Unpopular Truths From The Pod, Gourmet Gifts, and 4 Side Hustles

here's the headline headline gray headline guy sells one dollar bills for fifteen dollars here's how right and so here's what he did so he basically he's fifteen years old and he says he sees a dollar bill on ebay that instead of who's on the dollar bill bills washington or something like that instead of whoever let's fellow george washington it's michael jordan's face in the middle right and he orders it is he's like oh i love michael jordan or whatever this is funny and gets it and it's an basically it's a normal dollar bill but then there's just like a sticker paper over the george washington and you could just like do that you could just go to office max and like do this and so that's exactly what he did he goes to office max he's like i need to be able to create these because what better businesses there to sell dollar bills for fifteen dollars and so he's he goes there and then he goes he puts them up on ebay what's up let's jump in what you got you tell me you i i think i've been driving the last handful of sessions i i i'm gonna ask you to drive right now let's switch gears i wanna do a topic about you do you i think you know mark jenny you know mark james mark jenny he's a great friend of mine he's he's an amazing amazing amazing entrepreneur he's an awesome guy we're going i'm gonna meet him next week we're going down to stay at one of us he has like luxury airbnb portfolio and you should follow him on twitter i well you want to give his background you know his background i know a little bit it but go give give the story so if i remember correctly i think he was raised he had a something was a little wonky with this childhood i think like he didn't have a dad or a single single household or something like so he wasn't he wasn't raised in like a very privileged place and then i at one point i think he was even homeless and he lived out of like a storage unit or something like that he started a bunch of different companies like info marketing stuff and everything did kind of okay then he started rv trader i believe it a rv rv share which was like airbnb for rv he eventually sold a large portion of it to k r i think a large pe company and he probably made many many tens of millions of dollars a lifetime of money now he has a new thing that he's been doing for last maybe five or something like that years where he buys i think he owns twenty of them now he's got a huge portfolio of airbnb and these are high end luxury homes that sleep like twenty people it's like two acre like a two acre plot with like a fancy four or five six thousand square foot home with like basketball courts tennis courts mini putt putt and he's built this like really really good business making millions of millions of dollars renting airbnb b's and he's doing it right and he's got a small team and it's a proper company not like a side project yeah i think what what is like a fifty million dollar luxury airbnb portfolio at this point yeah i mean i i i'm friends at mark so we tells me lots of stuff so i'm trying not to say any of the numbers because i forget what's public and what's been private so anything that you i'll let you actually say any of the numbers because you're probably getting it yeah that's just what he tweets so you follow them on twitter he could follow and it's cool to see like he'll post like a before and after photo of these properties he's like here's what it was and then we added a mcdonald's play place in the backyard and it's like he does like dope stuff like which i like you know he's not just like and he's totally unheard of he is he's got like maybe two thousand three thousand followers on twitter i think like he's not like a popular like a like a big name person but he tweeted this out the other day and i thought that this was a great we haven't done a blue collar side hustle in a while so i thought this is kind of a great little no almost like a blue collar side hustle that he he said he had done i don't know if you saw this he he he's talked about one of his very first like sort of side hustle that he did or early early hustle was selling dollar bills for fifteen dollars did you see this yes yeah good tell tell the story so he tweeted this out you can kinda look at it but here's the headline headline great headline guy sells one dollar bills for fifteen dollars here's how right and so here's what he did so he basically he's fifteen years old and he says he sees a dollar bill on ebay that instead of who's something the dollar goes washington or something like that instead of whoever let's follow george washington it's michael jordan's face in the middle right and he orders it is he's like oh love michael jordan or whatever this is funny and gets it and it's basically it's a normal dollar bill but then there's just like a sticker paper over the george washington and you could just like do that you could just go to office max and like do this and so that's exactly what he did he goes to office max he's like i need to be able to create these because what better businesses there to sell dollar bills for fifteen dollars and so he's he goes there and then he goes they puts him up on ebay and he i first he looked on ebay and at that time ebay was showing like how many how many items a seller would sell and he could just keep track of like okay this week oh wow they're selling like you know a hundred of these like that's amazing so he starts doing it he creates an eb ebay account he starts selling these and he starts averaging a hundred a hundred bills sold per day for fifteen dollars which includes the shipping cost general profit about fifteen hundred a day about fifteen hundred a day he's he's profiting basically a thousand dollars a day doing this and then he he ramped it up and he got it to i think ten thousand dollars a day and in sales and he became the largest seller of custom novelty collectible dollar bills on ebay but it's a real dollar it's it was a real dollar real dollar yeah and you just add the the sticker on top so you could sell can you do that legally i guess so why not i don't know i i don't know there i just thought there'd be some weird rules around money no i think you could do it like you know people sell these like coins and whatever that seems seems legit so then what he would do he's like you know here so they had to start thinking of growth hacks how do i beat these other ebay guys at doing this so what he would do is he would do one of the auctions and then he would direct message everybody who didn't win the auction offering him the bill at whatever their highest price was and so and so he's like you know what whatever eight was your top price on i'll i'll do for eight and so he started like just racking up as many sales as he could doing this so then he became the top ranked seller which helped him in the organic search as he was going from there and i kinda love this and i loved it for a couple reasons one it's just another example of these little nuggets these little stories that shows you there's a trillion ways to win there's a trillion ways to get rich right like he was doing basically three hundred sixty five thousand dollars a year of sales or whatever you know he was doing really really well at that time you know hundred a day what how old was he did did you say he was like he's his teens he was fifteen sixteen years old it's amazing and and you know probably didn't last forever but these these these little arbitrage opportunities that come up and then i started thinking okay like what would somebody do if they're doing that now so here's i get i'm gonna give you three ideas of how you could do that now first i think you could probably do the same thing like yeah what's old is new what's out is in and i i think you probably do the same thing either on ebay or etsy or find one of the marketplaces and you could try to win doing the same i went on etsy and actually you could see that there's people doing this on etsy right now and you could see you know how they're how they're doing so possibly you could go do the same thing and compete especially if you could pick a different you know celebrity face to put on the thing like trump is the obvious one but if it's not trump like maybe there's some other some other ones that you could do but trump dollar bills is my first idea of how i would do this second idea okay well let's let's remix it right we wanna keep eighty percent of the idea wanna change twenty percent so what's the twenty percent change i would try to piggyback off of whatever's trending in movies or music or something like that so for example remember when super bad came out and there was like the mc love you know id his hawaii id the rainbow on it it's like this name iconic look i think you could just do mc love ids at that time i if that was the movie that can come out now i think you could take a prop from a movie or like in pulp fiction they had the bad mother f or wall or whatever like i don't know i had one i don't watch a bunch of movies now but yeah exactly i wanted one of those and you could just like jump on that trend and be like cool like for the mc level like upload your photo and we'll send you yourself as a mc love and id and maybe use little these like ai things to like create the avatar where it looks the same but i think that's one that you could do really cheap print and and laminate and then you you know you can send these out very cheaply because they're they're so thin then i saw some other ones if you go on tiktok you'll see things that are like this one for example i think the second biggest etsy store maybe the first actually now i think it's second or first on the planet is this thing called caitlyn men minimalist i'm guessing you've never heard of this but no what is i got a whole thing coming on the pot of my etsy deep dive but but i'll just give you a little sneak peek the top selling stores is caitlyn minimalist and what she does was how she got her break was she was like she was making jewelry for herself for or friends were like that's cool and her friend had a special real question she goes my mom or dad passed away i forgot which one and like the last thing they wrote me was like this note is it possible to like get their signature the in their handwriting as like a bracelet and she's was like yeah you just like i can do that for you and she she gave it to it for free was like this is so meaningful to you i'll just give it to you for free and she was like overwhelmed was like this is the most meaningful thing in the world and so she's like oh wow people just want like you know their name their parents name their kid's name and ideally in their own handwriting like done in jewelry and so that's what how do you do that you like send her or is it all digital you like send send her a picture are you write the name you know it depends if you wanna match the handwriting you gotta send a picture of the of this of like a piece of paper with the writing on it and there's some tech that just then like tells her it's like it in that that look right just so it's not like made out of metal it it's a metal plaque or like a it's like a dog tag and then she like no it is it's cut it's like the name is cut in it's like out of wild or whatever like say it is like you know whatever somehow somehow cut i don't know exactly her manufacturing process but these little like custom custom name things i think work and i was on take tiktok yesterday when i thinking about this idea i think is it oh it's huge she's done like probably eighty ninety million in sales is my my my so she's done two million transactions i would guess her average transactions like you know something forty fifty bucks something like that you know that's like eighty million dollars and say i was lifetime and she's just like this woman out of la or whatever and i was on take tiktok and was scrolling and saw another one of these which was use it was a hoodie it's like here's a perfect gift for the holidays or for valentine's whatever it's a hoodie and they're like take a picture of you and your whatever your your boyfriend girlfriend spouse whatever and it basically takes like let's say it's a picture of you and your wife and your kissing and it just like it'll etch it'll stitch like a silhouette of that yeah it's like into the hoodie so it's like a meaningful gift but again it's like this kind of what they call mass customization right so if you could do mass customization if you could figure out a manufacturing process to do this there's a lot of opportunity to sell somebody these like kinda gimmick gifts that i think will that can and will work do remember tees spring t shrink yeah there was like the print on demand type of yeah it was a really cool t shirt company sorry was guy named walker williams and they were like one of these companies that was like oh this is gonna be one of the fastest companies ever to get to a hundred million dollars in revenue and the way that they got popular was it was on demand t shirt printing and they figured out this hack on facebook where you could target people that have your like by last name so it could be like the one thing we all know about smith's is that they loved love to party or at they also did by location like the one thing we know about people who are raised in boston is that they love blank and it had a t shirt that said i'm from boston and i'm proud or i'm from boston and i love blank or i'm a proud smith or something like that and the engagement on those ads was crazy so their c was like stupid low and that's one of the ways that they grew and it's just like that it's that a thing from dale carnegie the most beautiful word in any languages of the person's name right and i think it's like name location and maybe like where you went to school and then follow by like your friend's names and if you could figure out how to like incorporate those into add or the click your rate is crazy pet's face so there's another one which is pet socks pets face on socks i think i have a pair jungle creations was the name of it so if i remember correctly at one point they did like a million dollars in like a week selling you'd basically go on the website you'd upload a photo of your pet's face and they would printed it on socks and they were just drop ship that to you basically and let me see if i can find yeah they did two thousand eighteen they did seventeen million in revenue they did seventeen million in revenue doing basically pet pet face on socks right and so that's the same thing you know celebrity face on dollar bill pet face on socks right like we have a buddy who is doing the pet portraits right like a painting of your pet that would just be like mass mass customized produced there's there's a ton of these like little opportunities yeah and the click rates on these things are like kill it for the ads so yeah i ned that's an interesting idea let's see if anyone actually files through with it i i but mark jenny amazing man he's awesome alright so let me break him one thing up dude this guy made fun of me the other day for having a course and it hurt my branding for a internet stranger a little bit of both and it really hurt my feelings do you feel like because alright so i built a business before i built a few businesses before so a few that i've got the seven figures a few of have i've got eight figures i've sold things i should feel confident about this and then you and i both have courses i'm gonna actually launch another and i think it'd be like a like a million dollar plus a year income stream for me and my family which is awesome it's never good when you have to say it for me and my family like if you have to justify feeding your family that means there's that's just the insecurity poking out poking out of there well it gives context and i what i mean is is it the contact the question that i'm gonna ask is is it worth it because part of me thinks well i'm such a big shot i shouldn't talk about it i should just have shit and not teach it but then i'm like but i like doing it and it's a significant like it pays for my whole life so do you yeah if you again the the only question i was gonna guys do you like it you like doing it yeah alright then that's enough right like but do you feel like you feel like a fraud sometimes too or at least i you've never said that to me but you said that when we had when we were interviewing that one person you're like i kinda feel like a fraud every once a while or i forget what you said not a fraud but i do feel like i make fun of myself about the course thing because same thing self conscious what that be self conscious is a better yeah yeah yeah like you know i would say somebody who is like somebody who is really locked in and i use the word locked in because it's not about how much money you have like but it's true somebody who's really really wealthy would not do a paid course i don't think don't think somebody who's like super wealthy probably should be or would be doing paid courses pretty unusual to do well i i think that's actually wrong though because like warren buffett had a course at columbia i mean there there's a lot of examples of like wonderful investors who go and they yeah but i don't think warren buffett did his course for like i don't think he was pocket a bunch of money doing a direct sales course type of thing like i if i went and taught a guess if i was a guest lecturer at stanford right i drove forty five minutes away i go guest lecture at stanford i'm a teacher there i would be doing that for different reasons and it would feel totally differently than me being like hey i have my power writing force go sign up and pay for it i don't know why it is it's it's just different it's it's a different thing but i would say it two things i said locked in because also if you have like a main thing that is totally an obsession for you you you're loving working on it there's so much there's more to do than you'll ever have time to do you really wouldn't take the time to stop pause and go seller it's my opinion about myself i should say i would not go do that so to me as long as i'm still doing courses it's me part of my wandering around phase trying to figure out what i really wanna do when i grow up what i wanna do with my life what i do with my time i know that if i get locked in on oh man i really love this project i'm just building brick by brick this is something that i'm really excited about there's no chance in hell that i would push pause and and teach course even though my courses are like it's two weeks out of the year so it's not a lot of time but even even those two weeks i probably wouldn't do if i was in that position in the same way that when i was building my startup i had no podcast i had no angel investing i had no courses i didn't do i didn't tweet i didn't do shit when i was building if i started for like seven years because i was fully locked in on that it's only after we sold that i started doing a bunch of these things and that became the new the new business was the podcast and other things i think i'm gonna keep doing it but i think you should totally keep do you said you like it so keep doing it let me share a little thing i do during my course because during the course the writing course some people will be like you know okay i get like this lesson was really great i feel like i now have a much better idea how i would write to like kinda grow viral or build my brand there's a part of me that just feels like you know they'll ask a question that's like how much content would you say is too much you know what what's too much to post or would you say that like you know i should wait you know until my product launches to start doing content like they they ask all these questions that are sort of like self promoting and self conscious feelings self conscious there's just under this a layer of self consciousness around the whole thing or like you know what do you what do you say if you post something and then somebody comments do you take it down blah blah blah do you you how do you deal with you know a negativity blah blah blah and i always just say the same thing i go like oh i i i i answer your question but hang what what time is it i wanna make sure we don't go over what time is it and then they're like nine thirty four i'm like no no it's meal clock and you forgot that it's meal clock you know you're thinking about what everybody else might think and what they might say and how they might feel and what my a bro you forgot the main thing it's always me clock you just gotta ask yourself do i like this do i wanna do this how do i feel about doing this remember it is always me clock in fact i wanna get watches made or a clock on my world that just just reminds me it is me clock should i wait to go do this thing no it's v clock should i care what other people are thinking no it's me clock how do i feel that's what i'm gonna do things based off dude there's this funny picture of fide fidelity castro you know like the the dictator of cuba it he's wearing two rolex at the same time both of the same wrist just because he's just like what's a flex that hard but no know it's a be like you need to get two watches on each hand that's say wait just let me make sure this otherwise up broken yeah that's exactly how i feel dude your question to me i don't even need to answer i gotta remind you it's me o'clock you do it you do what the hell you want alright you have another thing on here that was like the ten yeah the list i i'm gonna read the title and you you go from there so it just says a few non popular things i've learned from this pod pretty good headline eight out of ten thank you will accept i'm gonna say each one and i want you to give me your reaction and then i'll explain a little more context but alright the first one well can you give context on the whole thing like where did this come from or what why are did you even think of this list of because unpopular things you've learned from the pod i see a lot of things online of people talking where they try to explain like rules like you do have to work this much or you don't have to work this much or and the reality is is that there's a million ways to get the same things done so like for every example of one person succeeding in one way there's gonna be lots of examples of them succeeding a totally different so i think it's silly to have rules and so i like we'll see these things of people posting of like oh you know like they say it's a ten year overnight success and in my head i think man i know people who have had overnight successes were like literally in three months their life has changed and i think it's silly to i acknowledge that you know and so that's how i kinda i came up with this list okay alright hit i'm excited now alright the first one i just said so an overnight success which is like one or six months it's absolutely possible and those those exist and they're real what agree or disagree alright give us an example for example we covered this company called broom b r u m a t e and the i think in like year two they got the twenty million in revenue in year one they got to like eight million and i know a few people that have had other companies were like in the first six months like it kinda just took off and it worked so we interviewed who else did we interview well you're i would say your current stealth company we haven't talked about yet taken off right away yeah it's it's succeeded like pretty quickly and but do you count that do you count that overnight success or do you say i've been preparing my whole life for this right that's the that's the account argument i'll say like i built up a reputation and i'm trading up that reputation but there are times you and i have like talk to people for example we i had this guy on who you weren't here but you know him his name's is val you know valve v a l val he had a company where in year one it made like ten million in profit and it was selling like ringtone tones on the internet and like just some people just have the factor and then also like luck is real so that's another thing luck is real sometimes you just kinda nail it and it just works not always in most of the time it doesn't but every once in while it just happens and so i think for people to say overnight success isn't real i think that that's nonsense because i i know a handful of people who are like nineteen twenty year old kids who they like within a few months they've got something making many many tens or sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in sales and it just works yeah yeah i'm i'm with you on that i agree alright here's another one i think at least in the beginning of your career where you live it actually really really matters it's incredibly important and the people who don't move some places i think they are at a disadvantage hundred percent agree i did this i was sitting in australia and i wanted to do startups and i was i went to a local startup like event and i was like okay i'm like looking around everything's being super nice right australia everybody gets along great and i just thought by head i go who's the most successful entrepreneur in this room and it was this one old ass motherfucker who was like you know had built something in the nineties and he just like stuck around and then nobody else pretty much and then i was asked some questions i was talking something and then the got the organizer organizers was like dude you should give a talk next next month at the meetup up like this is great we would love to have you teach and i was like teach i'm twenty three i've done nothing i was like if and i like at first i was flattered and then i caught myself two seconds later i was like oh wait this just means i'm in the wrong pond i do not wanna be a smart guy in the room they should be like dude you should shut up you don't know anything about anything that's the type of room i wanna be in and so i literally went home i went on i think like t mobile or whatever i activated a a a phone plan and i got a six five o area number a area code because i was like i need to just mentally before i even i need to go to silicon valley now so i'd changed my phone number and then i booked a ticket and my mom was like you know what are you where you gonna stay do you have a job i was like i don't know i don't i'm gonna figure it out but i'll i have a better shot of figuring it out there than i do from here and that was my whole mindset and tony robbins has a thing think he says about this he goes proximity is power and i am a huge believer that proximity is power i have done pretty crazy things to just get in proximity of people that i think are awesome like i will take jobs that i think are like the worst job of all the job offers i have if i know that it's gonna get me to sit side by side with somebody awesome because i know six months next to that person is gonna do more for me than you know like a better higher paying job would have done and so proximity is power on big this goes beyond business it's beyond business it's just anything if you wanna make it in the movie industry you have a higher likelihood if you at least spend a handful of years early on in hollywood just putting in the time matters you know if there's like these funny stories about bill murray he lives in like north carolina or something and he's like totally out of the loop it's like yeah that that that definitely works there are examples of that but i think it helps your odds yeah you you wanna increase your odds of success the second one or the third one luck is is incredibly real you know i remember like early on in my career i was thinking like there is no such like as luck it's just hard work and i'm just gonna do it nah shit's real shit's real i remember i i've sent the story a bunch of times so when we were selling our company brian hall the ceo of hubspot at the time got a life threatening accident two weeks after we closed and there's a world where two weeks before if it happened it could have ruined it i think you've had a couple examples where if one or two things happen before after selling a business like it it like within like a month it could have changed things getting sick really matters being born like in a healthy place in a healthy family like things like that luck is totally real and i think that we dismiss it too often yeah i think i agree with that i would say luck is real i would also say a big part of luck is in your control and a small part of luck is out outside of your control so most of the luck you experienced in your life there's a whole bunch of things at the beginning being born in a certain place healthy your parents whatever those are outside of your control a lot of what happens after that is in your control and we've done the there's a podcast episode called four levels of luck where we talk you know on frame friday where we talk about actually manipulating luck to be to go towards your advantage if that makes sense there is a set of actions you can take that will increase the amount of luck you end up having in your life and this is not like you know hold crystals or somebody that it's like more practical tangible stuff okay the last part of that that i'll say is i remember when i was i had moved to san francisco and i met michael birch the guy i came to work with because again proximity power i just took the job i was like oh i get to sit next to this guy this guy is like a billionaire who's built for successful internet companies well what is the thing i wanna do build a successful internet company i think this is the place to sit and i was talking to him and i was trying to figure out like did this guy just get lucky or what happened because a lot of people i think would look at him and say oh he got lucky because the thing he sold two years later be he sold for eight hundred fifty million dollars two years later a year later aol wrote it off for like you know a giant tac write off and just like and nobody uses bib now facebook one and it it facebook beat it and so some people say oh he got lucky right you know he sold it for whatever and i definitely don't think that's true because he's built like multiple companies that have been successful but what i figured out what i the the thing i ended figuring out was it's not lucky that he won but it is lucky how much he won so he was gonna be successful either way but whether that number was twenty million eighty million or eight hundred million there was a large degree of luck and timing that was outside of his control that contributed to that he could just easily just as easily have been an eighty million guy versus an eight hundred million guy and that i don't think was necessarily in his control that was right place right top right time right circumstances you know the right person had the right drinks at the right bar next to the right person and i think that you know the magnitude of success is a lot more based on luck not the appearance of six not the not the existence of the success he was gonna be successful in no matter what alright and i'm gonna jump around another one ivy league ish schools so i don't know how we're gonna define that but like the a top twenty university is totally worth it what even if that means that you have to go into a lot of of debt i think it's totally worth it i think state schools where you get some type of in state tuition and you still get a college experience totally worth it most everything in between if you happen to go into debt for it i think it's absolutely not worth it feel like where i went school where i went i went to belmont university i was i was i got a little bit of a scholarship and my parents paid for for one hundred percent not worth it it was at the time i think thirty or forty grand a year and it's a no name university that you it does it just completely irrelevant one hundred percent not worth it but i know people who went to my wife went to an ivy league school i know people like you went to duke and like you have a a handful of connections if you go to stanford you have all these connections that seem one hundred percent worth it and here's another like thing if you have stanford on your resume you're gonna at least get the interview this is true if you look at how people recruit and they just got scroll through excel sheet and it just says where you graduated bell in kentucky that causes sixty thousand dollars a year or whatever it is that is not the same as stanford or darth dartmouth like you're just automatically going to have an increased likelihood of getting that interview but even more important than that you're gonna meet people who are have been maybe been around the world have rich parents like that stuff actually matters and it actually those connections and that that influence on your life it really actually matters that it's worth going into into debt i kind of disagree here so i went which is not an not technically an ivy league school but is like considered up there with with ivy league actually like a sports thing but like you know whatever considered like a top school and it wasn't worth it for me because i was not ready to figure out how to make it worth it right it's it's what you make of it it is not gonna be handed to you just by showing up and i had the total i had totally the wrong mindset i thought i'm here i gotta i don't know do the thing i've been doing to get here get good grades you know eventually graduate past the test you know go to med school and do whatever i'm supposed to do it was like a track and there are some people who made it worth it the people who are like y we got these resources free or i'm gonna go and meet these these two professors or i'm gonna get exposure to these other classes that i wanna learn about or i'm gonna use my time here to socialize plus spin up some side hustle because went man there's no better time to find founders to build a startup up than when you're in college like there were some people who had that right mindset the light my light bulb is not on right like now i got this floating ass light bulb there was no there was no light bulb on at that time and so i misused it i think the majority of people misuse it i did have one phone call that was really important and i'm just gonna say it out loud here because if there's somebody who needs to hear you know i got lucky that my dad gave me this phone call maybe your maybe your dad doesn't have the same sort of wisdom that that my my did so i'm gonna say it out loud i called my dad my second year into college and i was like hey he's like how's it going and i was like don't it's it's okay he's like do you mean was how's your you know how how cool and i was like well grades aren't great he's like oh man what what happened i was like they're not terrible i'm not failing i just like you know i'm a b behind a student here and like you i've been getting a's in high school so b minus was like no not very good he's like that's alright he's like are you trying and i was like yeah i'm trying but man like everybody here smart like you know everybody here is just as smart as me if not smarter and they all work harder than me and i'm trying to figure out this whole hard work thing but like you know it's just gonna be honest with you it's like these guys just live in the library and i just don't even like i just figured it out where they go they go to the library they go to officer i was like i was i didn't even understand where people were going with their free time that's what they were doing where you're with your dad paying yeah parents are paying for so i this what i told him i go you know you're paying a lot of money for me to go here and you know i could go to ut you know state school it'd be i think ten times cheaper or something like that like five times cheaper maybe i was like you know if you want me to try like i'm willing to transfer by the way just because like i don't think i'm gonna do that well here and so i don't think it's worth it for you to pay this amount of money and so i told him that and he goes and but i had been telling him i he's like he he goes why do you say that you know you're not like good there and i was like well like dude my my this guy who lives next door to me he's like a freaking genius he's like a you know he just gets the physics stuff right away and then he's also good like outside of class like you know in the summers he goes and he drives a a ambulance in the palestinian war just for fun and like yeah that's how he spends his summers like hey i'm over here picking boo with you like know i even know what to do in summer these guys all got plans and internships and and this and that and like this guy's uncle works at jpmorgan he's doing that thing that's and i was like and he goes yeah that's the point he goes that's why you're there you're not there for the classes you're there because when everybody around you is like that it will just raise your standards you won't even know what mediocre looks like do you think you're mediocre but because you're hanging out with exceptional people if i take you and put you in a state school you're not gonna have as many exceptional people around you who for them that's normal it you goes so you know the point of being in college for you to go to that school is not so you could graduate at the top of the class and get the best grades and be the smartest kid in the in classes it's so that that becomes your network and that becomes your normal and he basically said something to that effect so you're proven my point by the way pretty deep you're kinda proving my point i know i know so i'm saying like that is the the saving grace of it i don't know if the i don't know like that light bulb went off for me half i then i started to focus on oh yeah then once i realized that i started to get you know those people before that i was like oh these they're just different i'm a stay away and like i don't know i gotta find people who are like me who were just basically bum around here who don't know what to do instead i was like oh the point is to be hanging out with these people and become more like them and not feel like i'm competing with them or intimidated by them alright i've get a few more and i'm gonna actually merge a couple of them so another one having a technical skill if we're talking about internet companies it this mostly means like being able to like code or design in my case it was writing which actually i think counts but it's a little bit less more important but having a technical skill like in training to have a skill set is a massive massive advantage and i think being a generalist is not that is just a bullshit excuse but you should actually be good at at least one thing and right particularly coding or design would be better but copywriting counts as well and there's a few other things sales actually i think can count but you need to be good at something and i think that mostly we don't do that thing it's gonna be great at something you gotta like train for years to acquire skill and then go beyond that right you need a skill and i think it's a massive advantage and people dismiss that as being a generalist and that's just like self masturbation that is a bull crap excuse in reality you should be you just try to get great at something you know it's the funniest version of a generalist so generalist already is like you're teeter on the edge of just being a bullshit yeah it's people who call themselves a poly math have you ever heard somebody calls that bullshit dude yes that's like people who call them a contra like dude if you gotta label it you're probably not it you can't be the one who calls yourself a poly bath nor could you call yourself a trade it's other people who gotta pointed it out that's when that label works it's like you can't nick naked nickname yourself brain that doesn't it didn't work that way you know you gotta you you you either you either yeah no no that's how that worked yeah the other people can go you home you can get to call yourself on yeah so poly is like the you've you've you've fallen over the fence like hump dumpty and now you're fully in bullshit land when you call in yourself poly math so okay that's my that's my rant on that i think you're a hundred percent right you gotta have some skip what do we say you gotta have some attributes yeah behind me you gotta bring some attributes man you gotta have some size strength time me gotta have attributes it can't just be a dope i hired a guy that i thought was gonna be great because he was like you know saying all the right to use was hustle and he was he saying all the right things and within a month i realized guys got no attributes he's gotta have some attributes what are you good at what can you do man i can help with anything okay you can help with anything what can what problem can you go solve what what are you great at if i hand you this thing what can you just nail this part of it i don't know i would also consider myself somewhat of a generalist but it's you can only real what people mean when they're actually a good version of a generalist is they're great at one thing but they decided not to just specialize as that yeah that one tool for the rest of their life and they decided to go broader but they got that in their back pocket one or two core skills they're amazing at paid marketing they're amazing at copywriting they're amazing at building at you know coding they're amazing at sales and they could just do that as their job and they could be you know in the top ten percent of people if they did that just as their job not the top one percent right because they're not sure specializing and being like i'm gonna hone this craft every day for the rest of my life but they're in the top ten percent already at that and then they're in the top like thirty percent at four or five other things that's a real generalist not somebody who's just average at everything and like or good at nothing or good at nothing right yeah what what did a ronda ro called it a d you know remember that what's that mean she goes she goes she was talking about this when she was on the top and the the and she she goes all of of the girls are just d b's they just do nothing bitches and just i was like wow that is an incredible phrase and so in my head when i hear of a generalist i'm like let me make sure you're actually not just a d yeah dude dude nothing bench like you need to do something in in in or like in your case your skill set could actually be like charisma and like attracting and recruiting people and like putting him in the right direction that that's a skill set you know leadership is a skill set getting things started that that embedded like the the the initial match that gets like a a fire started i think that's a skill set but i think having a skill and that actually being great it's something it's really important alright i'll give you a few more assume that people don't change i think that's like a safe that's like a safe rule you know we we have this attitude maybe it's an american thing i don't know where it's just like you can change and i do believe possible you know i've had demons in the past that i've overcome i know a lot of other the people who have had things that they've overcome that shit does take place it's fairly rare and if you are a person that talks the talk and you don't walk the walk you will never change and if i meet someone like that i just assume oh they're just always going to be like that and they will not change no amount of encouragement is gonna make them change sometimes that happens assume it won't and that's i used to have a different attitude i started my company i'm like oh i'll just get these people and i'll teach them how to be great yada yada as i've grown with this pod and talk to people i just the people who act a certain way have always acted that way yeah there's my sister says that she goes no all people change for the worse like they will decay more often than they're gonna be like turning it around and like you know going from a to b and so i think you're right that is the working assumption un you know innocent until proven guilty you know same till proven different is how i feel with people right you exactly you gotta show that something is changing i am not gonna assume and i'm not gonna be that you know the the stereotypical like the woman who wants to fix him it's like don't i'm not that i'm not i don't wanna be that when i recruit people anymore now i'd rather just recruit people who are great and like just let them do the thing versus somebody that i'm gonna train and groom and turn around a project it's like why do all that effort you'd know bonus points for making it harder i can find this client in poll have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform so it shares its data across every application every team can stay aligned out of sync spreadsheets or dueling databases hubspot grow better alright the last two so i actually don't think necessarily that the time and effort put into a project is going to dictate the outcome i think to get like to build like a company now i would have to like put numbers on it to build the company that like makes you potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases you don't necessarily have you you you can achieve that by having balance but i think to have these massive outs sized world changing companies things that create tens of billions of dollars in ten fifteen years and have a meaningful impact in the world like a tesla or something crazy like that or stripe something like that i think that working eighty hours a week raising lots and lots of money and having zero balance is one hundred percent needed that said i think you could still achieve a huge amount of success compared to the average joe and actually do it working forty hours a week or in some cases after a while less and that's like an interesting die dichotomy but i think it's to be i think it's true yeah i'll go with that i like that what else one more last one and this is like an this is one of the very few irr irreversible decisions so having some type of success and taking a meaningful amount of risk before you have a family meaning you have less time you've got less responsibility unfortunately it's an irr irr irreversible decision but getting an early ish win early in your career is one hundred percent a huge advantage and you are at a massive disadvantage by having a young family and not having like achieve something and then wanting to go achieve it it's not impossible but like taking those risks early on people should be encouraged to do that more because it is life changing yeah i think so the paul graham has this essay the hero wrote i don't remember the name of it but he basically was like assume i i forgot the exact metrics i read this a long time ago i in my early twenties and i stood out to me he was like assume you start out with seven points as an entrepreneur and these are your the seven points is like your capacity to like take risks and like achieve what you want and then he's like for every one of these things like you know minus one right it's like mortgage and whatever minus one kids minus two you know and he's basically like you know you can still do it but you your margin of error and the difficulty that you're gonna have and the strength and the stress you're gonna have pulling this off like assume you are sort of sap your your you know your life monitor every your points in terms of how much ammo you have to go attack this thing it's being sap by each one of these these factors and i don't remember what all of them were but it's worth you know go and find this essay because i think he's actually true it's an uncomfortable truth people don't like this because it doesn't sound politically correct because like you know the politically correct thing to say is you can do it you could do anything and and you could argue and and you should by the way if you're forty you shouldn't be listening to this part you should be saying screw that i got all the wisdom i got the my purpose my kids i got the experience oh you know that a twenty year old will never have i have i yes you have different advantages but objectively speaking it is much easier to take risk and if you were gonna just play it out in an ideal scenario you would take your risk earlier when you have less to lose you have less pressure less stress less financial obligations it's just a more like game theory optimal way to play you don't have to play it that way but it is i think sort of objectively speaking and it a a a preferred way to play but you know if you didn't play it that way and it's okay you still win anyways so that's the list that's my unpopular truths my my not awesome stuff to discuss but i believe it to be true that i've learned from the pod and i'll end with all of those rules or i described them as can be completely broken and there's tons of examples of all of them being not true but yep that's what i believe would be true so that's my list okay i like it let me give you another idea alright so i was doing do you do like gifts like company gifts for the holidays or something like that do you like send out gifts you no that wasn't that wasn't a me thing do you are you doing warm tender person who might that that you know give giving up my lovely language which bro words of affirmation are silent nods of approval yeah love yeah yeah a pat in the back is the greatest gift the greatest gift is the lack of criticism but i provided you today so i was thinking about i was like oh you know and i remember at at you know at a previous company i worked at the the office manager she was good at the stuff and she would get like everybody's his address and then she would send these harry and david gift gift baskets have you ever had a harry and david gift basket no what's that oh dude imagine at the door who could it be you go to the door hey we have this amazing huge gift basket for you you take it into your kitchen and you're like wow what's what's gonna be in this gift basket sam take guess what's in this gift basket chocolate i guess could be chocolate could have been chocolate it's not chocolate though what else could it be like local foods like bricks of salami and cheese they give me salami cheese there's a little bit of that there's little bit of chocolate this a little bit of cheese in their pears they had these jumbo pears and they know because pears are the most underrated fruit they are the official fruit of my first mail as far as i'm concerned i agree huge delicious pears were in there and i was like what the hell is this and i was like what is this giant gift that i received and why does it why is it so awesome it's called one harry and david harry and david right so they they do gift baskets of all kinds but this one was of a giant pair basket that we got and i still remember this thing and i was dude you came over to my house i don't care if you're the the cleaner you're just a guy i walk by i was sling pairs to you because i had the j pears that were gonna go bad they were massive and i needed to offload these things and everybody asked oh wow where'd did you get this i said my company sent it to me because they love me and that's how i felt and so i thought i i always remember this experience and so then i started digging and i was like let's put this harry david to think by the way oh my end there's huge harry and david sold to a company that you know of one eight hundred flowers for a hundred and forty two million dollars back in twenty fourteen and they have a couple you know main brands of this i harry david which is these gift baskets they have wolf which is gourmet english muffins and other foods like that and they have stock yards which is you know prime you know prime meats basically and harry david it's a super seasonal business fall in winters when they get a lot of their orders and they got fifty retail stores that like you know help them fill the stuff and it got me thinking about harry david it got me thinking about one hundred flowers i did a little deep dive so one hundred flowers starts off as a phone number forty two years ago literally it was just one hundred flowers and it goes on to build basically like a six hundred million dollar plus business they you know for a long time it's just a phone number then nineteen eighty five they they start e commerce because they're like oh we need this and they basically have like thousands of locations in fulfillment centers not all owned by them but like fulfillment partners somebody can send flowers to you and you know basically these guys are it's like four it's like a bundle of fourteen brands and let me just give you their their revenue last quarter so they're possibly traded yeah what's that publicly traded they did four hundred and eighty five million in revenue last quarter so that that means they're now a what what is that five hundred ton well that's not even a popular quarter probably probably their february revenue like trump's like the the the the probably their biggest well let's say it's probably a billion and a half a year is is pretty pretty safe to say the gift baskets which are the harry and david section they're doing they did a hundred forty eight million last quarter so that means that's probably like a five hundred million dollar year business floral was three hundred million and then yeah basically they have like whatever they have some other stuff they got cheryl cookies they bought her for forty million they got you know personalization mail which is something i don't know they bought for two hundred fifty million they got sherry berries know there berries i love she berries yeah right it's great popcorn factories bought that for thirty million back in the day so they own all these brands so i'm like okay this is great now i've also been doing this food gifting thing lately because i'm like you not a big gift trying to get better at it inspired bar buddy ramon and who is a prolific gift the better absolute savage of a gift so he got me thinking man he he really highlighted my gifting deficiency so i said i i'm gonna start sending gifts but i i'm not a big plan ahead guy so day of where do you get a last minute gift that can get to that person's house same day same hour maybe maybe it's eleven pm i'm trying to sweet squeeze it in before midnight door and uber eats that's what i've been doing i will just door you food because food is you know the universal love language yeah what you gonna do is send me a pizza at eleven am that's stupid i'll send you a pizza and wings i'll send you four s i'll send you bob tea i'll send you a ci i'll send you bro i i got options i got i got a whole like menu of my gifting foods that i'll go to because i gotta know and i i gotta know what you like right like i know you got that sweet tooth right i might hit you with sixteen pint of ice cream and you'll be like this is sean this is simply too much ice cream i'm like i know because i love you that much right i'll hit you with these kind of these kind of gifts so i think that somebody should build a one eight hundred flowers type of brand because the things i'm gifting they're not made for this they're not made to be gifted right the ci is not made to be sent to a friend for their birthday but i think somebody should build basically birthday eats or last minute gifts on door dash on completely as as a cloud kitchen i'm just getting stronger as the idea builds as a cloud kitchen nationwide it is optimized for gifts so baskets that are nicely like put a bow on it handwritten notes that's gotta be a part of it you know so something that's gonna be able to give you a a note or even a little light little tri kit that shows that this is a card that this is for the occasion and then help me help you help me get to somebody else is how is how i feel about this now the cloud kitchen is already good but if you remember back in the day we had the idea of not just a cloud kitchen but a cloud kitchen where you partnered with the celebrity so this is where i need your help we need our celebrity partner who is gonna be the face of this last minute gifts brand this gourmet gifts brand that we're gonna create launch nationwide across uber eats it sounds mind it's this sounds like a rhetoric question so i have a feeling you have someone in my honestly the only person i thought of i was ryan c chris and i don't even know why i just thought i might as well go with the hardest recording man in hollywood i haven't seen his face in that app i he he would like to be in that app so i'm thinking ryan and see chris is a good white will white women like you you'd be fine universally universally not hated so you like a recognizable face but who else could be who else could be the guy or the or the gal like you know mariah carey she's seasonal maybe mariah maybe mariah is is is is maybe she needs to get out of a song game and get into the gift game i i i i don't know but i do think this is actually brilliant i've tried to order one i'm the last minute gift guy too and i'll try to order one eight hundred flowers the the morning of valentine's day and they and oftentimes they don't let you you know i'm just like it's too late if you're really loved her you would done this three years ago yeah and it's a it's it's super annoying so i'm totally on board i i i i i think this is awesome i think this is this is this is great can you not do that now the there aren't any good gift basket companies or door dash like if i open door dash right down so let's let's open this i can't get an edible arrangement also a great gift man edible arrangements wonderful yeah those are good and i think you can get some of those but i think we're you we need a fresh brand so like like you know they have like they have the flower and gift boutique online at least and it's flowers you know it's just flowers right like it's like roast flowers a cookie in a bag right you a bath bomb come on come on you think mariah and ryan sea chris are just gonna lose this no extravagant i i'm on board i i i've experienced the same thing and i've also studied one eight hundred flowers one eight hundred flowers is a really interesting company because they will tell you all types of insights in their annual report and they have so much intel because they own so many brands i'll give you an example in one of their reports they said succulent are growing amongst millennials and i remember reading about that like in two thousand eighteen and i told a couple people about it and they started succulent delivery businesses geared towards millennials and they kill it you know there's now the the sale there's another one called the what's that another one called yeah millennial yeah suck lot of businesses yeah i don't know dude and they have so much insights or another insight that you can get for one hundred flowers is they're like we're trying to they're what what of they say they we actually don't make a lot of money from flowers but we make a shit load of money from like when people buy vases so i'm like why aren't you like painting and cool shit on this vase and getting people to like spend more money on it you know like why aren't why don't i see like a free to call or whoever it is like painting on like this like sick vase and i'll pay you fifty dollars for it right dude one hundred flowers is actually a really really really good business to go and read their annual reports because they have such interesting insight and they've been doing it for i don't know how old this now it's from the seventies i think and so really interesting company of study i love that business i love the gifting business but their market cap sucks why is their mark cap so bad their mark cap is six hundred million dollars isn't really yeah it's horrible they just like plummeted over the past well i guess everything is plummeted but it's been really bad over the past year that's interesting i wonder if they think they're getting like you know disrupted by something yes six hundred million is the market cap that sounds and the guy who runs it's really interesting i think that the guy who invented it who founded it i think his name was jim mc mccann and his son now is the ceo and jim is like a really interesting guy i've i've had him on the i've talked to him on the phone a couple times really fascinating person and his son is is the ceo now so it's almost like a really weird family business another one that falls in this category have you ever studied omaha steaks no so omaha do you know what that is no but that just sounds like exactly what it is so omaha steaks it's a male order business they sell steaks if you wanna buy someone like two hundred dollars of like prime rib and filet mignon and chicken and and like brat worse and shit you order from there and they send to you and it's an awesome gift and i believe it's privately owned they make many many many hundreds i wouldn't be surprised if it's actually north of a billion in revenue and they were one of the very first companies to take advantage of internet marketing and so right when the internet got popular you would see omaha steak ads everywhere and they were very very very progressive with like their they're figuring out how to market on the internet and they're still really fascinating and it's a really really interesting company to study i think it's privately owned you've never i'm shocked you haven't heard of omaha steaks but you also didn't know who dolly part was so yeah you're really shocked yeah exactly but anyway look up omaha steaks you know i i i think they're in like the six or seven hundred million dollar year in sales range are they invented or founded in like nineteen twenty they've been around forever a really fascinating company this study so they are they like in are they mostly in stores or this is like no no no it's one hundred percent online and you gotta you just have to call them or there was like a catalog and you like would order stakes the very first thing it says the classic gift a ninety dollar package of steaks that's sorry you it's a great gift neville my you my best friend neville was also my neighbor his mom always is buying them omaha steaks and so whenever he gets order of omaha steaks we all go to his house and we like we grill them it's an awesome gift omaha steaks is a wonderful gift i'm shocked you haven't heard of it no but i i also feel like this could be done with like the right influencer partners like just do them a sort of you know a a slightly different version of this this this seems like the type of thing that is you know it's got a pretty good moat probably because they're like you know they probably own the the production or something like no that's not what their motives is i would think their moat is the fact that like it's been around for so long and so like you saw your parents gift it to people and then you're like like oh man why should they get this guy like oh like i guess like some fucking omaha steaks you know what i mean it's like sees candy it's like why does warren buffett like that he's like i don't know just because like that's just like the default gift that men give their wives and like people have seen their parents do it for years and then they grow up doing it don't local sees candy here near me they opened up a nursing home in the store because everybody there is so oh it's an incredible genius idea on their part they're like hey actually we're just a funeral home in the back it's you know it's like one in five kids you have in the store dude sees candy is pretty whack like i i go and eat it it's shit but like it does seem kinda dead at this point but you know i get have more moment likes clothes dating center for him like i don't what's on that like why is everyone ninety in inside he's scanner that is that just my local one here no it's always like that but it is like fire like get them like just some truffle you ever had a good truffle or turtle i'm all at the turtle there do that turtles great job to turtle it is is nothing to to bat and i about but yeah look up omaha steaks look up one eight hundred flowers these are really interesting companies as the study because like they're also interesting because you think omaha steaks and you like judge them of of like or at least i did i'm like oh you know it's just like some omaha company that can't be that sophisticated they they are incredibly sophisticated at least in terms of internet marketing and so they're really interesting to go and study right okay cool let's let's let's cap it here i by way there's a bunch of fun stuff coming so i gotta say i wanna do the studio tour and breakdown of how we did this like studio change and what you know what we learned from it and what it cost all that good stuff i wanna do a plan for next year we're gonna do our annual awards we're gonna drop the new intro music we're gonna do all kinds of different stuff and we're gonna talk about where the pods going so i wanna do that soon and yeah i think i think of the next the next two weeks i think we're gonna have some fire podcast podcasts yeah we gonna have are we gonna do the million awards we're oregon again yeah and let's get andrew brook in booked again so we can do the mill awards and we have austin reef i'm excited for austin so it's gonna be a good week