now the grid score goes i think it's zero to ten i want you to guess my grid score ten is super gritty gritty as it gets i would say i i would put you six six seven you're pretty gritty appreciate your faith in me i scored a two point five on this grit test bro did you just take it again i feel like i could rule the world and i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never looked alright sean you're back i was a trip my trip was great me and ben went to phoenix and i'm not gonna share all the details but it was a dope experience dope life experience i think one great thing to share by the way when's like saying what's the last dope life experience you had something you didn't have to do but you did anyways probably camp m few weeks ago don't let that happen i don't let too much time go by i think like every three months or so should try to do something that's a little extra extracurricular if you know what i mean just something that's outside of the routine outside of what you have to do so i did that anyway so we went to phoenix because matt ish who is the owner of the suns the phoenix suns the basketball team there we gotten in touch with them and he was like hey if you guys ever wanna come check out a game come hang so we go down to phoenix and we meet matt we meet the team we get to go set courts side do it like live life as an nba owner which is awesome because i always dreamed of doing that now what i wanna tell you though it's not about matt what i wanna tell you out is actually much more in the weeds so here's a little in the weeds a little in the weeds story so i think ben emailed him when he bought the team and was just like hey congrats buddy and then i was like thank you thank you ben levy goodbye and then that was the first touch point second touch point was we invite him to camp of member we're like hey you he used to be a college basketball player so he was a college basketball player now he's a multi billionaire who owns an nba team well that's a mix of basketball and you know entrepreneurship that that's who we try to invite to the camp and so we invited him he was like i'd love to come couldn't end up making the dates but his kinda of make good was listen sorry i couldn't make it but if you guys are forever in town let me know we'll we'll hang out we'll check out a game hey what do you know matt we're in town what do are you in town because that's when we're in town and so we worked with this assistant to be like when do you think we should be in town and we did that so this is the rule of reciprocity by the way you offered someone something and regardless if they take you up or not they now owe you we should just host events that aren't ever gonna happen and we make sure we file the person the online like oh they're out of town that date they're already busy let's ask him we're supposed to get charity of event honoring you so so yes we did that now the funny thing is well the the background here is that what what what's the randomness here ben used ben is a die phoenix suns fan he loves phoenix suns more than you love your child he loves the phoenix suns with a deeper passion then romeo loved juliet and he was a ball for four or five years so like literally was was with the team every everyday volunteer ball basically just to give you a sense of this guy so when every year when there's an all star games or you what the way the way it works in the nba is the fans vote on who gets to be named at all star so ben supporting his guys being the loyal supportive guy that he is takes literally one hundred thousand ballots home forces his family every night to sit there and punch the ballots to vote the phoenix suns guys in and himself over the course of a couple months they churn through one hundred thousand ballots to try to support the team they've got the players didn't care they didn't know about this he just did because he's that that big of a die fan so that's ridiculous ben obviously does a lot for me i was like can i what's a what's how can i make a bad appreciation weekend and that's what this was this was go and and kinda let him live a live a child out to dream out so he goes down there we we watch the game it's all good one of the cool things was and this happens all the time by the way you think you're there to meet the the famous person but it's actually this other thing that's really interesting that's more accessible that ends up being the fascinating and thing you wouldn't have known it until you showed up so similarly we go and we have a great conversation with one of the guys in they're kind of like data department so it's like analytics data that's become a big part of sports and so ben is grilling my guy ben's like the guy came down to say nice to meet you ed ben's like cool i have one thousand questions for you i'm a seat and he's like in the year in twenty thirteen you pick to this guy why i'd like to know you know what was telling you that what he's like what are the metrics that matter right now for us when we play a game obviously besides the score like you know what leads to the score and he's he's asking all these detailed questions and when ben asked questions sometimes i've noticed the person won't even finish i and he's like i got what i need next to like just like and he's he's he's great because everybody needs a place where they're shameless like for me and you like i'm shameless about like i'm a monologue okay i got something interesting interesting to say i know that's not how this is supposed to work but i'm a monologue because that's i just need to get this off by chest trust me you're gonna like it by the end your thing is like you'll just ask a blunt question you'll just be like well dude you keep saying this like what is it how much what's in your pocket right now and they're like i guess nobody's asked me out here here's the answer ben's thing is that he's like oh we're you know we're supposed to be at dinner i'm gonna ask you all of the questions i will i my curiosity is analysts and like i don't care what the social situation is like we'll be playing basketball and he'll be guarding a guy and he'll be like he'll be like so like what's revenue like nowadays and like do like you gotta let it go for this moment in time like just give it a rest he doesn't he do it anyways we're doing that with this guy and one of the of the fascinating questions that he yes we were like what's you're the data guy what's the data you wish you had that you don't currently have like what data would would help you do this because he's showing us these cameras in the gym where if you're just shooting around there's cameras now that will it does facial recognition it'll track okay sam is shooting in the practice session it'll record the length of the session the number of shots the exact arc on every shot his exact field goal percentage without anybody having to be there to keep attack track his stats so cool tech right now his answer was very interesting so he was like you know we test for we you can we know everything you've ever done on the court but what we've learned what everybody knows has been around sports is that the difference between the michael jordans and the you know isaiah riders or the kobe bryant versus the lenny brooks so it's like it's like what's up top what's in your mindset and the guys who are completely obsessed extreme discipline and they're able to work harder than the next guy they don't take those days off they you know are receptive to coaching and they're gonna improve on their weaknesses they're gonna double down on their strengths they could keep their confidence even when something goes back it's all about the mental right like every athlete every great athlete would tell you how much the sport is mental but they have no way of measuring the mental and so we said interesting what would be the way that you would wanna do that he's like great great what do you mean great said well there's this book that came out i don't know you ever read this book the book angela duck worth duck with yeah exactly so i went down this rabbit hole after that was just my segue into me going down this rabbit hole on these mindset tests so first i actually wanna tell you about a different test which you've probably done in the past and that's the myers briggs test have you done this test yeah do you know the backstory of this you know where this came from no but is it even real our horoscope real right yeah or palm readers real like there's a lot of bullshit in this industry which is why i'm fascinated by it so let me i'm not saying it's completely bullshit but there's a lot of hand waving myself here's the story there's a woman and her name is isabelle isabelle at nineteen forty two i think world war two is going on and israel's isabelle reading reader digest she reads in reader digest this article about people sorting people sorting and basically it's how companies are using tests to do people sorts and so she reads that lockheed lockheed the aircraft company was using it to locate you know possible trouble makers they're like we need to do some screening so that we can identify who's gonna be a trouble maker who's gonna have some mischief in them another company was using it for finding you'll appreciate this one hen peck husbands and they were basing oh the argument was that if the man is under the thumb at home then he'll easily also be submissive at work fascinating right like people were legitimately doing this they're and like trying to figure out like who's who's got that alpha who's got that dog in them and so alright well so she writes to her mom catherine she's like this is fascinating companies are doing this blah blah bla blah she's interested in psychology her mom writes back and says you should make your own test and you should do it you won't your always told me that that guy carl jung you should carl young young i don't know what i say he's like you should do it on those principles so she ends up creating and then their last names are briggs and me since she ends up creating the the forgot what's it's called the briggs myers type indicator or something like that right like that's that's how this test started and she creates a test and basically he had this theory this psychologist had this theory that there's like people branch out in this like decision tree it's like you're either a thinker or a feel so you're a perceive or you're a judge and and they if you just go down the tree ends up with sixteen possibilities and they gave each of the sixteen like kind of a positive affirmation name so there's no bat there's no bad score yeah they gave you a fortune cookie everybody gets a trophy and so they were like oh you are an executive you are a caregiver you are a scientist you are an ideal and they just had all these labels for the for the sixteen categories now of course the funny thing is you end up taking the test you'll get one score and on average if you take the same test weeks later fifty percent of people will will end up with a completely different label so yeah i don't know how reliable these things are and you know people who criticize it they say this takes advantage of something called the four effect i mean you've ever heard of this thing the four effect it's basically the same thing that astro fortune tellers and other pseudo scientists use where they kinda cold read something general about you like you're the type of person who you know you don't let everybody in but once but when you get close to somebody you really open up or like you're the type of person who you know sometimes when things get hard you're able to really you know you're room to really stand up and and and and make it happen it's like no i do have a little bit of adam me you're you know you're right how'd you know here here's some money and so anyways they create this test it's not that popular at the beginning but it ends up getting picked up by you know fast forward many many years and gets picked up by a a company called cp the consulting psychologist press cp and so and they picked up the distribution rights and they're like hey we are gonna market this to american businesses we are gonna tell american businesses about this when you say picked up do mean was this a publication that promoted it or bought it it was a publishing company and they buy the licensing rights to market it and there is about her mom are just gonna get a royalty and basically right as she died she dies at eighty two sales start taken off by nineteen eighty three almost a million people are taking the myers briggs test annually is it free no so the way it works is it's a it's kind of a brilliant business model so basically to take the test is somewhere between fifteen and forty bucks everybody who takes the test you get you know let's say on average thirty bucks from them but then well you can't just take the test has to be given to you by a practitioner well the practitioners have to pay two thousand dollars to become a certified practitioner that's the only way you could take this test and so like last year they enrolled five thousand practitioners who each paid you know about fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars each eight to ten million bucks in revenue off of just the practitioners and then each of the practitioners then distributes the test and they get they get paid by distributing the test so they it's kind of like a multi level marketing team right their practitioner makes thirty bucks a test and then the extra royalty the extra ten bucks on top goes back to the to the to the parent company to the publisher and so this thing they don't know the revenue because it's still private it's been private for like whatever you know since you know the eighties and they once said their number was over twenty million in revenue i suspect it's higher than that there's been millions of people who take this taken this test and myers briggs is that company cp it's their biggest earn it's that that's their cash cow and so insane dude it's used by the government it's used by two hundred federal agencies use this you know just the epa itself they use it on a quarter of their twenty thousand employees i think eighty percent of the fortune eighty nine eighty nine of the fortune one hundred use this test eighty nine percent of the fortune a hundred is that insane the there's a a few things that are insane about it one to create something so when don't she create it in forty two nineteen forty two yeah so we're coming up eighty years now is we're be close to a hundred years soon that's amazing to create something that lasts that long i mean that that's it's such a reputable brand even though i think it's nonsense but many people think it's reputable that it it's at this point in an annuity so you just like it's predictable revenue all the time we talked about was it gallo gallo pulling and they owned clifton strengths which is famous for strengths finder two point o yeah and i tried to find how much revenue they did and i could not find anything i believe gallo i i we did this two years ago so i don't remember i believe gall does something like a billion a year in revenue or or hundreds of millions but if you go to the shrinks finder website and you look at their traffic it's huge it's a huge huge huge thing and it costs the same thing twenty or forty dollars for one of these tests i loved this business because the test business is so fun because you're desperate to know like when you're in a hard time you're desperate to know you just want affirmation that things are gonna be okay and i loved it i loved it and i used to do these all the time and i would even gain them i'd be like well that's not right i should i should take it i should should take it again i probably answered a few a few wrong to check this out so i read about that now when we meet this guy and he tells me about the mental makeup the the grit the mindset being important i'm like he's totally right the mindset thing is super important and so i'm like what was that book grit angela duck what was that all about i i believe it's i you could put off desire what's that called or you could put off a reward gratification delayed notifications like that i think that's a part of it but the ones i think they had is basically it's ability so like your talent basically your ability times z which is like your passion or enthusiasm about something times capacity for hard labor is the formula for success and with what with grit specifically it's around z and the perseverance so it's you know basically your your enthusiasm your passion times times perseverance okay so here's what's interesting about this thing so he tells me about this and i'm like alright doug like what's my grid score let me go let me get guys now the grid score goes i think it's zero to ten i want you to guess my grid score ten is super gritty gritty as it gets who's the who's a ten david guidance is a ten i would say i i would put you six six seven you're pretty gritty appreciate your faith in me i scored a two point five on this grit test bro did you just take it again i am i am in the bottom ten percentile of grit so what were the questions you oh check this out i'm gonna read you some of the the test and this is this is why i was like this is bullshit why is this bullshit okay so here's the claims the she writes this book becomes a best seller you see keith for boys it'd be like grit it's the most important thing and all ceos like grits the most important thing they're not wrong it's just that like many of these best bestselling books it's like pop science right like the principles is not wrong but the the depth of the evidence is actually quite shallow and so here's what it says so it says so she starts off by saying well showing up you know the was that old quote eighty percent of success is just showing up you know and people realized well you like i guess if you give up that almost guarantees failure if you give up and they looked around and they said well fifty percent of soldiers quit the army during the selection process fifty percent of marriages and in divorce twenty five percent of students drop out of high school sales jobs fifty percent of people will turn over every every year in sales jobs and and they noticed that like there were there what's the counter point this the counter point is basically what they looked at was west point and i don't know if you know much about the school at west point but it's got a pretty like pretty high bar right it's like being a guest on this podcast it's a high bar and so what they do is they say to get into west point you don't apply when you're a senior in high school you apply when you're a junior you're applying in eleventh crane and you don't just apply with your test scores or whatnot you have to be nominated by a member of congress to get into west point so you have to hustle your way to get a congress member to vouch for you in order to do this you have to do a leadership interview you have to do a fitness test and out of fourteen thousand applicants they'll select like a thousand people to come join this thing and even out after they filter with all that like you have to run through walls to get here twenty percent drop out during the the the seven week orientation period that's called the beast is what's point free i don't think so so you gotta pay money to do all this and then go to the rv like all the best things in life alright alright the beast is a rotation of calisthenics marching classes weapons training athletics you go five am to ten pm with no breaks no weekends no contact with family or friends and you have to be subscribed to this youtube channel in order to get in and so even if you're not gonna do all the other things you should go to youtube right now my first mail and you subscribed to our podcast alright so basically grit was a higher predictor with this grit score they say it was a higher predictor of west point success than your sat score that your high school rank than the leadership interview than all the other things and so anyways i've thought here's the grit test i i can even just give it you so here's some of the questions they ask on this thing it says new ideas and projects sometimes distract me from previous ones basically do you get distracted by new ideas and projects from your current one is that very much like me mostly like me somewhat like me or not at all like me that's guess what is very much like me okay another one setbacks don't discourage me i don't give up easily okay that i scored well in that one i set a goal but later choose to pursue a different one i am a hard worker like come on this is not science this is this is what i call nothing that's what this tested to know there's some stuff here i finished whatever i begin so for example bro do you trust people's self assessment of this no here do you have any unfinished lego sets in your home i don't even have a lego set no but i will if i did i would i got a blocks of un set furniture right over here i have a a half half written book over there yes of course yes i i do fail this test and so do you but the thing is is i can think ten examples where i'm not like that i could think of ten examples where i am like that this is you know what i'm low and grit i'm high and honesty and to somebody who's like i'm really high on the grit score i'm like is this real like is this is honest is this an honest assessment i think you're butt hurt i think that you gotta i think change comes from within brother i think that you gotta be you gotta two i'm in denial right now yeah bargaining to yeah is there like grits anonymous you need to like go and go through the the twelve steps my friend you're you're it's sep never one if there's anyone else out there what's the opposite of grit by the way just like yeah just green cheese yeah soft damn that's soft because the sounds the sorry the marshmallow scale so yeah well you know what i want you to take this test actually just take it right now let's take it together let's see what your grit score is alright new questions okay here we go alright i'm gonna give you the grip the grit test okay sam you have to just say true or false especially yeah very true very false so new ideas and projects sometimes distract me from previous ones false false alright like very false would you say not much like me false not not like me setbacks don't don't discourage me i don't give up easily is that very much like you you don't give up easily or don't give up i don't give up easily that yeah i often set a goal but later choose to pursue a different one mostly like me i am a hard worker somewhat i have difficulty maintaining my focus on projects that take me more than a few months to complete that's not much like me i finish whatever i begin very much my interest change from year to year not much i have diligent i never give up somewhat i have been obsessed with a certain idea of our project for a short period of time and later lost interest somewhat i have overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge not much like me i i have not had that many setbacks like i'm just so good it just works i just try easy stuff wow alright that's a great score of three point five correct okay so you got a three point five okay so i had it wrong the scale is to five you're a three point five out of five you scored higher than forty percent of americans what does that in the sixteenth percentile no you're in the fort percent though right i don't fucking it know i'll between forty and sixty percent so i'm not that good you're like above average yeah or no you are sort higher than only forty percent so you're actually average to below average print yeah that sucks this stuff is stupid would would've been a lot better if i was a four or something yeah we would the segment needed you to be amazing and me to be terrible it's said you're pretty average and i'm way below average anyways go back take your grit score you just go to you just search google search grit score and take this thing and then post it in the comments on youtube i wanna know who was the grit youtube comment of them all it's probably the spam that never go away that keep impersonating us and being like to everybody who comments so like do you get me is that hey that's not us we're not telling you that we're not trying to sell you something like that that if we try to sell you something you'll know it trust me that's not the way we would do it i wanna tell you about someone who would score a five out of five on the grid score can i tell you about this person tell me do you remember a few years ago in sixteen or seventeen i think there was this company called lunch club it was basically like the social platform where you i guess meetup up of people for lunch i thought it was really dumb i used to do that i used when i moved to san francisco that's how i made friends i i joined the lunch club and i would go get lunch with random stranger tech bros i thought that that was a stupid idea i thought it was very stupid i'd never used it but not i i was alone on that one i think it's like you didn't have setbacks you're like i always have friends and i never have setbacks yeah i scored low on this really as well i but here's the thing not everyone else thought it was a dumb idea in fact they raised thirty million dollar i'm interested h and all these like really smart people and i don't think it ever became that big of a company but they raised thirty million dollars at a hundred million dollar valuation i have no idea what happened to it today because it's not really relevant anymore however the guy who started it is amazing and this is just proof that smart people sometimes do like they they've got silly things that are just stepping stones until the real thing and so the guy who started it his name is scott wu and recently i think yesterday it was he launched something that's pretty amazing and we're gonna do another episode where we talk in depth about what he launched but basically what it is is it's called cognition labs that's the name of the company the product is called devon the summary of it is you just tell devon make me a website that looks like yelp except it's just for agencies or something or make me a website that's like airbnb but for cars and what devin does is it gives you a checklist of all the things it's going to do and then it does it and it builds the website for you and this is like a game changing technology because it basically makes code obsolete it's an ai software engineer or a programmer yes and many really smart people patrick ka the ceo of stripe they're basically saying alright this is the first time i've ever seen anything like this actually be as good or better than a human and it's amazing whatever the product's is awesome we're gonna talk all about it but what's more interesting to me is bloomberg did this article on the three it's basically three c cofounder and then they have the main ceo his brother also works there if they did this amazing profile on the ten person company that created this and they are magnificent everything about these guys are beautiful the magnificent ten should we call yes a magnificent ten everything about this company is the greatest thing i've ever seen in my life so check this out it's ten employees they've raised twenty one million dollars amongst the ten employees they have ten gold medals that they've won from top coding competitions and many of the people on twitter when they when they came out with this they go i remembered scott scott was the guy who was winning all of the math competitions that i used to go to as i sat in the crowd wondering how on earth this guy did this and this one guy named by by fan his name he tweeted out this thing he goes i wanna show you all some tiger mom porn and it's basically and it's basically this young guy i again judging off his name i guess scott woo i guess he's chinese he there's this video of him when he's like twelve or thirteen years old and he's at a math competition say we gotta do this we gotta do this test i put i have the thing here's the question the question says if the pattern continues what is the letter in the two thousand and tenth position it it just says math math math math and and it says dot dot dot what letter will be the two thousand and tenth letter in this sequence in videos a so dude know how y'all you know how like in jeopardy he looks like he's like twelve years old in this video by the way like a child he's a kid and then you know how in jeopardy they show you the question as they're reading it so you could read along with it he answers one of the questions where it's like what's like three hundred and fifty two to the fourth power times like this other three hundred and eighty four to the eighth power he answered the question before the announcer finished reading it like he literally hit the beat alright i say the digits one two three four five can be arranged to form many five digit positive integers with five distinct digits and how many such integers is the digit one to the left of the digit two two such integers include fourteen thousand three hundred fifty two and three fifty one thousand two hundred thirty four go ahead just to walk me through your thought process here like i feel like an integer is like an appetizer i ordered last night with a little bit of parmesan cheese sounds like it influencer her mom on instagram like i've been up with a cool name for their baby there's we have bronx and integer they're going to math today like it sounds like a an amazing roller coaster right at six flags i don't know what an integer is i can't even answer this question but these guys were crushing it at these at these at these questions and there's three of them and so listen to the third listen to this segment from the article so this guy named ashley vance he's the one i think he wrote he wrote the the biography of elon musk he he wrote this article and he goes the third founder he's currently the cp he asked me that i not explicitly say what his current status is his enrollment status at harvard is because he doesn't want his parents to fully understand what he's done basically the cp the the c founder of this company that now is worth hundreds of millions of dollars has yet to tell his mother that he's dropped out of harvard even though he's now worth tens of millions of dollars because he's too afraid to break her heart and in the article the author the author goes i just wanna let you know you've raised a wonderful son and this can work out wonderful it's okay if he's me or may not be enrolled in harvard anymore and this article it's it's the greatest thing i've seen i just googled with the guy's name scott woo and the top it is a reddit post from eighteen hours ago in their subreddit r slash next fucking level which is an amazing subreddit by way i go i know they're all the time it's just next level shit and then he goes here's scott woo the c of cognition labs in a math quiz fourteen years ago against a clip this thing has five thousand up votes and the first first reply is if i was wondering here's the tricks that they use here you know for question three the standard perm mutations of five four three two one blah blah and then the top covid of that is it took me long to read your explanation then it took him to actually do it and answer the question it's ridiculous parenthesis i just had read not even understand what you just said so anyway these guys are ridiculous and what's it's just amazing that a there's young people that are like self gathering like this is like to me like truly like that facebook shit like that movie of facebook when they're just in the dorm room doing it these guys are doing it right now they're they range between ages twenty and twenty seven it was so inspiring to read about these guys and i'm so happy that freaks like these guys exist it was a it was an awesome article about this company the company i'm sure it's great the story of behind these guys is even better this is like the american dream to me yeah i don't if it's the american dream or like the robot dream or like the math wet dream i don't know what this what dream this is but it's it's mother is the chinese weather tiger mom dream for sure except for the dropping out part exactly yeah go you know it's not too late on you can still go back that's what they'll say at the article harvard launch a tiger extension school which is you get to remain as student or you get to graduate you it's dropping out by graduating early because we're like you you're done here your mom will be fine we just get point one percent equity in your company thank you and and all they have to do and we get point one percent and what you get son is you get a photo of you wearing that gown and we're gonna go get one of our our our teachers to shake your hand on odds we have this guy charles he'll shake your head he looks like the dean got you have a green screen here it'll look like you graduated and your mom you know it'll it'll make your parents brown this is the harvard version of a fake idea of some guy running a a scam anyway i wanted to bring that up i thought these guys are amazing what do you got do you have a thrill of a chill right right now don't you oh i have something cool i'm doing okay so this is not really a chill it's just it's just a thrill to be honest with you this actually costing me a lot of money it is not making me any money so i have an idea which is wouldn't it be amazing if you like this podcast you like listen to us maybe you sam you were at a meetup up last night that's cool people got to meet you what anybody like to text with me because i got a number that you could text and if you text me i'll text you back and so what i'm gonna do is i create a number so all you gotta do is just text me you just go six five o three three four zero seven nine o i think we gotta work on that number yeah but if we do that six five zero three three four zero seven nine o i'm just gonna send out text of stuff that we're doing that's cool i'm gonna share like you know stuff that's on my whiteboard throughout the day like just random stuff that i think is interesting or let's say the main thing i wanna do the the rate reason we had this idea was after every podcast you don't know this after every podcast ben levi he's usually not listening on the on the recordings but he was usually like really curious like oh oh yeah you guys have gary v beyond like what did he saying but he's he doesn't want the full hour long podcast he's like can you just send me like a voice note of like the two or three most interesting bits and so i do that and i've doing that for like three months now where after every episode i'm like yeah me and sam i talked about that that a company that's doing the ai software engineer and how that do the founder actually is like this mass genius and i also shared like myers briggs just twenty million a year and how it was how it's kinda of bullshit we did that and i'll just give him a two minute voice note of the thing and and so he loves it he's like dude this he's been telling me for months this needs to be like a thing but we didn't know how to do it and so everything we looked into was like you could try to create a giant telegram group but not everybody uses telegram i was like dude i just like just the way i get it where i you just text me this as a voice note or as a photo that's what i want what did you use so we're using this in this app that will let you do it it's really expensive and so i kinda just wanna limit this and so maybe i don't know exactly what the limit is i'm thinking just like the first thousand people i'm gonna cut it off because like this is gonna cost me tens of thousand dollars a month to do this but i think it's gonna be great so the number is six five zero three three four zero seven nine o that's right i'll put it in the show in the description so you can just tap it and send a text you just have to say hi you just have to say hi to the thing in it'll last year your name and then i then it so then it shows me so when you reply to me i can see oh it's jeff from you know cincinnati or whatever it is i can see who it is and i can i can reply back and so gonna try this out i wanna try it with the thousand fans i'm looking for don't do it if you're just like super casual with it like this your first time listening to except don't bother but like if you're like all about m and you've been listening to this for years and you know you're cool do this that's so funny this cost me a lot of money so please only do it if you really care i only like a thousand people do this i don't really want more than that to do this because it's quite expensive but yeah whatever leave it to me to cut it off at a certain point tell me about your friend walking back you have on here walking backwards and speedrunning isn't speedrunning just sprint no so we did a pod with gary v yesterday and it's not gonna come out for a couple of months two months i think it's gonna come out when his book comes out or whatever but he said something very interesting i don't know if this stood out to you but you had asked him a great question you go gary you started with like like family business mom and pop or actually before that you were just flipping you know baseball cards as a team then you joined your family business and was like a a family shop and then as you started to grow your brand now like you have all these business owners who listed to you but also your brand has grown so much you now kat you know rub shoulders is it rub shoulder elbows i don't know if people rub for you you rub against you're rubbing you're rubbing and chest to chest with a bunch hole there and you were like what i wanna know is have you observed any difference between the guys you end up guys gals who end up making it to the to the highest tier of the the of winning in business the billion dollar club let's say versus the the the small business owner the convenience soar owner versus the the the solar or whatever what do you notice in the is is the biggest difference he instantly answer something that i thought was not what i would have expected he goes the willingness to walk backwards what what do you mean and he said and it he didn't fully explain it anybody explain two things he goes number one the great ones always reinvent themselves you know you could look at elon musk elon musk starts out doing zip two and he he then he creates paypal he's like he's by this the internet entrepreneur and then after after that he was willing to walk backwards and go back to zero and he was basically like cool i'm gonna now try hardware which is a completely different game it would have been easier for him to just stay with paypal keep growing that or do another software company internet company but he was willing to walk backwards and so he started a a rocket company don't think he didn't know anything about it at the time but he's like i'm gonna start from zero today i can't tell you how to build a rocket and then fast forward it to today he's got self landing rockets that i can go up and come back and and land on themselves right it's kind of amazing he was also willing to walk backwards financially so he invested everything that he made from xi two and paypal into tesla spacex to the palmer it would have gone to zero if those companies had fail which they almost did so the willingness to walk backwards both in terms of where you're at in the mound can you go back to being a beginner and the second thing is can you go can you are you willing to risk gary told us that his he has a safety net you were like i have a safety net some of that money that i just don't touch if everything else goes to zero i always got that he's like me too and you're like how much is it and he i don't what did you expect that he would saying and what did he say i expected i mean he seems pretty wealthy i expected ten or twenty he said one million so he said one million dollars he said a safety net was one million dollars which if i had to guess that would cover his life expenses for like less than six months right as current lifestyle yeah exactly as like safety that that's a that's a safety lost my friend that's a thread you're gonna land on there obviously it's a lot of money the grand scheme things but like relative to his level of success and wealth that's a lot less than i would've have expected but he's like that's all i need exactly that's all needed safety i'm willing to roll everything else and i thought that was very fascinating then i've seen so i i thought that was cool and naval nevada has said a very similar thing he goes one of the hardest things to do is you start to climb the mountain and when you're in your twenties you don't you know you know don't know anything you just start going up the whatever the trail that you see is and you start going up the problem is let's say your ambition your dream is to get to the top of the mountain but halfway up you learned that the trail you're on is not the path that gets you there and so what do you do like the reality is that most people you're now thirty three years old you've realized that the path you're going alone is not the lifestyle or the path that you want but it is very hard to say i'm gonna to walk back to the bottom of the mountain and pick a different path and what most people do is they just settle they say i guess like i guess i don't need to get to the top just this is high enough and they're not saying it because they actually want that they're saying it because the thought of starting over is so hard mentally but the great musicians the great actors the great entrepreneurs the great scientists they reinvent themselves they go into new fields new new studies new beginnings and they start again and so i find that pretty inspiring that and i've seen that so many times in the people of my life that people who aren't willing to walk backwards aren't willing to go back to being a beginner again it's really tough i've met multiple people who have started something and sold it and then went back just went back to college da mesh being one of them that he started hubspot in college after he'd already made say the name same the name you wanna say so scott name you're dying to say brett ad hoc did the same thing our friend ci eva did the same thing that's right and it was hard at the time when your whole friend group is doing one thing when your own success does one i mean i've even felt it in the smallest ways this podcast is does pretty well i know that if i come on here we're gonna put out some content a lot of people can consume it the thought of doing tiktok which a i didn't even know how to edit a tiktok b i'm not like good at that style content see i got zero followers over there but i was like alright well like i need to be somebody who can go back to the beginning so tiktok is like your tesla exactly now you get and i'm just like eli elon so so what about these guys then then there's the opposite speed runner i'm gonna tell you about i saw the story and i wanna tell you about three friends so the story i saw was at the founder of rx bar speedrunning is such a better term for sprint for running yeah so speedrunning what is speed speedrunning is the opposite speedrunning is where you don't go back to that beginner mind you don't go back to the bottom mountain you literally hike the same trail again and now you know that trail so well you can do it so much faster they do it faster faster it's a video gaming term i don't know if you've you've seen it but like there's people that they don't play the new video game they don't buy the new the new the new you know the next the next edition of whatever fortnite or whatever they play mario that was released in whatever nineteen eighty five they play the first level and they play it over and over and over again to where they can flawlessly sprint through the level hopping on all the goo heads and they could finish the level perfectly in like thirty two seconds and that is like the actual fastest that a human being could do this and they could do it they're they're called speedrun runners and people love to watch them because you're you're watching absolute mastery over something that you know has been around for a while that they can just keep replaying until they absolutely master it like that jira guy who just like pack sushi for like fifty years and like didn't change right right it's exactly he's not trying to make the new shit he's like spicy tuna role yeah what we're gonna do and so i've noticed that i have friends that are the beginners and i friends that are the speed owner so let me tell you about the speed owner so first i noticed that the rx bar founder who built rx bar ended up selling it for six hundred million dollars came out with a new bar and it's called the david bar did you see this no but that that must mean that it's non compete ended like right then yeah yeah exactly he sold his company in two thousand seventeen and so now it's you know whatever yeah i don't know how many years what what i don't know year is than eight years or something like that it's he could start a new bar so he started this thing called the david bar it's like epic protein bar that he's doing david protein dot com looks sick by the way looks sick sick name and the macros are also pretty insane like look just look at the mac you see on there no a hundred and sixty calories twenty eight grams of protein sugar free that's amazing pretty in yeah i'm in so i wanna tell you a couple things about this before we finish actually i'll finish the speedrunning any point i wanna tell you about some rx spa story so anyway anyways speedrunning we have three friends i think you i think you know at least two of the three people i can't say their names but let's just call them e commerce friend number one two and three e commerce friend number one sold their first e ecommerce sold a e commerce company so the company let's let's say one the first time they played the level four hundreds of millions of dollars almost five hundred million dollars and then they decide they're gonna start a new company do they go into ai do they create a space company a satellite company no they're like i'm gonna start another e commerce company in almost the same niche and i'm gonna do it again i'm gonna speed the same level because the first time i was an idiot i didn't know what i was doing i figured it out along the now i figured all this knowledge out why not just do it again and so they they say they're gonna share start a new company they are talking to somebody and that and they go yeah i think if i they go i think if actually they weren't even planning to do they go i think if i started one today i can hit a million dollars a month in revenue in three months and the other person goes no way no chance dude bullshit like you think that but that's not true challenge accepted only for that reason this person starts a new company and how bigger are they now month two hit a million dollars a month in revenue you know they're they're you know couple months in and you know they're gonna do probably two to three million dollars this month in revenue and list less than six months old can you can't re can even say the category nothing i i can't say a word i'm on i might get shot just for saying what i said already so sorry alright that's the first who's who's person too person two e commerce person two sold another company also for nine figures nine figures means a hundred million dollars or more doing literally the same company and ken doing the same company in the same category obviously there's like you know ten percent twist but like back to e commerce back to the same category back to the same playbook how big are they now doing phenomenal again right off the bat i don't have all their exact revenue owners but i know it's like tracking faster than it was the first time friend number three friend number three was friends with person one and two saw them run the levels helped them a little bit along the way and then friend number three had an experience that triggered them also a little chip on the shoulder moment so they were invited by a very successful company to come to their annual like come check out the office come to our annual retreat and they go and they are watching they they go through the office like wow this is really impressive they go to the annual like company conference or something like that and they're like wow this is really impressive but the problem was that the the people invited them you know there's like a good faith to invite someone which was like hey check that out you'll really i like you'll enjoy it i'd love to show you what we're doing blah blah blah and then there's hey you wanna see my car collection but that's what was going on it was you wanna can i brag to you real quick and they're arrogant they're were incredibly arrogant at the whole time and my friend told me they said friend number three told me i think ago you know that scene in the big short where these bankers are are talking about how they're giving loans and they don't have to do any they're like they don't have to do much much of a a credit check and they they're able to giving stripper like five houses yeah exactly and the the the guy the the main character like why are they why are they a confessing and then as friend goes they're not confessing they're bragging and he hey goes he's like short this so you we need to short mortgage experience whatever my friend says same feeling walked out was just like why are they why are they bragging about all this and it's like and he's just got turned off he's like okay you showed be you should be exactly how big this market is you should be exactly lucrative of this is you should me how arrogant you are you show me how bloated your company is i will come out with a lean mean fighting machine doing the same thing that company gives him ten million plus in profit a year personally just ten million profit in your bank account every year and this is less than five years raised no cap raised no extra no capital all that stuff right amazing amazing story and when i was talking to this person i was like i was talking to one of the friends and i said this is amazing number one but it's also kinda lame they're like do you mean i was like you're playing the same level of the game again like yeah you're so talented you could do anything and like it's fun to win and i get that but it's also fun to grow and like i feel like you opted in to fun a win with no growth but you're so talented that you can get the growth and win that was that kind of my argument but i might also just be that they're like cool my broker friend thank you for the advice you know like and so i wanted to get your take are you a walk backwards guy or you a speed guy where do you land in the philosophy of this and i'm curious i actually for all the listeners i really wanna know because both ways can win but there's like a almost like a political opinion on this i have political opinion and a belief that walking backwards is the is the way it's the right way to do it in your life not the speed the same level again for years i thought you owe it if you have talent you owe it to the world to like almost be a steward of that talent like you you owe it to the rest of us because you're so special to exploit your ability to the max now that i'm a little bit older and i have a family i think fuck everyone do what makes you happy like make your kids proud of you and like just whatever you think is exciting and fun do that you don't owe anyone anything so not explore exploit basically like you're not don't wander out just hard what i what i think is if it if you so like for example i will name drop him again brett ad cock i was like brett why are you doing all this complicated shit you don't have to and he's like i just think this needs to get done and i should do it i love that attitude i also love the attitude of well i'm just gonna do the same thing over and over again because i get joy out of it and this is awesome and i just love it i think that is also a a total win i think both are wins and i don't think that you owe it to the world to do anything unless you choose so to the world so let's say we're not telling other people what they should do what do you how do where do you land on that let's say you could've have started another newsletter right after the muscle but it's not like i'm starting like huge like world i'm just starting doing other things i'm doing new things because i do i have a chip on my shoulder to prove myself in multiple industries or multiple business models but i don't want to risk everything and i'm not willing isn't that so funny like previous off to who who care is there myself sam's successful but only in what industry yeah i don't know respect to till he lands industry too like nobody has ever even had that thought beside you is that i crazy do oh you don't know anything about e com so for me personally i would say that i i don't feel like i owe i don't owe it to the world to explore and i don't owe it to someone who's less talented not that i'm pretty i mean i'm i think i'm mildly but i see someone who's really talented i'm like you owe it to me because you were gifted me i you this would you run it back let's say you were the rx bar guy would you run it back and into another bar company so i think when i run back newsletters no because that bore me the rx bar i think it's pretty dope i think it was great for the world i think that so yeah if i'm if i'm him i would and there was actually an article written about him how he was retired and he was bored and he had nothing to do and they had a picture of him but they made this photo the article of the of him really great where it was him by himself on a launch chair like in front of his mansion and he was lonely and they talked about is yeah you know what talking about that famous article that that was captured rock bottom yeah i was like client in front of a mansion well and it was like a another day and he was just like by himself and the whole article was like he's looking for his next thing and so for someone like that i'm like just do it again man that was exciting that was cool i think that's awesome and i think ours so if i'm david would i redo it yeah i think i would but also don't know if his name is david the i think his name is peter so by the way the rx r story so he's obsessed with crossfit do you know what do you know the story or no no so he's obsessed with crossfit he's like they don't sound any snacks that are like paleo at the time this is twenty thirteen and he goes to his dad and this is the best part this the whole reason i only wanna tell the story just to drop this one line he goes to his dad he's said dad you don't need investors i wanna start in like bar company as his dad literally says you need to shut the fuck up and go sell some bars if you wanna start a bar company he told him you need to shut the fuck up and go sell a thousand bars and so he's like okay and so he's like and he talks about like you know he's was in school he was not very good at school and he's like you know so when i when i was failing with this business i was comfortable i was used to eating shit i had been a failure it was not foreign to me i'd been a failure already at school so okay great i'm bad at not bad at this he's like i just kept going i didn't like doubt myself didn't like second guess it because i was like so comfortable in that like the the failure mode that every company starts with was first first business was in high school selling weed by the way alright let's see the next one so his next thing was like he's like i i thought raising money would solve my problems but actually it was such a blessing that they didn't raise so they sold for six hundred million i don't think they raised any money they bootstrap the whole way and he's like it was so good that because we were so forced on the one important thing selling the bars that was the only way to continue the business and so he's like we would just sell i would email i would call them i would give bars out on consignment we would do anything to try just try to sell more bars so in the first nine months it did six hundred k then the first in the first year they did two million year two six million year three i think they did thirty six million wow the year four they did a hundred sixty one million and then they sold to kellogg for our six hundred million at that point wow and then there's there's there's an article that's amazing there's an article making fun of the article clive for reference and it says michigan company pays guys six hundred million dollars but he's kinda bored now this guy is awesome the article was called what happens when he become a millionaire overnight second headlight that's amazing it was just like a shitty radio a local radio station because i guess david or whoever this guy is he lives in chicago and so like a local radio station like made fun of him it's pretty funny that's a good dude this guy's awesome we should we should get him on the pod right yeah peter come on the pod tell the story alright i gotta run it that's the episode good one i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i going to put my all in it like a days off on a travel never looking back