Alright, it's a new year, but it's the same old us. And we wanted to do something for you guys. So we wanted to do a mailbag of fan questions. So people have written in questions.
We are going to answer them. You ready to jump in, Sam? Yeah. I feel like I can rule the world.
I know I can be what I want to. I put my own in it like a day zone. Alright, here we go. Question number one.
What is the biggest mistake you've made in your business that you have not spoken about publicly yet? And how has it shaped your decision making? Man, I've got a great one for this. Tell me if your experience has been with us.
So I tend to hire ambitious young people. And I take chances on them. And I hate to say it, but the majority of the time, that is a horrible plan. And it's significantly better to hire more experienced people and pay them a lot more money.
And I get way better results. So when was this mistake? Is this like I've been making some mistake forever or this? Forever, man.
Look, this is like my mistake. It's like the American dream, you know? Like give me your your your broken your weak and your your like ambitious young. I can fix him.
Yes. And like I always want to do that because I'm so you know, I'm into the romantic idea of that. And just I recently, you know, at our Hampton, we've hired like significantly more experienced people and they cost like two or three times more than a young and upcoming person. But the results are like five or 10 times better.
Right. And I just make this I always am I I get so emotional and I always find the people say higher high agency people or hire these people whose growth rate is really high. But in general, it's just kind of better to say, hey, you already did this at this other company. Do do it here, please.
So we were just going through a hiring process. I wanted to hire somebody on my content team and we found this kid was great. He sent in this like wonderful video, like, he made this video application that was super funny. And it was well done.
And I was like, yes, this is my kind of guy young green. Yeah, he used to do this. You know, he just graduated. But like this video is amazing.
I got to talk to this guy. I talked to him. I like him. Before we hired him, you know, he has to have a simple question, which is like, so we want this to go well, right?
We want this to be great and we want this to work. And so like, does it make sense to just go with somebody who has never done anything even remotely like this? Or are the people in the world who have done very similar things that we could go talk to first? And should we not like lean in that direction?
And as soon as we had that, like, very simple sanity check, because I'm like you, I fall in love with the sort of angel investing in people idea. It's like the raw, up and come, or never done anything found this diamond in the rough. Why do I like that? It's not for generous reasons because it's like, I feel cool that I found that thing.
Right. Like finding a needle in a haystack, the diamond in the rough. But that's it is like, I have such a low hit rate with that. Right.
By definition, you're going to have a low hit rate with that strategy. And if it matters, and if there are people who have done it before that are way more proven in this category, like, why are you not going in that direction? So I've definitely had that same mistake sometimes. It can work.
And when it does work, it's the best story. It's the best. But like, check this out. This strategy I've been doing, I've been working well.
So I love hiring consultants and agencies. But I'll say, I'm only going to hire you for two months. And I'm going to, you're going to do the work for the first 30 days, but in the second 30 days, it's just you teaching me what to do. And so I found experience of like getting like a young ambitious, high agency green person and teaming them up with an agency.
And I have had some results with that. But in general, just hiring more experienced people and paying them more money. It's just typically the way to go. And that sounds so duh.
But that's the biggest mistake that I've made. Well, most businesses just figuring out what are your own leaks in your bucket. And then of course, to other people who don't have that leak, I mean, it's obvious, right? But you have to know, what are my biases?
And in your case, your biases are like, I like to be cheap as hell when I build my company. This was like how you were before, at the hustle at least, like before. Get the cheap office, get the free desk off Craigslist. Our dog will be security.
And you're like, I'm going to build this the frugal way. And then secondly, what if I found a guy like me just a level fuck up who could be fixed? And it's like, so those are biases that would lead you too far in that direction. That's not to say you've never hired a junior person, but too often defaulting to that.
And so you gotta know your own biases. What about yours? Do you have one? I wrote project selection.
So my theory is this, if you are hardworking and you are sufficiently talented, then the only variable that matters is project, what project you pick to work on. Because if you're going to work really hard on it and you're talented, then either you're going to be a 10 out of 10 person working on a two out of 10 opportunity or a 10 out of 10 person working on a 10 out of 10 opportunity. And I think I have picked some real dog shit projects in the past. I tried to start a sushi restaurant chain, which like restaurants are one of the worst businesses.
Sushi would be one of the worst types of restaurants to do. And by the way, that makes no sense for me as a person to do. The second one, I tried to make the next hit social media app. I tried to make the next Twitter, the next Facebook, the next Snapchat.
And I've done six years going after that as a project to select and God, that is hard to do. You try to make us hit social media app, which frankly you don't really use social media, you use Twitter, but like seldomly, to be honest, and seemingly you're good at it. And two, you eventually made a streaming video game, like, or that's who your market was. Neither of us know or play video games or like streaming.
Or had ever streamed a video game in my life. I mean, I made a craft beer app for craft beer enthusiasts. Dude, I can't spell beer. Like, like beers bro, it makes me burp.
I don't know, like I don't like it. I just picked all these terrible projects that were bad founder fit, just weak market opportunities in general, right? So it's like very, very poor projects. I started my e-commerce brand is a clothing brand.
You can be dressed. You love clothes. You don't even know what I'm doing. And that one worked, but it's such a grind because e-commerce and fashion and apparel and inventory.
It's like, dude, one of the worst projects you could select. So I think I've been together, just those projects I just mentioned. And by the way, those are just the ones I remember, just off the top of my head. There's some other do's in there.
Those are 10 years of my professional life. I've only had 17. So the majority of my professional life has been spent on really poor projects, and everybody who's talented knows opportunity cost is the biggest cost. So every year I was working on one of those years, I wasn't working on something that was a better fit for me.
The good news is Sean, that even a blind girl finds a nut once in a while, and you've taken enough swing, that's worked out. I've talked before about the way that I know how to make money, about how to leverage your time and energy, and the team at HubSpot actually went through the video where I explained all that, and turned it into a free downloadable cheat sheet on my four rules of how to make money. Now, this is not, you know, different types of advice, it's just core principles, foundational principles about building wealth, things that I wish I knew when I was just getting started. And so if you wanna download it, it's in the description below, it's totally free.
You can go get it, thanks to the folks at HubSpot for doing the research, making this document, and making it available to all you guys. All right, back to this episode. So this is from Dan from LA. I've been a fan ever since the pod was promoted in the hustle.
I think that was four or five years ago. I'm dying for another Sarah's List episode. My wife currently works at Waymo, but time to jump to the next five to 10X her. I'm tired of waiting.
They're a brother of a bone. Give me one company that you think would be perfect for the Sarah's List. Now, let's tell the listener, here's what Sarah's List is. So my wife Sarah was looking for a new job, and we came up with this idea where, let's see if you can join a company that has something like a thousand employees.
So you can make a great living in terms of like work like balance, because there's some stability, presumably, and you can make a pretty decent salary. But even still, there's enough growth left where your stock in 10X and hopefully make you worth millions. In her case, it worked. She did that with Airbnb.
When they were, I mean, it was a huge company. It was like a $18 billion company with, I forget, 4,000 people, and it grew to be a, I think, $100 billion company in her $250,000 a year stock, grew to like a million dollars a year stock, something like that. And so, Sean and I have made maybe three different lists where we predicted what the next Sarah's style company is. Can we love this because you want to be a millionaire?
Everybody does, I don't know. I haven't actually met anybody who doesn't want that. But not everybody wants to be an entrepreneur. That's huge risk.
Not everybody has the winning idea. Not everybody wants to be the brilliant investor who finds the gem at an early price. And this path was basically like, oh, you're not like the hotshot exec getting this insane package. You just join as a normal employee into a clearly good company that's already in a stable position.
You're going to get healthcare. There's like, you know, there's systems in place. There's a nice office to go to. So you didn't make any of those crazy sacrifices, but just by, even if you had a $50,000 a year stock rent, right, so let's say your total comp was going to be $180K, $150K.
And of that, you know, $120 is cash and then the rest is stock. And you get that every year for four years, normal, vesting cycle. Well, over those four years, that $200,000 of stock could become a million dollars a stock. Just by the company, naturally growing at the rate, it's already growing at.
And I thought, what hack? When I saw that when you said that Sarah did this and that you guys were somewhat intentional about what company to pick to go to, she worked at Facebook, then Airbnb, we decided to Chris in this as a Sarah's list. I think we came up with 30 companies. A couple of them were home runs.
So I think Rippling, Figma, Andrew, I don't even remember. I'm a person. Cool, yeah, the cursor, there's been others, yeah. Now, the question is, is why haven't we done this again?
I have an answer, which is my, and I think you're going to agree, it's so much harder to predict what the winners are right now because compared to Airbnb and Uber and Lyft and Rippling and these software companies, they were fairly steady growth with all these new AI companies. It's impossible to predict, hey, what's going to hit? And it's impossible to predict, are they actually going to have longevity? It's sustained, yeah, yeah.
The hot companies today are like, they're so proud to be the fastest grown, fastest to 100 million in ARR, but it's like, do that happen in four months or five months? Like, that's not the same like, sure footing that you could stand on. It's not a stable foundation, whereas you could see these things that have been going for seven years, just compounding steadily. You could predict that the next seven years will probably be more compounding steadily.
But I do have an answer, do you have an answer for Dan from LA? My, okay, so it sounds so boring. There's probably two of them that I would predict. One of them, I heard Scott Galloway make the same argument, so I'm just doing his.
One was your old, your alma mater, Amazon. I do think that you can get incredibly wealthy still. Yeah, Amazon, yeah. That's crazy big.
Amazon, what is Amazon? They've underperformed the market. They've underperformed the market. And I have- But you're saying it's currently a $2.4 trillion company.
So you're saying it's going to be a $10 trillion company, the first ever? Yeah, because I think that when I use my Alexa, it's still so stupid. Like it doesn't understand AI. Or what do you like, use Amazon.com?
And like, search for stuff, the AI is still horrible. Amazon is a wild pick. I don't know what else do you have. Okay, here I have two for you.
I thought there's one. We're both investors in this one company. I thought you were going to say that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That was pretty good. Okay, so I'll give you mine and then you can use that one too. I don't know if their valuation is public. So careful what you say.
I think it was. Okay, so my pick would be Neuralink. Okay, why Neuralink? Well, first, I think if you're going to join a company, maybe join the company by the greatest entrepreneur ever of all time, which is Elon Musk, undisputed at this point, I would say.
And so the Elon index of companies has just performed at the absurd level. Whether it's Tesla, it's SpaceX, it's XAI now, is now like a ridiculously valued company. Neuralink is what's next. So Neuralink is one of these companies that is doing something that very few, like there's no, there's no competitors to this.
There's like five competitors total in the world and they're all way far behind. What is Neuralink doing? They're putting chips in your brain that today help a quadriplegic person be able to use a computer just with their thoughts. And by the way, this isn't just like a pie in the sky.
Yeah, like there's a guy. You could watch him streaming himself playing video games on Twitch using his mind as the controller. And it's pretty insane. They've done it in like, they've done it in like, I think two humans now and it's just getting better and better where it's becoming less invasive.
Also, I think now he just tweeted out, there's like a, I think there's like a surface, more surface level implant that they could do that rather than going so deep into the brain. Do you even work here? Like, how do you get a job? What?
It's company. Is it? Okay. So Neuralink, I think when I initially said this on Sarah's List, it was like a $2 billion valuation.
It's now $10 billion. So it's already had one Sarah's List jump of 5X. It's gonna have another. This is going to be a huge company.
Like, if you think about computing, so computing went from computers to laptops to mobile phones. And the next one is probably some version of glasses or a watch, some version of that. That's what's coming next. And then what comes after that is the computer in your mind, right?
Like just attaching yourself to the computer so that you can literally just think and you have access to the internet, just from your thoughts. Now, some people will say this dystopian, some people say they don't want this. Guess what? Once the first people start to have the chip in your brain, you will be the equivalent of like a turtle, if you do not.
And so this is the game theory of this is that we're all gonna end up with this. Because if anybody does it, they're gonna be a god amongst men. You're like, I think you're like, I'm gonna make a prediction. You never said this.
Are you the type of guy who doesn't even like take a medicine? I don't take medicine now. That's what I thought. I don't take any supplements.
Exactly what I thought. The guy who doesn't even take medicine, like Advil or something like that, you're saying you're gonna be putting a brain chip in your brain? Again, you have to, right? Like I already basically have the computer attached to my hand.
Come on, it's in my hand eight hours a day. It's in my pocket, right? It's attached to my body at all times. If I don't have my phone on me, I kind of panic, right?
So it is in some ways already a third limb. But once this goes to the point where I can just have it, in my mind, again, it's not really gonna be that much of a choice because the people who have it are gonna be like walking around like gods compared to the people who don't. And by the way, he's doing the Tesla model. So the Tesla business plan was you first do the really expensive sports car, high cost, low production volume, sell it to just rich enthusiasts who want something cool or cool toy.
And then the cool toy becomes more and more mainstream and more and more, you know, eventually you get to the model three, which is now like a mainstream car. With Neuralink, he's doing it where first it's gonna solve the problems for people who are quadriplegics. The next one, he's going for people who are blind. And like people who can really improve the quality of life.
And eventually it'll get to, it's kind of like a phone. It's like a consumer device. We all just do for fun, right? But it's inarguable that you should not be helping.
People who are paralyzed, you know, have more function because of this technology. They have a cool, so the reason I was like, could you even apply to work there is because I had never like seen their job openings. I thought it was, I thought it was like a project. I didn't realize it was like a proper company yet.
Because if you go to the CEO's LinkedIn, he says like manager of a family office, but they do have a careers page and they're hiring for a bunch of roles in San Francisco or Friedman and Austin. And their jobs page is pretty cool. It says you don't have to be a brain surgeon to work at Neuralink and then it lists all the open roles they have. So that's pretty, okay.
Yeah. There's a content creator role. There's a junior accounts payable specialist, right? You can work at these companies.
Dude, I talked to a guy who worked at Facebook and PR. I think he said it was the 400th employee and he was in PR. And he said that they did things where, you know, at a large company Amazon, I had this to where you get, I forget exactly, do you get a discount on the stock? Or if you buy the stock, they match it or something like that as a perk, like 20 grand a year, nothing like crazy.
And he told me he did that, plus he like just stayed for 10 years and he said he made $90 million. So if you're listening to this and you are an accounts payable person, this definitely looks cool. I thought you were gonna say, I thought you were gonna say owner for your answer. So owner, which is valued kind of in the billion dollar range.
I think the last round they raised was billion dollars. I'll just tell you two things. One when I got introduced to the investment for owner, the person who my friend who introduced it said, by the way, this is the, he goes, hey, I think you should meet this company. Why?
Well, it's the best founder I've ever invested in and probably the best company I've ever invested. So it's like, okay, well, that's an incredibly strong recommendation. Within like 10 minutes, the CEO emailed me and now, this is normal, they'll say, hey, you love to set up a time to chat, here's my calendar, maybe we could, maybe we could grab coffee next week, we'll have to tell you about what we're doing. This guy Adams and Sav, she goes, hey Sean, great to meet.
I just forwarded you our last three investor updates. You can get a sense of how things are going. And you've ever seen that slide that says, if they don't have revenue, they'll talk about users. Or like, if they don't profit, they'll talk about revenue.
If they don't have revenue, they'll talk about users. If they don't have users, they'll talk about potential, right, or products, features. If they don't have features, they'll talk about potential. And it's basically like the ladder of proof of like, what do you actually have?
And I can tell you what you have, because I can, based on what you choose to reveal. And so, similarly, a founder that just says, here's the last three investor updates was, it was just like, oh, let me just show you, I have a straight flush. So here's my cards. Because the investor updates will tell you all the numbers about the company, because he sent me the last three, I know the trajectory of how fast they're growing across those three updates.
I can see how the CEO communicates, and I can see what they care about what their priorities are. So I was like, I made the investment without ever talking to the guy instantly once I read those three updates. And since then, every update is just like, hey, so we're crushing it. Here's another gigantic number.
Here's another thing we had just this quarter, or this just this month, instead of like what most companies do in a year. Check this out, this guy, Adam, I don't know how old he is, I think of him as a 22 year old. He was born in 1999. That's insane.
He was born during Y2K. One time he messaged me about his brothers, my brother's looking for a project to do, and I thought it was like a kid, and he's like, yeah, he's a content creator, and his brother has 30 million followers on TikTok, or something like that. I don't know if you saw that. But then he wrote this update yesterday, I read his update yesterday, and I was reading it, and he was explaining how it was becoming it, and he was like, we also had a little bit of churn in December, and that really bothers me.
And I thought, okay, he's bothered because the product sucks, or something goes, I'm bothered because that means that these businesses likely went out of business. Like these, so basically, sorry, owner serves small restaurants, that's their customer. It's like an ordering platform for restaurants. And he was like, we had some churn in December, and it was all because they likely went out of business, because that's when these restaurants tend to go to business, I guess, at the end of the year.
And I read that line, and it was pretty cool because he's like, kind of a Terminator. Like he says, like, here's where we said, we're gonna go, here's how we exceeded it. Here's where we said, we're gonna go, here's where we exceeded, like constantly throughout each category. And at the end, he was like, we did have some churn, and that is part of the bad news.
And it was because they went out of business, and that makes me, and that devastates me. I'm so sad, and that was really cool. Yeah, I ignored that. I was like, I'm just gonna think of this guy's a Terminator, and I'm gonna think of the human side of this that he actually cares to, because, you know, you need both.
You need both. You need both. Yeah, this guy seems very likable. I can't just have everything.
I refuse to have said that. Today's episode is brought to you by HubSpot. Did you know that most businesses only use 20% of their data? That's like reading a book, but then tearing out four fifths of the pages.
Point is, you miss a lot. And unless you're using HubSpot, the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business, the insights that are trapped in emails, call logs, transcripts, all that unstructured data makes all the difference, because when you know more, you grow more. And so if you wanna read the whole book, instead of just reading part of it, visit HubSpot.com. Let's do another question, which one you wanna go to.
Let's do this one. I don't think you wanna do this one, which is why I have to do it. Okay, Alex from Brooklyn says, gentlemen, every culture has its quirks. The Japanese make it take his shoes off at the dinner table.
The French chicks don't shave their pits. And my first million is home for asking blunt financial questions. And Sam, you are the king of blunt financial questions. So it's our turn to return the favor.
I won't ask you for the number, but it's handed over under 10 million in revenue in 2025. Alex from Brooklyn. Over. And that's all I will say, because it's one of the businesses, it's my only company, and I just wanna shut up and just quietly build for the next decade and just keep on trucking.
And maybe after 10 years, I'll come out and reveal some more information, but yeah, it's done really well. There you go. All right, good job, Alex. You put Sam on the hot seat.
All right, next one. All right, I just watched the Jesse episode and Sean playing the piano head. We kind of, wow, it's not what you can do in a year. If that was your Misogies for 2025, what is each of yours for 2026, Dave from Mexico City?
Yeah, put some respect on an American living in, I don't know what the CDMX, whatever that is. That's Mexico City. You hilly, that's Mexico City. CDMX, how's that for Mexico City?
I think it's some Spanish, like, I don't know. It's a Spanish way of, I don't know, the city of Mexico. I'm sorry, Dave. I didn't feel that's correct.
Don't tell badio, Dave. I just made a shoe. All right, so by the way, did you have a Misogies in 2025, did you do that? Yeah, I trained, so the point of a Misogies, so here's the thing, people can get on a Misogies, it's supposed to be so hard that you have a high chance of failing, and we don't talk about the failure enough, but yes, I trained for a 50-mile or run, and I just fucking got hurt and destroyed my Achilles, and I couldn't do it, so I did it, and I failed.
Now, let me recap something. So on two days ago, Sean put out this video of him going to Jesse Etsler's house, you preface it by telling what you did, so basically Jesse Etsler from the pod, amazing guy, you flew to South Carolina, and it seemed planned, but it was very spontaneous that you played piano for him and his wife, Sarah Blakely, a very famous entrepreneur. They were in tears, you told us about the video, and then it finally got released, it was awesome. But I have a bone to pick.
Everyone's saying how amazing this is, and they're like, you inspired me, because you played this beautiful song, and people were literally in tears, and earlier this year, you said you're gonna start playing piano. I'm pretty sure you've been playing piano for years and years and years, and you did not just pick this stuff from scratch. No, I haven't been playing for years and years years. I did as a kid, my parents did buy a piano, and they probably got us on a couple months of lessons when I was maybe eight or something like that, but by the time I'm like 38 now, I like forgotten everything.
So when I started this year, I started from scratch this year, but yes, technically when I was- But I remember you, I remember us being somewhere and seeing a piano, and you sat down, and I thought you played a song. I did know how to play two things on the piano, so I knew how to play the intro to James Bond, GoldenEye, like just like the dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, but like I want to hand song type of thing. And I think I also knew the beginning of For Elise, which is like a kind of a classic piano song through muscle memory, but I couldn't like, didn't know how to read sheet music, didn't know how to do the notes, didn't know what the keys were called type of deal. I just had memorized because at some point somebody had showed me like, hey watch, push these, push white, white, black, white, black, and that'll sound like James Bond, that was the level I was at.
Well, it was very good, okay. And so the question was, what was the question, what's your, so are you gonna be this year? What's it gonna be this year for each of us? Did you have one?
I have one, I'm trying to figure out the exact way to frame it, but I think I told you this, I deleted all my social media apps, all the consumption. So I said, I'm going to go dark in terms of consuming, like, I basically was like, how do I trade consuming stuff that people put 20 seconds of thought into? Right, like a tweet, people put about 20 seconds of thought into it, doing things that people put like 20 years of thought into, which is books. And so I deleted Reddit, I deleted Twitter, I deleted Instagram, I deleted Facebook, deleted all those apps.
And instead I just, if I open up my phone, I wanna kill boredom, I have to open up Kindle. It's like the only thing left to do on my phone is Kindle. And so I basically made a list, I was like, all right, here's the 26 for 20, 26, right? Like the 26 books I wanna read in 20, 26.
And I've kind of a hit list. These are books, honestly, I've probably owned for years, have thought about reading, I've heard really good things about, but hadn't actually read. And so I started that a couple weeks ago. So that's going good.
The only other one that might count here is, I have this life bucket list idea of coaching a high school basketball team. And so like, walking away from business, like not focusing on business for a season, which is three months. And so I started that last month, and it goes, our season goes till until end of February. But basically, there's like a local high school basketball team and I've become an assistant coach.
And it's like, we wanna go to the state tournament and win and that's the goal. I know your first game against Spankt. I think you said the second game went better. Yeah, we are, what are we now?
Six and three. So we're doing all right. We're getting better as a team. And right now it's all about like, just can't we improve?
But I'm basically spending, like, I don't know, I'm basically going to practices and games, four days a week roughly. And just me, like I get my coaches whistle and my little whiteboard and I drive to this high school. And then it's just, I'm doing it. I'm doing the actual thing.
I'm like coaching this high school basketball team. I'm an assistant coach. I'm not that coach. I have a two year old girl.
And then I have a two month old little girl. And I've underestimated leading up to it, how difficult it would be. And even though I have grandparents around and people helping out, my wife is helping and obviously running the show there, I have underestimated how challenging it was. And so frankly, I kind of feel like I'm holding on right now.
My goals are simple. I'm trying to eat 200 grams of protein a day and get out of bed at six a.m. So I have pretty small ones because I, I've always been, ever since I got into fitness, I've always been good at maintaining a fairly fit state. Right now I'm at the lowest of my fairly fit era.
And so I just need to eat my protein and going to early and waking up early, it's so rudimentary, but it's just has the biggest impact on my day's productivity. And so I don't really want to set a big goal right now because I am kind of hanging on. Yeah, although I do think those are big. I know a lot of people who have that goal and don't do that thing.
That is actually quite difficult to do both of those things that you just mentioned. If you actually did those are high leverage things. Also I'll say two things. One, I think it's great to acknowledge the season you're in.
I think people want everything to be constant. And there are seasons where you're able to be full out. There's seasons where you're in recovery mode. There's seasons where you're in nesting mode where you're just like, look, all that matters is like protecting the nest because there's like these baby eggs here right now.
And like that's all that really matters. I don't need to distract myself with a random hunt over here I need to stay at the nest. And so I think knowing the season and not being yourself about that is some of that ambitious sort of type A people struggle with. It's like you gotta give yourself some grace when you're so wired towards achievement of random goals.
You didn't do a good job of warning me though. You should have warned me. I didn't realize how challenging this would be. Well everybody says the same thing.
It's like, oh, it's man to man defense now. There's two of you and two of them. I did not understand. Like it's sometimes I feel like my wife is my roommate.
And like I barely have gotten to know my little girl because I'm a new baby because I'm with the eldest. So it's my job to take care of her. And like you gotta take her out of the house because she's gonna grab the pacifier out of the mouth. It's definitely a second baby blind side for dads because the first baby is the one you think everything's gonna change and it's gonna be like, oh my God, my life's gonna get really crazy.
And then it's like, sorry, I got this. It's not so bad. But not crazy. So you get this false sense of security.
And then when the second baby becomes, it's like, nobody, you had already given up. You'd already stopped worrying about it in a way. And the second one is the blind side, especially for the dad because for the mom who you didn't realize how much she was carrying the team, but now she has to focus on the new baby. And that means existing kid is your kid.
And all of their needs and all of their time is like, you know, on your clock. And that is a very, that's a big wake up call. Just getting her socks on. Like that's like a community ordeal.
Like just like these small things that I just kind of dismissed. So I'm frankly, I'm not drowning, but my cup is a bit full. All right, here's another question. So this is Gary V.
It's the Gary V one. All right, so I like this one. Gary V wants to buy the Jets. Sam, you're working hard to grow Hampton now.
Why are you doing all this? Are you trying to buy all the pawn shops in the US brother? In all seriousness, what is the FU money purchase that you want if this is a home run? This is Tark from the Bay, I guess that's the Bay Area.
So I went to New York City. I got this like really big nice apartment and I love it. And I've gotten so much joy having family come and stay and be comfortable that I have my eyes set on. I do in the next couple of years want to buy a huge, like lavish, you know, 15 or $25 million apartment.
I do that as well as something that I definitely want. But more than anything, I saw this photo. A $15 or $20 million apartment? Is your goal?
Yeah. Why apartment? If you're 20 million, should it be getting like a city block? No, brother sucks it.
Like one of the brownstones at least, like it's an apartment? I don't want a brownstone. I've rented one before. I don't like them.
I like having a door man. What's the like dream building? I mean, I think it's like the cool one to be in. Well, it's different flavors.
So like if like there's like this thing called Billionaire's Row, and it's like right next to Central Park, and that's what a lot of the really rich like tycoons, like Bill Ackman lives there. And it's $100 million for the fancy apartment there. It's insane. It's just absolutely insane how rich some people are and how much this real estate costs.
That's not my flavor. That's like, opulent. I mean, it's all opulent. If it's $20 million, but that's like, you know, like you're the master of the world type of apartment and it's all clean and cool.
Like, but what I'm really working to do, I don't like Donald Trump, but I saw this photo of him working at his office. And he was like, I just left a meeting with a bunch of his employees and his wife and two kids, the boys, I forget their name, Don Jr. and the other guy, they came up to him while he was working. And the cool part was that they lived in the same, you know, he owned the building and the building and they lived in the same building where he worked.
And the kids could see him working and he was just able to do stuff. And it was like a total life integration, work, life integration. That's my dream. That's really what I'm working towards.
I really want to do that. Wow, I never took you Sam to be the penthouse kind of guy. I'm not a penthouse type guy, but I guess I am. I just said I wanted to buy a penthouse.
I think you just said it's a dream. Yeah, I think by definition. You're like a penthouse type guy. Yeah.
Yeah. We used to have this funny thing on the bottom where I was like, you know, we're just too much producers, big dreams. Sean wants to buy the Lakers. And Sam would love to buy a lake.
I feel like you were so much more likable than that. Like Manhattan, Sam, you just lost like 30 points of likability with that answer. What are you doing here? Tell them the truth over here, bro.
You know what? It just happens that I live in the hat. But really, if I lived in like, let's say, St. Louis, Missouri, I would say I want the fattest house in the cul-de-sac that has like a soccer goal in the back and like a basketball goal and like all the kids play in my yard.
Like, that's really what it is. It just happens that I live in. Yeah, that's not so much better. It just happens that I live in Manhattan.
In order to do that, you have to spend $20 million. By the way, this Gary V. by the Jets thing I've talked about this before to me, this is like a masterclass in personal brand. So I always say like for personal brand, you want these five Ds, one of the Ds is what's the dream.
And if your dream is I want to make so much money, it's like crazy. It's like, just want to be a billionaire. It just sounds greedy, right? So what Gary did, which is brilliant, is he's like, I want to buy the Jets.
Now, there's a lot of brilliance in this one. It gives him the air cover to go try to pursue a bunch of money without just seeming greedy. He didn't say I want to buy the Yankees. He wanted to buy this lovable loser, his childhood team, the New York Jets, that's never done anything and try to turn them around.
And so it's like there's like a nobility to the mission. There's this like, like ability to the mission where it's like a turnaround project, everybody likes an underdog type of deal. And it's something a lot of people remember about him, like something he dreams of doing. And so I think that Gary doing that is yet another example of Gary, really understanding marketing and personal brand.
You know how, so Sean, I like the UFC and at the UFC, every after every fight, data white does a press conference. And he lists like fiber or 10 stats. So who got the fight of the night, who got the bonus. And then one stat that he always lists is how much money they made at the gate.
And it's supposed to mean like this is how many fans came to the fight. But the tickets are like two grand. Like I went recently and it was like $800 for bad seats. And it's pretty funny that he ran rebranding.
He like is using that as like look how many people are coming. It's like dude, no, this is how much you're just charging so much money for a ticket. So you're like bragging. It's sort of like what Gary says.
Like I've noticed the Gary's videos. People will be like, let me help you buy the Jets and achieve your dream. That's so much better than people saying, let me put money in your pocket. All right, let's do another question.
Or do you have one of these Sean? I don't. It's got to be authentic, right? So like I don't actually have one.
To me, I'm like, I bought back my time. That was the first purchase. First important part is buy my own time back my freedom. And then it's like you invest in health.
So it's like I got a trainer. I got a chef. I got like doing everything I can for health for me and my family. And you know, after that, like I don't know, I guess it'd be fun experiences.
Like I don't really have like this burning desire to go purchase some really expensive thing. Morgan Council wrote this thing in his book that really resonated with me. He goes, there's two ways to use money. Number one is as a tool to improve the quality of your life.
No, no, that makes sense. Right? That's buying your time. That's buying a nanny.
It's about getting a personal trainer or something like that. And the other is as a measuring stick. And I realize like all the big money purchases, like the things you would need tons and tons of money for, they tend to be measuring stick things. Like I've almost run out of like money as a tool to improve my life ideas.
You know, I've done a lot of the big ones. And so I guess I don't really want to switch into that gear of money as money as a measuring stick. Yeah. But you enjoy that penthouse, Sam.
Yeah. I'm sure people will think you're very cool. All right, let's go to the next question. Do you remember the kid's house when you were younger, where it was like the open door, where it was like a campus, you just get everyone going to hang out?
Yeah. I've I've inspired to be that forever. It just happens that you have to spend a lot of money even that to do it. All right, let's do this one.
Early on, you guys have a ton of friends on the show as guests. Give us OGs and update on the OGs. Where's Suley? Where's Ramon?
Where's Jack Smith? Is there anyone else that I missed? So when Sean started MFM, the first 50 episodes, maybe I'll realize this MFM is that like some number between 700 and 800 episodes. I don't remember exactly the first some number.
I don't know, 25 or 50. It was just Sean interviewing people. And all those people were being interviewed. And also, you and I, when it was just when I came on, it was just like 5,000 people listening, we basically just talked about our friends.
And so for the OGs, they went. Or we had them on and be like, hey, what's up? What are you up to? That sort of deal.
Before we were chasing clout, we were just hanging out with our friends. What's we figured out the YouTube algorithm thinks change? But before that, we invited our friends on thought a lot. OK, let's do an update.
So Suley, do you want to talk about Suley? OK, Suley is Suley Monalee. He's one of our friends. He's one of our best buddies.
There's a question later that I think will be a good explanation of who Suley is. But he's an entrepreneur. He built a company called TinyCo, which was like mobile games. So I think like Candy Crush.
But he licensed the IP for Family Guy. So he made like the Family Guy mobile game, the Harry Potter mobile game, those types of things. Sold Tiny for a bunch of money, nine figures. He then helped his brother start and sell native deodorant.
So the Ollie brothers are prolific. And they've both been on the podcast. Suley did something that I really respected admire, which was he was able to understand what matters. So he's like, Suley's in his forties.
He's been super successful. And when you're successful, winners have options. You get deals put on your plate every day. Things you could go invest in and make a bunch of money.
People who want to come work for you and start companies with you. You have more knowledge about how to win in the game of business. And it is very tempting to just go and go get more success. Because success feels really good and you're good at it.
And it's very tempting to do that because there might be other areas of your life that you're not so good at, where you're not getting that same feedback loop of, I'm awesome and this is awesome and my results are awesome. And what Suley did, which was great, was he didn't make the mistake of just chasing more success. He started to look at those other areas. So first thing he did was he started working out religiously every day.
Like I started being like, hey, what are you working on today? He's like, I don't know. But I scheduled my workout. That's the most important thing that I did.
He takes more workout classes than a 23-year-old Manhattan night woman who works in PR. And he takes the same classes that she takes also. He introduced me to Rumble Boxing. And I think my first group camp was his.
And he loves classes. So he started doing that. And then he was like, I want to have kids. That's the next chapter.
He just had a kid. And he has resisted the AI wave to focus on having a kid. For now, we'll see what he does. I think he wants to take a very big swing in the world of AI and robotics.
We'll see what happens. But he's a first-time dad. So that's the Suley update. Ramon is doing a very cool company called Athena.
If you've ever looked in your house and looked at the tap, your tap water. And you're like, I don't want to drink tap water. I want to drink clean water. I don't want water that has heavy metals in it, chemicals in it.
A lot of people don't even know. The water supply in most cities is very interlinked with sewage system. It's a pretty gross thing to drink tap water. But we all bathe in tap water.
We put it all over our naked bodies. And so Ramon has built a company that's around clean water for the home. And so it's started with a filtered shower head. So how do you shower in water that's going to be clean on your skin and good for your hair?
It's called Athena. And he's going into other categories with clean water for the home. And so Ramon's basically gone back to what he knows best, which is how do I sell stuff online? And he's just moved to more noble things.
He started when he first came on the podcast was he was selling essentially soap opera, daytime soap opera, spoilers. So like, what's going to happen tomorrow on the Young and the Restless? And he sold that company for like $9 or $10 million. It was a blog.
Basically a soap opera blog. And he only was only two years old, sold for $10 million. So when we talked about it, this was like such a story. And he's like a Dutch kickboxer.
He's never seen a soap opera in his life, but he just loves to sell stuff online. He loves to figure out how to get traffic from one place to another and how to sell. And now he's selling things that actually improve people's lives a little bit more than the soap opera spoiler. That's what we're going to know right now.
You guys should go listen to his episode early on. So basically, yeah, he started soap opera business. He sold for $9 or $10 million. And he started a dog ramp company.
So like, if it was called Sausage Dog Central. So Sausage Dogs can use a ramp to get up in the SUV and say in-grat 18 million. Now he's doing a Fina and he's a single dad. And his son's about to go to college.
You're not going to college. And he, his kid is like the most well-mannered, well-behaved kid. So that's probably the best thing he's ever done is imagine. He's been a single parent since the boy was two years old.
And now his kids has been, but is still thriving. Jack Smith. So Jack Smith is our buddy Jack Smith. So on paper, he basically sold this company at the age of $29 or $28 for $850 million.
It was called Vungal. Now the intangibles, if you meet Jack Smith, very quiet, you'll have to pull anything out of him. He won't tell you anything. If he asks what he does for work, he'll say, oh, I like the plan of computers.
Like he won't tell you, in terms of what you said, Sean, about people wanting to flex. He is the most non-flexing person I've ever met in my life. He's very special. One of my best friends, he now lives in Portugal.
And he's just bought 50 acres of land on the coast of Portugal. And he's building a meditation center. That's what he's doing. It's like digital detox meditation, right?
Yeah, so he bought 50 acres of land and checked us out. He has a mobile home that he mostly lives in. And this little, I think he has a house that he now, I think they've rented a house nearby. But for a little while, they're living in a tiny home.
Him and his kid and his wife. And him and his wife are both tycoons. They're both incredibly successful people. And they live very, very modest lives.
And they're dedicating everything right now to building a retreat so people can get into, I don't know, whatever you do when you meditate. Self-awareness, calmness. Whatever those things. That was what you needed.
All right, let's take a quick break, because I'll tell you every time I've been at the first time I tried to run payroll for my team. I was using a traditional bank, and you know the type. It's got a janky interface. It's built like a 2002 tax form.
And it was open only during business hours. And I hit send, and it froze. They flagged the transaction. They locked my account.
They put me on hold for 45 minutes. And then they told me, I got to visit my local branch. And that was the day I started looking for a new bank solution. After asking a few founders what they were using, I found out about Mercury.
And so now my payroll is two clicks. I can wire money. I can pay invoices. I can reimburse the team, all from one clean dashboard.
That's why I use it for all of my companies. And so do 200,000 other startup founders. Members FDIC. All right, I've got one that's tactical, practical, business question.
So this is from Ben's brother. Ben's my business brother. This is from his brother Sam. He says, I've been a realtor for the past decade.
I've had good success. I made $300,000 a year for about a decade. But I hate how it just doesn't seem to be compounding. So I've decided it's time to make a change.
Everything is on the table. Buying a business, buying a franchise, flipping houses, getting a job. I'm not looking for specific prescriptive advice on what I should specifically do. But I'm looking for you guys to tell me how you would think about deciding the type of thing you look for next and how you would attack it.
Have you read the, I think it's called the war. Is it War on Art by Steven Pressfield? War of Art. War of Art, sorry.
And he talks about this idea of the difference between an amateur and a professional. And an amateur maybe says that they have writer's block, or that their creativity just hasn't come to them. Whereas professional, they sit down at the same day and they get to work and they just write regardless of how they feel. Their emotion, that day doesn't impact how they feel.
They're a professional, you go to work. The things that I've noticed that I've held a lot of people back is when they think about making money, or in Ben's case, or Sam's case, what to do next, I think that they don't think of themselves as a company builder. I think that when you're thinking about what to do next, you have to think, how do I get enough traction to hire people, to create a team, and to create a proper company with a culture that solves a problem and has recurring customers? And I've noticed this with a lot of real estate agents in particular because they're one person business oftentimes, which is an assistant.
And I have a bone to pick a lot of times with these one person companies that we talk about online all the time. They're incredibly interesting. But in general, in order to build a lot of value for yourself, you have to create, in my opinion, a company. And that's sort of this vague term.