We asked a $15B Investor how to survive the AI bubble

15 years ago we set an objective to become the number one performing private equity. Since we set that goal to four funds we invested after that. Have all done 5x or better? How do you do 5x in six years? Well you can get Navy SEALs to run plumbing companies. That makes perfect sense to me. It works pretty well. Oh yeah. In your world there's a bunch of like AI roll-up. We're going to buy a company, we're going to throw AI in it and it's going to be awesome. Is that a good strategy? These venture backed apps still have 2 million revenue and a 500 million dollar evaluation and they're going to go to zero. How do you see the world in the market? Where do you see opportunity? Where do you see destruction? And where do you see overhype? Okay I'll start with overhype. How about that? All right well listen we have Graham Weaver here today. You've seen this guy all over YouTube TikTok where everybody's seen. What I'm interested is I would have always loved to go to Stanford and go to Stanford Business School. There's probably a lot of people listening to this. They kind of wonder what would it be like and that would be cool to be able to go learn from the best at one of the best schools. Well we get to kind of do that today. We have somebody who not only is out in the field you've got a private equity fund that has almost like 20 billion assets under management but you also teach at Stanford and I think today it'll be fun if we get to hang out and pick your brain and be students like we're in your class. Love it. Looking forward to it. You know what's funny is like you I've watched your talks for a long time and they're amazing. How to live an asymmetric life was a really good one. How to live your full life I think that wasn't the exact title one but that was my takeaway from another talk and I was doing research on you and I'm like I didn't even realize this guy had a PE fund and I think that's great that your ideas are actually what you're known for more than your work. So are you besides the talks can you explain with your fun how successful are you beyond just the talks. About 15 years ago we set an objective to become the number one performing private equity fund in the world as measured by net M O I C you know the return on capital and our last since we set that goal the four funds we invested after that have all done five X or better or the fourth ones on track to do that. So it's been it's been great like it's all the content that I try to bring to my talks or to the students at Stanford you know I I like to think they're really based in stuff that really works. There's a lot of a lot of amazing people that are have a lot of really good motivational content I I like to try mine out in the real world a lot and see what actually what actually works and I've and I think this you know the stuff that I I try to talk about is is exactly what we what we do at Alpine but yeah we've had a really great run and I'm really proud of how we've done it to we've done it you know with people treating people really well we build our entire business around the people at Alpine and the people the entrepreneurs in our portfolio and you know try to be a force for good the three goals are be the top performing fund be a force for good and be a place where the best people want to come and works and spend their careers and I think hopefully we've done it that way. So you you just said we set a goal to be the number one performing private equity fund in the world. No big deal. So and you said five X and I see which is multiple invested capital so and that's over like 10 years or what's the time frame we're talking here. I mean from the day the first dollar comes into the last dollar goes out yeah maybe it might be it it's probably easier to talk about the average probably averages about six years of the average investments probably about six years. That's pretty remarkable so you're normally you know sort of rule of 72 you put your money in the SP 500 and seven years you should double your money so you should get two X if you're there and you're basically in roughly the same time frame trying to get a five X right so you you're really trying to outperform can you in plain English because Sam knows this I spent the last two days having a 40 private equity meetings and you know I'm half the time I'm just like what they're like yeah we're a small fun a billion and a half under management and I'm like that was the story all day I was like how much money do you guys have and what the hell do you guys actually do so can you give me the simple what the hell do you guys actually do are you guys buying like HVAC companies or you buying software companies. So I mean private equity is a very broad classification there's lots of different strategies so I'll take specifically what we do I know there's a lot of talk around AI buy and builds if you can dive into it a little bit but we do primarily buy and build so we'll we'll take a we'll find a really amazing CEO that a lot of times has worked with us in a smaller capacity where they were the CFO of a company we had or they came through our training program and then we'll back them we'll go find an industry that we think is really interesting we like the prosaic industries like the ones you mentioned plumbing HVAC we also do software too because there's a number of strategies where roll ups and software can be really attractive so we it's a small part of what we do though smaller than the services stuff and but a lot of these really prosaic industries are massive you know the plumbing and HVAC industry mentions like it's like a hundred and seventy billion dollar industry so it's so if you get it right and you actually figure it out you know you can you can grow you know almost forever because you just don't run out of run out of tam which is why we like the buy and bills because we'll get it right once and then we'll stamp it out a number of times the other thing that's really cool about buy and builds is it really is plays to our core confidence which is just talent you know so we're the buy and build strategy the way we do it really is a talent strategy you know we're in a lot of cases we're putting high attribute like military veterans in to go run these plumbing business and they're just incredible leaders and so our our secret super power is really training these in awesome leaders and giving them an opportunity to do something they might not have had the opportunity to do otherwise Sam is not hilarious Sam you could be like how do you how do you do five X in six years it's like well you go get Navy SEALs to run plumbing companies that makes perfect sense to be right that's actually that's actually simple simple fight expression yeah Navy SEALs run plumbing companies it works pretty well the deck is only one slide I like it the Navy the Navy SEAL is actually the product a very common background of our of our leaders in these businesses and how big a company is are you buying so the add-on acquisitions which is primarily what we do I mean the I think the average deal we did is like thirty million dollars so the company might have 15 to 20 million revenue something like that oh it's pretty small do you and you do borrow money to and do borrow money to buy it yeah we do so well once we get it going we can usually finance all the acquisitions with cash flow and and debt so we don't have to put in any more equity that's important obviously if you're if you're trying to have a high MOI see the not putting money in part is is a big part that the main part of your model that's I would say kind of differentiated is is you kind of I don't know if it's not a search fund exactly but you basically start with a an operator or a CEO in house which most private equity guys don't do right they're they're mostly like we buy you we hope the management team really stays on that's really important or we're going to later install and do a search for an executive to run the company but what you guys are doing is you start with the person you kind of run a search with them it seems like tell me what I get wrong is it not like what's different about it than a search fund they come in house basically is the difference now Sean you nailed it it's like a search fund where we try to improve on the search fund model like if you think about a search fund and for those who may not know you know search fund is your backing a young person to go by a business and then they're going to go run it but the thing where it kind of falls down is the first part which is someone has to go sourcing by a business they have to go build an entire private equity firm to buy one company so we do all that ourselves because we are obviously doing this repeated on a repeated basis but the general part about having a really high attribute person betting their career on a business is a great formula right probably a lot of what you talk about on this podcast I mean it's it's the greatest formula there is so we love the that part of the DNA of a search fund model we're hiring very similar kind of high attribute people maybe a little bit older than the search fund a little more experience bigger businesses but generally it is what you just said Sean it is it is kind of like a super powered search fund model all right so this episode is all about excellence a while back I shared my personal framework for building excellence in my own life and the team at HubSpot turned it into a 30 day operating system you can check out right now it breaks down the systems it took me 10 years to figure out and shows how I actually use them day to day these are systems that genuinely changed my life so if you want to build a good life scan the QR code or click the link in the description now let's get back to the show so the simplified way of thinking about this is you find a really high attribute person we'll call them the Navy seal for now just say to somebody who's clearly a go getter winner organized effective individual who's willing to work really hard for five six years to create like life changing wealth for themselves and built and own their own business without having to come up with a great idea from scratch you go with that you're already looking at whatever hundreds of deals you have thesis around stuff you go and you buy the best deal you could find there and then you do add-on so you go buy the plumbing company it's already a good business that person should operate it maybe to be a better business growing organically and then you're going to buy maybe more tuck-in plumbing businesses to grow the thing using the cash flow from the first business exactly and then the other thing is once you bought 10 plumbing companies you know what it looks like to run the best in the world because this one company might do really well on training and this other company does great on customer acquisition this other company has a purchasing advantage this other one has a training available with superpowers of you Exactly, you grab and usually that's true. Usually each company has a superpower. But after, let's just say 10 deals, you've got all the superpowers, you know, and now your next deal, your 11th deal has 10 superpowers. Often you can improve that business dramatically really fast just because you take that playbook and the reason you can make that playbook consistent is because you're putting your own people into run it. This took me 10 years to figure out, but we would back founders and then say, "Hey, we have all these great ideas "and the founders would just smile and write stuff down "and never do anything." And that's not the, we don't love founders, but you're not gonna buy a guy who's run a plumbing company for 35 years and then come in and tell him how to run his business that doesn't work. So Sam, should we do Graham a favor and make him likable? Because you're too hangable. You're happy, you're good looking, you're super successful. You're like, we just got this model that prints. This is amazing. And I'm gonna do your favor here because that's the end point, but I wasn't where you started. The start of your story is you're mowing lawns in Ohio, listening to self-help tapes in your earbuds while you mow lawns to try to figure out what the hell you're gonna do. And then I understand it. You tell the fun part of the story, but I understand it is you kind of in college, bootstrap this with credit cards and went through the financial crisis, a bunch of stuff like that. So can you bring it down a notch and go to the part that makes us root for you? - What's hard about this? - Yeah, well, first of all, thanks for the kind words. I appreciate them. But I grew up in a small town in Ohio, went to a public school and it was a blue collar town outside of Toledo called Perry'sburg. Nothing special about it. And I was probably just average in just about everything, athletics, school. This isn't false humility. I mean, this is actually, I didn't make the basketball team. I got cut from the wrestling team. I mean, I just wasn't really, and I was okay at grades, not nothing special. And just as you said, Sean, I was mowing lawns and the Sony Walkman came out and I started listening to tapes by guys like Brian Tracy and Tony Robbins and Earl Nightingale and guys like that. And so you're imagine you're like a 14 year old kid and you're literally and figuratively brainwashing myself with this content because I listen to so many hours of it and walking back and forth. And the two big concept, the first concept that they said was, you're either gonna be your own best friend or you're gonna be your own worst enemy. So you figure out you first, you know? Like you think that the world's happening. Like for example, you think you got cut from the basketball team and all this stuff happened externally, but really it's you, you know? And that was a very hard message to hear because I was like, "Wait, what do you mean?" I had all these excuses lined up. Like I wasn't tall enough and I hadn't started playing early enough and my parents didn't get me in wrestling early enough and all this stuff. It's like, nope, you don't get to have any of that stuff. You gotta, it's like, you gotta get rid of all that and just you gotta accept total accountability for your life and that was absolutely brutal. And I realized they were talking about me and I wasn't doing that and I was, I was exactly who they were talking about. So if the first thing is kind of get out of your own way, the second one was like figure out what you really want and I give Brian Tracy the most credit for this about like how to set goals and I think he maybe the best, you know, at least back then was the best in the world at setting goals and so I literally would write down my goals every single day, multiple times a day in high school and it was just incredible. The combination of those two things, it's like pretty undefeated formula, you know? Get out of your own way, don't allow yourself to make excuses and then write down what you want, be super clear and then obviously gotta go do this stuff, you write down. But that formula was like really powerful and there was just something in me I guess that wanted more than what I had and so I just kept plowing through and then the story is definitely not even close to linear. I mean, everything you can imagine goes wrong, you know? I mean, I wasn't great at wrestling, I cut a ton of weight in wrestling, I mean, I was 125 pounds at six feet tall, we do that math and then without pine, I mean, our first fund lost money, trained my savings account, then we started calling our way back, got smacked by the great recession, trained my savings account again, you know? So it's definitely not been a linear story at all, but I think that this story is just one of like being clear about what you want and then just this crazy amount of like persistence. - I love that. I wanted to switch gears and ask about AI. So what the hell, what are we supposed to do? So you know, like five years ago, if I was advising my cousin on what to do, I'd be like go study computer science, I mean, like the technology curves only go in this way, learn to code, you'll be set. Now they're graduating and they're probably like, you know, you know, I hate their uncle now, because Uncle Sean told him to go learn to code and maybe that's irrelevant, maybe it's super powerful, we can't tell what either way yet. And so there's all these kind of, there's all this uncertainty. I want to hear from you kind of like, how do you see the world in the market? Like where do you see opportunity? I want those three categories from you. Opportunity, destruction and overhype. - Okay, I'll start with overhype, how about that? You know, I graduated from business school in '99, which was like, it felt like this exact time right now, but it was the dot com era. That was the time when you had like petfood.com and web van and all this nonsense. I think the, I think there were 400 companies that went public and the only one that I'm aware of that survived was Amazon, maybe eBay, but it was like, it was a blood bath. And so people were right that the internet's gonna transform the world and look at us right now. We're on a podcast having you, you know, over wifi. - And by the way, I can order DoorDash just like web van, might have wanted to instacart, right? The ideas might have not have been terrible, but the way they were burning money and, you know, that wasn't good. - And you know, you think about today, I mean, your mobile phone and you think about like, imagine just your wifi doesn't work for a week. Good luck. You know, like that. So they transformed the world more than people could even imagine back then, but there was a lot of like false starts and hype that people didn't really know where to place it and they kind of misplaced it. I think that's kind of where we are in AI. And my example of, I'll just just a backup. I think there's kind of four places you could play in AI. You could be in the infrastructure layer, which is really, you know, all the chips and data centers and energy. And you know, that's a very exciting area. That's gonna have growth first, long as we can see. Then the next is the large language models. There's really not a lot of those. So, you know, I don't know that you can really play there unless you're a big business, even investing in those, like you're already paying a price that assumes success for those. So, I don't think that's really that interesting. Then there's the app layer, which is where kind of all most of the venture money's going. And then there's the use case layer, which is your customer, you know, like a HVAC company and you're gonna use AI. And I think, and that's, you know, that's why I think a lot of these venture firms are jumping into these AI rollups because they're realizing that the first three layers are kind of tough and they're gonna play in that fourth one. But where the hype is is the third one, which is the apps. You know, I'm gonna be an app that, I'm gonna help law firms settle their cases faster. I'm gonna make call center software that's gonna allow you to not use humans or I'm gonna, whatever, I mean, there's a million of those applications. I think that's where a lot of the hype is. We see all these companies as vendors to our businesses. So, they're pitching us all the time, these venture backed apps and they'll have two million of revenue and a $500 million valuation. And they're gonna go to zero. Like they're gonna be worth absolutely zero. But a lot of them aren't. A lot of them are getting like huge revenue fast. Are you saying that you think some of those guys are gonna also go to, like is it, is the trend gonna be so high they're gonna go to zero? - I think that you have to say like, ultimately what's the barrier and what's the mode that they're gonna be able to build? There will be apps that will be successful, just like there were, there were, there were successful, but they're gonna get attacked by above and below. You know, they're gonna get attacked below from the companies that can have now, they can build their own stuff. They're gonna get attacked also from the LLM's who are introducing interfaces and new products that are like literally just taking the business to some of these apps. So there's gonna be this constant pressure on them. I think if you can build proprietary data sets which is harder than it sounds, or you can build really deep interfaces with your customers which is also harder than it sounds. Those are, those are modes you can build. But really I think sometimes what you're really, you know, you might be six months ahead of where the LLM's are gonna ultimately go and that you can make a lot of revenue for a short period of time. Again, going back to the internet, there was a ton of businesses in the, you know, 90s where it was like, get your marriage license online and those business made a fortune and they grew really fast. Hundreds, and they were growing at 100% plus a year. They were, until Google just absorbed all those rents. You know, it was like, and that's a little bit of like the analogy of the LLM's I think absorbing a lot of the rents. So I'm not making a blanket statement that all apps are gonna fail. I just think that's, you asked where I think things are over hyped. I think that's where they're over hyped. (upbeat music) - Today's episode is brought to you by HubSpot. Did you know that most businesses only use 20% of their data? That's like reading a book, but then tearing out four fifths of the pages. Point is you miss a lot. And unless you're using HubSpot, the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business, the insights that are trapped in emails, call logs translated. all that unstructured data makes all the difference because when you know more, you grow more. And so if you want to read the whole book instead of just reading part of it, visit HubSpot.com. And what about in your world, there's a bunch of AI roll-up. So it's like, let's go buy these service businesses, smash in some AI, baby. Let's put some AI in the front door. Is there a back, let's put some AI back there. Let's lift the shove some AI under there, right? It's like, it's like me with the Thanksgiving plate. I'm just trying to put mac and cheese everywhere. It's like, we're going to buy a company, we're going to throw an AI in it. It's going to be awesome. I think the reason that people are approaching the strategy is because they're probably seeing a little bit of what I was describing about the app layer and saying, gosh, I'd rather be the person using the AI than someone developing it. So I think that's why they land in these AI roll-ups. I think you got to be careful. I mean, we've been doing roll-ups for 15 years. AI is a huge thing. It's important. It depends on the industry, of course. Some industries are AI is a much bigger factor than others. But the other basics of getting the talent right, getting the companies right, integrating, doing the transition management, having your workforce stay on, doing training, recruiting, those are really the core elements. The technology, I mean, here's probably a hot take. I think the technology in many, many industries is going to be commoditized. I'll give you an example. In Property Management, we have it in Property Management. I know there's been a bunch of AI-native roll-ups launched by venture firms in Property Management. What's their real advantage? Are they going to have technology that's better than anyone else? I would say the answer is no. So what's the mode then? Exactly. The mode in Property Management is all the stuff I was mentioning before, hiring well, building good cultures, retaining, recruiting. But the technology, at least in that particular segment, is going to come through the, I think, the software companies are going to, and so we're all going to have access. And this is my take. There can be other opinions on this, but I think ultimately, I think most people are going to have access to the same technology. So it'll be a tool, and it'll help everybody, but it's not going to be the thing. It's not going to be the real differentiator. So I still would go back to say, if you want to win in AI roll-ups, you've got to win in all that other stuff I was saying. Yeah, that makes sense. I think what some people are doing, which is not really the roll-up part of it, but you go by a Property Management company that does six million a year in EBITDA, and then you use AI to make the business more efficient, and now it's doing eight and a half million a year in EBITDA, and your price data, five X difference. You've created 10 million to 15 million of value just by running it more efficiently. And even though another Property Manager might be able to do the same exact thing, doesn't really matter. Plus, most Property Managers are going to be slower to adopt AI than you might be if you're really bullish on this. I think that's the thesis. What you just described is the thesis. We'll see how it plays out. I'm sure there will be some people that execute really well and have some version of what you said. It probably won't be as dramatic. And then it's just like where the rents go and do that. How much of that rents ultimately get passed down to the consumer. I don't know that you necessarily win on technology per se. So you must get this all the time. If you're teaching at Stanford, I'm sure somebody's raising their hand and saying, "Hey, I graduate next semester. What should I go do? Where should I go? I'm a smart, hungry person who wants to be successful. You see the landscape and you know what's going on. Where should I be going? What should I do? What's the opportunity? I would say, if I were graduating right now, knowing everything I know now, I would go do a services roll-up because I know how to do that. It works really well. I think AI is a tailwind. I do that in an industry where you can build real modes and stickiness with the customers, not all industries allow that. What does that mean? Like services, your timer, like pest control? What are we talking about here? Like take wealth management. For example, you know, if you go into that business, you're like, "Okay, I'm helping people buy stocks or whatever." But what if you were helping people buy stocks and you were doing their trust and you were doing their taxes and you were helping them with all their state planning and, and, and, and, and. That's your mode against AI. It's old-fashioned stuff. It's, it's your mode against AI is like the deep, deep relationships with your customers. So I would say go into something where you can really build those kind of customer modes. And then AI is nothing but a tailwind for you because your customer doesn't care how you're doing your back end, you know. But I would just be playing around with that. I think it's like, it's going to be a language that I would advise anyone, anyone, no matter what age you are, but it's certainly if you're a young student graduating, like you want to know that language extremely well. You want to speak that language because that'll also allow you to look at an opportunity and say, "Okay, I know I could do this with it because I'm so fast all in these tools." So I think, so Sean and I have both started companies and without sounding too like grandiose, I think that sometimes we view ourselves a little bit artisty and creative, more so than good or even interested in financial models and things like that. And because of that, I think it's partially because I was jealous and partially because it's true that I thought that PE was kind of nonsense. Not in the, I thought it was very effective, but I thought like, "Well, buying a company and firing a bunch of people, that's not the only value creation is that as for the owners of the PE firm, not necessarily the betterment of the world," which there's a million examples of why that's totally wrong. But I think what's interesting about you is you're sort of the antithesis of that where you're putting out this content that's quite soulful. And when I've talked to you and when I see your talks, I'm like, "This guy's got it. He makes me feel good." And yet he's in the most soulless industry. Because you got to be good at both, right? You must be great at the ruthless analysis of business and finding the levers, cranking out that gross margin and doing all of that stuff, while still clearly not becoming the caricature that Sam's painted. You know, if I had to keep it really simple, I would say, let's pretend for a second that I wasn't interested at all in being a force for good and I was just interested in generating returns. I'd run my business exactly the same way. A lot of it is for me as like, it's having the confidence in building something that's going to be durable and enduring. So I'll use a real example. Let's say that I have this strategy, I won't use any names, but let's say I'm a software buyout firm and my strategy is I go into a business, I buy a software company, I fire people in a double price. I'll make money in the short term, but you look at a time like now where A.I. is coming, like you really want the companies that are going to win in software have incredible teams that are on top, they're making, you know, agentech products on top of their software and they're going to have A.I.B. of this incredible tailwind for them. And you know, if you just destroyed your team and your cost structure, you're going to get attacked from both sides, from your customer side and from, you know, the LLM. So we found that building things is a lot more durable than ripping things apart because you can make like one and a half times your money or maybe maybe even two times your money ripping stuff apart if you're lucky, if you time the exit just right. But if you actually build something, times your friend and it could be, I mean, you can make a hundred times your money. And so like I do think a lot of it is time horizon. I think underneath that is even deeper. Like why are you in this business in the first place? Like if your goal to be in the business is to make money and you want to do it as fast as possible, then maybe that behavior does flow from that. But in terms of just being good at private equity, I don't think ripping things apart. I don't think you're going to be the best in the world doing that. What's the best deal you guys have ever done? What's the hero deal? You know, we've had, we've had a few really, really good ones that rhyme with what I'll describe. But you know, you pick the plumbing and HVAC example at the beginning. That's one of our best deals. I mean, we, we back to people that we hired right out of business school. They joined our CEO and training program. They went through that program. They became the eventually the co-ceos of the business. We bought a small plumbing and HVAC business that had like eight million dollars of earnings. This year that business will do five hundred million of earnings. How long, how many years did that take? It took six years. Six years to five hundred million dollars. You have to break that down. A hundred million dollars of earnings, not earnings. Yeah, three billion or three billion revenue, five hundred million of earnings. And we, I think importantly, that happened without us putting in any additional money. Wow. So an initial buy of like what, 30 million or something like that? How much was it in your line? We put in a total of 50 in the first deal. We might have put in like that first year, like another maybe nine or so. That first year and then that was it. Then we never put in anymore. What was going on? Was it that you just, you guys just went on an acquisition spree and picked up all the mom and pops? Or was it that they weren't doing any sale? They didn't know what they didn't have a good website? Like what was, what was missing that you guys added? We got, we got fortunate that the third deal that we bought, we partnered with this guy. So the CEO's our name, AJ Brown and Will Masin. And then the, the third deal we did, we partnered with this guy named Ira Pruitt, crew it, it was like the, the group. He had a very good result, HVAC veteran, and just this wonderful guy. He had seven of his kids in the business, and he gave us a lot of the playbook levers, and then the next deals after that, we were adding to that playbook. So eventually, we just ended up with this amazing playbook about how to run those businesses, and then we began that talent program we were talking about earlier, where we started attracting a lot of incredible leaders, not all of them, but a lot of them veterans, and then that allows us to go buy businesses that other people can't buy, and it's like really, the line of people that wants to go buy a $12 million revenue plumbing business in the middle of Louisiana, that requires a management change is short. - Wait, can you, you have to address this. So you just, you described one of the guys, I forget his name, as a grizzled HVAC guy, which in my head, I have a picture in my head of what that is. So I, I looked up, the company that I was called APEX service partners, I assume. - Yeah. - And I looked up Will Matson, Sean, go ahead and look up Will Matson. And, yeah, he probably looks like the opposite of a grizzled HVAC guy. - Will is a baby-faced guy. Honestly, he looks, and he might actually be 28 years old. I think he looks very young, and he worked at JP Morgan, and went to Wharton, and worked at McKinsey. - So the grizzled guy is named Ira Pruitt, and the combination of AJ Will and Ira is like amazing. So, - That's what I want to ask about. - Yeah. - What makes this such a high functioning team to go from 8 million to 500 million in profit? Teach me what makes such a powerful team, and what attributes are needed in order to grow a business that fast, because these guys look like the fairly odd couple. - They are an odd couple. So the combo in this, in this particular instance, the combo is, AJ is incredibly focused on the talent, and he's the one that rallies the Navy veterans and flies around and gets them excited. Will does it the finance and the M&A, and a lot of the whole co-functions, and then Ira is the one that's like, "Hey, this is how you actually run a plumbing business. Here's the playbook we gotta implement." So that's how the combination works. What they all have in common, and then to answer your question, like what we look for in these leaders, number one is just this white hot will to win, and that's more important for us. We found that to be way more highly correlated than like, any other factor, IQ or background or experience, but like each one of these three in some version of their life has just demonstrated this crazy will to win. We learned this from a book called Who, which was the sequel to the book called Top Grading, and it's about basically how to hire. So we do like a three hour interview, and you start with the person in literally like in high school, and you go through yesterday, and you're just walking through their background. It's kind of a conversation just like this. It's not super formal, but you're collecting data on this person. And in A.G. in Wolf's case, or I, or really anyone that had gone through our program, you're just gonna see example after example of like, "Hey, this thing went really wrong," and it was a bummer. And here's how I handled it. I got up, I plowed through, I put my shoes boots back on, I kept marching forward, and you're gonna see that again and again and again. We always say like, if it'll leap out of that interview, and if it doesn't, then they probably don't have it. - So speaking of deciding what to do, and a bunch of your talks, it's basically like, I call it my rich life. It's like, how to live a rich life? You call it an asymmetric life, and you've done a bunch of different talks on similar topics. You have this cool thing called the Genie question, which I figure exactly how you phrase it, but it's basically like, what would you do if you couldn't fail? And it's an exercise to basically get people to decide truly what they want, because a lot of people listening to this, Sean and I included were ambitious people, and sometimes we only listen to, where's the money, or where can I fit into some traditional sense of success, along with a lot of your Stanford guys, they all think the same thing. Like where-- - Or fear talks to satisfy. - Yeah, like I can't do that. Like I was supposed to like, go to business school, I gotta go to McKinsey, then I gotta do this, I can't do this other thing. So you have this question of like, what would I do if I couldn't fail? What would you say is the most common reason why people are really bad at answering that question? - So there's a few things I'd say. First is, I think people don't ask the question. So that's probably 90% of people. It sounds crazy, but they never ask themselves, what do I really want? And they haven't given themselves like the permission to even think about that, or like, I think it's almost like the highest form of self-love is to trust yourself enough to say, I'm gonna be on the path that excites me. You're asking why people failed to say so, I'd start with people haven't given themselves the permission to even think like that. So let's assume now you have done that. But I would say for your audience, like give yourself that permission, you know, you matter, like what you get excited about in this world matters. What are some example answers to that question? You've obviously helped a lot of people go through this process. I assume it's at your, when you teach at Stanford. - I'll give you a couple just from my class in the last couple of years. Last year, I had a student who's building a theme park in Dallas in Texas, like literally a theme park. - Let's give him a shout out. - That was a shout out. - What's that called? - I think it's called Texas Land. I'm not sure maybe they haven't finalized that as the name, but that was her thing and she's going and doing it. I have a student this year who is, he is brilliant. He could go to any consulting or finance firm. He's going to India, where his family's from, to help them build free hospitals. And like that is his thing. Like it's super clear that's his answer to the question. I give him so much credit that he has the courage and commitment to go do that. And it's going to be very hard, but that's his answer. You know, what you guys are doing, I mean, you guys are building a podcast that's like really helping people. And you can just tell from being on this podcast, you guys love it, you're having a blast. Like you're doing it, right? I mean, you're doing the thing that you followed that energy and gave yourselves permission to be like, hey, that's a good place. - But I almost hate saying it that way, because I don't want people to think that there aren't doubts yelling at us or anyone who's successful all the time. Because I think in another talk, maybe the same talk, you were like, I do this exercise. An Alpine is a $20 billion fund. And I think you said for the first 14 years, you thought it was going to fail or you weren't confident. I forget the phrasing, but you weren't confident that it was going to be a home run. - Yeah, I think all of us have these like crazy limiting beliefs like that run through our minds all the time that are like beating us up with like, I shouldn't do this, I have to do this, I should do that. I might fail, oh no. And the thing about that is that's very normal. Like having that fear and those doubts, it's 100% normal, everyone has it. It's just what like, what do you do with that? And I think one of the things I try to help my students do is like, we have an exercise where literally, we like spend an entire class writing all that down. Like we like empty your mind of all the limiting beliefs that are getting in your mind. Just let them flow out. Okay, I might fail, I might run out of money. Just no one might last my podcast, Alpine might not make it, AI might not work, whatever it is. Write all that stuff down. And then once it's down on paper, you've removed it, it does the most damage to you when it's in your subconscious and you don't even realize you have it. So if you're walking around with some fear and you don't even know you have that fear, it just looks like inaction and paralysis and I'm not gonna go forward and I'm gonna say, they stuck, but once you have it down on paper, let's say one of your things is, I wanna start a company, but I don't know how I'd pay myself or pay my loans or whatever. Okay, so fine, if that's in your head, you're just not gonna start a company. But if you write it down, you can rephrase and say, how would I start this business in a way that I could service my business school loans and still pay my rent? And now that's a problem to be solved as opposed to a fear that is creating complete paralysis. And so I like the act of just going right at your fears, doubts and learning beliefs. - That's a great exercise. I highly recommend that. I also just think like the, you know, you have the blank page and like, there's a lot of things you could do with the blank page 'cause I think you said it right. I think 90's low, probably 99% of people don't really take the time to examine their life or think about what they really want and actually go answer that hard question because it's a lot easier to scroll. It's a lot easier to worry about what's going on in Iran and then what's going on in the market? And what's going on everywhere else besides, you know, here because those are, those are arms length away whereas it's very, very personal to be here. Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. They make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all of my businesses. I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them. And now they actually just launched a personal banking account. So I have my personal account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase. I'm just all in on Mercury. Why, I like products that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have. So like, it's really easy to make a joint account with my wife. Very easy to spin up virtual cards. One click and I get savings yield. It just has all the stuff that I need in one place. So if you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury. I will fist fight anybody who disagrees with me on that. Go to mercury.com/personal and learn more. Mark. is a Fintech, not an FDIC, insured bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and call them NA members FDIC. (upbeat music) For the person who's like, I wanna build the theme park in Texas. Awesome. I wanna build the hospital in India. Sounds great. I've been in that position before where it's like, I'm ready to have that answer, but I have no idea. And I'm kinda saying one out loud doesn't even feel right. I'm just making it up. And I had to, I've taught myself to basically go through this process of sort of dabbling. Like, you know, just take this mentality of a dabbler. Like, how do I go and run on either lightweight experiments or brainstorm or just not feel like I needed to commit right away, but like, go try to see where the energy is. How do you advise people to, if they don't have the answer of, oh, this is the thing that would light me up. Like, maybe you don't even know. Where do you go to figure that out? Yeah, I love that. Well, here's one idea is, maybe don't have one thing. Make a list of like nine things that would let you up. You know, here, okay, I think I'd like to go to India. I also think I'd like to start a podcast. Maybe I really want to, I don't know, become a DJ, you know, I don't know, right down your things. And then like you said, you don't keep your day job and devote X number hours a week to testing those things out. Maybe you're going to do some work on it, take some classes. You're going to start hanging out with people that do it. Maybe you're going to get trained. Maybe you're going to do podcasts and nights and weekends and see if it's as fun as you thought it was. And you're not looking there for, this is what I think is really important. You got to, you got to be careful that you're not going to get a false negative on the outcome. So like a student who says, okay, I want to start a company. So I'm going to spend five hours a week, this quarter. And if I get traction, I'm going to do it. Like no, no, no, no, no, you're going to get no traction. Like five hours a week, if you could build a business in five hours a week, like it wouldn't be worth building. You know, so it's not that you're looking for like, does it light you up? Like in that five hours a week, was that the five hours you were looking forward to that all week? Or was that five hours where you were like kind of like, oh man, I got to do five hours on this thing. You know, like that's what I think you're looking for in those like experiments. Because by and large, if you are lit up and you, I mean, you plus being lit up plus a long timeframe, there's very few things that won't yield to that. And that was me at Alpine. You mentioned, you know, it took 14 years for us to know it was going to succeed. Yeah, but I was fired up. I was willing to do it for a long time. And I was excited. And like most things will yield to that formula with enough time. - Was that right in year 14, where you still like, "Eh, TBD, if this is going to work." And what were the numbers? Can you say what your numbers were then? 'Cause I would think you were financially successful at that point, no? - Well, we lost money on our first fund. So, fund one was 2001. We lost money. That means that-- - How'd you get a second fund? - Yeah, exactly. - When you lose money on the first. - Well, we were very transparent with our investors about what was going badly, what we were fixing, what we were learning. So they were very like, they were like, "Okay, we see you're on the right trajectory. You're transparent." You know, at one point that fund was marked at 40 cents. We ended up returning like 95 cents. So they appreciated that. And they gave us another shot, thank God. You know, and, but what I was gonna say is, so we had fund one was it, you know, we had that anchor for more than a decade. 'Cause these, you have to go in and buy the companies, you run the companies, you sell the companies, it takes probably 10 years and then fund two comes along. And so it was kind of another 10 years after that, after fund two, where we actually had some success, you know, where we could have the outcome of that fund, you know, proving out that it was working. And so that's the 14 years I talk about. But to give you the numbers, we were 14 years in. I wanna say managing maybe two or three, three or four hundred million dollars, something like that. That sounds so right. It might sound like a lap, but we're trying to run an entire team and we have all these portfolio companies. Well, let's ask the question. So we called the podcast My First Million. And we started, there was a tradition. We would always ask every guest, when and how did you make your first million? And we like to really put that reference, 'cause a lot of times the answer was longer than people think. You try to get, you know, when you're 20 years old, you think it's gonna be when you're 20 and a half, you know? You think it's right there and it takes a lot longer. It took me, I was 30 when it happened. It took Sam, I think same thing, 30, 31. And so it takes a little longer. And also we talk about how did it feel? Like, well, what did anything change? And what change? - I love to hear that. - I, it's such a great question. All those are such awesome questions, 'cause it's so not what I thought it was gonna be. So a couple of different ways to answer the question. One thing to be a millionaire on paper, it's another thing to have a million dollars in the bank. They're different feelings as you guys probably know. - Yeah. - One piece of rent, one dozen. - Yeah. So I'll say a million dollars in the bank, 'cause I think that's when I actually felt like I had a million dollars. And that was the, that was year 14. That was one way. - Oh shit. - That was year 14. So I'm, I was 29 plus four, so yeah, I'm in my 40s, I guess, when I made my, actually had a million dollars in the bank. - But put that in context, by the way. That is pretty slow. Love like having a, having like a PE firm, your job is to get good returns and to not having like that. - Well, yeah, I wanna say what, we had what's called a European waterfall, which means we have to return all the money in the fund plus and eight percent return before we take any profit. And so we had it, first of all, fun one generated, no carry at all. And then fun too, we needed to sell. It was really the very last business in that fund that we sold until we got paid. So it was, that's what I was saying, like the part about paper on paper versus in the bank. You know, I was a million year on paper before that, but actually in the bank, it was, it was 14 years. But I wanna talk about wealth for just one second. The interesting thing is, like, I felt wealthy way before that because my denominator has always been small. So, you know, like there's two parts of wealth. There's the numerator, which is what you make in your denominator and what you spend. The biggest mistake, and this is something everyone who listens to the podcast can benefit from, the biggest mistake people make is the denominator. And so they go, like here's a perfect example. I really wanna start a business. I'm gonna go take this other job first, and then I'm gonna make some money, and then I'm gonna, and then I'm gonna start my business. Okay, that's what they say. Never happens. Because they go take that job, then they get a new house, then they get a new car, then they move to this other city, then they have kids, then they have kids' schools, then blah, blah, blah, blah. And their denominator is keeping pace or even surpassing their numerator and they're never actually feeling wealthy and ironically, they're creating less freedom every year. You know, because there's fewer, fewer things they could do to maintain the lifestyle, and there's no way they could start that business. So probably like one of the most underrated things that happened in my life is my wife. I married my wife who was an elementary school teacher and made $18,000 a year pre-tax. And like our first apartment that I think was like 900 a month, she thought it was the Taj Mahal. And like, so we never, I never, - Does the IRS just send you money if you're making 18,000 pre-tax? Do you actually just get a bunch of money every April? That's awesome. - They literally should. They should. I mean, she would drive around for like 30 minutes to save you know, two dollars on parking. I was like, okay, well we gotta not do that. But, but that, so they did denominator. So I felt wealthy way before that because I just had a big cushion between my, what I earned in my expenses. So. - There's this story, and I don't think at this point that this is true, but it's Ruben Carter. Have you guys heard that song? "The Hurricane" by Bob Dylan. - Yeah. - It's basically about a boxer who-- - It's a great movie too. - Yeah, it's basically a black boxer who is incorrectly imprisoned for triple murder. And he didn't actually do it, but it was like a racist thing. And there's a story that's part of this. And at this point, I think it's fake where he was like, I don't belong in prison. And I'm gonna take cold showers every day, just to remind myself that this ain't home. I'm only here for a minute, but I'm gonna get out eventually. And like I said, I don't think it's real anymore, but I heard about that story when I was like 15 years old. And so when I moved to San Francisco to like start things, and like I remember making a little bit of money sometimes, and then I would go for long droughts. I wouldn't make any money 'cause I was trying to start something. And I was like, when the money comes in, I still gotta take cold showers 'cause I can't get used to this. I'm not out of it yet. And so I was always reminding myself, like take cold showers. We're not home yet. - That's awesome. - Do not get used to this. But I remember there was freedom in that. - I love that. I love that. And the freedom part is so true, Sam. They know, like the steepest curve of utility with money was going from like, the first one was having peace of mind of like not having to worry if I had to fix my car, whatever, you know, some unexpected expense happened, but I've gotten money saved away, and I don't have to stress. That was actually very steep 'cause that wasn't always the truth for me. Like my car would break up, oh no. You know, and then the next curve that was really steep was, I have enough money to do what I really wanna do with my life. I mean, how magical is that? Like that's really where the utility, it's flattened out after that. So that's really where the utility of money comes for me. - But when you're giving advice to your students, what do you tell them that number is? For example, some people say that like financial freedom is 25 times your annual spending. Some people have, like, some people will say, like as long as you have six months of savings, like that they're good. Like is there like a threshold that you like? - Yeah, there is. I would say having, three to six months of savings is level one, which is like the peace of mind. Because then, like I said, you have some unexpected expense and you're fine. You don't lose sleep over that. You don't have to decide if you're gonna pay a rent or fix your car. That's like three to six months of savings. That doesn't sound like much. It's dramatic. It makes a huge difference in your life. And then the next one, I think it's lower than that. Like when I say freedom, I don't mean like the like, okay, I'm gonna live off the interest of my money I have in Treasury. You know, that, I'm okay. Sure, that's nice if you get there. But I'm not even talking about that level. I'm talking about I'm spending, I'm still working, but I'm spending my day doing something that I enjoy that is the job that I wanna have. I think that's probably nine to 12 months of savings. It's not that, so I think both of those are really within people's grasp. People who are like, oh, I really wanna get to the like, you money where I never have to work or anything. And then what, you know, like then what are you gonna do? And I wanna go back to the other question you asked, did it feel the same that you thought it was gonna feel? No, it did not. So when I actually had wealth and I'd worked and I'd go back all the way back to the lawn mowing and all the sacrifices I made and getting good grades and getting to the right school and then getting the job and then suffering through fun one and then finally getting on the other side and then finally getting this big liquidity event, it was like the most disappointing and like, 'cause I thought it was gonna change everything. It didn't really change hardly anything. And like what was still there was like, maybe the thing I'd been running from, which is like, I'm not enough, you know? Like, it's like, what career milestones since everyone listening to this is interested in business, but it could, and family's too easy to answer. But like what career milestone actually did move the needle on happiness? If it wasn't like a financial thing, is there anything out like, for example, you probably have hundreds or thousands, I don't know how many employees you have, whatever it is, like you've created like an institution. Has that made you feel good? What teaching at Stanford, what career milestone have you had that a listener can like be like, okay, that's like a cool idea on how he actually it got happy via career? Good question. The two ways to answer it. First is you could, one answer is, you're not gonna solve an internal problem with the external outcome. So like if I feel like I'm gonna be enough when, like whatever you answer that with is gonna be disappointing to you. (laughs) So that on that answer, it you can't kind of get there with the career. And you have to, at least for me, I had to do a lot of internal work, therapy, coaching, journaling, meditation, and start to just like let go of this. I'm not enough part. And that's probably created more happiness and peace of mind than the career. Probably the career achievement that I remember the most, it wasn't even really an achievement. It'd be like my three partners and I up in Napa, together working through something where I would just have the self-awareness to look around and just be like, wow, this is really special. These are people I really love. We're doing something we love and we created this together. And so it wasn't like a big wire came through or something, it was more just like these little moments. - Can we get some second-hand smoke therapy from you? So you know, you just talked about like doing the work kind of like internal work, therapy, coaching, reflection, introspection, all that good stuff. You know, a lot of people either haven't had the time or don't have the sort of guts, they don't make enough time to do that sort of thing. But I think, you know, if they're listening right now, we can kind of benefit them. I remember we had Daniel Nagrana, one of the great poker players come on the pod and he told us, nothing about poker, I don't remember anything about poker, but I do remember he said, the most impactful thing in my life was a mentor, a lawyer guy who I thought he lived life well. He told me I should go to this event and I went to the cell-help event. I hated every minute of it, but they made us do this one exercise about like total radical accountability, where you write the worst thing that ever happened to you, and you rewrite the story where you are the cause of all of that thing and you own the entire thing yourself. You don't blame anybody. Re-write the story is like that changed my life. And so like, you know, I almost secondhand got the benefit of going to that seminar, just understanding that principle, then you know, then taking it and doing it myself. I'm curious, were there any kind of breakthrough, really important kind of realizations or exercises or questions or conversations you had anywhere along the way that we would benefit from? - Yeah, 100%. And I'll give you a couple things that I learned. So one is almost all your battles that you have are you against you. Well, it's true. It seems like this whole thing is happening out there and you're, you know, you're winning this or you're doing this and like, but you're, remember, all that stuff that happens goes through this filter, which is called like the story you're writing about it, then it goes internal and like you can, you can change, the easiest part of changing your life is to change that filter, you know? It's way easier than changing what's going on out there. It's a lot easier to change how you're interpreting it. And so you can either be your own worst enemy or you can actually be your own best friend. And I can tell you that I was my own worst enemy. Like it almost didn't matter what was going on out there. I would look for what was wrong. I would have a bad story about it. I would beat the crap out of myself. And then I would tell myself another story, which is me beating the crap out of myself is why I'm successful, total bullshit. It was just what made me miserable. It's like running through life with your foot on the brakes. So one is just that awareness like that, wow, I'm having more to do with my peace of mind, meaning, success, happiness than anything that's happening external. I think if you really think about it, you'll realize that's true. And then the formula for like actually programming, actually changing that, I finally understood like in a simple way why to meditate and how to be, how to make it work and how to have it actually impact your life. So you go to the gym and you work your bicep and your bicep, you break it down, it gets stronger and then it re-grows and is bigger. So meditating is very similar, except the muscle you're working is basically your mind and your self-awareness, your presence. So you pick your meditation, you're counting your breath. That's simple one, right? You just close your eyes, you count your breath. And then your mind starts going off and talking about thinking about whatever. I messed up this conversation or I should do this or I'll get to Margette this, whatever. And then you notice that and you, it might take you a while, but you notice that your mind just took off and you bring it back to your breath and you do that again. And then happens again, you notice that you bring it back. You're basically building this muscle, you're building a muscle. The muscle is like, I'm going to two things. One, I'm separating from my thoughts. I'm realizing those thoughts that are happening, aren't me, I'm creating this muscle of observing my thoughts versus just succumbing to them. And second and even more powerfully, I'm building the muscle being present. Like if you want to have a great life, like be present. Like if everyone in the world was present and here, right here all the time and not in their head, like people would be like in this great state of joy. Like and so building that muscle of watching your thoughts coming back and being present is the same muscle of being your own best friend because you're seeing like, oh wait, I see that this thing happened and I, maybe I didn't answer this question really well or I could let that go and just be here, and like doing that over and over. - Well, it's a great reframe, right? Because normally if you meditate and then you're sucking at it, your mind is drifting, you're not doing it, you're not having fun with it, you're like, I'm bad at this, this is not working. It's like going to the gym and you pick up a weight, that those last three reps are hard, but you're at the gym, you know, oh that's great. I did exactly the thing I was supposed to do. I was building the muscle. If I just went and I did curls with a three pound dumbbell, like I wasn't doing anything then, I shouldn't have even been here. And so reframing the meditation, the failure in meditation, as more of great, I'm building this practice, this muscle, I'm getting better at doing that, and how do I get better by failing at it? Hey, can I ask you really quick before we wrap up about parenting? I saw that you've got three kids, you blogged about how one of your kids went to college. Do you do any of these exercises with your children? And at what age did you start doing that? Or were they like, you're my dad, I ain't listening to you no matter what. (laughing) All of the above, my kids are definitely like, you're my dad, you know, it's funny because in most circles, like worlds, I'm a professor, I'm running a firm, or whatever, at home, I get, you know, I have teenagers like they're ruthless, right? They make fun of everything I do. And I do it in a way that's not maybe as obvious, but I'll give you a real example, it's easier. You know, my son was like trying to decide his, he had a really tough years freshman year, and he was deciding if he was gonna play the cross next year 'cause he had a tough season, it didn't go out, we wanted it, and it was brutal. And so, you know, I did an exercise with him, and we said, "A kiss." is that okay Blake, let's go through and talk about, I want you to play out your next three years as though you didn't play lacrosse. Like let's go through it. Like I want you to really think through, okay, we get home from school, here's what you do. You know, here's where lacrosse season comes along. Your friends are playing, you're doing this. Now I want you to go through and you go through the season, but it's hard, you do this. And after that, he's like, I definitely want to play lacrosse. Like I know for a fact that's what I want. Like by the end, you know, when I get done with my four years, like I want to have gone through that. And so yes, I use these tools, but it's more letting them kind of, it's in service of their lives. And it comes up more like as when they ask, almost when they ask for it versus me saying, okay, it's Tuesday, we're going to sit down and do this. Having said that, my kids also watch, you know, your kids watch what you do more than they listen to what you say. And so, you know, my kids have goals, they work hard, they write down their goals, they try their best. I like to think, but I think a lot of that just comes from osmosis. - What about your employees? Because when I listen to your stuff, I listen to your stuff because I'm looking to change my behavior. Most people don't change their behavior though. And you talked about hiring these operators, these like people who have these wonderful backgrounds and who have a track record to where they have this white hot will to win. Are you able to change any of their behaviors ever when you hire someone or are you looking for someone who already has it? - So, I'm definitely not looking to teach someone how to be motivated or to care or to run through walls. Like I can't teach that. However, we've bought 800 companies, I've been doing, I've been in private, we've 31 years, we built some incredible businesses. So, we have incredible frameworks and tools and playbooks that we use that have been battle tested. And they're, if one of the things we're screening for is are they, do they have a growth mindset? Are they open to learning? And so, are, if you look at our companies that we have in our portfolio, there is a pretty much a 100% correlation between how much of the playbooks they're running and how successful their businesses are. So, they're coming into Alpine wanting to say, hey look, I'm 32 years old, I want to run through walls but I don't know how to run a business. Can you help me do that? And that's a great partnership because we have so many great tools. And now, they will take our playbooks and they'll make them their own. So, five years from now, they've added to it, they've, you know, changed it, they've made them better and they've made them work for them. But, but we're definitely providing a lot of the foundation of like, here's some amazing tools, you know, like we have Kaizen projects we run, we have Process Mapping, we have a one-page planning tool we use. Have you ever published this? And can I have it? (laughing) Just like Colonel Sanders chicken recipe. He's going to order this. Yeah, I'd be happy to share it with you. It's probably come through in some of my materials, but, but yeah, we've, I mean, we've, we've, we've, we've definitely codified a lot of this in over the years. And yeah, I'm happy to, I'm happy to share with you. That's awesome, man. Yeah, you're wonderful. You know, I don't want to compliment you too much because I don't want to make you uncomfortable. But Sean and I have this, we have this joke where we call it the total man where like, you know, we interviewed all these amazing people. We've interviewed people who are deckabillionaires, we've interviewed people who, whatever. And like we're always 19 year old. Yeah. Yeah. The whole spectrum. And we're always looking for someone who's like this combination of a good parent, a good husband, a good business person is interesting. Looks like they have fun in life and is kind to one another. And I think you've checked a lot of the boxes. And it's really cool talking with you because you, I think you're a good inspiration of what like a person should aspire to be. Oh, thanks, Sam. That really means a lot. I, I really appreciate that. And I really admire you guys a lot. And I've, I really enjoy your podcast. And, and this has felt to me just how you said it would, which is just hanging out and talking about fun stuff that we all really are excited about. And I'm really grateful you had me on. Happy to come back anytime. It was really fun. Awesome. Thank you so much for doing it. Where should people, where do you want to be able to follow? Is YouTube kind of your main spot or Instagram or TikTok? Yeah, probably, probably Instagram. And I mean, I'm on, I'm all the platforms, but I'm Graham C Weaver at, I think that's my, that's all of them. I think I'm the same part, the same username at all of them. So yeah. Well, bad ass brother, we appreciate you coming on. That's it. That's the bad. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like a day's all. On a road, let's travel, never looking back. If you made it this far, then you're going to love what I'm about to tell you. So there's this amazing entrepreneur, James Neil Patel. He's been on MFM. He's one of our favorite guests. And he has a podcast that's called Marketing School. And it's brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. Marketing School brings you daily actionable digital marketing lessons learned from years and years of being in the trenches. They have over 100 million downloads and over 2,500 episodes. Marketing School gives you bite size marketing wisdom that you can implement immediately, whether you have a new website or you already have this huge established business, you're going to learn about the latest SEO, content marketing, social media, email marketing, conversion optimization, and general online marketing strategies that work today. You can get Marketing School wherever you get your podcast.