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 it was pretty crazy i got a chance to talk to warren buffett on the phone um some some guy i was talking to i was saying you know i’m trying to figure out philanthropy and how to give money away and literally he goes oh you should talk to warren buffett and i was like what do you mean and then he just like cc introed me to warren buffett right it was one of the weirdest things that’s ever happened to me and it was amazing and i was like kind of nervous like warren buffett’s like my hero uh you know i i was never not expecting this it was just like a random friday and warren buffett’s secretary emails me back and just says oh yeah you know call call him whenever you know he’ll he’ll pick up and so i call and they get i get put right through and it’s just warren freaking buffett on the phone and basically he said you know oh yeah i’m not doing anything i can talk for as long as you want and i just got to pick his brain for an hour uh and it was insanely inspiring i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to i put my law in it like my days off on the road let’s travel never looking back all right uh shawn is out with his new baby i asked andrew to come on and do this and i wanted to do a special segment today called billy of the week we actually used to do these at the end of some episodes but people liked it and i want to do them more often i asked andrew to come on we have two people who were ready to discuss and andrew uh andrew doesn’t know the format the way that here’s what i wanted to do i’ll go first because i think i did more research than you but it looks like you actually did a fair bit um i’ll go first i’m going to tell you who i’m talking about and i’m going to explain to you why they’re interesting and then maybe and i and i picked this person on purpose maybe you can tell me who or like what other opportunities are in this space or uh and i kind of pick someone similar to you but the guy is probably twice your age so uh he’s further along his journey um but i think it’s interesting to you but we can also talk about anything else we want to talk about as we go yeah sounds awesome um also what’s going on how are you uh you enjoying being the ceo or the founder of a publicly traded company yeah yeah it’s interesting it’s kind of like um you know when you start your company it’s really exhilarating um you know you have your first employees you start dealing with problems and you’ve never done it before and so your stress level is like 10 out of 10 when you’re first doing it you’re like i don’t know what matters i don’t know what best practices are if i have a problem with an employee how do i deal with it all that kind of stuff it’s that same learning curve so it’s like incredibly exhilarating and exciting having a public company it’s like a huge milestone but at the same time i’m like i’m like a new entrepreneur like i don’t know what actually matters who to listen to where to focus sometimes and that’s just you know you do anything new and it’s stressful so it’s been stressful uh for sure but now i feel like we’re on the other side of it we’re starting to feel uh figure it out and uh it’s been really good is your stop i ha i check your stuff once a week um is it up this week or down or do not even look i think it’s it’s kind of coasting i try not to look at it yeah it’s kind of jumping between about 650 million and a billion dollars depending on the week wow um and our podcast has been growing a ton and people have criticized me for not doing introductions so first of all i’m sam parr i co-host this with sean perry who is now way more famous than i am because he’s crushing it on content um but i started this thing called the hustle just sold it for mid-eight figures to uh hubspot and then andrew is a friend of sean and eyes uh andrew i’ll do a quick introduction for you and then you could say but andrew started this thing called metal lab which is a an agency that makes all types of amazing stuff and using the products or using the profit from his agency he went and bought a ton of companies and invested in a ton of stuff now his whole enterprise does like 100 million ish in revenue very profitable and he just did a spec and took one of his uh uh pixel union one of uh we commerce he took one of his companies that makes shopify plugins and took it public and it’s now at a six five hundred six hundred seven hundred million dollar market cap did i miss anything there yeah i mean i i kind of uh i always think like i’m a designer who ended up becoming an investor just like how sam’s a writer who ended up becoming an entrepreneur um it’s been a process of just kind of stumbling into stuff and a lot of why we’ve gotten as big as we have is because i just i don’t like doing stuff that i don’t like doing and so i just kept delegating the stuff i didn’t enjoy and when you do that a lot uh in its kind of final form that’s just investing where you’re hiring ceos to run your companies and incentivizing them um yeah it’s it’s crazy i never would have thought we would get to the size we’re at now and it’s been it’s been a cool ride and the reason i’m asking this next question it’s because it’s related to the first story i want to get to but how many companies does uh how many let’s say how many companies do you guys own or partly own and then how many have you invested in and own like a like a like a smallish check size so we control um as in like we have over you know 50 in i think 35 businesses and then we have another probably 40 to 50 um minority investments so those would be anything from like little hundred thousand dollar venture bets to minority prep equity where we might own 10 or 15 of a business so in the 100 range-ish total deals yeah something like that so the guy i’m going to talk about today his name is brad jacobs bradley jacobs i think he goes by but we’re gonna call him brad jacobs and this person is super interesting because they have started uh five companies that have either gone public or are worth over a billion dollars he started age 23 he’s 64 now uh google them brad jacobs he’s worth somewhere in the range of three four five billion dollars and he’s bought or in both he doesn’t like invest passively like a venture check they buy companies and he’s bought something like six 700 companies and he’s done it across a variety of industries and he’s done the same strategy over and over and over again in different industries and it’s incredibly interesting and this guy uh is very fascinating to me for a variety of reasons that i’m going to explain but andrew have you heard of this guy brad jacobs do you know anything about this never i don’t know anything that’s kind of why he’s cool he’s kind of on the under the radar if you google him he’s uh he’s got like a bald head and he looks like a finance guy because he wears a tie and he’s like pretty um well spoken and you think that he’s just like a private equity person and i guess maybe he is but he’s really an entrepreneur he’s very entrepreneurial and he’s uh far more interesting than just a lot of the typical new york hedge funny type of folks and so i’m gonna give you a quick story about his background so he started five things that have been quite meaningfully sized so the first was uh it was called amorex oil associates he started it when he was and it was an oil biz it was basically like an oil brokerage firm which uh i’m not entirely sure what that entails but i imagine it just means connecting folks who created the oil to large businesses who are buying the oil and within a very short amount of time only about four years uh remember he started this when he was 23 so by the age of 27 amorex his oil business was doing 4.7 billion dollars in gross gross oil bookings meaning he would that’s how much oil they’re buying and uh and selling now i imagine his company kept a tiny percent of that like one or two or three percent but incredibly impressive for a young guy and after a few years he sells that business for a billion dollars then only a couple months after that he starts this thing called hamilton resource uh hamilton resource he starts out of uh uh england he convinces a french bank to give him a billion dollars line of credit which he was quite successful already even though he was crazy young but uh he made it happen and he went and secured a line of credit and here’s what he said he goes we moved physical cargos of oil from one place to another the 80s turned out to be a great time in the oil business and i built hamilton up to about a billion dollars in revenues and did business in dozens of countries uh dozens of countries before i moved back to the states in 1989. so between 83 and 89 he started this business and it also was huge i believe he ended up selling it for a billion dollar north of a billion dollars so that’s business number two business number three a little bit of a of an odd one was waste management um i don’t think there’s anyone out there doing waste management stuff now that’s brand new but there’s a ton of companies that at the time started in the 70s 80s and 90s like waste management the company waste management and what they did was they would go out and find tons of mom and pop waste management companies because back then that’s how it was it probably is a little bit to this day but he started this thing called united waste management which eventually became the fifth largest solid waste business in america and it had a very very very simple business plan which was buy landfills and small markets by many of the local trucking companies that were serving those markets optimize the truck routes maximize the pricings get margins up achieve size so that they have the capability to scale and they did that and the strategy worked really well and in just five years our earnings compounded annually annually by 55 and the and he took the company public eight months after starting it and the stock price went up as well 50 every single year for like five years eventually that company grew to 3.9 billion dollars in revenue and 1.2 billion dollars in ebitda with 750 locations and 13 000 employees is this freaking crazy oh sorry that i just gave you the numbers i gave you the numbers for um his next business but the waste management grew to 2.5 billion dollars oh sorry uh 2.5 billion dollars and an exit to waste management nuts right that’s crazy so i i one of the most interesting things about this is like i always think there’s like um four different types of entrepreneurs right there’s the innovators so let’s just take let’s take um chipotle as an example right so there’s the innovator there’s the guy who rolled the first burrito i was like oh [ ] this tastes really good then there’s the remixer there’s the person who creates chipotle they take the burrito they package it up they create a brand around it then there’s the scalers the person who scales chipotle to a hundred locations and then there’s the optimizer the person who just sits on top makes sure it doesn’t blow up and gets as much as possible gets as much juice out of the lemon as they can and this guy’s a great example of a scaler someone who just takes something that already works that’s already proven and just does a much better job of it and rolls it out makes it scalable and builds something massive and it’s super it’s super interesting um because i’d say i i kind of fall into this camp um at the same time i feel like what’s sexy about this guy is actually how boring the businesses are right they’re they’re so basic these are things that are like undisruptible and when you build them it’s like 100-year business or something which i think is really cool whereas what we do is like five you got to think in five year uh chunks i completely agree and if you scroll up to this document that we have open and you click source um the source that i’m using for a lot of this and this is so interesting um so we’re on business number three i’ll get to four and five in a second but when what this guy does and then when i wrap up all five i’ll explain to you what my lessons uh learn from this guy are but i’ll say one of them right now which is what this guy does is he raises money like a madman and it’s not like a ridiculous amount i mean saying you’re raising tens of millions of dollars i guess for the for the average show yeah that is a ridiculous amount but he’s got a track record and he turns them into multi-billion dollar things but uh so kind of tens of millions of dollars is not that much money um but if you click that source thing what what does that take you to to the sec okay i found this file on the scc and i don’t really know what this is but i don’t even remember how i came across it but this is what interested me it’s a q a session of him having written it out and he basically lays out the strategy of his fourth and fifth business and so what this appears to be is a q a that he prepared and they showed this to a ton of potential investors a ton of potential banks and they decide to invest in him and i think this was before the company even started is that what that is so you’re saying this is what he raised on like there’s no deck there’s nothing it’s just this is the thing he goes out and he says read this document and you can invest i’m not entirely sure but i think that is part of it i it’s called this is called a schedule 14a which i i’m not an expert in the sec i believe that is something that you have to answer before a board of directors at a publicly traded company um raises money but i’m not entirely sure but it’s interesting though because he writes in wonderful straightforward simple english and you could read his entire strategy which i’m going to go through in a second um but skim that while i bring well i i’ll summarize the next two businesses that he did so he started um i told you he started two oil things but base those were oil brokerage businesses then he started um well waste management business now his fourth one is called united rentals now i don’t know if you see this in canada but if you pay attention to this now and if you’re listening to this and you live in america go on a drive in downtown the downtown city wherever you live and look at the big box trucks and look at the rental equipment so look at um like the caterpillars or the bobcats or the the um the construction equipment as well as the um portal potties and anything involving construction or trucking go and look at those things and i guarantee you on a lot of them you’re gonna see united rentals well that is the fourth company that he started and he started it with the idea of the same thing of voice management he wanted to go out and he wanted to find a massive industry that was highly segmented by small businesses where that were profitable and great but they didn’t have enough capital to grow and they were kind of bad at sales and that’s what he did and so he founded it and in just five years five years it grew to four billion in revenue and 1.2 billion in ebitda and is he growing via acquisition or is he just rolling this out and crushing competition across the country we’re going to talk about that but what he said was we got there partly through acquisitions partly through organic growth developed by developing greenfield locations he goes we grew by using the same strategy at united ways we bought about two-thirds of the branch locations and colg started another third from scratch i actually prefer cold starts is what he said the business plan for united rentals was to become the largest equipment rental company in the world and leverage our purchasing power branding and other advantages of size within 13 months we became number one leap-frogging fleet frogging hertz which had become the equipment rental which was the number one equipment rental business in 1965. another thing we did was we went fast uh we went public fast we formed the company on labor day weekend and we were trading on the new york stock exchange by december labor day weekend is in may i think right so they started the company in may and five months is that seven months that seven months later they were public merrill lynch said it was the fastest growing or the fastest ipo they’ve ever seen and i stepped down uh uh and so he stepped down of united rentals in 2007 this is only five years after starting and to start the next company but when he stepped down united rentals if you look it up now i believe their market cap is 25 billion dollars so he spent five years on this company and it’s worth 25 billion dollars crazy so listen to what he did after after i stepped down i began looking for my next big thing i studied tons of industries and i ended up concentrating on transportation and logistics it’s larger and more fragmented than the industries i’ve been i’ve previously been involved in it’s a 13 billion dollar um sorry a 13 trillion dollar industry and here’s what this guy says this guy at the time is already multi-billionaire but let me see if i um i have he wrote out what he does which was basically he basically spends three months he reads tons of reports and then he calls a hundred experts in each industry and he just goes and he sits down with them and he just asks them questions it might as well be a podcast all that’s like exactly how he learned so he’s this multi-billionaire he’s his big shot he’s done all this amazing stuff and he calls these people and he just sits down and he listens that’s all he it’s pretty amazing and he did this and then he’s in this with his new thing it’s called xpo logist logistics have you heard of this i have i have heard of this i think it’s a delivery and logistics company like a competitor to fedex at least that’s my understanding well we’ll put this in the show notes but in that document up top that is the document from where he was raising money for xpo logistics and then playing it looks like it’s like supply chain so it’s like getting people things they need that are critical on time well in there he um in that document that i sent you he i didn’t i i couldn’t study the whole thing but in plain english he explains kind of what they did and his reasoning for getting into it and he just says well i just studied loads of industries this one seemed industry interesting i went and um interviewed a hundred people who are experts on it i hired really good people and we’re gonna do x y and z and that x y and z is exactly what he’s done in his uh last businesses and now i want to wrap up by by giving you guys incredibly detailed um stats or uh incredibly detailed strategy on what he does so his first thing that he does he looks for huge industries with lots of fragmentation that are small and profitable but don’t have the capital to uh to scale so here’s what he says he was in a nutshell this is how you ramp up a you buy a brokerage or some type of small business with 30 million dollars and you add 30 to 40 bodies to it and you double revenue in time i’ve looked into companies that have executed this plan but most of them don’t have the capital to sustain it i try to find those businesses and i bring all the capital to do it the second thing that he does is he hires sales people so he says i like to hire hungry talented salespeople at a low base but big upside for incentives i fund their training for a few months and it’s not that hard for the winners to build a million dollar book after a year or so um it’s a business where you have to make 99 calls a day and do one or two deals so you have to hire people who are psycho i actually don’t know this word what’s this we have supplier people who are psycho chromatically test high on the need to win scale and low on the need to be liked scale a sales person will have a base of 25 000 or 35 000 but can make many times that amount through an incentivize a really good incentive program once you get the right people in the system and integrate them on the right i.t it can be really powerful and finally speaking of i.t when someone asked him what was the best acquisition of all time they ever made he said they made a powerful software acquisition with a politically incorrect name called rental man and we used that to integrate all of our rental businesses we rolled up into that company we couldn’t have made the hundreds of acquisitions we did without rental man and that was his best acquisition of all time and that my friend is brad jacobs and i can go on i i like i both love and and um find these guys kind of mysterious and i kind of wonder like what the thing that’s missing in all this is like what keeps him going what’s his purpose how do you how does he use his money and and like why does he do this right what’s the driving force i researched him and the guy looks like a wall street stiff did you look up what he looks like yeah he looks kind of like there’s like a character actor that he looks like i’ll try and find a photo of him like a generic nerdy like steve ballmer looking kind of guy yeah he looks like he would be like in biden or trump’s cabinet uh yeah yeah but i’ve actually seen interviews with him he’s very endearing i think that he’s not actually just a stiff like wall street like just milk all the numbers out i actually think that he um just this is his bill this is his urge he just loves to build and and and he constantly talks about integrity he goes the common denominator of everything we buy is the people who we buy from have to have high integrity and also one of our moats is we take care of the people of the businesses who work for the businesses that we’re inheriting in fact the biggest risk of our plan is that the people who we buy companies from they leave and so we treat them all really really well and so i don’t think this is actually [ ] because when i got his energy from interviews i actually believed that he was a good dude and this was just his art what do you think though what do you think he does with his money is that kind of public does he do any philanthropy or or anything because i always find it so interesting i mean there’s two ways to look at like doing good in the world it’s like okay you do capitalism right you employ a whole bunch of people you make an industry more efficient you add to global gdp you know good things happen because he does this right but on the flip side like what’s driving making more money and maybe it is just continually maniacally going industry by industry and improving them and optimizing them that’s his like gift or whatever but um but the guy i’m going to talk about next is really interesting because he basically uses all his money to do crazy good things right which is really fascinating i’ll talk about him in a minute but do you have any sense of what this guy does like no with his money like doesn’t he like he’s very much like i don’t i cannot figure it out but i will i can wrap this up by saying there’s a few things that i’ve learned from this person the first is like taking the red pill which is like have you heard i i don’t know someone just used that phrase to me their day and i’m picking it up you should be careful it’s uh associated with all sorts of not so uh not so positive connotations oh well i didn’t know that what i mean is like i guess his perspective like when you look at what this person is capable of doing you think or when you read what he’s done if you didn’t know it was true you would say well that’s impossible no one can do that but the person has done it repeatedly over and over and over again and he seems pretty nonchalant about that and so my what i’m learning from him is that um you can create these amazing things and it’s hard but maybe could be kind of simple well it’s so inspiring right you basically go find an industry that has let’s look at the restaurant and industry in general right restaurants are disorganized they’re very difficult businesses they’re very low margin people have done this essentially in restaurants by building fast food chains right so you go in you build systems you do training you incentivize people the right way and you can make a lot of money doing that but you can’t make a lot of money usually in an individual restaurant so what he’s done is he’s gone out and fun he finds these fragmented disorganized industries like you know waste management or logistics and he goes okay i’m gonna do the fast food chain uh except for that industry it’s yeah and it’s really really cool um the second thing that that i learned is he actually does the same thing as you well i actually don’t know your numbers but i bet you they’re similar he likes to buy companies between five and ten times earnings um and that’s like his number um that’s what i mean yeah i’d say i love to buy businesses for that um that valuation or whatever um but the problem the problem with buying a business at that valuation is like you’re buying kind of a crappy business often if it’s going to be that low well these are trash what he’s doing yeah exactly what he’s doing is kind of building a platform where he’s like i just need one so i can build the systems and then i can go and acquire a whole bunch more and the final thing and then we can move on is the guy loves debt and often times that ends bad but i personally have zero debt in my life and i’ve never really had debt and i actually think though that not having debt or not having some type of leverage is silly and i’ve read articles about him and he talks about it very unemotionally like he seems like a really charismatic emotional guy but he’s like yeah look like this makes total sense because i can grow this business at 30 percent uh therefore the cost if i look at the cost of capital i should allocate capital this and it just makes sense and i hear that i’m like yeah everything you’re saying makes total sense i’m just so fearful and it’s really cool that you don’t seem to have that fear and i think that’s interesting yeah and i think debt that’s it goes back to like not having fatal potential potential blow ups in your life right so i’ve heard everything from like you know i was talking to a guy and he was saying i’m super rich guy and he goes i’ve paid off my house in full i never have a mortgage or whatever and it just gives him that sense of security maybe this guy has he’s so rich he’s already made a whole bunch of money on other stuff that he can take a little more risk or he knows how to structure dead or whatever it is um you hear both things and the problem is you only hear the stories about the guys who levered up and did really well there may be a whole bunch of other brad jacob types who went out levered up and it totally [ ] them they hit a speed bump oh yeah lost all that money so the interesting thing about this though um the and the difference between what we do in this guy is this guy’s essentially starting a new business um and what we like to do is find a business that’s already working where we can actually just leave it and make it you know maybe we’ll help plug in a new ceo or something like that but we’re actually not messing with it we’re not changing the dna this guy’s like modifying the dna he’s doing like crispr on these businesses he’s working and working with them and turning that he’s working really hard right so i don’t like to work hard i get really excited when i hear about people like i’m so glad they exist but i’m like oh my god this is a big lift i don’t want to do it’s a big lift but it does seem cool it’s cool uh it’s this is like cornrows or sleeve tattoos i think they’re cool i just don’t want it they’re cool for certain people and it works great for them exactly face tattoos not it’s pretty sick that someone else has it but i don’t know if i want it totally totally um and i i i think again going back to like this guy does make the world better because he employs a lot of people in industries where you know people aren’t getting laid off because of this guy right because he’s managed this business better he can probably pay people better give them more opportunity um he’s not going to lay them off because he’s got this global business so it’s very it’s very positive but what i would want to understand is what’s the guy do with the money what’s driving him like is he like a sad empty hole where he’s like i have to keep doing this all the time or is he like you know donating it all to charity or views this as super philanthropic in and of itself i’m super curious about that um i don’t know i i like the only thing that i saw is that he has a good glass door rating um which i actually everyone dismisses glassdoor but i’m like yeah it there is like i got made fun of from the michael saylor podcast i brought that up i’m like yeah it’s not like facts but it’s like there’s a signal that you can learn a little bit it’s the glass door people only go on glassdoor when they really hate you so it’s like the voices of the people who hate you most and if the people who hate you most are saying good things or at least okay things that’s a really good sign right so anyway it’s interesting but let’s move on to your guy because i actually know who this guy is or i know of him um so yeah my guy is um dan gilbert um and the reason i thought he was super interesting i’ve talked about him a little bit in the past but this guy has had a freaking massive year so uh you know two years ago or something he was worth like six seven eight billion dollars uh baby billionaire now he’s worth 57 wait five seven five seven 57 he’s number 21 one of the wealthiest people in the united states um and this is he’s had a crazy couple years so i think it was about two years ago he had a massive stroke so he was on the golf course with a friend and the doc the friend just happened to be a doctor and he said oh that’s weird i’m having these symptoms so his doctor got him to the hospital they he had a stroke in the hospital and in the hospital they were able to do this special procedure that if he hadn’t been in the hospital he might have died or it might have been way worse right so he got super lucky yeah and you know as lucky as one can be having a stroke horrible thing and uh now he’s been basically rehabilitating himself and getting back on his feet for last two years and so he’s had this horrible personal tragedy but at the same time he’s become worth you know 6x uh you know as much and i bet he would give it all away to not have had the stroke or whatever so it’s super fascinating um this guy uh he described it really well when they ipo they just ipo’d his mortgage he said this is a 30 year or sorry an overnight success 30 years in the making um so this guy’s been at it for a really long time um i think he’s super interesting because he started with nothing um his dad owned a struggling detroit bar he worked in pizza delivery he just kind of stumbled into hustling and was a good sales person and he started a business and that business was a company called uh rock financial which became quicken loans which i’ll talk about in a second one of the reasons i think he’s really interested interesting is that he’s invested into revitalizing his home city so his mission is to revitalize detroit and get it back on its feet because it’s struggled a lot um he’s like a capitalist batman in detroit and i’ll talk about some of the cool stuff he’s done and one of the things i like about him as well is that he uh he uh does a lot of stuff that might not work he takes big swings takes big risks that he think can make the world better and he invests in all sorts of crazy ideas uh he also has five kids which i think is pretty freaking cool i love to see that he’s you know billionaires they’re not just like miserable by themselves and they care about kids and stuff and seems pretty family focused um and then you know he’s been through these personal challenges this stroke and then also his eldest son was born with this disease called neurofibromatosis which is like super rare and he’s poured a bunch of money uh his own money into funding research around that disease so it’s been fascinating um so he said uh there’s a quote he said when i when we grew up all i wanted to do uh was do two things own a sports team and a casino and now he owns both uh so this is kind of like a childhood dream and his companies are quicken loans which is the largest home mortgage lender in the united states they’re bigger than wells fargo which is freaking crazy uh he owns the cleveland cavaliers the basketball team and a few other sports franchises until recently he owned a casino i think it was called jack which owned a whole bunch of casinos but i think he sold it and then he also owns rock ventures and rock ventures is where all the big swings happen and all the philanthropic stuff happens so they own a ton of real estate almost all in detroit and then they do venture capital and they’ve invested in everything from uh restaurants to you know real estate businesses hotels crazy tech companies and all sorts of other stuff he owns rob report which is like walmart can i tell you a few more things that he owns that’s interesting um so he owns i think he owns fat head do you know fat head yeah yeah i believe sports it’s like those like big hands and stuff and like yeah yeah weird if you’re a kid and you want to put like a like the face of michael jordan on your wall it’s like a decal that you put on your wall i think he owns the whole thing he just bought dictionary.com and thesaurus.com um totally random we were actually we helped him i know him i’ll talk about that a little bit but uh we helped him with that acquisition a little bit oh no way so you know about it it was like a it’s like a 20 million dollar revenue thing or more maybe um it’s been doing that for like 10 years i i mean i don’t have any insider information these are guesses um and am i right yeah yeah he owns dictionary.com and thesaurus.com um and like when you talk to him about why he bought it he’s just like you know i think this is cool like he’s just like i had all these ideas of things i could do with it he’s not like going oh i bought it for x times ebitda and i’m gonna make a 20 return and this is what i find so cool about this guy is he’ll just say yes so he owns like rob report which is like a magazine for rich people dictionary.com um he owns shi or has a very large stake in shinola so shinola has this like insane hotel in they make watches uh he owns uh stockx which is like a it’s basically like a stock market for sneakers and watches which is awesome on that because like he co-founded like his si hell is he in the 70s yet he’s like 50 50 something 56 i think he’s that young wow okay that’s a little bit older than like a sneaker head uh and he totally i he’s a co-founder i know that so he was it he sports he’s got investments in esports like just all sorts of stuff and then he’s also a large lp and a lot of venture funds kind of quietly like he’s the largest lp in ludlow ventures he’s got his own venture fund and so you look at it and he’s got this barbell right he’s got a really kind of dull boring you know mortgage business which is really innovative in and of itself just what he’s done is kind of like brad what he’s done is like basically taking this fragmented crappy industry run by banks and small lenders and like built out this massive structure and been very innovative around culture and other stuff um so let me let me just give the history of what happened though so basically in 1985 him and his little brother uh start rock financial which is basically a independent mortgage lender so when someone you know needs a house or whatever it is they go to them they figure out they basically make them an offer to lend them the money and then i think they go sell the risk so they would lend them the money and then they would sell it off to a bank over time um and basically in the late 1990s company grew into a huge business one of the largest uh independent in the united states and with the dot-com boom they launched an internet strategy where they just made uh rock financial i think it was rockfinancial.com or digitalmortgage.com or something like and in uh and in 2000 what was it no 1997 or something intuit acquired their business because they were like oh my god this is like you know this huge disruptive digital finance thing and so um what ended up happening is the dot-com boom blew up and in 2002 he came back and he bought his business back so he sold it for a ton of money into it her sale was 90 million okay is that right he basically i i don’t know i don’t have the exact number here but um something like that so you know the guy made a lot of money especially for the 90s but he wasn’t like a crazy billionaire yet then he raised money from investors so himself and some friends went back to intuit bought it back i don’t know what the number was and what’s interesting is they kept the quicken loans name so intuit owns quicken the financial personal finance software and they branded it quicken and so now there’s this weird other business they own called quicken loans even though that’s an intuit brand so it’s kind of a funny uh thing and it just kept hibiscu took it took it back got rid of all the crap into it that added and started growing at a again and this whole time he’s living in detroit and watching his own city totally fall apart so in the financial crisis uh you know detroit i think went bankrupt and he meanwhile is like super rich and living out in the suburbs and he says [ ] it we’re moving back into detroit and he moves his entire team uh into detroit so he had 4 000 or so employees they literally bought if you actually go to detroit there’s this um it’s called campus martius or something and it’s right in the center of downtown this huge building um and he moved everyone there and he basically said for my own employees and for the city we’re just gonna fix it and so he built uh casinos he built like a private security uh firm so if you walk around there’s like there’s like normal police and then there’s like dan’s police um he bought billions of dollars of derelict buildings uh you know literally like you go there and there’s like skyscrapers and he’s just it’s like going to chicago and he’s like oh yeah i own the sears tower and this and this and like basically all of downtown detroit he owns like 20 30 percent of and um he also just announced that he’s gonna pay off 300 million dollars of property taxes for detroit residences so this guy really really cares about detroit and since since he started it’s now become the largest uh independent mortgage business in in the united states uh you know they’ve gone public they had this huge ipo and it’s been it’s been a crazy story what i love about this guy is just he’s got such a crazy collection of i think if i remember correctly i think i’m probably i think i’m right but i believe he sold it for 90. he bought it back for like 20. and i think he took it public did he take it public like either recently or right away quite recently like it was like like uh six months ago and he owned most of it when it went public he owned like 85 or 90 percent of it and it went it’s totally crazy what’s the market cap now the market cap is let’s see here market caps 46 billion dollars wow so yeah where’s the other 10 billion come from just his other stu just as others he owns a lot yeah a lot of real estate you think the cavaliers are probably worth you know 500 million to we forgot about that whole part here you know all these stockx is worth i think a couple billion dollars now um so he’s just got this crazy collection of stuff and and so chris and i got to meet him the other cool thing about this guy is like he’s just a wild card like i so i read about him in the new york times they did this profile of him and i i have this habit of just cold emailing people i think are interesting and like 95 of the time i just don’t hear back but i wrote him an email at like one in the morning and said hey you you know i’d love to meet you and i get an email back like five minutes later and he’s just like yeah sure and then i got a follow-up from his assistant and we ended up flying to detroit and it you know sometimes when you go and meet these billionaires they’re like whatever you know you walk in you get 20 minutes with them that’s that he was like incredible they like planned this whole tour of detroit it was like this two-day thing like ev they set us up in their hotel um and then dan spent like two hours with us and he’s just this super nice guy he’s like deeply interested in what we’re doing um and super engaged and like every business i mentioned to him he’d be like how does that work how can we get involved what can we do how can we do it like he wants to say yes to ideas which i always find really inspiring right because i think some of these people have gotten really rich they’ve gotten rich by being like hyper disciplined and just saying no to everything but he says yes before no that’s really interesting that’s what shawn acts like and i usually i usually say no to everything sean says yes to everything and my joke is that like i’m like my success is probably going to be quite predictable and it will be really good sean’s success is he’s gonna go completely broke and die like young or he’s gonna become a billionaire super fat like you know it’s like a it’s a high risk high reward type of thing and that’s not the reality but that’s my joke but um and you actually can you tell the story of how you met someone recently who’s a big deal and they said like oh just call whenever like i’m free all day yeah uh so i recently got yeah well i got i was pretty crazy i got a chance to talk to warren buffett on the phone he just like cc intro’d me to warren this it was just like a random friday and warren buffett’s secretary emails me back and just says oh yeah and so i call and they get i could put inspiring right like this guy he was exactly who you’d expect him to be i find with a lot of these guys it’s like don’t meet your heroes and uh they’re not who they appear to be on tv all day he’s available all day he talked to me for an hour and a half and he was just the nicest guy he’s exactly like he was on his cnbc interviews showed a ton of interest in what i was doing and like i literally just like grilled him for like 30 minutes yeah he’s definitely on a landline and it was just it’s always it’s always really nice when someone is what you hoped they’d be that’s great so we’ll bring it back to gilbert but just so you know i have a feeling the clip that you just said about buffett that’s gonna go viral um uh so hopefully you’re okay with that uh and if you’re not you could tell us um all right um you you have something here about his strategy and his culture because i actually wanna know what motivates this guy and do you think that he was so i actually sent this to you i think i use newspapers.newspaper.com and i actually like to read all articles and i read a ton of old articles about rock financial and even before it got bought by quicken dan was like a detroit guy it seemed like it was like he was very um confident not arrogant but he was like he just had the it factor at a young age it seems like and um then i read his uh what’s it called the 10k or s1 when they go public and uh he was like 30 and everyone on his company was like in their 40s so it was like he was like a young guy and the business was booming and very interesting very seemed like a very confident person at a young age what do you think motivated i think he’s been super rich for a long time well yeah i was going to say like he says there’s a great quote he says one of our things is that money follows it does not lead so we want people that are fired up and passionate about their mission and people that aren’t so married to spreadsheets and thinking that kind that kind of voodoo controls the future because it doesn’t so this theme of doing things because it’s cool or because it makes sense or because you’re driven to do it versus based on financial analysis and that’s the feeling i get about this guy he says yes and he wings it and he takes risks and he takes big bets and i think it goes back to this thing of what’s the point of making a bunch of money if you’re not going to try and do cool stuff with it and so he’s just very very inspiring in that way and one of the ways that he wins is that he focuses massively on culture so when we visited him uh you know he probably had five or six thousand employees at the time and he said i still personally on board every single employee so once a month i go into like a conference center and there’s a you know 100 or 200 new employees coming in and i will spend all day with them talking to them about our culture and what you know what we represent and he gave me this book and he calls it isms these are the like the ideals that they live by or whatever and usually you get these stupid corporate bse things like you know we value integrity or whatever but it’s this series of um of kind of like words to live by so you know some of them yes before no money doesn’t follow it leads we’ll figure it out every second counts yeah a penny saved is a penny you know don’t obsess over saving just do the right thing uh anyway i i just love how he does that and then i also love again this barbell strategy uh where he’s got a conservative cash flowing business and that funds crazy [ ] and big bets and interesting stuff um and you know he also said anyone who dies with money in the bank is a failure right so this is not a guy who’s going to go hoard it or whatever he’s going to give it all back to society which i think is super cool that’s great do you think does he have so none of this would have been possible without quicken working out yeah was he has he was he always hands on or did he delegate right away you think well he’s got this really smart ceo called jay farner and jay my understanding is jay now runs that business and dan floats above doing all of his different stuff but i don’t know i think jay’s been there for a really long time so i’m not sure but i think he was the he’s the chairman or something i think he’s kind of taken that role where he starts up the business he’s super involved he’s still on but he he kind of lets someone else operate it day-to-day damn this is awesome i i’ve heard him talk my and i judged him incorrectly i think because he’s a nice dresser and he’s kind of good looking i and he like slicks like literally slicks his hair back i thought that he was frankly kind of a douche um and i heard him talk a couple times and i’m like oh wait this guy is not how i thought he was going to be super humble yeah he he talks like with the michigan accent he is super down-to-earth super funny like we when we were meeting him we’re like god this guy’s like he owns casinos he’s got slicked back hair he almost dresses like a gangster or something he’s got like kind of a serious yeah you look and you know there’s a story about him like punching a guy in the face at a party like you’re kind of like who is this guy but when you meet him he’s just completely real and down to earth and cool and and i would say one we’ve met lots of very successful people and i’d say he’s one of the only ones that i would go you know there’s a small list of people where i’d go i’d really want to be like right i’d love to trade lives with him is he grinding still or does he relax a little well i don’t know i mean i think with the stroke there’s a question of you know did he have the stroke because he was stressed or you know high blood pressure i i don’t know um but i’m not sure i i don’t know what his uh approach to work is or whatever i haven’t worked super deeply with him i mean we looked at that dictionary.com thing for him gave him our feedback on what we would do with it um and we’ve we’ve done like you know meta lab worked with with quicken loans a little bit and dan’s lit me up before via text saying you know this design sucks and you need to make it better but again like that’s what’s cool about him is like he’s running this freaking 60 billion dollar empire and yet he’s still texting me going hey this website sucks and that color’s wrong and you know tweak this um he’s just he’s a real person right and so many of these guys they’re like reptilian right these bill they’re they’re too slick they they’re never you know never out of place they won’t admit any of their flaws and you know it’s neat when you meet people and they’re just real they’re flawed human beings uh they’re doing cool stuff that’s great i’ve i’ve just become a dan gilbert fan i i prepared more than you i think and i think you you picked the right guy and you won i think i think you’ve won uh i’ve become uh you’ve convinced me to become a um a gilbert fan a dan gilbert fan he um he also uh is really into hip-hop culture so like he did um i think he’s the biggest investor in rap genius which is not really relevant anymore but better for worse yeah for better for worse correct but it’s whatever i mean you’re gonna lose sometimes if you say yes to everything but that’s cool that he said yes to that and he’s in uh so he’s kind of got like street cred and he does actually seem like a pretty cool um um and then that dictionary.com deal i according to the news it said that he bought it for a hundred million which is pretty sick i bet you that company could do 10 or 15 million a year in profit if it wanted to um but you would know more than i do but that’s pretty sick i’m a dan gilbert fan yeah me too um abreu what do you think of our first episode of billy’s billy’s but billy of the week i liked it i think there’s a lot to take away from both those guys i’m curious to see what people’s reactions are going to be but i think this could become a weekly thing sick um i think we’re scheduled to do it for at least one more week right andrew are we doing we’re gonna do the same format next time you want to do a different one well i like well i like doing this but the research is annoying it’s so much fun when i can just wing it i have something cool for you so okay at hubspot we now have two full-time researchers so if you’d like we can send a couple people to them i mean i didn’t do it this time but abray you can uh we’ll hook it up you mention a few people who you’re interested in and our researchers will take care of it oh dude i love that that’s awesome so uh if you’re looking for mr mr corporate big shot i know it’s trust me it’s also where’s your crazy camera set up are you on your like crazy dslr right now no but have you you’ve seen it right it’s real nice right yeah it looks amazing i um i’m driving to st louis to meet a newborn baby uh my my niece but i am stopping in oklahoma city to meet up with a bunch of listeners because that was like the middle ground and so i just tweeted out i’ll be in oklahoma city and like 50 people signed up so i decided to stop and stay and meet people and then i’m going to drive to st louis tomorrow isn’t it isn’t it crazy when you think about i remember doing this with our um we had this invoicing software like 10 years ago or whatever and uh it was really small but we had thousands of customers and you don’t realize like for you you’re just doing a podcast and you see these numbers it’s like oh yeah like we got 20 000 listeners or whatever when you actually think like okay there’s actually 20 000 people all over the world listening to you who feel like they know you and when you tweet out that hey i’m in oklahoma city some random city in the united states and 50 people show up in person that’s freaking cool it was even more yeah i was shocked more people tried to rsvp and then i tweeted that i was in or i was going here and then someone was like hey i own this fancy hotel would you like to stay here i go yup you guys have a restaurant he goes yep i go all right i’m gonna have 50 people come and we just created an event by page and it’s sold out right i mean wait are you vaccinated yeah oh dude it’s taking forever in canada it’s gonna be like another two months yeah i’m vaccinated and uh i still wear the mask to make people comfortable but uh i’m vaccinated so i’m just going to i don’t know i i i don’t even know you got two dose or one dose two hmm which one’s the problem yeah yeah it was one of those uh i’m so jealous i’m so i’m so done me and my wife got it done um and uh so that’s why i’m i’m i’m traveling a little bit do you think that this will be like you’re gonna be happier as a result of this like you this [ ] it’s kind of you had a hundred days of rain and then all of a sudden it’s sunny and you appreciate it way more than if you lived in southern california like did you just have like a boring year and now it’s super exciting does it feel like you’ve just been letter to prison or something from a personal perspective from a business perspective from fitness from bot from like my bodies and i don’t want to sound callous because i know there’s bad stuff covid was so good to me i i loved i mean i kicked ass my family night we we crushed it i enjoyed the down time i enjoyed getting fit i enjoyed moving business-wise business boomed um are you in the same boat no i would say um if anything like i have a tendency to be a workaholic and so what i used to do is i would go work at a cafe and then i’d run into my buddies who would also go to the same cafe or someone i knew would come and i’d have lunch with them or i’d go for a walk and it would just force me to kind of get away from work and have more perspective and break up my day or i’d be still working but i’d be going from meeting to meeting the meeting and getting eye contact and face time and now um all i do is work right like i’m just it’s basically i’m at a i’m at a house like i work out of a house that we rent and then i drive home and that’s it and it’s been this winter it’s been too cold up here in canada to really go and sit on a patio and so a total bummer and i’m like an extreme extrovert like i love spending like two three hours with other people every day so it’s been it’s been grinding on me for sure why don’t you come down to texas because well so my wife and i’ve been building a house for the last three years we’re moving into the new house at the end of this month and otherwise i’ve been i’ve gone to my wife but like we just need to move to hawaii for six months and just f off go get vaccinated and then wait for the border to reopen the reason i can’t fly to texas is if i fly over the border when you come back to canada there’s a mandatory two-week government quarantine even if you’re vaccinated so it means with two kids i gotta be stuck in the house or by myself my kids can’t go to school it’s just like that’s not fun do you the the downside that i’ve had is so many i’ve met people digitally and i hate that i have so many online friends and so my phone texts are always my i get so many and it’s not like because i’m necessarily popular but uh i get so many text messages i get so many emails uh i do phone calls all the time and so my problem is i don’t want people to contact me anymore or i just ignore them um and so it goes back to like this problem that you’d be so stoked to have five years ago like i have the same problem of like i post on twitter and then someone dm’s me hey check out my business and would you get on the phone with me and talk about it and five years ago it would have been like stoked i’m like oh my god i can help all these entrepreneurs and make all these new friends and now it’s like i get 20 of those a day and i just want everyone to leave me alone and like i’m trying to figure out how to even just deal with the amount of email and text i’m getting and this is this is the downside with scale right like with 35 businesses there’s always something happening there’s always a problem to solve or some a text to respond to or an email and so it’s uh pros and cons right i always make this kind of i historically i always kind of claim to be this guy where i’m like oh i have this great life i have all this freedom i don’t run my businesses but that worked when we were 20 companies two years ago now i’m hitting this threshold where i’m like okay i’m back to being busy again how do i restructure this yeah you’re gonna you’re gonna have to hire a you did if one you’ve got to hire someone to run that i need a chief of staff i hate that title i know i find that so douchey no you need a ceo of tanya now maybe yeah um i always love i always love these like silicon valley ceos who are hiring an assistant they’re like i need a chief of staff like i’m the president that’s so ridiculous yeah they should just replace themselves um and then the second thing that you did which might hurt you but you’ll figure your way out is you painted the picture of yourself as this guy who’s like what are you guys talking about like so easy why you work so hard like and now that you’re doing it everyone’s gonna be like told you told you well i think the way i describe it is when you okay so when you look at other people’s businesses and you’ve hired uh executives or you’ve let’s say let’s say you own a bakery right and there’s there’s you’re looking at a bakery owner and they’re [ ] staying up until two in the morning baking they’re sleeping for four hours they’re working the till they’re covered in flour and you’re looking at them and going dude it’s so easy just go hire a staff and build a manual right like this is not rocket science and then you do that and now you’re the ceo of the bakery and now you got to deal with people problems in a different level of of issues and to me it’s like i’ve done the right stuff and i’ve hired great ceos i have all that it’s just now there’s like too many different things to keep tabs on in my brain and i think humans aren’t designed for thinking about more than like two problems at once no so when i have like problems or 30 businesses it’s just hard to kind of feel on top of everything i think i don’t know i what i learned i think i learned this from you actually and then another person was like i was like oh i’m just gonna let this burn and oftentimes it doesn’t it yeah survives or gets usually usually they figure it out right if you don’t respond to the text and you take four hours to respond instead of 10 minutes usually it’s like oh actually i figured this out or you train people that you don’t respond quickly unless it’s an emergency and they go figure it out but if you jump in and you solve their problem all the time they’re just going to keep asking you yeah and i i kind of came to the conclusion of like i’m just going to let it die and then it goes it goes back to that thing of like you know tim ferriss or any of these people who talk about these hacks the hacks are real but what’s what’s what’s also real is human nature is to be miserable right so like you know you know old people who are like rich retired and they’re angry about their neighbors or their grass or their vacation got canceled or whatever the silly thing is and you’re looking at it you’re like dude you have a nice life relax enjoy yourself i think humans just always need something to be upset about and so for me it’s like you know i’ve got i’ve got i’m so happy with where i’m at and i i love all my businesses but i managed to still make myself miserable i would change it too we don’t need something to be unhappy about but we need a war i need a fight i there i i agree like it it’s good for me to have a fight i love uh having an enemy but then i think i’m a double-edged sword i’m the same way my business partner always says you need an enemy um i i get so fired up with that or like being wartime ceo but then like okay yesterday i did this viral tweet i got the biggest tweet ever right how many people did that reach 30 000 likes i haven’t checked the number of i think is uh it was like it was like tens of thousands or something of retweets right so one of the pieces so shawn’s clubhouse thing reached i think six million people but your thing looked like it was even bigger where do i look does twitter analytics yeah on your phone there’s this thing called insights so you go to the tweet and then underneath the like button like the heart button you see something that says view insights so i got 7.2 million impressions wow and total engagement of 1 million 1.1 that is 7.2 million is so good yeah so it’s crazy so anyway so i did that and you know it was like dopamine hits i was talking about a failure right it was like i hadn’t really talked about it i publicly revealed i lost 10 million dollars on this business i’d started and it was just kind of like exercising a demon right hey i’m just sharing this [ ] horrible story or whatever and the thing about twitter is that two to five percent of your audience will always misinterpret what you say go you know oh hey technicality or this isn’t right or you’re you’re trying to come across this way and that’s not true or whatever it is it’s a classic so how privileged of you totally oh how privileged you lost 10 million dollars or whatever it is and and i had it was it was hilarious i had um so my the story was basically we started productivity software called flow i decided to bootstrap it like base camp we had a big competitor asana and asana was run by billionaire the co-founder of facebook he raised a shitload of money and originally i was like oh no we’ve got a better product and then they just made their product better and they outspent us on marketing and we we got killed right and so i do this and you know the co-fou the co-founder of asana who i really like and i thought i complimented him in this story he started taking issue and saying you know in 20 we didn’t even have a marketing budget in 2012 and all this stuff and then was fighting with justin dustin was like fighting with me on twitter and i’m like dude i like you yeah you’re like i like you i’m complimenting you you’re like such a nice guy and and you said it really nicely and all this stuff and so he’s in the tweet you said dustin very nicely said we’re gonna crush you and he did and um but i love him a lot that’s what you said i didn’t really he didn’t even say i’m gonna crush you it’s more like hey here’s all the challenges you guys are going to have you should really join us and we’ll do this together right it was this very collaborative message because i think they wanted to buy us but um and then you know my other he like a hero of mine david heinemeyer hanson who like i’ve worshipped forever in terms of like their business they’ve built um he wrote this whole post about how i’m pro-venture and i’m you know mis misallocating you know success to all this stuff and he totally twisted what i was saying and so it’s like this downside of twitter and being public of like starting a fight and stirring the pot and sharing what’s going on like your buddy yeah and i’m friends with him we’re texting about it and it’s fine but it goes back to like the negative emotions of sharing and being out there and having you know having enemies comes with shitty emotions right and i’m debating this right now like is it worth over the last two years like i love coming on here and stuff but is it worth having a public profile right is it is it worth the negative emotions i think that that this is like a rich person’s problem it’s kind of not like not en rich of whatever you want so like whatever you’re trying to get whatever you’re trying to achieve you get it and you’re like uh man that’s not as good as i thought and i’ve experienced this as as well so if you’ve noticed like online i’ve actually try to be far more low-key than ever before because um i find the pressure and i find the attention to actually be a net negative although that’s like [ ] it’s like that’s a shitty thing to say because it’s not really a net negative because i’m happy with the outcome and i wouldn’t trade it so it’s not really a net negative but uh i completely agree i think that right now well this is the question is could you be known could you still be outspoken in audio and stuff but just have your photo nowhere so no one knows and not reveal too much personally or whatever because the the cool thing as an extrovert i like lit up when you’re like oh dude i i tweeted this out and 50 cool people showed up at this event right like that is the power that’s by by not being public you actually aren’t a you’re not sharing your lessons and you’re not helping the next generation of entrepreneurs and stuff but you’re not connecting with new people and you’re making all these friends as a result maybe you don’t need new friends but uh that’s so cool yeah so there’s we have two options one we just have thicker skin and stop being such a wussy um about it which like is hard it’s really hard um or we build anonymously a little bit more and we’re actually having what’s this the guy’s name biology the uh cryptocurrency yeah he’s going to be on the podcast in a couple weeks i think right abreu and um he uh his whole he’s got this big prediction that um that’s going to be the norm is that your co-workers are actually going to be anonymous and i want to i wanted to talk about that because i kind of agreed i think there’s a world where that could happen it’s fascinating to think about like if you think about like if you had a work persona and you’re just like you know sam x and then your sam pardon your personal life and sam x has a reputation and you talk about what you’re doing and stuff that’s super i mean there’s that guy the samurai whatever the [ ] the guy is i’m a big fan financial samurai you like that guy no one knows who he is right or what’s the guy’s name mr money mustache nobody knew who he was until that new york times profile right that’s the ultimate totally and and you and i both probably you you and i were this and you probably have a lot more we have friends who we feel like they’re incredibly close friends and you’ve not only never met them in real life you’ve actually never heard their voice or seen their face i’ve had a ton of friends like that uh who i only communicate with and i know what their profile picture is um and i consider them to be great friends um but even even liquid jack smith right it’s like his username is jack smith but his photo is just some random cartoon thing and it’s it’s fake and that is smart right like dude there’s i was texting with someone last night and he was saying there’s a twitter user i think he has like 200 000 followers or whatever the guy gets death threats right and i look at his twitter and i’m like this isn’t like this is pretty innocuous he’s not like some a controver i can’t say but not super controversial or anything like that and the guy gets death threats and you just go like wow like if that’s what you’re dealing with like i remember i had this guy six years ago um a schizophrenic guy in my city thought that because we worked with apple we had the apple watch before the apple watch came out he thought we had the apple watch plans and he showed up in our office in like a super manic state quivering and like demanding with his like fist spared that we give him the apple watch stuff and we’re able to cool him down and get him out or whatever i have like some schizophrenic uh people in my family who knew how to deal with it but you think about like that’s only going to happen more as you have a bigger and bigger presence and that kind of stuff’s a little freaky right you don’t want to get like john lennon i i call it love knifed you know they love you so much they’re going to stab um really and it is fearful uh i mean i’ve not had death threats but like there’s been times where sarah and i have been on vacation and we’ll take the picture of take a picture of our guesthou or the vacation home and we’ll um cover the address but still but i’ll get like five or ten packages um from people saying like oh we just found the house on street view and they’ll like send away they’ll send stuff yeah it happens all the time so i’m not uh that’s creepy they asked me not to take pictures of the of the house even if we cover the address dude that’s super creepy and i’m a nobody you guys you and sean have two x as many followers i mean and so yeah it’s weird it’s so it’s so interesting that’s so it’s it’s it’s a it’s such a first world problem right oh no i’ve got this big audience all these people listen to me or whatever but but uh yeah double edged sword yeah you know people always say that’s a good problem to have that’s a first world problem and my reply is like yeah you’re right it’s still a [ ] problem though totally it’s very real and you know i was saying i was on the phone with uh the other day and you know he he was saying um oh yeah you know i want to be a billionaire and i was going well think about being a billionaire you know think about the pressure of having billions of dollars and knowing like you can okay so like here’s an example it’s like i read bill gates new book about climate change right and i’m going oh it’s okay i don’t have enough money to really do anything in this right i don’t feel any personal responsibility let’s let the crazy billionaire bill gates or whatever deal with this and if i was a billionaire i’d be going oh [ ] you know i need to like call bill and i need to help and i this is my problem now and if there’s a shooting uh you know in town in town i need to fund the police to make it better to solve these problems like there’s a lot of pressure that comes along with large amounts of money and so it’s it’s interesting to think about who’s what’s the right amount of money right and i i the people i admire the most are often the people who have you know enough money in the bank that they can do whatever they want but not so much money that they can turn into wackos or stress themselves out what’s that threshold of they can do whatever they want like what does that i think really it’s like five in my city it’s like maybe like five to twenty million bucks is enough to you know that’s live a great great great life right you could obviously do a lot less but i could i can pretty confidently say that i think 20 is the threshold that you could live a great life in pretty much any city for the rest of your life with 20 yeah i think i would say that now i mean that’s like you could get like a crazy apartment in new york live like a king and you’re you’re good forever forever right but i mean in with like two million dollars even three million dollars you can live somewhere in the world like amazingly well yeah well um andrew thank you we’ll do it again next week and we’ll um get our research to do stuff i brought you what do you give this out of 10 9 out of 10. oh i’ll take that that’s good i would not have expected that