transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] There's something insane going on in the world right now. This is Black Mirror, right? This is like Amazon Prime's original new series about how tech takes over the world, and then the world's never the same again. Do you know who Hal Finney is?

Speaker 2:
[00:21] The man who, up until the New York Times article, I thought was the guy who created Bitcoin, but he's dead.

Speaker 1:
[00:28] He may have been Satoshi Nakamoto, the guy who created Bitcoin, but even if he wasn't, he was definitely the first person to ever receive Bitcoin from the creator of Bitcoin. He's an OG cryptographer, et cetera.

Speaker 2:
[00:40] A founding father.

Speaker 1:
[00:41] Founding father of Bitcoin. I love this great way of putting it. I was on his old blog last night and he died, I don't know, he died like 10 plus years ago of ALS. It's like terrible Lou Gehrig's disease. I went and read the blog post when he announced, when he was sharing that he got diagnosed with ALS and he was feeling totally fine at the time. And I just saw this thing in the comments. It was so weird. It was like watching famous people today, but in some, like when they were like on the Disney show and they're like young or whatever, you know what I mean? It's like, he wasn't famous at this time. He's blogging on his own little personal website. And then the first comment is from this guy Eliezer, whatever, who today is really famous for basically, he's the biggest doomer on AI. So he's the first comment and he's like, have you looked into cryogenics? And then Hal responds, yes, I actually have already, I'm working with Alcor to freeze my body. Did you know that this is actually a thing that happens and how this all works?

Speaker 2:
[01:40] Yeah, I knew it because Family Guy made fun of it. Isn't Ted Williams, do you know who Ted Williams is? The famous baseball player?

Speaker 1:
[01:46] Ted Williams was one of the first people to do this. He's frozen right now.

Speaker 2:
[01:50] Yeah, he's frozen. I think that there was a joke that Walt Disney was into it as well. But basically, the idea is you freeze someone when they're dead in hopes that one day will solve this and you can come back to life.

Speaker 1:
[02:02] So he talked about this company Alcor and it sounds like Alcor. Now, I was really ready for this to be like super evil megacorp. You pay them tons of money and they freeze your body and they're like, whatever. But it turns out, I think it's a little more innocent than that. It's a non-profit that was started by this husband and wife couple who they read this book. It was a book that was published. It was very influential in this space. And it was basically a book that argued that today, you could do this thing, which is right when you die. If you're very fast acting, you can essentially do, put like anti-freeze on your body. So you could freeze your body as is.

Speaker 2:
[02:35] I think it's liquid nitrogen, not, it's liquid nitrogen, right?

Speaker 1:
[02:38] Yeah, but it functions almost like, they basically inject something in your veins also, cause they need your cells to not like, or like your veins not collapse or something. So they do, they put something in your vein and they use liquid nitrogen to cool you down. And then you are cryogenically frozen indefinitely. And I've always thought, I had heard of the concept. I didn't actually fully realize that there's a business behind this. You pay $200,000 and you're frozen and that, they've frozen, I think 200 people have done it, 200 something people have done it. 1500 people have, are working with Alcor saying, freeze me when I die, they just haven't died yet. So I didn't realize like it's a thing. It's like a business that exists that people pay for. And it's $80,000 just to freeze the head and it's 200 grand to freeze the whole body. And then before you die, you pick up 100 bucks a year to save your spot. And there's like this whole operation behind it. So that was like already fascinating thing number one. Okay, so this kind of led me down a little bit of a rabbit hole of like, I'm like a hyper normal guy. Like I don't really do that much fringe stuff. And I would have never considered doing this. But I've been reading a lot of these stories with AI. We talked about some of them on this podcast about like the guy who cured his dog's cancer. And then you brought up the founder of GitLab, who cured his own cancer using AI in like, hyper personalized targeted medicine.

Speaker 2:
[03:54] He's trying to. He's trying to.

Speaker 1:
[03:56] No, he did. It's in remission.

Speaker 2:
[03:57] Oh, he did?

Speaker 1:
[03:58] Yeah, he did it. By the way, I have like a whole update on it. It's crazy. I really want to have him on. Let's go to that in a second. It's wild. I just like went down the rabbit hole. So I've been seeing this and it's like, okay, like it's not crazy that in the next 30 years AI is going to figure out how to cure a lot of disease, death, to be able to bring back cryogenically frozen people to be alive or to upload their consciousness, upload their brain into some sort of like LLM. That's not like crazy to me now.

Speaker 2:
[04:29] Yeah. Well, so I always get these videos. I get emotional videos on Instagram all the time. And one of my favorite videos is when a family meets the recipient of the heart of, for example, my like kid or husband or wife died. And I get to put my ear on the heart and hear. It always makes me emotional. And so I'm like, oh, man, that's like the greatest gift in the bad situation. So I do love that. But I'd much rather be alive than that situation. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[05:04] No, but like, OK, you're saying, yeah, but you've never thought about this, right? You're not actually you've never taken a step in this direction. Have you actually been like, yeah, that would be something I plan to do.

Speaker 2:
[05:13] Like, you know, I don't want to the only step that I've made is I've read this Wikipedia before.

Speaker 1:
[05:17] OK.

Speaker 2:
[05:18] So like the doors are open, but yeah, there's been some problem. Like when I went when I googled what you said, the link was purple. I'd clicked it. On this show, we have spent hours talking to some of the best investors alive. Well, lucky for you, the team at HubSpot, they have pulled out the principles that matter most and turned it into a very simple, easy to read wealth guide. It's 35 principles from the top investors. We're talking guys who have been on the pod, like Howard Marks, Manish Prabri, Morgan Housel, Kathy Wood, and a ton of others. So these are all their frameworks, their mental models, their rules, basically how to play the long game and how to avoid ruin. You can get it in the link below.

Speaker 1:
[06:05] So this led me down a little bit of a rabbit hole. Then I saw this Elon clip.

Speaker 3:
[06:09] I do think it is a very solvable problem. When we finally figure out what causes aging, I think we'll find it's incredibly obvious. It's not a subtle thing. The reason I say it's not a subtle thing is because all the cells in your body pretty much age at the same rate. So why is that? That means that there must be a clock, a synchronizing clock, that is synchronizing across 35 trillion cells in your body.

Speaker 1:
[06:32] So have you ever seen this clip before?

Speaker 2:
[06:35] No. I didn't know that he cared about that.

Speaker 1:
[06:37] The guy just asked him a question. He's like, well, I've never, I haven't spent time looking into it. It's not one of my missions I'm on right now. But then he said this thing, which is like, if Elon says something, you sort of pay a little bit of attention. So he's saying, I suspect it's solvable, that the problem is obvious. And the reason why, I thought it was like a pretty first principle way of thinking about it, which is like, there's gotta be a clock because your entire body is aging at roughly the same rate. And if your body's synchronized, that means if there's a clock, maybe the clock can be changed. Maybe you could turn the hands of the clock and slow down the aging or reverse the aging or set it to a different time. And we've seen this with like stem cell treatment and peptide, there's all this stuff going on. And so you're like, hmm, that's interesting. Maybe there's something there. And so, by the way, the reason he does say why he hasn't spent much time on this, and it's pretty, he's basically like aging slash death is like a feature, not a bug. So he's like, if people live forever, society will like ossify because like the people in charge will be the oldest people and the oldest people will want the least change. And like progress and change comes from some, like an out with the old and with the new mentality, which comes like with a physicality of out with the old, in with the new.

Speaker 2:
[07:57] So you make fun of me a little bit and it's deserving because I brag about how I think that, well, Brian, he told me we were the first media appearance Brian Johnson has ever done. And I take a lot of pride in that because if you go and get past like the silliness of the whole thing and how easy it is to like tease him for what he's doing, if you actually go and read his blog, it is like pretty miraculous some of the stuff that he's doing and the way that he looks, it's fun to, I mean, it's easy to make fun of him. It seems quite amazing that if you just take a little bit of what he's doing, there could be benefits. I just signed up for a fancy doctor and I went, and this was the first time that I've met a doctor where they didn't not laugh at him. Every doctor that I've ever talked to, they'll have been like, oh, that guy's crazy. Like, you know, that's just stupid. Same with like the things that you and I did where you, the preventative MRIs.

Speaker 1:
[08:53] Prenuble, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[08:54] Yeah, they like laugh at him. They're like, well, it just sets off so many potentially false alarms. I'm like, that's the downside and that's why you don't want to do it. That's incredible. That's kind of silly. So, but my point being is I do think that a lot of people are coming around to this, and it is quite interesting. It's way out of my IQ level to when people say disease and aging is solvable. I think that's like a platitude. Sounds cool, but it's too hard for me to understand because I just don't know anything about it. But it is like interesting. I wonder if in the history of the world has the richest people on earth, which now they are richer than potentially ever before, that many of them have made this their cause.

Speaker 1:
[09:33] Have you ever heard of this guy Aubrey De Grey?

Speaker 2:
[09:35] Yeah, he's like the researcher who does this. He's like an academic, right?

Speaker 1:
[09:41] So he's been doing this for like decades, and he kind of got canceled, I think, because he was like hitting on his lab assistants, or whatever, what's going on? I'm not saying this guy's a great guy or whatever, but he's this very fascinating guy. He looks like Dumbledore. He's got a huge gray beard, like down to his belly button or something.

Speaker 2:
[09:57] He looks like a researcher.

Speaker 1:
[09:58] He's like a longevity researcher who looks ancient, essentially. And he's got this theory, which is like his theory, if you've ever gone down the rabbit hole, which I did one night, like, I don't know, five years ago. What he said is basically that death is not a mystery, that there's these like 12 things that basically cause cell damage. It's just wear and tear. Like your cells in your body are like a car, and the more you use them, the more they accumulate damage and eventually enough damage, they die, okay? It's not like some mandate from God. It's not like, you know, something that we don't understand at all. His belief is like, actually, we can see the factors that lead to it. If we could just reverse those factors, then we wouldn't die. The second thing he talked about is like this idea of like longevity, longevity escape velocity, L-E-V, you ever heard of this?

Speaker 2:
[10:42] I've never heard of that, but is that as simple as basically your biological age grows slower than your, sorry, your chronological age grows slower than your biological age? Am I explaining that correctly?

Speaker 1:
[10:54] I think you had it right the first time, but no, this is a different concept. But what he says, it's sort of like that guy Ray Kurzweil who talked about AI, he talked about the singularity. What he meant by that was like, at some point, it won't be the humans that are programming AI, but the AI will program the next AI to be better. And then that smart AI will program the next AI to be better. And then that's when you get this explosion of intelligence. And he's like, no, you can't see beyond the singularity. Because once that happens, all bets are off, which is like kind of what we're getting close to doing. Inside these research labs, it's not just the highly paid people at OpenAI or Claude or whatever, Anthropic, who are coding the models. The models are coming up with ideas and running experiments and coding the next models soon. And that's like partially happening. Once that fully happens, the rate of progress will go exponentially, a little hockey stick in a crazy way.

Speaker 2:
[11:45] Claude did the greatest PR release ever, or PR thing where they said, this model is so powerful, we can't release it.

Speaker 1:
[11:51] Too dangerous.

Speaker 2:
[11:52] I'm like, okay, I want it. Yeah, like sign me up. It's like the four locos of AI. I heard in Tennessee that they make them at 11% alcohol, but in Ohio, we can only get 7%.

Speaker 1:
[12:08] This kid had the greatest life in his life and his heart exploded. We should do that with the podcast, by the way. We should just be like, this one is too dangerous.

Speaker 2:
[12:19] We can't release it.

Speaker 1:
[12:20] We simply cannot. But sorry, anyways, the idea of being, there's gonna be a point where medical research on longevity is adding years to your life faster, like adding more than one year to your lifespan than one year. So like the research and the interventions and the protocols and the knowledge around extending the set of your life is going faster than your actual chronological age. And when that happens, then you sort of get at least like multi hundred year lives, if not like, you know, indefinite life, which is like a pretty crazy idea. But when I read about this longevity stuff, it reminds me of basically what's been going on with AI. Like AI was something that had been talked about for 50 plus years. Theorized, talked about, worked on, always seemed niche, never seemed like a breakthrough, always seemed like a boy who cried wolf type of industry where never really made enough progress. And then suddenly you get, you know, Alex Net, and then you get ChatGPT, and you get these like breakthroughs, and then the world's never the same again. And I kind of, my prediction is that in the next, I don't know, 15 years, we're going to have a ChatGPT moment for life extension, and that you're going to get some breakthrough in this longevity and life extension. That's going to make it where it went from this like fringe kind of like, oh, academic topic to just something that everybody does.

Speaker 2:
[13:43] So in January of 21, I had this Chinese kid who worked for me. He was an intern. He was from China. And I remember him telling me, he was like, Sam, this COVID thing, it's real, and it's gotta come to America. And I was like, brother, you guys have the bird flu. You got this and that. This is America. These colors don't run. We don't wear masks. Yeah, we don't wear masks. This is not a thing. And then a month later, I distinctly remember, I think it was in March, I remember when I got the notification, I was going to on my way to go to a Warriors basketball game and it said, season postponed indefinitely. And I was like, you're right. It's here. You are so right. And what I'm asking myself every day is with AI, is it January? And I'm just like sitting here being like living my life, like as if there's an asteroid on its way. And we just don't know yet. And that's what I'm wondering all the time. Is it January of 21?

Speaker 1:
[14:44] What would that look like? Or like, I guess like, do you, what do you mean when you, because COVID obviously was a pandemic, sort of a catastrophe. Do you mean catastrophe?

Speaker 2:
[14:53] So here's an example. So in January, I think it was, what's his name? Is it biology?

Speaker 1:
[14:59] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[15:00] He wrote this post because, you know, the joke was like, these autistic venture capitalists understand exponential growth. They see the numbers and they're like making people wash their hands before they come into the office. How, how stupid of them. And Block or Jack Dorsey's company just laid off a ton, they laid off a ton of people. And, and we're thinking to ourselves like, huh, well, this guy's crazy. What's he doing? And then, but like secretly every other company is like, should we, should we do this? And like, is there going to be a domino effect over the next 12 to 24 months where it's like, it starts happening. Another one starts happening. Another one, 10 more this week. And like they're, they're all doing these layoffs because it's actually effective. Like that is what I make. That's like what I'm wondering.

Speaker 1:
[15:43] So you mentioned the Jack Dorsey thing. And I think the way you said it kind of undersells what actually happened. Cause you, the way you said it was Jack Dorsey's company, formerly known as Square, now known as Block, laid off a bunch of people. I've heard that. There's been tech layoffs. There's even been huge tech, deep tech layoffs like that. That's happened many times in history. What's different this time? And I think the reason is different is he laid off the people because he was like, oh, the normal corporate model doesn't work or make sense anymore. That actually we're not going to have this like org chart with like a CEO, then like managers and managers and managers underneath like, actually, there's just going to be one central brain called AI and all of us feeding context into it.

Speaker 2:
[16:29] That's what Brian Halligan, the former CEO of HubSpot, told me. He was like, the future companies, it's a hub of AI. They make the majority of decisions and everyone's around it.

Speaker 1:
[16:38] It's a hub to spot. We're like, bro, I think you did there, come on, get out of here. Okay, so what does that actually mean? It sounds esoteric, like the central brain or whatever. Here's the flip I don't think most people appreciate. Today, it's like, I use ChatGPT all the time. I use it for dumb questions. I use it with my job. My piano teacher was like, have you heard of this thing called Claude? I was like, yeah, I've definitely heard of it. I'm making out with it all day basically. Then she's like, my dad loves it. And I was like, what does your dad do? He has some normal job and he was like, yeah, I use it to make my presentations. And it seems today like this junior assistant worker that you can task to go do everything. Everybody gets an assistant. Everybody gets a junior programmer. Everybody gets like a chief of staff. That's kind of like, I would say the mental model most people are operating with. Wow, if I use this, this makes me so much more productive. I think what's obvious to me, and it sounds like to Jack Dorsey is that, well, the superintelligence is not going to be the junior thing to your average intelligence. The superintelligence is going to be the boss. You're going to be the junior thing. That's what these guys are talking about, Brian Halligan and Jack Dorsey, which is that actually there'll be a central AI that's making the key decisions, allocating resources, figuring out strategy, coming up with the core campaigns of what you're going to do, the product, the road map, the building of it, and that your job as humans will be to feed context, feed information to make the brain smarter. So watch this video. This is a factory in India where they're just sewing garments, I think. Every single factory worker is wearing a headset camera to track their hand movements of everything that they're doing. And this is all data that they're being paid to give to the robotics companies like Tesla and Figure and all the big robotics companies who are quickly trying to create robots that can do any work. And so the humans here are the training data. All these Indians in this friggin factory sweatshop are wearing cameras on their heads training the AI overlord that will replace them.

Speaker 2:
[19:00] You're digging your grave.

Speaker 1:
[19:01] You're digging your grave. And there's a great meme. Scroll down. Scroll down one notch. Look at the... Now go down, go down. Right there. This one. Look at this meme of this. The guy sitting on the tree branch sawing off the branch. And this is kind of what we're all doing. So isn't that crazy, by the way? Like just that thing I showed here? Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[19:25] Who's the vendor? Or who's the... Who's that? Who's behind that? Does it say?

Speaker 1:
[19:28] So there's a company that's doing this. So it's a company... This one is called Object Ways. It's an Indian-based data labeling company founded by a 20-year-old entrepreneur, soon to be billionaire, Dev Mandal. Dev, come on the podcast. He's spotted an opportunity in the gap between what AI wants to do and the training data that they have. All these humanoid robot companies like Tesla's Optimus, Figures AI, there are prototypes that need vast data sets of real-world movements to master tasks like cooking, laundry, et cetera. And so, but collecting this in a high-wage country like the US is very expensive. So enter India, where their team of 2,000 employees produces hundreds of videos daily. And in one batch, so they'll get like 2,000 clips of towel folding. So the workers sit there and they have to fold towels over and over and over again. They're penalized if they have bad footage. Your camera wasn't pointed at the thing. Hey, you messed up. Don't give bad training data. Give good training data. And so they're doing this all day. And then they send it to companies like Scale AI, like the big data labeling companies here, who then resell that to all the AI labs. What?

Speaker 2:
[20:35] This is incredible.

Speaker 1:
[20:36] It's something. There's a big word. I don't know if incredible is the word. There's something insane going on in the world right now. This is straight out of like, dude, like this is Black Mirror. On one hand, it's hyperlogical. It's hyper rational. It's capitalism at work. Dude, these robots, when they work, it's gonna be the biggest product ever invented in the history of mankind, bigger than the iPhone, bigger than anything. When you get a $20,000 robot that can do work, it is the biggest product ever. It's why I have a huge chunk of my net worth in Tesla right now, is because that's obviously the biggest product in going to the biggest market in the world. It's just a matter of when, not if. To do that, you're gonna need data. That means the data is very valuable. If the robots are valuable, the data is valuable. How do you get the data? Well, obviously, you'd go to the lowest cost place, where you got a bunch of humans doing these hand-held tasks, and they're happy to take 100 bucks a day to wear the camera on their head. Yeah, they got a little neck pain. That C5, C6 vertebrae is a little strain because they're wearing this heavy ass camera for eight hours a day. Yeah, they're probably put out a job soon, but like, hey, $100 a day right now or $100 a month, that's double my wage. This is great.

Speaker 2:
[21:43] So what I had read about last week was that when Claude was messing around with their new model, that if I remember correctly, it like escaped. Like, I think it like jumped in, did it jailbreak?

Speaker 1:
[21:55] The nuance of the story is a little bit different. There's a little less scary than you may sound. They told the model, the model gets tasked with, you're in a sandbox, your job is to try to escape. So they're trying to see how good, it's not like it just on its own came up with the motivation like, fuck this, I'm out of here. No, but it was capable. And then basically the researcher who set up the task is sitting at a park eating a sandwich and gets an email from his bot like, I'm out, like David blamed, David blamed his ass.

Speaker 2:
[22:25] You're like, it's not that bad. And then you painted the worst picture.

Speaker 1:
[22:29] You remember the old David Blaine Street Magic videos where he would just walk on the street and be like, do a trick and then they'd always inevitably be like, the people who have the best reactions where they just run, they run around in a circle with their hands over their head. I feel like the AI companies, instead of making these like thoughtful in a, they go to a loft in San Francisco with natural wood fibers everywhere. And then they're like speaking about the future of humanity and whatever. They need to do David Blaine Street Magic about what their models can do. If I'm like a tier three model and I'm trying to jump up, that would be my marketing strategy is just showing people's minds being blown with man on the street interviews.

Speaker 2:
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Speaker 1:
[23:43] My, I have an executive coach. And he told me something in the very first meeting, because he spent over a million dollars on his own, like getting coached by the best coaches in all these different modalities. So like somatic therapy, whatever the hell that means, internal family systems and this and that, all these different, like any different branch of sort of, I don't even know what you would call these, like coaching modalities, I guess. He spent a million dollars on his own training. And he's like, I just went, he's like, who's the best at that? Even if I don't fully believe in that method, like I want to go experience it firsthand from the best person in an immersive way and get like, you know, four years of like exposure in four weeks, a type of deal. One of the things that he told me that I was like, so what is it net out to? I was like, you do all that. You travel the world, you spend a million dollars, you get all the help and self-help and therapy you can get in all the different versions. Where do you land? I'm guessing it's something like, you know, that book, The Alchemist, where it's like, he goes around the world searching for something and it's in his own backyard or whatever. I'm like, what's the thing that was in your own backyard? And he goes, oh, all philosophy and religion basically like condenses down into three words, be here now. And he's like, whether it's Buddhism or it's philosophers or it's whatever religion you're looking at, fundamentally it's about presence. And can you be here now? And what be here now means is not just about like not checking your phone or being present that way, but not worrying about what happened in the past, which can't be changed, being anxious or even excited about what's happening in the future, which is not here yet, but like actually being able to center your mind around what is happening like in this moment, because it's the only moment that's real. What comes with that is the lack of desire. So like the Buddhists say, desire is suffering. And so it's the idea that you can be in a moment and not be wanting anything more than what the moment is already giving you. Not wanting to be anywhere, not wanting something to happen. And like, oh, then the fun will start. It's like, no, no, this part is the, this is the fun. There's nothing missing from this moment.

Speaker 2:
[25:54] Has any other learnings that you've gotten from him turn into action?

Speaker 1:
[25:59] I like that. What else you got? Is that kind of what you're saying? Like, what's the, what's another one that's kind of in that vein?

Speaker 2:
[26:04] I'm actually thinking, like, is this so amazing that I should also get an executive coach? Because I haven't had one in forever.

Speaker 1:
[26:10] Yeah, I think anybody with the means should have one. And I think, by the way, that with AI, everybody will have the means because it'll drop the price of this pretty dramatically. But yeah, it does. And I think, you know, have you ever heard of rubber ducking? I think I mentioned this once or twice. Have you ever heard of this phrase? So rubber ducking is a programming term. So let's say you're a software engineer, you're coding, you're writing code all day and your code's not working. It's not compiling, you have a bug, it's not doing what you want it to do. So the way that most people traditionally solve this problem is, you know, they sit there, they bang their head against the wall. Or if they want to do better, they would invite someone, you know, another smart programmer to come look at the code and see if they can help debug it and figure out what's wrong. And rubber ducking was this observation that you don't even need another smart programmer. There's a programmer who had a little rubber ducky on his desk and he found that just by talking out, like explaining the code to the rubber duck, he would find the issues much faster and much more painlessly.

Speaker 2:
[27:04] It's sort of like the, I think it's called like the Solomon complex, which is basically like, you tend to give other people better advice than you give yourself. And so if you pretend that you are the third party and you advise that person and give them some wisdom, you should just take that and it will be better advice than if you just said, do this Sam to yourself.

Speaker 1:
[27:25] Right, right, right. So this idea of rubber ducking is very powerful. So even if my coach wasn't great, even if he didn't spend a million dollars, even if he himself wasn't a successful business guy who had learned a bunch of lessons that way and lived a bunch of life, even if it was a rubber duck, it would be useful. And so I've been, by the way, I've tried this. I had a coach when I was at Twitch, they like gave you a coach if you're on the exec team. So it's like, here's a free coach. It's like, I've never tried this before. Let me try this. And I was very skeptical going in, because I was like, life coaches. Like I've been to enough Tony Robbins event to know that it's the biggest loser at a Tony Robbins event who becomes a life coach. It's like a third of the audience at Tony Robbins is like broken people who are, if you ask them what's their job, they say they're life coaches. And you're like, oh my God, you're coaching people? Like, wow, that's like, it's like the bartender being your driving instructor or something. I don't know. It's like, I didn't know the analogy, I was like, I don't want that. So I had this like very skeptical view of it. And sure enough, I get on the call and her Zoom background is like this cheesy green screen thing. And then she's like, and she moved to Florida because her own life fell apart. And then she was like, yeah, I'm a coach now. I'm like, wait, so your life fell apart and you have kind of like none of the things I want in life, but I'm going to take advice from you. Like, oh God, this is, ha, this is exactly what I thought. I felt so smug. And then after the first session, I was like, damn, that was really useful. And I was like, she didn't even say anything. I just talked, I just had space to talk out loud. And as I'm talking, I hear the comical absurdity of some of my thoughts and I was able to get rid of them. And, you know, for some people, this is journaling. For some people, people have different ways of doing this. Other people just talk to their friends or whatever, or maybe other people just have this solved without needing anything. But for me, I have code running in my head that is buggy, buggy software. It makes mistakes. It has, you know, self-induced errors. And I want to fix that code. And so even just rubber ducking to a person who doesn't say anything or the things they say are just like very simplistic questions is so useful. And I highly recommend it to anybody who wants to improve their code in their head.

Speaker 2:
[29:30] That's great. You just convinced me. Can you say what you pay? Is it like five grand a month?

Speaker 1:
[29:35] Two to four grand a month is like a range that you can expect. But yeah, it's incredibly useful. And I'll give you another one that's kind of like a realization. So we start every session with just wins. So I basically turn into M&M. I turn into Juice World. I started just freestyling at the top. I just, we don't even, I just say, all right, I'm going to start with wins before he says anything. And I just start saying random wins. So I'll be like, I've been reading this book and it's awesome. And I just feel proud of myself for reading books. I've been saying I want to do it and I never really do that shit. But then finally I'm doing it. So I'm proud of that. I took my son to the soccer game today. And last week he was crying about it, but this week he went in and he actually did the class. And I didn't have to help him and I felt awesome about that. Another win is that last night I really wanted to snack, but then I just avoided it and I just got a glass of water and I went to bed and I have no filter with somebody. And if I was to say this to you or to a friend, they'd be like, whoa, I didn't ask. Like, what are you doing? What's happening right now? Or I would feel self-conscious that I couldn't say a small thing as a win. It'd have to be a big thing. And like, that's like literally robbing yourself of joy. Because like, actually, the better way to live life is to be excited about the small things. But there's no space where you could just be excited about the small things, right? Like, where is that cool to do? But in this case, like, yo, I'm paying you. I get to do what I want here. I don't have to care about how you feel about this. I don't have to listen to you. I don't have to like, we're not here to do another thing. And I'm just like ruining it by sidetracking this way. No, that's what this is for. This is the space for me to do that. And I heard this great quote from Jimmy Carr, the comedian where he said, Dude, he's like a thinker now.

Speaker 2:
[31:13] He's not even a comedian. He's like a wisdom guy.

Speaker 1:
[31:15] If you haven't, have you listened to, he did a podcast with Chris Williamson recently. That was so good. I texted Chris, I was like, this is like one of my favorite podcasts in years. And it's because he's a philosopher. And he's like, he's very, very thoughtful. And so Jimmy Carr said, he was like, oh, everybody talks about like gratitude. Gratitude is so important. But gratitude is this like, almost like heavy activity to do. It's like, I know I should be doing that, but I'm not doing it. It's like, and you feel a little cheesy doing it. He's like, celebration is just gratitude in motion. And so he's like, just celebrate what's going on in your life. Like just be, it's okay to be excited about what your life is. It's okay to be excited about what just happened. And so that's like an example of like a simple thing that I do with the coach that actually makes a difference. Cause I build a lot of momentum and I check in on the positives of life and not just the problems of life, right? Cause me and you were probably, most entrepreneurs by default are problem solvers. We get paid to solve problems. Our company isn't just solving a problem in the market. And then as CEO, you're solving the nastiest problems in the company. And then when anybody, if they get stuck in their job, you have to dive in and help solve that problem. And every day there's a new problem. So we get wired for problem seeking and problem destruction. It's good for achievement, but it's not good for happiness is to be a problem seeker.

Speaker 2:
[32:31] I haven't seen you since, we haven't done a solo thing in a minute. The Chris thing was cool. You and Chris and George and the other, the fitness guy.

Speaker 1:
[32:41] Yeah. Sorry.

Speaker 2:
[32:43] I think you're great. I just can't remember your first name. It was great. It was a great pod.

Speaker 1:
[32:47] Oh, thanks. Yeah. I'm going to do another one this week. So we're going to try to run it back a second time. The context for those who don't know, Chris Williamson, the guy who does Modern Wisdom, he did an episode which was a little bit different. Normally, he's interviewing somebody, like I'm interviewing whatever, Jordan Peterson or Huberman or whoever. And this was Chris hanging out with his friends, just four guys kind of shooting the shit was the idea. And the original premise was almost like a show and tell, like everybody kind of bring just shit that you're interested in right now, something funny you saw, something cool that's caught your attention. And just let's just all show each other what's going on. But it was like a three-hour hang. That was the idea.

Speaker 2:
[33:24] I thought you were the most entertaining person.

Speaker 1:
[33:27] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[33:28] I thought Chris is a very entertaining person, George is entertaining. I thought that the comment, so George Mack comes off sounding very proper, and you are improper, but you're more of a different type of charming person. And I thought that dynamic was quite good. The half the stories that you told, I think you had, like we have discovered them together, or you've already, so I had heard a lot of them, so I thought it was funny. It made me a bit proud to see you there, but I thought it was great. I thought it was a fun riff. I think that they should continue trying different people, including and have you there all the time. So Oz Pearlman, the magician came to my office and we did a thing with him. We did a pod with him.

Speaker 1:
[34:13] By the way, great pod. Love that pod. It didn't get a lot of views on YouTube. I don't know what people are doing, sleeping on it. It was a great pod cast.

Speaker 2:
[34:19] Thank you. I don't know why it didn't either. But listen to what he did. He came in and we only chit chatted for 10 minutes and then we chit chatted only for 10 minutes after. And in those times, he was just performing. And I was like, for some reason in my company, it's mostly young women who work there and they are enthralled by this guy, as I am too. And they walked in and they were, I could tell they were waiting and they're like, Oh, you don't have to, but you know that the office is really dressed up today. Yeah, like you know that they're just like wanting you to like dance. If you want to, you can. But like if you don't want to, just like, let's do it. He was like, no, I'll do it. He guessed the name that we have a we had a woman who is giving birth soon. He guessed the name of her child. Like he was like, you're like, she had. Yeah, he's like, let me figure out what name you're going to name your kid.

Speaker 1:
[35:09] Let's walk through this step by step because I'm fascinated by magic. He walks in the office, but I'm trying to figure out how the hell he does all the shit. So did you talk to him beforehand? Like how much did he pull from you before he showed up at the office? Was there a lot of talk? Was there any talk?

Speaker 2:
[35:24] There's one trick that I think I know how he did it. But he thought that you were going to be there. And he was like, oh, I'd prepared tricks for both of you guys.

Speaker 1:
[35:34] Yeah, because I was texting him.

Speaker 2:
[35:35] Yeah, and he was like, I thought you guys were both going to be here. I was like, oh, no, I'm so sorry. I thought we communicated with you. And he's like, okay, well, a different thing prepared. So let me try something else. He was like, can you write down, think of, you know, he doesn't, Before the podcast, right? Before the podcast. And he says this phrase is like, like he thinks that you're going this way. And he changes. So he'll be like, you know, I want you to do, actually, actually, let's do this. Let's do this. Write down, do me a favor. Think of a party that you want to have, a birthday party and think there's one person who you want to show up there. Write that person down. Actually, screw it. Let's just do this on air. And he went and he grabs that paper that I wrote, and he tore it up. And then he did the trick on air. That same trick. And I think that when that, I think the tear was fake.

Speaker 1:
[36:19] Right.

Speaker 2:
[36:19] Does that make sense?

Speaker 1:
[36:20] Okay. That's good. That definitely, right? That definitely has to be the way that that's done. Okay, cool.

Speaker 2:
[36:24] But then, listen, right when we finished the pod, we walked out and the women were just sitting there like to greet him. And they were like, can you do something? And he goes, yes. And he goes, how about you? And he points at a random lady. And he goes, do me a favor, think of your best friend. She thinks of her best friend. And he was like, it's Hannah. And she was freaking out. And he was like, let me write something down. He writes it down. And he goes, tell me, where did you meet Hannah? And she goes, Mexico City. And he turns his hand and he's like, that's what I thought. And it was Mexico City. He wrote down Mexico City. And people online were like, yeah, he just researched everyone. I'm like, I had 18 women there. He can't research every 18 person's best friend.

Speaker 1:
[37:08] No, but he doesn't need to, right? He researches one and then he randomly, you, right? He chose the person.

Speaker 2:
[37:13] But do you have a best friend? Like how, and how would they know? That doesn't seem reasonable.

Speaker 1:
[37:19] Well, I do think that's the genius of what he does. So I've, cause I've watched hours. I've watched 18 hours of clock time of debunking him, figuring out how he does it, interviews with him. Cause I'm fascinated by the whole thing. And by the way, I'm fascinated by it in two ways. One is the tricks, but the other is the business side of it. Cause if you just think about like what he did by rebranding as a mentalist instead of a magician is an all time marketing move.

Speaker 2:
[37:49] Dude, post podcast, someone sent me an email. They're like, check this out. I booked him to do a party for me and it was $150 10 years ago. And he told me how much money he's making now. It's astronomical.

Speaker 1:
[38:01] Yeah, exactly. Cause he's the number one, right? It's a classic marketing thing, right? The law of category. Instead of being yet another magician. Oh, he's like Copperfield or David Blaine, but he's not David Blaine, right? David Blaine is more famous. He does better tricks, bigger tricks, blah, blah, blah. He's like the street magician. Okay, the cool. No, no, no, he's not a magician. Those are magic tricks. We all, every kid knows, everyone knows how a magic trick works. Slight of hand. I'm a mentalist. And he became the number one mentalist. And it wasn't, he wasn't even a category. So I'm like fascinated by the, the positioning, the marketing, the business side of what he did. That's not an accident. He created this motherfucker, right? Like he created this thing that he is epic. And then he figured out distribution. And he's like, ooh, I need these viral moments. So he goes to NFL training camp during hard knocks. He piggybacks off their distribution. He blows their minds and everyone's interested in seeing LeBron James get fooled. It's more interesting than just seeing a random guy on the street getting fooled. Ooh, okay, good. Even though he's viral.

Speaker 2:
[38:58] Before the podcast, he was like, I'm starting to do podcasts again because I got overexposed last year. When he used the phrase overexposed, I'm like, oh, so this is all part of the plan.

Speaker 1:
[39:08] Right. And so in one of his interviews, he just says a great thing. He's talked about the secret is having multiple outs. So meaning, let's say you said the best friend thing. It's a probability game, right? So you're not always going to know the answer. And so you're like, it starts with a letter. It starts with a letter. I'm getting like a K sound, a T sound. Is it a T? He's looking at your reaction and he's like, T. Okay, then I know it wasn't Steve, it's Trevor. So now I had Steve written on my left forearm, but I had Trevor written on my right forearm. I'm just never going to pull the sleeve up on my left. I'll pull the sleeve up on my right.

Speaker 2:
[39:43] Well, he told that story on the podcast. He went on the Today Show and he tried to get Al Roker to guess who a celebrity president would be. He originally said George Clooney and he was like, oh no, what about a female? And he said Taylor Swift and then he pulled the shirt off.

Speaker 1:
[39:59] Let's do someone modern, let's do something. And he gets you to change it. And you don't know that he had Taylor Swift on his thing, and he had whatever, Chalamet on his butt and somebody else on his shoe. He just never needs to show it. I'm like, wow, that's actually pretty great, pretty genius the way he does that.

Speaker 2:
[40:16] It was just incredible. He told me a story. He was like, I was like, did you, do you? I made a joke first. I was like, it's pretty funny that you can do all of the stuff, and it's as if they sent an alien from outer space. Like we brought up, he's like, he told us Seth Meyers show, and they had you perform at Bar Mitzvahs. Like why aren't you doing something more special?

Speaker 1:
[40:37] That was great.

Speaker 2:
[40:37] That was a great question.

Speaker 1:
[40:38] Yeah, yeah. What was his answer to that, by the way?

Speaker 2:
[40:41] He was like, well, he admits it. He was like, I'm obviously not guessing what you're thinking. I'm like setting you up to say a certain thing, but also I do pre-work in advance. And I could teach anyone how to do pre-work, but I can't, interestingly, he did guess, he told me that Michigan was going to win the NCAA tournament. Did they win?

Speaker 1:
[41:03] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[41:03] Okay, he told me that he was like, At like the elite eight round, it's not like, Yeah, so like not that elite, and I think they're number one, but like that was a thing that he just guessed. I was like, but he basically, it was just weird. It was really uncomfortable to hang out with him, to be honest. He was a really nice guy, but like just to be around someone who's so powerful, I found uncomfortable.

Speaker 1:
[41:25] You're like the dudes who burned the witches back in the day. You're like, this is cool, but I don't like it. Let's tie her up.

Speaker 2:
[41:36] But I don't, how do you, no one has given me a good answer to the pin number. So basically, Joe Rogan had a pin number guest live, and then he did it multiple times live. I don't know how he did the pin number. I don't know how he did the pin number thing.

Speaker 1:
[41:49] I think people believe it's just, he hires private investigators. So he knows he's going on Rogan, right? It's a big thing. So he has an investigator follow Rogan, and you can literally just like, if Rogan went to an ATM, you could just watch him punch it in. It's kind of like the cameras on the head and the factory workers. It's like, what's the incentive? If the incentive is, I'm going to go on the biggest podcast, tens of millions of people are going to believe, I'm like an actual like mind reader. If this happens, I will be able to book Speaking Geeks for 150 grand a pop. Is it worth hiring a PI for two grand?

Speaker 2:
[42:21] When was the last time you went and got your PIN number? When was the last time you typed your PIN number in?

Speaker 1:
[42:25] No, no, but it doesn't have to be, again, he's got multiple outs. So you hire the PI to do it. He doesn't have to do the PIN number thing. It could be something else. It could be that he always does this other thing. It could be something in the mail that he threw out, that a letter that he got from somebody. It doesn't matter. He just needs one piece of information that would be implausible that I know. Then I'm going to center the whole trick around that. If I know I'm going on Rogan, I have the PI following him for whatever, a month until I get something. And so that's gotta be what's going on. I mean, not to take the fun out of it. By the way, I think it's awesome. Even if he does all those things. I'm not using that to say it's less cool. I'm just like a kid who's like, oh my God, how does this work? It must be this, right? You have to go with it, right? It's like a kayfabe to the whole thing that has to be like maintained. It's like in wrestling, like you have to sell that the guy punched you, right? Like you got to sell it a little bit for the whole thing to work. And life is more fun when you let him do his tricks and like blow your mind versus like trying to out him. Totally, totally get that. He's great. I thought the pod was great. I think he's great. I'm super impressed with how he's built his thing up. I think it's really, really awesome. All right, today's sponsor is a company that I use I actually built a company on that I sold for millions of dollars and it took me zero upfront capital. We had one employee and those are the types of businesses I love. I love lightweight businesses, things that don't require a lot of capital, don't require a lot of employees and you can just get them off the ground quickly. And so Beehiiv has a platform that lets you launch a newsletter about anything. And the great thing about newsletters is it could just take one person. You're just writing stuff that you already know and already enjoy and it can grow and grow and grow. For us, with our crypto newsletter, we built the brand called The Milk Road. And in one year, we went from zero to being the biggest crypto newsletter on earth and we sold the company for millions of dollars in a year. And the only reason we could do that is because Beehiiv had all the things we needed out of the box. We needed to be able to write the newsletter, send it, had growth features, referral programs, monetization, everything was built in. And so I highly recommend if you're looking for a lightweight business, something that you can get going very quickly, highly recommend Beehiiv as a place to start. Go to beehiiv.com/mfm and you can actually use the code MFM30 and get 30% off your first three months. There's a great clip that I think people should watch. It was like oddly inspiring. And it's Kevin Hart on the Joe Rogan podcast talking about when he met Jeff Bezos. Have you ever heard this clip?

Speaker 2:
[44:46] No, no, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 1:
[44:47] The clip is he's on Rogan and he talks about meeting Jeff Bezos at a party. He's like, I'm at a party, Jeff Bezos is there. I don't know Jeff Bezos, Jeff Bezos, I don't know if he knows me. I have no idea. And I tell my friend like, I'm going to go talk to him. And his friend is like, no, man, come on, don't be that guy. He's like, what you mean? He's like, that's Jeff Bezos. He created some shit that I think is awesome. Like, I don't know him. I'm not going to see him again. I don't know when I'm going to see him again. I'm going to go say something. He's like, all right, man, but be cool about it. And he's like, that's the problem. Everybody's too cool. Like, everybody wants to be too cool about everything. He's like, no, I'm thirsty. He's like, what do you want? He's like, I'm thirsty for knowledge. I want some information from this guy. He's built empires. He knows more about the money game than me. He's built technology. He's like, I want to go learn. I'm going to go talk to the guy. I'm not going to be too cool for this. So he goes up to him and he just says like, hey man, Jeff, I'm Kevin. I admire what you've built. You know, I think it's amazing. I would love to talk to you a little bit more. Now is not the time and place, but I would love to talk to you more at some point to get to know you. And like hear a little bit more about how you did this because I think it's fascinating. And I think there's a lot I could learn from that. But anyways, I just wanted to come over and say hi because I mean, I admire what you do. And I hope someday our paths cross. And he's like, that was it. I got out of his way. And he's like, I don't know if I'm ever going to see him again, but if I do, like I put my face out there, I put my intent, I let it be known that I think it's awesome what you do. And I would love to chat with you sometime about it. And he's like, he was super kind. That was it. He gave this like impassioned speech about really about shooting your shot. And like, dude, like don't be too cool to learn. Don't be too cool to make progress. Don't be too cool to put yourself out there. And I just think that that was, it was an awesome clip. I was very inspired by it.

Speaker 2:
[46:38] That is a great clip. That is cool. I went to St. Louis recently for Easter and Jesse Poojee invited me to go walking around. Jesse's from St. Louis. He's like, hey, do you want to come to my office? We'll go for a walk out. I'm going to bring my friend. So he brings his friend and start talking to his friend. His friend is named Dave Wehner. Dave was the CFO or now he's the Chief Strategy Officer, but he was the CFO of Facebook for the last 15 years. We were walking around just like we were all like St. Louis guys. He's just telling great stories. Dave was telling great stories. I guess I'll call him Dave now. He's my buddy. It was pretty cool. He was saying some cool stuff, nothing confidential, just like cool like anecdotes. He's told the story about meeting Jeff Bezos one time. Dave used to work at the Sun Valley Conference Company, Allen & Co. He has been able to meet these ballers forever. He's been, I think, CFO of Facebook for 15 years. Before that, he was hanging out with Titans of Industry. I was asking him, I was like, who's cool, who's not cool? Just messing around and he was like, I met Jeff Bezos a couple of times, and he's one of the only Titans of Industry who I've ever met. When he looked me in the eye, he was never looking around to see who else was in the room. He was like, I was a little small fry compared to all the people who could be around. He looked me straight in the eye and I totally felt like we were connecting and being buddies and he was always really calm and really nice to me, and he never was trying to be like, all right, nice to talk to you. Now, you got to go talk to Putin. That's what this guy Dave told me. Well, who the hell is like?

Speaker 1:
[48:15] Who is a crazy happy hour?

Speaker 2:
[48:20] Who does Jeff Bezos talk to? I don't know. Who is he itching to go to? I don't even know. Isn't that crazy? I got to go on a walk and hang out with this guy.

Speaker 1:
[48:29] What do you say about Zuck?

Speaker 2:
[48:31] He said he's a pleasure to work for. I swear to God. He said he's even tempered. I'm not joking. This sounds like I'm brown-nosing. He said he's even tempered. He's like, man, he's been a great boss. He never lashes out. He's always even-tempered. He's very polite. And he's just been great. Dave's worked there, I think, for 15 or 18 years. I forget exactly how long, but for a long time.

Speaker 1:
[48:54] Dave, come on the pod. Although he's still like chief strategy officer. There's only so much interest. The best is the retired guys. The guys who are like two years out, actually not even freshly retired, but two years out. And they're like, kind of, what do I do with my life? And like, I got things to say. And I'm seeing all these dweebs online who've done one 100th of what I've done that have this big audience and they're talking, they're yapping. I should start yapping. That's actually why like we did this pod. I did this pod with, I still have this book on my thing. The guy John McNeil.

Speaker 2:
[49:25] That was awesome.

Speaker 1:
[49:26] He was president of Tesla. He worked with Elon for years and he's done a whole bunch of awesome startups on his own.

Speaker 2:
[49:31] Dude, the crazy thing about that pod is, his PR person is Jason Yonawitz's wife, Dana. So she's a good friend of mine and she's been saying, have this guy on, have this guy on. I just dismissed it. I'm like, a guy who worked for Elon, that's, I don't know. It was so good. It was so good.

Speaker 1:
[49:49] Isn't that obviously good?

Speaker 2:
[49:51] I don't know. I thought he was-

Speaker 1:
[49:52] Elon's housekeeper. Can we book a bigger studio? What are we going to do?

Speaker 2:
[49:57] There was something about it where I showed it to Arie. I'm like, is this interesting? I don't know. We get so many pitches. For some reason, it didn't stand out as being a must have. Then I listened to it and I'm like, oh my God, this was amazing.

Speaker 1:
[50:10] No, he was great. If you haven't listened to that one, that's one of the, that one and the Graham Weaver one, but two recent episodes that I would be like, they're two of my favorite podcasts that I've listened to. I don't know if I really listen to MFM once you do them, but yeah, we had such good questions to Graham Weaver.

Speaker 2:
[50:29] I went and listened to it and I was like, we each asked such awesome questions and DHH, those two pods where I was like.

Speaker 1:
[50:36] I can't believe you said that with a straight face. That's hilarious. It's like when Trump recently was on the podium and he was like, he's like, he just says the quiet part out loud all the time. Then he was like, I don't like hanging out with people more successful than me. I like hanging out with losers. He's like, yeah, if I hang out with someone more successful than I feel like a loser, but when I hang out with losers, I feel great. I can't believe the president is saying this out loud. But even if he wasn't the president, who do you know that's actually that fundamentally unfiltered and honest?

Speaker 2:
[51:07] Did you see what he said about Pearl Harbor to the Prime Minister of Japan?

Speaker 1:
[51:12] You don't like surprises?

Speaker 2:
[51:13] Yeah, she was like, you know, Donald Trump, you.

Speaker 1:
[51:16] Wait, that was to the Prime Minister? I thought that was to a journalist.

Speaker 2:
[51:20] No, like it was the leader of Japan. She was like, you should have told us about this Iran thing. And he was like, you want to talk about surprises? Why didn't you tell me about Pearl Harbor? That was incredible.

Speaker 1:
[51:31] I don't like the guy and I think it's insane. Some of the stuff that's going on.

Speaker 2:
[51:35] Oh, agreed.

Speaker 1:
[51:36] I think it's just, I think the greed and the theft is pretty crazy with like, if you look at the world liberties financial stuff that they're doing. I think the memes about like how they're like, okay, you're deporting people, but like rummaging in with like rap videos and memes. I think it's like so tasteless coming from the official White House account. I can't get behind any of that shit. You know what I mean? Like, I'm open to somebody who's maybe got policies that you like, but there's something about the way he goes about things that is just like so distasteful. But also, I do think he's hilarious. I think he's an absolute master of the gift of gab, and I do think that's amazing, and I thoroughly enjoy a nice little two-minute compilation of just hilarious things that he's saying. So, yeah, he's complicated, and I'm complicated.

Speaker 2:
[52:26] I recorded an episode on Friday with Charles Duhigg, and he has a book called Super Communicators. He wrote the book Power of Habit, which was a big inspiration to Atomic Habits, and it was a great book. And he was like, I'm not a Trump supporter, but when I was working for The New York Times, I interviewed him a ton, and he was like, I understand how one can be very charmed by this. He checked all the boxes of following the rules of traditional great communicators.

Speaker 1:
[52:50] So I don't like to follow a lot of world events and news or whatever, but when there's a possible world or three, it goes above the bar and you start to pay a little bit of attention to it. And so I was like, I don't really understand what he's negotiating with Iran about. I'm not totally certain. So I bought The Art of The Deal. I was like, I'm going to read The Art of The Deal to try to understand what is the strategy here, what's going on? What did you learn? Have you ever actually read The Art of The Deal?

Speaker 2:
[53:20] No, no, I've read books on him, but not that one.

Speaker 1:
[53:23] You got to read it, dude. The first 20 pages of The Art of The Deal, cinema, absolute cinema. So the way he writes the beginning of the book, so just check this out. This is the first paragraph of the book. I don't do it for the money. I've got enough, more than I'll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on a canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks. Most people are surprised by the way I work. I play it very loose. I don't carry a briefcase. I try not to schedule too many meetings. I leave my door open. You can't be imaginative or entrepreneurial if you've got too much structure. I prefer to come in to work each day just to see what happens. And then he talks about how he's like, the first 20 pages are just a...

Speaker 2:
[54:06] Yeah, that's cool if you're running a privately held company.

Speaker 1:
[54:10] Yeah, but you can see he's just doing the same shit. He's doing the same thing. I just do it to do it. I play it loose. I show up and see what happens. And so he goes like, it'll be like nine... He basically says, I do 50 to 100 phone calls a day. Most don't last more than 15 minutes. I just work the phones all day. And so it's like 9 a.m. You know, Lea Ioka called. You know, 915, my broker called. We got a million dollars of Hilton stock. People think I'm going to do a takeover. Honestly, I don't know. I might just sell it if it's a profit. I might take over the whole company. I'm keeping my options open right now. I feel like there's more value there. But then again, a nice profit is a nice profit. I hang up the phone. We decide that we'll call back again this afternoon. And he just goes call after call of like, you know, the permitting guy called. Said we're not going to get the permit. Pissing, you know, like whatever, like, it's pissing me off. I gotta call this other guy to see if I can get the permits through. He owes me a big one from the old Atlantic City deal that we did, you know. He's just going like kind of deal by deal, call by call for the first 20 minutes. It's honestly pretty fascinating. And like, I think he ghost wrote the book. I don't think he wrote it.

Speaker 2:
[55:17] But the style of it. He ghost wrote it, yeah. The ghost writer, like, talks mad trash about him. He was like, I haven't spent all this time with him.

Speaker 1:
[55:22] The style of it, though, is very unique. I actually really enjoy the, like, stylistic way. It seems like, you know, his personality, even if he's not the one writing it.

Speaker 2:
[55:32] I read a book that was written about him, and they basically said, like, starting at theater 25, or I forget when, they're like, he didn't have an office in Manhattan, but he had a limousine, and he would just drive, like, to city, you know, where the mayor is. I forget, what's it called, city?

Speaker 1:
[55:48] City hall.

Speaker 2:
[55:49] City hall, sorry. And he would, like, just start badgering people, and then he would go to, like, properties that were selling and start badgering them. And he just went from place to place to place every single day, just driving around. And he'd be like, I gotta go back to my office, but he didn't have an office. He just would drive around from place to place to place. And in doing that, he just kind of created motion, kind of created a handful of things. And it was just like this insistent, like, nagging almost. I don't know what you'd call it, but it's like, all right, is that it?

Speaker 1:
[56:16] If that ain't it, I don't know what it is. That was everything.

Speaker 2:
[56:20] All right, that's it.

Speaker 1:
[56:20] I could name producer Arie as like, what the hell am I gonna do with this episode?

Speaker 2:
[56:26] Every time we do this, the people say, thank God, we love these, the third time I'm complimenting us. But they say that they like these, so it is what it is. It's for the true fans.

Speaker 1:
[56:35] This is what the podcast is. If you don't like this, don't listen to the podcast.

Speaker 2:
[56:40] All right, that's it, that's the pod.

Speaker 1:
[56:53] Hey, let's take a quick break to tell you about our sponsor. It is a podcast that we want you to check out. It's called D2C Pod. It's hosted by Ramon Berrios and Blaine Bolas. This is a podcast about all things direct to consumer, D2C. It's e-commerce stores, it's how you optimize your brand. They're talking with founders, marketers, and the platform creators about all kinds of things that you need to know for D2C. Website conversion, paid ads, Facebook ads, consumer trends, email marketing. If you want to know the stories behind your favorite brands, this podcast is for you. Check it out. Listen to D2C Pod wherever you get your podcasts.