Introduction: Being One Hit Away [00:00:00]
Sam: In most areas of life you shouldn’t be hoping for the miraculous save, right? The one thing that’s going to turn your business around, or the person who’s going to meet you and just hand you that opportunity. But there is an exception.
Story 1: Noah Kahan and “Stick Season” [00:00:15]
Sam: All right, Shaan, I want to make you feel good. I want to make the world feel good. I saw an inspirational story this weekend and I want to share it with you. It’s going to involve a little audio and it involves pop culture, which you don’t know anything about. Some of our listeners might know this story, but I think it’ll be particularly cool for you.
So there’s this singer-songwriter guy I love — his name’s Noah Kahan. Have you heard of Noah Kahan?
Shaan: Noah Kahan. I can’t say I have.
Sam: He describes himself as the Jewish Ed Sheeran. He’s a great singer with a little folk in his sound — almost like Lord and Son meets Ed Sheeran, but based out of Vermont. Do you know anything about New England folk music?
Shaan: Yeah, yeah. I’m into that kind of music actually. Like The Lumineers type of deal.
Sam: He graduated high school, decided not to go to college, and got a small record deal right out of school. The record deal was only okay — that sounds like a big deal, but it’s like you just kind of barely get by. They’re almost like buying an option on you that you’re going to be a big deal. He had a couple songs that were kind of hits. I think one time he got to go on the Conan show and play one of his songs. But again, if that’s all you’re known for — doing it one time — you’re still kind of like, I’ve got to go get a job, I’m not sure if this is going to work.
So the pandemic hits. He’s living in LA at the time trying to make it big, but he’s like, what am I going to do? I guess I’ll just go back home to Vermont where my parents live and I have a little more space. He kind of gets depressed — eating bad food, smoking weed all day — and he’s like, what am I going to do? My career’s going nowhere, I can’t go out and play, I’m a nobody right now.
So he’s like, well, TikTok seems kind of neat, let’s try that. He starts posting some of his songs on TikTok and a few of them do okay — I think he gets like 50,000 followers or something. Again, mediocre success.
Then one night he comes up with something in about 20 minutes. He writes a verse to a song called “Stick Season” and he plays this one verse on TikTok. Then he’s going to delete it — he thought, I’m going to delete this thing, but let me finish getting high first, because he was eating an edible when he posted it. He ends up passing out, sleeps through the night, wakes up, and this video has gotten like 200,000 likes and 100,000 comments. He’s like, I better finish this song and actually complete it because it sounds like people like this verse.
This all happened around 2021. He finishes the song, it blows up. Now, two weeks ago — this guy from New England — he sold out Fenway Park, the stadium, for like 50,000 people. And he brings his parents on stage. [plays audio clip]
“Oh, your mom — she forgot that I exist.”
So he writes that song, puts it out, it goes viral. This guy in a matter of three years goes from just a dude in his parents’ house posting a verse of a song on TikTok — and what’s funny is, in 2019, right when he was doing this, he tweeted out: “I’m probably not going to ever sell out Madison Square Garden. In fact, I’m probably not even going to sell all the shows on this tour. But as long as you’ll have me, I’ll keep writing some songs.” And he played Fenway Park and sold it out. A few days ago he sold out Madison Square Garden three nights in a row.
I wanted to share this story because it makes me feel awesome. It also shows that if you put your stuff out there — this is what the internet’s for — even if it’s incomplete, people love seeing progress.
Shaan: That’s right up my alley. So I have two or three things that reminds me of.
The first is — we were talking recently and the idea came up that your business could be one hit away. Just because your earlier stuff hasn’t taken off doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad. You get a lot of false negatives, but sometimes you get these breakout positives. This is an example of where the guy goes to sleep thinking it’s a bust — basically planning to delete the video — and he was just one hit away from his entire life changing. There’s something pretty magical about that in a few areas of life: the arts, movies, music, content, even games.
When we had Dan Porter on, he was talking about how his company was failing, he had a few weeks left, and he said, let’s make one last game — and he made Draw Something, this stupid simple app that just took off like wildfire. Being one hit away is sort of like a last bullet in the chamber that you can continue to operate with some hope on. Which, by the way, implies you’re taking lots of shots.
My most viral Twitter thread was the Clubhouse thread when Clubhouse was all the rage. I came out and posted this really long thread — like 30-40 tweets — about how I thought Clubhouse wasn’t going to work. The very first comment was from this guy who worked at Facebook and was the principal engineer vetting our team when we were getting acquired. He posted it and basically said, “Dude, this is way too long, nobody’s going to read this, this is too much.” And he said it in a way that wasn’t even hateful — he was just concerned, like, what are you thinking? I was straight up about to delete the whole thing, and I just decided let me let it ride for a couple more minutes. Then it immediately started getting a bunch of positive replies.
That was a thread that went so viral that Malcolm Gladwell started following me. Like 10-20 million people read that. So it’s just a reminder: don’t count yourself out too early just because it doesn’t have the initial success.
Second thing: you found my fetish. I am a sucker for amateur singing talent. I have entire folders on YouTube and TikTok. I don’t want to see famous people on stage, polished. I like when it’s like this seventh-grade boy and he just starts singing and the rest of the class is like, “What, Jacob? You can sing?” There are all these clips on TikTok like that and I’m a sucker for that stuff.
Story 2: How Ed Sheeran Got Discovered [00:13:00]
Sam: You know who else had a moment like that? Justin Bieber got discovered on YouTube. And you know who else got discovered a funny way? You said this guy’s the Jewish Ed Sheeran — Ed Sheeran himself. Have you heard the story of how Ed Sheeran got discovered?
Shaan: I didn’t know he was discovered that way. I know he’s been famous since he was like 16, so it must have been when he was young.
Sam: There’s a clip of Ed Sheeran on a talk show where everyone’s like, “Oh, Ed, you’re so talented.” And he goes, “Listen to me — when I was 14—” He’s like, I kind of started to blow up in my 17, 18, 19 age range, I got discovered, but here’s me at 14. When people say artists are born with talent, you’re not — you have to really learn and really practice.
[plays audio clip of young Ed Sheeran]
It is awful. It sounds like if I picked up a guitar right now and genuinely tried to sing. He’s like, yeah, that’s how I started. It was really bad. I kept practicing.
So what ended up happening is Ed Sheeran knows he wants to make it. He has a small following because he’s from the UK. He comes to LA, like: I’m going to go to the Mecca and just try to figure out how to make it. He goes to an open mic night type of thing and performs, and you never know who’s in the crowd. In the crowd is Jamie Foxx’s business manager, who sees him and is like, this white boy is good. He tells Jamie the next day — Jamie was doing a morning radio show — he goes, “I have a guest for you, I want you to have this guy on for five minutes.”
Ed Sheeran comes on Jamie Foxx’s radio show, plays his bit, and Jamie Foxx is like, all right, I’m interested. He goes, “What’s your deal? Who are you, what’s your situation, are you signed?” Ed’s like, “Not only am I not signed, I’m homeless. I just came out here to LA, I don’t have money, I don’t have anything.” So Jamie says, come sleep on my couch.
Shaan: Yeah.
Sam: Jamie Foxx has done this with many artists who’ve gone on to make it. He would just say: if you have talent, you’ve got something — just come stay at my house, I’ve got tons of extra rooms. And Jamie is notorious for throwing epic parties. He’s like one of the most connected guys in Hollywood because he’s a movie star, a musician, a comedian — very funny. He’d throw these almost salon-style gatherings where he’d get people from movies, music, comedy all come hang out. Neville Medhora and Noah Kagan went to one of them and told me all about it.
Shaan: What did they say?
Sam: They said he has a piano in the other room, and people just slowly work their way toward it and it becomes almost like an open mic night. Jamie starts, someone raises their hand, someone else pops in.
Shaan: Like an actual salon. A place to discover one another.
Sam: Exactly. So Sheeran’s there, he plays at one of the parties, people are like, this is kind of cool. The next night Jamie’s like, all right, I’m going to test this guy. He takes him to this club that’s basically all Black — every artist on stage is slam poetry, rap, R&B, hip-hop. And then here you have this redheaded, freckled teenage boy holding a ukulele. They announce him and people in the crowd are like — why did you put this guy on stage?
So he improvises. He starts doing his own song, then reads the room a little bit and transitions into a freestyle version of 50 Cent’s “In Da Club” — on his ukulele, basically an Ed Sheeran version. And the crowd just gets lit. There’s a video of this online if you want to see it. During his performance the MC who was skeptical gets on stage with him, this girl gets up on stage, it just turns into this whole thing.
Jamie goes: that’s what I knew. If he can win over this crowd, he’s going to win. Then he made introductions and ended up getting him signed.
Shaan: I love those stories. Doesn’t that make you feel good?
Sam: Yeah, that makes me feel so good.
Story 3: Eric the Eel at the 2000 Olympics [00:26:00]
Shaan: I have a cool find for you — a story about my favorite thing on Earth: the Olympics. The opening ceremony just happened and I saw this story I hadn’t heard before. You might know it because you’re an Olympics guy. Have you ever heard of Eric the Eel?
Sam: No, I haven’t heard this one.
Shaan: Okay. So there’s this guy, Eric, from Equatorial Guinea, which is a country, and at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, I just see this footage. A Black dude with goggles on trunks, looking really nervous. There are two people next to him at the starting blocks. They’re about to go — and the two other guys false start. They jump in too early. This guy doesn’t move. So now it’s the qualifying heat and his two competitors are disqualified.
You’re like, oh, this guy gets a free run. But what you don’t know is this guy, Eric, basically doesn’t know how to swim.
Sam: Yeah.
Shaan: Some background: in most cases to qualify for the Olympics in a timed event there’s a qualifying time you have to hit. But for some countries they just get a wild card draw, like a lottery. They say, just send us your best swimmer. So Eric wins this draw and has eight months to prepare for the Olympic Games.
Can you just imagine that? You randomly win this draw and in eight months you’re swimming in front of the whole world. This is a guy who’s never left his home country, never swam before. He’s given access to a hotel with a pool he can use for one hour a day — 5 to 6 a.m. The pool is 13 meters long. He’s swimming the 100-meter freestyle. He’s going to have to swim nearly ten times this distance in the actual Olympics. He has one hour a day to train for eight months.
Pretty quickly Eric realizes one hour a day is not going to be enough. So he starts going to rivers and oceans, just trying to learn to swim. He doesn’t have a coach. When he’s swimming in these rivers, there are literally fishermen watching him going, “Son, you’ve got to use your legs — what are you doing?” Trying to teach him how to coordinate his body and float.
Fast forward eight months — it’s go time. He shows up at the Sydney Olympics. It takes him three days to travel there. He’s never flown before. He gets to the Olympic facilities, jaw drops, sees the pool size, and he’s like, I’ve never swum in a pool this large.
The other coaches and swimmers notice this guy is way too nervous during practice and won’t even go in the water. The South African coach starts helping him. They’re like, “Do you need goggles?” He says yes. They give him goggles and they’re trying to show him the day before the event — like cramming for an exam in a language you just learned two weeks ago, with the entire world watching you take the exam. And if you fail the exam you drown and you’re dead.
So when the other two guys false start he gets a free pass. All he has to do is finish. But he’s never swum 100 meters consecutively — he’s trained in a 13-meter pool.
He jumps in and he starts going. He’s going and going, gets really tired before he even hits the 50-meter turn. He finally gets to the turn and stays under for so long that there are literally gasps in the crowd — they think he’s drowned, like he’s caught in a riptide. He finally comes up. He’s going so slow it looks like he can’t make it. He’s exhausted. And the crowd just starts going nuts: go, go, go. They don’t know why this guy’s going so slow, but they know something’s wrong and they just want to get on his side.
Sam: It’s like a Jamaican bobsled moment.
Shaan: Exactly. He finishes in one minute and 52 seconds, which is like an extra minute past what it should have been — a very long time when these races are decided by tenths of a second. He obviously then loses in the actual Olympic heat. But this guy embodies that Olympic spirit that anyone, anywhere in the world, can do something amazing. The crowd goes nuts. He ends up becoming the national swim coach for his country decades later. That’s the story of Eric the Eel.
Sam: Did they ever produce any legitimate swimmers?
Shaan: Let’s keep the story inspirational, so — no comment. I don’t know if there’s ever been a medalist from Equatorial Guinea.
Sam: That’s awesome. I remember watching this years ago and it is inspirational.
CarEdge: The Father-Son Car-Buying Business [00:38:00]
Sam: Do you want me to tell you about a car thing?
Shaan: Yeah, let’s do your car thing.
Sam: All right. So I’m buying a new car and I found two interesting things. We’ll start with CarEdge. It’s a pretty genius business idea — these guys have been quietly building up a pretty epic business.
The story is it was started by a father and son duo. The father’s name is Ray, the son is Zach. The father managed car dealerships for years — he knew the ins and outs. The son was 24 or 25 and had always wanted to start an internet business. He also liked YouTube. He goes, “Hey Dad, what if I just asked you some questions on YouTube about how you properly negotiate at the car dealership, or how much profit car dealerships make so we know better what to ask for?”
Shaan: Love it. That’s gonna work.
Sam: Within about eight weeks they got 13,000 followers on their YouTube page. They were going to buy all these fancy cameras but they just used their iPhones, made it kind of janky, and people kind of liked it. It was during the pandemic, so people were watching a lot of that stuff. They parleyed that into starting a business called CarEdge.
So if you go to caredge.com — the headline says “your personal car shopper is here, no hassle, always fair prices.” Basically they help you buy a car.
There’s this thing called an auto broker or car broker. The industry is typically mom and pop. You Google “car broker New York City” and you get kind of a mom-and-pop website. You send an email, tell them what type of car you want, they have relationships with tons of dealers, and they’ll go buy the car for you. You pay them $500 to $2,000, but the savings you get on the price of the car typically outweigh the fee. They do all the negotiating so it’s not uncomfortable for you.
What these guys did is they took that idea and built a nice website for it. You can search different cars, or they have a variety of products. One is like 50 or 80 bucks a month and they give you tons of information like a database on profit margins on different cars so you can go negotiate yourself. Or you can spend $1,000, tell them the car you want, and they go buy it for you — they’ll even organize it so it gets shipped to you. And if you don’t save at least that amount, you get your money back.
They built this massive business. If you go to their YouTube page, they now have 600,000 subscribers. It’s this really cute dynamic between a father and son — all the pictures on the site are like the dad giving the son a noogie. Just wholesome.
Shaan: That father-and-son brand dynamic makes you like them a lot.
Sam: Exactly. And these guys basically described what they wanted to do as what you and I do — just riffing, a little less professional. You’re the father, I would assume. You’re older than me.
Shaan: You know, there was this big viral thing — like PewDiePie versus T-Series, who can have the most subscribers on YouTube? These guys currently have 533,000 subscribers. Your boys have 529,000. We are 4,000 subscribers behind CarEdge. I’m just going to leave that there for our loyal army who doesn’t want to see us lose to this father-son car-buying duo. Go to YouTube and subscribe.
Sam: All right. Back to this — the business is now doing roughly $10 million a year in revenue. I think it’s only two or three years old. I’m extremely impressed because looking at the traffic, they get almost 2 million visitors a month to their site. That is a huge amount of traffic.
Shaan: Is this something you normally do when you buy cars? Car brokers?
Sam: I haven’t, but I’ve heard of them. We actually talked about it years ago in one of the early episodes. I’ve never actually used one. But last time I bought my car I was in the dealership for four hours signing paperwork, wiring money — it took forever. I was like, I’m never doing this again. So I started Googling car brokers and that’s how I found these guys.
Shaan: Were they YouTube first?
Sam: Yeah, YouTube first. Audience first. The kid Zach has a blog where he’s been blogging since he was 22. He previously ran some small information businesses — one was doing like $150,000 in revenue. It’s cool, you can see him blogging as he goes: “I’ve always wanted to learn how to make money on the internet.”
I have a feeling — I kind of clicked their LinkedIn and looked around — I think the mother passed away from cancer, and there was this feeling like Zach wanted to be with his father more. Let’s see if we can do something together.
Shaan: He’s got some cool blog posts.
Sam: Yeah. “Getting Your First Customers Is Really Hard,” “From 10 to 14,000 Subscribers in Three Weeks — Here’s What Happened and What I Learned.” These are cool, I’m going to check these out. I think he’s only 25 and it’s just a really promising business. He’s blogging about projecting financials, deciding when to hire people — you’re actually seeing him do this in real time.
Shaan: Isn’t that cool, the father-son business dynamic — not in a succession, hand-me-down type of way, but they started something new together.
We had Alan Don come on and talk about Missouri Star, the biggest quilting store on the internet. It’s Alan and his mom. Same thing — YouTube channel where she makes the content and she’s the star, and Alan figured out the internet and e-commerce part. That’s a nine-figure business selling quilt supplies to other moms across the country. And when Alan refers to his mother, he doesn’t say “my mom” — he goes, “Yeah, I was just hanging out and Mom wanted to quilt.” Like Mom as a proper noun. I love when someone does that.
Sam: We also had the guys from FarmCon and Aw Shucks, same thing — father and son doing business together, but they started new businesses, not taking over the legacy business. I just think that’s so cool. If my kids want to do something like that, that would be a blast.
Shaan: I think if you get the right parent-child relationship it’s magical. It seems like the greatest thing on Earth. But they say that about everything — “don’t mix business and friends or family.” I’ve done business with my wife, my sister-in-law, my best friends. It’s high risk, high reward. When it works, it feels like a cheat code because the trust is there, the fun is there. When it goes wrong, you’re like, what was I thinking?
Sam: Do you know who Coco Gauff is? She’s the tennis player who was the flag bearer in the Olympics. I was reading about her — both her mom and dad quit their jobs and moved to Florida so her extended family could help care for the kids, and they went all in on teaching her tennis. The father had been a college football player and didn’t know anything about tennis — he learned, became her coach. She said it was really challenging, but they had a good solution: the center of the court was Switzerland. If they had an argument, they’d come to the middle, Mom would come as the third party and decide who was right. They built a system to communicate effectively for the 20 years they’ve been coaching together.
Mohawk Chevrolet: The Office, But a Car Dealership [00:51:00]
Sam: All right, let me tell you one last car thing I found. There’s this hilarious TikTok series created by a car dealership — Mohawk Chevrolet.
Shaan: Is this like The Office? What’s happening?
Sam: Listen to this. They hired a young woman to be their social media person — she’s 23, from University of Kentucky or something. Within six months on the job she films a video where she placed a bunch of rubber ducks all over the dealership and everyone’s trying to figure out who put the ducks there. She films this Office-style series — interviewing people, showing cutaways. It hits on TikTok. She ends up creating a 10-episode series about the dealership where they’re all improvising, but it is like an Emmy award-winning series.
Shaan: Dude, this is such a good find.
Sam: I think they’ve got millions and millions of views. The young woman, Grace — I said she’s 23. Chevy and Geico and all these huge brands are commenting and making jokes on the TikToks. So many people are like, “For real, this should be on Netflix.”
A Substacker named Rachel Carton discovered this and interviewed Grace on her Substack. Grace talks about the process — she says, “Me and Ben, my partner, we just come up with interesting ideas. We don’t write scripts. I sit in the corner like Pam and I just kind of babble, and we find a few minutes of gold and build a story off that. We make episodes every week.”
She is wonderful. People are asking what’s going to happen next episode. The characters are just other people in the dealership — the mechanics, whoever. An episode will be like: “My boss Jim, the owner, wants me to make a video about electric Chevys because no one wants to buy them. I don’t know what I’m going to do.” And the episode is her trying to figure that out.
Shaan: That’s amazing. Grace, I’d like to make you a job offer — whatever you’re making currently at the dealership, we’re tripling it. Come work for us. You’ve got to do this at a different scale than the local car dealership.
Sam: She’s a really good actress. She just leans into it. And the most impressive part is — imagine a 23-year-old coming into a truck dealership, which is probably all dudes, and she’s like, “Yeah, we’re going to do it this way.” They probably thought, we have nothing to lose, let’s try something new. You could never do this at the corporate account for Cadillac or whatever.
Someone on Twitter was looking at the search traffic for Mohawk Chevrolet — as expected, it’s through the roof. So I guess it’s working.
Shaan: Those are great car stories. Good finds.
Pokemon Sleep: $100M Gamified Health Tracking [00:58:00]
Sam: Okay, I have a cool find for you. I want to tell you about a wellness and health app doing over $100 million a year. You might think — is this healthcare? AI? Biotech? No. I’m talking about Pokemon Sleep.
Have you ever heard of Pokemon Sleep?
Shaan: No. Just check this out.
Sam: The Pokemon Company has created a sleep tracking app where you take your phone, put it on your pillow while you sleep, and depending on how well and how long you sleep, you catch Pokemon in your sleep. You wake up in the morning — it’s a sleep tracker that catches Pokemon based on how well or how poorly you slept.
This app is huge. It’s blowing up in Japan — I think like 40% of their users are all in Japan. They’ve done over $100 million in revenue on this app already.
Shaan: Isn’t that insane? How does it work — in-app purchases?
Sam: Basically, yeah. Go look on Reddit. I’ll read you a couple of posts.
“To be honest, my true intent with Pokemon Sleep is just to have a consistent bedtime, and it definitely helps with that. I was never the type to lay in bed on my phone playing games, but this does help me just put away my phone and put it on the pillow. Even though it’s not super accurate, it is helping me.”
Another one: “I did move my bedtime from 2 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily because I was getting frustrated at having so little sleep. I tried so many things, they all failed. Pokemon Sleep managed to make a lifestyle change that $2,000 in therapy has not. I’m even willing to spend money on buying bundles in the app because it’s actually cheaper than what I was paying before to try to improve my sleep.”
Shaan: Oh my God. This is insane. Is this owned by Nintendo?
Sam: It’s the Pokemon Company International — corporate.pokemon.com. It’s got 10 million users. Only 17% are in the US, so I think there’s an opportunity to basically replicate the same idea.
I’ve had this thought — health tracking right now is all quantitative, and nobody really does a remix that’s fun. Step tracking is super common, everybody likes it, but it’s just been the same. You look at: did I get my 10,000 steps today? It’s just you versus you.
Even the ones that try to make it social where you can add friends — it’s not really a social thing to do. My idea was: why don’t they just make it look like Mario Kart? It’s me and my eight friends at a starting line each day, and as we’re all taking steps, each person has their little car that’s ahead or behind. It’ll tell you if you get passed: “Sam just passed you.” You look at the map, you’re like, Sam’s a thousand steps ahead, I’m going to go get some more steps in. Buy your skins, make it look however you want. Take the same idea but just do the fun, social variant instead of the hardcore data-tracking version.
Shaan: Me and four friends, a few years ago, we did this a couple of years in a row — every January we’d wear Whoop bands and the person who burned the most energy for the entire month won. It becomes this crazy competition. You’re like, I can’t go to sleep right now because John’s winning and I’ve got to go burn some calories. It’s exhausting. I think Joe Rogan does that with friends, right?
Sam: Yeah, we definitely stole that idea from him.
Shaan: What does he call it — Sober October?
Sam: Sober October, yes. But when he started it, the bands didn’t really exist. Once they came out, we took the bands and did the same thing. Those competitions 100% work. There’s a guy I follow on Twitter who walks 30,000 steps a day, and everyone else posts their step counts at night just to compare. It makes you want to walk more.
Shaan: So actually I had an interesting conversation at this event I was at — with Nick Gray. Side note, Nick Gray might be my favorite person. He’s a treasure.
He was talking about the My First Muscle Challenge you guys did. He’s like, “Dude, the first muscle challenge was so wholesome, so fun.” He did it with his friends, and his buddy who didn’t even listen to the pod before started listening. And now, even if he’s just traveling and needs a quick workout, he just does that again and texts Nick every time.
Nick created a version of that accountability thing called Done. The idea is: a group of people agree we’re going to do X every day — maybe walk a certain amount of steps, maybe cold plunge, whatever it is. He made a WhatsApp group where you can only send one word: “done.” That’s it. Every day people just say “done” whenever they did the thing. You can’t say anything else. But you get the momentum from seeing other people say done, and you’re like, I’ve got to get mine in.
And he has assistants in the Philippines who, if you haven’t said done for three or four days, will DM you and nudge you: “Come on, man. You can do this, stay in it.”
Sam: I just thought that was great.
Shaan: He’s like, “You should definitely keep that alive. Do the Done group.” I think we should come up with a new challenge and just do it Nick’s way — one word, keep it super simple.
Sam: I think we need to do the My First Muscle Challenge again, except we tell people when it’s happening. People would train for it. If you don’t work that energy system it’s quite hard — I would train for it.
Andrew Wilkinson’s “Interesting People” Event [01:11:00]
Shaan: Did you meet any other people at this event? I met a ton of people. What would you like to know?
Sam: Here’s a fun way to do this — pick random numbers between one and 30 and I’ll read you whatever bullet point that is. These are notes to myself so I’ll have to add context. Just say a number.
Shaan: Well, I can’t see them. Just say a number — one.
Sam: One. “The best advice is free by definition.”
So at this event there were lots of talks, speakers on stage. We didn’t say what the event is, actually — sorry. Andrew Wilkinson, our buddy Andrew, hosts an event called Interesting People. This is the second year he’s done it. He invites a bunch of people out to where he lives in Victoria, Canada. Some people he grew up with, some he knows from the internet, some he doesn’t know but they sounded interesting when they applied. It’s probably 80-90 people, super well-run event, had a blast.
While I was there I was thinking about conferences in general and I realized: the best advice is free by definition. Here’s what I mean. Advice that is truly great is actually incredibly simple. If it applies to you in a generic way, it’s going to be almost hilariously uncomplicated.
If I said, “Sam, you know nothing about me, but you know I want to get in shape. Tell me what to do. You have 15 seconds.” Go.
Shaan: One gram of protein per pound, lift weights three days a week, walk 10,000 steps a day.
Sam: Great. Now if you wanted to create a course around that, you’d have to make it complicated. You’d have to add a whole bunch of things.
The best advice tends to be incredibly simple — so simple you couldn’t charge for it. “Eat whole foods, try to get enough protein, walk, get good sleep, exercise three times a week, lift weights.” These are such simple things you can’t build a whole course around them.
And on the other side, non-obvious advice — that’s hard-won wisdom. It usually comes from people who are so successful they’d be willing to give it away for free because they’ve won, they’re fully abundant, and they’re happy to pass on what worked for them.
So the best advice comes at either end of the barbell. It either comes from people so successful they wouldn’t think to charge for it — that’d be beneath them — or it’s so simple you couldn’t possibly charge for it because it takes a minute to tell you the answer, and after that it’s about you following it.
Anything that falls in the middle is the mid-win — advice that’s overly complicated, you’re paying for it, and ultimately you haven’t actually found the most useful version of it.
Shaan: Were there any people who you met who were shockingly amazing or interesting?
Sam: Nick Gray. Greg Eisenberg. Greg is 10 times more fun in person than he is online. You might like his online content, but I’m saying he’s that much better in person. Whatever energy I’m around him, it’s just fun, I’m laughing.
The way I approach these events is I’m just looking for two or three people who are amazing, who have a certain energy about them. If I’m getting out of my routine to go to something, I don’t want to spend time doing the same things I would do in my routine. I try to hang out with people I don’t see all the time.
Was there anyone else who fell into that category, or any insight you got?
Patrick Campbell’s Life Scorecard [01:19:00]
Shaan: Okay, one note here. Patrick Campbell did a breakout session. Patrick’s talk was basically about what happened after he sold his company — he’s been on the pod before talking about how he sold for around $250 million.
The question I asked him: “If your brother sold his company right now, what advice would you give him about the year after the sale?”
He said a few things. First: don’t make any major moves for six to nine months. No major purchases. The money’s there, you don’t have to be in a rush, you have the rest of your life to spend it.
The next thing he said was he hired a coach, Jack Skeen, who helped him do a kind of Life 360 — where they interview like 10 people around you. Andrew’s done this, Patrick’s done this with the same guy. When this guy stood up to do his intro at the event, he said: “My name’s Jack. When I was 30 years old I found the thing I could do better than anybody I’d ever met, and I realized that’s the thing I should be doing with my life.” He paused, like, you’re not going to ask me? Then he goes, “I look into people’s eyes and I can see their soul.” Basically: I can meet people, talk to them, ask them questions, and figure out who they really are, what they’re all about.
So Patrick said this guy interrogated him and the people around him to figure out who is this guy, what does he love, when is he at his best, when is he at his worst. Patrick took a very intentional approach to this introspection. Him and his wife did an offsite — they talked about what they want out of life: the material part, the emotional part, the lifestyle. They made a list, talked about it together. They’d share something and either it was cool, go for it — or it’s something we want to do together, let’s do that — or I’m not down with that, it’s not congruent with what I want.
And he made a scorecard for himself. He checks in every six months. The scorecard has four buckets:
- Accomplishments I’m proud of — my wins.
- Things I’m bad at that I’ve accepted. Not working on improving, but at peace with.
- Things I’m working on improving.
- Losses I will no longer live with — not okay in my life, I need to make a change, and I’m not already making that change.
Sam: None of those sounded surprising, but I never really asked myself those four questions.
Shaan: Right. What I like about these buckets is they normalize having highs and lows in your life. Most people try to bury things — here’s some area of my life I don’t feel great about, but I don’t want to address it because when I do I just feel ashamed and guilty. So I stash it. This framework brings it all to light and says: of course there are these buckets. It’d be silly to not have anything in one of them. Of course I’ve got some wins, some things I’m bad at, some things I want to change, some things I’m making progress on. Every bucket should have something in it, and that’s nothing to feel bad about.
A takeaway I’ve had from hanging out with people like Patrick is that when you quote “make it,” you don’t stop having doubts, and you don’t stop spending money on things like a Life 360. You actually spend even more on that stuff because it’s still incredibly necessary. More necessary than ever.
Sam: I’m reading this Jack Skeen website right now. The headline says “Discover your true life purpose and direction with the road map.” Normally I’d bounce off that immediately. But when you hear about it in the context of a story, your friends have done it, and you’re at a certain time in your life — it makes total sense to invest in things like this.
Shaan: Yeah, this is awesome.
Shaan’s Two Talks: What Worked and What Didn’t [01:27:00]
Sam: That’s a good trip. It looked awesome, I saw the list of people going.
Shaan: Yeah, it was cool. A lot of people there listen to MFM, which is great. People would come up and share stories — whether it was “I hit my first million” and I’m like yeah, cool, I’m like a genie — I appear when you hit your first million. Or people who were like, “You guys talked about this and I went and did all these things, here’s what’s happened since.” Normally you don’t get that feedback loop.
We don’t really think about this as having an impact — I just treat this like hanging out with you, trying to tell you interesting things. We get off the phone and that’s kind of it. We’re only now starting to be involved with thumbnails and titles, like, can we just make us look less stupid, please. But we definitely don’t get as much feedback as exists.
One funny one: you and I talked about this World War II book I was reading, and we talked about Hitler because he was part of the book. And the headline that was used for the video was “Leadership Lessons from the Third Reich.” I was like, oh my God, no. Delete, delete, delete.
Sam: Oh dude. Also I had a lesson learned. I gave two talks at this event — one good talk and one dog crap talk. Great lesson to learn: eating it and realizing five minutes in, oh, I’ve made a huge mistake.
The first was a breakout session and they were like, you can do whatever you want. I was like, cool, I’m not even going in with a topic. I’ll talk to the people and figure out what they want to talk about, then we’ll improvise.
Let me tell you about the bad one first. Lessons learned in public speaking.
I get up on stage and I can’t help myself — I try something I’ve never done before that I haven’t prepared for. Matthew Dicks, the storytelling guy, gave the opening talk at 9 a.m. He tells a great story, he’s a professional, he’s ready — talks about how in business, storytelling can be super valuable. I was writing a ton of notes. I’m already a believer in storytelling, so you’re preaching to the choir. It’s like the Kool-Aid Man bursting through the wall and I already had my cup ready.
He convinces us how important storytelling is. But the next five speakers already knew what they were going to say and they get on stage and don’t tell a story. I’m like, dude, we all heard that. Storytelling is the thing. So I was like, I’m going to try to tell a Matthew Dicks story at the start of my talk.
Fifteen minutes before I’m supposed to go on, during a little break, I decide to write a story I’m going to tell. Probably not enough time. But I got my reps in, gave it a shot. I would say okay, at least I get credit for trying something new. And everyone understood why my story was not great — I obviously made it up five minutes before.
After that, I decide: most conference talks, you get on stage and you’re supposed to have the answer. Here’s how you do X. You’re supposed to be the know-it-all genius. So I decide I’m going to be different.
And the thing about being different — when it works, it’s awesome. When it doesn’t work, you’re just weird.
I decided to go on stage and tell people about all the ways I have failed and lost money. Specifically the decisions I’ve made that have been the worst for me — how I’ve lost, you know, $100 million through seven or eight really poor decisions.
I get on stage and I start giving the talk. And what I realize is: this is a Debbie Downer. Even if my information is good, I am making everybody in this room state-change downward. I should be leaving them on a high note. It’s the end of the event. We should be lighthearted. Everyone’s done a full day, they’re tired. I came in like a weighted blanket on that crowd.
Five minutes in I was like, this is a bad idea. And I didn’t have the skills to pull out of that nosedive and change topics. I’m sure to them it was fine, but I know in my head what a good talk feels like when I give one — people are laughing, writing notes furiously, feeling good, buzzing afterwards. This was like the wall ran through them.
Shaan: What was the winning one?
Sam: The winning one was basically the opposite. As soon as they said “all right, get to your breakout sessions” — mine was in the main room, so people just stayed in their seats. Five-minute break, everyone’s on their phone checking email.
I was like, I’ve got to shift the energy first. Doesn’t matter what I’m going to say — shift the energy.
So I immediately said: “All right, everybody come over here to this side of the room. Bring a chair. Let’s make a circle.” Circles have a different energy than somebody on stage with a crowd facing them, not seeing each other. I had them move quickly, make a circle. Then I did a little bit of crowd work, almost like a comedian.
There was a guy in the group I knew — he used to be in a mastermind of mine. I kicked him out because four straight meetings he’d say the same thing and be stuck at the same plateau. I said, “Dude, honestly, the best thing I can do for you is not let you come here and say this same story again. Don’t come back till you’ve doubled revenue.” And he’s actually 8x’d since then in about three years.
So I was like, “I haven’t seen you in a while — how are things going?” He’s like, “Dude, it was great, I 8x’d, all good.” And then I had us do a push-up thing to change the energy right there in the moment. Get the blood flowing.
One of my principles is: good decisions come from good energy. If you’re trying to figure something out, trying to make a decision, trying to rally your team — doing it from a state where everybody’s tired or stressed or afraid, or just half paying attention, that is not where great ideas and great decisions come from. The first thing you do is shift your state. Then you make your decision.
So I showed people how quickly you can change your energy — 15, 20 seconds, you’ll be feeling different. And it doesn’t really matter what I said after that. Crowd work keeps everybody on their toes because they don’t know when I’m going to talk to them. Shifting the energy before worrying about information — that was the smart move.
Shaan: So it was a good trip then.
Sam: It was a lot of fun.
Shaan: All right, that’s a wrap for today.