You Have 70 Days to Win the Year

alright it's it's q four so i don't know what what whatever day you're gonna hear this there's about seventy days left in the year seven days left here year everybody makes a big deal about january first news resolutions but i have a different argument i have an argument that says there's seventy days left in the year just enough time to actually do the thing whatever the thing is for you that's gonna make this year amazing i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want at all in it like a days off a try today is a wake up call seventy days left it's time for one sprint on one priority just try to make it happen the one thing you could do whatever it is gonna make your you're awesome so for example maybe you're trying to get in great shape the diet starts this morning it starts now and we're going hardcore it's life or death diet mode if you're trying to if you're really wanna you know quit your job start the business put in your notice put in your notice today just put it in and see what happens see how it feels just the tip whatever you're gonna do you gotta figure out how you're gonna use the seventy day sprint if you're trying to you know hit your growth goal if you're trying to raise around of funding whatever it is this is the lock in time because seventy days is about the perfect amount of time where you could totally shift your life it's enough time to be honest about how long things take to make to make a change happen but it's short enough where you won't la and you will you're either gonna make it happen this year or you're not and this the last seventy days is gonna be the make or break as frank lu the guy who who was ceo of snowflake and wrote that book amp it up he goes priority should be a single word if if somebody tells me their top three priorities all i asked them is which one is it and then they get really flustered but he goes i believe priority is a single word and so i i saw highly leases suggest figure out the one priority the one thing that if you just did this one thing the whole year is a win and they use the seventy days to do it and wipe everything else off the account what's your thing gonna be my one thing for this year the one thing that if i just did this thing i could look back and be like well i don't care what else happened that year that happened and that's all that matters for me it's getting in the best shape of my life and so i've made good progress i'm down about fifteen pounds i would like to get turned the corner get the last ten down by the end of this year and to do that i'll need to ratchet it up it really it's not necessarily about pounds but like i set these habits i was like alright i have these habits that got me this body if i want that body i gotta have these other habits and so i've been trying to change either these four or five habits just just four or five four or five of these habits that got me where i'm where i'm at where i wanna go and i've probably changed two of the four so i have the last seventy days to get the other two done what are the other two so i'll give you the two i did i'll give you the two i need to do so the two i did the first one is planning planning my my the health part of my day at the beginning first thing that i wake up so we both i don't know if you still do but i use my body tutor or so it's great right it's a great service yes a great service we have no stake at least i have no stake in this business is you know i've just a big fan of it so she calls me at eight in the morning and she says how did you yesterday go what's today blah blah but the the thing that happens is instead of waking up and just starting my day with my work and my email is my slack and like give me little computer music of stuff no i start by day with the top priority the thing i really care about which is re wiring these habits and in doing so i basically stop improvising because the improvising is where i'm just gonna make whatever decision happened in the moment and the those decisions are the the key thing right so my plan in my day is say this this and this at these times i'm gonna work out here and most importantly we identify like what might trip me up it's like oh i have to take my kids to the gymnastics thing that's like an hour away it's at the time i normally eat dinner so you plan around the grenade yeah it's like oh so what are gonna do oh simple i'll just bring it with me in the cart or i'll i'm gonna eat before i go or you're looking at like like three days you're like alright on saturday i've got a birthday party i know we're gonna have cake i'm gonna splurge on that one piece of cake which means leading up to it i gotta gotta prepared that i'm gonna like i gotta be exactly today so a big part of it was realizing the decision tank the gas tank of decisions and good decisions is full in the mornings and by the evening it's depleted and so all my bad decisions happened then and so i just make all the decisions front for what i'm gonna do and then i simply just need to to stick to them which of course not perfect like the daily want so basically they call you daily and the reason why that's good is that's when you're like really get after it and then the weekly one is like i use her as like i'm happy where i am they should call it the sirius person plan and then the serious person plan like are you serious about this or are you not so serious if you're not so serious here do this weekly plan and then what's the fourth bar so first habit plan the plan the plan all the meals in the workouts up front first thing in the morning make the decision then don't make the decisions as you go make one decision at the beginning the second one is what i call the the four point swing so if you ever play basketball you know there's a this thing that the announcer will say where let's say you had an open a shot you should have made it you would have scored two points but instead you fumble the ball the other team takes and they get an easy shot and so it was a four point swing it should have been too you know you should have been up to they should had zero instead you missed your two and they got to right so four point swing so i realized oh there's one part of my day that's like the four point swing like coulda got in my favor and instead it totally wipes me out which is like basically for me it's i work pretty late so after my kids go to bed then i have kind of like this relaxation and i'll do like more work up i usually stay up pretty late if i late night snack there and so basically it's like i'm up late so i sleep i sleep late and therefore i also because i'm up late i eat late and then dude i started going a bed early just to avoid that situation exactly it's like y i i i don't know if i have the willpower to not late night stack but i can just go upstairs and go to bed and that's kind of the only thing and in the morning of i'm hungry great i make good decisions again the tank is full so anyways that those are the two that i've i've been working on and made a lot of progress on and then i have two more which is treat the weekends like the weekdays because my weekends i was just become a different person it was fucking marty g for me was like wait wait well why why did i throw away all those habits that i do during the week that are great and just treat the weekends totally differently so that's silly not gonna do that anymore and then i have one more which is by so my my my sort of like thing that gets me as chips it's like that sort of like a snack so it's kind of the root why it's like well it's basically with cheapest way of pleasure it's like super fast it's right in front of me it's the fastest way to pleasure so substituting that with another thing that's a fast cheap way to get pleasure right so it's like other things i like to do or other things that feel good in the moment that's not like some delayed gratification instant gratification just not through a snack but through whatever like you know take a shower or there's like this other like a sparkling water drink that i make whatever little other things that i can substitute so doing those substitutes the weekday and weekend thing is pretty funny want them i'm know cake he's one of my best friends and he was like years ago he goes you're the only person i know who doesn't drink but you're still fat what the hell i had a friend of the same because i sound like company he goes okay cool you're rich now i'm like yeah thanks he goes there's no you can't be rich ad fat he's like there's no excuse if you're poor you just don't have the time you can't get the nutritious food and you can't get the gym like okay understandable you're rich and fat that's you that's all you so he was like you can't be rich a fa just a rule i was like oh okay i like got into some club and they were like you need to take his shoes off at the door that's so funny by one thing to finish that that food thing where when brian johnson came on the first time on this podcast like before brian johnson became like way more famous and like you know changed his entire look he's so like kind of the before photo brian johnson basically when he came on he said something he goes oh yeah we fired evening brian and i thought that was just such a good way saying and he's like yeah we had a meeting of the brian morning brian was there work brian was there and evening brian was there we just decided evening brian you're fucking it up for the rest of us so you're fired do you no longer get to make decisions we've take that power away from you i thought that was a great way of saying it he he did a really good job have you read the book for you it was a power like one of the laws of power is like change your identity occasionally and like occasionally how it's says they're like like they they're like it's a tool it's like a tool so for example the author he was like lady gaga like if you look at like early photos of her she was like a very normal girl but she always had like a little weird quirky side to her but he like she went all in on it and just changed her identity overnight to be like this kinda like strange person then nowadays by the way if you see lady gaga she's not actually that weird anymore remember the era where she like would wear meat as a dress now she like has an album with like tony bennett like a very classic singer and she's like more of a like you know whatever she that would be called like classic beauty versus before she was like artistic pump when bitcoin prices up and pop when bitcoin prices down she pops the tail of your pops and i think brian johnson changed his identity and i thought that was like a really savvy thing to do i thought it was great and i think i i take inspiration from it can i tell you a a story that had i've been kind of thinking about constantly okay alright so i have to tell you the story about this guy named jamie beat so jamie is a twenty nine year old from new zealand he was raised in a single household in new zealand but he's kind of like grown to be probably like the best college kid on earth so listen to the story so this guy jamie he's raised my single mother in new zealand and i guess if i had like cycle analyze them him he probably like has some like rejection type of like you know he's not good enough type of vibe that a lot of great great people who achieve greatness have and he gets obsessed with school but particularly with university applications and how to get into like the best university on earth and so he sets out with a goal to become the most qualified high school student in all of new zealand and he like creates us really in endeavor strategy it's like you know he's gotta be unique so he goes and starts two different businesses one being like a newspaper delivery business one another being like an iphone repair business he focuses on being the best and so he like strategically picks activities that he can excel in then he looks to maximize validation meaning like whatever he's good at he wants like enter into a contest and like win and then really good academics so he's like it's straight at and so he like does this like crazy curriculum that it creates for himself and by the age of seventeen he's accepted into twenty five universities so he's accepted into harvard yale prince san columbia at cambridge duke and a bunch of other stuff but he ends up going to harvard but before he gets into harvard like word spreads in new zealand that this kid is like a wonder kid and he's like the greatest thing on earth and so he even like hosts like a two hundred and thirty person talk in new zealand where all these parents are like jamie tell us how you did this like this is so amazing so fast forward today he's twenty nine years old he's got seven degrees and one phd he has a like if you go to linkedin it literally looks like a fake linkedin listen to his education so a bachelor's and applied math from harvard a master's and applied math from harvard to phd and public policy from oxford to masters from stanford a master's in entrepreneurship from penn a master's from princeton a lot degree from yale and a master's in global affairs from a university in china is that insane is real show twelve education whatever seen that it it looks fake so now while this kid he's he's twenty nine now but while he was a kid sophomore in college he was like this is kind of interesting what's going on and so he creates a college tutoring business which is like kind of like a stereotypical not stereotypical typical but it's like a common story of people who like master the game they like start these tutoring businesses but it actually starts working to the point where by he's a sophomore in college it does a million in revenue and obviously he's in intern because that's what great college kids do but he's intern at tiger management which is like we know one of the most prestigious like hedge funds in the world and his boss is like dude this is pretty cool you should like go in on go all in on this and so he turns his little side business i mean was a million in in revenue by the time he was software when that when that much of a side business but he turns it into a real business and it's called crimson education and that's like what the story in the wall journal was about so crimson education does something like a hundred and twenty dollars to a hundred and fifty million in revenue it's valued around five hundred million dollars they have something like a thousand employees and it's like the greatest way i guess to get into a highly touted university for your kids and so these these parents are spending crazy amounts of money something like two hundred thousand dollars a year for a handful of the product offerings that they have in order to get their kid into an ivy league school and it starts way before high school we're talking like fit six great you're smiling is this ridiculous or what so sorry for a couple of reasons first the headline is great so it says the guru who says he can get your eleven year old into harvard and there's a picture of him shaking the asian kids hand which is alerts first why an eleven year old at harvard right that's that's funny thing one to love the name crimson education as you know right big fan of when you hijack the prestige of another thing in a way that's totally legal the way that you did with hampton the way he's doing with the crimson color for harvard crimson education great name when i google the name the very first thing it says and by the way this article came out six days ago the very first thing in the google headline is crimson education as seen on the wall street journal like this guy is of like a prestige hacker he immediately was like and now it's gonna be like as featured on my first million right like it's just gonna keep like grabbing badges from schools from press from whoever you can get so i think that's hilarious the next thing that i thing that i find a little bit funny is the premise of this is i will help your kid get into a top university is that right but it's not test prep no so they they have first of all if you go to are you on their website they're offering or like their headline is amazing ninety eight percent acceptance acceptance rate to your top college choice so listen to like the product so the the product is like pretty ridiculous basically like you remember how i like outlined it into like stick out you know like be unique whatever like he has like these the crimson education has these like tenants of what you need so it's like get amazing grade so he's like these are bombs you basically have to have like perfect a's then he's like you need to have a strong leadership and so what crimson does is they definitely tutor people so i think they have fifty thousand students who get tutoring but dude they encourage you to do all types of crazy shit so they encourage you to start a business podcast or or or rather start a business or start a podcast or go and publish an academic paper and so they have services that help their students get p r or help their students go and publish research and so they're one example of a kid who started a a podcast and it got so popular that universities started asking to be featured on the podcast and so that's an example of like things where they try to tell you that you have to have strong leadership they also say that you have to have a unique profile and so what he says is or what crimson does is they help students find like ten activities that they're interested in and then helps them be the best at the activities and cut the fat and not be and not participate in things that they're not gonna be like the best at it's like pretty ridiculous so they offer tutoring but they also offer like something like two hundred thousand dollars they do like really hands on like we need you to do this this this and this over the course of a handful of years to increase the likelihood and by the way it works like there's debate over how much it works like there's debate where they're like you know these kids are like rich smart kids anyway like their parents are gonna like force him to get into all the shit anyway like did this actually help but something like two percent of the students admitted it into brown club harvard and penn last year were his clients and it says like this many people get in as verified by a big four accounting service like he's like touting that they they've been audited it on their claims of of this this pretty wild dude because he's like bragging he was bragging to the washington journal reporter like crazy or not bragging he they were asking and him questions and he was like yeah like we had twenty four people into yale thirty four marketing funnel dude but listen says he goes the acceptance letters were certified by price water cooper and a list of students had admitted so like he he he sent wall journal the thing and it had like the price wide hot like seal of like yeah it's legit i hate this i'm just gonna say that out a loud i hate this but i respect this why i hate it for what i mean the respect is easy like it's easy like talk it's the same reason i hate the olympics and i respect people i respect olympia meaning this guy is doing the thing and the thing i said was stupid about the olympics for somebody dedicate twenty twenty twenty two years of their life to becoming the best you know lose the lose push in the world and it's like grow like if you had this much talent why don't you just supply to something that's useful dude what else could you if you're a lose what do you got a big ass and you get like push heavy shit like what else is it gonna do lo luc is built for you it can lay down well could've been a famous you know person percent in a rap video it could've many many options the only fans you had better options on the table no seriously that like it the sort of like game the embracing the system so much that you try to game the system for this arbitrary university application thing it's just it's like dialed up to level twenty there's something off putting about that to me i don't know i i guess like i just don't like i think most college education and as i wear a duke sweatshirt most ivy leagues in the admission process i think it's all pretty bogus and i don't think it has a very high correlation to like it's the wrong game right what what is the phrase play stupid games win stupid prizes i think this is playing stupid games to win a stupid prize however i get it and i respect that this guy has prayed on the fears and the hopes and the dreams of these tiger parents to be like hey give me two hundred thousand dollars i'll make sure your kid has a get gets the right logo on let i hear you and a lot of me agrees with you but let me just make the argument against you first of all the in your group of people the indians in part have thrived in america because of the emphasis on not just on education but like being the best so like there's definitely power to it but you also went to duke i didn't go to duke my wife went to an ivy league school so i hang out with a lot of these like smart people like you and her and that type of education it's on one hand it's sort of like a rich person telling you rich it doesn't make you happy to be rich and you're like yeah let me let me figure it out on my own like let me get there and and i'll just decide yeah but the second thing is i actually think that there's a huge amounts of tangible that benefits the education that's normal motors will from good goodwill hunting say like just i can get that for like fifteen bucks in late fees from the library to learn the same shit as you but like your network partially because most of these san francisco to be honest but a lot of it because of duke and sarah's network because of penn like it was so much more global than mine was at a small rink dink school in nashville tennessee like you guys thought so much bigger the people who you're with were so much more global they were so much more prestigious and and and and in a good way and so i actually think that playing the game to go to a top twenty university is probably worth it to play the game to win to play the game and not go to one of these amazing schools i actually don't think it's worth it yeah i'm not saying necessarily that going hospital was not worth it i guess what i'm saying is the amount of energy and sort of the manufactured nature of this it's sort of like the way that p r it's like that's i guess it's good to be featured but like p r is sort of this the the process to get a bunch of press is often a very sticky process yeah you're hitting the game yeah exactly i hate the game and i think that in this case like dedicating your life to manufacturing this perfect resume that's optimized for the harvard admission system just doesn't seem like the good like the right use of talent and time and so you know that same person if they actually just did what they were interested in and you know like follow their actual curiosity and passion i think that's just so get a better better way to live but you know no i'll get off my high horse down let me just let me get a stool so i can get down did you did you see a photo of this guy he looks like exactly like i want him to look like he looks like a student still yeah had at twenty nine like he looks he looks smart i guess so he looks ivy league did you have a college admission like counselor or anything like that yeah like our high school had a college counselor who i went in and they go okay so where do you wanna go to school i wanna go to duke and they go you should lower your expectations and i was like wow that's the opposite of what i think somebody supposed to saying your job like ernest supposed to dream big what's going on here and he's like yeah it's pretty tough out there so you know what else we got on the list let's go down lower on the list and see what we can do because my grades weren't the best and he rubbed it in his face did you but did you have like a tutor no but i did take like you know gmail or what about g like the a kaplan like test prep like i studied for the sat t's like that was what i did i did not have any of that stuff but when i was reading this article they said roughly twenty five take the sat no i did the act okay so you took the act did you do a test prep thing no i took it one time my junior year i think or maybe i took it twice my junior year and i got a combined score i think of twenty eight which is like combined score with like a boat test no prize i think i doesn't maybe i'm wrong but i thought they take like math and verbal or whatever yeah like they you get like the best of each try and they like combine it i think i got a twenty seven or twenty eight which is like eighty five percentile i think did you do well on it i did good on it i was good i a good test taker wasn't good in school like the consistency of every everyday you you know me i'm not good with the everyday stuff but if it was like it's time to do the big the big performance i could do that part well that's why did you get like on the sat you have to brag about it and then if you do good i think i got the equivalent of like a because they had changed the scoring system to like the twenty four hundred or whatever but i got the equivalent of what now is like a like a fifteen hundred basically what per i don't know sat but i look at goes up to sixteen hundred sixteen hundred is perfect fifteen hundreds like excellent and like you know thirteen hundred dude it says that's in the ninety eighth percentile yeah yeah it was a really good score scores like you missed like a couple questions basically did you try yeah yeah i tried i took i basically for like sixty days before the test i just took two two practice tests a day and this essay is like a six hour so i a six hour test in the morning i took a break i ate whatever and then i took another six hour test over a five hour test whatever it was in the evening and i just did that every day for like thirty days during the summer and then i took the then i took the well you should went and started one of these like companies on how to like master that shit because i didn't realize how big the these i didn't realize how big this was they said that like twenty five percent of people going to harvard this year they had one of these like tutors and then it goes up even higher that if your parents if your parents have a household come up at least half a million dollars half of them use these types of tutors and yeah i didn't realize how much of a game or how you could gain this so like you could you could really kick ass at it if you just like if you average parents will want in too if you just like higher coaches i i didn't i didn't buy into that but now i do so you're gonna do this type of stuff i think that if my children show an academic like if they're if they're good at academics and yeah i would encourage them to do this if they're only mildly decent academics i would say like let's consider all different alternatives i think i dude i'm like kind of an elitist i think that like these fancy schools like what you went went to should be like designed for like the like the academic class and like the rest of us like plea like i i think i should have gone to like a trade school or or or or or a state school i think i should gone to like a like a like a fifteen thousand dollar year university in missouri and like explored for versus going into debt of a hundred and fifty grand to go to like a non top university i that's ridiculous yeah i think that's right alright i have one and you have a few of which one you wanna do let's do a quick one on this thing i don't know how much i have to say just kinda fascinated me so let's see if there's something interesting here so i was at a breakfast and somebody was talking to me about a business idea that they were doing or that they had done in the past i like man that sounds like a good idea where you get that idea from and he goes oh it's the fisher investments model of what's fisher investments and he goes oh you don't know ken fisher like he's like you gotta look this guy so i go down this rabbit hold who's ken fisher so basically he's a billionaire money manager so he's my bill with the big time billionaire like like eleven fifteen billion yeah exactly and he basically created a of simple firm so it's a an investment adviser money manager type of firm called fisher investments and he grew it over the years to where they now manage you know upwards of two hundred seventy five million dollar billion dollars assets under management so two hundred seventy five billion with a b they got thirty five hundred employees they the and they ended up selling to private equity so they sold to advent they sold not the full about but they sold at a twelve and a half billion dollar valuation and that was the first outside capital raise so this guy basically bootstrap his way to a twelve billion dollar company and the question is how did he do it what did he do and so this guy's story in in the i guess the simple terms is his dad was a finance guy he actually wrote a book that was a popular called common stocks and uncommon profits which by the way when i went to von surprise hal he i asked him to recommend you know four or five books off his wall and that might have been one of i remember seeing it in his in his library and warren buffett called that book a major influence on career so that was his dad what he did was he left he went out and he started his own firm and the key is this guy is basically a marketing master so what he did was instead of trying to i shouldn't say instead of but like most people who are great with investments or money management there's certain profile of a person and that person typically doesn't have incredible direct response advertising skills by the way it's typically the opposite a lot of people who are in this industry are the opposite of extroverted and they kinda like wanna be in a hole and just not talk to anyone and they don't advertise at all and it's so when when they did this deal some of the numbers came out and basically these guys are spending sixty million dollars a year on marketing which sounded like a ton to anybody else in the money management space and to him he was like that's nothing that he goes i get the question why do you advertise so much he goes because we have no market share they you have over a hundred billion dollars in assets in our management it goes that is nothing then have you seen the size of this market we're just the biggest grain of sand in the sandbox but we're still just a grain of sand we have point one percent if that and so he said we spend about six percent of our revenue on marketing so that's still not a lot they spend six you know sixty million a year and so they're doing about a billion dollars a year in revenue and he basically created the system of this marketing system and so you can go watch his ads and i went and watch a bunch of his tv ads and what he says is like he's like well there's we we broke it down so he's like there's six mental profiles of people of about how they think of their retirement and their savings and investing and so they break out the six psycho geographic profiles you have you know let's say the the grandma who just doesn't wanna lose at all you have the the guy who's stash away and this four zero one k and he's looking for he thinks he he feels like he should be doing more but he doesn't know exactly what he's pretty dis with most people with a you know people who come to him and so they have these profiles and then they started running ads and you think focus groups and try to figure out which ads are working and they there's little nuggets along the way that they were why do you use they were like why do use your face in the ads you know do you feel like there's some risk with that or would it make it harder to sell the business he goes because we found that clients wanna the clients want to believe that there's someone who wakes up in the morning and gives a darn that there's a person not an institution who cares that's why we use my image because here's ken he's sixty eight years old he gets up in the morning and he cares that's what i need to get convince you of and then he talked about how they're like you know what did you learn from your you know your advertising because they're very scientific about it he's like well one thing for example we learned that men's faces do better than women i'm really told us we should be using female faces that's gonna peel more not in our testing our testing shows that men's faces are gonna convert better than than female face tenth there's a famous ad where it's an out outline you know how the wall street journal has photos of their authors that are like dots it's like a it's like a sketch actually it's a it's a sketch out of dots yeah whatever he buys out brain ads and tab ads and they would always see dotted profile photo where you think it looks like a wall street journal article and then you click and it goes to fisher investments right and so that's how i first learned about them i'm because i'm like these guys fisher investments are following me everywhere on the internet well so if you click one of those they're great with headlines so for example you click one of those brain ads as to blue ads you're gonna go to a page that's just a video there's no navigation there's no nothing and the va video is called debunk seeing through wall street money killing myths and it's a twelve minute video that you're gonna see where he debunk you know wall street wall wall street myths and you know this type of like buzzfeed headline stuff isn't what you're gonna find from most money managers most money managers would cringe at that they don't know that they don't know how to do those they don't have the team in place like you've talked about ago for example he's basically glorified you know money management by putting out really compelling juicy content and then advertising it everywhere so they spend a ton of money on ads they're on fox news or on forbes or in wall street journal they're on market watch you know they're basically they have his profile they're like we're looking for somebody who's got a five hundred thousand dollar retirement portfolio they don't want to get rich quick ad and then you look at their ads and it'll say wanna retire comfortably if you have five hundred thousand dollars download this guide by forbes columnist and money manager or ken fisher firm it's called the definitive guide to retirement income and then there's a picture of a guy on horseback and like like dude is like ready to retire and like it get out of the office and be on horseback or he'll have an ad like i have one here on i'll put these up on youtube so you could see the ads but like his operating ads says what does your net worth say about when say about how you'll retire so it's kinda like a personality quiz like what does your net worth say about how your retirement it's gonna go and it's a picture of a man a woman on a boat like titanic dude this is so good i'm looking at it now i mean just look like i wanna show you this here just i'm gonna screen share this real quick it works by the way because i i have to assume that his product is good right like i don't know we'll see i i i don't have a strong pain opinion look at this landing page though designed for conversion he's got the fifteen minute retirement plan as a book and it's an arrow and there's a drag and drop like box it's like where should you get it get it right here get my free quote right and then you got ken fisher below here's a here's a white guy you could trust and i just thought this guy's marketing is just excellent i think it's to be studied i think it's extremely effective especially with the crowd that he's going for which is kinda like the fifty and up crowd so studying this guy's ad library was was pretty pretty insightful and it also just brought up a an interesting idea which is a lot of people when they're great at marketing they go into spaces that them and their friends are already in which is often like d to c commerce or marketing agencies like you are being a look you're trying to be a great marketer in a sea of great marketers i think what the genius of this guy is is he said how do i be you know just you know two notches above average at marketing but go into a space where nobody knows anything about marketing right or everybody is like doing a very rudimentary playbook and so that's what i think the opportunity is like if you go do this and the senior living space it's like the people who own and operate senior living businesses are not the same sharp that you're gonna get try to sell you know handbags on the internet because those people the people who sell handbags on the internet they're world class marketers that's why they're able to sell you know a handbag for you know ten x the cogs and the other thing is that when people see these ads they think does this work i can't believe this works first of all yes it works it does it works for everyone it's not just like old like you kinda made a comment like only older people are into this i think this always works this type of stuff works really well regardless of the age but it went like a brand advertising guru who lives in brooklyn new york who wears common project shoes they see this type of shit and they think this is fucking lame i should make my wife's website looks flash year when in reality a plain white website that has just long form copy of like three thousand words can oftentimes more often than not convert better than a flashy website so let me read you the last few notes i have here so he's been a forbes call us for like twenty plus years so he he was like he's basic content marketing right like what what we do and what we get a lot of credit for which was like well you build an audience you build a brand and that helps you with distribution this guy has been doing that for thirty plus years he wrote several books so he wrote super stocks and other ones he has an army of salespeople that cold call investor and they call they talk about this basement this basement of like cold callers that are just sitting there and and people report that like dude i i signed i signed up for this free guide once i read it and then they've just been badger me for like years ever since and they keep calling me trying to get me to invest with them he says that everybody else relies on referrals from other partners they don't think about the broader world how do we get people calling us that was their goal and they have estimated about fourteen thousand dollar c it cost them fourteen thousand dollars to acquire our a customer they spent you know just over sixty million dollars on ads back in twenty nineteen they're the twelfth biggest spend of financial services they have like you know sixty plus thousand individual investors plus then they manage another ten billion dollars plus from pension state governments municipal etcetera they charge about you know one percent one one point two five percent in fees so you know you could do the math on one point two five percent of two hundred fifty billion and then it's hard to gauge the performance they don't have publicly available numbers for everything but they the in the past fisher funds with publicly available numbers have under under underperforming the market up substantially so they have a p total return fund it was a mutual fund that had twenty five percent return in ten years the s to p five hundred index would have been a thousand percent in the same time yet still if this some of the quote was if his firm is not the biggest r it's close and so to build the biggest investment adviser firm while not necessarily having the best returns in you know but being the best marketers is the story here to fuck podcasts i wanna do that this sounds awesome right of course there's is a billion reasons why like it's a pain in the ass to run just like everything else is but this sounds great dude i've been watching better call saul do you have you watch the show what a new what do you wanna become like an ambulance change or is any he just a lawyer no but well yeah he's a lawyer but like one of the things they show him doing is like him making his commercials and his ads to try to be you know to be like better call saul and it reminded me so much of this can fisher playbook and the show makes a seem the show makes also the the hustle he does to like create these commercials is also very fun he's nailed the branding this is cool i've seen his ads all over the place and i knew he was big i didn't know they got acquired so i i wasn't able to ever see any of the numbers but that's amazing well look look at here's some of the i think this is his own reporting of his performance two thousand and seven he says if he bought this is not their funds this is like his recommendations but if you bought all of my all sixty of my recommendations you would be up point nine percent and assuming you lost one percent transaction fees the sp founder is down point five okay so nothing big two thousand eight he says how are my results last year in line with the market which is to say not good two thousand nineteen what he said yeah two thousand and nine i made sixty four five recommendations if you put an equal someone each to be up forty four percent stock market's up twenty nine twenty point nine percent twenty ten he says your return is eighteen percent versus twelve percent but these are like his stock picks i think from his forbes column which is not the same that's like his entertainment if you have an an a a wealth advisor or whatever this this stuff's call if you have a an advisor who promises to make you more than the index they're lying but but then what is the point of the adviser the the point is is that like as you grow and get older it's savvy to think alright i need to get less stocks more bonds and those mature sometimes six twelve twenty four months so it's like the buying of those if setting up at a state plan there's a bunch of administrative stuff that often but not always that one percent can kinda of pay for itself or like help you you could also say that they are kind of like a therapist so when you wanna sell stuff they're like dude don't sell it don't be in idiot but there's a bunch of administrative stuff but outperforming the market is is not the main value and and if if if you have an adviser who says that they're gonna out pick then they're foolish by the way do you know who who else does this is motley fool so the motley fool they have a a fund that has well over a billion dollars and it started as a stock picking newsletter and now they branch out to having a fund and so they actually have a wealth advisory business that it is massive and it was built up the exact same ways as fisher yeah it's pretty crazy you had a billion dollars this guys over two fifty billion so somehow motley fool which is like also excellent at online content and it probably has way more traffic does not have anywhere near the same assets under management which i think is always interesting to look at you know when two people pursue the same strategy and one gets a hundred x return you know sometimes you point to look or timing or other things but often it's you know it's a business model of choice it's a strategic choice or it's an execution point that's different yeah this isn't insane that motley is one point five billion can i tell you a quick story about related to something that el gil said yeah so he made a comment where we asked some like what he's interested in and he said monuments and so what he meant was like an example of a monument is the statue of liberty or in some ways like the eiffel tower like things that like exists mostly to bring pride to a country but then also act as like a tourist destination and he was saying you know why don't we build more of these what happened to the monuments was sort of the question yeah he was like look when we were up and coming like we love building monuments and like the it gave a sense of pride and it was like good for like it was like very pro america and it got people bought in and i had a guy listened to the podcast and he sent me the deck that he's trying to raise money for a monument that's based in san francisco on a alcatraz and so you have to see this so it's a picture of first of all i don't know who this i've never heard of this person but you know who prometheus is he's like a greek god and it's basically like he represents the spear of innovation courage for the purpose of building for manifest destiny for in nobility which elevate humanity they wanna build a massive statue of him that's three hundred and fifty feet tall and it's on yeah where a alcatraz is and like for the statue of liberty had like a hot boyfriend this is be him yes and and that's exactly what it is cloud country he's just holding up a ports just like she is except he's absolutely ripped and he's from the movie three hundred and he's got like a speed o on yeah it's basically a speed to be honest certainly like there they did not hope pull any punches as far as the the the amount of stone and steel going into this guy and so first of all i've gotta say the obvious that there will never be a statue that tout manifest destiny and in born nobility and the spirit of courage that's gonna sit in the bay of san francisco that the the that like all the like a shirtless rip dude none of that i think will ever happen but the idea is actually interesting and so what they wanna do is they what are the raising a hundred million dollars to build the statue on alcatraz and so it's three hundred and fifty feet and but in their deck they talk about the money the revenue and profit of other people of other statues so what's of this shit so the statue liberty does a hundred and fifty four million dollars a year in revenue seventy million dollars a year of net income and then you can go down to like per harbor yeah i mean okay so statue liberty that doesn't say that again that's that's mind blowing so statue liberty you said seventy million dollars of net income a hundred and fifty million dollars of revenue so fifty percent you know net profit margins on four and a half million visitors each one paying twenty five bucks a ticket and ten dollars of concessions it's insane why it's insane and then it goes down to like mount rushmore which is on the smaller end which says fifty million in sales and twenty million a year in net income or pearl harbor same thing fifty million twenty three million dude i was why are we not doing this these are amazing businesses that's my point and so i went and i saw these numbers and i'm like that's absolutely ridiculous and it's like amazingly good and of course with all things related to like investment decks you know that you paid the best possible story and who knows if any of it that source cited on this there's no source i looked up some of the stats and like the statue of liberty numbers it does it kinda checks out where that it it is plausible that those are the numbers but they're raising a hundred and seventy million dollars to build this and their goal is to make a hundred million dollars a year in profit or like that's what they say the numbers are so you start doing the math and like i said this is all just some guy drawing this up and like who knows it's the this is painting the best story ever of of a thing that doesn't exist but the math is somewhat interesting behind like the like how this all works and saying there's a chance yeah so they're like if we do this we're doing ninety four million dollars your net income and so it's actually pretty interesting that like money of course dude you're not gonna like be able to build this in san francisco they're not gonna have any part of it how much have they raised so far do you don't no and like when i was googling it they're they have like a subs stack and they saved things like joe lyon sales on board and like all these like amazing people are on board and there have a subs stack documenting what they're talking about but they i don't think i saw that they said how much they've raised i think it's cool that people are doing this i guess i have a few thoughts i think it's cool that people are doing this i hope something like this happens i am stunned at the profitability of these other monuments that is that is my golden nugget for the pod that that is amazing noted okay noted there's there's something here this deck by the way does not look well made and i think if you're gonna try to pull something like this off you have to i'll like if you can't pay for a designer for your deck then i'm not sure i believe that you're gonna do this yeah yeah and and like this is i wonder how like i like when they're going bed at and i talking to their wives i wonder if they're saying like isn't it this hilarious that we're trying this or is it like when things built you got be do you got you gotta fully believe that you're doing god's work out here yeah and it could happen but so it's called if you wanna look it up i've got no affiliate i've never talked to these people it's called the american lost this foundation kinda funny yeah yeah i think you're right though that location really matters like you have to go somewhere that both has you know can be a tourist destination but has you need the approvals right you can't just get stuck in limbo and san francisco barrier is probably one of the harder places to get get approval for something like this dude san francisco the anti ent of a ripped like a ripped like alpha looking heterosexual male like this is like not like they i lived at san francisco for ten years this is not exactly what the culture is about so i think the remember had arc we had on the wall the giant painting we had on the wall at my office at monkey inferno where it was the reverse of the evolution of man yeah you know evolution man is like it's a ape and then he's like standing half upright then he's fully upright that he's walking and then it's like you know that's the homo sap today and the thing we had on the wall was the homo sap and then it's him bending over overlooking at his phone bending over sitting basically sitting down at a laptop and then typing and it was like a powder at the end of it and it was like that was the final evolution i think they to sit that was what that's what should be the monument in san francisco yeah it's like a giant neck beard yeah alright wearing on hoodie it not not a not a jacked greek god yeah you wanna do one more thing yeah i got a few quick hit okay let's do let's do this one so talking to bankers i think this is a good value add this a pro tip life pro tip for for founders out there i didn't know this when i first started doing startups i had no idea and only the first time i ever came into contact with a banker was when i tried to sell my company so i was kinda like i don't know eight or nine years into doing entrepreneurship and even then i didn't know what a banker was somebody said introduce you to a banker and i thought that's the guy at wells fargo that like sits in the back not in the front like i didn't i didn't really understand what that meant turns out a banker is like an investment banker there's somebody who can help you sell your company raise capital get debt that sort of thing and they they come in at a certain level of scale so usually something like thirty million dollars and up really they try to be like kind of like a hundred million dollar company or so and i had a friend who was you know successful entrepreneur and he told me something that that really stuck with me he goes i was like when do you think you should talk to these guys like you know and i was thinking meaning like when you're ready yeah like when i'm ready like at the very beginning of when i'm ready or do need to have all my stuff together and he goes i he goes the best thing i ever did was i talked to a banker a year before i wanted to sell my business and i talked to them and i got a year before what do you mean and he goes yeah because i went to the banker and i said if i wanted to sell my business today what would it be worth would it be able to sell how strong would would this asset look like in the marketplace right now and they know all the deals that have gotten done so bankers are in the process the bankers are in the middle of selling companies just like yours in your industry so you go to a banker that's in the industry they've seen everything that's traded they know the relative strength they know the valuations that they're trading at they know who the buyers are they know why that they're buying and so they can give you a really clear picture and he goes i went before i was ready because i wanted them to tell me what would cause this to not sell what would be the weak points of this business so that became my road roadmap for the next year of what i needed to fix that became my priority list so that when i did go to market i actually had those things fixed and if i hadn't gotten that feedback at that point i would have just got that same feedback a year later and they would have punt it the on the road they're gonna they're gonna tell you that shit regardless and so it's nice to know early and so i think bankers are actually a pretty cheat not just for selling so that was the first thing i i learned second thing was you can actually talk to bakers before even go into a space and i think you've done this before too which is you go to a banker who's in a space that you're interested in and you talked to them about the companies that have sold and you're like what what companies have sold how were they doing what what was their you know strengths and weaknesses why didn't who are the buyers why do they buy the question is basically what's the profile and attributes of a business in this space that out kicks the rest of you know that that performs better than that the other ones so tell me all those attributes and those those strengths of weaknesses and i'm gonna just do that or exactly you you can reverse engineer maybe you could work backwards from that and find a great business so i did this with a recent business we haven't announced yet where we we first talk talked to baker and that we we learn from that oh that validated a lot of things we already liked about the business idea we had an idea talk to the bankers that kinda cosign signed or stamp that yes this is actually an even better idea than we thought meaning it traded for much higher multiples and the business could be like we didn't we didn't have to do a b and c a and b we're gonna be more than enough to have an outstanding outcome they also told us the on the other hand like so for example here's my five questions for bankers so i go to bankers and i say what deals have gotten done recently that's the first question number two which ones like you said out kick the coverage so which ones traded at the highest multiple and why what was the unique about those was it just simply timing or was there something that they had in there the way that they did it or the cost structure that made them particularly attractive then the third question i asked is what deals didn't get done and why so meaning what deals couldn't cross the finish line what were the big red flags that stop people from buying the business because you wanna basically know those two fourth question who are the who are the buyers and why are they buying so basically every buyer has a plan and you wanna know are the buyers only strategic or are their private equity folks are there independent sponsors who are the potential buyers and then what's their game plan once they buy it oh they're buying things at a five five million dollar eb number for seven x or ten x and then they're are gonna they're gonna they're rolling up five of those and they're trying to get to twenty five million and they're trying to trade that at twenty x and okay that's their game plan gotcha and what are you know and then the last one is if my business did x y z so this is the useful one when you're not writing yet but i basically say hey here's where we're at today here's where i think we're gonna be in a year if this is what my business looks like a year from now what do you think it would trade for and why and getting that from four or five different bankers really helps triangulate a space i so i did last week i spent maybe seven hours on the phone with bankers doing this process and i feel like i learned more of those seven hours then i you know would have been in seven months of just operating my business it was so clarifying how to do this and it just made realized man more people should do this i'm gonna come on the pot and at least say it so that for the people for whom it's applicable which is i would say you're an entrepreneur looking for your next next space and you're not you're not just being driven by some passion or calling and you are doing it more analytical let's say this is a tool or if you're a business owner and you wanna sell someday and you prop in you're at you know a few million dollars of your profit minimum go have this conversation i'm so board i've done this a bunch of times and i think it's so smart i think that there's this idea in silicon valley there was like this trick question when you're raising funding for from a vc and it says like what's the outcome here like what would you sell for and the answer that everyone protects my dead body yeah i would never sell and the answer like the the answer i absolutely could be like i'm going to sell but the answer probably should be like well i don't know maybe we will maybe we won't but like if if we get to these numbers we can sell for this or we can ipo like the idea of like i have an exit in mind has been told to us so that's silly i think that that's that sense it's a very silicon valley thing because for two specific reasons one all venture capital is predicated on the idea that you're gonna drive this to a billion dollars plus so if you show any weakness any hint that this guy would sell for less than a billion dollars like if he got an eighty million dollar offer that would change his life he'll take it well then this is not a good investment for me because i'm taking all the risk of failure but i need to know that this succeeds it could be a billion dollar plus and one of the risks of it being a billion dollar plus company is not just that the business works but that this founder will hold on and they will resist temptation so silicon valley investors because of the fund math they need that that's why they put their values onto you and say well those are your needs that's cool for you that's not my needs as necessarily as an entrepreneur that's the first thing the second thing is just there's a ego pride it seems noble in some way to say this is my life this is my my life company i'll do this for a hundred years i think we're gonna dominate this space so much it just sounds so cool it sounds so but by the way i think you i think you can do that and also this so there's this book that i love called built to sell have you ever seen built to sell no it's a popular book but it here's the premise which is like you build your company to sell because building a sell business means you may or may not sell it but you have a company that operates well and you know what does warren buffett say he says like build your company so an idiot can run it because someday that an idiot will be running it that's kind of the premise here with build to sell which is like you know you're gonna build your company to to operate well and so i think you should build your company to exit regardless if you're going to exit or not i agree fully i guess what i'm saying is and that works for us because we don't raise venture capital for our businesses anymore we just owed them ourselves but a lot of the advice you get is still from vcs because they're the loud people they're the people who are famous so so you'd sort of take their advice even though you're not actually in their game you're in your own game and so i i think that's very very important distinction the other thing though is it does sound cooler to say i would never i would never sell this i sell sell to sell to i'm trying to buy amazon right well you why do you love your boy brett ad cock because brett ad cock is all bra he's all chest right he basically will say we're gonna change the world we're gonna be build a trillion dollar company anything less than that what's the point you're like oh my god this is it's it's it's into a sam par wouldn't saying it is into to be around somebody who is going only for the big shot and is not saying i'm building this to sell or that there's a path here to a three hundred fifty million dollar exit which will you know seven x your your money he doesn't talk like that and because he doesn't talk like that it is very attractive and it is very admirable because many of us wish that we could be as hardcore and brave and bold is that we're just not and that by way i don't think you have be i don't wanna play that game but when you do see something in the game it's cool i got admit it is agree i agree it's cool i agree and i like and i i've invested in a couple like right ad cock i invested in and he has this attitude and i like that by the way do you now that you have friends that are vcs or i mean you you sort of were one for a minute isn't it funny how you talked to them about like your company and raising capital and you'll say no we don't raise capital and when you're friends with them it's like that's the right move yeah you know what i mean exactly when you're not when you're gonna giving low five five put to hit you with the low five real quick yeah they like say that's the right move now when you aren't tell them that and you're a potential client they say like oh that's cute right like you know what i mean that's a lifestyle business that's good for you but when you're friends with them they think themselves or they'll say like smart the irony of the vc thing is a vc does the opposite of what they want all the founders to do so they don't go all in on one idea they have a diversified portfolio they they are not you know sort of only looking at the upside they make a ton of money in fees right so they you know they're gonna whatever when when somebody raises money so for example what's the podcast harry s harry harry stepping just raised a four hundred hundred million dollar fund that's amazing that's incredible by the way harry is gonna make eighty million dollars guaranteed in fees just fees he could be the worst investor in the world why because that he's gonna make eighty million dollars because he's gonna make two percent a year on four hundred million it's twenty percent over the life of a ten year fund so just do twenty percent eighty million dollars in fees guaranteed that's his floor who cares about the upside from there if for harry time right all you gotta do is keep the game going and ready baby everybody's another fund that would be amazing right so vcs while they want you to be all in and they want you to live on scraps and they want you to have no no diversification and stay super laser focused and they want you to go ride for the big upside they themselves have a very different picture of risk which by the way i think is it's a smaller picture of of risk but it is it is just funny that that's true it's funny that that the person giving you that advice is literally doing the exact opposite with their own finances and portfolio that's funny they're not wrong because they're saying oh you wanted to play the mark zuckerberg game then that's how you gotta play so they they are giving you the right advice for for you if you wanna be doing that the eighty million dollars fee thing i never i i never knew that i mean i i knew that they get what is it fifty percent when when you do the math it's well two percent is misleading it's two percent every year off the top the same reason why financial buy which type ken fisher oh one percent that's not much one percent of your entire net assets every year off the top regardless of performance is like one of the great sort of seven wonders of the world that's the eighth it's like that the eighth wonder of the world is that a one percent off the top fee every year is actually eat becomes a ga number over ten years and so that that's the same thing with a with a venture fund like this dude god bless him god bless america i guess he's not even in better america that's the best for they didn't put a monument of harry standing somewhere for raising a four hundred million dollar fund and eighty million dollars in fees it's the eighty million dollar monument oh my god that'd be great that that funding thing or that monument thinks ridiculous right this monument think is fascinating we gotta i gotta go look more into this is a great great episode yeah alright that's it that's a pod i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never looking back