Jack Smith: Selling A Company For $800M At 29, Million Dollar Businesses that Can Be Started Just From Reading a Manual, and More

you wake up at something like three am or five am and the first two to three days the only instruction they give you is hey feel how the breath feels on your lips when you're breathing in and out okay see you you're in three days and you sit there it's really extreme walk okay this is my management style too i feel like i could rule to where i know i could be what i want to put at all in in like a days on on a road alright we're live here we have a guest jack smith one of my best friends in my wedding an amazing person not even how to describe you jack what you i guess like the top line is you started a company that you sold for like eight hundred million dollars when you're were twenty nine that's like the that's like the the headline impressive stuff but we have you here because you have done you're just like one of the more interesting people i know okay well thanks for having me i also thought kind of an interesting contrast coming after rob because like he was describing himself as like the pinnacle of human optimization right like he plans how long it takes him to go to the toilet each day and i was thinking i'm may an interesting contrast so i'm like human procrastination like the exact opposite of that so yeah but you do optimize stuff like sean i don't know if you know this but like jack one time we went to his birthday party and his wife made him a cake and it was in the shape of an amazon box because he had this like it was like a walk in closet but it's was basically a room in his home and it was full of amazon boxes and you're like jack what is that and he has this list this six excel spreadsheet that he keeps and anything that he buys ranging from a book bag to baby apparel or baby accessories or one time he was obsessed with chocolate he would literally buy fifty versions and test all of them and then rank them on this like system and then have and so he had these huge list of everything that he's tested and he's done this so much that we're haven't you been banned from amazon like multiple times yeah and then also ben had this policy for i i don't know if they still have i think for many years at a policy where you could return any item even if it was used up to three hundred and sixty five days after and so i had a spreadsheet tracking when i bought everything basically i got a new wardrobe every year because i just sent all my clothes back on the three hundred and forty days and then just got it all like credit and bought entire new wardrobe drove every year so yeah i got banned from a few times and but no rather have more common than you than you think he's planted his poops and you're planning your returns call in a giant spreadsheet you what you have this like sam said this kinda like personal wire cutter you create for yourself sure have you always done that or was that like i got too much time on my hands i'm gonna come up with a new hobby like you know figuring out the best of everything were you doing that kind of when you were twenty one also well i didn't have any money when i was twenty one and i still bought stuff from amazon but i think it probably would connect like sean you've talked on the board about you know having an in intuitive mindset and i think for me i like to go deep on something so as sound shot sam said about chocolate but when i was just interested chocolate i wanted to go deep so i'm like i want to i i bought my own beans i roasted them in my house i i wanted to learn what's the entire process because i think it's kinda interesting these crafts that go back centuries and some people dedicate their whole life right like fifty years there are expert chocolate here and then for me it's just kinda interesting just have a glimpse into that and keeping that mindset about craft but also maybe challenging the way things are done sometimes because if you've done chocolate for fifty years you'll maybe be like that's the way it's always been done but if you come from a fresh angle you may like wait what if you did it this way or something but i think it's just i'm interesting general to go deep into topics i i call you when i describe you to other friends i said jack i think jack is the most interesting man in the world and i think there's this great quote it's like to be interesting you need to be interested and to me that's the perfect description for you you're the most interesting in the world because you're interested in the most things at the most depth you know in the highest variety and so i've talked to you about you know five different things and you've gone down a rabbit hole in each one of them it turns out and because of that you always have like a really interesting point of you what's been the best find like you're talking about this chocolate rabbit hole you went down and you're like you know you you you you may come out with a different conclusion than the experts are the people who've done this for a long time what's an example where you you kind of just you came to a different conclusion yourself well it was actually i was listening back to our last episode or maybe or one of the previous episodes and it was what we talked about there where it was like i just looked me and my c founder at least just researched how ad networks work for a week and then we were like alright we think this is how it works and tomas who runs angel pad was like dude you're thinking you come into totally different conclusions in a week i were working at google for a decade and there's people a decades of experience in this but we just fought from the principle of just very basics and so the first bit similar with app loving is we were like why are these ad networks charging based on how many times someone watches a video we we built a video ad network we were like apps they actually just care about the end action so they actually only care how many people install their app or how much money these users are gonna spend in their app they don't actually care how many people watch the video so why is it that the industry charges that way and so we kind of made a bet and said we will charge it doesn't matter how many people watch your video we'll just only charge you based on how many people install it it was a bet luckily at worked out sometimes you have to kinda make a gamble right like especially with an ad network we had no idea if the business would work because the unit economics are kind out of our hands right we don't know if these ad network if it's gonna work which by the way we should like give a background so basically your company was called v you how were you twenty two twenty one twenty so basically like the story that you always tell which is you had like you got into an accelerator an incubator i think you had one idea but it wasn't working out and then you just like mocked up like a powerpoint you went and it was like on a mobile ad network so based likely you would see an ad in between levels of games you brought it to developers and they're like yeah this is way better if you could actually build this we're in and you did that a bunch of times where you got maybe a one or i think a million dollars of the commitment of like yeah i guess if you build this we would spend like this much money and then you took that and you actually hired a a developer bryant who's not the cofounder of web flow mh and you built that business and then it like spiral into this thing where i think you'd only raised ten or fifteen million maybe seventeen million and within seven years i think wherever it was when you sold you guys were doing a million a day in revenue was is is that like that situation yeah maybe yeah about hundreds of millions in revenue it it and it was absolutely crazy then he sold it for i forget what eight hundred yeah yeah kind of in that region and i mean what's interesting as well is obviously sean talks about having worked with fe one at ab love app loving launched about six to twelve months after us so i think as another example you don't have to be the first to market like everyone's jumping on the ai trend right to be first to market but actually you don't have to be the first market to be the be biggest apple loving was one of the slower movers and to give context they at their peak have been multiple times bigger than vulnerable they went public and probably out there peaking the region of ten billion market cap now they're a bit low ups market the winning they're nine billion now they were twenty billion at its peak of something like twenty twenty five billion at his peak what do you think they did why did they have kind of a let's call it ten to twenty ex figure outcome if they started a year later what when you look back what what did you learn from that and it was also interesting because one of our investors besides for con being beast one of our investors came to us and said like oh yeah we're backing we're we're looking we're investing in this company they do like video advertisements inside of mobile apps etcetera they're called app and m the right you're describing our company what are you talking about your investing in do that that's what we to do and actually so they're call they're called web win web investment network they invested in i think they're the only invested they invested in bang and at love inn they're they're great guys but at their time we were like fuck so they have massive wins there one bit we observed is actually app loving bang we fought that like at the time before bang mobile ads were monetized through like banner ads like kind of on the internet you know went for first all she these crappy banner ads and we were like well they obviously suck so we're gonna do video ads which is ten x better a difference that loving did is they didn't only do video ads they did everything they did they they were like we don't care what you wanna spend money on we'll just take your money so they're like one form you could do banner ads video ads everything and so i think that enabled them to capture a bit more market share and perhaps the founding team being more technical like i say that i'm a crappy engineer like i could not build bang from scratch and sean listening to your story on one of the more recent episodes you describe fe one making that dashboard for adam that he could just look at the apps and poach them right we did similar bits but there's perhaps more technical one of our hacks we did is we actually had a team of people in at about ten people in pakistan and pac so cheap so we had in entire office and they had one job two obsessed why it was really easy to recruit there we'd said just play mobile games all day we just got them more an iphone and when play play games all day and whenever you see an ad write down what the ad was advertising and what ad network was using it and so they basically built us our lead gen database by playing all the games so maybe we did it manually they did it by looking at this sdk source code insane yeah that's amazing you're like last night someone was asking me i was at the dinner they're like have you met anyone who created a business and sold it and was wealthy enough and they just retired and i was like not really basically everyone i know who's started a company and had some type of success usually after some amount of time six months or three years they usually get to something sometimes it's more intense sometimes less intense but they usually do something you're actually the only person i think i know who was incredibly successful at a very young age with thirty years older whenever you sold it and you actually have not ever started another business before you do a lot of odds stuff like for example i'll be like jack what are you doing now you gotta any projects you're like yeah i i have like a ton of in prison and i like set up this thing where it's this website where people inmates can order any book they want to and i like ask them to create like a book report on it and i'm like that's so interesting do you think a you'll ever get back into business and is the reason do you just spend all your days just like seeking out all these interesting topics is that what you're doing now so i would not say that i'm retired at the moment because when i think of being retired i think about having no stress and just like sitting around reading books all day or something like that you know actually i am working on a bunch of stuff but they're not just this not taking approach of trying to build another billion dollar company when i think back a trait i notice in many entrepreneurs and i observed in myself is that i think i was successful early on because i had a chip on my shoulder i had something to prove and doing my first startup in london it was really hard to a startup and i also felt like people kinda didn't respect me i they like people just kind of thought i was a joke or whatever and i kinda of felt inside i thought i was like i think that i can build something successful i didn't want i didn't aspire to be super rich or anything i just wanted to build a big company but i had that chip on my shoulder something to prove now when van sold when i kinda reflected i was like i don't think that i have that chip on my shoulder anymore and i think if you're gonna try and build a billion dollar company you or or really ventures back company or something you have to make a lot of sacrifices right and have a drive about why you're doing it and when i sat i'm like i don't need more money now and i don't have this thing to prove anymore so when i sat with it i fell what is gonna motivate me more now is where can i have an impact and kind of impact the world not necessarily trying to impact a million people in the world but even if i just deeply impact a few people in the world i think that will be a driver to a reason why to work on this because making more money is not enough of a driver for me and all of us free we're in this chat group right about cup founders that have sold their first company and it seems that the majority of people have this crisis i have sold my company i don't know what to do with myself and i'm good at building companies i don't really need more money but shall i just do it because that's what i'm good at and i can't think of anything else to do and also i don't wanna just sit around so seems to challenge many others facing for me the conclusion i came to was where can i add impact and that looks like setting up some charities and a project that i'm working on a moment you guys have talked briefly about it before is moved to portugal to set up a kind of digital detox type place for people to switch off from technology and be in nature so these are the kind of things that i'm doing i mean that one it will hopefully make money but money is not the core metric if it's been a success or not even if it doesn't even if it breaks spin or loses a bit of money if just it can heal people people say like y that changed my life was super healing to me and people talk about it that is success me with that project did you were the first person i've ever met who does a lot of things that are now more popular so i remember one time sean jack and were hanging out and we are playing frisbee golf it was just us it was like ten am in the morning we're playing frisbee golf in san francisco and i was like jack you're being a little quiet what's wrong and this was like after an hour of playing he's like oh i i was doing ayahuasca from for the last three days and i was like what what's ayahuasca he's like well you go to this house and you like drink this thing and then you throw up and you're supposed to like you know find yourself or whatever and you have like a shaman guiding you and i was like when did that end and he was like oh my i came straight from there i was there like i was there like an hour and a half ago and so you would do that stuff like way before this type of psychedelic stuff was popular another thing that you would do jack would come and speak at hustle con and he's like hey i gotta go like literally the next day i was like where are you going he goes i'm gonna to bali for three weeks for a silent retreat and he would i would see him leave he would bring like basically no clothes and a massive bag like a whole carry on or a whole check of books on the library and i was like what are he doing he's like i just overwhelmed with all the people i gotta go to bali now for and he would go to the silent retreat for literally three weeks and not say a word and now i'm talking to like my quote normal more normal friends my friends who are doctors and lawyers whatever and now they're doing it you do so many things that are so odd and now every now everyone's talking about psychedelic like these silent retreats are significantly more popular you've been doing that that's since two thousand twelve i remember he's telling me about all this stuff like this is the craziest thing i've ever heard of and you've been doing all that now and it's way more popular vip persona is a is a type of silent meditation if someone says they've done a silent retreat often they're talking at this think of bit bizarre and yes i think it has got more mainstream nowadays but it has actually been pretty popular concept for a long time but i've never done it and that is actually really extreme approach like many people i speak to who have done them say it's kind of like if you can't swim and you jump off an olympic diving board it's really extreme approach to switching off and feeling burned out some people i think they're doing it because well i know people would told me they did it because it sounded like a challenge but it's not necessarily a good thing so to give an example you go for ten days right my friend did it his pillow was made it's run by monks so non profit they have about three hundred locations around the world run by monks and it doesn't cost any money you may pay small fee his pillow is made out of concrete you're not allowed to make eye contact with any other person there your meals are like rice you wake up at something like three am or five am and the first two to three days the only instruction they give you is hey feel how the breath feels on your lips when you're breathing in and out okay see you're in three days and you sit there it's really extreme what okay this my management style too but this is really popular but what i did and i was inspired by bill gates he had this thing called think week where he just goes to a cabin in the middle of nowhere and he just reads for a week now i was like oh that's awesome and i found this place in indonesia and it's just totally different to a vip bizarre because they don't have any rules like you can make ike the only rule is don't talk to each other but you can make eye contact you can do whatever you want you don't have to do any meditation at all but and then so for i just took loads of books and i came out that each time getting all the benefits these people doing bib persona which traits talk about like i feel super re energized my mood feels off the chart super happy but i'm having an amazing time i'm reading all these books wanted to read all year and the food is amazing it's grown on their own jungle slash farm so i'm like this amazing experience and i feel awesome and all these benefits but since the other guys are like oh i spoke to one guy this morning he's was like totally glad i did it would never want to go through that again it was one of the hardest experiences of my life and i'm like well you can actually get a bunch of the same benefits but you don't have to talk yourself but i've never found a place like this place in indonesia and so for many years i kind of felt that i just have to do this which is expand their concept two other continents around the world so i'm starting portugal if that goes well hopefully then expand to america etcetera that's awesome you put a couple things on the sheet that i wanna do you said business opportunity so you're not it sounds like you're not doing you're you've you've been able to resist the temptation to start another business even though you're good at business and you see lots of opportunities so share with us a couple of these like random ideas that you have on this list yeah because i know you guys like i think the audience likes different business ideas and things that are also actionable with my first million wallet it so i was kind of thinking to myself and one business i don't know if you guys have come across this but it was kinda interesting to me it's a company not vc background but it's called no man's capitalist and is this guy and he's kind of made a name for himself as the leader for rich people that just wanna go around the world he organizes a conference for like family offices and he has a book and he has this brand called no mad capitalist and if you look on reddit loads of people talk about it i actually did a pre screen call with them and i also read the reviews about it etcetera they're basically just a reseller for tax lawyers because tax lawyers just suck at marketing you know and he's got a podcast cast he's got book he's just a really great marketing and he's got this like he's like oh the best chat strategy is to like have free passports so i help you get multiple passports and set up a bank account another a country etcetera did a call with them and they basically wanted twenty five thousand dollars retainer and then what they'll do is they'll just make you a report and they're like alright the twenty five thousand dollars you can later put it towards whatever things we propose for you but i was like okay but then as i did more research i kind of just myself found out like wait i can just cut out you and just find an awesome tax attorney myself and pay three thousand dollars i don't need to give you too twenty five thousand but he he had he's he's doing really well and he also has the level like if you pay him seventy five thousand dollars you can like go and hang out with him on an island in person and he'll he'll he'll be your concierge with so some of these people i think it's just like which people having too much money and they don't wanna do the research or reference text to find good tax people they're like oh well this dude his website looked really great he must be fault leader he's got this book he's on all the podcasts i'll just hire him because also i found tax attorneys they don't give you a simple answer to the freaking question you know i'm just like i i i wanna do this whatever and then they're like oh it's really confident and they they use all this jargon they just suck at speaking plain english he does he's so he's been a really good business i was thinking think a business opportunity is building a reseller layer on top of these industries that just suck at marketing or communicating what they do you know so he's doing it for tax international tax for really rich people and i was thinking there's probably other industries where just make an amazing brand website write to book go on all the podcasts and make a brand about yourself hit really great name right like no capitalist to do that for other industries i thought was one idea so what do you get what do you go for the twenty five grand he's like i'll make you a report that they'll make you a report an eight paid report telling you we think that you should set up a trust in bermuda and that was going to cost you thirty k the twenty five k that you paid us you can put that towards the trust in bud but basically he's just taking a cut he's just taking a re he's just taking a referral fee from the lawyer you know it he only costs five k to do the trust so basically and then if he gives you the report and you don't like it he keeps the twenty five k so this is my this is the business model that the think and grow rich guy does and dave ramsey i've come to realize so what they did is i i i know somebody who reached out to he he got into thinking and grow rich robert k like you know book plus blow poor your goodness you're getting confused poor dad rich dad is the robert kawasaki guy or whatever name robert something they can go rich as napoleon hill yeah that's what i'm rich board dad say they say i want yeah yeah so he reaches out to the rich dead poor dead guy who i think is that guy and he's basically that like he he's gotta philosophies he's like look this is the way to get rich and it makes sense and you're like cool i wanna do it he's like awesome reach out to one of our you know reach out to our headquarters and we'll do a call and we'll get to know you and we'll tell you what we think you should do and it's just a layer resell tax strategy and so what he did was he paid twenty k to these guys to get a connection to a tax strategy lawyer the tax strategist and and lo who then data you know saves him a bunch of money actually saved him like eighty k or something like so he's like yeah there's a great deal put in twenty got eighty then he introduced me to the tax guy and the tax guy is like cool yeah for all this it'll be six k and i was like oh but like some my brother was like you know you you you paid twenty i paid six what do you mean and he was like well yeah like that i was like where did the other you know where were the all the other money oh that goes to like their central agency like that filters the deal so they don't just take a cut it's not like we get a ten percent referral fee they mark up the whole service by three x and keep sixty six percent of the three x markup in order to do this and then dave ramsey does the same thing so i was like you see dave ramsey right like you know america's you know favorite uncle or whatever and he's doing this call and show he does all this stuff and was like how much and and we had done this feature on him on the pod that blew my mind sam you knew a little bit about this but he has like a huge campus of like his office is like it's in tennessee he's got like you know multiple buildings hundreds of people on staff i was like dude how big is this guy's podcast did he could pay for that that sounds a little outrageous like what's going on here and it's basically the podcast the books all of that is just lead gen for people to come to him and if you go his website it'll say what do what do you need you want insurance you want a mortgage you wanna learn how to save money you want tax help talk to people with the ramsay shield and basically what he does is he goes and finds local people in your market he he they have to pay to apply so they pay some numb some amount of money and like you know couple thousand dollars to get certified and when they're certified so he makes money off them but then he for them it's a no brainer because they're gonna get leads from his giant top of funnel like his website if you go to like whatever the traffic you know analysis on similar web it says it gets ten million visits a month on his website so he's getting a huge amount of traffic that he just funnels down to these providers and he basically gets his cut and they and these advisers all have the shields like what does the shield means it's like our team has vetted them i like invented what you don't know if these guys are you know you let you actually do it out here and i'm pretty sure this entire business is making like three hundred million a year and this is off of or more a combination of basically his like the the ramsay trusted advisors and it's basically like they follow the ramsay rules and it's like what are the ramsay rules it's like oh you know they're there's parts of his philosophy that they follow and and so they can they can either pay for the leads or they pay for the certification and just off this lead gen he's just generating just like tons and tons of cash and then on top of that he's got his like his university and then he's got his medium ad stuff so the combination of all those just sort of like a three hundred million plus a year empire which is pretty insane it is doing exactly what you described jack it's a it's a layer that i call it a router business it's gonna route you to mh the service you want yeah and you know i'm the router because i'm the trusted source and if i do actually do a good job of c a hand selecting and people get a good outcome from it then this can be a sustainable business and so yeah i think you're absolutely right on that and what's the other one yeah what's this rt t what does that mean oh rt t i just meant like read the fucking manual so basically i was talking someone have someone helping me with like mid journey and all this stuff just came out right and then i was just trying to figure out like i kinda just delegated to him like alright we let's just see if mid journey can help us so said i'm building this like physical place and i'm like just see if it can make us some mock cups so take this image of a cabin and this image of the piece of land and just see if mid journey can blend them together and were even hire people of about work to have for five like journey experts to help us and the was all sucked and then there was not doing what i asked and then he had said he'd had been playing around with it for a while and then i was sometimes i was like i fuck it i should this is gonna be valuable skill i should learn how it works at least the first step i did is i read the mid journey guide book that they have and it explains how to do it and then within fifteen minutes i saw like hey guys we can do what i'm asking you just have to use this certain commands do you do you even read the fucking manual about how this works i think most people don't read the manual like manuals are boring right they read the manual they're just trying to figure it out themselves or look at youtube and then i was just like just read the manual pretty simple and so i think if you just do the basics that most people don't read the fucking manual about how mid journey works or chat gp or something there's so many people that the ai is this merging trend but they're fucking lazy gonna read the twenty page manual and you can kinda just tell them like oh you wanna do that i'll just do it for you it maybe only takes you five seconds but you can just charge them a premium you know actually my wife she has a startup up and she said there's this guy he's going around he's doing conference in a different country like every few days about ai and he's teaching business leaders like oh mid journey chat gb is how he use it to sit this ask my wife i'm like what's that guy's actual credential course you know and he's not he's not he is just a nobody but he's saying that he's an ai expert because everybody is they only just came out with somebody and he's just running workshops and charging business leaders there's a loads of money about how to run they in your business and so i think if you just you know if you just don't sleep and just learn mid journey chat gb learn all of these things only came out recently somebody you can be a fault leader and write a book launch it launch on amazon a book how to use chat gp in your business and and logic for each vertical using chat bt for lawyers and accounting and whatever i you guys are in the group i don't know if you saw sean is more active sam i'm not but people were talking about this business case text just got acquired by lexus nexus for seven hundred and fifty million dollars and actually in the investor report it's kind of embarrassing but in the investor report the lexus nexus said the reason we paid seven hundred million dollars for this business it because they came up with eight prompts for for open ai about how to make it give good responses to law questions so they're kind of openly saying this business is just a layer on top of open ai they just came up with eight prompt texts and so we're buying them for seven hundred million tell me what about this company i mean i'm not an expert but someone in the who the group who is in the industry said lexus nexus competitor has just come out with some ai thing and so lexus nexus which is like multi billion dollar company was like oh shit like we need to get up speed right and we need to get up speed fast and so they just paid this ludicrous or what people are saying is ludicrous some because they needed to get up to speed but literally in the investor report they said the reason we are buying this business is because they have eight proprietary prompts and in anyone who's used tech or anything knows that's like not very much intellectual porter or whatever you're think you know i think case takes have been around for like ten years though so whatever they were doing before you know they were they were around so they like i think they like on the website there now says ten thousand law firms use them you know it's not literally just eight props but but i get i get your point and definitely they got the the ai premium the exit here because yeah it you became immediately strategic and urgent for for like and i'm totally with you about the the you know you could become an expert in mid journey and chat gb in like nine days nine days of like trying to do shit and then basically figuring out how that applies to certain vertical or job is is definitely like a thing that that can't exist should because exist i had the same thing i was trying to use it in my business my e comm business and i was like how i do this and i just reached out to the guy at runway and i was like hey i'm trying to take an image and make a very similar image and i was like it's not i don't like i can't do text to image because i can't describe this image i have an image i want another one like it and i want actually fifty variations of it can you do that yeah we have image image just go over here i was like oh thank you like this would have i didn't know even which tool to use i wouldn't have known what it's called i would have known how to do it and then oh i did it but there's one problem he's like oh just change this setting blah lot and then it just fixed it i was wow that's that's amazing and save me so much time and you you really do have to play with these things and most people don't have a time or the patience to go play with these things to figure out how they actually work as a business leader you pay your lawyer at a thousand a thousand five hundred dollars an hour to give you tax advice right why would someone not pay that for a midterm person if they can answer their question in an hour for a worldly a full leader mark cuban has his great blog i don't think he updates anymore but he was writing it for maybe a couple of decades now it's really old and i used to go back and read his old post a lot of people don't know this but he actually got his first like two or three million dollars of wealth when he was thirty one because he started this thing called micro solutions it was basically i forget how we described it but it was basically like a like a it agency so like if a big ish or even a small company was like implementing oracle or something like that he would help install it on everyone's computer and then teach people how to use it and he he goes the reason my company was successful wasn't because i necessarily was an expert on this stuff but he goes i was the only one and he used her same acronym he goes i was the only one who read the fucking manual he goes i would stay up late at night and i would read the fucking manual and i would just learn how does this hp computer work and the next day i could go and like talk to a business owner and explain how it works and say yeah we can install that thing or this thing or that thing and then i go and read the manual on those other things and that's all i did and it was hard work and i stayed up i've all my reading these things but that's how i became a an expert in the stuff i just read the manual which no one does and it's pretty funny because he used the exact i think he has a blog post actually that has the exact same acronym but you have here's what he sent it's a blog post called how to win at the sport of business he goes every night i would take home a different software manual and i would read it of course the reading was captivating i'm reading peach accounting words star harvard graphics lotus apex at the every night i would read him after getting home no matter how late it was it turns out not a lot of people ever bother to rt t read the freaking manual and so it turned so so people really started thinking that i knew my stuff and that's all i was doing yeah it's hilarious and he like talks and he talks about that in a ton of different blog posts so when he talks about read the read the freaking manual it's it's quite good and he and he attributes that to like a lot of his early success you have a few others that i gotta ask you about okay so you wrote on this little cheat sheet you wrote hack you know non obvious barriers to entry for business and then you said hacking the iphone to record screen what are you talking about here non obvious barriers barriers to entry for business sure and i mean as i said you don't have to be the first mover to market but to be successful in business but when an entirely new plot comes out there are opportunities to the product that's why i was able to hack linkedin ads that after the hack we've talked about because linkedin just launched it so it was not properly bug checked and all that stuff you know now the idea i was saying or it's not necessarily business idea about where you could discover opportunities for me and to give an example is that you might have a wedge or like a business you might have a you might have a hack that's it's not business but maybe it can go somewhere from that initial kind of hat you know so to give an example with fun back in like two thousand and ten the business i had before we were making educational videos like how to use adobe photoshop and stuff like this so like videos about desktop like computer applications and fairly around that time i think a year before the iphone app store had launched and i was reading this ga report like i iphone apps are gonna blow up and then i was kinda feeling like wait so we're doing this for desktop and apps on your computer why could we not do the same on your iphone now that nowadays is very easy to record your screen on the iphone right like you just pull down and tap was called screen at the time you could not record the iphone screen now i read a little bit online and i kind of felt like hey i think i've looked at these different pieces of hardware it's like a cam called mixed with like this cable you plug in with the iphone but you have to jail break the iphone etcetera etcetera i was like i reckon or i just have a hunch that if we put these together i might be able to figure out how to record the iphone screen now my c cofounder he was like do this fucking waste of time like you've got forty eight hours to try this out otherwise obligated to move on alright now not that many people know this but actually the post store lets you buy a product and you can return it within fourteen days even if you used it the macbook an iphone and ipad you can return it used so we had an in intern it was his first day there and i basically said our company we have about a thousand dollars in the bank account and i told him like take this credit bank credit card and i told him to spend our entire budget at the apple store i want you to buy the latest iphone and latest ipad and your first task is the intern is jail break this and we have forty eight hours to figure out if we can record the screen from this because my cofounder thinks is waste of time i think it's not and and we and then we're gonna return it within fourteen days so we have a time time buffer because we don't have a found dollars to just throw around so we're gonna play around with this iphone max fourteen days then we're gonna send it back we managed to record this we managed to record the screen it was a free it was taking like a cam called a cable you had to jail the iphone etcetera etcetera but we managed to get this unique thing where we would could record the screen of the iphone at that time we didn't have everything useful to do with it as it's like okay great we can record the screen in the iphone more come we do this but later on when we built the video ad network when we came up with idea about the video ad network the vu is today obviously if you're gonna run a video ad and app needs to have an advertisement to run right and we were the only because we had just started with this we actually just had an in house production studio that's how we we initially made money by charging five hundred dollars to make a video for your app but five hundred dollars that kinda of sucks but what we did is we par laid that idea and at some point we made the best videos of anyone like apple la or however they couldn't make a video so what they'd have to do is you'd have to spend thousands of dollars hiring creative ad agency who probably used the camera to record the iphone screen or you had to do loads of work as the app developer send them all your image assets we could literally record the screen at the iphone that others could not and so what we said is like hey guys we're no longer you can't buy a video from us anymore that people love our videos the best quality videos but we're like even if you offer us two thousand dollars we don't make videos anymore but if you spend more than twenty five thousand dollars on our advertising network will make you the video for free and our videos are the best so they're gonna convert amazingly as well but you can you can use the video on your website and stuff but you cannot use this video on app loving or any other network is proprietary to us so that was a hack that worked for bundle and what i would say obviously you have to have a credit card that had this limit and check that apple actually allows this but what i would do is if i am twenty years old and i have a credit card because america gives the from credit cards i would go to the apple store the first day the apple vision pro comes out and i would try and hack it and jail break it and play around with it look up on my hat jail rocket it and i would try and find hacks like how to record the screen of the apple vision pro that's not gonna be a feature at day one no one needs to do that if you can hack it and do that you have something proprietary you could launch a business off the back of that and i would return it within in fourteen days and maybe go to another apple store and buy it under do get my friend's file i mean but that is one opportunity of like you know it's a hack it's not a business but that unique hack that no one else has can lead you to have a barrier to entry to be successful and build a billion dollar business in a tangent industry from that i love that love that you you also have a couple on here you said why i believe in the law of attraction and practice applications this is interesting to me because i think there's like people who believe in the law of attraction and they also you know believe it horoscope and crystals and other stuff too probably and then there's people who are you know hyper rational problem solve types that typically don't believe in something like the law of attraction i would have peg you as more of the practical logical problems solve type but you're saying you believe in this so tell me why you believe in this and what do you mean by practical applications yeah people that are really rational like my brother law is a bit hard to talk about this topic was they're so rational i'm pretty rational but i'm also open minded to stuff now law of attraction the interpretation many people of the crystals take and i kind of it was kind funny because i went to somebody that did this alternative kind of kinda like massage therapy but like alternative and then she was doing it out of her house but then on the books shelf was like a book like how to manifest well to be a billionaire now i but then i'm like well you're in this like really crappy studio so how's that going or you know like on the extreme alternative side that you're talking about sean like doing horoscope as sweater i'm somewhere in the middle where i'm like law of attraction so pop by the book called the secret if you just do it at the basic level is just like oh just like think about what you want and it will manifest and appear to you but actually there's a book that i like called practical law of attraction and what is kind saying to be honest it basically i didn't know about this stuff when i was launching my business but it kind of actually reaffirmed the stuff i was already doing in my life to be honest which is like clearly the clearly feeling and defining what you want and then taking steps to get there now why i think there's a practical clarification and why i do believe in it i don't believe that you just think of it and if nothing happens i think now to give let me give let me just give an example story that reaffirm this i was i was living with my roommate and at this time my business was growing pretty good but he was trying to launch a business off the ground and he was thirty five and he was trying to thumb raise raise a sea round and he could not raise any money at all and his mindset was just stuck about feeling sorry for himself like he was just like oh i read on tech crunch about eighteen year olds getting into why comb but nobody respects me like i have way more expense than him but investors they must just they don't value me they they blah blah blah he's you're feeling sorry for himself it's having negative energy i mean a prime example of it was like one day he called me and like really like anxious and he's like oh my god jack like a a letter from the irs arrived for you and i'm like dude i'm sure it's not that big of a deal but he's like dude what the fuck that he's freaking out right and lo and behold it actually was a refund check they were giving me a one but he had this negative mindset and i feel that obviously people study by body language and all this stuff but i feel that law of attraction works because there is so many micro signals and body language we're projecting to people all around us that we're not in control of and don't even know and so i feel for me i and my c founder we were convinced we're gonna raise funding and we're the shit and i think that investors and stuff can tell you know you can tell if someone bluff so he's going into this meeting and he's got a hundred rejections and he's feeling sorry for himself he's already going in with the idea that these people i'm not gonna invest in me and so they are just sensing that this guy's a loser right of versus me i'm just like we're gonna raise funding and so when i say something like an investor one time asked us like how's your fundraising raising going we had no investors but we told him like oh it's very amazing we're just site we got a bunch of top tier people interested we're just deciding who's gonna be the best fit for our business and the guy kind of freaked out and it actually gave us a term she because i think he could tell that we believed it we were not lying because we actually believed it now what was amazing with my friend is at just at some point i just noticed him adopt a mindset set shift just one day basically and at some point he basically just said like alright look what i've been doing thus far it it hasn't worked and and he also was saying that he looked at me a bit as a bit inspiration because jack just it doesn't not worry about this stuff you know and he's like i realized that i haven't going it been going all in because i'm scared that if i don't waste funding i'm gonna look like a failure to my network as if i try and do a business again then they'll think like i will he failed the last one not gonna do it again but he it's like from this day forward i'm a adopting a mindset that if i do not raise funding for this business i'm never going to try and raise funding for a business ever again this is my one shot and i'm gonna go all in and he looked up all his connections on linkedin and he was not embarrassed of our rejection or that he would look stupid to them in if check he's like i'm going to ask every single person in my network for investing intros literally within a month or so he raised the amazing seed round business now has raised over twenty five million dollars because he just went all in and i think that people could tell that he had the conviction shouldn't you know he's telling them now he's not feeling sorry from himself white i can't my son he's like i'm gonna raise funding and this business is gonna be fucking huge and just it was amazing to see him adopt that mindset shift and so that is an example for me of law of retract is like yes you're manifesting it and whatever shit but you're actually believing it and you're projecting it to others now think he's adopted back new mindset right so if an investor reject him in his original view that would have reaffirmed his original view right like oh all the investors hate me and i'm never gonna funding because i i just got rejected if with this new mindset actually it doesn't necessarily have to change every single outcome in every interaction you have they also changes how you view them if one investor rejects him now you'll just be like oh well i'm gonna raise funding so i guess this guy was just not fit i just move on to the next one you wouldn't see as reaffirm that you suck you would just be like oh this investors in idiot like i'm good away funding it doesn't distract you from the path so that is what i was thinking about when it comes to of attraction and i've we've been friends for a while but i remember very distinctly and you might need to fill in some of the details right and i'll try to be vague and you could decide what you wanna share but i remembered distinctly i think we were i think we were at my apartment in soma and soma when you came over or we could been at my house in glen park but i remember like distinctly hanging out with you and you had just v hadn't sold yet but you had sold some shares to live off of because you were basically cat you you didn't have a lot of money you sold some shares and you you got maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars but you lived off that for like three years and it was at the very end of that money and you had you didn't even tell me i i asked like how things are going do you have enough money to last until you think your the company gonna sell and you're like yeah i think it's gonna sell for a whole lot of money for hundreds of millions of dollars and i'll be fine when that happens and i was like but how are you now and for some reason i remember i saw your robinhood account i saw one of your account and i don't know if you remember this but i i think there was single digit thousand dollars left because you had made like a really dumb trade do remember that and you were like totally calm and i remember like being around you and it was like you you you're you're one of my like three best friends and i remember they can like oh like you're my family now like you have inspired me because you actually were living what you're talking about now do remember that do you remember when them yeah and i mean in line with that basically yeah i got a bit of money like as you said a secondary right and i was living and then the money was running out doesn't last forever i think that i i i saw from the previous episode so people like talking about specific numbers right so i think that when i i think yeah i think that when i left fungal and then tried doing ship and it didn't work out etcetera but i didn't have any many savings at van i think i got a hundred and twenty thousand dollar salary we paid us after we raise funding but price that we've never taken any money and then just to help me out because i was like hey dude i don't actually have any money my c founder van helped give me an introduction to some people that bought a secondary of of of some of my stock now i think that i i comment was that i think it was five hundred thousand and i hadn't held the stock for five years so it was not qualified this thing called q sbs yet so i basically had to pay a bunch of probably probably have pay a half of that in tax being in california right so i had like let's say two hundred and fifty k left that's not a load of that's not a lot of money in san francisco to pay your rent food if you have no other income so now i was advising companies and stuff but they don't give you they give you equity they're not giving you money and my money was running out and sam why you said i didn't have much money left and people were saying to me like hey dude what are you gonna do if you like run out of money and i was like oh i guess i'll have to get a job but i'm not really contemplating that right now i don't have a timeline for when business gonna exit but i kind of feel something is telling me that is i'm gonna be alright i'm not freaking out about it even worst case scenario i'll moved back in my my parents whatever but i was not making a plan b what was the dump trade i was day trading like options trading and all this shit and kind of funny feel like two hundred fifty k is not a lot of money in san francisco for food rant in my day trading business i and with hindsight is is is very stupid but like our day trading stuff to try and make some money when i looked back in hindsight i i actually was spending like a few hours a day because i just got interesting trading so learned options trading and all this it's spending a few hours a day i actually would have made more money if i had just put it in the vanguard v t it it's s and p five hundred as it wasted all this time and yes lost a load of money yeah so that was just a negative trait of experimenting the way you described it i've heard described differently so tony robbins did this this is a video on youtube of him talking about this where he says like you know you've ever heard of the phrase like a vicious cycle and if you know vicious cycle is kind of like what you described your friend was initially doing which is he draws these three circles he says first one's belief second one's action third is results and he goes like what do you do with you like let's say you're you're supposed to do something but you don't really think it's gonna work it it doesn't matter it like you know you you're looking for the salt and you know your girlfriend says it's in the cabinet but you already look there you don't think it's there so you kinda you go you don't really rum around too much because you don't believe it's there right so basically low belief typically creates weak you know lower weak action and lower weak action so almost always creates bad results and then the the message the story we tell ourselves is see i knew it and knew wouldn't work and then it just reinforces the low belief and that's the vicious cycle that happens for people you know it could be i don't really believe that i'm gonna stick to this diet and then so therefore i'm not really that hardcore i i start to slip and then my results say nah you you never stick to what you say and reinforce a low belief right it could be on the end it be business it could be personal give me whatever and then there's the exact opposite which is the the virtuous cycle the virtuous cycle is massive belief this is gonna work what happens when you believe something's really gonna work you wake up before the alarm clock you get out of bed you start doing it immediately you can't wait and you take massive action what happens when you take massive action for a while you start to get a good results or massive results when you get massive results and reinforces the belief see i knew the shit was gonna work and so that and is basically the that's the difference between winners and losers is which side of that cycle do you go down and like the the core thing is there's some people who just wait for a result to happen to to inform their belief and what's what that basically means i'm gonna sort of wait to hope to get lucky and then i'll start to believe and i think anybody is in the kind of entrepreneurial bucket the the pre wreck for any result is the belief and and you have to have that sort of massive conviction or massive belief in yourself and in what you're doing and that part is the that's the law of attraction part that's the part where it's faith it hasn't happened yet you believe it will happen and because you believe it will happen you're right it's not like love not like the secret where they're just like close your eyes and you say i'm not you know there are no weeds in the backyard there are no weeds in the backyard you look oh there's still weeds in the backyard well you didn't take any action you didn't go and get rid of the weeds is is you know the action is a is a is a requirement to actually do this mh you you also mentioned one other thing on that when she said you have to feel it versus just say it yeah is there a difference there because i when i talk to people who kind of really believe in this they over emphasize this feeling feeling it part versus just saying it or or try to believe it in your head so my wife is totally not into this at all and maybe it just doesn't work for her but she's like dude i can't just feel all that i'm gonna can't just feel it's gonna work it doesn't work for her but for me maybe i'm just delusional or i just have conviction in something but i just sometimes you feel it's gonna work and i guess one bit that is related to this a bit is like perhaps adopting different mindset personas so i saw this interview with beyonce and they were asking her about like she has her thing like sasha fierce right her nick nickname yep and they were like when does when do you become sasha fierce and when you just be beyonce that the same is a joke but she's like i literally become sasha fierce before i'm going to go on the stage because when i'm beyonce i'm nervous i think people are gonna hate me or whatever and i just adopt this alternative persona that i am sac and i am going to kill this performance people are gonna love it it's amazing because they're adopting and she's adopting some persona she's really feeling it i i don't necessarily adopt this up persona but that is the feeling that i think would be insane yeah i do the same thing and i also think that who do you become i have this persona that i created angry patel like what do you are you who are you gonna be tough and yeah again this is another one that came out of tell you rob he he goes he goes we we all we all have a version of our person like you know raise your hand if you've ever been super kind to others yeah you have every everybody everybody's is a hand raise if you ever made selfish choices and been a selfish asshole everybody raises their hands like we all have all these features of our personalities like the question is who's driving the car right now and he's like you know people think that they come to this this weekend workshop and i'm gonna oh tony he change your life in fact you go home people sort of mock you like oh so what happened you're a whole new guy now and he's like you know obviously you don't you know you you don't become a hold new person after thirty five years in one weekend but he's like you know one thing we will do he's like i'm take the most badass version of you and that's who gets to drive this weekend and if you if you're it's only for this weekend and you decide after this weekend i don't want that person to be the one who's making decisions from now on alright fine fair fair play but for these next two days that's who's in charge we all have a version of ourselves that is the more badass version of ourselves the one that that does believe it's gonna happen the one that one that is decisive versus indecisive all these traits he's like what do you call he's like what do you call when you i forgot he says he's like he's like we're gonna make that that he's like we're gonna make that personality or bitch and he's like what do you what do you do when you train a dog you give it a name and you train it to come when you call it and he's like so you're gonna give it a name you're gonna figure out you're gonna be able to adopt that state when you want to be in that state he's like that takes practice reps and we're gonna get a bunch of reps at it this weekend and you sort you you have to figure out alright what is the version of me that does have those traits that does walk that way that does make those decisions and then can you call it on command or you only gonna do it when you feel good are you only gonna do it when the weather's nice like no no you wanna be able to have that on demand when you want it he says the same thing like i think his real name is not tony robbins it's either it's like his original name is like anthony he's that some other last name he's like people see me now and there's is female on stage and all the stuff they think man tony you're you're you're amazing you you you you're just special he's like no i was anthony blah blah blah i was broke i was fat i was all these things he's like i created this tony robbins motherfucker i created him and i was just like i like that part of the the thing that he was talking about because it's i think more empowering if you feel like oh you just are the way you are and that's it your fixed quantity and it was you know it's it's based on your genetics it's based on your childhood things you're gonna have control of versus this idea that oh i actually have multiple versions of my personality there's some that i would want to be in charge more often than others and i can craft that i can create that version to me that i want that's a different mindset some people don't believe it some people are like really married to their kind of like they're upbringing in their past traumas and their their dna that's not that's not how i look at the world at least dude this is get me this is getting me ant i feel good i feel like i need to go i need to equate my version of sasha fears jack i you inspire me i'm happy i feel thankful you we're friends i feel thankful that you came here you're a very inspiring person i just feel i feel you you're you do have it's like you're you're almost not inspiring because you're not this like crazy and intimidating person but or i guess you're the right type of inspiring because you're not this like crazy and intimidating person but you have and you have a you're very mild manner i'll be with you and other friends and i'd be like jack like you i already know you know all about this topic that they're talking about you but you're just sitting here asking questions why aren't you like pumping your chest more or like you are dressed like this bum right now at this thing all these people think that you're just like one of my loser friends but you're like you know successful not in terms of just finances financial finances but you've got like this friend dude can you yeah help me out here a little bit well i'll be like you're like successful and like all attributes like i know you're like really insightful i know that you're successful traditionally you've got all these like amazing things but you're you don't even like you want me to brag about you that's like i feel like i gotta like sometimes like put you on a pedestal and and but but that's one of the things i love about you is like you're just very very meek is a bad word because that almost sounds insulting but you're very humble and you're very mild mannered and that's one of the reasons why i love when you come on here and you like explain some of these stories because you never ever brag about yourself and i like hearing you do that every once in a while check yeah well thanks for having me on again i mean picking up on that i mean what it is very important for me just too i i guess just from my childhood and stuff but i've always tried to be humble and i'm not judging any it doesn't matter i will have an in index conversation with like to give you an example i'm here in portugal right and there's a guy i pay a guy to come and pick up at my recycling i'll my cardboard is taking the cardboard to the trash so trash man i'll have an in index conversation with him about how his life is going and stuff like that and i think it is good to remember that you can be successful and still be humble and not judge people about where they're at now sam like your father lord lives with like celebrity and he said like the celebrity just fucking it he lives in the same apartment complex and treats everyone like shit and ignores him he say and he and his they're both rich and the thing to remember i think is where people are in their life now it's not where they're gonna be in ten years and people do you treat them like shit they're gonna remember like i when i was nineteen twenty we pitched a vc in london a bench venture capitalist and we've been speaking to the associates we had a few meetings with them and yes we had nothing and our idea was terrible but the associate said like hey the partners agreed to have a meeting with you just like come by here at like six pm to come by the office we're alright okay it's been of weird times come by but sure whatever and we had no money like spent the money but my business part especially was in a lot of debt spend the money got an underground ticket went there etcetera in within ten to fifteen minutes at the meeting getting started because the guy was asked his questions is like you guys don't have a business this is just like shit and at like six fifteen it's like yeah i've gotta go to dinner so this meeting is over ten years fifteen however many years it's been more than ten years later up i we still remember that meeting and that guy treated us like shit he's still got a vc fund if he asked me for deal flow i'm not gonna give it i'm not gonna pretend that never happen i'm like dude i remember how you treated me when i was shit you you always do weird stuff like this that makes sense but i'm like no why why would you ever do that so like for example you named your child so jack has a two year old now you named your child baby yeah for the you told me you're like i'm gonna i'm gonna name her baby for the first twelve months because i wanna get to know her and i was like dude like everything about your life is weird can you just just do do something normal for the kid and you're like no i think i think this actually makes more sense and then i got to know her and i like and then you you you should talk about the naming ceremony but you did this thing where you named after her a year and you're like this name like it fit her more and i had to get to know her a little bit and i was like after a year i was like that actually is makes so much sense but it's so not normal but you're always doing these weird things that actually appear to be well you've done a lot of stupid stuff but you've done a lot of things that actually like are pretty amazing but are not normal at all yeah and and i that's one of my favorite parts about you you know what i mean cool thanks and i mean also as i listened to the pot lot i noticed that you guys hadn't talked about sam had made a massive announcement on all his social that now he's gonna be having a baby and so notes you guys hadn't talked about that so i had some of the different wack things i've done with my baby if you wanted to talk about them and naming ceremony many was one of them yeah you you know me and sam just we're just like guys were just like yeah nice job with the thing alright let's move on you know girls are like oh my god congratulations i'm so excited for you wow how oh my god you look you're glowing sam you look amazing and i was just like hey dude good shit about the you know you know alright the the your stuff's working congratulations we well i wasn't sure i wasn't sure like what i wanted to put on the internet mh and i haven't actually made my decision what so you made your day sam posted a shirtless picture of himself to celebrate the baby i was like wow that is that is unbelievable combination there like that's a what an upsell you created in this photo i was better like got pump announcement with the shirt off flexing it's y bob pass in the middle of my stomach she's like dropped out on the photo like yeah by the way there's a baby over there hey that's the only reason why we did the whole thing do you do you put your do you put your kids face on it i don't think you have maybe on facebook sean i have you jack no that i have but you only do it on facebook right where it's just like friends well my wife does on her own instagram so you know that's like but yeah it's just her friends so yeah i'm trying to decide what to do i think i don't mind but i don't know anyway i'm still like working through yeah let's go through some of the things you did with on the parent side checks so the naming thing sam talked about it yeah let's do let's finish that one so how'd did you come up with that idea do you think it was a good idea and eventually how did you actually end up naming her besides baby so basically again coming like basically i think one of my values maybe is i don't like being told what to do mh and relating to what we were just talking about i also like to question norms so preparing to give birth or maybe even yeah yeah you're preparing to give birth what i read online and the mid life etcetera you're was saying is you have to pick her baby's name before you leave the hospital so we can put it on her births certificate and hell up and so and i was like but why do you have to do that like that's quite a short deadline that you have to pick a name if before we leave the hospital after you go to this traumatic experience yeah but i don't really like being told to do that like does really need a name or he or she like tipping been born like do you really need a name you don't really need and so basically i researched and it took varies state by state but i found that as long as both parents consent this was in hawaii i as long as both parents consent within the first twelve months you can change a baby's name without having to go to court or anything like that you just fill out a form and as long as both parents consent we just had like a no tree come to our house you can change the name pretty easily so i was like okay well of i mean the first conclusion was i don't wanna have to pick a name before leaving the hospital there's too much rushed for me and it's also telling me what to do so my wife the last name was more important to my wife because she's korean and in their culture they have like a book of last names and whatever and so i and we kinda made a deal okay the baby can have your last name but i get to take a lead on the first name but i wouldn't pick it by myself but i get to take a lead on what is it and so then i was like okay well we'll just have the first name as baby and so that is what we did at the hospital like on the birth certificate etcetera so submitted and then i did get a call from the department of health whatever like a week later and they're like okay we just wanna confirm i understand you've had a a recent birth just want to confirm the name and i and i was like yes it is b a b y and they're like okay so just to clarify ace baby the the name of your baby is and then it kinda surprised me was i was like yeah that's correct and then the guy was like okay that's cool i mean actually i've worked ten years and there has been one or two other people who've done this before as well actually and i was pretty surprised for that that but anyway and then i also fought like in southeast asian culture like china korea maybe some other places they have this kind of just for fun they have this ritual when the baby is year old or so they put it the baby on the floor and on the other end of the room they put down like a stethoscope a law book stuff like this and they just let the baby crawl and whatever it picture is like oh picked a sc stethoscope that means you're gonna be a doctor and then it's just a fun like they do this indians do that too but it's just three stethoscope yeah oh you're supposed to be whole one of them exactly yeah except like fifty years ago they started adding like little motel that you could pick you know they're like oh nice and you could eco large alright take a look and for my bit then i was like oh alright what if we actually did that but we just have different names so then she can pick her own name so i also remembered that when i was when when the first joining high school like the first day of school they were like i everyone go around the room and say an interesting fact about yourself and i remember i couldn't really think about an interesting fact about myself and i was like oh if i do this then she's always gonna have anything interesting facts about herself right like i picked my name it's pretty interesting so i was like that's pretty cool and this like product obsession you've done this with babies so jack's actually the best gift give of all time so what he does is like for my big my big life event events he'll like one time when we got married he sent me this maybe like three really big box i bet you there was like three or four thousand dollars worth of products in there and he'll send me like a variety of products and then he sends you a list of a paper that's like three pages long and it's a detailed description that says like this is blank the reason why it's the best and he like explains it and it's like sometimes it's really random for example he was like these are the best bath towels because they have a little bit of copper in them which prevents molding or he even like my wife uses lotion all the time he's like this is the best lotion it's the best because it uses this vitamin or whatever and it was like crazy or it was even like these are the best gummy bears because they're low in sugar but they still taste sweet but they only use stevia and you did it with like maybe fifty items and then when i told you we were pregnant you sent me this box and but it was all baby stuff and you're like this baby formula it's meant for babies that are three months old i actually i think it's best for newborns because same thing as a newborn one but like there's a small i forget exactly everything but it's like this massive list and you're doing now are you doing that now with all the baby stuff where you're just literally analyzing every product yeah i test out quite a bit i mean the reason i gave it to you as a gift is because you and sarah had told me like oh you should create a business like jack jack's box of like your favorite stuff i didn't actually wanna do it in the business because i don't think you would make that much money and quite a bit of effort but i wanted to do for you guys because you kind of come up with the idea i research different products now do you publish your your research well not the baby products yet i was actually thinking maybe to make like a beat a baby book or ebook book just with different recommendations you've seen on my as my pinned tweet on twitter i have my favorite products random products so i have whatever favorite i don't know what i've got on there but i've got like twenty products i shared as my favorites on twitter and you're underscore ja smith that's your thing let's talk about some the other crazy things you're doing so you have a guy watching your baby and baby camera and cassandra or something like that what's going on so you what what are you doing with this baby sleep monitor thing yeah i mean i kinda of feel bad because you know when when speaking to new parents or if someone says like are you're having a baby like people say like oh prepare to like never sleep again you're never gonna be sleep and i kind of don't say anything but inside i'm like dude i'm thinking better now than i was before having a baby and that's due to setting up various things but one of those is that i mean you have to have a house big enough for this but basically we put my daughter a few doors down and so initially if she would wake up and cry in the night we found that you know she would wake up cry for like five minutes but then often go back to sleep so she only really needed help if she's crying like longer than that and i actually got the idea from jonathan swanson who's the founder of fun and he called it like digital night nanny i called it like deep sentinel for babies i know sam in lesser than deep sentinel and basically what it's doing is having a virtual assistant i have in india and basically he just watches my baby cam all night and he basically has specific instructions like okay if the baby wakes up and starts crying you start a timer and if she just cries for like three minutes and goes out sleep don't do anything but if she cries for like more than seven minutes then call me and wake me up and we have like you know i have a special phone for that and we have a backup phone in case that one broke or something so basically we only get woken up if our doctor is crying longer than seven minutes and then so now i would say only have to tend to her she's two and free two years three months she now only wakes up maybe once every two months we have to go to her otherwise we don't have to do anything so that was one jonathan one some came up with ed been really good for me what does that assistance say that indian person say like when you're like yeah here's the job i mean are they that's a pretty odd request yeah well one of the guy actually it was i've been working with this guy's a virtual assistant and then he's he's like oh my brothers in india he speaks a little bit of english but not perfect english he's looking for a job do you have any task that i can give him and then so i was just like i just do this so i think for him pretty awesome job because he can be multi multitasking he can be doing whatever else i mean the downside is that i i don't know how they're working this but he actually doesn't take off a single day in in the year he's working three hundred and sixty five days a years a so i guess he's having like thanksgiving and christmas and the baby monitors on loud to speak with his family i don't know so he doesn't take any time off yeah he's just not there jack hey he hasn't looked the camera in months he's like this baby's two years old he's gonna and your baby's gonna has had some horrible separation anxiety he feel like big crying for like fifteen thirty minutes and like nothing around your baby's like his twitch stream so what about some of these other things so you said i don't think that universities will exist in twenty years and don't plan to send my daughter to school let alone college okay a bunch there say more so what i read this book somebody on twitter had recommended it and it's called like don't tell me i can't and is written by this guy a kid who was like fourteen and he is it's this trend at the moment is trendy now but he he's talking from his perspective that he was doing this since three years old or something how he was brought up that he was not home school but homeschooling schooling has been around a long time right he was what they're calling underscored and this is actually a trend at the moment and he described how at worked for him but see how worked for him is like his family was super poor and also his dad was an army veteran like injured in the army and so was in a wheelchair and stuff and so he was always kinda helping to help out his dad and be self sufficient and so and the local scores was like the worst in the country or something and they didn't wanna send him there so initially they were like alright we'll just try homeschooling you and so his home called for like six to twelve months but it didn't go that that well and one day his dad he said normally they were more encouraging but for whatever reason one day he just asked his dad like hey dad how do people how would do people get rich and his parents are like really poor so maybe also touch on an insecurity his dad is just like oh why didn't you just figure out yourself you know why didn't you she watch some videos of warren buffett because i don't know we're not rich and then he did that he went and listened to loads of warren buffett stuff and it actually spiral from there so un is the concept that homeschooling is trying to rip replicate the school curriculum right like like math science and you still have to do the tests and all that un is there is no there is no curriculum the kid just learns whatever they want to learn and whatever is useful so he was saying from around an age of like five to seven years old he was repairing their car and doing things like this and he'd grown up in a poor family but he actually started his own business and by the time he was thirteen he like par laid it like so initially he bought a tiny piece of land and got some animals on it and like sell the produce in his local town stuff then he got he built a built a super run rundown house i was falling apart and the seller they built the house himself and so they didn't wanna sell it just for money but he's like hey look i'll buy your shack that's falling down and i'm a kid and i'm gonna put on dedicate all my time to repairing it so it's it's restoring your legacy and so they really like that and they sold it in cheap he repaired it and then flipped the house by the time it was thirteen he had something like hundreds of acres of land he was managing and he said one time when he was about twelve he went out with some friends and they were complaining about what they were learning at school they're like oh had to learn the names of the planets in alphabet alphabetical gl when the hell are we gonna learn that you wouldn't need to use that in life you know they asked him they're like hey cole what were you learning at the moment and it's like oh yeah well i've just been looking into recently certainly found a cut engineering how which people generally have like a pass through llc and then a c corp and then they can deduct this from their taxes on this never kids that i want to fuck talk you know but he got so not like crazy rich but he got he was only hunter he actually was like loan money to his parents he's like they never asked me for money and i never asked them for stuff but like in tough times like i loaned money to my parents i bought our car from them just to help them out you know suffer and then for me i was thinking back in school like i learned piano in school as a piano lessons and in at some point had to do like gray you you had to do you know playing chords and i had an exam and then it was just so shitty you know it was not fun like i don't want to learn how to play these chords and music variants of passing examiner like this sucks and then i'm just looking now especially nowadays kids learning piano they'll do it by just saying what's their favorite song and it was just learn to play the song and that's just really fun and i think that exams and stuff just ruin the fun and curiosity of learning skills and so for me my daughter comes like how can i ensure that she's just having fun for as long as possible and and like this kid said that was un underscored he said like he didn't learn traditional math but just when it seemed that he had a need to learn a score a skill obviously he would then learn it like he's doing his taxes so he has to learn math to do his taxes but it's not because they're like i'll learn the p theorem and you have no idea when you're gonna use it he identified himself i need to do my taxes so i need to figure out how to do math and i think that's just a philosophy that i subscribe to a lot i mean is wacky obviously but when you look like elon musk he created his own school for his kids jeff bezos created his own school his kids i could go only as i seven kids i think that you don't have to be billionaire to take this approach i billionaire seem to be thinking the school system is kind of fucked up you don't have to be a billionaire you could so what are you pull what are you gonna do then so so fast forward she's six or eight years old what you gonna do well at the moment she goes this thing it's called is that another trend it's called forest school it's actually nothing to do with school basically they just go to a forest bunch of kids and you're just playing all day like do you have a fake mud kitchen and you are like picking oranges and turning to orange juice and sheer sheep and shit i'm i'm planning to just my own thing like that but going to a bigger age i'm just like let's just tap bring a bunch of kids anyone in a local school thing can come around and also i feel like instead of teaching them like how to write and studying whatever i'm like wouldn't it just be awesome like whatever topic they they can pick the topic i can suggest some wouldn't it be awesome if i just ping my body and be like hey sam could you just teach the class a lesson on copywriting or i kind of feel what if they just ping someone on twitter if someone peeing if someone is to if a ten year old kid pinned me like hey i i'm underscore myself and i've decided i wanna learn business would you mind doing a lecture to my class and well we'll have my parents will bring us to you i would totally do it yeah so i'm kind of thinking stuff like that so i i love this my sister actually runs a school like this called nature kids if they said they're just outside they just walk around they go in trails if they find something they liked learn about it and if they wanna go climb trees they climb trees whatever and it's face has two two things one so she has a traditional school and she has this nature school and the nature school the kids are like by the end of the day this traditional school kids are like dead they have like no energy they're like ready to go home and they kinda like wonders is watch you youtube and whatever and the nature kids kids even though they've been out walking around all day outside they have like way more energy which is like kind of counterintuitive that's the first thing i noticed mh the second thing is yeah like they know a bunch of things that are interesting to them versus like in school it's sort of like you know you're forced to learn something that's not that interesting to you and you sort of begin to associate learning with boredom learning with sort of like you know being forced to do things versus on the other side you know with self driven scrape and exams right yeah the pressure of that now the the and i love the story you told about that guy but my question would be i think i think un schooling or sort of self self driven learning is awesome when you're driven so what happens if your kid is not trying to like you know flip a house and learn through learn about pastor he's like i guess like the fear i would have and i think most people would have is your kid doesn't really have any interest kinda just wanna you know sit around and do nothing or you know there and so now you you're un unscrew but you're not really having this kind of like awesome you know self driven curiosity do like are you worried about that or do you think like no i can create that or this situation will we'll we'll mold the person to be more that way and also on the other side what if she wants to be a doctor or a lawyer where you need you need to learn how to write credentials yeah but and you need credentials yeah i mean great questions i mean the first side i definitely agree with you sean and he's one bit my wife has said like you know some kids are not like you jack wanting to i was trying to make money when i was really little and stuff and might not take that approach things just have to see how it goes as we go along one other bit that was interesting is i visited a local montessori school and so monte montessori studying it a we're learning these different things just my wife and i just have interest but one bit they had which is awesome is exactly as you said sean school finished and we went there at the end of the day so whenever school finished finishes four pm or something actually there was a bunch of kids still there and they have a farm outside and the head teacher was giving us a tour just as my wife made friends with them with her and she was walking around speaking to the kids about what's going on the farm but she was not telling them anything to do the kids were just giving her an update so she's like oh i see the rabbit cage is broken like what's going on with that and the kid is giving her like a detailed plan like oh yeah we've seen this broken and we've come up with a new roofing method that we're gonna implement etcetera the kids run the farm and i was like that's awesome what if you just have that but just scrap the school part and this score is also quite religious so we're like what if you just scrap the religion part as home sam about a bit if she wants to be a doctor i mean yeah i would guess one approach could just like go yeah sit out like or take the total opposite approach and just hire loads of tutors and be like alright if that's the approach you wanna take then okay i guess we're gonna have to get you up speed faster than other kids and i i don't know how much you actually known when you're five in school anyway so maybe just like alright you've got if you wanna do that you're gonna have to be super smart and skip a bunch of grades then will help you do it but oh i just i love hearing your stories i mean we could we could do this all day i don't know what do you think sean how do you feel i've had a few times jack where i just called jack randomly and i just ask about something and i think you are kind of more of a one of one and at least at my life of people who are very like i know independent minded is kinda like the best way i would put it like i think you choose to lead life how you want i think that's his inspiring i also think that you are extremely like sam sort of curious and like i think you're a great competitor when you need to compete in something but you're not constantly trying to compete when una asked for it and that's a very silicon valley trait people are trying to compete in times that are what are you competing why are you trying to you know show that you're the smartest you're the you're the what at most whatever it's an annoying trait and i think it's great that you don't have that so oh it's good to good to talk to was always do you leave us with either a book or product recommendation one of jack's fines that you think people should check out that you're passionate about something you think is awesome well the book that i mentioned i guess the book that i talked about un is like don't tell me that i can't and two i guess like spoiler alert like the kid at it really sucks because this kid was building something amazing he actually drowned and died right after he wrote the book kinda sucks but it's really short sure you should've have told him not a great man the butter on that one yes sick it's sick way to end yeah good job to end the pod you moron of so what's the name of it don't tell me i can't and then it's just short book you can eat do for hours and challenges a lot of assumptions you might have about education and stuff and so for me was like we inspiring scenes but i'm looking at your products on did you just say wait wait so did you just say it's he should alert sure to listen to the yeah yeah and the life understand don't go at he's i get you read by book i'm going in you're an asshole jack i'm looking at your twitter list of products and you have this buckwheat pillow i think i bought one of these are these like hardest as of rock like i just like super super dense you you can adjust how much buckwheat is in it and then i also have a pillow case that divides it into three sections so you can adjust why do people love these so much they you need to get used to it a little bit but actually it cured my neck pain and i can't sleep on another pillow and i think sam you said as well some of your friends even ship the pillow to the hotel before they arrive nick gray yeah nick gray is have you heard of this nick gray our buddy dick gray literally every time he goes to a hotel he has his assistant send this pillow to the hotel and then he just leaves it there when he's done every single time and sometimes if he's gonna stay at a place for more than i think like four days he ships him a mattress mattress i swear to god you could eat if if you stay home gray you have a message for the hotel the google nick gray pillow and he'll tell you the story and i have been to like whenever you if i'm in a city and he's visiting i've go to his hotel room and he always has that pillow he gets it ship there every time how would you get what are the mat trace yeah well i don't but i don't know what he does about the mattress but if you google i think he has a blog post on it but i but it's not just talk i've like out whenever he's staying someone out go to his hotel just hang out with him and the pillows there every time this is so funny wow so so basically it's the best for neck pain that a pillow normally is like you know it's a rectangle and in but ideally you actually want your head to have less support than your neck because otherwise you puts your head at a weird angle you know so with this you can pull the buckwheat to one end and so it's giving a lot more supports to your neck whereas your head is a bit lower and so it allows you to kinda be laying completely flat and so you're not kinda cranking your neck and waking up with like neck pain the next day i was listening to this podcast of derek sieve on tim ferris and derek si he's interesting guy he was they were like oh you do this he has this one business i think it's like web hosting or something like that and he was describing it and there tim's was like why did you decide to do this he goes you know sometimes i'll pick a project i'm para here he's like sometimes pick a project because i think about who's my customer and do i wanna are those my kind of people and he goes this is a business that lets you host your own personal website and i just realized that people who have their own on website for no reason like just their own name dot com those are my kind of people and i was like oh that's really great to figure out your filter for like what's a simple heuristic where like not everybody you like does this but everybody who does this you kinda like and i think this like try every product to try to find the best quality of life levers i think this might be one of those things because everybody who have met that does this i like that person and you you're you do this nick great does this and it's kind of amazing do you still have a sheet are you still tracking everything i'm not really a spreadsheet no i mean for example with the bay baby box i sent you i just looked around my house at like like i just kinda anecdotally buy a bunch of stuff try them all out and then send back ones i don't like and it keep the best so i wrote it down for you so i don't have a fixed sheet as i said maybe i might turn it into a baby book but haven't yet he had this closet at one of his houses is at i used to go to and it was like again a walk in closet and it literally had i bet you had thirty thousand dollars worth of supplements in there like it looked like a it looked like a pharmacy it was like any bottle you could imagine and i was like does any of this do anything it was like nah not really you can't really feel he was except this one thing and he had like a ziploc lock bag and it had like tar it it looked like it was like i was like is this like heroin what the hell is this and he was like yeah it works yes it was like he's like this is like himalayan something and if you just take a little dab of this it gives you so what was that that's called shi have him consistently found it repeatedly amazing but yeah himalayan lion shi acts it's like an extract from a volcano or some crap dude it was like i swear to god it looked like a pharmacy it consistently impress anybody that you tell about it that's what it does he had like scales and it had like white powder on it i mean it looks like a drug dealer and i was like does any of us to do anything i don't know how much money you spend on all it was tens of thousands and you're like this one thing is the only thing that like is amazing and it was like a ziploc like bag of just this like tar amazing alright jack we gotta wrap it up is fine thanks for coming on we should do this again thanks so much for having me love the podcast listen to it and don't to any other a podcast to be honest i just listened to it in the car so thanks again so much thank you i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put my all in it like a day's off on a road travel never looking back