if you wanna stay being a broke idiot don't listen to studio and then he'll be like babe here's the first lesson for you do this and i know what you're gonna say blah blah blah well here's what i say about that and then he'll like flashes like fancy shit i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a road so sam texted to be this morning and he goes weed did over a hundred million views this year for the podcast and a hundred million i thought he was wrong i was like now away you gotta go double check that he was right we did and that is way more than i thought we did that is a bonkers number i remember when we started this podcast that sounded completely crazy and what we wanted to do today it's at the end of the year we wanted to look back and find what were the key takeaways and lessons that we learned from the hundred million views that we had this year on the podcast so what were the biggest things that stood out when we look at the whole year or were the biggest takeaways that we had sam where do you wanna start yeah let me let's just get the lead out the way let's start with the numbers so i'm gonna give you i'll be transparent about a bunch of numbers but not all but a few alright so in the last eleven so we have a love we have ten days left in new year so i we're not actually at a hundred million i think technically we're at ninety five million but i think it's the past few months it's been like five million a week so on youtube we got eighty million downloads or eighty million views so far that includes youtube shorts which is those pop off sometimes times and we'll get millions of views and so i don't put too much emphasis on that but so youtube was around eighty million and then downloads for the podcast the actual podcast so we call we call everything the podcast but there's basically we call it the rs feed that's spotify itunes whatever you listen to your podcast that was around fifteen million and so collectively we're at at about ninety five million we did a hundred and thirty one episodes which is a ton by the way like this job it's fun but that's a lot of work do you agree like or or do you do you still think that every episode is fun i episode fun to me and i feel like i'm able to i feel like i'm able to improvise well so it is a lot of work but there are some days some of our best episodes our ideas we have ninety minutes before we record and someone sends a text saying actually what if we tried this and those turn out really well sometimes i think it's because what we've tried to do is make this podcast the byproduct of the other work we do so it's like the the basic business model is do interesting business shit so so invest in businesses create businesses talk to interesting people and then the pod is just dis still the you know the the most interesting ten percent that you're allowed to talk about and we go talk about it and so if we do that right the pod is pretty easy when we don't do that right then the pod gets pretty hard but it's kind of like exercising like some days i don't want to do it and then almost every single time even if it's a bad episode or something didn't like i didn't love i feel happy and i'm proud that i did it so right for it's it's like exercise alright and i'll give you a few more stats so do you want me to go through the most pop the top three most popular episodes yeah well are they alright so we actually have two categories so which is weird because the most popular episodes on youtube are not the most popular episodes on podcast podcasts so again rs assess feed so the three most popular episodes on mega phone that's what we used to track this the first one is the greatest businesses of all times si ups as a service work harder not smarter hack that was the the title the second one was brainstorming chat gb business ideas with billionaire dha shah and the third one shockingly i didn't think this was gonna be the top one one of the top ones was nick nick hub how to make millions from content without selling ads that was the most popular the top three most popular on podcast the top three most popular on youtube it was the same one actually it was brainstorming chat business ideas with the billionaire it was with da shaw that has four fifty thousand views i don't know this for sure i think he did something da did to manipulate this i think he for sure email this out to his audience i wouldn't be surprised if he bought ads or did something because da loves to win and be number one so he's number one on youtube the second most popular one on youtube ten years of money wisdom in under twenty minutes four hundred twenty five thousand that is you by yourself and i think you've made that episode with youtube in mind is that right yeah i made that as a youtube first and it worked and then the third one was very recent it was november second how i bought a multi million dollar a carton business for zero dollars three hundred and ninety one thousand views on youtube sarah moore and sean and then i'll just say the fourth one was martin sk when we interviewed him to had two hundred and fifty seven thousand views so that was a the some of those were a bit surprising what do you think about that those make sense to me i mean each of those is basically when i read the title i'm like yeah i'd click i clicked that and that's basically what what what works on youtube is i click that and then you gotta deliver on the promise and so you know maybe this is maybe this whole content thing is a lot simpler and you just gotta get the get the titles right and then you work backwards from there and make the content off the title well and this this point is for any content creator out there we you and i this show we are kind of bastard children of content creators so we started without youtube we only went for podcast downloads on podcast apps i think we had a youtube channel but it was really like you and i went to best buy and we bought a camera and we just set it there and we just uploaded it and and so we didn't really care about it i think we'd only started carrying about a year ago and what's crazy is if you really wanna do it the right way or maybe not but the really right way is you start with one in mind and you go all in on that we didn't go all in on youtube i don't think we should have but but i understand the argument that we should have because what works on youtube doesn't always work on rs assessment feed and vice versa and so speaking of you youtube by the way do wanna hear here's a few more stats so we added so we did a hundred and thirty one episodes we added about two hundred and fifty thousand subscribers oh sorry two hundred ten thousand subscribers subscribers we started the year at a hundred and fifty thousand and we ended with three hundred sixty thousand and you wanna know the the biggest needle mover besides actually caring about youtube do you wanna know what it was that got a subscribers i i my guess is it's the gentleman agreement is that not it the the gentleman's agreement and so for all the listeners out there here's another takeaway when you hear a youtuber say click the subscribe button and all that and you hear everyone say that and it gets you you think it doesn't matter we saw a there's a distinct point in the chart where we ask people to subscribe and it went up and so like it absolutely works and so it's sort of like the you know how people say why are you buying ads on facebook nobody uses facebook no one clicks ads nonsense that is absolutely not true yeah and actually that was one of my takeaways for the year was when we were like alright we should start growing on youtube what are we you know what are we not like about what what's stopping us from wanting to do that and one of the things is dude i don't wanna be that guy who's like alright guys if you like this video click the like button and then smash the subscribe button i turn on notifications as well as like oh god i gotta turn into you know like inflatable arm youtube guy and you like in front of the car dealerships it's like that that way you know an arm balloon thing i was like oh god i don't wanna do this but you had a really great idea of this idea of the gentleman's agreement so basically how do you do the cringe thing in the non cringe way right how do you turn lemons onto into lemonade you did it with a gentleman's agreement i think we also did it recently with the thrill of the shell or it's like yeah alright look we wanna have ads to promote our businesses cool that's fine and i think the audience gets that that's fine but how do we not make this an experience that's annoying for us to do like sit down and record these like shitty ad reads and then on the audience side they just wanna hit the skip button like what would be neither what would be fun for us and actually fun for them to listen to and then when we switched to the thrill of the show i feel like that was a good idea and i think that's something that people should do more of if you could pull it off right you should basically set a standard of like no no i'm gonna have my cake and eat it to and i feel like we did that in two areas this year and i i feel like that's a that's something worth worth remembering as we go into next year of like alright what would also be instead of something that's kind of lame or a bit of a drag or just kind of extra work how do we make it awesome for us and the audience because it didn't take that much more effort to do that it just took a little bit of a you know charm no and it wasn't hard at all the the problem was the gentleman's agreement that we would always tell people about it like faded out like it got we forgot it got not it got not novel and we were like oh shit we have to come up with another one and i like watch all i'll these youtube videos and i just see one and i write down and i'm like copying that copying that and i just never forgot to say it so we've screwed up by not being consistent do you wanna go like tit or tat a little bit and like just go through like interesting things that you've learned throughout the year yeah yeah alright i'll go first with one so this podcast is steady eddie this podcast is the tortoise not the hair so it grows very steadily you could put up this chart from social blade that's like your our youtube growth and it's great in that you know we started the year under a hundred thousand we're ending the year almost four hundred thousand but there's like no spikes this thing is just a line that's just creeping up like it you know like this is like if my uncle goes for a hike this is what it would look it's like what it would look like it's a it's a map it's like this is his str right here and so i'm like what is this this is so different than everything else i do because i am much more of a go for the home run try to do something incredible and then if it doesn't work or even if it's like you know you find something that's good this don't really follow through and this is like a leak in my game in a way but i kind of took some pride in this let me give you some examples so on twitter we all join this group chat called the hundred k club we all had i don't know ten to twenty thousand twitter followers and we all five or six friends we will all wanted to hit a hundred k we independently had that goal and we all did it we all surpassed it but we all did it very differently nick hub nick cooper did it and he's kind of polarizing so he'll say controversial shit that he believes but he'll kinda spiced it up a little bit he knows what he's doing he uses controversy to grow and saw hills like every day i wake up and i open a fortune cookie and then i type it out to whatever it was i'll put that out to twitter i do it that every single day and i'll do a thread every every tuesday and thursday and why would i not it works and we're like why would it not because it's so boring to do that but he's he did it and he did it and he grew the the most out of all of them i think he's like i got a million he did it with like what i'll call more cookie cutter stuff yeah feel good you know kept it you know pretty safe no controversy no real like i would say like that much original you know a storytelling or or wisdom but more like general best practices like kind of you know stuff we've heard before but packaged well he's posted so many videos of children and just probably title that humans are amazing yeah but i i love my son like i'm never gonna write that shit right like yeah my son and i was like hey listen you're never getting that alright that for me i'm not i'm not using you for that if you're not using me for that alright we're not doing that but jokes aside you know saw hill was more of consistency and and just put out you know he was ready to hit base hits and he just base hit his way to a million and i did the opposite i didn't have a schedule i didn't draft things i didn't have a ghost writer i didn't do anything i just had a i had probably six tweets that went viral one was like this club house thread one was about the meta one was about elon musk one was about whatever i just had a couple of these things go go really really viral and i would go weeks and weeks without even tweeting and then i would just do that and and i got to baby three hundred and fifty thousand and so here's the lesson learned the joke on me in the end so this is kind of the the long one to take away is i was like your boys a home run hit i just go for the big swings i don't have to do all that consistent cbs i just come in just mike up with a viral thread and i peace out and i was so happy with myself i kinda looked up at the end of the year i was like like the people who did the consistency thing got way further and had ended did way less like they didn't have to pull a rabbit out of a hat to do it and i felt like i was having to pull a rabbit out of a hat in order to to get growth to happen and because that's so hard i could only do it so often the podcast because i do this with you and you are a more structured disciplined guy you're like let's set recording dates and let's never missed them and i'm like dude what if we did like ten episodes in the next two days but then like you know if i'm busy let's not do an episode like i would have had a totally different schedule i would have such worse results and when i look at this it's like damn consistency wins again this brings me the way it's it's five i think we're is this five hundred and fifty or five hundred and twenty so we're like five hundred hundred plus episodes yeah five hundred and thirty three alright i said so we're five hundred plus in it's a lot that's a lot and we record like clockwork same time same days every week no excuses and so i would have never done excuses we've had some excuses well we've have reason yeah yeah yeah sickness children and that's about it so alright so but i guess the the the this takes me to one of the biggest lessons i learned was through the podcast we met andrew wilkinson consent people know about him but i also met his business partner who you know chris and chris said something at a dinner that i've i've shared on the podcast but it it was the question of the year he goes do you know somebody was talking about some something they did they failed they like but i'll and then somebody else to like kinda of pat them on the back was like you know you learned so much i'm like oh my god learned so much yeah so many lessons learned so many and chris goes like what and you would think for somebody who went through this traumatic experience so many lessons learned that they would be like number one this that's the most important lesson number two this number three this those lessons weren't at the tip of their tongue in fact the lessons weren't even in their head they learned actually nothing and chris correctly called it out and i had never heard anybody questioned this assumption that when somebody says i failed what i learned he was like you know i don't think people really learn it was an in fact some people who when i asked them what they learned they say something that tells me they learned the wrong lesson and i think that's what happened to me this year on the consistency versus like big home run viral thing i think i learned the wrong lesson i was cursed by the fact that i did go viral a few times and i i did pass my kind of hundred k goal and actually the lesson was dude if i just had consistently tweeted every monday wednesday and friday probably would took me thirty minutes i probably be at a million followers instead and and so i think i learned the wrong lesson and i think that chris question of did you even learn the right lesson from this experience it showed up everywhere for me this year everybody i talked to i realized you know more people fell into that camp the outlier was somebody who went through something and had the right takeaway from it the outlier was that well i would say to you and this isn't a leading question but it it is for me when i myself this which is is that even worth it is having is being popular on social media even worth it and i talked to a lot of people who are significantly more successful than i am in turn terms of traditional success they built bigger companies whatever and they'll ask about getting popular on social media and my immediate response is like but why like you're doing you're doing awesome and you could be private that sounds way better and so i would wonder is it even worth it to have a million for you in your case actually the answer is probably yes but that's something that i always ask people when they talk to me about social media i think for a lot of people the answer is no because it's almost the cliche example of play stupid games win stupid prizes it's like if you play the i wanna be popular on social media game you win the wonderful prize of having bunch of followers you you know don't really know or care about you and you basically turning your life into a performance for them right so you sort of win the stupid prize in the end for me my the like you know after a bunch of soul searching it was became very obvious that the thing i actually wanted to do the thing that would bring me the most joy in my life is i if i get to be kind of like a one of these like thinker guys it's like i think you know i don't actually wanna be elon musk i wanna be tim ferris and once i realized that and that sounded very true for me i was okay then i gotta do that i gotta go learn cool stuff i gotta s you know information from a bunch of places and then yeah which is super fun for me and then i'm gonna try to teach it and i like teaching it and i'll you i'll try to share it i'll try i like sharing it why not i'm so excited about the stuff that i'm figuring out i'd like to create content and i'm good at creating content so it's a good fit for me and so for me it is probably the right game i wouldn't say being popular on social media does the right way to phrase it i think it is like getting to be a thinker like make making that your your actual charge so sure but you're right me me calling it popular and social media it's like calling it a creator like it just it's like oh that's cute that's how i meant it but that's sounds sounds like alright the biggest thing i learned this year and i have a bunch of them but number one the biggest thing so i'll i'll set state here so i think last spring i i do remember what month it is we were like alright i had i was at the two so basically when i sold the company the hubspot i had like a two year deal where i stock head of s whatever that ended in february and then we had to renegotiate some stuff some some contracts and i think we started that what did we start that do you remember which month end of april end of april it didn't end until september is that right did it was a september where ended something don't like that august september so we go to negotiate this and i'm a pretty soft guy i have known all along that i'm bad at negotiating i either was a fair shame hard on the outside soft on the inside yeah like i i just i'm not good with uncomfortable conversations i i i just i don't love confrontation i want people to think that i'm easy to deal with but i leave a lot on the table i leave a ton on the table and we go to negotiate this contract and sean you were like let me take a lead on this and you did so many things that i thought were the stupidest thing ever and i was like you're being rude this is stupid you're be like you're asking for too much you're big diff you're being difficult you're in the weeds too much why do you care about this once you know it'd be like a five page or eight page contract you're like this one sentence guys we need to talk about the like when need to change this word from like you know like mandatory to optional or i don't remember them yeah like it like you were like and i think we probably had ten revisions and i and we had a we you and i had a hire a lawyer to go through all this stuff and we sweat the details so much in my heart i was like everything about this is wrong and you wanna know something i was wrong you are right you negotiated this wonderfully and i learned so many things and i could summarize this in something that you had said i think you said someone told you which is the person who could be most uncomfortable and in negotiation will oftentimes win yeah i think that i think that's it so the way you said it is the next actually the way i say it so you said you know whoever's more comfortable will win and it's actually like the first thing in negotiations realized it's not about winning like both sides want things usually different things you have to make sure both sides get what they want so that both sides feel like they win but that it is true that you have to be willing to be uncomfortable for much like almost like the definition of the word uncomfortable for longer than you're comfortable being uncomfortable right that was the that's what i was trying to say because you know it's very easy in the moment to say if i push this button the pain stops and the uncertainty goes away and the item goes off my to do list and i very tempted to wanna push that button well like i'm not particularly that so at the hustle we did enterprise sales basic so we you know hundred thousand dollar plus advertising deals i wasn't particularly good at that but one thing that i learned early on was it's what for any salesperson it's best to not be like a hard hitting like i'm gonna sell you this i'm gonna sell you this and said you say alright so what are you guys looking for like what when what what are you trying to get out of this what do you need our customers or you know you you basically ask them what they want and then you tailor a solution or or or or position your solution to fit their needs you did a really good job of that you're like alright hubspot tell me everything you guys want and we'll try to accommodate or or or i'll phrase my solution to fit your needs and and and we you did a really good job at that alright so let me do a simple one this year my cash flow so my monthly income i think went up by like four and a half however i didn't i i was very focused on baking money and i didn't and i normally don't care about like you know expenses or you know it's like you know that phrase it's like not how much you make how much you keep that's true i just don't really follow it very well and the biggest expense sounds good always not smart the biggest expense always is taxes and i didn't do a lot of tax planning this is very simple one one of my big takeaways for the year is lesson learned again the taxes are your biggest expense once you start making real money and i looked into a bunch of different opportunities and at the only at the end of the year that i do something smart which was i know somebody very well who is phenomenal at real estate they have a very niche application of real estate they crush it like i'm talking about went from zero to owning a billion dollars in real estate with no outside capital in like you know eight years type of thing and i watched them do that brick by brick i know this this beth this like specific thing that they do where they have a bit of an unfair advantage where it why it works and i never really asked them to participate in a deal i was like you know they don't take any external money so why not but i know that we have a good really good relationship i was like maybe they would take it so finally it towards the end of year i like hey can i like deploy some capital here because if i can invest with you i think i'll get a great return but also i'll get that sweet sweet depreciation and so i will get a you know sort of a double return on my side because i get the you know returns to the property but i also get the tax savings today and i just started doing it it it is so good it is so smart and i'm i am so regret that i didn't take this more seriously earlier and jess mock came on the podcast and she said it was her that triggered me to go take action on this she goes i go do you spend a bunch she goes oh i wanna talk about what risk will do their taxes and we didn't even really get to that in the episode but during the pre call i was like what do you mean by we should talk about it like and she's was like well i think just the general thing is that most entrepreneurs really don't spend enough time on on their taxes and i get it they wanna build their business but she's like if you just look mathematically like this is gonna be you know between i don't know thirty to fifty percent of all your income every year it gets taxed this way and twenty plus percent of your gains of all your investment gains gonna get taxed this way she's like it's financially irresponsible to not at least spend five to ten percent of your time on this and then i did them i was ten percent of my time would be five full weeks of a year i was there's no way i'm gonna do that but i was like i should at least spend like two one you know like something where i'm actually focused who did you hire like a did do like a tax strategist i talked to a few but you know the reality was it's not that hard like the real real estate really is the best way to do this because what you do is you take you know you take income and you have taxable income coming from one place you take that cash you deploy that cash into real estate and my you know my wife is a real estate professional so we have we can offset the active income and so you you put the cash there now that cash is gonna grow in the property but you got all this tax lost to wipe out your your taxable income if that makes sense so so you get cash on both sides but the taxable income gets gets you know reduced by using real estate so it doesn't really take like i don't need by the way it is hard it it's hard to find deals that are are good i mean like that's the key like i i knew this for a long time i was like great what am i gonna do do go look for four places in missouri like i i don't have the time or the energy or expertise to do this then you have a bunch of different like you know fund manager type people you're like i gotta vet them and figure out if they're any good and and and do a couple deals with them and i could do that in this case i was lucky that i had a very long relationship with somebody that i had seen to do this with their own money they're not a money manager and so and they get you know far above average returns because of what they do and so anyways that that became you know the thing i'm gonna do so anyways we we should talk more later you you should do this too i i'm like so convinced that this is a good idea for people in our position and i think most of our friends in our circle we're all like internet money people and we'd like kinda suck at the the real world money stuff yeah i suck at it alright i've got another one i've titled this loose canon loose results so for the majority of my career i've been a loose cannon i would say silly stuff and it would get a reaction and i would get results sometimes i gotta put that asterisk sometimes there's all like a laugh or like i was in the media business we are still in the media business is like i i i can go the obnoxious or blunt or ridiculous route and i can get clicks and the problem with that is as you get more popular you have to decide are you gonna go all in on that or are you gonna not go all in in it or you wanna be this medium ground and the medium ground is bad and so here's here's an example of someone who goes all in on it dave port the guy's a missionary he but here's what here's what that means so he says ridiculous stuff he had a sex scandal this year regardless of what the facts are i'm not even debating what the facts of that of his issues were he was accused of being i i i it might have been like crazy like a assault like some really bad shit and he went all in on it and he came out with like and he like he kind of i don't think he joked about it but he like confronted it head on but then there's other things that he's done where he's like look i'm so rich i can do all this stuff and but there's a downside to that the upside is he got lots of traffic he you know whenever he goes through any type of scandal he gets lots of views and somehow imagine he gets paid to those ads the downside is obvious which is you are now this guy where you've gotta live this life where you're this loose cannon guy you say whatever you want and you're a huge target then we've gotten really close with andrew wilkinson who is not a loose cannon he says some stuff bluntly but inch and he's a very honest guy but he's reserved a bit more measured yeah he's more measured we had sci on the what's what sides last name bulky bulky he's one of the best guests we've had very measured the guy only thirty two or something and he's in the ballpark of being a billionaire he owns all these companies and off air when i have hung out with them he's all a little bit less measured but on air he was definitely like he he was very like i look my reputation matters i need to have a good reputation and he cared about that stuff we also had kevin ryan kevin ryan probably the second or third most successful guy we've had in the podcast very measured very honest but very like straightforward but also like calculating sarah moore was another person sarah mo sara moore she's explicitly said i don't wanna be famous i'm only gonna be here and she still said good stories but i'm sure that she like her reputation was in mind things like that and i think that i'm not willing to go the day port when out for sure i don't want that flack i've said very mild things and i'll get flack for it and i'm like yeah i just don't wanna live this life where i or i go hardcore so anyways a takeaway is i've actually wanted to pull back some public persona stuff not reveal certain numbers i don't wanna be a target i don't wanna have to fight these battles i don't get joy from that i used to get joy from that and i would respond to haters constantly online just prove like so you can talk shit to me i'm like i'm a real guy i i read all the comments that's stupid i don't wanna be that person that that that's a pretty big takeaway you you've done a good job of like you've not you've actually had a few fires this year where you said some stuff that you got called on and you didn't back down from it but you also didn't in it i don't even remember i'm sure there was what it there was a time where you criticized someone who worked for you and it caused a little bit of a spat on the internet yeah and i i i don't remember another time but i think that that's what i'm referring to and in my head when i'm hearing you say that or and when i'm seeing that i'm like i wanna stay out of this i don't want any of this drama i don't wanna i don't want i don't want this stress you know we've seen it with cha a bit where he put himself out there and he's done some contradictory things and he's taking a lot of slack and i respect that he's like owned up to it and he likes faces it head on i don't wanna live that life i thought i did i don't as we've gotten more popular i i for sure do not wanna live that life and i prefer to be more private now than i was in the past that's a good one i have kind of a related one so one of the best meetings i had this year was with james career james career for those don't don't know he is the founder of something called n which stands for network effects they basically and they they have like i don't know a billion dollars of assets under manager they they invest in tech startups he's been in he's a silicon valley og so he's been building successful tech companies for like you know twenty years or something like that it's had i i think multiple a hundred million dollar plus exits correct and super fun guy i go to his office i drive down to palo alto i don't usually leave the house but for james i'm there and literally it's just me and him in the office i was like where is everybody else he's like we don't really even have that many people but also yeah nobody's coming to work anymore everyone works from home so just me and him in his office for a couple hours and he shared with me a piece of advice that really stuck with me and i started seeing every something i hadn't really thought about so he goes he goes can i give me some unsolicited advice i was like please and he goes you know today he drew this like line on the whiteboard he's like he goes he goes i really like what you guys are doing with your show but i don't know like where you go from here because he's like you're kind of in the middle he's like meaning if i think about really up market he's like you know when we make content we're not making content that we don't want a million views if we did a million views on a piece of content we probably made the wrong piece of content he goes because what i'm doing i've fact is he's like i'm trying to invest in you know whatever it's the next airbnb the next twitter the next whatever so he's like i need the most ambitious founders in the world who are building you know like venture backed tech companies to read our stuff really care about it and think when i'm gonna raise money i'm gonna go to that fx and he's like so you have us and a sixteen z and others that are trying to be really up market because we're trying to attract a certain quality founder of which there's only you know a smaller pool but they also care about different things they're only gonna you know they don't wanna hear about the the vending machine side hustle like we'll we'll be like oh this guys got eighteen vending machines he's make a twenty two k a month isn't that sick and like doesn't care about that they're trying to get you know only people who are gonna like disrupt the health care system or some shit like that i don't know you know so such a big idea who even knows what it means by the way i would disagree with him i i think that the i i think they care enough to listen but not enough to actually do anything about it you know what i mean oh yeah and the vending machine thing actually you're right because i meet a lot of these people and they're like pretty fascinated by like the economics of stuff that's outside of their world because there's yeah of business nerds i think they actually care enough to be entertained by it but right that's but that's about it but like then you have on the other end of the spectrum you have you know let's say and i i love gary v but you know gary v is basically like motivation grind like hey you got like his content will be literally he's like i'm gonna pull up to this garage sale and i'm gonna flip this v for you know on on and imagine if i do that every day you could you you that could be your hustle and it's like so i could make you know a hundred grand a years like i kinda a job can do that but this is i guess the the entry level of entrepreneurship it's like hey and he who he has a huge audience which i was by the way but if you still wanna do it gary you know like what's the deal for like the best investments gary he's made i think came from his peers like his friends hung out with not like is listeners in that way right i on his fans right and he probably like i i shouldn't speak for him but i guess like it's very easy if you're in that position to be like it's great because i get huge numbers but i'm not necessarily it's not like a two way thing i'm not learning back from my audience as much maybe i'm you know i'm happy to sign autograph and take selfies but i'm not i i'm not excited to go have dinner with five people in this group because i don't feel like it's gonna you know iron is not sharpening iron there right like i i'm a black belt i'm more hanging white belts and so i kinda wanna when i'm trying to spa i wanna spa with black belts anyways so he's like you have a decision to make you're in the middle right now with my first million you kind of have a foot in both camps and he's like it's gonna be very tempting for you to go down market and he's like don't do it he's like go if anything go up market and i agree in the long run you're gonna want you're gonna be more interested in the topics that those people are interested in you're gonna not wanna keep saying the same like beginner level here's how you you know literally here's how you make your first million and here's how you get here's how you should quit your job and here's how you get a startup up idea and here's how you incorporate in an llc like you're not gonna wanna make that content as you grow and he's like you should steer market he's like my only advice to is that i think that was so smart and so i don't even know why he said that to me because who's even thinking about that i wasn't anything about it but now like i'm just gonna give you an example alex i think it's in one hand absolutely killing the content game i think alex is awesome i think he's super super talented but i think he's making a mistake and that he goes very down market i'm just gonna read you some subtitles of his last of videos he's posted in the last like two months okay how to make so much money it makes you sick how to get rich this black friday watch this if you're tired of being broke the real reason your business isn't growing a bunch of these right so like the i i don't wanna you know pick on these but these are more down market video concepts and they'll get views for sure and like the comments will kinda show you to people like oh my god to change my life you're my hero blah blah and that it's not that he's not doing a service for those people however i i look at that i think for me the game i wanna play is definitely gonna be not to go down market to resist the temptation try to create that content and to focus on creating up market content which is gonna have a lower view count number but it's gonna have a higher value per viewer and more of the audience and i'm it's like i'm creating a magnet i'm not creating an audience i'm creating a magnet with my content and i wanna attract the right people and so anyways that was a big lesson takeaway for me that i wouldn't have otherwise thought about yeah i think like sometimes some of the contractors who work on this podcast will suggest ideas because they're just looking at like youtube analytics and i'm like no i i i eight eight out of the ten things i i don't like would would work apple sold iphones for five dollars they'd sell more units too right like but if you're building an up market brand if you louis a vuitton like you you don't want to go down market there's another guy we met and and we followed victim to it as well i i don't wanna act like our shit don't stink but like even though you and i will fight it like sometimes we will correct the only reason this of lesson resonates is because it's something i'm wrestling with right if i solve problem i don't really care about it it doesn't stand out as a big takeaway because i didn't i didn't have the problem in the first place this is a problem i have so i'm trying to figure out where to go and this advice was very helpful there's another thing guy i does this have you seen this guy in instagram the genius ceo yeah yeah yeah you know came to he he's in austin right now i think he's so funny i think he's so funny funny so like i find him hilarious and like when i met him he can't tell if it's it's a grab the joke like it's like there's a lot of like nuggets in there but he'll be he'll be like bad bunny is only making thirty million dollars a year what a bitch move we're gonna teach this guy out to make a billion like it'll like insult these people and it's pretty funny yeah he'll be like goes the this product this product is gonna bust fashion than a bunch of you jumps out there so let me tell you how i would do it i was like well yeah like what a hook so we met this guy in real life in real life total sweet sweetheart and very smart guy right super nice dude humble whatever and then i'm like and then i'm like what do have this like ridiculous mustache your fingernails are painted you got this like crazy chain and a gucci purse but like well he looks like a celebrity he's like a tall good looking guy like an ig like like male ig thought but you're in person you're totally respectable humble nice guy dad and he was like oh yeah created this character like i realized like what hits on ig is gonna be like fancy cars fancy shit six pack abs hot girls and he so he's like you know i just do that it's my character and i built a following so we've got two hundred thousand followers on here his content is hilarious it's so funny he's but he's selling a you know fba you you know basically like i made my millions selling drop shipping basically i you know i'm doing fba brands you know you're if you wanna stay being a broke idiot don't listen to ceo and then he'll be like like here's the first lesson for you do this and i know what you're gonna say blah blah blah here's what i say about that and then he like flashes like fancy shit he's like this a video of me buying this von cl you know necklace it's so funny and i'm like what lose this guy but i think he's also gonna be trapped in the down market thing right he's selling a mashed remind you gotta go pay to get into he's gotta make millions of dollars doing this but i don't think he's got any like you know i don't think he's he got any way out you know that that is a he's cornered himself in that way sure sure yeah i i he's a good follow he's very funny alright let me give you another one so the biggest takeaway that i i want people to have in this podcast we've done it now for three or four years is and and and and at first i like i'll go get a haircut and they'll be like so what do you do for work and i was like oh i do this i do that i i work on this podcast and then they're like what's the podcast about and i'm like well it's called my first million but it's not like the title is accurate and and i'll i'll explain what it's about and what what i what i tell people is that look we've had multi billionaires on this show we've had employees at companies on the on this show i think what we care about is people who create a path and they do it not necessarily like i don't necessarily think just because you are billionaire you are particularly better than anyone else like what i care about is someone who says i'm gonna be great at this weird type of art i'm gonna choose a game so they choose a game with intention and then they play the shit out of that their game right that's is that the description because that's what it is for me that's exactly it and so for example the guy i talked about all the time brett ad hoc he's not like me he was like well i'm gonna raise a billions billions of dollars and try to create a five hundred billion dollar company i'm i'm inspired by that but i will never i don't want to do that or even this example we just gave the genes he chose to play that game he's playing the shit out of it i respect that i don't wanna do that but i i i kind of admire people who intentionally choose their game and then play the shit out it i admire the hell of it or we've we've had john k john k started soy which scaled to be a a a fairly large business he's got another company and now he's like a full time content creator he has a a youtube channel and he it's beautifully done he's doing it wonderfully and then we've had rob die account we've had layered hamilton on guys who aren't the silicon valleys type of lifestyle but they kill it whatever they do and i admire all of them equally and so the takeaway that i've had which is there's a million ways to get to where you wanna go or there's a million ways to get to certain way to a certain place what and for a lot of these people it's money but there's still a million ways to get there and there's you shouldn't just like for example when i'm moved to san san francisco i was like you have to raise vc you happy to this you have to do this but then we meet meet sci who brings all i imagine yeah i imagine he's worth five hundred to a billion dollars he started a wordpress blog which sounds crazy stupid if you don't know what you're talking about which i didn't turns out that killed it then he bought tons of gas stations now he owns fifty different wordpress plug ins collectively that does over a hundred million in revenue he's a young guy in florida not even a cool part of florida he's not miami i think he's said like tallahassee or i forget where like somewhere in florida no disrespect tallahassee see ari alright but it's much there's just there's just people who listen to this pod just like oh man their hometown where they grew up dude gets short lauderdale autumn care i'm from i'm from saint louis sorry alright i could say these things i'm not from a cool place so all the baltimore out there you know like i i feel love for you the tier tier city cities out there it's it it it's it's objectively not like the place to be and and but what i'm saying is i appreciate the hell a lot of people like that and learning about all of these different ways and my biggest takeaway from this year and doing the podcast which is there's a lot of different ways to do it you just have to choose where you wanna go and you gotta choose what rules you're willing to play by but there's not one way to do it and i wouldn't even i wouldn't even go as far is to say there's one that's likely in fact if i had to say that i would say the one that's likely to get there is starting a small services business and just growing it over fifty years and paying yourself a good salary after year ten and doing that for for decades which is not at all what i would have expected you know it's just a a normal small business owner that does it for a long time is significantly more likely to have a higher income and die rich than any other way but there's a lot of different ways to do it and that's one of the things i appreciate it appreciate by doing this podcast that's a great one and i do think that that's the if you zoom out that is kind of the point of the pod the point of the pod isn't saying do x or do y it's check this out you can do x here's how that works you could do y here's how that works you could do z here's how that works and by the end of it you're either gonna be in one of two positions some people hear all that and get overwhelmed don't know where to go there's too many pop too many paths too many possibilities they yeah it sort of para them but i hope that's not most people i think for most people the the net reaction is kinda like wow winning and being successful is this thing that feels scarce if you're not around it right like where i grew up i didn't know any business people nobody and my family was a business purple person no nobody i'm my cousins on my aunt i'm my uncle none of them did business they raised tallahassee born in oklahoma and the and so you know i wasn't just sorry to flick me off or make it tallahassee by the way and so so you know i i wasn't around it it seemed like this far away thing that i didn't really even understand there was no map and i thought maybe there's one path but i don't know it and i'm not invited to that to that party and then my hope is that if you listen to this podcast you're gonna hear over the course of a year a hundred different examples of ways to win and how they work and at that point it's just a matter of choosing and all of a sudden winning and success becomes this thing that instead of being scarce and difficult is abundant it's everywhere and it's right as your fingertips if you just start start doing whatever sounds most intriguing to you and then you just keep playing the game but you know it'll it will work out for you that's i think that's what the pod ultimately does for people good i hope it does i have one more deal one more you go alright my last one so we had scott gallo on scott gal it's guy who he he said on the potty because i'm worth over a hundred million dollars and he also said in that same sense i'm deeply afraid of running out of money we had morgan h on most recently and he said something like he knows that you shouldn't necessarily set goals for money and he knows like objectively he's got enough that he likely won't ever run out and he knows that he shouldn't check his net worth but then also we press them on it and he was like but of course like if i'm laying at bed at and night i like just because i know what i'm supposed to do i still wonder what it would like be like to have more and i don't think we've ever had anyone on the podcast maybe jack smith maybe jack smith but jack smith like a freak but i don't think we've ever had anyone on the podcast regardless of what they have they don't want more and that sounds like a really negative thing of like what you have enough why do you need more why do you need to achieve this and that i think it should be the opposite and i think the takeaways no matter what you have you're always gonna feel that there's another level and that you should wanna and i don't think that's a depressing takeaway i think the takeaway should be you will always want more accomplishments more achievements and that is okay that is totally okay and that is normal and just expect that wherever your goal is once you achieve it you're gonna feel satisfied only for a short amount of time and then you're going to want to achieve more and that's basically ninety five or no i would say ninety nine percent of the time that's true and that's okay it's okay to want more right i think there's a healthy way to go about it and there's an unhealthy way to go about it i would say scott probably has unhealthy ways i would say i have unhealthy ways and i think you can change those unhealthy ways to healthy ways but no matter what you have you will accomplish it whatever your goal is and you'll get there it'll take six months and you'll say what's next how do i do it again how do i do more and just expect that that's going to happen yeah i think when people hear that it sounds like yeah you know it sounds wrong or sad or bad or something like that but another way of looking at that same thing is the concept of infinite and finite games and so the my my understanding it i i haven't spend a ton of time on this but my understanding of it is a very simple understanding is a finite game is one where you play for the result so you play in order to achieve an outcome and you're hoping to get to that outcome yeah that's the purpose of it and then an infinite game is one where you play for the sake of playing and so you you play because you want to play now if you look at that in practice so for example for me basketball is something i i consider like an infinite game right like i i play because it's so fun to play and i want to play and my goal is not to like win and stop my goal is to win but i i wouldn't stop if i won because but not because it's like greed it's like well winning is a is bait it the score board makes the game more interesting and it in a small burst yes of course we're trying to win the fourth you know by the end of the fourth quarter i wanna have the higher score but ultimately like you know hey alright let's run it back let's play it again let's play again let's play till our legs fall off is it's basically how it's always felt for me and that's the closest thing i felt to an infinite game until kind of business came in and it's actually very very similar it's like i like having a score board it makes it more fun to play when you do keep score but i'm not trying to get to a result to i'm not doing work to get to a result and then i'm gonna stop working it's i like playing i plan to keep playing i'm playing for the sake of playing and but but the score board makes playing a lot more interesting and fun and intense and that should be the takeaway that way the takeaway is that because i had the i previously had the if i get to this i will not feel stressed and i won't work anymore the reality is i still felt trust i felt less trust though there's no doubt no doubt about that i felt a lot less trust and six months later i was like but i have to go and do something i i feel like a piece of shit just sitting here and i feel good contributing the so why do you think you if i just said why do you still feel stressed why do you think you feel stressed after even after the event because i think that i i the the stress i i think that i well like to get like therapeutic it's all baked into some type of childhood trauma and and and that just takes years like unwind but why does it why part of the stress is comparing yourself to others and so you want to achieve more and also wanting more stuff which is what do they say desire is hell or desire is pain yeah or desire suffering so wanting more stuff which i try to combat by just i'm like no i that won't i try to like say this won't make me happy compare myself to others wanting more stuff and also just wanting to get rid of a chip on my shoulder right i'll offer you a different answer that might be true for you i don't know if it is or not but i i think i i believe this is more true because i hear a lot of people talk about it insight out trauma it's like alright well nothing i could do about that that's literally it's written it sounds like it's a it's a long unpacking process though i don't wanna do that like i i still got suitcases over here i have an unpack from vacations i've been on like i i'm not trying to unpack years of childhood trump similarly it's like oh i have to like stop the feeling of envy or desire oh my coach will never wired as an asshole yeah that's sounds like a game i'm never gonna win so i actually think there's a different answer which is emotion the the emotions you feel are much like muscles it's basically you've had a lot of practice at dressing so what happens is people practice feeling a certain way and they don't think about it as practice but what does it mean when you do something all the time regularly you are habit yourself or practicing doing that you're getting reps at doing it and then sun one day suddenly they changed the the environment and they think that all that practice and that that muscle that they've basically developed and practiced and wrecked daily will just go away and there's new muscle called content and happiness will appear because the the the bank balance in your you know bank of america account has changed no way right and so i would actually say it's the opposite if you wanna change that feeling it's not the money it's you have to find a way on a daily basis to practice having that feeling you wanna you wanna feel happy you gotta practice happy you wanna feel content and peaceful you gotta practice content and peaceful you gotta practice that more than you're practicing anxiety and fear and stress and all these other things and so for anybody out there is listening sam is absolutely right your feeling is not gonna change but i don't think it's because of these like deeply rooted psychological and historical reasons a simpler example a simpler explanation might be that i've really just gotten a lot of reps practicing one thing and therefore that's easy and familiar and habit individual for me and i gotta start practicing the other the same thing happened when we sold the milk road i talked ben and i was like ben i was a feel you know first kind of big exit for you and he's like honestly it doesn't feel like i i'm kinda disappointed like it doesn't feel like very much like it doesn't i don't feel that much and i go he's like maybe it's because maybe if the number was bigger or maybe this right he started to going down that path and i was like no dude it's because you're trying to feel like this kind of victorious joy how many days out of the year the last three or sixty five days did you feel that like zero did you let yourself feel that zero and so what do you think all of a sudden today you're gonna turn on and be really good at feeling that like no dude this practice he if you wanna feel that he we gotta do that regularly so that that muscles there and do you did you come up with this theory on your own or did you steal twenty robbins when i was at that event he has a similar thing he calls it your emotional home he goes everybody's got an emotional home he's like because he's like he's like look watch watch this raise your hand if you're somebody who you know sometimes gets a little pissed off every raise their hand he's like raise your hand if sometimes you are just super silly having fun being playful everybody raise their hand he's like okay so we're capable of both you are not like just an asshole or just a super nice easy going guy we all fluctuate and he's like but it is true that we have an emotional home it's the place your like your home it's the place you spend the most time as it's like if your emotional home is that you are stressed out it doesn't matter if you sell your company for dollars if you did if you grind it for seven years you were stressed all the time you're not just gonna become a different guy all of a sudden right because that's your emotional home but he's a good news is you can move it he's that you can move it if you basically practice it right and he's like so we wanna basically you know you don't wanna wait for the for things to happen to feel a certain way he's like you wanna have it on call that you can change the way you feel like that fast can you do that can you change the way you feel that fast and a lot of the events of tony robbins and the reason why people feel like almost like he's manipulative is because he literally is manipulating the way you feel he's showing you that like you can change the way you can go from focused to j to zen and calm and reflective to motivated and inspired in like a thirty minute span just by the way he's kinda prompting you and the trick obviously is to learn to do that yourself so that you now are in control of your own mood you're the master of your own mood and that's that was big but that became a big focus for me after that event that was my big takeaway from the event was that and then i started practicing that for like like six seven years i wish you had come up with that on your own because you don't realize it but one of the big three like a psycho you know so there's like sig freud and then there's two other guys who are considered like the godfather of nineteenth century like psycho analytics and all the stuff and one of the guys is alfred adler and he's got there's a book called the courage should be disliked this that's quite good and what you saying is exactly in parallel with what he has said about like happiness and like like well you're anxious because you're choosing to be anxious and you don't you're not choosing to do this other thing and he's got this whole book on it but you you didn't realize it but you've just discovered relative you know the theory of relativity just like albert einstein you didn't even know about it so you're kind of like one of the big three guys sounds like a smart guy yeah like yeah sound i'm gonna go check the yeah so so so that's you alright where do we go from here is that it that's it i think we wrap it up thank you for everybody for listening you know those those views aren't gonna view themselves it's because of you guys but you know we we we just talked about wanting more sam are you satisfied or we are we do we have enough subscribers would you say we only have three hundred sixty you know mister has a hundred a hundred million we're nothing we're losers i'm anxious about this and so if you've enjoyed this episode if you enjoyed any of our episodes subscribe on youtube but also go to spotify go to podcast the the apple version and subscribe to therapy and stop wanting this or you could just click the button and make us feel happy and which one save us years of therapy and just click subscribe and just say you're welcome in the comments and we know when you say you're welcome it's because you saved us years of therapy you just gave us what we wanted instead yeah alright that's the pod i feel like i could rule to world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a travel never looking back