3 killer businesses hiding in plain sight

0:00 Guess how much a monkey costs? I don't know, a thousand dollars. Almost 20,000. One monkey is 20 grand. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. Put my law in it like my day's all on the road, less travel never. Before we start, can I get a can I get a wellness check on my hair, dude? I just feel like I feel like I might have hit the point where I gotta like start

0:22 Taken something. You know when I'm getting the hat on every day. I feel like that's I'm w I'm literally waving the white flag with this hat. That like maybe

0:32 Maybe we're getting a little thin on top. What's the thing that you would take? It starts with an R, like is it it's the R word. Uh Neutrophil. I oh yeah, well there's like a generic name for them and then there's all the branded ones, but like Madoxophil something, something does that sound right? That that sounds like something. One of the downsides on one of them I think is Limp Wiener. Right.

0:52 Well, that might be two for one. I'm done having kids. So so you know. I I the if I I was thinking about the vasectomy, maybe we don't need to do that. It's so funny, dude. Ben, as you know, is you'll never catch Ben without a hat. Yeah, for for similar reasons. And he met a guy and he was like, Oh, I got a I'm on a hair protocol from this guy. And I'm like, What? Like, what you got? A Turkish guy? Who you got? He's like no no no it's my friend, he's got me on this protocol. And you know protocols just become the fancy thing since you went in and Brian Johnson's like, What do you mean he gave you a pill? Is that a protocol? And he was like, No, no, no, I gotta like red light therapy, do this, put this serum, blah, blah, blah. Okay.

1:27 So I was like, How's it going? And he's like, uh he's like, I don't know, man, you you tell me when you see me. So I just saw him uh yesterday. She's got a beard now. Oh, thick beard. He's got a beard, but his hair looks the same. So something's kinda working. Beard looks great. I gotta give him that. Have you seen there's this app out? I've I've been targeted by it like crazy. It's coves.com. So it's

1:50 Q O V E S dot com I've been getting targeted. Like crazy. By this app. And I bought it.

1:59 It's a hundred and fifty dollars. Um the ad worked. Improve your looks without surgery. And then there's a woman. Posing.

2:07 Uh life changing transformations. Uh We're look back we're look maxing? Is that what's going on here? It's not even an app, really. Uh, ba and I don't even know if it's AI or if it's some like Filipino who's gonna criticize me because when you sign up, it takes Three weeks for me to get my results. So I feel like there's gonna be like

2:25 You know, a bunch of guys in the background like making fun of me. Uh Uh no, I just signed up for it. I got the ad while I was in San Francisco. Instant conversion. Did you just stop on the middle of the street, sit down and and download this? Well, they had an Instagram that has a million followers and it basically like tells you like

2:43 what people can do to improve their looks. And it was in a beautiful Instagram and a lot of my hot friends also follow them. So I figure Let's give it a shot. But I d I don't know if you've ever heard of this. All right. I think we need to let the comments Predict before your results come in. Where you're gonna score. So here's some of the things. Cheek activation.

3:02 Zero a hundred. Facial femininity. That's gonna be a tough one. Yeah. Homogeneity. Average. Is that good or bad? The categories themselves are cutting. Wait, do I want to be more homogenous?

3:19 I think you wanna be more homogenous. Okay. Well Dude, I got called ugly when I was in the second grade by this girl I liked. I liked this girl and she was sitting in the front of class and my friend Who I think really knew what he was doing. He was stirring the pot here. He's like, dude

3:33 Let me go tell her you like her and then maybe she'll And then he goes up to her, he tells you like her and I see them both smile. And then he comes back to me and I'm like, And and he goes She thinks you're ugly. And I was like oh. Like

3:47 Wasn't even a yes or no. Just she thinks. That was the end of it. I was like, So no then? And he's like, I think no. Still recovering from that. I think that was my earliest memory. Millie, was her name. Millie. You asshole. All right.

4:04 I'd like to talk to you about the wild world. Of lab testing on monkeys. So I didn't realize I d I never really thought about it. You know, like when you hear about a drug, oh it's in phase one clinical trials, phase two clinical What does this all mean and what what's actually happening? along the way of like a m a medicine, a cure, uh a vaccine, whatever it is coming to market.

4:26 I didn't really realize How much medicine gets tested on monkeys and how big of a That is. So can I just tell you about like a little bit about this? Yeah, and what's the scale? I I I'm I have no idea.

4:41 All right. So Basically more than twenty percent of all drugs are tested on Monkeys? And and what's a monkey? Like what is it the same breed? Is it all m like are all there's like a couple that they like that like sp they they are used specifically for this, so like The long tailed, uh, you know, I don't know how you say it, like a they call it like a sino, C Y N O

5:02 Um like the sino whatever, it's like the the long species name is the like the ideal monkey to test on. And it's kinda sad because it's like the ideal monkey because it's like smarter And like more close to a human and so like If you look at these monkeys like in the wild, they're known for like They'll steal your phone and take a selfie with you. You know, they'll they'll they'll like grab your hat and won't give it back till you give them food. You know, they like kinda know how to play the game. And so this this crazy business where

5:29 Look, I get it. Like, you know, you don't want a medicine to go and be tested on humans right away. You'd want it to start mice and rats and And but but like eventually the closest proxy is monkeys. And so what happens is every year You know, tens of thousands of monkeys around the world get imposed. So the US will import, let's say, twenty thousand monkeys. And each monkey Cost.

5:50 Guess how much a monkey costs? A thousand. Almost twenty thousand. One monkey is twenty grand? They used to be two grand a monkey. When Covid happened. prices shot up'cause they needed to test for medicines, vaccines, whatnot. So it got to twenty thousand, fifty thousand per monkey.

6:06 And then what happened was at the time China supplied Like sixty percent of the world's What they call uh N HPs, non human primates. They do everything. China does everything. They breed them, they were t spine them. China just went cold turkey. They just went cold monkey. They just stopped exporting. They were like we're gonna we're gonna keep them all for ourselves. Okay. And so there was a this huge supply shock, prices sued up to fifty thousand per monkey.

6:31 And Cambodia steps in and Vietnam steps in and the Mauritius whatever that is islands step in. And they start pr providing these monkeys. So the US kinda needs it and there's these big businesses in the U So this is one business called Charles River Labs. Have you ever heard of this business? Charles River Labs. It sounds like a venture capital firm.

6:50 Well, there is Charles River Ventures, so not to confuse them. So Charles River Labs is like in Boston or something like this. They do this full as like research uh testing as a service for all the biotech companies so they don't have to do it themselves. Okay. So they basically have all the like The the mice and the rats and the dogs and the monkeys all there and they do this testing. They work with like eighty percent of biotech companies. Like it's cra like the scale is pretty crazy. Even crazy. I think it's like eighty percent of drugs that go to market get tested with them. Like this have this absolute monopoly. They do four billion a year in revenue.

7:21 Yeah, it's a publicly traded company. They bought a monkey breeding business, like a supply like part of the monkey supply chain, because they were like so dependent on these wild swings. They bought one for five hundred million dollars. Just to control the supply better, to g make sure that they were not Gonna like lack uh lack the supply of these these NHP. What's a monkey breeding business. Hey I wanna tell you about something pretty cool. We have a database of all of the business ideas that have been discussed on this podcast. So hundreds of episodes. The team at HubSpot went through They pulled out all the simple

7:52 Relatable. interesting, profitable uh ideas that we have brainstormed and they're all available for download for free. Just click the link in the description below. Thank you to our friends at HubSpot for sponsoring this podcast and putting together this free resource for you guys. Back to the show. So it'll be like in Cambodia, or it'll be in Vietnam and the basically so they they they They certify that the basic they breed these for testing. They don't take'em out of the wild.

8:17 And then they like kinda tag them, they like track them, whatever. But th they've gone wrong. So the g there's a story in Fortune magazine of This guy, see this guy in the blue shirt here with the glasses? So he He's like the director of wildlife in Cambodia.

8:32 And these are like monkeys in a cage right here coming out of this pickup truck. And they're being transported and so this guy goes into the US for like, you know, a a business trip. It just gets detained. You know, they have a warrant for his arrest because they feel like the monkeys from the from wildlife were being passed off as

8:50 Like lab testing monkeys, bread m uh bread monkeys. And uh were being renamed, re tagged, and being sold. And so he got jailed for like a year. He was like in house arrest for like you know, a year waiting trial. In America? In America, yeah. And and the DOJ kinda like impounded him. Which is pretty crazy. So there's that's this wild world. D have you ever even thought about this? And and so no, but uh impounding is that the is that your new term?

9:15 They they should have put him in a monkey cage. They towed him, yeah, exactly. So it's crazy, like it just was another reminder. You know, one thing this this podcast has done a lot of for me is it rewired my brain to understand that when I look around the room. Nothing is here by accident. Nothing just appeared.

9:35 You know, like the the little like the lead that goes in this this mechanical pencils. There's a company that makes that there's a guy. Who you'll meet on a boat somewhere, whose business is just to provide these lead. And he knows everything about the lead business. And he goes to me sits and meetings and they talk about three millimeter lead and six millimeter lead. And Everything is a business. It would not exist if there wasn't. Mm- Entrepreneur behind it, making it exist.

9:59 And the world is full of these projects bigger than you think. And it's always bigger than you think. It's always bigger than it. Can you imagine someone making five hundred million dollars by creating a Breeding monkey. And when you looked at the photos, it It looked like a huge shed almost, that photo that you showed me. It's crazy. And you know, y I remember meeting people who were like The richest guy in my neighborhood growing up.

10:23 What do you do? Uh what's your job? And he laughed. He's like no there's no job. He's like I sell You know, in a factory when there's like a conveyor belt or like you know, where you go through TSA and there's like a conveyor belt. He's like the tread of that conveyor conveyor belt. We make the tread. And I was like, what? How? What? How'd you even start that? Where does that even come from? You know, like

10:43 I own an almond farm, a mushroom farm. Met a guy who makes the dye that makes the color blue because blue is not really a naturally occurring You know, chem uh substance you find. You have to like make it. He's like I make blue. It's like Well I love lamps, sir. I don't know what you're talking about.

11:00 And they're just like richer than you'd ever think. Did you um another thing that I've noticed is that there's companies that do things that I had no idea that they that they still did it and it could potentially make a lot of money. So for example, I'm reading uh for the first time I'm reading Snowball, Warren Buffett's biography. And I find you had referenced this, but I didn't quite know what you were talking about and I didn't want to ask because I didn't want to look stupid. But it's the uh soybean oil shortage. Um and basically the idea here is that um

11:32 One of Warren Buffett's best trades ever was uh American Express because Uh at the time There was this whole scheme Where basically there was a a scam artist. And he realized that he could get loans against his soybean oil

11:50 Uh Inventory. And so basically what this guy did was he had I don't know if it was hundreds or dozens of massive tanks. Where he would Store

12:00 That oil. And let's say that oil was worth uh five million dollars in aggregate, he could get a four million dollar loan against that oil and he actually went to I think fifty different banks And got a bunch of different loans, which is fraudulent. But then he did

12:17 Double whammy fraud because he got uh in order to get the loans, he hired American Express. to verify that the oil that he said was in the tank was in fact in the tank. But what he noticed was that when they checked, There was a way that you could kinda like uh scam'em and eventually he filled these huge tanks with seawater, salt water. Right. And it was fake. The oil didn't exist. And for a variety of political reasons, a deal fell through with Russia

12:46 where they're gonna import or sell them a bunch of oil. America said, Nope, we're not gonna do b business with the USSR. Therefore the price of soybean oil went down and it crashed and all these um l lenders said, Hey, soybean guy, you us you owe us our money. And he was like Well, the thing is is that none of the soybean oil actually exists. Therefore I can't pay you. And because American Express was the guaranteer, they were the company that promised that the amount of soybean bean oil promised to the lenders was there, they were the ones who had to pay this massive fine.

13:20 Ed Warren Buffett goes around. And he was like, you know, American Express stock is down right now. And a lot of people have no idea that they even like did we're in the soybean oil. Checking business. But I have a feeling b based off of going to restaurants and I'm talking to waiters, I have a feeling that

13:36 The people who are using American Express, they don't really give a shit about this. They still trust that American Express is good for, you know, credit cards. And I was reading about this and I was like, Oh, that's a crazy story, but B American Express is in the soybean oil checking business. And you'd have no idea how many strange variety businesses exist. And by the way, it was like a multi hundred million dollar a year business to like be in this soybean checking oil business. And it was one of those moments where I'm like, I can't believe this is a thing. I never and I think that crisis was so big that I don't think it brought down the economy, but I think it like um

14:11 I think it hurt a lot of companies to the tune of like many tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. Yeah, it's all hidden in plain sight. And the more of those you sort of download, two things happen. One is it rewires your brain. To realise like It's just the world is full of gaps and then founders who plug them.

14:27 And uh so you start to realize oh that was a gap and someone plugged it. That was a gap and someone plugged it. So you start finding gaps and thinking, Could I plug that? And and it changes you that's what an entrepreneur's brain really like. Comes down to the is seeing the world not as this like set, fix, solved thing that mommy and daddy have like

14:46 They'll take care of, but like no no there's tons of opportunity. You can go and just change it. You can literally just bend the world. Um and make it make it a new. And then the on the other side you realize like Wow, there's a lot of business in the weird nooks and crannies of the world. There's a lot of money to be made doing things that are

15:03 just off the beaten path because there's this arbitrage between What smart people learn about In their day to day life or school. Which is why you'll see a lot of programmers who will build To do list apps and you know.

15:15 Dating. apps and things that it's like what's a problem that every smart person runs into. You simply want to just stay away from that. And go into things that They just haven't heard about they don't know too much about, you know what I mean? Like go into a a category that is just not ripe with really smart

15:31 You know, high agency people and you're playing against weak competition. How do you think you do that? 'Cause that's really hard. It's hard to find problems worthy of solving. that are one hundred percent outside of your

15:45 of your of your realm. For example We met um A guy in San Francisco. uh who had a business with dentists. It helped It it it was a Dental back office. So it's called Daydream Daydream Dental.

15:59 What they're doing was You're a dentist, your back office, you got Debbie sitting back there, and she spends most of her day calling insurance companies, reading out billing codes, trying to get the claims filed, accepted, checking patient insurance. And that entire process is kind of the revenue lifeblood of the business. And guess what? There's a lot of times where things get Either rejected Build the wrong way, cash not delivered, that sort of thing.

16:23 And so, you know, there's a it's a very lossy part of the business. You would think you go to the dentist, you pay money and then That's it. It's over. But that's not really how the dental industry works. And so what he was doing He goes to his dentist and he says, Hey, let us take over that function for you. We will use AI and smart people in computers to basically do a better job of that than Debbie can. So you don't

16:42 You don't have to employ a bunch of people and have a bunch of overhead to do that. We will employ the people, we will specialize in that function for you and will collect fifteen percent, twenty percent more revenue that you're just leaving on the table. That's the pitch. And he was doing I think in year two close to ten million a year in revenue, something like that. You guys can listen to the episode to get all the

17:00 All the details. But we were like how did you get this idea? Because he was a He's either a Stanford grad or a Stanford dropout. He's like this guy who like You'd think my cousin. Yeah, he was like not hanging around a bunch of uh dental offices.

17:16 Um I mean, he had great teeth, but he didn't look like he was like doing this like dirty work. And he was like, Oh, my mother was a dentist He was like my summers when I was a teenager, I just worked in the dental practice. Yeah, and I was like The greatest gift. that uh and your mom's gonna rub it in your face. But the greatest gift financially that you've been given is the fact that your mother was a small business owner and you got to see firsthand these problems.

17:38 And how lucky are you That you were you know, born in the situation where you are just your eyes are open. We had another guy who uh had a business servicing generators. So basically like a nursing home who has an industrial size generator

17:54 They can't go out for even an hour because you know, that's that's a huge deal, or a hospital. You can't have your hospital generator or your can't have the hospital power go out in the middle of uh heart surgery. His job was installing and servicing generators and this business might eventually become a A hundred million dollar maybe. billion dollar company. And he explained the story how he got into it. And it was like this like winding row of like I worked for this company that like one time we did a consulting project with this thing and I got into that, which then I got introduced to this other guy and this other thing.

18:25 And I just was asking myself how like I was envious of like people who do these like dirty Tech. Ish jobs and they discovered these problems that I had no idea were even a thing. It's it's the art of noticing. I told you I spent like a bunch of months looking up

18:40 Uh how some of the world's most creative people work. Uh, how do the best writers work, the best musicians, the best filmmakers. Because you know, I spent so much of my life studying how great entrepreneurs work, which is a lot of brute force, a lot of high agency, a lot of scaled thinking, a lot of Hustle. And you know, usually there's obviously creativity involved, but I thought, well, let me go study the people who specialize in this.

19:00 If you go listen to like what Rick Rubin says, what the great comedians say. It's all about noticing. It is actually why comedians when they get rich and famous, they fall off. Because It's the struggles of the everyday person.

19:15 That led them to an insight. That when they said it in front of a crowd, everybody connected with it. But when you're flying private And you're you have four nannies and you have a chef and you have this and that. Well, you don't really encounter the same struggles that the everyday person does, so the th you stop

19:31 coming up with the genius insights that make that resonate like a truth. That you said out loud to the audience, and so. You have to really like create a system. Where you are gonna be exposed to interesting things and then a habit of noticing them. Of paying attention to them, of writing things down, of slowing down, of not being too busy, not being too distracted, of being more present.

19:52 And that's where the great if you if you look up like uh remember Mark Manson came on the podcast and he's got this k crazy hit book. Right. You made a like one of the best selling books. Um if of nonfiction in the history of the world is the subtle art Not giving a And he wrote that book and it's like he was blogging, he wrote, you know, thousands of blogs, but nothing really resonated. That one that one or nothing resonated the same level as this idea did.

20:17 And um Where'd that where'd that name come from? And he was like, Oh, I actually really liked this band. And the band had a Song called The subtle art of something was something it was like the last part was different.

20:30 He's like, and I just noticed that like I just really like that name. And I remember I couldn't tell you the other fifteen songs on the album, but I remember that one. So then I wrote that down and I that became the book title. And it's like Noticing і such a superpower. It's a superpower for entrepreneurs. Paul Graham wrote this essay called How to Do Great Work. And what he describes is like

20:48 A few step system, and I'll just just it's like a three thousand word essay. It's probably one of his most important essays, but it's so long. In it, he basically says, look, like here's the formula. You want to first just follow the path of most Excitement so of most interest to you. And he basically says, Look, uh this is twofold. One is that Being really interested in something is highly motivating. So you'll work more than other people

21:10 You'll have more endurance than other people. Uh he goes two, it's differentiating. Cause exactly what in interests you is not what interests most people. And so you have a specific like Flavor palette for what you like. And if you follow that

21:23 Truly, you will end up in a place of less competition. So he says for let your excitement or your interest be the motor of the boat as well as the rudder. So it's like it's the motor that motivates you and it's the rudder that guides you of which way to go. He goes, Okay, so now you took that boat. And you just let it go and you just follow it and you follow it all the way to the edge of the frontier of whatever industry you're in, whatever field you're in, whatever technology you play in.

21:48 Go all the way to the frontier. If it's lead for this pencil, it's lead for this pencil. If it's the conveyor belt thing, it's the conveyor belt thing. Whatever it is. And he goes when you're at the frontier When you're far away from the frontier, the fr uh the frontier just looks like a like a circumference, like a like a continuous line. But if you get all the way out there, you notice, oh shit. You gotta kinda step over these gaps. People don't know this. They don't do they don't know how to do this.

22:11 Oh, you gotta do this manually yourself. Nobody does this for you. It's kinda tedious. It's a pain in the ass. And it's only when you're in the frontier there that you will find the gaps and then you s the entrepreneurial step is to just decide to fill one of those. And uh It starts with noticing. That's a that's a very good summary of that article.

22:28 Paul Graham is another guy who's like I don't know if it's a He might be an artist. I don't know what he considers himself. I think he does actually. I think he's uh uh in terms of traditional art, but also like when he writes stuff. It's pretty amazing how he takes something that um it's sort of like how to win friends that influence people where he tells they tell you certain stuff in the book and you're like, That's obvious.

22:49 But the way that you put it makes it seem so much more important and insightful, uh than I previously thought. And it is important and insightful. Right. And so I've been I have been wondering how to stay uh as Eddie Murphy calls it, sensitive. I told you what Eddie Murphy said, right? He had that documentary and he was like, I'm a great comedian for a bunch of reasons. One of them is that I'm super sensitive to stuff. If I give the valet my car And he comes back with the car and it just slightly smell different. I can make that joke about that slight smell. Uh or if I notice a slight dent, I can just n make a a d a remark about that faster than other people because I notice it better than they do. And they're just not sensitive enough.

23:26 Yeah, Jerry Seinfeld has this book called Is This Anything? Have you ever read it? No. It's it's so Jerry Seinfeld has this daily writing habit every morning, first two hours of the day, he sits down with a Legal pad and a pencil and a coffee. He just writes. He just writes jokes.

23:42 And he's like, you know, writing is the game. And so he's been doing that for forty years. So what he did was he compiled all of those yellow pages of just half jokes, which in the book is called Is This Anything'cause like most of the jokes don't go anywhere. They're And he's just asking himself like Is there something there? Is there anything is that is this something? And so he

23:58 Put them all together in a book. And uh one of his jokes is He just noticed that, like, have you ever been on a phone call? And it drops and the other person calls you back and they're like, Hey, yes, hey hey, sorry, I don't know what happened. You just notice we always say that and he goes.

24:12 You how does everyone always say, I don't know what happened. Of course you don't know what happened. I don't know what's I don't know what's happening right now with this phone call. Do you think I could explain What went wrong? I couldn't even tell you what was right in it. I don't know how phones work. And so you just noticed how silly it is that we say, I don't know what happened, as if you had any power or control or knowledge into The way my phone is magically connecting with yours anyways. And so

24:34 The reason I get excited about this is that nobody will ever practice this. Nobody will ever say they're doing this. It doesn't sound cool. So there's a few of these kind of traits where there's like high alpha. Because They matter a lot.

24:47 But everybody else brushes them off. Or doesn't even know what to do with them, so they just don't try. And so imagine like, you know, if you want to be The best Fortnite player in the world. You're competing against Tens of millions of other kids who spend every day doing this. You're entering just such a competitive field. But imagine there was another game.

25:05 The had the same prize pool. As the world fortnight championship. But there's only seven players. Like you know, that's that's what happens with some of these traits like noticing. I've said another one is enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is such an underrated trait. Everybody knows in that that it's better to work with somebody who's enthusiastic. Everybody knows that enthusiasm

25:23 is a positive attribute to have But it's something that smart people feel stupid when they do it. Like it's a low status thing for a smart person to do is be enthusiastic. And you seem sort of like dumb, like a golden retriever. Well, guess what? Everybody wants that person around. We love good golden retrievers. And it's actually a very useful trait for going and doing something hard is to have enthusiasm every day versus just being beaten down by the reality of your situation. So there's these like handful of traits that smart people refuse to work on.

25:52 Which makes it like an an uncompetitive playing field. You could just go dominate with very little effort. Hey, let's take a quick break. You know that feeling when strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned, and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content? That someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow. Well, the Breeze assistant from HubSpot can help. It works right inside HubSpot. You can draft a campaign copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice, all using your actual customer data.

26:18 So you don't create just content, you create content that converts. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. This is something that I think about all the time and I've never come up with an answer that has been truly effective for me. But how to

26:35 Find a thing. That you love. So like you were talking about um Like this is the step before all of this stuff. But like whenever I read about Jerry Seinfeld and he you know, he's I've known about his writing habit.

26:48 Each day. Uh I'm like How lucky are you? that you at a young age you discovered something that you're obsessed about. And often I ask myself, how do you find something that you're obsessed about? And also

27:02 Can anyone be obsessed about any like anything at all. Like I get obsessed with something for a short time, but I'm not like but anything that I've been interested in for twenty years, I would say that I'm like a forty hour a week obsessed. You know, I can uh like I'm a pretty Pretty I'm mildly interested for a long period of time.

27:20 But I'm not obsessed. I'm not obsessed. You really feel that way? You really feel like you don't have things you get obsessed about. I think you're the exact opposite, dude. No, I get obsessed. You got obsessed with fitness. You got obsessed with the if you have denim. You got obsessed with the media business. You got obsessed with researching businesses. How we're almost at a thousand episodes of this podcast. There is no way. That you've talked for a thousand hours about niche business ideas. Trust me, you're obsessed with those.

27:45 It doesn't feel Obsessed. Like I don't know. I just like when I see the other p it's sort of like a Oh man, they have it, and I don't. And of course I can like look at my a my past actions that I and I could argue otherwise, but I'm just saying, generally speaking, for the average person, have you thought about how to find something that you're obsessed with, or even can you become obsessed?

28:07 I do think it's e everyone is capable of it, but very few people ever do it. I think there's Two two interesting things I can say about this. The first is look into your childhood. Yeah, that's what Robert Green says.

28:20 Yeah. So if you read about People who suggest how to do this, a lot of the times they say Look at your childhood or pay attention to what you did in your free time. Whether it's your free time as an adult, but as adults, our free time sort of shrinks. In smaller and smaller segments. And you know, you fill your free time with errands or things you should do. But when you're a kid, you don't really think about what you should do. You just simply think about what you wanna do.

28:40 And so When you're a kid, you get obsessed with different things. You go into these different rabbit holes or different phases, and then you grow out of them. But they often have like similarities. So, you know, I got obsessed with one video game, but then I would grow grow out of that, but then I got obsessed with online poker. And online poker has a lot of similarities to that video game, if you think about it, but I didn't consider online poker to be a video game. And I got obsessed with business. And now I'm sort of obsessed with investing. And they're all the same fru line, right? Of It's sort of this game. There's points, whether the points are called stars or points or money or R O I, whatever it is, right? Like IR is a different scoreboard, but it's the same idea.

29:17 And it's a company game, there's competitors, there's strategy. And it's hard to win, but it's fun to win. And like you got to trial and error and try to figure it out. So like I like strategy games and I've always liked strategy games. I always it's very easy for me to get obsessed with a strategy game. Are you like a board game guy? Yeah, like I'm a I love board games. I love g I love social strategy games. I love watching Survivor. I love playing card games where you gotta lie and you gotta do, you know, you gotta sort of bluff.

29:42 That's poker, but there's also other social card games like that. Yeah, so so you start to th notice patterns and you gotta think back. So there's a great story of Dan Brown. You know Dan Brown, the author of The Da Vinci Code, which is like one of the best selling mystery thriller books ever, and like Demons and angels. He's got a c he's got a bunch of books like this. This guy's an amazing writer of these kind of like Treasure hunt. Books where the hero's trying to find something and it's a race to find the thing, he's getting the clues and he's figuring it out. He's unveiling the mystery.

30:11 Well when he was a kid His dad did something really wonderful for him and sparked this like passion in him. Every Christmas, instead of presents under the tree, his dad would put a treasure map. Oh, that's baller. And so he would wake up and like every kid goes and they just un unpack the gift. His gift was

30:27 Here's a map. Go find it. He had a scavenger hunt to go find his gifts. He's and so guess what? Like that like kind of Keystone mo memory and moment like really like triggered a spark inside him. Of loving the idea of a treasure hunt.

30:42 And if you look at the Da Vinci Code, what is it? It's a treasure hunt story. And he just tells it better than anyone else on earth. He he paid attention to the things he was interested in and loved as a kid. What happens is We find these things that we're interested in, but we blow we blow them off. We just brush them off as if they're sort of trivial, they're meaningless. They are irrelevant or they're childish or they're silly or they're not serious. I should do a serious thing.

31:07 But it's the people who pay attention to these things that are Yeah, on the surface somewhat unserious. But they take a simple idea, they take it seriously, and they turn it into something that actually matters. I'll give you an extra perfect example of this. I just took a trip to uh Toronto. And I went to Toronto and I

31:22 I was there to celebrate because we just had this huge win, huge business win. I'll talk about that later someday, uh, when I can kind of be a little more public about it. But we just this biggest biggest win of my life in the world of business. And so we flew our team out, you know, me, the CEO, and and Ben, we flew out together. We're like, let's celebrate. But our first thought was let's go to Vegas. And it was like Just the thought of it's not just the thought of Vegas like induces like Fatig in my body. Yeah. Like I don't I don't want to drink. I don't want to party If we were at the club the three of us, it would be the three stooges. You know, one guy doesn't even drink

31:53 And so we went to Toronto. One of the reasons we went is because Um, we were like we had this wonderful day where we played like Padel, which I had never played before I've Love Badell. Immediately was like, Oh, new life hobby unlocked. We went to this escape room. That's unbelievable.

32:08 It's like a castle, there's actors in it. I never experienced an escape room like this. Like the escape rooms I've ever been to was like a small box with like, you know Toys inside. I love those. But dude, I loved escape rooms. And so it's like that same thing. The strategy, mystery, like unlock the puzzle type shit is what I like. And that was what I chose to celebrate with. And so Know thyself.

32:31 But w w were the other guys like Sean. We'd rather have gone to the strip club. Well no, that's kinda the beauty of it is If you do the shit that's the the most to you. You will only atr you repel people who wanna be at the strip club and you will attract people who are like you. Those will be the people who you end up working really well with, right?'Cause like

32:56 You will attract you will attract like minded people. It becomes a honeypot. So what's the second thing though? You said um So just one is one is pay attention to your childhood, notice what you love then. The second is Don't uh sort of brush it off. Don't don't uh you gotta be a bit shameless about it. And so I'll give you uh so why did we go there? Well our buddy Who came on the the show, Elon Lee.

33:15 Elon Lee was one of the creators of the exploding kittens. Board game. And you built it enormous. I don't know if he said the numbers publicly, but absolutely gargantuan business. In the business of

33:27 Board games and card games. If you walk in the aisle of target in the board card game aisle. He's made like seven of the top ten selling games in the world. You know, like the dominant m monopoly. Well what is it so I went to his house. He has got a house in Toronto. I think he was like telling us that he was

33:43 Building it. He was like showing photos. Is it like a dream house? Well, this wasn't the dream house. This was like the house he's living in while the giant dream house is being built. And I go up to his office. And his office is like a kids' toy store. Not only does it have all his games But then there's like these Insane Lego things that he's building and he's wiring LED lights into them and he's like this

34:04 Unbelievable construction. Like He's like a kid, right? He's just still doing the shit he loved as a kid, he's still doing it now. He had a dinosaur egg. Like an actual dinosaur egg, a fossilized dinosaur egg.

34:15 And he's like if you kiss it or lick it, you get to sign the book. So I kissed the dinosaur egg. I'm signing the book and I'm like, this is like worth millions of dollars. He doesn't have it like in this display case. He's like, How boring. Like the eight year old version of me would think how lame I don't get to touch it. Eight year old me would want to touch it and show my friends. So he's got the egg out. He's letting his friends touch it, kiss it, and lick it. And then he's he show there's this Xbox sitting there.

34:39 And he's like, That's the first Xbox. I'm like, dude, how'd you how much was that? Did you he's like, Oh, I got that one. I they gave it to me. I'm like, Well, how'd you do that? He goes, Well, I designed it. He's like my first job was Xbox, you know, Microsoft handed me a bunch of money and a to a team and was like, design a competitor to the PlayStation. So that's the first prototype Xbox we ever made. I'm real proud of that one.

35:01 Wait, really quick. To give perspective on this guy. He uh he's wildly wealthy. Uh like Mm c who knows? It could be a billion dollar company. Who knows? Let's just say he's in a hundred millionaire, billionaire status.

35:14 He goes to us a group of guys, twenty of us he goes. Hey, do you guys wanna see my new game? And he gets on his hands and knees and he pulls out these glasses. Where he's trying to like look. He's like, All right. No. Okay. So these are glasses. These are the sticks, right? You need these to stay on your face. He had glasses that are just two lenses.

35:38 Yeah, and they were like boundaries. And he was wearing like sweatpants and socks. Like it was like it was basically what I'm trying to get out of he was like an old man kid. He's not actually old, but like he's a grown man kid. And he's on his hands and knees and he's like, All right, so you just got this card. I think that's what that means. What it means is you have to do that. A empty deck that he could just take a Sharpie and make a game up. On the spot. That's kinda what he was doing for us. And and he was like testing to see and he was like This means do this. And he was seeing if I would actually go and do it and if I was happy about doing it. And he was like prototyping on us. Like he was getting our reactions, like being a comedian and throwing out uh jokes to see if they're any good. And it was so funny that he was doing this like

36:19 Uh it was very natural to him, and I found that to be very inspiring. And so w if you think about like you know, that guy, he's he's still Like he didn't Brush those things off as like Yeah, I like that, but now it's time to get to work.

36:33 He just Kept doing that until it became His work and he became the best in the world at doing that. At making games, playing games, making games that people love. So he didn't like brush it off. And when we were hanging out, he was telling me about escape rooms. So I thought I liked escape rooms.

36:47 And I thought us going there to go to an escape room was like a pretty indulgent thing in this like passion of mine. Dude, he travels the world with a group of like fifteen neckbeard guys. Testing every escape room. The whatever the best escape rooms in the world are. He travel he goes on like Like a

37:05 Bachelor party every couple years Testing the world's best escape rooms and trying to escape them with his friends. And that's like how he vacations. That was like one of the things he does. And I was like wow, this guy is w if you took the governor off or the filter off of like Yeah, that's me, but that'd be a little too weird. So let me just keep a little bit of that in.

37:24 It's like no dude. What what was it that used used to say at your office? Let your freak flag fly, baby. Exactly. And that's what he does, and I think that's the second part. Notice.

37:35 What lights you up? And then Let it fly. This this that's so cool. Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. Uh they make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all my businesses. I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them.

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38:14 So If you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury. I will fist fight anybody who disagrees with me on that. Go to Mercury.com/slash personal and learn more. Mercury is a FinTech, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and column NA, members FDIC. Dude, all right. So I just got back from a seven day trip in San Francisco. Can I tell you one of my biggest takeaways? So you you did this with New York. You had a bunch of'em. I had one major one. So

38:43 San Francisco is the best city on earth, in my opinion. To induce the emotion of awe. So the definition or the par paraphrasing the definition, it's basically experiencing Both vastness. Which means something that's really large.

38:59 Something that feels like endless or incredibly old. While also being a thing. Where it sort of breaks your mental framework, your mental schema. And so it basically your brain has to do this thing called accommodating. Where you have to change how you think in order to fit what you are looking at into your your schema. And it's sort of like we use the word frame breaking and it can't but it can't be just like impressive. You know, it can't be something that's just big. It has to be so big or so epic where it's different than from what I what I'm used to and how I define uh how life is. And that is the emotion of awe.

39:33 Well I was g I just looked up the I have the exact definition, which is very much what you said, but with a little extra. So it says All is a strong feeling of deep respect, wonder. An amazement. Often mixed with a bit of fear. Or nervous dread, which also happens a lot in San Francisco.

39:50 Yes. And I felt that. But I want to explain why like I felt awe in the good way. Because not awe is bad. Like you can be in awe of like an atrocious act. Like when you read about World War Two, you can be in awe and it's not necessarily good. But basically awe is interesting because I have found and I think that I can't just I've read about a little bit about this, but also some of this is my opinion. Uh, is that it reduces d anxiety and depression because it creates the self diminishing emotion. So a lot of times

40:19 anxiety and depression it exists because you are the center of all your problems. It's basically me, me, me and you're constantly thinking of yourself. And I think that we all have to do like self rumination and we have to think about issues all the time. But when you experience uh awe, uh opportunities that exist They either seem much bigger than you think. Or they just seem not important. And you stop thinking about yourself and you start more so thinking about like the stuff that you see. And when I'm in San Francisco, I drive through or ride through the presidio and you see these massive hills and you see views. And what I've noticed is that seeing horizons

40:57 Particularly when it's like a large view and it's an ocean. Like it's uh you're above an ocean and you can overlook. It gives me this like deep sense of calm, this deep sense of like, um Well of all. And I find it to be incredibly addict, but also a very inspiring emotion. And I left s I left San Francisco be thinking like

41:17 This is the greatest feeling on earth. W well, you you described the nature side of it. I was surprised you didn't talk about the Entrepreneurial awe. That you also get.'Cause we sat there for

41:31 Every twenty minutes a new founder came in and sat in the seat in front of us. Basically we did this episode where we had nine founders come and explain what they're working on. Yeah. Sort of like sit in the hot seat. Tell us what you're doing. Tell us the numbers. We kind of nerd out about your business. What did you think of that?'Cause I you know, you're a New Yorker in the hustle and bustle of things.

41:50 But the types of businesses people do and the types of people who do business Are very different in San Francisco. I thought it was was fantastic. More so than the businesses that they were working on. What I like about San Francisco is there seems to me an outsider it felt like there was a significantly higher Quirky. Attribute.

42:09 A significantly higher nerd attribute. Against the grain attribute that I particularly love and I get a huge amount of inspiration was um from. Like we met a guy Who was an Indian guy He made a machine that made Basically for us, Fettuccine Alfredo, like an Italian dish. And I was like How s silly and wonderful is this that this like Indian guy who talks about growing up in India and is now m using like a robot to make us Italian food. And like I thought that was like a really quirky cool thing and we talked to all types of quirky cool people and that was in abundance.

42:43 Yeah, San Francisco has the most startup ideas that will sound Terrible. And probably be terrible. than anywhere else where you find entrepreneurs'cause like a lot of other entrepreneurs will be doing You know, like if you go to New York or something, you'll meet a lot of like let's say media entrepreneurs.

42:58 And they're doing media and media is something you can understand and something's good. It's really an execution based thing. Where in San Francisco It's like, you know, you're just digging for gold. And most of the time you're just gonna find dirt and sand. And I and I could have told you this is probably dirt there.

43:13 But every once in a while someone finds gold and that's what keeps everybody out there doing these kind of weird, undiscovered uh random sounding ideas. The the the spread of the ideas is is just So different than anything you'd see. In most other like Places where you're gonna find business.

43:28 I think if I was twenty two years old or twenty years old in a recent college grad and I was remotely interested in technology I still, without a doubt, think it's the place to be. Yeah, agreed. Agreed. I just started reading have you heard of this book called The Art Thief? No. Very, very popular book. I'm still like very early on into it, but it's the story of a guy. It's a true story.

43:51 Of an art thief who stole I think it was three billion dollars worth of art. And what makes this book amazing and what this g makes this guy sp uh spectacular to read about S did not sell one piece of art. Ever.

44:06 So he stole it. And he felt he had like a a code. He felt it was the right thing. He's like it you can't Steel art. And hurt people.

44:15 And you should just do it in the middle of the day. while the uh museum is open. Like there shouldn't be like a big heist. And so like He was uh a genius, I guess you could say, at like going to a museum and when the gu he would study the guards for weeks and when they were on their like routes where they would have to change he would like hurry up and unscrew one screw and he would take the screw out and put it in his pocket and then just like walk around And then he would do it a bunch of times where he was able to get the art.

44:39 And what's crazy is that when he was arrested He had his girlfriend who was his accomplice. They lived in his mother's apartment in a r rinky dink room and in this room was roughly three billion dollars worth of art. It was like paintings, trinkets, and he was like

44:59 He had this famous statue. Look at the statue of Adam and Eve. It's like the size of a shoebox. But it's this beautiful statue. And I believe it's worth tens of millions of dollars. And he had it on his bedside table because he said This art shouldn't be in a museum where there's gonna be some tour guide telling you some like written story about it and you're barely even going to be paying attention. He's like, It should be in my room where I could wake up and I could rub my hands across it and like truly experience this piece of art.

45:27 Is it weird to just really honor and admire. This absolute criminal? Because I do. Yeah, it's weird. But that sort of goes back to the point about like awe and like how not awe Not

45:40 All aw is good. Um And so yes, I can like ad acknowledge that what he did was wrong. And also I can still like be in amazement as to how pure your code was, even when it came to being a thief. And how it relates to what you're talking about, where he the reason he was so passionate about this was his grandfather going around the beach with a metal detector. And so he got obsessed with finding treasures very similar to what uh Dan Brown did.

46:07 And he's and he got obsessed with art. And so It's kind of an interesting story. And I'm like, Why am I so drawn to this story? And you're kind of explaining why I'm so drawn to it. It's because enthusiasm's contagious. Alright, I don't know how we got on all that, but that was amazing. I gotta run. So uh let's wrap this bad boy up. Alright, that's it. That's the pod. Well I know. be what I want to

46:29 I put my law in it like my days off On the road less travel never looking back All right, let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about marketing school. It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network. And it is run by Neil Battel and Eric Sue. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. And so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it, this is the podcast for you. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.

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