3rd Richest Man In The World, Team Zuck, and MrBeast's Best Biz
Do you know about a certain man named Gautam Adani? Have you ever heard this name before?
I don't remember. What's his shtick?
So Adani just became— this guy just became the third richest man in the world.
And so, yes, the Indian guy from, uh, uh, he's kind of like a— and he owns like a huge mansion in downtown, like, Mumbai where, like, it's like a skyscraper.
Yeah. So he, um, so he— Elon Musk number one, Jeff Bezos number two, and now Adani number three. And so people they watch this list and they're like, who's— who is Adani? All right, in this episode we're talking about the third richest man in the world, somebody who you've never heard of.
We talked about Team Zuck. So basically Zuckerberg has this new video of him doing MMA, and we did a little recap on how we feel about it, but also we kind of looked at how he makes his decisions and what our perspective is on him. And I actually think it's quite interesting.
We broke down one of MrBeast's, to me, the most interesting business that MrBeast has that nobody else is really talking about, and I think is lowkey a star business.
So that's the episode. Give it a listen. Let us know what you think and write in the comments.
Go on YouTube, write in the comments. I'll be replying to every single comment that's in here with something that's either smart or funny. I guarantee it. Go to the comments and leave one and I'll reply.
All right, I have a, a, a fun one. This will get us in the mood. So Kanye West, Uh, pop culture-y. Uh, do you follow Kanye?
Of course.
I don't really pay attention to Kanye West, really. It's not really on my radar, but he did something kind of funny, and we talked about him yesterday, and it's business related. But basically, you know, he's having this like tizzy with Adidas. Do you know about that?
No. And nice use of tizzy.
You like that? Uh, well, and frankly, I don't entirely know about it, so I'm just gonna kind of like summarize. But basically, you know, Kanye worked with Adidas to launch Yeezys, his line of shoes. Um, it's collectively made like, or not collectively, but in 2020, Yeezy sales were $1.17 billion in revenue. He made around $200 million from that. So he made a lot of money and basically he's having a fight with them. I don't actually know what the fight is about, but the backstory is that he's accused them of stealing his designs and leaving him out of meetings for their Yeezy shoe collaborations. Sean, uh, Combs, you know, Diddy said he's going to boycott because of this. And Kanye has said, I'm going to make things unbearable for you guys until you comply. So I don't exactly know what comply means. But what's kind of— it's both sad because like it looks like he's going through some stuff and it is funny and he's kind of trying to be funny and it's working. But he basically said, I've got no chill. It's going to cost you guys billions to keep me. It's going to cost you billions to let me go, Adidas. You stole my design among other things. And I'll give you till Tuesday, not until the 7 months that I told you originally I was going to give you. Today's the day. Like he like went like he's going crazy and on his Twitter, which he's got, like, I don't know how many followers, tens of millions, I would imagine. He's posting each person's picture who's on the board of directors, as well as a couple other boards. Like, they have a board of advisories of Adidas's people. And so he posted this one woman who's also— and he's like, he'll say stuff about them. Like, sometimes it's funny, but sometimes it's like, this woman's on the board of Adidas. She's also chairman and investment banker at JP Morgan. I went to JP Morgan in order to raise money for my buyout, and they wouldn't do it. Like he's going kind of bananas. And I, and I thought that that was wild. And then I saw another thing that he's, he's having another tizzy with, uh, his wife Kim, or ex-wife, about a school. And I went and looked at their school. Have you heard about this?
So he has his own school, right? Like he has his own academy or something like that.
Yeah. So he's trying to start this thing called Donda. So donda.org, if you go there, it actually looks weird, but interesting and kind of fun. Like it looks cool. And if you go to about, uh, on how we learn, you'll see like they described the curriculum and it's like, it kind of makes sense. But then you see like weird things. Like if you look at what the daily schedule, it says after-school parkour.
Well, first of all, I went to the site, danda.org. It's just like who we are, how we learn, admissions, and choir. Those are the top 4 links. Choir. Which of these does not belong? I don't know why choir is up here. Secondly, There's just like a white— I don't even know what it looks like. A white pigeon, to be honest with you. Just flat wings. It's slow-mo. Okay. It's like a fat dove though. It's not, it's not like a sleek, graceful dove.
It's like a chunky guinea pig.
Yeah. It's a guinea pig with wings. That's just flying up in slow motion. And that's the website. I'm going to click how we learn. Cause I can't not. Um, okay. They got less than 12 students per class. Rule number one. Should be— students should be confident in forming or forming ideas. If not, their writing will suffer. Okay. So their daily schedule, full school worship. Okay. That's a good way to start the day. How we similar to how we start the pod.
Um, yeah.
Core classes, lunch and recess, enrichment classes, including film choir. And you're right. Parkour, a bunch, a bunch of singing ninjas out here, just singing and flipping around.
So I thought this was interesting. Thing because, uh, it, you know, even though he's— I don't like laughing at him, a guy, if he's going kind of insane, but he's trying to be funny with this Instagram thing and it kind of is hilarious. Uh, like he posted like the— a guy, I think the CEO of SAP, uh, or is it SAP? Yeah, the like the HR software that nobody actually understands what they do. He like tweeted out or, uh, Instagrammed his— this guy's face and goes, you are a sap. That's what he said. And it just, it's just All right, that's it. He's just doing the most childish, immature thing, and it's so funny. It is working. It's awesome. And then this school thing I saw because of his other little fight with Kim, and he's like, anyway, I don't know how this is related to business, but I, I thought that you would have known about this because you're more of a pop culture guy than I am.
No, but let me tell you, uh, okay, so this is— here's a theme for this episode. I'm gonna call it people with giant egos. Okay. No, I'm gonna call it, uh, cause I don't actually know if these people have giant egos. I'm gonna say creative titans. That's better. Uh, all right. Creative titans. So the first one is gonna be my Billy of the week. Million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool?
A billion dollars.
Do you know about a certain man named Gautam Adani? Have you ever heard this name before?
Uh, I don't remember. What's his shtick?
So Adani just became— this guy just became the third richest man in the world.
And so, yes, the Indian guy from, uh, uh, he's kind of like a— and he owns like a huge mansion in downtown, like, Mumbai where, like, it it's like a skyscraper.
Yeah. So he, um, so he, Elon Musk number 1, Jeff Bezos number 2, and now Adani number 3. And so people, they watch this list and they're like, who's, who is Adani? And I actually, I don't know if I met him, but we definitely pitched him. I, I think my dad pitched him, uh, a business thing many years ago. My dad always kept saying, oh, we just need to get Adani on board. Adani, Adani, Adani. And so I'd heard about this guy before and I didn't, you know, and his net worth has just skyrocketed because his stock, is up like 13x in the last—
out of this Reliant Industries.
No. So Reliance, it was the top kind of like company there. And the guy who runs it, Mukesh Ambani, was the— I think he was— he was the richest man in India. And now Adani has passed him up in the last year because his stock went up 13x. So, so who is this guy and what does he do? Okay, so what he does, you'll, you'll appreciate this. Is he a software guy? Is he a Mark Zuckerberg? No, no, he's not. Is he Elon Musk? Is he trying to create the future of, uh, you know, space travel and, you know, like brain-computer interfaces? No. This guy operates in a place that Sam likes: power. So he does coal, ports, plastics, you know, shit like that. So basically this guy's like, they do, they do like industrial work. And so he owns— when, so when he was a, he was a kid, he was in school. He went to go visit this port. It was the largest port in the country at the time, a port, you know, where literally like ships come in and out. And, um, he's like inspired by it and was like, one day I'm gonna own the biggest port ever. And the biggest port in India. And now he's, sure enough, he owns the biggest port in India. He owns the most ports in India too. Um, when with the deal we were trying to do with him, we were trying to get Adani to come to Australia to build a port for our, our startup that was based in Australia because These guys were the kings of ports, but his story is pretty cool. He's a, he's a college dropout. So 18 drops out, he becomes a diamond sorter. I don't even know what that means, but he became a diamond sorter. He got an interest, interest in the diamond business. And after a couple years of sorting diamonds, he then goes in and he starts his own diamond brokerage and he's like, I will trade. I will basically age of 20 as a diamond broker. Brother calls him up. Brother says, hey, Brother, I have a, uh, a small plastic factory here that I, I, I own now. I've, I've, I bought or I run. And so he helps him go scale up the plastic factory. And then as he's doing that, he's like, oh, well let's start importing the, like the, the materials that come up, you know, upstream of plastics. And so he starts doing, he creates like an export company. And so he just keeps creating these companies. So now he has 7 publicly listed companies. He's got the Adani Group, which is like the, the mega one, and then they'll start like Adani Power, Adani, you know, like trading, Adani real estate or whatever. And they'll start all these different companies. They'll take them all public. And what's interesting about it is that—
and he's got a beautiful mustache, by the way.
Yeah, he looks like, you know, the meme account Dr. Park Patel. He looks like the meme account's photo, actually. So I don't know if it's, if it's him or just looks a lot like him.
He looks like a like an Indian Mario, you know, like Mario and Luigi. He looks like an Indian Mario.
Like, you know, he does. You know, when Mario does that little squat, like, you know, when you want to, you want to do that trick where you go behind the thing you're standing on and you run and you get the magic. He's like squatting. He's a little squatty, squatty version of Indian Mario. So anyways, this guy has now become, you know, whatever, the third person. He's got these crazy stories. He was, I don't know if you know, there was like this sort of like an Indian 9/11 thing where there's like a terrorist attack on a hotel. He was in that hotel and he was like in the hostage group that was there. Wow. He was also kidnapped at one point in time and taken ransom for $2 million. They paid it and got free. And so this guy has just lived this like kind of crazy life. And even now he's doing really well. The group's doing really well. He's third richest man on earth. There is a set of people who are very, very skeptical about what these guys are doing because They have so much debt in their companies. Like he is basically constantly trying to acquire companies. Like they just bought the largest cement producer in India, but they buy these companies using debt and he's got this intricate like set of companies. And so there's a big question of like, is this all a house of cards that's gonna fall over and you're gonna see a guy go from the number 3 richest to like, you know, falling off the list completely? Or is he actually gonna pull this off? Because what they'll do is They'll say, okay, the, the parent company has some profits, we'll take a loan on that. And then they take like one of the new companies public, like, oh, Adani Green Power. And they'll take the green company public because it's got the Adani name, stock price goes up, and then he'll invest in it from the parent company and then he'll sell those shares and then he'll borrow against the, the, the stock and then he'll issue a bond and he's got like all these different debt instruments. And so they have, I think, more debt than like any other company in India. And now there's a question of, is this all going to fall over or is it all going to work? It's pretty fascinating, dude.
When do you ever feel— I feel self-conscious when I hear about these things because my, like, my thing with business is like just the very simple of buy low, sell high, you know, like I purchase a widget for, you know, $1 and I put some type of value or I just buy tons of them. And so I get a discount and then I sell them for like $1.50. That 50 cents is my profit. I use a quarter, a quarter of that. To pay myself a quarter to go buy more. And like, it's like a relatively like simple, straightforward process. And then I hear about like, you just used the word debt instruments and how he, you know, he did like, he does this thing and gets a loan across this thing and this thing. And when I hear that stuff, I just think like, so like, where's the dollar that goes into his bank account actually come from? You know what I mean? Like, right. Like I try to think about, I'm like, I don't understand how this person then eventually collects the money and how the people who are owed money, where they got the money from and when they're going to get paid back. Like, do you know what I mean? It's like, it's so complicated for me because I'm such a simpleton. Or is it just bullshit?
I don't think I was in 7th grade. My parents got me a piano teacher and I wish that instead I just learned how to play dead instruments. Like, that would have just been so much better. Than learning how to play, you know, chess.
What do you mean? Oh, debt instruments.
Yeah, no shit. Like, where do people learn this stuff? Where do people learn this sort of financial engineering? I think that a lot of it happens if you're like on the inside. So you work at an investment bank or you work somewhere there. But like, this guy didn't.
But this guy didn't do that. Yeah.
Yeah. So, you know, I think he hired people who do that and they sort of say, hey, look, here's what we're going to do. We're going to, we're going to issue this bond and we're going to take this company public. Then we're going to like take a loan, pledge the shares. We're going to get a loan against the shares. And basically somehow $1 of EBITDA has become $8 of you know, cash flow for us. And like, we got to figure out how to do that without it all collapsing. But like, when, when I understand financial engineering, they have such an edge, such an absolute edge.
But when I like originally like made some money and I remember like our banker saying like, yeah, you could borrow money now at 1%. And I'm like, yeah, I don't want to go into debt. And they'd be like, well, no, sometimes it's like, it could be wise for you to do that. For example, if you have to pay taxes, I'm like, why? He goes, well, because You'd have to sell this thing, which then you'd take like a, you know, a 40% discount on that because of taxes. And I'm like, wait, I don't understand this. Can you like lay this out? Like, can you write this on a piece of paper? So like it, and then my banker Griffin, he ended up flying to New York to visit me to like, he goes, dude, I just need to sit down with you so you understand this. I swear to God. I swear. I go, why are you coming here? You got meetings? He goes, no, I'm coming to explain this to you.
So he came and he explained it to me and I, he's like, yeah, sure. Meetings. Yeah, I've cleared my day to explain the one concept of borrowing against stock.
Like, I just didn't understand it. Were you the same way? Were you like, I just don't get this. This doesn't make sense.
No. Where's this? You and others explained it to me, right? So like, yes, it's true. I didn't understand. I didn't know about it at first. And then when I knew about it, I didn't understand why it was good. And then somebody's like, hey, so you notice why this is amazing, right? You could either sell your stock pay taxes and no longer own the stock, or you could keep owning the stock, never pay the taxes, just borrow at a 1% rate against that money, and like, you're good. And I was like, okay, so that's good, right? They're like, all right, you dipshit, you didn't understand. Like, let's do this again. And they like show the numbers.
Yeah, I just like— so these financial engineers, you know where I learned a lot about this stuff is from Ben our Ben Wilson, his, uh, podcast with Rothschild. Like I, and like I started like learning about this a little bit, but then I also learned that I think some people, I don't know like what skillset it is. I do think it's rooted in just like, they're just good at math and they understand, um, just like complicated algebra, to be honest, just like exponential, exponential, like that, that, that's a concept that's like, it sounds like I'm joking, but that's actually quite hard to understand. Like to understand what is 7% or 10% or 12% growth. For 50 periods, what's that actually look like? Like, I remember listening to this podcast, I was like, oh, you're just like, just like LeBron is just taller and can dunk better. Doesn't matter what I do. Like there's some people that are just better at this and I don't know what that skill set is, but there is something there that it's like, you're just, you're better than me.
Well, I think you just get curious about that thing, which most of us who are like builders, makers, entrepreneurs, you know, like the stereotype about, let's say, um, You know, who cares what, you know, corporate structure, uh, bookkeeping, taxes, like, you know, whatever, raising debt. That was never the reason I got into business. That's not what I found interesting at the time. I was like you. It's like, oh, we could buy this thing for X and sell it for Y. You know, that, that's, that's the game plan. Or we can make this thing that doesn't exist and wow, look how cool it is. Look how it works. That was always more fun. And it's just like a level up, a progression in the game to be able to understand How do I, A, keep more money than I make, and B, how do we leverage money so that we could do more interesting things, you know, in a less dilutive way? So, so I think these people are amazing, you know, like Xavier, who runs Enduring Ventures. He told me this once. He's just, he was just like, you know, if I died, I'd be reincarnated as a CFO, not a CEO. And I was like, funny. It was like the weirdest brag I'd ever heard. I was, I never heard somebody like bragging about wanting to be a CFO. And I was like, what do you mean? He's like, He's like, I don't know, I just really like learning about how to be efficient and smart on this, like, financial— like, financial engineering. And he had done, you know, real engineering before that. He built basically like— he's like— he built a solar company in Africa, the largest solar company in Africa.
That's so funny that he's interested in that stuff, though, because he's like— he's like a hippie.
He's totally a hippie, right? He did that because he's like, dude, there's people suffering in Africa. Like, I want to like that seems like the problem to go fix. But then along the way he's like, all right, well, how do I create, you know, how do I finance all of these solar panels and battery packs without having to go raise venture capital? And so in order to do that, like the necessary evil was he needed to learn how to access cheap debt. He needed to learn how to like issue debt and underwrite for other people because what he did was he was like, you know, these people should basically— they don't have the $21 to buy the solar panel that goes on top of their house. That's going to power their fridge. And like, if they don't have a fridge, their life really is tough and they need this, but they can't afford the $21. So like, let's just do it at $4 a month or whatever. And like, I will underwrite a loan against their like income. And it's like, how do you underwrite a loan for somebody who doesn't even have electricity in their house? And he would figure these things out. And so I think it became a necessary evil and something he got fascinated with. And so now they're doing this whole holding company. And so he does this, this one thread he did went viral, which was like, How to have a holding company like Warren Buffett and basically like, you know, make a massive amount of money, pay as little taxes you need to, and like, you know, have, have more and more money to do acquisitions as you go. And he basically outlines Warren Buffett's corporate structure and why that's at, why that's advantageous. And, uh, you know, I read it and I still only understand 25% of it, but I'm just glad that there's people like that that I can go to whenever I have a question.
That's hilarious, dude. That's great. Well, I like this guy. Got him. I'm gonna, I wanna learn more about him. You have more on him or you want me to go?
Uh, I have another person like this, or another person and idea like this. Okay. So now let's switch gears. Another creative titan that we talked about, MrBeast. So we hung out with MrBeast. I don't know if you guys are sick of us talking about that yet, but you know, uh, producer Ben is literally sitting here in a MrBeast, uh, t-shirt. So, you know, he's a fan. Uh, by the way, that's good, Ben, because you know, when, when we were sitting in that meeting and they brought in the swag, Jimmy, who is MrBeast, he goes, he goes, oh man, they're not like kids, dude. They don't need, they don't need this stuff. Like, you know, they're not going to be— because the guy came in, was like, guys, I got treats for you. And he's like, had a bunch of swag and nobody moved. And Jimmy was just like, oh no, they don't care about this stuff, man. They're, they're adults. And then like all of us were like, the fuck are you talking about, dude? And like, we're just like, I just like, I literally rolled my chair over to him like, you know, like a kid. I'm like, Whee! I like just rolled my rolling chair over to that part of the table because it was like a long boardroom and I was just like, I'm going to get some swag. And I went and got it. And the other guy was like, I got kids, man. I got— they're going to need— if I don't bring back swag, they're going to be pissed. And so— and now Ben is wearing his.
Damn.
I—
Jimmy drove me like when we were going to the— I took a ride with them and I found that shirt that you're wearing, Ben, in the back of his car. And I just go, I'm fucking taking this. He's got tons of them. So I stole mine from him. I didn't know that we had the opportunity to take it like ethically.
Never considered that. Yeah. Um, so Jimmy, okay, so I wanted to bring something up that he had talked about that we didn't mention on the podcast, which to me is the most interesting business that this guy has. You might be thinking, is the most interesting business his YouTube channel? No. Is it his chocolate company Feast named Feastables? No. Is it his dropshipping burger company, his cloud kitchen called MrBeast Burger?
No.
Do you know which one I'm going to talk about? Do either of you guys know? Give me a, uh, Sam, do you know which one I'm going to talk about?
I think.
Ben, do you have any idea which one I might be referring to?
Uh, well, uh, no, but are you going to talk about his burger? Did you guys see his restaurant just open? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But let's talk about this other thing first. Okay. Okay.
No, no, I don't know.
You know, I'm like, I wrote down what I think it is and then you, you say it. All right. I'm going to say it.
It's his kind of translation internationalization company. Translation. Sam got it.
There it is.
This idea is amazing. So when we're sitting there, he's like, yeah, I got basically whatever the number one, number two, whatever biggest channel in America. And he's pulling up his YouTube stats on, he's like airplaying onto the TV, his YouTube stats. And then he goes, I also have this channel in Português, my Portuguese channel is growing really fast. And he puts up a video. It's got 20 million views in Brazil. And I was like, and it, it starts talking and all of a sudden he's talking in fluent Portuguese. And I was like, what is this? He's like, oh yeah.
Like it, like AI?
No. So what they did was they were like, look, one of the things we, we already put $1.5 million into this video where I built this chocolate factory and I'm gonna give it away to one of these people. How do we get more juice outta that fruit? And so what they realized was, we can go international into markets where YouTube is huge, like Brazil. Um, Brazil's got this massive population. It's huge on YouTube and they don't have content like MrBeast is doing. Like he's ahead of the game for the US. He's light years ahead of the game for like Brazil or the Philippines, right? Or different places like this. And so, but the challenge is it's a language challenge. So what they did was they went, they basically hired somebody to create a YouTube channel. They said, hey, you're gonna be our YouTube channel manager. For this country. You're the country manager for Brazil. You gotta have our Twitter, our TikTok, our YouTube, all of it. Um, you know, MrBeast Brazil or whatever it's called. Then secondly, we're gonna, when we have a video here, you need to get it translated by a local, like a, like a dubbing service. So like a local translator and I want it translated. I want the description translated. I want, uh, all of it done. And then you upload it there. You respond to the comments, you manage that community, all of that good stuff. And what they did was they would not like, they didn't just go get like, you know, some random crappy, person on Fiverr to do it. They got like the guy who dubbed Spider-Man in, in Brazil. They got him to do the voice acting for this. They paid him a lot of money. They paid him like a couple hundred grand. And I was like, I feel like you didn't need to do that. You could have just got anybody. And he's like, check this out. Like basically you don't know shit about shit, Sean. And so he goes to the comments and every comment is, oh my God, MrBeast is Spider-Man. Like they just thought he must be that guy. Like that's him. That's that voice I recognize. Yeah. And so he got like all this extra, you know, social juice. It was a little more remarkable. And again, back to our principle from last podcast, which is just do the doper thing. Just do the dope shit instead of the lame shit. Yeah. What's cooler, the cheaper guy from Fiverr or— all right, you paid him $100 grand or whatever. You got Spider-Man to do it. It's like, of course, of course. What am I thinking? And so that's it.
Whenever, by the way, when I listen to audiobooks like on Audible, I— every— if I see a famous person's the author, or the narrator rather, I listen to it. So like I'm listening to Huckleberry Finn, not that I really care about Huckleberry Finn, but Nick Offerman is the narrator. You know, the guy from Community. Uh, you know who that is?
He's like, is he the main guy in Community?
Yeah. Ron Swanson. He plays like an angry, like white country guy, or like it'll be another guy. Like it'll be just like whenever I see an author who I rec— uh, a narrator, if I recognize they're a famous person, I listen to it. So Tom Hanks doing Da Vinci Code. I didn't really even want to do Da Vinci Code, but Tom Hanks. So like the whole narrator thing, yeah, that's pretty sick. I'm on board with that.
I can't find this client info.
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So, so basically what he's done is he's like, cool, now that's okay. So he was doing that for himself. So he's like, oh good, I'm, I'm blowing up in Romania. I'm blowing up in Philippines. I'm blowing up in Brazil. Brazil. I'm blowing up everywhere. He's like, I already did 80% of the work. It's that last 20 that is foreign to me. Feels, feels like a lot of work, but I, but I'll, I can hire the people to do this. But the smart part was he's like, this is not just a way for me to expand my brand. That's already a smart business move. He then created this as a service for other big YouTubers. So now if you're whoever, you know, you're Arak or you're, you're, you know, some Yes Theory or something like that. Right. You could basically just use his service. He'll just go to you and be like, hey, do you wanna be big in Brazil? We'll just do all the work for you. And like, we'll keep like 30% of their ad revenue. And they're like, that's crazy. Okay. Yeah. Like, I'm not gonna hire, I'm not gonna go and do this interview process to hire all these people and figure it out and manage this all myself. That's kind of inefficient. But what he can do is like, he can have one team in Brazil that's gonna manage 15 YouTubers' channels there. And so I think this is one of the smartest businesses that he has. I think it's gonna be one of the most successful. It's gonna be pure profit essentially. And, um, I think he's got the distribution locked down cuz if he goes to any YouTuber and explains, hey, here's what I'm doing and you get access to my machine, they're all gonna say yes. And it's an, it's a good idea for them. It's a win-win for them cuz they're just not gonna capture this extra value. Um, and so he's doing this and it is just another example of turning a cost center into a profit center. And I actually wanna talk about some examples of those. So basically, Things where this would normally just be a cost to him to run this, to have all these people on staff. But once he turns it into a service for other YouTubers, now it becomes a profit center. And so there are a bunch of examples.
Which I think this would make way more money than the chocolate bars. Like, I remember I ate the chocolate, the chocolate that he had, and I was like, well, you know, like, A, it's good, but I don't— it's not like that different than any other chocolate that I've had. And B, it kind of sucks that I've got to feel bad about myself if I consume a lot of your product. And C, it's only like $40. It was $40, I think, for a box. Like, that's hard to build a big business, $40 a pop, you know what I'm saying? At least when you're not— if you got to be in Walmart or something.
Yeah, which I'm sure he could do also. Like, to Ben's point, he, he opened up a brick-and-mortar location for his burger joint. And normally you're like, ah, you know, opening up a restaurant in a mall, maybe not the best idea. And then he like posts this video. There's like literally, I don't know, 50,000 people in the mall like lined up. It was like people were lined up, up and down each concourse, just like, you know, the, the restaurants on floor 1 or whatever. Like people were on floor 4 just lined up in this line and it was insane. So, you know, this guy's got pretty massive pull.
So what are the other examples of, of turning call centers in?
So the first one that came to mind for me was AWS. So AWS today is basically Amazon. Amazon's most of its profits come from AWS. And AWS is basically when Amazon had to have a really robust set of servers to run their own website. And then they were like, hey, the way we use this kind of like server infrastructure and it's just like this big expense for us to have this server farm. What if we just rented this out to other companies who want to have like Amazon-level servers without having to go rack their own servers in some data center? And that became AWS. And basically AWS spits off billions and billions in profit now. What started as what would've been a billion-dollar loss. And so, you know, that's a huge swing, but I have some others, uh, that I want to explain to you. So, uh, Michael Gurley, who came on the pod, he goes, my favorite is, um, this company called Freight Alley. They did what, what HubSpot kind of did with The Hustle. They basically have this thing called FreightWaves, which is FreightWaves is basically a, um, media company and Freight Alley is the like the SaaS company. So basically they're a SaaS company that created a media arm that goes and, uh, normally a media company, you know, has expenses, but they turned it into a profit center. Basically that acquires customers for the SaaS business at a negative customer acquisition cost. So the media company is profitable and brings in customers to their own SaaS, uh, you know, at the bottom of the funnel. So that's one example, not exactly the full thing, but dude, another is—
Dude, that guy, the guy who started that company, his name's Craig. I've hung out with him a bit. He, um, bought a big piece of property in Tennessee and he's the one who's turning it into like an airport. It's like a country club, but instead of a golf course, there's an airport. So he's selling— he bought a huge plot of land. Now he's sub-selling or he's selling smaller plots of land and there's going to be an airplane strip and a hangar that everyone has access to. So if you're a flying enthusiast, you buy a home there and you can use this. And he bought a magazine. I think it was called airplane.com or something like that. He bought a magazine and he's like, I'm going to buy a magazine and do the same thing that I did, but instead of software, we're gonna do it with these houses.
Wow. That's, that's, that's amazing. Another, um, another example. So, uh, any D2C company that eventually takes their own warehouse and starts fulfilling for other customers. So they turn their own warehouse, which is a cost for them for fulfillment, into a profit center because they're doing fulfillment for themselves and others. Very similar to, to AWS. Okay, here's another one. Uh, this guy George on Twitter just sent me this. He goes, Ford decided to own the timber supply for their vehicles. So there was lots of wood in the early cars. Yeah. They ended up with charcoal, baby. They ended up with so much leftover wood, they started selling charcoal. And that's Kingsford Charcoal Company.
That's my favorite, man. That's my favorite story.
That's a, that's kind of amazing. I didn't know that. Uh, is there more to know about that or did, did we kind of nail it there?
No, you nailed it. So basically they were, so Ford was making frame car frames and they had to burn a whole lot of wood in order to, you know, bend the steel or do whatever they had to do. And they had all this leftover charred wood and they're like, what do we do with this? And I think it was Henry Ford's idea. I forget exactly whose idea, but he goes, hey, let's, let's start selling this. Let's make something out of this. And that's where it kind of came from. There's a bunch of entrepreneurs that have kind of like done things like this. Uh, Standard Oil did something like this where they're like, this gets more complicated and is less interesting, but like, hey, this offput of kerosene is like this weird, like fluid that's like really greasy. Is there anything we could do with that? And like WD-40 or something like that. Like they've like, there's like stories like that with, with Standard Oil as well.
And so here's a couple others. So Foursquare, Foursquare had an API for businesses cuz they needed all this data about businesses, where they're located, all that stuff. And they needed that for, to power their own Foursquare app. And Foursquare kind of went up in this hype cycle, then went down many years, sort of forgotten, sort of written off. But a new CEO joined and almost oriented the company around this. It was like, look, the more valuable thing is not people using Foursquare, the app and playing the game. It's all the data we've collected. About businesses, where they're located with like hyper-precision. And so we actually just need to make that API available to everybody. And they productize the API and they make, I think, more money off the API. I think they make more money off the API than they do off the core app at this point. Um, so, so I think that's, uh, that's another great example of this. Amazon has a bunch, like Amazon was a bookseller, right? So their main cost of goods sold was their books, but then they create Kindle. And Kindle self and the self-publishing business and the pub, you know, and all of that. And so now Kindle itself became a profit center. What, so what used to be a cost, which was selling books, now they sell eBooks that they kind of own and, um, you know, they turned that to profit. Same thing with payments, right? Amazon had to pay a, a merchant like a fee every time they processed a payment. So they created their own payment software, Amazon called Amazon Payments. And now like, you know, for our e-com store, I just went, I, I was like, oh, I think we take Amazon Payments. Where does that money go? And I went and found an account. We have with Amazon Payments that had like $400 grand sitting in it. 'Cause we use that service, Amazon Payments, to take payments for somebody who wants to pay with Amazon. And so they turned it into a profit center along the way.
That's crazy. Another one is, um, Slack. So Slack started out as a game, and when they were working on their game, they, it, it wasn't actually doing that well, but they created a way in order to communicate effectively with their, with their coworkers. And they said, ah, fuck this game. This thing's actually way cooler. Let's actually turn this internal tool into a, a proper tool. We thought about doing that. So here's, but here's the problem with this. This all sounds sick. A lot of people, uh, say, yeah, let's do this. And so a lot of publishers are doing this. And so they are like, let's sell our CMS. So BuzzFeed, Vox, Washington Post, I forget who else. It was like, they build these custom website builders and they say, let's sell this. And I think oftentimes it's a distraction and they always say, well, Amazon did it. And I looked into this. Amazon did launch AWS, uh, pretty early on. But you know how many employees they had when they did it?
How many total employees are on AWS?
Yeah, total employees, there's about 5,000. So they were already a multi-billion dollar company with— and so they— the way the story is told is like, oh, they were just this little guy. No, they had about 5,000 people when they launched AWS. Like, it was like a, you know, it was a, it was a thing. It wasn't just like a scrappy startup. And a lot of times people like will say, well, let's also sell this. It's like, dog, we've got 8 people working here, like who's gonna do this? Uh, so that's always like, I've always been conflicted with this strategy.
Yeah, that's, that's true. Uh, you guys considered it, you would've done it for what is it, your, um, our email sending platform.
So like we built our own for a little while and then we made it really easy. So like if it, so basically hypothetically, which there aren't that many people doing this, if you had a daily email, it was really easy for you to talk to your advertiser. Make the ad and insert into the thing, have them approve it. And like, it was simple and easy to use, but the problem is, is like, there are not that many people doing it, you know what I mean?
And B, there weren't then, but like Beehive basically does that now and they're actually growing pretty well.
Well, maybe I could have been wrong, but I don't think I'm going to end up being wrong. I think that, I think that I'm not convinced that what they're doing, at least ads for a daily email, that, business I don't think will ever be that particularly big. And Beehive. So Beehive is kind of like Substack. Uh, so it's these services that you get subscribers and they take a small amount of revenue based off of how much you're making from subscriptions, or you just pay them like a fee on how many subscribers you have. Do you think that some of those businesses actually can become huge venture-backed size companies?
So I just invested in Beehive actually. Initially I didn't invest cuz I was like, I don't know how big this gets. And then two things sort of changed my mind. The first is every time I needed something for Beehive, the founder was an absolute animal on my request because we use it for Milk Road.
Yeah, he's great. His name's Tyler. He's awesome.
Tyler was awesome. He's like, it's already on a roadmap. The question I have is A or B. There's nuance about it that shows he's been thinking about this, noodling on it. And then he'd be like, When do you need this by? Because normally, like, it's scheduled to be out in 3 weeks, but if you need 3 days, like, you know, the weekend exists, I might be able to do, you know, like, whatever. So he was able to like rip off feature after feature after feature that we needed and everything that was like, you're like, hey, we have this question. It's like him and his team would dig in. So he, so I saw that he kind of had that grit that you like in an entrepreneur. So I got to basically test drive the entrepreneur.
He's pretty, he's special.
Which I normally don't get to do with most investments. Um, you know, with most investments you meet 'em, you do a call with them, they say all the right things, they send you the deck, you look at it, you kick, you look at the product and like you gotta make an educated guess at that point. You don't get to spend months working with the actual entrepreneur as a customer and see how quick they are with features, how, how fast they're responding, the quality of the product, all that good stuff. So, so that was the first reason. The second reason was I've come to realize that the, the best investments I've made have been ones where what looks like a small market, what looks niche, turns out to not be niche. So we got acquired by Twitch in our last company. Twitch was a kind of the quintessential example of this, right? Like, yeah, but like how many people are gonna watch other people play video games on the internet? Like how many people are gonna stream themselves playing a video game and how many people wanna watch that? Looked niche and turned out to be a massive behavior. Um, this is also true with like, you know, uh, now Shopify seems really obvious. I remember talking to the VC who led Shopify's early rounds, uh, you know, maybe 6, 7 years ago. And Shopify at that point was still like legit, but it's not what it is today. It's not like seen as it is today as like one of the like blue chip startups. And it was the same thing. It was like, oh, okay. You know, like just like Etsy, like, you know, how big do these actually get? These kind of like, indie maker seller type things. Isn't Amazon and big brands just going to like dominate this? Like how many mom and pops are there going to be on the internet that can actually do this well? And how much—
Dude, I remember that. I remember Tim Ferriss invested in Shopify and he was talking about it and I was like, Shopify, that's so silly. Like, you know, this thing exists, this exists, this exists. Why don't you just use this thing? And like, you know, I remember like, I forget what those were, like BigCommerce. Do you remember BigCommerce?
Is that— There's BigCommerce, there's WooCommerce, there's Magento. There was all these. And so that was actually the big problem. Which is if you looked at the existing ones that had been around for like 10 years and they were kind of like, like those are pretty like, uh, they're cheaper, they're harder to, they're more flexible, but they're way harder to use. And they were kind of like from a different era. So they kind of like peaked at a certain point. And you look at those and you're like, well, they were peaking back then. That, yeah. You're like, how big does this get? Look, that's how big it gets. Not very big.
Right.
And the same thing happened with Airbnb. I remember when Airbnb was like coming out and it was like, oh, well, It's Couchsurfing, but better, right? Like, I don't know if people remember Couchsurfing.com was like one of the early, oh, that's a cool idea, but it never made a bunch of money, never got huge. Because again, how many people really want to go live, sleep on, you know, someone's couch or extra bedroom in, uh, in some city? Okay, yeah, it's this kind of vagabond hippie traveling shit, but like, that's not mainstream. And so if you looked at Couchsurfing to see how big Airbnb could get, you're like, well, Very, very similar idea. Been around for longer, seems to have plateaued around this size, not that big. And like, you would've been wrong. And so I guess I've kind of learned that like the absolute biggest wins in venture come when you find something non-obvious. And the non-obvious, the non-obvious to me typically is like just fundamentally like product categories or markets people aren't going after, or markets that other people think are small that actually are going to turn out to be very big.
There's this really great story with Sam Altman, who at the time was the president of Y Combinator, and Brian Chesky. And Brian Chesky is getting— or maybe he just worked at Y Combinator. And Brian Chesky in 2000— must have been 2011— was getting ready to pitch. You know, so YC, you go through this 8 or 12-week incubator. At the end, you pitch a bunch of venture capitalists, and YC helps you a bunch of ways, including getting your pitch right. Brian Chesky's with Sam going over his pitch. He goes, this company one day is going to make $100 million a year. And Sam was like, Brian, can you just do me a favor? Anywhere in this presentation where you have a number, can you do me a favor and add a zero behind it at the end of it? No, no.
He goes, change all the Ms to Bs. Investors like Bs. That's what he does.
Yeah. He goes, anything that you have an M, I want to see a B, change it all. And I don't remember exactly how the story goes, but it was paraphrased in such words like Brian goes like, but that's lying. Like, there's no way that we're going to do that. Like, it's just impossible. No one has done this before. He goes, yeah, but you know, it seems like a big market. And here's my reasoning. Like logically it makes sense. There's just so many people who stay at hotels. Like, of course you can do this. I mean, someone can do it, I bet. And so just do me a favor and change all those Ms to Bs. And even Brian Chesky didn't believe it. And there's another story, by the way, Or I remember what was Amazon's first VC? Was it Madonna? Is that what it's called? Madonna? It's like, it looks like the word Madonna. They're based up in Seattle and he's pitching. And I listened to a podcast with the guy he pitched, and the guy he pitched tells a story of Bezos saying like, look, if we, if we get our act together and we make this work, I think we're going to make like $100 million a year in like the next 5 or 10 years. Like, that was his pitch is like, that's how big I think we're going to get. And the guy was like, I need to get a lot bigger than that, but whatever, you seem really competent. So it's just proof that like even the people starting things sometimes also are like, I don't know how big this can get, I don't, I don't know if this is going to work out.
Yeah, like there's that clip of Mark Zuckerberg talking at a college and he's like doing an interview, a campus interview, like, hey, we're here with the Campus Report and we have Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of the Facebook.com, uh, which is blowing up around campus. People really like your website, Mark. Um, You know, he's like, he's basically, he's wearing basketball shorts. He's got a red Solo cup he's drinking out of. Yes. And he's just sitting there and they're like, so you've expanded to like whatever, 7 colleges and where are you gonna go from here? You could end up going into high schools or, you know, you're gonna, how big can this get? And he's like, oh, I don't know. Like right now it's Facebook is cool. Like it's cool for colleges, really, really useful. And sometimes if you try to make something too big, like it loses what makes it cool. Like maybe it doesn't like, Why does it have to be bigger? And maybe it doesn't have to be bigger. He says that. And then like, you know, sure enough, fast forward 10 years, he's like, we need to launch a satellite to India to give these rural villagers internet. So more users, the Facebook. Yeah, we need more. And so, you know, he turns into an absolute animal. By the way, this MMA clip of Zuck. Awesome. You seen this? Awesome. Killed it.
He killed it. He killed it. So for the background on this, uh, but Zuck went on Rogan and talked about a bunch of stuff. It was, it was actually a pretty good interview. I think Zuck actually kind of redeemed himself a bit. But, uh, in, in part of the interview, Zuck said, I've been training MMA, and people are like afterwards, yeah, right, okay, nerd. He posts this video of him training. He looks really good, way faster than I thought he was going to be, like fighting. He was fighting.
I was like, dude, even if he wasn't good, the fact that he does this It's just like, basically this was my tipping point. I already liked Zuck, but now I'm team Zuck, which there's not a lot of us here, right? We can't even play a game of pickup basketball. There's 4 of us on team Zuck. We're just still looking for a 5th. And somebody tweeted this out. They go, Jack Dorsey, you know, he goes, Jack Dorsey hasn't worked in 10 years. Constantly, like, constantly meditating, uh, you know, dating different models, no family, tries to run multiple companies at once, fails, uh, Twitter never makes anybody, blah blah blah. Zuck, you know, begrudgingly runs a trillion-dollar empire, you know, faithfully monogamous, uh, great dad, uh, trains MMA, like, all these— like, it was like Jack Dorsey doesn't work out, it's like, trains MMA, And it just highlights basically why does everybody hate this guy again? What has this guy done? And some people are like, he ruined democracy. It's like, no dude, he built basically the modern telephone. You're pissed that some people make phone calls that you don't like. That's basically what happens on Facebook is that he built the app everybody uses to communicate everything stupid or amazing. And sure enough, some percentage of that is not content you like and is not controllable. And the guy's literally built— like, it was at $1 trillion at a point in time. He's built a trillion-dollar company and he just keeps running it and he keeps trying to make it better and he keeps trying to push the envelope and he keeps trying to make like better and better products and services. And do you think he really cares about— like, do you think he sits there being like, I want to influence the election? But no, that's like You know, that's the— that's a pain in the ass he's trying to deal with. It's not like his agenda. People make him out to be like this evil guy, and it's like, dude, people don't like him because he's awkward. Like, all right, yeah, you're a bully if you don't like him because he's a nerd, you know? Like, think about who you are if you don't like Mark Zuckerberg. You're a fucking bully. You just think he's awkward, and that's how you judge him. Like, screw you, man. The guy's awkward.
We should do— we should do like an entire episode about this because there was one beautiful line that he said. So Rogan was like, 'Look, like, you had these Russians doing this and influencing the election, and then the Hunter Biden story came out, and you guys, like, took it down, and you told them it wasn't allowed.' And then, and like, Rogan was like criticizing him, or at least voicing all the criticisms that Facebook had. And Mark goes, 'Yeah, look, like, how would you handle that situation?' And love to see you do it. Yeah. And Rogan goes, I don't know. And he— and Zuck's like, yeah, we didn't either. And so our reasoning was like, we like took down the 100— like, I don't even remember how he explained. He's like, well, our reasoning was this, this, and this.
Well, he was like, did the FBI came to us, told us about to be a story that could be massive misinformation and go viral? We just basically— they just got their wrists slapped because they previously let other information spread too fast that they said you should have known that was fake news. You should have stopped it. So now the FBI comes to you and says there's about to be a dump of fake news that's going to go viral. So what do they do? They're like, okay, we shouldn't just like— I guess we shouldn't block the news, but maybe we should like suppress it in the news feed so that it doesn't go super viral because of, you know, isn't that what we just got in trouble for? You know, like, he didn't say all this, but like, it's obvious. This is obviously what— what would you do? The FBI comes to you, that's what he said, to be a misinformation leak, and then it it comes out and sure enough it starts going viral and you have to decide, do we just let this take over the platform and like, oops, we did it again? Or like, should we play it safe and like not let this spread like wildfire until we can fact check this and see if this is real or not? And like, by the time it does, one side, the left or right, is gonna be mad at you. And it's like, if you just think about this shit, it's like the person who in 2016 was like, the election was rigged, the Russians manipulated the election. Then here, fast forward to 2020, Biden wins, and then the right is now like, the election was rigged, Biden was counting votes that didn't count. You know, like, it's like they're both—
it's just they just switched.
You're the same, you're the same dude on either side of the aisle. Like, don't you realize, like, you're— it's like the Spider-Man meme, they're pointing at each other, and it's the same thing over and over and over again. It's like, um, you know, she's got, you know, the bad thing on her server. It's like He's got the documents in Mar-a-Lago. And it's like they just keep doing this, you know, left and right. How is a communication platform supposed to win? Because literally no matter what you do, one side is going to think you're being completely unfair or the other. There's no—
this is such a good job though. That is such a good answer. And he like humanized himself so much there. And he goes, we— our reasoning was— and he said exactly what you said about the FBI doing this. And this is what we thought seemed right at the time. How would you have handled that, Joe? And Joe was like, "Well, that's a good question. I guess I would call someone who I think knows the answer and just talk and listen to him." He goes, "Yeah, that's what we did. We called these people, we talked to them, and this is the best that we did. And could it have been wrong? Maybe, but we don't really know the right answer." And I realized like, "Oh, wow, this guy, Zuck, he's 38 years old or 36 years old. He's in his mid-30s." been doing this since he was 21. Like, he's just making it up and trying to make some good decisions along the way. Is he maybe a little evil? Maybe. But we all got a little bit of us in that. We all have a little bit of that. And like, he's mostly doing a good job. And it just— he did a really good— that question of, well, how would you have handled it? That was such a beautiful way because it was like, oh, you're, you're fallible. You're just like me. You know, like, we're not that different.
Is he a ruthless competitor in the sport of business? Sure. I wouldn't expect somebody who's number one in their game to not be a ruthless competitor at their game. Like, I wouldn't expect them to be a softie who doesn't care, or, you know what I mean? Like, it's insane to me that people hold this, like, this crazy standard. Other reasons I'm Team Zuck. So, you know about his, like, once-a-year missions that he does?
Yeah. Like, one year it was, like, travel the country in an RV.
Yeah. So he did. That was, like, when it was, like, election time. He's like, I need to—
I don't know.
I need to meet Middle America. I'm going to like, you know, I will visit places with Walmarts. Like, you know, that's like his mission for the year that year.
Dude, by the way, I respect when people do that so much. I was watching this music video with Mike Posner, you know, Mike Posner, and you probably love— or he went to Duke. He went to Duke. Yeah, you know how he walked across the country?
Yeah, so he like followed it.
Yeah. Yeah, it was awesome. I spent like—
he got bit by a rattlesnake.
Yeah, and he like had— he got bit by a rattlesnake and he had to go home for 2 weeks and learn to walk again, and then he shipped right back out to where he was, and he went to You know, he's like this guy who you imagine as being this like California cool kid guy or New York cool kid guy. And he ends up walking the country and he's like, I walked around places with Confederate flags. I went to like rural Kansas. I went everywhere and I saw America. And I realized that like, I don't know shit about America. These people are a lot different than I thought. And it was really nice to get to know like other types of people. I love when people do that. And so I'm team Zuck a little bit because he did that.
So he did that. But the first ones he did, I feel like were things that he was actually just self-interested in. So he, um, I remember one of his first ones was that he was going to only eat, if he was gonna eat meat, it had to be meat that he had personally hunted. So he's like, I've never hunted. I think he had like never hunted before. And he's like, I don't really know where my food comes from or like what goes into this showing up on my plate. And I wanna like actually like with my hands, I wanna experience this entire process. So he had to hunt it, he had to like prep it or kill, like, you know, clean it or whatever and cook it and then eat it. And so that's what he did for one year. One year he was just like, I want to learn Mandarin. I think Facebook really wanted to go into China. So he's like, he showed up in China to give a talk. He did the whole thing in Mandarin and surprised the shit out of the whole crowd. They were like, it was like, you know, the scene in 8 Mile where he's going off on in the rap battle. It was like the whole crowd was like, oh, what's going on? Like he's just speaking fluent Mandarin with like the proper tone. And like, dude, what a machine to in his like spare time, just pick up these hobbies and then do them. And now he's doing, MMA and Balaji, who's a, you know, a friend of ours. He, he, he tweeted this out. He goes, it has begun. I forgot who he said. He goes, first, uh, great line.
It has begun. We could say that for so many things. That's a beautiful, those are beautiful first words.
He called it, uh, he goes, first, first Bezos, now Zuck. I'm seeing it across the board. Tech people starting to seriously lift and train. Testosterone replacement therapy, quantified self, optimal diet. Eventually this will be productized for all, but transhumanism starts with personal Chadification. He calls it personal Chadification, turning yourself into an absolute Chad. And I know you— I don't know if you saw this tweet or not, but every word of this, you know, you were just doing the, the, the— you're at the Black church saying, you know, you're the gospel. This— the choir of Donda Academy singing and you're like, amen to this. Right? Like, cause you've been doing this, right? You've been doing your own personal Chad face.
I've been doing this for about 5 years now. I've been becoming Chad and you want to know something? It is awesome. It is so awesome. I've influenced you a little bit too. You've slowly become into it. It's the way to live, man.
Yeah. I'm not like a Chad. I'm like a, um, like a Charles right now. Like I didn't even become a Chad. I'm just, I'm just slowly working. I'm like a Brett trying to get, trying to get to Chad right now.
Dude, just like lifting— this sounds so— I don't care how it sounds. It is what it is. Lifting heavy weight and then just like eating meat and vegetables. I just feel happy. I feel good about my life. And I look at old pictures of us when we were recording the podcast at my office and my face was so much more round and I'm disgusted. I'm like, you are such a fucking filthy animal. You are filthy. You are a horrible human being. And I look at myself, it has made me so much happier. So much happier. And like, I'm, I'm pumped that the nerds are finding out about it.
Yeah, I think Balaji lifts. I think he powerlifts as well.
So, so yeah, there's just like, there's so much research that shows like being stronger, it just makes— they say, you know, a strong body, a strong mind. Like when getting stronger, like there's so many benefits to living a longer life. What's his name? What's the, what's the guy we like? The hunk. Scientist, uh, Huberman. Huberman. Yeah. Huberman. Don't act like you don't know.
For the record, we never have referred to him like that in private, which is why I was confused. You acted like we always call him the hunk scientist in text message.
Dude, I have a friend that like went and got in a cold plunge with him and he goes, he's ripped. Like he's jacked. And I'm like, yeah, of course.
These guys got it all. Those pools are like made for one. Like how close together were they? Those are like an occupancy of one.
That's a new protocol. You got to sit on top of one another. It extends. That's what he's telling people. He's like, uh, hey, uh, you know, if you, uh, sit right here on my lap, uh, you're going to live like an extra hour. But my dude, my friend did a thing with him and he goes, he's just jacked. And, uh, uh, I don't even remember how we started on this, but he, he did a podcast the other day and he talked about like living longer and he's like, yeah, lift weights. And go for runs and you'll— and you'll live longer. So I'm happy.
You probably do this stuff. My trainer has me doing this stuff called myofascial— myofascial release or something like that.
Do you do this like a— like a massage?
It's basically foam rolling, but on steroids.
Like, I go to a doctor 2 days a week and get it done on my calves.
Yeah, I knew— I knew you would do this as a— as a— as a full Chad. You, of course, are like, you know, all the way in on this. It's basically he has these trigger point balls and these different torture devices, I'll call them. And he's like, all right, so I've done foam rolling before. It's okay. It's kind of boring, a little bit painful, not the most fun thing in the world. And it was always recommended to me like, hey, just you should foam roll tomorrow morning or tonight. That'll help you with your soreness. And I was like, yeah, sure. Right after I eat my broccoli and asparagus and say my prayers and get to bed by 9:00 PM.
Of course.
Yeah.
I'll also foam roll. Why not?
Added to the other list of shit I'm not gonna do that I should do. And so with this, we do, we now, he, the way he got me to do it, he is like, the first 25 minutes of every workout we're doing this. So he'll be like, all right, find this spot like in your hip flexor and take this like rock hard ball and you're just gonna like put all your body weight on that thing and wherever it feels most painful, that's the spot. And I'm like, oh my God. He's like, yeah. He's like, he'll hear, hear me like basically wincing and groaning in pain. And he's like, all right, cool. Just, you found it. Now stay there for 3 and a half minutes. And I'm like, 3 and a half minutes? And so this has turned out to be, I bring this up because A, I find it interesting. I think there's a lot of fitness movements that have a business-like angle to them. And I feel like you've been ahead of the curve on a lot of this. You were on ATG or the kind of like knees over toes stuff before most people. And in general, what do you call it? Movement therapy or something like that?
Movement therapy? Yeah. Mobility.
Mobility training, this myofascial, cardio release. Like, I think this is also like an area where the, the puck is going and more people are gonna be interested.
Well, it's like, uh, and you feel amazing as soon as it's done, right?
Like you feel absolutely amazing, uh, when it's done. But the, the part of it that I find interesting is basically I, for me, working out is not like I want to get as jacked and shredded as possible. It's basically like I want a part of my day where I'm not at my computer sitting down, I'm not on my phone, I'm not even thinking about work.. And I know that could be other things. It could be meditation or whatever, but like a way, a way more achievable form of meditation for me is exercise. Exercise where I basically, I'm only focused on the thing that's right in front of me, like being absolutely present. 'Cause there's like a giant weight that's about to fall on my face or hurt. I'll hurt my shoulder or I'll, I'll injure myself. Or I'm like in extreme pain doing this like trigger point massage or whatever. And I'm not, I can't go anywhere else. I can't think about the past. I can't fantasize about the future. I can't worry about what notification just buzzed on my phone. And I'm just like out of it for at least 1 hour a day. And for me, that became the real like benefits of this more than like, oh, you know, I'm getting more fit or I have more energy or whatever. It's like, it forces me to do that, like the, like the real version of meditation. So that's what I like about it the most.
Dude, I told you what Scott Galloway said, right? He is like, the whole point, he said this in an interview and I thought it was amazing as, as like, I've been trying to say that, but you just said it so much better. He said in the interview with Ryan Holiday, he goes, basically, I think the whole, like, if you are not fit enough that you can kill and eat most people in the room or outrun them, then you have a problem and you should like work. You should, he's like, I pretty much just exercise just so I can kill and eat most people in a room or just be able to outrun them. And he said that, and I was like, oh yeah, that's actually— that's the way to go. That's the way to live.
That is so stupid. That's the part where I'm like, okay, I don't even want to be a part of this movement anymore. Like, why is that? How is that even relevant? That's like saying, you know, I want to be fast in case an asteroid is going to hit the Earth and I got to get out of the way. It's like, what are you talking about? What is this scenario where you need to eat and kill or run away from everybody in the room? Has this ever—
no, that's your entire lifetime happened. That's, that's at all not like— it's like, it's more like, why does a car need to go 120 20 miles an hour when the speed limit's 60. Like it just doesn't cause it's just, it doesn't know, but it's awesome that it does. And because it can, that makes it just a little bit cooler. Are you ever going to drive 160 miles an hour? No, of course not. But like, I still want that Ferrari just cause I want to know I can do it. And like the act of training to get to be able to do it is awesome. So do I intend to eat you? Eh, TBD, probably not, but like, it's cool that I could, like, if I wanted to, I could do X, Y, and Z to you. And just training for that, I think, is awesome.
I would taste horrible. Like, if you're going to eat somebody, I'm not your guy, you know?
Dude, I heard the best place to eat someone is their— is like their thumb right here. I heard that's like—
that does— it does actually look like a chicken drumstick, actually, now that you think about it, right? Like that little— that little section.
Yeah, I heard that's the best part.
I always thought calf would be the way to go because that looks like the giant, like, turkey leg at Disneyland. I thought— I thought, yeah, but would be where I would do muscular parts.
Muscular parts aren't good. You know, you want fat. The fatter the part is, is the better. Your calves are pretty lean compared to the rest of your body.
It's just your butt basically.
Then you're gonna eat your butt and your belly. Yeah, you ever had pork belly, man? That shit's good.
It is. It's amazing. Salmon belly, fantastic. And pretty much any belly.
Yeah, you want the fat.
I'm a belly guy. All right, I think we've gone off the rails and we will—
we started with Kanye and we ended with eating each other.
What part of each other would we want to eat? Uh, we have fun. All right, see you.