The best stuff we’ve read in the last 12 months

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/7eb0cdc912ac3619

Most people live their life like this.
They build a well and they start to pump water.
And at the end of their lives, after a lifetime of pumping, they see they are still thirsty.
They spent their whole life pumping rather than drinking, which was the reason they started pumping in the first place.
I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to
I'll put my law in it like my day song on a roll less child. I wanted to do something a little different today. End of the year.
I was doing a little Slack clean out and I was looking at
I had this one channel for like the best stuff I read this week.
I call it my content diet channel. It's basically what were the vegetables, what were my whole foods that I consumed,'cause I consume a lot of junk, but this stuff was actually good. And I was just kind of browsing through
what really stood out or resonated with me. And I have a couple. I don't know why I w and I wanted to know yours, because you read a lot more than me.
And I think we read totally different things. So I I'm curious
If anything comes to mind for you on that topic.
Yes. Um, for me it's a lot of books.
And so like for example, the the topic that I got obsessed with this year
It was presidential assassinations. I went deep on the four different presidents who were assassinated and it w uh that interested me. But
You know, I'm a huge history fan. And so I could talk to you all about history, which I which I I could like say some of the most amazing stuff that I learned. I feel like we did a whole bit when the Trump assassination thing happened on presidential assassinations. There's some crazy stories, right? There's like the guy who had a speech in his pocket that like blunted the blow, and so he got
And he's survived. Yeah, Roosevelt and he gets shot by his car on his way to a speech.
doesn't die'cause the speech is so thick in his pocket.
gives the speech while bleeding.
There's only been four presidents that have been successfully assassinated, and three of them happened between like eighteen sixty five and like nineteen oh five. And like pretty much up until Andrew Garfield was assassinated, which I think was like around nineteen oh four.
Any human, any American, it was like customary, you can just go to the White House and schedule an appointment with the president.
And the idea here was that they were supposed to be like a man of the people.
And I think that's ridiculous. And the secret service, even up until nineteen sixty three, sixty four, sixty five when JFK was shot, it was only like
Three hundred people.
And so like basically was non existent. And so I'm like obsessed with that.
uh about how like something became an institution even after four years or sorry, four deaths happened. And so I've been obsessed with that. I've also been obsessed with leadership and the idea of speeches. Have you ever studied any of the great speeches of American or world history?
Not in particular. Well w what you got? So in particular, uh uh Winston Churchill. Have you ever seen the movie Dunkirk? You've never seen it, right? No.
Okay. The idea is like early in the war of England.
This was when like n the not Nazi Germany had just invaded France and it was like clear that Nazi now was a f uh Nazi Germany was officially bad. Before it was like, Yeah, they're horrible, but like they're gonna stay themselves. They start evading other countries and people start freaking out. They go to France and everyone's like, Oh my god, I can't believe uh you know, imagine today, imagine like France getting taken over. France.
Yeah. Yeah. It's it's just like insane. And so England, which is nearby, they were like, Oh my gosh, now they are coming to us. And so they start officially getting into get into a war and have squirmish in Dunkirk, where Nazi the Nazis surround uh a part of England and they surround like I think it was like fifty thousand or even a hundred thousand soldiers. And basically if those people died
The war would have been over.
And it was a magical moment where hundreds of ships that were just fishermen, but also the uh British Navy, they raced over and they grabbed these guys off this island and they saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Whatever. Whatever. But that's not the important part of my story. But up until that point
England was like fearful. They were very fearful. They're like this is horrible. Like they were imagining all the worst things that that was gonna happen. Winston Churchill, who was in power, was a very fearful fearful person.
And he was very nervous, but then he goes screw it.
We're not gonna take this. We're gonna get after it. And he gave this speech. And at the end of the speech, he does this in like I forget what their I think it's the House of Parliament Parliament. It's like their like physical setting where like everyone's watching him. And he was like
We're gonna fight on the beaches. We're gonna fight in the trenches. We're gonna fight in the land, and we will never, ever give up. And he like gave this like
Amazing speech.
That basically changed the entire morale of the country. We're talking about tens of millions of people.
And it just like I've always been very fascinated when there's one person who can exert a relatively small amount of energy and get everyone else to change their energy. So like have you ever been to a concert, I used to love watching these Oasis concerts. They'll be literally they're famous. They they they were famous for helping create like this idea of like a mega concert. They would have 250,000 people in the audience.
And
They're relatively high energy band, but it's just one or two guys singing into a microphone and they get two hundred fifty thousand people to like light up.
And like push that energy back to them. And I'm obsessed with what is that one thing that person has, and how do they leverage that amount of energy to impact potentially hundreds of thousands, or in the case of Winston Churchill, tens of millions of people.
And so I'm like uh
Like try to figure out like what words does someone have to use. And like if you think about Winston Churchill, do you know what he looks like?
Uh yeah. I mean I've seen photos of him. Like he's a a short, fat kind of drunker.
Like he's not like he's not like a good looking guy. Like he doesn't have like the traditional movie star good looks or anything like that.
And so what I've been trying to study is how people do that.
Because you want to just deliver this at work? Or what what's the like connect the dots for me. Yeah, because I do want to become a better leader. Like once your company gets so my company, we're only at like twenty five or thirty people, but I'm getting to the point now where I'm not doing a lot of the work and I am having to
Not motivate people because all my a good employee is already motivated, but in order to make a a good employee a great employee, you do need to inspire them. Right. And so I've just been trying to figure out how to become a better leader. And so I've been studying some of the advertise on the banner ads. We're gonna advertise in the podcasts. We're gonna advertise everywhere. We will advertise you know, what what do you what is the like
rally cry that you're trying to trying to get to them. Well w what would be like what would be the example? Have you done it yet? Have you tried? Yeah. Like s so so right now AI is everywhere.
And I just it's making me sick that I am like having to talk to AI all the time and I'm not having a lot of like relationships in real life. I'm not having what you call these belly to belly conversations.
And what I've noticed with Hampton is once we got people in room in the room, in the same room, once a month to have their conversations for the core meeting, it literally will change their lives. Not because we're particularly special, but just being in a in a physical setting with people who have been vetted and you know that you have like minded interest interests and you're indoctrinating them into having what do we call the three Cs confidentiality, candor, and commitment.
That will change someone's life, and it changes their life.
Just in a small way, these are entrepreneurs. It's not like the average show. So eventually we wanna like figure out how can we do this with everyone else.
But
Just this idea that the world is going one way. Yeah, everyone is so incredibly lonely and sad. What can we do that like solves that, even if it's for a small group of people like entrepreneurs. Did you see churn like go to zero when you went from digital to in person? It it's crazy. Like on a bad month, it would be like sixties annual churn.
Now it's like
Eighties and nineties.
Six wait, sixties meaning so forty percent churn. What do you what do you mean by that? Uh sixties uh uh retention.
Yeah, so forty so forty percent.
Would turn.
Every month.
Before? Annual. It's annual. Annual. Okay.
Of your annual membership. Okay, gotcha. And then now it's like jumped up significantly just by making that. Eighty five, ninety percent. Like it's not even it's like but but there's all this other work of like
being crazy about the vetting process. I don't think people realize that thousands of people apply and we let in like four or five percent per month. So we do a lot of work. But
In real life, does most of the work.
The problem is it's a
fucking pain in the ass. It's really hard to do. We gotta find these like moderators in all these cities and train them. It's really, really hard.
But
Not even close. Like night and day.
All right, I read a ton. I would say almost a book a week. And the reason I read so much is because my philosophy towards reading is I want to see what worked for the winners that I love and what strategies they use. And then I want to see
What mistakes w uh uh did they all make? What were the common flaws that they all had, and I just want to avoid that.
And so HubSpot asked me to put together a list of the books that have changed my life so far in two thousand twenty five. And I did that. And so I list it out
Seven books that made a meaningful difference in my life and I explained
what the differences that they had on me or what
actions I took because of the book.
And then also I list it out my very particular ways of reading because I'm
pretty strategic about how I read and how I read so much and how I remember what I read and things like that. And so I put this together in a very simple guide. It's seven books that had a huge impact on my life.
And you can scan the QR code below if you want to read it. Or there's a link. You guys know what to do. There's a link in the description. Just go ahead and click it.
And you'll see the guide that I made. So it's the seven books that had a massive
change in my life this year so far.
And then also
how I'm able to read so much. So check it out below.
So it sounds like one of the things you're doing is you're
Tying it to a bigger movement. Which is I what I think what the great leaders do. So you're not saying
Hey, we're trying to win, we're trying to grow revenue,'cause people will only get so excited by
the sort of financial success or metric success of your specific company. But when you say, look, the world is going this way.
But we gotta fight.
We gotta fight. We I don't want to live in that world. I think that world is messed up. The world where
We just get lonelier, sadder, we're only talking to AI. We're not seeing other people. We're just living digitally like
This digital.
Overload.
Is going one way. I wanna f I want we're part of the resistance.
And that sort of we're part of the resistance is generally one thing that like
Most leaders do. They they tie their
You know, you could play in a football game, a high school football game.
But you'll feel like you're going to war and you're fighting for your brothers and like they took something from you and your family. And you could you can make it so important when actually it's a in a division three A high school football regular season game that you'll never remember four weeks from now, right? But but the leader can elevate the importance of what this means.
Because the meaning
It is what it is. No. It is what you say it means.
And so what you tell yourself it means is is that what you'll actually um
what you'll actually feel about it.
And you know, I don't when you study when you were in like social studies classes in like fifth and sixth grade, they used to talk about these Roman emperors. And I don't know if you remember this, but they would often refer to them as orders. Yeah, orders, yeah.
Which is kinda I remember thinking I'm like that's funny.
So this person could be content creators with without the internet. Like I if I had a order at Rome was like someone who stands on a rock and like
Hey everyone, here's what we have to do. Should we rebrand from podcaster to orator? It's kind of a it's kind of like an interesting. Technically that is what we do. And you asked yourself why on earth would an orator someone who could just speak good
Why would they control like, you know, the entire world?
Right. And I started thinking about that obsessively, and I'm like, Okay, well what do the riders have in common? And most of the time it is great speeches and great speaking. And I underestimated that for a long time. So
I've been trying to figure that out. That's been a rabbit hole you've been uh obsessed with. I'm shocked that you're not going down that track either.
I think that you I think you have that.
I think that you study it as well. I don't think you get credit enough for studying that.
But I'm shocked that that doesn't like fascinate you. It uh it does. It's just what season are you in? What w which rabbit hole do you happen to be in right now? That's a good one. I've got it earmarked, you know, like you know, uh it's that's a that's of of great interest to me. But uh right now I'm
interested in in a couple of other areas. I want to give you one. You know, there's a book that I think a lot of people have heard about, probably vr even read
I read it, but I had sort of forgotten about this part of it.
Die with zero.
And die with zero is really like
It's just YOLO rebranded.
And so what what is what is it?
About. And I I emailed her this passage. I said.
Here's from the book.
Death wakes people up and the closer it gets, the more awake we become.
'Cause when the end is near, that's when we suddenly start thinking, What the hell am I doing? Why did I wait this long?
You can't live every day like it's your last.
If so, you wouldn't bother studying or visiting the dentist or doing anything that has delayed gratification.
But
If you d delay gratification for too long or indefinitely, it's just too late.
You also can't live life as if it's infinite.
So we all face the question, what's the best way to uh allocate our life energy before we die? And here's the principles.
So principle one.
Timing matters.
Some experiences can only be enjoyed at certain times. You can't water ski when you're ninety.
And in the book he tells this great story about how
His buddy
When he was uh investment banker's buddy was like, Let's go back backing through Europe He's like I'm down He's like Awesome
It's gonna be a six week trip. He's like, Six weeks. How are we gonna get six weeks off? He's like,
We'll last, but they're probably gonna say no, we'll probably have to quit.
And he's like, quit. And he looked at his friend like he's being so reckless, like, wow, you're just quitting your job to go backpacking through Europe.
What a reckless thing to do.
What a irresponsible thing to do. I will do the responsible thing and stay in the job.
And he talks about when his friend came back.
And he immediately just he's he sees the glow, sees how he's talking about his time abroad, is like, Oh shit, I made a mistake.
What I thought was responsible was actually irresponsible because I threw away
this time in my twenties where there's only one there's only timing matters. There's only one time to go back back into Europe and sleep in hostels.
And so he actually talks about when he was thirty two or something, he finally
You know, gets his prom promotion he's been waiting for and he's takes he has enough time to take off and he goes and he
He goes and does that trip.
Bill Perkins, the author.
Yeah, Bill Purke goes and does the trip.
And he's like, guess what?
It's not as fun to go bumming around in hostels when you're thirty two, thirty three years old. Like
That was a game to be played when I was, you know, twenty to twenty five.
And I missed it. I missed the window.
And um so timing matters.
That's the first thing. Second thing.
What to worry about?
We can always make more money in the future, but we cannot go back and recapture time.
So it makes no sense to let life opportunities pass us for the fear of squandering money.
Squandering our lives should be of much greater worry.
All right, the last one. Money is life energy.
Think of money as the concept of life energy. You trade some life energy.
Working.
To get some amount of money, maybe ten dollars an hour.
Then then when you w wanna buy a shirt for thirty dollars, you don't think about thirty dollars. You say, Hell no, you want me to go work for three hours for this shirt?
Similarly.
A higher salary doesn't mean more income on an hourly basis. If I'm making two hundred K a year but only working twenty hours, that's better than making three hundred K working forty hours.
It's like eating a cookie.
One cookie is one hour on a treadmill.
Is that cookie really worth it?
Just imagine if your credit card the imagine if your credit card it like starts at a hundred years old and every time you buy something and now goes to nine hundred years.
You know, nine hundred years in six months. It's like oh shit, that was six months. I just paid for that.
If if when you checked out, it was like awesome. Um based on your al your salary
That was, you know, four and a half days of work. So, you know, would you like to would you like to s work a hundred and eight hours right now? You know, like you know when would you like to schedule that in?
You're like, never mind, just keep the blender, dude. I don't want it. I'm not interested in this. Um and so I thought there's a lot of good stuff in this book. Uh I actually
Didn't really read the full book'cause it was kinda like a book should be a blog type of deal.
But the the core concepts in the first, you know, let's say fifty to seventy five pages.
I thought were really, really good.
The last one this is one for you.
The vast majority of financial fears are completely irrational.
There are real financial fears. They do exist.
And then there are irrational or illogical financial fears, like rich people who still worry about money, even though the math clearly shows
They're fine and will always be fine.
And I think this is also true for a lot of people.
But I hate I hate that advice though, because well, you didn't you know w I'm not gonna criticize the book because I I think it maybe it goes into like actual tactics, but it's sort of like selling like a young guy like
who's struggling to date someone like just be yourself.
It's like well, but myself sucks, so can you like maybe instead just teach me how to be a better self?
So like telling someone not to worry is like telling an alcoholic just like
Try harder.
You know? So what is the solution?
Fuck, I don't know. Years of therapy? I'm not sure exactly. But but but I haven't found it.
No, I y I have found it. It's just get richer. Like what there's No, I don't think you found it.
Mm.
Mm.
I don't know. I think you have to uh there is a point. I have hit a point where I'm like, Okay, there there's enough for this current lifestyle, um, that's for sure.
And by the way, the the final visual he has, it says most people live their life life like this.
They build a well and they start to pump water. And as the well fills, they use
Cup to scoop out a small amount of water.
They take a sip and go right back to pumping.
Higher and higher.
And at the end of their lives, after a lifetime of pumping, they see they are still thirsty.
They spent their whole life pumping rather than drinking, which was the reason they started pump pumping in the first place.
When I when I see these things, a lot of times the takeaway that people have is that I shouldn't work.
Or I shouldn't do something.
And I think that that's not the takeaway that he implies or what he wants the takeaway to be, but that's the takeaway that a lot of people have. And I think that that is such a bad idea.
to like not work.
I do think that there is something magical about
Thirty or
thirty to fifty hours a week, there is something magical where you have to have a thing that you are contributing to with others for a shared mission.
And so when I see this, I don't want people to think young people to think I should get rich and not work. I think that's not the goal. I think you should have a mission in life that it aligns with yourself.
But
Um
You have to contribute to society, otherwise you're just gonna feel empty.
Yeah, I think the idea here isn't
Worker.
don't work or don't care about money or care about money. It's those are sort of false choices. It's really the idea of uh
W the way most people live their life.
Is
I'm speaking to the type of person who's gonna listen to this podcast. You're probably an overachiever type.
Probably a little type A.
You're probably pretty hungry for success.
Um, you might be slightly impatient.
Right? These are
I would say common common uh
Disorders of the M FM listener.
group, right? I know this because I am one.
And I would say
The trick is
For most of us we
Basically work, work, work, or work.
And then we try to fill in some life around the gaps.
And
The idea I think of what he says and what I picked up from Jesse is
Look, you gotta decide
What you want.
to do in life.
Schedule that.
Don't worry, the work will the work is always there. The work will fill in all the cracks around those things. But if you just wait till you have large gaps of free time.
Or it's the right time to go do that thing you always wanted to do.
Work just as like a liquid or a gas. It just f expands to fill the container you give it.
And so you have to be really conscious of how you let that fill the container. Like the the analogy I use with Jesse is
Um you know, you have a jar.
Jesse Esler.
Just the answer. Yeah. You have a jar.
And imagine for your year you have uh you know, next to the jar, the jar's empty right now, but you have sand, you have small rocks and big rocks.
And the sand is gonna be like all your day to day life routines. It's gonna be your errands, it's gonna be your Zoom calls, it's gonna be your meetings, whatever.
That's the sand.
It's stuff that
You you do, you gotta do.
Um you gotta do a lot of it.
But you're not gonna look back a year from now and remember any of those.
You know, your Zoom calls don't go in your sort of
your lifelong memories or your photo albums, like it's it doesn't make it there.
Right, but you gotta do some of them.
Then you have the small rocks, which are like, you know, little little initiatives, little efforts. And then you have the big rocks, the things that, you know, really matter to you, you know, taking that family trip.
Or going and visiting your parents.
Even though you don't have to and maybe you don't have time to do it, but hey, you're gett they're getting older and you wanna go visit them. Or it's learning that new skill or whatever it is. Launching that project.
Those are big rocks.
And if you've put the sand in the jar first and then you say, Great, now I'm gonna fit the big rocks in
They don't go in at all.
But if you put the big rocks in and you say I'm doing these, these have this much space. They're in here.
And then you fill as much sand as you can. It turns out you can fit the whole can you can fit all the
things into the container if you're doing it in the right order.
The sand will fill in all the cracks and crevices.
But the big rocks don't work that way. So you just have to make sure you sort of figure out what are my big rocks? What do I actually really, really care about.
And then how do I put them in the jar first?
Uh not do the first, but even to schedule them first so that
My life doesn't just become
You know, a jar full of sand.
Dude, that's so funny. That's the same analogy that the book the book uh traction that teaches you how to use e their EOS system. They use the exact same analogy on why you should like set goals and work hard and all this stuff. Yeah,'cause it's like a I mean, somebody did this to us in like
high school or something. They did some it's like a magic trick. It's like, oh try to fit all these in. And if you do it in one order, it looks like it's physic impossible. You put it in the other order, it all fits in.
And you're like oh
I didn't need a bigger jar.
I just needed a
Put things in the right order.
Today's episode is brought to you by HubSpot. Did you know that most businesses only use 20% of their data? That's like reading a book but then tearing out four fifths of the pages. Point is you miss a lot. And unless you're using HubSpot, the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business.
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What else did you read this year that you liked?
Um, there's this Howard Marks blog post that I mentioned called Selling Out is the name of the the title. Have you read this blog post? That's a new one.
Was that one of his more recent ones? Uh no. It was in January of twenty twenty two.
Oh, that's cool. What'd he say?
And it's a conversation with his son Andrew.
Howard Marks you
Uh came on the pod and it was awesome.
His son Andrew's also a great investor and and so they were talking and basically they're like uh
You know, the basic idea in investing is buy low, sell high. Okay, great.
Uh, but like when? When do you actually sell on the high? Like do you sell like you know, when it goes up a little bit.
Uh, you know, when it goes up a little more, when it do you wait, you hold it forever, like how do you actually do this?
And um he's talking to his son about it. He's like, Hey, you have this position
You think you should sell?
And his son is like no and he's like well
Is there any price that you would sell?
Like certainly there's gotta be some price and the son's like, Yeah, and so they have this
sort of back and forth, almost like Socratic dialogue. And he basically says like
The the premise of the blog post is
Uh uh.
He's like, There's only two He's like after lots of thought, I've realized that there's only two reasons people sell.
Because things are up or because things are down? And he's like, That sounds a little silly, but let me explain and he's like, you know.
You could sell'cause it's up is in you're taking profits. You're maybe afraid that the gains will go away.
And so you want to do that?
But like
It certainly doesn't make sense to just sell just because it's up, right? That would be like you would be selling, let's say you own Amazon back in nineteen ninety nine.
And it's five dollars a share and it goes to nine and you sell, like obviously that wouldn't have been a good decision. And so like simply saying sell when it's up doesn't make any sense because
How far up and uh
And just always that doesn't work.
And selling when it's down is you know usually a a a
Uh
emotional reaction to things. Panic, fear.
um you know sort of disappointment lead leads people to sell you you the whole market gets pessimistic and so you do too.
So clearly just selling because it's down isn't a good idea. So okay, so then when do you sell?
And basically he talks about the concept of basically it's a it's like an opportunity cost. So uh
All investing is about relative selection.
So
Um, you know, two things. You sort of look at two things. One, i this is all gonna sound very basic, but
The reality is that myself as an investor and most people as investors don't actually
act in accordance with this very simple logic.
So the first part of the logic is
You initially invest in something'cause you have some thesis.
Well, over time you m you'll either feel more validated about that thesis or less. Like, you know, more information will come out.
Does the reason you bought this thing that does that feel more true today or less true today than it did at the time? Yeah. So maybe you believe that this would be uh the best thing ever, then they release the product and it's not so great. So now
you know, your confidence level should go down when that happens. So the first part is like
is the primary like principles behind why you invest it, getting more true or less true.
The second thing is
All investing is relative. So putting a hundred dollars in one stock
Is Wait, sorry, but was he saying that that is the what was he saying for point one, is that the right way or wrong way? That your opinion shouldn't change
No, no, they should change.
As new information comes out, you update your thinking and you say
Well, if the reason I bought the investment is no longer true, like then I need to either had have had a new reason to invest or I should not be investing in the thing. Versus just sticking with it because of cognitive bias of like y y some cost fallacy or cognitive bias trying to like convince yourself that like no no no there's
Despite all this evidence, I still believe, you know, that it's all wrong. The facts are wrong, you know, and and and sort of sort of
going in your s you know, sort of putting blinders on to to reality.
Well, the second part of it is it's all about relative selections, opportunity costs. So
If you were not invested in this, you would be invested in something else.
So do you have you know the uh more conviction in the pr better prospects investing in something else than you do in this?
Right. And so that's the second thing. So he's talking about like
Th there's a third factor which is if you're too concentrated.
And he's talking about with his son Andrew, he's like, you know, you're really concentrated because this thing has gone up. You're overweight, this one thing. He says
Um
His son is basically says, Well, that's true, but it depends on your goals. Right now, s trimming or selling
Would mean selling something that I have immense comfort in.
Based on my bottoms up assessment of it.
And moving into something I feel less good about and know less well.
And to me, I would rather own a small n a smaller number of things, which I feel strongly about.
Because I will only have a few good insights over my lifetime. So I have to maximize the value that I have from those.
And um you know, this is tended to be true across like, you know, m most people who are active investors is that
You only have a few good ideas, whether this is
You know, angel investors who like, you know, the vast majority of their portfolio comes from, you know
Two, three bets that they made out of.
Yeah, potentially hundreds.
Or it's George S Soros saying the most
The most important thing in investing.
is um position size.
Because
You're gonna be wrong a bunch. I think his hit rate was estimated to be about thirty percent correct. So seventy percent wrong.
And he's like so the key the key is that to thirty percent correct. I need to be correct in a big enough way.
Where it's going to make, you know, outsize returns. And I when I'm wrong, I need to be wrong in smaller ways, right? So position sizing.
If the game is all about sizing, like I don't care if you're right if it's too small. And and Stanley Drucken Miller, who's now this legendary investor.
says that's the number one thing he learned from Soros. He came in with a great idea and he expected Soros to say it's too risky or whatever.
And he's like, Well, if you're still confident, we should be betting ten times the size.
Like
Either you're wrong about your thesis or you're wrong about your size.
You can't be right about both right now, because your size is too small on what you're what you're pretending you believe in.
The reason I love talking to people like Howard Marks and I would love to have any of these investors on, not because I particularly care about investing. I find it mildly interesting, but it's uh whatever, it's fine. It's but I care more about what they can teach me about how to live a better life.
Because when I hear you m like talking about like truthing this with investing, I'm like, Oh, I made that mistake with this relationship. Th therefore my flaw is thinking.
Uh is my my thinking is flawed. Um
Did you have any takeaways on how this could apply to life other than just through investing money?
No, I was thinking about it more from a money money point, to be honest. But
I mean his solution. It's not like he gives you like some formula at the end, right? He says the bottom line.
We should base our investments based on our own estimates of the assets potential. So that's the first like you have to think about the assets potential. That's the reason you invest, not because it's up or down.
Um we should not sell just because it's the position has risen.
There could be a ri reason to limit the size or how concentrated you want to be.
But there's no scientific way to calculate what that limit should be. It's a personal choice. And he goes So in the end
It comes down like everything else in investing.
Entirely to judgment.
It so it was less about like how do I apply this philosophy to everything? It's like
Damn dude, everything
You know, judgment is the ultimate lever.
Because the right
It's just like you're saying with relationship, who you pick to marry, where you choose to live.
What you choose to invest in, where you go with your career.
Like these are all judgment calls.
That we put very little thought into.
I would say, you know, most people are pretty thoughtless about about a lot of those decisions.
Or we put very little effort into becoming better at judgment.
Like if I asked you today, how do you become better at judgment and how much time did you spend this year working on that that muscle? None.
None consciously, right?
So consciously we're spending no time on probably the most important muscle to us to to our like long term happiness, right? Because
Your decisions become your destiny. So how do you make better decisions? Do do you study that?
Do I study it? Well, I do a couple of things. I don't know if I study it, but
I told you this before. I I write down all my decisions. So I have this thing called the decision register.
The table.
And I write down
Two things. When I'm making a decision, I write down what it is and why I'm making it.
And my like confidence level in the decision.
And then I go back and I assess the decision register.
And there's two things that come out. First I see was I right or wrong on that. And then the other thing was
What were important decisions that I didn't even realize were important at the time?
Like
going on a whim to that conference. Felt like a small decision at the time, but actually this amazing relationship came out of it and that led to this
You know, a huge outcome for me.
That's a good way to be retroactive.
Explain to me how you said you would write down what it is.
Part of solving the problem is defining the problem. I buy into that.
But how can I use your your framework for making a better decision in the future versus just rectoac looking back and trying to adjust my
So here's here's I I call the d decision survey. So I here's the actual questions I have in a Google Doc.
So first, what is the decision? Write it in the length of a tweet.
So I'm deciding to do
X. Right.
So
Actually write it down.
Then two, check in on your feelings. So what am I feeling right now while I'm making this decision? Is it extreme fear? Some fear, neutral.
Some greed, extreme greed. So like why what is my emotional state when I'm making this decision?
And I know if I'm on either end of the spectrum, you know, on the gr far end of the greed spectrum or up into fear.
Fear spectrum.
Um
I shouldn't be making the decision. It's like going to the grocery store hungry.
Exactly.
Uh, then I write this. I say, What is the one decisive reason to do this? Blended reasons are bad reasons.
So learned this from Reed Hoffman, uh LinkedIn guy or I think he learned it from Peter Thiel, which is
If you want to go do something.
You don't say.
Well it'll be good because I you know, he gives the example of like, Oh, should I go speak at this conference? He's like
Well, it'll be good'cause you know, I've never visited Canada before and um
You know, I might meet some cool people there and it might be a good reason to work on my speech, my public speaking skills.
And you know, it'll be a good time chance to spend time with this person.
And basically that's what bad decisions sound like. You can just blur out the words, but that
If you hear that tone, you're about to make a bad decision. But you're saying bad decision meaning
a bad outcome or you're deciding on the wrong thing.
Like does bad decision mean I'm saying no when I should say yes, or does bad decision mean I'm
I shouldn't even know. Poor judgment process. A poor use of the skill of judgment.
So
A better way to make decisions.
Right, the input, right, making the decision.'Cause the outcome might work out, right? It's like in poker. Sometimes you play
Do seven off suit.
It's a bad decision. You shouldn't have made the bet, but you got lucky. Two s two sevens came out and you you hit trips. Okay, cool.
You don't want to fool let that fool you into thinking, Well, I should always play Do seven. It's my lucky hand, right? That's what really bad players would do. Same way where
There's people who will fold pocket kings'cause they got beat once.
It's like well no, you should always just put your money in with you know, with good odds and then let the
Let things play out based on the probability and over time it'll work in your favor. Right. So you kind of only c you can't do what's called resulting.
Where
You judge every decision only on the result.
Like you have to be able to judge the decision based on
How is the input, not the output?
Uh, which is easier in poker'cause the odds are known than it is in life,'cause the odds are unknown, but you gotta do your best to do it either way.
So anyways, I try to write the one decisive reason. So if I'm gonna go give that talk, it's literally because I wanna go spend time with this person and they live in
Canada and that's why I'll go give that talk.
Uh that's why I'll take the trip.
And if that one reason is not enough to do it, then there's really no reason to do it.
So you should have one reason that's strong enough to do the thing.
And everything else is bonus, but you can't count it.
You gotta and and what I do is I'd I make my strongest reason for
And my strongest reason against.
And then they joust.
So it's like I write the single reason I would do it and the single reason I wouldn't do it and I look at those, I say, Who would win this? If that's an arm wrestling match, who wins? Which one is stronger? But what attributes does each of those arguments have? Like
For example, it could be like I don't wanna
I wanna be around my family versus this one thing could uh change
Mm. I can make a lot of money because it's a a new customer.
First it's gotta be honest.
That's the first thing'cause
I think we're not honest sometimes about why we're doing certain things.
Um, I think it's gotta be concise.
So it can't be a spaghetti reason because your brain can't even understand it.
And then the last is it's gotta figure out you gotta tie it to the value. So right now is your top value
Uh making more money?
Getting in great shape.
Or is it spending time with your loved ones?
Right. They're all good things.
But like do you have one that's that's valued more?
And secondly.
Do you have good substitutes?
So okay I
I could do this to spend that time with this person, but
Couldn't I just
Go hang out with them when they're back.
Right. Couldn't I couldn't I just call them once a week? Is there not like a valid substitute that doesn't have the same cost?
And if there is a valid substitute, you do it.
Okay. Secondly, uh I write down what are the secondary benefits?
And then I ask again, if I took all the secondary benefits away, would I still make the decision? These are all related to
Don't do blended reasons because that's the number one thing that we try to do, especially smart people, because we love making lists.
So we make like long lists.
Like pro you will a lot of times what people do is they do pros and cons and they go
Well the the consless is way longer, therefore that's right.
Yeah, exactly.
Or they just don't even make a decision. They write a big pros and cons list and just paralyze themselves.
I don't know.
It's too complicated.
Right. Like that's that's why you don't want to do that.
So what triggered the decision?
Uh what made me want to do this basically, which is usually uh like
A sneaky way of figuring out the fear and greed thing. It's like, Oh, because my buddy did this and he got this great thing and now I want to. It's like FOMO or something like that.
Seven is what alternatives did I consider?
Which is usually just a test of did you consider any alternatives or you just try to do the first thing that you thought of? And that's a it's a sign of shallow thinking, which results in bad decisions.
A is it a reversible decision? If it's a reversible decision, good. I don't need to worry about it as much. If it's irreversible, I should think about it a lot.
What's the upside if I'm right? What's the downside if I'm wrong?
What follow up is important to make sure this one decision would be higher chance of being a success. So that's kind of like you can almost make a decision a good decision.
If you do it with enough intensity, if you follow up and follow through and do secondary actions.
When and how will I know if this is a success?
And then lastly, um
What do I think is gonna happen?
Just write down a quick prediction of the future. Did you create this?
Yeah.
Pretty good.
Thank you a lot of effort.
Um
Like I'll tell you I do this probably one third of the time I should.
And I would say the average person does it zero percent of the time.
And the reason why is because
It's like
going to church or something. It's like Oh man, I gotta
I gotta I gotta go do this thing. I know it's the right thing to do. I know I should do this. I know it's good for me.
But it takes a little bit of effort and it's gonna require me to be critical of my own thoughts.
And it's so much easier.
To just.
Not check in on those things.
There's this like I don't know what it's called, the a quadrant four four squares, you know, the graph when it's like high urgency versus low urgency and then highly important.
And
Not important.
And I think the idea is like you want to spend you have to allocate a certain amount of time
Two things that are not urgent.
And are very important. Right. But that bucket tends to get no love.
Typically it's
Unimportant and urgent.
And important and urgent.
And because of that, you don't make all you don't you don't invest enough time that has actually builds the foundation to a lot of things in the future. And what's really fascinating is is that we're discussing like how do you get good at making decisions.
Which is like one of like the top ten things on earth you could ever potentially learn, right? Like and yeah, I have never actually thought about that.
I've tried to read um
Charlie Munger is like famous for being like um an interesting thinker in his um
when he died recently, they wrote an article about him and he like had these funny quotes where he was like
You know, it was really hard in life because I just
knew I was so much better than everyone else. And even though I talked a lot, I wanted to talk so much more to show how much better I was than everyone else. So he's this like really really cocky guy.
But his like thinking is very good.
And I have like tried to read poor Charlie's Almanac like
five different times and I just find it incredibly boring. But now that that I think about it, you find it boring too?
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm like, I should love this. On paper, everything about this, I should love it. And then you read it and it's like oh I'm reading about Charlie's grandkid. Do I care about this? No, no, no.
And
It's just a little slow to give me some like I need I don't know. I I need some I'm like a kid. I need some zingers every few minutes. Well he has like this speech which is like
Him and a lot of other people really love these like cognitive biases. Like one of I think his he gave this talk once called like the
Top reasons of human misjudgment.
Right. So it's about this exact topic. And I've listened to that. It's good.
But I find it pretty hard to memorize like twenty three cognitive biases and carry them around in my head all the time.
and like identify them when they're happening and then like find some root cause.
And I find a much easier thing is this sort of like Socratic method.
Of like, Well, what are you doing?
I'm doing this.
What makes you think that that's a good idea? Do this.
How will you know if this worked? I don't know. Stop asking me questions. But like that Socratic method.
to me is like just a much clearer indicator of when I know what I'm doing and it's a I'm making a good decision or I'm making a bad decision and it helps me avoid things.
Um in the moment. The other thing is just time. So like don't uh
Don't do don't don't try to make a decision in the same you know, in in in the same time you're sort of tr gathering information or don't you know, sleep on it or like let three days go by as a cool down period.
If you can. It's like same thing with like any impulse control, right?
You need if you just add a time delay.
You
Can
Avoid a lot of mistakes.
When I was younger, um in my t early twenties and late teens, I used to do book reports on all the books that I read.
And I still occasionally do it, but before it was like I'm gonna read this one book this quarter.
And I'm gonna read the bibliography and like all the cited sources and I'm gonna master this. And then I'm gonna write a book report on it.
And one quarter it was like um
The Forty Eight Laws of Power because I was like, Well, if you like learn about like power, like then I could see when people are trying to manipulate me and if I want to get powerful, hopefully I can memorize it. And I was like, But there's forty eight of them. How on earth am I supposed to memorize all of them? And so for the longest time, if you Google forty eight laws of power summary
I had this Google Doc that I wrote and I wrote all my thoughts and I wrote and I summarized all forty eight laws.
And I
share the document with people, but you know when you share on Google Doc, you sometimes put like share with link.
Or sorry, uh share a link to anyone.
You forget that that's searchable on Google. Right.
And so for the longest time, I think it was like three years, my Google Doc was number one.
And every time I logged in, there'd be hundreds of people on this document. And it was so funny that it became number one. And then what I did was I I put made it so people could comment.
And so people started commenting on it and they would add like interesting like takeaways and stuff. So it was like a um
crowdsourced thing. It was actually really cool.
But I was obsessed with like how do I memorize this stuff. And now that you're talking about this Charlie Ammonac thing, I'm like
I've just said I've tried to read this like tons of times and right now I'm telling myself and everyone else listening that this is important, but I have not done it. I need to do this. This is actually so fascinating. And a really interesting interesting thing is
I asked myself, I w like, do do I wish I would have done this three years ago?
Yes, I should probably do it like immediately then.
Because I will be less regretful if I do it in the future. And so this is funny that that we're talking about.
Well
Naval had this thing about reading that changed kind of the way I think about reading.
So I I I used to
approaches similar to you, which is like m I'm reading to get information. I'm really reading to learn something. So I was like
This book contains stuff.
The goal is to get the stuff from the book to be stuff in my head.
Right.
And
That was hard.
And sometimes I'd be like, Oh, this stuff isn't that great, or Oh my God, how am I gonna memorize all this? How am I gonna remember any of this? Do I remember s stuff I read recently? No, I don't, does this even work?
And Naval put it differently, he goes.
When you read, it's like rubbing two sticks together.
All you're trying to do is create a little bonfire in your brain.
So he's like you're looking to spark a thought, an idea.
So you read not to get the stuff all the stuff from the book to be all the stuff in your head.
You're reading to just catalyze some spark, some thoughts, some uh some realization, some thought process, some new idea.
in your mind. And if you look at books as
creating that spark in your mind, you look at them very, very differently.
And so you don't need to even you often don't even read the whole book.
You don't feel any guilt towards that?
You don't need to remember things from the book.
The book just needs to be a consistent tool.
to get you to think more interestingly and think um more deeply
In the moment itself.
And if you just do that habitually
You'll just consistently be a good thinker.
And um once I started doing that.
But once I sort of kinda went into reading with that mindset, I enjoyed it a lot more.
'Cause it was way less pressure.
There was way less obligation. I didn't feel obligated to finish. I didn't feel obligated to remember.
All I felt obligated to do was ask like what thoughts does this spark in my head?
And when I started paying attention to that, like it changed you know how I read.
All right, let's take a quick break because I gotta tell you a story. Let me tell you about the first time I tried to run payroll for my team. I was using a traditional bank and you know the type. It's got a janky interface.
It's built like a two thousand and two tax form and it was open only during business hours. And I hit send.
And it froze. They flagged the transaction, they locked my account, they put me on hold for 45 minutes, and then they told me I gotta visit my local branch.
And that was the day I started looking for a new banking solution.
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Did you read anything else?
That you like to share?
Uh, I read a lot of stuff. I mean
fiction. Uh there's this book called The Will of the Many. Highly recommend.
If you like stuff that's in the kind of like Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, like fantasy, sci fi, like it's not sci fi, it's more fantasy.
But it's basically this book that's like
This kind of uh it's like mirrors like the Roman
Like the Roman political structure.
So like when there was like you know the the
Um
the th there's like a hierarchy. And so uh the will of the many
was a good book and it's it's a series. The second book just came out strength of the few. I just crushed that one. That was yeah, I'm I'm into this series right now. This is a good series.
And like for me, one of the great joys of life is like getting into one of these like
fictional series, like whether it's again Game of Thrones or Harry Potter or like one of these one of these different ones. But they're pretty hard to find. They're pretty hard to get into
'Cause it's a lot of world building.
When you do
It's like really, really rich. And um Jack Carr this year. You know Jack Carr?
He does what, mystery novels or what does he do?
Is it like war, like Tom Ryan or whatever? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's called The Terminal List. And we actually had'em on on My First Million. The James Reese series, uh, which starts with tur the terminal list, which is like the bestseller.
Dude, it's crazy. So this guy was a we had him on on the pod. I didn't want you to come because I wanted to nerd out with him and I was embarrassed as as like how much I like love this book because it's one of these things where you read one of these books and you like fall in love with like these fake things.
And you like don't want to like
Tell anyone else.
And you're like you're sad that it's over and you're like, I have to remind myself that this person isn't real.
Like there's been times that like I've read a fiction book and I'm like Googling. I like need to see like did other people ever draw this character or was an act did an actor ever play them so I can like you know like get to know them further. Uh that's how it was with the with this guy and uh Jack Carr. What would you read? Which books do you read?
Seven of'em. He's got like I think he's got like six or seven of'em. I've read almost all of them.
And he's got a he's got a bunch of'em. He's the one of the more prolific guys. I don't know how he writes so much, but he was
If you came on the podcast, what was like
Is there like the one thing you remember from what he said, or did he say anything really insightful?
So listen to this. He was a Navy SEAL where he was he was bad. He was a bad of the bone dude.
And
He uh basically started writing these books, which was funny because writing is not like a very typical masculine thing, writing fiction, writing stories.
Wait, this guy is like
I mean he's a masculine dude.
And he starts writing these like he writes like this. Like his grip on the pen and like when he's thinking, he's like picking his teeth with like a big knife. Like But he's like a pretty hardcore dude and yet when he talked to us
He was very soft. He was the politeest guy. І сон.
And the book series is basically a Navy SEAL who was wronged and he goes to the end of the world in order to uh wrong the right.
And it just so happens that it gets into different like adventures, you know, seven different times, seven different books. Sort of like James Bond, like how on earth is one guy like constantly saving the world. So but it was crazy how soft this guy was, yet at the same time, he was like very
I mean he he had definitely has killed a lot of people before and he was like this pretty hardcore dude, but he was so gentle and I found it really
Mm.


Is that a weird thing to take away?
Well this a it's a thing you do a lot, which is
Like we have someone on and you're almost like a feeler rather than a listener.
Like you you're more into their vibe and their persona.
Always. It's always the first thing. Um like which is cool. I I it I I it's different than like the way I
But like I I find that
Often when I ask you about somebody, it's always like
The way they were, not what they said.
Which is cool. And I think actually there's probably a lot of people pick that like that is what we pick up.
From people is like the unspoken.
But
You are like particularly in tune with that. So I felt that way with John Morgan. Like I don't even remember half the stuff that he said, but like he had this cowboy vibe that I was into.
I'm all vibes. That's an interesting observation. I do I do do that all the time.
What did we I don't even remember what him and I talked about. I can't remember anything. But then you will do these things constantly.
Well, you recall these stories.
And they're very minute. Like
I've been with you and
Yeah, I've heard you retell the story and you'll be like
And he set this thing down and he looked at us and he said this thing
And I'm like, He did? I don't even remember that. How do you remember that one like I don't I don't think of those details or like I we've been with like I you've told stories of Furcon and you'll like retell a story with a detail that I had no idea. But I just remember him as like a really nice guy.
Yeah, it's it's kinda interesting also to s figure out like
What?
What do you want to observe?
Right like
I wonder how intentional you could be about that.
And be like, Well how do I like can I change like my little like metal detector here? You know what I mean? Like can I
Could I actually improve it? Could I be more intentional about what it is? Or is it just like
That's innate. It's very hard to change. It's sort of like people who say they're bad at names.
And I'm like No you're not. You just don't care.
So like I'm someone said that to me. I was like, I'm bad at names and they're like, No, you just don't care.
And that bothered me. And so I was like, Okay, I care. So whenever I meet someone, so if someone recognizes me on the street
I'll say what's up, man, what's your name? Kevin?
Okay, Kevin, where are you from, Kevin? You're from you're from Idaho. Okay, Kevin from Idaho. Man, it was so good to meet you. Um thanks, Kevin man. Like I'll like you like repeat it a bunch of times and then you associate. And you I I'll associate with where he's from. And so I will always remember someone's name all because someone made me feel bad. And so
I I think I should change to like rally remember like certain details. And the way that I think you have to remember those details that you're referring to is you have to remember s the story.
It all has to be the story.
So
Eric Jorgensen is another thing I read this year. So Eric Jorgensen he runs Scribe and he wrote the Navalmanac.
So he wrote a book that compiled like all of Naval's wisdom. Dude, I think he sold a million copies of that.
Is that true?
I think he sold a lot more than that.
More than one million copies?
Yeah.
How many books have sold more than one million?
He's made
He's made a lot of money off that book. And it's great because the the funny thing is the genre of that book
is a in your own words.
In his own words.
biography type of book, right? So he doesn't write
himself. He compiles what Naval said.
Without adding any of his own commentary.
Naval has this philosophy of like you open source
your material, you let other people sort of fork it, remix it.
And like your ideas spread. Like what more do you want than your ideas to spread?
This is a win win for everyone.
Right. So so he's doing one on Elon right now. So he sent me a d like an advanced copy of his Elon book.
And
I was excited and I cracked it open and one thing that I like right away is
You know, smart by Eric, which is
He puts something that you don't already know about Elon.
At the front.
Just to at least signal to you there's gonna be shit in here that you don't already know, assuming you're like any lawn general like
fanboy or you know, you're you're in the tech bubble already. If he was like, Yeah, Elon likes to think for first principles. I'm like, I know, I know I've read all this shit before.
But he talks about uh it's a qu it's
Elon talking about memory.
And he's like, Yeah, like when I was a kid, I learned how to do these like memory palaces. He's like, You can remember pretty much anything.
If you learn that like memory is a skill and there's like a way to do it. Is that like walk into a house? Yeah, like you know, like the idea of a memory palace, like you like create like a physical
um revie you know, structure in your mind.
And then you sort of link
The the thing to a room or a location, a visual object.
And then you create a little bit of like a story of like walking through from one to the next. Like So like the people who could the people who could memorize like all the cards. They're like the king is like a real king and the number seven is a house. There's a king in a house. He meets a queen, so he has a wife. The king is the one. And on Seven's Lane, his wife, the queen
She loved diamonds and so she yeah, and you do that and that's how you sort of build this thing.
So it's like Elon talking about like memory palaces. And I was like, this is great. I'm like, just give me more Elon stuff. I need, I'm happy to get.
You know, an unlimited buffet of like new Elon anecdotes and nuggets. Cause like how rare is that, right?
So I thought that was pretty cool. And in general, his book is really good. It's gonna be good.
I can't believe he has sold that many copies on that book.
That is absolutely insane.
So one of the topic I was gonna do today is a work smarter, not harder.
Topic.
And uh Eric is an example of this, so
How do you write a best selling book that sells millions of copies?
Well
Yeah.
What if I told you it's um
None of your ideas?
And none of your words.
Would that interest you? It's like a a way smarter way to write a bestseller, right?
So Eric doing that.
There's this incredible interview that came out that there's a clip that came out. Did you hear it? It's uh A con talking about his music.

No, what do you say?
So Akon the Rapper.
He was on a podcast and he g s told the story. He's like
They were like, dude, so you you know, you you had a crazy career, you know, they were talking about his Guinness book of world records.
That he owns for ringtones.
He tells the story. He's like, Yeah, man, he's like I was
Recording music.
And at the time the way we sold music was you would sell your single on iTunes and it'd be a dollar ninety nine for your four minute song.
She's but then I'll walk around and I saw everybody had a phone
And they were all had a s like a ring tone. They had a song as their thing.
So I asked somebody I said, Hey
Do you get to pick what that is though? Yeah, he goes
How much did that cost? Is it free? And they go, No, you pay for it.
Four ninety nine.
It's four ninety nine.
A four minute song is one ninety nine.
Ten second ring tone is four ninety nine.
He goes and then even better he goes, I asked my I call my lawyer, I say, Hey um
Check my contract with the record label.
What's the cut on ringtones?
And he's like, calls him back, he's like
Acon, there's nothing about ringtones in here.
There's no there's nothing about digital anything.
Uh like he there's nothing for ringtons, he goes.
Yeah, say less. So he hangs up the phone he goes, I started making music
Songs that were meant to be ringtones. Every song I did I would focus on how is this a ringtone?
So Mr. Lonely became the number one ringtone in the world, and he wrote that song to be a ringtone.
He's like, I would write the song with a ringtone in mind. I would record it with a ringtone in mind. I would chop it up and make it really easy for these songs to be ringtones.
And he's like, um I broke the Guinness Book of World Records. I sold eleven million ringtones.
It goes four ninety nine, that's fifty five million dollars of gross sales on ringtones.
And he's like, I became the ringtone king. And then he's like, Then the next time they tried to redo my contract, they tried to slip in
Oh and ringtone sales exact.
Let's take that out right there. Nope You know, that's not going in the contract. We're gonna have to renegotiate a separate deal on that.
I just thought it was brilliant. The A A con ringtone, work smarter, not harder. How do you sell
A ten second song.
For five times the pri or you know, for for for two times the price as a four minute song. I so remember like being fourteen and hearing girls that had that on there. I'm gonna put that on my as my ringtoe now.
Can you do ring tones? Does that still work?
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nobody has a ringtone now. No, I did. If you called by it was a remix version of the Nokia one and actually had beads. It started off like a normal like cross came back. Can you just bring ringtones back? I feel like if
Feel like if I was the music industry, the number one thing I would try to do is bring ringtones back. Well, do you know what I here's let me tell what I'm bringing back.
In my house, we b I bought a uh D V D player.
And an activity, because I don't let my kids watch TV, but I'm letting them like on sometimes on Saturday when we're like over like if it's just me watching two kids and I'm overwhelmed, I'm like, I need like something, but I don't want to turn YouTube on because I don't like the ads and stuff. And so I've got a DVD player. And we go to there's a thrift store down the street from my house and there's DVDs, and I will find the DVD and it's incredibly fun.
to like put the DVD in there. And there's this new toy. Have you seen this toy called um
You don't know. It's the little red thing, right? That plays music. That plays music. Yeah, what's that called? Like the yuck box or yum like it starts with a Y.
Uh
Mm.
They kill it.
Are we just old?
Tony's.
What is it?
There's two of them.
There's one that starts with a Y as well, so there's is it Okay.
It's a in the it's called Tony's is like the box and you put like a disc in it.
You put
It's a it's a box and then you put a character on top, like a record.
And then it just starts to play songs.
But actually you buy it and then it doesn't connect to your Wi Fi'cause you don't have a two two G connection only a five G that's that's my story about with the Tony's it doesn't connect?
Doesn't connect. You gotta have two G.
Gonna have less Gs. I don't I don't I have too many Gs. Like I I mean, yeah, I don't even have like five G. I've got one above that, I think. But they um
Like it's an incredible toy.
Like I'm playing with this and so we're actually I'm actually t on the hunt for a a boom box.
I wanna buy a boom box.
Where you just put the C D in and a cassette tape and click play. It's so fun.
We've had so much fun in my house, like doing some of this stuff.
Uh, Tony's these guys crush, by the way. They do like
Yeah. Like
Hundreds of millions. So Tony's
Uh let's see, is this the right thing?
Yeah.
Five hundred and ten million euros last twelve months.
Five hundred and ten million euros on this
Kids boom box.
Isn't that insane?
Tony's uh the other one is Yodo. That's the one I got. Y O T O. Have you seen Yodo?
No.
It's like the same thing. I don't know how they're different.
But I just remember one time I typed in Yodo and it said like Yodo versus Tony's.
Hundred twenty seven million in revenue. Are you joking me? What what's going on? Crazy, right?
It's it's an incredible toy.
It's ridiculous.
This makes me mad. Why? It's pretty brilliant.
Yeah, that's what makes you mad.
That the brilliance was not mine.
Dude, I follow this guy on Instagram now who started um
Poppy. I don't know how he came on my feed, but I saw him and I I thought it was me. He looks just like me, but he's better looking.
Have you seen what he looks like?
Poppy the drink? Yeah, Poppy founder, the man. It's a husband and wife. Look'em up. Let's see, let's see.
So you thought this was you?
No, click a video, go to his Instagram.
Yes, trust me, go to his Instagram right now. I'm telling you.
Look at the videos.
I was like, Am I really a billionaire uh C B G guy or what?
Ha.



Hm.
I said, Wanna do a video together, we look alike.
And he said, Could be funny, let's do it.
Yeah.

He's got a podcast?
Better podcasting. I don't know if he has a podcast, but he just like does the Instagram shit.
Dude, are you mad? This guy's just taking everything you work for?
And I was shocked at just like
Do you know that Poppy sold for like
Two or three billion dollars.
And it started out as a probiotic.
Soda?
The w that sounds like the worst idea ever.
He lives in Austin? Oh my God, this guy's
You. Yeah.
If he wants to trade spots, we can we could talk. Uh he uh
Just crushed it on that. And it's like the ultimate hack. When you start a company with your wife and it works and you both get all of the equity.
Yeah.

Uh, yeah, that's crazy. Is that it? Is that the pod?
Alright, that's it. That's it. That's the part. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to.
I'm put my all in it like my day song on the road, less travel, never looking back. All right, everyone, if you're listening to MFM, you probably want to make more money. Well, I want to tell you about a podcast you might want to check out. It's called The Sales Evangelist, and it's hosted by Donald Kelly.
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