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can i show you the highest value comment on hacker news that i've ever seen yeah that has a lot of weight i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a goal travel and from like years and years ago but it's this comment about sales because hacker news is full of engineers and they're like hey like you know i suck at sales anybody can help me get better at this and this guy wrote seven points and i just nod in my head so vigorously that my c four c five is a little sore so let me just give you this here he said the guy goes yeah there's tons of resources to help you with sales but i'll start with i'll try to offer some simple tips number one sales is a lot like golf you can make it so complicated that it's almost impossible or you could simply walk up and hit the ball i've been leading sales for about twenty years my advice is to walk up and hit the ball number two sales about people and it's about problem solving it's not about tech or solutions or chemicals or lines of code or artichoke it's about people it's about solving problems number three people buy four things and four things only ever those four things are time money sex or and approval or peace of mind if you try to sell anything other than those four things you will fail number four people buy aspirin always they'll buy vitamins sometimes and but it'll be unpredictable sell aspirin number five i say in every talk that i give that all things being equal people will buy from their friends so make everything else equal and then go make a lot of friends number six being valuable and useful is all you'll ever need to sell things help people out send them interesting post right write birthday cards record videos sharing your ideas of how they could grow their business introduce them to people who would benefit from knowing each other and get out of the way expect nothing in return do this consistently and authentically and people will find ways to give you money i promise number seven no one cares about your quota your payroll your op your burn rate no one they care about the problem you're solving for them there are more than a hundred trillion dollars in the economy just waiting for you to breathe it in good luck who is the job of hacker news are you reading any books i am reading influence again by robert geraldine why are you reread robert tang influence because as the great buddhist prove says no man steps in the same river twice for he is not the same man and the river is the same river oh my god have you how long give you waiting to use that one you start reading books what can you do you just start turning into a quote machine no but really i think you know reading the best books again at different times in your life it's a totally different book do you think you've read it in what i found is you you remember you shockingly little of books and so going back and reading great books is is like you know the gift that keeps giving in that sense so so that's what i'm doing did you ever read the blog post that i wrote about influence his book no in two thousand and fourteen i had just read his book and i wanted to implement what what he he talked about and he has this rule called the rule reciprocity which basically just says let's say that neighbor one goes to neighbor two let's say i go to sean and i say hey can i borrow a cup of sugar and you say yeah i got you the next day if you come to me and say hey can i borrow your car for the day even though even though those two ask aren't even remotely equal i because of the rural reciprocity am very likely to lend you my car because the rural reciprocity states that if you do something nice for someone they are they have a high chance of doing something nice in exchange to you even if the they aren't equal and that's like how society is is built one could say is it's like based off the world reciprocity so when i was a kid i was twenty four years old there was a motorcycle for sale i think for eighteen hundred dollars and i went to buy it and i took photos and documented all of this as i went and i was like hey you have the motor motorcycle for eighteen dollar eighteen hundred dollars let me see let me check it out awesome oh by the way i'm really sorry i'm late i i just i wanted to stop and get a coke because it was kinda hot outside i got one for you if you want do you want one and he goes yeah sure thanks and then i said start talking to him and i'm like look i love this motorcycle but like i'm a young i have a lot of money i know you're asking for eighteen could could you do fourteen and he goes you know you brought me the coke you seem like a nice kid yeah i guess i can do that and so like there's a blog post where i took photos of myself like what he was what he was like turned around like assigning the paperwork i like took the took the photo but anyway the rule reciprocity is pretty amazing so let me tell you a funny follow ups story to that i remember you telling the story about the diet coke and the negotiation and how you always bring two diet coke to negotiation correct you've told me this before like ten years i to be a gift yeah i try to bring something well i took it as diet cook so here's what happened i recently i was coaching this high school basketball team as you know and anytime i'm doing a project i wanna try to make it as interesting as cool as possible and what i do sometimes is i do things that are maybe like not the default way of doing things so i was trying to create content for the team so that the team would have like really cool like media going with it and so the principal and the ad did not like it are you talking about the the post that you made about your doing being a coach a being a coach yeah and how we were gonna try to have this take this underdog team and try to get them to be state champions and that was we're gonna record the vlogger along the way so post the vlog it gets twenty thousand views in the first twenty four hours but one of those views was the principal of the ad they call me and they're like hey you need to take this down so okay we'll take it down and he says i wanna meet with you be in my office monday they a good call that principal i called into the school and so here i am i thought i was past this i'm now in my late thirties and i'm going i'm nervous i'm going to the prince office and i bring so we're we're recording a vlog of thing and i'm i'm telling the vlog i said you know my friend sam taught me this this trick a little little the law of reciprocity like let me put you guys on some game you know people this really high likelihood to return the favor if you do a small favor for them i said watch i said i'm i'm gonna be late to this meeting i'm gonna stop and get this diet coke because is the most important part of the meeting and i'm like follow me vlog camera follows me and we get two diet coke and we go and i'm so ready for this and i get to the meeting and we sit down and i'm like i don't fully remember the line that you said about like how to do it i think there's actually a really specific way in the book that rubbish describes it which is two people are doing a psych study the guy walks out and he comes back and he said says hey they i asked the guy if we if i could have a coke he said yeah so i brought you one too so it's kinda kinda sounds like very like you know thoughtful in in passing and you said to set a very similar thing and so i walk in and i just go he's like hey guys and i go you wanna diet coke and then he's like and he just goes no thanks and now i have two diet coats i go i have two i go i have two and he goes i'm all set and then i and the vlog cameras on me and it's like the office i look at the camera and it's like this is not going as planned on michael scott in this and then i open up the diet coke almost explodes because i've been like yeah nervous hold time luckily doesn't totally foam over and i proceed to drink two diet coats while this guy absolutely shuts down my program and so that's the law of reciprocity gone wrong that's so funny that is so funny that is so good alright i have a story for you hey everyone really quick if you're enjoying this episode on ceo stuff so del having hard conversations with your team hiring then i've got something for you so the team at hubspot they actually way put together a bunch of best practices that sean and i use in our own companies and they put it together in something that's really easy to read and understand and so if you wanna just save yourself ten years of headache and heartache then you should check it out i wish we had this long time ago would help me a lock but there should be a qr code on your screen that you can scan or a link of the description so check it out it's totally free and totally awesome so i told you the other day how i like for the first time ever i like went out the dinner with someone and i'm like such a home body well my friend who are you talking about i visiting new new york you literally walk around new york with a brief briefcase and like you know business cards and alto toys in your pocket trying to meet people riding the subway you're you're out when don't try to take my stick i'm the whole body you're you're the guy who's out there but good idea i just carry the briefcase my wife's like why do you have this like to do business yeah and cosplay plays a businessman in new york city i'm doing business sarah i need it i need the case it's got the cra and the snacks get off my back yeah what when you said ata i was like i okay that's enough so i've been hanging out with this guy named mark have you heard of gl yeah the expert network so you you know you wanna find out whether nvidia chips are gonna go up or down maybe call someone in this in the in one of the buyers who like an expert buyer who give you insights about the industry huge business yeah and i've become good buddies with him i've hung out with him a bunch because he lives in my neighborhood and basically gl like you did explain huge business they filed to go public at one point and so some of their numbers are public it does something like over a hundred million dollars a year in profit and cash flow very amazing company and we were just hanging out he owns another business in the community space now that he loves and he sits down and he starts telling me i'm like what are your hobbies what else are you into and he told me this crazy story so i want you to google something google it's called united hot okay i found it okay equipment aid looks like a charity or some kind of volunteer medical emergency services exactly so listen to this story so he tells me this story so mark he started gl when he was only like twenty three twenty four or a pretty young guy when he's something like twenty seven twenty eight he meets this guy named ellie ellie was either an ambulance driver or was at the scene where this happened but basically a kid was choking on his food and the am they called an ambulance the ambulance didn't make it there in time and they could die and he was like it it really sat with them it he was really bothered by that because they late come to find out that they're actually actually was a doctor like next door or like down the block or something like that within it like a pretty close vicinity and he's like it really stinks at this ambulance took fifteen or however however many minutes to get here when there was a guy right here that could've have like cured this kid and he didn't have to die and so ellie ends up starting this very small thing with only like six or twelve people where they basically self organize and they train themselves on how to do very simple things like cpr the he maneuver and and they train themselves on that and then eventually went to like they could even like do like an emergency baby delivery and he had started a nonprofit where he would actually give out these like forty pound backpacks that had like very a small amount of oxygen a baby kit system so or a a baby delivery kit so you can like deliver a baby in case of an emergency like these like really a essential supplies and he starts telling mark about how he's got the things going and mark's like that's awesome this thing could be it this could be like a really big thing and mark gives him eighteen thousand dollars because mark was just getting successful but he's like i have eighteen grand i can give you but i can be your c founder and i can help commercial this thing and make a huge thing and so it's been around since for the last eighteen years and at this point they have eighteen thousand volunteers in israel it's mostly it's it's only in israel they answer something like two thousand calls a day and the mission statement is very simple they say that on average it takes something like twelve or ten minutes for an ambulance to arrive to you our goals is to get there in ninety seconds in anywhere in israel and right now i think they do it in like two minutes and mark was telling me he's like basically right now we are him and i went out to eat he was like if you were a member you would tear your bag with you at all times and if somebody ten floors down got got sick or something happened where they had a called ambulance you would be alerted because you are nearby and you could run down and give them some type of need until the ambulance got to them and they could actually do the real stuff but at least you could be like a life saving thing and because of this this company it's a nonprofit they have saved potentially millions of people because they've done this since for in the last eighteen years and what's interesting is they started this before iphones before gps and when they started they actually just gave out these like walkie talkie like these radios and now it's gotten quite sophisticated so they the the the entire foundation runs off of donations and they are spending many tens of millions of dollars a year and what they have noticed is like for example through eighteen years of data they know that heart attacks are more likely to happen in the morning it which means people are probably in their home versus the office and so they know that they need to recruit volunteers who are on call and ready and they're prepared for a potential heart attack within these areas and they have this they actually did a youtube video on it they have this entire like ai setup that they know where to predict that something bad potentially might happen and to have their eight thousand person volunteer force to do it to be ready and there's a few interesting things here about this one there's this thing called like it's called good samaritan law laws we have in america they have it in israel which basically just says like when you're on an airplane and the captain goes like is there doctor board could someone help me as long as that doctor acts in good faith they can't be sued by the person you know as it's it's a called a good samaritan long words like as on so but if you are on there for pay meaning if you're are a professional like i'm paying you money there's an exchange of goods for you to do a service you could potentially be sued so mark was like this thing it needs to strictly be a non nonprofit he said the second thing he was like in israel what's cool about this he's like we have super orthodox jews who are doing it we have not secular jews who are doing it we have arabs we have muslims we have christians he was like i've noticed that what has brought us together is not just us sitting around talking but i can get all groups of people to come and work together on something and and and get their hands dirty and it really brought us together and he was explaining this in a very altruistic way and i totally got bought into it and i was like weren't aren't in america he's like well actually did try to but we started in two thousand and nineteen or twenty like right before covid and it it was a false start so we just haven't we just haven't made it here but he's like this one hundred percent could work in virtually every city in america and he was like could didn't even work in rural areas he's like in rural areas they have volunteer firefighters but it was really fascinating to hear all about this stuff because i think that you know we talk about money for profit stuff but if you are like a social entrepreneur or something like that this is a really interesting opportunity in hearing him describe this it was amazing dude so cool i mean as reading the stats about it just now it says they basically handle one call every forty five seconds crazy right the scale of that's crazy there's only there's only late eight thousand volunteers or nine thousand volunteers so that's a lot of covered i mean two thousand calls a day and you only have nine thousand volunteers everybody's busy like like this is not like a once in a blue moon you know thing this is this is w average response time is three minutes their goal is ninety seconds that's nationwide and twenty four seven coverage which is pretty pretty incredible it kinda makes sense in a way right because i mean what are like you asked him what are your hobbies and he tells you this story which is hell hilarious because you're probably like he's like what are you like skateboarding yeah but like for for people i mean to be able to be like yeah i saved a life today or did give you your purpose right i i mean what yeah like what an where else can you get that that that would be actually like really meaningful for people if they felt like they could join something where they could actually do that well think of a the people who have like kinda crappy jobs that they're not particularly motivated by like this is something where you're like yeah i'm i'm i can do that non motivated that pays a bills i'm so thankful i have this yeah like i have this thing that like i'm i am needed and my and and i actually have a literally a life changing impact on people yeah yeah that's crazy i thought you're gonna say the us they just pivoted a to door dash if it became door well this is the omni story of food deliveries kind of interesting but i thought this was awesome and i was pre inspired like hearing i i think he said that he goes we have eight thousand people who are part of the network and he's like we're growing he's like we're gonna keep on growing he's like and he's like one doctor who is probably doing okay but he's not wealthy he gave us four thousand dollars and he's like i got this line where i tell them this because i believe it to be true he was like you giving us four thousand dollars is the best donation we've ever received like the fact that you are willing to do this it is so important to us and and that's how they've grown to be able to spend tens of millions of dollars a year very cool very cool hey let's take a quick break you know that feeling when strategy is done the brief is written everyone's aligned and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content that someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow well the breeze assistant from hubspot can help it works right inside hubspot you can draft campaign copy blog posts emails all in your brand voice all using your actual customer data so you don't create just content you create content that converts check out hubspot dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses let's see you want lightweight where you want you want something quick and fun you want something a little more give me follow deep did you see this amazing it's a master class of p r by bernard ar no i didn't read it what happened it happened more see this okay so so i don't i don't normally pay too much attention to this stuff but check this out so i saw this from lulu i don't know but lulu chang i don't know how you say your last name mess survey she's like the kind of go direct founder she she she's like she was doing p r at andrew and now she has her own fund and what is she the one who has the handle where it's like here's how you should and should not address like p issues yeah yeah she's just like constantly giving founders like advising that her herb philosophy is go direct philosophy so anyways check us out so this backstory is that bernardo i no who you you know probably better than i do he's the the titan behind the luxury conglomerate l and once in a while he's the richest man in the world yep he he's kinda yeah he floats you know between number one and four and the richest men in the world and he writes this post and it's just title mer right thank you in french and he he basically says so so what happened was this publication in france did this like year long kinda sort of expose on his family and they tried to make it as like juicy as possible so they dropped a six part investigative series called the empire of bernardo uno and they was talking about how and basically paints him as the last royal dynasty of france and it describes like tension between his second wife and his son law and how their sunday family dinners are like you know palace in intrigued type of thing and how they're you know they're trying to figure out the you know the five airs or five kids are sort of jo for position because he's he's now close to eighty or think of who's gonna sec succeed you know it's like basically six succession but for real life and so he so they they dropped this whole series and he goes and he goes here's a three three page open letter that he he basically posts and i just wanna read you a little bit of so he goes thank you that's how he starts it instead of being defensive he just starts with thank you he goes it seems i am the head of quote the last royal family of france i'm reading this between two cups of tea and my children who are alerted to this over whatsapp asked me if they should now curt in my presence and i told them hello sir would be would be sufficient they burst out laughing and with you know this has just been a wonderful week and if is it says it seems like lemon mans has decided to roll out the heavy artillery six months of investigation two full time journalist blah blah he basically like paints them as absolute overkill for what they were trying to do and this deserves a word and that word shelby thank you you know i i haven't been granted this treatment since i took over you know the company in nineteen eighty four and at that time they called me the terminator but i far preferred the last royal family former elegant and really good for sales at dior that he continues on and he basically says he he he goes he goes on and he goes apparently i'm the whisper into the ear of every president well i plead guilty and he starts naming the different presidents and he says owned by the way it's not just the french you know presidents it's also five american presidents i've whispered to three british prime ministers blah and am to understand that whispering into the the only french whispers are scandalous that a group that earn seventy five percent of its revenue outside of europe should should should be sort of isolated and not be talking to leaders of these countries and then he he basically just addresses his point by point the accusations and the article but does it in such a smooth non defensive french way where he basically turned a dis like a a dis track into a into a giant compliment for himself and you know he just he addresses each term one by one i'll give you one more he's known as a lover of arts and tax breaks and he's like yeah i contributed two hundred million euros to the reconstruction of not dame i fund to the tune of fifty million mathematics research at the school you know i pay this much in taxes every single year we employ two hundred twenty thousand employees forty thousand of them who work in france itself yeah i like i'm sure you forgot to mention that in the research but i mean i'm happy to help you know happy to help you here and and so he's just he calls out like the wording you know that that they use for for the different things just making them seem a little bit ridiculous any he ends with rest assured i will keep doing the mon cross word which i which that i must say is excellent confident in the cross and basically inadvertently dis the article and i just thought damn this guy that this was like such a perfect take down where you normally see ceos get really flustered they either ignore they deny they go start to complain and say they're biased and there it's a hit piece and you know play the victim and instead just so smooth and i thought there's a lot that that american ceos could learn from this do you know what the biggest thing is to use humor bring to bring her back to robert child he says the rule like ability how to be more likable one of the these easiest ways i don't know if he actually said it this way but and he's a way to be more likable is to be humorous like like yeah is to make people laugh at smile and like make people laugh about the silly stuff and like if i heard about someone doing an article if i was in this guy's shoes and he was doing an article about my family i would be livid right i wouldn't wanna to laugh about this i'd be so angry and the fact that he could do that is awesome and it makes him one hundred percent more like well i didn't know anything about him other than like he's a business like ty but now i'm like oh i'm kind of a fan of you yeah exactly you i wasn't gonna read their annual letter this year but this like basically he used the in entry of gossip that attention that spotlight to say something very different which i would say obviously if you just hate the guy you're gonna still hate the guy if you love the guy you're still gonna love the guy but the sort of the mass in the middle which is folks that you and i who don't really care aren't really paying attention it's just one little nugget where you're like i like that guy couldn't tell you exactly what he said but i i liked his approach and and if you expert as well jean yeah got that genes whack you know what i mean and it's people have studied this with like presidential debates and what whatnot it's like after the fact you know whether it's two hours later over two weeks later you rarely can remember anything that was said but you do remember how the person came across and and the level of like sort of ina inadvertently trust and like ability that you felt in the moment so your your impression lasts although your memory for the specifics does not dude to what's crazy is i'm i'm not aligned with mom donny beliefs i'm donny the the mayor new york i'm not aligned with a lot of his beliefs i'm not aligned with a lot of his ideas for policies i see him talk on the internet and i'm like oh my god you've got this dialed in you know how to be likable it is just insane have you ever watched any of his videos oh yeah and it's same same exact reaction oh my god like he just had it dialed in perfectly i went to yeah out here in new york city there was the national track field meat for like to professionals and he popped in to say hi and like it it got more cheers than the actual race did and like i i i really disagree with virtually everything he's about but he just ooze the cares of the charisma it was crazy it was just absolutely crazy i've i've he's just been on all the time yeah yeah yeah he's he kinda ran like a social media masterclass class right like just figuring out little memorable likable things to do along the way whether it was the speech at the mix or talking about like oh the like the whole halal food trucks is fourteen dollars now for a plate to chicken what's going on and you know just rather than like boring people with with you know political jargon okay so you've probably have heard this on the podcast but if you're running a company i think that the number one attribute that will determine if you are gonna succeed in business is how fast you can learn from others specifically how fast you can learn from other entrepreneurs but there's a problem with that i have this problem and in fact you probably have it too that's one of the reasons why you listen to my first million in the first place the problem is that finding other successful entrepreneurs to learn from it's a pain in the butt and so that's why a few years ago i started a company called hampton you can check it out at join hampton dot com we have thousands of members and they exist for this exact reason so here's how it works if you're a founder that does at least three million in revenue and you make it through our incredibly thorough vetting process we then match you and put you a group with nine other entrepreneurs you meet in real life in your city once a month and it becomes your peer group that will frankly change your entire life at change mine i'm in the group as well and so if you're a founder that does at least three million in your revenue check out join hampton dot com again the url is join hampton dot com what's the second thing alright let me tell you about let me tell you about this company so i wanna tell you about a company that is i had written off i i just thought it's sort of like i don't know some archaic company and then i saw some news recently that kind of blew my mind some numbers and it led me down a rabbit hole and it's the business of magic the gathering the nerdy business of magic the gathering and i wasn't interested in this at the beginning let me just start with that if you said hey would you like to know about the business of magic the gathering i would have just you know moved on to the next stall i i was not paying too much attention to it but i think if you think someone would be talking to you would you guys were like uri or uri yeah yeah exactly like he's not because i one people you like magic do what here doing about the economics i just feel like i wouldn't have paid attention to this and i'm telling you it's very very interesting okay so the way i noticed this was diego was tell me he's like oh has bro stock popped and he's been going to these card collectors conventions every weekend he's been telling me about the pokemon scene he's just he's just been getting into that like sub culture he doesn't really buy any stuff himself i i don't think but he he interested in the obsession in the fan and then like the sub culture that that exists because he's like invisible to you unless you're in one of these conventions so he's like yeah has stock just popped and it was because magic just hit like an all time high magic the gathering like magic gathering isn't this like twenty years old and it's true magic the gathering has been compounding seventeen percent a year on average for seventeen straight years and so the it's just been this like incredible compounding machine this franchise which sounds like you know it might be like a a quick fad like beanie baby but explain what it is so like i had the cards when i was kid but i don't even know if it was a gamer or not yeah so it's a it's a it's a game you can play two people can sit down and you can kinda like have a duel so it's like a card game but and this is kind of the genius of it a lot a lot of the fun isn't even playing the game against children like pokemon it's about collecting and so how do they do this and so this the backstory story is pretty fascinating so for so first all has is this company that owns monopoly they own nerf guns they own like yeah they own a bunch of stuff but like every you know of every dollar that comes in one out of every three is driven by magic it's like it is their cash cow magic will do you know two billion this year in revenue it's been just cranking along this was like you know an all time best quarter so you'd think like is this old ip not like fizz out no no it's like having its best quarter ever if you read the true backstory story you realize one thing which is what true sort of tinkering the power of tinkering so this guy starts with this he's making this game called five magic and five magic is a game he makes doesn't go anywhere but he puts a lot of heart and soul and sweat into it and he he puts it on the shelf because who cares and then he goes along and he's working a job but then he creates this he has it's another idea for this like more advanced game like robo something where you're like kind of like build robots and them it's like a board game where you're actually like building a robot and then he pitches it to this guy who's doing this wizards game and that guy's like dude this is too hard to build can you build something that's like more like kind of you know this sort of sci lore type of game you know this wizarding lore fantasy stuff and make it like something simple not the like rope you have to build a robot but like just like a card game or something so he goes back and he's thinking and he's on a hike one day and he has a sort of eureka moment and he's like oh i could take five magic but i could change it and he has this really good insight which is most games like chess or checkers at the time we're all like fixed games meaning you open the box and the pieces are all what they are monopoly like the the pieces are exactly what you think they are and i'm gonna play with you and then when we're done we put the box you know put close the lid on the box and the the game stays in the box and when richard was growing up he had a very unique upbringing and this is very this is off we a fast editing part of this how these like this like butterfly effect so his dad moved them when he was very young to like bangladesh and nepal these countries that you know totally fish out of water didn't speak the language and so to make friends really the only thing he could do was play games because he didn't he didn't not have talk so they had to use the shared language of a game that he knew that they knew and that game for him was marble and so he would go and play marble and marble is a very unique game where you don't go and open a box and play marble each kid brings their own marble set to the game and you play and you can win other people's marble you could trade marble and you have your own ever growing collection of marble and sometimes you run into a kid he's got a marble you never seen before and it made you just want want to go find your own version of that marvel you didn't even know it existed and so that was part of the all lore of the whole thing and so he has this idea of like hey what if i take that mechanic from marble where it's this like infinite set of of of possibility you have your own collection you bring the pieces to the game it's not a game where the pieces are already inside the box and that was the core insight for magic the gathering and why twenty years later it's printing you know five hundred million dollars this quarter off of that single insight about like what if the players had their own collection that they would bring to the game rat they would walk around with rather than like a fixed set of pieces it it's so right now it's doing two billion a year in revenue it's on pace for that this yeah we one lot something last year or two billion dollars this year and so he's and by the he's the great great grandson of james garfield it's kinda cool yeah of the president exactly yeah so he was like doing this did he sell it or what did he do yeah so he sells it about i don't know i don't know it's six nine years in and something like that he sells it to has for three hundred something million is the reported pricing they had to earn out took it up to almost five hundred million what so he was only five years or seven years into this when he sold it something like that and he was very smart so he was building this game and i'll tell you kinda like how we got it off the ground i'll tell you how he the the very smart thing he did right before he sold it and then why this is so great as a business model so so first how he got it off the ground he has the idea he starts tinkering with it and he's he and he's a total like game design nerd he's been focused on game mechanics and game design for a long time in fact when i told you he like grew up in like bangladesh and to paul he was playing these games he actually got into dungeons and dragons but he didn't know the rules thus like it didn't come with the rule set so he had the pieces but he didn't know how to play so he was inventing his own rule rule set which again is like if you look through you know great inventions it always comes with this weird constraint or this irritation that sounds like a total problem but if if it they turned it into actually like the irritation drove the innovation so him not knowing the rules led to him to experiment with all different types of rule game design and rule design and he would play it and later in life he actually found the official rule set it was almost like bummed out like oh that's how you play i've been inventing all these other like versions of this that were really interesting so he had been studying game mechanics for a long time and so even with magic he was play testing like crazy and he would do things that others weren't doing so he would find he would say okay who would be the best play testers for this i can take guys who play these card games or these board games but he also went into baseball he's like you know who really loves studying that the statistical aspects of games was strat cinematic which is this like baseball baseball simulation game that like uber statistical nerds who love baseball would would get really into strat so we'd find the best strat players get them to test this because he knew if you get the game design wrong the game fizz out he's like you could have the rich kid problem which is just it's all about going and buying the best cards and once you have the best cards you can't be beaten so it can't have that problem and i can't have this problem i can't have this problem he's finding all the bugs before he ever got to launch it and by the time he gets to launch he doesn't just try to launch this widely or you know just like launch it to his friends he goes and he drives basically like down the coast and he's going from like comic con to like trading card conventions to a board game conventions and he's finding like the white hot center of who should love this game and it should be basically like board game nerds and he would go and he would demo it to like very small groups people but he would influence the influencers he would get the guys who own the shops he would get the guys who write the magazine articles he would get the guys who were the the pro players of other games he would win them over and once he won them over they would then be his sales engine explaining it to the next people and so he would just like you know kinda like traveling in his truck with the game in his trunk go and win over like hand to ham combat each of these is oh he says he it he says he launches us in ninety three so he was doing that in the eighties well that was kind of his launch strategy and then he's right away it sold out he sold like like hundreds of thousands of cards like in the first four days and then he reprinted it and he he had sold ten million within the first like year or something like that like this great movie like the the like early nineties late eighties in san diego la like that is like a really cool setting and then like a guy like going through all this like it's not gonna work it's not gonna work oh it might work a little bit it's not gonna work okay it really works like that type of trying to to like booths right so he he runs the it sells so fast he has no cards can't print any more cards it takes time to do a print run but the scarcity of there being no more cards and people going into shops being like hey do you have any magic and the owners being like what's magic and then they would have to go figure out why are people walk you to our door like hunting for this thing i've never seen this level of passion is that the scarcity drove the like economy of the of the game and so he and and again the business model the genius of the business model so normal board game will sell for like whatever twenty bucks let's call it well the average magic player is spending a hundred bucks a year for life eight or nine years of their hobby so the average player is spending like a thousand dollars and obviously there's extreme collectors who are spending hundreds of thousands there's schedules who fade out right away but if you just do the math like the lt tv per customer is in the thousands of dollars per player you could never get somebody to buy a board game for a thousand dollars but by doing this kind of drip drip drip mechanism where you get into the game but then you want your collection to become better so that you show up with like the ace up your sleeve and you have social status because you have cool cards and then you can trade or sell those cards so it's an investment it's not spending and that's what you know pokemon did that afterwards heart stone did that afterwards and now like you know a lot of the like sports card stuff have have have really taken that model and and run with it but you know magic was really one of the og who did it so i thought that was pretty amazing the other cool thing you did was he bought dungeons of dragons so he wanted to ipo the company he realized like if i'm just one piece of ip i gonna be seen as inherently risky and so dungeons of dragon had been out beforehand him and it had like forty million in revenue but it had like thirty million in debt and it was doing really they they stop printing cards because they just had too much debt they owed a bunch of money they were scattered their business too much so he bought the company nobody knows exactly how much but like it looks like it was like thirty forty million maybe and they just took care of their debts and in doing so he had a a more diversified you know brand portfolio of like another franchise that had millions of players and had been around for a while and so he's you know you buy it for thirty million but then your your eventual exit is for you know three hundred to five hundred million to has because you were more defenseless so i thought that was actually pretty brilliant as well if you go on ebay type in magic the gathering and sort by most expensive there's cards on here that are hundreds of thousands of dollars yeah that is wild that i mean pokemon part i think the most that's pokemon cards sold for like ten million or something twelve million you you know the goo you remember the goo or sorry not the goo moo sure don't he's at the gh his he's the moo anthony scare or mu the moo his kid bought it from logan paul for like ten or seventeen million dollars something like that right what's the good known for you don't wanna know but did he raise funding no this is like a food bootstrap thing okay and what year did he sell it i think he sold it late nineties is my my guess but it was like you know it was like eight years in the making before he even launched the game because he's just been i mean it really had been thinking about the steps since he was a child i think there's a belief in entrepreneurship that these ideas just sort of exist you just have to sort of find one and make one and or you sort of get to be the one who gets the winning lottery ticket and then you read about stories like this you read about the story of how the u almost went bankrupt and really like dana white and the fort you know built that thing brick by brick against pretty much every headwind you could have being outlawed by by states losing money nobody would put them on tv like just every headwind you could have they faced and still built a multi billion dollar i'll be still doing it today even after cashing out and i think there are actually many businesses that we're only gonna be built by by one person was either gonna be built by that person or it wasn't gonna exist and i don't think that's a popular belief but when you hear these stores you just can't imagine would there really have been another person who had the this combination of the background the the hustle the insight the personality the force of will like the combination of factors that it takes to make it happen the other time i felt this was when we were talking to joe ga from from airbnb and he was telling the the true founding story of airbnb all of the headaches that they faced along the way you know just being shut down and being sued and being this and being that and it was like being copied by these like much bigger more well funded competitors and just the the number of times they escape death in the first two years it's like a dozen deaths that they escape you know they're they're out of funding and then they create a cereal box for john mccain and barack obama and they sell that at the conventions and they get just enough money to continue their business it's like the hell is going on and so you know those are businesses it's like oh airbnb was not meant to survive it broke the rules it was supposed to die twelve times and it it finally the universe gave in was like fine go ahead and exist it was not like anybody was gonna make that happen it was it was not gonna happen that way it's so good there's a scene that in in the movie rudy have you seen the the football show or the fall movie rudy yeah yeah the like rudy like talking to a priest and the priest like rudy i've been a priest now for this long and there's only two things that i i've realized i believe in there is a god and i ain't him and and whenever i hear stories of like dana white what do we say or we we are para someone else but it was it it was like make sure your passion burns so bright that everyone will come in town to like watch you burn something like that when i hear stories like this that's what i'm md yourself i'm like i wish i cared about anything as much as this guy i cared about a stupid card game yeah that's exactly right when you hear the stories of like these kind of like singular force of will creativity you know like the guy who who's the guy credit minecraft one guy yeah not yeah the whole thing himself you know what i mean i i have a friend is a very very smart venture capitalists you know this guy is like back to some of the biggest winners and he said something to me once about i remember when esports was like on trend and people were investing a lot of esports and overwatch franchises were selling for twenty million of pop because they were trying to make it the next nba and he wasn't buying any of it and i'm like but this is kind your thing you like these like weird niche things that could be huge but they're kind of written off and now they're starting to pick up steam like i'm surprised you're out he goes sports needs it's dana white and he was like i don't know who that person is but he goes anybody could have told you that like fighting martial arts like it was a thing for sure but the guy who was gonna make it the worldwide thing it took a very special like batch of entrepreneurial energy to do that and somebody who was gonna just break through walls for twenty years and so he's like you just need to and but he's like so i'm just waiting i'm just waiting till esports has that he's like i don't think es sorts is not gonna be a thing but i also don't think it's a thing it's going to be a thing right now because i don't see who that person is yet and you see this with other things rick right now a longevity is obviously a huge trend wellness longevity it's kind of replaced health and fitness as like the way people wanna optimize and brian johnson i think was the dana white of that industry i think brian johnson was willing to do things no one else would do in a way in a combination of like skills and personal sacrifice that very few people were ever gonna ever gonna do and he had that special combination i think he's gonna do it for a long enough time that it's gonna i mean it's already broken mainstream but i think it's gonna just keep going and he you know in in his case he's not creating like the one company necessarily that will be the winner in the way that like the say the u was but i think he made it happen in a way that no doctor no scientist no fitness athlete was ever gonna do yeah man but i remember when we first came across and we were like there's this guy he's got a blog and he's like just writing about his blood levels but look how he does it look how nerdy you he is well what were the factors right he had to have first personal wealth to start spending millions of dollars because no investor would have funded that right hey hey i'm gonna go raise money to inject myself with crazy shit measure every organ in my body individually for its aging speed because i wanna know that my left ear lobe is aging differently than my my kidney and i'm gonna do that for years and like you know somehow that's gonna work right like he he need a personal wealth then how many wealthy guys would wanna like donate their body to science while they're still alive almost well he he needs someone who's basically like a little bit autistic and a lot ranks high on disagreeable and he i mean he admitted himself he was depressed and you know suicidal and so he had nothing lose he's like well being isn't and making me happy so let's spend the money and doing something else that will give me some sense of purpose and and and something that will will take me out of this fun then you needed somebody who had the unique quirky personality to be loved by some hated by many and watched by all and so you know his look his personality his combination of scientific intelligence business acumen and then like willingness to look like a fool on social media right like i actually believe that brian johnson is the greatest social media marketer in the world and so like if you see him now you know he's like i'm gonna a live myself taken taking dmt or whatever like what's the thing like the a toad pissed in my mouth then gonna hall it know whatever it is like he's doing that type of stuff on a live stream you're be like oh my god who would think to do this like is he he's got like jake paul's social media instincts packaged in elon musk's wealth and you know hub band scientific right like he's got like elements of each one of those not at the at each one's level but like that combination is just a very rare skill stack have you seen his youtube videos they're great they're so good they're they're not at all like anyone else's stuff they're so good and i'm not saying i agree with everything he's saying i'm not saying i endorse or whatever i'm not i'm not saying any of that stuff but all i'm saying is he undeniably broke through the noise and broke through the barriers and brought so much attention to this entire like way of living that it just seems like who else was gonna do that he told me his motivation he was like i can't tell you who the seventy or fiftieth or a hundredth richest person was in nineteen seventy five but i can tell you who galileo is i can tell you what the wright brothers did there's about five to ten people who i could tell you what they invented and how they impact society and none of them does it relate around money and so that's when i realized that going after just business and making more money was not the answer to my question of how do i be somebody that other people remember in five hundred years because that's my motivation do when you hear stuff like that it's like such an amazing one line kill shot because you know five seconds earlier it's like you're crazy you'd be crazy to do that and then he says one thing and you're like i guess you'd be crazy not to do that what i'm like that's how effective that is it's like yeah you're right like what is the money for nobody cares that you you know you sold brain brain tree slash v for seven hundred million dollars and then you know what are gonna live the left rest of your life sipping phoenix cola like you know on islands you own like yeah you could do that or you could be a man of history and like yeah you know you could do this i okay you could help people you know live forever that i guess that isn't crazy i guess that's that actually sounds way better than the alternative give her much the grammy is or they do like the sake or like the oscars i forget where they do the segment or they remember the people who died that year it's like a constant of like oh he died or like or like oh i remember that guy and like you're maybe are thinking back to a time when you did remember because that movie that that person in was like your favorite movie when you're a kid and you're like but he was the man i love that guy okay like like it's just like next and whatever whatever that segment exists i'm like the vast majority of a large percentage of the people who they're talking about are probably significantly more successful and impactful than i am and yeah all they're gonna get from me and millions of other people is a right okay yeah and like and and in some hand i'm always like that's a bummer and then on the other side i'm like that's kinda freeing right like just do whatever you want then and so those segments always reminded me of what brian johnson said so so much of the worst things of our living life are caring about what other people might think of us while we're alive if you stacked onto that and you knew everybody would care about you and think about you when you were dead anyway i think it'd be net negative right like it's a good thing if we don't all have these like insane legacies that everybody knows about because it's freeing to let you actually just leave your life on your own terms for what you you know because nobody's thinking about you anyways i don't even know how we got onto this magic the gathering oh magic together what's the guy i doing now and that's the true magic of magic the gathering oh it brings us together alright is that it that's it just i feel like i could rude to where know why i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never looking back alright let's take a quick break i wanna tell you about marketing school it is a podcast that is part of the hubspot podcast network and it is run by neil patel and eric sue and these guys are both marketers who are running businesses and so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it this is the podcast for you check it out wherever you get your podcast