Dopamine Fasts, Cruise Ship Investing, and Elon Musk vs. Jeff Bezos Feuds with Andrew Wilkinson, Co-Founder of Tiny

because i was like pipe that content into my ears baby while i'm falling asleep i don't wanna i even wanna fall asleep i wanna be entertained and pass out yeah i feel like i could rude to where i know i could be what i want to put at all in and like a day so on a less travel never look back if what's going on yeah too months in long time no see yeah man you went up the you went off the deep end because period that became a monk pulled the matthew mc mcconnell how was it you do that it was awesome yeah apparently matthew mc mcconnell when he wanted to write his book he drove into the desert like four hours into the desert and he lit he literally lived in a shack for two months and wrote his book did you read it i read that book or red part if you read it and you use matthew mc mcconnell voice while you're reading it it's actually printed entertaining because it's good stories but also it's like just stories about his life that like i'm not i care that much about matthew mccartney line why wouldn't you just listen listen to the audible book then if you wanted hit vote voice read it not smart already exist that that would have been way better yeah should took the audible book just honestly did think about it it sounds like a good idea i should probably do that so you andrew basically what we'll do the intro now andrew it has is a great friend of ours has this big business called tiny where they own a bunch of different businesses north of a hundred million ish or so in revenue took a company public do you you're whatever you're successful in terms of career and traditional sense of successful you're a good friend you normally come on a lot but you just tweeted how you kinda like took off for all of august and you kinda bailed because you're kinda having a a meltdown in which we all have had before like a digital overload meltdown and you just bailed right totally it was it was really it was bad i mean it's interesting to think about like i think this happened to everyone over covid like their life just shifted in a weird way and my life just became crappy over covid which is weird because i had this amazing year like we took a business public we raised a big fund we got to work with all these interesting people we bought some great businesses i didn't die of covid like all these great things happened and yet i was totally miserable and when i look at it when i kinda zoom out my old day i don't know if you guys you guys know but i live in victoria canada and i didn't even have an office so i actually like just working out of cafes i would just go to the same cafe every day and i'd sit there with headphones on three or four of my friends would always work there so it's kinda like cheers there's always like interesting people to talk to and my day was just broken up into a bunch of chunks so any need given day i wouldn't really be on the computer or in one place for more than an hour or two and my day went from that to sitting in a house on my computer all day on zoom and doing email and it just kinda made me miserable and so i i you know what i look at like what i love about business i don't actually love you know doing business is great doing strategy coming up with ideas all that kind of stuff but the cool thing about business is you get to meet interesting people like business is just a hack right so like if you're interested in health you figure out like a health business you suddenly can meet all the most interesting people in that world and i'm an ex so so anyway just i was totally bummed and i started you know going on twitter a lot because i was craving socializing i and i i went from like twenty thousand followers to a hundred and seventy thousand followers so i got totally hooked into that and like a good day would be like i have a viral tweet or i go on your podcast or something something exciting happens a bad day would be i say something on twitter i got dunk done i got misunderstood or it doesn't do well like what a ridiculous thing like i tweet and it would only get like fifty likes instead of five thousand likes it would like throw my day off so i got to a point where i was just like jesus christ like this is totally ridiculous i'm thinking about twitter constantly i'm checking twitter constantly and on top of that i'm you know email you know checking stats stocks if i went to the bathroom without my phone i feel like i feel i feel like i was gonna freak out constantly listening to audiobooks constantly listening to pod podcast podcasts no silence so i just like hit this weird breaking point august first where i woke up and i was like i'm not stoked to get out of bed i'm not depressed objectively everything is fine i'm like i'm just like i have like and don like i'm just not excited about anything so i just said fuck it i'm just gonna what what what's that word you just said that was a good it means like an inability to feel pleasure right like not nothing would get me pumped nothing would give me a hit like you know you know when you like you're always you got netflix you're like scrolling endlessly for the perfect thing you just can't find it that's how my life felt and so i basically you know as the middle of august i live in british columbia it's super beautiful and so i just said to my wife you know what i'm out for the next month let's just go off to our cabin we'll you know we'll go on some trips and i'm just gonna totally check out and i said a couple rules for myself i was like no phone no email no computer no podcasts no phone calls no social media no news i couldn't even read non fiction business books right so pretty extreme and i put on my apple watch which has you know cellular so i was like okay if there's an emergency i can get a phone call and i put my phone in a drawer and i just disappeared i went up to my cabin and hung out with my kids and honestly for the first like three or four days it felt like there was like a bug in my brain like i was just like so you like like something i i itch i couldn't scratch like just so irritable as being a huge asshole i was like slapping my pocket every five seconds to check off i'd be sitting on the beach with my kids and i'd constantly be like oh i need to text this to a friend i gotta i gotta take a photo of this right so it's really weird horrible withdrawal but then after like three or four days i was like holy crap like this is really interesting i started reading fiction books and just sitting for hours you know enjoying a sunset taking a silent drive doing all this stuff and i think it's kind of like if you eat junk food all the time like you're drinking coke and having burgers and stuff all the time and then you eat broccoli it doesn't taste that good your brain is primed for like these extreme flavors and then if you switch to broccoli you know you don't give those things for a month then you eat broccoli broccoli is like orgasm it's amazing and so anyway i did this for four weeks and i was feeling really good and i came back to life like i kind of reintroduced myself in into society and started going out and working in stuff and it was really bizarre like i you know would listen to a song that was playing in a cafe and it'd be like the greatest song i've ever heard i'd read some random article and it would be like fascinating and i'd just be completely like just you know engage with it and then problems i had to solve they would've have pissed me off like seemed like no problem when i was excited to solve them and i was kinda going like man why why did that work like well what was it about that and at the same time like around then i started listening to podcast again and i listened to this podcast by andrew hub in hub in lab which i'm sure you guys have listened to he's amazing yeah he's he's coming on the podcast oh amazing that's that's awesome so he did this deep dive on addiction and he did it with this woman an le who's a stanford addiction doctor and i was like oh this will be interesting it'll be about like heroin addiction or something and how they treat alcoholism so i'd start listening to it those other people who have those other bad problems yeah i'm not one of this fun it's fun to read about them totally i was like i was like oh this will be you know maybe philanthropic you know i can help on the heroin and addiction center in victoria or something so anyway and and as i listen i just go like oh my god like you know this is not this is universal like basically the chemical of dopamine and the neurotransmitter is the thing that makes you feel craving and pleasure when you do things and it motivates you to do things and i realized you know basically like she said you know something along the lines of if you eat chocolate cake once a month it tastes amazing and you don't really crave it that much you don't really think about it that much it's very pleasurable if you eat it once a week you know it's still enjoyable but it sounds good and you start having cravings you start wanting chocolate cake if you eat it every day your brain literally crave it and you're in pain until you eat it and when you eat it it's not even that enjoyable it just makes the pain go away for a little bit and she compares that to like heroin addiction or anything and so you know here we all are we're stimulating ourselves with social media twenty four seven we're constantly taking these hits and the hits become less and less enjoyable and she talked about you know she's at stanford so she's treating students and she talks about these kids that would come in and they're addicted to social media and video games and they have no motivation and so she said look i basically recommend a dopamine fast for four weeks they can't do any of that stuff they gotta go walk in silence drive and silence have quiet moments not avoid those things and i realized that you know i basically done that for myself and that's why i felt better and i you know i was an addict it's crazy how do you propose doing this though given like i hear everything you're saying and i think oh i actually i i'm sure i have the exact same problem but i'm like i better record this podcast i've got to text i mean i guess i don't have to but you know it's but for you say rich guy right like that right for somebody who's listening or even most people i would say the practicality of detach for four weeks is hard oh yeah and i think my my version of it was extreme but there's many different forms of it i mean it could be as simple as you just wear your apple watch and you don't text and the only way you text is crappy on your apple watch you take calls on your apple watch and you know you do zooms on your laptop but you just don't have that constant twenty four seven imessage coming in or maybe you just screen time your phone super progressively i mean how do you not eat junk food all the time and have a good diet don't keep junk food in the house don't keep booze in the house right self bind yourself so i mean i just basically like screen time the hell out of my phone and like today for example i drove to my office i just have my apple watch i don't have my phone so i know if my kids fall down and hurt themselves my wife can call me but otherwise i'm not really texting do you do that sean because i think of you sean is someone who is connected a lot i am connected a lot i've consciously picked two parts of my day where i'm like these are my like disconnect base you know like these if i disconnect hours at least because you'd i i think about it very much the same as andrea i heard two things that that kinda shifted my view on this so the first was naval had this great thing he used to say when he goes the ancient struggle was scarcity you know the the ancient struggle was we just didn't have enough we didn't have enough food we didn't have enough water we didn't have enough you know access to medicine entertainment whatever and the modern struggle is abundance which is where overloaded with cheap dopamine and like and then that the idea of cheap dopamine is something that literally last night i was listening to hub little clip that came up my youtube feed of andrew hoover and it's funny by the way because it's like i literally i i have it's like the addict is like learning about rehab while like shooting up basically because it was three am i had just i was going to bed i had say it up way too late already and i'm the type where you know if i like you said i'm going to the bathroom and i have my phone with me i'm like oh i'm gonna miss out on like my entertainment like i right now i could watch something listen to something do something while i'm just peeing or whatever like brushing my teeth and i had literally bought this headphone that i can wear to sleep because it's comfortable so it's like a head headband it's like a soft headband that has small earbuds baked into it so you could sleep with headphones because i was like pipe that content into my ears baby while i'm falling asleep i i don't even wanna fall asleep i wanna be entertained and pass out like that's kind of the way i was sleeping and so even last time night i was doing that my my bad habit and it was is like you know ultra connected too connected and i start listening this thing and he goes he said something that really struck me he goes he goes one way to think about addiction is it's a progressive narrowing of what gives you pleasure so it's a it's a you are narrowing the things in your life that that will give you this rush of pleasure so so andrew when you when you when you dopamine fasted you started getting pleasure from silence in the car from the sunset from fiction books but before that it's like twitter was this cheap fast instantaneous guaranteed source of pleasure and so it was a narrowed the number of places you were going to get that pleasure to like this most convenient time also it also became more painful though more like when i first started doing twitter it was pure pleasure so fun and then over time it took more and more of a hit to satisfy the numb and then yeah you get numb to the sort of you get you build a tolerance right like you would with alcohol or anything else and of course you had to turn your you turned your experience into a thread which probably became one of your most reached place totally totally well this is the debate right is do you want to engage like okay like obviously it's a good thing that we can all use imessage and use these devices like they're they're bicycle for the mind there's always these amazing things you can do you can meet all these amazing people but the question is how to use them in a responsible way so like my twitter i have a one way twitter client that i'm using so i don't actually see the results of my tweets right although in this case i'll admit i did when i did go and look but my goal is actually fully screen time on every device so i can access twitter only the the api i think there's here's a good way to look at it so have you guys heard of this person named earl night nightingale so basically he probably died in the sixties maybe he died in the seventies and he was famous in the fifties and sixties and he basically was almost like a tony robbins of that era but he was a little bit more well known as like a writer he was like a almost like a like a like a dan rat meets tony robbins mainstream famous guy and he told this famous story on this on his radio broad cast where he talked to a a farmer and he went to the farmer's house and this is right when the telephone got popular he went to this farmer's house and he's talking and they're just having this conversation and the phone starts ringing and the farmer doesn't flinch she just make keeps making eye contact and having the conversation in about five minutes later the phone rings again and just the same thing he keeps making eye tight eye i contact and then a few minutes later it rings one more time and the guys the guest go earl goes hey do you need to answer that and the farmer goes the with that thing no no that's just there for my convenience i i answer that whenever i want and whenever i heard that story a couple years ago i was like that's how i'm gonna treat my phone it is there for me and so i don't feel guilty about clicking ignore deny or don't not replying it is this this thing this phone it exists for my convenience not the other way around i i own it well the other the other thing is you know do you ever think well like the nineteen fifties so in the nineteen fifties if you're an executive at a business you would a have a secretary right and the secretary would be keeping everyone away from you and then you'd get your mail once or twice a day and so you'd batch it right you'd get a hundred letters half of them would be done by your secretary you get twenty or or fifty of them or whatever you just do that over an hour you write all your letter responses then you're done for the day whereas what we have as a mailman who's coming to the door every five minutes knock knock knock here throwing a bunch more letters in there and you're kind of doing it in the middle of everything so i think like batch also is incredibly helpful the other thing is like you know people who talk about being friends with their family with an alcoholic they talk about how the alcohol will will actually if someone gets in in between them and the alcohol they will always choose the alcohol and i think the hard part is you know you think about and think about all the arguments i've had my with my wife where if i don't get to follow my routine my dopamine routine of well i like to listen at podcast in the shower and then i like to do x and y and z and i've got my whole routine and process if she would mess with it like hey i've got i need you to go and do this or whatever i would like rage right and i just thought i was an asshole or ocd or something and then now being off of that i'm not raging and getting frustrated in that same way so it's really fascinating all the addiction stuff just really flows through this i've created basically three two windows in the day so exercises is one exercise is beautiful because you know i have a very low urge to check my phone when i'm working out anyways so that becomes a full kind of like almost ninety minutes of of not looking at my phone and i don't care what's happening and i don't care who's i don't care how much sales we have i don't care you know who's mentioning me i don't care who's emailing me slack me and so sam i think you probably have the same where when you work out i don't think you are checking your phone during that yeah i don't i it it means nothing to me i do look at it to mark down what i'm doing but typically what i've been doing lately is i'll mark down on a notepad my workout and then i transfer it after the workout specifically so i don't touch my phone listen music while you work out because one of the things hub talks about is you don't wanna dopamine stack so people work out to experience pleasure and dopamine but if you start stacking at so you say i when i work out i watch game of thrones and i get a smoothie after and and and you start to not enjoy the actual workout whereas if you do it for intrinsic reasons you can actually train yourself to enjoy it right we i do because i listen to music too and i like i love the like that's i feel like that's music listening time you know what mean we're basically i'm your i am training am to love one your addiction you want sorry go ahead that's funny andrew i'm i'm getting between you and addiction and sam raised out immediately you know the i i'm i'm doing the opposite where doctor dan ariel the kinda like famous behavioral economist he was talking about this thing where he had this medicine he had to take because he has really bad burns he had really bad facial burns and he had to take this one medicine all the time or apply this ointment and burned it was like really uncomfortable and so he was like instead of trying to wrestle the brain and convince the brain through logic that this is a good thing for me when the brain is just saying oh this i don't like the the way this medicine makes me feel don't take this he's like i just attached really i think i really loved to taking the medicine every time i take the medicine i would take it during the intro of my favorite movie and i would watch my favorite movie or my favorite show and he's like that helped me stick to my routine of taking the medicine actually get healthier and so for me that's almost like working out where working out wasn't something i found super pleasurable that's why i didn't work out for so long because it kinda felt like work and so i had to retrain myself using music having a a great trainer who i like hanging out with you know like doing different types of workouts that are more sporty so that i would actually get pleasure from working out so i actually like it so i stacked it intentionally i stacked things i knew i loved onto to working out so that i started to love working out because i only got to do those things when i worked out yeah and i i'd also say though andrew well you're taking the stance i don't know if you actually feel that way is addiction necessarily bad like alright so i had i've talked about this someone i've had like alcohol problems and then i started like going to cigars like one way that i got off it is i started smoking and then like after smoking i like started doing sugar or something like that and i went to the doctor and she's like i was like you know i'm eating so much sugar and she's like well was it helping you not drink i go yeah she goes my fuck just do it and i'm like yeah why wouldn't i just do that and so with some addiction i i'm whenever i think of like i'm like just it's not necessarily bad like so like if you're addicted to one thing or the other well is that is is that like does it kinda make you a little bit happy you know i think actually some addiction could be okay that's kinda there's there's a lot of different levels to it right like i think obviously heroin and alcohol drug abuse that leads to a life of guaranteed misery very quickly and you die young and you're depressed and everything else but the fundamental question is if you're addicted to work and it's making you depressed then you know just because you're objectively achieving what's the your achieving if you're depressed right so i think that's the way i would think about it yeah the dope what's the highest order bit right if the highest order bit is that feeling good on a daily basis i'm i enjoy my life i feel i feel good then cool whatever your system is is serving you but as soon as that spirals out and it it might start that way the same behavior might start feeling that way and then all of a sudden it it's you stop feeling that that's what kinda happened with you andrew is like let's say like at first you were getting this great pleasure in rush from connecting with people on twitter and sharing your ideas and that's fun and you were helping people because people heard those ideas and they took them for their own and then like you know everything in excess sort of has the the the cons will sort of reveal themselves over time totally well now other the other thing that's interesting is like i'm the kind of person where i'm always hacking everything right so i was like okay if i do the dishes i found a way to enjoy the dishes so i'm stacking on i've got my podcast i've got my music i get my treat after you know all those things and recently what i've been trying to do is just do the best job of doing the dishes i possibly can in silence almost a medi practice and what i've noticed is again the first couple times i did it i was raging i was like this fucking sucks i don't wanna do the dishes you know this is bs and then after a while of just silently doing the dishes i started really enjoying it and now in my wife says can you do the dishes i don't get irritable and i'm not expecting a treat and i'm doing it because it's intrinsically enjoyable feeling the hot water and washing the pan and doing a good job which sounds ridiculous but it's no different than gardening or any other thing that people like it's just tuning your brain for it so can we talk about something that doesn't seem similar but kinda is but basically andrew you bought this company aero press which is actually like in my opinion probably one of the best companies that you could own if you are trying not to get addicted to fast twitch notifications alerts because it's been around forever it you'd do you guys even sell anything do you even sell it online really other than amazon a little bit only i think it's like three percent of sales are online right now so like it's a pretty like low stress like because you have it built anything new or aero presses it's basically up if you don't know aero presses it's a coffee maker that's been the same way since the beginning is that right yeah it's been around since i think two thousand and six and it's like this it it looks like a pvc tube and you press down and you put some coffee in the bottom of it you put some hot water and you press down and it makes like a concentrated coffee and it's been around yeah for for a long time and it was started by the guy who made the frisbee he's like a serial inventor so that those like neon pink frisbee from the eighties yeah it's it's an amazing product can you say what you bought it for the deal was seventy million seventy million to buy it and can you say how big it i mean i'm what what can you say about it it was for sale or this was one that you were like let me see if i can if they're willing to sell so i mean basically the story is four or five years ago i was making coffee i'd been using an aero press for years we had one at our office someone brought brought one in like ten years ago and i looked down at it and i was like man i wonder who owns this so i started googling i realized the founder still owned it and he's this eighty year old serial inventor venture who lives in palo alto so i sent him an email i looked up his email on voila nor and i said hey can i come to palo alto and you know would you ever explore selling and he said i don't know if i wanna sell but i'm happy to meet you and so i flew down and chris and i spent a whole day with him just kinda talking about the business and there's just so much to love about this business so what would he like he's like this like really funny old guy he reminded me a little bit of my grandpa you know he had hearing aids he he like just clearly loved inventing and coming up with ideas and he started walking me through you know all the different inventions and ideas that he had and things he wanted to make did he did did he actually work there yeah yeah yeah he so he really like ran he was really responsible for inventing in the product and then he had a president who was running the day to day business and so you know this is like it's such a crazy business so there's zero marketing so they spent absolutely nothing on marketing it's sold in pretty much every single gourmet coffee shop in the world like you walk into anywhere blue bottle from down to like little independent ones everyone sells it it's very very like it's like it's a a category owner i would call it right so definitely if you think about like a commodity product even like k are band aid right it is the it's it's the category defining brand right so no one searches like p nomadic tube coffee maker they just search aero press so and it's literally written on grinder so like one of the settings on the grinder aero press so basically this is an opportunity for us to buy a category of like ming coffee a way of ming coffee and like people are fan there's like world aero press championships barista get like tattoos of aero presses like it's totally nuts so anyway i spent four years trying to convince him to sell his business and i literally emailed him every single month for four years i'd call this the dentist the menace just like i have an email reminder in superhuman and i just kept asking and then finally you know over the last six months we negotiated a deal and got it done and the idea is very simple i mean this is an incredible product it's really just about selling it in more places and they really just didn't have d strategy so we're basically coming in we're gonna focus on d and keep the business as it is otherwise and just scale that channel so we're super excited about it what you just said when i think he said this on the podcast so i think i could share it when when mo ali was selling native and native at the time was just just a deodorant that's all they sold one one one one product with a couple scents of flavors and and so it was like a you know here's this there's sort para and free aluminum free deodorant and he's you want any selling and like part of the sales pitch of like how to get more upside in the deal was hey we right now we're doing so well with just the deodorant owner and imagine if we expand it or whatever that's kinda like the the high level idea but i thought the way he said it makes a big difference so like it was wonderful he and this is like i call this out because you know what i teach is power writing course i live for these phrases these but let's take the same information let's say it two different ways and watch what happens and so you know one is there's lots of room to expand into other product lines okay emotionally registers as a one and then the the the way he said it and when he was a meeting with somebody they were like well how big can this do you think b and like you know what's the upside here for us he goes he goes do you know how to write the word native on other bottles he's like like if could you write that on a shampoo bottle could you write that on a toothpaste bottle i he's like that's your upside and it's like obviously kind of a funny asshole thing to say but it really like hits home and so when you when i was hearing about the aero aerospace thing i it reminded me of that which is like you know do you know make a website because right now if if it's all if it's all done not through d c not done online it's like it doesn't take a genius to make this if the genius thing was buying it not making it bet better and bigger than it is today and that's like your sweet spot right is you're not looking to the doing it yeah there is this period where factories went from being seen powered to powered by electricity right and you could basically go and you could buy a factory and convert there's a lot of money being made to be made in just electrification in factories or products or anything and this is one of those things right where you find a business that's using a legacy sales process via retail which we're gonna keep i mean it's an amazing advertising mechanism and we love all the distributors and everything but at the same time it's like hey we can also sell us d c awesome and it's such a simple insight that we don't need to be geniuses a even if we don't do as great as we think we'll still do fine we'll have a great business and if we do well we're gonna blow the doors one one more point on that that you bought it for seventy million dollars what is the annual rough roughly the annual marketing and advertising spend that has created this business that you bought for seventy million dollars is it honestly or less than one million dollars dollars yeah so like twenty thousand dollars exactly so i mean here's the other one right it it's salaries there's there's a a few people in the marketing but let's call it if you include salaries maybe let's call a hundred and fifty two hundred grand hold on many people there why do you have a marketing person if you're spending twenty thousand dollars yeah i why is there argument salary and what we do do what they do do is lots of like wouldn't even call it influencer but like they do a lot of p r and outreach and that but the company the company this company is it it's like it's like fucking car mix or something it's like you made it one time and then like what when i imagine a business like this what do the people do every day like you have like like you know recently how many order hustle i used to be like why do you have twenty five people here you write one email and you're like yeah just it takes a lot of people to like you know make this email great and like have ads well for us for us it was redundancy you needed redundancy because because it it it was a it was a digital thing that people made every single day and i actually think you could run the whole business with fifteen people or less but with aero press you you probably could do did you only need like ten or five or help people did just think there's sub tenant in place wow and they're managing the distributors and making sure manufacturing is good and all that kind of stuff that's crazy it's a a a five or ten percent company for seventy million dollars that's awesome that's so cool like you you know what car mixes is andrew it's the like the chap web bomb yeah yeah this is it's like this is like one of those you i think you up here you called a cruise ship this is one of those things we're just it does does the same thing like you guys didn't create anything new after the initial thing right no no we haven't done anything it explain this cruise ship investing the last framework what what is this well okay so i think when i talk to any young person and you know myself included i really glorified startups right and i i i i like to kinda turn these into like analog or whatever just so the easy you explain and i was like oh you know a startup is really like a speed boat right it's exhilarating it can go anywhere but at the end of the day you know you're driving over waves you're getting your you know body destroyed your freezing cold you might hit a rock you might get drunk you really have to be white neck and pay attention and you're constantly worried you're gonna run out of gas right so i was like okay so that's a start up a cruise ship is slow and steady it moves on a straight course so you can pretty much estimate where they're going you can make an educated guess that you'll end up in hawaii versus antarctica based on where they're going and what their course is and you can get a comfortable sleep lots of amenities there's very low odds of failure it's not dangerous at all and best of you don't have to buy the whole boat you just buy a ticket and i was saying you know a stock certificate right so essentially just as a mental model i go i when i look at a business i go is this a speed builder or cruise ship do i need to be white not this and do i need a you know amazing captain or can i just go and board a cruise ship that's already doing really well and it's much more boring to write a cruise ship no one's gonna give you an award or write a book about you for having an amazing crossing of the atlantic or whatever on a cruise ship but it's very comfortable and enjoyable so i i've just been using that example when i talk to young entrepreneurs there's a similar example to so this guy named joel what's the the guy who started joel on software that's what you're thinking about yeah joel on software joel on software what what it called so but what's the thing that everyone knows it's doctor tracker stack over over channel yeah so this guy he's he's amazing so name joel software his blog if you wanna read good writing it's this guy it's called joel software dot com it's amazing and he's got this amazing blog post where he talks about different strategies and he basically calls it the ben and jerry's or the amazon and so with amazon it's new competition or sorry new technology and there's very little competition efforts and you basically need to go balls to the wall like a speed you need to go as hard as you possibly we can't early on to grab as much market share you're okay with losing a lot of money and you know it's and you gotta go fast otherwise you're gonna lose and it's a zero sum game or there's bed in jerry's where there's already a lot of ice cream competition you can go to bunch of different icing places throughout the week and it's no big deal and if you do a good job this could last for fifty or a hundred years and that's kinda like the different strategies although i would say that the cruise ship analogy is is probably even better totally i wanted to ask you you said something about the cruise ship thing which was like you know you don't get to be the hero because you didn't you know white knuckle and like survive the the a crazy storm and come out the other side which is like you know the startup founder who pulls it off and disrupts the industry and blah blah blah and you had a thing on here which i think is more related to your twitter stuff but i think they're they're both the same they're both they're both related which is what's the perfect amount of notoriety so what's the perfect amount of fame and and to what extent do you do you do things in order to build your profile build your build your fame right so what are your kind of like most what's your most up to date thoughts on that because i think you've done a good job right you do have a high profile you have a higher profile than i don't know ninety nine percent of people who do what you do which is private equity and you know so so you've done a good job that and i think that's paid work dividends and it's probably had fun you know ego dividends too where you feel good about it but you know there's downside so what do you what do you think now what do you think the perfect amount of notoriety well this what i'm trying to figure out and i i don't really know if i have the answer and i think you guys have probably gonna gone through this exact same thing as i have i mean i was sitting in a cafe my my wife was like hey you know go take go take a couple hours to yourself and so i when and i sat at a cafe and i was reading a book and a friend showed up i started talking to him but could've go twenty wife just go take a couple hours for yourself could i just the mvp of look what's going on i to tell my wife this is the thing from business is because i haven't been irritable right because i'm not an addict right now it's anyway i'm sitting there and chatting with my friend and you know i'm sharing personal stuff and you know talking about what's going in my life and maybe twenty minutes into our conversation there's this guy who's sitting to our left and he goes hey i'm really sort to interrupt but i heard on my first million and i've bought a business over in vancouver and that was so cool right like that's i'm sure you guys have that too every once in a while someone else that is that a real story by the way yes a hundred percent real that's awesome there's the guy i'll mentioned the guy he runs a he runs the best gourmet coffee shop at ubc which is a big university in vancouver it's called bulldog coffee and i was like wow that's actually genius you've basically got a capture you've captured a market that's smart but anyway what was going through my head after that is oh my god what did i say like you know to here's this person who heard what everything was saying i don't think i said anything bad or you know overly personal but there is this sense of like oh there's a loss of privacy and not only that but you have to be consistent so if i go on this podcast and i say i'm about x and y and z now every time i talk to someone if i change my mind or i wanna be kind of a chameleon and just be a different person or whatever like they almost like call you out or whatever so it's just it's it's very interesting and some of the other downside is that i'm sure you guys have had is consistency and commitment bias right so one example is i talked about the sugar free bakery thing i was doing and we ended up getting we weren't legally allowed to use a key ingredient in canada until it's approved so i was like okay i have to shut this down but i didn't shut it down for like two months longer than i should have because i've gone on here and made a public statement to everyone hey everyone look i'm doing this thing awesome and i felt shame so it was like in a log illogical thing there's this great quote by bill murray and i said if you think you wanna be rich and famous try being rich first and see if that covers it and i think that that's really interesting and i i think like you wanna be respected in your world you wanna be like in the in film you'd wanna be like the cohen brothers right where it's like no one knows with cone brothers look like but if they're at the academy words they're like baller and they can get the attention and do whatever they want i i think do you know do know who da punk is yeah oh dude dude i was like they've got the best job because they don't even have to show up and they they probably make ten million each a year just help these concerts because the ed or whatever the genre is they've they're huge concerts i'm like they didn't even have to show up they could be anyone underneath that mask there could be anyone totally i think it's for smart and i i don't i don't know what i mean what do you guys think what sam you've shared some stories about being stopped in the street and stuff yeah i get sean do you get stuff i i could stop probably once or twice a week i don't think our audience is big and the the suburbs of california so you know my men my neighbors like average age is like seventy probably or something so i don't think these guys are listening but what's cool is like my trainer he came to me the other day he's like i met these two guys in the gyms they're like twenty one twenty two years old they and they were telling me like dude you gotta to listen to this podcast it's a like we're we're hooked on it and then we're getting so many ideas we're gonna quit our job we're gonna do this stuff and and they they were like he's like what's the podcast and it was like my first feeling he's like bro that's my buddy they've bet that's why trey i'm going there right after this and they're like no way and so it's more of these like secondhand stories that have either a happened to me or b like kinda light me up a little bit like i mentioned my cousin name on the last podcast because jack jack who was on podcast had invested in him and he's like dude to he's like i know you do a podcast or i know you mentioned me in the podcast because i'll just get a bunch of messages being like oh somebody you know he shouted you out or can we invest in your thing he's like it's amazing how much instant like kind of you know love i get if you just say my name or say our company's name on the pod and those are cool moments yeah the serendipity like i talked about this idea sam and i were r on like you know what business would you start if you could start anything today or just throwing out ideas and one of them was d pregnancy health so how do you build a super baby using supplements and blood work and all that kind of stuff and now i'm in partnership with this woman named katie du and we're working on this business together and it's been super fun and i never would have been able to do that and i literally you know met the best possible person for that idea i never would have been able to do that so it's like the pros are huge but then the cons are those kind of odd things or for you guys i would assume you're probably addicted to your podcast stats right oh where are we ranking on the itunes our no our well i would say we i i'm more addicted to twitter i think yeah so like i i was like i'm i'm gonna be slick and turn off my notifications but what i do is i search the sam par my twitter handle like i search that and i'm then type in latest it's like i see my but yeah like i'm like so that kinda of like that's stupid i'm on the podcast is not podcast is not designed to be addictive because you don't get these like viral spurt it's slow and steady compounding with no immediate feedback you don't get comments after every episode like and that makes it suck and that there's a lot of bad things about that but the good thing yes it's very zen and so like of all the things i've done news newsletter or twitter and i've like tried to be successful and them try to grow them gotten some growth cotton at success gotten made money off of them and they all like like fade out because i'm like you know i don't like what this does to me you know i i i think one of the most toxic things you can do is care too much what other people think of you and it's fundamentally the loop of what social media is is you post something and then other people react to your either your photo what i look like what i sound like or what i said or what i thought right and so care you know i hate tweeting something and then wanting to go check the mentions check the reaction to it because fundamentally i'm putting all my awareness and attention to what do other people think about me and that's a horrible but it doesn't have to be that doesn't have to be bad so let me give you an example andrew you probably don't know this but i'm a fitness influencer now i've got four thousand so i you're like i was i kinda did it as a joke but kinda not so basically i this the year of two thousand twenty one i wanted it to work really hard to get very very very fit and i had a hit a little bit of a plateau and i was joking which but i of was wasn't i was like i'm just gonna start posting on instagram constantly and just be i'm gonna change my identity to become a fitness person and i've been doing it lately and it's obviously it's not a big deal like no one actually watches but it's made me not eat certain foods because i'm like i i said i posted that i was gonna hit this weight and these people are like it's not real but in my head these people are expecting me to do it i have to come with the results so i can make fill this make this story complete and you know like be like the love of their lives and like get their attention and is that unhealthy kind but i'm getting a great result yeah well i think we gotta talk about this book i read called wanting have you guys heard this book no no so funny have you ever heard so peter t talks about mimo miso or nomadic desire have you guys heard about this concept yeah it talks about like so renee gerard or whatever renee gerard by the like i can't fucking read this as so dense like no it's like a french david david pre david pre did a bunch articles about it and even then it's just too dense it's too academic i didn't get it and finally you know one of my friends who's like super into peter t gave me this book wanting and it was kind of a revelation for me so the idea is basically that you want the things that are modeled to you by other people so you know you meet a friend at a bar you want a beer he of martini maybe you go oh maybe i do want a martini right so that's that's like the most generic example of like a meaningless thing what about if your friend tells you he just raised around from su sequoia capital right you started asking yourself why didn't i raise from sequoia why don't you know why does his startup have more place than mine does when didn't i get that job title he is a sailboat why don't i have a sailboat why don't i have a rolex he moves to brooklyn why don't i live in brooklyn right so basically when you surround yourself with peers you start competing with them and you start wanting those things and you know i see this in my own group of friends you know when one of us buys a new car within a year we've all bought a new car right there's these waves or the other thing you see is mirroring so you know let's say i buy a tesla my friend might say i'm buying a classic for mustang and i'm gonna constantly talk about how much i love the rumble of the engine or working on it right it's like this like counter mirror so it's super interesting because you don't actually want these things these are not real desires these are model to you and so in this book they talk about thin desires so these are like ex things coming from the modeling of others right so wanting a rolex because people you know that are your peers value rolex and then there's thick desires which are intrinsic they come from inside of you so you enjoy working in your garden you don't need to tell anyone you don't post about it it's not part of your identity you don't do it to impress anyone it's just saying you quietly enjoy and so i think the big thing is coming up with what are my thick desires what are real versus what come from wanting to be like my heroes or my friends or or whoever it is because if you're not careful at pruning this you will become this and if you spend too much time around people who want things that you don't actually want you will still desire and achieve those things so so i love what you're saying keep going so you read this book and then there's like the question of what are your models who are your models and what did you you know you know what did you take away from this so yeah i mean like are you jealous of jeff bezos no jeff bezos is not someone that you compete with right jeff bezos is off in this celebrity world right jay z that's not someone you compete with right the people you compete with are people within your bubble like like it could be each other that's three maybe there's other things that there there could be other things that people are more jealous i i i guarantee you anyone who's on twitter for example anyone on twitter and business you know you and the morning brew guys like it doesn't matter if you like them or anything you're still in a meme nomadic conflict when i see sam as a fitness influencer you bet your ass i work out hard harder of that day totally well exactly he now values health so that's that's good if you wanna be healthy hang out with sam will probably make you healthier over time right so that's that's a good thing but so you know and and there's so many different bubbles there's so many different worlds so for example if you live in san francisco the thing that everyone wants is you know fundraising and valuation or who your investors are if you're in new york it might be about your wealth through your art collection or your fashion in la it would be you know what awards have you won where do you get restaurant reservations you know athletes it's olympic metals chefs it's michelin stars comedian at netflix specials you know you you name it so the way to figure out who your models are as well is actually to ask kind of an odd question you say who do i not want to succeed right and maybe it's deep within you right but it might be that guy on twitter who you know you're friendly with and everything's fine you kind of he bothers you or he's maybe a little ahead of you has maybe ten thousand more followers you just don't want him to succeed that's probably who you're in mime rivalry with and and so the real question is you know how do you a align with people who will lead you down a path of this meme copying they will actually make you happy so that's spending time with people who are actually similar to you and want things that are your thick desires right being healthy being safe gardening you know whatever that is and then the other question is how do you opt out and and really that's pruning you know what do you read who do you listen to who do you spend time with and you know for an example i thought about for myself you know i was spending all this time reading about warren buffett of idol warren buffett forever but when i think about you know what is warren buffett actually doing in his day he's a guy who can sit there and read all day reading annual reports that's what his life is set up for i would kill myself like i have no interest in doing that and i think i'd be very bored so i have to be very careful not to over index on one buffett the other thing you can do is you can opt out so you can say you know i'm gonna be like dave chappell i'm gonna move to ohio where i'm just you know a redneck and you know in a small community or whatever for me i live in victoria you know i'm not as exposed to this is other people and there's this great story of this guy who's a michelin star chef so you think about chefs the ultimate is you open a restaurant and a really high end restaurant you get a michelin star sky sebastian brass did that all he wanted was to get a michelin star and he got it and when he got it it didn't actually make him happier he just wanted a second star then he got a second star well didn't make him happy either and he just lived in fear of losing it because they just come in and inspect to you you know it'll be like they'll come to your restaurant and if the table cloth isn't perfectly clean or the food is in a certain way you know you get rejected and so you end up living your life by these arbitrary rules that don't actually make you happy and you fight for something that you know is not what you actually want so this guy is a baller he just said michelin i want you to remove my star take me out of the guide i'm out right so you can do stuff like that but that takes like brass balls that's very cool to do why did you mention read why i mean you're talking about reading and everything and i wanna ask you what you're reading why did you mention read wise on your document well i think like you know i'm like you guys i just read all sorts of random stuff and i'll read all these books it'll make a huge impact on me but then i'll forget everything right and so i use this tool called read wise where my kindle highlights basically get emailed to me once a day at random and it's like there's like a memory thing called space repetition and so it basically sends you you know every week every month i'll get all these ideas back boomerang rang back to me and i just kind of and reminded of some of these things i've read when you're reading do you just read book after book yeah usually what i i do that as well i'm thinking that's actually really stupid if i find like a book that like has a big impact or like has a ton of learnings i should probably reread that every handful of months or something like you you know you you you should do whatever it takes to really understand and and grasp and assigned reading not as much like go from thing to thing to thing you know what i mean you know you know what find min method is no it's basically you you read the thing and then you teach it and you can't truly understand it until you teach it so like a a way of remembering really well would be go on the podcast and in a very cog way summarize what you've learned and then keep bringing it up for yourself right like i i mean you know just even writing out some notes for this podcast it forced me to actually go what did i learn in this book and i'm sure it'll actually hammer into my head better it's all i used to be in college i didn't know that that was a technique but i'd figured out pretty early on that the way i could get better grades like i wanted to have good grades but i didn't wanna keep studying as much like i feel like other people studied so much spent so many hours in the library and i just didn't find it i didn't wanna do it and i was like well here's what i'll do i'll basically quickly skim the material and then i will lead a study group where i'll teach it to that group and in that process i was like a horrible teacher for the first like hour when i was doing it because i don't know the material yet i actually don't even understand it i barely remember half of it but i remember half of it and like by teaching it i remember that half and i quickly figured out the other half i didn't know and i just remember like that's how i studied for every final when i was in college and it was it was pretty amazing because i could study half the time as other people because what they would do is they would try to just ingest it and just keep ingesting it they're trying to keep reading it and reread it and writing notes and reread it and they would never try to but articulate it off the top of their head to anybody else or answer a question you know in public with anybody else and so they never did that and they just tried to like solidify it in their head but it never really did you know for them or took way longer to do it it's such a hack right to be able to summarize it in one sentence or have a you know have a metaphor or you know whatever it is that helps can you do that just by running a blog post about it or do you actually have to speak about it you could do that i i used to run this thing called the anti nba and it was a weekly book club basically we would read a book a month in each week we would divide that book into quarters so we'd talk about a book every week and i would basically be leading this and we would have ten or twenty people show up i would lead it and i remember i learned like crazy every book i was like mastering it but i wasn't sure if i could do that now just to blogging or if i actually had to like organize and talk to people about it because that'd i'd be a pain in the ass what one thing i've seen is my i don't know this is kind of an unpopular way to think or something i don't know i i don't think this is the this is how much people think but let's like andrew so i think andrea i think you're super smart and amazing and great and i love them when you bring these ideas because it makes me be like it brings all these new thoughts into my head but i think you and i think sam an extent do something that i used to do that i'm trying to stop doing and that is like this constant optimization and so like you know this idea that i'm gonna read a book i'm gonna find a great book and then sam's like i'm gonna reread it because i wanna to sink i'm gonna drill it into my head and andrew's like no what i do is i highlight using this tool and i set up an auto trigger to email me back the best highlights like old me would have been like dope love that that's gonna be my solution to this like underlying ever present problem i'm gonna keep seeking these solutions that are like new hacks new optimizations new like kind of techniques and and solutions and methods and and the one like realization i've had by talking to some other people outside of it like my trainer is really the one who drill this in me because he would be talking to me during a workout he would say something to me i would go run to my notepad i'd write it down because he said this really wise thing and it was so good and i wanted to like remember it it's a negative goal and he told me he goes he goes you know you you won't have to write these down and i go i go what do you mean he's also how nerdy of you to be riding this down i would literally stop set and i would drop the weight and i would go write the thing down because i'm like you just set it so perfectly and in my i'm like i'm gonna know this i'm gonna this i'm gonna tell other people i'm gonna say this on the pod it's gonna look great my head actually is silently thinking all these other things it's like trying to like achieve some stupid goal because i'm like this is the answer this is something then the nugget that's gonna be my next hit my next tweet my next whatever that's gonna be great so that's like you know a lame thing to admit but it's true that's where my brand was going but i was like do you mean i have to write these down like you know i'll just remember it and he's like you won't feel like you lack something and so you'll stop like trying to catch everything and grab everything and hold on to everything and learn the next new thing you what you'll realize is like you already know the answers he's like you know it's like a thin book you didn't like imagine a book that ended in twenty pages and it's like you know for for a diet book right you can keep searching for the next fad diet you know the atkins diet and then the slow carb diet and then the car diet and you're you're just cycling through for all these different diets trying to find the next solution and read the next thing and in reality you kind of know the answer the answer is you know don't eat too much and like it basically like eat real food mostly plants and not too much three lines you that is the answer and but instead of actually just let sitting in it you want it to be more complicated than that you would like it to be that actually there is more i need to go learn and find and try buy this you know get this app that's gonna do my intermittent fasting and then put this ketone drops in my drink and then wear a patch that measures my glucose monitor and like all these optimizations and so i've actually spend so much of my life trying these different optimizations and i've a really i'm just saying this as almost like a public service analysis of like if that's you if you've done a bunch of these optimizations you kind of on this endless path of optimizing and you do get results it's not that you don't get any results but like i've now found this like other way that's a lot more peaceful and a lot more fun and it's basically get rid of the underlying like feeling of lack and doubt that you have that's causing you to constantly chase the next best method in solution and answer i think i think that really resonates and one of the things i didn't talk about was my routines and how that was making me miserable i think often routines are great and best practices are great but they end up creating conditions under which you can have a good day and if you don't follow the conditions your brain start saying oh it's not a good day because i didn't get that out in or i didn't get i didn't do my cold plunge and do my tim ferris tea in the morning i didn't do my evernote note you know nineteen i didn't do a got a journal i didn't use this app right there's endless things and i totally resonate with that like one of the practices for me was like how do i not check my order ring how do i not check my blood glucose all these stupid things that are giving me their ticker right yeah so there you go they're their ticker for life and ticker make you miserable you know look at a stock ticker look at k guys look at revenue day to day hour to hour and you're miserable you shouldn't have those for your life yeah and i i should say it's bad for business for me to say this because this podcast and all of my content and all everything i put out is optimizations hacks shortcuts you know ways to be better ways to better yourself in this constant curiosity about what are some other things i could try to better myself what are some other areas i wanna be better and what are some ways i could be better and so i'm like juggling these two things that are almost complete like opposition and like you know and i and i'm not perfect on it either right like i still wake up swipe over and check the bitcoin price even though i know it's this roller coaster and like when it's red i'm starting my day off with like you know a tiny jab and when it's green i i start my day with this this this great little delight that like i don't control and so now my my my first mood is up to you know the conditions of like you know if fucking crypto prices which is silly totally sean what do you think what do you think people are gonna think of in episode like this i'll be i'll be curious i'll be because i sometimes i get nervous about talking about this shit because i'm like i don't wanna po authenticate too much i don't wanna like act like our way or my way or your way it's necessarily better than any other way i get nervous about like having like a guru productivity vibe i get nervous i'm like and then i also get nervous i'm like these people just want like money making schemes let's just give it to them i'm barely like think about like cha right why is cha math and trusting he's interesting because he goes you know he goes on cnbc he talks about all his crazy investing stuff and then he goes with cara sw any he like pours his heart out and he's interesting and em imp yeah and and like he doesn't give a fuck good yeah you do a disservice if you don't show the negative side of all this stuff at the same time because people will just blindly think you know oh yeah these guys have it figured out so and we don't so i think we're all as miserable as anyone else i think two is are what you said i think you're not giving the audience enough like the people who really listen this podcast they they know this is not money making schemes we just like we are shooting the shit about business stuff kind of business nerds and that's what they like so it's not actually that they're looking for god i came to this to find my next million dollar idea that's the like surface level thing and then when you get issue you get through the door realize that's that's not it the second thing is it's just like like this feeling you're having like what are people gonna think of this episode i am rid myself of that that question that question doesn't come into my brain anymore why because who really not at all i'm i am not wearing red robes she's gonna have his head shaved dude he already does she shows up to the podcast have the tide wear to rope exactly the i'm not saying i have rid myself of it i'm saying i am trying to rid myself of that of that question right it's coming up less and less why because two things hey i don't wanna be that way i don't wanna sit here and be the dancing monkey performing on the stage just just for their entertainment i wanna be here from my entertainment and like who are the people who are gonna love this podcast the people who love what we talk about period so if we're talking about something we are interested in that they're never always gonna be into it and if we just keep that as the method right who are my customers the people that love what i do that becomes the sort of like the the the the most joyful way to do you know any kind of business or any kind of product because it is just you pushed out and so then you don't have to worry about what are they gonna want did they like me do they not like me this good is this bad you know i liked it but are they gonna think this it's like those questions just disappear if you commit to who are my customers the people that love what i do the same thing for so who are who are listeners the people that like what we talk about period so then i don't need to if if i like what we talked about i don't need to worry about it and that becomes a very simple filter that's internal and not like seeking kind of what what what are other people gonna think about this yeah yeah yeah and and you and i agree on on a lot of stuff about how feel about the audience i guess sometimes i think of it like i'm gonna do whatever the hell i wanna do and other times i do think i'm am here i exist to serve like others right so like you could say like well just don't give a fuck don't give don't care about what other people think yeah but what if i phrase it of like well i'm i'm here to service other people or you you know what i mean but it's like that and that's fine line and andrew you're saying the service one of things one of the talk is being you you know that's the service the service is being in public in public transparent you know and lately i've been watching all the dave chappell stand up comedy from netflix i just kind of like rediscovered him and watch them all and if you watch the first one it's kind of like a generic dirty stand up or yeah his old bugs from like twenty early twenty seventeen or whatever and then as you watch them they get more and more intros intersect and darker and longer stories in different style and it's cool to see someone evolve or see some you know deeper emotional range or whatever so i don't i don't think it really matters like at the end of the day yes you guys you know this podcast you do i i listen i have to treat it like crack right when i listen to you guys i get so fired up i'm always the shower and i'm going fuck why don't we do that business or i should start this or you know i i love it but and that's that's the that's what people love about the podcast but at the same time like yeah i think talking about this stuff is fine like i look at a couple of the bigger podcasts that are kind of like people we like to listen to sometimes so look at rogan do you think rogan gets on the pod every day and so like do you think he's thinking alright you know what do the people want i what does the audience want how do i make this conversation entertaining for them like i think that's so far back in his mind worth it seems like he's just having a conversation with somebody he finds interesting he talks about what's interesting to him in that thing but you know what if ro came on and he said i had a big fight with my wife this morning and he started talking with that for thirty minutes and didn't let the guys talk yeah he's broken the format yeah but but also with ro like you'll notice he like for example he'll say stuff like he changes his words he's like well i like and i agree with this he'll be like well you know i'm not informed on that topic so i don't even wanna to rant about it of course or he'll say like you know i like i'll noticed he'll he'll use certain words to be respectful and and he's like well you know what and people have asked was like well i just didn't know i know that i influence people so i just wanna to keep in mind that i don't wanna you know say something incorrect and so that's keep so i i don't think you have to entirely tell people to you don't give a fuck about i guess what i mean is like rogan format where he's like yeah i'm gonna talk to an astrophysicist one day and then i'm gonna talk to an mma meet head the next day and then i'm gonna do a drinking podcast and like buddy's while we watch some other shit you don't get you're not looking at i'm just looking at i'm gonna talk out loud and i'm gonna do it for i'm gonna do three hour long episodes yeah dude but ro a fucking comedian his whole stick is that he gets in front of people and like comedian are inherently like the most needy people he gets on a stage and like it needs them to laugh and reply and if he bombs he feels bad and so for me what you're saying is his show broke a bunch of rules that other people would have have had ours episode should be one hour you should have like this you know like sin intro you shouldn't one day be talking about one topic and then your know the the people wanna hear neil grass tyson don't care about brandon shaw or whatever else sure and then you have like like le friedman huge huge podcast use channel he's created and the guy's talking about the nerd of the nerd subjects in the most like mono voice right so it's like he's not mister charisma he's not talking about pop culture and like other top because he's not he found the balance of doing what's interesting to him in his normal personality and i just think that's just like a better way to go than try i'm just trying to say don't act don't act like rogan not human and has the same insecurities and like well i wanna please people i wanna look oh wow bernie did really well i should do bernie more often you know like shit like that yeah yeah i don't i i don't buy that you don't care like i think everybody cares you can say it and i i i get what you mean like you know that should be the attitude going into it but it is unavoidable so i think like well we all give a shit how we're perceived and we'd all be choked if you know i i made that tweet the other day and i got i got a message from a friend that said are you sure you wanna tweet that right because he'd gotten messages from people saying oh my god andrew's is having a mental breakdown on twitter right said are you sure you wanna tweet that yeah you said are you sure you wanna tweet that and was like oh my god have i made this bitch that's why i tweeted it yeah i know now yeah resonated with lots of people got lots of traction and it got lots of nice notes about it but you know it's it's scary putting putting this stuff out there yeah i i i don't find that up to scary but that's weird i when someone says i hate i would hate that interaction are you sure you wanna tweet that yeah dude i just like it took me like an hour to write that i'm fucking sure double down for sam it's like you what like i blame you double down on that down yeah i wanna friend text me that if they actually think that though like i think that's a valuable service right no i don't but that's okay different breads i i i i like also if i have a friend my friend jack sometimes i'll tweet stuff and he'll like reply like that's not true or like what do you like he'll like are you with me and i'll tweet i'll text them i go jack don't argue with me in public like don't don't you dare like you got like what time other he like brothers do that sometimes strikes me crazy oh dude i'm like we're family this stays in the family don't you don't you fucking you defend me you you laid out in traffic for me as i will for you you don't talk you don't argue with me in public you always fucking does that like what's up my out the the numbers of the podcast and he was like but like mega a phone is wrong or he said something like he's like oh but you count youtube that kinda like that's not really a dumb or he said something like that i don't remember what it was and i'm like what the fuck jack just like shut up but i'm like just text me but we we're not gonna argue in public you're you're you're just supposed to i don't even know how we got on but i anyway my point was not bringing up that we shouldn't do this up i'm just curious to to hear what what a feedback is we care about feedback i care about i'm thinking my myself i care about feedback feed us and you can test me and see if i respond to any of it and fail my i think my so how how how often are you keeping this how often are you holding your phone how often do you use using your phone well i'm i'm basically i'm down from six hours a day screen time to two just over two hours and i'm basically just around random days i've just been taking my apple watch so if have a zoom call or something i'll take my phone but if i don't know just bring my apple watch and it's been strangely freeing right because you look i can still see the text and i can get the calls but is it add apple watch the pod yeah watch airport it and if i'm texting i've gotta do this stupid scratch or siri and so it's just not fun to text and so i just don't do it and you're one of they you met steve jobs yeah i met steve jobs tell me what that was what happened well so a lot of people don't know this but when i was fifteen my very first business was a website with an incredibly embarrassing nerdy name it was called mac teens dot com and it was me and a kid from hawaii and another canadian kid and we all made this tech news website and we started writing you know reviews and news and all that kind of stuff and we started getting a lot of traffic in like breaking apple rumors and stuff and i ended up getting invited to go to mac world as is like a member of the press and you know i got invited to this tour of the apple store in new york when that was a you know is brand new who's the first one i think and so i walk into this tour and i think like we're just gonna get some p r flack touring us around and i'm standing outside waiting and a limo rolls up and steep jobs and he gets out and he shakes my hand and i'm you know fifteen the guy's my hero i've read every single biography of him i'm like a quiver mess and i spent the next hour me and like five other journalist getting toured around the apple store was steve jobs and i just asked a bunch questions about you know about the products they're releasing it was like a p r thing so it's not like i got to ask them deep questions but it was pretty freaking cool on the bucket list what was his like a presence like or how how did you treat people or what what what did you kind of take away from just being around well i mean you gotta remember he was he was in steve jobs p r you know mac world ceo mode so he was just incredibly polished i remember he was talking about the cd burner in the seventeen inch imac and i was like in rap the fucking like oem cd burner right but he's making it sound like it's the greatest thing in the world i mean you know the reality distortion field is obviously real and yeah he's just amazing amazing guy and it was it was cool to me did you read this story that this guy tweeted out yesterday i thought you might have a story related to this this guy this tweet kinda went viral about he was trying to sell his company to steve jobs and he fucked up did you read this no like guess said this it's the guy who was the what happened ceo of i like which was like a kind of like a music discovery service kind of like in the early yeah you know like startup up days and it was like a popular service and it's like apple wanted to apple edition acquiring them he's like perfect like apple would be my dream place to get acquired and they go and he gets to have a meeting with steve jobs and he sits in the meeting with steve jobs he's like you i started off a little rough because i was so nervous to be in front of steve jobs he's like but we kinda hit our groove in the presentation we hit our demo like you know like first is like the demo kind of went off the rails first because the executive suite wifi f was down and was like shit how are we we're not in the internet how do we do our demo but we like recovered and steve asked a few questions while we were talking but we had great product answers and you could just tell he was digging it and so his story is basically that at the end of the the meeting he was like look like i think you guys are great and i think he built something something good here you know we'd like to buy your company i'm gonna you know like like i like to buy your company we're i'll talk to eddie and we'll figure out you know eddie will take it from here he'll he'll deal with the details and and then he's like is the guy like kinda didn't want the meeting end right there because you know it first is like that's amazing when he's like you know like what what range you know would you be thinking about for for price for for an acquisition and then like steve kinda like the dial the dial like turns up a little bit like this conversation gets a little more serious for was talking about the price now he's like he's like what's your revenue and how much did you raise what was the valuation is your last financing and the guy's like oh like you know revenue like we haven't we're pre revenue we're we're super small right now but you know we raised that fifty million dollar valuation and we've added like like millions of users since then i think he said fifty million users since then which was just some absurd number and as steve jobs like we probably acquired it for fifty million and then the guy like went from this high of like steve jobs just said he wants to buy my company to like oh shit we've been working like since the last round we raised two years ago we've been working at acquired users them i'd have to go to my team and be like hey you've created essentially no value between last valuation and and the exit here so he's like you know doesn't want it to just leave it there and he's like he's like you know i just think i don't think my team will be i don't i don't think my team or the investors would you know that would be acceptable to them and then he's like he's like we'll make it he's like we'll like we'll convince them know think i was like steve jobs respond something like that and the guy's like you know i just feel like you know i think we're worth more than that i think we're i think we're worth a hundred fifty million and he like paused for a second he goes actually like i know we're worth i know we're worth a hundred fifty million and he's like jobs got like pissed he's like you know do you have another offer on the table have you been offered a hundred and fifty million dollars but is that how you know that you're worth that and then the guy's like just pauses for saying he's like he's like bullshit he's like you're a liar and he's like i don't he's like forget this we're not doing this deal and basically like locked out and then he's like and we tried to salvage the deal like we tried to like with eddie eddie tried to like make it all good he's like steve jobs called him later was like i don't trust you you you i don't trust you i think you're a liar you know over you overstated like you know every you over overflow your hand basically and i was like we're not doing this oh i love that that is awesome who wrote that wow what company that is an awesome story this guy he's wanna pull up his name i so his name is ali p so his his twitter handles ape eight apart o so p a r t o what when ended up happening to his company that did it itself so i think let's see what what ended up happening so it's what a baller story i think that's he's like soon after that apple released the itunes genius sidebar it was a rip off of their thing facebook copy their thing and they sold the company for a loss within a year that was the sort of like the oh my so the story the other good one is drew the story of drew house and going they were talking about some dropbox apple and steve jobs so start saying feature not a product your feature not a product we can just rip you off and i mean in some ways steve jobs is right i think that criticism is fair over the next decade rid the it'd be irrelevant but at the same time drew house and went on to become a billionaire and build this great public company so dude i actually i love stories where steve jobs is wrong because the guy it was like a fucking asshole like you know he fuck that guy was he brilliant yeah but like i was thinking the other day where he like had this quote where he goes to that guy who who was selling pepsi and he was like just wanna sell sugar water whole life your life or do you wanna come and change the world and i'm like part of me like badass that's awesome steve good job yeah so to sucks whatever you're doing is doesn't suck and then i'm like dog what you've just created is fucking can't like this the break you if if we hate if i if i'm supposed to hate zuckerberg i should dislike you too like you're on the crack pipe he's on the crack what's the difference and so you know what i mean like it's like it's the same it's like the same thing like so so anyway whenever i hear these stories about him and would being arrogant i'm like yeah you're badass ass you're awesome you're always right and then also like you're a dick shut the fuck up like i was i was as a ceo is terrible because i couldn't do that right like imagine sam you're hiring someone in and you say like do you wanna change the face of publishing forever right you just sound like such a deal yeah but you talked to most silicon valley ceos they say something like that i just could never bring myself to say that well part of these en i'm like oh wow you actually believe that you are doing something and then part of me like you're full of it i i just read this book called endurance have you guys heard book called endurance oh my god amazing i never wanna feel like your life is good read that oh my god i couldn't put it down sean you know what it is i haven't read it but i've seen the time i've seen the cover i know the cover in my brain so basically in the early nineteen hundreds probably between nineteen hundred and like nineteen twenty five it was called like the heroic era of arctic expedition so they had steam engines and they had combustible engines but it was still they still had sales and they didn't have radios and so these guys would sail from england all the way down to antarctica the very southern part of the world to try and figure things out the world wasn't really well mapped out but it kinda was so basically it was kinda safe but mostly not safe and this guy named ernest shack basically led this expedition of thirty people and they got stuck in the ant art an antarctica and it's basically the story about their two and a half year or maybe two year expedition to survive and what i learned reading that book is basically the pack the the the people you're leading they mimic the behavior of the leader and so for a while i was against this like we're gonna change the world they're like you know i should be vulnerable and i should let people know like you know things aren't going that good but now i after reading that book i'm like no fuck you gotta like commitments convince everyone that it's gonna be okay no matter what totally it's an amazing book too i when i get stressed out at work one of the things i love to do is to watch i'll what is it called alone have you guys seen that show they literally dump people in the middle of nowhere and it's competition to see who can survive in the wilderness all by themselves for the longest oh my god you know you're watching people eating rats and like trying to catch fish in the freezing and cold how long do they last i cuts his leg open with a hatch it or whatever you know usually it's like some some people go like three months four months six months but a lot of people are out pretty quick and the the shack book is exactly like that i watch it and i just feel so relaxed because i'll be cozy on the couch and warm in my bad reading the book and it really makes you appreciate just how comfortable our lives are you should read that book sean so we could talk about it because it like i read it over two days i think it it it it was it it's riveting i i posted really it was crazy i can't believe that that that people survived that and it it made me feel thankful and it showed me that like in order to be a leader you do need to convince people out and yourself that everything gonna be okay when i read that i was like i don't wanna be a good leader not willing to do what this guy was willing to do i willing to go this far something funny just happened on twitter so speaking of distractions and and all that good stuff and speaking of the the meme kind of like who are your models and then do who do you want to see who do you not like to see when alright so so bezos jeff bezos just tweeted at this thing he goes he goes you know you should listen and be open but don't let anybody tell you who you are this is just one of the many the the this was and he puts a photo of a barron article of a head of a a front page of barron which says amazon dot bomb and it's a picture of jeff bezos face on a bomb and it says the the the title is the idea that amazon's ceo jeff bezos is pioneered to new business is silly he's just another middle man and the stock market is starting to catch on the real winners this was it like the early two thousand yeah this is in i don't know when like sorry go ahead giant ish or something like that yeah that's ninety nine nine he goes it says the real winner on the net and it's like apostrophe net like internet the real winners on the net will be firms that sell their own product directly to consumers just look what happened to sony and dell that's what's gonna happen to amazon and and so bezos is basically saying like you know people told us we're gonna there's one of many things when people told are gonna fail and he goes today amazon of the most successful companies and has revolutionized two entirely different industries and then elon musk participated out replied with just a silver a silver medal with a number two on it like the emoji with metal if you gotta give the me because elon is currently richer than phases either because of that i don't know space yeah it's doing better than i i think i think it's the rich thing which is douche if it's a spacing thing that's not douche she if it's a rich thing that's douche she but it's so funny as you were saying cinematic right has been arrival yeah were saying like to us if jeff bezos is not really the rival we don't really root for his you know whatever it doesn't like hurt us personally with jeff faces wins a little bit more but but for these guys these are their meme rivals right like these are their their their peers that they sort of are are in competition with dude also this is i do wanna see elon lose a little bit it gets too smoke with his how great he is be smoke because he is in fact amazing but this how baller is that tweet hilarious it has get earlier you said you know you said fuck steve jobs and i think in order to be that successful you have to have some kind of personality disorder or yeah or like mama or something and you look at musk or bezos or if you read more about bezos i think he's a really difficult person to work for like all these guys are so complicated and a hundred years ago you just wouldn't know there wasn't twitter you just wouldn't see this this would all go on behind the scenes and it's crazy that we get to see stuff like well i don't even think it's that complicated musk is really successful because he's incredibly smart and has a complex because his father probably didn't love him like that like it's probably quite simple and but it's it it works right i'm thankful of that well this thing that's great i think i don't know you got a phone but you know show me a great man and i'll show you a bad man or so what is that quote well i always say i don't know if i got it from anywhere or not but all men are also evil man all great great like like that right yeah great great men or bad men yes and in order to in order to be great you have to do bad stuff or you may not think it's bad but like let's say that like sixty percent of americans think obama's a saint well like the people who we drone they don't think he's a saint i've got afghan friends and they'll be like oh i fucking hate obama you know he he drowned my family and so but like so in order to like do great shit and be loved by i at a large scale you're gonna piss off a lot of people way i would put it it'd be better might be all great men or sad men right so they have a sadness or don't wanna worry andrew or or don't wanna order or the driving to do this because why else would anyone do it right talking about the shack expedition these guys are the shack of business well why would anyone choose to do that unless they have a personality disorder or like deep trauma right but meme ram andrew just went up to you perfect yeah like actually i think you're example of like obama drone striking people is a little too extreme i think it's more like you elon my is in a he's a great inventor and businessman that doesn't also mean he's got great views on the vaccine and on he's not a great husband maybe and like yeah you know we will praise somebody for an aspect like on this podcast i will happily pray somebody for an aspect of something they do that's ching like this is like the the jake paul tweet i did where was like jake paul is a great marketer a great self promoter like i don't even think that's ar i think he's clearly a great self promoter that is how he is so famous as he promoted himself into fame and like people are like yeah but he you know he's accused of assault on this girl and like he's a jerk and like haven't you seen these videos where he makes these crew jokes i said oh like sorry did i say he's my like he's my hero and that like he is a great boyfriend like i i don't think i said that i think i said he's a great marketer and self promoter and you can learn for from right i appreciate that and that's the the way i take it which is you know anybody that that you praise or you call for being awesome or call it for being bad it's not you're not saying they are either all great or all bad it's like they are grain and ways and bad in ways and everybody is bad and it's not even that you you can like how he builds cards but not how he treats his marriage right yeah