Hire 1 to Hire 10, Sam Gets Hacked, Shaan Buys a $200K NFT, and More with Andrew Wilkinson

like first it's exhilarating we're renting an agency is awesome when you're starting out you get a seat at the table and all these places you don't deserve to be right i was like a twenty two year old pip sq and i was meeting the founders of pinterest and slack and they're were asking me for my opinion right it was it was crazy i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never look bag alright we got andrew wilkinson consent on the pod today we just talked about sam got hacked and situation where andrew got hacked and how crazy the hacking situation is we talked about this two hundred thousand dollar and t and whether that was dumb or a good idea we talked about how andrew is functioning during world war three going on or you know the craziness of the world and how he's dealing with that what else we talk about sam we talked about how when he thinks it's time to hire first employees which sounds like a basic concept but we actually i actually thought it was really cool there's there's a gem in there called hire one to hire ten hey and he talks about this this little nugget i wrote that down during the pod was like oh shit i've been making this mistake for a long time he he's totally right we talked about why bad guys usually win for fraud con artists oh we talked about his his newsletter business and the card of copywriting and some of the we we we took one of his private kinda emails and we start talking about some of the genius things that he did in the copywriting of that sean you're awfully quiet this episode and i was too because i was like just listening and learning is that what you were doing i was listening to learning and then also our connection our internet connection is not super great i didn't know when you were gonna talk first when i was gonna talk so i was just decided to be paused a lot of times but it was good i always like having him on alright cool enjoy this episode alright andrew wilkinson here what's up dude hey man how are you doing we're supposed to be in person but i got covid yeah i know we had like two hundred people coming to see you and i talk and we canceled it like three days in advance so crappy we gotta we gotta do it but covid was i've i've had worse massages it wasn't too bad i was one of the lucky ones on like sean that's a good one excellent one liner can i alright i tell you guys what happened to me this week weekend i had a long weekend so sean i i called sean urgently because he was the first person to come mind because i thought he would know someone at twitter but basically i got hacked and let me explain to you how i got got because i got got good so basically i was sitting in my bath yeah i was sitting in a bath at one pm and i get this text from a number and it says in a really nice text i actually i i sent you a picture sean and it says you we've noticed suspicious activity on twitter from some city in india and it said the name of the city and it was this real official looking text and it said we just sent you a confirmation code in another text can you copy that code and paste it to us so we know that this is zero you and i get this other text right at the same time and it's from twitter and it's eight numbers and i copy it that i put it in the other text i hit send and then immediately i was like wait a minute that was i should not have done that and what it was was it was the the text from twitter that was actually someone hitting reset password and and they sent me a text and i sent it to those people and so what happened how did how did you re you you realize right then you'd had been hacked did not like once you saw something suspicious you didn't go back and think how did they get me right then i was like i sent the text and i was like it sat for ten seconds or twenty seconds and i was like wait a minute that doesn't seem right because i was like playing on my phone i was like sitting the bath watching at youtube it played up my phone and i wasn't paying to touch it this was automated i was just like in in an automated mode and this happens and i send it and then i go wait that's weird so i log in to twitter and i can't log in and i type my password and it's not working and i click reset password and it said we've sent an email to and it's an email i don't recognize and i was like oh my gosh i got got and then they tweeted out a thing that says i partnered up with hubspot to give away a bunch of playstation and we're gonna give the money to s saint jude here's a picture of the playstation dm me and i'll sell you the playstation for five hundred dollars all money goes to saint jude and they but they i think they only collected like twenty five hundred dollars but here's the kicker one of the guys who gave money he gave money five hundred dollars and he goes also because i such a fan because i like you so i'm gonna give you another five hundred so he sent them a thousand dollars and so eventually twitter helped me and i got back but when you gotta give you gotta give these guys marks for creativity like so often you get those spear phishing emails and stuff and they're written and like yes esl they don't really make any sense those those guys sound pretty good it was a good one and i actually called them and i talked to them and i was even texting them and they were like trying to sound like me it was it was pretty wild they they got me have you guys ever had that happen i i actually had i've been i think i've been hacked before it was really weird i don't i i really talked about it actually but about two years ago when you remember the jamal k killing where you know saudi arabia basically beheaded a political dis and i tweeted about it and said i don't remember something like this is horrible and an atrocity or something and at the time we're raising our fund and like a week later i get a dm from a shake and he's got this legit looking account he's got that you know the head address and i go to his website and it looks like this legit you know financial institution or whatever and he says i really wanna invest in your fund and so i get on the phone with him and unlike any other investor pitch he doesn't ask me anything about the fund he just starts grilling me and he starts saying dude do you know in qatar is there anyone in qatar you know and i'm like oh that's weird like you know have a chat with him for thirty minutes hang up don't hear anything from and then twenty four hours later i got a video message from him on whatsapp and it's just fireworks and it says happy new year and i'm like well that's a weird like what a weird guy i don't think anything of it and then for the next week my phone is constantly rebooting and around this time it clicks for me and i'm like oh my god i probably was identified as somebody the saudi wanted to like check out and they probably did one of these zero days on me so i ended like basically redoing my phone sending it away i never figured it out but it's like it's freaking terrifying this is like i watched a video and these guys probably had rude access to my phone what's the what's a zero day a zero day is a attack that uses a flaw within the operating system that nobody knows about right so it's like you know they've they could send you a link in safari and it could somehow get root access to your iphone and apple doesn't know about it yet so they can't prevent it wow have you had that sean i would thought the bitcoin bros would kind i think god i've never been zero day no that's i mean that's where at least as far as i know but that's dude that's so scary like that's that's like why when the when the un meets they have to like put their phone in a radioactive safe or whatever like you know else you know like with with obama he had a special toilet they would bring with him so he couldn't poo anywhere except for the special toilet and it would inc his feces because they don't want anyone to get his dna right like that's how intense they are no way and like cops yeah yeah he like drinks from a cup they like secret service takes it they like destroy it we we all have a mutual friend i'm not gonna name now but they told me that they they work for this famous company and when they go to well i could say it because i think facebook does it too but like some i've heard stories some folks at the injuries in h set when they go to china they don't they're not allowed to bring their normal laptop and they have to bring a different laptop that doesn't have anything on it yet and i think a lot of facebook employees have to do that too but they like don't want certain laptops going there oh yeah like russia china i mean you gotta be so paranoid but i mean ideally we're the crazy thing you realized is that like i was talking to a friend of mine this guy matt holland who's got a cyber security company called field effect and he's former cs which is like the canadian hacking offensive cyber command or whatever it's like the kindergarten version of cia exactly exactly it's like the crappy canadian version but he worked with like he worked with the cia like tailored access and all that stuff so anyway i was having dinner with him and i was like dude like i use two factor like you know i don't get text messages i follow the procedures like you couldn't hack me could you and he's like dude like two hours like give me a budget and as long as i've got budget i can afford to go by cyber weapons so like these cyber weapons these zero days they cost like one to three million dollars but if you have the money you can get anyone you want you literally just send them a text they don't even have to click a button and you got them it's absolutely terrifying the guys and you just hope we're not on the radar of some huge country like the why would they care about us he he's like you thought that was shrimp shampoo you were just eating bro i got straight to your phone from that appetizer during this meal right i i heard i heard somebody go on likes friedman podcast and they said they were talking about this market for zero day exploits and they were like you know it used to be iphone exploits were like the the the creme la cr that was the caviar of like you know cyber you know ammo emma that you could go by and now android exploits are higher ranking because there's just affect more people and and i think maybe some governments had switched off of iphone or something like that i'm not sure entirely but like yeah these things run like seven figures to buy you know these these exploits or these are like routed devices basically that why almost i almost started a business i bought a domain hack my company dot com and the thing that's interesting is that all the enterprise businesses so like government organizations companies over a hundred people they have it they think about this stuff but nobody in the small and medium sized really consider cyber and it's just it's something no one thinks about it and like we've dialed it in over the last couple years but i really had to drag everyone along like nobody thinks about it but it really is a total loss you don't think you don't think about it until you get got you know what i mean and you don't it's one of those things where it's not a big deal until it's a big deal and anyone who's experienced a little bit of it they're like oh okay i understand why but what's screwed up is in america we have ex experienced do you know what ex experience is andrew it's like a one of the three credit bureaus they lost like i think they had like almost every americans credit score and information they lost all of our information and it was hacked and like we didn't most americans don't care but then when i get like something that like this weekend happened to be now i'm paranoid now i'm like really nervous oh yeah so what's crazy is like if someone really wanted to get you and they didn't have a budget let's say like some hacker just wants to get you they can literally just go outside your house in a van they can get a pringles can antenna they can point it at your house and they can broadcast the same whatever your wifi network is let's call say it's called sam's wi i just recreate sam's wi i pointed it at you go on your laptop and you're like what the fuck like i can't log in and you try your password once you try your password they know the password your wi they get into security camera on your property or whatever and then they're in your network and it's just insane oh fuck you and now that we're talking about we're all target this spot we we should edit it we should edit this though this is scary i there was been this is like talking about how you've got a safe full of jewels in your house there's was three things that i was gonna say and i was like there is no value in me saying this on the pod because what well good does it tell you to say this thing i discovered of that somebody could do to me nope not kinda say it then the measures i took against it nope not gonna say it like what why why do i wanna say to this basically this stuff freaks me out like i'm same nose i'm very chill about almost all things this is one that really does freak me out because these like these attacks they could just come they could come at you and it feels like you could just get you know you could just get rob silly you know whether it's personal for me like you know if i'm in the i'm on of the shower and my phone is there i pointed away i'm i don't know who's got access to this camera i'm not trying to have my dudes out there right now like literally thinking about that every time i shower every time i think is that a thing though like i see people with with think so you guys have a little bit more experience than i do i think or you make maybe me know people who work at these companies i don't think fate like do you actually think that facebook is listening to what i'm saying or the make not i don't i don't think facebook is but i think well i think they have programs that record random samples and then people listen them but i don't think it's like a conspiracy again that that's that's a thing that's that's a thing so if you go on alexa settings like they're like you can opt in to being like oh help us make alexa better and they'll listen to random recordings of you saying stuff right on the flip side i don't think you need to worry about that i don't think that's like a massive conspiracy and they're gonna use that against you what i would be worried about is someone getting into your phone and having access to your camera when you don't realize and that's a real that's a very real thing for sure yeah i'm like you know and you you know these are the things that were you you seem paranoid but there's enough at stake for somebody to be able to like let's just take tiktok for example tiktok is downloaded on like over a billion phones right now and it's a chinese company and it has access to your camera your camera roll your face at at all times plus it has the feed which can like feed you any information you want alright so this is like pretty much rude access to your life and your brain and and so you know i'm not saying they're doing anything but like could they of course they could right like looks like that you know that face app app where you can like make yourself fat or whatever early rushing knows everyone's used it it's owned by the russian government probably right and now they have scans to their everyone's faces yeah exactly and so and like you've ever been on your phone and then you like kind of you do that thing where you swipe up to like close apps and then you see like this app that you forgot you had opened four days ago and it's on and it's like on the camera screen that's it's like whoa this the app just has my camera open right now like i didn't even realize my camera was open but clearly it is because like if i click to that app that camera's on right now like i like i can see even in the preview that it's on so there's all kinds of crazy stuff that that's out there was saying when your thing happened i did another round of like kind of like my shitty version of like drilling in bolts into like the the walls of my my stuff but you know i just know that anybody who's sufficiently talented and motivated can kick my ass at this area i just you know i actually just hope that they don't give a shit about me that's that would be the other scenario you wanna air gap yourself right so it's like you don't want to be the one who sends the wires for payment you wanna have a whole process and a series of things that have to happen before any money gets sent or any access it's like you don't want you don't want access to github you don't want access to the s three you gotta have like many many layers of that but but yeah it's freaking terrifying this stuff well thanks for sharing sean i i called you first and it worked someone a twitter employee saw it in holler at me on facebook yeah and by the way when he did i was he's this really a twitter employee i went i went in stock the shit out of this guy was like oh yeah he's just a twitter it looks like legit i like front him on facebook and like soft he was married i'm like who's your wife so like i was i was nervous and then i've had people dm me saying they were scammed and i'm like should i give them money but then i'm like i don't know if they're real so like my whole rate is kinda screwed twitter the twitter guys like just give me your login for instagram and i'll get this all though exactly i'll i'll take care of for you so anyway i'm i'm messed up but thank you it it worked out the by the way you need to just buy p they were scamming people with a ps five thing right just need to buy a ps five four for the guy that helped you that that's i think they'll think totally yeah to close the karma loop completely somehow i'm willing to do that i think what i'm gonna do is make them like facetime me though or or just actually give it to saint jude right they were basically saying oh this is for saint jude it's for the kids okay you can't trust any of these people online but they were trying to give to saint jude you should just give to saint jude and then that game close the karma loop for you alright i'll do it i'll do i'm gonna i'm gonna do something i'm gonna highlight these guys i'm gonna make them facet facetime me i'm gonna actually i'm a be alright and go to your computer log in to paypal show me that you send a money alright i got you i'll make it right so because i'm just speaking on this i i had a thing that i was gonna talk about on the mill road it was like super relevant so basically i don't know if you guys i saw there was some news where the number basically the number two n nfc project kind of number one and number two they essentially merged number two kinda bought number one and it which which sounds a little crazy but that's what happened so like these two projects that have had like a combined i don't know three billion in n sales they merged board api yacht club and crypto what club bought crypto punk you you wrote about it you said it it's it's as if chocolate bought vanilla if harry potter bought mickey mouse yeah exactly i like the straight kind of like merger at the top it's like if beanie babies bought po there alright yeah nice one so so basically this went down yesterday and when when the news was breaking i was like okay this is gonna cause a spike in one of these projects bought either board apes are gonna go up or punk are gonna go up i don't know which one i was like i've been on the fence about buying one of these i'm gonna buy one so i texted ben i was like alright apron punk he's said i hold on putting the baby to sleep i'll call you in twenty i go ben punk i'm the impulse is now twenty minutes from now i'm gonna chicken it out like i've done twenty times already in the past six months about these things i'm buying one of these right now and i made a bet that the punk would go up guess what guys bet completely wrong punk punk state punk punk down you know a little bit five percent or so that nothing bad but apes shot up i would have made about about seventy thousand dollars and twenty four hours had had i just picked the other one know i picked i picked wrong on which one i thought would go up but in doing so i was gonna share with the community on the i was be like hey here's the punk i bought here's the process i that you know just like share the story basically along with the news of this happened so i thought one of these would go up i picked this one i was wrong the other one went up but you know anyways here's the pump i got and and then i was like i don't even wanna share this i don't like i was like first i need to go through all the measures to like put this into cold storage and like get this off the fucking internet so that nobody comes in and steals my two hundred thousand dollar n entity that i just bought well you paid two hundred grand for it yeah oh my god are you my previous i don't know most expensive piece of art would have been i don't know zero dollars than twenty dollar yeah like t shirt kid at the you know the jersey shore or something like fucking family reunion sure i you know what's crazy as you could you could have like i've bought some art over the last couple years and like for two hundred grand you can buy like a very significant piece of art you could have this beautiful thing in your house that you know act in a real art market that we know has existed for the last hundred years like i'll be super curious to see how this goes wait andrew enter you bought two hundred thousand dollar pieces of art no not two hundred thousand but like you know i've bought expensive art for my house and office and that kind of stuff and you know for two grand you can buy a pretty you can buy a nice piece of art you you can buy like a lamborghini babe right right maybe used lamborghini you can use lamb for that about so definitely had some buyers or remorse as soon as i hit the button because i was like what the hell did i just do but you know that's the game like i the one thing i'm doing this whole year is i'm playing in all parts of crypto i'm actually using all the different protocols and the tools and getting to know and i know like you know a couple of projects i go in there you know it's gonna be a scam i'm gonna get rug pulled all the projects are gonna go up like crazy some project i'm gonna realize yeah that thing i thought you know like was kinda stupid was was actually really stupid and so this is you a wonderful it's like if you're i think you're gonna be in the space you gotta play the whole space i think it's the right way to do it i mean i actually have a whole in the notes i had a whole thing about this but you gotta do it wrong before you do it right right and if you know you directional wanna go into n t's in crypto you just kinda have to throw a bunch of spaghetti get the wall and you gotta lose a lot of money and you know this might make money might lose money but just starting i think is way more important so i don't think it's a bad mood necessarily let me ask a question that sean wrote on here which is actually really good so we've got a ton of topics andrea has a ton of stuff i did a lot of i did a lot of research andrew on your topics but sean got this great question which is what does what are people's take on how you're functioning during world war three so basically with the markets the way they are with people dying war andrew and sean what are you guys doing and where's your head at so i from a business perspective i've spent so much time trying wrestle with current events right like think about trump and all the unpredictability reading the new york times every day at the end of the day i'm resigned to the fact that i don't control the global economy or or if this turns into world war three or something the way that i'm operating is very similar to the way i always operate which is i try and have amazing businesses that generate a lot of cash flow and i try and keep as much money as i can on the sidelines and by businesses that'll be fine even if valuations are down there's no venture capital there's no banking there's no market so i'm kinda going as i usually am and this time i don't know i think i'm less less into it and i what i mean is psychologically i'm i'm a little more distance from it than i usually would be because of the last five years like i kinda over exhausted myself with news and stuff when you say you have money on the sideline what's that mean well that i have liquidity i have you know money in the bank waiting to yeah but you do do you have it literally in savings or bonds or do you have it in equities i have it in like us treasury bills or or gi usually because having things and inequities equities like i have right now i'm hurting well here's the thing i mean i talked to so many friends about this like warren buffett has this great line where he says if you owned a farm and you know your farm to you is worth like a million bucks right let's say it makes a hundred thousand dollars a year of profit just because some jackass rolls up one day and says hey can i buy your farm for fifty grand you just say fuck off no i you know i'm not selling for fifty grand it doesn't mean you think your farm worth fifty grand now right and the stock market goes up and down and you get all these bids you just don't have to sell so unless you sell your stock at this valuation it doesn't affect you in any way yeah well the the only difference is i think i like that mentality a lot it's more like you're in a neighborhood and you're like my home is worth a million dollars and then your neighbor sells their home for like two hundred and fifty thousand dollars you're like whoa hey well what's going on here and then the other neighbor to your left so their home for or for fifty thousand dollars and every day you're hearing about another home sale in your neighborhood for like so much less and you're like look i'm not moving i'm holding on but damn i really do you know like it's hard to still feel like your house worth the million dollars when all your neighbors have just sold there well you know you know the the whole mister market thing right but also it is a irrational yeah but that's i understand that but what's to add a point to sean's analogy is and you've taken a loan against that house at that billion dollar valuation totally that's what the funny thing is about the loans i don't know how it is is in the states but in canada if your house gets valued to ten million dollars let's say and you go and you take a two million dollar loan there is no market for your house right the bank doesn't rev value your house every year and so they don't call it it's not like a margin call where if it's a stock at ten million and it drops to three you're getting margin called day of real estate that like i i wouldn't worry about that too much yeah so i think real estate equities yeah oh yeah well that's dude margin calls that's like driving with a knife on the steering wheel you have to be incredibly careful you don't take any debt like that i mean i i the market it has to drop by another hundred percent for me to or any of my loans to to pay back i mean it's gotta drop a lot so i i take create a little cent or or something or sorry not a hundred percent it's got a half it's got a half yeah there's i i do but it's in kind of non core stocks that i hold outside of my business and i don't anything that's volatile i don't use margin and if i do use margin and i'm using like five or ten percent typically or i have other cash on the sidelines to pay off that debt if i need to but i live in fear of debt i think it's like the number one way you can lose you know you can already be rich and then lose everything so the only way basically do you do you think tiny would have been possible if it weren't for meta lab well i think like at the end of the day whatever the do you need you need a business that generates cash flow i think the structure certainly can exist you know anyone can recreate the structure the question is do you need partners and investors outside capital in my case you know i had an original business that generated cash flow i use that to start you know five more businesses a couple of them worked and then we could make a group but yeah you kinda need something to work in the first place if you wanna own the whole thing yeah who'd woulda thought it would've have been an agency though i never would've have predicted that well agencies are they're a great way to make money a lot of money quickly right they just they're linear businesses and you kinda have to accept that something that you wanted to talk about today was whether it's better to own one hundred percent of something and bootstrap it or to give up equity for to partners whether that's for sweat equity or money or money but you we were talking about that and i asked my audience companies that were bootstrap and quite big and there's a few that are doing billions a year in revenue and i know noticed two commonalities one a lot of the things that were bootstrap to be really big they were things that were easy to take bank loans against so it's a lot of restaurant stuff so maybe they took like loans against some equipment or they took loans against a building they owned things like that and the second thing was i've noticed that there's a lot of agencies that were bootstrap and became pretty substantial sized agencies or agencies or service based businesses so like recruiting companies it services things like that where basically you bill out people's time for a hundred dollars and you charge three hundred dollars or something like that well think about it you don't need especially if you're a young person and you can cut you got enough money to live for a year you can go in certain an agency because at the end of the day it's you go and sell you win a contract as soon as you win the contract you go and find a developer or you do the work yourself and then before you know what you're cash flowing and you're always able to hire people just in time for the work and so at the end of the day there's really no burn and it's very capital efficient and you don't need you don't even need an office anymore mean we we almost never had an office and oh you know we over time we had you know a couple small ones or whatever but the big fuck up a lot of these big agencies make is they start starting like these fancy humongous five million dollar offices in new york and san francisco and spain and you know whatever they're they're great businesses if you run them right and how many people work at meta lab now i think it's about a hundred and seventy how often do you say to yourself i'm not sure if the the headache is the headache of having a hundred and seventy employees is always worth it well it's very abstract for me right i haven't been in the business for five or six years and the way we run tiny now is that we meet with the ceo once a year and otherwise they check in whenever they need help with anything and so when i was running it like first it's exhilarating we're renting an agency is awesome when you're starting out you get a seat at the table in all these places you don't deserve to be right i was like a twenty two year old pip sq and i was meeting the founders of pinterest and slack and you know all these amazing places and they're asking me for my opinion right it was it was crazy but at a certain point you get so exhausted you're making a good amount of money you don't wanna get on a plane to san francisco every second day to go and sell and at that point you know it starts to become a much more intensive business and for me personally i don't enjoy running businesses after about fifteen or twenty people and so once i hit that point i knew i needed to transition to a ceo so when we were in the document you say the pros and cons bootstrapping and only one hundred percent what what do you have under those well i mean i think that i've changed my opinion a lot on this like when i first started i was like adjacent free david hana meyer hanson aco like hundred percent every business should be bootstrap i now think that's crazy and stupid and i think there's certain businesses where it's insane not to raise money right like if you have an opportunity to grow your business it's like the analogy always use is if you own a bakery and there's a line out the door and you have a single oven and you need to buy three more ovens but you don't have the money and in order to service the people in the line you need to buy two more ovens it's crazy not to raise money or go get debt or something i just was never in that position and i think you know owning a hundred percent or owning majority in your business it's like a dictatorship and dictatorship can be very good like lee you from singapore or they can go terribly like kim jong un right and the question is what's your personality and what's gonna work for you i mean you can move in insanely fast there's no board there's no committee you don't owe anyone anything you don't have an outcome you know you don't have the ipo you don't have to sell and you have total integrity like when chris i buy a business we can look people in the eye and be like we're cutting a check like this is us right that's very different on the cons i mean you're on an island you don't have anyone to really who's aligned and cares and can tell you you're being an idiot and so you can really drive your business off the rails and then you also think in a limited way i mean i know so many entrepreneurs who could ten their business but they're so addicted to their dividends or they're conservative and so they don't so what like i'm i ira raise money for our podcasting software company super cast i'm gonna raise money for our news business like there are situations where it's logical what about that conversation of employees employees saying they want equity and you don't get just there's certain businesses there's certain businesses where we do and there's certain ones where we don't right and the big question is what i always say to a to an employee equal risk equal reward and if the business is gonna sell at some point or we think it can ipo great we'll love to talk about equity but there's a cost to it right if you wanna make three hundred grand a year and you don't wanna give up any of that three hundred grand in order to get stock options or buy equity then doesn't matter so i love i love giving people the option in saying look you can either give up some of your comp or upside or whatever and we'll give you stock options or you can get the big salary and prioritize cash and a lot of people prioritize comfort and cash i find at least you know not outside of the bay area by the way andrew you mentioned the guy from singapore sam do you this guy leak on you i know a little bit about them i didn't realize he was a dictator i thought they called them like the ceo or something now he's literally a dictator so like a good the good dictator angie do you can you give us like the two minutes two minute kind of summary of of who this guy is and why he's awesome so effectively he took over singapore is like a island tropical island state in asia and at the time it was like rice patti poverty like a bog and he literally took it over you know how an auto had total control and he basically thought like a business person and was like okay how do we make this the most business friendly place how do we optimize taxes how do we ensure we have hyper competent government how do we pay government really really well how do we incentivize the whole world to manufacture and export you know their products from here and basically built it into asia's kinda outside of hong kong i think it's like the central banking and finance hub in asia so it's a pretty incredible story and i think he his background is like he's like a math and computer science guy right like he he doesn't come from kind of this like you know political background like he came from a different sort of background and i think that's why you got different ideas from from a leader in charge totally i was gonna say you had one thing you tweeted out that's related to how you run the business at tiny which is this this higher one higher ten framework what what is that because that that sounded interesting to me and i think that that's like from what i understood it was a pretty useful concept so so explain that yeah so our ceo's get super annoyed because i say this all the time probably the number one thing i say and it's probably the biggest hack that enabled us to build tiny over the last eight years so i mean think about it like this so if you had an army general who is commanding a thousand troops but he's still telling individual soldiers what to do and he's personally restock their ammunition and he's shuffling people around you'd be like what the hell is this guy doing right but i think a lot of people operate their business like this i mean i certainly did in the early days i would swoop and poop and you know instead of hiring a vp marketing i would go and i'd hire a whole bunch of marketing people and just kind of become the vp of marketing and or i'd bypass people and tell people what to do and what i realized is you should never ever hire the ten people always focused on hiring the one person so that could be a ceo who will then go out out and hire all the executives or could be hiring an executive who will hire an entire team but it just it's such a hack right it's like eighty twenty how do i do twenty percent of the eighty percent of the result and yeah i mean it took me ages to figure this out i feel like i've only cracked this in the last like five years and i still crystal will still catch me in this he'll be like hire you know hire one to hire ten didn't when you hire that that mistake all the time and when you hire that one person how much so let's say your business is doing let's say one million in revenue it's small no let's say little let's say ten million in revenue two million in in like actual cash flow you have you hire that one person you pay them a lot of money two hundred and fifty thousand dollars do you only hire that two hundred and fifty thousand dollar person when you know for a fact you've got budget for like two more people yeah that i mean that's my approach that's why i've shifted to is like i hire you know here's an example is like we hired the ceo of aero press and he asked me questions oh you know what do you think about this hire or that higher and i just said that's your you know that's your hire you know i hired you i trust you a hundred percent you make those hires right and so it's complete delegation of you know when i buy a business i make two decisions who runs it and how are they incentivized and unless they do thing dirty or horrible or the business goes to shit you know i just leave them to it what's the trick on the how are they incentivized so so what's the how do you think about that when you buy business and you say alright the business today is here and i think naturally it's gonna get to there and i'm bringing on this person to get it to be some inflection above that and i also know that things can go wrong so how do you think about that incentive structure is it is it case by case you're coming up with very unique patterns or very unique you know packages or do you have kind one base that you that you go off of it's so different i mean like everyone's incentivized differently there's there's certain people where for example they need to be able to say they're a partner and they have equity you there's other people who don't care about that and they want just targets to hit i mean we've done everything from saying okay let's say the business makes a hundred million dollars and it's growing at fifteen percent you anything you do over fifteen percent growth you get five percent of that's in its simplest we've also done things where it's like you know hey when the stock price hits x you get a payment and i remember i got to have dinner with charlie mu like two years ago and i was like what's the perfect you know incentive structure and he just said i've done hundreds right and everyone is different and i still don't know what works i think it's really an art not a science because you know different people are just so differently motivated and you actually in like steak so you sorry one more sam when when it's usually usually when it's like it depends there's there's that not that what they usually means is the winning formula is different a lot but there's usually a common losing formula so what is the common losing formula for incentives the common losing formula is them not being aligned on risk so for example if they're able to use my money and i can keep injecting money into the business but it in no way hurts them so for example they don't get diluted or they don't have to pay a high interest rate or you know it if it goes bankrupt they don't lose anything that's a huge problem and i've learned that over the last five years and so now what i try and do is if somebody wants equity i always make them right a check right or or i loan the money and it's literally a personal loan guaranteed by their house or something right and it's got it doesn't i don't want it to be so much money it's gonna ruin them or be a problem but i i if someone wants equity i'm like okay you gotta put up something because if the business fails or goes down you gotta have a sense of loss people feel lost or that people feel lost more than they feel game i just imagine the the wilkinson moving truck coming in front of the house so like no honey it's all gone wrong you have to come into your own furniture your own art on the walls they get to live there but they have to know that it's your house now and they truly we have fuck we have done it we hit i obviously you know i'd never wanna do that and it's always structured in a way where it's not you know we're not gonna have to take their car or something but i just want i want a feeling of like there's gotta be some downside you know sam is gonna take this like way too far he's gonna take their car and it's like a punch cross like hundred punch you just because of you i know money i'm gonna punch you yeah i love this game you you also speaking of that of risk you also hire people really early you told me i don't know if you talked about those but you were tinkering around with this bake do you wanna talk about the bay can you mention the bakery or no yeah well the bakery is kinda sad sorry not the bakery the the the ghost kitchen ghost kitchen you tinker with this thing where you hired a baker and you were making stuff to sell in door and uber eats and i don't know if it was so entirely legal so we don't care it but the point i'm bringing up is is that no i can i can i can tell tell the story let me ask my question sure so basically you know i i'm pretty interested in health and stuff and i was trying to get off sugar and so i went to a baker and i was like look can you try and make like like sugar free cookies using modern you know there's always like crazy modern sugar like you guys in magic spoon yeah yeah like magic spoon uses a stevia and monk fruit and stuff so he started making these and i was like okay these are like not as good as a chocolate chip cookie but they're like ninety percent there and i bet you a lot of people would be of this as like a replacement like think about halo top it doesn't taste as good as ice cream but you can eat a fuck load of it and it's not bad for you in the same way so i basically made that we started making all these treats we're cooking it out of our office which is not technically legal and what happened was i got a call from island health which is like the local health authority and they just said hey you're using an ingredient that's not approved in canada and unfortunately all is not approved in canada and so you just legally can't serve food with it even though it's generally regarded as safe and everything so i'm still gonna do it at some point i think but it i just legally can't it sucks and i've never it it's insane to me you can hit up against these regulatory issues like imagine being a real estate developer and like you have this amazing vision and then city council's is just like nope yeah like sucks that is insane to me as an internet entrepreneur and that's what gonna ask so you like hired a baker to do it but then also with your newsletter business your local business you hi i forget the guy's name but he's i've talked to a bit he's a nice guy you've hired him to be the ceo and so you you hire people pretty yes and you you hire people pretty early on and hiring someone to do something to me is a huge risk because in my head i'm like man if this guy's got a kid like i'm like his kids now kinda my kid too you know like it's like a big risk if he's quitting it that's why i felt when my when my one of my first employees got married i was like oh i a family now because i was like some of the decisions i make are gonna impact this entire family and that's really stressful and it's also a huge conversation to convince someone who's in their thirties forties or whatever and they're even in their late twenties to leave their fancy gig at salesforce to bail and come to my company that i'm gonna pay him forty five thousand dollars that's a huge thing i i go when i go to bed at and night i'm that stresses me out but you seem like you overcome that pretty easily you hire people relatively early and you're like yeah no big deal i'm just gonna hire this person what's that like like what do you thinking when you do that bang well i've lost i've i've messed that up a lot and i think you guys know my whole story about losing ten million dollars building project management software like that was a perfect example where i got ahead of myself the business didn't make sense and i threw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall and none of it's stuck and i had to let a whole bunch of people go and it was really horrible and sad and you know it's like a ten year slow death right so i've been through that so now it's more with the amount of scar tissue i have i've been enough i have enough signal where i can be like okay i'm gonna try this and with the bakery i was just contracting a friend right that was that was the best example i said this is an experiment with the news business i actually ran it for three years before i partner with far and he took over a ceo and by that point there enough signal it was slapping me in the face so i was like this is a big opportunity and is that the case with all with all those things that you start we take that thing usually like if i if i go in and i i hire a ceo i'm pretty high conviction that there's something there or there's already a business that supports has cash flow what i would never do is be like hey there's you know i have an idea for this i'll just go hire a ceo like i i i would never do that andrew i feel you've reached this point and i used to be like how did these motherfuckers do this where i remember i was doing a start and it was so hard to get my one thing to work and then i would meet people who were like oh yeah so i have that past success then i have my current success and then here's my three side successes that i had this idea and then we just started doing it and then guess what the lines out the door and then this other one it's like kind of cool we just started it you know like i accidentally you know my hand just fell on my keyboard and i accidentally wrote this app it was amazing it went viral and this other thing that i just tweeted about and then this all coming together nicely and i just remember being like what what do they know something i don't know is there just like extreme luck component and i felt that way for many years five six years straight when i was pushing the bold up the hill with my startup and then i now have experienced exactly what the thing that i was most jealous i have no idea what switched in between where like the last five things i've tried have all worked and all worked pretty much immediately and that it doesn't matter how big or small like you know whether it's like the the podcast or the course or you know the my e commerce business or my the new milk road newsletter business like each of these has just worked straight away in a bigger way than anything ever done before with less work and less stressed than like the old stuff i used to do and i have no idea what changed or i have a kind of inkling but i i don't really know same of your thought about this or are you know what i'm talking about and what do you i know exactly what you're talking about and i completely agree you're on a role right now and what's your inkling i i have a feeling my my my my answer is it it's kinda like a shitty it's like a mindset like abundance attitude and being on being on offense versus defense but what's your what's your what's your inkling so my inkling is that i switched up my situation so like i was in one situation for a very long time like and it was a nice situation it was a very nice situation but it was like where i was going to this office every day working with these people in this hierarchy with this boundary box of like what project or projects we can work on and like what success might look like and as soon as i got out of that i was just me i was like oh okay so now that it's just me that i have to look out for i guess i could just do a podcast i didn't have to have like this big venture billion dollar outcome i didn't have twenty engineers to go tell what to do i had no engineers so i just did what i could do with no engineers which was like i'll do a a podcast i'll do of course i'll do i'll just try to get big on twitter let's see what happens and oh you know like five tweets go viral and boom got two hundred thousand followers it's like there's these things that i just wasn't doing before because i think before i had a really set thing of like here's what i need to do like here's the only way to win and i had like almost too much ammo i had like too many people at my disposal too much funding too much everything and because of that i had a very narrow window of what could work and so i was just trying to come up with ideas that might work versus oh let me just try this because i i'm i just kinda wanna try it and then when once i got into i just kinda wanna try it and i didn't have i didn't have to worry about what other people thought or i didn't have to come in and manage anybody in the that day and tell them what to do i didn't have like investors to go pitch two i just did the thing and then all of a sudden i feel like you know sort of like all the talents that in skills that i had been building up over the past ten years like finally got to just do them yeah don't you think it's like dating or something though where it's like you you know you did a couple crazy girls and it's really exhilarating and then over time you're like wow that was horrible and there's pattern matching you're like okay when i go to a restaurant and a girl's rude to the waiter that's a no right and in the same way with business you go oh okay like i used to think i want to build all these kinds of businesses but those were ten foot hurdles i don't wanna jump ten foot hurdles i wanna jump one foot hurdles and so if you think about it all the stuff you're doing they're in your you know circle of competence and they're relatively simple to execute they don't require a lot of people they don't require funding i think learning that is like a fifteen year overnight success kind of thing where it just clicks suddenly right and i'll catch myself occasionally getting pulled down rabbit trails of like oh what if i did this crazy you know drone ai startup up whatever but then i always go back to base hits and i and there's this third component of of confidence and so i think that because of like my work bit more confident and i understand like well if i invest a dollar here i think i can make at least the three dollars the next two like just understanding how machines like money making machines work investments but then also i think sean because the we get to hang out with we hang out each other we hang out with andrew we hang out with our circle of friends we hang out with all the people we've had speak at our events we hang out with our podcast guests it becomes more normal like succeeding has become far more normal than not succeeding actually and not succeeding is just like oh yeah it's gonna happen but then you just move on and do the next thing and it's like and then inevitably it works so it's not if it's or it's not when it's if and i think that confidence has actually helped a ton where so for example now if someone wants to like real estate in a an an easy one because it's so predictable but with real estate you're like oh man i'm putting a hundred thousand dollars down on this house is a lot of money that's a you know that's six figures it's like well dude but it's gonna make twelve percent like well i don't know that and i'm yeah know but it's gonna do that so you you actually wanna invest more so like that confidence of just knowing the motions and knowing the routine and process has actually helped a lot totally yeah the other thing i gonna say is which is what you guys both just said but frame differently is i was taking a shit load of market risk before and now i basically take almost no market risk i just take execution risk and before even if i felt like i executed great which i did i feel like i did and and a couple of the projects that we had done and during my like kind of like the the the previous startup the market risk was too high like there was just nope it was like inventing a new fucking like new science you know on a new land and it was just the market risk was way too high now i'm just doing things that are like oh i knew i just know that this works and i just need to do it well so it's like commerce is nothing there's no fancy science to it and i had buddies who did it and i just used their model and i just did my own in my own lane of their model milk road is the hustle but in the crypto lane which is the crypto lane i like right it's like i just took your blueprint for the hustle and i just copy paste over here execution risk from there i know dude i saw that you literally copy and paste of the twitter handle it was hilarious your twitter description is literally copy i sent you some old resources from the hustle and we call ourselves the your smart good looking friend or something who tells you everything you to know about and you just copy that and it's in a business attack you just put like delete crypto or something like that and actually the thing is it wasn't even you know why to that i remember seven years ago or eight years ago when you first said that to me and the very first like you know like you you kinda sat me down and you're like look people are not people are age like we don't watch msnbc and like cnn and this stuff for our our information that's not the brand we trust and you you said it you're like i just wanna be like they're smart and remember you said it i just be like you're smart no bullshit friend who just explained and tells you what's going on and i was like i like it clicked be eight years ago and so when it came time to do this was like that's the exact description the smart bullshit friend i think it one more thing andrew is that i look at i i used to you kinda said that andrew and but in terms of like financial success which is a big but not only measure of success andrew you're like grand slam at the moment you know you're you're i imagine you're incredibly wealthy you built businesses that are incredibly large so by that measure of success you are like way out there and for a while i think i like admit you're like mystical to me where i'm like how does he doing this now it's changed to where i think i acknowledge that you definitely have talent that makes you special you for sure have skills that makes you special but really a lot of it is also i don't know what percentage of it is the each but let's just say a third a third a third a third of it is well he's just been doing it for like fifteen years now or a certain amount of time and he just like took the risk of raising or building the business and then he raised the money a little bit for the fun and so it's not a matter of like how is he doing is doing this it's just like well if i want that life like i probably could do it i just have to dedicate fifteen or twenty years and go through the same motions that he does and that may or may not fit the well wasn't it what i like the interesting thing is i don't know if you know this but warren buffett made like ninety seven percent of his wealth after the age of fifty five so so it all happens very slowly he started in his twenties or whatever and he wasn't really well known until the nineties and the same thing happened with us where we didn't really talk about what we did people would meet us and they'd be like oh you're some sc from victoria who owns some digital agency you seem to own all these really boring businesses you know whatever and so it requires being kind of underestimated and dismissed and playing a very boring game while watching everyone else go and make you know tens of millions billions of dollars taking risk and startups meanwhile we're just going how do we take you know a hundred grand and make ten fifteen twenty k a year on that money and just keep compounding and so basically the mental model was take seventy percent of our profits and constantly reinvest take the other thirty percent live nice life and that number went down over time and yeah you do that for seventeen years and it turns into a you know a big number ironically i still feel just as at risk and terrified as i did fifteen years we that's real and i think it's the classic thing of you're you're not you're not actually scared i scared are you because i have liquidity now and i'm i'm scared but i'm like am i as scared when i only had twenty thousand dollars in my bank account i can't just sell i don't know but it's it's maybe it's different for me because you know i have i an un for if you told me ten years ago how much you know cash we have or what our cash flow is it would blow my mind and i'd say how could you ever feel at risk the problem is that the stakes are bigger you know we have almost a thousand employees now right so there's a lot more you know there's the stuff that can go wrong do i feel that i've built out a castle with a whole bunch of emo and stuff yeah absolutely and i'm better diversified than i was ten years ago but there's still that kind of dust farmer mentality right it's actually something i wanna talk about like just we all kind of have this feeling of like the way i'd put it is i started chopping wood just because i was anxious right like fifteen years ago in my backyard and my neighbor poke his head over the fence and he's like hey can you chop some wood for me from my fire i'll give you twenty bucks and i'm like okay amazing i don't know this was a business and then before i know it i've hired three or four buddies we're all chopping within in the backyard we're a mary band we're selling to the whole neighborhood it's awesome i love it and then one day fifteen years later i wake up and i'm in a sawmill and i own fifteen saw and all i do all day is file papers but there's still this part of me that beats myself up for not chopping wood right i still have this mindset even though all the machines do all the labor there's still this part of me that's constantly saying you need to chop wood you need to chop wood and so i think you're gonna you know you you guys have this for sure like doesn't matter how much you have how diversified whatever it is you have a need to do labor and there's anxiety that you're harnessing to perform that's a good analogy i not gonna lie the first thirty seconds while you're explaining i thought you legitimately took up wood shopping as a hobby and i was like oh that's cool it must be cath and then i realized i was inside of a charlie mu or warren buffett analogy like parable you have this thing on here that's that's pretty cool bad guys usually win as a bad guy myself i would love to hear yes sir how this what what you mean by this oh man okay so do you think you're a bad i've got go story i don't think you're bad joking go ahead i think a bad guy is a fun connor artist who lies i call myself a bad has achieved rather than calling myself a good guy and having all the comments on youtube tell me a bad guy it's easier just to call myself a bad guy and have people tell me the opposite or bad meaning not bad meaning bad but bad meeting good that's that's so i i'm sure you guys have had this experience and i'll kind of minimize this story in this case it's a bad girl bad girls usually win but so this this happened to me like almost ten years ago i was really overwhelmed i was running like five businesses i got introduced this older woman and she had just sold her business for twenty million bucks super successful and she kinda says hey mentor you i'll help you out and so she comes over to my office we start whiteboard boarding and i'm just like holy crap this person is a genius she could help me so much and so first she's an advisor and mentor and then eventually she's like hey how about i come in and i'll help you with marketing and sales and so i inject her into the business she starts killing it like business takes off everything going great but i did zero diligence right she legit minimized herself by being the super successful person and because she was so successful i was just grateful to have her she was like a miracle and made all these problems go away for me and then suddenly the cracks started appearing so people started saying she's lying she's spending money in weird ways their you know her expenses were out of control you know staying crazy hotels all sorts of stuff and it turned out that she was lying and like false flying documents she hadn't sold her business she wasn't or successful and when i called a bunch of people that she worked with in the past like a bunch of them had had terrible experiences right so we fired her we move on and i'm in this very odd spot where ethically you know i wanna be like okay this is a bad person i wanna shoot up a flare and i wanna be like everybody watch out right and i'm thinking like okay you know people will diligence her they'll call me you know she she won't be able to keep you know pulling this off but legally i don't know what it's like in the us but in canada when someone calls you for a reference call you're quite limited you can basically just say you know i wouldn't work with them again and do your diligence and so i usually and what like i'm not a allowed to talk about it and they get the hit right that's smart i i said a bunch of stuff like that like you know i i would never work with this person again it's one of the worst professional experiences in my life whatever but almost always those people go on to work with them and you realize these people are just incredibly charming and they always assume you're the bitter x girlfriend right because they've obviously buttered you up and told some story and so this woman you know i see her on linkedin and she's still succeeding and going every year she's somewhere new and you know people like this they don't get super rich they're so short term and if they only knew how much money you could make by not being a crook they would probably be ethical but it just it was so sad to me and i wanted my sense of justice was like i gotta put a stop to this and you just realized like no like you just have to let go never wrestle a pig you both get dirty but the pig will enjoy it and so you know these people are out there and they continue to succeed and unless they're elizabeth holmes and they get you know in the wall street journal they're fine i wanna know who the person is i will never say you had another example of a of a guy at a famous company who you know you had some fraud or you had some issues that people not being honest us as well remember you told me that about about that one folk i don't know i don't know which one that is i mean look at like you guys talked about nav jane on a podcast maybe like ten episodes ago and i mean like there's a perfect example right there's this guy who basically did a pump and dump that's my understanding alleged alleged pump and dump but these people go on right unless they're criminal indicted and even you know people who are criminal indicted look at michael milk michael milk was literally front running his own investors committing tons of like outright fraud that if you or his investor you would hate went to jail for ten years and now he's lauded as a philanthropist i mean or hot always win i mean do you know the crazy do you guys know girl i think his name ga ba his g is what people would call he's i think he's indian and indian guy indian american and he started a thing called gravity something what was it called gravity four four gravity four and then he started another one called like radian blue radian is that what it was and ready iridium one and he got arrested he was on oprah as this like you know hundred and fifty million dollar man under thirty or something like that like the best bachelor most available bachelor all this stuff he's good looking guy he got in trouble three two or three different times both times he basically locked his girlfriend in their apartment and it was there was a camera there i don't know what he was sleeping and he was hitting her and just being in that i mean just a horrible guy got arrested spent time in in in jail months got out raised money again for starting the same company now he's overseas because he's kinda burned all his bridges here in in san francisco in america he's overseas i think he raised money again for another ad tech company this is the hard part is if someone is a i mean typically someone who does bad things like truly unethical things they're either a psycho path or a narcissist and they're very very charming they're very compelling they're fun to hang out with they're fascinating the great to listen to it's hard not to like them i mean one one actually heuristic after having that experiences is i actually had a company that i looked at investing in and i liked the ceo so much and he was so compelling that i didn't invest because it made me suspicious right or wrong i was just like i left the meeting and i was like i would buy anything from this guy and i just wanna give him all my money right now and i stopped myself and i was like this is that feeling don't invest right i probably made a mistake but you know maybe i'm too concerned but crazy same i'm the same way and i'll i'm willing to throw out the good with the bad just to steer clear of the bad because i know how into that type of drift is and you know i've actually put in some like you you talk about air gapping for like you know security purposes i've now done that on on decision making for some investments as well like so andrew you sent out an email to to us and me say sam a couple others about a business such you're raising money for and it's a really great email like it's a truly great email i gotta give you a lot of credit and i actually wanted to ask you sam help me with this to what goes in to writing an email like that and they're the master copywriter i you a secret weapon okay well records to the record which is i barely touched it i barely touched it barely i read writers and it wasn't it wasn't like oh the writing wow this this sentence structure was so fantastic right obviously that helps but it was the thinking it was the way of framing the business and opportunity is telling how you stumbled into the opportunity what type you know like here your analogy to you complete this if you want to chipotle like you really did a good job of framing this business and it was so good in fact that i said i am not gonna reply to this for like at least forty eight hours because if i read this email i'm gonna say give this person my money instantly like it was almost like whatever out of ten the business opportunity was it was a ten out of ten like pitch and i actually when i look back at businesses that that i invested that i had that go on to do well it's usually actually a nine out of ten business opportunity with a you know sort of five out of ten pitch and in fact it's only midway through the conversation with this person that i'm like oh wait so you basically have x and they're like yeah i'm like well why didn't she just say that and they're like i did kind of right and i was like oh dude you have no idea how to pitch your own business but that to me once that happens i know wow i'm actually like i underweight the opportunity because the pitch was so bad versus overweight a business opportunity because the pitch is so good and that's become like a a standard practice i yours was just one example but that's a standard practice for me of like beware of the ten out of ten pitch beware of the ten or ten charm person that you wanna hire or that's to help you with your business the biggest one that i've seen is you get this uber charming pitch and then you say okay what could go wrong and they say nothing right and you're just like no this isn't insane this is terrifying i've had like five or six different pitches where that was the one signal and it went to zero or bankrupt or criminal how's is the news business going it's good it's really good actually we just hit a profit in my hometown in victoria our first market and we're now in eight different cities and i'm super stoked about it as you can witness based on the email that email but how how quickly because you might have a knack for just understanding and framing businesses and that's probably a super superpower of yours has that how quickly did that come together for you how quickly do i write it well i mean it's something i've been thinking about and kinda talking about a little bit publicly for two or three years now so i i had all the analog and stuff formed but i mean i wrote that in like an hour or two and then sam just helped me touch it up and then my typical writing structure is i'll write something it first draft and then i'll sit with it for two weeks or something like that so i sat with it for a week and then finally i sent it out but it's crazy like i don't know if you guys get this something that drives me insane is i get all these emails from people who are raising money and it's literally just a template like it almost looks like they're sending it out with salesforce or something the formatting is wrong it's generic it's not properly addressed to me and i always think like what i was trying to do with that email is i wanted the first sentence to hook you and so i think the first sentence in that email was in twenty nineteen i was pissed off right and then they you know line one you're like what's he pissed off but what's going on right there's a bit of a hook nobody knows how to use those copywriting tools to pitch in written form i think a lot of people are very good at pitching you know in a in an actual pitch setting or whatever but yeah it's been it's been a great tool to be able to do those tweet storms and emails and stuff the most important sentence of of anything you're write it's the it's the first sentence that's the stuff well i love that one what's the line that you said let me be very clear right and you're just like oh shit like this person means business what's going on here yeah it was fucking good at this and and in fact i made the criminal mistake when i asked you this question which is if you go to michael jordan and you say mike how do you jump so high he'll if he's being nice he'll try to answer something something but it's not gonna actually tell you in the same thing or do you know steph steph curry how how do you shoot your jump shot to be and how do how do you shoot better than anybody else people who are truly great at something they have very low awareness to the actual like how why and what is making it so great and there there is a way to ask questions about greatness but it's not how do you do the thing you're great at because people will sort of fumble around and and they'll try to tell you something but it's it really has nothing to do with with how they do the great thing like for example what you did great in that email was first you decided to not make it a template that decision probably comes from you some view your some way that you view the world and like that you observation you had about pitches that were coming to that most people just don't have the second thing was you when you framed the business you used the analogy of like these local franchises that was because you had studied other other great businesses just for fun you probably studied the business of chipotle and mcdonald's and other businesses not that you were ever gonna start a restaurant but you stored that somewhere in the recesses of your mind and so when you saw something else that was a local franchise you knew how to like apply that and and so like you know it's very hard to actually describe what goes into the art of making that happen right well not only that but being able to communicate a moat you know why does this have a competitive advantage and in this email i kinda go through the history of the news business local news why local news is so much more why has a better moat right and you think about it and you go why would that be interesting you know fifty thousand people to three hundred thousand person cities that seems like a small market but in reality it's the stuff nobody wants through fishing where the fish are off the beaten but you and and you can dominate a local market you've always done this so i actually read your email when i was when you sent it to me in google drive and i was like oh this is really good i'm gonna i was putting together of this course where i just like aggregate good writing and i sent it to people and i was like i gotta i'm gonna use some more of a stuff let's see what's out there and i went and read all your stuff on medium and i think there's like ten or twelve things or and okay solve the same format over and over again which you it's it's you clearly are influenced by warren buffett and you're influenced by like traditional storytelling tech techniques but if you go to your medium you're actually pitching your business on medium constantly you're just not actually there's just no call to action so you don't actually care if it feels a deal but there's like things where you're you're you have a headline called so you didn't mean to do this but you could've have done this so it could've have been we're raising a million dollars for our company instead you made the headline where you you you the headline was joe rogan could be the world's first podcasting billionaire is that what it was that was that it no it was he got joe rogan first is but do rogan government ripped off which is funny because he just signed a hundred and twenty million dollars yeah that's what it was counter yeah so that was it was a good ass headline and then you explain so that the emotion there was shock which always does really well so you're shocked like what the hell you're saying that he got low ball a hundred dollar just so much money and you're like no you see it's nonsense you see howard stern does this ro could've have done this it just so happens that we have a company that does that that's how i know about it and then like if you wanted a call to action so you have your attention interest desire already there if you want your action to make this a full ada formula you could have been like ps for raise of course you can't do this it's illegal but you go to the ps we're raising money for our company and she this is this is like you've you've always said like the most valuable skills come out i think both of you guys have said that like a hundred percent i i chuck up the only reason metal lab worked was because we would pick fights we'd write these controversial articles and we knew how to like we i i if there's one thing i'm good at is it's just like taking taking a boring topic and just finding a wedge and getting people going on it and that always results in people knowing of you and passing your name around and you become a topic of conversation and it led in our case to lots of client work and other stuff so if i think everyone needs to read the book made to stick that was the book that like really clicked me i know if you guys are heath that stanford talk about this totally and it's that one that first line the first line just has to hit you the the best thing you do so so i think for me if i was gonna break it down the middle of your writing is is like inspired by our influenced by you know some some ways warren buffett but you're he his stuff is very dry right warren buffett grew up without the clickbait generation he doesn't need to to do that but like thirty seven signals so like dha you're chasing free like to me you're writing and so similar to theirs that i can tell you know that was like a you know a pretty major influence on it and one thing that they do amazingly well is they they will basically pick a fight while simultaneously taking the moral high ground and i think you do that amazingly well too what i mean by that is you'll say like you know joe rogan got ripped off but you're not you're not criticizing joe rogan you're actually saying you know joe you you sold yourself short and you know it a an artist in a creator like you should not sells yourself short for some to some company who's was gonna take advantage of you here and so you're taking the moral high ground wow picking you know going against the grain and like sort of doing a call out which is amazing most call outs just basically it's somebody you know sling shot from the crowd and you know there's sort of a sniper that's like you know angry at them and so i've never been able to do this but i've noticed that you do this and thirty of students does this amazing but they say facebook is over valued and they'll talk about why facebook is over valued and then they'll talk about you know like we sorry we're just the kinda of guys that like businesses have actual revenues and profits but you know call us crazy and so they're they're they're taking the moral high ground and they're saying that this facebook value at the time of it was famously like why billions millions of dollars i would i would argue i would argue those guys would not be where they are today without copyright out and i think that's like the sawdust from their sawmill right it's like hey we got fucked on the app store what would most people do okay we'll just go in with apple they use that as the biggest marketing opportunity ever they were on every talk show they were their names were everywhere i mean they also got kinda canceled as well so there's a cost to that but they've done an amazing thing call it and that's a hundred percent where i learned it i i worship those guys for years i call it like the malcolm glad effect so with malcolm glad well you read his books and you have to remember that a lot of what he's saying is just theory there's no there's some proof that it's real but it's it's not proven and but he's such a good storyteller that you think like oh what you're saying is just a fact like his have you heard a story about david goliath it's wonderful and he likes this he he's like actually david goliath wasn't that part of a contest because it turns out goliath was like mentally eventually challenged or like had some issues where like and he's also blind couldn't see he he had like he had this thing where he was so big that it ruined he like guy gigantic or something like that so and then also like david was a shepherd and they're actually so good at they're own these rocks that they could take a bird out of the sky so it's really like basically taking a a big dumb blind giant and shooting him in the head with the gun that's not hard and like that's his argument about he's like david goliath it's it's nonsense and is he right i don't there's no proof who knows is david gl even real we really even know that but you like hear the story that changes you but the problem that i have with base camp and other good writers and this is something that you have to be really careful i i i work on all the time i'm like i can be such a good storyteller teller that i can get you to think that something's real even though like i will tell you but there's no proof but like i'm gonna write it in such a way and base does this all the time where they say well they'll write something and i'm like oh this is the truth this is how the world is we're it's like well no let's for let's not forget this is an opinion right totally and there's lots of nuance and going back to what we're talking about with bootstrapping i i read all their stuff i drank the ko aid and i you know i love those guys they built an amazing business but let's you can't just have that perspective it's very nuance there's there's you know like like i said there's so many situations where it is logical to raise money and if you talked to d ten years ago he'd say salesforce at facebook will be bankrupt in ten years and this doesn't make sense and again i love these guys and i know them both they're awesome guys huge fan wouldn't have built my business without them but i do think they they present everything in a very black and white way which i think benefits them in a because it makes them more compelling no one wants to hear nuance and this has been a good pod what do you think sean yeah was good there's i mean there's a couple others we wanted to do but we're way over so we should we should wrap it and do another one soon i know we didn't get it yeah i think we got like we have like we have like twenty topics to so one jesus like here's the five pillars of happiness i like do i wanna be happy i should probably ask about that one like i would like to be happy and then the jamie dyson thing there was the whole you wanted to come on because you're like i read this spoke about dyson i wanna come talk about it we need talk about it oh man i'm so excited to talk about him he's incredible oh let's do it let's do another one unless you have time i don't we we can keep going if you want but otherwise let's do another one and we'll do dyson and his mother's yeah i gotta i gotta a i gotta a lunch in twelve months alright man good good see k you guys knows pun i feel like i could rule to where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road travel never looking back