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Okay, so the news is this.
Search this video
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If you've been listening to this podcast, you know that Shepherd is a business that I'm a part owner in.
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I've been talking about it on the podcast, and it's a great business.
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And last week, news broke that there was a private buyout of a majority stake in the company for $52 million at a $52 million valuation.
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It was done by Nick Huber.
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I had the opportunity to sell my shares in that. I decided not to. Not a single share.
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I'm holding every single share.
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So, today we're going to talk about I guess we'll tell the story of, you know, how Shepherd even grew in 4 years to be a $52 million company, how I ended up getting involved with the becoming a owner in the business, and why one of the owners in the business did this buyout, how they they took $29 million and bought the majority controlling stake in the company. So, that's the news.
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Now, here's the backstory. All right, Sean.
0:54
Uh last week, you guys had a big announcement.
0:56
So, you and Nick bought Shepherd. And that's amazing.
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And I didn't I didn't do it. Nick did it, not me.
1:02
Yeah, but you were part of it. You were part of it.
1:04
You're you're you're one of the partners.
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And I guess maybe I'm going to interview you at least for this first segment, cuz I want to learn all about it. Sure.
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I think it's amazing what Nick has done.
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So, let's start with the beginning.
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Explain what Shepherd is, and then I guess that we'll start it in like 2020 when it started and explaining like how it grew and what happened last week.
1:25
Yeah, so there's a guy named Marshall Haas, who was entrepreneur done a bunch of different things.
1:29
I think he owns like a hotel in St. Louis.
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He had a bunch of e-commerce companies.
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Some goofy one, like some emoji something something.
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Then he had Peel, which was like a phone phone case type of like a thin phone case.
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So, he was in e-commerce.
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And one of the common things with e-commerce is e-commerce is like a real business, but it's like a lemonade stand business. Every margins matter.
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And so, what a lot of e-commerce operators do, and I did this too with my e-commerce friend, I think 60% of our staff is is offshore, is because margins matter, you have to figure out a certain a specific problem, which is how do I get great talent at without paying the full cost without paying the full cost of hiring Stanford grads and Harvard grads or or you know, even just a normal median worker in the states.
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And so a lot of us, we go to talent hotbeds like Latin America, where you find great programmers or data analysts or the Philippines, where you can find a great customer support team that will um you know, do the job at a fraction of the cost.
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Usually about five times less than it costs in the states.
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So five times less is like pretty massive.
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So Marshall's running Peel, he starts hiring more more people overseas and he decides to start a company called Support Shepherd.
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Which at the time was ridiculous.
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I saw I'm friends with Marshall on Facebook.
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I've been friends with Marshall since 16 or or 14.
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When he told me he was doing this, I was like, this is silly.
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But then I saw the branding.
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The website pretty much looked the way it does now from the beginning.
2:52
Well, he uses your favorite color of green as well.
2:53
And so And so he he creates this brand and you're right like uh the idea of hiring talent overseas is not new.
3:00
This has been going on for a long time.
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I remember my dad once bought this book called The World is Flat.
3:03
And I was a little kid and I read this book and it was all about globalization of talent.
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Uh and it was something that big companies were doing, but more and more small companies have been doing this, startups uh and the like.
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Especially for specific roles, right?
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So anyways, he starts this company and it starts doing decently well.
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He's promoted on Twitter and starts to grow. So now Nick comes along.
3:25
Nick Huber from Sweaty Startup. Exactly.
3:28
Nick's got a storage company, he's in the real estate space and what people don't know is Nick has certain companies like uh he has a cost segregation business.
3:34
Cost seg is basically when you buy a property, you do a cost seg study and it allows you to accelerate your depreciation.
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So instead of depreciating something over 30 years, you might be able to accelerate the schedule to seven years.
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It saves you a bunch of money in year one.
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So it's well worth the it's well worth the trade to go pay for cost seg study in order to save the money.
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So, most people who do a cost seg, they hire US talent.
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What he does, all of his talents like in Columbia. They do it on an iPad.
3:58
You like walk around with an iPad, right? how it works.
4:01
So, the way it works is it and I'm far from an expert.
4:03
The way that I understand it is basically typically real estate has something like a 30-year lifespan.
4:08
What they came in and said, "Look, the rules actually say that your windows can depreciate in 10 years.
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Your roof is actually only 15 years.
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So, what I need you to do is do a video tour with one of our people on the phone and I have a a checklist of things I need you to show me in the home and you got to walk through and spend about 30 minutes just walking through the house."
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And I did that and the person was I knew he was I mean, he he spoke perfect English, but I thought he was overseas and I was like, "I actually don't know where you are."
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I for some reason I thought it was in Europe.
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I had no idea where he was and there was a guy on the other line as I'm like looking through the house and he's marking down what type of windows I have and things like that. Right. And so, pretty crazy.
4:44
That used to be something you somebody walks on foot through the building and has a clipboard or a piece of paper and now you've got low-cost talent in Columbia that are getting it done for you, right?
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So, anyways, he builds that business.
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So, he's using Shepherd Lot.
4:57
So, he ends up going to Marshall and uh cuts an affiliate deal.
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I think initially it was an affiliate deal, which was just, "Hey, uh if I send you traffic, if I tell people, 'Hey, I'm using Shepherd, it's great.'
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Give me a cut of the fees that you that you generate, the revenue that you generate." Marshall says, "Yes."
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Nick starts sending traffic and along the way, Nick goes back and he says, "You know what?
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Affiliate's great, but my beak's not wet enough.
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I need a little more skin in the game."
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So, he cuts a deal with Marshall to end up becoming a part owner of the business.
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Business continues to grow.
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Last year, almost a year to the day, I become a partner in the business. I approach Marshall.
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I say, "Hey, same same story.
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I'm a power user of the product.
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I have a big audience and I think I can help grow your business."
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Did this all come from the place of it'd be cool to grow company based off of your influence?
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I had a lesson, which was invest in your P&L.
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And this was a lesson I learned the hard way, which was when I was running my startup studio.
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And for 6 years I was trying to make a successful try I was trying to be successful make money.
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And what I learned in the end was that a lot of the I would have made 100 times more money had I simply look at our expenses in our P&L.
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And just knocked on their door and said, "Hey, can I invest?
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I'm a big fan of your product.
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I'm an early user of this product.
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I really understand this product and whenever you're raising your next round at whatever valuation, do that.
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Maybe I can help you out in some small way.
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And you know, we were I was one of the you know, first I don't know 200 companies using Slack, uh elastic search, PagerDuty we were using early on, Figma we were using early on.
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Like all of these like tons of them.
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Like I I don't even know.
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Like there's like 20 apps like this.
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And so I learned this lesson the hard way, which is you should always try to invest in your P&L.
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So you look at your expenses, you figure out which expense is meaningful.
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It's a line item that you notice, but you don't regret it.
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It's an unregretted expense.
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Meaning it was worth more than the than the cost.
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And so I looked at mine and I was basically like "This overseas recruiting is one cuz I'm getting great talent."
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So I went to Marshall and I said, "Hey, love the product.
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I said I love this category, too."
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So I said, "I'm not for sure going to invest in your business, but you're my first pick and I'm going to I I use your product. So let's talk."
7:01
And so we we ended up working out a deal.
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And it was a a great deal for me what actually I thought at the time was a great deal for me.
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It turned out to be an even better deal for Marshall.
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So he had a lot of wisdom in making that deal.
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Because I thought I was getting a favorable deal, but he understood the power of the audience and he understood the power of what we could bring to the table.
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And he listened to MFM, he saw what we were doing on Twitter.
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He had no they could come on MFM before and mentioned it and it was like their biggest day in in a year or something like that.
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So he kind of had a he had enough validation to take a leap of faith.
7:30
Uh but it was still to be clear a leap of faith.
7:32
So it turns out better than we expected.
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Like we had forecasted how much we thought we could grow the business and I try to over always under promise over deliver type of thing.
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So I was like, "Look, I think we can, you know, maybe 50%, maybe 75%."
7:43
We basically grew it by 300%.
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So, the business has basically tripled in the last year, valuation grew, and along the way, different acquisition offers came up, and I went to Nick one day, and I was like, "Hey, look, there's an acquisition offer.
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I think this thing still got a lot of runway to run."
7:56
And actually, the initial idea was, "Nick, why don't we What if we bought it?
7:59
What if we raised the money and we bought this thing?"
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So, most people don't know that.
8:03
That was the initial conversation, and Nick's like, "I'm I'm thinking the exact same thing.
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Uh let's talk to Marshall and see."
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Within an hour, I'm like, "Too much work. Never mind.
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Nick, I don't want to do this.
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This is too much effort for me.
8:14
It'd be a huge transaction."
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Like, he to buy this business.
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So, what what actually ended up happening is Nick announced, he said, "Big news.
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Yesterday, I acquired a controlling interest in Support Shepherd for 29. 7 million." So, he paid 29.
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7 million dollars to buy enough to become a controlling owner of the business.
8:31
I think he said the valuation.
8:33
I think Yeah, maybe they did it in a different way.
8:35
Fi- 52 million was the valuation that said 52 million dollars.
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And so, which is pretty amazing, cuz from the time one year I literally one year ago, I think it was April or May that we we did the in my deal, that means the value of the company has more than tripled in a year.
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So, you know, just tremendous value growth, a win for everybody involved.
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My stake grew, Nick's stake grew, Marshall did obviously phenomenally well, and Nick goes and he basically raises the money.
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And so, he raises the money to to go and buy, you know, basically for 30 million bucks, he buys a controlling stake in the business. Hey, real quick.
9:03
As you know, we're big on ideas here.
9:05
We love bringing new ideas, business ideas, brainstorming ideas for the podcast.
9:10
Well, a lot of people ask, "What do you do with all those ideas? Can we go find them?
9:13
Is there a list somewhere?"
9:13
The great people at HubSpot have put together a business ideas database. It's totally free.
9:18
If you just click the link in the description below, you can go download a collection of over 50 plus business ideas that are from the archive, listed out for you, curated.
9:27
And so, what are you waiting for? Go download it. It's free. Check it out.
9:30
It's in the description below.
9:30
All right, back to the show.
9:31
My little crew, we we threw in a little a little Welcome to the team. Finally.
9:37
Yeah, we're we're very very very small stakeholders Uh amongst this thing.
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It was hurting me to get rich without you. I got to be honest.
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It kept me up at night a few days. That's all right.
9:43
We we we have a very small taste of it.
9:45
But okay, so it here's what I wanted to bring up.
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About two or three years ago, you and I did a podcast where we said, "Look, there's all these people who have created billion-dollar companies off of Instagram.
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They've done it off of YouTube.
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Um they've done it off of Facebook.
10:02
There's not really been any breakout hits off of Twitter yet cuz Twitter's audience is a bit small.
10:07
Uh but I was like, I think it's good.
10:09
I think we both said it's great because it's text-based.
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You get to know people, whatever.
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And there's it's a B2B crowd a little bit more so than High-value crowd.
10:15
Yeah, more so than the other places.
10:17
And it hasn't happened yet.
10:20
But I think it is happening right now.
10:20
I I think I don't know if this is going to be a billion-dollar company, but I think the fact that Huber uh like went out and raised this money to do this, that is a big swing and it took a lot of courage for him to do that.
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And it could our our prediction could be coming true as we speak.
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Very ballsy move, I got to say.
10:37
Very ballsy move to do this.
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And I tweeted this, I go, "Ballsy move.
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I can't wait to see how this plays out."
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And people thought that was a negative thing.
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But to me I literally just meant like, "Oh my god, I can't wait to see how this how this ends."
10:48
Like what is the story what is the story going to be?
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And I think it's going to end really well.
10:50
It's not ballsy to bet Wait, it's ballsy that he took the ball in his court and he's like trying to do this thing.
10:55
And I And by the way, what I tell everyone is I don't want to bet against Nick.
10:58
Nick is a is a really good entrepreneur.
11:00
And if someone could pull it off, I I have faith that he can pull it off.
11:03
You know, when you watch somebody play sports, you learn a lot about them.
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And I played basketball with Nick Huber.
11:07
He is a He is a workhorse.
11:09
He's an incredibly physical player.
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He's an incredible He comes to the pickup games with a mouth with a mouthpiece in.
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It's like, "Bro, I don't know how much contact you're planning for, but it's more than I was ready for today."
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And so you see you learn how he operates.
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Let me tell you a couple things about this.
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So Nick could have been on cruise control.
11:26
The guy owned self-storage facilities.
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Self-storage is literally a closet you lock.
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It's the like like the least operational thing you could possibly do.
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It's literally put your put your objects in this door and lock it forever.
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I I think it's a hundred million dollars worth of self-storage units that he owns.
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So, it's a significant amount.
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My point being is he's kind of financially he uh He could have been He could have been in a good spot. He loves to hunt. He's got little kids. He loves to do outdoors. He loves to play sports.
11:55
He could have just been chilling.
11:56
Then he has a Twitter audience, so he starts He could have done affiliate deals.
11:59
He started launching all these agencies.
12:00
He's like, "I got a SEO agency."
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He's like, "I got a hiring agency.
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I got a you know, I don't forgot what else he has." He's got Costa.
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He's got like seven different agencies he started.
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And any of those would have brought in, I don't know, 50 to 100K a month. Enough.
12:13
He could have been totally chill. He chose violence. He chose to not chill.
12:18
He chose to bet his entire career, put his entire network and net worth on the line, basically, to say this is to take this bold bet. And you love to see it. I love to see it.
12:31
I don't think it's going to fail.
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I think the even the worst case it's it's a very survivable thing.
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I think best case is is quite huge.
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It could be a very big outcome for him.
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And I think it's so cool that he's doing this. Yeah, yeah, it is.
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And like look, I thought we were taking a big bet when like when I put my name on something or Nick puts their name on something, it's got to be good cuz we're spending all this time, years building up a reputation, years building up a loyal trusted audience.
12:52
At the end of the day, you got to turn over your cards.
12:56
And if you don't have if you don't have the hand, you know, you were just bluffing the whole time. And you can't do that.
13:00
Nick took it to a whole new level, which is to basically say, "Forget all my other [ __ ] I'm going all in on this."
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And I think that's that's really awesome.
13:07
Okay, so now let me tell you the big picture take.
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So, forget Shepherd for a second.
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This is part of a general idea I've had for a while, couple years now, which is the idea of an audience co-founder.
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So, when I started my first companies, I knew I needed like I myself as an entrepreneur could do part of what was needed to to succeed.
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To succeed, you need to build a great product.
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You need to say identify a gap, build a product that fills that gap.
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You have to have the maybe a technical uh team in order to build the product.
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You need money, you need a bunch of things.
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And as a founder, you try to go do all the things.
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You try to identify the gap, you try to go raise the money, you try to go recruit a team.
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But it's hard to do by yourself.
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And so, very common in Silicon Valley is to have a a technical co-founder.
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And a technical co-founder is, you know, that's the person who's going to do the the engineering, the building, and you rely on them to do that.
13:51
And you're saying, "I'm going to do the the the other components of this business."
13:55
Well, now I think there's a more more common playbook, which is the idea of an audience co-founder.
13:59
What an audience co-founder is is you partner with somebody who has a has a cheat code in go-to-market. Right?
14:06
They have a advantage, they have an unfair advantage that is non-fungible, that is non um you not easy to recreate yourself.
14:11
It they And what they do is they essentially lower your cost of customer acquisition.
14:15
Um sometimes to the point of being zero, sometimes negative, but it definitely lowers it. Which isn't new.
14:20
The this isn't new, you know, George Foreman and then since the beginning of time, we've talked about celebrity partnerships of Exactly. So so they've evolved.
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And so, what I that's what I wanted to bring up, like the evolution of these.
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So, for example, you got the Foreman Grill.
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And it used to be you hire a celebrity, they hold your product, they smile, "Buy this product." Right? That was an endorsement.
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Then this then they on the the audience people, they they got a little bit wiser.
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They said, "Oh, instead of just taking cash for this, I'll take some equity, too. Thank you very much."
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So, they start taking equity, too.
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And you're going to put my name and face on it, then that means I'm going to have to own a piece of this.
14:52
So, you get the Foreman Grill, you get all of these celebrity alcohol brands.
14:55
You get McGregor doing Proper Whiskey.
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I think McGregor owned about 15 to 20% of Proper Whiskey.
15:00
You have Logan Paul and Prime.
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I don't know, but I think it's something on the order of magnitude of 20 or 30%.
15:05
You've got Clooney doing his tequila, you got The Rock doing his tequila, you got Ryan Reynolds doing his gin.
15:10
You got a bunch of people that do the the sort of celebrity alcohol brand, the celebrity cosmetics brand, right?
15:16
Rihanna with Fenty Beauty.
15:16
But But each time it's getting a little more and more tied in with the co-founder.
15:20
So, you go from hold up the product and ding, play the jingle to putting my name and face on it to actually it's named after me.
15:30
Actually, I'm going to be the one creating the media that we use to market this thing.
15:34
Instead of you paying me twice a year to come to some to some commercial shoot, I'm going to be posting every day. I'm Kylie Jenner.
15:39
I'm going to be posting every day on my Instagram stories about this. I'm Conor McGregor.
15:43
I'm going to be reposting tons of material on this.
15:45
I'm going to take a bottle to the press conference. I'm Logan Paul.
15:48
I'm going to take a a you know, a bottle of Prime with me to WrestleMania when I'm uh when I'm and I'm going to use it.
15:54
I'm going to crush one like before I go in the ring.
15:55
And so, the celebrities become more and more involved.
15:59
And now, what what's happening is this is transitioning out of major celebrities doing major, you know, uh consumer products to more and more it's happening in the software space, which is more new, I would say.
16:11
So, you have Russell Brunson do this with ClickFunnels.
16:15
You have Hormozi just bought a chunk of School.
16:17
And now, he's wearing a School hat and a School white beater everywhere he goes because he's trying to promote that product.
16:22
And so, you see what me and Nick did with Shepherd.
16:26
And you see that basically these brands that are almost private equity brands, right?
16:30
So, we build a consumer-facing brand and then we do private equity.
16:34
And the beautiful thing is that the private equity guys don't know anything about brand.
16:37
And the brand guys don't know anything about private equity.
16:40
And if you happen to be somebody that knows about both, you're pretty unique uh proposition in the market.
16:43
And so, I think we're going to be seeing more and more of these audience co-founders where people realize that I can either just take a bet that my product will get off the ground, that I can get out of the kind of the the the muck of similar products at the subscale and try to break through, and they're going to use their cap table as a tool for to do this.
17:03
And um I I've I narrowed it down into three things that I think you need in order to make this work.
17:08
Cuz I think there's going to be a lot of people that try this, and they're going to fail.
17:13
And here's I think the three essential things you need in a audience co-founder.
17:19
The first, a large trusted audience.
17:20
Trust being the keyword here.
17:22
There's a lot of people with an audience, but they have low trust, meaning if they go tell people, "Hey, you should go try this.
17:29
You should read this book.
17:29
You should try this lotion.
17:30
You should show up at this event.
17:31
You should watch this movie."
17:33
How many people actually go do it?
17:35
And I'm not going to name names, but there's a lot of people that we know that have audiences, but they don't have anything for trust.
17:40
Or they have audiences, but their audience is broke.
17:43
And so, the only thing they could sell them is very cheap things for broke people, basically.
17:47
And so, you have to find the right trust somebody with a trusted audience.
17:52
Uh so, trust, that's quite challenging to measure, but large is easier.
17:56
So, I could tell you So, our podcast, MFM, if you measure YouTube including shorts, which you could argue, and I would agree with it, that shorts is nonsense, but we had something like 90 million impressions last year across the podcast.
18:10
And then if I had to guess, your Twitter handle probably had another 10 to 20 a month, uh million impressions.
18:17
And then your newsletter, I don't know how often you send it out. You send it once a week.
18:20
You let's say you let's keep a round number of 100,000.
18:23
So, you're talking to milli- tens of millions of people a month.
18:27
Would you say that's accurate? No, to be honest, no.
18:29
I think the number of people is a lot less than the number of impressions. Sorry.
18:33
It's for sure tens of millions impressions.
18:35
I don't know how many people.
18:36
Maybe a million, maybe more than a million.
18:39
I think we reach somewhere between half a million and a million people, truthfully, right?
18:41
And there's a lot of you that will exaggerate these numbers.
18:44
Truthfully, I think that's the absolute ceiling of what we reach, but then the trusted audience is a fraction of that.
18:50
But, um it doesn't matter.
18:50
It's It's the depth of trust that matters.
18:52
And this is the total mispriced asset in the market.
18:57
Cuz the easy thing to measure is number of followers, number of views, number of of of impressions that something gets.
19:01
A little bit better might be likes or replies.
19:05
But then even better is bookmarks.
19:07
Even better is how many people click the link.
19:08
And then the ultimate true source of the truth is revenue.
19:11
There's other tests that I like to think about.
19:13
So, another trust test is and I talked to a guy who who's getting millions and millions of views on shorts.
19:19
And I said hey, if you tweeted out tomorrow that you are hanging out at this coffee shop in Austin.
19:27
And you said hey, I'm hanging out from 10 to 2 tomorrow or 10 to noon.
19:28
2 hours, I'm hanging out. Stop by.
19:33
How many people would show up?
19:35
There are some people that would have a line out the door.
19:38
And then there's some people that nobody would show up for because they have a very fleeting transactional impression-based thing.
19:44
They are not the focus of it.
19:46
Maybe they're putting up meme content or they're putting up you know, like canned videos that are highly animated, but they're not even involved in it.
19:53
There's no trust that's being associated with them. Um another trust test.
19:56
If I email my list tomorrow and I said tomorrow I'm putting out something that I've been working really hard on that it's [ __ ] good. Trust me.
20:07
And I said it's it'll be available at 5:00 a. m.
20:09
tomorrow and it's going to be available to the first 1,000 people that that try it. That's it.
20:12
How many people would set their alarm? Right. Right?
20:15
There are certain companies and products you set your alarm for.
20:17
Apple gets people to set their alarm and come camp out to get their new product.
20:20
It's trust at the end of the day, right?
20:23
That's the that's the measurable value of a brand is trust.
20:26
And so, I think that's the the number one variable.
20:30
Number two, product to audience fit.
20:30
So, basically if I came on here and I started telling you about cologne it's not going to work.
20:37
It's just the wrong product for the wrong audience.
20:42
It's not what my audience wants.
20:42
It's not what they trust me on.
20:43
It's not the right price point given the size of my audience, right?
20:47
I sell products that are worth tens of thousands each.
20:50
Logan Paul sells products that are worth $4 each, but he's got a much bigger audience.
20:53
You've got to find an equation that works.
20:55
So, product audience fit.
20:56
A great example was the episode we did with Dani Austin on this podcast.
21:00
Dani Austin was a woman who was she was she had struggled with postpartum I think postpartum hair loss and was really insecure about her hair.
21:07
She wore wigs for like a year, then she took the wig off and told her her Instagram audience, like, "This is what I've been going through.
21:13
I feel a little bit silly.
21:14
I felt insecure about it, but I'm trying some things. Let's see what works."
21:18
And eventually ends up creating her own line of hair care called Divi, which is a product to cure this pain point that she authentically had, that many people in her audience authentically had, and trusted her for it.
21:29
And so, the highest highest version of product audience fit is when you genuinely authentically experience a problem and can tell a story about it.
21:37
And that story resonates with your audience cuz they also have that problem, and they believe your story.
21:42
Third one, content creativity.
21:45
So, how good is this person at creating an ongoing stream of content that plugs the product?
21:51
Dude, that's shockingly hard, by the way. Very hard to do. It's very hard to do. at it. at it.
21:57
I think you're good at I think Nick is exceptionally good at it as well. Nick is fantastic at it.
22:01
I He posts probably, I think, 100 times a week on Twitter.
22:06
I looked it up, and he's good. He makes hits.
22:12
And you see this everywhere.
22:12
So, when Logan Paul and and KSI launched Prime, they did a photo shoot.
22:16
they did a photo shoot. They did a photo shoot of them drinking, and then there's this viral image There's this image that goes super viral, and it's basically it's Logan Paul drinking Prime and KSI drinking Prime, but KSI was kind of like
22:26
bent down on one knee, and then somebody photoshopped them together, so it kind of looked like KSI was, you know, like going down on on Logan Paul, and then they printed a cardboard cutout of that, and they put it in the aisle of I forgot what Walmart or wherever they were launching. So, they The news was, "We're
22:38
So, they The news was, "We're launching in Walmart."
22:41
And many Okay, what does a creator do normally?
22:43
"Hey guys, just so excited. I can't believe it. We launched in Walmart. Good for me.
22:51
Um, you know, go go check it out.
22:53
Please, go buy our product from Walmart." Right?
22:54
What Logan Paul does is smarter about is he knows how to go viral around his product.
22:59
He knows that it's not about patting yourself on the back.
23:02
It's not about a generic announcement that doesn't mean anything to the audience.
23:05
He gave them a reason to share the news, which was put put him and KSI in a compromising situation, made a joke out of it, and then that image goes and gets 100 million views, right?
23:15
And it's the same story, but he knew how to package it to go viral.
23:18
He'll also do things like he'll create content that'll be um I'm going to try to make this drink using these three flavors of flavors of Prime.
23:28
So, it's like it's kind of like those will it blend type of commercials, but he's using his product.
23:32
You know, for us, we will do like me and Nick, we would do a workshop where we would we did a like a delegation workshop.
23:37
So, I was like, look Is that what most people call those things?
23:40
I mean, haters will call them webinars. Uh, yeah.
23:43
But they're called haters.
23:43
You call it a webinar, I call you a hater. I do have a W word. I couldn't think of it.
23:50
It was a learn shop, something like that. Yeah. It's on the web. I forget.
23:54
It's kind of like a seminar.
23:57
But we would do these things and they would drive so much business for the for the business.
24:01
And so, we would we would come up with what is a value add thing we could do that delivers so much value in 45 minutes and I was like, and we just say, by the way, if you want to do this, Shepherd's a great tool.
24:08
But you've delivered so much goodwill and so much value that you can you can do that.
24:13
Anyways, there's a whole bunch of stuff around content creativity.
24:14
How do you on an ongoing basis create native content that is going to continue to bring the brand front and center or do it.
24:22
We created the thrill of the shill, for example, to give ourselves an excuse to talk about our products.
24:27
And so, there are creators that are better at that and there are creators that are worse at that.
24:31
We're, you know, we're good, but there are people who are incredible at Who do you think is the best?
24:36
Like who do you look to besides some of maybe some of the non-popular ones?
24:39
Are there any non-popular ones you look at and you're like, that's really great.
24:44
There's a guy on Twitch named Dr.
24:45
Disrespect that I first noticed is incredible at this.
24:47
And I noticed it because majority of Twitch streamers get a ton of blowback if they ever mention a product, a service, the chat immediately sell out, sell out, sell out. Oh my god, whatever. Dr.
25:00
Disrespect created a brand that almost allowed for it.
25:02
And he created so much humor and content.
25:05
It's like you don't want to be in the middle.
25:09
So, either you just never sell out or you try to try to sell product, but you try not to sell out.
25:15
You're just sort of hedging, and the audience can sniff that out a second, and they will pounce on you.
25:21
Or you go full you go full sell out.
25:21
At Twitch they even did this.
25:24
When Amazon wanted Twitch the company to promote Prime Day, it's like, "Oh, how are we going to do this?
25:29
Our our community is very sensitive to us promoting something, especially promoting a big corp mega corp like Amazon."
25:36
And so, they created a campaign called Twitch sells out.
25:37
And they made a joke about it.
25:39
They made a joke about it.
25:41
Twitch sells out, and that was the whole campaign was, "Well, today Twitch sells out."
25:45
And then they basically like they they leaned into it. Dr.
25:46
Disrespect would do this.
25:48
He he would do a promo promo with Old Spice.
25:51
And then he would create like a full like a full like content series around this thing, around Old Spice.
25:56
And he would do it in such a way that by the end of it, the whole chat was looking forward to the next Old Spice like if if I can already call it like the Champions Club or something like that.
26:05
He would create all these little things around it because he was a total character. He knew how to do it.
26:09
So, he was I could see how much money he was making.
26:11
He was making way more money per viewer than the average Twitch streamer because he knew how to monetize that audience.
26:18
Do you remember we had Justin Mares come on and he told us about his new company called is it TrueMed or True Medicine? TrueMed? Yeah, TrueMed. So, TrueMed.
26:23
Um I how do you explain it? Is it HSA spending?
26:28
So, it's like a kind of a boring topic, but basically like you can spend your insurance money.
26:32
Anyway, his co-founder is this guy named Kelly Means.
26:36
And Kelly Means is I guess he's a I think he's a doctor or a former doctor, but he's like obsessed with metabolic health.
26:43
And I followed him on Twitter, and he is indoctrinating me on like healthy eating.
26:50
bookmarked thing yesterday. Same.
26:50
It was like the four points, four things like you know, basically he's like America has like you know, a 20% obesity rate or something like that in young kids.
26:58
And like other countries have 4%.
27:00
Here's the four things we should do imme- effective immediately to turn this around.
27:03
And I was like, "Sir, yes, sir."
27:05
You know, clearly for president.
27:07
I've never met this guy, but god damn he's convincing. He is so convincing.
27:11
And so his company and he does it in such a good way because his company is a very specific thing, HSA spending.
27:17
And you can buy like healthy stuff.
27:18
I think you can buy like an Eight Sleep mattress or whatever using like your insurance.
27:22
Something something like that.
27:23
But anyway, he'll he his whole crusade is on like processed foods and over and being overweight and things like that.
27:28
And so he's like uh a renegade and a champion for like healthiness.
27:32
And it just so happens I have this thing that I that you could actually use to like buy some of these things.
27:37
So like he tweeted out the other day, he's like, "America's super obese. Here's four points.
27:40
Like you shouldn't be able to use um uh food stamps on soda.
27:43
Or uh I uh pharmaceutical companies should not be allowed to advertise on TV."
27:48
And he had like two or three more things.
27:50
And I get obsessed with it.
27:51
And he's starting to change my opinion.
27:54
And then I'm slowly starting to think about TrueMed, his company.
27:57
should have him come on, by the way, cuz I've seen him now do a couple of these rants and each time I am so convinced I'm so convinced that I actually schedule time on my calendar to look up opposing evidence.
28:08
Cuz I'm like, before I just fully bathe in this Kool-Aid. Same. Same. hedge myself.
28:12
I need to create some firewall where I go see if this guy's full of [ __ ] cuz he is very convincing. He's very convincing.
28:18
And this is a really good example.
28:20
I asked you for a non-popular example. I guess I had one.
28:23
Kayley Means is a non-popular example of a Well, I guess he's I mean he's not like mainstream popular, but he's somewhat popular in our little circle of of a B2B product and he is selling it wonderfully. Absolutely.
28:33
Yeah, I think it's a I think it's amazing.
28:36
Uh there's a bunch of these, by the way. Liver King, Nick Bare.
28:39
Like there a lot of guys do this.
28:40
And I think the the interesting thing now is it used to be celebrities hold up the product in it.
28:46
Or it would be the celebrity creates the company themselves.
28:48
What I'm finding now is this interesting new new variant of this, the new strain, which is company that already exists finds a audience co-founder to accelerate growth.
28:59
And by the way, if you're trying to do this, come to me. I want to do this again.
29:02
I I want to do this one more time.
29:03
The Shepherd thing went so well.
29:05
Uh and I I tweeted this out.
29:05
I go, you if you have a cash-flowing product that is genuinely a great product.
29:09
Like it has to be a great product, otherwise I'm not going to put my name on it.
29:12
Um and you are bootstrapped.
29:15
You are not on the venture path. Hit me up. shaan@shaanpuri. com.
29:18
I want to do this one more time.
29:20
You have this thing on here about the curse of family riches.
29:23
And I want to talk about that.
29:23
But before we talk about that, I want to tell you a story about someone I spoke with recently.
29:29
So there's this company called Simple Modern.
29:30
Have you heard of Simple Modern? Of course.
29:32
So Simple Modern is a website that sells basically mugs, but I think they sell a ton of stuff.
29:37
So like Stanley mug competitors, tumblers.
29:39
They sell a ton of stuff.
29:41
I talked to him the other day, and he gave me his annual revenue since they started the business, along with the profit from some of the recent years, and he said I could talk about it.
29:51
And so I listed it here in this document.
29:52
So the company you their revenue, do you just go, do you just like evil laugh, or what do you do?
29:57
Well, whenever I talk to people, I'm like, hey, before we even have a conversation, just so you know, I'm not saying any of this.
30:02
Um and then I'll 20s, we tried to get girls' numbers.
30:04
In our 30s, we tried to get guys' numbers. Yeah, yeah.
30:09
I want to know people's people's income.
30:11
But then at the end of the conversation, I was like, dude, this is so fascinating. Can I share this or not?
30:15
And he was like, yeah, dude, I don't care. You can share.
30:16
And so anyway, he started this company in 2015.
30:19
In 2017, they had 10 million in revenue. 18, they had 20 million.
30:21
They grew it, and I'll I'll skip a few years.
30:23
Up at 21, they got 80 million. 2022, at 95 million.
30:29
23, this most recent year, they did 180.
30:31
This year, they're expected to do 225 million dollars. Selling these tumblers. It's mostly tumblers.
30:36
And he started the company with like $200,000 in his 30s.
30:40
And so he's a bootstrap company.
30:41
He owns half the business cuz he gave away a lot of the the the business to employees.
30:45
And I was asking about it.
30:48
And by the way, in 2023 they did $180 million revenue and $45 million in EBITDA and profit.
30:52
And so he's been able to make like a significant amount of money.
30:55
But the reason why Mike was so fascinating to me is he's based in Oklahoma.
30:59
So he's just like real soft, sweet, wonderful, nice guy.
31:01
He's I'm sure he's aggressive in business, but when you're just hanging out with him he's like a sweet man.
31:06
And he was like I started this company because I wanted to do two things.
31:09
One, I wanted to just build a business that I could hire people who I admire being around.
31:14
And number two, he he's like I just wanted to give away a lot of money.
31:19
Like I I feel like it's my mission to like give away money.
31:20
And so this guy, since the beginning of the company, the company has pledged to give seven 10% of their profits away to charities.
31:29
And the people within the company vote where the charity goes to.
31:31
And so he actually doesn't have control.
31:33
He set it up so everyone's allowed to vote.
31:35
But in the meantime, he's been giving away all his money.
31:38
And so he's giving away something like $100,000 a month of like the Beckham family money.
31:42
And he like said what is He's like I I've I've been able to save up like $4 million, but I'm still giving away something like a million dollars a year right now.
31:52
And I don't know if my $5 million liquid net worth is going to go up a significant amount because I intend to give as I go.
31:57
And he's been giving since the beginning.
31:59
So he's like when it started I was giving away $5,000 a month.
32:02
When I was making he said what did he say?
32:04
He was like when I was making 200 grand a year I was giving away $5,000 a month.
32:07
And my intention is to continue giving so when I die I don't have a lot left.
32:12
I've given it away as I've gone.
32:13
And he was like basically like I kind of wanted to be generous when I was alive, not when I was dead, which is what a lot of people do.
32:21
And I don't know if I'm going to leave any money for my family or not.
32:23
Maybe I'll leave them enough that they have a little bit of something, but we're going to give away most of this.
32:27
He's like my net worth right now is probably $200 million based off the value of the business. I'm giving it all away.
32:31
And I was so fascinated by this and it really actually inspired me, not enough to take action because honestly, it's still it's still a bit fearful if I'm being honest.
32:44
Like, I'm still quite fearful of it.
32:46
But, he seemed so freaking happy talking about this.
32:49
Do you give away any money at all like this? Uh a little bit, yeah. Not like this.
32:54
Um sounds like he's giving away 20% of his liquid net worth per year.
33:01
Something like that, yeah. Like a significant sum.
33:05
And And his liquid net worth is growing because he was like, "This is the first year that the business" He's like, "We're going to do 45 million in EBITDA.
33:12
It's the first year where like, we don't have any new ideas within the business.
33:15
So, we're going to take a big fat dividend, and I'm going to end up giving most of that away.
33:18
Uh and I'm just going to give it away as I go."
33:20
Two parts of this are impressive.
33:21
One is uh money where your mouth is.
33:24
There's a lot of people that that talk about, "Oh, yeah, I want to be able to give things away."
33:28
And then they live their whole life, and they're like, it's like the Sam Bankman-Frieds of the world where it's Did you give any of it away? What What happened? What happened to that?
33:35
He was giving as he goes.
33:36
I think that's really really really great.
33:38
Some of the happiest people I've met in life are the people that give the most. Same.
33:43
the most successful people I I know in life um are people that give the most.
33:47
And the the more interesting thing is of the people that give the most, they've been giving from the beginning. Yeah.
33:53
that's the real takeaway is like the fallacy that uh when I have enough, then I'm going to give.
33:59
And it just creates this like internal fear of, you know, giving away, right?
34:04
Um you know, this year last year we did when we had uh Scott Harrison on, I did the thing where I gave away my birthday.
34:11
So, I basically said, uh I'm turning 35.
34:15
I'm going to give $35,000 to Charity: Water.
34:17
I said it live on the pod, so I can I can say that aloud here.
34:19
And then I encouraged people, "Hey, if you want to give me a gift, go to the Charity: Water thing. Donate the gift there."
34:24
Do you know how much that raise?
34:26
I think it raised like about another 30 or 35,000.
34:29
I think it raised 30,000.
34:29
So, in total, this pod gave, you know, audience people gave 30,000, I gave 35,000.
34:36
And it was an uncomfortable give, like not that like it didn't change anything in our life, but I when I went downstairs and I told my wife I was like, "Yeah, on the pod I got kind of inspired and I committed to giving away $35,000."
34:46
And she was like She's going to punch you in the stomach really hard.
34:48
Yeah, she was like, "What are you doing?"
34:50
I was like, "I'm helping people."
34:51
And she's like, "Help me." And I was like, "What?"
34:52
And she's like, "Take out the trash."
34:54
I was like, "Okay, sorry."
34:55
Um but you know, just in general it was an unfamiliar it was unfamiliar territory to just like that on a whim commit an amount of money that's, you know, meaningful.
35:05
That's a car, you know, that's that's like something.
35:06
Um and I really like the feeling.
35:10
And every year I try to do that.
35:11
I try to get to giving away in a way that's meaningful to me.
35:14
So the other thing we did is when Tony Robbins came on we pledged to give away I think it was 40 or 50 tickets.
35:21
Each ticket's, you know, 50 to 500 to $1,000 basically.
35:23
Um you know, so that's another, you know, sort of 25 to 50 grand that we'll give, but I'm like giving away an experience that was really meaningful to me that I think can help a lot of people.
35:35
And so um by the way, I need to go pick the winners for that. That reminds me.
35:38
So if you've been waiting, you didn't miss out.
35:41
I didn't pick the winners yet.
35:42
There's like 1,000 people to go through and I just left that pile of you know, 2,000 applications.
35:46
I was like, "I'll get to that when I have some free time." But I will do it.
35:51
But the idea is give an amount that's slightly uncomfortable for you.
35:53
I think that's a uh a good practice that I'm just now doing.
35:57
Last 3 years I think I've done that and and probably should have been doing it earlier to be honest. I've not. I need to do it.
36:03
And the reason it kind of interests me and I was like, "Mike, is it okay to be selfish about this?" He's like, "Well, yeah."
36:08
So I was like, "Do you get tax advantages?"
36:11
He's like, "Yeah, like it it we you can like you you can like there is some stuff I can capture."
36:15
You're trying to find the other reason to do it?
36:16
Well, I would he was like it's like he's like, "I'm not going to not take advantage of something like but that's not the reason why I do it, but it is it is a nice like cherry on top I can take."
36:25
But I was talking to him and I was like, you know what's crazy to me?
36:28
So he's religious but not in a way where like we disagree on anything.
36:33
Like he's very kind about his [ __ ] and I was like, dude, if you're telling me that you're put here on earth to like please God by giving away money, I never want to bet against you.
36:42
That's like the best motivation on earth. You know what I mean?
36:45
Like who wants to bet against that person?
36:47
Like I don't want to go against you.
36:49
You're going to like destroy everyone.
36:50
You get the best motivation.
36:52
And so what's this thing on here about?
36:54
Curse of of Oh, was it It was familiar riches. I wrote it down.
36:58
I said family I didn't know when to break it to you that you thought I was saying family riches but it says familiar riches. Here's a transition.
37:10
You talked about giving away money.
37:12
This is the greed side of it.
37:14
This is about making money.
37:15
Okay, so I have noticed a pattern in myself and in many others and I call it the curse of familiar riches.
37:23
And here's how the curse goes.
37:23
You grow up thinking a certain amount of money means you're rich.
37:29
For me that was always a million dollars.
37:31
That's why this podcast is called my first million.
37:34
I used to play games with you know my sister, whoever it'd be, would you rather you would you cut off your pinky for a million dollars?
37:38
Would you and it was just like escalating what if scenarios. That's an easy yeah. Yeah, exactly. That was a starter.
37:48
Um I never even asked about 10 million dollars.
37:50
Never thought about a billion dollars.
37:52
I never even heard honestly I never heard the word like I never even heard people talk about billionaires, never knew a billionaire when I was growing up.
37:58
It wasn't even on my radar as a thing.
38:01
Uh I thought a million dollars was like all the money.
38:02
So you have this idea of like what a ton of money feels like but even a million dollars wasn't my goal.
38:08
It's not like a million dollars was what the rich people have.
38:10
That wasn't what I thought I would have.
38:11
And so I thought making six figures, a hundred thousand dollars was like the goal.
38:15
That was the you've made it line.
38:17
When I met you and you were making six figures, I thought you were the wealthiest person I knew. It was a great feeling.
38:23
I enjoyed being the wealthiest person you knew.
38:25
Yeah, I was like, "150 grand a year? Oh my gosh." Do you have a driver?
38:34
Um so, anyways, I and I get the curse of familiar riches is you have you start with this amount of money that you think is a ton of money.
38:42
And it is a ton of money to you at the time. It's all relative.
38:43
And then you get you you do it, right?
38:45
So, I graduated from college.
38:46
I think my first job Well, my first thing was a startup and we were paying ourselves nothing.
38:50
We were living off of We made $25,000 of prize money from a business plan competition.
38:55
We lived off that, three of us.
38:56
So, we were, you know, eight grand a year or something.
38:58
But then I got I We got kind of apple hired.
39:00
I ended up getting a job.
39:01
And my job was paying me 120 grand a year. And I was laughing.
39:03
I couldn't believe that they were paying me that much money.
39:08
And once I was making $125,000 or $120,000, my brain, this is why it's called familiar riches, my brain could think of many other ways that I could make $120,000.
39:20
I could get another job doing this.
39:20
I would maybe hear about an opportunity.
39:21
I could realize that I could stitch these two things together.
39:25
And if I did those two things, it could be like $125,000.
39:29
And so, there are a Once you get to a certain level, whatever that level is, it's quite easy and familiar to come up with one or two other ways that you could make that same amount of money.
39:40
And by the way, that exists at every level. At every level.
39:42
This is This is the problem.
39:44
This is why This is the curse.
39:45
And so, the easy thing to do then is when you get to 100 grand, you realize, "Oh, I can go get this other job that would pay me 100 grand."
39:51
Or even 120 grand, or 150 grand.
39:53
But it's basically between a one and two X of where you're at.
39:55
So, you you can figure out how to make about what you're at, 50% more, or just double.
40:01
But your brain breaks after you say, "Awesome, how do you make five times more?" Yeah.
40:06
And I remember hearing at the time like, "There's a guy who makes $500,000 a year in salary."
40:12
And it was stunning to me.
40:14
I was like, "He's stealing the money from the company.
40:16
There's no way anybody could create that much value that they're making a half a million dollars per year. He just gets paid that. That's insane.
40:24
I And if you ask me, Sean, what's the path forward? You're at 120 now. How do you get to 500?
40:27
My brain would short circuit and break.
40:29
And so what I did for many years was I did things that were very familiar and I found a way to one to two X my earnings.
40:39
And then when we got acquired by Twitch, whatever, and I got my package for the the the here's your upfront cash, and I sent it to my dad.
40:45
And my dad, I think the most he ever made was 300 grand in his life. And a year, a salary.
40:50
And um so I sent him the offer.
40:56
And he called me and he's like, "It just keeps going." I go, "What?"
40:57
He goes, "I thought the first line was the total amount. I was so excited.
41:02
And that was the boat signing bonus."
41:04
He's like, "And then it And then the next thing" He's like, "Then they're going What is a RSU? What are these things?
41:08
What are they giving you?"
41:09
And then he's He couldn't believe it.
41:11
He He emailed me again that 3 days later.
41:13
He goes, "I just read it again.
41:14
I still can't believe it."
41:14
And He like thought it was like a menu where you like pick one of the options.
41:19
It turns out it's more like a like a It added all up.
41:23
And so And my brain broke, too.
41:26
So what am I getting at here?
41:28
Uh after that, I started to ask questions.
41:31
I started to realize, "Wow, there are people Forget making 500,000 a year.
41:34
There's people that make 2 million dollars a year.
41:36
There's people that make 5 million dollars a year."
41:38
And so I started to use as a thought exercise, how does How would I make 10 times more than I'm making today?
41:45
And at first, again, the brain broke. There was no answer.
41:49
I sat down again the next day and I said, "How do I make 10 How do I How do I make 10 times more than I'm currently making?"
41:55
Well, I guess if I was going to do that I would And I And then you start to get creative.
41:58
You're like, "Is there anybody who makes that?" Of course there are. "What do they do? How do they do it?"
42:03
You start to reverse engineer some things.
42:04
And then you add time into the equation.
42:06
I remember we came on this podcast because I had a brain-breaking conversation with Nikita Beer.
42:12
We were like, "Nikita, what are you up to, man?
42:13
You're sitting at Facebook.
42:14
You're just been 4 years.
42:14
You're just rotting away over there. What's going on?"
42:17
He goes, "Yeah, I'm thinking about for the summer, how do I make $10 million in 90 days?" And I was like, "What?"
42:24
I never even heard somebody ask a question Oh, no, it wasn't 10 No, it wasn't $10 million.
42:28
It was How do I make What It was like a million dollars $3 million. I forgot what it was.
42:34
Yeah, it was it was not 10.
42:34
It was more like, "How do I make a million dollars in 90 days?"
42:40
And I was like, "I don't even know I don't know.
42:41
What do you That time scale breaks all the existing answers I have."
42:46
But sure enough, there are answers.
42:46
And that that summer he created the ga- that app called Gas.
42:52
And I think he made $7 million in revenue.
42:54
And then they got acquired by Discord.
42:57
The son of a [ __ ] did it.
42:57
And I was like, "What the hell is that?"
42:59
And so, I started asking myself better questions.
43:03
And I've just noticed this and it's just a prompt for the world.
43:04
Anybody who's out there, you don't you don't have to do this.
43:07
It is absolutely wonderful to be completely content of where you're at and to focus your energies on other things besides making money. Probably healthier.
43:14
And if you're doing that, more power to you.
43:17
But if you're slightly broken inside like me, and you don't go to therapy, and you think that money's going to cure your problems, this is a good exercise to actually do it.
43:25
Which is to absolutely refuse any option that's going to make you one to two extra money.
43:30
You have to completely say no to anything that is a one or two X where you're currently at.
43:36
And only think about what would it be a 10 X.
43:39
And then let your brain short-circuit every day until your brain starts to come up with answers. And it will.
43:44
It just takes like 5 to 6 days of doing that every single day to get to to start generating some answers.
43:47
So, I want to give two points to that.
43:50
One, I actually think there's good news.
43:54
The good news is is that, you know how they say money doesn't make you happy?
43:58
Um I actually think it does make you happier.
43:59
So, the good news is is there is a threshold.
44:03
I don't know what that threshold is.
44:04
It's different for everyone.
44:04
It could be tens of millions.
44:05
It could be a certain amount of year uh per year.
44:07
But, that $70,000 study uh that's [ __ ] If you zoom in on that graph, it continues going up.
44:14
It just doesn't go up as steep steep.
44:16
And that study is also like 20 years old.
44:19
So, it's totally outdated.
44:21
But, there is there is some number I think where it will make you happier.
44:25
The bad news, I know a lot of rich people.
44:26
You and I know a lot of the same wealthy people.
44:30
We know people who are billionaires.
44:30
Um we know people who are hundreds of millions millions in millionaires.
44:35
I am just about 100% positive and I can tell you that this is based on my personal experience, it's never enough. It is never enough.
44:44
You and I have a couple friends who it is enough for a very small group of people.
44:49
But, for eight out of 10 people, it's never enough.
44:51
And that whole 2x idea, it always exists.
44:53
And so, it is a challenge, but it's imperative that we It doesn't matter if we're making 100 grand a year.
44:59
It doesn't matter if we're making 500 grand or 50 million a year that we have to figure out how to be happy and present and uh enjoy ourselves along the way because once you just automatically get that outcome or whatever you get, it it doesn't change a significant amount from like where you were the months or years prior.
45:15
What's the Jim Carrey quote?
45:17
He goes, "I wish I wish everybody could be rich and famous so so they would know that that's not that's not the answer."
45:23
It's absolutely not the answer.
45:25
It I think it can make you happier, but it doesn't necessarily make you happy.
45:28
Let me tell you one for all the uh finance personal finance nerds out there.
45:32
What I used to do is So, money's kind of a weird thing because when you like sell your company or something like that, it's just like for the first few weeks, the only major change is when you log in to chase.
45:42
com, the number like the digit like the screen looks different.
45:46
Like if you think about it, that's like the all that's like And that is awesome, but that's like it's kind of weird that that's like there's some weird psychological thing where that's the only like meaningful difference is that number is different.
45:56
that have come on the pod and said they used to just go to the ATM and just click print receipt.
46:01
Like to it like do a random withdraw 10 bucks, print receipt, please, just so I could see the number.
46:05
So, I'm going to explain how I hacked that. So, they told me that. I heard that as well.
46:09
And so, about 2 years before my exit, I used to use this thing called personalcapital. com. Which is basically mint. com.
46:15
Whatever Whatever you're using could work.
46:17
I You can create a manual account where you can add in manually where it's not connected to your bank account.
46:22
You can just add in numbers.
46:23
I put in like $15 in the manual account.
46:26
So, it said that my net worth on paper was at least $15.
46:33
And so, I saw that number.
46:35
And then I sold my company and I got the money and I went and deleted the $15.
46:40
And I And then I saw like the real number and I was like Well, I've already seen this for the last 2 years.
46:46
Like this isn't really like that different. You know what I mean?
46:49
And it did a shocking amount of stuff to my brain to like see that number leading up.
46:53
And so, you almost get used to it. It's very strange.
46:55
And it kind of ruined that like initial deposit cuz I was like I was like these numbers are kind of like the same.
47:02
But by the way I got to be the counterbalance to this because I've heard I've listened to many podcasts, YouTube videos, and I've heard many people say similar things that you know, money doesn't make you happy. There's never enough.
47:16
Um you know, that day after it happened and then you know, nothing really changed.
47:19
I know I just kind of felt a little I I didn't know what to do.
47:20
I kind of actually almost had a little bit of a depressed period after this.
47:24
And I'm not saying that they're lying.
47:25
I'm sure that's true for many people.
47:29
I had a very different experience.
47:29
I had what I had exactly what I would have hoped.
47:34
It The more money I got, the happier I got, the more free time I had, the less [ __ ] I had to deal with.
47:38
Sure, I had some new problems, but they were way better than money problems.
47:41
And then when when I saw the number in the bank account, I said, "Fuck yes!"
47:46
And I was so excited and I had a such a great day.
47:48
And I took my parents to dinner that night.
47:50
And I was so excited and they were so excited for me.
47:54
And I bought a bunch of socks and those like these socks make me happy because I got a bunch of matching socks with the highest quality and the highest highest kind and then I felt amazing.
48:01
I felt better and the money made me feel better.
48:06
And so there are people out there for whom this happened.
48:07
You don't don't misunderstand me.
48:10
I said it makes you happier.
48:11
It made me happier, but if we didn't but we still want more, right?
48:16
We're still having conversation of how do we two or three or five or 10x?
48:19
Because if we were truly content, we wouldn't be asking that question.
48:21
And so what I'm saying is we still want more and it does make you happier, but it's in itself is not always it's not like the answer.
48:29
It is potentially part of the equation. Right.
48:31
And I guess the thing that I'm talking about right now is really just a question of of leverage.
48:36
Meaning for the same inputs, can I get more outputs?
48:41
Okay, so so all I'm saying is that if you just change your brain to say, you know what?
48:45
I am familiar with many ways to get this amount of rich now because I've done it.
48:50
I know other people who have done this.
48:52
I've been doing this for a little while now.
48:55
I am comfortable at this level.
48:58
And there's more levels that I would love to be at, you know, without 10x my input, can I 10x my output?
49:02
I'm always interested in that.
49:04
If I could get 10 times more people listen to this podcast without having to record 10 times more or prep 10 times more. awesome. You do it. That'd be awesome. I would do that any day.
49:13
And I think even you did this when we were talking about growth for the pod.
49:15
It was like here's some low-hanging fruit and then you were like, is there anything we could do that would just get like a million views per video?
49:22
So it's like let's just shouldn't we just like ask that question at least in case there's an interesting answer?
49:25
And that's kind of what I'm saying, which is you want to ask that question because it it fries your brain for a second and it forces you to think a little differently.
49:33
You may you may decide that you may never come up with a great answer or you may decide I don't want to do any of those things or I'm totally comfortable with that where I'm at, but I just think that there is a curse of familiar riches which whatever level you're at, if you're making 10 million a year, you probably now know a bunch of ways to make 10 million a year, but you'll have very few ways to make 100 million in a year.
49:49
And as a thought exercise, I think it is very valuable to say, "Let me say no to all things that do the that are at the level I'm familiar with, and let me only think about and consider options that would 10x where I'm at."
50:04
Um and then see how And then you can decide afterwards whether you want to take any action on that or not.
50:06
Let me ask one question as we wrap up. Yeah.
50:11
You're talking about earning.
50:11
Would you spend 10x what you're spending now in order to get used to that life?
50:20
In order to get used to it?
50:20
Yeah, in order like to not an idiot.
50:23
What do you know like Like um you know, the act as if.
50:24
So, I've got friends who will say like uh you know, this is going to work.
50:30
Therefore, I'm going to just behave as if it works, and I'm going to spend because I like uh burning the boats and feeling this, and I have to make it work.
50:38
I am totally into act as if, but not by spending.
50:41
That's not the I don't I think that that that perverts the spirit of act as if of or living from the end.
50:47
So, what The way I do it is act as if means um to me, I'm like in decision-making, meaning I'm willing to say no to doing certain things that come from a scarcity mindset.
50:58
So, maybe I would have said yes to some speaking gig cuz it gives me money.
51:02
But if I had 100 million bucks, I wouldn't say yes to I wouldn't go travel, leave my family, go to this speaking gig in Duluth.
51:07
You know, I would I would just I would just say no.
51:11
And so Duluth So, I use it in order to just put myself in a more of an of a of abundance mindset in order to make decisions that are more aligned with who I really want to be.
51:21
Those aren't like oh, let me go buy a tiger in order to increase my burn rate in order to add the pressure to me.
51:27
Like, I just think that that's a completely unhealthy way to go about it.
51:29
Or the other version is how would I, you know, uh a lot of people walk around with a lot of anxiety, a lot of stress, or in a in a big rush.
51:37
They rush through their day.
51:37
They're constantly feeling a lack of time, and they live again in the scarcity mindset.
51:42
Lack of time, um uh a lack of ease.
51:42
And so, the act as if that I'll try to do is put myself in a place where what if I was what if it was all figured out?
51:53
What if I knew what I was doing?
51:55
What if I had already done it?
51:55
What if what if you know, what if X was already done?
51:59
And it allows me to just walk through my day with a greater sense of presence and ease and joy and less stress, less anxiety, less of a rush.
52:07
So, I'll use it in those areas.
52:07
I will never use it to be like, "Hey, how about I just like increase my burn just to see how it feels."
52:13
It's like, you know, it's like aren't people into like dripping hot wax on themselves before they like, you know, do do stuff? Like, not me. I'm good. Don't need to do that.
52:22
And if you live in Duluth, you can kiss my ass.
52:27
Wait, is Duluth even a place? I just said that.
52:30
I had a Yeah, there's a Duluth in Minnesota.
52:31
I don't know but there's probably a Duluth in a lot of places.
52:34
Shout-out to the listener who just caught an absolute stray in Duluth.
52:42
Yeah, if you live in Duluth, just comment in the YouTube to let us know, but you can still kiss our ass.
52:49
Um all right, that's hot.