3 Anti-Comfort Businesses That Are Making Millions

What does Nate Diaz say?

One of our favorite fighters, he goes, stay ready so I don't have to get ready.

Nate goes, warriors are always ready to roll, right?

I'm a ninja. Ninjas don't warm up. Uh, I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days off on the road. All right, we're live, Sean. And to the listener, at the end of the, this next 10 minutes, little opener I have for you, I'm going to need you to make a promise to me. And I need the listener to do the same to themselves. Now, before I get to that promise, let me tell you a little story. So there's this guy named Marcus Elliott. I read about him in this wonderful book called The Comfort Crisis. And Marcus Elliott is an interesting guy. You can Google him. He's like this ripped older guy now. He's a doctor, whatever. But his story is that he got his MD from Harvard and he thinks he's going to go down this route of being a doctor. But he kind of hates it. He's not really into it. And so he goes into sports, a world, you know, a lot more than I, uh, than I do. And he decides to work for the Patriots. And the Patriots had an issue where they had something like 21 hamstring pulls per year. And they're like, dude, our guys keep getting hurt. It's losing us millions of dollars. Help us out. So Dr. Elliott helps them out and they reduce their hamstring pulls by, uh, to, to only 3 per year. The MLB sees this and they're like, hey, You're the man. Come and do that for us. He works for the, uh, Major League Baseball and he helps reduce injuries significantly. Eventually he opens up his own facility where athletes, all types of athlete, basically most NBA players, a lot of baseball players, they go and he's got this beautiful facility where they do like 3D analytics and they look at your body and they're like, you have a weakness here. You have a strength here. Let's capitalize on this. We need to fix this. Otherwise you're going to get hurt. And so LeBron, all these guys go to him. And so. The picture I'm trying to paint here, super data-driven scientific guy. He's all about the numbers, whatever. However, there's this one thing that I read about him that didn't exactly fit with what he talked about, and it got me super invigorated. And this is where the promise that, uh, I'm gonna need from you in about 5 minutes comes into play. So there's this thing called misogyny. You've never heard of misogyny, have you?

I think I've been called one, a misogynist or something.

Is that—

no, something else. Sorry. What do you want to do?

Jesse calls it kind of like his one— it's like his one big annual mission or challenge or adventure that he's gonna go on, right? His misogi.

Masogi or misogi, you know, I've been calling it misogi, but it's one of those words that you read, you don't say.

To each their own. Yeah.

Today we're— it's a masogi day, bitch.

Does he list them somewhere? You said he's been doing this for years. What are like, I need some, I need, I need some options. Cause, uh, I would have never thought of carrying a rock underwater, 80-pound rock underwater for 3 miles. That's, it's hard to even brainstorm. Does he have good ones?

Yeah. So they, they, they can be fairly random. And so he actually chooses to not train a lot for them. But in your case, it could be like, today I'm gonna walk 30 miles, or today I'm gonna walk 20 miles. And you actually don't, a lot of times you don't wanna plan for it too much because then that gives you too much of an edge to actually get it done. Or it could be like, I'm going to, in your case, it could be, I'm gonna carry two 45-pound kettlebells for 10 miles, and that will take you probably 12 hours, something like that. Like a crazy challenge. Or, uh, you're going to ride your bike from LA to San Francisco. Uh, just like a crazy challenge like that. That is only a 50% chance of completing it. And so I need you to have one of those.

What about you? What's yours?

I've picked one. So this, this, this August, I'm doing a 50-mile running race and I'm going to try and run that race at 10-minute-per-mile pace. Which is really challenging for me. And the most challenging part is I don't even know I'm going to be able to finish this, but, or because I think I'm going to get hurt. I think like there's a good chance I get hurt just training for it, but I want you to pick one.

Let me tell you why I like this. Let me tell you why I like this. Number one, anything that's like, there's this Japanese word that we don't have. I always love the end of those sentences. So that's the first thing. The first company I ever started was called Sabe, Sabe Sushi. And Sabe is this word that the Japanese have for basically finding beauty in the imperfection of things. And like, we just don't have that word in English. And, and, you know, so I like this anytime there's a Japanese word that we don't have the equivalent of. Second thing I like about this, I like the way that he did it where it's not a thing you're training for all year that you know about. You kind of said both ways. You were like, you prepare all year and then you do the thing. But then you also said he would just be like, F it today, clear the schedule. We're doing a really hard thing. I found a hard thing. We're doing the really hard thing. Today is the day. It, it's not about preparation. It's about guts. It's about courage. It's about being in a ready state of mind and a ready physical state all year so that whenever adventure calls, you can do it. I kind of like that a lot more.

Yeah. So Jesse Itzler is the one who adapted it to the 364 days. He, that was a beautiful phrasing, I think, but it is more so are you ready to do this? And so you have to be ready at all times. What does Nate Diaz, what does Nate Diaz say? One of our favorite fighters.

He goes, stay ready so I don't have to get ready.

Nate goes, warriors are always ready to roll, right?

I'm a ninja. Ninjas don't warm up. So I do like the idea of misogi. I am down to do a misogi. I want to kind of brainstorm what a fun one might be, or I might just go the other way, which is to say, sometime in the next, let's call it 3 months, I'm going to find something. I will notice something, a challenge that kind of scares me. And that's the day that I have to do it. That's the day. Cancel the podcast, cancel the meetings. I got to do this. And you know, one misogi that I think everybody could take right now, one mission is to go to youtube.com, type in My First Million and subscribe to the channel because we have crossed 400,000 subs. And I got to tell you, dude, I'm at gymnastics yesterday and, uh, you know, gymnastics is basically like part kids gymnastics, part like Fatherhood Anonymous. It's like all dads in there with their daughters usually. And, um, we're all just, you know, taking part. So one guy, he goes, hey, were you the guy who did that? Did you talk to Tony Robbins? I was like, oh yeah. He's like, dude, I saw you on YouTube. And I was like, oh yeah, that's great. Did you watch it? He's like, yeah, it was awesome. He's like, what is that? I was like, oh, I got this podcast. Next week he comes in and he goes, dude, I saw 3 more episodes. Really like it. He goes, he goes, you know, I'm impressed. You guys got like 400-something thousand subscribers, but also I feel like you should have a million. I was like, wow, the audacity to just tell me how many subscribers. But he said it in a complimenting way. He was like, he's like, you guys are dropping gold. He's like, that thing about the A+ problems. I love that shit, man. That was, that was good. He's like, I'm surprised you don't have a million subscribers. And I was like, I'm surprised too. So to save me from future gymnastics embarrassment, go to YouTube, subscribe to the channel.

All right. That's a, that's a great reason.

All right. So back to Misogi. So the, I like the idea of the challenge. I accept, I will find what it's going to be. Um, but you know what I really like about this? I have avoided things like this. Like anytime somebody's like, oh, I'm doing an ultra, ultra man race, or I'm like, you know, doing what I don't even know what these things are called. They're like a hard thing. Yeah, I'm doing, I'm doing a warrior jog. It's like, all right, bro. All right, cool. I'm not big into the David Goggins thing. In fact, I've kind of built my brand on the work smarter, not harder, or like, hey, I'm a counterpoint to the idea that you got to work hard to achieve your dreams. Like, I don't know, I didn't work that hard. I achieved my dreams, right? Like it's, it's worked pretty well for me. However, I do think that the real value of this is not the physical challenge. It is the mental. Challenge. And I mean that in the least corny way possible, which is like, I imagine if you do one of these, it removes one layer of feeling limited in your life. It's like, well, if I did that shit and that was so hard, I did not think I could do it. I did not think I could push through, but I pushed through. I did it. I was scared of it and I did it anyways. I acted in the face of fear. I feel like that's the value and not obviously how many miles you ran or how strong your body was to be able to do that thing.

That's absolutely the value. The value, I think, that to do a lot of these things physically, I think most people could do them if they tried really hard.

I have a challenge back to you. You gave me a challenge that's going to be very hard for me because, you know, I'm a lazy motherfucker. I'm a dainty guy. I don't really get my— I don't like getting my hands scraped up. So I accept your challenge, but I'm going to give you one back. So you gave me what I'll call the macro challenge. The big, hard spectacle challenge, right? I'm going to climb this mountain with my fingernails, like whatever, some shit like that. I'm going to give you the micro, the micro challenge that I've given myself many times, and I've actually never completed this, but I've tried many times that I'll give you because I think for people like you, the hard thing, honestly, let's be honest, is not that hard. You're going to do this 50-mile thing. You're going to succeed at it. And you know that. That's the thing about you, dude. You know you could do stuff like this. That's why you're attracted to this.

Just be honest. I'm attracted to it because I love the glory of like getting it done. And I love like proving to myself, but no, I'm scared.

You believe you will get it done, but you believe you will get it done.

I believe I will get it done. Okay.

Agreed. Here's a hard one for you for the next 24 hours or for any 24-hour period. I challenge you to not be bothered by anything for 24 hours, a zero complaint and a zero bothered 24-hour challenge. See if you could do it. It is so hard. I have tried this for like 3 years and I've tried it like consciously, meaning like, okay, today I'm going to do it probably at least 50 times and I'm over 50, but I get closer and closer each time. And it really points out, it's like, damn, I threw it all away for that just because that little thing happened.

And is it challenging? Is it so I can't complain about something mentally or, or, or only verbally?

I, I think that's a great challenge. And I, I wanna, I wanna wrap this up and I'll only spend, uh, uh, 2 minutes on this, but there's 3 challenges that I think are interesting if the, if they interest you.

I don't think, I don't think you could do the, uh, we'll see. One, and we gotta talk about, this is like a business podcast. These guys have turned these into businesses. The first one is called The Speed Project. I keep seeing people talk about this, but check this out. It's an underground race, meaning there's no website. You, you can't really find details about it. I don't even, you have to apply for it and I don't even know how you apply for it, but it's a race from Santa Monica to Las Vegas. You get 4 friends to do it and you, and there's no rules. There's no route. They just show up at the start line and they go, all right, go see you in Vegas. And the, and the organizers go to Vegas and the first group of people who arrive and you have to run the whole time and you can't go on highways. Those are the only 2 rules. The first people who get it, they win. The second one, and this is called The Adventurous, of which we've talked about. They do this thing called a Monkey Run where you're on a mini motorcycle throughout Africa and it's something like 1,000 miles or something like that. And it takes like, uh, 8 days or something like that. These guys are hilarious.

I met with the owner. Are these the guys with the amazing website copy?

The amazing website copy. I met with the owners. They're doing millions a year, uh, in revenue. And I actually think this could be a potentially much larger business than it already is. I think it's a decent business. So let's, let's go into this. All right. So website.

Great branding. These guys are masters of branding.

I remember— wait, listen to this. So, and we'll talk about branding, but listen to this. And then once you get accepted, the registration fee is you have to bring a license plate. For some reason, a license plate. You have to bring flannels, socks, and underwear because that's what this Lazarus Lake guy, that's what he needs to, in order to live throughout the rest of his ear and a vial of blood. And the race starts not with a gunshot. It's when Lazarus Lake lights his cigarette. And that's when the race starts. And he made a video a few years ago where he goes, he was trying to, it was like a clickbait video where he goes, women are physically not capable of completing this race. And he goes on to say why. And he goes, and if you think I'm wrong, come and prove me wrong. No woman has ever done it. Well, this year a woman finally did it. She's one of the, I think only 18 people have ever finished this race. And now she's one of them. And so he does this hilarious branding stuff and Google this guy. He looks like a redneck hillbilly who wears Walmart camouflage and like fluorescent red hats, like he's going hunting and he smokes cigarettes all day. And he just thinks of all these insane obstacles that he could have. And so yes, the branding on these things are amazing. And it's just so, it's so fun. So, uh, to create these things. And I think there's a lot of interesting opportunities here. You just have to do whatever you think is opposite of the right thing about business.

Look at the branding of this thing. Well, just, I'm just on this guy's Wikipedia page. I've never heard of this one. So, um, Trail Runner magazine calls him an evil genius, the Leonardo da Vinci of pain. So good. Uh, like his icon, which is him in the orange beanie lighting up the cigarette. Genius. The kind of like, you have to try so hard just to even get to the starting line. Like I remember we did one of those like a Spartan Race or Tough Mudder or whatever once and, uh, You have to climb a wall to get to the starting line. It's like before the race. Yeah. You better get through this wall. If you can't get through this wall, you're not— you should not even do this race. You started this by talking about the comfort crisis. I think there's something to this deep inner knowing that we've all become very soft and people are willing to pay for pain, which sounds insane, but it also probably would have sounded insane back in the day when we all worked on fields and did labor that we'd be like, yeah, you know what? At some point we're all just going to sit all day for our work. And so then there'll be a place with heavy objects. You'll just go voluntarily pay a membership fee and you'll go there just to lift, lift heavy objects, you know, like to move them somewhere. No, it's like, well, there must be crops that we're lifting. No, no, they're just metal. So you just lift it, then what do you do? You put it down.

Yeah. You lift it, put that down again.

Yeah.

Like 3 sets of 5.

What are you talking about? And so I think these are just the modern day gyms, right? Like these are the modern day gyms. And the beautiful part about this is not only do you get the pain, you get a story to tell too. You get to go, you get the social, social cred, which is the key part of all these businesses.

I heard this quote the other day from the CEO of a luxury brand and he goes, the definition of luxury is dominating your customer. And I was like, that's one of the greatest things I've ever heard.

Because if you think about it, dude, say that again. That's an MFM classic right there. What, who said this?

I heard it on Acquired, the podcast. I think it's attributed to the guy who runs Louis Vuitton Group. And I think, what's his name?

Yeah. And he goes, I think, but he says, he goes, luxury means dominating your customer. And what's that mean? So Ferrari, in order to buy a Ferrari, you have to get on a waitlist. If you want to sell your Ferrari after you're done with it, you can't. You've got to like jump through all these hoops. If you want to go and buy a Louis bag, I believe you have, in many cases, you have to go set up an appointment. To go and, um, and actually purchase the thing. And so I heard this quote, and this has changed so much of my thinking, uh, and it relates to this race, it relates to other things, of making your customer jump through hoops in order to acquire the good makes it so much more valuable. The problem is, is that's really hard to pull off. But if you can pull it off, you have the, the will and discipline in order to like take this risk, it's pretty badass, and it creates a true cult.

I I think that's an awesome insight. I'd like to tell you about a luxury brand that I was going to bring up anyways. Now, when you think of luxury, typically you'll think of what, like Louis Vuitton, like, you know, these sort of, uh, fashion, fashion brands, right? Yeah. How much does a Louis Vuitton bag cost?

A cheap one maybe is $2,500. I imagine a really expensive one is $20,000.

he's doing it right now.

No, this guy just posted about the store, but I guess it's this Brandy Melville store that's doing it. But I just thought this is a very smart thing that this company is doing. Selling this gear there, and I've seen kind of like the demand for US college elite universities as like a Louis Vuitton style, uh, you know, symbol.

Do you want to know a little bit of history? This is very weird, but I recently read a book called How Japan Saved American Fashion. And the story is basically after World War II, America takes over Japan. The Japanese are like, these Americans are going to come over and crush us. Well, uh, America's rule at the time was we're going to try and be kind and hopefully they're going to, we're going to buy some goodwill and it's going to turn out okay. And they did. And so these Japanese start becoming friends with the American soldiers. They start learning about American culture. And for some reason, this guy named Kensuke Ashizu, he creates this fashion brand and he calls it Ivy Prep Fashion. And, and so he like sees old pictures, or they're not old, but at the time from the '50s of like Brooks Brothers ads. He just sees these 'cause one of the American soldiers has it and he goes, wow, everyone who lives on Harvard's campus must dress like a Brooks Brothers magazine. We're gonna make this popular. And at the time, the Japanese were very conservative with their dress. The prep fashion was considered a little bit less conservative. And so he makes this a huge thing. It becomes a massive company. And that's one of the reasons why in, in some Asian cultures, this Ivy League prep is popular over there. It turns out, yeah, it's very popular there. But it turns out he ran this business for 10 years without ever going to America. So he goes, I need to finally get over there to America and see what it's all about. He goes to the campus of Harvard and he walks around, he's like, You guys are wearing like cargo shorts. Why aren't you dressed like the magazines? And so have you ever like hung out with some of your like, uh, Asian friends who just came over and they dress a lot nicer than you and they like, they like wear better American fashion. That, that's kind of what happened with this like whole fashion trend was like, we took the American style, but we cranked it up to the extreme. So we're now like more American. We're, we're, they're the American caricature as opposed to what they really are.

And so at Duke. So Duke is kind of like these old school, the campus looks very much like Yale or whatever. It's like the Ivy of the South, they call it. There was a guy named Bobo, and I don't know what his real name was. I think his last name was like Bobadilla or something like that, but everybody called him Bobo. And I think he was in the international dorm, but this guy would always walk around dressed to the nines. So he had the vest, the blazer, and he was wearing khakis. He would never wear shorts. He would never wear athleisure shit. And he had a rolling briefcase that he would take with him to every single class. No backpack. And he had that kind of like the beret type of cap. And at first we all kind of laughed at him, but by week 3, we're like, the boba looks pretty fly, actually. And I think that's what happened. This guy came over internationally, was like, I think this is how I'm supposed to dress. That's all he had in his wardrobe. It was amazing.

Yeah. And that tends to happen. I've had a bunch of Asian friends who come over and I'm like, dude, you are dressed as if you read an American magazine and think that That's how we all behave and you look way better than us.

Well, this gave me an idea, which was like, you know, how do you just, how do you put a 10% remix on an idea? So, um, I don't know if you read my 5-Tweet Tuesday thing I sent out, but I had this one picture in there. Do you see the McDonald's merch I put in there? No. So there's this guy on Twitter. He's a, he's a great follow. He's, uh, I don't know how you say his name. It's like the most French name I've ever seen. Guillaume Huynh. I don't know how you say it. Um, he's the senior marketing director at McDonald's. He's the ex-head of social. He tweeted this thing out. I follow this guy and he's great. He just has like really great McDonald's, like marketing stuff that I like to follow. And so he tweeted this thing out. He goes, the merch from McDonald's France is a big oui, like a big yes. And, um, there's this jacket that just looks so fly. And I'm like, oh my God, I want this jacket. This jacket looks amazing. I never wanted a McDonald's jacket until now. I must have this McDonald's jacket. And it kind of gave me this idea, which is if you take this kind of like luxury, high fashion streetwear type of like designer, but you use them on licensed IP, that's usually pretty low end casual. You get kind of an interesting result. So he did it with McDonald's. I, when I saw this college thing, I was like, oh, you know, the college gear that pretty much every store sells is the same. It's sweatshirts, it's hoodies, it's like sweatpants and like t-shirts. And nobody really takes those, that same IP and does it in kind of high fashion or any kind of like luxury interesting or streetwear. Yeah. Or streetwear. And I think that would be a good remix that you could do.

I agree on this. I agree. It's awesome. I totally agree. I actually own 4 or 5 different Ivy League sweatshirts because I got so obsessed with this. I took tours of them. I always tell people I toured Harvard once. It's like I bought a Groupon. I have a Harvard sweatshirt. But I completely agree. I've got my Stanford one. I completely agree. I'm into this.

I really want to do this with company brands. So I want to create a, like a rogue merch company that just does absurd merch for, for tech companies. Because, for two reasons. One, all merch is, all corporate merch is the same. It's the same thing. It's all hoodies, t-shirts, backpacks, vests, like the same socks, like the same shit. Um, and it all tends to be pretty cheap. And I just thought it'd be interesting if you sold, if you did a merch company called the Absurd Merchandise Corporation, um, or the Ridiculous Merchandise Corporation. And so I was like, well, what we would do is you take, first you make categories that are not already made. So for example, um, when you were at The Hustle and you guys did ad sales, did your sales team have a gong? Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, man, dude, if I had, if I could purchase like a really cool old Apple or like, remember how Apple used to have the, the Apple that was a rainbow or how Microsoft had the, the four squares that the retro vintage throwback stuff.

I went on Etsy the other day looking for this stuff and I bought a bunch of things on Etsy of like vintage retro. Tech stuff. There's not a lot out there, but I was inspired because I went out to dinner with our buddy Greg Eisenberg and Greg shows up. I haven't seen Greg in a few years and he's like a cool guy. And Greg's very cool. Greg has, Greg is like mood music. Like if you just hang out with Greg, your head starts to nod almost like there's music playing and you're like, why am I just in a good mood? Why is my foot tapping? It's because you're hanging out. It's like there's a Greg Eisenberg within 10 feet of you. So I'm hanging out with him and I'm like, Is that an IBM jacket? Have you ever seen his IBM jacket?

No, but was it old?

So he's got like a 1980s IBM windbreaker jacket.

That's awesome.

And it doesn't quite fit exactly right, but I'm like, I'm like, where did you get this, dude? What is this? He's like, I was in Japan. And I was like, okay, of course. And so he goes, I was in Japan and I'm on a train and I'm sitting next to this guy, this older guy, and he's wearing this jacket. And I'm like talking to him. He's great. We have a great conversation. And at the end of the conversation, he gave me his jacket. I was like, what? Most Greg Eisenberg thing to do, strike up a great conversation with somebody to the point where they're just like, I like you. Here's my jacket. And so he's got this jacket. And when I told Greg, I go, dude, you should just turn this into one of those, like, one of those things that exists in the world for no reason, but is awesome, which would be, you should, next time you have an amazing conversation with somebody. You have to give them the jacket and then they have to give the next person the jacket and let's see how far the jacket goes. And so I kind of want to start this and I want to, so I bought one off Etsy and I was like, I'm going to buy this jacket and I'm going to do this. The next time I have an awesome conversation, I'm going to give it to them and I'm going to say, the next time you have just a lovely conversation that just leaves you lit up with somebody who just spontaneous, serendipitous, not somebody you know, you must give them the jacket and let's see. And then when you give them the jacket, I'm going to make like a Google Doc, be like, jacket handed to Japanese man on train, you know, with a date. And let's just see how far this jacket goes.

You better buy some old stuff. Otherwise the person will be like, no thanks, I'm good. You can— no, it's yours. You can keep it. Um, dude, pick one of these other topics. Some of these sound like they might be funny and I feel like laughing. What do you got?

Okay. I got a funny one. Uh, if you want it funny, I got a funny one. This is— Some people are going to be like, you shouldn't make fun of this, but that's what this podcast is.

I'm in.

I'm in. It's an honest conversation amongst friends. And so did you see the Marissa Mayer new app launch?

No. What happened?

Oh my God, dude. Wow. This is, this is insane. Okay. So Marissa Mayer, who do you know her backstory? Who she is?

Early at Google, one of the first 20 Google people climbed her way up. Gets wealthy and then becomes CEO of Yahoo.

She created the product manager, like, program at Google, which then trained a bunch of people who then went on to go work at Facebook, a whole bunch of product people. It's like this long family tree. So she, and she's famous. She was like, you know, tested the shade of blue on the, of the Google search button, you know, 42 times before finding the optimal shade of blue, right? Like, you know, whatever. So it's supposed to be like, you know, high product chops. Goes and then becomes the CEO of Yahoo. She's this amazing CEO apparently, but then kind of like Yahoo falters. So people are kind of like, was she good? Was she bad? I don't know. Maybe it was hard to turn that around. Anyways, I haven't heard from her in a little while. So she comes out of nowhere and just posts a Twitter thread and is like, you ever been at a party and you, uh, and somebody says, hey, share that photo with me. And then they don't. Well, I'm going to solve that problem with my new app Shine. And all I want you to do is so, so look at this app. So she. It's 2024. She creates a photo sharing app, which is like the most 2012 thing possible that you could do, which is the last time anybody heard of Marissa Mayer. It's like she was frozen in time and somebody unfroze— somebody like thawed her out and she popped out and just made the same app you would make in 2012 when the iPhone was like, you know, just popping and people were doing photo sharing apps. So she posts this thing and you'll see that the thread has like thousands of like, you know, retweets and whatnot. And the reason why is because Some people are like, oh, this is cool. And a lot of people are like, why is this the ugliest app I've ever seen? Look at the design of this app. So just look at the pictures. I want you to give me your reaction. And then I want to read you some of the funny comments that I saw on this.

Uh, she's maybe past her prime in terms of, uh, knowing what's up, like knowing what's cool, right?

I think so. Basically, the thing looks like a TestFlight app. Like everything is rectangular. All the colors, all the buttons are too big. All the colors are too boring. The font she chose for the main thing, literally, like somebody retweeted this, they go, okay, cool. But why does it look like an Indian wedding invitation? Which is so spot on. The font literally is the Aladdin font. It's crazy.

Why is she, why is she doing it? So Marissa Mayer is probably, I bet you if she's not a billionaire, I bet you she's like, yeah, hundreds of millions within that ballpark. Why is she doing this? This seems like way beneath her.

I mean, it's fun to build things, and I think she felt this problem of like, oh, it's hard to do group photo sharing at events. Uh, you go to a party and you want to see everybody's pictures, and it's not easy to do still. And there was a famous app, Color, that tried to do this way back in the day. Many, many people have tried to do the same app, and, uh, maybe it's time, or maybe it's time to hire a designer. One of the two things are true, and we're gonna find out which one it is.

I like her. I like this woman a lot. I hope, I hope she wins. I'll leave it at that.

Oh, did we do a good cop, bad cop thing there? I like that.

That was nice. You like her too. I mean, she seems great.

I mean, I don't know her.

I don't know her either, but her Wikipedia left a wonderful impression on the Reddit.

Here's the thing. If you are successful and famous and you put out a product and the product looks ugly, it's not— my personal belief is that it's not mean to say that the app looks really ugly. And I'm not the only one to say this. There's a lot of people saying this. I found it very funny that this was the case. That's all I'm saying. I wish her well and I have nothing against her personally. I do not know her. And she's obviously very smart, more successful than me, smarter than me, and all those usual disclaimers.

All right. You do one more thing.

Well, all right. It's time for the Thrill of the Shill, which, as you know, is when we shill one of our companies. But before we shill, we thrill you with something interesting. And all right. So here's the interesting thing. So me and Nick Huber, we're part owners of Shepherd, but we, one of the things we've done that's been pretty cool is we do these like workshops or, You know, haters will call them webinars and our fans call them workshops. So we do this together and I thought going in, I was like, okay, cool. So what are we going to do? Just show up and be like, you Shepherd? And he's like, no, no, no. Like, let's add a bunch of value. It's like, okay. He's like, so let's talk about the stuff we're doing in our companies that actually works. That's non-obvious. And like, kind of was an unlock for you as a CEO or manager. Like your life before you did this tactic was one way and after was better. And so I'm big on that. I'm like, oh great, I'm going to shine here. And we get on and Nick tells a story that's so good that I'm like, where the hell did he get that from? That was awesome. And I had to follow that. And I was like, oh yeah, I do metrics and KPIs. Uh, you know, just whatever. Nick's thing was so good. I didn't even need to say anything else. So Nick comes in there and he starts talking about a monkey on a desk. Have you heard this story? No.

Okay. So.

How did he tie in Shepherd?

Well, he's like, you know, look, uh, you need, you need to hire great people. When you hire them, it's not like, like, yes, Shepherd will help you find great people, right? That's what we do. We're like, in, you know, you need a bookkeeper, you need an assistant, you need a marketing manager, you need somebody to do SEO for you. Whatever it is that you need, we'll find you the person. But if you're not good at actually delegating them, you're not going to ultimately get what you want out of this. You didn't come to us just for the hire. You came to us to have your problem solved with less workload for you, right? To scale your business with less work for you. That's actually why you come to Shepherd, not just to hire a person. And so his big thing was like, if we can help people actually learn how to delegate, then they're going to end up hiring more people because they're going to have successful hire after successful hire, right? You're going to have one great experience and it's going to lead to the next great experience. And so that's kind of how we tied it in. But I really like this monkey on the back thing. And I started to see it then. And every time I would come to, you know, an employee would come in with a problem. I would, you know, quickly differentiate between do we need to talk about this now or should we just have time when we talk about things? And secondly, how do I make sure that they're not just giving me the problem? And my instinct is a problem solver. I'm a doer and I trust myself more than I trust anyone else. So my instinct is just to do it myself just this one time. But that just this one time mentality never ends.

But you, you don't catch me as a regular one-on-one meeting type of guy, but are you?

Yeah, yeah. All the competitors, all the companies that are like doing this, like the companies are starting now, I think they're having a tough time or a much tougher time. It's not really going to work out in the long run, but the ones that have been doing this for like 4, 5, 6, 7 years, they're benefiting from like this, like Work went remote, right? When work went remote, that was a big deal. Having offshore talent is just like a smart thing to do. It's just like more remote. That's fine. It's no, no extra organizational cost to you. Right? The second thing during the zero interest rate, you know, period, everything was about growth, growth, growth. Nobody cared about profits. Now everybody cares about profits. Well, one of the biggest costs to every business is their labor. And if you can basically reduce your labor costs by even percentage points, that all drops straight to the bottom line. And so your EBITDA goes up. When your EBITDA goes up, the company value goes up. That became the focus for a lot of real companies now. And I think the last thing is that, I don't know, people like me and others have started to talk more openly. Like it used to be, and maybe still is, I don't know, kind of a douchey thing to be like, my assistant or whatever. Like I have an assistant. Like it's kind of like a thing most people didn't brag about or talk about. But a lot of people are now more open about like, Hey, here's what I, here's what I did. Here's how it's benefited me. Here's how, here's the systems I used to set it up so that if you're in a similar position, maybe that'll benefit you. And I think that gospel started to spread.

It was also more fringe. So like, for example, before COVID it was like, this company's all remote. Wow. That's so crazy. It's almost as crazy as like a company serves lunch. That's insane. They have like free washer, like they'll clean your clothes.

He doesn't wear like deodorant. Old choice.

Like it was, it was insane. And then Shepherd and a couple other people actually did a really good job of kind of repositioning it. Uh, they packaged it a lot nicer because obviously Upwork has been around forever, but it was still considered, uh, low status a bit where it was like, oh, I just used Fiverr and like, I can't believe it actually worked. Whereas now companies like Sheppard, you guys, like, like your team is your team and it doesn't matter which country they're in, you know what I mean? And so they've done a good job of, of repositioning it to make it seem, well, it did not make it seem because it is the same thing, but It just, it made it feel better.

If you're not hiring with Shepherd Overseas, are you racist? I don't know. It's just an open question. Just putting that out there for the, for the, uh, for the masses. All right. Enough of the, enough of the thrill, enough of the shill.

Yeah, this is amazing, dude. So, okay. Smart beds for special needs. The thing looks amazing. I don't know why this is special needs. I would love to sleep in something like this. This amazing cocoon of peace and solitude. Why would I not? With like padded walls and whatnot. This is amazing.

It's amazing. And, and if you go to the website, it looks awesome.

It's like, uh, this is better than Eight Sleep. This is better than the Purple Mattress. This is better than all those companies. I love this company.

And it costs— I don't, I don't know the exact price. I actually am not sure if they even put it on there because people's insurance pays for it, which is just a whole nother beast. I'm like, how on earth do you figure that out? But I think it costs $5,000 to $10,000. It's quite expensive. And they are selling the crap out of these. And I was telling them, I'm like, dude, not only is this an awesome business, this is like one of the few things that you can make where you can make a lot of money. And I think it's like actually good for the world and everything like that. Um, can you believe this guy pulled this off? Like, would you have had the same reaction to me as I did years ago?

No, I would have seen the genius in it and I would have invested on the spot and I would have told him, you're a legend for doing this.

Well, you and I are not the same.

We're a little different.

Uh, but I, I got to give it—

everybody bring your ideas to me, not Sam. He's a hater.

I got to give this guy—

you can go to Sam.

I got to give this guy a shout out. I think it was awesome. He told me a story I was like, dude, I haven't heard from you in like 8 years. That's so awesome.

I love that it's covered by insurance. I'm sure that was not simple to do that, to get that done. Um, but now you have this $14,000 bed. That's, uh, yeah, I just put it in my cart. It's about $14,000.

What are all the features that it has? So it has like a camera, a camera system that I guess is good and it has monitoring.

Yeah. Like the kind of safety, kind of like it's like a contained thing that has like soft, you know, walls and whatnot. So you can't get hurt. Um, It's a bed besides that.

Yeah. It vibrates. It has a light that comes, has a camera and it has lights that like dim with the sunset and come up with the, with the sunrise. It has cameras or it has speakers in there so it can help with meditation and like certain breathing patterns. It vibrates. It's pretty cool. It's a pretty cool bed and it's been totally bootstrapped.

I honestly think somebody should make this for adults. Am I wrong? Like, should there not be a version of this for like the Huberman acolytes who are like, You know, I need to optimize my sleep. Why not?

Yeah, I definitely think that this could work for, uh, I told one of our mutual friends who is definitely on the spectrum and his immediate reply was, yeah, they need to make these for adults. I want one.

Dude, I, um, I went to Rob Dyrdek's house and he has this Nap Pod in his office and it's like this thing, it's like a giant helmet. So he lays down and like his body is out of it.

That's so lame.

His like chest up is in this cocoon. And I don't know if it works. I don't know if it doesn't work. But if there is something like that that works, I would definitely pay. And in fact, I feel like that company should exist. If somebody's making that or somebody has one of these that works, please reach out to me. I want to, I want to learn about this.

Yeah, I, I think that Nap Pod is just absolutely ridiculous. I think a blanket and a couch will suffice, but what the fuck do I know? Clearly I'm wrong.

Congrats, CubbyBeds.

Good job. Uh, where do we go from here?

Maybe we wrap up. Maybe that's the pod.

All right. That's the pod.

I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.