3 Underdog Stories That’ll Get You Inspired This Week
In most areas of life, you shouldn't be hoping for like the miraculous save, right? The one thing that's just gonna turn your business around, or the, the person who's gonna meet you and just give you that opportunity, just hand it to you. But there is an exception.
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. All right, Sean, I wanna make you feel good. I wanna make the world feel good. I saw an inspirational story this weekend and I wanna share it with you, and it's gonna involve a little, some audio, and it involves pop culture, which you don't know anything about. So I, I think that some of our listeners might know about the story, but I think it'll be particularly cool for you. All right, so there's this singer-songwriter guy I love. His name's Noah Kahn. Have you heard of Noah Kahn?
Noah Kahn? I can't say I have.
He describes himself as the Jewish Ed Sheeran. So he's like a good songwriter, he's a great singer, he's good, but he's got a little folk in his, in his sound, almost like Mumford and Sons meets Ed Sheeran, but based out of Vermont. Like, do you know anything about like the, do you know anything about like New England, like folk music?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm into that kind of music actually.
So he graduated high school and decided not to go to college and was able to get a small record deal. The record deal, it was only okay. That sounds like a big deal, but it's like, you just kind of barely get by and they're almost like buying an option on you that you're going to be like a big deal. He has a couple songs that are kind of hits. I think one time he got to go on the Stephen Colbert Show and play one of his songs. I mean, that's pretty awesome, but if that's all you're known for is doing it one time, you're still kind of like, oh shit, like I gotta go get a job. I'm not sure if this is gonna work. So the pandemic hits. He's living in LA at the time trying to make it big, but he's like, shit, what am I gonna do? I guess I'll just go back home to Vermont where my parents live and I have a little bit more space. And he kind of like, gets depressed where he's like eating bad food and smoking weed all day. And he's like, what the hell do I, am I going to do with my career? I can't go out and play. Like, I'm a nobody right now. What am I going to do? So he's like, well, TikTok, I guess seems kind of neat. Let's try that. And so he starts posting some of his songs on TikTok and a few of them do okay. I think he gets like 50,000 followers or something like that. So again, it's like a mediocre success, but then one night he comes up. It took some 20 minutes and he writes a verse to a song. The song is called Stick Season and he plays this one verse on TikTok.
Weather, 'cause I see you when it rains. And Doc told me to travel, but there's COVID on the plane, so I am fucked. I'm fucked. I suck. You suck. This sucks. Fuck.
Alright, so this is just a 20-second video that he posts on TikTok. It's good, but he posts it and like 2 or 3 hours later, like no one replies. He's like, this sucks. I'm just going to delete this thing, but let me finish kind of getting high. Cause he said he was eating an edible when he posted this. He's like, let me finish getting high. He ends up passing out and sleeps through the night and he wakes up and this video gets like 200,000 likes. And like 100,000 comments. And he's like, shit, I better finish this song and actually complete this song because it sounds like people like this verse. Now he plays the rest of the song and you could actually see the full song that he plays.
As you promised me that I was more than all the miles combined, you must have had yourself a change of heart like halfway through the drive because your voice trailed off exactly as you passed my exit sign. Kept on driving Straight and left our future to the right. Now I am stuck between my anger and the blame that I can't face. And memories or something, even smoking weed.
All right, so this all happened in about 2021. So he finishes that song, it blows up. Now this guy's from New England. Last week he sold out Fenway, Fenway Park, the stadium, for like, you know, whatever, 50,000 people.
Yeah, I know I am no longer funny. Child, I miss the way you laugh. Once called me forever. Now you still can't call me back. And I love her more. This the season of—
So he writes that song, he puts it out, it blows up, it goes viral. The guy, in a matter of 3 years, goes from just a dude in his parents' house playing on TikTok, posting a verse of a song. And what's funny is that in 2019, right when he was doing this, he tweeted out, he goes, I'm probably not going to ever sell out Madison Square Garden. In fact, I'm probably not even going to sell all the shows that I have for this tour. But as long as you'll have me, I'll keep writing some songs. And he played Fenway Park and sold it out. And actually, a few days ago, he sold out Madison Square Garden 3 nights in a row. And I wanted to share this story with you because it makes me feel awesome. It also shows that if you put your shit out there, this is what the internet's for. If you put your stuff out there, even if it's incomplete, People love seeing progress.
Dude, that's right up my alley. So I have 2 or 3 things that that reminds me about. The first is I forgot who it was we were talking to recently, but we were— I was having a discussion and the idea came up that in most areas of life, you shouldn't be hoping for like the miraculous save, right? The one thing that's going to turn your business around or the, the person who's going to meet you and just give you that opportunity, just hand it to you. But there is in content an exception, which is that in content you're really one hit away. And just because your earlier stuff hasn't taken off doesn't necessarily mean it's bad. So you get a lot of false negatives, but then sometimes you get these breakout positives. And this is an example of that where, you know, the guy goes to sleep with no comment. You know, he's basically planning to just delete the video, thinks it was a bust, and he was just one hit away from his entire life changing. And there's something that's pretty magical about that when it comes to only a few areas of life. Like I think this is true in all the arts. So movies, music, content, but also even games. When we had Dan Porter on, he was talking about his company and his company was failing and he basically had a few weeks left and he's like, let's make one last game and I'll make it this time, even though I'm not a game designer. And he just made Draw Something. This is like stupid, simple app that just took off like wildfire. And so being one, being one hit away, it's sort of a last bullet in the chamber. That you can think about and sort of continue to operate with some hope on. I think that's pretty powerful.
Which implies, by the way, that you're taking lots of shots.
Dude, so my most viral Twitter thread was that Clubhouse thread when Clubhouse was like, you know, all the rage. And I came out and I posted this like really long thread, like 30, 40 tweets long about how I thought, you know, everybody thinks Clubhouse is going to take off or is the next big thing, but I don't think it's going to work. And the very first comment was this guy who worked at Facebook. And when we were getting acquired by Facebook, he was like the principal engineer who was like vetting all of our team. And I post this thread and you know, when you, you know, you push send, it's like that MailChimp GIF where the finger's shaking right above the button and you're like, you know, you're putting yourself out there a little bit. And his first thing is like, dude, this is way too long. Like nobody's going to read this. This is too much. And he said it in a way that wasn't even like a hater. He was just like concerned. Like, what What are you thinking, man? Like, this is ridiculous. And I was, I was straight up about to just delete the whole thing. And I just decided, let me just let it ride for like a couple more minutes. And then it started to just like immediately get a bunch of other positive replies. But I was very close to just deleting the thing right there. And that was a thread that went so viral that all of a sudden Malcolm Gladwell's following me and there's all these like crazy things going on in the next, you know, 3 days of my life because 10, 20 million people read that. And so it's just a reminder of don't count yourself out too early if it doesn't have the initial success. That's the first thing. Second thing, you found my fetish. I am a sucker for amateur singing talent. I have entire folders on YouTube and TikTok. I don't want to see like famous people on stage polished. I like, you know, when it's like this 7th grade boy and he just starts singing and like the rest of the class is like, what, Jacob? What, you could sing? And like there's all these clips on TikTok that are like that.. And I'm a sucker for that stuff. And you know who has a moment like that? Who? Justin Bieber.
Yeah.
You know, right? Get discovered on YouTube. You know who else got discovered a very funny way like that? You said this guy's the Jewish Ed Sheeran. Ed Sheeran himself. Have you heard the story of how Ed Sheeran got discovered?
No, I didn't. I didn't know he was discovered. I know that he's been famous since he was like 16, so I guess it must have been when he was young.
So there's a couple interesting things. We should play this clip, but there's a clip of Ed Sheeran on a talk show and he's like, everyone's like, oh, Ed, you're so talented, blah, blah, blah. He goes, listen to me when I was 14. He's like, I kind of started to blow up in my 17, 18, 19 age range. I got discovered. But here's me, 13, 14. And he plays an audio clip on his phone of him singing, and it is awful. It sounds like if I pick up a guitar right now and I genuinely tried to sing, it sounded that bad. He's like, yeah, I just— he's like, that's how I started. He's like, it was really bad. And he's like, I kept practicing. So what ended up happening with Ed Sheeran is he knows he wants to make it and he has like a little bit of a small following because he's from the UK. So he comes to LA and he's like, I'm going to, I'm going to just come to the mecca and just try to figure out how to make it in this scene here. And he does, he gets a couple of fortunate breaks. So he's, he goes to like an open mic night type of thing and he performs on stage and you never know who's in the crowd. In the crowd is Jamie Foxx's like business manager. And he sees him and he's like, oh, this white boy's good. He's like, uh, because he's like intrigued by him. So he tells Jamie the next day, he goes, Jamie, on your— Jamie was doing a radio show in the morning, he was hosting it. He goes, I have a guest for you. I want you to have this guy come on 5 minutes. So Ed Sheeran comes on Jamie Foxx's radio show. He plays his like, you know, 5-minute bit and Jamie Foxx is like, all right, I'm interested. So he's like, what's your deal, man? Who are you? Uh, you signed? What's your situation? He's like, no, I mean, I'm not only am I not signed, I'm homeless. I just came out here to LA. I don't have money. I don't have anything. So Jamie's like, come sleep on my couch. Yeah. And Jamie Foxx has actually done this with many artists that have gone on to make it. But he would just, he's like, if you have talent, you got something, he would just be like, just come stay at my house. I got tons of extra rooms. Just come stay here. And Jamie Foxx is notorious for throwing epic parties. He's got like, he's like one of the most connected guys in Hollywood because he's a movie star, he's a musician, he's just, he's, he's a comedian. He's very funny. And so he would throw these almost like salons where he'd get people from movies, from music, from comedy, all come hang out at his, at his house.
Neville, uh, Madora and Noah Kagan went to one of 'em and they told me all about it.
What did they say?
They said he has a piano there in the, in the other room and like people just slowly work their way towards the piano and it's almost like an open mic night.
He'll just start performing, right?
Yeah. And like he'll, Jamie starts and someone like raises their hand and someone else pops in and like, it's oddly a salon's a great way to describe it. It's like a, a place to discover one another.
Exactly. And so he, Ed Sheeran's there and he's, he, he, I think he does that. He like plays at one of the parties at night and people are like, oh, this is kind of cool. So the next night Jamie's like, all right, I'm gonna test this guy. So he takes him to some club that's basically like an all-Black club. And every artist on stage is like either slam poetry, rap, R&B, hip-hop. And then here you have this redhead, freckled teenage boy holding a ukulele, and they're like, and next, Ed Sheeran. And Ed Sheeran comes up on the stage and he's literally with a ukulele. And literally, Jamie Foxx is like, I was in the crowd. He's like, and my guy was like, man, Jamie, come on. Why you got to fuck up the vibe? Who is this guy? Why you got to put this guy on the stage? And so he improvises and he starts off doing his own song, and then he's like, all right, read the room a little bit. So he transitions into a freestyle version of 50 Cent's In Da Club while he's on his ukulele, basically. And he plays like an Ed Sheeran version of a 50 Cent rap. And literally during his performance, people get so hyped that the MC who was like pretty skeptical just gets on stage with him, starts performing. This girl gets up on stage, starts performing with him, and it just turns into this kind of thing. And Jamie goes, that's when I knew. If he can win over this crowd, he's gonna win. And then he made introductions and ended up getting him signed.
Dude, I love those stories. Doesn't that make you feel good? Yeah, that makes me feel so good. I love those stories. You have a, another inspirational story about my favorite thing on earth, the Olympics.
Yeah. So the Olympics is going on right now. The opening ceremony just happened and I saw this story that I hadn't heard before. You, you might know it cuz you're an Olympics guy. Have you ever heard of Eric the Eel?
No, I haven't heard this one.
Okay. No. So there's this guy Eric, and Eric is from Equatorial Guinea, which is, I guess, a country. And at the 2000 Olympics, it's happening in Sydney. There's this footage. So I, let me just work. I don't know who this guy is. I just see this footage. The footage is this, it's the Olympic swimming, like trial. And you see a guy, this black dude, he's got goggles on, trunks, and he's just feeling nervous. And there's two people next to him. And it's about, they're at the starting blocks and they're about to say go and the two other guys false start. They just jump in too early. This guy doesn't move. And so now this is the qualifying heat and his two competitors are disqualified. And so you're like, oh, well this guy gets a free run. But what you don't know is that this guy, Eric, who's about to, about to have a free pass into the thing, it's not a free pass. 'Cause this guy basically doesn't know how to swim.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And like some background. Basically in most cases to qualify the Olympics for the running or anything that's timed, there's a qualifier. So you have to hit a certain time. But for some countries, I don't know how they decide who they just get to have.
Like, it was, it is a wildcard draw. So it's like a lottery raffle.
Yeah. And they, and they go to the country and they go, just send us your best.
So, and so he wins this thing and he has 8 months now to prepare for the Olympic Games. Could you just imagine that? Like you randomly win this draw and in 8 months you're gonna be swimming in front of the whole world. This is a guy who's never left his home country. He's never swam before. And so he gets at, he's given access to a hotel and in the hotel there's a pool that he could swim in for an hour a day, 5:00 AM to 6:00 AM. The pool is 13 meters long. He's swimming in the 100-meter freestyle, so he is training in a 13-meter pool. He's gonna have to swim 10 times this distance in the thing, in the real Olympics. And he has 1 hour a day to train for 8 months. Now pretty quickly, Eric realizes like, all right, 1 hour a day, not gonna be enough. So he starts just going to rivers, oceans. He's just trying to learn to swim. He doesn't actually know how. He doesn't have a coach. And so when he's swimming in these rivers, there's literally fishermen who are watching him. They're like, son, you got to use your legs. What are you doing? And they're trying to teach him how to coordinate his body on a float. And this is what's happening. So fast forward 8 months, it's go time. He shows up at the Sydney Olympics, takes him 3 days to travel there. He's never flown before. He gets to the Olympic facilities. Jaw drops. He sees the pool size. He's like, oh my God, I've never swam in a pool this large. And so he's preparing for the event and basically the other coaches and swimmers are like, why is this guy so nervous during the practice? He's not even going in the water. He doesn't know what to do. And so the South African coach starts helping him. These other guys start helping him and they're like, do you need goggles? And he's like, yes. And then they give him goggles and they're trying to show, trying to teach him, like in the day before the event, he's cramming for the exam. Cramming for the exam for a language that you just learned 2 weeks ago, and everyone in the world is watching you take the exam, and if you fail the exam, you drown and you're dead. And so that's the problem, because when the other 2 guys false start, he's gonna get a free pass. All he has to do is finish, but he's never swam 100 meters consecutively. He's trained in a 13-meter pool. And so he jumps in and he starts okay, and he's going and he's going, and he starts getting really tired. Before he even hits the turn, the 50-meter turn. And he finally gets to the turn, and at the turn, he stays under for so long, there's literally gasps in the crowd. They think he's drowned. He's just caught in a riptide, basically, that looks like. Finally, he comes up and he's going so slow. He looks like he can't make it. He is so exhausted. And the crowd just starts going nuts. They're like, go, go, go. They don't know why this guy's going so slow. Why is this Olympic? They don't know at this point. But they know something's wrong and they just want to get on his side.
It's like a Jamaican bobsled moment.
Exactly. He finishes in a minute and 52 seconds, which is like an extra minute past what it should have been, which is a very long time for something like this. These races are decided by tenths of a second. And so he qualifies and so he gets it to the actual Olympic trial. He obviously then loses. But this guy embodies that Olympic spirit that anyone anywhere in the world can, you know, do something amazing. Crowd goes nuts. He ends up becoming the national coach for his country, you know, decades later. And, and that's the story of Eric the Eel.
Did they, did they ever produce any legit, uh, swimmers?
Well, let's keep the story inspirational. So I'm gonna no comment that one. I, I don't know if there's ever been a, a medalist from, uh, Equatorial Guinea.
That's awesome. No, I remember watching this years ago and it is inspirational. Do you want to do your sleep ad thing or do you want me to tell you about a car thing?
Let's do your car thing.
All right. So I'm buying a, I want to buy a new car and I want to tell you about two interesting things that I've discovered. We'll start with Car Edge. So it's a pretty genius business idea and these guys have been quietly building up a pretty epic business. So the story of this business is that it was started by a father and son duo. The father's name is Ray. The son is Zach. The father, he basically managed car dealerships for years and he was like, oh, there's like, I know the ins and outs. And his son, I think was 24 or 25 at the time. And his son always wanted to start an internet business and he also liked YouTube and he was like, hey dad, what if I just asked you some questions on YouTube about like, you know, how do you properly negotiate at the car dealership or how much profit car dealerships make so we know better what to ask for, you know, things like that.
Love it.
Gonna work. Yeah. And within, I think something like 8 weeks, they got 13,000 followers on this YouTube page. And they were like, you know, we were gonna buy all these fancy cameras, but then we just got like our iPhone and made it kind of janky. And it just, it, people kind of liked it. And it was during the pandemic, so people were watching a lot of that stuff. And so they parlay that into starting a business called Car Edge. And so if you go to caredge.com, what's it say? Do you see the headline?
Uh, yeah, it says your personal car shopper is here. No hassle, always fair prices. So basically, they will help you buy a car.
So the way it works is there's this thing called an auto broker or a car broker. I think you got your car now from a friend of ours who's a car broker. The industry is typically like mom and pop, and a lot of times if you Google like car broker New York City, you're going to go to like kind of a mom and pop website and you get on the phone or send an email to this person, you tell them what type of car you want and they have relationships with tons of dealers. So they know They know the ins and outs of the car business. You pay them a fee, $500 to $2,000, and they typically will go and buy the car for you. But the savings that you get in the price of the car is typically better than the fee that you pay them. And so it's no big deal and they do all the negotiating for you. So it's not uncomfortable for you. Whatever. Cool. What these guys did is they took like kind of a startup-y internet vibe and they created a nice website for it where you go to their website. And they, you could, you could search different cars and they will rather, they have a variety of products. So like one, they have got this thing, it's, I think it's like $80 a month or $50 a month. And they will just like give you tons of information, like a database on what the profit margin is on different cars. So you can go negotiate yourself, or you can spend $1,000 and tell them the car that you want and they go and buy it for you and they'll even organize it. So it gets shipped to you and they do all the organization and all that work. And if you don't save at least $1,000, you just get your money back. And they built this massive business because if you go to their YouTube page, I think they now have 600,000 subscribers on their page. And it's this really cute dynamic between a father and son.
All the pictures on the site, by the way, are like the dad giving the son a noogie. It's like just a, just wholesome, just so wholesome.
And that father and son, like, dynamic for the brand, it makes you like them a lot. And they, uh, they were like, you know, there were a bunch of car podcasts, but we basically what they described what they wanted to do is, they probably have no idea who we are, but it's what you and I do of just kind of like riffing a little bit less professional.
You're the father, I would assume.
Am I? You're older than me. You can be the dad.
You know how there was this big viral thing where it was like, um, you know, PewDiePie versus T-Series, like who can have the most subscribers on YouTube? Yeah. So these guys currently have 533,000 subscribers. Your boys have 529,000. We are 4,000 subscribers behind Car Edge. I'm just going to leave that there for our loyal army who doesn't want to see us lose to this father-son car buying duo. Go to YouTube and subscribe.
All right.
Yeah. Back to this.
They, uh, this business is now doing, so he has a video where he breaks down the revenue. So he pulls up their QuickBooks and you can see it, but he blurs out the numbers and I messaged him and I was like, hey, uh, I have this thing, this podcast, like, and he goes, yeah, you know, I've heard of it. Uh, I go, just can you tell me the numbers and I can talk about it? And he, and, and so he did. And so this business is now doing roughly $10 million a year in revenue. I think it's only 2 years old or so, and it seems like a great business. These things could be really cool.
I think honestly, I thought it'd be almost bigger because looking at the traffic, they get almost like 2 million visitors a month to their site. And so that is a huge amount of traffic to your website for this thing. So I am extremely impressed. This is only 2 years old-ish.
Yeah, it could be 3, but yeah, something like that.
Is this something you normally do when you buy cars? You use car brokers?
I haven't, but I've heard of them. We actually talked about it years ago of people who, you know, we brought this up in one of the early episodes. I've never actually used it, but I remember last time I bought my car, I was in the dealership for like 4 hours, like signing paperwork, wiring the money. It took forever. And I was like, I'm never doing this again. And so I just started Googling car brokers. I was like, I want to try one. And that's how I found these guys.
And were they YouTube first? So it was an audience first, right? YouTube first. Yeah. YouTube first. Did they even plan to launch this as a service or did it start as just, let's make a YouTube channel?
The kid, Zach, has a blog where he's been blogging since he was 22. And he previously, he ran some small information business that was doing like $150,000 in revenue. And it's cool. You could see him blogging as he goes and he's like, I've always wanted to learn how to make money on the internet and start an internet company. And so you could see like he had like 2 or 3 businesses that weren't huge or anything, but it was very promising for a 21-year-old. And I have a feeling, I kind of like clicked their LinkedIn and looked around. I think the mother passed away from cancer. And so I think there was like a feeling of like Zach, the kid was like, you know, I want to be with my father more. Let's see if we can do something together.
Yeah, he's got some cool blog posts. So, you know, getting your first customers is really hard. And he talks about getting there for early customers for this. And then another one is from 10,000 to 14,000 subscribers in 3 weeks. Here's what we learned. Here's what happened and here's what I learned. And then, uh, I haven't read these yet, but I'm just looking at the titles. These are cool. I'm gonna check these out.
Yeah, this is a cool kid. I think now, I think he's only 25. I think, I think he's young. Um, and it's just a really promising business. And on some of the blog posts he talks about how he is like, now I have to project financials so we can decide when to hire people. And so you're actually seeing him do this in real time, but he is not in you and I's world. And so it's a really fun business. To pay attention to and see what this guy, uh, what is he going to build?
Isn't— how cool is this? Father-son businesses, like, um, or just like, you know, parent-kid, but in not in a, uh, succession, you know, hand-me-down type of way. So a couple examples of this. We had Al Doan come on and talk about Missouri Star, the, the, the biggest quilting store on the internet. And it's Al and his mom. And he's like, you know, Al, I think his name, her name is Debbie. I don't know. He's like, yeah, like same thing, YouTube channel where she makes content and she's the star. And Al was the like, cool, I'll figure out the internet and like e-commerce part of this and let's make this a thing. And this is a 9-figure business that sells quilt supplies to other moms across the country. It's amazing. And it's Al and his mom that do that, that business together.
Or, and Al does the thing that I love when he refers to his mother. He doesn't say my mom. He goes, yeah, I was just hanging out and mom wanted to like quilt, you know, like when they use, when they use mom, uh, as like, uh, as a proper noun. I love, I'm like, whenever I hear someone do that, That, that, like when they just refer to them as mom, not my mom.
Yeah. Uh, it's very cute. So it's Al and, uh, and Jenny, they basically created it and she, and her YouTube videos are great by the way. I've, I've like randomly watched these even though I have no, I have no interest in quilting, but I'm interested in her videos because she's so wholesome and she's so good on camera. So I think that's a great example. We had the, the guys from FarmCon and Ag Swag, same thing, father and son doing business together, but not in a, um, legacy, you know, you could take over my business, but they started new businesses together. And I just think that's so cool. You know, if my kids want to do something like that, that'll be a blast.
I, I would love that more than anything. I think if I had to bet, more often than not, it turns negative. But if you get the right, if you get the right parent-child relationship, it's like magical. It seems like the greatest thing on earth.
Yeah. But they, they say that about everything, like doing business, doing a business with your friends, like, oh, don't mix business and friends or family. Like, I've done both. I've done business with my wife, with my sister-in-law, with my best friends. Like, I've done businesses with all of them.
And, but it's high risk, high reward.
When it works, it feels like a cheat code because the trust is there, the fun is there, and it's like, why wouldn't I want to do life with these people? Of course. And when it goes wrong, you're like, what the hell was I thinking?
Well, do you know who Coco Gauff is? She's the tennis player who was the flag bearer in the Olympics. I was reading about her last night because she's, she's been inspirational lately and her father was like, man, when she was like 9, we're like, wow, this, our little girl is like very promising. So both the mom and dad quit their job, moved to Florida where their extended family was to help care for their kids, and they went all in on trying to teach her tennis. And so the father who was, I think a college football player, didn't know anything about tennis, learned about tennis, became her coach. And she would say, yeah, it was really challenging that relationship, but we came up with a really good solution. The center of the court was Switzerland, and if him and I had an argument, We would come to the middle and then mom would come and be the third party and decide who was right and who was wrong and would help us like figure things out. And so like they built like a good system where they could communicate effectively for the last, you know, 20 years, however long they've been coaching together. All right. Let me tell you one last thing about this car stuff that I found. So there's this hilarious TikTok series created by a car dealership.
This is Mohawk Chevrolet.
Yes. It's called Mohawk Chevrolet. It's just a normal, like Chevy truck dealer.
Dude, is this like The Office? Like, what's happening?
Listen to this. They hired this young woman to be a social media person. She's 23, from Kentucky, or went to University of Kentucky, something like that. And within 6 months in the job, she films a video where they place— or she put a bunch of random ducks, like rubber ducks, all over the dealership. And everyone's trying to figure out who put the ducks there because it's kind of annoying., and she films this Office-like series of her interviewing people and then showing like cutaways of what's going on. And it hits on TikTok. And so eventually she creates a 10-episode series about the dealership where it's all, uh, they're all improvving, but it is like in a, like an Emmy Award-winning like series.
Wow, dude, this is such a good find. This is so cool.
So people, so I think they've gotten millions and millions of views and the young woman who did it is, like I said, 23. And Chevy and GEICO and all these huge brands are commenting and making jokes on the TikToks. And so many people are like, for real, this should be on Netflix. Like, I want to watch this. And some Twitter person, I guess I'll, I think a Substacker, her name's Rachel Carton. I want to give her a shout out. She discovered this and interviewed Grace on Substack, on her Substack. And she did a really cool interview where she talks about the process and she's like, well, me and Ben, my partner, we just come up with interesting ideas. We don't write scripts. I just go into the corner of this, like, as if she's Pam. She's like, I sit there like Pam and I just kind of babble. And we like find like a few minutes of like gold and we build a story off that. And then we go and we make episodes every week. And she is wonderful. This is the greatest thing I've seen where people are like, hey, what's going to happen next episode? And the characters are just other people in the dealerships, like the mechanics or whatever. The episodes will be like, today my boss Jim, the owner of the dealership, has want me, wants me to make a video about electric Chevys because no one wants to buy 'em because they're afraid of them. I don't know what I'm gonna do. And it's like the, the, the episode is like her trying to figure that out. It is so good.
That's amazing. Uh, yeah, I wanna check this out. And also Grace, you said her name is, is that her name?
Grace Kerber.
Yeah. I haven't even seen a single video yet. I just heard about this. Literally a minute and a half ago. Grace, I'd like to make you a job offer. Whatever you're making currently at the dealership, we're tripling it. Come work for us. You gotta do this at a different scale than the local car dealership. But that is, uh, that is so impressive. This is amazing.
She's a really good actress. Like, she like leans into it.
Yeah, I can just see from the thumbnail here. It's like so good.
And the most impressive part is imagine a 23-year-old coming into a truck dealership, which is probably all dudes, particularly like frat bros. Right. And she's like, yeah, we're gonna do it this way. Uh, like, let's just do it. It's beautiful.
'Cause they're probably like, we're not even doing TikTok. We have nothing to lose. Right? Like, you know, when you have nothing to lose, you could try something new here. You could never do this at, you know, the corporate account for, you know, for Cadillac or whatever.
Someone on Twitter was like looking at the search traffic for Mohawk Chevrolet and as expected, it's through the roof. Uh, so I guess it's working. So those are my two car stories.
That was great. Great segment. Uh, good finds. Okay. I have a cool find for you. I want to tell you about a wellness and health app that's doing over $100 million a year. You might think, is this healthcare? Is it AI? Is it biotech? No, no. I'm talking about Pokémon Sleep. Have you ever heard of Pokémon Sleep? No. Just check this out. Pokémon, the Pokémon Company, has created a sleep tracking app where you just take your phone. You put it on your pillow right next to you while you sleep, and depending on how well you sleep and how long you sleep, you catch Pokémon in your sleep and you wake up in the morning and it's a sleep tracker that catches Pokémon based on how, how well or how poorly you slept. A gamified sleep tracking. Now this app is blowing up. It is huge in Japan right now. I think like 40% of their users are all in Japan and They've done over $100 million in revenue on this app already. Isn't this insane?
What?
How? Well, there's in-app purchases, basically.
What do you buy?
Go look on Reddit. So if you go look on Reddit, you can find people talking about it. So I'm just going to read you a couple of Reddit posts. It says, to be honest, my true intent with Pokémon Sleep is just to have a consistent bedtime, and it definitely helps with that. I was never the type to lay in bed with my, on my phone playing games, but this does help me just put away my phone, put it on the pillow. And even though it's not super accurate, it is helping me. Another one is like, you know, I did move my bedtime from 2 AM to 10 PM daily because I was getting frustrated at having to wake up with so little sleep. I tried so many things, they all failed. Pokémon Sleep managed to make a lifestyle change that $2,000 in therapy has not. I'm even willing to spend money on occasionally buying bundles in the app because it's actually cheaper than what I was paying to try to improve my sleep before this.
Oh my God, this is insane. Is this owned by like Nintendo or whoever?
Yeah, it's owned by Pokémon. Like if you go to the site, it's Pokémon Company International, it's like Corporate.Pokémon.com is like the, uh, the thing behind it, but it's got 10 million users. Only 17% are in the US. So I think there's an opportunity to basically what they're obviously going to try to grow in the US, but I think there's an opportunity to just replicate the same idea, which is I've had this thought, which is health tracking right now is all quantitative and nobody really just does a remix of it that's fun. Step tracking is a super common thing. Everybody likes step tracking. But step tracking has just been the same. So everybody just looks at, oh, did I get my 10,000 steps today? And it's just me versus me, really. And it's step tracking. And even the ones that try to make it social where you might be able to add friends and whatever, it's not really a social thing to do. And I had this idea years ago of like, why don't they just make it look like Mario Kart where it's me and my 8 friends at the starting line each day. And then as we're taking steps, like we each have our little car that's ahead or behind the other person., and it'll tell you if you get passed by somebody during the day, like, oh, Sam just passed you. Um, and then you look at the map and you're like, oh shit, Sam's like, you know, 1,000 steps ahead. I'm gonna actually go get some more steps in. And you would have your car that would, you, you know, you could buy your skins or whatever, make it, make it look however. It's like, take the same idea, but just make it more, do the fun variants, do the social and fun variant versus the, uh, the hardcore data tracking version.
Me and, uh, 4 friends, uh, a few years ago, we did it, uh, a couple years in a row where I think it was every January we would wear Was it a whoop band? And we would, the person who burned the most energy for the entire month won. And so it becomes like this crazy competition where it's like, shit, I can't, I can't go to sleep right now because I gotta go burn some calories. Like, John's winning. And it's just who can exert the most energy in January. And it's exhausting. It is so exhausting.
Yeah, we, we definitely stole that idea from him. What, what, what does he call it? Sober October.
Sober October.
Yeah. Yes. But when he started it, there weren't, the bands didn't really exist. And so once they came out, we took the bands and we did the same thing. Those competitions 100% work. There's a guy I follow on Twitter who walks 30,000 steps a day and it is like, and then everyone else will post their steps, like their step counts that, that night just to like compare. It 100% makes you want to walk more.
Right. So actually, I had an interesting conversation at this event I was at with Nick Gray. So Nick Gray, who, side note, might be my favorite person.
He's a treasure.
He was talking about, he's like, dude, he's like, my first, the, my first muscle challenge you guys did was so wholesome. He's like, it was so fun. I did it with my friends. He's like, my buddy who I did it with, who didn't even listen to the pod before that, started listening. He's like, he also now, if he's just like traveling and needs a quick workout, like, what can I do in, you know, 15, 20 minutes? He's like, he just does that again. And he texts me every time he does it. And so I think Nick created a version of that called Done, which I loved. He's like, he's like, you should steal this. He's like, you guys should do this. He's like, keep the momentum of the My First Muscle Challenge. So he has a thing called Done. It's like a group of people that all agree we're going to do X every day. And I forgot what X is. It might be walk a certain amount of steps, might be cold plunge, might be whatever it was. Let's assume you set the bar. And what he did was he made a WhatsApp group. WhatsApp group, you only can send one word, done. And that's it. Every, every day people just say done whenever they've did the thing and you can't say anything else, but you get the momentum from other people saying done. You're like, shit, I got to get mine in. And then he has his assistants. He's got these like assistants in the Philippines who will go in. And if you haven't said done for like 3 or 4 days, they'll like DM you, they'll nudge you and they'll be like, come on, man. Like you could do this, uh, you know, stay at it. And, um, I just thought that was great. And he's like, you should, you should definitely like keep that alive in some ways. Like, do the Done Group. It's amazing. And so I think we should come up with a new challenge like that and just do it the way Nick did with one word. Keep it super simple. Done.
I think what we need to do is do the My First Muscle Challenge again, except we'll tell people when it's happening. I think people will— I mean, I know I would train to get— because I hadn't— if you don't work that energy system, it's quite hard. Like, I would train for it. Did you— you were with Nick this weekend. Did you meet any other people at this event?
I met a ton of people. What would you like to know? So here's a fun way where you can maybe do this. So I came home and I brain dumped all of my notes into this doc, but I did it almost like a Twitter thread where I, they're not, it's not like a long blog post with one coherent message. I just bullet pointed like, you know, 30 bullet points. So I want you to just pick a number. Let's do 3 of them. I won't do too many of them. Pick 3 of them, just pick random numbers and, uh, between 1 and 30, and I'm just gonna read you whatever that bullet was. And these are notes to myself, so I'll have to add some context, but, uh, but go for it.
Well, I can't see them. That's all right.
Yeah, you can't see them. Just say the number.
Well, 1.
Okay. 1. Uh, the best advice is free by definition. Okay. So what does this mean? At this event, there's lots of talk, speakers on stage, that sort of thing.
Um, are you going to say what the event is? We didn't actually say.
Oh yeah, yeah. Sorry. So Andrew Wilkinson, our buddy Andrew, hosts an event called Interesting People, and this is the second year he's done it. So he invites a bunch of people out to where he lives in Victoria, Canada, and it's supposed to just be a mixing of interesting people that either he knows really well, like some people he like grew up with, some people he knows from the internet, and some people he doesn't know, but they sounded interesting when they applied. It's probably 80, 90 people. Super well, well-run event. Um, I had a, had a blast. So while I was there, I was thinking about conferences in general and I realized the best advice is free by definition. And what I mean by this is this advice that is truly great is actually incredibly simple advice. If it would apply to you almost in a generic way, it's going to be simple and almost hilariously uncomplicated. If I said, Sam, you know nothing about me, but you know that I want to get in shape. Tell me what to do. You have like, you know, 15 seconds. Go ahead, tell me what to do.
1 gram of protein per pound, lift weights 3 days a week, walk 10,000 steps a day.
Great. Now, if I said, if you wanted to create a course around that, maybe you could, but you'd have to make it complicated. You'd have to add a whole bunch of other things. Like the best advice in the world tends to be incredibly simple, so simple that you couldn't charge for it. So the best advice is free because either The great advice is so simple you couldn't possibly charge for it. It would be laughable to charge for something like that, to say, well, yeah, eat whole foods, try to get enough protein, walk and get good sleep, right? Or whatever, right? Exercise 3 times a week, do weightlift. These are such simple things. You can't create a whole course or program around it in that simple way. And the other side is advice that is non-obvious like that, the non-common sense advice. Is like hard-won, like wisdom usually comes from people who are so successful that they would be willing to give it away for free. So the advice from the real winners of life, they're not charging you for it because they've won, they're fully abundant, and they're happy to pass on what worked for them. And so I realized that the best advice comes at either end of that barbell. It either comes from people who are so successful that they wouldn't think to charge for it because that'd be beneath them, or it's so simple that you couldn't possibly charge for it because it takes a minute to tell you the answer. And after that, it's about you following it. And so I think that that is a general way that I'm now thinking of advice. Anything that falls in the middle is the midwit. It's basically advice that is overly complicated. You're paying for it. And ultimately, like, you haven't actually found the most useful version of the advice.
Were there any people who you met who were shockingly amazing or interesting?
Nick Gray, Greg Eisenberg. So Greg, Greg, a lot of people know Greg 'cause he is on Twitter or whatever. Greg is 10 times more fun in person than he is online. You might even like his online content, but I'm just saying he's that much better in person. He's just got, he is a, he's just like a walking vibe. Whenever I'm around him, it's just fun. I'm laughing and it's very interesting what's going on. And I guess the way I approach these events is I'm just looking for 2 or 3 people that I think are, you know, like amazing. And I'm just, I'm looking for people who just have a certain energy about them, a certain way of being that is good to interact with because I already have a day-to-day life, a routine. If I'm getting out of my routine to go to something, I don't want to just spend it with, I don't want to spend my time out of my routine doing the same things I would do in my routine. So I try to make an effort to hang out with people who are maybe people I don't hang out with all the time or hang out in a way that is not just like, you know, my normal zone that I'm in.
Was there anyone else that fell into that category or any insight that you got?
Okay, I'll give you one note here. Not necessarily something that changed my mind, but something that I thought was pretty insightful. So Patrick Campbell did a breakout session and Patrick's talk was basically like after he sold his company and Patrick's been on the pod before. For, uh, talking about how he sold his company for like, I don't know, $200, $250 million and what happened after that. And he said something that I, I, I really liked. The question I asked him, I go, if your brother sold his company now, you can give him some advice on like what to do in the kind of the year after you sell. What should I, I just sold, what should I, how should I think now? Knowing what you just went through, what would you advise him? He said, well, first thing, probably like no, don't make any major moves for like 6 to 9 months. No major purchases. I think you did this too, right? No major purchases for 6 to 9 months. He said it well. He goes, don't worry, you have the rest of your life to spend this money. So you don't have to be in a rush. The money's there. The next thing he said was he hired a guy, this coach, Jack Skeen, and he helped him do kind of like a life 360, kind of like a, you know, people do these like 360 reviews where they interview like 10 people around you. Andrew's done this, Patrick's done this with the same guy, and basically this guy who interrogates people. When this guy stood up to do his intro during the event, he goes, he said, my name's Jack, and when I was 30 years old, I found the thing that I could do better than anybody I'd ever met, and I realized that that's the thing I should be doing with my life. He's like, you're not going to ask me the thing? We're like, what's the thing? And he goes, I look into people's eyes and I can see their soul. He's like, basically, I can meet people, I can talk to them, I can ask them questions, I can figure out who they really are, what they're really all about. So Patrick said, he's like, he asked me a bunch of questions and he's like, he really interrogates you and the people around you to try to figure out who is this guy? What's he all about? What does he love? When is he at his best? When is he at his worst? That sort of thing. And what Patrick said was he took a very intentional approach to this introspection. He's like, me and my wife did an offsite. He's like, we did an offsite. And at the offsite, we talked kind of like, what do we want out of life? The material part of our life, the emotional part of our life, the lifestyle. He's like, and we made a list and then we kind of talked about it together. And he's like, we compared it. We said 3 things. He goes, I would share something that I wanted out of life and either it would be cool, go for it. Like, you know, you do you. Or it would be cool. I want to do it with you. Let's do that together. Or I'm not down with that. Like, I don't think that's congruent with what I want. And he also said that he made a scorecard for himself. And he said one thing on the scorecard that I really like. So on his scorecard, he was like, you know, I check in every 6 months or so, whatever. And I think about, you know, accomplishments I'm proud of, my wins, things that I'm bad at that I've accepted that I'm bad at. So like things I'm bad at that I'm not working on improving, but I'm at peace with the way they are. Then it's things that I'm working on. And then the last one is like losses I will no longer live with. And he's like, this is Ls that I'm no longer willing to take. So things that are not okay in my life that I need to make a change, but I'm not already making that change. And I thought it was very useful to do this bucketing because when he said these, none of them sounded that surprising. But I had never really asked myself those questions. All 4 of those. What are the wins? What are the things I'm bad at that I'm accepting? What are the things that I'm bad at that I'm not accepting, I'm working on? And what are the areas of my life I'm no longer willing to tolerate? The losses I'm no longer willing to tolerate. And what I like about these is it normalizes having kind of these highs and lows in your life. And I know that most people try to bury things like, you know, here's some areas of my life I don't feel great about, but I don't really want to address them because when I do, I just feel like ashamed and kind of guilty and I feel like bad about myself when I do. So because I feel bad about myself when I address these, I don't address them. I just stash them. And I thought it was a very useful way of thinking because it brings it all to light and says, well, yeah, of course there's these buckets and it would be silly of me to not have anything in one of these buckets. Of course I've got to have some wins. I've got to have some things I'm bad at. I've got to have some things that I want to change. I've got to have some things that I feel like I'm making progress on. And every bucket should have something in it. And that's nothing to feel bad about. I thought that was just a very useful exercise that I think more people could could benefit from.
I think, um, a takeaway that I've had of hanging out with people like Patrick and other people who, uh, maybe people earlier in their career look up to, of which Patrick should be that type of person— you think that when you quote make it, you don't have doubts and you don't spend money on foo-foo shit like a Life360. You spend even more on that type of stuff because it's just still incredibly necessary. You Do you know what I mean? Yeah.
Like I'm more necessary than ever.
I'm reading this Jack Skeen website and this is something that previously I would look at back out on and be like, who needs that? Like, if you're gonna kick ass, you're gonna kick ass. Now I'm reading it and I'm like, I want this. I need answers. I have no answers. This man has the answers.
I mean, the headline says, discover your true life purpose and direction with the roadmap, right? You know, if I, if I hit that normally, I'm bouncing. But when you hear about it in the context of a story and your friends have done it and you're at a certain time of your life. It makes total sense to invest in things like this.
This is awesome. Well, that's good. It was a good trip.
It was a lot of fun. It's also, I mean, it was cool because I would say 60, 70, 80% of the people there like listen to MFM, which is great.
You're popular.
Well, yeah, but like more, more than that. I mean, a lot of people had cool stories of stuff that we've talked about that they could, they would come up and share. They'd be like, oh dude, like whether it was just like, oh, I hit my first million. And I'm like, yeah, cool. I'm like a genie. I appear when you hit your first million. That's it. You just say the words and it happens. Or there's people who are like, yeah, you guys talked about this and I went and did all these things and here's what's happened since. And normally you don't get that feedback loop, right? When we get on here, people don't realize, like, I just treat this like I'm just hanging out with you and I'm trying to tell you interesting things. You're telling me interesting things that I get excited. And then we get off and like, that's kind of it. Only now we're starting to be involved even with like the thumbnails and the titles to be like, hey guys, like Can we just like, I don't care if it gets less clicks, just make us look less stupid, please. Um, you know, like that's kind of like our level of involvement post, post-episode. Um, but we definitely don't really get as much feedback as there is. So that was, I would say the most fun part was people coming up and having stories that were, that branched off of something that we talk about.
One time you and I talked about this World War II book that I was reading about. Uh, and we talked about Hitler because he was part of the book. And like the headline that we had used or somebody picked for the video was like leadership lessons from the Third Reich. From the Third Reich. And I was like, oh my God, no, do not do that.
Delete, delete, delete.
That is not what I meant.
Oh dude. I also had a lesson learned. So I gave a, I gave two talks at this event. I had one good talk and I had one dogshit talk. And that was a great lesson to learn. Of just eating shit and realizing 5 minutes into the talk, oh, I've made a huge mistake. So the first one was just a breakout session and she was like, well, you could just do whatever you want. And I was like, cool. I'm not even going to have a topic going in. I'm going to talk to the people there and we're going to, we're going to like figure out what do people want to talk about? And then we'll improvise. We'll riff. So I'll tell you about the good one and then the bad one. So the, actually I'll tell you about the bad one first. So here's what, what went wrong with the bad one. These are lessons learned in public speaking. So I get up on the stage and I grab the microphone and I can't help myself but try something that I've never done before that I have not prepared for, but I just want to see what happens. So I go for that, which was actually, that part was okay. So they had Matthew Dicks, the storytelling guy, give like the opening talk at the event. So he was like the 9 AM and I was like the 4 PM. So at the 9 AM thing, he gets on there and he tells a great story and he's got He's like a prof— he does these speeches everywhere. So like he's ready to tell us how in business storytelling can be super valuable. So I'm writing a ton of notes and I'm inspired. I'm already a believer in storytelling. So you're preaching to the choir, right? It's like the Kool-Aid man burst through the wall and I already had my cup ready, pour it on in. And so he convinces us to how important storytelling is, but the next 10, you know, 5 speakers or whatever, they already knew what they were gonna say. So they get on stage and they don't really tell a story. And I'm like, dude, we all heard that, right? Storytelling's the shit. So I was like, I'm going to try to tell a Matthew Dick story at the start of my talk. And so 15 minutes before I'm supposed to go on, there's like a little break and I decide to like try to write a story that I'm going to tell, which is probably not enough time to do that, but whatever. I gave it a shot. I was like, I'm here. I'm going to get my reps in. So I got my rep in. I tried to give the talk. I would say, okay, at least I get credit for trying something new. And everybody understood why my story was like not so great. Was because I just obviously made it up, like, you know, a few minutes before. Now, after that, I decide, I'm like, you know what, conferences are these— usually it's like you get on stage and you're supposed to have the answer. Like, here's how you do it, right? Here's how you do X. And you're supposed to be the know-it-all genius who, like, you know, that's what the guy on stage is doing. So I decide, you know what, I'm gonna be different. And being different, the thing that I'll tell you about being different is when it works, Awesome. When it doesn't work, you're just fucking weird. And so I decided to go on stage and tell people about all the ways that I have failed and lost money. So specifically the decisions I've made that have been the worst for me in terms of success and finance. Uh, how, how, how I've lost, you know, $100 million to these 7 or 8 really poor decisions. And I get on stage and I start giving the talk and what I realize is this is a downer. This is an absolute Debbie Downer. And even though my information might be good and the principles in this might be good. I am basically making everybody in this room state change downward. I should be leaving them on a high note. It's the end of the event. We should be like, you know, lighthearted. Everyone's done a full day. They're tired. They're not looking for something heavy. And I came in like a weighted blanket on that crowd. And so 5 minutes in, I was like, oh, this is a bad idea. I shouldn't have done this. And I didn't have the skills to, um, you know, pull out of that nosedive and change my topic. And I'm sure to them it was fine, but I know in my head what a good talk feels like when I give it. It's, it could be electric, you know, like people are laughing and they're, they're writing notes furiously and they're feeling good. And afterwards they're buzzing and they, they, they wanna run through a wall afterwards. This was like the wall ran through them. And so I, I feel like, uh, that was a, a big mistake on my part there.
What was the winning one?
The winning one was basically the opposite of that. So I, as soon as the talk happened, or as soon as they're like, all right, get in your breakout sessions, everybody's, and mine was in the main room. So they were like, people just like stayed in their seat and it was like a 5-minute break. So everyone just like stays in their seat. They're like kind of on their phone, checking their email. But, and I was like, oh no, no, I gotta, I gotta shift the energy first and foremost. It doesn't matter what I'm gonna say. I gotta shift the energy. So I had the, the insight at that point to do it. I just didn't have it at the other talk. And so I, um, I immediately was like, all right, everybody come over here to this side of the room. Bring a chair. Let's make a circle. Like, circles have a different energy in general than somebody on stage and everybody sitting in a crowd facing them, not seeing each other. And I had them move, bring their chair, come over here, quickly make a circle. And then I did a little bit of crowd work, almost like a comedian. There was a guy in the group who, uh, who I had known and had a funny encounter with before this. I, he used to be in like a mastermind group of mine before this. And I kicked him out because I was like, it was like 4 straight meetings where he would say the same thing and be stuck at the same plateau. And I kicked him out. I was like, dude, Alex, like, honestly, I think the best thing I could do for you is not even let you come here and say this same story again, because you're just like getting into a rut. Don't come back here till you've doubled revenue. And I just like kicked him out. And actually he's like 8x'd since then in the like 3 years since then. And so he's done incredibly well. And so I was like, I haven't seen you in a while. Like, how are things going? Any tension here? He's like, no, dude, it was great. I made X. It's all good. And so anyways, and I had, I did this thing where people were like, how do you do X, whatever? And I had us do like a, like a pushup thing to like change the energy, like in that, in that moment, like let's get the blood flowing. Cause one of my principles is good decisions come from good energy. So if you are trying to figure something out, are you trying to make a decision? Or you're trying to rally your team, if you're doing it from a state where everybody's tired or stressed or afraid about what's going on or just literally like half paying attention, that is not where great ideas or great decisions come from. And so the first thing you do is you shift your state and then you make your decision. Then you try to ask yourself the question of how are we going to make this happen? And so I showed people like how quickly you can change your energy. Like, watch this, like 15 seconds, 20 seconds, you'll be, you'll be feeling different than you are right now.. And so that was a much better thing where it didn't really matter what I said, but crowd work in order to make it more interactive keeps everybody on their toes because they don't know when I'm going to talk to them. And then shifting the energy first and worrying about information later was the smart move there.
So it was a good trip then. I mean, I, it looked awesome. I saw the list of people going.
Yeah, it was cool. Tons of great people.
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.