Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en that’s exactly how it works is people think oh if i practice stoicism i’ll become that person who is calm mind and able to just operate and doesn’t have these sort of like massive swings and it’s like no it’s the other way around when once you learn to tame the mind once you learn to master the mind you’ll naturally become a stoic person i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to i put my all in it like no days off on the road let’s travel never looking back what up all right what’s going on um i’m in nashville wait it’s uh is it eight or seven where you are seven oh it’s seven wow it’s really so i woke up a little bit late and i texted you and i go you just want to record something right now and he said yeah i’m thankful you said yes yeah let’s give it a shot you’re at a podcasting conference which sounds like not a ton of fun is it a ton of fun though so it’s educational and i’m happy and i’m learning but it’s just like nerdy stuff and uh you know there’s not like i don’t want to i can’t absorb it for that long but i’m happy that i i would love yeah it’s worth it it’s cool people uh people like know us and that’s crazy like it’s crazy just to walk around it’s it’s at a hotel and like so everyone’s staying and it’s kind of funny to be walking around and just people come up to you and say that they like listen so that’s kind of neat because it’s all podcast nerds yeah okay i like that uh you learn anything cool any hacks any any growth hacks for us or what i think youtube is just the way to go so and that’s what we’ll be doing with this show is going hard podcasting is for nerds we’re going to youtube no i mean well um that’s the way to go some of these people spend so for the listeners shawn and i spit it’s not our money anymore but when we were doing this like we were like so cheap and i actually think too cheap about starting this podcast i mean i think it was right how we did it with like really uh bad at first and then it got a little bit better and a little bit better but people spend so much money on recording their stuff and i actually don’t think that’s important but when you have something like we have which is like you kind of hit this lick it’s important to invest and i think we’ve under invested which is crazy yeah maybe i don’t know i was renting a studio the first 10 10 20 episodes 100 an hour so that was a that was like a professional setup i went i thought i was going i thought i was over investing at that time because i had zero listeners when i recorded those yeah no but that’s my point is that uh my perspective has changed when i’m seeing like some of the budgets that people have um but for this episode i like i called you because i saw like three amazing things that i wanted to bring up to you and you have one two three four five uh interesting things and i just wanted to talk to you about them all right let’s do them what do you where you want to start give me give me your first one okay the first one that i we didn’t get to last time but i wanted to fill you in about it uh and it’s uh about the oh i’m just writing notes it’s about the elevator business so i told you a little bit about this so i like there’s this was one of these moments and i’ve had them with you a ton where you explained something and you’re like i didn’t even know that this was a problem i didn’t even know this was an industry but now i’m totally bought in and i think it’s amazing and this particular comp and well in this particular company i’m not sure i don’t it’s not because i think that they’re bad i just don’t know them well enough to actually believe that they’re gonna win but like it was pretty amazing so let me set the stage so i believe there’s something like i might be off by a little bit but i believe there’s something like two million elevators in america and only four companies basically control the whole elevator business have have you ever been on an elevator and looked at your feet where the doors opened and seen the names yeah you there’s this little like plaque there but i don’t remember any of their names i don’t i don’t i i can’t recall i once threw my key in the crack and had to call one of the companies to be like hey how do how do i get under your elevator wow so it’s otis you probably recognize that’s the big one yeah yeah otis schindler cone and uh mishibi is that uh yeah miss mushibi mitsubishi um are the big ones i know of otis because i’ve already i’ve looked into them a bunch they’re not technically these four aren’t technically a monopoly because there’s more than one but basically they control just about everything and what that means is um when you buy an elevator i’m not actually sure how how much an elevator costs but something like like target might have six or seven thousand elevators and when you buy an elevator from them it’s a like 10-year or 20-year contract it’s a really long contract and it’s almost like buying a car so when you buy a car you get a 50 000 mile warranty and except imagine buying 5 000 cars and it’s incredibly challenging to know when each car needs to be serviced what type of service the the car company is actually going to pay for and what they’re not going to pay for what falls under it is kind of a pain in the butt and so what happens is oftentimes a company like target they employ a whole team to manage their elevators and escalators and they don’t know like you know what they have to do and instead of fighting with otis and deciding they just go ah [ ] it we’re just gonna call service people and we’re gonna we’re gonna get figure out on our own and there’s two new companies one is called audit mate that’s who i talk to but there’s one in britain called we maintain that’s raised 40 million dollars and basically what they do is they manage your elevator and escalator um like it’s like fleet management you know what i mean right they determine what and i thought that this was so fascinating and very interesting and when i heard about this company uh i was like well i don’t necessarily want i’m not sure if i ever want to like invest in anything like this but i would love to own it and so the way it works is they charge 50 to 60 a month per elevator and the name of the game is you just go out and find all the elevators and you say look we’re gonna be your your agent which means we sign on to speak on your behalf and we’re gonna negotiate with otis and we’re gonna make sure that your shit’s maintained it doesn’t break down and we’re gonna handle all of it and i thought that that was amazing and it’s one of these business models where it’s kind of like the way that they charge you right now or a lot of these companies charge is a subscription fee which is fine but this is one of those business models that we’ve talked about like uh turbo tax where they take a percentage of all savings so this is like the easiest [ ] ever to sell right and so anyway they’re basically saying hey you have no no risk no loss because we’re gonna save you money you know you sign up to pay you sign up with us we’re gonna save you money and we’ll take we’ll take out of it in the same way that um you know like main street does this with tax savings basically for you they’ll be like all right uh we’ll take a percentage of whatever we save you it’s like oh okay sounds like i have no downside and even if that percentage is large it’s like found money so they feel good about it i thought and i thought this was cool i’ve never have you ever even heard of anything like this no dude so you so i’m just looking at some of your notes otis 12.5 billion in revenue schindler 11.6 billion cone basically the same 10 billion in revenue uh huge those are huge revenues for for these companies now i don’t know how profitable the elevator business is but well they’re like family owned otis is like a family-owned business i’m almost positive otis has been around since the 1800s i mean these are like huge huge family-owned businesses so they definitely are i believe they they have to be profitable um here otis oh otis says 12 but the otis is publicly traded so what do you think their uh market cap is uh for 12 billion in revenue okay i’m gonna guess they are a 22 billion dollar company might be less i think it could be less you think less i think less oh it’s about 40. 40. okay so i was 22 i was off uh i was so okay pretty crazy right like who would have thought and so this is just software that lets you negotiate twitter twitter is like 50 75 or something like that so is it really what is the elevator company yeah twitter had been hovering below that and then now it says 5560 or something like that because the stock went up recently but um basically otis the elevator company is worth almost as much as twitter which is insane and not only that i believe let’s see it’s been around since 1853. yeah amazing so it’s the funny thing is this is named after like a guy’s first name it sounds like not even it’s like it’s just it was it was the the company was uh invented in yonkers new york in 1853 and they’ve been around since then [ ] elevators and so this fascinates me when i like learned about this because you know i like old [ ] when i think about you and i and a bunch of friends were talking what is yonkers is jonker’s a place you never see yonkers is somebody born in yonkers because that’s amazing i want to say i’m from yonkers melon yeah it’s in uh it’s in the i believe it’s in the bronx in new york it’s like a it’s like i don’t know it’s in new york yeah i’m from yonkers in the bronx all right well uh so so this company but you’re what you’re saying is that this company is a sas company on top of those right yeah it’s a sas company that lives on top of it and here’s why this fascinates me i love old [ ] things that last a long time and we were talking about like the creator economy sub stack i don’t remember what we were talking about something like involving like uh one of these newsletter like one-off creators and it’s like yeah i think you can make a lot of money but can you do that for 20 or 30 years it’s really really challenging i think right basically sam’s type on companies did you start in the 1800s in some way did you um did you have a physical product that you could feel that you could touch and feel did where you started in the midwest or some some part of america you know are you named after a family like rockefeller or schindler or otis or or something like that uh let’s see what else what else is it you know are you absurdly profitable uh what those are your those are your type essentially yeah look i think it’s cool that’s something that to build something that can last a really long time yeah that interests me because that that that like you you optimized for excitement i think or uh interest i optimize for what’s the least amount of work i can do in order to like have freedom and you’re bothering yourself more like durability and and i feel like durability is like number one it’s like yeah you just if you have this you win and i’m like if you have this you might win for an hour and then you might lose the next hour like i’m cool with that so both work but they’re both work they’re just different what um what what do you what do you have what do you what are you doing let me give you one all right so uh what i want to do let’s do let’s do the zoo um okay let’s do this unbundling etsy one so i’m really interested in the second tier or like what i’ll call b-class uh marketplaces i don’t mean that as an insult i mean it more like if you’re in real estate you’re like oh do i buy an a you know a class property which is like it’s a modern building fully leased uh blah blah or do you go for like an older thing that has upside right do you go for something that has some hair on the deal that you might be able to do and so you go you know this is not new york right like that marketplace might be amazon um etsy or poshmark are these like second-tier marketplaces but i see a lot of opportunity in them we talked about i think we talked about this about building sas tools for sellers uh on those market places so you you you brought that up and i and i thought that was a pretty revolutionary thing that that was a big idea and so these exist but they’re not great and there’s not a lot of competition and so like i think we talked about jungle scout which sold for some large amount of money that you knew um jungle scout is a tool for sellers on amazon and i was thinking okay who’s building stuff like this on these second-tier marketplaces like etsy or poshmark uh so that was the first idea then i started thinking okay wait that can are you gonna elaborate on that because that’s pretty amazing well i think didn’t we talk about it maybe we talked about i thought we talked about it no if not no that’s not i think i don’t know if you phrased it that way i think the your the story telling here that you just said is actually wonderful so i think that’s actually brilliant we had so at hustle con we had poshmark thread up and one more of these companies speak and yeah i think they were some of the biggest murkari mercari’s a big one yeah they’re huge secondhand sales the real real you know there’s all these like other marketplaces basically there’s all these other other places so ben’s wife uh tiffany she is a poshmark like super seller or something like that and so she like she sold so much that like when they ipo they invited her and like whatever the top other thousand sellers be like do you want to buy the ipo you can buy the reserve price basically we’re reserving some shares for you because you’ve helped build this thing for which company for poshmark and like airbnb did the same i think i think for they they offered super host ability to buy some share some some small amount of shares and so um an airbnb by the way another another marketplace where could you build a jungle scout type of tool on top of it there is that i’m a subscriber to it’s called air dna it’s amazing and what does that do it tells you like what to price it at or yeah so it’s called air dna and when i was so i rent out my house when i’m not there and i buy property to rent out and i use it as a research tool and i guess it just crawls airbnb and it determines what the average occupancy rate is what you should charge what the earning potential is it’s just it’s tons of signals for buying properties to make into an airbnb and there might be other things like reporting you know uh tax you know some tax savings you can get or whatever if you if you’re an airbnb host it plugs into your airbnb and it generates your your report um so anyways i was thinking okay you could build a jungle scout type of tool and for those who don’t know what jungle scout is basically you go on amazon if you have jungle scout installed it’s a chrome extension and basically when you are looking for products you can just click jungle scout and it’ll tell you hey here’s how much search volume this has how much monthly revenue this product makes it’s an estimate but it’s pretty good uh here’s how fast it’s growing and here’s how strong the competition is and so what you want to find is something that there’s a lot of search and low competition and if you find some if you find a combination like that you’re like oh nobody’s searching for you know wooden spoons that are like wooden oversized spoons uh you don’t want to build that because nobody’s searching for it but if you have like you know wooden oversized baby spoons it’s high search low low competition you could go go to china get that product made and become like the top result on amazon which is basically free traffic for you so that’s the idea so i think you could do that for poshmark i think you could do that for etsy one thing that i was thinking about for etsy is i think you could spin off a whole new marketplace just unbundling etsy etsy is now big enough it’s a public company been around for a decade plus and um has all these different categories right so it’s like you can go and you can go to home you can go to you know custom gifts you can go to all these different categories on etsy and you can ask yourself huh could i make a marketplace of or or a service that just does this one thing better than etsy’s doing market it as that and actually like unbundle a piece of etsy in the same way that people have had a lot of success unbundling reddit unbundling craigslist if you haven’t seen this google google unbundling craigslist and look at the diagram it’s it takes every part of craigslist and then it just shows how oh look this housing part of craigslist became airbnb and this became etsy and this became this other thing and so the same thing i think can be done here so here’s that’s the that’s the core idea is unbuttle one of the verticals of etsy what i would do i was looking at the categories i would do custom gifs so custom gifs is one of the top categories on etsy and people go there because they want to send a thoughtful kind of like what looks like a homemade handmade gift to somebody or they’re getting it made for like their wedding and they want all their wedding coasters to have their names on them or their bachelor party and they want everybody to have matching shirts that say the bat the the bachelorette’s name on it or whatever um and so i think custom gifs could be spun out into a marketplace that’s like fiverr where it’s basically just uh here’s a bunch of custom gifs push a button and you get these for you know 10 bucks or some some flat rate basically so i think you could do a fiverr or or even like a cameo style thing for custom gifts and that’s the that’s the category i would go after but i think generally i think you could study their marketplace and find it find a we’ll find one that works because you can also see the shop sales you can go into any shop on etsy and you can see how many sales it’s at which is like you can do that an entrepreneur is now right yeah this is part of etsy it’s like you know here this shop has had six thousand orders and you can look at the price price of the store be like oh you know average thanks 35 dollars that’d be like 6 000 times 35 that’s how much revenue this stop the shop has made in two years those are both two big ideas um so you’re talking about building like the the the software that analyzes the sales and then the um the marketplace that sells the stuff both actually pretty amazing i go to etsy sometimes and i do so if you scroll all the way to the bottom you’ll see how many sales they have ebay does it too um but not as good but that’s actually a great idea i and and by the way i looked up air dna so the thing about these software companies uh you’re you’re talking about two different things we’ll call it one software one marketplace the software so if i told you or if you told me about jungle scout a few years ago i would say like oh that’s a nice little that’s a nice little hacker business yeah yeah well it it probably does like 80 or i mean if it’s worth a billion i wouldn’t be surprised but it’s definitely worth nine figures i know that for a fact because it sold part of their company so i told you just about air dna i thought that was just a small thing how big do you think air dna is by the way jungle scout raised over 110 million dollars which is that gives you a sense of how big it is if it was yeah i think it was some of it was private equity so i don’t know how big the valuation was but it’s definitely huge right okay air dna i don’t even know what it does i’ve never been to a website so i’m just gonna take i’m just gonna say a random number out of the air i’m gonna say 35 million what is there worth well so the air dna so they charge i think i pay a hundred dollars a month for it in 2018 they did 4.9 million in revenue in 2019 they did 8.4 million dollars in revenue they said they were going 100 so you could probably assume that i would i would actually bet that in 2020 they probably did 16 and then 21 i i wouldn’t be surprised because uh there’s a lot going on with investing in airbnbs i wouldn’t be surprised if they’re in the 30 million recurring revenue annual recurring revenue range and they raised eight million dollars in order to uh build up they bootstrapped to nine million in revenue and then raised eight million dollars so these are like these things that you would think are small insignificant stuff that could actually be quite big so that’s a that’s a 50 to 100 million dollar your value business uh at that roughly those numbers you just told me yeah it’s a huge thing and who would have thought i never would have thought that if you just told me you’re gonna build this thing that analyzes airbnb i’d be like no i would have been like side hustles are cool yeah yeah you should be able to bring in the 45k a month you know with your little airbnb dna tracker whatever the hell you’re talking about and and i would say i i i would have if you had to guess what’s bigger etsy sellers or airbnb i would think there’d be more etsy sellers than airbnb hosts well the thing with etsy sellers is that um so airbnb is very much it’s a lot more set it and forget it and there’s less levers to pull and there’s less like um there’s less like categories and things like that whereas like etsy has like multiple different categories each one has its own little nuances uh and then there’s like such a wide variety of sellers where yes there’s many people have houses but it’s all they’re all doing the same they’re offering the same service etsy’s offering like a million different services to people um and so i think that’s why it has probably a little more opportunity what would you do why did you call it cameo well i was just thinking custom gifts if custom gifts is this big of a market i would just start with that i’d say custom gifts i wouldn’t maybe the end product wouldn’t be a physical gift like etsy maybe it would be something like a cameo where it’s a video or just making a jingle for somebody or it could be with celebrities or non-celebrities but basically some way to send a custom gift to somebody if that’s such a big uh such a big part of etsy maybe you could rank for it in search or run google ads and hijack some of that traffic of people looking for custom you know handmade whatever custom name blah blah blah and be like yeah we do that we’ll put your name on a shirt yeah it’s not as nice as etsy it’s you know we just took the generic etsy look and we just mass produce it um that that that’d be one way i’m on board with that um you want to move on to another one yeah yeah all right so i’m gonna weave two one of mine in one of yours i i’m a big ufc fan so are you so dc daniel cormier he is uh he’s retired now but he’s a big fighter and he he posted this thing and i’d seen ads for it but he posted that he’s now gonna endorse this thing called fit to warrior and i went and looked at it so fit to warrior it’s incredibly interesting and so what they do is you spend twenty two hundred dollars and in six months they take you is it six months maybe three months i think six months they take you from being a complete noob so you’re just a guy off the street to warrior oh sorry i spelled it yeah it’s whip my bad that fit to warrior wouldn’t make sense it’s called wimp to warrior uh wimp two warrior they take just you off the street you give them twenty two hundred dollars and i think you get like a hundred classes or fifty classes what did i write fif so uh so it’s a 20 week program how many months is 20 weeks five so five months in okay so you have five months and what they do is you sign up and you have a fight you have a fight scheduled five months from the day you sign up and it’s like and it’s like cohort based you pay like twenty five hundred dollars or something like that of course yeah yeah it’s a cohort based thing and they say in the next five months we’re gonna take a guy off the street and you’re gonna have an mma fight now it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that the goal of this is not necessarily to get you fit or to like get in a fight the goal of this is to have like a pivotal change in your life to be more confident to say like look i’ve i’ve said i’m gonna lose weight forever now i like i have a fight in five months if i don’t get my act together like i’m really it’s not a good it’s not going to be good so this is like a pivotal life-changing thing and i love this business they just raised 8 million from a bunch of pe people it was launched in australia and basically what they’re doing is they came up with this name went to warrior they come up with this program and they work with loads of different mma and i guess boxing gyms and they license out their program and now they are paying conor mcgregor’s coach john cavanaugh’s on board dc all these coaches to like promote it and they give them some type of fee i thought this was amazing and i think this is amazing for a couple reasons one it’s a business that i actually think this would change your life if i told you you had to if i told you you had a fight in five months would that be the one thing that finally like said like i gotta take this am i wrong that you basically this should be mandatory part of the education system well so look here’s the thing everybody to do this here’s what here’s here’s why this has always fascinated me so women have this because they have like a biological like you are now officially a woman but men we’ve lost like a rite of passage we’ve never had this like all right now i’m officially a man like i guess if you’re jewish and you have a bar mitzvah maybe that’s like the like the crossing of the cast of like all right you are no longer a boy now you are a man and like we had this like i i love uh the sparks the spartans because they do this thing where they like you’d go they’d say all right you’re 14 or whatever now you got to go out in the wild for five days and you gotta survive and just come back when you’re done men american we don’t really have this like this this modern day yeah yeah and so i love these type of transformational like all right it is official you have there’s a start beginning and then like an end type of thing so i love that and you up here you want to talk about mental fitness i’ve also done like yoga or not yoga um meditation i love head space i love calm i i try to i do buy into mental fitness stuff but it’s a little bit tough because it’s not like intense and so i love these intense programs and i think that they can be great businesses and incredibly fun and fulfilling to run yeah so i think there’s a couple things first i i had seen this i thought uh mcgregor’s coach john cavanaugh i thought he invented this because he was the first one always talking about oh we’re doing wimp to warrior it’s so good we have 200 people doing it this season and he just kept doing it and it was like they take average joes you come in and you basically say cool i’m gonna turn into a fighter i’m gonna train like a fighter for x amount of weeks and then i it ended kind of the graduation the culmination the rite of passage at the end is you do the likes the the amateur exhibition fight or whatever with somebody else from the program i think so it’s not like you’re not in a ton of danger i think it’s really cool i didn’t realize that there was like a business underneath this and so just to do the math so basically what they’re doing is they’re licensing this out to gyms and they’re saying hey this is a great um customer recruitment like mechanism right so you you run a wimp to warrior program we’ll give you the branding we’ll give you the business in a box kit and what you get and we’ll send you the customers and we’ll send you customers because we have star athletes and coaches promoting this because it’s a feel-good thing for them too and and so we’ll send you a bunch of interest people they’ll find a wimp to warrior program near them and you be my operator so it’s asset light you do all the work we will just do the marketing and create the brand on top of this i think this is actually really really smart i would invest in this company um even though it seems like so crazy fringe uh i i i there’s a there’s a very nice model um it’s better than tough mudder better than spartan race better than all those because they take on a ton of operational overhead they’re a traveling circus and so i i like this model a lot better so okay i think whimp to warrior’s cool i think that your rite of passages write a passage thing is interesting and especially we talked early on about boy scouts and like the downfall of the boy scouts program and what you would do if you were gonna buy it or reinvent it or make a new boy scouts and i think we were onto something with this and we should keep looking for the opportunities that are here um i’m i’ll tie this into the mental fitness thing we we did a segment on simone biles in a podcast two two episodes ago one episode ago yeah and we ended up cutting it so it’s only it’s it’s in the lost archive lost files along with me and sam sparring footage from when i went to his house in austin and the reason we cut it is because i had a strong take i was pretty so but we didn’t i didn’t have i didn’t have all the details of the story i didn’t realize that there i thought this was when she said i had like a mental breakdown i was like oh that’s like crazy like that’s nuts but then yeah yeah and then there’s like these like the twisties things i’m like all right well that’s like that that’s like an injury that’s like your leg’s broken type of thing so my opinion changed and i was like ah i didn’t actually have all the facts when i was when i was kind of explaining my opinion uh yeah that’s that’s true and so we we basically were like we sent it to sam’s wife and we were like hey what do you think too much it was like yeah a little too much that’s how we cut it but i i thought there was one part of it that was interesting right like so yeah nobody really cares about sean and sam’s opinion on simon biles even though kind of that’s whatever it can be interesting the more crazy your reaction the more interesting it gets i thought the more interest i thought the real part in it was there’s going to be a trend i’m calling it now over the next five to seven years people are going to start to really give a [ ] about mental fitness and it’s a very different thing than mental health just like for your physical body you have health like do you have a disease are you ill like no i i’m not i’m not sick but you can be not sick but you can be not fit at the same time and um right so so you could be healthy but not fit and in the same way you could have mental health meaning you don’t uh you’re not suffering from you know depression uh severe anxiety bipolar anything like that but you can also not be mentally fit and you know so what’s a fit person right sam’s a really fit person uh you’re really physically fit if you work out with sam you go for a run with sam you’ll be like god damn this guy can run he’s you know he can go long distances he’s he’s fit and so similarly there’s mental fitness which is basically just like in physical fitness it’s about overcoming some adversity so a mentally fit person is somebody who can overcome a high degree of and variety of of adversity and intensity of diverse of adversity and so um you know [ ] not going your way getting in sticky situations being out of your comfort zone these are all areas where mental fitness matters relationships uh different different challenges that come your way is where mental fitness matters and i think right now this is something that is very poorly understood it’s rarely talked about it’s almost never taught but i would say mental fitness is in my opinion the most important skill one can have right the most important thing is the little voice in your head that’s talking all day non-stop this chatter box we have in our head and what is it telling yourself is it telling yourself that you suck that you can’t do it is it telling yourself that you should give up this is too hard is it telling yourself that uh you know don’t do it things might go wrong or is it saying the opposite is it saying uh you know what you could figure this out hey um even if it doesn’t work out no problem you know you’ll still everything will still be okay hey even though this this person just cut you off on the road look at look around the sky is blue the air is crisp your family is happy and healthy you have a lot to be grateful for right like the voice in your head dictates the quality of your life and the voice in your head is your mental fitness it is it is the the manifestation of your mental fitness and so i think we’re going to be seeing a lot around this i think we’re going to be seeing growth in services content thought leaders whatever around mental fitness what do you think am i overblowing this or is that are you a believer i’m a believer i think that what you’re doing with this title mental fitness is i think you’re just re-branding something that’s been around for a long time you know this is like a tony robbins book so i i i totally buy into what you’re saying and i and i 100 agree with it i think there’s a few opportunities here the first is so i’m reading this amazing book called human nature i’ve been reading it for a long time for like six months and it’s it’s very dense but i’ve i’ll read it and read it over and over and over again and i take notes and i’m trying to like master it because to me it’s like a handbook on how to like handle my emotions and how to handle other people now what i would do with this is what i would want to do is almost have like a wimp to warrior type of program where i can spend a fair bit of money and have a very intense program and i think that a mental fitness type thing i think that’s a lifetime of learning and a lot that’s like a lifetime journey but i do think that there is like transformational moments and series of your life that could actually level you up significantly and i think that there’s an opportunity to build something like that in this weird kind of [ ] up way i’ve always been a little bit jealous of people who went to the military or at least people who um went to military school because like there’s this like classic like i was undisciplined i was fat i was unhealthy i wouldn’t wake up early now i make my bed i know how to like show respect to each other to people i have self-confidence i know i have a a a new level of discipline and i’m like oh my god i know what i’m made of i went through hell week and i made it so i i have been to my breaking point beyond my breaking point where there was just no way and and i did it and you know they don’t brag about it but you could tell there’s a certain level of confidence that people have by discovering your bottom right what is your actual rock bottom not not not in terms of your money but in terms of like your mental your mental game where you break you break physically yeah sure but when you break mentally it’s over and uh and so they’ve been there because you know that’s what the military does they challenge you in that way and i’ve always been jealous of that i’m like man i wish that like i make a i like i say in a joke away but i’m not actually joking when i’m with my wife i’m like i i wish i would have went to military school because like there’s some like discipline stuff that i don’t have that i wish i would i would have had and it’s almost i’ve searched for like what type of program’s going to go to where it’s like it’s like basically like the like the the the soft version of that it’s like a like a fat camp version of that where i can just like spend money and they just like insult me for a week but uh anyway i think that’s like i think there’s something there with that and i also think that there’s something there with mastering some of these books and some of these things um and doing this mental fitness type of type of stuff and so i’m on board with this i actually think this is quite amazing yeah and i think the the word is amazing and this concept this concept of look you’re healthy you’re not like ruined but you’re not fit i think that’s amazing i love um you know who could like crush us if they wanted to but i don’t think they they do have you bit paid attention to what ryan holiday has done with his stoic brand no like i’m from before but i don’t know anything specific i’ve seen his books but tell me what’s interesting so ryan holiday is an author his first book was called how to get famous or what was it called how to it’s like news jacking or whatever yeah i forget what it was called the obstacle is the way ego is the enemy or something like that he’s got a buddy yeah so he’s got obstacles wait you go and this whole idea is based on stoicism which is this uh what are they greek i don’t know marcus aurelius these philosophies of basically you’re gonna face hardship in your life and it’s not about avoiding them but it’s about embracing them and finding meaning in them and it’s great and these and it’s probably predominantly male young males who listen to his stuff i’m one of them and he’s built this brand called the daily stoic so i believe it’s called dailystoic.com and he sells 25 stoicism coins which i own one he sells um like a 19 email course where every 14 days he teaches you like a new stoicism like thing on how to read more like and it’s it’s pretty amazing and like if i don’t think he would ever want to do this he he seems like he’s got a good life and he doesn’t want to work much harder but i i i would imagine that if ryan holliday had like a stowaway stoiism boot camp for like a month and he charged like 10 grand and like it was around this mental fitness idea i think loads of loads of people including me would would pay to go yeah by the way i heard something that i thought was great they go a lot of people get it backwards i forgot who said this uh they were talking about stoicism and i was like yeah you know stoicism you know i get it you’re supposed to be stoic and then that that brings you sort of this calm and this peace and this like sort of like really stable mental mental game and uh he goes no it’s the other way when you calm the mind you become stoic you don’t become stoic to calm the mind and uh i thought oh that’s so true which is that you um that’s exactly how it works is people think oh if i practice stoicism i’ll become that person who is um you have to get that get the order back get the order right and uh so that was like a big breakthrough for me because i know i know a lot of people that have tried to get into stoicis they have this anxiety they have this like sort of mental like lack of clarity and calmness they get into stoicism thinking it’s the answer and they get sort of disillusioned very quickly they’re like oh yeah it wasn’t for me and it’s like well that’s true because stoicism is almost a state you get to after you learn how to calm the mind it’s not the method you use you know so i’ve read a lot of stoicism books and i like it from just a history perspective and i like it from a practical life philosophy perspective i think it’s one of the very few like philosophical things that you could apply to your daily life you know whose book changed my it kind of changed my life on it and it was shocking it was naval that naval almanac what’s it called right the navalminec it’s so good it’s so good so the first half is all about making money and the second half is all about being happy and the first half is like that’s just normal whatever who cares the second half i felt was was pretty game changing and he talks a lot about stoicism and a lot about mental fitness and i and he was basically like uh the the the summary is basically happiness is a choice that i made and here’s some of the strategies that i use and it’s very sto it is stoicism and i thought it was very useful all right let’s uh let’s jump to a different topic uh real quick can i wait let me quick tell you really quick about one of the greatest hacks that i’ve seen so a financial hack so when starting a company so the first one that i always tell people and this is something that’s new to me that a lot of people or was new to me a lot of people don’t know about it’s called qsbs so it’s probably the greatest american uh tax adv basically when you sell your company if you have qsbs which basically is like the it basically means qualified small business tax so if you sell a business and you’ve owned the business stock for five years and it’s a c corp if you sell your the first 10 million dollars in sales are in uh and profit that you make for your company you don’t pay taxes on so it’s but i think i found something that’s even better um moving to canada so i talked to this company the other day and they they were building this like amazing thing and i was like huh how many people work there you’re like a really new company and they’re like well we have about 18 people who work here and we only spend about a million dollars a year uh in total cost and that’s kind of cool so basically when you’re starting a company i started my company in san francisco if you’re starting your company i i would imagine that you would when i started it i it was ten thousand dollars ahead but i and i was hiring like um young people who didn’t pay much but i imagine you’d wanna you’d wanna bake in fifteen thousand dollars ahead right easily engineers yeah so maybe more so but let’s just say fifteen thousand so fifteen thousand times twelve is let’s say fifteen thousand times twelve is um so that’s a hundred and eighty grand ahead oh i think it’s even more than that it’s probably it’s it’s so that number you’re talking about is basically seven years ago and non-engineers and now you fast forward seven years double it and then engineers basically double it again and so you know what what was maybe let’s say 10 grand is actually you should be buck you should be budgeting almost 30 grand 30 grand per per head is probably closer to reality now 30 grand you think okay so 30 grand engineers yeah so 30 grand times 12 is 360. so 360 thousand dollars a an employee so 360 times uh 15 if you have 15 employees that’s gonna be around five million dollars and by the way so that’s not um that’s not to adjust their salary so let’s say their salary is 200 to something k then you have to pay all the like you know kind of additional overhead on salaries which is about 20 that’s your fica that’s your social security all that good stuff you have your rent you have your free catered lunches you have your your snacks in the office you all the other [ ] that you gotta do if you’re gonna hire in this like extremely competitive hiring environment signing bonuses recruiter fees it all rolls up uh so if that number sounds high uh if that number sounds high you’d be surprised if that number sounds low you’re probably right and so let’s just say like three to five million dollars is a huge range to have a team of 15 engineer heavy uh highly competitive startup uh to get going it’s a lot of money i talked to this guy the other day and he had 15 people and i was and he told me he was spending a million dollars a year and i was like wait what he goes yeah so here’s how it works in canada we have these things called the research and development credits and basically what that means is if you’re an engineer they’re called them shred credits even though it’s s-r-e-d but i think they just when people talk about it they call them shred yeah i i heard people mention it but i didn’t actually look at the mechanics of it and i’m not an expert on it but he was reading it to me and i was amazed and basically what happens is he pays their full salary so he pays some engineer 150 grand a year and at the end of the year i think he literally gets like deposited money back 50 of the cost that he’s allocated or he’s paid them he gets that money back at the end of the year so 160 000 salary is actually only 80k to him and also in order to manage cash flow there’s these loans there’s loans that you can so he has to pay the 160 000 so 160 000 bi-weekly so he pays that out so you have to have cash up front but he was able to get a loan against that and so he gets a loan up front and then at the end of the year after paying taxes and things like that he gets the salary money back this was amazing and he was telling me all about it and this guy was based in toronto and i’ve never been to toronto but it’s it sounds like an amazing place there’s a company that you should check out for this uh that’s kind of cool so so most companies aren’t going to make the drastic move to go move to canada so there’s a company it’s part of atomic if you’ve ever seen it and while you’re talking pulling that up i think um i think the best arbitrage to do this in or one of the easiest is service-based businesses so okay so but i think you can’t do it unless they’re engineering i feel like it’s only engineering roles i believe it’s for anything that’s uh research and development right which usually i think is uh no no no because the at the hustle we got a uh we got a tax credit for some type of research and development stuff and i had to go through each employee and like kind of guesstimate what percentage of the time is on like research and development and and you can do this for agencies um you can get a fair bit of money back so agencies that do a certain type of thing and i was at my friend’s office uh who has a new york agency and their office was like lavish because and and they spent they i think they sent half a million dollars uh decorating it and uh i was i was like well why’d you guys do it he’s like well this is just what you got to do to like keep up with everyone and i was like well [ ] i don’t want to play this game i’d rather keep up with other people in other places and i think that we have a friend who has an agency and he sells silicon valley and new york companies but he does this arbitrage thing and he makes way more profit than most huge agencies the um the company i was talking about was terminal terminal dot io i think they basically their their their startup is a smart idea they basically were like hey we will spin up a canadian engineering office for you so you want these credits you want these cheaper engineers but you don’t want to relocate yourself and your whole business and figure out shred credits and figure out where to go find engineers and figure out you know the best coffee shop in toronto cool we will do the engineering office for you and you just pay our bill and like basically they’re kind of like a recruiting spin-up agency for for talent in in this region which i think is pretty smart a smart arbitrage now they’re doing it in kind of a fancy way i think anybody could really do this i think it’s a smart idea yeah and uh so anyway this guy like made this it like i had this whole conversation and then he like kind of he like made this off-hated comment and i’m like wait wait wait wait wait what and that like it totally was like there was a big shift there um and i was like i’m sorry i know we’re not supposed to like this isn’t like the main point of this conversation but can you tell me everything about this right and that was pretty that was pretty amazing you wanna do one more yeah let’s do one quick one um all right what’s fun uh did you see that reese witherspoon sold her production company for 900 million dollars yeah and a lot of people cause to fuss about that and i don’t entirely understand the business but i don’t think i think people cause the fuss because they don’t understand what the buyers were getting but what they’re getting why is this worth 900 million dollars they get three tv shows and her her team well so this is like kind of bro science so i want to preface like i haven’t done like entirely a bunch of research on this but reece witherspoon has had this production company i think since like the early-ish 2000s so for a long time what that means is i believe that she owns the rights you know do you realize that reese witherspoon is like like she’s gross like over a billion dollars i mean she’s like one of those people that she’s like the killers like the killers is a band that like maybe not everyone says that they’re it’s their favorite brand but like everyone knows like mr brightside and they like you know they they’re quietly in the background just always the best in the most popular but even though they’re no one’s favorite that’s kind of what reese witherspoon is it’s like everyone that at least kind of likes her and will go to her movies and so with uh with the deal i believe what they’re buying is like a lot of ip from years and years of production work so uh okay so so i’m looking up i’m looking up right now so it says that she started hello sunshine the company that got bought in 2016. before that she had another one it’s called pacific standard in 2012 and that’s a subsidiary of it so she kind of rolled that in so 2012 so that’s only a decade and uh i guess in 2000 she had another production company called type a films and they made i don’t know some oscar gone girl they made you know not nothing too big big little lies was their hit recently and then they had the morning show which is on apple tv but uh this is wild this is like so she has a book club and the book club has over 500 000 followers on instagram that’s pretty amazing um she also owns a dude good for her she’s a filmmaking lab that teaches 20 year old 20 girls that are 13 to 18 the art of filmmaking like this is great dude be like she also has a she also has a clothing brand i think it’s called draper james and they have brick and mortar stores all over the country what about what a powerhouse reese is kind of like an oprah thing where she’s just got kind of got a web of like a variety of different things she’s uh she’s a baller she’s also a kind of a baller because a few years ago her husband her and her husband were at a party and they drove home and her husband was got pulled over and i think he got a dui and she got out of the car and like uh confronted the cop and and she’s like i’m going with him so and she got arrested with her husband so she she’s kind of um she’s kind of a boss no it’s amazing i think if i remember correctly i believe her company was bought by kevin mayer who recently was the ceo of tic toc america but got fired because of all the stuff and before that was he’s a ceo he was a ceo of disney or he wasn’t the ceo but he was president and he he like was the president i think of disney plus uh before like when they launched or whatever yeah so he’s a big swinging dick and he yeah and he basically they bought this to build a conglomerate of like some type of media company i don’t entirely understand the structure these deals to me always seem very complicated and they seem very like deal makey the numbers right because like i’m looking at the so i’m looking at the assets so they have gone girl which which made 360 million gross in the box office and then the next highest one was 50 billion so they have four films uh of which you know nothing nothing huge um and then they have on tv they got big little lies the morning show little fires everywhere those are the three shows you know and then there’s six that have been bought or sold to either apple tv plus amazon abc netflix whoever i just don’t get how you get to that number because i feel like to do that you you basically need to uh like like the office was getting 100 million dollars a year of like streaming royalties that’s like you know the top of friends you know those are getting 100 million a year i feel like there’s a pretty deep drop-off after that so i think this is this is like a beats by dre acquisition is kind of what i see it as which is basically somebody being like cool we get rhys we get recent and then some stuff great i think that’s basically like when apple bought beats and they’re like great we get you know we get dr dre and we get whatever his name is jimmy iveen or or whatever um plus we get some headphones all right three billion yeah we’ll we’ll pay three billion for but i think it’s like the most expensive the company that bought it was blackstone they’re the funding and they i i would imagine they don’t they’re pretty savvy i don’t know if they overpay for a lot of stuff blackstone is funding that guy kevin mayer kevin mayer’s company is the one who bought this so i think it’s more like kevin i think it’s more like a quibby thing where kevin mayer in this case uh quibby was started by what’s the name jeffrey capps katzenberg katzenberg you know the dreamwork the guy who started dreamworks so he was able to go raise two billion dollars because he’s like i’m jeffrey katzenberg i started dreamworks and then he used it to go buy a bunch of content and it all evaporated into zero dollars um i think that’s that’s you know more like what this is like versus some some like real asset that you can analyze and say yeah it’s worth that um dude congratulations congratulations to reese for getting that bag we i would i that she is actually amazing reese witherspoon’s pretty have you seen have you seen what she you know she’s like i think she’s in her mid-50s isn’t she i don’t know but she’s killing it and uh she’s exactly the same well she looks exactly the same they get like you know shot up all over their face and you know they look the same or or or it goes the other way and they just look super weird and they’re like yeah it’s just gone wrong um you know we’ll end on this one one last thing you know the new coven strain uh is called like whatever delta the delta variance delta plus is the new one um i was thinking about this this morning first delta how shitty for delta airlines just for for the new covets train to get named after you god that’s a that’s a tough that’s a tough loss to just wake up to it’s like yo which scientist just decided to name this delta like that’s not cool and then i was like it’s a scary name it’s a scary name i was thinking what would that be worth to them if you were delta delta’s if you were delta what would you pay some lobbyist some some bribery to some scientist how much money would you shove in the briefcase for this to not be called the delta variant it’s like yo we call this the united variant call this the the the southwest variant don’t call this the delta variant so i’m staying at this hotel it’s called the i don’t know what’s called gaylord opryland or i don’t know what it’s called but i i think it’s called gaylord i mean gaylord opryland that wasn’t like a joke that’s what it’s called and i’m in this like wing of the hotel called the delta wing and it i it it has like a bright red sign that says delta wing and i’m just like what i’m seeing is i’m like oh man this is just like not good but yeah i don’t did you associate delta airlines with the variant i didn’t i didn’t i didn’t it’s gonna happen i mean corona like corona beer with the coronavirus like you know that can’t have been good for them um i didn’t associate corona beer too much with that did you i mean yeah people did it’s like that it became the word of the year and it’s associated with like the deadliest virus in a hundred years is the coronavirus and who owns corona you know nothing good comes from that except for you know the like college bro who’s like bro i’ve had i’ve had the coronavirus for you know five years been loving corona you know but ever since it’s like that joke that’s the only upside you get uh everything else is downside and so i don’t know i feel like delta should pay you know they’re worth i think like 25 30 billion how do you pay i though you can’t you can’t pay anybody but i’m saying what would they pay if they could push a button and make this go away i feel like this is worth a billion dollars to delta like easily this is worth 125th of their of their market cap this is worth a four percent swing and like brand value perception you know who’s going to want to fly on delta with the delta variant going around uh i i just feel like that’s a there’s some weird association here on delta that’s my understanding of the delta wing so i think you’re and i’m selling you’re just helping health and delta all right uh yeah anyways i i feel like if i could if i could secretly present the ceo with a button that said pay a billion dollars and this goes away this doesn’t this isn’t called delta i think he pushes that button yeah i would agree um all right i think that i think we had an action-packed episode we’ll see what people think um i think we gave like eight good things good all right and uh our early morning episode in the books enjoy the podcast conference uh all right i’ll see you see ya what travel never looking back