The $70M/yr Sports Bar + Sleepy Industries Worth $100M

alright we gotta talk about this this business is really really cool it's a product i wanna use and i think it's a business that could be kind of big but revolutionary maybe i feel like i could rule world to know i could be what i want to from all in in like a days on on a less travel yeah you probably saw this because it's been going viral over and over and over again and i always look for products that have this playground viral vitality meaning anytime somebody shows you that you're using it or they share a picture of it it immediately sparks a big reaction and so i saw i'm gonna share these three posts so there's like check these out the first one is this reddit post and so i go on reddit and i see this post and it's in the r slash damn that's interesting subreddit which is one of my favorite subreddit and it's basically a video of somebody inside this venue and it's like a sports bar meets imax so you're sitting there you've got a beer you're just hanging out with your friends but there's a giant screen it's almost a dome that's over you where it looks like your front row at a football game in this case and they're cheering and their crowd when went i'm crazy but it it it looks like you're in the state stadium of but you're not in the state you're just in a bar and this is called ko or as i'm calling the mini sphere some people have probably heard you probably seen the the sphere in las vegas this giant huge dome that's you know in the middle of las vegas and it's this insane two point three billion dollar project that is you know just remarkable it looks like it's kinda cool it's like one of those things where it's like humans built the pyramids and then we built the sphere it's like it is marvel of of engineering and technology well the chasm is basically a mini sphere so it's like a two thousand you know seat venue that you can use for sports games and all this stuff now they got a couple of them popping up i think this is really cool i think it rides on a bunch of big trends so it's you know out of home entertainment i think is a big deal i think people are looking for places to congregate to drink to eat and to enjoy themselves and movie theaters are sort of stale like i think streaming is sort of kicked movie theaters ass in a way and now this is the out of home way of punching back this thing i think is gonna be a much better way to watch live events live sports stand sitting at home yeah so basically if you're listening if you see the photos it's as if they so they build this massive it's not even a bar it looks like it looks like a sign center it's like a huge building that they're building just for this thing and you go in and it's like as did you ever go as a kid the science center where it has the i was ontario omni max yeah like a planetary where screens all above you that's basically what it is but they had to raise two hundred and fifty million dollars to to build this because it's like a matter they just raised that so they just raised that few months ago they built the first two without or they built the first one at least without that because i was in july who funded that so the story of this is there's a guy who's behind it and he started one of the biggest real estate property management software companies i think called real page the guy's name is nguyen yeah something win so he has this thing called real page real page got bought by thomas bra for like ten billion dollars this guy made a couple billion dollars out of it he then starts his own kind of by the way you might be confusing the name steve wynn is the guy from las vegas the casino guy yeah i think this guy's name is also win but it's w really yeah so oh that's it it's a different steve win that is that is behind this one and so he he's got this venture capital firm of capital so he basically what he did was actually producing so you said it's like a planet no no it is a planet do do you know the back of this no i no so he went and bought three companies so he bought the companies that make the science planet things for every you know museum or whatever like you know science place so they he bought that company then he bought another company that you know did the led screen part of that that he bought another company that was like the like cameras and technology part of it so it's a roll up of three or four companies now at this point that he did and because of that they have you know they're they're basically the monopoly on i i mean it's not a monopoly as and nobody else can do it but they're the biggest player in developing this type of technology these types of screens wow what he did was realize hey this is cool but it doesn't have to just be for for plant the planet like you could use this for sports if you send your own video crew to go film like the the sort of courts side or field side seats at these different venues and so they they're basically a full stack thing so they have the rights with the leagues like u for example they have the rights with the they have the rights with certain certain football leagues and they go they send a full production crew there so it's not just what it's not just what you see on tv but bigger it's its own thing and so they have like cruise that are almost like vr where you see like they're right there by the end zone and then as the guy crosses the camera's turning with them and then they have a live production team that's basically cutting between the different cameras that they have to show what's gonna be on that huge screen and so that's how they actually made this that's the backstory of how they did this that's that's amazing i did not realize that that's how it started i really wanna go to one of these i've had a friend who his name's hat i think you you know hat he went to the one in dallas and he sent me a video i have a friend named hat who's who's our friend named he didn't he he messaged us about he hosted the dallas m okay gotcha friendly you're friendly with a guy named hat and he he sent me a video and he was like hey i'm in houston and it was a some sports games some support game and i was like that game's not in houston and he's was like no is a screen right like i'm not here right now it this is a screen and i genuinely thought he was there it's so like i would pay i'm i i as soon as u is on this i'm gonna be paying money it is this weekend actually so this weekend's sphere the the the fight card they're having at the sphere i believe is gonna be shown in the cause so they they basically have a a mix of so it's not just sports so they're sports but then they got cirque to sole and so if you wanna go see oh but you wanna see oh like in the best seat that ever existed plus the backstage plus follow with one of the performers plus in the air you can go watch o at this thing and so that i was doing the math on this and i don't have the exact numbers here but here's here's the rough math on a venue like this so they have general admission which is kinda like standing room only you could literally there's people just sitting on the floor and those are twenty two bucks so super cheap and they're gonna make the money on those people through you know beer and and french fries or whatever then they have the like booths or tables type of thing which is each seat there is kinda like between fifty and two hundred bucks depending on the the day in the the event and they could fit you know a thousand general admission and a thousand you know premium people into this thing but they have shows all the time because they have like the cirque sole lay thing they have this like art exhibit thing they have a orbital thing that space then they have sports and so they have sixty four events this month very in the next coming month and i don't know what i don't know how you know what the occupancy is like but it's pretty easy to see that this thing is probably somewhere between you know four to six million a month in revenue right now not counting all the alcohol sales so you know that that might be double you know there so i i would say low end maybe three to four million on tickets and on the and then you know double that once you once you factor in all the food and alcohol purchases i talked to this guy the other day on for money wise we did this podcast with him and he basically made something like twenty five million dollar he like owned a a a tech company he sold it he got twenty five million in cash he still owns twenty five million in equity in the business and he's based out of canada inside of a two thousand person count and he sold the business made his money whatever and he still has his office in that small town and he said that in the small town of two thousand people he employs roughly fifty of them and he owns the fanciest office building on the main street and they have barbecue and shit like that every week where the community come and hang out whatever and it made me sad that i make make money on the internet and that i make money remotely with the remote staff because it's hard to see the magic that you're working so hard to create or hopefully your output is magic where you create products and services that people love and it made me really bummed and i was like i wanna get into like more physical stuff or to be able to like physically see my creation even if it's just like employees in an office and when i see products like ta it seems trivial like oh we're just doing it just like a place where people could drink beers and watch for but that's it's more than that and to see this as your output of like i'm creating something that is physical that i can go and see and be proud of while people are watching and enjoying it i'm am en vs of that as someone who goes most digital sport drink beer but they can watch more drink beer in front of a huge screen a big ass cream no i know what you mean i i would feel that way but i've done a restaurant i have an e commerce thing that has physical products and i've also done some events and every time i've done any of those things i hate it i'm like oh my god this would be so much easier i would join my life so much more if i could what i am so much happier sitting behind me computer on my laptop in my officers you know i told you that the peter levels photo of him sitting on a couch with his next scrunch in the worst posture no sure boxer laptop on that to me is the jordan logo dude that is that is the joy that is somebody dunking from the f throw line of life and that's what i want i don't want any of this shit where i have to like have a brick and mortar venue i know it sounds romantic but no look you're in luck that's a perfect segue to today's sponsor because look if you like to create content doing what you and i do of having a podcast it's kind of hard because you have to have like a schedule all the time and you gotta like go and perform doing video is even worse because videos like impossible to edit and it's just a pain in the ass writing is without a doubt the best in terms of having the best lifestyle because you could just write late at night you don't to be dressed you could do in your bed whatever it's also the best because it might be a newsletter might be one of the most profitable creator outlets i think there is in terms of like cpm then willingness people to buy subscriptions can we tell the we're doing the hustle i remember you had a blog and you were doing these viral blog posts that where that like a guys you know micro dosing lsd you like paid some some dude like two bucks of micro dose sd lsd another guy was living on soy for thirty days straight and like documenting it every day and these posts were getting millions of views i then you came in my office you were like yeah i'm switching to a newsletter i was like newsletter that's like old what do you mean are you talking about you were way ahead of the curve and you told me you were like yeah i think these things make like fifty bucks per thousand impressions like fifty dollar cpm and i was like no hey dude to youtube video a video like video ads gotta be higher like youtube a youtube creators making like four dollar cpm why would the news that it make fifty dollar cpm and you were absolutely right of course you know six years later i started a newsletter company doing the same exact model for the same exact reason and ended up you know selling it you know as just the same way you did it is is amazing how well that business model works and if you're gonna do a newsletter where where should you do it here you should do it be high of course and we're gonna give that plug but i wanna give you the the math behind that you just talked about which was basically let's say that when i was doing those newsletters or those blogs let's just say that like one or two went viral and i would get like hundred fifty thousand visitors that month or two hundred thousand visitors that month i made like a thousand dollars let's say i had a newsletter that had a hundred thousand subscribers and i wrote to them daily that's five brand a day that i would make if i could get fifty dollar cpm which i was exactly so it like the math was like so i literally went from like five thousand the three hundred thousand dollars per month and in one you like prayed to the viral gods to go viral in the other you basically just you told me you called it your pirate ship you're like i'm a pirate this is our pirate chip and every new email subscriber is a little wind in our sales and i i love that metaphor and i think it's the same way that i know a ton of people who are on behalf that have like a and user it a ten thousand twelve thousand twenty two thousand thirty two thousand readers that are it's great they get to put out to the world their thoughts their ideas and they get paid to do it i think it's an amazing thing so check it out if you're looking for a place to do a newsletter b lehigh dot com it's b e e i v the worst thing about it is the spelling of the domain everything else is flawless can i tell you something that's gonna sound stupid and ridiculous but i think it's true and it's gonna make a lot of money stupid and ridiculous but i think it's true it's gonna make a lot of money damn dude did you just do a personality test that's awesome you describe yourself is that your bio yeah there's people who are like ef g whatever have like an ef id oh i it's the new myers briggs dude that was also yeah i d iot o what are you oh you at ebb listen to this so you know how like let me let me think how what's the best way to phrase because we're coming from a morons perspective alright so there's something that i think has not been like touched on for forever for or at least in the startup world and it bothers and the reason why it bothers me is because tesla when that came about that was like oh my god this is like the craziest thing ever know one whatever touches us but but it it has worked and now r and there's other now car startups same with spacex spacex when they started it was like this is ridiculous you can't make a a hardware company that goes to space that's ridiculous now we have andrew we have a bunch of other stuff like that and they're getting funding and they're proving that like this is a good idea there's a category of products inside your home mh you probably have used this product today that it bog my mind why there's no innovation so to put this in perspective i believe alright so there's about fifteen million cars sold per year there's about thirteen million units of this product sold per year basically everyone in america has them they cost thousands of dollars the lifespan of these products is like five years and that is the washer and dryer it bog my mind while we not seen more innovation with the washer and dryer and yes i'm gonna say i say washer because with an r that's a weird midwestern accent i'm gonna get that of the way because people gonna make fun of me but what's been killing me is and i've said this for years is that there's not a good two in one washer and dryer so this company called lg they came out with this like washer and dryer the other the day that it's a two two in one washer and dryer and it was on the wall street journal and it there's videos on youtube talking about this washer and dryer these nerds like me who are like into this technology they're like going bananas that this technology has actually is actually coming to fruition which basically being the main critique of the washer and dryer in one is that it was really hard to create a so when you have a washer that means it has to be water sealed but when you have something that's water sealed that's hard to increase the temperature so how do you put heat in there to dry your clothing and that technology is actually really hard but these guys have actually like they're slowly getting around to where it's actually working and it's amazing how big some of these businesses are that sell just mostly washer drive so if you look at whirlpool i believe what whirlpool is publicly traded last year they had twenty two billion dollars in sales and about half of that revenue was from washer and dryers mh and what's crazy to me is that that's compared to r which is a venture startup up now i think it's publicly traded two billion dollars a year in sales right and so like it's crazy to me that a lot of these sex industries in the hardware space cars rockets self defense are getting funded and are like popular but the washer and dryer in particular i'm making a prediction that in the next ten years maybe fifteen we're gonna see a lot of movement in this space and i think the appetite is big and i'll give you another example there's this company called impulse labs have you heard of impulse labs not never at them so impulse labs and you can make the same case that made for washer drives you can make that case for ovens or stove tops but if you look at stove tops the majority of homes in america have electric stove tops and electric stove tops are huge pain in the ass because the way they work i believe is that there's basically only one temperature and so it's like an on or and an off and so when you use an electric stove top even though you put it on high that just means that it's going to like self regulate to where it's at to stay on for a certain amount of time and then turn off for a few seconds and then turn back on and then turn back off to a point where it's high then with medium it's gonna turn off for longer and then you know what i mean so like try and stay at that same time that's actually like makes a huge difference in you're cooking if you're into like cooking nice meals and it's a huge pain in the ass and so these guys called impulse labs they have built this technology to where you have a battery that's charging all of the time in that battery when you wanna use your stove it like turbo charges your stove tops so it keeps the heat at a steady temperature and it gets hot really really fast and so they've launched these new stove tops and when i hear their argument about how big this business can be i kinda have bought into like i think this actually can work now the downside is that you have to raise hundreds of millions of dollars potentially but when you're think about stove tops and washer and dryers these are actually really really big markets right like we're like this like similar at size of car companies but are drastically underfunded potentially you have less competition than a lot of these other industries because there's not a lot of startups attacking this well i think this is pretty interesting but i able to poke a few holes in your argument there's many but this argument that i presented it's like we're gonna call this string cheese the swiss cheese i think the you're looking this swiss no it's string cheese there's really guys there's ways around build back some holes in this the string cesar let's keep the analogy going so the problem with the kind of rockets and or cars let's just take cars for example i think the reason that r and tesla have so much had so much heat when they came out even though they weren't selling that many units was people see that they're first of all cars are much more expensive than washes and dryers so that's the first thing yeah that's full of maybe ten x higher pro higher price per unit so yes they sell the same units but at least ten x higher maybe twenty x higher in a lot of cases on top of that you buy multiple of so like i don't know when you get like i haven't replaced a washer and dryer in five years since i've been living in the a place well have you lived in one home for one place probably not familiar have you lived in one house or five years but is that the is that the shelf life of these things you have to replace them after five years yes okay gotcha the other part of it that i think is is hard is with tesla and r i think the thesis is that all cars eventually go electric so you basically take the entire fleet of cars and you say these are all gonna have to switch to electric and that the traditional car makers are not gonna be these guys will figure out how to rent production before the traditional car makers figure out how to go electric and i don't know if that's proven out to be true or not i mean tesla has obviously beaten the traditional car makers and it's i think tesla's worth more than like all of the other you know next five car makers combined type of thing it's ridiculous and whereas i don't think the two in one necessarily maybe maybe it's true that two in one basically replaces all all combos i'm not sure the last thing i would say is that a lot of these have like switching costs so for example you know the stove top even if i like it i'm not gonna rip out my stove to do this it's only gonna be let's say new builds that are gonna put something like this in like the stove top whereas with a car the switching cost is lower because i can always get a second car i can my i can trade cars it's not the same as like ripping up my kitchen in hurry to get this so i think that's the hard part about some of these is you have a lot of capital and a lot of difficulty but some payout out you know ten or a hundred x and that's why the funding goes to the space companies goes to the military you know weapons companies and goes to the car companies before it's gonna go to some of these that being said i have the i have the june thing i have the june oven and i gotta say it's good but it's complete overkill and so i think the hard part of this is like like i don't know if you've ever reused it but there's a camera inside of it so you put a bagel inside stupid but and it just says wait wait i got it bagel and i'm like yeah cool still get a push toast like the fact that this camera was in here that recognize recognized the bagel is like a cool demo but ultimately like not that important of a feature compared to you know just like not being a thousand dollars right they the thing the i think that you have is like a thousand dollars or more so yeah i'm not i'm not super convinced on these but i do like where your headset at which is what are these sleepy industries that need innovation where size is there sleep ness is there but the innovation is super low that in general is a is a good place to go if you're really determined and can make some shit happen you know who kicks ass and one of these spaces is shark ninja have you heard of shark like they make ninja and shark it's two different brands but under one company shark ninja i believe it's a bootstrap company started in nineteen ninety four the it got bought it went public but within six years they were doing a hundred million in revenue which in within the year eight they were doing two hundred fifty million dollars in revenue based out of boston american company the products that they make amazing they have made some of the best products so like their vacuum is amazing i own the creamy which is like the greatest thing ever they help innovate and create the air fryer some of these appliance businesses have been shockingly good and surprisingly bootstrap well you know my favorite one of these that's like not as hard to do but also kind of a sleepy industry is hex clan do you have hex cloud do you have any other pins i'm thinking about buying some so commit me while i should buy them well dude i don't know i think the you know of the things here is like customer has like a different like awareness and sophistication level so i don't actually know what would make a great pan if there i'm sure there's people out there who are like no only cast iron or only this type of pan or it's all marketing whatever but i'm in the bucket that's like the fat part of the bell curve where it's like yeah marketing just kinda works on me right like i saw that gordon ramsey invested a hundred million dollars into hex clad which is while stunning amount of money and i let me make how does going in and ramsey they have a hundred million dollars i said a lot let me make sure that i i have this right so i get a wet website studio so studio ramsey global a partnership between fox and gordon ramsay is investing a hundred million to card so not him personally let's say but him and his venture studio or whatever his venture venture firm their website is beautiful and i want to buy hex cloud right now because it so i bought it the pans are pretty good i don't know again if they're the best pants ever but they're they're good and the branding is great the visual of it so like the pan itself has little hexagon as the bottom of it so it's like instantly recognizable product like when i look in my cabin and i have like all my generic pans and then i can literally just see the difference of a hex pan and it's like ties to the name and then you have gordon ramsay as the influencer behind this and it's just pants dude it's like a sleepy industry that everybody needs it's high value high ao product and these guys crush they do have hundreds of millions in revenue and you know they're they're sold in costco they have like amazing distribution i think they're one of the biggest shopify stores overall and it was such a non like i i don't wanna disturb if by calling a non innovation but it's not rockets and it's not electric cars right it's like non stick pants but it is it is very well done and i'm very impressed with their execution and it's a great business well they just was it just to get here here's what says in twenty thirteen the two cofounder danny and cole they had worked for a now cook company and decided they wanted to start their own so they started you know working on it they dabble a couple products they started selling in twenty sixteen twenty seventeen they get a deal with costco and the business has doubled almost every year since twenty seventeen they're one of the top shopify sellers in the world they have one of the biggest black fridays of any they said i've never heard of anyone who's sold more than us on black friday which i think is just pretty dope it's a very very well done product they make you feel elite you know by buying this this pan whether the pan is is a lead or not is sort of secondary it's an amazing example of just like what brand marketing and influence can do for you speaking of food and cooking do you have any plans for the holidays because i i've got some i got an idea for you okay you're inviting me over or well what's happening right now that's even better okay this is even better are you're free i'm free alright i've got like a little like eight week little project for you if you're interested you know it's no big deal it's just a little small it's like a it's like the equivalent of like a super lego okay go for it weight watchers do me a favor in google weight watchers stock right now yeah okay what's their market cap at oh jeez fifty eight million what happened oprah what happened that's what happened oprah left oprah is gone so serious that listen caused this well and they lost a hundred and ten million dollars last year and the business declined by hit what what happened i think those was amp hit him well let me make an argument as to why weight watchers is gonna start selling it epic and why sean is gonna own ten percent of the company so listen that's your little your eight week project your holiday project so weight watchers was started i think in the sixties and the way it started was it was there was a housewife in new york city and she was a little overweight and she got a bunch of dieting tips on how to lose weight and then she created like an eight person support group where she got her friends to give her two dollars per meeting and they met once a week and it helped everyone lose weight they helped were held accountable and they loved it she did it for about a year and then eventually this one man and his wife or his his wife was like hey you should neil lose weight you go to this woman's support group but she'll will lose weight and this guy was a a businessman man and he was like hey we should definitely make this a thing like her name was jean he was like hey jean this should be like a business this was amazing i actually like lost weight and it changed my life a little bit and so they come up with this idea to franchise the business and they launched it in nineteen sixty three and by nineteen sixty eight they had a million members each paying a a monthly fee in order to attend a local meeting that was based off of their dieting advice but a local meeting where you would go once a week or once a month in order to have like your support group and then by nineteen sixty eight they sold the business for three hundred fifty million dollars into they sold up for some seventy one million dollars then which is something like four hundred million dollars in today's money oddly they sold to hines hines ketchup up which is like the maker of a lot of foods that are the opposite of what weight watchers would suggest but anyway they do their thing and then oprah comes into play and so oprah comes into play and when she comes into play the the stock like takes off to where like she buys a bunch of stock and then within like weeks or something like that she has tripled her money and it boobs and it takes off well over the last handful of years her weight watchers plan has been shedding her weight to watch watch her stock and she's been losing a bunch of her stock and selling it and now it's plummeted and so the stock is horrible and so my opinion is if i'm weight watchers i think i'm just gonna start selling oz that's what i'm gonna become if i have millions and millions of members who are subscribed to me for weight loss tips if i needed to you know just only care about money my new game is well i and by the way they have three point eight million paying subscribers the name of my game is hey for an additional three hundred dollars or four dollars or five hundred dollars a month we really can guarantee that you're gonna lose they're definitely going in this direction so i didn't realize this but i do who the ceo of v watchers is no who her name her name is seam sis and the reason that name sounds familiar is because she was formerly the coo of mee cat do you remember mee cat to like live streaming app what yeah so she worked with ben and when they turned into house party they ended up getting acquired sema and ends up now being the ceo of weight watchers and she recently wrote an email to the to the team so this is a couple months ago and it says team as this is the week draws to a close i wanna take a moment to address some of the breath list media coverage i'm sure you guys have seen and basically it says hey we're we're in a good cash position we have strong liquidity the work we do matters our business is healthy and it says we've reposition the company to grow with a clear differentiator we're gonna offer full spectrum of weight care from behavioral which is the thing where they what they've been doing to clinical and clinical being you know the sale of of essentially you know sema type products is is where they're going with it so i think it's kind of interesting what you're saying because i don't know what the what is the price of a weight watchers subscription if you don't have insurance semi is somewhere between five hundred to a thousand dollars per month per month exactly and so like let's if your insurance and your insurance will cover if you have diabetes or if you're obese and i think isn't there like government proposal to like make like on know free oz to everybody like isn't there like some proposal that's like gonna cover it and that the government would somehow cover this well the oz epic issue is basically highlighting an issue with the healthcare care system and it's just so it's funny that oz epic is like the straw that's breaking the cables back but they're like dude in europe this drug is five dollars in america it's a thousand dollars what the hell what's going on things like so it's kinda like notice which is like the company that makes oz zen they're not only i think the i think they are now the most valuable company in europe but on top of that i think they spend more on lobbying than like any any other company right now and so they are pushing very hard for us lobbying which is insane so weight watchers your subscription is nine ninety nine a month right now for the first nine months and if you just take the idea that they're gonna go from making a hundred dollars a year per paying customer to you know even if fraction of the audience decides yes i'd like to push a button and start to get those oz or start to get whatever their their generic version is gonna be called you know they're gonna jump to five thousand or ten thousand dollars a year for those customers right so if you believe that they have the right distribution and they have the end customer relationship they might be swapping out you know training wheels for harley davidson in terms of business models and the business is is quite large unfortunately they lost a lot of money but last year they did nine hundred million in revenue and had a hundred million dollar loss so those are huge numbers but their market cap as of today is sixty million dollars and so i don't care but it's gonna be fun to watch because there might be a roller coaster here and it's so here by the way the one of the reasons the business is not doing by way your project for me was to what to take us or to buy the stock somebody might well maybe a little down and do maybe a little bump what i okay so when oprah did it so there the estimates are that she made a quarter of a billion dollars over ten years of owning and then selling the stock so basically she announced that she was like you know part of weight watchers the stock doubled in a matter of dates and so in february of this past year twenty four the stock went down by twenty five percent just when she announced like alright that's ran ran course i do my thing i'm don't out i'm no longer involved i think sean per is gonna be the new offer i think that look for two million dollars you can own four percent of this company that did i math that right are close to four percent i think and then just announcing it we're gonna sit to a a good old fashioned pumping and dog whoa whoa well he just got us flagged but so some agencies out andrew dude they're listening to podcast now you know we're big in the sec right now right let's podcast guys is going viral there i'm joking by the way but i do think that a sixty million dollar market cap for a business that has these large numbers even if it is a massive loss and a reputable brand i'm just reading about them on the fly here while while you're talking about this but it looks like they made a hundred million dollar deal to buy sequence which is a telehealth business that lets you do virtual prescriptions for patients who want weight loss drugs and that they will start doing the the sema ted's stuff soon so we'll see yeah i just thought this was interesting i wanna put it on record that we've discussed this because maybe there could be like this could be like one of those big opportunities but because sixty million dollars for a the a brand that's so reputable in some circles but like everyone knows what that means that's like pretty amazing to me okay i like it sam's stock picks whether there's a great there's a great news by the way any stock i have just don't listen to anything that i ever given by regarding the stocks like it's horrible what's that guy there's a guy who does this youtube channel called good work i think he's part of morning brew and he put out this video that i thought the best youtube title that i've seen i know is it z no not the zen one z was also was also great the zen one was is zen gonna kill me and the boys sorry i know no the new one is can this extremely loud man make you rich and it's a picture of jim kramer who's like you know shi some some some stock i i know was awesome dude the their videos he's the best like i did he's the absolute i want our youtube team to just look at these titles and thumbnails this is what winning looks like this is what we need to do i'm just gonna read you some of their their other titles so his other titles so saudi arabia go saudi arabia going sick mode on its sci f city state it's the picture of that giant wall that's saudi arabia building helping a fourth grader explain her loser dad's start stupid hedge fund job yeah it's great yeah i'm a big fan of this guy he's he's really good i the austin's one of my best friends the founder or the ceo of morning brew and i give him a hard time for a long time because dave morning brew has not been able to like hire interesting talent and hiring and retaining and developing talent on a media as a media company that's really really really hard you gotta find interesting people which is hard and then the most interesting creative people are typically also the biggest pain in pain in the assets to work with and to retain them this guy and a few others actually but this guy is a really good example of how a media company finds talent and nurture it and makes him huge yeah he's doing amazing good job what is his name by i don't know the guy's name but dan too to yeah dan you're doing a great job so i moved to this new city it's called west connecticut it's a thirty five thousand person town and i've been reading all these books about like biographies of politicians and stuff leads so i thought i don't really know do anything i think about politics i'm gonna see what i if if if getting involved is even interesting so i just emailed the mayor which like i didn't know if that was a thing or not but i just found her email and i emailed there and now we're gonna go get lunch together would would you lunch with the mayor i said in a small circle of the internet a very tiny corner i'm a little bit popular and i'm not sure what that means to you if anything but i'm just trying to like make myself a look a little bit important to you and i would love to hang out and introduce myself with no agenda and that's all i said and she said absolutely and so what's the plan here what are you gonna do well i don't know yeah i gotta figure out how to be con diving and how to take over a a town i don't have a plan yet but i just thought it was a you're gonna like be don't know like two seasons of house of cards or something and just start to get yourself in the mindset yeah yeah i'm just gonna like come with like armed guards that just take over like it's it's i would pull i wanna do a coup it's gonna be a cool now yeah i don't know i just i i think local politics are are like a really interesting way to actually have real impact and but it's kind of just fun and so i didn't know that you could email a mayor and they would reply but they didn't it reminds me of when we got to college my buddy dan that you're given like a school id right a school email address so his well i don't know like d n c six at duke dot e and so the first thing he did which i would have never thought to do but he's a weirdo and a genius and so he goes he emails d seven or know four and d five and he's like fellas i'm here i don't know who you are i don't know what those initial stand for for you but i'm here to carry the torch the legacy what do you guys do and like one of them is a banker somewhere and it's like coulda led to like you know like an internship basically just by sending out a random email being like hey i'm i'm gonna i'm the new guy in town that has the same you know i'm i'm the next in in the new alpha american sequence here for us ended the big become friends i don't know i feel like he just would open up all these doors and just look inside like what's in this closet right and when someone comes into your house like what's this over here that people to do that with their with their phone number they change one number and the phone number and they text them and say that their phone number comes yeah exactly you said something a few weeks ago that had an impact on me and i've been meaning to bring this up to you but i had to test this out so you told me that there's been a few weekends where friday to sunday you did phone list and i thought that's a great idea the problem is is that i'm an addict of all types of sorts and just like everyone else getting rid of my phone is like really hard so i look for a solution and i found this thing this isn't a a sponsored thing i've never talked to these guys i just think it's cool have you seen this it's called brick yeah i've i've dm these guys are young guys i don't do you know who did you look them up yeah so i looked them up so let me explain what this product is but i think it's only forty nine bucks so for people listening on on your headphones and not looking at a screen i just showed a brick it's like a two inch by two inch square that's made out of plastic just like three d printed plastic and the way it works is you download their app and you say which apps are allowed so in my case i think i've allowed texting phone calling and email and basically i use this brick and i touch my phone with it and it bans or like makes every app on my phone except for the ones that i've allowed it makes it so i can't use them unless i touch this brick again and there's an emergency button within the app so but only three times can i click like emergency override and i could override like if i'm away from this brick but if i leave this brick at home i can only use the apps that i've allowed on my phone shockingly good this works i like it i love it and i think these kids who started it i think they started it when they were like twenty year old college kids is that right yeah something like that and i think this business might be amazing you know it's only fifty bucks it's hard to make a lot of money on fifty dollars but what's interesting is that we build all this technology to like get we want new we want more convenient we want better and then after a while you get used to this life and you gets better and more efficient and more addict and you wanna create things now that while i undo all of that and so i've been testing leaving my phone at home i've been testing but that's a little bit inconvenient sometimes because what if there's like a real emergency so do you i have to buy like a dumb phone but then to buy a dumb phone i need a whole different cell plan it's like a safe for the pantry you like put your snack in it and then you lock it it's like this can only be opened at seven pm yeah well one and once time i broke it to get to my phone like it's fucked up how bad am and so this brick so far i think is the best solution i found that's cool yeah i looked into this because i was curious about it i think it's a really cool idea i like the design of a too by the way i like the name of it who it just breaks your phone i love how brick up you are about this whole thing so i think it's a great i think it's a great product i don't use it personally but i have thought about doing the the kind of dumb phone smartphone thing and this does seem better than having two phones but i would lose this brick sure so what is it so if i lose this brick i can just through my own phone just put in the emergency and be like hey i need my phone back yeah but only like three or five times i forget the number but after a certain number then the app like the the brick doesn't work and you gotta go buy a whole new one it's like a nicotine patch for cell phones yeah and it's awesome and that's exactly what it is and i think it's actually pretty good and it's cheap enough that i'm gonna just like start gifting these out it's a great passive aggressive gift right yeah it's like get get your a pallet guess hey asshole there's something you need yes but these these these are awesome by the way i think it's is it's called npc is that the technology that they use for is that i think nfc sorry and which is like it's like a very very very tiny chip and then the rest is just like three d printed plastic and so there are like interesting ways to make this font like you can three d print anything and just touch your phone and so like for example if you have a music event or not a music event like a like a small club or something at your home like if you have like an event something where it's like a book club you have ten people coming you just touch your thing everyone touched other thing and that breaks your phone like there are like a bunch of cool ways to to to make this of that can break anybody's phone or just your phone if you if you have the app i think it could break anyone's phone okay well there's an there's a next level to this of course so of course but it's actually quite cool and then you have you seen the things where you're go to comedy shows and you put your phone in one of these like air tight that i hate those things but i understand i i hate them too they're at the local school that i live at they're starting to do that for the school so you have to leave your phone in these bags yeah my four year old is in tk k and she told me her friend as a phone she's was like yeah she showed me it's a real phone in her bag it's hers and i have something i'm like and we're we're like friends with the parents do i just text the parents be like y you got your get a phone or or or do i just text the kid and like is this a real phone let's get blood on that's insane can i finish with just a a pro tip a life pro tip a little framework a little bit of value here at the end feel like we gave some dessert and now it's time for for a quick vegetable alright alright so i have a friend who is named stan and stand is a silicon valley og and what's interesting about sand stan is that for many years mark zuckerberg personally tried to recruit stan and he always said no no no and and zach just kept reaching out kept trying to recruit him and eventually got stan to join facebook and he ended up running messenger the the bit you know the the multi billion user product inside facebook what does the recruitment from z look like so he's you know he's not he's just not want to kiss and tell so he didn't give too many details and brag about it too much but i got the sense that not only was he recruited but he had been he had reached out to him many times across the years and eventually made him an offer you know to get so good he couldn't refuse and so he joins and i asked dan and i go stan what are you like why why are you so good and i was like no bad question let me ask a better question like what are you doing differently than the average person here in silicon valley who has maybe the same skill set as you but isn't having the same result as you are you asking why z wanted him or why he's had success throughout his entire i i i knew z wanted but i didn't ask why like i asked him specifically i said why does somebody who why are you having more success than the average person who has the same skill set as you like is it that you're just working ten times harder or are you ten times smarter than somebody or do you do you know something or gonna do something and you told me one thing that i thought was interesting you said a few things but the one that stood out this was many years ago by the way this still sticks with me is he said you know and silicon kind of ellie were big on being data driven and data data data and data's is awesome but he goes what i found is that most people when they look at data they already have a story in their head about what they think happens or what we need to do and then they simply just search for data that's gonna confirm that story or they just like squeeze the data until it fits that cookie cutter story that they want it goes i'm goes i'm different because i just do one thing different look at the data and ask a simple question what story is the data telling me and what story is the data telling me is a much better question for example we were just looking at the weight watchers of stock and i was like what happened and you go oprah i was like oprah what happened and you go oprah happened but if you actually look like the stock falls off a cliff as soon as like the oz trend started right like that was the that was the date and oprah left i think in like twenty fourteen or something she left like a long time ago but the stock really fell off a cliff when oz epic took off and the data is telling us that something happened in early twenty twenty three that really hurt weight watchers stock and then you go look at what actually happened and i've i just felt this in one of my companies too where we in my eco com stores like we've been beating every month forecast and then august was the first month we didn't beat and i asked the team i said what happened and my cmo will give one answer and our chief product officer so we'll give another answer and then the the website guy will give a different answer and how am i supposed to figure out what answer and the the way i figure it out is i tried i just told them i said post the data first and then tell me the story because what it what always happens is they tell me the story and then they'll go find some data that might some cherry pick a bit of data that might support that but they'll leave out a bunch of other data well it's like you ever played those things where it's like find a word and like it's like the puzzles in the new york times like find find this word it's like already know i'm looking for this word yeah where like if you if i know i'm looking for this word i i think i could find it but if you tell me i gonna find a a variety of words i might find those first exactly exactly and so well we did i just flipped it i just said before you give me your your idea of about what hap went went wrong can you first just show me the picture of the data like the full full set of the data of what happened and then it should tell us a story so then we just started asking the question what data what story is the data telling us and i think that that is just a much better way to approach data decision making and i think that is a great hack that this guy who's had an amazing success in his career says you know this is one thing i do differently that i think it leads to a different result because every time i do that you know it's like how do you be right more often one way is just remove a bunch of your bad habits and bad biases that's causing you you to make bad decisions and i think this is a good habit that would lead you to make better zoom so i wanted to share that that's kind of a weird that's if for for you to think for him to think why am i so successful not weird weird the right word that's a very particular well i i specifically ask what are you doing differently not why are you so successful but what do you do that's different than the average person who's got the same skill set issue what is it that you do differently so for example i know that you know sam you're a great writer i feel like you know why are you a great writer and you might say well i practice a bunch or i read or naturally have a gift for it a different question is what do you do differently than other people who also write blog posts or write newsletters what would your answer me i potentially am significantly more honest than most people and i explain all of the bad sides and the good sides front in a particular story which makes people like and trust me more so like i tried to be the opposite of sensational yeah you wrote an email to the mayor and you said i your honest thing was in in a small corner of the internet i'm popular i don't know if that matters to you but i'm trying to impress you because i yeah i don't know if that worked but i'd like i'm say that i say that to impress you nobody would say to the email i say that to impress you like obviously they do that to impress them but nobody says that out loud i think your gift is that you are willing to say the the the honest part out loud and that that dear people to you and that makes it more likable and that makes it more distinct and that makes it stand out versus you know re reasons that other people their writing might stand out so i think that's a it's a great example of like that question of what do you what is it that you actually do that's different versus how do i become successful or you know how did you become successful like people have different they'll give a different answer depending on the question and i guess what i'm saying is it's calling you him weird is not the right word because that sounds negative what i mean is that's such a a particular and unexpected answer of like oh you just look at the data and you're like not judgmental about it versus coming to it with an emotion or a story to prove so it's was like you're you're like you're black and white about different information and you're not coming with an agenda right it's weirdly specific answer i agree well the caveat is this was like ten years ago when he told me this and also i bet i asked him same question today he would give me a different answer maybe that was just top of mind because of what was going on that day in his his world or what he had noticed recently why did you well why did you just remember this now because i i saw the problem pop up in my own company where i was like oh this is hard i can't get to the truth because everybody already has a pre baked answer and then when i tell them hey can we figure out what went wrong they say yeah i'm gonna go figure it out but really it's just oh wow they never changed the answer when i just said hey what went wrong as i say can somebody dive in and they come back with the same answer every time it's like wow what's the point of diving in if you already had the answer and then when you dive in you simply just go find one or two cherry picked data points that support that and then if i go look and i say well is that really true because what about this that it kind of violates the narrative so it's more like maybe you're right but that doesn't explain all of this or correct and and then they're like oh yeah that's true and so i need i needed i i need my own team doing it and i think i in general if more people did this they would be more successful myself included it i i'm i'm guilty of this as well where i have an immediate reaction of what we should be doing or what's bad about what we're doing or what's not working and then i try to find data or examples that support it versus first looking at the at the actual data and feedback and then saying what story is this telling me when you go through that how often do you question if you are right or wrong or put differently what level certainty is your average big monthly decision that's a great question what percent certainty is my average monthly decision in this in the situations where i have data because there's two types of decisions there's data where there's decisions where we have information and there's decisions that will actually go create information meaning we're only gonna know this by trying this and that will gather more information like like here's here's what i mean every month or quarter or so a business that is in the five million ten million twenty like the some range where it's like alright this like definitely is working but i don't know if it's gonna be massive medium or it could even go out of business eventually but like there's something here so for for those types of businesses every quarter or month there's a decision that can potentially change the trajectory entirely or not impact anything at all and i've noticed that like it's like monthly or quarterly and i asked myself wondering like before i was very certain certain like this if do this i'm gonna do this or we're gonna figure it out now i'm actually realizing the decisions i make on for during those periods can actually be very impactful both in a negative and a bad way like you can make a decision today that you pay for in eighteen or twenty four months and so i i used to be very confident now i'm less confident of like i think this but i want i wanna know i don't know anything right right and so what i'm asking for you is are you how do you come to these decisions with high certainty or low certainty i don't really think about it like that if i had to answer that part it would probably be high certainty for the next phase the next chunk meaning i know that i've looked at what the options are and what the information we have is and i of those two and once i take those you know i have the menu of and i got the the the information that we have i can make the right decision for this moment that doesn't mean it's going to end up being right it means given what i had that what that had that had to be the right decision there was no there was a only other sub optimal decisions from there but there's still some probability that that's not gonna be true but i couldn't have known that because i just didn't have the information i think i've done a good job of hitting the ball into the net where i look back because i do this often and i look back and i say could i have known this or did i already know did i actually know deep down and i ignored it or did i know or could i have known but i rushed and i have cut those down a lot mostly honestly because i work with ben and i talk things out loud and when i'm talking out loud i can literally hear like i can lit against my point i can hear the holes in my argument right and i'll and i'm comfortable enough with him to be let to be saying it out loud and not feel stupid to mid sentence be like but actually i think that doesn't matter at all or but actually that might not even be true and i might just be saying that or i'll stop midway and just say but honestly of all those things the most important thing i said was this and that actually wipes out all the other shit and so and never mind let's go for a no instead of a yes and i'll just edit it mid air because he's me basically feel comfortable enough and or we have enough trust built up or it it's only about getting it right there is zero percent about appearing right which in my my other companies before i think i was much much more tied to having to feel like i needed to maintain some appearance of being smart and in charge and knowing things and even and i wouldn't i wouldn't lit my own thoughts i would not cross examine them enough and i think that led to a lot of bad decisions before and the reason i'm bringing that up is i'm feeling this is similar thing as i get a little bit older and sometimes have more success and sometimes not what i'm learning is that there's a million different ways to get done different to get different things done and they're like for example we saw go viral this founder mode thing and everyone loved it and maybe that is right for certain people i could point to many examples of successes that are not right this an exact opposite it it violates exactly what that person is saying is is the law and as i grow and start getting to somebody's of these decisions i'm learning a little bit i'm it's more becoming i don't know anything let's just do it feels good and so i guess it's like surrendering to like the world of like i know nothing right bet so you know you you you you're kinda back to where you were when you're were eighteen years old of like i don't know the right way whereas when you're a little bit younger you read all these books like according to the start with that startup book about lean mvp yeah lean startup according to the lean startup we have to do this this this so you just do that and sometimes it works nice but there's just there's so many different ways to make the same thing work because of i wanna get some of these decisions i'm significantly less confident in having the right answer but i'm kind of okay with well i there's a difference between confidence in certain so i'm definitely less certain that doesn't necessarily mean i'm less confident meaning i can be confident that this is the right decision to make but i can agree that hey there's low low certainty here that this is going to work with that this is correct one of the things that's helped me is to figure out some words to describe this because what i found was that one of the big leaks was that i was mis communicating my own certainty to others meaning i'm talk in a very confident way or i'll say let's do this and even though in my mind i'm like let's do this and then we'll know by next friday or we'll try it three times and then we'll know after three times whether this was the right path or the wrong path but i wanna go try it three times right i wanna go give it three weeks so i wanna go give it three months i know that for certain but that was coming across to other people like this is the way and this is the right answer and then they got very they got a lot of whiplash when that would change and i'm like why are you getting whiplash we were looking for we were wanted to try it to know if this is the correct path or not and turns out we're gonna turn and until i found that i use this phrase a lot now which is let's turn over another card which is like a poker term right so it's like in poker you operate with you have your hand first you have your your two cards so you just know is it i fold here or is it worth worth seeing the flop so i'll say that let's see the flop here the let's see the flop is let's take the call with the person let's take the meeting let's make the prototype let's draft the thing let's write down let's let's write down the the the plan and then let's see after that if we wanna do it or not and then sometimes we'll say you know what let's turn over another card which means let's get to the next milestone information to get to a point where we're we will have more certainty of whether this is the correct thing to do or not and that language at least taught kinda like my little team which is is they know now how much like yes we are doing this we're committed to doing this step but we're not committed to doing the next thousand steps because we're gonna tone over another card and we're gonna find out some more information we're gonna find out right oh we think this guy is really great should we hire him let's tone over of another card let's do some reference checks and let's give him the project right we don't need to debate more we've already debated as much as we need to given the information we have at this point it's about getting more information and the other thing that's helped a lot is be specific about what information so often ben will hit me with like well let's see or like yeah i just wanna like look into it more or like i wanna try it out and then we'll just pause be like cool what it what specific information do you think you lack right now like if we don't have enough dis information to make a decision what is the information we need and then you often realize you're like and actually it's just i didn't feel com confident enough to make a decision right now i don't even really know what i'm looking for so even if i spend another few weeks thinking about this or exploring this i'm gonna do it half hazard because i don't have clarity on even what i'm looking for i don't know what what question i'm trying to answer here so therefore probably gonna have probably gonna still be as uncertain three weeks from now as i am today but when you you kinda try to pin down like well what do we really need to make this decision or what extra information do we need to know you might be able to like make the decision in that afternoon yeah i mean i guess i'm become old but like i thoroughly enjoy it like like like these are the things i think about lately it's just like am i making the right decision you know like what's that one smart dude say a life une examined is a worthless life let's that dudes name socrates it's so like examining like some of my decisions and things like that anyway i could talk about this stuff all the day but it gets pretty nerdy i think i've have done a little exercise for you i do this thing it it's on the wall over and you can't see but i take every month and i just make a box so it's like a twelve box grid and in it we'll look back and we'll say okay last six months a twelve box so it's like january february each each month is a box okay so i just make it make a like calendar looking thing and then what we do is we just go and we look and we just say what's the one thing we did like what are what were the things we did that month that were the the like big the things that actually made an impact so we worked you know twenty four days out of the month or whatever we did so many things but like when you zoom out and you just look back you're like what were the things that actually mattered that month similarly we'll say and and in that could be a decision it could be you know a a product you launched or a thing you did it could be a buy sell decision it could be a hiring firing decision it could be whatever right but it's all big font so it's like it's gotta be something you can read from like you know ten feet away i mean you can't just write in there your entire to do list and when we do that it's amazing because every month has like an embarrassing low number of things that actually mattered like one to three and everything else was just the cost of doing business everything else was just the noise that it took to get to those one to three things that even mattered in a month and when you do that you start to but the good thing about going back and looking at it is the more you go back and look at it the more that in the moment you start to realize like oh this is probably gonna be the thing for the month that actually matters let me really like focus and get this part right because it's probably gonna make up for like all the rest of the the random activity the random emotion that i've been doing this month because you you start to see patterns of like what what even could make it into this box and you know those are the things that matter okay this month this seems like it's probably gonna be the thing that we'll end up writing in the box for the month and you never write it before well i don't know before exactly right like i just on a given day i kinda know what i'm on in a given week i kinda know what would make for a good week but when i zoom out it's like you know the decision to invest in x or the decision to bring on this person this trip that we took that had those five meetings in person that would not have been the same over zoom you know spending that two days with that person who we think is like just awesome value add to our life so such a fun awesome person and going deep with that person rather than keeping it surface level like little things like that or it's the decision to stop working on x project was the main thing we did that month and that was huge because had we not done that we wouldn't have had the time and the the bandwidth to do this thing the next month so it's usually things of that at at that level that's pretty good i'm gonna start doing that is that it is that the pod are we doing a a sarah's list on wednesday six next episode we're gonna do sarah's list i got i got probably six or seven companies right now that i think are are good contenders for it and if you don't know sarah's list we'll do the teaser here sam's wife sarah blew my mind being sam we're entrepreneurs we're taking maximum risk we're living off of nothing you know like sam's span stuff like twenty grand a year or something like that at the time and i just looked at what we were doing which was this kind of like one in twenty shot of success mostly eating shit every day had to be innovative had to take higher risk and then we looked at sarah who joined i think air airbnb b and facebook companies that were like we i could've told you in my sleep that those were winners and she joined as like employee four hundred or a thousand or something like that like not even betting on it when it was the first ten employees and the basic math was that if you get a job that's what's to say i i don't know her number so i'm just gonna make this up you get a job where you're making plus call it a hundred fifty thousand dollars a year base salary and then they give you a stock option grant that's gonna give you forty thousand a year of stock on top of that so you get let's say a two hundred thousand dollar ish stock package that if that company just basically four x's five is in a four year time span you've made a million dollars without taking any of the risk that we were taking as entrepreneurs and she did it multiple times she did that multiple times and we realized wow there is a set of companies that are like they're past the point of like they're out of the they're going out of business they're out of the the the death trap of or they're you know like the the highly likely to die you know area these are great businesses that we'll just keep growing keep compounding you could join them today as employee five hundred and you will become a millionaire without doing any of the entrepreneurial stuff if you could just identify the kind of like ten companies a year that fit that mold and so we take a stab at identifying those ten companies and that's that's what we call sarah's list in that episode we're gonna record wednesday so i gotta prepare for it i got a a couple but it's really hard this is actually a hard list to make because i don't wanna like you're not exactly giving advice but some people take it as such so i wanna make sure that it's good well we've also done the work back at the last time we did it and i think our our hit rates we get we'll do it again we'll go we'll go look at we'll we'll go look at an update see what was the hit rate of the ones we did last time we do not pro preclude to be you know that these are all gonna work no way right that's not that's not it but and the hit rates good because we pick things that are obvious and they get big because it's like it's all there that's current valuation of the company right so yeah that was already a billion dollar company cool it's six now so it's six x right your two hundred thousand dollar stock package is six x now alright that's today's pod we'll talk you wednesday i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a travel never looking back