Top 5 Interviews of 2022

yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days on a road less travel never looking back happy new year mfa fans this is of course producer ben and for this episode we just wanted to share some of the best interviews from this year so as i went through and looked at every single interview there was really tough to to pick to whittle it down there were some really great interviews this here including a lot from q one and q two that i had forgotten about so i wanted to res surface some of those remind you of them give you a little sampling a few little segments from those interviews and hopefully they spark something remind you of of some parts that you loved and you can go back and listen to some of those interviews so first up we've got mister beast and hu min live from camp m m talking about their work styles is your company ran like a normal company at all well and the reason i was asking was because my employees sometimes would complain that i'd be like too aggressive changing things too much but you see more aggressive than i am yep and for a certain type of person they like that but for you to achieve your goals you're gonna have to have a lot of people and then once in while process and everyone's in all infrastructure and everyone's planning for your perfection well of course yeah i just like to make the greatest youtube videos possible and that's that's literally all i want so yeah i mean if it's not the greatest video i just wanna to upload it and after you scrap a few videos we kinda ever you know just kinda starts to figure it out does it scare you that you can't stop do you ever feel like damn i'm like i'm i'm just throwing all these coals on the yeah on the em of the the algorithm i like to use better analogy it's like a treadmill we're i'm like twelve like yeah buzzfeed feet up been going at a couple years no it doesn't scare me but so like i was telling him the way i like to work is like i like to go basically wake up ob obsessed over something go to bed wake up obsessed go to bed like every second of the day i just have a mental breakdown i'd burnout out and then i like take a day off or maybe a day and half off and i like to go right back to it so i don't like work certain days i just go as hard as i can every ounce my entire body i just crash and somehow that's sustainable what what time do you sleep right now usually around three am wow yeah and then what and then and then you get up at like whenever i they tell me what to do i don't like the numbers so like some big numbers for revenue for your other businesses yeah and you have to have infrastructure for that so that's why i was wondering i was like because you you are like this oh gotcha yeah so on the stereotype you're like this crazy creative person who's disorganized and that's perfect yeah but to sell that much of candy and or of burgers like you gotta be yeah so those are all separate so for our snack brand we hired jim who helped build rx bar and we built the team around him so that's a whole independent company that doesn't even work out of studio and same thing with bi spur so that's the beauty i like to just find people who are just the best thing they got well their job and then just empower them and give them money and so how many people work at the studio in the studio like sixty because we don't have enough space to fit everyone so that's why we're trying to build more of a building things just take forever do you do people like working for you you think no this the reason massive is like these like creative types are like curious plans man because because it's not like a normal company where it's like we are all trying to achieve this it's like no we're trying to make mommy i've been on both sides of it where i'm on john stewart show i'm on trevor noah show so i'm like i'm facilitating somebody else's to show and then i've been on the other side it where it's was like no it's my special it's my show it's my movie or whatever so there's also certain projects where i'd be like i'd love to learn from you so there's been shows and movies that i've done like the morning show like i've never done a sexy one hour drama i wanna learn from reese witherspoon her i wanna learn from jennifer anderson i wanna learn from the show creators like how do you do that how do shoot that with set lens are you doing that is that a fifty is that a seventy five you did it how did you that tracking shot why did you do that track let me see the script let me see the future script there's all these things where i'm like i just wanna absorb i just wanna see how you do the whole thing you what i mean like and that's a additive like positive value for me because most people don't have that access to that you know i having sample streak kinda made as idle today oh man broad three you gotta set the bar yeah we had told them that you were coming in today to the thing and like the look of this appointment when they saw was i was the only brown like really next up we've got palmer lucky the founder of oc and and talking about the founding of oc and what that was like what it was like to sell and why he decided to sell to z and to facebook but this is a podcast that started it's called my first million because we're interested in money and we think it's really funny that the silicon valley things you to pretend you don't like money and like i know you're talking about yeah you know we're we're not doing it here for the money you know this money money you money money's is not the real objective i actually tell my own employees and onboarding that if you work at a place where your boss is saying that you should be worried because it's it's one thing it's one thing to say that to the press it's one thing to say that in your marketing materials but you you know if if your employees don't believe that at the end of the day you're trying to make their job a fiscal responsible decision if you're effectively telling them you could be making more money elsewhere and your financial success is not my priority you should be concerned yeah yeah exactly and you kinda did the best of both like for all the kind of ironic people who are like we're trying to change the world with this like hr onboarding software you know you actually kinda did and still made a bunch of money doing it so you know it's not like an either or hundred i mean when when i started oc it was not because i thought it would be the thing that would make the most money there never been a successful be our company in history to be clear and i did it because it was something i was really passionate about now that said one of the things i'm most proud of in my whole career is that everyone who worked at oc achieved financial independence because we were able to build something incredible and i like i feel great that everyone who was part of that mission and who supported me early on was able to make a bunch of money and a a lot of them gone on to do incredible things but yeah oc was not was not was not done because i thought it was the best way to make money it's because i thought it really was gonna be the best way to change the world in the long run was a little different i i that one it wasn't just oh this will be fun i wanna do something really cool and was like i felt like i had to do it or things were things are gonna go really poorly so more more of a more of a stick than a carrot on that one how much did you make off the ocular sale oh man i probably shouldn't say because this is also one of those complex things where you know there was the there was the sale so there's what they believe they called the merger consideration portion of the of the compensation and then they you know you cut unemployment deal where they say we're going to pay you you know this much for five years i can say that i i was locked i was locked up on a five year vest schedule so typical would be for most of our employees were before i got locked up for five because i was a key guy and that that money technically is not for the acquisition it's just what four yep so and of and of course you know you you can't you can't pretend you can't say they're the same thing or they they're supposed to be treated differently tax wise compensation wise and then of course there's the bonuses we had we had an earn out that was a there was a it was a a huge earn it was hundreds of millions of dollars for the founders of the company if we could hit certain sales targets and user hours of time targets and we actually had four years to hit those targets and we we hit them within less than two years so we actually did it's kind of funny when be like oh man the acquisition must not be going as well as people expect is like no we maxed out the top bracket of our earn out because we're we're we were kicking butt but anyway i it it was in the hundreds of millions of dollars i can tell you that in the healthy hundreds of millions of dollars a bunch of people who listen to this are our founders and and like would want to sell their company someday and both me and sam started this podcast right when we both exited our companies because it's like alright we're kinda earning out well we can't start another company right now but like oh we can start a podcast that that sounds kind of fun and actually yet just yesterday i just closed on another sale of a company but these are small scale compared to what you did right like congratulations thank you but you you sold for i don't know two or three billion bucks how does that happen somebody you know z comes over to your house and it's like i'll give you three billion dollars for this like how does that how does that conversation go down when when when when you're talking about the sort of like the grand slam type of outcomes well it's a it's a long story but you know i you know i i know i know sam didn't wanna talk all about vr but i can tell i can tell you that no i the the this shit's interesting to me oh great then we we do we were told one won't talk about vr optics and in the med then but i i guess on on the business side of it the the interesting thing about the acquisition is that we didn't have any of intention of selling initially and when we first had our conversation with facebook and i think that really what was a positive thing because actually first time we talked i think basically we were offered a billion dollars to sell and we said no we're not interested we think this company is easily gonna surpass that value we think it's not gonna be a problem for us to make more money and we're we're happy to work with you guys but we we don't wanna by the way was was that easy to say no a billion dollars i mean you started this thing like on a kick kickstarter dude like you know at at some point where you like was it hard to say no or was it not a not an issue at that point it wasn't an issue for me and i think i think a different people at different opinions i mean look if you if you look over my career i've made a lot of similar decisions like when i was starting oc when i was deciding whether i was gonna do a kickstarter or work for someone else i actually had a job on a job offer on the table from sony to run a playstation vr lab you know i had a playstation group and when i turned them down they actually doubled the offer and then i had to turn them down again and a lot of people were wondering how could you have done that you know how could you have decided to do your own thing it with so much higher risk and i think that a lot of it is is social programming you know i grew up watching media the conditioned me to believe that when you have an opportunity you have to take it when you know when you almost have to follow the narrative and looking back i'm not sure i could have done anything i was like could i have stayed in school instead of starting oc once i realized i had this breakthrough in vr technology i think i could not have possibly done it there's it it it's almost to the level of free will not existing i could not have chosen that could i have gone to work for sony looking back i don't think so i think i couldn't have made that decision and i think it's actually the same thing with that billion dollar offer like i almost could not have said yes you know like that that that first offer i like narrative it makes no sense it doesn't align with what i've been trained is what you do when you're a you know when you're a a free thinking icon class and so i i couldn't have done it i think what what what happened is a few things changed over over time after that initial know we didn't talk to to facebook for for for a few months after that and a few things happened one it became clear that our competition was not only serious but was going to be putting massive dollars into their success it's something not a lot of people remember but i certainly do because it was a big deal in my mind the day that we announced no the day we find it wasn't anything anyone else the day we finalized the facebook acquisition was the same day that sony announced playstation vr and we had known that it was coming for a while you we we had actually even shown each other prototypes and stuff but it really reinforced this was a serious thing we're gonna have some of the biggest games companies in the world putting hundreds of millions of dollars in a competing with us and that made the the pitch that facebook came back with which is listen you maybe you could make more money an independent company but if you're with us we're gonna make vr happen much faster so at you yes you'll you might make more money but you're going to go much slower than if we were able to artificially super charge your growth far beyond even what you could do with venture capital and they will they were willing to commit billions of dollars a year for a period of a decade or more and that's that's a really tough thing to turn down when you really believe in something and is this like literally z coming to your house and talking to you about this or is there like an army of lawyers in between you guys that are like down it anchors and and corporate people it was a very small number of people i mean it was it was i mean i i think that the the the the lawyers and the accountants are much more likely to be involved in a deal when the deal is contingent on you know your your revenue and your multiples and your p ls like that that's where you need to drag those people to really make a an assessment this was such a high level bet it's not like oh i think that you have this margin on your headset and you've sold this many development kits it was so early and the technology is so nascent the real bet is do you believe in the universe do you believe that there's going to be a virtual world parallel to our own where you're living and your working you're playing and then most importantly do you believe this is the best team in the world to do it and i didn't notice this at the time but i found out later that mark had been going around and talking to various university research labs government research labs talking to a you know seeing what other companies were doing and their conclusion was we were way ahead of everyone else and that if if this was going to happen this shift to immersive computing the final computing platform arguably that we were the people in the best position to do it and that's not something that a lawyer can really give an opinion on it's not something that accountant can put a value on it it's a a very high level bet alright next up we're going to go to an interview with da shah the c cofounder of hubspot this whole interview is gold but here is talking about starting to start up during an economic downturn and it's really about more than that it's just about startups in general and what is crucial for success if you go to poly graham dot com slash bad economy is the name of the blog post and he makes this case or he goes the economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in first stretches bad them mid seventies which is when microsoft and apple were founded and as those examples suggests like a recession may not be such a bad time to start a startup but he which you've heard before but i thought there's one interesting part where he goes i'm not saying it's a good time either the truth is more boring the economy doesn't matter much either way for for a founder starting a start up and i actually thought that was a really good point because i hear this so much is like i'll talk to kinda young founders and they listen to twitter and they listen to podcast podcasts and they listen you know they listen to kind of these like a lot of it's like you know vcs who are you know also pandemic experts and also you know you know macro economist as well and so they hear and then they they sort of start to adjust their plans and their mental models and like their room for everything that's like dude if you're a startup you're like an ads in this world does the aunt care what's going on with the presidential election no like you basically just need to build a product you need to carry your little piece of dirt it's like build a product get a customer get ten customers like it doesn't matter if the if the economy is bad if you can't get ten customers it's not gonna work anyways and so i thought it was a great little blog post talking about like kind of starting a a startup up during the downtime which is where i think we're about to or we just officially entered a recession again so yeah as curious der do you any thoughts on that yeah so my position is i i'd i'd lean more towards kind of paul graham and in the spectrum which is i think it's either neutral that it doesn't matter it's one of things you're suggesting towards positive and the positive elements of being in a an kind of down turning economy or recession is that things become available that would not have been available to a startup before like talent i it's like oh were there are people sitting at meta facebook sitting at google right now that may reevaluate their lives or they may have just been let go from a venture backed company that raised two hundred plus million dollars right so now you've got this talent that's coming on the market that might not have come on the market before things that were super expensive like buying google adwords or certain marketing channels because you have this glut of money and a glut of venture capital yeah i think of venture capital is a very efficient machine of turning like money from lps into google adwords rep review right that's the they're just a conduit between the two and as in in a downward economy you're gonna get less of that kind of glut of money flowing in drives the cost overall down for certain things that i think are important entrepreneurs so i'm i'm generally net positive that and down economy is actually a roughly good time to start a start up for like the last eighteen months or you know whenever like the last twenty four months whenever everything's been booming i've my wife works at a or airbnb b and you know i've got a lot of friends at work at obviously i hubspot all these and sean was at twitch so we have like some some perspective on how on the salaries of big companies and i've seen some of these salaries and they are crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy as the as like a leader and the biggest shareholder of husband hubspot and you like see these see these numbers are you thinking to yourself like this like we can't afford to pay someone like an entry level person two hundred and fifty thousand dollars year i don't know how this is gonna work like what what's your perspective on that when when these salaries are going so high and now it's like a little bit normal more normal yeah but as a as a startup up i mean you can't afford those salaries anyway right let's you are one of those kind of rare exceptions that has fifty plus million dollars going out of the gate which is very very rare and so you know as one of the things a founder has to kinda get good at it's convincing really smart people to do this irrational thing was to join you in your startup up right and if you can't if you can't do that if you can't make that sale which is the most important sale you'll make is being able to kinda attract people and then it's customers it's not gonna work so you have to do one you have two things either recognize kinda superstar account and give them something they can't get you know because it's beyond confidence like you'll learn more here oh you're gonna do your own startup up someday this is a place to get your startup up mba because you'll be exposed to a bunch of things you'll meet your future cofounder of the company those kinds of things either you have to do that or you have to say i'm going to be really good at identifying diamonds of the rough people that have not made it to the two hundred plus three hundred thousand plus dollars salary yet but they will someday i caught them early in their kind of evolution and so i can get them there's that's has me one of the other form of arbitrage otherwise you you you can't play the game that's just not i don't think it's viable i i i'm doing when you're saying that it's like resonating so much because it's it's basically you all the three things we just talked about i'm it's like i started the milk road in january this year and so it's you know sick it's been it's about to be six months or it's been six months and it's like here let me start a crypto company right when crypto crashes you know like seventy eighty percent and at the beginning ben even my founder ben he was like you know the only thing i can see going wrong is if crypto goes in a bear market and i go well crypto gonna go into a bear market like that's like one of the few certain of crypto is that it goes up and down and when it does it is dramatic in all both ways it goes the elevator is dramatic in both ways and i was like you know so it's just a question of like do you what do you think that kills it or do we just make it through like there's that's really all we have to think about here so that was the first part of starting in a bad economy the second one on talent was i recently hired this guy and he quit a pretty well known venture backed company that i think it just raised maybe fifty or a hundred million dollars and he joined and i talked to him a little bit before he joined like he was thinking about doing his own startup he we have traded a couple emails nothing serious just he he was wanting be to use his product then he took a job at this place alright whatever i forgot about it then he emails me and i i shared this on twitter he emails me subject line i have made an irreversible decision and i was like okay i gotta click this what's inside and he's like i just quit my job and i think you should hire me and i was like okay direct into the point and he tells me why i'm blah blah and so i was like alright boom i'm sold very bold approach i already liked your hustle before this because when you were hustling to try to get me as your customer i was like this guy's is good so okay let's do this and i made him a job offer which was not like you know a silicon valley job offer but the guy lives in san francisco he was working for his silicon valley startup so he was like oh dude that's like a fifty percent pay cut and i was like i idea i didn't say this out loud but in my head what i what i felt i i i told him i was like that's what i could afford to pay right out and like you look you come crush it the sky's is the limit but like that's what i could pay you right now side unseen and i said and in my head i was about to tell him the the line that i heard from warren buffett you guys probably heard the story but when warren buffett goes and tries to work for his you know kind of hero or whatever ben graham and he's like you know i'll work for you for free and ben graham goes your price is too high sir which is which is the the truth which is the idea that that you got to shadow ben graham at work side by side with them every day was you should be paying for that if you really wanna be like a successful investor that's how i felt and i didn't wanna say it because it's kinda arrogant but like dude yeah if i take you under my wing my team is like three people if you're become one of those three and you're working out of my he can't run to my house yesterday you're sitting by me work working out of you know side by side every day like really i'm providing more value to you than you are providing to me at that point and like there's still a you know i i i i appreciate the the value bring but let's like the the dollar amount is like the salary dollar amount is not what not the value you're getting and i think he knows that intuitively and that's why he said yes but like that ben graham story always stands out family no no he's a young young guy just graduated from college but here's the thing i think people couple thoughts on that one is the salary slash compensation is just one vector of value that you get from a company that you join right another one that you get is you get the learning whatever it is that they get exposed to one that you get is a network that you build while you're there right so there's all these other things but also in kinda in aggregate and maybe and and i think it's common for people to over index on the compensation or the kind of current compensation and under index on other things that and then they're just the just raw emotional value like being around the people that you're around do you enjoy the idea that you're working on like is it you know those things matter as it turns out i have a fun hubspot story so when we started on this compensation thing you know brian i had to pick salaries for ourselves something more than zero and so we picked five thousand dollars a month right like okay well that's it's a it's a number and we obviously well below market value we've been out in the market for a while and had worked in our lives so when we hired employee number of three we had to decide what we were gonna pay them five thousand dollars hired employee number four five thousand dollars and so we just built like okay you're here for the salary you're here for the wrong reason right that that's not why you're gonna join this motley crew of of folks and that lasted for like a while was like we and then we and then it kinda has this inertia built in like okay well all of us sitting in the room chatting with you that we're trying to get you to join a are all paying each other i'm paying ourselves five thousand dollars a month now what do you think you should be able to get when all of us are making five thousand dollars of course that doesn't last forever and you have to what what was the pitch at that time so it's not like you know no offense to to hubspot but it's not the sexiest idea you're not saying we're building the electric car here you know like you didn't have that going for you you know you might have like a you know your own magnet which is like you know like for me i get this cheat code because like this guy he listens to the podcast and and this happens this podcast is a great talent pipeline for us because people will listen to it over time they just they decide for themselves either i think this guy's a dummy and he annoys me or i think this guys smart i really like you know i'd love to be hanging out with these guys i think i could learn a bunch from them and so it becomes an unfair advantage but you didn't have that back of the day so what was your how did you convince people to do this five thousand dollar you know lego block of salary building so we cheated a little bit right because of the first eight people in the company seven of them came out of an mit sloan the same school brian and i went to and we met in class it was kinda in network kind of thing it's like okay well it's just a bunch of friends that sort know each other in network or whatever let's let's go do this thing right and it's also and they were kinda far enough too long in their careers that they were not missing meals or anything like that right they had just gone to you know business school or relatively did business school and and so that was a like and then the other thing and this is the part of there's equity but there's also the like this is not that risky dude like let's say this doesn't work out and we end up being chunks with the idea is really bad three six months from now you will basically be able to pick up where you left right there's like there's no loss other than the opportunity cost of those three to next month this is not like a irreversible lifetime decision that i've made this call and that's all i'm gonna have to be able to do for the next five or ten years and that was enough okay next up we have an interview with peter levels this is one of our most downloaded episodes of the year and it's because it was a really great interview and in this segment he's talking about what it takes to become a successful solo so what's the total size of all your of all your projects in terms of top line and bottom line revenue and it's in it true that you're the only full time person and how many tractors are you using yeah so i have one customer sport contractor part time isabelle and she works for all my projects and i have a moderator for the slack group because to slack groups take there's some drama in there like i've had some crazy drama in these select groups in communities so you need to have a moderator you need have rules and you need to have a you cannot just automate this moderation away like i tried that but you need a real person there to you know check on messages and stuff and then i have dev ops guy is my best friend daniel and he works kinda like a s l l s sla like a service level agreement where if the server goes down he gets a message you know if i'm sleeping with something he brings it back up but the problem is never was down anymore like it doesn't we haven't where had that for a years so he does security updates and stuff you know like because i have a vps i don't use amazon i use a vps on digital ocean in line and he kinda keeps that stuff safe you know so that's good and how big the business top line sorry it makes the business so remote k is the job board it's the biggest business makes the most money no this is starting to grow though like it's past i think hundred k this month a hundred k month so almost like a million dollar business remote case is one point six million a year i think and re bases the new business is an immigration agency so i wanna help remote workers integrate to countries that i wanna attract remote workers with like you know beneficial text stuff portugal is one of the first ones to do that so those are the three business where really make money and the rest doesn't really make money a lot like the book makes like i think like four k a month so but everything you do is part of one flywheel so i've looked at your kind of like system and i've looked at a bunch of people because i got into a little pickle where i was like god i'm doing so many things and i wanna do all these things i'm interested in all these things but shit you know am i gonna be able to juggle five different things i got a podcast i have a vc fund i have my e commerce business i have a newsletter business i have you know i don't even know what else core business i i got another shit right so it's like am i gonna be able to do this and what i saw that you did i i i have this kind like mental model of a solo and a solo and nobody's actually solo everybody's got like a little support team around them that's like helpful some some in a big way someone in a small way but basically it's like somebody who builds a personal brand and then builds a bit builds a a a successful business and lifestyle around that and what i noticed was that you had this formula which is i don't know if it's intentional or unintentional but i'll say it out loud because here's my my read of your business it's basically you you starts with the red pill so the a red pill is like you know that scene in the matrix where morph face is holding out a blue pill or red boys like know do want do you want the truth or do you wanna you take the blue pill you could just go back to your normal life just as everything was you could forget this ever happen and he was like no i need to know the truth what's the truth he takes the red pill and basically it's like every great solar i think starts with one truth so like tim ferris truth was basically that like the nine to five work in a cubicle for forty years model is like effing broken and you don't need to do it that way like you could work four hours a week and live like a millionaire and so i was like tim ferris is red pill and yours was basically like this is idea of being a no a digital no which is like hey yeah you don't have just you know subscribe to the subscribe to the the normal way of living you pick a a place that's where you are from that's where you live and you pay you know you just kinda stay where you grew up and like and you go to an off us every day and like you have to wear shoes and whatever you're like no i wear flip flops i walk around on beaches i just kinda go wherever i feel like whenever i feel like and i carry a little like backpack and that's my life yeah so you start with the red pill then you be then you create content around that red pill so you talking about that lifestyle and sharing everything from like hey people always ask what i put keep in my backpack for the day here's what it is it's like yeah there's every bit of content you can come up with that's it's like poppy that's like fits that red pill so then you be that bit gives you authority on that subject so you become like thor authority and so you know pom became an authority around bitcoin and tim ferris became a authority around life hacking and you've become an authority around no and then you take that and then you basically spin off one of many businesses that can come up with it but every one of those business either it's a big money maker or it's just another funnel and more content more new audience that's gonna like get sucked into that same red pill lifestyle that you are like talking about and so it even though you're doing six things they're all actually part of one flywheel and everyone that you do is you're gonna feed it either because it's gonna give you a bunch of cash that lets you fund this lifestyle in a bit bigger and better way or it's gonna give you new content new stories new things to be known about that fit that lifestyle as well that's how i see it i'm curious is that a good is that traffic accurate and and my thing started when i was i was blogging just like you said i was blogging about like no but i was blogging for my mom because back then you had like travel bloggers like two thousand thirteen and i was going to travel kinda and no mad and i wanted to you know every place i went and i wrote little i was the city to live in and stuff and what happened all the croatia that happened to me and my mom is reading that but i wrote it in english because my mom was obviously to dodge i was like okay she can read english so maybe easier to get more traffic and stuff audience but it wasn't like super like a big idea it just kinda happened and then those blogs started showing up on hacker news and i started writing more about like mood bootstrapping startups ups as a no in in thailand or something or in asia and those started going on hacker is really high and i think that was the time it was like two thousand thirteen two thousand fourteen there was the time when i noticed that the developers in san francisco working for all the startups ups they also were realizing okay maybe i can start doing this remotely because her remote work was not cool back then and no money was not cool back then because she had the tim ferris wave in two thousand eight it was like the first no wave but there was i loved him ferris but there was something about the the followers there and the the the business that were created they were kinda like like shady there was a little shady shit i met i came across in asia in thailand like americans and europeans it was like a lot of brain supplements and shit like do it yes yes do it yeah drug dealers online directors and like spam indexing and like there's still shady shape but less and i was like i really hate this shady i don't feel like part of the scene i think it would be cool to make it more like you know mainstream like reputable businesses reputable jobs to do it so i kept blogging about it and it kept taking off on hacker news and and you're right i think and then went on twitter and i think i kinda organically people started following me and then a lot of people went no man a lot of my friends went no man because i was blogging and they became my friends now and yeah and then i started all those businesses and but i think it's it's not like some it sounds very like a constructed it's not a master plan no it's not a master plan it's very organic like i kinda try i'm like user zero i try to build stuff for myself and i always have like i have like new ideas like there's just like you said rep bull this like something there's a con in society and what i'm thinking and most people then think like okay they must be wrong something there must be someone wrong with me but i think like arrogant i think there must sound wrong society maybe this is like a new thing so i'll try and make a little website about like inflation like three years ago or two years ago i was tweeting about inflation like this shit's gonna go crazy with all the fat printing money and everything now inflation is fine stop stop whining about it i'm like no i'll just prove you that the real inflation numbers are higher so made this inflation charge dot com website that shows inflation numbers are really high turn out to be true kinda out so yeah it's all great what what a technology are you using to build those sites because they all do look alike and you seem like you can spend spin them up like really quickly well that's really funny because i get a lot of criticism for for the technology i use i use ph because that's the language i knew because i was making a blog like right like wordpress so i knew ph a little bit so i was like okay i just need to write with the language i know because i don't know on other languages and i did that and then i use a javascript and i use jquery so everybody starts laughing now because jquery is like way pas but i still use it because it's so easy to you know make a button buying an event to it age to the server it to the ph script does something with a database sends it back and it works for me really well and i think it doesn't matter what you use but as long as you use something it's really fast feedback loop and iterate loop where you can really quickly develop like i can make a new button in like you know twenty seconds and deployed to the server and it's really fast and i know other developer friends of mine use a very big stack all this you know kubernetes and all this stuff all these keywords i don't really know and for them and take sometimes like you know an hour or maybe even days to deploy a new feature and i think what we learned from startup and lean startup is that the customer feedback loop has to be very the feedback group has be very fast iterative so you can really quickly change stuff and also makes your customers really happy because they see something they have a problem or a feature idea you can really quickly build it and then they see it and they that's i mean if you want happy customers that's how you get it you make something for them and they're like oh my i influence this product and yeah so that works for me so very very simple stack alright and then last up we've got alex h talking about sales tips and what it takes to be a great salesperson you what are my favorite things from you is these little tiktok or shorts i see where you're giving like a sales tip or a little sales track or whatever and i would love for you i think most people probably you know most of people who are listening to this just you know the bell curve of people listening to this probably have spent you know zero time trying to improve their sales and have not seen some of these things so i wanna give them the opportunity where they don't gotta go click and find this random tiktok that i'm talking about in the ocean of tiktok i want to role play a little bit give us kind of like give us an example of normal like here's the default way people are doing something and here's the rephrase of the reframe that has better results i would love to to give get two minutes of learning sales from alex sure and just as a quick caveat to complete the loop from like forty minutes ago you said like what was the book or training or whatever that so it's my belief if you look at be you look at bradley you look at grant card down some of the big sales trainers that are out there almost all of them invariably have the same story which is i started selling and was the best guy on the team by fucking mile and then i tried to figure out what i was doing and so i do think that some people naturally based on their childhood their upbringing their whatever or just have a higher pro for selling which carriers to get a gap and and and yeah and i think it carries over into how you recruit for selling too because we built a lot of sales teams and i actually have a very short allowing for people to fail at sales cycle probably much shorter than most people and it's just because i've never had a killer salesperson who didn't do pretty well the first week and so for me we you know we turned through this quickly but as a result of that the team is just killers and they know that so i i like this quote from card says you know my sales seems a dangerous place to work and i i love that so in terms of sales stuff i think that i think people don't know how people are really freaked out about the idea of selling right and so i think the first reframe is like you're not selling you're helping someone make a decision that's gonna help themselves and the the the the front part of that is that i do think that the number one predictor of good sales is conviction and so fundamentally you have one person who should believe in something another person who does not believe it yet and trust is the thing that transfers that conviction so if fundamentally there's the two things you need you need trust and need conviction most times salespeople people don't have a hundred percent trust i'm sorry a hundred percent conviction and so the also the idea of conviction as a binary fall so it's not like i believe it in or i don't believe it is is to what extent do i believe it right and so that's why like in terms of if i wanna to improve a sales team i can do the drills which we do and that's like blocking tackling but the thing that really juices a sales team is hearing the testimonials of the people that they sold last week and what they're doing today and how their lives have changed and so i noticed this because on my sales teams when we were in person whenever i did weigh out day which is when everyone finished their challenges and everybody was crying and so excited i tried to stack as many sales opponents as i could while people were weighing out and during those days we closed like a hundred percent because people were like dude how can you i think this works it's right there and so the thing is is like you can either trick yourself and to having the right tone or you can train yourself and i think that it's much easier to trick yourself into it by just simply believing because if you talk if you truly believe in the product you will talk about it differently and so in terms of an understanding of selling if you need to have conviction you need to have trust trust is gonna come from expertise and some love of rapport right and so i think that overarching to help someone sell we just have to ask the right questions to get someone to come to the conclusion on their own and so most sales conversations fall more or less the same framework if you know what you're doing otherwise people are just chasing their tail and trying to chase the prospect to an outcome that the prospect doesn't know how like we've had this conversation a hundred times they have only had it once we should be the one knowing how this conversation is supposed to go right we should also come in with a massive advantage to how to have this conversation go the way we wanted to because we do it on fucking day right and so you know big big front end pieces is like why are they there what's the problem what have they done so far understanding where they failed seeing why our product is different from the things that they failed asking for permission to explain about the product explaining the product not in any way based on features but only based on the experiences that they will have as a result of it and using analog to explain those experiences right and then and then having a close at the end which the the tiktok i think that you you referenced like a note base close and i think a lot of natural salespeople people do this anyways like if i want something i'm be like hey can you do this for me i'm like hey would you mind and they say no they don't don't mind right like this natural communication dynamics that most people who naturally know how to persuade people are at least influence do that on their own this is just retroactively looking at and say what did i do differently like why is this different and in terms of like overcoming because people are afraid of confrontation right that's what they're afraid of and so i believe that you can solve without ever having confrontation and you can do that with what i like to call child like curiosity and so if someone says well my husband's not gonna approve that i'm like i wouldn't need it wouldn't like that's so interesting telling me more about that rather than like alright let's my jonathan the asshole like that's not gonna work because in arguments no wins right and so you're like why why would do you think that because because i would think that he wants what's best for you right yeah he wants what's special does he know you're struggling with this right now well i mean yeah you know i'm struggling with it okay so he wants the best you knows you're struggling with it so why do you think he would be a opposed of solving something that that you're currently struggling with the just so i understand would he be happier if you continue to struggle well no it's like well brain then would you be opposed to moving forward today and that way hey if you go home to your husband then you make a joke in the white scenario then you close it right and so it's i think child like curiosity is the immediate that you have to train because people get defensive so that is one thing that like fighters talk about when they're in the ring like in the beginning you breathe in too much right i don't know if like if you've been like spa and stuff like you breathe in you breathe too much your hyper and so the guys who've done it enough they slow down the breathing because when they get things get intense they can slow it down and so i think sales is a lot the same way where you're like your adrenaline kicks in show up breathing faster spider flights so you gotta be able slow it down and i'm like that's crazy i wouldn't have thought that okay tell me more about and like you now you're interested and then they feel like you're combating them they feel like you genuinely are interested and want to help them which is what you should be doing because you should be selling them too only if it makes sense okay i hope you enjoyed sample platter of some of the best interviews of two thousand twenty two thank you to jimmy hu palmer dha peter and alex and thank you to all our guests this here it was a really great year thank you to all of you to our listeners we couldn't have done it without you we're so happy to see the growth of the show and happy people responding so happy new year and we will see you in two thousand twenty three i feel like i could rule world to i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a travel never looking back