're constantly thinking of yourself and i think that we all have to do like self rem discrimination i mean if i think about issues all the time but when you experience opportunities that exist they either seem much bigger than you think or they just seem not important and you stop thinking about yourself and you start more so thinking about like the stuff that you see and when i'm in san francisco i drive through i ride through the pre reside and you see these massive hills and you see views and what i've noticed is that seeing horizons particularly when it's like a large view and it's an ocean like it's a you're above an ocean and you could overlook it gives me this like deep sense of calm this deep sense of like well of awe and i find it to be incredibly addict but also a very inspiring emotion and i left i left san francisco be thinking like this is the greatest feeling on earth well you you describe the nature side of it i was surprised you didn't talk about the entrepreneurial all that you also get because we sat there for a whole day and just every twenty minutes a new founder came in and sat in the seat in front of us basically we did this episode where we had nine founders come and explain what they are working on yeah it's sort of like sit in the hot seat tell us what you're doing tell us the numbers we kind of nerd out about your business what did you think of that because i you know you're in new yorker in the hustle and bustle of things but the types of businesses people do and the types of people who do business are very different in san francisco i thought it was was fantastic more so than the businesses that they were working on what i like about san francisco is there seems to me an outsider it felt like there was a significantly higher quirky attribute a significantly higher nerd attribute against the grain attribute that i particularly love and i get a huge amount of inspiration was from like we met a guy who was an indian guy he made a machine that made basically for us alfredo like an italian dish and i was like how silly and wonderful is this that this like indian guy who talks about growing up in india is now using like a robot to make us italian food and like i thought that was like a really quirky cool thing and we talked to all types of quirky cool people and that was in abundance yes san francisco has the most startup ideas that will sound terrible and probably be terrible than anywhere else where you find entrepreneurs because like a lot of other entrepreneurs will be doing you know like if you go to new york or something you'll meet a lot of like let's say media entrepreneurs and they're doing media and media is something you can understand and something's good it's really an execution based thing whereas san francisco it's like you know you're just digging for gold and most of the time you're just gonna find dirt and sand and and i could've have told you there's is probably dirt there but every once in a while someone finds gold and that's what keeps everybody out there doing these kinda weird undiscovered random sounding ideas the the the spread of the ideas is is just so different than anything you'd see in most other like places where you're gonna find business i think if i was twenty two years old or twenty years old in a recent college grad and i was remotely interested in tech technology analogy i still without i think it's a place to be yeah agreed agreed i just started reading have you heard of this book called the arts thief no very very popular book i'm still like very early on into it but it's a story of a guy it's a true story of an art thief who stole i think it was three billion dollars worth of art and what makes this book amazing and what this makes this guy spectacular to read about he did not sell one piece of art ever so so he stole it and he felt he had like a a code he felt it was the right thing he's like you can't steal art and hurt people and he should just do it in the middle of the day while the museum is open like there shouldn't be like a big heist and so like he was a genius i guess you could say at like going to a museum and when the he would study the guards for weeks and when they were on their like routes where they were at the change he would like hurry up and unscrew one screw and you would take the screw out and put his pocket and then just like walk around and then he would do it a bunch of times where he was able to get the art and what's crazy is that when he was arrested he had his girlfriend who was his acc they lived in his mother's apartment in a rink dink room and in this room was roughly three billion dollars worth of art it was like paintings tri and he was like he had this famous statue look at the statue of adam and eve it's like the size of a shoe box but it this beautiful statue and i believe it's worth tens of millions of dollars and he had it on his bedside table because he said this art shouldn't be in a museum where there's gonna be some tour guy telling you some like written the story about it and you're barely even going to be paying attention he's like it should be in my room where i could wake up and i could rub my hands across this and like truly experience this piece of art is it weird to just really honor and admire this absolute criminal because i do yeah it's weird but that sort of goes back to the point about like all and like how not all not all all is good and so yes i can like it acknowledge that what he did was wrong and also i can still like be in amazement as to how pure your code was even when it came to being a thief and how it relates to what you're talking about where he the reason he was so passionate about this was his grandfather loved going around the beach with a metal detector and so he got obsessed with finding treasures very similar to dan brown and he's and got obsessed with art and so it's kind of an interesting story and i'm like why am i so john to this story and you're kind of explaining why i'm so john to his because enthusiasm contagious alright i don't know how we got on all that but that was amazing i gotta run so who wants wrap this bad boy up alright that's it that's the pod i feel like i could rude world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never looking back alright let's take a quick break i wanna tell you about marketing school it is a podcast that is part of the hubspot podcast network and it is run by neil patel and eric sue and these guys are both mark who are running businesses and so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it this is the podcast for you check it out wherever you get your podcast recruiters