The "Idiot Index": the simple math that made Elon Musk billions

The headline here is the $300 million butcher. - I'm in. - It's just a reminder that if you're the best at anything, money will never be a problem for you. ♪ I feel like I could rule the world ♪ ♪ I know I could be what I want to ♪ ♪ I put my all in it like a day's all ♪ ♪ On a road let's travel never looking back ♪ - All right, Pat LaFreta. Do you know who this is? Pat LaFreta? I feel like you definitely know who this is 'cause this is like, if there's two things that you like, it's red meat and denim jeans. So I feel like this is right in your alley. It's a family owned business. Do you want to hear the story here? - Yeah, oh man. I love the name of his website. Pat LaFreta, meat purveyor. - Purveyor, so good. We changed this podcast name to my first million, business purveyor. - My hot dog stand, it's first logo was Southern Sam's purveyor's of fine winters. - Was it actually purveyor's? - Yeah, yeah, if you Google Southern Sam's logo, you'll see the logo. - Oh wow, this is like a legit looking logo. Purveyor's of fine winters, premium quality. And then you have the smoke and the hot dog with the smoke lines coming off. Yeah, it's good, right? Although there's something wrong with like the beveling of these letters. - Well, I pay this guy Billy. - It was Billy from Nashville. I gave him $50 and it gave me the logo. So. - This is not bad though, as branding thing. All right, so here's this story of the headline here is, the $300 million butcher. - I mean. - This caught my attention. I didn't even think a butcher could be worth hundreds of millions, but it's just a reminder that like, if you're the best at anything, money will never be a problem for you. You're the best plumber, money will never be a problem for you. It doesn't matter what you are. There's a guy in Dubai is just the best at trimming what's it called, split ends that women have. And people will fly to this guy to get them to cut their split ends. You're the best at anything money will never be a problem. All right, so here's the story. Back in the day, early 1900s, 1909, there's a guy named Anthony LaFrida. And he migrates from Italy, he comes to Brooklyn, and he opens up a butcher shop. And he opens up a butcher shop and their idea is they don't want to just do hamburgers like everybody else. So the way a hamburger normally works. I think a hamburger and a hot dog, they're basically the worst parts of meat mashed together. So it's like not the premium cuts of meat that you could sell separately a steak. And they mash it together and that's what a burger was, it was the scraps. And he said, we're going to use whole muscle cuts only. And he had this great line, which is, you can't hide your sins in the hamburger. And he reviewed that that's what the other butchers would do is they would just take, hide the sins, as we all the bad parts smashed together. Hey, there you go, that's your hamburger. So that's the first LaFrida blend. And it was like parts, different parts of the muscle. So business is okay, normal butcher shop. In 1950, New York butchers go on strike. And restaurants have no meat. And he decides to seize the day. So what does he do? He drives out in New Jersey. He goes and he buys up a bunch of the meat and wholesale. He brings it back, he starts selling direct to restaurant. And they open up LaFrida meats in the meat packing district. And it's going good, but nothing spectacular. And in fact, the grandfather, then the father takes over the business. It's not growing. By the late 80s, things are getting bad. Restaurants are switching to Cisco, which is like the sort of Costco for restaurants of how you get food delivered. And the company's kind of dying. And so the son was never allowed to be in the business. This is Pat Jr. And the father was like, son, I want a better life for you. Don't stay here, go to college, get a good job. Don't be a butcher. Don't be like me. Don't be like me. And he says specifically, he goes, why would you want to do this? You're going to be rubbing together pennies for the rest of your life. And so he's forced out and Pat goes and he becomes, he goes to a good school. And then he goes and becomes a stockbroker on Wall Street for nine months, but he hates it. And he just comes back, he begs his dad, let me be in the family business. And he petitions with the sister and I think the mom or the aunt or something like that, like let Pat Jr. into the business. And so the dad would land, he says fine. If you really want to do it, do it. So here's where we're at. This is now like 1994, not that long ago. I think like Lion King came out in '94. Like this is not like hundreds of years ago. And they had 44 customers. They had five employees, two drivers. The mom did the books. And the dad and the grandpa were still the only two butchers. Okay, so that's when he took over the business. All right, so he decides I'm going to start reinvesting in the business like crazy. So he's buying new equipment. He hits the streets of New York. He's just signing up restaurants manually door to door, right? 'Cause you know, sometimes when you have a really like product focused organization, the sales side, just that muscle never got developed. And so he decides to hit the streets. And he has this genius idea to start creating branded labels for specific cuts and blends that nobody else was doing. And so he takes a bet on an unknown chef, named Mario Batali. And Mario Batali was a nobody at the time, but he liked him and he desperately needed some real loin. And he didn't have any money. And so Pat convinces the dad to give, to sell the sky the meat on credit. Something they'd never done. The dad was against it, but he's like, I just, I think this chef, he'll be good for it. I think we should support him. Let's do this. And Batali rewards this with loyalty. So for the rest of his career, they only buy La Frida. And as he's putting, as Batali's reputation as a star New York chef grows, and he becomes a celebrity chef, he adds on the menu that he's not just serving meat. He's serving La Frida meats. And it helps him too, 'cause it sounds like it's a more exclusive premium high quality product. And this was the key lesson that Pat Jr. figured out, which was don't sell a commodity, create a brand. And create a brand not just for him, but for each of the chefs, so that the chef had their own brand. So we would create custom exclusive blends for every one of the hot restaurants in town. And so 50 restaurants got their own custom blend, locked under an NDA that only they had. And this was kind of like a key growing thing for the business. Now, it is awesome. Somebody you might know becomes a fan, Danny Meyer. So Danny Meyer, who's got the upscale restaurant, Union Square Cafe, I think it is at the time. He's using La Frida and he says, "Hey, I got this idea for a more fast casual burger joint. "It's gonna be called Shake Shack." And can you give me like a burger for that? He's like, "Sure." He goes, "But here's the thing, like you got to make it "where it's pre-formed patties." And 'cause we're fast, we got to have that. And the grandfather and the father were like, "No, no, no, we don't do that. "That's blasphemous." So the son secretly does this against the parents will. He had the sort of the right amount of rebellion to pull this off. He knew what to keep sacred, he knew what to wear to rebel and he does it. And now he serves all of Shake Shack's locations with his meat only. - No way. - For his party. And he took his dad to the first Shake Shack and they see 200 people in line and he goes, "Dad, that's our burger." And he said, "You know, there's a classic, "you know, a son trying to make his dad proud." And I was like, "You know, we did it. "They look at this." And they just kept doing these counter-intuitive business moves. So 2008, financial crash happens in New York. It's, you know, blood is in the streets. And everybody's hurting. He does a pretty counter-intuitive thing. (upbeat music) Hey, I want to tell you about something pretty cool. We have a database of all of the unsexy business ideas that have been discussed on this podcast. So hundreds of episodes, the team at HubSpot went through, they pulled out all the unsexy ideas. So not the super high tech ones, but the simple, relatable, interesting, profitable ideas that we have brainstormed and they're all available for download for free. Just click the link in the description below. Thank you to our friends at HubSpot for sponsoring this podcast and putting together this free resource for you guys. Back to the show. (upbeat music) There's a chef who asked him to create the ultimate burger. And he says, "All right, I'll give it to you. "It'll be a 30% dry age New York strip steak burger." But that black label burger, it's gonna cost $28. It sounds insane, a $28 hamburger. But they said, "Let's do this. "We want to have the best burger." And that as a marketing thing played well. Everybody thinks he's crazy, but they sell like 15,000 of the black label burgers. And versus they had a cheaper burger. It outsold the cheaper burger by 2X. - Which restaurant was this? - This was a Miniatta Tavron, Miniatta Tavron, something like that. - But I feel like I remember headlines. This is always an easy headline, which is like, wait, it's a $40 bagel. What the hell? - Yeah. - That's like, well, let's see, like-- - We should see. - Is it worth a hype? - Yeah. - You gotta know what makes this, this happened with strawberries. You know, these like Japanese strawberries, like a $50 basket of strawberries and you're like, "Oh, I must do that." - We should tie it up that company sometime. It's killing, there's a company behind it that's doing really well. - Yeah, by the way, I think it's great. I think there needs to be more premium. Like somebody who just says, "I'm gonna make the best thing for people who aren't cost conscious." And I think there's always a market for that. So these guys did it. People would go to that restaurant, they would order it and share it as an appetizer, the burger. They'd like chop it into six and feel like, "This is amazing, we had to try it." So today, fast-forward today, the company does $270 million a year. They make like, what if they're like, they feed like 100,000 people a day or something with their food. They bought their own facility and they're like, they have these huge, like the world's largest tri-aging room and their facility can hold $10 million of meat every night. It's like sitting in there like a Swiss bank account. They basically are just been scaling up, scaling up. To the point where New York, I think designated them as, no, actually not even New York, a presidential mandate that they are an essential service, that they cannot close down. (laughs) And so there is essential food infrastructure at this point. And it's this lesson of how you can take something that's just a commodity product and totally differentiate and build a multi-hundred million dollar business that by the way, in the world of AI, seems like the place to be. I'd rather own this meat business than tech businesses today. And so I just thought you'd get a kick out of that. That's a great story. I'm looking at the guy. He seems like a guy who talks like this, like, you know, with his hands. This looks awesome. - I don't know what that means. I don't think I've been to New York enough to a net charter. What is this? - What is that? - Hey, hey, what are you doing? This is my meat. You know what I don't know. - This is awesome. We should like do like an in-person thing with this guy and like go and like look at his meat packing setup. 'Cause this is really cool. - Can we see and feel the meat? (laughing) - This is really awesome. - I mean, this is, I think it's near where you're at. - This is in your hood. - I can't, I'm stunned. You don't know this name. - I'm not like a food guy, you know? Like, I like McDonald's. You know, I'll be fine going anywhere. It's all great to me. I always like have this joke that like, when it comes to Mexican food, I'm like, it's all the same to me. It's either a yes or no. And it's mostly like avocado and like beef. Like, it's all the same. I don't know, man. - Is he a yes or no? - And it's yes. - Yeah, I don't have like, I don't have like a wonderful palate. But this is pretty cool. I also think that like, there's a romantic feeling about these things that obviously is not fully true. Like, it was not fun to do that when it was not going well. And now that things are going great, it's probably only fun part of the time. But I do think that there's something like soulful about things like this. Like, you and I actually talked about this. Justin Mayr's was, I think he's an investor or helping get going or advising. A Justin Mayr's is like one of our health conscious friends who started a kettle and fire. And he loves like these healthy things. And he talked about like Ace. He's like, I wanna do a better butcher. And he has one going in Austin. That sounds like it's really great. - He came on the pod and talked about it. I didn't know he launched one. - Yeah, the first location is down the street from my old house. And there's a butcher there. I don't know how it's going, but I just know that there's a butcher there. But my point is, is that it's kind of cool. And there's actually been a lot of these large meat things. So for example, butcher box, the guy who started butcher box, he's pretty active on Twitter. It's a boot shop company that I believe is mid nine figures. I think like North of 500 or right around their million year. And there's a bunch of really cool ones. There was a guy who joined Hampton that had, who had boot shopped a hundred million dollar plus farm to like farm to the consumer's door butcher. And I think they're really awesome. And then Omaha Stakes, you know the story about Omaha Stakes? - No. Similar story where it had been around for a very long time. But they really took off because VAM and Stamps.com were one of the early, early, early innovators of internet marketing. And so Omaha Stakes, I believe there's North of a billion dollars a year in revenue because they were one of the first people to advertise on Google. - And DBC Stakes. - Yeah. - Thanks, Bill. - Oh, you've never had one? - A stake in the mail? - No, Omaha Stakes. It's like one of those gifts that if you can't think of what to get your parents, you like give them an Omaha Stakes gift. - I don't think you Indian people do that. - Yeah, there's maybe a cultural divide here. (laughing) - Yeah, that's a great call. It's like the Harry and David like gift basket. I think I've like defaulted to that many times just because it's like, - That's what you gave me when I had my first kid. - Who doesn't like huge pairs? - Yeah. Or like edible arrangements. Yeah, I mean, it's just like, I don't know, it just works. And Omaha Stakes, they were one of the very first people to advertise on Google. And now if you listen to a lot of, like a lot of the early podcasts, do you remember early podcasts? It was like stamps.com, me, Andes, and then like Omaha Stakes. These were like the early advertisers. And at this point, the company, I think they have this massive marketing operation and it's incredibly sophisticated. It's very, very fascinating to watch these guys grow. - Maybe the best thing to do is just to follow Omaha Stakes and stamps into what, just go look at their revenue, their marketing mix, and then just go follow them because they just seem to find the new channel every single time. And literally just copying their playbook is better than hiring like a great CMO who's going to come up with their own playbook. It's sort of like, I remember when we were trying to do this sushi restaurant, we were looking at location to try to run like these analysis on population and foot traffic and you know, how many business, how many high income households are within two miles? And then it was like, oh wait, Chipotle has a 300 person real estate team. Why don't we just go next to wherever there's a Chipotle? Like they did all the work and turns out that's actually what, like that's how Burger King chooses locations. They just go, if McDonald's does the research, they just go piggyback off McDonald's and go near there. And you know, you could sort of save yourself some breath. - My other takeaway from hearing stories like this, there's so many people who are just building amazing, amazing, amazing companies. They're not particularly in the mainstream. They're not vocal about it. And it's just fundamentally a pretty solid product and pretty solid marketing fundamentals. So for example, I just hung out with a friend of mine who works at a element, element salts, you know, is that one? - Elementy, yeah, yeah. - Elementy. - I don't know how you say, I think you say element or I don't know if you say elementy, but that's on spell, LMNT. - I remember seeing this business get started, like it's only four or five years old and I remember seeing it get started and I'm like, this is silly. Like who on earth is going to buy these like little packets of salt? It's basically electrolytes and salt. - Well, they did a, like they let their customers like invest in them. And so a lot of the financials are public. You can like see the numbers. I think it's close to $200 million here in revenue. And they have a small team like 30, 40, 50 people. And it's just like good, fundamental. It's like I was reading the CEO puts these blog posts out on how he runs his company. And he talked about James. - Is he awesome? - Oh, great. He's like one of my favorite, I've only met him once. He came to our basketball camp. I was, I just love this guy. He's so lovable. He's like super thoughtful, super well-meaning, really smart, obviously, just like a killer, good basketball player also. He's just like a, he was so nice, so kind, so humble and yet had built like not only this killer business, but other killer businesses too in their portfolio. He is such a winner. I love that guy. - So I've only heard about it from my friend Esther. She was telling me what it was like working for him and she only said good things. And then I started researching him and there's always a cool blog post where he writes about how they do these things where they run the company by doing three weeks sprints, one week of planning. You know, most companies run off quarterly plans. He was like, no, we do three weeks where we go hard and then one week where we go a little bit easier and we get rest from. - But by the way, that one week is really specific. It's three weeks like you're working like a, like at an office or like you're online. And then the one week is everybody's in think, rest, reassess, plan mode, quietly by yourself, do whatever it takes for you to kind of step away. And he's basically shown that like that works really well for them, but like giving people time and space to think and plan. You can have a high performance team with that. It's not about just constant burnout of like pushing as hard as you can with no breaks whatsoever. - It sounds amazing. And he has a blog post where he talks about like this process that he does, but he has all these other blog posts where my takeaway was like, this guy is incredibly well intentioned, but they're not well intentioned, thoughtful, which I think you actually described him as. So that's funny that we came to the same conclusion. You hung out with him. I just read about him. - Amazing entrepreneur. And they don't see mainstream in the sense of like in our little like silly marketing, like loud about it online, internet world, but they're just kind of building a amazing company that solves a real need. Customers seem to absolutely love. They have like all these weird like avatars. I think they have like a nurses avatar. So there's like a nurses who actually use their product and then they have like a military one and then like a construction worker one or something like that. You know, they have like all these, and then of course like endurance athletes and all this amazing stuff. It sounds like an amazingly well run company run by a guy who's not particularly loud, but is incredibly successful and thoughtful about running his business. There's another guy named Jason Cohen who I like. He had a blog post somewhat that wasn't entirely addressing this, but the phrasing is perfect and it was a bit similar called be king or be rich. And he was like do you want to be rich? If you want to be rich, then there's like all these things that oftentimes the kings are unwilling to do. So the kings are oftentimes like the loud ones who raise all this money and do this for that. And then there's like the be rich, which is like a bootstrap and just quietly do it for a long time. And it's like at yourself, do you want to be king or you want to be rich because they require different things. I think Neval has a funny one like that. He goes, if you want to be rich and famous, try getting rich first and just see if that does the trick. That's so good. Hey, let's take a quick break. You know that feeling when strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content that someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow. Well, the breeze assistant from HubSpot can help. It works right inside HubSpot. You can draft a campaign copy, blog post emails, all in your brand voice, all using your actual customer data. So you don't create just content. You create content that converts. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. Here's on that idea. I saw this tweet today by this guy, Renee Selman. He was talking about Nick Sleep. Who Nick Sleep is? He's basically like a legendary value investor. He's kind of in the Warren Buffett, Trelly Munger, lineage of investors. And I'll butcher the long story, but there's a simple way to understand Nick Sleep is that he crushed it so hard for a period of time, made so much money for himself and his investors that just like, I think we're good. It's like shut down the fun. It was just like, it's re-won. And they had won by just holding like a very small number of obvious sounding positions. It's not like he found some niche thing and not like he was super ahead of the curve. He owned Costco. He owned Amazon. And he owned like one other thing. He owned four stocks and he just held them. Is it Berkshire Hathaway? Was that the other one that he owned? I think he had Berkshire, I don't remember what it was. He had four stocks. The core of his portfolio was super concentrated. It was like four winners and they'd held it for a long time and that's all you need to do. to do. The game wasn't more complicated than that. And so he put this in one of his, and he has great letters to go read. It's like, you'll be a smarter investor if you go read the, the next sleep letters. And so here's, here's one of his things. It says, empty vessels and a quieter approach. So I'm going to read this because upon reflection, it is curious that this quiet attitude extends in its own way to the company. So he's not by his own quiet attitude, but he's like, this actually extends to the companies we invested in that we've entrusted your dollars. Amazon and Costco do not advertise. No shouting here. Berkshire Hathaway and Games Workshop do not provide earnings guidance, which is popular to give to fund managers and stockbrokers. Amazon Costco, Air Asia and Carpet Right and Parsal Berkshire give back margin to the customer. And we would argue this is a pretty humble strategy too. In other words, around two thirds of the portfolio is invested in firms that in some major way shun the commonplace promotional activity and yet there are no less successful as a result. So like Amazon and Costco not advertising Tesla famously does not spend any money in marketing. Amazon is a huge advertiser. I think at this time, they weren't, I don't know if they were doing like the Google performance advertising, but I think he's talking about like kind of brand advertising and anything like that. And then he talks about, Bezos has this quote, which is advertising is the price you pay for having an unremarkable product or service. And he goes, if you look at the, he goes on the other end of the spectrum is the razzle of general motors. Now this was written a long time ago, but he says, which has the largest advertising budget of any company whose annual report we read this year. And it went not that title went to GM this last year, the year before and the year before their advertising spend was 5.3 billion in 2008 or $630 per car that they shipped. If you just took the advertising spend, it would have retired half of the company's debt. It seems easier to call Madison Avenue than build cars that sold themselves. In our opinion, GM is very much the empty vessel making the most noise in that regard. Our portfolio takes a different approach. So I just thought it was interesting that the idea of like people, but also companies that like almost as a negative signal, which companies advertise the most. Like I wonder if you actually like back test that idea, how many of them actually have, you know, either worse performance to their peers or their like least durability, which is why they have to constantly be advertising because they have a commodity product and they have the least durability in the market or they have the least the smallest moat, which forces them to continue to pay this tax. Look, just to be a little devil's avocado on this one, I feel like Berkshire Hathaway's biggest company is Geico and they're like the biggest advertiser. Yeah, or Coca-Cola also. So I don't know. I mean, I think that this guy is significantly smarter than me and significantly more successful than me that said. I'm not racist, but this is less like what that statement was. I don't know. I feel like all many of those companies are like huge advertisers, but I do think the sentiment is cool and one would say that like even though Tesla doesn't advertise, advertise Elon Musk bought a $38 billion social media platform and I would say that that has benefited Tesla greatly. No, come on. That's not, I don't think that's fair. I don't think he didn't buy it for that nor I think. If anything, Tesla car sales have slowed down since he bought Twitter not. I just think that like, I just think that like there are a lot of outliers, of course, and maybe you could say Tesla is the outlier, but Contrarians are often more often than not wrong. And if you look at some of the other best companies in the world like Apple, like they are, or many most all actually, they are notoriously wonderful advertising. Yeah, I don't think they don't advertise at all, but I think percentage wise matter. So for example, Elon has one mental model he caused the idiot index. And the idiot index basically is something he kind of figured out with Tesla and SpaceX as they bought parts from providers. So we need this turbine. We need this valve. Basically, if the valve costs $5,000, it's like, well, that's the market price for the valve. We can't find anyone who's selling it for less than that. And what he would ask is basically, what is the cost of the raw ingredients on the London metal stock exchange for the valve? And then what is the markup relative to the actual raw materials cost? And that's the idiot index. It's the price, it's the idiot tax you're paying because you don't know how to make the part yourself. And he found that the space industry had essentially the worst idiot index of all the industries that he had seen. Where the idiot index was like, you know, 100x plus on almost every single part. And while he realized that he could do SpaceX without having a NASA level of funding was because NASA was buying things at the idiot prices and SpaceX didn't have to and that he could bring the cost to, how did he know he could bring the cost down so much was because he knew he saw how high the idiot index was. That's the does the same thing. Another version of this was I was listening to Palmer Lucky from Andrewl talk yesterday. And he was talking about the other defense contractors. You know, if you think about what Andrewl did was pretty crazy. They went into like a space that no real modern tech company had gone into defense. He was talking about he goes, if you look at Lockheed Martin or, you know, these kind of other defense primes, the first thing is they all operate on the cost plus model. Cost plus model basically just says, cool. For me to win this contract, let's say it's a whatever this contract is $10 million or whatever. I'll bid $10 million because I'm saying that the the cost to do it is nine and I want to have a, or you know, let's call it $11 million. The cost to do is 10 and I'm going to have a 10% markup. So he goes, guess what happens? Does that company have any incentive to find a lower cost way to do things? No, because they make 10%. In fact, the incentive is to say that everything is more expensive because if it costs 20 million and I got 10% I would make 2 million instead of saying it's 10 million and making 10%. I make 1 million because it's a cost plus model. So I'm always just whatever the cost is I make a little bit on top so the higher the cost, the better. Same thing with going faster. If I say I could do this in half the time, which is half the people cost or the labor cost, I have no incentive to go faster. So what's the result? The military is buying from from providers whose entire incentive is to make everything cost way more and take way longer. And so he goes the first slide on the Andoel of Pitch Deck and our seed investment said, we are going to save the American taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars a year and we are going to make hundreds of billions of dollars. And so he's like, that was the entire premise from day one. And he goes, I think that's exactly right because he would go and bid. He goes, we're not a cost plus model. We will, we will basically say, hey, we can get you this, we're going to sell products to the American government. So we're going to sell you the best product at the lowest price. And we're going to try to get it to you the fastest. And that way we're like Amazon or Walmart, right? Or Costco. We're trying to give you the best product at lowest price and the fastest delivery. And our incentive is to do that. We get to we win contracts the more we do that. And he goes, then you see that play out in the business. He goes, just look, if you don't believe me, go look at Locky Martin. They'll invest 1% of revenue in R&D. We have invested 100% of revenues into R&D every single year of Android's existence. And people think Palmer, how long are investors going to let you do that? Well, I don't know. I've been able to do it for eight years or whatever it's been. And I think I'll at least be able to do it for another five. He goes, Amazon was able to do the same. Amazon was able to convince investors that they should be able to invest this. All of their profits and more back into Amazon for like 20 years. And that's what gave them this incredible, durable advantage and allowed them to take so much market share. That's what we're doing. So in some ways, I think it's pretty cool to almost look at like a simple heuristic, like the idiot index or like what percentage of your revenue do you put in R&D? And it's like, I can't hear your words because the action speaks too loudly is one way of looking at businesses. I think that we've talked about like Eddie Murphy. And he was like, I'm a great comedian because I'm extremely sensitive. If the valley takes my car and there's like the tiniest scratch, I'll notice it. And I'm good enough that I can make a joke about it. And that's what makes comedians great is they're sensitive that they notice small moments. And that's what's funny. And when I hear this story about Palmer, I don't really care about his business or the industry. But what I care about is his personality and his attributes. And it seems like there's this event diagram where you have to have all three. It's like the sensitivity to say that this is ridiculous. And to like question, why is this the way it is? Same thing with what you're talking about with Elon, of the idiot tax. Like that, you have to be very sensitive to like notice these things. And then the other thing is you have to be audacious enough to actually think that you can fix that problem. And then there's this final circle, which is like logic. You like these guys are really interesting at logic in their way into these problems where he'll say like, so this problem exists. And why shouldn't it be this other way? And there's this weird like through line of like how you can do something that seems logical when he maps it out on paper. But virtually 100% of all people are like, there is not a chance that doesn't make sense. And it's like, well, no, it does. Like here's the math like and it's very simple math that you would use to explain this stuff. But you need to add in the audacity. And then you need to add in the sensitivity to even recognize it in the first place. I admire those people greatly. So the three audaciousness, logic or first principles thinking was the third one sensitivity sensitivity. Well, he had said something that's kind of a combination of all three in this interview. So he said two things I didn't know. One was that he was homeschooled. I don't know if you knew that. I didn't know that that he was homeschooled. I think in general, I think homeschooling one of the possible advantages I could suspect of homeschooling is that? that because you are out of the crowd, you are less likely to have heard like thinking. And so I think that's interesting already. And maybe there's some selection bias of the type of parents who would choose to homeschool might also raise you differently, to think differently in many other ways too. That's the first thing. Second is he said his first job was using virtual reality like light things for veterans. So he's kind of the combination of the two companies who built Oculus and Andrews. So he's like, I worked at this place where veterans were coming back with PTSD from war and we were using a VR-like thing to help mitigate their symptoms in some way. I thought that was interesting. I didn't know that either. The third thing he said was logic experiment. He goes after I sold Oculus, I think at 19, he started or sold Oculus at 21, he basically sold it for $2 or $3 billion to Facebook. And when he left Facebook, he basically left a place where he noticed that the smartest people in the world were all focused on increasing advertising revenue or basically getting you addicted to mindless entertainment. And he saw that Silicon Valley culturally had decided that war defense weapons was like taboo, bad, you're a bad guy, you're evil for doing it. And that was not the history of Silicon Valley that he had read about. That was not the approach that they had. And he talked about how certain companies, like Bill Packard from Hewlett Packard, there was some story like how either he did a tour of duty with the government or like somebody said, this general and Bill Packard, they're basically the same guy. One guy's just doing business, but they have the same values, they have the same beliefs. And he's like, I just don't think that that was true over time in the tech role. And he said, is it a bad thing for America if all our smartest technologists and engineers go work on entertainment and advertising and refuse to work on defense? Like that seems like a bad thing. How would we change that? Like, because he goes, other countries aren't gonna do that. Like other countries are not gonna have their most brilliant minds not working on these things. And if they have their most brilliant minds working on weapons systems and we do not, like doesn't really matter how much money or clout you have, like that's not gonna end well. At some point, the slope of their line will cross over the lead that we have. And it's that kind of like simplistic big picture zoom out sensitivity thing you're talking about, then multiply, plus the logic, then multiply it by the audaciousness to go do something about it. All right, that's kind of what you're talking about. It's like this formidable triangle that gets created. And it's sort of like this thing where sometimes hard things are easier than easy things, because when you have this grand admission, it makes it where you can work harder and you can inspire people and you could recruit better, better the best talent for less pay when you can't afford it at the time. There's this book that I just started reading last night about the Manhattan Project, the creation of the atomic bomb. And they're like, I'm creating violence, that's not good, but Hitler's doing it and we need it before him. And it created this sense of like excitement in a weird way. I don't know what better words to describe it, where they are-- - Purpose and excitement. - Purpose, duty. - A sense of duty, where they were able to wrangle up all the best scientists and get them to quit what they were doing, which was their dream jobs of teaching math at Berkeley. And like they were happy. They got them to have moved to New Mexico for a year or two. And they worked like crazy and they invented things. Like in this book, they explain how splitting an atom works and it's just impossible for me to understand. But it's like that is just some crazy stuff to invent in a very short amount of time, but there was this sense of duty and I kept thinking these big meaty problems in a weird way seem easier or more exciting to go after than some of the small, small problems that might be significantly more lucrative. But in reality, the first one can be way more lucrative. And so it's kind of like the best of all worlds, but there's like this seems hard, this seems impossible. I don't want to do that. You know what I mean? - Have you seen the imitation game, the movie, the imitation game? - Is that with the touring? Is that touring? - Yeah. - It kind of has the same thing, right? It's like during the World War, Germany's kind of blitzkrieging and bombing and you know, the UK and they basically hatched this secret project to try to crack the German Enigma machine to be able to crack their correspondence. And Alan Turing and a small group of like brilliant people figured out how to decode the messages, how to decrypt, I should say, the messages so that they could understand. But then they couldn't, so it was like, it was huge, this kind of impossible thing. How do we break the Enigma machine, this encryption that we can't break right now? - Basically, for the listeners, a machine that the Germans were using to relay messages to one another and the British wanted to crack the code so they could figure out where the Germans are going to go. - Where are their ships? Where are they going to attack? Where are they? How are they doing this? What's the decoy? What's real? Like, where is their leadership right now? All those things. And so they couldn't do it. So they basically, it's like, you get the brightest mind, you take them out of universities and businesses and you say, look, it's your duty. Like every day that we don't crack this, you know, your friends and family are a risk of dying basically. Okay, we could lose this war to, you know, this bad guy. And so they worked, you know, for a couple of years to crack this thing, they cracked it. And that was extremely helpful at like swinging the tide towards defeating Germany. And I mean, it's just like, the movie's great, right? It's like entertaining in that way because it's like a very romantic idea of like the brilliant minds secretly conspiring. And then they couldn't tell anyone, either. They couldn't even tell anyone that it existed. Once they cracked it, they couldn't show how much they knew. So they had to, like, this is part of the one of like the moral dilemmas. I don't know how real this was, but in the movie, they're basically like, they crack the thing, they know when an attack is happening. But it's like, if we, if we prevent that attack on that civilian boat, don't know how the hell did we know that was coming? Don't know this, they'll just change the encryption. So we're gonna have to be really selective about where we use our knowledge of this. And I just, oh, that's like another layer of game theory on top of this whole thing. When I was 24, I took a cross-country motorcycle trip for six weeks. I traveled the country on a motorcycle. And I had this distinct feeling when I got back where many of the things that I thought were normal or like the routines that I was in before that trip were broken because I did a lot of camping and I met a lot of different people from all walks of life. And I've noticed that whenever I travel, I don't know if you've noticed this, but whenever I travel particularly to another country, I come back with a more perspective, not in the like woo-woo way, but like I seek frame-breaking moments and it's significantly easier to find those moments when you're out of the country and in place that's, this is why I wanna go to Japan so badly. I wanna see like all the weird stuff. - I wanna see about Japan. - I wanna see all the weird stuff they do 'cause I wanna be inspired. We had Kevin Ryan on the podcast. He's one of my favorite entrepreneurs and he said that either him or one of his co-founders was originally inspired to start guilt, which was like an auction, luxury auction. - Yeah, it's fine. - But they had this weird mechanism where they made people wait and lie. I forget exactly how it worked, but he was like, I went to France and I saw this and I'm like, we should just do that in America. And that's a very simplistic way to a really simple example, but I've noticed that whenever I travel, I come back with that feeling of where I ask myself, well, why am I living this way? And to bring it back to Palmer, I think that is what makes people the great, really special is they're able to be sensitive enough to find these small insights and they're open to having their opinions changed. - Right, I'm totally with you on that. I think Coinbase kinda started for this reason, by the way, I think Brian Armstrong went down to Argentina and was just working out of Argentina. And if you've ever been to Argentina, it's a local currency has been hyperinflated away. If you have dollars, it's not only just the normal increase purchasing power of the dollar, then there's something called the blue dollar, which is basically like, there's a blue dollar rate. So it's like two X, what the actual dollar rate is, 'cause they're that desperate to have dollars. So your dollar just goes so far there. And if you see something like that, it's a frame breaker because if you're here, you just take it for granted. Money is essentially like, it's like a fish and water. You don't even see it. You just assume a dollar's a dollar. And we now have they have two, three percent inflation. People get it, but it's over such a long time period. If you go to a place that's inflating 20% a year, you realize very quickly like, oh wow, these people need a different solution. And then you connect the dots when you hear about something like Bitcoin, which is mathematically impossible to inflate as a currency system as a saving system. You could see why that might be really valuable to people because of your Argentina experience. And so there's so many examples of this, you know, all around the world. I'm with you. In fact, I think that's the one thing I miss the most since having kids is that my travel has dramatically slowed down and has safeened up. I'm like convincing myself that we have to go travel. I have to go travel. We gotta get it. It's like one of these things that like, it's sometimes a pain they have to do. And then I look at my two year old, I'm like, I guess we'll just go to the resort. It's gonna be pretty tough to. Am I really gonna, am I really gonna adventure out there right now? Let's see. Yeah. Maybe a few more years. It was a fun life for a few years. (laughs) by yourself. And that is when mediocrity can creep in. My company, Hampton, we solved this problem by giving a room of vetted peers, of other entrepreneurs who are gonna hold you accountable, call you out on your nonsense and help show you the way. Because the fact is, is that there's only a tiny number of people in your town who know what you're going through and who have been there. And they're hard to find. And if you can find them, it's hard to have this explicit time, this explicit place where you sit down where the rules are clear that we are here to help each other and to be one another's board of directors. The biggest risk is not failing. You have a company in its working. You're gonna be fine. But the biggest risk is waking up 10 years from now and saying, shit, I barely grew and business and in life. And for people like you who are ambitious, wasted potential and regret is what we want to help you to avoid. We have made so many of these groups and we have a thousand plus members. And I know this stuff actually works, whether you work with Hampton or you get your own group on your own. But having a group like this, a group of people who you meet with in real life once a month, it can change your life. It changed mine and I know it will change yours. So check it out, joinhampton.com. (upbeat music) - I did something the other day that I want to tell you about. Got a babysitter, went out my wife on like a Thursday. It was a big deal and we went to this thing called the Webby Awards. Have you ever heard of the Webby Awards? - Well, as a one time Webby Award winner, yeah. You know we know about the Webby Award, but I don't know the origin story though. It's basically the Oscars for internet nerds, minus all of the prestige. - I have a love hate relationship with the Webby Awards because it was actually quite fun, but it's a circle jerk. But the business behind it is kind of cool and I think there's a lot of opportunity here and I think you would dig this. So basically it started in 1994 as a website called the Cool Site of the Day. The internet had just started. I don't know how many users there were on the internet, but potentially only hundreds of thousands. And there was a website dedicated to showing off the cool websites every single day. And it was almost like dig or read it, but like one website. And this lady had this idea where she was like, we should turn the website of the day, the cool website of the day into an award show. And the first Webby Awards, I think it was in 1996. And so the early Webby's was actually quite cool. They called it the Oscars of the internet. And it was total nerd stuff. So check this out. I want you to see this video. So they played this montage video when I went to this award show. And it was so cool because it was like internet history. First shot, the founders of Google, Larry and Sergey wearing giant foil capes. And it looks like they're rollerblading. I can't see their feet, but they're gliding or on the stage. They said they said a hundred million times a day and then searches a day. And then he goes, do you get a penny every time they search? And he goes, I wish. Turns out that wish came, wishes do come true. He got a lot more than a penny. Hollywood has the Oscars. TV has the Emmys. The internet has the webbies. Okay, so you're back in on the webbies because they gave you free food. Go on. - Three to six cents per search. So good job guys. - They make three to six cents per search. (laughing) - That's insane. - That sounds too high. That sounds crazy. - Okay, so webby awards, it was really cool early on because it was internet culture. This was when Google was a company that was still almost like a nerdy project. It was awesome because there was Kim Kardashian before she was super famous and she was famous for like, she said, I think it was like nude photo of the year. They had goofy categories. Do you remember when Will Ferrell did E-Bombs World where he did the Angry Landlord? It was awesome. It was nerdy stuff but it carried over into pop culture. When the food fighters were really famous, they were there. David Bowie was there. It was awesome. And it was so cool. And when I went there the other day, it was also awesome because the famous thing is every single speech can only be five words. Some of the people who won the awards were like, a lot of like Instagram stuff that you see online, like nerdy niche shows, but it's a total pay for play scam. So in order to get into the webbies, they have something like 1300, or sorry, 13,000 entries per year. And it costs like six or $700 in order just to enter. And they have so many categories that they have a blog post on it called how to pick the right category, or like how to find your category. And at this point, the reason I didn't want to like it, even though it was quite fun, is because-- - So when you went, was it like pageantry, like were you blown away by the production or was it kind of like bootleg? Like what was this? - No, I mean, it was awesome. - I mean, it was awesome. - These hosts of yours, but-- - No, it was great. There was a red carpet. And everyone was taking photos and like everyone dressed nice. My wife and I, you know, we dressed like as if-- - Wait, were you famous there? - I was quite popular there, yes. - What? - Yeah, it was-- - There was like actual famous people, like for example, the big award went to, is it Drusky? You know, Drusky or is it Trusky? - Trusky I think, yeah. - And Jack Harlow gave him the award. So there was some like proper famous people there, but you know, I was a favorite because we're a business podcast and so a lot of these influencers who are way more famous, they actually listen to us sometimes 'cause they want to get like business content. But the company's crazy because it's been around for 30 years. It's now owned by private equity, which is hilarious because the bulk of the people there, it was a very Brooklyn hipster-y like woke people. - Right. - And if I started like researching where the webbies is based, it's based out of Kentucky. So it was bought by a PE firm and now the headquarters are in Kentucky. So it's not even like this like necessarily like cool internet-y Brooklyn night business, but that's what everyone there, that's what they were. I think that someone can start a cool back to Indy award show that is properly the Oscars of the Nerd internet. Like I don't think that Twitter is mainstream enough but that might work where you could have like nerdy Twitter stuff. But I went to this other one coincidentally called the Shrip Mall Trent, you know, Shrip Mall Trent is. - Yeah. - He has a gala, which is hilarious. So it was a black tie gala and it's just all of his Twitter real estate friends. So it's just like real estate Twitter has an event. And it was awesome because it was all these guys who I'm friends with on the internet but I never actually see. They were all there, it was amazing. But I do think that a proper Indy Oscars of the internet type of stuff like the nerdy stuff start extra small would be epic, would be so cool. - This model, this business model of basically create the award, create the event, create the list. I call it the Kingmaker move. So you basically can go into any industry, any social circle and simply by making the winners list, by making the awards, by making the list, you can insert yourself at the center of any network or any market. Actually Jason Callock-Hannes did this back in the day in New York and I think he's talked about how, I remember hearing this like 15 years ago, he was explaining this, he goes, I was in New York and I was, you know, nobody was reading our publication and nobody knew me, but I knew I wanted to be in the tech scene in New York. And so what he created was the Silicon Alley 100, which was gonna be the 100 power players of tech in New York. - Which at the time was a small, a small group. - Which is a smaller market back in the '90s, I think, or maybe early 2000s. Specifically what he did was let's say everybody knew that Ariana Huffington and the Huffington Post was like, you know, she was like this power player and he wouldn't put her one, he put her at four. And so immediately she's like, what? Who are the three people that beat me? 'Cause if she got named one, it's kind of like, oh, whatever. But if she got named four, she's like, I gotta know who were the three that were above me? It had created controversy and he's like, I intentionally would place people at certain parts of the list to maximize the controversy and the word of mouth with which this thing would spread. And he goes and it worked. They would call me immediately and they would wanna know who we are, what we're doing and all this traffic came to the site. Because when you win, you share, 'cause it's good for you to win. And when you lose, it kind of pisses you off and you wanna figure out who are these people and why don't I have status in their mind and you kind of like, you become on their radar where you weren't before. And I thought, wow, that's pretty smart. And I've since then seen this done many, many times over in different ways and different spaces. And I think actually you could do this really in any industry. I'll give you one other example. My brother-in-law, he's based in Vegas and he does real estate. He's come on the podcast once before. I told him, he doesn't like ever go out pitching like investors or whatever, but like because his returns are really high, he's probably had like, I don't know, a couple hundred million of investor capital put into his deals now. But he never picks up the phone. He never does any networking events. And I was like, dude, why don't you just create the Vegas 100? And he goes, what is that? And I go, basically decide to throw a one black tie gala, kind of like what you're saying, the real estate trend guy did. And just honor, give awards out to the 100 most influential business people in Las Vegas. And you invite them, you let them know they won this award and that they are one of the most influential people in Las Vegas as deemed by you, random person. And you rent out this car dealership 'cause you already have really fancy cars there and that's just how he already adds to the luxury aesthetic and Vegas being really flashy. I was like, just rent out your buddies, car dealership, host it there, cars on the floor. And then at the dinner, you're gonna network with everybody 'cause you're the host. Everybody has to meet the host and those will become investors for you. You'll never have to go on a road show 'cause you can get everybody to come to you and if you create a honey pot like this. - I think it's awesome. And I do have to add an asterisk. So I did go to the Trends black tie gala. It was amazing and I saw a bunch of friends. But I have a rule that I don't go above 50 floors in a building and I got to the lobby of the event. and you had to get into this elevator to go to the hundredth floor on the top of the Hudson Yards. And I had my black tie shit on that I rented and I found out it was on the hundredth floor and I said, "Not for me, guys, have a good night." And I always stayed for an hour and a half. - Are you serious? - Yeah. (laughing) - That's what, dude, I'm not going to the hundredth floor you get to be. - What are these changing at floor 49? - It's just not for me. - You're getting to make that jump, like what the fuck is happening? - Going to a wedding set or more than an hour away and going above floor 50. - That's not for me. - Not for me. I just have a rule all the way over here. - I was all the way there, not for me. - You're a man of principle. - I actually appreciate that you live by such a code. I don't know if there's really any rule that I live by as much as you do. - Yeah, I got there and I, I was like, "You know, so I went to the bar and got like a glass of water to calm down." I was like, "Can I?" And I went to the tenant of the elevator. I was like, "How long's the elevator up?" And he's like, "About a minute." And I was like, "Mmm." - I don't think so, guys. Have a good night. I hope the gal is great. It was nice seeing you in the lobby. - You just went to a bodega and a black tie? - Yeah, just went home. And my wife was like, "What are you doing home already?" I was like, "It was on the hundredth floor." She was like, "Ah, get it." (laughing) - Have you heard of, dude? Some of these can be big businesses, by the way. There's institutional investor, which is like a magazine and they rent the best investors. And it's like a $200 million business. - Is that the minus list or minus a separate? - Separate. Institutional investor. It's like a super niche publication for institutional investors, people who raise money from institutions. And we talked about JD Power. You know JD Power. - And their associates? - That's a fun one. - This is why it's funny. - Who is JD Power and who are these associates? - I think what was his real name? James David Power. That was his real name. And the associates was his wife and kids. He started the business in 1969. And he went to Wharton. He was a surely smart guy. And then I think he worked at Ford in advertising. And he had this like brilliant insight, which is like, no one actually speaks on behalf of the customers. I don't think Ford, I don't think they're asking the customers if they're truly happy with their purchase. And so he gets this idea to go and survey a bunch of customers to figure out what they liked and didn't like about Ford and a variety of other cars that they purchased. And he went and sold the research to the car companies, which at the time in 1969, there weren't that many car companies. And eventually he gets the idea is like, let's create an award. And so he creates an award called the JD Power Award. And this is like 10 years later. And he starts giving out these awards. And the people who he sells research to was like, I'm angry, why am I not higher up on the list? And he was like, well, for an extra fee, I can teach you how to improve X, Y and Z to so you can get higher on the list. And that was the JD Power Award. And then like 20 years into it, he creates the trophy. Everyone knows like the trophy. It's like this weird. - No, I haven't seen it. Is it like a Stanley Cup? Oh, it's like this little arch. - Yeah, maybe who knows this? Nobody knows this. You see the, when they show the commercial, they show like ranked best in safety by JD Power. And they like show that little emblem. And that's when things really took off. And he ends up selling the company to McGraw Hill for like $500 million. And then they sell it a few years later for a billion dollars. And now it makes, I think over a billion dollars. And it ranks and does these awards. And what they do is they have all these different categories. So they can continually give awards to a variety of car companies. And people pay for their research. And I was thinking this can work across a variety of categories where there's something where you need to do a lot of research in order to buy what's necessary and where you can license the award to the company and they can use it to attract more revenue. For example, a really niche idea would be like old people homes. Senior living. It's like a $10 or $20,000 a month decision. And it's like a huge decision. And you want to research the best one. I do think that you could have these like award, this award business, this research business for a variety of categories. And it's quite interesting to me. If anybody wants to do these like you create the award, you create the list and then you piggyback an event off of it, hit me up because I have two specific ideas I want to actually bring to life that are like this. I'll give one of them out and I'll save the other one. The one that I'll give out, Sam, have you noticed that probably more than ever, there are teenagers. Yeah, people who are 12 to 20 years old that are just doing amazing things, doing stuff that like, you know, we're just picking boogers when we were teens compared to them. And now we're picking boogers, compared to what they're doing out there. The average team nowadays does seem way further ahead of where you and I were. Well, maybe not even the average. Maybe it's just the outliers because the outliers have the internet to show that they're outliers. I think the outliers kind of always existed. But there's two things. Do you think there's more? There's more it seems. Seems like there's more. I think because they're visible, you know, back before the internet, how would you even know? And then secondly, I think they got inspired, like they got access to better information. So they're growing up mentored essentially by Elon Musk and the fall and Mark Rangeries, they have access to the best knowledge, the best founders, they see what they call some brothers. And so there's a almost like Roger Bandister, a four minute mile type of thing going on where the really smart people see what other really awesome people do and it breaks their frame of what they thought was possible for themselves and then they do more. But here's a weird thing. Like, Sam, do you think those people, the people I'm talking about, the ones who create like, they invent things, they create world changing companies, they're hackers, they're, you know, they're just really, really brilliant in ways that are important in the business and tech world, let's say. What do you think that person looks like when they are a teenager? Do you think they're on the on and roll, taking six AP classes with high SAT scores and class president? Or do you think that they look a little bit different? Well, the second one, obviously, yeah. And so because they look different, where do they show up? Right? So because, you know, how do you think might be signals of somebody who is brilliant? They have this kind of like Sean and Sam would want to invest in them. We'd be tripping over ourselves to invest in them because we just know that this person's a winner. What do you think we would be the signals that we would care about? We would see them on the internet. Or if like, they have like a weird hobby, like they're the best video gamer or something like that. You would like, catch little bits like that. They're great at something that's competitive and nerdy, but not necessarily business. That's a good signal. They might be like running a like a some weird like sneaker flipping franchise or Empire like a power watching. They grant a photo skins or some shit like that. And they're making a lot of money doing something that we're just like, "But you, you own Instagram handles?" Or like you sell Minecraft like props. Yeah, whatever that is. A third would be really hardcore in math and science. So math, Olympiad, science, you know, doing, you know, actually like writing papers that are published in nature, like doing some weird shit like that that like the average teen shouldn't have specialized in that way. Yeah, like being passionate in world class at things that don't matter, that actually in itself it does matter. Being passionate and obsessed with things that are specifically low status when you're a teenager. Like you get, you get bullied. You get a wedgie for doing this, you know, you don't get status points for doing this in school. So I think that it would be really interesting to find a hundred kind of of these like hacker kid outcast misfits. Go find the number one Yugi-O player in the world. Go find the kid who's like figured out how to hack Google Maps or like he hacked his Tesla. And he's like, "What?" And he's like, "Yeah, I kind of got a slap on the wrist for it, but like it was fun." And you go find these kids, you bring them together and you let them know two things. One, I see you. Everybody likes to be seen, I've learned. And the second thing is, "Hey, the set of skills you have right now that is not really celebrated by parents and teachers or other kids in your thing, we celebrate it." And legit people that you admire, like go get, you know, the kind of, the founders of red, hidden Airbnb and all these things to come to this event and give these kids like time, attention, mentorship, like, you know, their flowers and be like, "Yeah, I used to do that when I was a kid too, so you could be like me." And let them know if they ever shift that laser beam from doing dumb stuff to doing like something that might create some value, you could be here and create a network of those people. So I really want to create this. That's cool. It just needs a name, a brand. I have the network to pull it off and the money to pull it off. I just need somebody who's got the energy to come like build this brand and then host the event with me. I think it'd be amazing to, you know, corral these folks are all around the world. The Ernst and Youngs of the world, like these huge mega corporations that are kind of like dorky, they would be just chomping at the bit to sponsor things like this. And we would reject them to raise our profile as being cool. Just imagine there's some kid in the Philippines who's like, you know, playing around with like whatever, lasers. And he's figured out how to laser etch something. You're like, "What, I don't know what that means." And then there's another kid in the Ukraine who's doing something. And then there's this whiz in Canada who's just like the number one starcraft player. He kills all the Koreans starcraft servers. He's just dominating. Who are these kids? We got to know who they are. If you identify them in that golden window, that like 11 to 19 year old window, you can actually be such a meaningful like trajectory razor for them. You can actually shift the course of their life just by giving them a network of other weirdos like them at that level, I think would be amazing. That's pretty cool. I do remember how I started that website, SAMSLESS. It was like a ranking for account. I gave the website, I gave it to this woman named Kimmy. So she's the majority owner. And it'll do like maybe 500,000 in revenue this year. It's my what it was for people who don't know. So, about three years ago, I needed an accountant. And I tweeted out who has a good accountant. And I got probably 300 replies. This would be a lot to go through. I still don't know who's good. I was like, "This would be interesting. What if I called all 300 of them?" And I aggregated the results. So for example, what services they specialize in, how much they charge, and what if I could even get reviews on them? And so I ended up calling like 30 of them. And I was like, this is interesting. I know how much each person charges, and if they're right for me or not, but I don't wanna go through the rest of them. This is too much work. So I tweeted out, who wants this website? I don't want this, but this seems like it could be cool. And so this woman, Kimi replied, and she took it over and she not only went through, I think all two or 300 of them, but she convinced them to send the website to their clients, and they would give reviews. And the way that the business model works, I think it needs a little bit of tinkering because accountants or CPAs, they're not exactly the best sales people. And so for example, she's had problems where like, she's like, hey, these five people just inquired to use your service and they haven't heard back from you. And they're like, well, I emailed them one time and they didn't reply. And she's like, dude, you gotta follow up many times. Like things get lost and things like that. And then all these financial planners, whatever. They're more like these alpha sales bros because unlike an accountant, you can have tons and tons and tons of clients because you don't really service them like to the same amount of quantity, or the same amount of work and you get fees. So the business models far better. And they're like clamoring to like use this website. And I'm telling her after this podcast, I'm like, you should host an award show for accountants and also you should offer the service to financial planners. But she's done a good job. She has a bunch of followers on TikTok now where she interviews like these accountants who are nerds but they kind of do it in an interesting way. And so she's like actually gotten this following of like nerdy accountants and people who won in the accountants in accountants. So it's kind of cool. But I think she can do an award show too. - Yeah, that's an interesting one. Well, I don't know, an award show, but like some sort of like recognition. Doesn't EY do like entrepreneur of the year, like some insane type of-- - But there's hundreds of them. - But it's like, there's thousands of them. (laughs) It's literally like-- - And whenever I think about this, I'm like, what do you want? - There's a lot of you doing, like, here's the event for the non winners, 'cause there's too many winners. So we do the event for the people who did win. 'Cause they do it like every city has multiple per every industry and every size of business. So it's like, congratulations. You are the Houston, Texas, best oil and gas, mid-sized company. (laughs) You know, a award. - Well, that's why I met at the webbies. They gave like the awards to all these people. I've never even heard of them. Like when the podcast of the year just go to like Joe Rogan or Theo Vaughan or like just call her daddy, like, but that didn't fit the narrative. I love this type of shit. I love talking about this stuff. This like, ascetic weird stuff. So this is cool. That was good episode. - But how have we had like a thousand hours of conversation with each other? And it's still just as good as the first, my friend. That's unbelievable. - When we were on episode 20 or 30 or 50 or something, Andrew Wilkinson messaged me and I think he messaged us in a group chat and he was like, aren't you worried that you're gonna get nervous? Or aren't you nervous that you're gonna run out of stuff to talk about if we were like kind of, but I guess we'll approach that when we get there. And thankfully it hasn't happened yet. All right, is that it? That's the pod. ♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪ ♪ I know I could be what I want to ♪ ♪ I put my all in it like no days ♪ ♪ All for the road ♪ ♪ Let's travel never looking back ♪ - All right, let's take a quick break to talk about a podcast. 'Cause if you're listening to this, you like podcasts and what's better than one podcast, another podcast. And let me tell you, another podcast you should check out. It's called Success Story. If you like hearing about different success stories and hearing Q&A sessions with successful business leaders or hearing keynote presentations or just checking out conversations about sales and business and marketing tactics, this is a great podcast for you. So check it out wherever you get your podcasts.