Listen To These 40 Minutes To Unf*ck Your Life

so the quote is this it says most of us have two lives the life we live and the un lived life within us between the two stands at the resistance more powerful than a locomotive and harder to kick than a crack cocaine habit it and here's the biggest bitch we don't even know what hit us i feel like i could rule where to know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a go less track alright sam i gotta ask you about this so i was watching that le and brothers play i don't know if you remember i was telling you i went and saw the le and brothers play and there's a line in there there's a part that stuck with me the the point of the play is it's talking about the generations of the le and brothers from the great grandfather to the grandfather and i don't know if you know this story but basically they started out their their german immigrants they come to america they they land somehow in alabama and they opened up a small little store selling fabrics okay so somehow they went from german immigrants who had nothing selling fabrics in alabama to the fourth or fifth biggest investment bank in new york in like a couple hundred years so how did that happen the story is how did that happen and the transition goes they're selling fabrics for you know for clothing in their store in alabama and then they realize they could just buy the raw cotton so then they start going to plantations of buying the raw cotton and selling it to the guy who makes fabrics out of it so then they become the largest buyer and seller of they become a middleman man and they kind of like they in the play they said they invent the idea of middle i don't think so but like they really popularized the idea of being a middleman man where they weren't making the cotton nor were they making the fabrics they were just in between broker the deals and so then somehow that that ladders up and eventually they become a bank and so you it's like generation two or three so what they show is it's realistic like one of the kids that took over was really smart had new ideas he's the one who turned it into a bank but there's other kids who was like maybe a little bit more of a gambler and a bit reckless and that put them in positions that you know maybe they shouldn't have been and they got a little too greedy a little too aggressive which ultimately in two thousand eight le brothers falls and it's the biggest bank collapse in the history of the country it's because of you know some decisions that were made along the way the seeds that were planted by you know the heirs heirs to the throne so in one of the scenes it's the the kind of the older generation and then the younger generation they're both in the boardroom and at this point the older generation is kind of the figure head he sits there in the boardroom but he's not the guy he's not the guy making this decision his son is the guy making decisions and so i forgot who it is somebody asked them some some bank or someone else comes and asks them they say what is your secret recipe what are the ingredients that let you do what you do and they think long hard and and you know i forgot what answer they give but it's something like the people or it's the the trust that we have that's what that's the special ingredient and then that sun comes up and he goes in our you know when we're baking our flower is money some people use money to buy things we use money to make money our flower is money and like that was like one of the big transitions where they became a bank versus becoming before they were merchants who are like buying and selling products buying and selling commodities and it shows that like once they have that realization like they never go back get more financial more financial more financial where they're trading on computer screens and they're trading these subprime mortgages and they're never they're never issuing the mortgage not living in the house they're not they're just it's numbers in a spreadsheet from their on out basically and we've talked about this idea of like what is it that you sell and it kind of comes down to like the way i think about this is there's many moments of my life where i'm choosing between two paths the path that's opportunistic meaning i see green on the other side i see money on the other side and then maybe the path that's more interesting or fulfilling yeah art versus money that's a good way to put it but for others it might be others might be impact it might be like making a difference in the world right like that might be the the fulfilling path for them so and as much as i could hear the advice like you know the answer the answer is go do the fulfilling thing however me and many people like me out there are just wait let me just bring make a quick pit stop over here and those pit stops add up yeah one pit stop after another where you choose the opportunistic thing after after i make this money then i'll go do the thing or well this is too good to pass up right and i do that many many times in fact i am still doing it today even as i i am ashamed to admit it i do that all the time and so i wanted to talk a little bit about people who choose one path of the other yourself people you know well and see if i can get a little bit of wisdom on this so do you have any stories on this or i can share maybe something i'm reading right now that i really stood out to me but well where do wanna start i wanna hear the story because i i think you're reading a book that i've always wanted to read but i've refused to read it so far because i know what it's gonna tell me and i don't like that answer because it's all because it's hard it it's a hard thing so you're reading is it the war and art by steven pre yeah the war the war of art so it's like the opposite of of the art of war yes on so it's the war of art and i wasn't gonna read this book and then yesterday i i asked diego i am my guy i was like diego you read books because he goes not really but reading this one book right now pretty good called the war of art and i said give me the what's like one thing that stood out to you and he just screenshot of this patch that then i went and ran and tweeted out wait hold on so you're not actually reading the book you just not inspired by what started sir this is the trigger i'll just giving you the whole story here so i got the excerpt first which is actually a great way to to decide to read a book then i read half the book last night so it's a very fast read alright so the so the quote is this it says most of us have two lives the life we live and the un lived life within us between the two stands the resistance just like every sun casts a shadow a genius shadow is resistance resistance is faster than a speeding bullet more powerful than a locomotive and harder to kick than a crack cocaine habit and here's the biggest bitch we don't even know what hit us i never did from the ages of twenty four to thirty two the resistance kick my ass from the east coast of the west coast back thirteen times again and i never even knew it existed i looked everywhere for the enemy and failed to see it right in front of my face that makes be sad right well that's one reaction to it i felt the other way i felt like a inspired rage i was like no i'm not gonna have the un lived life within so i pick up this book and i start reading and there are a ton of just like bang passages that are they're just so good that i wanted to i wanted to you know talk a little bit about with you keep reading a few more what are the other good ones alright so the premise of the book if you didn't get it from that that is basically we have the thing that's our calling that we kinda know that we should do or the direction we know we should go and then there's us not doing it that's maybe choosing what to work on but then there's just a day day so he'll point out like you know hey you got that diet that you haven't stuck to you got that that book that you haven't written you got that that that startup up you wanna go start you know of course you'll start it after you you know just save up a little more money and he goes you know fast forward the clock you're forty fifty sixty years old and you're that great author that never wrote a book and he gives tips as well so he was like if you're gonna be a writer you must write every day you don't not right because you don't feel good just like you don't do this other thing because like if you are just like feeling bombed you still gotta go to work he he calls up the difference between and an amateur and a pro he goes an amateur they do it because they love it that's what people think he's like oh they love it so much that they only do it once every month they love it a month that they never stick with it he goes you know who loves it the pro the pro who wakes up and shows up to work like it's like it's a job like treats it like it's a job you don't not show up to your job you do it every single day and you do it whether you feel like it or not you don't just wake up and decide am i gonna do the thing or not today and so he talks about being a pro and how the pro sits down and quote unquote does the work and the work is he's like i don't care what it takes you know you basically you sit down and it you know it doesn't matter how long you sit there doesn't matter if you wrote three lines it doesn't matter if those three lines suck you did the work today and as search soon enough if you just do the work often enough those three lines turn into thirty lines turn into thirty pages and those thirty pages turn into you know terrible just mindless dr to you know your best work and the only way it gets there is by sitting down day by day and doing the work do you follow jerry seinfeld at all because he's he talks about the about this topic all the time he's one of the few comedian and actors and whatever you would describe him as that actually gets into the tactical stuff of like when it goes through day to day and he's like i have a a big pen and a yellow notebook and i and i write jokes like all day not all day he said i'll do like an hour a day but i try to get it done just a little bit every day and he goes most the time it's garbage and then he talks about when he was writing seinfeld he was like i would go into the office i i would go to my office and i would sit down and i would actually write things out and then i had a process and he's like a lot of times i didn't wanna do that but i just did it anyway because that's my job and i wanna and i and i need to be great and so anyway he's a really good guy to follow because it gets really specific about the tactics behind this stuff which people were rarely discuss have you ever seen the clip of him at a comedy club talking to a struggling comedian who's was like asking he just caught jerry backstage and asked him for some advice about how to make it yeah what he say it's just like you get your point you're like i'm much one can i take it look what was time running now you out of time getting older please mh you're getting all it's not lot you can listen i'm i'm twenty nine i feel like i sacrificed so much of my life a lot three years you guys send out she would rather have been doing oh i'm not of appointments or other explanation you gotta be not necessarily no not i i see all my friends who making a lot of money a lot of money on wall street i see like you know what i just see like my friends are you know they're moving up and i don't i'm worried moving up moving up hate me behind no i no that on my mind i just this has nothing gonna do with your friends you above said now you there's a special man i he has nothing do with leaking or did you ever stop and compare the life and go okay i'm twenty nine what fragile all married doll having and kids they're all on houses they they have some sort of sense to valley i how very tell your parents what do you you know how do you feel with that they're racial your lawrence yes hello i can two your parents with me let me tell a story about this is my favorite story about shovel glenn miller orchestra they were doing some gigs somewhere they can't land where they're supposed land snowy night so they have to land like in this field and walk to the gay and they're dressed and they're seriously ready to play they they carrying their instruments so they're walking through the snow and it's wet it's s and in the distance they see this little house and there's lights on in the inside you call a smoke come in the chimney they come to the house and they look the window and in the window they see this this span he's the guy and his wife beautiful and his two kids and they're they're all sitting around the table and they're plow and they're laughing and they're eating there's a fire and the fireplace and these guys are standing there in their suits and their wet and their shooting ring and following their infamous and they're watching this incredible northern love while seeing one guy chance the other guy goes i people live like that that's what it's about right and he just leaves the guy with this parable and the guy is just like you know stunned basically but the point is like this guy says that he's doing the thing that he loves but he's like jealous of the of the comfortable people who are who are not living that life basically and like the true artist the people who are gonna make make the great shit the people who are gonna live there sort of the their most fulfilled life they're the ones marching through the snow in the discomfort but they're doing exactly the thing that they wanna be doing they chose this discomfort and i love that story i'm gonna remind you of something that we did so in february i think it was the lego episodes if you could go my first million lego at the very end you had said something of like i forget exactly what you said but it was something where i remember the energy being i own this company that i'm not sure if it gives me purpose and it's not really related to my main thing and i said well you know the product that you're selling doesn't necessarily have to be something you're passionate about you could be passionate about creating great jobs or you could be passionate about creating a a a a wonderful place to work making it so your employees can afford a car or whatever you know that it doesn't always have to save the world and i think that kind of helped you a little bit and i was reflecting on it because i talked to brett ad hoc the other day when you weren't here it's gonna go live after this episode i think so brett ad hoc started figure it's a humanoid robot company that like it's one of those companies that you would pay as like it's gonna change the world whatever he did two things that were interesting the first thing is i tried to na them a little bit to get like some good content out of them and i go brett you know you're doing this world changing thing now but before this you had a company called battery which basically is just like a glorified job board and he laughed and he he knew i was just get him a hard time and it was a hundred million dollar company he was a great exit and he had explained how figure is changing the world and how he was thinking about doing artificial meat so meet that you grown in a lab he was like i was worried about these really big problems and i go veteran was not a big problem and he was like he kinda laughed but then he got serious and he goes well the way that i thought about it was that you know you spend fifty hours forty hours a week away from your family with a company you should be spending it on something that you really truly love and enjoy and that you get value out of and i was like you did it again man you just woah this story around something that makes it really inspirational and world changing is he saying that the job board is helping people find that that's what he was saying or he was saying he got he got that out of it he got that out it and he was like and and and and it it's it's not really a job board it's significantly more complex than that but wanted to like just give him a hard time to get get get him to come out of the shelf but he was saying like he's like well no it's not just a job board like we weren't just helping people get jobs we were helping them find value in their lives and helping them find passion and he did such a good job of telling himself a story that i also believe i believe his story to be true and the other thing and anyway it inspired me of like telling myself vegetables aren't just crackers with cheese if you think about what makes a sandwich you must ask yourself do i need all of it or could i reduce it in size could i have could i do more with less what is enough and that's what the lunch stands for it's a reminder of what is enough that's exactly what it did i thought it was great but then he's got this a new thing so his new thing it was called cover so if you go to cover dot ai it says cover is a ai security company developing concealed weapon detection systems covers technology scans students backpacks i think for concealed weapons in k health schools our goal is to prevent school shootings by identifying concealed weapons inside of bags and underneath clothing apply to work here listen to this so he had just sold one of his companies or no sorry one of his companies went public it was called archer it was basically an electric helicopter big deal it's a big deal and he was thinking what am i gonna work on he had three ideas idea number one was meats grown in a lab which we've talked about which is like it's pretty insane that you have have to have all these cows in order to get ground beef is there a way that you can make real beef in a lab he was really fascinated by that and you read a bunch of research he's like that that that's on my shortlist list but that's something what i'm gonna do the second idea that he had was robots where he was like we just can't get enough warehouse workers to fill these jobs i wonder if a robot can fulfill this demand that's what he ended up doing the third one that he didn't do that he was very close to doing he read this study he read this study that was done i think or a research paper done in two thousand and fourteen or twelve or something like that and basically it was about nasa trading this technology that could use not exactly x rays but almost like a like a cellular phone like like cell phone raise and from fifty meters away so about a hundred and fifty feet this thing that looks like a video camera can you a human being can walk in front of it and you could see if they have a bomb on them you could see if they have a weapon on them you could see if they have anything underneath their clothes or in their backpacks and he goes that's amazing i wonder what we could use that for he saw this graph about school shootings where basically there's something like a school shooting a day and i'm not talking necessarily school shootings where it's like predetermined where i'm gonna go and i'm gonna like you know have have be overly violent to thirty children i'm talking about like kids who just have a gun in their book bag at school and someone says something rude to them and they freak out and someone gets hurt and shot and he was like that's what we need to solve that we need to solve that problem and so he didn't end up taking and running with that idea he did fig however figure kinda working a little bit and he has a little bit extra money and so he went and cole called the nasa guy who created this research report that explained the technology and he convinced the guy to let brett come and check the technology out he has now since licensed it and he's funded covered dot ai with ten million dollars of his own money and he's hired a team of nasa engineers to build technology to build this stuff out to eventually they're gonna start with going to stadiums so you could see if someone's coming into a stadium with a weapon and then they wanna like give away that technology to schools to prevent school shootings because schools don't exactly have money to afford the software and he was telling me the story and i'm like who would wanna prevent school shootings that's like the greatest thing ever that's a that's a really hard thing to compete against what i'm recruiting an employee to come and join a newsletter business versus like you're gonna like literally save lives and it got me thinking of what what what i was saying to you about well company doesn't have to be x y and z i felt that was a cope i felt that when i heard what brett was doing i felt solving big problems and going up your passion and not exactly caring about how big of an opportunity is in some regards in some ways that is better than doing it the way that we you and i tend to do it well i i think that what brett is pretty awesome here he he did it as a you know we talk about one chart businesses that's exactly what i told him on the podcast i sean to love this yeah it's so it's a one chart business because we've really talked about this before which is some businesses the best businesses really are so simple that you could just put up a single chart on a screen and say that's why we're doing this the example we gave before was that the rise of cremation so cr cr funerals has grown from like in a less than ten percent of the market to over fifty percent of the market now the majority of funerals i guess in the us are are cremation which is surprising to me still but if you're creating a business that's around that which we we we met these guys i think after was the name of them and like they had a whole deck and i told him i was like you didn't need to send the deck this slide three was enough you to show me was that and say we enable this we make it easier to do information like look at this rise that's what we're doing and so the best businesses are one chart businesses i know a lot of people that did d brands and if you ask them about their d brand they'll tell you this and that about the market that they're in and about the business model about the direct relationship with the consumer all they needed to share was time spent on facebook that's all these markets were based on this time spent on facebook at facebook and the cpm on facebook that's yeah a single chart would have told you that hey there's a new way to reach customers and it's called facebook ads and we're gonna just work backwards from facebook ads and start selling products via facebook ads that's really what happened in d this over the last fifteen years and anyway so when i asked brett about like this idea i was so give me the pitch what's the thesis around this what you what are you excited about he goes oh it's this google image and he just searched school shootings per year pulled up the chart he goes and it's just a it's like a up until the right exponential like it's like a what you wanna start up growth curve to look like you know starts really small and it starts getting bigger and bigger bigger accepted school shooting so if you want it to go in the opposite direction and because i was like dude how do you have the time don't you just wanna go take an nap like you wanna be with the kids but like even if you're not with the kids if i get take an dude like why do why do you're already working doing one insane thing competing with the elon musk how dare you go start another hard thing and he's like well have to i feel like compelled to yeah and when i think about like you know this isn't actually realistic but i wanna think about a company trying to compete with brett when you're recruiting someone it makes it really hard and i asked them i go why do you do these big things and he goes well i think big things in many ways are easier it's easier when i have this crazy awesome mission to get employees investors customers like it's just it's just actually easier and it kind it messed my mind a little bit so my takeaway from that by the way is not that you have to go solve a really gnarly problem in the world to be doing something think that is definitely one path and the way i think about it instead is instead of saying what should i do a better question is what would i do if i wasn't afraid like if i wasn't afraid what would i go work on and usually you're afraid of failure usually you're afraid of it not working out usually you're afraid that it might be too like so for some people it might be starting a humanoid robot cup a company might be the answer but you're not doing it because you're too afraid that like it's too hard i don't really how to do that it's don't take too much money what if i can't raise it but if i do this or if i do that i'm competing with google and in elon and all these people and so they wouldn't do it and for other people like for me it's a creative endeavor right it's to say well what like i don't know i think the thing i really wanna do is go write this killer book or go make a tv share go do something really really interesting and the reason i don't do it is because it might fail right i might spend a couple years writing to book and it comes out and people are like yeah cool book man and that's it that would be disappointing and that would be the failure and i think one of the good things about about this book that i reading the war of art and some other stuff i've been consuming is you you really separate the like choice of what you do and the result of what you do as two different things and like you know you control the controllable the thing you can control is did you spend the time doing the thing you really wanted and did you give it your all you cannot control the outcome and if you go listen to rick rubin talk says the exact same thing it goes your job is not to make it popular popular is not something you do you don't make popular you make stuff and you make a lot of stuff and you put your best stuff out there and you do your best job doing the best stuff you can and popular i mean that's not even something you think about that just happens or it doesn't happen and it's irrelevant at that point whether it happens or doesn't happen because you're just gonna keep making stuff eventually popular starts to pay attention to the guy who's making a lot of stuff we talked about rocking in the last episode the story of sylvester alone after the episode i went and did like a deep dive on it i went and my i watched rocky last night and i watched all of his old interviews from the nineteen seventies and i really got into and there was so many good parts but the one thing that he said he's in he's being interviewed by this guy and this is the movies come out it's it's been a success at this point any he but it's like a year in and he says you know so they offered you a lot of money for and you needed money we talked about how he had to sell his dog because he's he had big like mas and was eating too much he's like either i'm not gonna be able to feed the dog and not feed myself or i sell this dog and then i could feed myself and hopefully the new owner will be able to feed my dog and as much as it killed him to do it he's like i i have no choice here so he was like down on the dumps and he the way he says that he goes i had a hundred and six dollars on my bank account i had a three hundred dollar a month rent and i had a pregnant wife and he goes the wolf was at the door i love that phrase he goes the wolf was at the door why did you because they're like how did you write it in three and a half days the the the v one of the script he goes the wolf was at the door i had no choice and so he and they were like but then they offered you a money for this like a lot of money for this goes yeah they go how much they offer you goes well first out for me about a hundred thousand and i said no and then they came back a hundred fifty thousand like why did you say no because we'll they said we'll take the script but like you know you go away we we will go get burt reynolds to to be rocky like we don't need you to be rocky we like the scripts no that's who they went to they went to bert reynolds they they were just they went to three or four guys who were big at the time and he's like no i only wanna give you this script if i'm gonna be rocky and they were like god okay forget it then they came back hundred fifty thousand but you're not rocky no then the final offer was two hundred sixty five thousand dollars but you're not rocky and he said no and they go he goes how did you say no to turn sixty five thousand dollars when you dollars that's like eight hundred grand now yeah exactly it's like a million bucks basically and they they were like how did you say no when you had a hundred and six dollars in the back and he got a couple of lines he goes he goes it's not he goes it's not that hard to say no to money when you never had money you don't even know what money is he goes he goes if you've never ridden in a rolls royce you don't mind bumping around in a volkswagen it's all you know you he's like he goes i didn't have a frame of reference for that he goes i did wanna get out of some misery he's like my land lady was a a big just beast woman and she would you know she would show up my door every month and her she was so large she cast almost like a shadow at the door he's like i just remember being afraid of shadow all the time and he's like but i you know my goal was rent my goal wasn't two hundred sixty five thousand dollars i didn't need all that but and he goes they go but you know they go did you ever have any doubts he goes yeah he goes before when i was telling them no i was saying are you kidding me burt reynolds that guy like i can out act all these people they i will kill this role i will be so good in this role you you guys have never seen anybody the act like i act and then as soon as they finally re and they were like cool you know you can do the movie they what by the way the deal that ended up doing was a million dollars of production budget which was very little at the time like the big movie at the time king kong was like twenty five million rocky one only had a million dollars budget he produced the whole thing for nine hundred sixty thousand and he like cast his brothers and his own uncles and like you know they did one take on everything and like if they couldn't get something like there's a scene where their he's they're supposed to be ice skating on a date but rock he didn't supposed don't didn't know how ice like you don't have time to learn so they they just changed the scene where he's walking and she's ice skating and they like made it they just changed the script to why that would make sense and they just brought cameras to an ice rink and stuff like that probably like to get his dog back he cast that guy in the movie plus gave him money it was like are you gonna be the movie so the guy in the movie for like one line so anyways he's making this movie for for less than a million bucks they well now you've made a lot of money right hey he goes age he's he's laughing and he goes i've about a four hundred dollars more than i had before this like they four hundred dollars he goes i mean i had a lot of bills before this and all that land lady cast in that shadow she showed up for the rent and then taxes and then all this he goes he goes but you know what he goes he goes i basically paid myself the stage actors guild minimum the sag minimum so he made six hundred dollars a week doing the movie i think he owned the like some percentage but it was gonna be on the back end he didn't have the money yet and so he goes he goes but you know what the money never mattered he goes i would have done this whole thing for a doughnut and a tuna sandwich the money meant nothing it was always about the opportunity i had to prove my to myself that i wasn't a liar that i wasn't living a life of because that's very difficult because i thought of myself as a creative person and i told myself that i was a great actor but i had never had an opportunity to go fight figure out am i any good or not and so when you asked me should i take the money or should i take the opportunity to find out am i living the life of a liar or not i had to get that answer because if if not it would have eaten at me for the rest of my life he goes i'm i think of myself as a creative person i didn't wanna wake up and be fifty years old and realize that i'm this creative person who's never done anything creative that would be terrible i'd be living a lie it would kill me dude is is here new kinda crush move on brett ad cock yeah so sylvester sal salons to my guy now and he leaves he's still amazing the dude these interviews are so good like i'm gonna make a separate youtube video just as like a aunt like homage to to to s because he's got so much swag which i didn't realize he's very funny and by the way this is another thing i love about the guy he not only did all this stuff but he kind of overcame the adversity right so the reason he wasn't getting casted is because he talks funny well why does he talk funny do you know the story didn't when he was born or no didn't he he he hit his face or he was born with like no nerves on side of his face right when he was born they used four ships to get him mouth yeah four ships damaged the nerve and it's the nerve in your mouth that yeah when you dove for a dental procedure they numb you and you know you're like your tongue doesn't move right you can't talk right imagine that for your whole life that was his whole life and so because he was really jacked and because he talked with kind of a slur and like a sort of mouth part of his face part of his mouth is paralyzed people assumed he was dumb this guy was incredibly intelligent he was very well read he wrote the script for this he is a very creative el person he's a great writer and people just thought him as this action hero like this like you know like an action figure basically oh you got ads and muscles and that's why you're why you're doing these roles but that's not it at all and his guy was a very deep and interesting person but he was sort of masked by this maybe my doctor used four subs and shit because i slur everything and i have ads is one and i'm kinda smart y adrian y adrian that's really good i think i think my my doctor also must use that same tool is i bought in new jersey as well i wanna tell you a story about an interesting person i hung out with but before i get to that this is kind of the inspiration episode it scenes and we've talked you feel inspired you know but it's sometimes it's hard to feel inspired when it's a hundred and five degrees and i'm sitting in austin texas sweat my ass off what would you do sean if you wanted to feel inspired maybe write a book maybe get away from it all what would you do i don't i run a i'm sorry i didn't get away but where would i go i think i would wander today's sponsor is wander dot com we like wander so go to wander am i even saying that funny by the way do am i saying that with a weird if you didn't still alone it you're good so wander dot com it's a really cool website where they operate really luxurious high end properties they're awesome if you go to their website you'll see every photo they take is inspiring like only these example beaches like a cabin in the mountains it's just like high end stuff and they've got gyms and work somehow don't even take the trip i just go to one dot com just look at places and i give like ten percent of what it would feel like to go on vacation right now and it's like okay well that just took me ten minutes sounds yeah my wife wanted to go to grease greece and i was like hey let's just look at google earth and look at the parking here i'm like pretty dope right do that yeah that that's what i do with with wanda dot com so check it out the today's sponsor they're an awesome company i wanna tell you a quick story about what did the other day so i get this text this guy michael just joined hampton and i become become friendly with him and he's like hey are you free out on tuesday at six o'clock i was like yeah sure what's because do you wanna go fishing i was like yeah okay whatever i like i'm currently right outside new york city so i'm like what do we get like we like is it gonna be like sewage water where do you fish i i i don't know so i go to this guy's house and i get to know him and so i sent you his house i sent you a link to his house so you have to look at it don't say the address or anything but i pull up to this house it looks like i'm at like a high school or an art museum he's got this massive beautiful home that's built like on a peninsula and the boat to get into the the long island sound which is like a body of water around here he it's like right on his front porch and we're basically thirty minutes outside of new york city see the photos of the house this is this is incredible it's in more than thirty rooms more than it's it's it was one of the most spectacular things that i've ever heard of and so we go out fishing and i get to know him a little bit and i had to tell you about this guy so he's really fascinating because he's one of those guys who you would know his products but you may and not have ever heard of him so have you heard ever heard of fog creek software they launched in two thousand ten like so fog creek software launched in two thousand and it was sort of like an agency where the internet was just getting started and these guys were like the early nerds amongst amongst the nerds so if you wanted like some the development work they were the guys their mission early on was like you know we wanna work with programmers and we wanna create create a great place to work for programmers and they start this little agency or or consultancy but like a lot of consultants they're like just doing service where it kinda sucks let's create some products and so they create a handful of products the first one being fog bugs so fog bugs was like a a bug tracking software and after ten years it does alright it's like you know in the eight figure so ten million plus in revenue it's doing pretty good but it's kinda stag a little bit and they go let's like spin off some more stuff that we've been working on so i believe i don't remember which order it was but let's just say the first one was trello so they spin off trello and they fund it with a little bit of money so trello it's an sonic competitor it's a task management software they grow this business they raise only ten million dollars they it it get started and they and they grow a little bit then they raise ten million dollars they grow this business and they eventually sell it to atlas software for four hundred and fifty million dollars i believe and if you look at a atlas and software stock i think when they sold the stock was seventeen dollars and when it eventually peaked like last year or two years ago when everything think when everyone went crazy it was like twenty at and so they got a combination of stock and cash for this deal so huge hit this guy just made it well it turns out they spun off another company as well and that other company was called stack overflow so stack overflow was basically like it still exists it's kind of like a message board but originally for developers and eventually you can make one of these message boards for a variety of topics it's huge did you know that that company sold this wasn't in the news too often but did you know that company sold for one point eight billion dollars who bought it a european publishing company pro pro pro process process i don't know are you you have it up no i don't have it here but that's okay just some traffic by they get almost like two hundred million monthly visitors a huge site and so i was talking to this guy and he was like yeah then we also sold sold fall creek software and i made a little money there so he's like i've had a hat and so this guy has done all these amazing things and so just like learning about story how he's pretty low key in the sense that like he he doesn't have twitter he doesn't really use social media and he's like giving me all this like interesting intel on growing their companies and making him huge it's called process according ari and he's like yeah i sold that one we sold that one for one point eight we sold this one for you know four hundred and something but the stock like appreciate a ton so who knows what the actual price was and i was like what are you doing now and he's like just fishing just to thinking and so he goes fishing on this boat like every day during work hours and he's like show me at two of his home he's like yeah this is where my office was but i don't really open up a at laptop did you know this guy or why is he inviting you fishing i met him in hampton and we just started talking and he just was like do you wanna you wanna come over and i guess this is look when you're he's like we looks like a guy likes to fish well spotted i thought here's why this guy was cool to me he's like an outdoors and basically new york city and he's like living a very unique life and he he just but he's very zen like he's super zen and he was telling me stories about how he like overcame certain things of the company the whole time he's like telling you a stories he sounds very zen and calm and low key and i thought that this this guy was one of these people who deserves a little bit of love because super under the radar as successful as anyone we've talked on this podcast but does not have a big mouse so i'm kinda blowing up his spot a little bit but i i asked him if it was alright that i said all this and super interesting guy that you should look into michael prior is his name he's awesome what was anything cool from your conversation anything you you learned or an insight or an observation you had that made you think yeah so he was a i just liked how low key he was about everything so he was basically the cfo of stack overflow stack i don't know what their revenue was but they sold for two billion dollars and i was like did you are you like an accountant did you were you a cfo he's like no i barely knew how to do any of this stuff but the company needed a cfo when we started he's like i was a programmer he's like i haven't programmed in forever but i just kind of learned like how to pay taxes and i just had to learn how to pay taxes and i had to learn how to do payroll and he just like rolled with the punches and i think that i was like were you intense he's like no i'm not intense at all and we hear stories about how people are doing what is elon must say hardcore hardcore mode or yeah hardcore and this guy he was like i'm not i wasn't really hardcore he's like we are smart and we worked pretty hard but like i would not describe what we did as intense and we just kinda roll rolled with the punches it was really cool to hear something that differs from the loudest people who are incredibly successful of being intense you gotta grind you gotta do this that wasn't the vibe that i got for michael in like the early founding of these companies and i thought it was really inspiring i thought it was awesome i also think and this is for anyone who wants to build the company you have to look up his partner his partner is the louder one his partner called his named joel and and it's got this amazing blog that i've read for years it's basically like paul graham but more a little bit a little bit more hot headed a little yeah well it is it's very tactical but he also writes like he he he's a little bit more joke and he it's a little bit more bras which i appreciate is and it's called joel on software i think it's one of the best entrepreneur blogs out there i don't even think he updates it anymore but he has probably a thousand articles and so it was awesome just like hearing little bits of like intel from these guys and so i wanted to shine a light on this guy it was really fascinating yeah that's amazing that's cool how's your fishing game dude it was like an easy mode like the poles were like attached to the boat and it was like once you once you hear like a bell rig you just go and grab like you like grab the thing and just like barely crank it in like the door dash of fishing yeah like his boat like told me where the fish was like it gives me like a little alert i was like fish here and you just like sit there i'm just like said drinking water and it's like oh we got a fish i guess and so oh did you see the picture of it was three foot long that's this fucking crisis thinking i was like how the hell did you catch this but dude out that was like a record kit that was like a record setting fish it was just like the fishing rod was just like in one of the holes on the boat and he just like barely touched the reel and it came up i mean it really there was really no glory at it it's like ai for fishing it's like wait a minute yeah like like the boat these i don't know anything about boats a lot of people look at me and they think that i'm like outdoors but i don't know shit about the stuff and like it like has these sensors that tell you where the fucking fish are like there was no work involved so like this fishing shit's easy i don't know why people are impressed by this let me ask you one more question i'm always interested in what other peep what other interesting people are interested in what was this guy interested in when he was talking to you what kind of questions did he ask you we talked about being popular so basically like a lot of people who are already ask you a good question i think i was like the tallest image here like where i was just i was like the only one that he could like a talk to whoever who has even a slight popularity we were talk so i found it odd that and i don't think he actually en me at all nor do he want this type of thing but a lot of like rich and successful people who are low key are curious what it's like to have an audience and what i tell them all the time and i don't know if you feel this way i go hey i will trade you my audience for your network account any any day of a week i'll gladly make that trade and of course the none of them whatever actually wanna do that but i think it's funny and and i'm i'm not talking about him but people in general that they're into what it's like to have like an audience and be internet popular or something like that and i always remind them i'm like it's really just like me and my bedroom just or on my toilet just type out stupid tweets and like there's like not that much joy in it and i would i i would much rather have a two billion dollar company and so don't get like don't actually envy this or think that it's awesome and so a lot of these people are curious what it's like to be like a popular internet person let me ask you a question hypothetical how much would somebody have to pay you to never create content again delete everything on this podcast delete your blog and never you never get to publish again no twitter or no social media no nothing how much would you have to get paid thirty million dollars what about you a really specific number very quick and specific number well i had to think about it i had to think about what it's worth for half a second well i had to think about what you know what it's worth what would you what would your number be i think a hundred no i think under more than a hundred i think it won't be like yeah i think it would add so dude you i think it's alone you were not you are not sylvester alone you you you don't have the landlords not here like you've tasted the dice life if you want more of it you would do it for much less no no i i really would it so your official number is two fifty two fifty that's insane to me i do not believe dude that's like you need no no no no i think you're i think you are full of shit i think you're absolutely you just take power of attorney and change my decision for me i just don't like sorry my idiot i'm gonna change that number why why why because i think i'm gonna end up at a hundred to two hundred anyways doing what i'm doing and i like doing it so it's basically if i think i'm gonna make that anyways doing this and i like doing it so then you have to pay me a premium on top of to make me stop doing a thing i like doing and then there's the additional like time value of money that i get it all upfront right now guaranteed right so so you know i'm just kinda factoring that in and i would just rather air on the side of what's the number i would not i would not regret like what what number you could pay me that i okay i'll go figure out some other hobbies well would you still be allowed to do anything anonymously like on a pen name no not alright you you your your hands are taped you can't you can't type can't can't do any of that stuff yeah maybe it would be higher than like if i could if i could do something anonymously i would do that i think that i think the anonymous thing is actually pretty cool it might pretend anyways i think it's better anyway i think the anonymous thing is cool i'm i'm really fascinated by these authors who use pen name so we had jack carr on the podcast that's a pen name right but it like was a pen name because it's a stage name or is a pin name because he wants to be anonymous real life i imagine the second one of course he's not anonymous because like we see his face but yeah like i think it's just a stage name which is different i don't know what you call i yeah i don't know but i just know that's not his car just sounds cooler you know i i remember i was in a movie one my name with that why does his name sound so much cooler it's the c it's the the case sound right case letter everybody knows that i was in a movie once and the main actor was cal penn i was like man cal pen what a guy cal penn what a name sounds like a hero it sounds like a hollywood star cal penn dude that guy's do you know what his real name is he is he's his name is like ko si mold that's his real name he couldn't get audition and so they changed instead of his first name being gu they changed it to cal penn and then all of a sudden he started getting audition and he was telling me this like he was embarrassed like he got embarrassed by but he was like f up that this is what we had to do because like anyway want to change my name i just wanted to act and the price of having to act was to change my name and this is super common like mindy cal her name is not actually mindy cal like a bunch of asian actors same thing like they all changed they all changed their name to sound cooler and more you know whatever in fact leonardo d cap that they tried to get him to change his last name they wanted him to be like lenny williams was what they wanted his same to defeat and he refused and so we we were almost robbed of leonardo d cap he was about to be fucking lenny williams if he had listened to the to the suits lenny williams would have been so much worse for him because lenny williams sounds like a fifty year old who dates a nineteen year old leonardo to leonardo d cap at least a fifty year old girl at least there's some suave or whatever you like for some reason wait is that illegal no he's kind of italian i think yeah yeah that's normal difference so i guess normal if you question it lenny williams sounds like a like a fifty year old guy who watches softball on tv you know what i mean like yeah he did the right thing leo leonardo d capri he pulled it off it's good job for him do we end here on this rambling wandering podcast i think so i think that's it yeah alright that's a pod i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a goal travel never looking back