today there's gonna be literally a thousand threads that are charlie mu was live till ninety nine here's ninety nine lessons i learned and they're gonna reg the stupid quotes of wikipedia but this is my first minute we do things differently around here we're not just gonna give you the reg quotes i gotta give you that you know little special zoo that old you that you can dip the sandwiches i feel like i could rule the world to i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a road less travel charlie mu has died at age ninety nine and all around the world people are remembering charlie this guy who who's warren buffett business partner you know bill gates called charlie you know maybe the broadest thinker he knows he said that he has the best thirty second brain of anybody's he's ever met and we wanted to dissect that brain what's inside that what made charlie so prolific why did warren buffett say that berkshire shaped in the mold of charlie mu that he is one of the the smartest and wisest men he's ever met and we pulled out seven of the big ideas charlie said them a lot of things over the years but we we identified when we think are the seven big big bits of wisdom that charlie has shared what we wanted to do was instead of just making list which you're gonna see a lot today here's see people on twitter you know every thread boys is gonna be like charlie mug died at ninety nine here's the ninety nine bits of wisdom and they're gonna copy paste with wikipedia we didn't wanna do that what we wanted to do was take the seven that we thought were really really impactful and specifically tell a story of how we learned that lesson in our own business life or in our life it made for i think a pretty amazing episode i told sam i said dude this notes document that we have for this episode thing is you got a hand shift this thing is dripping with wisdom and you're gonna that's how you're gonna feel at the end of this podcast you're gonna need to take a shirt you're gonna need to wipe the old podcast player because this episode is about to be dripping with wisdom i hope you enjoy this episode on the seven bits of wisdom from charlie mu alright so let's jump into the wisdom so what i think would be fun is we just sort of trade our favorites because this guy got little qui or or quotes about the way the world works about the way minds work about the way the markets work alright you go first okay i'll i'll start with the very easy ones so one of you know one of his big ideas is to get what you want you need to deserve what you want and so he says you know the easiest way to get everything that you want is to deserve it and it's so simple that it's almost like obnoxious simple this advice if you want the partner you want you should be deserving of that level of partner right make yourself worthy of a partner like that same thing with investors saying hey he kind of calls out if few things that money can't buy so he's like trust in other people success and admiration those are things you cannot buy you can only earn and so if you want somebody's admiration deserve it if you want somebody's trust deserve it if you want success deserve it and i'll share like a very simple more practical anecdote about this because again like his big ideas are amazing but they just sort of float in the clouds unless you bring it to earth will have a real tactical example so when we sold the milk road i've said this before but one of the reasons we we sold to the guys we did was i really really respected these guys it was not the highest offer but these were the highest quality people that we could sell to and we just had a hunch that like selling to the highest quality people will result in the best long term outcome you know for every dollar we're taking west today we might create three more dollars in the future just by being around high quality people and i'll tell you a story that came out of the due diligence that like was like a nugget of gold that stuck with me that was exactly this so one of the guys that sold his businesses for about ninety to a hundred million and the other guy had sold his business for over two hundred million and both of them had built businesses that were seo based and i know a lot of things about marketing and growth but i know zero about seo i am an absolute beginner novice i never touch seo i don't do businesses that are seo base i literally know nothing and so one of the ways i priced in the deal was oh i'm gonna learn seo from these guys who are frankly masters at seo and so we get to the point where we do the deal i we're not negotiating anymore and i'm like oh good i'm a start digging and i'm gonna start picking these guys brains for seo shit so i sat them down i was like you're gonna teach me about seo now and they started to tell me something that i was like okay okay that's the general stuff i've heard that stuff before like what's the like real like master shit what's the real like black belt shit that i don't know about that you can't just google and read and you know some blog that like helped you guys create you know one guy created the number one search result for if you say i wanna buy gold online and that's the business i was you know sold for a few hundred million dollars that he bootstrap that you know never raised any money and he did it because he knew how to be the top result for by gold online how'd you do it ro what did you do was it in some some hacks some technique and he's like you know we did all the normal things and he's like when i tried some of these hacks or techniques it didn't really work he's like so then he's like you know what happened was one day i googled how to buy gold online and we were the fifth result at the time he's like so then i printed out all five of the results us being number five and i printed one through four also and i sat down for an hour and i just looked at them and i read them and i like i had an honest conversation with myself of why would i click on my page what is better about my page than these other pages and i was like wait so you didn't like do some like black hat seo shit that was like this like advanced trick and he was like no he's like we didn't deserve the click we weren't better pages he's so he's like so all i did for the next year was every week i printed out all the pages and then i made my page like you know ten percent better why i figured out one way that we could be better as objectively better even if we weren't moving up in the ranks yet that i could look at it and say this is a better page we deserve to be higher ranked and i had literally never heard this i was like on one hand in the moment honestly i was kinda disappointed i was like dude like came to you for the secret j you about seo like i'm not trying to have this like you gotta work hard and and just actually make a better page but it was also kind of like refreshing it's like you go to the people who are masters of seo and they're like yeah you could do all the tricks but at they end of the day you have to have the best result like you have to have the best page and you have to have an honest conversation itself of is your page better than these other pages he's like if you really wanna sustainably like climb the ranks to be than one that's it and that was such a like tangible business example of like to get what you want you have to deserve what you want and i'll never forget i was like one of the biggest takeaways ahead of the whole process that's beautiful i like that one he also had another line mu did but he's like i never tried to disagree with someone's opinion unless i understand their side better than they do right and that and that's like a specific example of like let's say debate of how he was like i need to i need to deserve this right so that's number two i love that one and he says i'm not entitled to an opinion like i can't have conviction until i can argue the other side better than someone who believes the other side and i he's like he's good right i think like people think this is some like crazy high bar and those people haven't ever asked somebody who believes something why they believe it like it's actually quite a low bar to surpass their own like can the their own understanding of something and you know i i think about this with like bitcoin for example i'm a bitcoin believer and my approach to this was always to say here's all the reasons why i believe in bitcoin it just makes sense for you know reason a b c and d but actually the better way to do is to say smart people who don't believe in bitcoin would say a b and c and i understand that and here's what i think about those and why i've landed on the side of conviction that i have it's just a much better logical way to think than to just say here's what i believe and i'm gonna come up with all the evidence i mean even you're gonna make up some of it to justify my opinion which is i would say how what do we call ten deal manning yeah so steel manning is like argue you the other side better than they would even argue there's a cool story from i think it's called making of a an american capitalist and so they talk about how here i'll read just the this part of the they go physically mu was uni unemployed he had an elf like face pc skin and glasses and inch thick though something of a sn and highly judgmental he had a deep sense of ethics and his smarts were matched by church self assurance once he was asked if you could play the piano and mu replied i don't know i've never tried and i thought like what a tell line like i wanna a tell lied so most people you say no i can't play the piano this was i probably could it's there's definitely a potential that i will be a great piano player i just haven't tried and when i read that line i i just thought this man's beautiful this man's one of a kind and i love people like that because myself you most everyone we default to can you do this it's like of course not i i don't have the capabilities i i i cannot do that where you that little mind of like well not yet dude noticing that props to you i read that line in the research i even understand what was remarkable with the line i just moved on i didn't even notice it till you just set it like you did so good on you for even observing it that a good one well that's what i'm saying when i'm reading about these guys it's like these little one off lines or these like like for example they'll say he founded this law firm and then next he was bored there next like whatever and i'm like well hold let me go look at this law firm and then you start reading about this law firm and dude this is quirky this is a weird super strange law firm and so anyway yeah this line it's a beautiful line about just showing like the day to day about how you could be different alright if you're loving this episode i'm glad i also wanna tell you three things that we are doing as a podcast quick little news flash news announcement about m m i have three things to tell you here they are number one there's like this meetup up thing going on so there's a woman here a company that basically helps like contact creators like a spin meet so basically what's happening is in in like a week or two around the world there's m meetups which is kind of fun we're not gonna be there because it's like you they're they're all happening on the same day in different locations but forget us if you're one of these people that listen to the podcast you're probably gonna get along with other people who listen to the podcast people who listen this podcast your business nerds with a sense of humor and if you like business owners as a sense of humor they're all getting together everybody's going to like a bar you know like there's one in toronto there's one in california there's one in austin and they're they're going to hang out it's called the river so if you go to get river dot i o so get g e t and then river like a stream river dot io o you scroll all the way to the bottom and you'll see my first million meetup up they're happening in austin in houston denver right so yeah they did this for all in i think that that's kind of one one of the proof of concepts i think there's gonna be fun so so do it we'll try to like i don't know call in into a couple of these and say hi but this is cool so that's happening next week that's fun go meet some other people who are part of neck beard nation number two we're doing the poker tournament so a while back we talked about this business that we found fascinating which was a cloud poker tournament it's like is digital poker tournament wherever everybody's these webcam cams on it could be private for our community and three hundred or four hundred people signed up we just never scheduled it but now we schedule it it's december thirteenth it's happening we will give away merch and some cool stuff as prizes we'll come up with some dope prizes thousand bucks or a call or free merge or whatever so yeah at cloud poker dot com so cloud poker dot com slash m m so if you wanna register for that if you already registered we'll send out an email to be able let him know that that's happening and last thing is i do a thing every year which is i this month this month of december is the plan for you know other people are thinking about christmas i'm thinking about end of your next year hit my goals and so i basically use this time for planning for twenty twenty four so i'm gonna host a free session which basically is i i'm currently doing it for all my businesses i make like a one page plan for what i'm trying to do next year and it's basically like the big goal and then the breakdown like how i'm gonna do it i have a method of how i get to that answer and you walk away with kind of like a clear one pager for your business ben had the idea he was like dude i love when we do this he's like we should just like do this together with other people that own businesses that wanna do it and so totally free you'll walk away in an hour with like a bunch of clarity on what's what your next year looks like i have a bunch of good questions that help people get clarity so if you wanna attend that plan four twenty twenty four dot com so go to plan for twenty forty four dot com ben's gonna spin up a website and we'll we'll invite people to that if you're the type person that wants to kinda like set the vision and the intention for next year let me give you number four so my number four charlie is i wanna bring up is let me tell you a little story about about where i where i felt this first and i would tell you the charlie so let's rewind the clock fifteen years i was living in indonesia and in indonesia i lived in this building that had a ping pong table and so i used to go down and just hang out by the ping pong table because i thought well that's maybe like you know my equivalent of like go having a drink at the bar let's just go see if anybody's down here to to play and maybe i can meet some people and so sure enough i would go down me and my brother that would go down and we will play and my brother was better than me at ping pong and he the way he plays is what you imagine somebody who's good at ping pong he's not just gonna hit it fast he's gonna jump even though you don't need to jump he's gonna be like whoa but he's gonna just make you feel like he just smashed this shot and like i was so like i was trying to get better than him he was trying to get better than me and i thought okay he's brilliant at this like he could just hit these amazing shots and i gotta be able to hit amazing shots so i'm practicing hitting amazing shots and he and so whoever used to come down he would beat them he was the best guy in the building until one day this fifty five sixty year old man came down named poppy and we're like your named pop he's like i'm poppy like okay i don't know if he's bit flexing on us if there's a real name and he takes a paddle out of his of his like case and we're like oh dude he's got his zone zone paddle oh shit he like the guy who bring us on bowling ball to the bowling alley you know got means business so we're so we already aren't on like a game basically and so i play him and poppy beats me but he didn't do anything like he wasn't smashing the ball he was doing it and i just thought man i was off today alright like aaron you play and so i'm my brother like aaron i'm like alright aaron never lost to anybody in this building let's see what happens a starts playing poppy and he's trying to do what he always does he's trying to hit brilliant shots on the corner down the line cross court you know drop shot and none of it's working poppy is destroying him and the way that poppy plays is like this is for anybody who's like a real ping pong fan i i need like something to demonstrate here's this pen pretend this is the paddle normally when you play ping pong your arm is back you're doing like a full stroke like a tennis thing poppy used to just he used to just hold it like this forward like the panel just facing you and then he would just move left and right like a wall and he would just whatever you hit he would just hit back and the thing about poppy is poppy was never hitting brilliant shots but he would also never hit it out and never hit the net and so inevitably he would just keep hitting it back and one of your brilliant shots would go out bounds you would hit it too hard too soft if you you'd hit the net like you would mess up and he would always score based on your error and he crushed us and he crushed us that day and he crushed us every day and he would just chuckle and say good game and he would go upstairs and we'd be like i can poppy man i'm gonna get this guy and we never got the whole summer i was there we never one time beat this guy and then one day he invited us up to his house afterward his apartment in the building he lived in the penthouse beautiful he was so successful in business but like poppy dude you're ball out of control he had like a secret poker room he had a a wall of just like super fancy like liquor he like people have a wine seller here had like a fancy liquor wall was crazy he had a shower with like six shower heads and we're were like dude this guy popped this and we're like what do you do and he's like i sell soap and we're like you're like you make soap he's like no i just import an export and we're like is it better soap he's like no it's just soap he's like it's good soap it's not the best and we were like well how do you sell he's like well i go to people that need soap and we're like this fucking hobby like this is how he lives his life too he's just making no no brilliant shots but no un forced errors and so this is a charlie mon which is avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance and he says other people spend their whole life trying to be so smart all i'm trying to do is not be idiotic it's harder than people think but this is more important than trying to be brilliant and so charlie was basically like how do i just avoid the great errors in life let's say it's investing how do i avoid the great errors of investing if it's health how do avoid the great errors of health and that's basically what he oriented around he wasn't perfect at it but i thought what a totally different you know a different strategy than you'll ever hear which is about being the best and becoming more advanced and becoming you know being brilliant and talented and his thing was just just avoid stupidity and you know y'all outperform everybody is there a category in the oscars for like podcast who can weave in a story into charlie mu if if if yes i think you might get i think you might get that nod that was a wonderful we gotta give it up that was a wonderful you you you had been p and i didn't know where you were gonna go with this i i was job that sometimes you just open your mouth and start talking and see where it goes and you won that mister wonder you you're you totally won that one that was a beautiful the beautiful way to tie that in copy ready that's what that's what that was i'm honestly the reason why today there's gonna be literally a thousand threads that are charlie mu was live till ninety nine here's ninety nine lessons i learned and they're gonna reg the stupid quotes of wikipedia but this is my first we do things differently around here we're not just gonna give you the reg quotes i gotta give you that you know little special zoo that old you that you can get the sandwiches and you you came with he that's gonna be hard to compete with i let me let me ask you something so right now it's it's november twenty ninth so most people are doing their next year financial planning for their businesses for years at the hustle i made a very similar mistake that i bet you made and that is over optimism have you ever hit any of your projections in the first six years of your career i've never i've never met a goal i've ever sent yeah dude if you ask people at the hustle like one of my big weaknesses is it's looking at the numbers of the excel sheet and you know you see like a seven million here and you're like what if we took that seven and deleted it and put a nine i'm like like how much more profit they gave us let's just be that genius yeah yeah people would be driven crazy because that's what i would do i just look at the sheets i'm like yeah that looks good but hey look if you just delete that number and put it to that number look how much better this looks so let's just do that and i've made that mistake so many times i i bought a property recently or a few years back and i remember like thinking like okay this is only an okay price property but yeah you know i i'm gonna like take better pictures or i'm gonna like do something when i sell it and i'm gonna make that's how i'm gonna make all this money is i'm just gonna increase revenue and i'm gonna i'm do this this this and guess what just like years of failing at projecting i totally f it up so now i try to be way more modest with my financial projections but i completely have always messed it up and mu got a bunch of good quotes he's like it's dangerous to rely too much of models and formula the the the reality is way more complex than that we're very disciplined in on our approach and we're not swayed by flimsy optimism and then he goes on to say he's like it's pretty ridiculous that people are are our bias by both over skepticism skepticism and over optimism in in the business world if the micro reality is good good decisions and good systems are what i look for not predictions of macro environment changes and so basically the point being is that his whole philosophy was to buy businesses where if i bought a good business at a good price i'm golden and then if i ever wanna sell it or if something crazy improves that's icing on the cake whereas what i do and i bet most people do and i try my hardest to avoid this nowadays is i say i default too no the optimism is actually the truth the truth is just that's just what they did because they don't know what the hell they're talking about you know what i mean right and that's been one of my biggest mistakes in business there's over optimism and what it does is it crush team morale and it gets you in a losing state of mind and it just sucks what what mu said was he goes you make a lot of money when you buy a good company at a good price but you make all of the money by letting it ride for twenty years so the patience is where the big money is and i struggle like crazy to do that i have this this year we're we're i'm trying to things a little bit differently but i have never hit any of my projects because it's just too optimistic and that is it's basically just mental masturbation is what it is by by making these projections and it's harmful it's it's a liability well there's like the thing you wanna hit you know some people say you wanna hit seventy percent of the goals that you that you set and that's like the right balance between ambition and you know practicality hitting zero percent of your goals is obviously means you're setting the wrong goals and hitting a hundred percent of your goals means you're you know obviously being applying it too safe conservatively and so there is some number between you could pick seventy fifty sixty whatever works for you and yeah i think most entrepreneurs and investors for that matter air on the side of optimism because boy doesn't it feel better in the moment to you wanna know something i'm trying to do no goals i'm trying to do no goals and i it's it's not working out with any of the partners who i'm involved with who are trying to find what it's not doing working out yeah i'm trying no goals and i'm getting no no bias so i hate i've be i've grown to hate goals man like it shouldn't change like you know what i mean it's like like this is thing with money you have like a you have like a weird relationship with money that you need like money therapy you have probably like a weird relationship with goals that like you just need to work out like you know these extremes crazy goals that nobody can hit or no goals i would just assume that the answer is actually somewhere in the middle right the mu ism is probably somewhere somewhere in the middle not not either extreme let's go to one of his other ones i think is kind of related which is one of meng big ideas the one one that he is is well known for that i have taken into my life is this idea of inversion so he'll he says invert always invert and so you know the what does this mean it's basically a way to think through problems backwards so if you it let's say you wanted to solve a common thing that people ask which is you know how do i be successful or how do i be happy in life and there might be like a thousand different answers to that question but what mu would do is is in order to get to the answer faster he would invert right why does bill gates say he goes from a to z faster than anyone he's has the best thirty second brain of anyone it's because mu default way of problem solving is to invert so he'll say instead of figuring out how to be happy let me just figure out what is the sure surefire path to misery and he literally wrote it out like i can read you the answer or what he said is to the fire path to misery or what what what did he say okay so his his he he actually did a talk and he calls us his prescription for misery so he says what a beat what a beautiful line by the way is that beautiful language or what it's it's wonderful and he says in you know number one ingesting chemicals to alter your mood or perception so if you rely on chemicals to change your mood yeah eventually this leads to misery this is like you alcoholism or like sort of like overs stimulation whatnot number two is envy he has his great quote which is the world is not people think the world is driven by greed is actually driven by envy he goes you know am lucky that you know i'm a old man now and i have conquered my envy i don't give a damn when anybody else has i don't want one anybody else has and i don't care what they have but most people are not like that for most people it drives them up the walls if they see that the neighbor has a nicer car or that their friend has a higher paying job or that their coworker gets promoted they didn't even want it in the first place but as soon as somebody else has it envy kicks in and it drives them it drives you know so much of their behavior and so number two of the prescription for for misery is envy third related is resentment if if your joy goes down when other people's joy goes up that is a surefire way to have a miserable life so those are three that he stole from somebody else and he says i'd like to add my four on top of that he says number four be unreliable if you're are un unreliable you will be dis trusted by all of those who matter and that you might be a mighty fine turtle but you will be out run by hoard of mediocre turtles if you are unreliable and even some turtles that are on crutches so it's like this idea that if you're unreliable it sort of cancels out any talent that you have that one hit home for me because as you know i am a a bit of an unreliable person and i have paid the price for that in many many times yeah hey by the way we break up that m podcast meeting that you missed yesterday yeah just was on a different call and forgot about it and so these things happened it is a penalty i paid is part of my prescription for misery here's the next one so he says another number five is learn only from your own experience and your own you know trials basically if you decide that your firsthand experience is your only way to figure out good versus bad and you're not gonna learn from other living and dead people that is a surefire way to misery because you will you will learn much slower than it than somebody who who learns the other way next one he goes when hit with adversity go down and stay down that's another prescription misery is not bounce back from adversity the ever the the inevitable and unavoidable blows of life and the last one he goes don't be objective stay stuck in your ways hold on to your initial ideas your most loved ideas hold them with a death grip and that is this final prescription for misery is to to never change your mind in light of new facts my of those that you mentioned my biggest weaknesses are envy so this pod is fun for you and i to do sometimes it creates a lot of envy because we have all these amazing people on here or or if it's just you and i like sean just did great sam didn't do as good or if we have all these amazing people on and you start talking to them and you're like i'm just as smart as this guy but this guy how do you know is when you ask how old are you that's the yeah that's the trigger of like i'm feeling terrible can you really just do the finishing blow and tell me that your teeth you're gonna be yeah and and and every once in a while there are people who i'm like yeah you're just better so i'm in vs happy zillow people's houses after you after you see them that's not real nothing good happens on the end of a zillow so i have i've got i i read i read a lot and i i like reading biographies and whenever i read a biography i do sort of i did up here where i write down like let's say it's a business biography i'll write down the years and i'll make notes of interesting things that happened to that person in that year and then if it involves a dollar amount i'll write the dollar amount and then in one sell over i'll say what's that dollar amount in today's nut numbers and then i'll say how old were they and so i'm like reverse engineering different people's lives but you know what i'm really doing i'm comparing myself to them yeah of course i'm comparing myself to them and i justify it by saying if i read someone and i am better off than they than they are i say great i'm doing better than them and ended up wonderfully i'm gonna end up wonderfully or if they're kicking my ass at my age i just think oh they're fuck this sucks i gotta give you credit for your honesty and vulnerability because you're being honest and i'm vulnerable admitting this i do not advise anybody follow this game plan this is a recipe i am not saying that this is i am not saying this is helpful i'm just a admitting and and and the last thing that i sort of suck at is being bend what what was the last one what how to do describe it he's like you know don't be objective don't change your don't change your mind you know stay stuck in your way stay stuck in hold on to those initial ideas you had before these new new facts and ci and circumstances came out i try to think of myself as bend able but i could work on that for sure the ones that i struggle with out of this are the unreliable one for sure and then maybe envy a second one i think that's probably like number two i think i'm pretty good on all these other ones i wanna give you some more i i i wouldn't have thought by the way of you as an en nba person i think that's a hard one to kick you know i don't think i'm like let's say terrible at it but it's definitely there it's not something that i could be like yeah i have conquered that mountain no no i'm still somewhere on that mountain hey do you know what the what i think it's the sixth tenth command is thou s not thou shall not cove thy neighbor's wife right right don't be jealous they'll jealous as my friend so even david i think if i said this joke it's gonna get me in trouble with at least five people at minimum in my life so i'm just gonna not make this joke alright so i wanna give you some interesting examples of of the invert principle because i think this is one of the most important ones so when he was a military meteor epidemiologist it's world war two his job is to keep pilot safe and he's like okay what what's everything i did know about pilot safety and he's like you know there's like seven textbooks about everything a pilot needs to know and then instead he's like no no let's work backwards what are the most likely causes of of crashes or incidents pilots and he went and studied that way simpler answer he's like okay i just need to be able to predict snow ice and fog really well as a military meteor epidemiologist those three if i can avoid the if i can get my pilots out of the way of those three i can ignore everything else because those three are the the real killers and let me like so he inverted it in order to like do his job let me tell you another example of this when i was in college i got picked as part of something like thing called ky that was like i love top college startups in the country oh honestly it was like worse than forbes thirty under thirty in terms of like credibility literally if you signed up you won and even better if you signed up you one and then you you made friends with the person they would take you on this all expenses paid trip to china for a week to go meet jack mod ceo of alibaba or the founder of alibaba and so we go i get picked on this trip i go fly to china i don't even know what alibaba is we go to their headquarters i'm like holy shit is like ebay for china or something that's crazy and we get sit down meeting with the ceo this was guys like one of the most powerful people in china and somebody you know we got to ask questions one of the kids ask you know this or simple tim question like you know what's your advice you know i wanna be successful what's your advice like what are what are the keys to success from your experience and and he says you know i was obsessed with this question also what are the keys to success what is the blueprint for success and i talked to a hundred successful people and i got a hundred different blueprints and i thought well that doesn't really help and this is actually a guy named david way i think is his name he was this current ceo at the time he was the one answering this part and he goes so every success is different it's its own little unique snowflake but every failure is the same and we're like you know we lean in and you know he had his answer and his answer i don't think it's actually the right answer but for this but like he goes it like tied into the alibaba store and he goes every every every big company that that eventually fails so his his answer was like not how to be successful but how do you not screwed up once you're a big company which was the problem they were having he goes too much money too much technology and too many people and so he tells a story about like how they were gonna compete with with google and with ebay when they were coming to china and he's like we needed to invent our version of google adwords and he goes jack said cool you get i think it was like twelve fifteen people he's like twelve fifteen people this is like gonna be a huge part of the business google has two thousand people working on this he goes did i stu her you get twelve to fifteen people you're gonna work he's like we need some office space you know give us like a couple floors at the office or whatever he's like you're gonna work out of my old apartment he's like your old apartment we need a proper office he goes i started alibaba in that apartment i think it'll work and he goes technology technologies like you know we're gonna need this many servers we should get the best stuff and you know we need this but let's have double that for redundancy in case you know the servers go down we don't wanna lose anything he goes oh if i give you redundant servers you're gonna design a system that goes down i'm gonna give you only the servers you need and in fact you go get go get used servers so it can run on even shitty servers and you know he'd sort of david go them that was like hit the story that he told about like and they they've eventually did they pulled it off but i wonder if that guy found that inspiring at first or like what the fuck jack yeah was definitely like a fuck you man come on but yeah know when it all works out then you can tell this great story bezos has a simple version too they were like you know jeff tech you're you're you know one of the like internet ceos internet's evolving so fast technology is always changing what technology innovations are you most excited for what's gonna change about amazon in ten years and he goes oh i don't think about that instead think about what's not gonna change he goes customers are always gonna want the most selection the lowest prices and the fastest delivery and so everything else can change but that's not gonna change and so we focus on what's not gonna change because we have to change it with the times in order to like constantly beat consumer customers expectations on delivery speeds low prices and and vas selection and so you know this idea of inversion is so powerful even in my own like life i was telling you like i'm i'm having a bunch of progress right now with my diet which is great because like you know the score board is currently you know thirty four years of no progress and you know like a month of great products right now is well what changed and well i did a bunch of things but but i also actually just inverted so instead of trying to figure out what's the best diet program what's the best workout program exactly how many grams of this how many milligrams of cr how many of protein how much how much of this instead of trying to like go is that the paleo diet keto diet mediterranean diet what should i be doing it was just the inversion like what's a surefire way to be fat and that answer was quite simple yeah i like i need to eat way more calories is that i'm gonna burn eating shitty foods at a fried and ultra processed you know right now he eat late at night pretty sure that's a recipe to get fat sitting all day instead of walking for my meetings probably pretty good way to get fat as to sit all day and i just inverted and i was like cool i'm just gonna walk more i'm gonna you know eat gather that i consume and i'm gonna not late night snack because i always eat crappy food when i do that is literally all i changed and like boom like started to get results finally after like you know instead of like being like let me go download nineteen hours of andrew hub and try to like follow this protocol it's like that wasn't the problem right like that that was the complex solution rather than the the easy version that's great where where do we wanna go from here let's do a couple more do you have any other ones that you like here i i have a story you told that i thought was pretty cool let's wrap up with that story alright so he's he's teaching a class at some college he goes to like an economics class so he has this general idea of you need to learn all the big ideas in a space so he's like i don't know anything about psychology but i figured there's probably twenty big ideas in the world of of psychology and i just like read the books and try to figure out what are your what are the twenty big ideas in your space like if i know there's twenty big ideas i'm gonna be better than like i i'll know more than ninety eight percent of people who spend their whole life you know ninety eight percent of people including some people who spend their whole life doing this because they're so lost in the weeds and so one of the big ideas he had was like so he goes to economics same thing what are the big ideas in economics everybody knows like like economics one zero one is the supply demand curve and you know basically the the idea is that you know as the you know you know supply of something goes down the demand you'll go up or the price will go up similarly if you drop the price of something that demand should go up so like people know this generally about economics is but charlie has a thing he's like you learn the big idea but did you also how do you make this useful is you need to understand the exceptions to those rules so what is the i before e except after c so he's like how do you understand that okay generally when prices go down demand should go up for that you know the demand for tvs is let's say you know x at five thousand dollars but if you drop the price of tv down to five dollars there's a lot of people that will buy it and so he's like but what are the exception so he goes in this economics class and he goes everybody understands you know when prices go down demand goes everyone says he says okay fantastic what are the cases where that's not true an item that is supposed to signal prestige exactly so hands go up fifty hands go up and they say luxury goods any item where price is signal for quality or status and he's like you know this is luxury handbags and whatnot you know if a louis vuitton was two dollars tomorrow the demand would actually briefly go up and then in the long term go down and he's like i everybody gets that one and he goes what else and now you get crickets right like what else and he goes he goes any industry where demand is based on b the purchaser he goes what it goes yeah there's like many industries the defense industry the many parts of the the medical industry where actually it's a screwed up kind of per reverse incentives where companies take profits and they use those to you know shower you know goods or or or money or experiences on buying agents purchasers and whether that's through advertisement so like i spend a ton of money advertising and that's how i create the demand and if i didn't have any advertising budget i wouldn't be able to create the demand or it's things like the the the military industrial complex where there's like some cro where it's like yeah you give me this contract today because in five years you're gonna be on my board and your retirement package will be ten times what you're making in the government and because we all know that that's true because i have so much excess profit you want to reward me with big contracts and actually what you want to pay more for these contracts so that we can be this really successful company because it rewards you in the end and he's like once you realize that that's an exception to this rule you will understand how the world actually works you understand where the laws of gravity actually break and i just love that story and i think it told like it's an interesting little and nugget business wise but also you the way that capital works but it's also shows kind of the way this guy thinks which is this i before you accept after c mentality where he goes into any space he tries to speed and figure out you know what are the ten to twenty big ideas of your space and then he looks at the exceptions and you know i did this recently i was i went to brian johnson's house and afterwards i was like thinking about longevity and i was like alright should i be one of these tech guys that like really fucking cares about longevity like i as longevity gonna be my shit or am i gonna zag and be like longevity is overrated and i was like i need to have an opinion and i decided oh but mu say hey mu lived to be ninety nine he he didn't look like a longevity freak well somebody said this well they've ball said that he goes buffett and mug these guys are like in their nineties and you know they famously like you eat mcdonald's breakfast every day you know eat you know m and m's have drink diet coke maybe for show but you know they least do it they're not sitting there taking metformin and like cold plunging every morning and he's like you know it just goes to show how how important like not being stressed is actually to your health yeah because these guys actually were quite low stress in the the way that they they live their life you know because they spent most of their days reading plain bridge talking thinking very few meetings they didn't sort of like you know stress out about investments they were buying a whole long term investor type of thing like low stress compared to a lot of successful people but on the longevity thing i was like alright let me go learn what are the ten big ideas in the longevity space and i literally really carved out two days and me and ben all we did was just deep dive in a longevity like i read i read like power skimmed through some books i read i i i was like who are the five like thought leaders and then what are their most popular ted talks and like let me go watch those let me go see what these you know what does peter or tsa what is brian johnson what is what of all of it my takeaway was that the big ideas and this is like somebody who's a big long longevity every person will will argue with me because i'm gonna do it the short version of this but the big idea is essentially everybody in everybody's health declines we are probably past the age of like the live forever so there's like one big idea which is that if we ever figure out a way to reverse aging or like minimize cell damage it's not just gonna be this gradual thing like we used to live till eighty than ninety then a hundred then the hundred and ten hundred twenty hundred thirty there's gonna be a step full jump once we figure out how to stop cell damage but if you've already had too much damage they're not gonna be able to like get you back into your twenties you're gonna be like past the point out of return and so like the big breakthrough is if you can figure out how to stop sell damage we don't know how to do that yet when that happens there's gonna be a age sort of point a tipping point where people below that are gonna live to like three hundred and people above that are still gonna live to like one ten and like there's gonna be this big like polarity between those two outcomes that's interesting the second interesting thing is like in terms of the peter school of thought of longevity which is not live forever but it's like live a longer health span so health span versus life span is one big idea and the health span idea is at the end of your life everybody's gonna have a marginal decade which is like your last ten years of life your your health is gonna decline pretty dramatically from like being i mobile and pain and and pain to like you know really you know not being able to wipe your butt by the right so it's like that's typically the like bad version of aging what peter t and these guys are trying to do is basically push that decade out so if it was gonna happen to you from eighty to ninety let's make it from ninety to a hundred or if it's gonna have a ninety to hundred let's hundred to a hundred and ten and the cost of your today lifestyle in order to affect that final marginal decade i personally was like not worth it i'm gonna find the eighty twenty of like healthy things to do that are not so costly like not so painful or hard to follow or like regiment or whatever like i'm not gonna forget to live today in order for my aid ninety to a hundred to be like better i was like you my takeaway was basically i don't care about the marginal decade i'm not gonna orient my life around that there's an eighty twenty of like healthier stuff to do that's like i don't mind switching to that lifestyle i'll do those and then that's good enough for me and if like you know wonder drugs come out in some point in the future hopefully i'm in time for that cut that was my conclusion do you think that buffet is gonna die like next week now like partners is just like you know like an old couple that they die together yeah like is that is that i like that very well might happen he i think he had buffet announced recently there they're like i i he's like i i finally found my successor at the age of ninety two i i found my guy yeah i think that will that will probably happen alright well if you made it this far sean i wanna tell you the people in the youtube comments have been making fun of you and what they are saying that i dress like a serial killer which i don't know what that means entirely or that i vow that i'm a father i'm starting to dress like a father or look like an accountant and they're making fun of your hair don't exactly know what they're making in fun about your hair because i think you've got great at that video maybe it's messy i'm also looking exclusively at my hair in that i had a bad i had a bad hair in the sense that i wake up for a lot bit i do this podcast right away and i don't even look at the mirror and dude i'm like the har guy in earth like i got hair on my fucking and palms like i'm like you know like a a gorilla and somehow i think i'm losing kind of some hair or the i'm getting a little light and people were like y he's gotta start taking whatever the drug is called i i feel forgot what it is but like an est or do all the comment go up yourselves right we're just do hear what other people think of me unless it's related to my looks or my intelligence and so i did go ahead and and and wet the hair a little bit today and you know tried to try to spruce it up it does hurt my feelings too sometimes if i'm being honest hey but you know what's what's working sean pee my little gary v branding pivot is kinda working in the comments every day they're like sean p shawn for president and right now we're a small but loyal army i don't think anyone said shop be for president there's a small but loyal army that there's as they said in the arrested of development there's tens of us out there and but but it but it is from that small base that we shall grow shawn it is and i feel like sean is such a good such a good brand pivot i'm actually a little upset it came to in my thirties instead of in my twenty alright that's a pod i feel like i could rule to where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a road travel never looking back