The Exchanges

Q And how did that come about? They approach you, you approach them. What happens?

A So we actually listed it. My philosophy is that every material thing should have a price tag. This was super controversial. A lot of people that saw the success were like, you should never sell this. This is lightning in a bottle. But I was like, no, I've learned so much from this process that I could theoretically redo everything way better. And plus, if I ever want to raise money, I want to be able to show like the full life cycle of a deal. So we went ahead and listed it with a broker and we got approached by Multiple private equity groups. They see the writing on the wall for commoditized short-term rentals, and they want these one of one of a kind properties. And, um, but most of them need to operate like at a much bigger scale. This group was small enough that they were willing to take a one-off property. So here's the crazy thing in the hotel industry. You typically have three parties. You've got the real estate, you've got the managing company, and you've got the brand. Sometimes the operator and the brand are the same. Well, with this property, we built a 150,000 followers on Instagram plus like 30 or 40,000 people on the email list. So we essentially were selling the brand and the real estate together, which is part of the reason we got such a crazy high price, you know, for a seven cabins in the woods in Texas. But basically they came along offered seven, seven milli…

AI assessment note: “we went ahead and listed it with a broker and we got approached”

Q the opportunities you see? So what do you think somebody out there, um, could go do and break that down like a blueprint? Like, okay, you're now talking not to me and Sam, you're talking to this person who's listening, who is inspired by this and says, could I do that? How would I do that? What would you tell them? What's the two minute blueprint you would give them?

A Yeah. Love it. Huge opportunity. Again, Airbnbs have been commoditized. They're just, you know, unrecognizable from each other. There's no differentiation. So whether this is a, an old summer camp that could be totally transformed into like this micro resort or say it's a roadside motel. A lot of people are doing these or it's seven cabins around the lake. I got a friend named Brian who had this idea to rethink what Houseboats meant. And so he built for 200,000 dollars, built this houseboat. You can look it up. It's flow home. That's F L O H O M. I mean, it's like totally different than what you think of. It's like a mini yacht almost. And then he started renting it out. Absolutely went berserk. Now he's raised a bunch of money. He's buying marinas. So the cool thing about houseboats is you don't fall typically into the same regulations as STR as short term rentals, because you're on the water. So he gets to be in like these prime locations in like, you know, Baltimore Harbor or Annapolis or Washington, wherever. And you get 360 degree Harbor views. You're, you're sometimes in hotels, sometimes not even in any zoning at all. And there's zero competition. So again, that's completely unique. There's such a spectrum of what these could be. I've got another friend who's doing tree houses. So he bought a piece of property and here's, here's the blueprint that I go after. Number one,…

AI assessment note: “here's the blueprint that I go after. Number one, choose red states over blue”

Q How did you figure that out? Because that is something that not a lot of people have been able to figure out. So how did you figure out what's enough for you? And how did you actually execute that? How did you figure out what you wanted? What was enough? And then do it.

A You know, one year I was doing my taxes and I had busted my butt in my business and absolutely incredible amount. It was just one of the hardest years. And I think maybe we netted out like 350,000 dollars profit. And it was one of the hardest years of my life, honestly, for a variety of staffing reasons and other things. And as I was doing my taxes, My accountant said like, oh, wow, do you realize you made like so much more money from your investments than you did from your business? And I never thought about my investments. I don't even think I just buy it, set it and forget it. And at that moment I was like, wow, I'm like destroying my health and my sanity for this amount of money. That's not even as much as I'm making off the investments. There were a few moments like that that I've had over the last 10 years that have just made me reconsider how I spend my time.

AI assessment note: “I'm like destroying my health and my sanity for this amount of money.”

Q Why do the name tags matter? Because I went to a party with, of yours, and at first I was like, okay, this is second grade, this is cheesy, but then it was kind of useful, obviously, because I don't remember a lot of people's names, but it seems like there's more to it than that. What is the, like, what's the why behind the why?

A The why behind the why is it's like a sports jersey to show everybody that we're on the same team. Have you ever walked into an event, it's the first time you've gone to something, and you figure that it's me walking into something else. Everybody else must know each other. They must all be friends already. I am the outsider. When you have name tags, you show that you are all on the same team. This is not a party of clicks. We're all here together. By the way, if you host meetups, you absolutely have to do name tags when you host at a bar or another public spot so you know who is there for the meetup. Have you ever gone to a meetup and it's at like a beer garden and you're like, well, who's here for the meetup? They're like, oh, these people. It's like, great. I guess I'll just Figure it out on my own. Amateur hour. All right.

AI assessment note: “The why behind the why is it's like a sports jersey”

Q marathon on a treadmill with max incline. And low agency people do the opposite. So this is the kind of idea of treadmill friends. Afterwards, you've got so much energy. You need to go on a treadmill. You can't sleep. Then you have like sofa friends who you need to lie down after hanging out with them. Who's like the treadmill friends in your guy's life that comes to mind?

A Sam's like that for me. My buddy Suli is like that. Like I can't, I can't hang out with Suli and literally our hangout tends to be, we walk for like four hours talking, uh, because we almost have to burn off the energy. That's like the, the excitement of the ideas and the stories that we're sharing while we're doing it. Um, that's how this podcast got created. It was on a four hour walk with him, and I was like, you know what I really want? It was like hour three. I was like, you know what I really want to do? It's not a company. I want to create a podcast. I want to be Tim Ferriss. I want to wake up and have a, be in a million people's ear balls. And that was like a thing that came to me when I worked myself into that state. Uh, Ben is kind of like that. My business partner, Ben, where he's like, I could just, I probably do call Ben, I think eight times a day on average. You know, so we just talk eight times in a day, which now that I say it sounds very weird, but it feels very normal. If I didn't have kids, it'd probably be 20 times a day.

AI assessment note: “Sam's like that for me. My buddy Suli is like that.”

Q What percentage of the deals do you say it's shit? You're like, no, dude, like, there's no opportunity here.

A We've had, I mean, it's, it's a young business. We've only done 20 projects, but let's say on 25%, we've said we, we should, you should stay the hell away from it. One, I mean, one, there was just straight up fraud in the SEO backlinking that they would have never spotted without us. That was a huge win. And I mean, they paid us. Obviously, they didn't do the deal. And then we've had a couple where we were not convinced that there was as much leverage. Like, the management team puts together projections Right? So they're, they share projections in these things. And we look at those projections and we basically go, dude, this person would have to be the best Facebook ad marketer on the planet to hit these projections. Like we, we think they can grow, but we don't think the projections they put together are reasonable and we need to double click. And as they double clicked on that, they lost excitement about the deal.

AI assessment note: “let's say on 25%, we've said we, we should, you should stay the hell away”

Q Have you ever felt richer than that first relief of being like out of the mess?

A No, I say it in my book, in the, uh, the offers book, the last, the last chapters, uh, the first 100,000. When we had our first 100,000, which was like four or six weeks after that, I showed it to Layla on the phone, and I was like, we did it. And she was like, what do you mean? And I was like, look, and I like pulled it up, and it wasn't like in the business account, because I'd had that in like business, you know, but it was like, But that's like operating expensive and earmark for other stuff. But like, this was like in the personal account. And I was like, we can, we can screw up for like three years and we're going to be fine. Like we could do, we could just do, we could take off for three years and be fine. And, uh, to this day is, it is a hundred percent the richest I've ever felt. And I think it's because of relative change in wealth. Cause I have thought about it. Cause it's like, if you go from a thousand dollars to a 100,000 dollars, it's a, it's a hundred X increase in wealth in a month.

AI assessment note: “to this day is, it is a hundred percent the richest I've ever felt.”

Q By the way, the, the end of that story is, like, within the first 12 months, there's some, like, ridiculous benchmark that you guys hit, right? So from that brink of failure to, what was it at the end of the year?

A Yeah, so, so we did the, so, December 26th, the, of, of 2016, uh, processor shuts me down, and I make the big bet, and Layla says, I'll go with you under a bridge, and it's 3300 a day. It takes four or five months for me to realize the new model Where I fly out to gyms has this big refund problem. And so now we're into May of 17. Uh, I flipped, I flipped during that kind of like April, May ish, the model, uh, and we started doing the, the licensing model and it goes like 407 hundred, uh, a 1,000,001, two, one, five, like into the end of the year. So we ended up with like 6.8 million top line. And I think we did three million in profit. And then the full next calendar year, we did, uh, twenty-six million and, uh, sixteen million in EBITDA.

AI assessment note: “we ended up with like 6.8 million top line. And I think we did three million”

Q Do you want this to grow or like, what's going on here, right?

A So it went from, it went from, uh, two million to did sixteen million to, uh, 50, then 70, then this year we'll do one 10. And so, We hired 40 sales guys so that we could do, we could add that back end in. We added a CMO. We added a CPO and a whole product team to help the, the chief product officer out. We added in a controller. And so one of the things acquisition.com, what we do is that we recruit. And so, because we have a lot of inbound, we have a lot of talent that is in my audience. And so I, I might not endorse the company publicly, But from a private perspective, we'll endorse, we'll, we'll recruit at Holdco, get usually higher quality talent than a portfolio can get, place the high quality talent, and then they just grow way faster.

AI assessment note: “So it went from, it went from, uh, two million to did sixteen million”

Q learn your voice. So it can write your, it can help you write your emails or your blog posts in your voice, which is kind of like the next level up from autocomplete, next level up from Grammarly. It doesn't just kind of correct or spell check your stuff, but it actually writes the way you write because it has watched the way you write. Is that the thesis here?

A Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think it can be, you know, lots of different types of business communication, but especially like email. So I don't know if this is, this is actually my friend Mike Vernal's idea. I think he suffers from the same thing I do that might be true for you, which is like I'm an incredibly picky writer. And so I will use the models today for generation of basic content, or I'll ask my amazing EA to like draft emails for me, and then I will go rewrite the whole thing. Because I don't like the tone because it doesn't sound like me or because it's not tight enough or because I want to use a certain phrase. And I think the next level of like value and impact is definitely going to be, um, fine tuning to specific voice.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think it can be, you know, lots of different types”

Q How did it happen? So the game's blowing up, and what, you get an email from Mark Pincus, or how does that happen?

A The game's blowing up, and not only is it so big, it's literally sucking the user base out of every single other game on the market. And so that's Zynga, that's EA, that's like everybody else who's about to report earnings and talk about their DAU and MAU, and you know, I have these videos of The download numbers and the counter is just broken because there's, you know, there's a million drawings happening every five seconds. And so, you know, Mark knew somebody on my board. They invited me to the headquarters. I was a joker, so I entered my name as Dr. Dre from the company NWA coming in. I thought maybe somebody would know I was there or whatever. Uh, ultimately there were five or six companies that were really interested in buying it because it was just The trajectory was so big, and I think they were playing offense, like, they clearly was like, these guys are some mobile game savants, and I think they were playing defense because they were bleeding all of their users across everywhere.

AI assessment note: “Mark knew somebody on my board. They invited me to the headquarters.”

Q Okay. Smart. All right, cool. I like it. Give me another one. Give me a different one. Is there one that you have that's not as internet marketing?

A Well, I, I, I do. I have, they are pretty much all kind of in that internet marketing niche. What another one that I think I'll hit you with two more. So the next one that I would do is there are four hundred million small businesses in the world, right? There's sixty million in America. There's five million in the UK, there's two million in Australia, and as everyone moves online, And there's people all over at all different time zones that want to get in contact with these business. A lot of these businesses have a Google my business listing, right? A Google page with their reviews and all of those kind of things. Um, and the thing that very, very few of these people offer is live chat. So I would offer live chat as a service. Um, and it was just me and I was trying to start a side hustle. You know what I mean? I could do it after hours, whereas where a lot of people don't have the manpower To offer support after hours or to be able to field inquiries. And again, it would be free. I would say, Hey, I'm going to do this for you. No charge. So I don't need to try and convince these people to do it right. A compelling offer is infinitely more powerful than a convincing argument. So I do not want to get into a convincing argument over the phone that they should do this and they should pay me money to do this. I would say, cool. I know that this can increase your sales by Because …

AI assessment note: “they are pretty much all kind of in that internet marketing niche”

Q Okay, so, uh, we're at the end of 22, and I think around this time, you actually were like, Holy shit. Uh, I might have just like hit on something interesting. I should go out and buy more and do this again. Or did you first come up with the crazy idea to buy all that land?

A So I bought the land in 2021, about 1500 acres. So originally I didn't plan on being a real estate. What we actually wanted to do was, uh, go out and build a media center connected to a runway. Cause I, uh, you know, If people are gonna fly in airplanes, remember, at the end of the day, the content for flying is all about the airplane. Like, people care less about the pilot, they care a lot about the airplane, and this is no different than a car magazine where you're gonna look at the Lambo or the Ferrari. For the aviation audience, they want to see the newest aircraft being produced, and so we wanted to create a video center connected to an airport. The problem was that none of the airports in the community, five regional, uh, community airports around Chattanooga, Were willing to sort of do anything. They said, you know, basically, you have to go from the state, the municipality, the state, and the FAA have to approve it in order to get, to build a media center.

AI assessment note: “So I bought the land in 2021, about 1500 acres. So originally I didn't plan”

Q great with risk. Like you, you're, you're going, you're taking more risk, I think. Uh, but it doesn't, it's all working out. And this is where it gets interesting is you're like, all right, this thing worked for flying magazines. What, flying magazine, what happens if I go out and get more? Of these titles and do this whole content to commerce thing. And did you raise money for that?

A Uh, not initially. Uh, so I have not raised any, my father invested when he sold his trucking business last year. So he's my only outside investor other than the initial round. Everything was done by myself. And I was just using bank debt, uh, frankly, borrowing money from banks and liquidating my portfolio because I felt like I would rather invest in myself than invest in the S&P. I think the difference between Sam isn't necessarily that I'm Like, I am willing to take more risks. I'm also willing to take more shots on goal. I just think fundamentally, like, an asymmetric mindset that I have is, is I may lose, let's say the real estate project went to zero. I'm gonna lose three and a half million dollars. That sucks. But you know what? I had been, my dad cut me off. My dad fired me in 2014. I had basically, like, No job, nothing. Like, it was, I was, for all intents and purposes, on my own at rock bottom. I had to figure it out. I've done that before, and so I'm not afraid of losing it all, and I know that I can get it back, and so we've applied that rule to everything that we've done, and we make acquisitions under the philosophy that it's asymmetric risk. It's like, let's say that we buy a business or buy a magazine that we spend half a million dollars or a million dollars, and let's say it goes to zero. Let's say that we're completely wrong about our thesis, And the thing is…

AI assessment note: “not initially. Uh, so I have not raised any, my father invested”

Q Can you explain how, how those worked? Like, just to finish the story of chubby brain to CB inside successful company. What did CB Insights do on those three criteria? So, you know, who was the buyer? What was the edge you gave them? And then what was the collection feasibility?

A Yeah. So the, the buyer, and it's changed over time. Initially it was investors and investment banks. So think of like VCPE investment banks. You know, they are in the business of sourcing. Like, that's one of their key responsibilities. They make their money off of finding and sourcing the right deals, and what we saw was there wasn't a really structured way for folks to do that. So that was the edge we wanted to deliver, is we're going to give you access to more companies, we're going to get them to you quicker, and we're going to have deeper, richer profiles on them. So that's the, the sort of sourcing edge. Um, over time it's, it's more, um, You know, the opportunity was in that group to start, and I think that's another big thing is, like, start really narrow. Uh, you know, if I made a mistake along the way as we got too broad. So, opportunity was in that group. The edge was, you know, a sourcing edge, and then collection was, in the beginning, it was just ground and pound. Like, it was, we had 50,000 articles about funding and M&A events, and me and the guys just went through manually And put in columns in a spreadsheet, here's the investors, here's the amount, here's the valuation, whatever we could find. Then we got lucky and hired some amazing engineers, and they basically reverse engineered that process and automated it, right? And then over time, now we do interviews…

AI assessment note: “So the, the buyer... Initially it was investors... So that was the edge... collection was”

Q talking about flying, and we're talking about Firecrown, and I'm blown away. I didn't know about Firecrown. I only knew about flying, and Sam is telling me about the, the growth of this thing. I got two questions for you. Uh, number one, when you guys started this, was this the plan, or you guys sort of stumbled into, oh, wow, this might be bigger and better than we thought?

A So when Craig called me in 2021, it was a lifestyle side help, basically side hustle. He's like, Hey, you want to come out? We run this. I asked him, I was like, why are you buying a magazine? You know, I can't tell the last time I read a magazine. And, uh, he was like, well, it's just going to be kind of like a side hobby. Freightways is really my business, but yeah, keep it small. And, uh, but if you, if you know anything about Craig as a person, He can't, he, that's not in his nature. So all of a sudden it, you know, we started rolling stuff up as we saw opportunities and, you know, now it's ballooned up into, I mean, we're at 257 employees.

AI assessment note: “it was a lifestyle side help, basically side hustle... well, it's just going to be kind of like a side hobby”

Q And so, you know, as we were looking, I always tell myself that too. Where's the, where's the hangar space in Chattanooga?

A Yeah, right. Exactly. Well, so we've got three airports and each of them have a wait list of like seven to 10 years long. And so we're like, well, I guess we're gonna have to build an airport if we're gonna be able to get hangar space for any airplanes, you know, that we get on demo or whatever. We wanted to build a media center on the runway and, you know, every airport was like, yeah, good luck. It's gonna take at least 10 years. So we said, hey, let's build our own runway. To build a runway, we should, you know, do something unique. These flying communities are interesting. And we started writing about it and realized that, like, There's really high performing content, like user, you know, from a, from a Google Analytics standpoint, it's like, you know, we could see that the content being engaged with it. We're like, okay, people actually care about this. They care about airparks. So we said, okay, well, let's, let's go ahead and let's build an airpark. We announced it, bought the land, 1500 acres, about 45 minutes outside of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and through advertising in our own magazine and said, all right, well, This will probably be like a five to seven year project before we get started, uh, you know, kind of underwriting. And we had, we, we basically met our three year kind of pro forma in pre reservations in like the first three months. So we're like, all right, t…

AI assessment note: “we've got three airports and each of them have a wait list”

Q And then, and, and that's when you got into like internet marketing, but didn't you do like a Kendrick Lamar website too?

A Yeah, that was, that was, uh, man, that was probably like a couple of years later. So the story on that one is my cousin. I was living with my cousin at the time. He was like a biomechanical engineer and I'm over here doing all this weird stuff on the internet, like building sites and stuff. And he's kind of getting intrigued by it. And a friend hits me up and he was like, Hey, I have all these blogs that I need to sell. I just need some money. I have Kendrick Lamar, Rita Ora, Schoolboy Q, like all these sort of up and coming artists. And this would have been like 2014, I think. He goes, you want to buy one? And I go, I I'm kind of doing my own thing, but maybe I'll have my cousin buy it and we'll do it together. So my cousin Johnny actually puts up the money for it. And I think I had like 10% equity in this Kendrick Lamar website. And we start, like, scouring the internet, and we actually become, like, the biggest source of Kendrick Lamar news on the internet before he drops his first album, Good Kid, Mad City. And so, no one really knows Kendrick, like, only superfans know him. And there was a point where, like, I think Kendrick's manager even called my cousin and was like, like, we really appreciate what you're doing for Kendrick, like, you're putting his name out there, da-da-da-da-da. And the way we monetized that is we were just selling shirts, just, like, print-on-demand…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, that was, that was, uh, man, that was probably like a couple of years later.”

Q And hobby blog in that you were actually like into gardening and you're like, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna create content around. But did you see any numbers where you're like, uh, this could be a big company or was it straight joy?

A No, no. I mean, it was a mix, right? Like I was gardening for fun and then I would just document whatever, whatever I was doing and like make a YouTube video or make a blog post. And I would try to monetize it. Like I'd make some ad revenue or I'd make some affiliate revenue, but I never thought it could be huge. Like I remember talking to friends that were all kind of doing the same thing at the time. And I was like, man, if this thing could just make two grand a month, or if it could make five grand a month, like that'd be amazing that I wouldn't have to go get a job. Uh, cause I think my mind didn't understand the scale that any, any business could really become at that point in time. So yeah, it took, it took a while for me to realize the potential of it.

AI assessment note: “I never thought it could be huge. Like I remember talking to friends”

Q had, um, I'm, I'm friendly with James Clear and Mark Manson, and I think that they have some of the best-selling books of the last, like, maybe decade, but I would imagine, I would imagine that after a few more years, you're gonna be up there, because you, you were a Navy SEAL, which you've talked a bunch about, but you started writing, but the books are relatively new, right?

A Yep, so, 2018, I started writing the first one when I was still in, as I was getting out of the military, so I think December of 20 14, I wrote my first words. They're the first book. So they, but it came out in 2018, and then there's been one a year ever since, and this is the first year with two books. So I have my newest one, the seventh book in the series, Red Sky Morning, comes out in June, and then I have my first non-fiction that comes out in September. So September 24th, and that's on the 1983 Beirut Barracks bombing. Uh, and you probably noticed I weave a lot of history into that as well.

AI assessment note: “Yep, so, 2018, I started writing the first one when I was still in”

Q Wait, so hold on here. Snap the podcast. So like, what, so what should I do next time I sit down to write? How does this actually work? Where am I going to dance? Do some jumping jacks? What do I actually do?

A Yes, exactly. That's exactly right. So state change is three things. Number one, radical change in your physiology. So you can sprint, you can do pushups, you can dance, you can, um, do 20 air squats, you can dump your face into cold water, whatever it is, you will, it's the fastest way to change how you feel is a radical change in your physiology. So first I Um, so do that. That's the, that's the very first thing. Um, I have a friend who's a professional poker player. He does the same thing. He goes during poker players are like notoriously degenerates. Like you're literally sitting there in a casino, which is like the worst air pumped in environment. There's no windows and you're around other degenerates all day. People are smoking. It's bad. Um, he's like a monk and he, during a tournament in the breaks, he goes in the parking lot and he does wind sprints. He's not doing it to be a He's not doing it to increase his VO two max. He's doing it because he wants to make a better decision when he gets back to the table. He knows he makes better decisions when he changes the state. And, um, that's part of his edge is why he's been a European, like, you know, poker champion, uh, uh, a tour champion, uh, you know, several years. So first thing is a change in your, your, um, your state. The second thing is a change in your focus. So what are you even focused on?

AI assessment note: “Number one, radical change in your physiology. So you can sprint, you can do pushups”

Q What's a power word? What do you mean?

A Power words are things that will instantly hook people that are very strong words such as free, zero dollars, stole, or any like crazy word. Uh, cause be, and the reason I say that is because I see a lot of people, like way too many people start their videos with, this is, I'm out. This is, is not telling me anything about the video. Like I'm, I, I actually scroll cause it's like, it's bad. As opposed to if someone says, Free chicken sandwiches all weekend. I'm in. Where are these free chicken sandwiches? I was in the moment you said free. So that's the number one thing. You want your, your hooks to start with power words. The second thing is you want it to be progressing the video. The reason why this is, is also bad is because it is just saying a statement. It is not doing anything. This is blank. Doesn't tell me what you're going to do. It's just telling me a statement as opposed to free chicken sandwiches this weekend. You're already telling me the whole story or I'm building a secret room. You're already telling me the action, even though the, even though the power words aren't until three words in secret, it still works because it's starting with the action. I'm doing blank. I'm going to do blank. The story is progressing as opposed to a statement being stale. That's the second thing. And, uh, another thing that's very crucial for hooks or in your general, like introducti…

AI assessment note: “Power words are things that will instantly hook people that are very strong words”

Q again, I, I think for most people it's like 15% or something crazy, crazy low. Okay, so the hook and the first frame, what about the visual? What works in the actual visual? Because there's, with short form, there's no thumbnail, and people aren't really reading the title, I don't think. So what's your, what's your philosophy on what to put on screen, what that first frame should look like?

A Yeah, I try to keep it as simple as possible. It's very similar philosophy to, like, a title and thumbnail, same psychology in a way, where I try to keep it, like, little to no focus points, high brightness, high saturation, and we, like, we'll go through, we'll go through so many lengths and measures and After Effects and VFX just to make it, like, pop out just that much more, such as, like, sometimes we'll add artificial fire just to make it look crazier, like, What in, in one of our shorts, I went to Hell's Kitchen, but that you don't really get that message across unless you actually add the restaurant on fire, you know, and it's like something as little as that.

AI assessment note: “I try to keep it, like, little to no focus points, high brightness, high saturation”

Q Interesting. And so what was the first thing you said? No, no little to no focus points.

A What does that mean? So what I mean by that is we don't want any busyness to go on. I think, you know, it's a really good example. If you can show who has the best dollar menu, like, In the first frame, just pause it and notice that that is not a real environment. Like, we actually took myself, we rotoscoped myself, and then we found a image of McDonald's on Google that was so much cleaner, that had no cars, the logo was clean, there was no trees, just so it could be perfectly, like, just look perfect for the viewer, if that makes sense. That's what we try to do. We want the environment to look as clean as possible, so there's no busy points.

AI assessment note: “what I mean by that is we don't want any busyness to go on.”

Q to great. We've done the hook, how to grab them by the throat, get that 80, 80 plus percent, uh, view rate. Now you said foreshadowing is the next part. What is foreshadowing and how do you do it? Cause I, this is one that I've heard, obviously I've thought about the ideas. I've thought about hooks. Uh, this is not something I do in my process. What is foreshadowing?

A Foreshadowing is when you give a viewer the expectation of the end of the video. And the way I've coined it is you basically want to tell the viewer that there's an Amazon gift card at the end of the video, essentially, like they need to watch till the end. Sometimes you'll have to explicitly tell the viewer, oh, you'll get blank at the end of the video. Usually a lot of my foreshadowing is implied. So who has the best dollar menu? It's very implied that by the end of the video, I'm going to tell you who has the best dollar menu, essentially. And that's, that's usually the best foreshadowing. One that's like, So obvious because it's within the hook and it's implied. But an even better, even stronger foreshadowing hook is when you have a mechanism. So an example of that is what does 10 dollars get you in Miami? Now, not only do you know by the end of the video what 10 dollars gets you in Miami, but you also know what, how I spent the 10 dollars. Now the mechanism is actually seeing the money being spent because in the first second you see, oh, she spent two dollars right on an eight dollar budget. And then a couple seconds later, oh, now she's at five. And we have a sense of progression of where the video is going. Because otherwise, if the viewer does not feel like the video is constantly progressing, then they're going to leave because they don't feel like, even though you sai…

AI assessment note: “Foreshadowing is when you give a viewer the expectation of the end of the video.”

Q That's great. You've also, um, Done, like built some tools. I think you, you like scrape idea, you scrape, uh, data off these platforms so that you're able to analyze a bunch of videos. Um, and you're looking for some kind of outlier, I would assume, or you're looking for something in that data. Can you describe what you did and what you look for?

A So You know, like, like you said, my team has built a bunch of tools. And the goal for that is to understand our viewer psychology. So recently, our number one goal is to increase subscriber conversions, because we have over a billion views, and two million subscribers, where the average person would have like, ten million subscribers. So we're like, okay, let's increase our subscriber conversions. And essentially, what we did was we created a tool where We took all my videos and I manually labeled what I did in each of those videos. So some of them were labeled as had my family in it. Other videos were labeled as malicious content. So me pranking. Other words, others were labeled as like wholesome and et cetera. Like I just labeled every video, every video with any possible thing the video could be about and a bunch of different like things we did. For example, if I mentioned YouTube or if I said subscribe or Literally anything that could have happened, I labeled them manually. And then we put them in a graph and a chart to see the subscriber conversions on that specific video to find how I can maximize subscriber conversions. And doing something like that, we found that I double my conversions when I have my family in the videos, and specifically when I'm making wholesome content where I surprise them, such as like, you know, giving my mom a birthday present, for example, wou…

AI assessment note: “we created a tool where We took all my videos and I manually labeled”

Q more trends and opportunities. Uh, you had talked, I asked you a question when we were hanging out, uh, yesterday, which was what are, what's a business type that you really love? Maybe you guys didn't even make an acquisition in the space, but like, what are categories that you really loved? And you mentioned, I don't know, like a regulation compliance type of category. Can you explain that one?

A Yeah, for sure. So, like, any time a government anywhere introduces some kind of arcane rule, you have to follow, if you don't follow, you go to jail. So it's like the ultimate kind of motivation to buy, right? And, uh, sometimes it can be really difficult. So, you know, we looked at a bunch of examples. One, one was, um, there's this great company, a software company in Italy that just did banking regulation for all, make sure all the banks are compliant with all these things. And that's like an amazing business because First of all, you're going long Italian regulation, which is probably a great trade in and of itself, but like in the future, Italy is going to have more rules than it does today. And then aside from that, it's like a bank is not going to rip that out ever. And it's, you know, it hits that golden criteria, which is it's relatively cheap, but mission critical. That's like a really great one. Um, and there's a bunch of these, there's all these, you know, for buying a house, for, um, for vetting tenants, for, um, KYC and AML, um, Uh, if you, if you start looking for it day to day, you see it a lot. Like I just rented a car and there's like a process there where they check my license against some database and I'm sure that's a piece of software. Like those are great because I love it because it's like a low lift and the downside is super high and you don't really w…

AI assessment note: “any time a government anywhere introduces some kind of arcane rule, you have to follow”

Q Like, I track, I track income. I don't track, uh, net worth, because there's nothing I can do about that, right? It's, I've, I've, I'm not like you guys. I've done a set it and forget it, but now that Bitcoin, Bitcoin and, uh, Uh, ether is close to an all-time high. Bitcoin is, I think. Uh, should I just, should I just sell it all and get out?

A Uh, the number one rule of Bitcoin is you don't want to sell your Bitcoin, obviously. Um, no, I mean, look, I think the long-term kind of like thesis around Bitcoin is, uh, no different than it's always been, which is you have a scarce supply, uh, asset. There's lots of people who want it. That number of people who want it is increasing. Now the people who are banging on the door aren't like retail investors on the internet with 10 dollars. It's large institutions that have billions of dollars. Uh, they're obviously allocating to it. Um, and probably the most exciting part over, you know, call it the next 12 months or so, is that at the same time that all this demand is coming in, uh, the Bitcoin halving is coming, and that's just when the daily incoming supply, the number of Bitcoin that get created each day, is gonna get cut in half, from 900 Bitcoin to 450. So like, I always joke, if you went to Economics one-on-one class, supply and demand, if supply goes down and demand goes up at the same time, then the price has to go up to accommodate everyone, and we've seen this happen before, and it'll probably happen again.

AI assessment note: “the number one rule of Bitcoin is you don't want to sell your Bitcoin”

Q This is probably my favorite one of yours so far. Do you got any other ones? You had one more maybe?

A Uh, I've got two more that are kind of related. So, um, I, everyone's all excited about like the deep tech stuff. Uh, I, I invested in this company called Rainmaker. And so Rainmaker makes it rain. They're flying precision drones into clouds, and they're dropping chemicals in the clouds to make it rain. Um, and so, like, that's kind of crazy. That is probably the riskiest one. Wow. And then, um, kind of simultaneous to that, uh, if you look at like, what's like the cyber security version of all these deep tech companies, there's this guy, Joshua Steinman, who left, uh, I think he was on the national security council, uh, in the Trump administration. And he like realized, wait a minute, like there's no companies that protect all of our public infrastructure. So like the example he gave me was, uh, imagine what happens if someone can hack like the water treatment plants and change the pH levels of the water. And have like massive, you know, carnage or like, you know, really, really screw with like a local area by simply hacking this like one facility that's public infrastructure and doing something nefarious. And so he's creating a company called Galvanic. Uh, again, it's super small, probably, you know, on the higher end of the risk, uh, spectrum, but just like a really cool mission of, um, if you're able to protect public infrastructure, there's like unlimited demand for this t…

AI assessment note: “I've got two more that are kind of related. So, um, I invested in this company called Rainmaker”

Q but you said, um, the reason that most of us aren't happy most of the time is that we set goals, not for the person we're going to be when we reach them, but we set our goals for the person we are when we set them. And I don't think you explicitly said that the company doesn't set goals, but you sort of implied it. Is that the case?

A Yeah. By the way, that quote is from a fellow named Jim Kudal, who is a good friend of ours and runs field notes, which a lot of people know. You know, our goal, our only goal is to be profitable on a given year. We've been profitable every year for 25 years. That's the only thing we look at is we want to make sure that we make more money than we spend. Otherwise, we don't really set goals or have expectations other than just to do our best work. I'm not a fan of thinking that you're going to do better work if you set a goal. I think you should do your best work all the time as best you can. And again, let the chips fall where they may. You know, the way I think about this That I think helps people understand this more is if you want to go out for a run and run a six minute mile and you got to run a six minute mile and you end up running a six Oh four. You're, you're like, didn't hit the goal, and you're maybe upset, like, I almost got it, whatever. Now, some people might say you're going to work harder next time, but what if the goal was six oh five instead? Like, it's five seconds difference, and you would have beat it, and you would have felt differently. It's like five seconds. Does that matter? Like, to me, the right question is, like, was it worth it? Did I enjoy the run? Did I have a good time? Do I feel good now? Don't want to do that again. Am I injured? No. Great. Did…

AI assessment note: “our only goal is to be profitable on a given year... Otherwise, we don't really set goals”