Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates

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 what’s the most annoying thing in the world an unhappy billionaire and i think he said something like that i was like wow that’s so true actually like if he came to me about being glum and whatever it would be hard for me and my initial reaction to be like dude you have it i all like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to i put my law in it like no days off on the road let’s travel never looking back all right let’s get into it you ready yeah ah all right what’s going on not too much um can i tell you uh a quick story that i just read i love when we start with the story the last the last story uh got rave reviews big reaction for the psychedelic story oh did it great all right let me tell you a quick one this isn’t about me though and i’m and i’m actually reading the book called story worthy because you told me it was a good book but uh and so i haven’t read it enough that i’m gonna implement what it’s what i’ve learned so don’t have your high expectations but i’m reading the biography of the wright brothers do you know who they are of course that’s the airplane well you didn’t know who dolly was first people to to have a flying plane yeah that’s good yeah the the wright brothers they uh they created like insulin right um so wilbur wright was like the smart was like the smart brother or he was like the lead brother and when he was in high school he was very smart he was gonna go to yale he was like the it was gonna be a big deal and he was an athlete and he was out one night playing hockey in the neighborhood uh he lived in ohio dayton ohio where it was really cold in the winter and you could you could play ice hockey on the lakes and he was playing and this kid comes from behind him and smacks him in the face with a stick and he knocks out most of his teeth he breaks his jaw and he has digestive problems for years and he’s basically like not in a coma but he’s like he doesn’t he doesn’t leave his house for four years the guy who hit him his name is um like howard howard hoth or something like that and he this guy this kid who hit him one of the reasons why it’s hypothesized why he hit him is this kid had been suffering from a cold or some type of flu for a really long time and the at the time they gave him this medicine that was cocaine-based and so basically he was like a drug addict at a young age and he was a bully he was known to be a bully and he smacked uh wilbur right the face really bad no one knows if it was on accident if it was on purpose turns out years later this guy who hit him uh turns out to be one of the first serial killers based out of ohio and he’s put to death because he kills like 20 people so he was like a bad guy for for from since the beginning and he hits wolver right in the face and so wilbur wright was gonna go to yale that year and he ends up not going to yale he kind of uh he was like a good student but he wasn’t like a homebody like he had since now become and he was like that for four or seven years and so he basically locked himself in his room because he was having digestive problems he was embarrassed because his teeth was all [  ] up and he just felt horrible for years and years it’s not like there was like they didn’t like do surgery on this and they didn’t have like amazing pain pills for you so he just had to suffer and in that time he started reading a lot and he actually like read a book on bicycles and he got really interested in bicycles at the time someone bought him like a toy plane that was kind of like a kite but it was like a plane and he started getting really fascinated with mechanics and fascinated with planes and once he once he healed he decided i’m gonna this is gonna be my life this is what i’m going to do is instead of going to yale like i was going to do him become a doctor his i believe his father was the doctor he goes i’m going to study mechanics and i’m going to create a bicycle shop and then from a bicycle shop he says i want to create a glider and then eventually i’m going to create a plane and it all started with getting hit in the face and it like like with a debilitating hit in the face and he thought that his life was over and i love stories where you think it’s all over you have so much uh uh adversity in front of you and that totally shifts the outcome i had that one time when i got fired from a job when i moved out here i had nothing i was like i don’t know what’s gonna happen so i ended up starting my first company but i love that story and i wanted to bring that up because i love when when bad things happen and and i’ve gone through it enough times that i’m like don’t worry this bad thing well right it might lead to something really amazing have you ever had something like that where it led to something where you’re like my life’s over well okay you know not the wall not wilbur wright level so first i have a few questions about the world right so what’s the other brother so if wilbur’s the smart brother who overcame you know this debilitating smack in the mouth what’s the other brother story um well i’m only halfway through the book but they they get along they get along quite well the younger brother’s a little bit more gregarious and a little bit more outgoing and so wilbur is the calculating one orville’s the one who says um hey all right that’s a great idea let’s go do it let’s go so they find out that there’s this place and here’s another amazing part of the story so they just talk to friends they talk to officials they go where is there a place that has a lot of open land that’s windy and it gets they talk to the for some reason i don’t know why at the time but the postmaster knew of a good place and that postmaster connected them to another postmaster in kitty hawk which was dayton to kitty hawk i don’t know the exact exact distance but without a car it’s a massive trek and the boat brothers are like you know screw it let’s do it so they go out there and they knock on doors and they find someone to house them and let them camp on their land for four weeks at a time while they test their stuff and it was so like this is why i love america the postmaster of kitty hawk was like yeah you know this whole flight thing i don’t think it’s gonna work but like i give you my thumbs up go out and do it no one will bother you we got you if anyone bothers you bothers you holler at us there was so little bureaucracy i loved it but uh orville uh was more a little bit more outgoing and pushed wilbur who was the more calculating brother and you said from the beginning because i knew they had a bicycle shop but that you’re saying from the beginning you said i’m going to do bicycle then eventually i’m going to make a plane or did that just happen it’s like you know um toby from shopify creates creates a snowboard shop online for his snowboard company and then creates shopify but he didn’t think to himself first i’m going to do this then i’m going to build a platform that will have millions of stores on it it just sort of happened that way so which one was it was it was it a master plan or was it uh you know what progressive ambition it was progressive ambition so basically he saw this plane his toy glider that he had and he always thought that that was interesting and but he just kind of let it sit in the back of his brain and then he got into bicycles first he started a a pressing prince a pressing a print press where he made his own newspaper and then he’s like this is kind of cool but they learned about bicycles and like this new cycle technology is amazing we gotta get into that and again start getting that and he’s like you know what the key to riding a bike is the the that’s how you balance and he started staring at birds and he started looking at this old glider that he had and like man that balance is the same thing like that’s so important i bet we can translate that to this you know this dream i’ve always had of flying i bet you it’s actually quite similar and so they just they they they kind of carried it over and uh and i think there was like a bunch of other teams that were way better funded working on this at the same time and i think they just beat the other teams to manned flight by like four months or something very a very thin margin where they go down in history and nobody remembers the second crew that made it is that right well i’m not that far along but throughout the book now they have guys saying hey i’m friends with andrew carnegie i can get you guys some money do you want some funding we can get you we can get you about 200 000 a year which is probably like two or three million now and they go no no our cycle shop is making enough profits we can we can afford it which they really like they they kind of could afford it like as in barely but they would they would they would go to kitty hawk and they would um they’d go to kitty hawk and they would find places to crash and and and so it wasn’t like they were rich um by the way if you like stories like this we may have something coming down the pipe even left we’ll announce later yeah okay so i’m excited about that so uh okay have i had stories like this um you know i probably have and i probably need to go dig it up that’s one thing i’ve learned especially from story worthy one of the things in story worthy is he does he he’s not just telling you how to tell a great story like he does that right there’s mechanics about what makes a great story and he talks about what is the beginning supposed to look like what is the end supposed to look like how do you raise stakes in a in a story that sort of thing but the other thing the main point i think the guy’s trying to get across and story worthy is that we we all think that like our day-to-day life doesn’t have stories but once you start looking you’ll find stories everywhere and it gives you these exercises to do to find stories from your past there’s like this exercise called first last best worst and i do this in my course i don’t teach the course anymore but like in my power writing course i help people come up with ideas of what to write about and i use this exercise and it’s it’s killer you could take anything so like we’ll just play the game real quick we’re gonna do it with uh jobs okay so topic is jobs or career right so give me the first job you ever had i worked in a bakery sweeping floors okay great uh give me the last meaning most recent job you ever had and that’s probably you know the hustle or maybe this podcast i was the ceo and owner of a media company called the hustle right then it’s uh give me worst so let’s go what was the worst job you ever had the worst job i ever had was um cold calling people in college to sell seo services out of the yellow pages there you go all right and then you have best what was the best job you ever had the best job i ever had was co-hosting this podcast all right there we go it’s and then there’s another one called weirdest uh that i added in that’s not story worthy but i added weirdest because i found that this gives this gives a lot of good stories out of it so what’s the weirdest job you ever had that might be the hot dog stand no i was a skateboard instructor at the ymca when i was 15. i learned something new every day about you all right so so you could do that so that that gives you a bunch of stuff that you’re like oh if you show that to somebody else it’d be like what like what you know like skateboard how did that come about or how did like how much money does that make or how did you get the idea or what’s the hardest part about doing that or what’s the what’s a day in like oh you scooped ice cream at coldstone like dude like what do i need to know about cold stone ice cream that you know only you know because you were there every day making it and so it’s this great way to generate a bunch of stories so that’s like one of those exercises he has another one which is like you look for a five second moment in your day you just try to jot down at the end of the night what would have been my story of the day if today is the last day of my life or whatever today was the only day of my life what would have been the story of the day and you just looked for a five-second moment everyday stories i think he called right and so yeah it’s a good book so i i think everybody myself included probably has their version of a wilbur moment it might not be that you literally got punched in the face it might be that you like you said got fired somebody you know slammed you in a meeting and told you you know you’re you’re a dumb ass so this will never work or um you know whatever you got rejected in some way you’ve tried and spectacularly failed in some way you publicly failed in some way and um the other thing that came to mind when you tell me this is my brother-in-law who’s come on the show before it’s a crazy man brother aaron he’s a crazy man we gotta have him back on he basically just goes down rabbit holes and internet conspiracies and things like that so he has this story that he tells and i’m gonna half tell the story right now i’ll do the fast forward version so he’s like i was in college i was just having a great time kind of like 50-year senior type of [  ] i think maybe he was in grad school actually for this and he doesn’t really care about his grades he’s just partying he’s playing basketball all day he does he really doesn’t care about his grades and he finds out that and he’s taking out a bunch of loans and he finds out that you know his gpa his first semester sucks and um there’s something happen where like he had one semester left and in order to graduate he needed and not like have to pay a whole bunch of extra money uh for his loans because he didn’t graduate or whatever he needed to essentially get a 4.0 gpa so he needed to go from like a 2.1 to like he needed to graduate with a three point something or i don’t know what the numbers were but basically his first year gpa was so bad that he needed an absolute perfect gpa in order to graduate and not be like 50 000 in the hole and for somebody who grew up like on food stamps like 50 000 was like an insurmountable hole at the time he didn’t want to be in that hole he wanted to graduate and he was dating my sister and my sister was like yo you can’t just be like a broke joke who’s like not graduating in mountains of debt so he’s like i’m gonna lose my girl i’m gonna like oh all this money it’s all crashing down and so he’s like okay you know what i’m gonna do this and so it’s like in the story-worthy format it’s like you have a hero who has an um intent an obstacle so he has an intent he has to do this if he doesn’t do this what happens loses the girl of his dreams is in a mountain of debt will never recover um you know like basically has to drop out doesn’t finish his degree and if if he does that whatever happens those are the stakes and so then he tells the story and when he’s telling the story he’s like there’s all these like additional obstacles that come it’s like he actually like starts to study super hard and he’s not like you know he’s not like the smartest smartest guy who it just oh if he tried a little bit he’d get an a he needs to get an a plus uh like he has to get a 97 to 100. if he doesn’t get that he he flunks out of the program and he starts studying he actually gets his first test he gets like a 98 and the teacher calls him into the office and is basically like you cheated he’s like no i swear he’s like dude you were a f f student and you’re g you want me to believe you have an a plus here no way you cheated you you know whatever and so he gets obstacle after obstacle and then they change the rules or something so at first he needed an a which is like a 95 and up then they changed the rules on the on the gpa system he now needed an a plus in every single subject where it’s like he needed a 98 99 or 100 and he’s like oh my god and every day every time you hit one of these obstacles he just feels like he can’t do it and he just the way he tells the story he just keeps repeating goes but then i dug deeper and he just keeps going he’s like i hit rock bottom but then i dug deeper and he just keeps saying this over and over and by the first time he says it you know it has some effect second time he says it’s losing its effect third time you’re laughing by the 17th time because by the way he’s telling the story not of him telling the story now it’s he went to a job interview with nasa and nasa was like yo you’re not an engineer like why would we give you this job and he told that he tells the story he’s like because i know my limits and every other kid you have coming in here is from a good family who’s got good grades their whole life they don’t know what they’re made of i tested myself i know what i’m made of i dug deeper when i hit rock bottom when i couldn’t do more i went further and he just keeps going and he tells us he got the job and he and when he tells the story just makes everybody laugh and i when i heard that story not only does it make me laugh it made me think everybody deserves to have a story like this and if you don’t then when you’re in a shitty time just think to yourself this is my dig deeper story okay pile on the obstacles because you know what i need it for this story to be great in the end yeah he’s uh i’ve hung out with him a bit that guy is crazy and i enjoy i enjoy that story can i tell you um can i tell you about something that’s going on on twitter that i find to be incredibly fascinating yeah so right now i’ve singled out four people but there’s probably 12 of them or maybe 24 of them so there’s something very weird going on about real estate twitter okay and i just and i contacted three of them and i posted all my notes you see my notes on there yep i see them i know all these i just okay i’m actually meeting up with one of them tonight uh strip mall the strip mall guy so for the listeners basically like twitter is experiencing some crazy stuff right now and obviously me and sean are deep in one particular niche but i have a feeling that that niche is quite large and that niche is like techy startupy people tweeting stuff and also there’s like a big overlap with crypto and nft stuff and that’s even probably much larger and then next to that is like robin hood and stocks and fin they call what they call it fin twin and that’s probably even the biggest but there’s this new subset of people that i’m seeing and i think it’s new and it’s nowhere near the biggest there’s like marketing twitter there’s like teacher twitter there’s like every profession has like oh i mean like some culture i mean like some of the i met some of the bigger uh i meant the biggest of the the ones i had mentioned uh okay and yeah yeah and and keep in mind that like if we’re looking at a piece of the pie the everything i just mentioned is like maybe like it’s like it’s like a like a maybe like a 15 of the pie so it’s like not big but if you’re listening to this you are likely part of that and so there’s a very new and emerging part of that pie and is these guys who are constantly tweeting about boring real estate stuff and as as a whole the leaders are [  ] crushing it it is some of the most not boring as in sam’s judgment boring as in that’s actually their positioning is like oh you guys talking about all this fancy [  ] i just do boring stuff and i make a bunch of money that’s actually their brand that they want to bring in so that i think at least i think it’s intentional i don’t think they’re trying to be boring i think they’re trying to say hey boring businesses print money and there’s like this counter culture counterculture appeal to it in the same way that some people are like oh vc it’s all just a big waste of money and you know it’s a bunch of you know it’s a fool’s race i actually bootstrap and i make profits i have my profitability and they use that as their badge of honor but the reason why i want to bring this up now is because we are in the early stages or maybe in the middle we’re right in the thick of it it’s not huge huge yet but we’re seeing something happen here and i want to call it out because i think it’s very fascinating to watch this and so here’s there’s actually four guys i only talked to three of them ahead of time but i’m friends with the fourth one so i can kind of like riff off them a little bit but there’s four guys that i went and dm’d and the first there’s a guy named strip mall guy uh his handle is strip mall guy or or but his name is trent and people call him strip mall trent and so we’re gonna talk about him the second guy we’re gonna talk about is a guy named moses kagan moses kagan uh so strip mall guy buys strip malls and it’s hilarious his twitter the second guy is moses kagan he buys multi-family in la the third is keith wasserman who is one of your third fifth eighth guest on the podcast and he does multi-family and then the fourth guy is this guy who we’re both great friends with nick huber who i’m an investor of and he buys storage units and he’s made it so popular that he gets mocked regularly because of it and so i want to tell you a little bit about each guy i will go really quick so strip mall guy so fax so he has 500 million dollars in assets under management his twitter is anonymous um i’m actually about to go go for he’s actually staying down the street for me i’m gonna go hang out with him uh right after this he’s 41 years old he uh uses none of his own money so 99.9 percent is other people’s money and he has bought roughly 500 million dollars worth of strip malls and what he does is um he finds strip malls that he thinks are undervalued and he just fixes them up and he either holds them or flips them and his the reason why he thinks this is a huge deal is because the the there’s a huge lack of uh data in this business so the rents that people are paying versus what the market rent is like it’s really hard to know if if you’re if you’re charging your attendance market rate and for some reason that’s incredibly challenging and he goes that’s where the opportunity is so i just work really hard and i knock on doors to find out what everyone’s paying in rent and i come up with uh and then i find a strip mall where they’re underpaying and i buy it and i increase rent and i fix it up a little bit so anyway that’s kind of interesting and so he told me that he pays himself or he personally cash flows three million dollars a year from this kind of interesting and he does it with a team of four that’s pretty fascinating isn’t it right yeah of course so is he a syndicate or it’s a fun i think it sounds like it’s indicator i don’t know i actually i don’t know um i think a fun but he has like family offices behind him so i guess if he’s a syndicate that means he just does a deal by deal versus having a fundraiser deploy um i i yeah i don’t actually know um kind of fascinating the second guy is um and he’s in this guy strip mall trent i believe he just started when did he start uh like his mother sounds like less than a year old and i dm’d him and i was like uh oh by the way he he told me actually i had asked him he said deal my deal basis um and i think he’s now gonna now gonna raise the fund he’s like it’s insane how many people are dming me about investing in my deals and stuff like that he’s like my twitter account is an anonymous i’m an anonymous cartoon character i might you know i could be anything he’s like you know i am the real deal but like they don’t know that that’s crazy that how much how much opportunity there is on twitter for somebody who’s vocal in their space and then um and he was actually he’s like should i you know tell my friends about who i am like my account or whatever and i told him i said keep it super super tight to the vest uh it will get out if you if you if even if you everybody you tell you trust them they trust three people they trust three people and like by the by you know three hops later the word is out and so uh so i told him i said don’t tell me who you are just just uh stay anonymous keep doing what you’re doing it’s gonna get really big and i agree and it’s one of the reasons why it’s interesting there’s another there’s a guy uh who doesn’t think he’s 22 000 followers now i bet you he’s at 100 in less than six months this guy’s going to be big and uh there’s another guy who runs this [Music] newsletter called petition where he talks about um companies that are going bankrupt and who can buy them and he runs that all anonymously and one time he called me and asked for advice and i sent him a zoom link and he screwed up and he put his name in the thing and i go bro i just saw it turn it off and i like deleted it from my brain so i don’t actually remember his name but i talked to him on the phone uh a regular basis but i’m like just you know i still don’t remember your name so okay so you just said that this guy tr uh was able to raise money or is it being offered let’s go to the second guy his name is moses kagan he currently has 200 million dollars through au on under uh management and he’s deployed 30 million dollars of uh sorry he’s had 40 million dollars come from twitter so this guy started tweeting about his deals he got 40 million of his twitter followers they came up with 40 million dollars to invest in his fun he said one guy gave him 20 million and he found it through twitter is that nuts we have a friend who put a couple million bucks into his thing yeah i know and i i talked about him and did he say that he’s happy with it uh i think it’s early so i i think it’s probably too early to say but he recommended it to me he’s like i think he should do one of these guys deal so that means he kicked the tires and was yeah i think it’s worth you know like this guy seems to be smart uh seems to know what he’s doing so so i think that was you know trusted enough i flew down and i met up with him i thought he was great and then the third one is keith wasserman so keith currently has close to two billion dollars in assets under management for for his real estate deal and he said um that uh uh he’s so he’s got a thousand a thousand investors he said and uh twitter 5xed his his uh his fund so that’s pretty nuts and then the last one nick huber is who’s a good friend of both of ours i came became friends with him through twitter basically i was doing a live video and he popped in and i just became friends with him and now we’re like i’m gonna go visit him in his house and hang out with them and we um i invested 100 both have that redneck energy to you you guys both you know you just want to be out in the sun all day get sunburned while you’re like hunting fishing golfing and shooting something at the same time like if i could just put those four objects one on each limb you’d be a happy person put a rifle on the hand a fishing pole on your toes you know that’s what you guys want both of you you’re like i love you he texts us he’s smoking a cigar it’s tuesday at 1 p.m he’s like kids are running around his giant like i don’t know farm or wherever he wherever the hell he lives he’s got a bunch of anchorage and he’s just like yeah life is good we’re going we’re going to go white water rafting in like you know my backyard right now he’s awesome i i invested in it and uh the returns have been pretty good and anyway i thought it was crazy fascinating and so i’m going to give everyone a take away here’s my opinion here’s an easy one where this can be made so there’s a guy already who’s doing this with vending machines we talked about him his name was quinn miller i think he’s doing pretty good um but there’s another one that i think that this could be done so click the link uh you see where it says car wash advisory.com yes okay so i found this website um and basically what they do is if you go to carwashadvisory.com and then you click buying and then you can see car washes for sale you can look at how much car washes are selling for and i’m honestly shocked at how expensive these are you can see what their eba does you can see what their profit or what their profit with their revenue you can see all types of stuff um and it’s pretty fascinating i think because this is so interesting i think that there’s a world where someone could get into this business and start tweeting about it constantly and just tweet publicly our youtube people put the put the website if it put this like put the website go to buy and put that on the uh on the screen right now like this is how you know this is a great website because all the listings that are sold it goes it just has this huge stamp it says sold and then there’s balloon like these clip art balloons all over the listing that’s that’s how i know that this thing is amazing uh it’s like you know when you see somebody who’s like you know driving a fancy car and they get out and they have like total like dad wardrobe it’s like yeah this person’s it’s the opposite of the person who’s really slick getting out and you’re like ah did they lease this thing and is this is this a rental like you know they’re doing it for the image versus when the image is so bad but the money is so high it’s like oh yeah that’s where there’s dumb money it’s great yes and i think that you could do this so nick’s got a thing on this guy’s doing strip malls uh moses and keith are doing multi-family nick’s got storage um there could be there’s this guy quinn’s got vending there’s a there’s room for car wash i think i think that that was that you were going somewhere else i think and maybe this is just me probably you too right now which is like once you get a little bit of money it’s like you go get your phd in tax avoidance and i think it’s crazy that nobody has just taken the throne here of saying i’m gonna talk all day about these little financial hack strategies for high net worth people around um you know just either examples or strategies or loopholes or little did you know about you can go into an opportunity zone and then you can roll that through a 1031 over here and then you could backdoor the backdoor ira and then you can do a super roth it’s like you know like whatever i’m just making up terms but i think everything you said made sense unfortunately i’m pretty sure it didn’t but there’s somebody who should be owning that like there’s one guy his name is mitchell something mitchell baldrige i don’t know like it’s one of those names i’ve never said out loud i just see him on twitter all the time he kind of does this it’s basically a cpu wait is he does he look like a really really white dude like a grown-up dennis the menace yes exactly mitchell baldwin yeah 21 000 followers i did a call with him because i was thinking about you know should i use him for my stuff um and it’s like yeah he’s a texas cpa focused on family and helping high net worth 30 to 500 million investors and business owners preserve and grow their wealth and then it’s like you know this is not financial advice um but basically i just think that there is such a lack of information last night i was like i do this thing because my daughter’s bedtime schedule is like all screwed up it’s like takes forever to put her to bed now um and like you know there’s probably some way to like shorten that but my hack is always like how do i just have more fun doing this rather than try to make it more efficient and so my hack to have it more fun is headphones in while i’m like putting her to bed and i learned something so like um you know either audiobook or listen to a really good talk or right now my shtick is like this week is crypto week but besides that i’ve been doing tax text learning so you know like what are the different things that people do in order to generate a lot of income and pay minimal tax and it’s so hard to find somebody who’s good at this on youtube like there’s definitely stuff out there but it’s like i don’t know how to describe it it’s like dollar store [  ] it’s like yeah it’s kind of cheap it’s kind of tacky it’s like way too surface level and it’s like too it’s like you know it’ll be like did you know there’s a 401k it’s like okay i need more than that but you know like still delivered to me in a way that’s like simple and understandable and like walks me through cases like yeah i have a client who’s you know made a bunch of money through selling a company and so then we started buying real estate and here’s the type of real estate we bought and here’s how we managed it and here’s what we did with the depreciation to offset these things right like i want more and so i feel like tax is one of those boring topics that’s a great one get super big with like this now the incentive is kind of not there in that it’s a service based business more so than you know these real estate guys because they just want a bunch of investors to pile in so they can go buy bigger and bigger deals yeah but look like who doesn’t want more customers yeah yeah exactly or better and better customers i so the to wrap this up the more the story is there’s some amazing people out here particularly in this real estate niche but i think that you can do this for many things there’s loads of services loads of like real estate things i mean we’re talking about vending machines car washes uh taxes and these these guys are making in like i guess like in order to be good at that i’m gonna disrespect these folks a little bit but like it doesn’t seem like you have to be that good to be good at it you know what i mean like if you just do if you’re just pretty good and and you’re consistently at least pretty good and you do it for 30 years you can be a [  ] winner and what they’re doing is they’re making it really hard to lose by getting this massive audience and creating this incredibly interesting content around typically boring stuff and so everyone who has money is like oh can i give you some more can i give you some money please so anyway i think that’s interesting it’s and it’s happening right now and so that’s why i wanted to call this out this is not something that we i don’t want to look back i want to say look this is happening it’s kind of neat yeah basically the fewer the people the less common it is uh for people in your industry to be blogging or tweeting or podcasting the more of an opportunity there is for you to go do it there is an insatiable appetite for this stuff and if your industry is sort of backwards slow it’s private behind closed doors bigger opportunity for you than it is for guys like us because in our industry everybody’s doing it so it’s less it’s less cool it’s less opportunities for just to be the 30 000th tech person to tweet their tech views you know so all right i’m gonna let you lead because you actually have a ton of good stuff and i kind of dominated a lot of the time okay so i want to talk about this thing i’ve been doing that this week um called crypto week so okay what dude i almost got i almost got so mad at you when i saw that tweet because you go i told bad kids i was like sean we only have one meeting this week it’s only 10 minutes please i hope you don’t showed up i showed up but i did tell i did tell ben and i tell that i said hey no meetings this week so i did one with you for our youtube channel because that’s ten minutes it was ten minutes it was great um shout out to essie and then it was at this podcast this is the only two commitments i have on the calendar this week good all right thank you besides that i cleared everything off and i didn’t just clear the calendar of meetings i just said i’m not working on my other [  ] e-commerce business not doing it this week and ironic things like having its best week ever but like i basically just told our ad guy i said hey i’m on vacation now am i actually on vacation no i’m sitting in my garage 18 hours a day neck deep in crypto and uh why is it so basically are you are you just sitting with your phone right now no is that what you’re doing because like i met whenever i do these weeks which i do them as well i i’m just like surrounded by books reading but are you really you really just leaned over on your chair with your phone in front of you and you’re just like drinking milk laptop my laptop drinking milk exactly i’m on that i’m on that edison diet right now i’m just drinking milk and i’m inventing the future so um so what i think is uh this is kind of amazing so i had read that bill gates does this uh like once one week out of the year he calls it his think week or his reading week or something like that where he’s just like throughout the year he gets interested in certain topics but he doesn’t he’s so busy that he doesn’t get to go as deep on that topic as he would otherwise want to like he’s got more curiosity than he has time in the moment and so what he does is he carves out this one week a year and then it’s let’s say that that he’s all about crispr right let’s say that that’s what he was really interested in and uh and by the way for all the people who are like oh bill gates he’s trying to like [  ] poison everybody it’s like okay yeah step aside please um basically he he takes his all his books on crisper and he goes to a cabin he doesn’t take his wife and he doesn’t take his kids and he locks himself in the cabin and he just reads he just immerses himself in that thing and he comes out the other side with a greater understanding of this topic that he was curious about so i wanted to do this for crypto now i’m like i’m not like a noob at crypto right like you know we’ve been talking about it on this podcast i i’ve you know been buying and owning assets since i don’t know 2014 or something like that and so like it’s not like this is like a completely new subject but it was wow this space is evolving so fast and there are so many toys that i haven’t got to play with i’m gonna do this and so um and i can’t tell you how fun this has been i i want to tell you why but like that’s just the highlights the intro where do you want me to go with this well uh for so i don’t want to talk too much about this concept of doing a crypto or book reading week because it’s so i i’m totally on board with it everyone should do it so i don’t even want to talk have you ever done something like this not lately not in the past couple years but i have before so i’ve done it with like copywriting i’m like i’m gonna learn everything yeah it’s very you can you can learn so much you have to shut down slack facebook twitter and just not look at anything and so i’m gonna give you a few things that i’ve observed during this so first about doing one of these weeks it fits my fits the like framework of how i see the world which is that that work like a lion not like a cow and that this is a sprint week and it’s a sprint week around learning but it’s a sprint week nonetheless it’s like a lion when they find their prey and they want to go sprint uh at it um it’s like a mini vacation or a mini retirement in a way it’s like what would i do if i really wasn’t working actively on anything well i would just be kind of learning and you know i’d be like interested in all these things because i had all this free time well i gave myself a mini shot of that for a week uh it reduces fomo like crazy because there was always this itch this this this uh this aching feeling like i’m missing out on all this opportunity because i’m busy with you know my good projects that i like but like i just don’t have time to even know what i don’t know and so this reduces fomo and last thing is learning by immersion so i’m not just the only one doing it my team which is ben and andre i cleared off their whole calendar too and i said don’t do any of your normal things you’re doing andre andre andre new guy he took my power writing course dude andre’s story is [  ] nuts can i tell you this i didn’t tell you about this guy he created this website let me actually find uh go to go to uh sup shawn.com so sup and then my name shawn.com and just read this for a second hi sean i’m andre okay so this guy made this website he sent it to me and you go it’s called sup shawn.com so i’m curious and he says hey sean i’m andre i’m a future student in your power writing course i built the biggest large biggest student startup conference in canada uh blah blah blah oh by the way i just recovered from being wheelchair slash bedbound for two years check out my blog post for stories about why i made this site for you i’m not looking to grab a copy of your chat i love you i like the hustle of this website i just have one quick question i want your help with and then he has like he stole like the design off my website and he just put a bunch of fake quotes of people being like you’re a legend wow like quote wow sean when seeing this website um and then he’s talked about what he’s working on now and then he has a question and he’s like if you were me you’ve just been strapped to your bed for a couple years and you’re now starting your career how would that how would you change your approach to life and work some context i had this thing of a jig for five years and i’ve just got over it and i feel like i’ve been given a second life by the way the fact that he didn’t like go into a sob story and explain yeah just calling it a thingamajig just told me yo i’m on your level of like i’m not looking for your sympathy but this is true and i’m just explaining to you this situation i’m in uh so so mad respect for the way he did that he goes i just want to maximize every year blah blah blah you know blah blah blah and so anyways he uh he got me to reply and he took my course he was great then he sent me this video after my course like yo here’s three things you should be doing better in your next cohort like really loved it here’s three three ways where i would make this better i just hired him i was like come do that and then he came and he did that for me and now i’m like he’s brought such good energy where like literally every day he’s like just he’s on one dude he’s never in a bad mood he’s always in a good mood and it’s amazing how far enthusiasm and having like positive vibes goes as far as like my books at least and so uh that’s always important but i brought him up and he’s working on your course so he did my course but now i like the course was like a smash success last month and i was like i’m kind of bored of this let’s go do some other [  ] so like uh he’s not doing that right now but he’s helping me with with other [  ] so this crypto week thing uh anyways we’re all doing it so a couple things that i’ve learned so i’m a big believer in learning by doing and so my attitude for this week was what are i thought of it like disney world i was like okay there’s all the and if you go to disney world it’s like you can go to the magic kingdom you can go to like whatever the harry potter land you can go over here to this other area so i started mapping out the different worlds there’s like the nft world there’s like defy world there’s like kind of like security world i need to learn how to i got kind of like a like a good amount of this stuff like i wanna what are the best practices for securing this and i’ve been putting off uh okay you know what’s better than what i’m currently doing um and so i just mapped out all these different areas i’m curious about and that we started diving in one day on each just going as deep as we can uh with each one but are you are you like messaging your team throughout the day like let’s everyone let’s sit for three hours and read this and we’ll come back and talk basically so it’s like we’re just sharing stuff in slack and then we do these like slack has that huddle feature now which is like really dope yeah it’s like a quick little discord chat basically so we’ll huddle up and we’ll be like um we we kind of set out at the beginning which was dude what would i want but what i would want is when i wanted to spend a week going deep into crypto and get a real understanding i wish somebody just had had a product like this where i could it’s not a course it’s not like a vlog it’s like uh the best way i’ve learned about crypto has been furcon my smart friend basically who knows this [  ] inside and out he just sits me down on a zoom call and he screen cheers he’s like all right so like do you have meta mask and i’m like uh do i maybe i feel like i might have made one once he’s like okay well like here’s what that is it’s this wallet it lives in your browser it’s how you do [  ] in the crypto world so like let’s get your set up and like by the way don’t fall for these scams like here’s the smart way to do it and so then i click it click it and i’m like hey this says this he’s like yeah that’s normal go ahead and he just holds my hand and sort of teaches me like he’s like okay have you ever um taken out a default loan i’m like no why would i do that he’s like well you know let’s say you wanted to not sell your crypto but you want to go buy some [  ] in the real world and the banks don’t recognize it so let’s go take out a loan for like super low percent rate and let me show you how you do that you’re going to go to compound.finance and then you’re going to put your ethe in using that wallet we just made and now you’re going to take a loan and let’s take that loan let’s go do something with it and so he’s walked me through step by step and so i’m like i want to do that with all the new areas of crypto and then secondly when i was talking to the guys yesterday i was like dude the way we are learning this by having our hand held where we like have trust and confidence that we’re doing the right things we should just make this the next course which is like it’s not really like a course it’s like a zoom call you join and it takes you on a tour through disneyland it’s like here’s all the attractions and like i’m not just going to tell you about them like actually like you’re first editing who’s leading you right now is leading me so i do it oh so he’s and he’s when he gets stuck yeah when i get stuck i say hey can you show us like like liquidity pools i heard you saying you make money in this i don’t really understand what’s the point of this liquidity pool and like how do i actually do this and like what do i do to do this in a way like tell me the pros and cons and the risks so i can make a smart decision on whether i want to do this in the future but like let’s do my first liquidity pool trade together and then like i have my dashboard of how much i’m making off this right or like oh yeah you um you know you you have this nft great like i want to display that how do i do that how do i secure this how do i store this safely great how do i mint one you know like all the different like questions that i have if i can’t figure it out myself by doing i call him in and he kind of like shows me he screen shares and shows me what to do step by step so what are the learnings so crypto week what are like the top one to five learnings that you have so far so one big learning is like dude this is evolving so fast it’s like it’s like if you you know when you go by a club and you kind of hear the music faintly from the outside you’re like um huh like you hear this little hum like little you hear the bass from the outside but it’s not that loud you walk by you go on to your you know your cafe or your bus stop wherever you’re going you leave it’s like i swung open the door and there’s a full underground rave going on and everybody’s having you know this crazy time and and now that i’m in it i’m like wow the energy has really picked up last time i was here was like you know a year ago and i was kind of on the outside now i’m on the inside i’m seeing what’s really going on how crazy this energy is what does that translate to well there’s a whole bunch of like developer tools because anytime i see something cool that i’m using i’m like can i invest in this company and so like the way that during during the internet explosion you had companies like twilio or pagerduty or you know like all these just like basic infrastructure stripe it’s like oh yeah people need to take payments people need to be able to send notifications send sms’s every every product that’s on the internet that’s going to build at the internet is going to eventually want to do these things they’re going to want to have cloud hosting and so i’m finding the equivalent of cloud hosting and twilio and all that stuff these dev tools that are in in what’s called web 3 or the crypto world and i’m like dude i need to be investing in these because if crypto is going to be a thing then these are these infrastructure companies just like they did great in the in the internet age they’re going to do great in the crypto age so that’s the first what else what else have you learned so like then it’s like okay how do you actually you know nfts it’s kind of this thing that like i thought it was interesting i owned a couple but like it also seemed a little bit nuts and like why are people doing this are they all just like trying to make a quick buck and they’re just you know you know doing some crazy [  ] or is this actually the new art and i’m missing today i’m laughing at it and then three years from now i’m gonna be the one pimping it out because like now i aha get it uh you know the same way i was with bitcoin early on where i was like that’s kind of weird don’t really get it move on and three years later i’m like oh this is the you know jesus christ our lord and savior and so um so what i’ve learned is like i’ve been actually using the tools so like check this out go to go to a site called rarity.tools so i’ve been using this as i’ve been looking at which nfts i wanted to collect and buy i gave myself a quarter million dollar budget for this week to to go play in crypto world and some of that’s used some of that’s used on buying nfts and i haven’t used most of it yet i’ve only bought a couple things um but but basically that’s my like learning budget if i want to do something i can do up to that amount and look at the similar web traffic on rarity.tools holy [  ] holy [  ] that that like that it’s like a water slide yeah exactly april it’s like at zero essentially uh you know it’s like a convert ramp it’s like under under half a million uh uniques and then you know july just under a million august it’s now at three and a half million it’s just hockey sticking up and what is this this is just like what we talk about like this is a picks and shovels business so anytime there’s a gold rush you can either go try to find the gold meaning go find the best nft and oh you bought a crypto punk and now it’s worth seven million dollars okay that’s one way you found a nugget of gold or this is a great picks and shovels business which is like hey a bunch of people are interested in nfts cool we will make a site that helps you figure out the rarity of different nfts it helps you find underpriced assets that are you know the price is good given the rarity and so um so i think this is a great example of like of a picks and shovels website for the crypto world so i’ve found a bunch of these types of tools as well and then met a bunch of the people behind it and so uh you know like one guy who’s behind one of these tools is like dude i’m a big fan of the show like my story’s nuts at 15 or 16 i entered an online scrabble tournament that was like a million dollar tournament and i just wrote a bot for me back then that nobody else they didn’t know how to outlaw this so i won the tournament like i won the million dollar scrabble tournament using a bot at age 15 and then at age 17 i did this and i just 21 i did this and then now i have this discord with 90 000 people in it called rarity sniper and it’s all about finding like nfts that are undervalued and i have like 90 000 people in this discord server and i’m like you’re finding all these people and the biggest lesson i’ve seen is it’s a whole different demographic like these are new rich people the the winners and the builders like the people who are going to be the mark zuckerbergs and the larry pages and the brian chesky’s like it’s not the it’s not the people we all know that are like twitter famous that are making it big in the crypto world it’s a whole new set of people and most of them are like anonymous just icon accounts and then i’m talking to them and i’m like dude you’re fascinating you’re also like a madman but like wow this is crazy what um okay so right now where where do you stand and uh you’re okay so i would place you i think on the correct side of reasonable but not exactly so like parts of you are reasonable like normal person reasonable other parts of you you’re you’re a crazy person so i kind of trust your opinion on this but not always so try to try to be try to keep that in mind you want the reasonable person is that who you want to talk about reasonable sean or you want to talk to a rational show where do you think do you think okay so what’s your take right now on the nft world are you as bullish as some of these our friends and uh where what’s your current stance on it so i was in this like one-hour conversation with some random ass nft anonymous guy on twitter in dms and i was talking to him but by the way just just these 90 000 person discords and talking random people that alone is this that’s a phenomenon right the way that all these people are like this thing got minted it was called rookie nft and i like bought a couple it was real cheap it’s like it’s just coming out like 45 minutes before that something’s like hey check this out you’re into sports you’ll probably like this and i did like it was actually a really smart concept so i bought a bunch of them right away and again these are lottery tickets you buy you most likely you just scratch it you throw it away and you got nothing and sometimes you you hit big and so like one of mine that i bought you know has i gone up 5x in value already um and you know of my of one of these nft bets that i made in the last two days but the and the others are just like flat like cost of doing business basically and so i said look early on i wrote off bitcoin because i was like i don’t get it it’s not this has no intrinsic value it’s imaginary money it was made up by an anonymous person and like it’s going up and like what happens when the music stops meaning what happened you know it’s going up people are buying it because they think it’s going to keep going up and that seems like a ponzi scheme that seems like a pyramid scheme that was my initial like this is 2014 2015 me thinking i didn’t really understand 2013 maybe actually and um and over time as i got to unders that was just my lack of understanding over time i started to understand that actually all the things we call money they’re all this they all operate the same way why is this piece of paper valuable why is this lump of gold valuable why is this diamond on a tiny diamond valuable because there’s a social agreement yeah there’s a social agreement and the social agreement happens because we justify it through rarity uh right gold is somewhat rare diamonds are somewhat rare um so scarcity basically is there um and then there’s like you know some intrinsic poll or or whatever but really it’s a social agreement and a lot of the meaning we place on it comes later and so i was like i get i i didn’t get that at the time when it came to cryptocurrencies money i didn’t realize that actually it’s not just a ponzi scheme that actually the more people who buy in actually is what it what makes it valuable so it’s not a bubble that’s going to pop it’s that the more believers that you have that’s the stronger the social agreement is and therefore the thing actually that actually gives it real value and um and this appeals to certain people and so it’s going to it’s going to grow in this that social agreement is going to grow and i think there’s some crazy charts by the way that show like bitcoin adoption is i think one of the fastest if not the fastest adopted technology ever so i don’t want to say the word ever of all technologies maybe like i don’t know the printing press or like the telephone was a little bit faster from what from what i heard i haven’t gone and verified this before i heard it was faster faster than all those but if you just look at the internet for sure it happened so mobile phones and the internet were probably the two most recent technologies that took over the world right and if you look at mobile phone adoption and and uh and internet adoption bitcoin is on a faster pace than both of those and so um so the the social agreement is what gives cryptocurrency value and so i was like but this art thing like dude i remember cryptokitties in 2017 right for condo sitting next to me at the office and he had two kitties and he was breeding them and he gave me a kitty heat bread and i was like what the [  ] is this and he’s like it’s an nft’s he was explaining to me for the first time back in 2017. i was like oh that’s cool but like and there was this hype i remember one day cryptokitties overwhelmed the ethereum network it was like eighty percent of all activity on ethereum was just cryptokitties and andreessen horowitz put all this money into cryptokitties and then like a year later cryptokitties were dead and um it was like the beanie babies fad but even faster and by the way that same team who built crypto kitties they’re the ones who built an a top shot as well um and so so anyways i was just like who’s to say that today you guys are spending millions of dollars on crypto punks and millions of dollars on this board ape yacht club um who’s to say two years from now this is not crypto kitties all over again and then a bunch of those believers kind of gave me a bunch of reasons and what i realized was it’s the same thing it’s the same same idea which is that art has value because of a social social agreement a social construct so why is the mona lisa more valuable than the next painting of a chick looking sideways well because we as a society have over time decided more and more that the mona lisa is valuable and it’s not doesn’t matter what type of paint was used what size of canvas it doesn’t matter what year it was made like art can have value based on the social agreement how many crypto punks are there ten thousand okay so my argument is like well maybe there was like a few then yeah could it be valuable in a hundred years yeah maybe but there’s like ah mona lisa yeah but you know you say oh how many you know monets are there how many uh how many how many paintings did this artist do it’s like in their lifetime they maybe made a few hundred or whatever it was and so you know you can go find any picasso painting and it’s valuable and that’s the idea is that these are like these are the picasas right it’s like the og stuff i think it’s the first nft project uh ever was was crypto punks and that’s what has it’s kind of like story value uh and now the people who believe it it’s like bitcoin so there’s this great quote that came out that was like again i don’t know if this is true or this folklore but recently some of the big finance guys started buying a bunch of bitcoin and i think it was um stanley druckenmiller who was on the podcast with uh trunk he came he said you know the thing that turned me around on it was i thought oh this thing gets pumped up then it crashes down it’s too volatile isaac and then paul tudor jones who’s this billionaire hedge fund billionaire hedge fund trader uh one of the most famous guys from wall street he called junker miller he goes hey did you know this that when bitcoin crashed from its all-time high which was like 17 18 000 down to 3 000 that 86 percent of the people who held it never sold a single coin and he’s like wow that’s amazing the people who own this thing they’re like religious zealots about it and he said well if people are that religious about it meaning if the social agreement the social construct is that strong the belief is that strong that it can withstand an 80 crash and they don’t liquidate this thing is going to go up and this thing is going to be like have long-term value and that’s the thing that i see right so that’s the probably the only area i’ve changed my mind is i wasn’t going to buy crypto punks for 48 but i thought it was just another crypto kitty that’s probably going to go away and now i’m starting to realize is that the people who own punks like if you go to openc right now you go try to buy crypto punk you can’t just none for sale it’s like these people don’t want to sell them they’re like the bitcoin people who are bitcoin’s gonna be worth a million dollars a coin someday the the crypto punk holders they have infected each other with this story that says this is the original nft this is like the most valuable art that will ever be created in crypto world um this these are going to be worth you know 10 million each and they’ve convinced themselves that that’s true and that because of that there’s like no supply on the market uh and then you know supply demand will sort of tell you so you’re you’re okay so nft’s got it you’re not now after you’re halfway through your week of learning your current stance on on crypto as a whole i mean i was super bullish before i’m super bullish now it really wasn’t i’m trying to judge whether this is good or bad that’s not really what this was it isn’t even really i’m trying to understand it better although that does come it was just dude i haven’t had time to actually go use all the different stuff that’s been built like i already owned the cryptocurrencies i already own the assets what i didn’t do was you know there’s a lot of things built of what you can do with your ethereum you can stake it you can trade it you can blend you can borrow you can buy nfts you can fractionalize those nfts you can create a dow which is like this organization it’s like this group but it’s got a wallet there’s all these different things you can do and i knew of them but i haven’t done them and there’s like a lot of value in actually going and taking the time to go use the apps right it’s like go use the products and then form your own opinions on how you feel about them but for me it was really isn’t even about the opinions it’s like it takes time to actually learn how to actually go do all this stuff and if i was 20 today and i’m just you know my time is worth jack [  ] and i have nothing else to do this is all i’d be doing and this is how i would become valuable what i noticed was that like it’s kind of like the people who didn’t really figure out the internet because they were successful in real estate or doctors or whatever it’s like i don’t want my success to inhibit my own ability to go play and learn and so that’s what this week was for me this is i’m i’m like chewing on all this i got to think about all this this is nutty to me i your it’s like the way that maybe like maybe maybe like some fitness stuff the way that it comes to me and i just like i grab it easily and i enjoy it and i am obsessed with it that’s how you are with this it’s so hard for someone who’s not pre pre uh i don’t know who’s predisposed to this type of stuff to like when i hear you talking this stuff is a great example because you’re athletic so if i say there’s a track nearby you go you go there and you [  ] run on this track in circles and i’m like oh man that sounds like a lot of work i don’t really want to do that or if i’m like yeah there’s this knees over toes guy you go by the program and you spend the next six weeks trying to do pistol squats on one knee and then like you’re like oh boxing cool then you go join a boxing gym and you go sign up for an amateur fight like i’m doing that in the way that i’m athletic which is like great yeah like when i go to when i go to a discord i’m like i it’s like i’m like i’m like a little autistic going into an ikea i’m like i just i’m overwhelmed i don’t know what to do i want to clam up i’m freaking out there’s too much uh all right you want to do want to run through a few of these things or are we going to wrap up i have a two i have a two interest i have two interesting things i wanted to show you uh okay let’s do this this is related there’s this great twitter thread i thought i wanted to get your opinion on it’s about levels of levels of wealth and something we’ve talked about on here before but i thought this guy’s take was interesting so okay this the account is i i i 529 and i read it but i i like your i like yours he didn’t do a very good job of writing it uh did he not okay maybe he didn’t okay so his writing wasn’t as clear as yours okay i thought it was pretty good maybe i’m wrong but anyways i thought the material was good so this is one of those anonymous twitter accounts that’s like this guy’s clearly wealthy he owns something crypto punks and he’s like kind of smart i would say like he’s a little navali for like the crypto world he’s like pseudosynonymous a little bit in the vault right so so he has this he has his threat he goes uh here’s how i think about um about making it or like wealth basically he goes level one crushed by circumstances these are like refugees in syria you’re born in a civil war in the congo unfortunately billions of our like come you know comrades in life don’t even have the faintest opportunity to make it because they were born in you know for circumstances outside their control they were born into like very very tough situations he goes for me he goes this this feels like this makes me feel funny inside uh i’m paraphrasing for it but it makes it makes me feel funny inside right like thousands of little kids will die today and i’m on the internet buying you know jpegs for for thousands of dollars um you know because and they don’t have access to a 50 cent pill that could like end their agony and like give them like you know some peace and they’re you know their dreams are being cut short because they don’t have access to basic you know water or sanitation and medicine he goes because level one is not a um it’s not a like niceness problem it’s a coordination problem he goes literally everybody on earth would skip having a soda today you know and they would just have a glass of water instead if they knew it would save that kid’s life if that three bucks could go to the kid’s life instead for that coffee or that soda that you would skip but the systems are not placed in order for us to be able to just push that button easily and have that outcome happen he goes for for now society hasn’t fixed this this tweet alone i thought was like one of the most insightful and maybe i’m just a [  ] sucker for this [  ] but like when he said this it rang so true to me that yes we all in the like privileged world would happily skip over a cup of coffee or more just i skipped that that money goes into this thing it actually saves this person but like we need the coordination we need the certainty we need we need a lot of people to do it for that effect to happen and then we need the money to actually go to the right place and then we need to see the result in order for us to actually like fix these problems at scale so i thought wow if you want to go work on a startup idea solve that make it so that lots of people can very easily skip this thing and that they can that money actually gets the result done and then everybody sees the result of it and it would bring so much gratification that we would all want to do it again um okay so that’s one tweet then he goes all right if you’re at level one maybe crushed by circumstances you’re not reading these tweets i have no solutions to level one i hope humans progress and we can solve level one we can reduce level one problems every year if you’re if you’re ordering your key point if you’re reading this tweet you’ve already made it past level one keep going all right level two is the struggle is real this is where day to day you have financial problems they’re kind of finance is like a stress for you you might have a job or two you don’t have much in terms of savings you worry about if you had an emergency where would you find the money to pay for it if a car breaks down it can cause a cascading set of crises and problems just because you didn’t have enough money buffer if you’re in level two and you’re in good health do everything possible to get out of level two work overtime take another job push harder right now because just getting out of level two to level three the life change is massive uh when money problems are like front and center in your life or that stress lingers in your head all day it is a tax on your happiness and your productivity and unlike level one there’s a lot of people in level two that i know and have been there in life and have gotten out and if you can escape do everything possible to do so uh he goes here’s my my practical advice if another if you’re in level two and you might own something like an nft that if you sold it it would move you into level three just absolutely sell it right now and get out of level two uh the life benefits versus level two and level three are huge and he goes level three middle class in the u.s everybody thinks they’re middle class i think this is so true um if you’re if you’re making 50 000 a year in ohio you think you’re middle class if you’re making 500 000 in san francisco you think you’re middle class so uh despite the fact that there is a definable middle class and he’s like for you know for simplicity let’s just call it this you got a house you have a car you have some some savings but you don’t have enough where you have like [  ] you money you can’t just buy whatever you want and you don’t really know how you’re gonna pay for big things down the road bigger house college et cetera i spent most of this guys talking to you guys i spent most of my life my life in middle class it’s a great happy place to be if you’re there don’t keep looking up at the people who have more first be appreciative that you’re not in level two or level level one where you’re crushed by circumstances you have a great life you’re in the top one percent of anybody who has ever lived on earth uh that is very true he goes level four i call this we like nice things he’s like this is where he goes this is anything from like the up the top end of middle class to like the uber rich and it’s a state of mind it’s not a specific income level your basic life issues are sorted and now you just buy things you enjoy this might be like a trip a vacation a hou a second house or it might be a private jet there’s an endless playground of [  ] to buy and however much you earn you can spend it there’s enough things to go by congratulations once again you’ve made it you’re now in the 0.01 percent of people who have ever lived on planet earth and then he starts talking about like you know but level four is tricky um you think it brings you a lot more happiness it doesn’t really in fact sometimes it brings more stress or this anxiety that you you you got it all and you’re still not happy and um here you go so actually level three kind of only had upsides compared to level two but level four actually has some traps if you made it to level four congrats you know like um here’s my take you know you get you really want to get to level you want to be first he says be honest with yourself no he goes first do all the things go to paris rent a boat upgrade your flight to business class check out how level 4 lives he goes then ask yourself are you happier did this bring you joy which of those things brought you joy what was the is it the stuff is it the experiences what felt great what doesn’t like ask yourself those questions it goes level five is when you’re post consumption where you no longer care about the [  ] you can buy you’re just caring about sort of like how you choose to spend your time you want to spend your time in ways that bring you like peace and happiness for some people that’s a small house and a truck on a farm in wyoming for other people that’s you know living large you know in new york and being a power player and on cnbc every week don’t make any judgments uh it is what it is just you know figure out how you want to spend your time are you playing golf or are you working on something with a higher purpose for you the happiest people seem to be the people that are satisfied through level five by working on things that intrinsically motivate them intrinsic happiness not external goods blah blah blah blah um and that’s the that’s the truth so i was just curious what’s your what’s your take on this that’s awesome that’s awesome is there any part of this by the way he goes question i get what level is his username 6529 which is his username he goes i balance between level four and five based on how much i enjoy how much i worry about the world and nice things i see on instagram any given day i spent most of my life in level three middle class loved it my family had brief moments in level one level two but i was too young to notice i feel blessed that’s good this is a good ass thread this could be a book he did a good job i guess you’re right he uh his writing was pretty good if that’s if you read it exactly i was skimming it and i was like it’s confusing but that’s amazing i think intel hook sucked it was way too much jargon but the actual content was solid the one thing i told him i go i dm to my go this is a great thread it resonates i go the one thing you’re missing is that there’s a moment somewhere at the top of l3 right before l4 maybe this is just l4 which is that you decouple time and money where before in your life you were always trading your time to earn money and now you start trading your time your money to get more time back and i said actually i think that’s what level four really is not just being able to buy all the stuff you want it’s the freedom of time and recognize that and like get to that point as fast as you can i think it’s this is an interesting conversation for us because both of us probably have very recently gone from three to four and very likely are not entirely far from four to five and so but we kind of experienced all that very we we experienced both all those jumps like in a in like a incredibly short amount of time um can i do my wannabe naval thing for a second yeah so we were right we were level three when we first met you know last seven eight years of our life and then probably in the last two years when i sold my company and you sold yours is when we jumped into level four and if we the naval thing is basically we got financial freedom which meant we don’t have to like worry about money anymore um but then we need uh freedom from finance which is level five which is when you stop making decisions based on money and i think that’s what the truly wealthy people do is they choose how to spend their time not because of the financial outcome at all but look bro listen listen though let’s let’s no longer pulls at them let’s be real here though we just first of all we’re getting paid stupid money to just sit here and shoot the [  ] second of all we just shot the [  ] about you taking the week off to learn so like we’re not are like maybe that is five or is that four it is five but at the same time why am i doing this ecommerce business is it because it lights my soul on fire every day no it’s because there was an opportunity and i’m trying to capitalize on it and it’s working and now i don’t want to give it up because i think it’s going to be super successful and i like i like feeling like i’m successful i like winning i like when a project works and i like the money that comes with it and so like there are still and i like the way he said he bounces between them it’s not like when you’re at a level well then 100 of your decisions and you 100 of your life you you’re you’re acting that way it’s not you you like fluctuate between these things and i personally have not been able to like let go of like i i haven’t been able to remove money from my kind of like core decision-making criteria of why to do something or not do something it’s still there that means i’m not actually free from it because it’s still like part of the contract part of the part of the thing i’m optimizing for whereas i know some people who don’t do that who like michael burch uh right who’s my main investor i got to work with him sit next to him every day he he does something he invests he does things that will make money he thinks he’s you know he gets excited when an investment or business starts to work and makes money but when we were deciding what to do in any really any given case like i feel like money was like i don’t know 12th on the list of things he would think about is he a billionaire you think or he’s probably he may not be but it doesn’t matter he goes most people that you think are billionaires are not not quite there but it doesn’t matter it’s probably not that you know what’s there between 500 and a billion right um yeah and so um do you think he so the the weird thing that i’ve noticed is when you when money is now no longer part of the equation it’s kind of depressing because you’re like [  ] this has been like the goal the whole time and now like my decision-making process has totally changed it’s kind of a weird spot and so is he depressed do you think because of that because like he’s the same motivating factor isn’t there anymore and he’s like oh man now i’m like changed no he’s happy he’s really happy but he did tell me he goes actually he didn’t tell me this okay the reason the billionaire conversation came up is because the bbc did a documentary called how to be a billionaire yeah by the way your boy has a camera a cameo in it i saw a minute or two um i don’t know where this thing plays it’s like on airplanes so sometimes i’ll get a picture somebody sends me their head rest as they’re watching this documentary and then i popped into it and so like you know because they’re talking it’s about michael it’s not about me but like there’s they follow four people that are billionaires i think he told me three of the four he goes i don’t think are actually billionaires himself included and he goes he says something in there he goes yeah when we sold bibo and we had like you know all of a sudden all this wealth he goes it’s obviously great and like you know but kind of anticlimactic like i had more fun building it than i did selling it and he goes um you know the weird thing was that anytime i felt like not so good like if i felt sad or whatever like nobody wants to hear it right like reaction to be like dude you have it all and it’s like that’s what a person of the third world would say to me and that’s what a crippled person would say to that person in the third world like this there’s a never-ending chain of looking at somebody and saying you’re unhappy you have it all and so he did say there was time such people where they were kind of like well what do we do now and um that was a little bit weird and you can be unhappy for other parts of your life that money doesn’t solve those problems and uh whether it’s like relationships or other stuff that can happen too but since i’ve known him which was a few years after he sold it he is extremely happy and at peace he doesn’t have like fomo or this itchiness to like go prove himself and all this stuff i didn’t see it at least um and then he worked on projects that gave him joy so like he loves building like buying real estate buying buildings and like designing a space and having people use that space so what that’s why our office was so pimped out because he just loved the idea of building a dream office and coming to work in it every day and having you know this is the perfect playground to go work in he did that with the battery bought a 60 000 square foot old candy factory retrofitted it and then put you know turned into willy wonka’s factory he made all the rooms unique and fun to be in and that project was never going to make money in fact everybody told him dude you’re burning so much money doing this is such a bad financial move he’s like well that’s okay it’s not a financial move how did that end you know what was it he got well he built a dope space it had like the who’s who our members like through it he’s made all these made all these different connections like you know when justin bieber comes down and beyonce they stay there and you know elon musk hangs out there like dude i’m pretty sure i was i’m pretty sure i was there one time and i saw a monk and snoop dogg sitting at a booth together yeah dude it’s crazy you could bump into a lot of people there uh you know i saw leonardo dicaprio walk in i was like oh [  ] leo um but you know it’s not just that the fame like obviously like i think that i think that side still pulls to him i think the social side obviously he does a lot of things to like maximize the social game but it’s not financial so he had told me once he’s like he’s like yeah this thing cost a lot of money to build and we we blew our budget on like trying to make it a dope space uh he’s like but my thing was my rule was like okay once it’s operational i don’t mind if i never get my capex back as long as the opex doesn’t continually bleed more and more money every year and that’s what it got to where the opex basically the membership and the the fees of the fee the membership dues plus the restaurant bar and all that cover the cost of running it so while he may never get a positive return on actually almost certainly will never get a positive return on the i don’t know maybe maybe 100 million he put into like the building and the build out i don’t know what it was i wouldn’t be shocked if it was 50 to 100 million uh i don’t think he’ll ever get that back but it doesn’t believe money now and so he’s like happy with that so yeah anyways i don’t know long story short he’s super happy he goes he goes on trips to africa all the time where like he doesn’t just give money to charity water he goes there he visits the villages he stays there in a tent and he like experiences that he brings his whole family with them and that’s like their favorite time of the year is when they get to go to like rural africa sleep in a tent you know and uh and live in this village and then like bring help bring like better work life conditions to the people there well that’s badass do we want to um do we want to end there or what do you want to do yeah we can end there because uh somehow we went pretty long they told us to keep these under 45 minutes for youtube but uh i have a feeling it’s gonna be hard for us to do that that’s all right this one was maybe extraordinary i i i was i was long-winded yeah well all right this idea you said something about let’s do one more uh panic attacks you said you’ve had panic attacks and you started you asked twitter for panic attack help this gave me an idea but first tell me your panic attack thing and then i’ll tell you my idea so i’ve had panic attacks since the seventh grade i remember the exact day it was the third day of school at 8 55 pm i had this weird thought where i thought like what’s outside of the world and like if you like you go into space you just like keep going and like there’s nothing out there and we’re meeting and i remember i if i flipped out and i got panicky i went to the doc i went to the downs to the nurse i was like my heart i’m having a heart attack i can’t breathe like i do and so ever since then i’ve had i’ve been very panicky and i get a panic attack i have very very distinct triggers and i take daily medication and like a xanax for that i keep with me just in case so like anything that involves tight spaces that i can’t get out of or uh like being really deep in the wilderness and i can’t get out of i flip out and i hate it so i get crazy panic attacks because of it so like when we fly i’m very medicated um i just i can’t stand very claustrophobic i don’t go in elevators or i try not to i don’t like rooms without windows and i don’t take the subway okay and when you get a panic attack what do you do i keep medication on me at all times and i’ll take one pill um if i didn’t take that pill it feels like i’m dying like i feel like i want to kill myself like i’m like my heart is is going so hard uh i feel like i feel like i’m dying i feel like i’m about to die i literally think the world’s gonna end and i like i’m flipping out okay that’s crazy i’ve never experienced something like that my buddy had one in college while we were he was sitting nationals were playing halo and then like he was doing something else and he had a panic attack and like we called an ambulance and it was the first time i’ve ever heard this and at the time i was like bro just relax like yeah it’s hard it’s like right that was my time it’s like telling it it’s like telling a drug addict like dude just don’t do heroin right i know i know that’s like i didn’t understand it and um it was my first time experiencing it yeah it sounded like a heart attack like all his symptoms were like a heart attack symptoms and so uh one thing i wanted to share with you somebody had tweeted this and i saw that emmett who was my my manager at the time but he’s the ceo of twitch he had tweeted this back somebody said tweeted to me no no somebody had tweeted this out they go any advice on how to help someone experiencing anxiety and potentially panic attacks relax and ground themselves i don’t have experience with uh blah blah blah and then emmett randomly replied sorry sorry i want to get contacts they retweeted my tweet no no this was a tweet i saw two years ago that your tweet guided me okay i saw him reply to this and he goes this may sound weird but the mammalian diving reflex is triggered by triggered by submerging your face in cold water and cuts the panic attack loop can be very very effective but obviously hard to do in public have you ever heard of no but i would love i would be interested in it so then he linked it and i you know so i went to it so like here you can uh i’ll give you the link so emmet had panic attacks i think a lot of high-functioning people get it because like i think in order to be like high-tech consume so or why would because in order to be in order to be like high-functioning and successful often times you’re motivated you’re like you’re you’re neurotic right you’re motivated by some anxiety driven thing and i imagine there’s a huge correlation between the two so i’m looking at it so basically my understanding so i look i remember reading this two years ago when you tweeted it reminded me of it so um i remember looking into it and basically there’s uh you just need to change state so there’s a state that triggers the panic attack and so if you want to undo the if you want to stop the panic attack you need to change state that’s hard to change state when you’re in a panic attack and so the when you feel it coming on this is the thing to do you go into a very cold uh a very cold ice water you have to get really cold water and plunge your face for 10 to 20 seconds and what that does is it automatically triggers your heart rate uh to slow down and your um your blood gets sort of like centered around your core and that will short-circuit the the panic attack loop and so for you or anybody else who has this that’s good i don’t know how you would try this but but try it well it’s not that bad it looks like there’s like an example of a guy in his kitchen with just a bowl of ice water like i get him in the middle at night sometimes i’ll wake up and i’m like what’s going on where am i and i start flipping out uh and he shows his heartbeat right going from 103 beats per minute to 47 beats per minute after just 20 seconds with his face in the thing so this guy so okay so by the way 103 beats per minute just from a panic attack that’s pretty wild that’s a that’s a high that’s a high heart rate it’s hard like i can’t make my heart rate go that high just sitting still isn’t like resting heart rate like 70 to 90 or something like that it should be less than 70 yeah uh okay so that was the first thing that came to mind the second thing was uh patients like me so the thing you did where you were like i have this thing and like people have kind of like an aversion to going to the doctor in general right some people don’t go because of cost some people don’t go because of convenience some people don’t go because they don’t like the doctor some people don’t go because they just want to feel they are worried they’re going to get diagnosed with something and they just they’d rather be a blissful ignorance patience like me has always been this thing that fascinated me are you familiar with patients like me no i’m looking it up it’s this community it’s where you find other people that have the same condition medical condition that you do so let’s say you have some rare form of leukemia you will find a group of other people with the same form leukemia and then you could go there and like maybe in your real life you can’t find anybody who can empathize with you or share ideas or share suffering or share you know uh in this there’s a bunch of other people going through the same thing as you which is one of the most bonding experiences there is is going through suffering that uh going through a unique suffering that other people have gone through and so i think these groups are probably incredibly valuable to the person and also sticky as a product now they’ve raised 150 million dollars which tells me that this is a real like business opportunity but our patients like me has been around for a long time i bet that there’s an opportunity to like reboot the sort of like patients like me idea and just do it simpler more mobile-friendly and i think you’d be doing a lot of good in the world plus be building a very valuable app around community where and maybe you could start this with facebook groups you know there are lots of facebook groups for people who have certain conditions um and and i think there’s probably a way to bootstrap this but i think this is a really valuable company to build both in terms of the value to science how does this make money value as a business i don’t know how patients like me makes money i don’t know if they you know have sort of like you know pharmaceutical companies sponsor certain things or i don’t know what they i don’t know what they do as far as that goes maybe it’s a paid membership i don’t know i’m assuming people would pay once they find some value in the community for like maybe premium education or like a member’s lounge or something like um i’m not sure how they make money but i do think that these are probably very very valuable and the thing you did where you just kind of go ask if you want other people who have similar who have the similarities the the response is crazy right i’ve gotten a hundred and dms exactly because if you if you’ve experienced something like the way i felt the urge to share with you this a solution like this is what happens whether it’s like hey my pet won’t eat well you know i have a maltipoo and she’s picky eater i’ve tried everything any help and it’s like people will [  ] come to the rescue on facebook and be like here is like a 10-part guide i just created for you because i went through that too and i found something that actually works and so there’s this very strong psychology around that so i think that there’s an opportunity to reboot patients like me i would use google adwords because i think people go to google when they have a problem this is interesting how to stop panic attacks and i would just use adwords to uh to grow this thing and try to get like you know each niche uh thing to have like you know tens of thousands of members inside what calls it like the crazy crew um crazy crew.co uh this is awesome i’ve never seen this i got to research this maybe that’s a good idea yeah i mean i got so many disease things right dude when you had your lyme disease problem who saved you you put it out there in public like i got this [ __ ] thing and then somebody was like yo i got you she’s yeah i got you and then she gave you like the miracle cure and then you’re like fine now right like you literally kind of got your life saved through doing something yeah yeah the lady i told the story lady oh i don’t even know bought me a 25 000 treatment and i uh she didn’t even know who i was it was it was wild i’m gonna have to research held yeah all right well good suggestion i’m gonna research this i’ve never heard of this i’ve never heard of so many of these things mental agility and uh patients like me what a crazy business i have to research it um all right i think that’s the episode we’ll see if this is gonna be good this is our longest episode ever i think yeah this one went awhile all right we’re out here never looking back