#64 - Trapped Data Creating Unicorns, Billionaire Punches Punk Kid & Missing Out on $5M

alright everyone we have jordan har are on and i'm gonna tell you why so we get a lot of and a lot of people asking us questions on how to do different things that we talk about in the podcast and that's great and we do the same thing sean and i and one of the folks we turn to on a regular basis i'm texting him all the time is jordan harbinger so jordan he's had podcast for thirteen years now he's been in the top one hundred for almost that entire time and he's got a great product called the jordan harbinger show where he talks about social engineering in particular he teaches navy seals how to do social engineering engineer he teaches intelligence agencies special operations it's incredibly fascinating he dives deep with his guests to learn how they think why they think and it's really really really fascinating and it's something that i've been listening to for years but he has one episode that's incredibly fascinating to me and that's about the guy from catch me if you can frank ab male is that his name jordan yeah frank ab male he's a fascinating character he came on the show and we spent a long time talking about the psychology behind how he was able to trick so many people so to refresh people's memory he posed as an airline pilot which is kinda terrifying a doctor and an attorney all of these are pretty specialized you know look if you just pretending to know how to stock shelves at a grocery store like that is something where somebody who does that for a living could probably catch you but the a normal person might not have any idea now when you're pretending to be a doctor the stakes are pretty high man you know law kind of trickier to pass the bar exam that kind of thing so the airline pilot of course is that really takes the cake he did this all in his twenties and we spent a ton of time on the jordan harbinger show discussing and dissect the concepts behind why people believed him these same concepts work even now he's told us that it's actually easier now for fraud scams con to operate than it was back then because you'd think oh now we have computers we can verify everything back then they didn't have that the communication took longer now though people trust the machines too much so you can trick people and you can trick machines things just got even more complicated and he that's what he does now is teaches law enforcement fbi and citizens like you and i how to avoid common scams and fraud all of course while dissect this psychology behind it i loved this episode is one of my favorites i remember watching this movie years ago and then i immediately read the book and i was fascinated i'm a scheme and and i like building businesses and just like what i call scheming i like doing things and whenever you see someone doing something like this i mean they romanticized it and made it and made it sound like like it was kinda cool to go and and become a a pilot and so he gotta use it a little bit for evil but what are some techniques and tactics and strategies that he used to persuade people that you think people now should capitalize on so something that he used that i actually to a certain degree also used in my twenties is the element of fear and now look i don't mean you're scaring people and pulling guns on them and making them freak out but for example i used to talk my way into concerts before i could afford to go to them and the way that i did that was i would show up and say hey i am from this magazine from this german website or whatever and people would say like well i don't have anything on that i have no reservation for you and i would say oh well that's okay i what's your name julian okay i i just wanna make sure because i'm gonna go home go back to my hotel and get some rest but i don't wanna get in trouble from my editor so i'm just gonna be like add gi didn't have my reservation on her sheet and she go hold on a second because nobody wants their name pinned to a failure in a business so she'd go get her manager i'd give him the same spiel and then the guy would go you know he he's doing the calculation in his head right he's going either i don't let this person in and possibly the owner gets mad at me because this media guy came from germany and was supposed to be doing this thing and it didn't happen or i just let him in and it's no skin off my nose so they can do the calculation in their head now an amateur person will try to explain and force you to do that calculation by explaining it to you and being explicit if you can get people to think it's their idea and that's how they solve the problem then that's the security hole right and it's kind of like sales except for your trying to un sell them on a certain idea and then you get them to push the issue forward now that's it simplification but that's essentially what he did in many ways in order to pose as a doctor to lawyer in an airline pilot he learned jargon so that he sounded more believable and we can find we can do the same thing if you know how to talk in the language of the target you are going to have a huge advantage in terms of being believed a lot of military people find this you'll say that the you'll see that military people can find who's posing as an intelligence agent or special operator by the words that they use so if you can master that vernacular you go automatically behind the circle of trust right they start believing you because you talk walk act speak like them that's dangerous mental fallacy to fall into god that's so fascinating i'm just i'm sitting here just licking at my chops at how i wanna apply this i really appreciate you coming on so there's no money being exchanged here we're we're promoting this because jordan is is an amazing guy and has helped us grow this podcast but also i've been listening to him for years and so this isn't don't take this lightly we we love this guy jordan how can people find you yeah you can find me anywhere you get your podcast just search for the jordan harbinger show or you can google the jordan harbinger show or go to jordan harbinger dot com i appreciate man is awesome thank you we're back another episode of the greatest podcast ever created my first million how are you sam what's going on how are you i'm thriving i'm actually really hot in this room but i'm thriving do you wanna talk about andrew wilkinson consultant because i've been thinking about him a lot he's on your mind got a crush it's you on your mind yeah i mean we did an episode with him i thought it was great i think he's great and the reaction was great so that's triple great from my end what what what's on your mind i just think he's great and say it's you i just think that he was smart good attitude i think that the reason i like talking to him is because i'm in san francisco there's this constant mindset that i'm so thankful that i've thrown surround myself with which is all these people who like have these ideas and some them are really dumb ideas and they raise a lot of money for and they become huge and some of the dumb ideas become awesome and that's fantastic and a lot of the dumb ideas remain dumb and just a lot of money was wasted and there's just a lot of mentality things that are in san francisco that i love but a lot of it has downside so it's nice to hear something from andrew who just totally does not do anything that i'm used to and i love it yeah i also like how he's kind of a one man crew like i know he obviously has ceos for companies and it sounds like he has a partner but like i read his blog that tim writing when we're you know when we're talking on the phone the strategy is like he thought it was he was an original thinker so he he basically decided how he wanted to live his life and then lived his life that way and his decision was his it was not like oh i just chose of these five popular paths i picked path four it's like nah he picked path seven which was just a path that you know him and a few other people have have made for themselves yeah i just always think it's great to hear hear from people who do things totally different than what what you think you should be doing and it's just nice to hear it was just just he us a fresh perspective and for those who don't know didn't listen didn't care the things in my opinion that he did differently sort of like okay where did he say who andrew is yeah so andrew he owns company called tiny if you got a tiny capital dot com you could see it and he's trying to do the sort of warren buffett model where he buys where he thinks are wonderful businesses he plans to hold them for a long time he has operators run them and he has a holding company that owns all of them and sort of the net value is you know over a hundred million dollars for these companies down he's he basically had that he's and the way that he financed it was he started an agency when he was nineteen he's probably thirty three thirty four now right and so that get like a little cash cow exactly so started that agency kind of in his parents basement type of thing did that for many years like you i don't know a decade or so and then got it to the point where he had a bunch of free cash flows okay what do i do with this money and decided to invest it buying business so what the way i think t zig whatever everyone else sag was the canada decision so contrary you know sort conventional wisdom is you gotta be in silicon valley you gotta be new york la wherever wherever the hubs are and he was like like no i'm gonna live where i wanna live and i'm gonna take advantage of some of the arbitrage opportunities of you know he charged san francisco rates to his companies he was doing designs for but he paid his people you know local rights for doing the work that they were doing and so his agency was wildly profitable and that compounded over like a decade which is great so canada was one contrary decision the other one was buying businesses versus building them so building businesses very sexy heroic you're a genius your steve jobs by biz buying you know a business that does two million dollars in revenue and one million dollars of eb you don't get that same sort of props but his take was like i think that building is sort of fun and he still does it but overrated and over indexed on versus buying where there's way more opportunities so i thought that was another one and i went to canada i went and hung out with him for a couple days we almost did business together and i was like oh i can't find a flight to directly to victoria so andrew lives in victoria which is like a it feels like a small european town i don't know how many people live there maybe three hundred thousand maybe lot maybe maybe last actually maybe two hundred thousand and i was like i can't find the direct flight he goes it's okay we'll get you up here and he chartered a jet for me lying there poland it was awesome it was great so i'm happy i'm friends with him for that reason alone i have your friends of him yeah he's seems he was good guy i think we should have him on the punch yes like once a month at the minimum and it should just be a friend friend of the ships do you wanna talk about something that is that i found on the internet that i think is i don't know if it's real or not tell me more okay so there's this guy named sam evans have you heard of this person you know you had mentioned his name and i was like sam evans never heard him it sounds like a fake name and then i googled him and i saw his i was oh i've seen this guy on my facebook feed this guy advertise a lot so to tell me about i don't know much about them tell me about yeah so the way it started was he's in a new zealand guy he's maybe thirty years old and he started what he claims is a consultant consulting business which basically he would talk to small barber or i don't know what type of company small local things that wanted in more leads and he would help them like optimize d yelp or something like that and i think that that was mildly successful and from there he goes well i'm just gonna teach other companies how to do this and so he created a course and he named it consulting dot com and at this point now there's three courses so the first course is creating a consulting business which is like you do stuff for local companies like teach you like how to be a consultant yeah it teaches his course teaches you how to be a consultant and so obviously that's like the model as you make more money teach teaching people and than actually doing the thing and so he it's called two grand and they started making money off that then that teaches you how to go from zero to some sustainable business and then from there there's a five thousand dollar course which teaches you how to go from a hundred five hundred thousand dollar company to a some million dollar company and then there's a higher end which is fifty grand and that teaches you how to go from one million to eight figures right and his website like i don't know if this is like a git rich quick scheme like i can't tell because it is so elaborate that it could be true but it seems so good to be true and he claims to do something like fifty or sixty million dollars a year in sales with fifty percent margin on his sorry website his consulting dot com yep great day yeah but like when you click through it it all seems so good to be true like there's like video overview and i am i know how to like hack that together yeah of course you can make something look totally legit and like six hours with two red bulls but his stuff is so it's so elaborate so if it is a key and then i look at his class door reviews and like it not it some some some sometimes i think this adds up to be legit or this adds up to where this is just a massive fraud scam it's very interesting so he says on the website twenty thousand active students so if we take the lowest paid plan that you mentioned to downtown that's forty million a year of recurring revenue well no it's not recurring it's just a one time okay that's forty million in sales right not over not the sale is a digital course correct yeah so it could be very profitable minus ad spend right so maybe sixty sixty percent margin or something like that yeah it's super interesting it's very interesting but like so you go from level one beginner level two master to level three god oh damn don't you just wanna spend that fifty grand to become a level three god but it's so interesting because if you like if you had cash flow each year like what's the amount of cash flow that you need each year to where you think that you don't like that you couldn't spend that amount like twenty million dollars probably right oh yeah i think that's high i don't think you'd spend more than five million dollars a year net taxes like after taxes taxes yeah maybe you could dude i think what's two hundred thousand dollars a month that's a three million dollars a year i could spend three million dollars year pretty easily lily doing what i've have got friends who live in long island what what would you do and they spent eighty grand a month i mean i would i would just have two huge houses and a full staff to take care of me i mean would be a company just you staff care me just handle of my needs it would be a company right care i would have a a handful of cars in two a nice house and and then another house in the warm weather right and i would fly private and you're still under the five million right that's three point six million that you you said so like get maybe maybe you need ten as a buffer i just think that you could do it so so you're saying this might be a tremendous business and it's a little discussion the box detectors go i wanted to know if you had ever heard of this or if the listeners have ever heard of this and if this is legit some of our trump subscribers told me they subscribe to it and they're like i got i got a lot of value out of it yeah i would believe that so so i'll tell you kinda of my closest experience or something like this so first of all no i've never heard of this and i don't know any entrepreneurs in san francisco were all my friends are from that do anything like this but that doesn't mean it's not valuable the closest thing i did to this was sort of going into the tony robbins pipeline and so i've i i've tried a bunch of times about tony robbins how great he is and blah blah i like them a lot i got a lot of value out it go into his workshop it was all with you and i helped because it freaked me out yeah a lot of people get freaked a lot of people's pre consumption is just this is like a cult sky a snake oil you know salesman or whatever yeah like what am i getting myself into and i gotta admit like when i went there i was like okay cool i'm going but i'm not doing any of that dancing shit i'm just a i'm just here for the information i'm gonna sit down i'll be quiet i'm not gonna yell i'm not gonna hug i'm not gonna dance and you had the friend sat separately so you wouldn't be embarrassed if you do was my brother line and we just agreed beforehand were we're like yeah we might end up doing the dancing shit so you sit on that side of the i'm sitting on this side of the room and let's see we didn't see each other except for at the end of the night when the the event would end each day and we would get back back together but anyways by you know hour one i'm dancing and doing all the good stuff too but anyways it was a lot of value you know it cost me like thousand bucks to go to this thing i thought it's tremendous and then in the thing like he upsell just like this guy does right so he's like you know one of the first kind of i don't know coaches lifestyle coaches business coaches out there and he's been doing this for forty years now so he went from audio tapes to books to info commercials now the internet like whatever the channel was he wrote it and i was like i'm the business coach i'm the livestock coach and you know i i got a lot of value and at one point he upsell his business mastery class or his business mastery things it's like okay if you like this if you like how you're feeling right now and right after he makes you feel great he's like you know that table over there is for anybody who wants to grow their business it's ten thousand dollars you spend five days with me and if you don't get a million dollars of value from this thing i will give you all your money back and in the moment i was like dude i get a million dollars of value today either you know of course i would do that so i didn't actually sign up for but our buddy c did and went to he did i also so i believe so and so you know sorry to see if i got that wrong but i pretty sure he told me he did and i have several friends who actually did it as well and they said they're like yeah great and if you have a business that's doing you know if you have a business your size right your business worth tens of millions of dollars if you can get a sort of two percent three percent five percent lift yeah in your business just through improving your own psychology your own enthusiasm your own tactics it's obviously paid itself off right so so but how does the infrastructure of this work like i'm looking at it now does you does tony robbins literally have to be at all the things no so well he does his live event yes so he's the traveling salesman that does the live events and he probably does i don't know i'm gonna get it wrong but like let's call it twenty to forty live events a year a lot it's hard work a lot you know every week he every week or two he's somewhere and then he has his sort of like army of like coaches that are trained under him but by the way they all seem garbage and so he has this you know the people who are the actual coaches that will call you and do all other the stuff with you they are you know like there's like a a fleet of them i don't know a hundred and a hundred people that and just need the the structure is garbage those people are garbage when i met them i was not impressed in fact on the days so turnaround to do this for forty years to the point where he's been public speaking on stages hype crowds up for like forty years right so he can't actually do two days back to back so he does day one and he goes from eight am to one am and there's no breaks you can go to the bathroom but you missing the action when you go and he's just talk and the whole time he's on stage he's talking and he's got ten thousand people in an audience i've been twice now actually i've been three times so i should i just correct that so so the first time i was just experiencing at the second two time i was observing it because i took a fleet of friends i bought tickets from my family and friends i was like this is the best gift i can give you and they loved it most of them and so anyways he holds people's attention for like fourteen hours straight which is incredible you know you can't most of people can't you know listen to a six minute youtube video and and have their attention help but then the second day it's not him on stage because his vocal cords are shredded right so he can't speak the next day and this like his number two comes up and this guy's is a good public speaker but he's not like it's like michael jordan and then you go down to bj armstrong and it's like oh now i came here to for michael jordan and so literally this guy just he says stuff and then he tees up a video of tony talking ten years ago when he used to do this like he used to do all four days himself oh my it's he cues up the the video of tony and he said there you're watching youtube videos with ten thousand other people and this guy is just moderating it it's like this bizarre experience that's crazy i didn't really sell it very much but i'll tell you this that was probably the best the best money i've ever spent on anything self improvement wise add up all the books or or anything else it's not even close maybe i should do it you should tell you should totally it i took about twenty people so i paid for twenty people's tickets to go you twenty grand yeah i basically became an affiliate for him i didn't get paid i just i believed it so much i paid for twenty other people to go and since then in the in it's been four years since then and of them i would say four people were like me where they were like holy shit life changed that was the most valuable thing so four out of twenty let's say and then another let's call it i don't know fifteen we're kind of like that was amazing and i talked to him a year later and they're like disappointed in themselves that they didn't carry it forward they're like god was so good and i had so much clarity and had so much energy but i'm kinda mad at myself i just kinda let it fade from there like i don't even really remember it now i just remember what i felt them and yeah guess i didn't really get too much value because i'm not doing any of the things i wanted to do you know after that weekend well and then there's three or four people that literally left they were like this is way too cult this is pop science i don't like this i don't believe this i don't like how he's manipulating everybody i'm out and i was like okay that's the spectrum anyone i know alex from calm the founder of calm he hated it and so he just went for a bike i think in the middle of one of the days because he was like it's just too much for me he's like i don't i didn't i didn't feel good and what was going on and so i left i rode my bike around the city and i had fun doing that and then what what was the number one takeaway away for me oh dude i have a notepad full that i call the bible because i was like this is the closest thing that i have to right it's like religion and is mainly like god real religion is like an operating philosophy for life right that's what that's what what people use religion for in many ways like you know don't harm your neighbor blah blah blah like it's an operating philosophy so this was an operating philosophy so i'll i'll give you two of the nuggets right so the first one is the quality of your life is equal to the quality of the emotions you have on a day to day basis what does that kind of a mouthful but like we're both in a good position we're very privileged were more successful than we ever thought we would be seven years ago probably like the position were in now seven years ago us would have been en at that what your happiness is not like ten times more than it was seven years ago right like you're probably feeling about the same and the reason why is that you know life is not about you know what you have and what you've achieved it's about who you've become and so what most people well most people miss is that if you are it doesn't matter if you're rich doesn't matter if you're a family it doesn't matter if you have you know if you're famous if the emotions that you're feeling on a day to day basis are stressed then you have a shitty quality of life if you're feeling anger or upset then you have a shitty quality of life regardless of everything else and so then the question is how do you figure out how to like change your emotions on a day to basis so you're feeling good every day regardless of your situation also like so he gives you three three or you like he's like here's the three movies ways you exchange change how you feel the very first thing is your bias is yeah physical so if you change your if you have a radical change in your physiology calls it which it basically means if you did a bunch of push ups if you exercise if you ran if you jumped into a cold pool or or why people like taking a hot showers is it to relax the fastest way to change how you feel is to physically change your body in fact emmett who's the ceo of twitch was telling me this the of other day or you he was kind of talking about this on twitter people have panic attacks and when you have a panic it's really uncomfortable feeling and most people with panic attacks really want a solution of like how do i not get these any i i take medicine and so some people take medicine and that's one way to change your physiology is chemically changing your physiology what most people try to do is like people try to help people think their way out of it they're like oh just no don't be so anxious and you need to just relax and like as if that can help that's like you know that's if that that easy yeah we would all do it and actually what science has shown is that fastest most effective kind of quick and dirty way to stop a panic attack is to plunge your face into really cold water if you do that right at the start of panic attack it will stop it because your fight flight will kick in it'll it'll override that and so one time i to one time i accidentally ate a brownie up my roommate made and they turned out to be edible brownie and i don't smoke weed and i hate weed so much like i don't do any of that and i ate a lot of and i was like james up flipping out and he goes yeah i'm sorry those were wheat brown is and i i i started having panic attack and i went and gotten a cold shower and that was the only thing that helps oh nice okay yeah so so that's fastest way james what you feel is your body either through heat cold or getting your heart rate up and exercising and it doesn't be like go go to the gym it can be like if you did ten jumping jacks you will feel different than you did right before that the second one is focus so what are you gonna focus on so so you you know where you place your focus is gonna judge how what your brain is what your brain is basically signaling to your body of how to feel so if you're focused on pain then you're gonna feel shitty if you're focused on how somebody did you wrong how this guy cut you off in traffic you're gonna get outraged but if you focus on things you're grateful for if you focus on things are going well if you focus on things that are that you can trust that you can rely on you'll feel different and then the last one is i think it's like language the language or story which basically the words you use in the store you tell yourself the big the big idea and i recommend this to anybody who's in business which is the quality of your results is linked to your quality of your decisions and the quality of your decisions is linked to the quality of the internal monologue you have so the conversation you have with yourself ends up dictating the decisions you make which ends up dictating the results you get and that's kinda what i pulled away from the whole thing and then it's a whole bunch of strategies to do that better i think you just saved me a thousand dollars well you gotta get up and dance otherwise it doesn't stick this is awesome i like learn about this yeah i always hesitate to talk about it because it's like kinda preach but i no i don't don't helps soft people it's never preach when you can make fun it so like you you you do a good job of making fun of something and then you explain what it is so that's never preach okay sounds good alright let's do let's do a little a little different let's do we started this joking segment called the billionaire of the week billy of the week and i think we should actually continue it i loved it i your guys xavier neil i went and looked you talked about him two weeks ago and i went and read all about them he mostly speaks french and all his talks on youtube so it was kinda hard to you gotta read along he's badass ass i love that guy okay then he had one that you were thinking about who who's the billionaire of the week yeah let me pull up my notes so his name is michael lo have you heard of him i had not okay so michael lo in the nineties i'm pulling up my notes he started this thing called synapse group and basically what they did was this was before a lot of things were popular on the internet and so they patented i don't know how they did this there must been something unique about it but they patented the subs online subscription model i don't yeah i i don't know like how that there it there's some really nitty gritty things that are a little bit beyond what i'm able to understand but hold on they've made money off that patent or they're just patent but everybody does it well so they they just created a unique way to do it and i think i don't know exactly how it worked but basically time magazine meredith which is this huge magazine publisher all these magazine publishers would pay them money to get them more subscriptions because this way in which they were able to get people to renew subscriptions must have been fantastic and it worked really well i don't understand how it worked then basically what it seems now is like a really robust affiliate network so like meredith will cross sell meredith which is a three billion dollar company based on of in minnesota i believe bought the company synapse for a lot of money and they deployed it across all their brands so i it's kinda let's he made it big through the synapse group which was a magazine subscription yeah he it definitely made him wealthy he didn't make him a billionaire there but it made him he definitely got wealthy what made him really wealthy was what his c cofounder synapse he went started price line and price line eventually i think are they are they owned by ex xp or are they the own thing i'm not or as an owner let's just check it out booking booking hold booking so it now it's just a huge you know huge thing so that that made them very wealthy but what's interesting is after that he started like they what used to be part of just like a a a rich entrepreneur playground where they just launched companies right and it's called lo n lo dot nyc and they've started a whole bunch of companies including a company called the i believe it's called drip relief you know what that is no so what you do is you go to it they started companies like or they used to they used to own script relief and then they renamed it to something else but basically what you do is you go to the website and you can get discounts off of your pharmaceutical drugs and so like if you wanna buy if you xanax x or some type of acne medicine or something like that somehow they they get they get access to these deals and you use that coupon code at cvs and you get a discount and gotcha it's paid for sending cvs business and they made that business we talked about on the podcast call thanks the b gifting thing it looks like it's in their range incubator yeah so they own a business stuff and he owns a lot of them and a business like script relief was making something like a hundred million dollars a year in profit and so some of his companies are really big now here's another reason why he's interesting do you ever watch that tv show billions yeah love it do you know the house at bobby axel rod okay yes that's his house so that's michael lu house oh wow okay and baller last year or two years ago michael lo had a big party like a fundraiser like a sophisticated thing and his son brought some friends along and some of the eighteen year old friends got drunk and started pissing on the front lawn and just looked them like a fool and so a low punch one of the kids in the nose and broke his nose and might go to jail for he he he just punches his kid one time but he heard him pretty bad he's he jail for just that they're they're trying to get him to go to jail for that i mean that's a saul if you if you heard someone you can get if be if you wanna a billionaire there you definitely could go to jail for that i i they're trying to get them go to jail i have a feeling he's just gonna write a fat check i mean yeah that kid was is probably just a rich sn so where did you see the scripts thing this is not on their website i talked to people who work there oh sam doing this thing investigative to a journalist sam i like it this talk to people who work there so if you google and let's see michael lo so google michael lo script relief it's it's on his linkedin yeah i see it now it's renamed something else though do say what it's renamed to i'm checking but you know logging in into linkedin is like yeah know taking the first ten steps the hell so i'm gonna try this now sc relief was recently sold to united health over five million users yeah so it was sold to someone at else and now it's called something else but he just has like a web of companies and he's just super interesting because do this is gonna sound weird when you look at this guy do you do you think this guy looks like billionaire man does this guy look like a successful guy no that's why he doesn't into me he looks like a guy who would punch him in the face yeah he looks like a guy who's like bitter out about his life and punching kid in the face for that reason not punch a kid in the face because he's a billionaire in the kid pissed in his pool oh oh he looks like he would be punching kids in the face regardless of when his financial status was that's why he he's interesting to me so i have such a look at his mug shot google is name and look at about like he looks like he looks like he looks like a tough guy yeah he looks yeah he looks like a tough he looks like an enforce that a billionaire i would have he he's a billionaire he looks like a billionaire is enforce her yeah that's why i think i think this person's interesting because he's dang they have a picture of the kid who he punched yeah he fucked him he left to that broke nose oh man i did not expect to just see those two side by side that's yeah this is quality this is quality google when is searching it's good right and look at that kid he definitely has a punch face yeah well the kid looks like he did something he's even he's like kinda sm in the picture you think a broken nose he's in the hospital shirts covered in blood he's got a little sm on them yeah super interesting person right right yeah so okay i like this guy i i never even heard of this guy i feel like you know a bunch of these guys they're like the either media titans or like these other like new new york you know new york rich people i only know like san francisco or like dubai rich people i know them because i spend time time on wikipedia because my way of building businesses is i'd like to see what has worked and on i i reverse engineer how it worked and i i'm like alright i'm gonna deploy that on my company right and when i reverse engineering things i'll like read about the company right well i'll see who started it and i'm like oh wait guy started oh but he was friends with this person and they partnered previously i bet he had access to that's probably how so like i like under so you i just like reverse engineer thinks yeah i like that and then you call people which most don't you get a op funny start calling people work at the company and you get that extra ten percent that you needed right to get that of helps because oh i've made friends with someone who started his thing so now if i wanna meet him i i have it in right so okay so i have another example of what you just said i was gonna save this guy for next week but we're gonna do a double billion of the week so we're doing a double building special get get your get your billy right now richard burton okay so have you heard of this guy richard burton is it burton spell words no so this guy i started a couple of different companies so just if you just google richard burton i did earlier and nothing came up oh did i my saying is the name wrong i i think you got it wrong because i did okay heat barton sorry barton not burton okay so barton so this guy started zillow he also started one of your favorite sites glass door he also started he has three so he has zillow he has glass door and which what's his other one i was gonna research this for next week so we're just gonna do this live here and he did ex xp he did ex board of directors on netflix you did ex ex zillow and glass door what a fucking baller like okay media yeah so okay so how how did this happen so i've listened this interview with this guy like five years ago before this podcast even started before this podcast was even a little you know sperm my balls and when i when i look at this guy the one thing that stood out to me was he had a very simple thesis that he used to start all these companies which was information wants to be free so okay what his information wants to be free so he was basically like i'm gonna bring transparency to industries that are that are not transparent and so he's you know let's take zillow for example before zillow and they sort of online house and house search companies existed like t and all this red fans stuff like that the ml listings were something that only the agents and brokers had access to and so this is they were gatekeepers they were like oh you wanna know what's on the market let me literally print out the ml papers and i'll i'll show you the show you these and i'll i'll tour you through these companies that's so straight line dude information that one information wants you got information wants to be free and so so they needed did the same thing in travel right we had travel agents who were the brokers who you had to call be hey i'd like to get a flight i don't wanna pay too much and that you just trust that hopefully this agent is gotta do we gotta do their job they're gonna know all the different options different times different airports and they're gonna find me something that fits my needs and ex ex was just a search bar that would just tell you here's all the flights you decide here's the information you don't need to go to a agent anymore and glass door is the same thing you wanted to know what's it really like to work there and employers have no desire to put that out there they don't want anybody to know any of the bad things that happen you know the working environment of the company and employees were often scared to do it because they would sign things so would be like you know non disclosure whatever non sla or figure forgot what the term for it is non dis and so glass door was unleashing the information about what's it like to work at x company and so i love how this guy literally on one thesis has started three multi billion dollar companies off that one premise and so that was when i when i did what you were talking about i reverse engineer engineered how did this guy do it it wasn't how did he build ex how did he build zillow it was how did you even get this idea oh okay what other industries today lack transparency where i can open them what are they oh doable well if now you that's a billion dollar idea i need to have the spot cut let's think of some one of them is pricing for enterprise software right what they do is find out how much money your company makes and they go okay we're gonna charge you this right like that i like that a lot like i hate the call all for pricing model i mean i i hate it but it works we do it so angel did this in in a way as well when you were able to figure out who's invested in what that used to be like sort of not easy to find information it wasn't sort of like totally guarded but i the crunch base as well i'm literally just looking at the tabs that i have open right like yale yelp yep yelp put something like that too you know was what is like to eat either the review system it it organized and made public information that people wanted that was not super transparent before this yeah i mean housing he did that there's a lot there's there's so many good ones salaries you did that with glass door there's a lot last salaries yeah so there's there's one that i use that's in the tech world called levels i think we talked about it once before but they do it where with just the like kind of tech companies it's like what what do people at tech companies make and a lot of people are been doing this on inside companies so inside microsoft for example they created an anonymous google doc where you could just put your level your job category like engineer or designer or product person whatever and you're salary and your pay and then people store that's yeah can you figure out am i under underpaid but the but this was even in like more specific it was like in a company these are people now like if it's not just glass over it's like just a few who kind of go and post this stuff but like these these companies are having at these like with really rich documents of thousands of people contributing and and right now those are just excel docs i wonder if you could take the just a salary component of maybe what's in glass door and do it in a better way inside company so people make sure they're not getting the short end stick within their own company right now that's interesting another one is freelancers so like is what freelancers and agencies so the problem with a lot of this stuff is when we're were trying to hire some agencies to wordpress development i have the back channel and go find out from people who work with them what they were like both okay once i sign up to an agree with them i can't i won't find out unless i'm on a weekend if they suck or not right and it's like oh my god i can't believe that i can't believe i'm mean and that's the same thing with like payroll software too like gust looks good but when you sign up to it you don't realize like what you like and what you don't think about it so we have a couple friends who are doing things that are trying to put up you know they're trying to make information come free of what software your companies use so like a lot of people would wanna know what does the hustle use what do you guys use to send email what you guys use for analytics what do guys use for your pay pay wall what do you use for trends and like i know ryan at product hunt they're doing this with something called stacks or your stacks and they wanna know what's your software stack that your the company runs on and it's an interesting idea he's designing it kinda like a social network but the value in the end if you do if you get there is oh cool i can now go see okay if i'm building an airbnb type company what do they use to run their company what are they use wireless do you think that that is not working well it's really tough to build right this one of those things where really valuable if you get there really tough to get the information in because you have to get the incentives right later on you have the incentive to come to the site because you wanna see what other people use but what's the incentive to post and so he's trying to make it fun and interesting and cool to post by making it like very visual like sort of a doing that a profile for your company right like of like yeah we used this stuff and so i don't know the numbers on how it's doing but i do think it's an interesting experiment and i think if they did it it would be the most valuable thing that product hunt has built because it's it's just just inherently surely there's a great business model on top of that if you can show what software people use that's cool i agree that's interesting i love this idea of information needs or information wants to be free yeah i let's think more about that so i think we'll come back with an example of information today that is either behind a walled garden or it's incomplete and if you set it free it would make people make better choices or or save the money or whatever it is like maybe it's something in the insurance based maybe it's i don't i don't know exactly what but i'm wanna think about this because i think this is a formula for building really big companies yeah for me it's how much things cost like like freelancers and and lawyers and things like that that's that's always bothered me i don't like i like my lawyer could be like yeah we charged seven hundred dollars an hour and when i was first getting going and i was like i have no idea as that normal right and on the other side it's also how much companies make right you love it when you hear that a company's public or it's to non nonprofit because you're like yes i'm gonna get to their financials because they have to report but facebook full private companies yeah well and they do in a really interesting way and they're owned by a publicly traded company they do about a hundred and twenty million dollars a year in revenue what they do like twenty five grand for pitch subscription right really expensive and they do about a hundred and twenty they're owned by is it called mornings star or it's a company bright are i think it is mornings star or mornings starts like the mutual fund thing it's yeah it's owned by one of those things and i i just read their their earnings thing morning star it is mornings sir and they are the mutual fund thing too and they what they do is they do a bunch of different things the first thing that they do is they crawl the web and they find sec documents and they find like all type they just crawl and find data and they have a team of like three hundred people who just hit the phones all day and call people and get the information right and then the other one that's like that is you know even for podcast podcasts when we look at the top charts and we're like how do we become the number one business podcast we don't know how much we don't want many downloads they get right there's this idea of how much something how much is being earned how much is something making and how much does something cost i think that just generally would apply to whole bunch of different spaces that you could you can use for this yeah that's why i use a similar web because i show me how much like traffic the guest traffic one of the dope ones of this do you use second measure yeah they're great they're great i think there's a little bit expensive they are yeah if you don't know what they are so second measure takes credit card spending data and can tell you essentially the like how much money something is making just by analyzing how many people are charging spotify per month and then they're like cool right imagine spotify if i was up public company you'd be able to see here's how much revenue that they're making our they do this with like the delivery companies which delivery companies winning well they can just check this huge data set of credit card spending and say okay it looks like gru hubs in the lead and then second is door dash or whatever and so second measure is super powerful using a source of truth which is credit card data i how they get at it really talk about this stuff all i wanna do is i like on the pie cast and make my days fifty hours long and just start search everything this whole this whole data or make information or find information wants to be free that whole concept that's amazing that's the test i want people to listen to podcast podcasts and be so excited and then i want you to feel anxious i want you to feel stressed that you don't have fifty hours in your day to go do this and that's that's how this should feel i've heard a bunch of people say like yeah i have to keep pausing the podcast to like hey write it down b take a breath think of think about what's going on and then i resume it and yeah that's what we want set that high value you want wanna think about one more thing yeah which one you see you you look at the list tell me which one you wanna do what happened with you lost five million dollars alright i didn't exactly lose five million dollars but i did not make the five million dollars that i could have alright so this is called sean's shitty investments this the new segment that we created just now and i'll tell you about two bad investments in one kid investment my made so i was talking to a friend of mine a guy had been i had been advising this guy about his startup up this maybe four or five years ago i've been advising him he didn't live in america he was building a product for international his product was around international students applying to us universities and making it easy if you don't know if you live overseas like i i finished high school in china so i saw this first firsthand if you're in china you're in india you're in malaysia the goal like your life goal is to go to a us university doesn't even matter if it's a good one it is to go to a us university and the us universities over charge for for that and and they get jump of that too sometimes yeah it actually right now there's a bunch of stuff in the news because they charge like three times more for so the state is in trouble because they have like sixty percent chinese nationals there and they're like like right what the fuck you guys are charging sixty grand for these because exactly so so anyways i was helping this guy great founder really like the company was really interested but i was at a point at that time financially where i was like okay if i'm investing in startups and a pretty irresponsible investment because you know when you invest in startups high likelihood of failure so you need to place like twenty five thirty bets and so if you say okay i'm gonna place you know twenty five thirty bets and each bets gonna be twenty five grand like i'm basically i need to have five five hundred thousand need to have seven hundred fifty thousand dollars that i'm gonna put into this which means that can't be like your whole net worth which is like my this would that would have been seventy seven seven hundred fifty grand at that time would have been more than my whole net worth and so i knew i didn't have the the sort of bank to do it but that was an excuse i could've have found a way i could've have worth to check anyways i could've have bank on myself making more in the future like i did and bottom line is i didn't so i would've have been the first check into this guy's company and my sort of twenty five thousand dollar check which i was just very very close to writing would have become five million dollar stake in this guy's business by now wait how wait what's the name of the company i don't know how i should say the name and how how big is it now i'll i'll just tell you the name will bleep it out so but it's called and so he he told me that they just crossed you know the billion dollar valuation and and so i don't know they're exactly at that don't know if they're a little over a little under but the point is they're they're doing well and and so yeah i was kicking myself because that would have been a a a big investment and this has happened to me this has happened to me now two different times where i could've have i could've have been one of the angel checks into a business i thought it was a good business i didn't pull the trigger and those two would have combined to be worth you know ten million dollars plus by now well was in the one yeah so this company this studying a broader company they're do they make a lot of revenue or is it just yeah revenue now and even then like this was they were pre revenue at the time but i was doing the math and i was like wait like they had a lo signed by a bunch of universities and i was like wait so if they just matched this supply demand like this thing's gonna make money but didn't have enough conviction and is it just a legion site no no it's a full software tool that led that actually does the application for the student blah blah the universe take money it's a saas company it's a free saas tool for the user and then it's a lead gen on the other side where moving gonna a kick gets accepted they get paid that way got it and they they charge the university's money yeah like thousands of dollars per student got it so okay so they don't charge the money for the software no this the software is used by the the actual student end customer so anyways it was a it's a great business big miss on my part happy for the guy though he's an awesome guy and i really i like this guy's energy lot i i you kind of sometimes to meet people who got who just have a good energy i don't know how i'll describe it but he was one of those people so and you lost mgm so now not again so basically i haven't talked about this on the podcast but i during covid i decided to to mess around with option trading which you know famous last words and so i was literally this is how dumb i am right so so i don't play in the finance but public markets that much i just do very simple things i just buy companies i think are good the next ten years or buy index funds i don't do a whole i don't do like day trading i don't do you know leverage buying or i don't do shorts but i was like you know what i don't see any way that mgm which is mgm resorts i was like i don't see any way that their business doesn't go down with this covid thing and so i was thinking about it and it it got cut by like seventy five percent so the stock price dropped from i don't know it was like twenty five dropped from thirty down to like twelve and and i was like yeah i still think that this thing is gonna go down and so i'm literally on one tab i have like a khan academy video of like what the hell is it put and on the other hand i've got my robinhood accounts and i'm like just pushing buttons and so i pushed a bunch of buttons and i placed this trade which basically said okay i think mgm gonna go down and yeah know about two thousand dollars worth options and like let's see what happens and it turned out mj mgm did go down but i needed it once i understood my own trade which was like after i placed it to those again just push your buttons when i was looking at the like confirmation i was like shit this is horrible trade like i i just basically said that this is gonna go down forty percent in the next seven days i was like what stop you lose grand i love so i was like what a stupid bet so that's my bad the two bad investments i wanna share on the other side other side i bet really being into bitcoin when it dropped to like forty five hundred recently and now back up so that one made back put money from for the buy shitty option trading in spain i i completely stay away from stocks i only buy and smb b five hundred hundred or facebook stock and about two weeks ago when it was at the bottom i was like thanks i was like no when the whole market was real low like the lowest point maybe ten or two weeks ago i sold most everything and i was like i was like i think this just gonna get worse similar and worse because unemployment and unemployment comes out and it's the highest it's ever been and or the unemployment work claims and then the stock market goes up twenty percent i like i just don't understand how this i don't i don't understand how this works at all because right and then i applied for the loan for for that trump enacted and i'm like so you're telling me we get free money that sounds great but you when you start thinking about it you're like i'm gonna pay for this eventually like somehow i'm there's no such thing as free or we're gonna pay for it eventually and so this money it's just this whole situation it doesn't make sense to me because the stock market should be going down yes they will this is a this is this is a sort of a debt cap balance or like sort of a false rally but for getting forgetting the market right now because don't know shit about it and who also who cares it's not that interesting it's a spec game the there's a a phrase i learned that thought that was pretty cool it's called a kensington beauty contest do know what the kensington and beauty contest is okay so have you heard of that sort of the economist of got bull names like maynard john maynard ka or whatever anyways he's famous guy in the the world of economics can economics and a mackenzie beauty contest describes this phenomenon where let's say there's a no what you think the stock market should be is here's the asset here's a company you could buy some of their stock and you buy it if you think that the companies are gonna become more valuable than it's priced at today that's what we think should be happening but what's actually happening is this is a spec market right so speculation driven market and so you don't in in a short time horizon you don't you're not betting that the company is going to improve and actually generate more revenue and whatnot you're just betting that other people are gonna think this is more attractive but they're also betting that other people are gonna think things more attractive so it's can and beauty contest is where you're not actually judging the beauty of it you are thinking what the other judges would think about this thing and they're thinking about what the other gestures think about this thing and it becomes a sort of speculative loop and that's my sort of wikipedia page of the week that's that's that's exactly how things are working and it just annoys me so you have so much more control over your life when you actually run the business right and there's also a great phrase which is sort of in in the short term the stock market has a popularity contest and in the long term it's a weighing machine and i i think that i really describes it well right so like is this is also for private companies as well and when you're when you're raising a series a and you're a hyped company it's a popularity contest and when people like how did this valuation that doesn't make any sense it's like yeah it makes sense if you if you understand that this is currently a popularity contest but over the long call it does not remain a popularity contest becomes a weighing machine and if you're full at air and there's nothing there like your value will go down and so for all people who don't understand those valuations that's why it's frustrating i'm just so i don't i don't do anything in that world because i just not i i don't know anything about it and i don't wanna know i it makes me too angry okay cool do you wanna squeeze anything else in or do you wanna we can wrap it tell people about the other podcast you guys are doing yeah we just launched one with mo ali which you should go on it sean i had a i went on it to help mo interview better but it's called exit strategy so mo started this company called native and he started it me and moe started our companies in the same same office and so saw him started it from nothing i saw him and get the idea and start this thing he started this deodorant owner company called native and twenty months after starting it he sold up for a hundred million dollars of cash or been twenty eight month months and so he decided to launch a podcast because he is looking for a new project where he's interviewing other d founders and he was talk about scaling and selling their companies it's called exit strategy to google the hustle exit strategy or just looking it up in on the spotify podcast or where you'll see yeah i started listening to it i'm like five minutes in but so far so good we'll see it how going crazy i told on my feedback to him was for the next episodes be can lean into being crazy don't hold back yeah that would be my advice as well which is don't i think when you're your when you're a really interesting person and actually your opinions are more interesting than your questions in many ways you need to make it a a conversation a debate more than a interview because i think what's gonna end up happening is that mo is gonna be end up being more interesting than most of his guests and so what he should do to raise both people's levels is for him to just act out we would normally act in a conversation with that person anyone who rather he like he says the craziest stuff ever and and he's a great guy but he's a loose cannon and i love that about him so i need him to remain as a loose camden right so check it out exit strategy we want the the podcast family to get bigger stronger better every bad entrepreneur who wants a podcast needs to go the hustle and push a button and start their podcast with the hustle but like it should be badass interesting entrepreneurs not you know sort of judgment i wants to start podcast yeah that podcast that should be the least interesting thing thing you've ever done in your career yeah we want experts we want experts who are charismatic not charismatic people who hope to be experts right and also not experts who are not charismatic because nobody wants that either yeah but yeah well it was that that's out and yeah and keep leaving reviews i i read all the reviews everyone could yelling on at me because i say my mic sucks i saw i ordered a new one but everything's back ordered yeah i have a new mic coming yeah amazon doesn't know essential these essentials are microsoft alright let's read one review let's do a a reviewer of the week let's give somebody a shout here so i'm a scan these for one second okay so three stars sam could learn how to talk to a mic but both these guys are very knowledgeable and give vest a fresh young spin i've been listening just just since it was just sean spelled my name wrong and loved it but when sam came on it became different saying gets excited his voice pops into the my yeah but come on that's the excitement sam loses the podcast not gonna do it that's to listen to yourself you can tell sean speaks softer sean mis misspelled again and tries to get sam have to quiet down but it's not working that's not true i just try to get him to to send it up okay let's let let's look at another the low lower review i these are more interesting than the high reviews although i want the high reviews but let's just do it well we have like eight hundred reviews and almost all our five stars the only ones that aren't in five stars are the people who call unethical which is bullshit the the people who say that my mic sucks which is bullshit and the people who just call bros also bullshit well no that's not bullshit i am a bro me the man yeah that's that's me alright cs value says very smart guys would not recommend hello title for review so these guys are very smart and you'll certainly learn a finger to about making money by listening to this podcast that's said it's not worth the subtle rec of your moral compass i don't know that's a decision for each listener to decide okay so then they say these are not high integrity people here's their examples of why i we're not high integrity we ask people to sub an ugg tub to gained the podcast algorithm give me a break yeah a joke laughing about lying on a job application and getting caught i didn't laugh because i thought it was good i laughed because that's the way you deal with heartache i laughed cover the pain don't you understand yeah like i said how i i i said how that was a horrible move and i got what i deserved right casually dismissing a host criminal record a host that was me yeah no one dismissed my criminal record they said it's stupid i shouldn't have done it and that's why i changed my lifestyle gotcha these guys are doing sharp guys it could at hustling hacking and scheming but this is not content i would recommend anyone putting to their brain you know what what what welcome if that doesn't make people wanna listen to this more i don't know what will that's there's our clip for instagram i like are you're looking around like our we're still in the studio and we have our staff to like clip it it's just your wife behind you okay cool let's get out of here we'll be back tuesday and yeah see enjoy share the pod