I talk to Ben about creating luck, his barbell method, plus 6 half-baked business ideas

0:00 All right, we got Ben here, and this is the real deal, Ben. This is Ben, the business partner. If you listen to every single episode of this podcast, you hear me two hours a week. I probably talk to Ben twenty hours a week. Yeah, pretty much. I feel like you have a hundred times more great stuff that never makes it anywhere. It just goes into our text thread. and dies immediately. And we gotta bring it out. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to

0:24 I'm put my all in it like my days off on the road, less travel, never looking back. Ben, I was counting before we started this episode. So together. We've been working together for five years now. We've created Nine different things. I don't know if you've seen this. We've created nine different projects. That have made more than a million dollars each. So the very first thing we did together is the all access pass, which was a pretty batshit crazy idea where I was like,

0:48 What if Listeners of the pod. Could actually See what I'm doing every day to build a business. And I basically was like for three months I'm I'm ninety days. I'm gonna send an email every day just showing you what I worked on each of those days while I

1:03 Try to do X. Whatever the thing I was gonna try to do was like One of them was like starting an incom ecom brand. One of them was raise a fund. One of them was start a course, whatever. And so that one did over a million dollars. The craziest part about that one is you were basically like, Hey, dude, I just met you or we barely work together.

1:19 Wanna do a ninety day sprint where we just figure out what we're gonna do and then tell everyone in the world what we're doing. But we've never we basically never worked together before then. We've never worked together. Also, we have like the what's the opposite of a romantic comedy? first meeting, you know, like in a romantic comedy they're like walking down the street, then they like bump into each other and then the papers fall on the ground, then they scoop'up, they look they make eye contact and they're whatever. They're like It's a thing.

1:42 Ours was completely different. You I think you you were just a listener to the podcast and I was testing out an idea. That was like these um CEO mastermind groups. So I basically I said, Hey, I need five or six people. Who have a business that does over a million dollars a year, come join this group. Which basically became Hampton, by the way. Sam Sam ended up turning that to a a real business called Hampton. I did one group and you were in it.

2:05 And the funny thing was you had a business that was doing Over a million dollars a year? And Ben, how many how many customers did you have in that business? One one customer. Been out of business with a single customer. That paid him a million dollars a year. Can you say it's over now? You can say who it is.

2:21 Yeah, it was Anheiser Busch at the time, Bud Weiser. So so Ben is basically like Yeah, my customers Budweiser. There are no other customers. They pay me a million dollars a year to do this like very simple thing where you were like, I don't know, you were like building their SMS list for them or something like that. But you seemed bored out of your mind.

2:40 And also Like you seem bored out of your mind and I was trying to do new things and I was like, Hey, I like this guy, he's got a good vibe. You want to try some stuff with me. Is that is that the summary of uh of how it went down for you? Pretty much. I mean the only other thing is like peak Covet. I specifically remember like it was those masterminds and watching the Jordan doc. And those are the highlights of the month basically.

3:01 Why did you say yes? Because you had a business that was doing a million dollars a year. I was not offering you more money than that. Why did you say yes to the to the offer, by the way? I think there's something You have good instincts and I think there's I I've never asked you this, but wh why did you even say yes to begin with? I mean, at the time I felt like I'd tried everything to figure out how to grow that business and I just had zero answers. I'd been like, you know, it's been it had been a year and it was like I've tried literally everything I can think of. Not one thing is working. Like this is kinda going nowhere. I'm running I'm hitting a wall every time. That was one and then two.

3:31 You know, I thought you had a ton of juice. Yeah, I feel like I text you this all the time, which is TMJ. I just feel like you have too much juice, which I felt then, I feel now, which is like you know, this guy's a beast. This guy is like, you know, the next Joe Rogan. Is it T M J like The thing where your jaw hurts. It's like when you're looking at the case. Yeah, that's what I have. I've got I got a bad case of TMJ, too much juice. Yeah. I just had belief in you and I was like, I'm gonna take a bet. And also I had felt like

3:59 I just ran against the w you know, I'd hit the wall a hundred times in a row trying to grow that thing and it had gone nowhere. Well, I do appreciate that. You you do have a shit ton of belief in me, which is cool. We actually have this phrase we call what what do we call it? Like your first believer. Which is basically everybody I know who's successful in life. at some point had somebody who irrationally believed in them. Right. Bill Simmons calls it the irrational confidence guy. I think there's that for the entrepreneur for entrepreneurs too, which is

4:26 before you've proven anything, before you've actually done it. And honestly, when you still kinda suck. Somebody is just like, No, I believe. I'm in. Blank check belief. In you. Like for me, that was this guy, Michael Birch, initially when I was twenty three, twenty four years old, and he kind of like recruited me for a job I wasn't really

4:44 qualified for and then he gave me he named me CEO. He gave me his job as CEO. I was the youngest person in the company. And that was irrational. Like there was really no proof, no logic, no nothing. But like I will never forget that. And then we've actually taken that where If we believe in somebody, we don't believe it in private. We go tell them. We're like and and me and you will text them and be like

5:05 Dude, like there's this guy, Billy Oppenheimer, who I think who I think we both are big believers in, and we'll just text Billy and be like I'm buying all the Billy Oppenheimer stock on the market right now. Like I'm cornering the Billy Oppenheimer, you know, market right now. I'm trying to build a huge position here because I am a believer in you and your talents. Um have you seen that? And who else are we kind of first believers in, do you know? Yeah, I think George Mack says that you were one of the big one of the first believers in telling him he should stop doing an agency. He should just go all in on betting on himself. Uh

5:36 E Sean, your old intern. Yeah, I was a first believer in him for sure. Yeah. He was like probably eighteen years old to start working with him. Uh, but I think everybody needs that. And if and whoever was that for you, you should send him a note today and just be like, by the way. Thank you for that. That was huge for me. And you did you had no reason to believe me, but you did. Uh But I think I think more people need to do that. It's like an angel investor. But before money, you need at least belief that you can do something.

5:59 Right. Like it's actually more important as a starting ingredient than uh than cash initially. And I think people more people need to have that. Like belief angel investor. You need someone to give you minutes in the game. You know, I just want to get two give me two minutes. Don't leave me on the bench. A coach that puts you on the floor. Dude, you were just uh speaking of basketball, you were just at this. Fantasy camp thing. Can you Explain what this was. Like two week two weeks ago, Ben goes

6:25 Hey, I'm gonna be offline for a week. I'm going to the Duke Basketball Fantasy Camp Coach the K Academy. Can you explain what this is? Cause I think this is kind of amazing. Yeah, so Two weeks ago. I basically decided to go to K Academy, which is Coach K. Obviously you know who he is, Sean, famous Duke coach. Every year he hosts a basketball camp for people that are thirty five and older.

6:46 Spoiler alert, I just turned thirty five. Like six months ago. So I the first time I could go I immediately decided to go. I took my dad with me. Uh so it was me and my dad. We haven't hung out for five days in a row and Years without kids. So we go to we go to North Carolina.

7:03 And it's unbelievable. It's basically rich dude. fantasy camp. It's like summer camp for for rich dudes, right? Yeah, it's basically rich dudes that want to go back to high school where they were on the basketball team and they're competing like their lives depend on it. And every other hour someone's telling us. That's an amazing pitch'cause I would I would happily pay ten grand for that right now. If you could take me back to

7:26 When I was on my high school basketball team, those like the happiest days of my life. Yeah, that's what I thought. And then immediately when I got there in the first game, I got way less minutes than I thought. And my dad was like Cussing under his breath that I should have got more minutes. I was like, I don't know I don't know that I actually want to go back to high school again, where I literally had the same exact experience, but So we So we get there and uh it's a hundred and fifty people.

7:49 And everyone there, like one for me, actually. Do the math on that. Hundred fifty people, what is the price of this thing? It's Thirteen thousand dollars. All right. So it's a two million two million dollar kind of five day camp, basically for them, revenue wise. Yeah, two million dollars, but I think everyone there, it like basically becomes a part of their fund and helps support Duke Athletics.

8:11 Uh, so it's great for that. It's like great top of funnel for key people for becoming a booster or an alumni, uh a sort of like a supporter of the program. Yeah, but what I wanted to do, when I went there, I was like, Yeah, I love basketball, it's gonna be awesome. But I just want to meet every single person that's here. Cause if you s if you're spending thirteen grand to hoop for five days. You're probably rich and interesting. Or just rich, maybe. Not that interesting. That's also a possibility.

8:35 We should explain this. Like I always say we're business partners. What does that actually mean? What do you actually do? I would I just got you know, the way I tell people Which you probably tell people differently, is like three things I say Yeah, basically just try to make Try to make whatever try to make the main mission happen and the main mission changes very often.

8:55 Which is everything from make great content Two Make money to just have fun. And then I added the last part which is like Well also not working that hard. You know, like I think I work hard, but I think in general

9:08 Like wanna have a good time and wanna also be there for my friends and family. And I I'd say the fifth part is I probably spend twenty percent of my time playing basketball. So I added that in last year, which is you know, I wanna play I wanna spend twenty percent of my time playing basketball. Um So I spent a lot of time just trying to find interesting things that we can attack that may support the main mission. So whether that be Buying a company.

9:31 An investment Uh some interesting content ideas. Meeting people. So so here's some examples. Um

9:39 One of them was let's raise a fund. Right. This was back in twenty twenty one, maybe twenty twenty. We decided, hey, we want to raise a fund to invest in startups. We have all this deal flow. Let's do this. And so that became the main mission for like a three month period.

9:53 And we raised I think something like twenty million bucks. to invest into startups. Okay, great. Then we did um grow my ecom store. I think at the time you joined, maybe my e com brand was doing Five million a year in revenue?

10:07 And then now it does twenty five million or thirty million in revenue. Um, and so for for twelve months, like that was the mission. And so the funny thing is is we'll just like pick a main mission. Roughly every I would say

10:19 three to six months we pick a main mission. The longest we've done is probably a year or two. Um And we just Do whatever it takes to figure that out. So for example, when

10:30 We were doing the ecom thing. Neither you nor I knew anything about e commerce. And one of the things Ben does that's brilliant is He's basically very, very good. Uh

10:40 Getting insights from the audience. And so what you did was you created this group called Club LTV. And Club L TV was basically you put out a call, you go If you own an e commerce brand that does more than five million of revenue, right? We were at five million, you were like, if it has more than five million of revenue. Come hang out in this thing. I'm not selling you anything. It's free to join, but you gotta be legit. You gotta be the owner and you have to do over five million revenue.

11:03 And we're just gonna hang out every other Friday. I'm gonna host it. It's like speed dating. You're gonna meet a bunch of other econ founders. We're gonna share what's working in our businesses. And then every week one guy's gonna stand up and say, like, Oh, here's what I'm doing with TikTok, here's what I'm doing with email marketing. And you're gonna learn something that's gonna instantly make if you just implement it, it'll make you more money. That was the the general idea. And you got like I don't know, a hundred and fifty

11:25 become business owners in there in like, you know, the first month and then suddenly we were just getting We uh whatever problem we had, somebody in that group had already had that problem and could answer it. And so it just accelerated our business learning so fast from doing that. And that's kind of where I figured out this model of like

11:43 I create the content, I attract interesting people. But I'm kind of an introvert. I just like being alone. I I like doing stuff like this podcast. Just me in my bedroom, like I don't really like going out and doing meetups or hangouts or doing calls. Ben loves that shit. And so Ben would go meet people, talk to them.

12:01 See what they're up to, find a way to help them, introduce them to people, make connections, be useful to them. And in doing so, they would you know Every one out of every twenty of those people would do something that's useful to us. Maybe we invest in their company. Maybe they teach us something, whatever it is. That's an example of of how it's worked in the past. Yeah, and I think the two things I think about a lot are like, you know, I want to be useful.

12:21 Like you know, a lot of this is I don't wanna take from people. It's like, Hey, I wanna help you Uh and I could When and if we ever need anything, I know they'll take my call. But it's not really about that. I talk to a lot of people. I might know something that you might want to know. I might know someone you should know.

12:36 Uh and then two, I think like I think this is a Warren Buffett thing, which is like you can't connect the dots looking forward. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs, all right. A lot of this is you you've you know, a lot of it is creating serendipity and luck and You know, I just never know it's gonna connect. You know, something that someone might have said a year ago.

12:53 Might randomly hit that I never thought of For the past year. Well, we should explain uh'cause people don't know how we do this. So first explain who this guy, uh I think his name's Nick Dio or Nick Dio. Explain who that guy is. And then how he kind of inspired us to do to do stuff on our side.

13:11 Yeah, so Nick Dio, let's just call him Nick Dio. I like that better than Dio. But Essentially he's Gary V's relationship guy, I think is the way I would say it. Uh so Gary Vee obviously has tons of access.

13:24 Owens a huge agency, but he can only be so many places at once. So he's basically built this guy Nick. And what he does is he manages all of Gary's core relationships. So from what I've heard, he basically will host a dinner every night. Anyone that wants to meet Gary, he connects them. He's the main guy. That's the face of Gary. He's front forward. He collects everything. He helps people. And sometimes and I think a lot of times Gary's not even there. So it'll be like Gary really likes this person or these people, or he wants to get to know certain people. Nick will go and host an event or take them on a trip or hang out with them. Almost like on behalf of Gary. Right? Like Gary's not even there some percentage of the time. I think I think a large percentage of the time. I think like ninety nine percent of the time Gary's not there. I think it's literally. But the guy knows he's just like

14:10 Yeah, Gary thinks what you're doing is dope. We just want to get to know you. If we can ever be helpful, let let us know. I heard this and this was like In sports There was this thing that came out several years ago that was like LeBron James spends a million dollars a year on his body. Like on just treatments.

14:26 You know, a trainers, food, all of it, like a million dollars a year just fine tuning his body. And other athletes heard that and they were like shit, dude, I'm not doing it. Like I just gotta go to the gym or like I just use the Teams guy. I don't do that. But it makes t total sense. Like if you're a f athlete Your body is your business. Like it makes sense to spend money maintaining and improving your body.

14:48 So LeBron did that and I've always had this question which is like What's my version of spending a million dollars a year on on my body, right? And so When I heard that Gary Vee has this guy Nick. I was like, Oh, that makes perfect sense. Gary is like Building a magnet.

15:02 to attract people who like what he's all about, right? That's his content that he's putting out there. But He can't and maybe he doesn't even want to. Just constantly be meeting people that he's attracting'cause it's Too much. The the audience is too big.

15:15 So of course it is it sounds crazy. He hired a guy that just Hangs out with People in his in his orbit. And I was like, Yeah, that sounds a little weird, but actually that's

15:24 Obvious and logical and we should totally do that. And I didn't hire you in that way. That's not what But you do you would do end up doing that because You're extroverted. You actually like you get a lot of energy from texting people, talking to people like Like Today, how many people are like in the last twenty four hour peop twenty four hours.

15:40 How many people have you texted? I mean Yeah, probably like seventy. Uh it's a it's a ton. Like if I look on my phone right now, how many people do I actually text on a day to day basis?

15:54 There's my wife. There's uh the lady who we're getting our mortgage loan from My dad for Father's Day. Yeah, there's like seven people max that like I'm talking to in a given day. And even that I'm pretty bad at replying. Whereas You just love doing it. You do it all the time. Um, in fact you had this like Little phrase you're like.

16:13 I I was like, you know, what's the secret? You're like I reply, bro. Most people just don't reply. I replied, Ben He replies. That's what he does. And you also check in with people and see like what they're up to and what how it's going. You congratulate people all the time on what they do. You have these like The little things that just kinda keep people uh in our orbit. So that's one thing is is learning from that.

16:32 The other is We took luck. And we actually made it Like a business metric that you measure. Could you explain the the luck system and how we do that?

16:42 Yeah, so The core idea, I think, was basically okay. If we're gonna spend a ton of time creating luck that's gonna Yeah, surface in a ton of ways. Maybe it's gonna surface in content. Maybe it's gonna surface in an investment. Maybe it's gonna surface in a future business. You gotta track it. You know, I I it's really easy basically to say, Oh, I'm every day I'm gaining weight, but I never get on the scale because I just don't wanna look at it. And then I just gain 10 pounds. Like it happens so fast. But if I'm on the scale every day. I'd never gain any weight. And what I mean by that is

17:11 I basically decided okay, I want to track. What I'm actually doing And what I mean w I wanna track what I'm actually doing. So every day I wanna say okay Here's like the five or six things I did today that I think will create some luck. And then I want to actually see. Did anything ever hit in any way um looking back? So an example might be okay, if I pull up my spreadsheet.

17:32 Uh I found this tweet that then became a great piece of content for MFM. So You know, another example might be okay, we ended up getting into this deal. That was because I chased this guy pretty aggressively to get into this round, and then we wired him. So like you know, an example would be

17:50 Um You know, one thing you're great about is you're like happy for other people. I think a lot of people in the entrepreneurial game get bitter as other people become successful. You see that, oh, they hit this revenue. And your actual reaction is either like Fuck. Yeah, we're we're way less or Um

18:07 Or um or you know, whatever, that's not gonna last. I think there's a lot of that bitterness people don't really say out loud, but in general I think that's a A pretty common reaction for people. Whereas I've I've been around you a bunch. Do you actually have the opposite? If something awesome happens for people, you you literally are like, Oh, that's awesome, congrats. And so you'll do something like Somebody hits a milestone and you'll send them a cake with like the number on it.

18:29 And um and so you do these like random things that seem to be like I don't know, unproductive in nature. Like uh y you took Fifteen minutes to like Design a cake to send this guy. But then that guy calls you thanking you and then you catch up with him and he tells you about this thing that he's doing.

18:45 And you realize like oh For our basketball event. I didn't realize this guy actually knows the owner of that team. We could ask him for an intro and like You create luck through just a bunch of these different activities that you're doing. Other simple examples would be like

19:01 you are pretty willing to just refer people to like uh You find out that somebody's looking for X. You'll take an hour. And go actually like hunt down a referral for them and go find them the the agency they're looking for, the person they're looking for and like make the connection. You'll do it same day for that person. It doesn't seem in the moment like there's anything to gain in that for us. But it builds so much goodwill that of course, like

19:23 There's business karma, it comes back around. And so what we did was we looked at All right, in the last two years, what are all the best things that have happened? And then if you kinda trace the The twenty three and me, the the ancestry.com. Like what led to that? So we have this one business that's Just going gangbusters right now.

19:38 It's uh we haven't announced it yet, but it like you know, it's We just crossed ten million in in and ARR profitably bootstrapped in like less than, you know, eighteen months. And That business is amazing.

19:51 But if we look at Well, where did How did we get the key customers for that? Where did we get the intro for that? Where do we hire that key talent for that? Each one of those came from basically Ben doing random shit. So we decided

20:04 The Peter Drucker mantra, what gets measured, gets managed. Let's actually treat luck like something you can actually manage. Could you Measure it. If you could measure it, would you would that encourage you to do more of it? If you did more of it, would more good things happen? And the answer so far for us has been

20:19 Yes. Even though this is kind of a nerdy thing, this is like when When Sam talks about how him and Sarah do off sites and have like OKRs for their relationship and you're like, Oh, dude, you're kinda killing the romance here, it's like Most people treat luck the same way, where it's like Dude, just let it happen. And um

20:34 We actually treat like creating luck as a skill. Like l luck is a thing you can actually influence how much of it you're gonna have in your life. And um And then we we kinda celebrate you doing things that generate more and more luck for us. I also think it makes you just think about the things I'm learning or seeing'cause it's like oh if I write it down If I just p keep it in my head.

20:53 One, you never hear it. It never goes anywhere. It's pretty easy for me to forget, but if I write it down, it's like oh that actually was interesting, or this story someone told me. would actually make sense to tell in the podcaster we should follow up on that. So I think that helps a ton too. It also changes your decision making. Like sometimes you'll be like, Ah, should I go do this? Like you you went and flew out and hung with uh Jesse Itzler for like a couple of days.

21:17 There was really no like uh we weren't trying to c do a deal with him. We weren't trying to sell him on anything. There's no there's no agenda. He's awesome. We thought he was awesome. He was like, Hey, you should come hang and you were like You know, people just say that as like a figure of speech. Like, Oh yeah, if you're ever in town, hit me up. Whereas we were like well

21:33 I think doing that will generate Some good Good things. Good that increases our luck quotient if you do that versus if you just sit at home for the next two days. So Ben books the flight, goes, hangs out with them for two days. Sure enough, while you're there, the conversation leads to different like

21:48 You know, different good things, different either learnings, insights, opportunities, whatever it may be. And I don't think we would maybe have the The green light. to to shoot our shot. As we do now now that we actually like made it one of our like kind of goals is to create more luck and and actually our goal for the year is

22:06 Ben's gotta create a hundred lucky breaks. And so he keeps track of the hundred Lucky things that go our way. And in order to do that, you gotta do like five hundred or seven hundred Just i interesting things that might generate those hundred lucky breaks. Yeah, we'll say Jesse Isler's a proud member of the TMJ crew. Too much juice. So if you're in if you got too much juice. You know, you get a round trip flight from me immediately if you're in that class.

22:31 T explain your uh your barbell thing,'cause I like this. This I think more people should should do this. The way I operate is basically two things. Either I'm constantly t I mean You know, my phone is just constantly texting people with things I see. So it's either okay, we're constantly talking via text, or I'm texting. But in a very lightweight way, right? Like it's very Light communication. You're not sitting on a a forty minute Zoom call with them.

22:54 Yeah, and I do say I do go by the I reply thing, although since I told you that and since I think you said it on the podcast Every time I don't reply, I feel very guilty'cause you know, sometimes I just Sometimes I forget or sometimes it's just hard when you you know when you have a lot of tax. And then uh And then Yeah, and then the barbell is just go spend more time in person with people. So I haven't done it as much as I want to, but I I think longer hangs. I think this is also a David Sender idea, which is you do longer hangs.

23:22 I th I think Coo Coogan was the one who told John Coogan from uh technology brother, T P PN. He was the one who told us this idea, or he said it out loud, at least to me. And it was like The middle zone is death. It's death by a thousand zoom calls. So like a forty minute zoom call or th forty five minute zoom call is basically the worst of both worlds. It's like

23:43 Kinda takes a lot of energy to do it. But you don't really build that much of a bond or relationship in it. You don't even get into much depth. You would rather be like Just quick funny memes and texts or sending tweets to people just to kind of like Very lightweight, takes you ten seconds.

23:58 Or go hang out with them for, you know, five hours. Just go fly to'em and hang out with them for five hours. Or go drive up there and Go go go grab lunch, go for a walk and then, you know, have a coffee and like If you do that. you actually get like way more of a of a connection and a bond and more insight. More it's a different type of hang and it's actually It sounds like it's

24:19 you know, um it's the equivalent of ten zoom calls, but no, it's like the equivalent of like two hundred zoom calls when you do it, right? And so you wanna spend your time on either end of the the barbell, the lightweight. Side or like Go really in depth. There's a good example of this, by the way. Chris Saka used to do this.

24:34 I don't know if you know the story, but he He was an angel investor. And he moved out of San Francisco, which at the time made no sense. It's like all the angel vest in San Francisco, that's where all the startups were. But he goes, You know what? If I if I'm in San Francisco, I'm just constantly playing defense. I'm just taking all these random coffee meetings.

24:50 And kind of feels very surface level. It's just does it's not differentiated. So he moves to Truckee, which is near Lake Tahoe. He buys a cabin and he bu he gets a second cabin like a guest house right next to his cabin. And what he did was he would if he found somebody who was interesting, he would Like make a bigger effort, he would invite them to come to stay for a weekend in his cabin and let's hang out.

25:11 And founders are like, Oh, that's cool, I'll I'll go to Lake Tahoe. That like that sounds like fun. And then he would spend like forty eight hours with this person. They're in the hot tub together, they're skiing together, they're talking, they're drinking, they're eating, they're They're cleaning up, they're doing all this different stuff and By the end of that, like

25:25 They actually feel like like good friends, not like you would get at a coffee meeting. Plus he would really understand their business. And this is how he got into the Uber deal. And how he got into the Instagram deal. Was he invited the founder of Uber to the founder of Instagram? to c come hang out for the weekend and it was in that weekend where they kinda like solidified the bond, he understood the business in depth. He knew really how good this founder was and what they were really made of, which you couldn't get in a twenty, thirty minute coffee meeting.

25:50 He knew to to back up the truck and invest. And I think it's also cool to just go hang out with people and see how they live. I think we've talked about this a lot. It's like you know, you go see how someone like Monish Pabry lives when we go to his house and hang out with him. And you can taste their lifestyles and decide whether or not It's actually interesting. Right.

26:08 By the way, I'm looking at the luck sheet right now. This is a great example. Your mission was to grow MFM at one point. So you were spending a couple of months trying to grow my first million and You were like, dude, you guys don't bring enough guests on. The guest episodes do well. You um But you and Sam are pretty lazy. You don't like to reach out to guests. And so you're just like, you know, it doesn't really happen.

26:29 So you went back, you looked at the archive and you're like, All right. Uh, let me find somebody who was awesome on the pod before, bring'em back. And so you found that Jesse Itzer was on a year or two ago. You tried to get him on. He didn't reply. He didn't reply again.

26:42 And then you saw that he had like, I don't know, his uh his calendar or his book was coming out. And he basically bought a hundred of them proactively. And you were like, Hey, I think your calendar's awesome. I bought a hundred of these. And I'm gonna give them away on my first million. You know, just keep doing what you're you know, th keep doing what you're doing. This is great. He replies to that because he's like, Oh, dude, somebody just came and bought a hundred of my product because they think it's awesome. Like, thank you, you know, I appreciate that.

27:06 And and by the way, yeah, like I'm happy to come on again. And then he comes on the podcast and it reignited maybe a relationship that was kind of dormant. And you've done that a bunch, where you'll like Somebody comes out with a product, you buy it, you hype it up, you celebrate it, and then that makes them feel good and that leads to like good things. But All this stuff is like pretty unpredictable when you're doing it. But it works out.

27:26 Yeah, I th I think like, you know, it is important to say uh none of this is transactional. You know, I kinda do this again. Goal is to be useful. I want to help people. Again, I think we all win together. Like this is not a zero sum game. Uh Yeah, we help people, they help us, et cetera. That's how it goes.

27:42 Yeah, yeah, exactly. And also, you know, for every one thing I'm saying, that led to this. There's eleven other things that didn't lead to anything and we're totally fine with it. It was just fun to do. It was nice to do. So we did it. You know, that's all. There was no expectation of something happening except for you just know like Hey, if I do a bunch of great stuff. With great people, like good things are gonna come out of that. Um So that's the

28:03 That's the luck thing. You sent this doc with other stuff on it. I wanna Let's talk about some of these other things. I know normally Basically, you always do business ideas, but I feel like you and I talk business nonstop. It's just constantly business ideas. So I made a list of things that I wish existed, basically stuff I want to be customer number one of. uh that I wanna talk to you about and show you and see what you think.

28:26 So things that Things that don't exist today, but you kinda wish You low key wish existed. Yeah, and you know I'm an early adopter, so someone someone makes these I'm gonna buy'em.

28:36 If Ben tries weird stuff, he'll be like Oh, I'm eating this peanut butter that's made out of caramel only. And I'm like, What? He'll buy any product that's like Weird. But there's a chance it's amazing. Most likely sucks, but there's a chance it's amazing. So I'm guessing these ideas are gonna be like that. Probably weird.

28:54 Probably suck. But there's a chance it would be amazing. Am I right on that? Yeah, and one out of ten hits and you know, hey, I'm glad I tried Ten random peanut butter protein things, you know? All right. So this is Ben's random wish list. Let's go. So I've got

29:07 I've got three ideas. I've got Ten ideas, but the first one I'll give you is Courtside seats.

29:14 Obviously, you know what court side seats are, whenever you're watching an NBA game, they always show you know, if at the Knicks games they show Timothy Chalamet every time going nuts with Kylie Jenner. But I just think there's way more to do around courtside seats. Let me give you three ide I have three courtside seat spin off ideas. So one, I wanna make a YouTube channel where basically all you do is buy courtside seats and you interview someone courtside every game. Goal is figure out what do they do, how much money do they make. How do they make their money? Uh, and all you do all you have to do is buy a court side seat and you immediately can get someone every single game.

29:48 What do you think? Okay, so The upside is you get to be court side. So worst case scenario, your YouTube channel fails, but you got to go sit court side at a bunch of games. It does use that that thing that seems to work, which is on TikTok, people go and like stop like a rich person in their car. They're like, Hey, just

30:04 Nice car, man. I just wanna ask, you know, what do you do? And then they say something and it creates like, you know This one minute thing that tends to tends to go viral or people like that stuff. So You're basically piggybacking off of that. But the investment here is pretty substantial, right? Like how much is how much are courtside seats anyways? Like how much would this even cost to do? Forty there's forty What, four forty court for uh forty home games a year?

30:25 So what are you spending to do this? It probably depends where you're doing it. I think if you're doing it in Orlando, you're probably spending a hundred grand. If you're doing it in New York. You're probably spending Four hundred grand. Five hundred grand. Which you could probably go get like a fan duel or Seat Geek or somebody up front. to uh to sponsor you for this and be like, Hey, look, I'm gonna you know, this is the this is a concept.

30:46 I bet you could pitch them enough to be like, This is gonna be kind of like a a show where you're the main sponsor and I think this will do really well. I d I kinda think you could get it paid for for it you don't need the you don't need all of them paid for, but like Enough to do four or five. And then once you get some views, then you can kinda go from there. It's not a bad idea. And then the the tangent the tangent I have on is like why are there not courtside seats?

31:08 at the Apple demo day, Y C demo day, open AI. Like why is Timothy Chalet. Not sitting courtside there. Like they should definitely have Timothy Chalamet or whoever sitting there he's the courtside seat. Like sh you know, like pretty much any event. It is kinda interesting to know who's who's up front, who's there, who came.

31:29 Uh I I'm kind of interested in that. You know, What I want is not the interview though. I just want to know literally like This is my version of LinkedIn. Like whenever I'm watching a Warriors game I'll basically pause the screen and I'll try to see like do I recognize anybody or who are these people that are sitting there? Because It's kind of like my first million. Like all those people have some interesting success story, right? You don't get to be quartzide.

31:51 Without an interesting success story. And I wanna know who those people are. Like I were to pay I'd be yeah I'd gladly pay twenty bucks a month. If somebody was just photographing who's courtside at the games and then just telling me what those people who those people are and what they do.

32:05 Like it's my version of like paparazzi or TMZ that I actually give a shit about. It's like this weird mix of like business and basketball. Very niche, but I would do it. Yeah, the other day was like a highlight of my week. I was watching the Thunder Pacers game, and I saw a guy that we know on Twitter sitting courtside. Uh fist pumping Mike Beckham from Simple Modern, or I was like, damn, that's cool. I saw that. Yeah, I saw that. That's cool. All right, what's your next half baked idea? Alright, so the next one I call lunch bounty. Before we gotta buy lunchbounty.com. So the idea is basically this.

32:37 You've seen things like Um, you've seen these social networks where basically you can buy all your tokens are available and to claim them, you get a hundred thousand dollars, right? That was bit cloud, right? Yeah. And then we've heard these stories of people Where they spend You know, thirty thousand dollars, a hundred thousand dollars to go get lunch with someone like I believe Warren Buffett or Warren Buffett, or I've heard stories where people used to pay thirty five thousand dollars to get dinner with Peter Thiel, and it changed their entire life.

33:05 But there's no real marketplace. To find those opportunities. Like maybe you'll occasionally find them on eBay or their Twitter. I want to create a marketplace that's basically like, okay. If There's a hundred thousand dollars sitting here and Bill Ackman. All you have to do is hit yes, and then your lunch is, you know, Ben is willing to pay a hundred thousand dollars to get lunch with you. Just to have a marketplace where it's just lunch a one hour lunch and someone can basically

33:30 Preemptively bid on how much they're willing to pay for lunch with X. I like this. This is actually when you first said it, I didn't know where you were going with this, but this is actually kind of an interesting Simple idea. By the way, I think the right uh the right lens for this is uh these are non serious ideas. Like we have a bunch of Serious

33:46 More boring business ideas, but these are just like fun ideas. Um and the key to this one, by the way, is it charity. The key is like everything is a charity. Yeah, exactly. So you need basically and are you saying do it permissionlessly, so like Are you saying you'll go you'll just put up Bill Ackman lunch New York.

34:03 You get it to fifty thousand dollars of somebody who wants to go have lunch with Bill Aquin, and then you basically are telling Bill Aquine, Hey, by the way. We're auctioning this off. It's at fifty thousand. The proceeds will go to your favorite charity. Would you be are you willing to to honor it? Are you willing to do it? The guy doesn't get charged anything if you don't do it. And you're basically gonna like publicly pressure them to do this to get it off the ground.

34:23 Yeah, exactly. That's the exact idea. You know it's sort of a grey area, but How mad are they really gonna be? You're raising a bunch of money for their, you know, charity of choice. Um, I think you could do this. I think you get away with this. I know Andrew Wilkinson did this not not long ago. I think he did like a twenty thousand dollar lunch or something like that. We know that money is provide.

34:42 paid six hundred fifty thousand dollars to go to lunch with Warren Buffett. If you just think about like If you had Let's just pretend you had two of these a week. Right. Maybe you have it as like a successful person and then maybe uh

34:54 Either an actor, celebrity, musician, or like an athlete, something like that. But even two a week. And let's say the average one of these would go for what? Like you think twenty five K? Ten to fifty yeah, twenty five thousand dollars, good ballpark. So you're gonna raise Basically two and a half million dollars for charity.

35:13 If you could even just do two of these every week. Yeah, I think it's I actually think it's a good idea. It is a crazy idea, but I think it's a good idea. Yeah, exactly. I think if you're trying to do like Fun slash social impact. This is kind of an interesting idea. And by the way, you would end up meeting all these people Because you created this like whatever this thing is, the the the lunch program.

35:34 Yeah, exactly. If that's my idea. Yeah. All right, what else you got? Wait, do this one. Everyone needs their Birkenbag. I'm surprised you even know what a Birken bag is. What what are you what are you thinking here?

35:44 I don't know much about burkin bags other than it sounds cool and I think it's really expensive. So for me, what that was is uh one of my buddies started this company called Stock X and he called me I don't know. A year ago and he was like, Dude, I'm starting a new company. We make these awesome collectibles. Uh And what we do is we basically the website is I think ghostwright dot com. And what we do is we basically make Um figurines

36:10 of fame we do licensing deals and we make figurines of famous people, very similar to this thing called Cause KWS. So and by figurines, are these like small figurines or they big? What are what are the like the plastic? I think he makes I think he makes both, but for this specific one, he calls me out of the blue. Six months. Class, plastic. Mix of everything. But six months ago he calls me out of the blue. He goes, Dude

36:34 I know you're a huge Phoenix Suns fan. I've got something f just for you. I was like, what is it? You're like you're calling the right guy. Uh He goes. Yeah, we're ba we're doing this special run. Of six foot

36:45 tall figurines. It's like all right, I have no idea where I'd put a six foot figurine. Uh that's I think made out of the three. It's like I have no clue, but hey, you got the word Phoenix Suns and like Honestly, you might have sold me already, and he goes um so it's We're doing a special run. It's only M only a certain number of NBA players We're making a Devin Booker, so a six foot tall Devin Booker figurine. And uh

37:13 Yeah, it's like all right. How much? Like you know, I guess I've been looking for my Birken bag, so how much? And uh yeah. He goes uh ten thousand dollars, which Yeah, I I Don't think I've spent$10,000 on myself really on anything. Uh outside of like, you know, investing in Bitcoin.

37:30 I can't think of the last time I've spent ten thousand dollars on something. Yeah. I don't even think about it. I said yes immediately. And then later I told my wife and I was like And by the way, this is like a one of one, or there's like gonna be thousands of it. It's a one of one. So I'm the only guy with the Devin Booker. And uh

37:48 Yeah, I don't know what I'm gonna do with I mean I it's I so I'm the only guy with a Devin Bookery and I was like, Okay, it's gonna be cool'cause maybe one day He's gonna call me, he's gonna be like dude I respect that you own the other one of one. Like that's cool. Devin Booker's gonna call you. That's the dream. The dream is that Devin Booker's gonna call FaceTime me one day and be pretty fire.

38:08 Yeah, exactly. Did you want to be friends? That's what you thought was gonna happen? I mean that's a terrible dream now that I say it, but that's what I was hoping for. Right. And then uh I told my wife, I was like, Yeah, um So I got this thing coming in six months. I don't know when it's coming, but like it's from a buddy. But

38:25 Yeah, here's the good news. Here's here's the good news. It's a six foot tall figurine and the even better news. Is that it was a gift. But uh yeah. Unfortunately, like I left out the fact that it was a ten thousand dollar gift. Uh it was a gift. So you know it's kinda led me to my new take, which is that like, you know, everyone needs their Berk in bag. So

38:44 Yeah, the idea is basically like Empower everyone to make that crazy purchase. It makes absolutely no sense. Uh And just

38:53 You know, th it just call it a gift, you know. Tell your wife it's a gift. Tell your wife it's a gift. It's a gift that I bought for myself. You know, you um Yeah, I think you might be on to something, right? So collectibles is now a bigger, bigger space, right? One of the investments we missed on Which I think still kinda eats at us a little bit is whatnot. We had the ability to invest in whatnot.

39:15 Pretty early on. We tried to. The guy was like Ah I don't know, there's not enough room in the round and we didn't really push it. We were like, Okay, well we hope you know let's We w we want to, and then we don't we didn't really follow up. It's now how much is whatnot worth now? I think at the time whatnot was like valued at fifty or sixty million dollars. I think it's five billion dollars now. Five billion. And I think they just said that they they've done five billion in sales on their thing. If you don't know what whatnot is, it's basically You open an app.

39:42 It's a live video of someone Basically opening up like a pack of Pokemon cards or NBA trading cards and they're you basically you buy it. So you push a button, you Apple Pay you could buy the pack and he'll be like, Oh, Sean, all right, Sean, you bought the pack, all right man, good luck. It opens up the pack in front of you, shows you what it is, and then it it mails you the cards after the fact.

40:01 So you're kind of like You just shop live and then they open the pack. You see it's like a lottery thing. You see if you win or not. And then they mail you the thing after the fact. It's kind of like a crazy idea. But it's all collective and they've sold five billion dollars in the last I don't know, yeah, twelve months or something like that. Of collectibles. So like people are getting their Birkenbags. For some people it's Pokemon cards, for some people it's NBA trading cards.

40:25 For some peop for you it's your statue of Of uh Devin Booker. For you know For your wife it might be an actual Bergen bag. I think the question is who doesn't have their Birkin yet?

40:35 So like basically what niche does it and We have a buddy that is going pretty hard at Tech collectibles. So he's trying to buy like the original Macintosh or like You know, a piece of the first SpaceX Falcon.

40:52 Stuff that there's not really a market for now. It just feels like random memorabilia. But I think over time tech has become so much more important in culture, right? Like Growing up tech was a side thing, but now it's like you got movies m you know, like the social network and Everybody knows who these CEOs are, you know who Zuckerberg is, you know who Elon is. They're like the most followed people On the planet in some cases.

41:14 I think that Tech. collectibles is gonna be a big thing. And our friend who's doing this, I'm I'm sort of jealous that they're doing this because I think this is a smart idea. Yeah, I think that's a great idea. But I am curious, what's your work and bag?

41:28 Like what what have you bought? Like, dude, that's insane. Um What is the definition here? So it's gotta be something that's Totally irrational. Right. Like it's not about the utility of the product. Like I bought a piano, but like I bought a piano, I play the piano, it's an instrument, like

41:45 Yeah, I could have bought a cheaper one, but I bought a more expensive one. I th I think that doesn't count. I think it's also gotta be kinda like status. Or collection driven. And I don't know if I'm a collector. I'm not a car guy.

41:58 I'm not a watch guy. He did buy a crypto punk like, you know, three years ago. I did. I did. But I didn't buy it. I mean we bought we bought that just as like a marketing gag for uh for Milk Road. We didn't really It's not like I actually was like, oh my God, I love the art.

42:13 Yeah. It's never been a thing for me. Yeah. You know what I would do? I would do um if musicians did their version of Birkin's. So like If a musician was like, Hey, we have like a Kind of like a one of one collectible.

42:29 Maybe it's a recording or it's a freestyle or it's like a a variation of the song and they're only gonna you know, they're they sell one of them and you get to collect it as a piece of art that's music. I would be pretty into that. I think that's pretty cool. Maybe M F M needs to come up with its own Birkin bag that we can uh Uh, for the biggest M F M fans.

42:46 Yeah. It'll be a six foot statue of you, dude. All right, what else you got? You got any other good ones? What's your best one? Wha what's your what's your best idea? Okay, I think My best idea I got a bunch of good ones, but I'll give you a great one.

43:01 Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about When you're post economic, which I am not, but I hope to be at some point. In the future. The defined post economic. What does that mean? People don't know that. Yeah, basically if you've made over.

43:14 Ten million dollars and you don't have to work. Uh What are you gonna spend your time doing? Like I would say post economic is when You no longer make decisions based on money. That's both spending decisions, like

43:26 You decide what you want, the price doesn't really matter, right? And this happens first at like You buy guaca chipotle, you don't care that it's two bucks, then you buy You can go to any restaurant, buy anything, you can go to any store, buy anything. It it just levels up from there. You travel first class, you don't even think about it. You travel private, you don't even think about it, right? Like Spending.

43:44 Is one side and then the other side is Earning meaning You decide what to do with your time, not based on how much money it's gonna make you. That's to me, that's post economic. Yeah, so like once you're there, you could but you basically you have all these nice things

43:58 And you just quickly get used to them, right? It's like you move into a nicer house. After a week. You totally forget. You just don't even, you know, for lack of a better word, you don't even care, right? It's like, yeah, I'm used to it. Get a nicer car. So I've been thinking about Like what are actual experiences

44:13 That Change ever like yeah, they people won. I think when you're there One, you wanna feel you wanna feel pain again. Like you kinda wanna go back to where you were when you were starting something. When everything was hard and you want to feel pain. So my big idea is Survivor.

44:30 So we all Yeah, obviously you know what Survivor is basically T V month long TV show where you go in the middle of nowhere and you have to compete. But imagine a world where we basically created an island where you have to pay a hundred grand to go compete in a real life survivor. So You get dropped in the middle of nowhere for a whole month. You pay a hundred grand to be there. And the winner

44:50 You know, the winner wins money, but the whole idea is basically an actual survivor that you pay to be there. All your friends and family can watch. It's live streamed. Uh And it's purely for when those people are post economic and you know, they're sick and tired of flying all over the world. They're sick and tired of just staying at random hotels. Like Yeah, it's just not that interesting. I go back to square one. And go be on Survivor.

45:15 You know, I think when you first said it I was like, Mm, this sounds kinda dumb. But actually You know, we have so many friends that basically sell their company and immediately start training for Iron Man. Right, or triathlons. And actually If you want to get in great shape, like

45:30 Or like an ultra race, right? Where you where you're like run a hundred miles or fifty mile fifty miles or something like that. And You know, like marathoners and ultra racers, like they're in good shape in one dimension, but it's not actually like good for your body. Like they end up just kind of shin fluence and just sort of destroying their body a little bit. They don't get in like very good aesthetic shape to do it, right? You don't like put on muscle, you kind of like skinny yourself out.

45:55 But they do it because they want to do something hard. And you're right. You kinda feel alive and you feel tough and you got a story to tell and you challenge yourself and like You would do this like voluntary hardship. Cold plunge, same thing. Voluntary hardship. That you get to show.

46:11 And so I actually think that you're probably right that there's A number of people who would sign up for like a Combination of it's a digital detox, right?'Cause you're not gonna have your phone, internet, you're gonna be totally disconnected. It's hard. And so you're gonna get that like hardship experience without having to like train to run a long race.

46:31 And um I think it's like transformative rite of passage type of thing. Which It seems like people need more and more. Now that like The whole world is so easy. You push a button and someone will like literally deliver a platter of nachos to your door from Door Dash, right? Like

46:46 The life has never been easier. In one sense, which creates a craving for hard. But if hard is not natural, then you have to sort of create an artificial hard. And I think that's what this is. It's an artificial hard. I think that's why people like this David Goggins, Jacko Willink, like I think that's why people gravitate towards that type of stuff because there's some itch.

47:04 They're trying to scratch and it seems like you're saying Here's a version of that. Pay fifty or a hundred grand and you're gonna go for what did you say, thirty days? Yeah, thirty days. That's all it takes. Thirty days. And you have to survive

47:18 Just with your own bare necessities on an island. Yeah, and you know, this works, you take it to other franchises too, right? It's like Love Island. It's like Don't go unmatched. Don't smash me. P branded as part of the game. As part of the show, is what you're saying. I'm just saying you take all these I all these popular reality TV shows.

47:37 And people just go pay to have their own versions of'em. Uh Dude, love is blind. I swear, I can't believe there's not just like a love is blind tour going around. City to city.

47:48 People who are single and see love as blind are like, All right, I wanna do it, I wanna go on the pods, I'm gonna meet somebody That way. And I'll spend, you know Basically three or four days. Doing this and then come out and then I date that person.

48:01 Trim the like marriage part because that's the drama for TV that doesn't make any sense. Like, oh, we propose and we have to get married in twenty days. Like you could take that part out, but just the like the pods experience. If I was single, I would want to do that. And that's kind of an insane thing. I can't believe that's not on tour. I mean, I for real life survivor, I'd pay a hundred grand right now to go there and you know, basically like it was just like a hundred grand, I could just drop you off somewhere, dude, and I'll I'll pick you up for thirty days.

48:27 Yeah, I I think that I think like reality TV uh done well for people that want to pay for that is a great idea. Yeah, it creates the desire and the curiosity of like, could I do it and how would I do it, right? Like And so if you just made that accessible to people. Yeah, for sure. For sure people would want to do that.

48:46 And and by the way, is this like are you saying this is a business or what are you what are you saying here? I'm saying it's a fun fun maybe it's a business, you know, maybe it could be like the new Tough Mudder. It's like, you know, back in the day when Tough Mudder was pretty big. Uh maybe it could be the new tough mudder. It's just a Five, ten day experience. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Well I think you gotta bring the price down. I mean a hundred thousand is really it's it's very high I think you really

49:10 I think if you did this for Ten thousand dollars. Um This might work. Not to not to cheapen your idea, but I feel like You could get

49:18 some scale with this thing'cause w what does it cost you to run it? It's like You just need like a medic. Then there could be like twenty people doing this together. They can live as a tribe. In fact It's probably better as a tribe and not you on your own, right? Yeah, it's probably way better like your five friends as a tribe in there. Are you doing the whole thing? Are you voting people off or no? It's just thirty days of survival. No, you're you're voting people off. I think you got it.

49:44 All right. You got some more on here, so let's do um Cool Curple Tunnel Brand. Oh, I know what this is. Yeah. Put your hands up right now. If you're on YouTube. So Ben right now He's not wearing this glove. I've never seen Ben's right hand because every time I get on a call with Ben, he's wearing this Michael Jackson glove.

50:05 This absolute OJ strangler glove on his right hand at all times, and it's because you had like a carpal tunnel issue. And so he just wears that all day. Honestly, I don't even know if I have carpal tunnel anymore. I'm just used to wearing the glove and I like to fit. So I'm like, Oh Yeah, people make cool baddie gloves for baseball. It's just my thing now. You know? Now we just need cool bat cool gloves for working. Like where's the cool Corpal Tunnel brand? Uh.

50:31 So okay, so so I guess I can explain this. You started having pain. You googled how to fix it and then this came up. I mean, I think it's like one of those Web M D things though, where it's like, Oh one day I was like, Oh, my hand feels kinda weird I'm typing Maybe I've got bad form and then you just go down this whole thing and you start watching YouTube videos about, Oh, maybe I've carpal tunnel.

50:53 And then I Went to Amazon and I probably bought spent five hundred dollars on fifty pairs of these gloves that I now wear every day. We were talking about um touch limb the other day.

51:03 With Harley from Shopify. And the thing about Touchland is they took a very boring sterile category. Hand sanitizer, literally sterile. And

51:13 Mm-hmm. The founder rebranded it, remade it into something that was kind of sexy, kinda cool, smelled good, and then they started collabing and made made the designs look good. They started branding uh collaborating with Disney and others and licensing the IP. And I think about like actually all Um

51:30 Kinda like braces. Like, you know, basically like you you're talking about your wrist Brace, your wrist glove. I have like a knee thing. There's like arm sleeves. There's like, you know, a lot of people wear these'cause they have pain and they're they have plantar fasciis. They have knee pain. They have elbow pain. They have They have frozen shoulder, whatever it is.

51:48 And actually all of those Are very ugly and very sterile looking, similar to hand sanitizer. And you're you're probably right that somebody could just make a cooler brand in that space, charge more for it. But like If you wanna it's

52:02 It is fashion. It doesn't have to be ugly. It's it is a thing you're wearing. Why not make it look better and see what we what comes out of that? Yeah, I mean I think it's a no I think it's a no brainer. Again, I kinda wanna hide this glove when I wear it, but you know, hey, I think it's a no brainer.

52:17 Yeah, but uh uh although I don't know what glove would look cool on you. Like what would I do to that glove to make it not look like you're wearing the Michael Jackson glove. I I don't really know. I if it was a different color, would that really change anything? It's it's hard to say. I think it needs Johnny I if like, you know, if we had If we had five billion dollars, we could get Johnny Ive on it. Um all right. What else should we talk about? Which is

52:41 See at the top of this episode we were talking about how I went to K Academy. Uh Yeah, basically went and spent a week at Duke basketball, competed really hard. Uh and coach the cool thing about it is Coach K was there the whole time. He's sitting there. He doesn't talk much.

52:57 Uh he doesn't talk much, but he does give like two or three speeches. And you know, he said one thing in his speech that I wrote down that I thought was really good. Or he said two things. One of them is part of the half bake idea, the other one's just interesting. He said, You know, at Duke we pursue moments, which I wrote down'cause I think It's really yeah, basically he's like everything's a moment. I wanna hold these moments that are awesome. So you know, one I kinda took down and said, All right, I wanna pursue moments. I think that's what does that mean? Sounds good, but w what do you really mean by like what's an ex what's an example of that? What do you mean by pursue moments?

53:27 I think it's basically just like be present and like you're looking for like very and enjoy very specific things and remember those things. Uh but also I was just like oh that sounds cool. It's like a cool thing to tell my mom that's I do like that we pursue moments. I think that like yeah, I think about like whether it's with my kids or It's like, you know, yeah, you're gonna do a business for five years. That's a long time and like If you just if I probably just told myself that, like, all right, I'm just trying to pursue this moment. What's the moment I'm trying to pursue or like if I'm in the moment.

53:57 really pursue it, really go really go for it, lean into it. I think I kinda like that. All right. I mean, I buy that. Go ahead. And then the second part was like, you know, he was talking about how Uh he worked with Kobe.

54:09 And Yeah, he w he was basically telling the story about how he He made Kobe cry before they played in like this USA gold medal game, I think, and Two thousand eight when they beat Spain. Um and he was talking about how he

54:21 motivated him. So I went around and like, you know, at this K Academy Everyone there is like an ex Duke player, so like there's fifty X Duke guys just kinda walking around that you can talk to So I went and asked like five of them, like You know what it what was Coach K so good at like

54:37 What what was the A plus plus at and everyone just says Motivation. And I know you're like a motivation guy. I know you're a Tony Robbins disciple. Um And Yeah, everyone talked about how he just made these incredible custom videos. So it'd be like all right, if we're before this game He's gonna bring me in and he's gonna have this

54:57 Custom thing that he built just for me, just to focus on, you know, my hustle or my intensity. Uh so I kinda had this idea which is like Uh Coach K in a box which is With AI could you essentially

55:11 Make something that does custom motivational videos based on all these inputs that exactly you need today. So it's like okay If I wore this device and it knew everything about me. I just want a custom motivational video right now for this workout I'm about to do or for the sales call I'm about to take. Um so that's the idea, like Coach K in a box. And I know you have a bunch of thoughts.

55:32 Let me hear him. Well when I was at Duke my roommate Trevor was trying to walk onto the basketball team. And he ended up

55:41 being the last guy cut. So he didn't end up getting on the team, but he was a manager for the team for Three years. Coach K. Like, uh yeah, what is he doing? All that and and I had the same question like you, right? Like this guy's the I think he's the all time winningest college basketball coach. He was the men's

55:57 He's the Olympic basketball coach for for a long time. So okay, he's a goat. Okay, so you know I think you asked the right question, like what makes this guy so great? Because I want to learn from that. I want to learn from the goats.

56:08 And um Trevor told me he's like, dude, he would do this stuff in the locker room. So what he would do is I thought when a coach gives a motivational talk, it's They walk in. All right everybody, listen up. Like

56:20 We got a big game. We wanna get out there, give it your all. Are you gonna give it your all yeah. No, let me hear you say it. Yeah. I thought that's what it is. No no no. Here's how it worked. He was like Before Coach K enters the room.

56:33 They dim the lights. They would turn on the the big screen that they had in their locker room. And it would be Uh edited video. Like kinda like what a sixteen year old kid on TikTok would make. And it's basically

56:45 A spliced video that was like Let's say it was them playing the last time they played this team. But then Inter Splice was like Footage from Braveheart. It'd be like the speech at Braveheart, the war scene spliced in with the game. And you're like, all right. It's kinda cheesy, but they're like No, trust me, in the moment

57:02 The shit hit hard. It's like the music, the splicing, the speech. The the footage of you And then at the end Literally Coach Gay came out. Face painted like Braveheart.

57:13 Roll the ball onto the ground and Koshke's old. Like he was like in his seventies. He had like double hip replacement. And he would dive on the ball. And like basically like you know, like uh the the ultimate sign of hustle and basketball is diving for a loose ball. And he would He would run into the locker room, face band it, dive onto the ball.

57:30 Screaming and be like And be like, let's fucking go kill these guys right now. And people would be like, Whoa, like it was total shock value for the team. He would really light into them and get get into them on that. And so he would do the motivational Up videos. And then

57:45 Last time we did uh or two years ago when we did our our basketball camp that me and you do, we call it hoop group. Where we basically take Twenty five or thirty of the most like ambitious founders we know. Like there's like I don't know, half the people there are billionaires. But they love to bat they l love to play basketball. And we went to go visit

58:01 Duke Campus and we played in Duke Stadium, Cameron Indoor Stadium. And when we were there, we were asking one of the the ex players who's now a coach We were like, Can you tell us a great coach K story? And he did. He goes, I was on the team, I was a captain and I Had a bad game.

58:16 And after that bad game, the next day I practice I thought maybe Coach K would kinda like rip into me a little bit or tell me I needed to play better. That's kinda what I expected. And you know, if you do what people expect, you don't really get much of a response, right? They're they're ready for it. It's like somebody who's Yeah. They're tensed up. You can you can't really like, you know, push them over. They they're ready for it.

58:34 And so he g he he's like he doesn't say anything during the practice to me. Doesn't talk to me. And we're practicing. I'm kinda like, Oh, he didn't didn't say anything. And then he calls me over to this room and they have this film room where they normally like um review game footage. And he's like, that room has like six TV screens or eight T V screens in the room.

58:53 And I walk in And it's I'm my face is on every single one of the screens. And it's just me and him in there. And it's It was a basically s uh a slideshow of his facial expressions from the last game.

59:07 And it was just his face kind of whining, I didn't get a call, being bet being I missed that shot, kind of being bummed about it. I got taken out of the game. I had bad body language there. Then in the second half, started I was having a bad game. So I was just kind of, you know, I was checked out when we were doing the team huddle. And then again I fouled this guy and I disagree with the call and I'm pouting. I'm doing this with my hands, being like, Oh, come on, man. And they froze it on that screen and it goes, Coach K looked at me and he goes If I ever.

59:36 See the palms of your hands again. You will never play for this team again. He's like I don't ever he goes, You're a captain. You're a man. You're a leader. Leaders don't look like this. They don't beg and whine and pout.

59:49 For something, you know, like you need to carry yourself like a leader. He goes, I don't care what you do, I don't care if the ball goes in or not. But you will not. Act like this again. And he goes, dude That burned into my skull. Like he's like, I just I would never do that again. And

1:00:05 I thought that was an incredible story. I was like Dude, this is a Whenever I talk to people about like oh what's it like to work with Elon or Steve Jobs, I'm looking for a story like this. What do they actually do that's different? That's something I would never do, that I would never think to do. But it makes sense when they do it that like holy shit, yeah, that would actually like

1:00:23 Shift the way that somebody operates and somebody works. I couldn't believe that story. Do you remember that one? Yeah, that's insane. And that's a like that's what I want. I'm like, okay, he's a good motivator. But like tell me the stories that he like I wanna like I'm like oh we should just go write a book where you go get twenty five Coach K stories that are

1:00:41 Just about how he motivates,'cause it's insane. Yeah, exactly. And also just kinda makes you think like damn I wouldn't even think to do that. Like I'm how much uh you know, there there's no rule against something like that, but like what a It just feels against the norms. But I guess like as you build up your own credibility. It's almost like lean into that power and basically use your credibility. Like

1:01:04 He could kinda say anything, he could do anything kinda crazy. Uh, and get away with it'cause he's Coach K, I guess. There's a method to the madness. I wonder like I wonder if he was doing that stuff early on and I wonder if he got more bold about it as he went along. But I'm with you, dude. If I had a coach K in my life I'd be good. I don't know if I could do the motivational speech'cause like I think part of it is you need like

1:01:25 The B roll needs to be me like Plans. The B roll of me just like typing emails. Like writing a document. I don't I don't think there's any you you could play Fort Minor on that track. It's not gonna do anything for me. It might

1:01:42 It might. I don't know. Yeah. And also there was this one story like Yeah. A few years ago the Heat had that miraculous run to the finals and I specifically remember this moment where This guy bam out of bio is like up there at the end, yeah. They're like interviewing him because he's the Eastern Conference Finals MVP.

1:02:00 And he's just he gets on the mic and he goes Dude, you don't haslam had this insane video for us. That changed how we approached game seven when they beat the Celtics. And I've spent the past two years like Trying to figure out what that video was. So at this camp, the last thing about K Academy is I I went up to Justice Winslow, who played for the Heat.

1:02:19 I was like, dude. What do the Heat do to motivate? Like, what was in that video? He's like, I wasn't on the team then, but I could text them guys. He's like, but I'll tell you now. It is exactly like the thing you heard from Coach K. It is gonna be something so custom. It's gonna be Braveheart. It's gonna be Fort Minor. It's gonna be like. They're pulling out all the stops. And uh, you know, it's like in that setting. And ever since then, I'm like, dude, I just want to Like next hoop group, I just want to experience that for like ten minutes. That's my only ask.

1:02:48 Yeah. Oh that's too good. I love that story. Yeah. I I really love that story. That's like That's in my like hall of fame hall of fame of like uh

1:03:00 You know, motivational stories. Um what else you got? Do you wanna do anything else or we we're gonna wrap up? Let's see. I think uh I think we should wrap on one final thing, which is you know, earlier you were talking about Club L T V, which was awesome. You know, I think we had 150, 200 people in it back in the day. Meeting I think once every m other week.

1:03:19 To talk business, meet each other. And I think we should bring that thing back in some way. What do you think? What would we do? So we don't I don't think we need to do the ecom version of it anymore. I I so here's my

1:03:32 Here's my thesis. Thesis is a very fancy word for what I'm about to say. So let me let me In uh Mfm has roughly a million people who listen to it.

1:03:44 Maybe not all regularly, but that's like kind of our reach. Uh is a million people who are all entrepreneurially. They're all What I call like Entrepreneurs with a sense of humor, as of who I think we attract. People who are entrepreneurial with it and they have a sense of humor. And so um

1:04:00 My my thinking is I'm never gonna meet all those people. Uh honestly, I don't really wanna meet a million people. That's not really my goal. However The top one percent. Of our audience. Is fa is like a fascinating group of people, right? They're very interesting. They you know, it's gonna be like people who are like CEOs of public companies. It's some dude in

1:04:20 You know, Wichita who's got a forty million dollar like chemicals plant that he runs. There's a guy who's got this like tutoring business side hustle thing that's whatever. There's a bunch of interesting people in that top one percent. I think what would be dope. Is if we Did Club L T V again.

1:04:35 Which was like your thing. You would curate It was a curated group. I think that's key,'cause you you want everybody else in there to be somebody you're happy to have met. Right. Like that's the goal. Um take the top one percent of MFM listeners. And then basically do like what, like a happy hour? Kind of like a speed dating thing. That's that's kind of the way we did it before, which was like you meet once a month, roughly.

1:04:55 And Ben kinda puts people in groups. And then You go, you talk with a specific prompt and then he switches it, he shuffles the groups. And so you meet in an hour, you're gonna meet a bunch of cool people. And you're gonna learn one or two things. And I think That would be awesome. We should bring that back.

1:05:11 Yeah, we should do that. By the way, people don't know club LTV stands for in in ecom LTV means lifetime value. It's like the key metric there. So we made it Club L T V which is basically uh the the name the gimmick of the thing, but the f the funny thing was Ben would always do these like He would pursue those moments. He would make these little things that would make it fun. So like You would send everybody like custom Zoom backgrounds or like

1:05:33 The start of every club LTV. Because it was we called it a club. It was like a nightclub. He would have like like DJ Khaled would record a cameo and you would play it for the whole group at the beginning. It was awesome. It was a lot of fun. I think you should keep doing those things because that I I still remember that and I think we had I think we had the right vibe. I think we have Redman. I think we have Method Man and Redman too, I think. Every time there was like some washed up rapper who would hype the shit out of us for like the first thirty seconds uh of the of the thing. And Ben's just burning like five hundred dollar cameos to make that happen. Yeah. I mean, I mean to me it's like You know, it's like when you meet someone that also likes M FM, even for me and you two, it's like oh I

1:06:14 I like this guy or I like this woman. I like this girl. I mean actually You mean you like that person. Uh No, I know what you mean. It it w we're not for everybody. So if you like it, the odds of you getting along with somebody else who really likes the podcast are pretty high. So it's kinda like one of those things where If two people were wearing the hat.

1:06:32 You would do the nod and be like, Okay, we I'm sure we would have a pretty fun hangout if we hung out and that's kinda the idea here. Yeah, and it's not Hampson, it's not a group, it's just like very lightweight, meet some other cool people. Uh You know, get to know the other people in the American. And it's free. It's free, by the way. It's not it's not like a paid thing. Um so what do you want how do you want people to like apply?'Cause you're gonna curate the group. So what do you want people to do to how how should people do it?

1:06:56 Let's see. Let's put a link in the description. All right. If you wanna do it, if you think you you're in that top one percent of interesting fun. Mfm listeners, uh Put yourself down there and tell us tell us who you are and then Ben will kinda curate a good group every uh every month for us. All right, and if you want to follow me on Twitter, Ben M Levy, I don't tweet much, but uh you know, I will DM you. Why would someone follow you?

1:07:19 When was your last tweet, dude? It was like in twenty eighteen. It's been a long time. It's been a long time. So that's uh that's Ben. Thanks for coming on, dude. Uh I'm gonna talk to you probably right after this, because that's what we do. I call you after every podcast. So I'll see you in a second. Alright, thanks guys. I feel like I could rule the world, I know I could be what I want to.

1:07:40 I put my law in it like my day's off On the roadless travel, never looking back

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