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Kind: captions Language: en all right it’s it’s Q4 so I don’t know what whatever day you’re going to hear this there’s about 70 days left in the year 70 days left in year and everybody makes a big deal about January 1 New Year’s resolutions but I have a different argument I have an argument that says there’s 70 days left in the year just enough time to actually do the thing whatever the thing is for you that’s going to make this year amazing [Music] today is a wakeup call 70 days left it’s time for one Sprint on one priority to try to make it happen the one thing you could do whatever it is that’s going to make your year awesome so for example maybe you’re trying to get in great shape the diet starts this morning it starts now and we’re going hardcore it’s life or death diet mode if you’re trying to if you really want to you know quit your job start the business put in your notice put in your notice today just put it in and see what happens see how it feels just the tip whatever you’re going to do you got to figure out how you’re going to use this 70 days Sprint if you’re trying to you know hit your growth goal if you’re trying to raise round of funding whatever it is this is the lock in time because 70 days is about the perfect amount of time where you could totally shift your life it’s enough time to be honest about how long things take to make to make a change happen but it’s short enough where you won’t lolly gag and you will you’re either going to make it happen this year or you’re not and this last 70 days is going to be the maker break as Frank slutman the guy who who was CEO of snowflake and wrote that book amp it up he goes priority should be a single word if somebody I tells me their top three priorities all I asked them is which one is it and then they get really flustered but he goes I believe priority is a single word and so I I highly suggest figure out the one priority the one thing that if you just did this one thing the whole year is a win and use the 70 days to do it and wipe everything else off the calendar what’s your uh thing going to be my one thing for this year the one thing that if I just did this thing I could look back and be like well I don’t care what else happened that year that happened and that’s all that matters for me it’s getting in the best shape of my life and so I’ve made good progress I’m down about 15 pounds I would like to get turn the corner get the last 10 down by the end of this year and to do that I’ll need to ratchet up and really it’s not necessarily about pounds but like I set these habits I was like all right I have these habits that got me this body if I want that body I got to have these other habits and so I’ve been trying to change you know these four or five habits just just four or five four or five of these habits that got me where I’m where I’m at where I want to go and I’ve probably changed two of the four so I have the last 70 days to get the other two done what are the other two so I’ll give you the two I did and I’ll give you the two I need to do so the two I did uh the first one is planning planning my my the health part of my day at the beginning first thing when I wake up so uh we both I don’t know if you still do but I use my body tutor so she calls me it’s great right it’s a great service yeah it’s a great service we have no stake at least I have no stake in this business it’s uh you know I’m just a big fan of it so she calls me at 8 in the morning and she says how did yesterday go what’s today blah blah blah but the the thing that happens is instead of waking up and just starting my day with my work and my emails and my slack and like me little computer stuff no I start my day with the top priority the thing I really care about which is rewiring these habits and in doing so I basically stop improvising because the improvising is where I’m just going to make whatever decision happened in the moment and that those decisions are the the key thing right so by planning my day I say all right I’m gonna eat this this and this at these times I’m going to work out here and most importantly we identify like what might trip me up it’s like oh I have to take my kids to the gymnastics thing that’s like an hour away at the time I normally eat dinner so you plan around the grenade yeah it’s like oh so what are you going to do oh simple I’ll just bring it with me in the car or I’ll uh I’m going to eat before I go or you’ll look ahead like like three days you’re like all right on Saturday I’ve got a birthday party I know we’re gonna have cake I’m GNA splurge on that one piece of cake which means leading up to it I gotta I gotta prepare that I’m gonna like I gotta be tight today so a big part of it was realizing the decision tank the gas tank of decisions of good decisions is full in the mornings and by the evening it’s depleted and so all my bad decisions happen then and so I just make all the decisions up front for what I’m going to do and then I simply just need to to stick to them which of course not perfect like the daily one so basically they call you daily and the reason why that’s good is that’s when you’re like really getting after it and then the weekly one is like I use her as like I’m happy where I am uh they should call it the serious person plan and then the unserious person plan like are you serious about this or are you not so serious if you’re not so serious here do this weekly plan and then what’s the fourth so first habit plan the plan the plan all the meals and the workouts up front first thing in the morning make the decision then don’t make the decisions as you go make one decision at the beginning the second one is what I call the the four-point swing so if you’ve ever played basketball you know there’s a this thing that the announcers will say where let’s say you had an open shot you should have made it you would have scored two points but instead you fumble the ball the other team takes it and they get an easy shot and so it was a four-point swing it should have been two you know you should have been up two and they should have had zero instead you missed your to and they got to right so four-point swing so I realized oh there’s one part of my day that’s like the four-point swing it’s like it could have gone in my favor and instead it totally wipes me out which is like basically for me it’s I work pretty late so after my kids go to bed then I have kind of like this relaxation and I’ll do like more work so I usually stay up pretty late if I late night snack there and I so basically it’s like I’m up late so I sleep I sleep late and therefore I also because I’m up late I eat late and then I dude I started going to bed early just to avoid that situation exactly it’s like yo I can’t I I don’t know if I have the willpower to not late night snack but I could just go upstairs and go to bed and that’s kind of the only thing and then in the morning of I’m hungry great I make good decisions again the tank is full so anyways that that that those are the two that I’ve I’ve been working on and made a lot of progress on and then I have two more which is treat the weekends like the weekdays because my weekends I was just become a different person it was [ ] Marty Gro for me it was like wait wait well why why did I throw away all those habits that I do during the week that are great and just treat the weekends totally differently so that’s silly not going to do that anymore um and then I have one more which is my so my my my sort of like thing that gets me is chips it’s like you sort of like a snack so it’s kind of the root why it’s like well it’s basically the cheapest way to pleasure it’s like super fast it’s right in front of me it’s the fastest way to pleasure so substituting that with another thing that’s a fast cheap way to get pleasure right so it’s like uh other things I like to do or other things that feel good in the moment that’s not like some delayed gratification uh instant gratification just not through a snack but through whatever like you know take a shower there’s like this other like uh sparkling water drink that I make whatever little other things that I could substitute so doing those substitutes the weekday and weekend thing is pretty funny Once time know Kagan he’s one of my best friends and he was like years ago he goes you’re the only person I know who doesn’t drink but you’re still fat what the hell I had a friend that said the same he goes I saw my company he goes okay cool you’re rich now I’m like yeah thanks uh and he goes there’s no uh you can’t be rich and fat he’s like there’s no excuse if you’re poor you just don’t have the time you can’t get the nutritious food and you can’t get the gym like okay understandable you’re rich in fat that’s you that’s all you uh so he was like you can’t be rich and fat it’s just a rule I was like oh okay felt like I got into some club and they were like you need to take your shoes off at the door it’s so funny um by the way one thing to finish that that food thing remember when Brian Johnson came on the first time on this podcast like before Brian Johnson became like um way more famous and like you know uh changed his entire look so like kind of the before photo Brian Johnson basically when he came on he said something he goes oh yeah we fired evening Brian and I thought that was just such a good way of saying it he’s like yeah we had a meeting of the Brian morning Brian was there work Brian was there and evening Brian was there we just decided evening Brian you’re [ ] it up for the rest of us so you’re fired you no longer get to make decisions um we’ve take that power away from you I thought that was a great way of saying it uh he he did a really good job of have you read that book 48 Laws of Power like one of the laws of power is like change your identity occasionally and like occasionally is that how it says they’re like like they’re like it’s a tool it’s like a tool so for example the author he was like uh Lady Gaga like if you look at like early photos of her she was like a very normal girl but she always had like a little weird quirky side to her but he’s like she went all in on it and just changed her identity overnight to to be like this kind of like strange person and then nowadays by the way if you see Lady Gaga she’s not actually that weird anymore you remember that era where she like would wear meat as a dress now she like has an album with like Tony Bennett like a very classic singer and she’s like more of a like a you know whatever she that would be called like classic Beauty versus before she was like artistic pomp when bitcoin price is up and pomp when bitcoin price is down there two pomps The Tale of Two And I think Brian Johnson changed his identity and I thought that that was like a really Savvy thing to do I thought it was great and I think I I take inspiration from it hey let’s take a quick break to talk about AI we all know AI big deal um you see demos all the time of people doing really cool things but as a business owner sometimes it’s hard to figure out how do I actually use this what do I actually do I’ve been trying to use it across all my businesses you know things like making little prototype websites without needing to hire a coder or writing copy for our website or I give it a bunch of data and I ask it to analyze it for me it’s been kind of amazing but the thing I always need is inspiration I know the tool can do a lot but it can almost do so much that I’m not really sure what I should actually be doing with it and so that’s why I think it’s great that HubSpot has created a report where they surveyed 2,000 Global Marketing leaders and ask them you what’s separating the high growth and low growth businesses and what strategies they’re using with AI in their business you can grab these strategies and apply them to your own business for free the link is in the description below can I tell you a story that I’ve been kind of thinking about constantly okay all right so I have to tell you the story about this guy named uh Jamie Beaton So Jamie is a 29-year-old from New Zealand he was raised in uh a single household in New Zealand but he’s kind of like grown to be probably like the best college kid on earth so listen to The Story So this guy Jamie he’s raised by single mother in New Zealand and I guess if I had to like psycho analyze him he probably like has some like rejection type of like you know he’s not good enough type of vibe that a lot of great great people who achieve greatness have and he gets obsessed with school but particularly with University applications and how to get into like the best university on Earth and so he sets out with a goal to become the most qualified high school student in all of New Zealand and he like creates this really in-depth strategy it’s like you know he’s got to be unique so he goes and starts two different businesses one being like a newspaper delivery business one another being like an iPhone repair business he focuses on being the best and so he like strategically picks activities that he can excel in then he looks to maximize validation meaning like whatever he’s good at he wants to like enter into a contest and like win and then really good academic so he’s like gets straight AIDS and so he like does this like crazy curriculum that he creates for himself and by the age of 17 he’s accepted into 25 universities so he’s accepted into Harvard Yale princ and Sanford Columbia Cambridge Duke and a bunch of other stuff but he ends up going to Harvard but before he gets into Harvard like word spreads in New Zealand that this kid is like a Wonder kid and like he’s like the greatest thing on earth and so he even like host like a 230 person talk in New Zealand where all these parents are like Jamie tell us how you did this like this is so amazing so fast forward to today he’s 29 years old he’s got seven degrees and one PhD he has a like if you go to his LinkedIn it literally looks like a fake LinkedIn listen to his education so a bachelor’s in applied math from Harvard a master’s in applied math from Harvard a PhD in public policy from Oxford two masters from Stanford a master’s in entrepreneurship from Penn a masters from Princeton a law degree from Yale and a master m in global affairs from a university in China is that [Laughter] insane show 12 educations I’ve never seen that it looks fake so now while this kid he’s he’s 29 now but while he was a kid sophomore in college he was like this is kind of interesting what’s going on and so he creates a college tutoring business which is like kind of like a stereotypical not stereotypical but it’s like a common story of people who like Master the game they like start these tutoring businesses but it actually starts working to the point where by the he’s a sophomore in college it does a million in revenue and obviously he’s interning because that’s what great college kids do but he’s interning at Tiger management which is like you know one of the most prestigious like hedge funds in the world and his boss is like dude this is pretty cool you should like go in on go all in on this and so he turns his little side business I mean it was a million in Revenue by the time he was sophomore wasn’t that wasn’t that much of a side business but he turns it into a real business and it’s called Crimson education and that’s like what the story in the Wall Street Journal was about so Crimson education does something like 120 to 150 million in Revenue it’s valued around $500 million they have something like a thousand employees and it’s like the greatest way I guess to get into a highly touted University for your kids and so these these parents are spending crazy amounts of money something like $200,000 a year for a handful of the product offerings that they have in order to get their kid into an Ivy League school and it starts way before high school we’re talking like fifth sixth grade you’re smiling is this ridiculous or what so I’m sing for a couple reasons first the headline is great so it says the guru who says he can get your 11-year-old into Harvard and there’s a picture of him shaking this Asian kid’s hand which is just hilarious hilarious first why an 11-year-old into harv all right that’s that’s funny thing one two love the name Crimson education as you know right big fan of when you hijack The Prestige of another thing in a way that’s totally legal the way that you did with Hampton the way he’s doing with the crimson color for Harvard Crimson education great name when I Google the name the very first thing it says and by the way this article came out six days ago the very first thing in the Google headline is Crimson education As Seen On The Wall Street Journal like this guy is a [ ] Prestige hacker he immediately was like now it’s goingon to be like as featured on my first million right like he’s just G to keep grabbing badges from schools from press from whoever he can get so so I think that’s uh hilarious the next thing the next uh thing that I find a little bit funny is the premise of this is I will help your kid get into a top university is that right but it’s not test prep no so they they have first of all if you go to are you on their website they’re offering or like their headline is amazing 98% acceptance acceptance rate to your top college choice so listen to like the product so the the product is like pretty ridiculous basically like you remember how like outlined it into like stick out you know like be unique whatever like he has like these the Crimson education has these like tenants of what you need so it’s like uh get amazing grades so he’s like B’s are bombs you basically have to have like perfect A’s uh then he’s like you need to have strong leadership and so what Crimson does is they definitely tutor people so I think they have 50,000 students who get tutoring but dude they encourage you to do all types of crazy [ ] so they encourage you to start a business podcast or or or rather start a business or start a podcast or go and publish an academic paper and so they have services that help their students get PR or help their students go and publish research and so there one example of a kid who started a a a podcast and it got so popular that universities started asking to be featured on the podcast and so that’s an example of like things where they try to tell you that you have to have strong leadership they also say that you have to have a unique profile and so what he says is or what Crimson does is they help students find like 10 activities that they’re interested in and then helps them be the the best at the activities and cut the fat and not be not participate in things that they’re not going to be like the best at it’s like pretty ridiculous so they offer tutoring but they also offer like for something like $200,000 they do like really Hands-On like we need you to do this this this and this over the course of a handful of years to increase the likelihood and it by the way it works like there’s debate over how much it works like there’s debate where they’re like you know these kids are like Rich smart kids anyway like their parents are going to like force them to get into all the [ ] anyway like did this actually help but something like 2% of the students admitted into Brown Columbia Harvard and Penn last year were his clients and it says uh like this many people get in as verified by big four accounting service like he’s like doubting that they they’ve been audited on their claims of of this this is pretty wild dude because he’s like brag he was bragging to the Wall Street Journal reporter like crazy or not bragging they were asking him questions and he was like yeah like we had uh 24 marnel dude but listen what he says he goes the acceptance letters were certified by Price waterhous Cooper and a list of students admitted so like he he he sent Walsh she journal the thing and it had like the price water Cooper’s like seal of like yeah it’s legit I hate this um just goingon to say that out loud I hate this um but I respect this why do you hate it for one I mean the respect is easy like it’s easy dog it’s the same reason I hate the Olympics and I respect people I respect Olympians meaning this guy is doing the thing the thing I said was stupid about the Olympics where somebody dedicates 2020 22 years of their life to becoming the best you know L the Lou Pusher in the world and it’s like bro like if you had this much talent why didn’t you just apply it to something that’s useful dude what else could you if you’re a ler what you just got a big ass and you can like push heavy [ ] like what else you gon to do the L is built for you you lay down well could have been a famous you know person in a rap video could many many options only you better options on the table um no but seriously like the sort of like game embracing the system so much that you try to game the system for this arbitrary University application thing it just it’s like dialed up to level 20 there’s something off-putting about that to me I don’t know I guess like I just don’t like I think most college educations and as I wear a Duke sweatshirt uh most uh Ivy Leagues and the admission process I think it’s all pretty bogus and I don’t think it has a very high correlation to like it’s the wrong game right what what is the phrase play stupid games Win stupid prizes I think this is playing stupid games to win a stupid prize however I get it and I respect that this guy has prayed on the fears and the hopes and the dreams of these tiger parents to be like hey give me $200,000 I’ll make sure your kid has a gets the right logo on their here I hear you and a lot of me agrees with you but let me just make the argument against you first of all the in your group of people the Indians in part have thrived in America because of the emphasis on not just on education but like being the best so like there’s definitely power to it but you also went to Duke I didn’t go to Duke my wife went to an IB League school so I hang out with a lot of these like smart people like you and her and that type of education it’s on one hand it’s sort of like a rich person telling you rich it doesn’t make you happy to be rich and you’re like yeah let me let me figure it out on my own like let me get there and I’ll decide yeah but the second thing is I actually think that there’s huge amounts of tangible benefits the education that’s normal what is Will from Goodwill Hunting say like just I can get that for like 15 bucks in late fees from a library to learn the same [ ] as you but uh like your network partially because mostly because San Francisco to be honest but a lot of it because of Duke and Sarah’s Network because of pen like it was so much more Global than mine was at a small Rinky Dink school in Nashville Tennessee like you guys thought so much bigger the people who you with were so much more Global they were so much more prestigious and and and in a good way and so I actually think that playing the game to go to a top 20 University is probably worth it to play the game to win to play the game and not go to one of these amazing schools I actually don’t think it’s worth it yeah I’m not saying necessarily that going to top school is not worth it I guess what I’m saying is the amount of energy and sort of the manufactured nature of this it’s sort of like the way that PR it’s like it’s I guess it’s good to be featured but like PR is sort of this the process to get a bunch of PR press is often a very sticky process and yeah you’re hating the game yeah exactly I hate the game um and I think that in this case like dedicating your life to manufacturing this perfect resume that’s optimized for the Harvard admission system just doesn’t seem like the good like the right use of talent and time and so you know that same person if they actually just did what they were interested in and um you know like followed their actual Curiosities and passion I think that’s just again know better better way to live but you know get off my high horse now let me just let me get a stool so I can get down did you did you see a photo of this guy he looks like uh exactly like I want him to look like he looks like a student still at 29 like he looks uh he looks smart I guess he looks ivy league um did you have a College admission like counselor or anything like that uh yeah like our high school had a college counselor who I went in and they go okay so where do you want to go to school I said I want to go to Duke and they go you should lower your expectations and I was like wow that’s the opposite of what I think somebody’s supposed to say in your job like aren’t I supposed to dream big what’s going on here and uh he’s like yeah it’s pretty tough out there so you know what else we got on the list let’s go down lower on the list and see what we could do because my grades weren’t the best and he rubbed it in his face did you um but did you have like a tutor uh no but I did take like you know GM or what not GM like the Kaplan like test prep like I studied for the SATs that was what I did I did not have any of that stuff but when I was reading this article they said roughly 25% did you take the SATs no I did the ACT okay so you took the acts did you do a test prep thing no I took it one time my junior year I think or maybe I took it twice my junior year and I got a combined score I think of 28 which is like combined score with like both tests both I think doesn’t it maybe I’m wrong but I thought they take like math and verbal or whatever yeah like they you get like the best of each try and they like combine it I think I got a 27 or 28 which is like 85 percentile I think did you do well on it I did good on it I was good I was a good test taker I wasn’t good in school like the consistency of everyday you you know me I’m not good with the everyday stuff but if it was like it’s time to do the big the big performance I could do that part well that’s what did you get on the SAT you have to brag about it then if you did good I think I got the equivalent of like a CU they had changed the scoring system to like the 2400 or whatever but I got the equivalent of what now is like like a 1500 basically what I don’t know SAT but let me look it up it goes up to 16 1600’s perfect 1500’s like excellent and like you know 1300 plus dude it says that’s in the 98th percentile yeah yeah it was a really good score it’s like you missed like a couple questions basically did you try yeah yeah I tried I took I basically for like 60 days before the test I just took two two practice test a day and this s is like a six- hour test so I took a six hour test in the morning I took a break I ate whatever and then I took took another six- hour test or a 5 hour test whatever it was in the evening and I just did that every day for like 30 days during the summer and then I took the then I took the SATs well you should have went and started one of these like companies on how to like master that [ ] because I didn’t realize how big that these I didn’t realize how big this was they said that um like 25% of people going to Harvard this year they had one of these like tutors and then it goes up even higher that if your parents if your parents have a household income of at least half a million dollars half of them use uh these types of tutors and man yeah I didn’t realize how much of a game or how you could gain this so like you could you could really kick ass at it uh if you just like well if you have Rich parents for one and two if you just like hire coaches I didn’t I didn’t buy into that but now I do so you’re gonna do this type of stuff I think that if my children show an academic like if they’re if they’re good at academics then yeah I would encourage them to do this if they’re only mildly decent at academics I would say like let’s consider different Alternatives I think I dude I’m like kind of at I think that like these fancy schools like what you went to should be like designed for like the for like the academic class and like the rest of us like plees like I I think I should have gone to like a trade school or or or or or a state school I think I should have gone to like a like a like a $15,000 year university Missouri and like explored versus going into debt of 150 Grand to go to like a a a non-top university I think that’s ridiculous yeah I think that’s right all right I have one and you have a few which one you want to do let’s do a quick one on this kfish thing I don’t know how much I have to say it just kind of fascinated me so let’s see if there’s something interesting here so I was at a breakfast and somebody was talking to me about a business idea that they were doing or that they had done in the past I was like man that sounds like a good idea where’d you get that idea from and he goes oh it’s the Fisher Investments model what’s Fisher Investments and he goes oh you don’t know Ken fiser he’s like you got to look this guy up so I go down this Rabb hole who is Ken fiser so basically he’s a billionaire money manager so he’s my bil of the Week Big Time billionaire like like 15 billion yeah exactly and he basically uh created a a simple firm so it’s a um an investment adviser money manager type of firm uh called Fisher Investments and he grew it over the years to where they now manage you know upwards of$ 275 million do uh billion dollars assets under management so 275 billion with a B they got 3,500 employees they uh the and they ended up selling to private Equity so they sold to Advent they sold not the full amount but they sold at a 122.5 billion valuation and that was the first outside Capital Race So this guy basically bootstrapped his way to a 12 billion company and the question is how did he do it what did he do and so this guy’s story in in the I guess the simple terms is his dad was a finance guy he actually wrote a book that was kind of popular called Common Stocks and uncommon profits which by the way when I went to money P’s house he I asked him to recommend you know four or five books off his wall and that might have been one of them I remember seeing it in his uh in his library and Warren Buffett called that book a major influence on his career so that was his dad what he did was he left he went out and he started his own firm and the key is this guy’s basically a marketing master so what he did was instead of trying to I shouldn’t say instead of but like most people who are great with Investments or money management there’s a certain profile of a person and that person typically doesn’t have incredible direct response advertising skills by the way it’s typically the opposite a lot of the people who are in this industry are the opposite of extroverted and they kind of like want to be in a hole and just not talk to anyone and they don’t advertise at all and it’s uh so when when they did this deal some of the numbers came out and basically these guys are spending $60 million a year on marketing which sounded like a ton to anybody else in the money management space and to him he was like that’s nothing that he goes I get the question why do you advertise so much he goes because we have no market share they go you have over hundred billion dollars in assets on management he goes that is nothing have you seen the size of this Market we’re just the biggest grain of sand in the sandbox but we’re still just a grain of sand we have 0.1% if that and so he said we spend about six% of our revenue on marketing so that’s still not a lot they spend you know 60 million a year and so they’re doing about a billion dollars a year in revenue and um he basically created this system of this Marketing System and so you can go watch his ads and I went and watch a bunch of his TV ads and what he says is like he’s like well there’s we we broke it down so he’s like there’s six mental profiles of people how they think of their retirement and their savings and investing and so they break out the six psychographic profiles you have you know let’s say the the grandma who just doesn’t want to lose it all you have the um the guy who’s stashed away and his 401k and he’s looking for he thinks he he feels like he should be doing more but he doesn’t know exactly what and he’s pretty distrustful with most people with you know people who come to him and so they have these profiles and then they started running ads they do focus groups they try to figure out which ads are working and there’s little nuggets along the way that they were like why do you use they were like why do you use your face in the ads uh you know do you feel like there’s some risk with that or would it make it harder to sell the business he goes because we found that clients want to the clients want to believe that there’s someone who wakes up in the morning and gives a darn that there’s a person not an institution who cares that’s why we use my image because here’s Ken he’s 68 years old he gets up in the morning and he cares that’s what I need to convince you of and then he talked about how um they’re like you know what did you learn from your you know your advertising because they’re very scientific about it he’s like well one thing for example we learned that men’s faces do better than women’s everybody told us we should be using female faces that’s going to appeal more not in our testing our testing shows that men’s faces are going to convert better than than female faces K there’s a famous ad where it’s an outline um you know how the Wall Street Journal has photos of their authors that are like dots it’s like a it’s like a sketch actually it’s a it’s a sketch out of dots yeah whatever he buys out brain ads and tabula ads and they would always see a dotted profile photo where you think it looks like a Wall Street Journal article and then you click and it goes to Fisher Investments right and so that’s how I first learned about them because I’m like these guys Fisher Investments they’re following me everywhere on the internet well so if you click one of those they’re great with headlines so for example you click One of Those outbrain ads those tabula ads you’re going to go to a page it’s just a video there’s no navigation there’s no nothing and the V video is called uh debunkery seeing through wall Street’s money killing myths and it’s a 12-minute video that you’re gonna see where he debunks you know wall Street’s wall Wall Street myths and you know this type of like BuzzFeed headline stuff isn’t what you’re going to find from most money managers most money managers would cringe at that they don’t know that they don’t know how to do those they don’t have the team in place like you’ve talked about Agora for example he’s basically agor fied you know money management by putting out really compelling juicy content and then advertising it everywhere so they spend a ton of money on ads they’re on Fox News they’re on Forbes or on Wall Street Journal they’re on market watch um you know they’re basically they have this profile they’re like we’re looking for somebody who’s got a $500,000 retirement portfolio they don’t want to getrich Quick ad and then you look at their ads and it’ll say want to retire comfortably if you have $500,000 download this guide by Forbes column as a money manager Ken fiser firm it’s called the definitive guide to to retirement income and then there’s a picture of a guy on Horseback like like a dude who’s like ready to retire and like get out of the office and be on Horseback or he’ll have an ad like I have one here on I’ll put these up on YouTube so you can see the ads but like his out braing ad says what does your net worth say about when say about how you’ll retire so it’s kind of like a personality quiz like what does your net worth say about how your retirement is going to go and it’s a picture of a man and a woman on a boat like Titanic dude this is so good I’m looking at it now just like I want to show you this um here just I’m going to screen share this real quick it works by the way because I I have to assume that his um product is good right like I don’t know we’ll see I don’t have a strong opinion on that look at this landing page though designed for conversion he’s got the 15minute retirement plan as a book and it’s an arrow and there’s a drag and drop like box it’s like where should you get it get it right here get my free quote right and then you got Ken fiser below here’s a here’s a white guy you could trust and I just thought this guy’s marketing is uh just excellent I think it’s to be studied I think it’s extremely effective especially with the crowd that he’s going for which is kind of like the 50 and up crowd um so studying this guy’s ad library was was pretty pretty insightful and it also just brought up a an interesting idea which is a lot of people when they’re great at marketing they go into spaces that them and their friends are already in which is often like d Toc e-commerce or uh marketing agencies like you are being a you’re trying to be a great marketer in a sea of great marketers I think what the genius of this guy is is he said how do I be you know just you know two notches above average at marketing but go into a space where nobody knows anything about marketing right or everybody is like doing a very rudimentary Playbook and so that’s where I think the opportunity is like if you go do this in the senior living space it’s like the people who own and operate Senior Living businesses are not the same sharks that you’re going to get trying to sell you know uh handbags on the internet because those people the people who sell handbags on the internet they’re worth class marketers that’s why they’re able to sell you know a handbag for you know 10x the cogs and the other thing is that when people see these ads they think does this work I can’t believe this works first of all yes it works it does it works for everyone it’s not just like old like you kind of made a comment like only older people are into this I think this always works this type of stuff works really well regardless of the age uh but when like a brand advertising goo who lives in Brooklyn New York who wears common project shoes they see this type of [ ] and they think this is [ ] lame I should make my website look flashier when in reality a plain white website that has just long form copy of like 3,000 words can oftentimes more often than not convert better than a flashy website so let me read you the last few notes I have here so he’s been a Forbes columnist for like 20 plus years so he he was like he’s basically content marketing right like what what we do and what we get a lot of credit for which is like well you build an audience you bu build a brand and that helps you with distribution this guy has been doing that for 30 plus years he wrote several books so he wrote superstocks and other ones he has an army of salespeople that cold call investors and they call they talk about this basement this basement of like cold callers that are just sitting there and and people report that like dude I I I signed up for this free guide once I read it and then they’ve just been badgering me for like years ever since and they keep calling me trying to get me to invest with them he says that everybody else uh relies on referrals from other partners they don’t think about the broader world how do we get people calling us that was their goal and they have an estimated about $114,000 CAC so it cost them $144,000 to acquire a customer they spent uh you know just over $60 million on ads back in 2019 they’re the 12th biggest spender on Financial Services they have like you know 60 plus thousand individual investors plus then they manage another 1010 billion plus from pensions state governments municipes Etc they charge about you know 1% uh one 1.25% in fees so you know you could do the math on 1.25% of 250 billion um and then it’s hard to gauge the performance they don’t have publicly available numbers for everything but they the p in the past Fisher funds with publicly available numbers have under underperformed the market substantially so they have a purisma total return fund it was a mutual fund that had 25% return in 10 years the S&P 500 Index would have been a th% in the same time uh yet still if it this so the quote was if his firm is not the biggest raia it’s close and so to build the biggest investment advisor firm while not necessarily having the best returns and you know but being the best marketer is the story here dude [ ] podcasts I want to do that this sounds awesome right of course there’s a billion reasons why like it’s a pain in the ass to run just like everything else is but that sounds great dude I’ve been watching better call Sal have you watch this show what and what do you want to become like an ambulance Chaser isn’t he just a lawyer no but well yeah he’s a lawyer but like one of the things they show him doing is like him making his commercials and his ads to try to be you know to be like better call all and uh it reminded me so much of this Ken Fisher Playbook and the show makes it seem the show makes also the hustle he does to like create these commercials is also very fun he’s nailed The Branding this is cool I’ve seen his ads all over the place and I knew he was big I didn’t know they got acquired so I wasn’t able to ever see any of the numbers but that’s amazing well look look at here’s some of the I think this is his own reporting of his performance 2007 he says if you bought oh this is not their funds this is like his recommendations but if you bought all of my all 60 of my recommendations you would be up 0.9% and um assuming you lost 1% transaction fees the S&P 500 is down .5% okay so nothing big 2008 he says how are my results last year in line with the market which is to say not good 2009 that’s what he said yeah 2009 I made 65 recommendations if you put an equal summon each you’d be up 44% stock markets up up 29 20.9% uh 2010 he says your return is 18% versus 12% uh but these are like his stock picks I think from his Forbes column which is not the same that’s like his entertainment not same if you have an in an a wealth advisor or whatever this this stuff’s called if you have a an adviser who promises to make you more than the index they’re lying but but then what is the point of the adviser the the point is is that um like as you grow and get older um it’s Savvy to think all right I need to get less stocks more bonds um and those mature sometimes 6 12 24 months so it’s like the buying of those if setting up an estate plan there’s a bunch of administrative stuff that often but not always that 1% can kind of pay for itself or like help you you could also say that they are kind of like a therapist so when you want to sell stuff they’re like dude don’t sell it don’t be an idiot but there’s a bunch of administrative stuff but outperforming the market is is not the main value and and if if you have an adviser who says that they’re going to outpick then they’re foolish by the way do you know who who else does this is mle fool so the mle fool they have a a a fund that has well over a billion dollars uh and it started as a stock picking newsletter and now theyve branched out to having a fund and so they actually have a wealth advisory business that is massive and it was built up the exact same way as Ken Fischer yeah it’s pretty crazy they youed had a billion dollars this guy’s over 250 billion so somehow mly fool which is like also excellent online content it probably has way more traffic does not have anywhere near the same assets under management which I think is always interesting to look at you know when two people pursue the same strategy and one gets a 100x return uh you know sometimes you point to luck or timing or other things but often it’s um you know it’s a business model Choice it’s a strategic choice or it’s an executional uh Point that’s different yeah this is insane Molly FL is 1.5 billion um can I tell you a quick story about um related to something that eled Gil said yeah so he made a comment where we asked him like what he’s interested in and he said monuments and so what he meant was like uh an example of a monument is the Statue of Liberty or in some ways like the Eiffel Tower like things that like exist mostly to bring Pride to a country but then also act as like a tourist destination and he was saying you know why don’t we build more of these what happened to The Monuments was sort of the question yeah he was like look when we were up and coming like we loved building monuments and like they it gave a sense of Pride and it was like good for like it was like very pro-america and it got people bought in and I had a guy listen to the podcast and he sent me the deck that he’s trying to raise money for a monument that’s based in San Francisco on Alcatraz and so you have to see this so it’s a picture of first of all I don’t know who this uh I’ve never heard of this person but you know who Prometheus is he’s like a Greek god and it’s basically like he represents the spe of Innovation and courage for the purpose of building for manifest destiny for inborn nobility which elevates Humanity they want to build a massive statue of him that’s 350 feet tall and it’s on uh the where Alcatraz is and for the Statue of Liberty had like a hot boyfriend this would be him yes and that’s exactly what it is on the other side of the country he’s just holding up a torch just like she is except for he’s absolutely ripped and he’s from the movie 300 and he’s got like a speedo on um it’s basically spe to be honest so like they did not pull any punches as far as the the amount of stone and steel that’s going into this guy and so first of all I’ve got to say the obvious that there will never be a satue that touts Manifest Destiny and inborn nobility and the Spirit of Courage that’s going to sit in the Bay of San Francisco that the like all the like and a shirtless rip dude none of that I think will ever happen but the idea is actually interesting and so what they want to do is they want to they’re raising $100 million to build this statue on alcatra and so it’s 350 feet and um but in their deck they talk about uh the money uh or the revenue and profit of other people of other statues so listen to this [ ] so the Statue of Liberty uh does $154 million a year in Revenue $70 million a year of net income and then you can go down to like Pearl Harbor really yeah I mean hold on where is okay so Statue of Liberty that do say that again that’s that’s mind-blowing so Statue of Liberty you said $70 million of net income $150 million of Revenue so 50% you know net profit margins on four and a half million visitors each one paying 25 bucks a ticket and $10 of concessions it’s insane it’s it’s insane and then it goes down to like Mount Rushmore which is on the smaller end which does 50 million in sales and 20 million a year in net income or Pearl Harbor same thing 50 million 23 million uh dude I was laughing why are we not doing this these are amazing businesses that’s my point and so I went and I saw these numbers and I’m like that’s absolutely ridic ridiculous and it’s like amazingly good and of course with all things related to like investment decks you know that you paint the best possible story and who knows if any of it actually no Source sided on this there’s no Source I looked up some of the stats and like the Statue of Liberty numbers it does it kind of checks out where that it is plausible that those are the numbers but they’re raising $170 million to build this and their goal is to make aund million dollar a year in profit or like that’s what they say the numbers are and so you start doing the math and like I said this is all just some guy drawing this up and like who knows uh it’s the this is painting the best story ever uh of a of a thing that doesn’t exist but the math is somewhat interesting behind like the like how this all works and so you’re saying there’s a chance yeah so they’re like we do this we’re going to do $94 million a year net income and so it’s actually pretty interesting that like monu of course dude you’re not going to like be able to build this in San Francisco they’re not gonna have any part of it how much have they raised so far do you know no in like when I was Googling it they have like a substack and they say things like Joe Lonsdale is on board and like all these like uh amazing people are on board and they have a substack documenting uh what they’re talking about but they I don’t think I saw that they said how much they’ve raised I think it’s cool the people doing this I guess I have a few thoughts I think it’s cool that people are doing this I hope something like this happens I am stunned at the profitability of these other monuments that is that is my Golden Nugget for the Pod that that is amazing noted okay noted there’s there’s something here this deck by the way does not look wellmade and I think if you’re G to try to pull something like this off you have to Al like if you can’t pay for a designer for your deck then I’m not sure I believe that you’re going to do this yeah yeah it and like this is I wonder how like like when they’re going to bed at night talking to their wives I wonder if they’re like saying like isn’t this hilarious that we’re trying this or is it like when this thing build got you got you gotta fully believe that you’re doing God’s work out here yeah and it could happen but so it’s called if you want to look it up I’ve got no affiliate I’ve never talked to these people it’s called the American Colossus Foundation kind of funny yeah yeah I think you’re right though that location really matters like you have to go somewhere that both has you know can be a tourist destination but has uh you need the approvals right you can’t just get stuck in limbo and San Francisco Bay area is probably one of the harder places to get get approval for something like this dude San Francisco is the antithesis of a ripped like a ripped like Alpha looking heterosexual male like this is like not like they I lived in San Francisco for 10 years this is not exactly what the culture uh is about so I think you remember the art we had on the wall the giant painting we had on the wall in my office at Monkey Inferno where it was the reverse of the evolution of man you know evolution of man is like it’s a ape and then he’s like standing half upright then he’s fully upright then he’s walking and then it’s like you know that’s the homo sapien today and the thing we had on the wall was the Homo Sapien and then it’s him bending over looking at his phone bending over sitting basically sitting down at a laptop and then typing and it was like a coder at the end of it and it was like that was the final evolution the opposite that was that’s what should be the monument in San Francisco yeah like a giant neck beard yeah wearing a hoodie it not not a not a jacked Greek god yeah um you want to do one more thing yeah I got a few uh quick hitters okay let’s do uh let’s do this one so talking to Bankers I think this is a good value ad this is a pro tip life Pro tip for for any Founders out there I didn’t know this when I first started doing startups I had no idea and only the first time I ever came into contact with a banker was when I tried to sell my company so I was kind of like I don’t know eight or nine years into doing entrepreneurship and even then I didn’t know what a banker was somebody said I’ll introduce you to a banker and I thought that’s the guy at Wells Fargo that like sits in the back not in the front like I didn’t I didn’t really understand what that meant turns out a banker is like an investment banker there’s somebody who can help you sell your company raise Capital get debt that sort of thing and they they come in at a certain level scale so usually something like $30 million and up really they try to be like kind of like a$1 million company or so and I had a friend who was uh you know successful entrepreneur and he told me something that that really stuck with me he goes I was like oh when do you think you should talk to these guys like you know and I was thinking meaning like when you’re ready yeah like when I’m ready like at the very beginning of when I’m ready or do I need to have all my stuff together and he goes he goes the best thing I ever did was I talked to a banker a year before I wanted to sell my business and I talked to them and I go a year before what do you mean and he goes yeah because I went to the banker and I saidif I wanted to sell my business today what would it be worth uh would it be able to sell how strong would would this asset look like in the marketplace right now and they know all the deals that have gotten done so Bankers are in the process the bankers are in the middle of selling companies just like yours in your industry so you go to a banker that’s in the industry they’ve seen everything that’s traded they know the relative strength they know the valuations that they’re trading at they know who the buyers are they know why that they’re buying and so they can give you a really clear picture and he goes I went before I was ready because I wanted them to tell me what would cause this to not sell what would be the weak points of this business so that became my road map for the next year of what I needed to fix that became my priority list so that when I did go to market I actually had those things fixed and if I hadn’t gotten that feedback at that point I would have just got that same feedback a year later and it would have punted the C way down the road they’re gonna they’re going to tell you that [ ] regardless and so it’s nice to know early and so I think Bankers are actually pretty big cheat code not just for selling your so that was the first thing I I learned second thing was you could actually talk to Bakers before you even go into a space and I think you’ve done this before too which is you go to a banker who’s in a space that you’re interested in and you talk to them about the companies that have sold and you’re like what what companies have sold how were they doing what what was their you know strengths and weaknesses why did who are the buyers why did they buy the question is basically what’s the profile and attributes of a business in this space that out kicks the rest of you know that that performs better than the other ones so tell me all those attributes and those uh those strengths and weaknesses and I’m gonna just do that or exactly you can reverse engineer meaning you can work backwards from that and find a great business so I did this with a recent business we haven’t announced yet where we we first talked to bankers and we we learned from that oh that validated a lot of things we already liked about the business idea we had an idea talked to the bankers that kind of co-signed or stamped that yes this is actually an even better idea than we thought meaning it traded for much higher multiples and the business could be like we didn’t we didn’t have to do a B and C A and B were going to be more than enough to have an outstanding outcome they also told us the on the other hand like so for example here’s my five questions for Bankers I go to bankers and I say what deals have gotten done recently so that’s the first question number two which ones like you said outkick the coverage so which ones traded at the highest multiple and why what was unique about those was it just simply timing or was there something that they had in their the way that they did it or their cost structure that made them particularly attractive then the third question I ask is what deals didn’t get done and why so meaning what deals couldn’t cross the finish line what were the big red flags that stopped people from buying the business because you want to basically know those too fourth question who are the B who are the buyers and why are they buying so basically every buyer has a plan and you want to know are the buyers only strategics or are there private Equity folks are there independent sponsors who are the potential buyers and then what’s their game plan once they buy it oh they’re buying things at a five $5 million eida number for X or 10x and then they are going to they’re they’re rolling up five of those and they’re trying to get to 25 million and they’re trying to trade that at 20x and okay that’s their game plan gotcha and what do they you know and then the last one is if my business did XYZ so this is the useful one when you’re not ready yet but I basically say hey here’s where we’re at today here’s where I think we’re going to be in a year if this is what my business looked like a year from now what do you think it would trade for and why and getting that from four or five different Bankers really helps triangulate a space I so I did last week I spent maybe seven hours on the phone with Bankers doing this process and I feel like I learned more in those seven hours than I you know would have in in seven months of just operating my business it was so clarifying how to do this and it just made me realize man more people should do this I’m going to come on the podt and at least say it so that for the people for whom it’s applicable which is I would say you’re an entrepreneur looking for your next next space and you’re not you’re not just being driven by some passion call and you are doing it more analytically let’s say this is a tool or if you’re a business owner and you want to sell someday and you Pro and you’re at you know a few million dollars of your profit minimum um go have this conversation I’m so on board I’ve done this a bunch of times and I think it’s so smart I think that there’s this idea in Silicon Valley there was like this trick question when you’re raising funding for from a VC and it says like what’s the outcome here like what would you sell for and the answer that everyone pretends My Dead Body yeah I would never sell and the answer like the answer absolutely could be like I’m going to sell but the answer probably should be like well I don’t know maybe we will maybe we won’t but like if if we get to these numbers we can sell for this or we can IPO like the idea of like I have an exit in mind has been told to us that that’s silly I think that that’s that it’s a very silic and valid thing because for two specific reasons one all venture capital is pre uh predicated on the idea that you’re going to drive this to a billion dollars plus so if you show any weakness any hint that this guy would sell for less than a billion dollars like if he got an $80 million offer that would change his life he’ll take it well then this is not a good investment for me because I’m taking all the risk of failure but I need to know that if this succeeds it could be a billion dollar plus and one of the risks of it being a billion dollar plus company is not just that the business works but that this founder will hold on and they will resist temptation so Silicon Valley investors because of fund math they need that that’s why they put their values on you and say who those are your needs that’s cool for you that’s not my needs necessarily as an entrepreneur that’s the first thing the second thing is there there’s an ego Pride it seems Noble in some way to say this is my life this is my my life company I’ll do this for a hundred years I think we’re going to dominate this space so much it just sounds so cool it sounds so by way you I think you can do that and also this so there’s this book that I love called built a hell have you ever seen built to sell no it’s a popular book but it here’s the premise which is like you build your company to sell because building a sellable business means you may or may not sell it but you have a company that operates well and you know what does Warren Buffett say he says like build your company so an idiot can run it because someday that an idiot will be running it that’s kind of the premise here with built to cell which is like uh you know you’re going to build your company to to operate well and so I think you should build your company to exit regardless if you’re going to exit or not I I agree fully I guess what I’m saying is and that works for us because we don’t raise venture capital for our businesses anymore we just own them ourselves but a lot of the advice you get is still from VC’s because they’re the loud people they’re the people who are famous so you sort of take their advice even though you’re not actually in their game you’re in your own game and so I I think that’s very very important distinction the other thing though is it does sound cooler to say I would never I would never sell this I sell sell to sell to Amazon I’m trying to buy Amazon right why do you love your boy Brad Adcock because Brad [ ] is all bravado he’s all chess right he basically will say we’re going to change the world we’re going to build a trillion dollar company anything less than that what’s the point and you’re like oh my God this is it’s it’s it’s intoxicating as Sam par would say it is intoxicating to be around somebody who is going only for the big shot and is not saying I’m building this to sell or that there’s a path here to a $350 million exit which will you know 7x your your money he doesn’t talk like that and because he doesn’t talk like that it is very um attractive and it is very admirable because many of us wish that we could be as hardcore and Brave and Bold as that we’re just not and by the way I don’t think you have to be I don’t want to play that game but when you do see someone play that game it’s cool I gotta admit it is cool I agree I agree it’s cool I agree and I like and I I’ve invested in couple like Brett Adcock I invested in and he has this attitude and I like that by the way do now that you have friends that are VCS or I mean you you sort of were one for a minute isn’t it funny how um you talk to them about like your company and raising capital and you’ll say no we don’t raise capital and when you’re friends with them it’s like that’s the right move yeah you know what I mean yeah exactly when you’re not when you’re not give you a low five they not give you a high five but they’ll hit you with the low five real quick yeah they like say that’s the right move now when you uh uh are tell them that and you’re a potential client they say like oh that’s cute uh like you know what I mean that’s a lifestyle business that’s good for you uh but when you’re friends with them they think to themselves or they’ll say like smart the irony of the VC thing is a VC does the opposite of what they want all the founders to do so they don’t go all in on one idea they have a diversified portfolio they um they are not you know sort of only looking at the upside they make a ton of money in fees right so they you know they’re gonna whatever when when somebody raises money so for example um what’s the podcaster Harry steing just Harry stebbings just raised a400 million fund that’s amazing that’s incredible by the way um Harry is g to make $80 million guaranteed in fees just fees he could be the worst investor in the world why because that’s he’s gonna make $80 million because he’s gonna make 2% a year on 400 million it’s 20% over the life of a 10-year fund so just do 20% $80 million in fees guaranteed that’s his floor who cares about the upside from there if you’re Harry steing right all you got to do is keep the game going and raise maybe raise another fund that would be amazing right so VC’s while they want you to be Allin and they want you to live on scraps and they want you to have no no diversification and stay super laser focused and they want you to go ride for the big upside they themselves have a very different uh uh picture of risk which by the way I think is a smarter picture of of risk um but it is it is just funny that that’s true it’s funny that that the person giving you that advice is literally doing the exact opposite with their own finances and portfolio and by the way they’re not wrong because they’re saying oh you wanted to play The Mark Zuckerberg game then that’s how you got to play so they they are giving you the right advice for for you if you want to be doing that the $80 million fee thing I never I I never knew that I mean I I knew that they get what is it 2% when you do the math it’s well 2% is misleading it’s 2% every year off the top so the same reason why Financial Val we talk about Ken Fischer oh 1% that’s not much 1% of your entire net assets every year off the top regardless of performance is like one of the great sort of seven wonders of the world that’s the eighth if it’s like that the eighth wonder of the world is that a 1% off the toop fee every year is actually becomes a gargantuan number over 10 years and so that that’s the same thing with a with a venture fund like this dude God bless him God Bless America I guess he’s not even in America America that’s the best for they need to put a monument of Harry stebbing somewhere for raising a $400 million fund and $8 million in fees it’s the $80 million Monument oh my God that’d be great that that fun thing or that Monument thing is ridiculous right this Monument thing is fascinating we got to I got to go look more into this this is great great episode all right that’s it that’s a pod