#141 - The 2020 MFM Award Show (with Andrew Wilkinson)

u yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's all on a road less travel never looking back ryan okay we're here i got sam and andrew wilkinson is here we are doing a end of the year super mega podcast breaking it down did preparation for this one so if you notice a difference if you're thinking to yourself this podcast forecast better than the usual podcast that's because we really tried for this one and so we have a bunch of kind of like end of the year i don't know questions awards and we're each just gonna give our hot take on each of them so this is gonna be the big twenty twenty pod are do are you guys the type we're like right now anytime talk to somebody about twenty twenty they're like oh man twenty twenty fucking sucked that's just like the default thing that everybody says do you say that or like it kinda sounds bad to not say that because obviously people are dying everywhere and stuff it's you know you don't wanna be like twenty twenty has been awesome but how do you guys talk about twenty twenty i think twenty twenty has been great i mean i don't think it's been bad it's just there's just been change so i think it's been us i've enjoyed it i feel like it makes it easy to be grateful right because you see these people who have it so so hard right now or their families have been deeply affected and i feel like living canada where i am we've been super lucky it's been like new zealand here there's been very few cases my wife and i were watching a movie last night it depicted world war two and we're like okay like we have a oh oh so we hang out in our jam b's in the house and watch netflix like oh wow this is brutal right so i i feel like i'm i'm just grateful right it's like i have to be quarantined you know in my house with the internet while being healthy and like you know pushing buttons and getting groceries delivered to me this this can't be that bad alright so we we should get started we break it down into three section we have awards we have kind of like predictions slash investments and then we have ideas i guess we have one more we also have like personal like life and so we're gonna go through all four of these and i don't know how long it's it gonna take so we should get started and we should we should go forward it so without further ado and by the way these are called the mill if you're listening to this you don't have video i'll pray you maybe me a special background it looks like the oscars and it's called the mill this our annual awards ceremony and so we're gonna go through the mill first the first mill is for the billy of the year right we do the billy of the week which is the billionaire of the week that we like to feature somebody who's who's built a you know huge fortune doing something interesting and so billy of the year goes to and each one of us is gonna give her answer so let's start with sam sam who is your billy of the year billy of the year now twenty gotta go to chuck fee chuck fee got popular because he made something like ten or twenty billion through duty free shoppers this year we talked about him in february a year ago officially has given away his entire fortune other than a million dollars and a san francisco apartment and so he's the billing of the year because of the giveaway or because yeah because he's yeah he gave it all the way he i like guy who can make it and then i love the the idea of giving it all the way and he did it all in one lifetime i like it andrew who did you have as your billy of the year mine was mark leonard do you guys know who mark leonard is canadian constellation software yeah exactly so so he's super interesting this is a guy who's just gotten on my radar over the last year he's worth one point nine billion he founded constellation software which is like the og saas acquire so like over last five years i think every single person in the world has realized software businesses are good company are good businesses everyone's trying to buy them paying crazy prices this guy been doing it since nineteen ninety five from up here in canada he's been focusing on super boring verticals with low competition and high switching costs so all the businesses are like software businesses for like car rental companies or government hotels mining just very niche odd businesses they issues go out golf course management like you name it and they have high switching costs so their businesses that don't have competition from vcs nobody ever changes they really lucrative service contracts and so he's just been compounding this business for like thirty you know twenty five or something years and what's so interesting about this guy is that he's like completely anonymous so if you google him there's one photo of him in which he has a huge gandalf beard so he can't even see his face and other than that there's no public images i've been able to find he's totally private he doesn't do interviews there an interview like two months ago and all the value investing nerds freaked out because it came out and within a week it was pulled so this guy's just like super private and i just think that's really cool that he's worth two billion dollars walks around nobody knowing super cool i would have proposed one more and canadian so i'd bring this guy jim patterson you know jim patterson yeah i i know he's number two guy he's they're amazing i've just discovered him this year we talked about him i like that guy he's what do they call like a warren buffett of canada he's he's kinda like that the best story about you mean patterson as they own a signed business up in canada patterson i think it's called patterson signs or something like that like every bus stop every ad you see up here has their logo on it and they were trying to figure out how to break into the united states do and so he gave all his sales guys bags of money and they would walk into all the places that had signs and they'd say i'm gonna give you all the money you would make from the other guys for the next three years in cash right now i'm gonna double the rates and i'm gonna give it to you all upfront they dominated throughout different regions in the states and then over time they started increasing prices again and they basically took over a monopoly down there he's he's hardcore bag of money trick is amazing okay i'm gonna give you my runner ups and then i'm gonna give you my winner so runner ups elon you know tesla stock has been crazy this year his personal net worth grew from about thirty billion dollars bag to a hundred and seventy billion dollars this year so that was pretty impressive i bet that you're not gonna say cha off no so no each month is not on this list although he could be it could be elon shot everybody up who was kind of the short sellers of his stock at least temporarily came through in his word that this was gonna be the short burn of the century and and tesla stock did that my second runner up was mackenzie scott who basically you know divorce jeff bezos i took half the fortune and gave it all the she's been given away a billion dollars a month in twenty twenty so she gave away twelve billion dollars this year hit the ground running so i thought that was good my last runner up was michael sailor who places humongous bet with his company on bitcoin he bought half a billion dollars worth of bitcoin and then you know just off the balance sheet and then took a loan out you know basically like issued a bond took the bond money and bought more bitcoin and he's made five hundred million dollars of profit this year on his bitcoin bet so i thought that was pretty epic but my winner is eric yuan the ceo of zoom the founder of zoom which not only did zoom perform like crazy and he made tons of money he's got about a eighteen billion dollar personal fortune out of zoom but i feel like zoom held the world together during twenty twenty so i think that the thing he made that was like ten years in the making zoom kept schools afloat kept families like connected zoom was like the connective glue i think for the world during twenty twenty so that's why and everyone talk says that guy's is a good guy and i believe he posted in trends like you know somebody said something like oh zoom has this glitch or bug or whatever and then fucking eric you on swoop in into the trends group it's like hey i'd love to help you out can you email me my emails you know eric at zoom dot com just tell me tell me what the issue is i'd love to take care of it and he's he's done that i've seen him do that like customer service bombing ten times on the internet so it wasn't just a one off you guys have talked about a lot is dan gilbert so dan i think in twenty nineteen his net worth was six or seven billion at least based on forbes et took rocket mortgage public or quicken loans and now it's forty seven billion his net worth jumped by thirty six billion dollars in one day a wow that was kind of a big win okay so that is our billy of the year the next award the next mill goes to the breakout company of twenty twenty so what company came in made a splash and really just broke out hit escape velocity for you this year we'll start with andrew i said shopify i mean i think super obvious super boring i know i just i i was like it was slapped me in the face but i mean shopify went from you know commerce was what fourteen percent of all global sales now it's twenty twenty five percent or something i just think they're the obvious winner of of the last year in the pandemic i'll go with a hop in you all know hop yeah hop of the events digital events platform like only eleven months old i think launched in two thousand twenty raise a lot of money they're gonna either be huge or they're gonna go out of business in the next three or four years but still breakout nonetheless we had the guy i forget his name the founder on the podcast he hired like two hundred and fifty people in six months he seems competent and people seem to like work there so i think that's the breakout company of twenty hop interesting choice i'd went with modern so modern is the company that obviously if i can save the day with the with the vaccine but what's interesting is if you go back to modern so modern had this technique where they were doing mrna vaccines or mrna based vaccinations and so this was kind of a new technology it was not something that was very popular it's not the sort of standard way to do vaccinations to develop vaccines they go public in twenty eighteen for eighteen dollars and sixty cents a share fast forward to twenty twenty two years later the stock price is at eighteen dollars and eighty nine cents a share so they've you know it's gone up like thirty cents in two years and then as soon as the shelter in place gets announced as soon as covid is is popularized kind of january february march time frame these guys hop in and they put the company all in to developing the vaccine for coronavirus and they did it the stock price is now like i don't know a hundred in thirty hundred forty hundred fifty dollars a share so it's gone up more than you know ten x and look at this year alone and they developed the vaccine and kind of record time alongside you know pfizer so i thought that was the breakout company and maybe a breakout technique for for developing vaccinations because pfizer also did the same mrna technique that modern had popularized at the time in that same vein do you remember who we had on i mean this is a huge question but do you remember who we had on in february that's now like got quite large was the woman who started ever well do you guys know well yeah remember she julia julia cheek so at first what did well make like some like food sensitivity blood testing thing at home allergy testing for fruit and we had her on i think in february so covid was a thing but not like the thing they pivoted have since raised i think the two hundred million dollars since we spoke to her and it's a multi billion dollar company but that was odd timing that we had her on in february they remember you even asked her you're life are you guys gonna like do something with covid and she was like well like well like she i this might have been off the record at the end and she was like yeah we're gonna do something and i remember thinking to myself like you do food allergy testing me what the hell like what are you talking about you're not gonna be able to do this and was that wrong about that one yeah so she had a good year you probably the the best year of any guest who's pick do we like the best there so we had shopify we had hop in we had modern where do you guys where do you guys land with that i don't understand how modern or shopify can be considered an award winner on our they suck i was pissed myself france or not honestly i just couldn't come up with anything i i wanna think about who's benefiting that you what's the second order consequence right like i've heard that like weird businesses like flag stores are doing really well i would think about something like that what's the second and third order businesses that are benefiting like furniture stories sam you mentioned in the last odd furniture there's gotta be someone who's winning like crazy yeah i mean obviously like rogue fitness do you know rogue fitness they bake really like the they're considered like the best weight lifting equipment and it's like the official weight equipment of crossfit gyms and they also do it at home it's complete for home gyms completely bootstrap based out of ohio and when covid hit the guy was like we're now hiring two thousand more blue collar workers out of our factory in ohio entirely bootstrap company probably does five hundred million in sales a year so i think they would have to be a breakout of the rope fitness that kinda takes us to the next the next million award which is under the radar company of twenty twenty and this is that's where i was thinking like who just had a big benefit but it's not shown up yet right what your process the price of the stock has gone up like crazy it's shown up you know modern maduro same thing they made the vaccine okay everybody heard their name who has on the low been growing and benefiting during this time but we haven't heard the news yet so who is the who did you guys have for your under the radar our company twenty twenty sam you're turn pal and i actually had a conversation about andrew with andrew about this remember when we talked about call yeah i think i was like all about it and you kinda shot it down right i love it as a tool but i think it's easy to copy and i've seen so many clones of it that said i mean just the name being unique i think there's a lot of value there because everyone talks about it it's memorable whatever but if it was called something else maybe it wouldn't have done as well but so call was started by a nigerian immigrant he's based out of georgia atlanta georgia i think entirely bootstrap andrea maybe you know better than me i think entirely bootstrap he's at around seventy million in arr so the company's worth north of a billion dollars i gotta give the award this year to account it's a great product and in great business and such an amazing story too what i you like that one sam coming in with the left field answer i would have never thought that our andrew who did you have under the radar company twenty twenty i don't have anyone i couldn't think of i was trying i was racking my brain in for some reason i just couldn't think of anybody who you got i had i'll do two then since since you didn't goes one okay so the first one i had is pipe for so i've been getting to know this business a little bit better now we first talked about pipe i don't know maybe closer to a year ago you know maybe in march something like that pipe at the time i was like oh this is clever let's say you have a customer who signs up you know for a monthly contract you could you know pipe will give you the money up upfront so you don't have to wait twelve months to receive twelve months of value you can take like eleven months of value upfront and they'll keep the one month as their fee for so i just thought oh that's clever like kind of like financing you know upfront financing for your your saas contracts and i kinda wrote it off and that's all i thought it was turns out it's much much more than that so they did that but what ended up happening is you get all these saas companies who joined the platform because they want cash upfront and they want cash that's not gonna dilute dilute their company it's like you know instead of selling equity shares in your company for capital you could just sell some of your customer contracts to get the capital and do zero dilution so i thought okay that's clever but on the other side what they've done is they opened up banks institutional buyers to come and buy this new asset class so they basically turned a saas contract into a whole asset class of its own and they have old school ass institutions banks that are coming on board and they're saying great i'll buy this bundle of saas contracts i don't know what the hell any of these companies do i don't need to know what they do they're just sort of investment grade vetted contracts and i'll just buy the bundle of these and i'm gonna get my eleven percent return on these contracts and the companies get cash front with no dilution and i think it is genius to turn saas contracts into a liquid asset where there's a market for them i think that is a big big play i think pipe gonna be humongous and it's already doing well but it's gonna be a multi dollar company it's super it's super one of the companies that i thought i don't know if it's necessarily benefited this year due to what's happened but i think is like a sneaky under the radar companies is carta you guys familiar with them yeah so totally july this just like talk a lot of shit up about them oh well so it seems like yeah i think they did like a big lay and you guys were talking about that or something oh they did a lame way but that doesn't yeah i i remember i think it's it's super brilliant i mean it's this super boring product it's basically cap table management so it's a way for you to see who owns what percent of the company you can issue share certificates through it it's like digital share certificates right so far super boring i like foreign stuff i think that's a good business in and of itself what's exciting about it is the idea of being able to basically expose your cap table and sell or trade those as securities or do raises through carta right so imagine if you create the card second market and i go in and i say i'm a bank or i'm an investor i wanna buy stripe shares at twenty five dollars a share i can actually go out to all the shareholders who have those shares and solicit that and transact on the platform and so it just makes private shares way more liquid it makes almost like a stock market for private shares so it could be an incredible incredible business separate from that if people standardize on it go to carta which is c a r t a x dot com that's where you can sign up to be part of the this kind of liquid secondary market for these private companies it's gonna be i think it's gonna be dope i think that's that is i was i was wondering why all these investors i remember i put out a tweet saying what companies today that are worth you know one to two billion are most likely to be worth you know fifty billion plus and carter was one of the most popular answers which i was really surprised about and i think this is why i think this because it's more than just capital management it becomes a a network or a marketplace for for private the company stock which would be and there's there's an opportunity like we've done this a little bit with buffer and other companies that we're excited about but if you go out there the price is whatever people are willing to sell there's not a liquid market and there's not beds so you can just go out there and say hey i'm gonna i'll value stripe at forty billion dollars and maybe the last raise was at sixty billion dollars but you can just say that i'll buy at forty and then if any employees want liquidity and you're the only person willing to offer for liquidity might be able to get striped shares for way less than their worth so we've done that a few times it's a great way to do it but it's just incredibly inefficient so carter would make it much more efficient better priced etcetera sam if you had brought rogue fitness to the table i feel like that would have been the winner of this category brought that to table can but we're gonna go with andrews which is carta even though he said he didn't have an answer he actually did carter's is amazing and that's a good that's a good answer the next mill award each one of us just to give this out your favorite person who's a non family member of twenty twenty who who's it gonna be for you guys we'll go fast on this one i'll say jack jack smith for a friend is a person and then a person who's no longer are live but felix dennis someone refer you all the time i love felix dennis she's amazing that was one of the most impactful books i've read in the last decade they too yeah amazing there's this incredibly douche titled but incredible book called how to get rich by felix dennis and everyone should read it i always have to say that andrew whenever i recommend the book i go look it's horribly titled but the guy's legit and he's like a good guy let's like seth book i will teach you to get rich right it's i mean it's title back accurately sean just started reading it is it great i've actually been reading it just really slowly a third of the way through the book right now and i really like it you know he has his table at the beginning which is like if your liquid net worth is this you know you're in the like poor somewhat poor you know you're in the lesser rich the kinda rich the very rich the stupidly rich and he has like all these tiers and i was like okay i'm in the whatever somewhat rich or whatever it was i just think he's funny how he thinks about things but he's got a lot of gems in there that actually kind of nothing to do with money make the book really great the biggest thing people think saving and investing in stuff is about not buying latte and living with chase life or whatever what i thought he does a really good job of pointing out is that you're better off spending that five hours negotiating your mortgage interest rate by a couple basis points then saving on latte right that that has such a big profound effect over twenty or twenty five years or not paying some investment broker or whatever percentage your stock portfolio yeah yeah exactly it's not the avocado toast after all that's true your turn andrew who's who's is your most impactful non family member and you can't say your business partner chris i was gonna see my business partner because we just had such a insane year and he's done so much stop and like alright fine you can say it but then you gotta say someone else honestly like this gonna sound super cheesy but you guys right i know it it's like ridiculous but you guys are so consistently in my head right like literally in my head i'm in asana i'm walking hanging out with my kids whatever and you guys are just consistently a great spark plug of ideas and interesting shit so kudos to you guys thank you right we humbly accept this mill award mine is j who's my trainer i hired a personal trainer in august because i was like fuck i'm just still fat you know why am i still fat and then i and he showed up and i've had trainers before but this is just sort of an example of like the people make all the difference in anything you do and this guy we hit it off he trains not only my body but he's like my mindset coach as well because that's what he's into and we're both into that this guy's had a pretty massive impact on my life in a way that i wouldn't have i wouldn't have guessed and so definitely gonna be my trainer when i was researching this i was looking at all predictions we made and i looked at some of our youtube videos and there was this guy who commented and goes man how did sean get so fat and that was a year that was a year ago i'm gonna send it to as a motivation and b i want you to reply and be like f you i'm not fat anymore yeah have to reply with a photo one year after that date how have you been tracking your progress because i used to work out with a trainer and i i worked i did it for like five years pretty intensively but i'm a pretty skinny guy so i'd look in the mirror and i'd be like oh yeah i think i'm more muscular whatever but this is a lot of work and then i got married and i stopped doing it and i've lost it all and now i look back at photos and i'm like oh shit i was actually like kind of buff but because i didn't track it along the way like i feel like one of the missing pieces in fitness is just seeing the progress like if you took a photo of yourself every single day you would probably not fall off the wagon okay so that's a good question i got kinda brain by amazon amazon is like really intense about this framework which is you do you measure inputs and outputs and so your input metrics are like the thing you control the thing you do that like should move output so the first thing i tracked was just how many days am i working out and so if a three month span i worked out six days a week now and in the three months before i hire the trainer i worked out you know on average i don't know probably a quarter of a day right those this was like weeks i wasn't working out so in a ninety day period you know i'm now working out for six out of the seven days a week so i my input metric has gone up like crazy that's the first thing i track i didn't take a photo at the beginning which i'm really pissed about because i can feel the games but i don't have the proof now and as i have like older photos but like i i wish you jackson your weight like do are you have like apple watch and so he told me that he goes scale stuff he goes don't look at the scale that's the first rule because what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna first put muscle on you and your weight actually gonna go up in in some ways because muscle ways more than that and so first we're gonna put muscle on we're gonna learn we're gonna teach your body that it needs to build muscle not store fat and then we're gonna start shred away the pounds you know in kind of month three for you know as we go and so he told me we don't look at the white i did get a texas scan done which have you ever done that awesome i know it is yeah so i got one done recently so i was like okay that's now my like i what what body fat percentage so i just got back the results i'm i've now thirty two percent body fat which means i was probably like forty two percent body fat when i started this thing which is kinda crazy how much attention you paying to diet how have you change that it's all i mean it's all diet it's all the thing is like if you're working at my problem was i got like you know like a chu buff right where i was like chu and i put on a bunch of weight because i was eating like shit but i was also working out and now i feel like with good diet so yeah what are you doing for diapers because i feel like most trainers don't really think about diet when i did my half iron and a year ago i gained fifteen pounds it's in like i was like oh well the oven burns hot enough you can you can you can put anything in there and this just is not the case you can out eat any out yeah for sure so same thing chu buff that makes sense that's what's happening right now which is like getting a lot stronger but the mid section still has like done the belly fat well we agree agreed to too because i told him and i was like look i'm not trying to like you know shred down for you know in three months and then kinda like y y over the next five years and be like oh i'm i'm on my diet i'm off my diet i wanna fundamentally solve the problem right what does the root cause the root cause is that my lifestyle does not net a fit body i was like my lifestyle before was not working out and eating like shit so i was like i need to replace it with workouts i do because they're fun i want to do them and secondly food that i like to eat that just happens to be healthy and so we took it one meal at a time so he's like first we're gonna conquer breakfast we're gonna make your breakfast a healthy breakfast and you can eat whatever you want the rest of the day and now we've gone on a healthy breakfast healthy lunch healthy stack and now dinner is the only thing that's left and so that has we've basically just turning the dial in a very slow and steady way thinking how do i solve this problem for the next twenty years not the next two months and you tried skipping breakfast yeah i do that a couple days a week so i intermittently fast a couple days a week and then the other day it's just a protein shake in the morning are you still doing the glucose monitor i'm not doing the glucose monitor right now okay d tour on sean fact aside we're back favorite tool sean what was your favorite tool of two thousand twenty favorite tool i started using okay so i had a couple of like kinda like healthy things like the wim hof breathing method app the five minute journal app good apps good tools for sure but i'm gonna give it to it an tool i just started using which is called pan pinata farms so have you guys seen this yes awesome love it so it is a meme maker that is so good these guys have been working on this for couple years they're like guys in la this is the same sort of thing i usually write off i'm like a people in la working on some consumer thing in stealth nothing comes out of it for three years you're like out that right you can just write that one off as a zero but no they came up with this app called pin farms and it's a great way to make hilarious memes you just cut out your head put it on any video it has like text that can come in really easily it's the shit you see on reddit but it's like actually easy to so i'm gonna go with farms i'm obsessed with this thing and you're gonna see a lot more memes from me now well i'm on your twitter feed i don't see any they're only going into emails right now i haven't even cut come on my one of our writers trunk fam has been doing it and he had a couple get fifty thousand views on twitter so it's awesome a love it what'd did you have sam new too two of them they're the same thing it's kind of the lame answer like shopify but youtube premium why it's awesome is because you can listen to live music or any type of music on youtube and you could close your phone and put it in your pocket while you work out and click next it's the best the second one is youtube tv which is similar but i've been a big fan of youtube tv i love it's the only place that i can watch those stupid reality shows that my wife and sean watch but youtube tv and youtube premium i think if i could only have spotify or youtube premium youtube pretty easy i also use both of those and vouch for it and they need to sponsor this podcast because we're actually both genuinely big fans of it i've got two one is read wise read wise basically scans your kindle highlights and then every day it sends you an email roundup of all of the best quotes so over the last ten years been reading on kindle and highlighting stuff and this just res surfaces ideas to be constantly quotes ideas for tweets whatever that's been awesome the other one i love is called hu duff and basically kind of in the same vein as youtube premium when i'm you know if someone links me to like a lecture or something that i really wanna watch but i don't have time for i put it on my hu duff and it's basically it sucks the audio and it puts it into a custom podcast that's just for you so you get the audio from whatever youtube video you want it's a great way to just consume long form audio content it's made like ten years ago by these two british web developers and it's super it's super ghetto but it works great it looks great i'm looking at their website now it does not look like they've put a lot of attention into it but it looks like it we get the job done maybe we need to buy it it does seem interesting doesn't it this definitely looks like a side project deck is actually pretty useful okay that's dope i've never heard of either of those tools actually and they both sound good so i like that alright we're now moving to section two of the mill which is the investment slash predictions so the first question is what was your highest returning investment and this is financial you can't be like you know investing in myself you know financial investment of twenty twenty will start with you andrew so mine was e commerce so we've bought so basically i started a company in the shopify ecosystem software company about ten years ago we sold it in twenty thirteen for seven million dollars and then we realized shopify was gonna be a big deal after we'd sold it and we're were like fuck we screwed up we shouldn't have sold this thing and so in twenty nineteen we ended up buying it back for twenty six million or so and then about two years later just a couple weeks ago we took a public and at one point i hit over a billion dollar we valuation right now it's at like six hundred and something million market cap and so i had about ten million dollars into that business and cash and it turned into two hundred and twenty million so that was that was not bad yeah no shit not bad i think two the slow clap that's amazing yeah i think that ones would to be hard to be mine's airbnb stock went public this year we had airbnb stock we had it when they they laid off a bunch of people in march and i think the valuation that the we got more stock was ten billion or whatever is that what it was in march anyway thought it was thirty but maybe maybe aren't that wrong no that's what it was pre covid and then covid hit and then it was lower well it was lowered for a month only and then it went to ninety three billion so airbnb stock was the biggest my biggest return are my family's biggest return yeah and i think silver lake was the one who came in and scooped up a bunch of those shares at at like half price and then whatever the silver six months later they got like a five x which is five x on multiple billions of dollars invested so yeah whatever silver like got that's what we had i think it maybe was a x but i don't remember exactly but it was good enough and how about what about the pre existing shares because she's been there for years right four years yeah what valuation were those at maybe eighteen i think eighteen but made single digit millions of dollars so it was good for it goes back to like everyone thinks they need to go into a venture back startup up but the odds are you know your wife took no risk essentially got great job she enjoyed the entire time got paid a ton of money and then i mean not most people who go to work at startups don't make any money on their options but certainly this is an example yeah like number two thousand employee not no risk at all so airbnb stocks and also like it was easy to predict a few weeks before the ipo and you saw door dash but who woulda have thought that airbnb was gonna ipo at a hundred billion dollars right during the pandemic with travel shut out like no one thought that so i got lucky that my three biggest positions were basically amazon bitcoin and zoom which all did really really well this year for various real reasons it said amazon i think is up sixty seven percent since we got acquired the strike price we got acquired at was eighteen fifty a share and now it's at like thirty two hundred a share so whatever i thought we were getting bought for we actually got bought for a kind of like a a hundred and sixty seven percent premium in fact the cash we took upfront i now wish i just wasn't cash i wish it was just stock also because that just would've have been more and i wish my investors took stock instead of cash as well because they would've have got more of a return but you you could've have just done that right yeah i mean we were optimizing the other way we were like give us cash it us cash now give us cash upfront and cash not i don't know i know about all use stuff when you take cash for a transaction like that i would assume that's tax free too if you get paid in in stock is that right i guess because the stock has value you take it it's a little more complicated so normally yeah the stock has some base value and ideally you qualify qs usps but the way our acquisition went down it was called a waiver and release which is great for closing but not great for taxes so it's great for closing because you don't have to they don't have to acquire the actual company they just acquire all the code and the team and was that a stock or a an asset deal it's neither it's neither an asset deal nor a stock deal it is called waiver and at least it's a third type of thing it's the fastest way you can sell and facebook kinda of thing i don't if they're the ones to popularized it but they they definitely do it more of the most company most tech companies because it is so efficient and it skips a bunch of legal stuff but because of that it just gets taxes ordinary income they just say shut down your company and then separately we're agree to check unemployment right where right you sign a waiver the investor sign a waiver that says we will not sue you for hiring up a whole team we will license the ip to forever and every individual employee gets a package and that's how that acquisition goes down it's pretty cool but the tax stocks on it so it paid almost fifty percent tax on on every dollar i made including the stock because that's how our use get tax as well so bitcoin is up basically four in twenty twenty and about a month ago yeah when if you start your pump and dump scheme sean no dump maybe pump and hold but pump and hold it continue to pump publicly annoying so basically i originally bought into bitcoin about four hundred dollars per bitcoin but i was buying small my i back because it through the fuck knew about bitcoin and then recently i went down to youtube rabbit a hole one night and i was like look i believe why am i not investing to the level of my conviction and so i started buying twenty five thousand dollars a day which is the max coinbase base and then fifty thousand dollars a day on robinhood which is the max i could do there every single day until i accumulated a position that was twenty five percent of my total net worth was moved into bitcoin and i was doing that at eighteen thousand dollars of coin which was almost the all time high and now it's at twenty seven thousand dollars so i've i'm glad i didn't dollar cost average in i'm glad i didn't pussy foot in that has been good for me so how would you feel how would you feel if it went to ten thousand dollars right now would still be saying you know what this is the right decision i i know it's gonna go up yeah exactly like i'm i'm betting on a sort of like five to seven year horizon i just thought the time was right now because of a bunch of signals where a bunch of institutional capital is coming into the space there's a whole bunch of different signals about that and evidence of that like paul tudor jones these old money guys who are known in the the the traditional financial world are using bitcoin as a hedge like a you know sort of a small part of the portfolio they're putting a bitcoin but a small two percent of paul tutor joe's is a large amount when you think about your skill set it's probably analyzing businesses right and i think you understand businesses really well you understand the future cash flows which is how businesses are valued and when you think about bitcoin it's it's akin to you making a call like george so in the nineties and saying you know the pound sterling is gonna get dev valued because of the eurozone shifting to x and y and z at the end of the day this is like a currency or commodity right and i i i do i do kinda go like is that your student power you putting it in such an elegant way i would put it he finds interesting stuff in his reckless i would say the one thing i do understand is actually i can analyze this is okay that's not like that's your skill said actually is like what is the durability of this cash flow stream or what is it what is the value today of this how would i you know what are the one or two growth levers i could apply i'm okay at that but that's not my if i send to you if i send to you there's two stocks one's gopro the other there's apple which of these businesses is more likely to be around in twenty years and keep making more money you're gonna know okay it's apple right gopro is probably dead in five years so the thing i'm actually good at is understanding network effect businesses it's all i worked on in the ideal lab was messaging app social networks what how these get valuable what signals do you look for and so actually the analysis of bitcoin is not as a company it is as a as a network effect money is you know one of the largest most powerful network effect projects that there is and so what i looked at was a whole bunch of underlying signals such as how many wallets have been created the held over x percent how much of that money is moving versus being held how much of bitcoin owned today is owned at the price of today and not from like the early kind of miners who just accumulated a bunch when the price was really low and so i looked at a whole bunch of signals and what it showed me was that you have network effects are where the most values created in business the network effect of money is one of the most valuable network effects you can get into if you can invest into it and then the last one is this network effect has gotten so much stronger in the last three years in a way that the price does not reflect the network effect has sort of grown by ten x and the price has only gone up like two x from where it was at know three years ago and so i totally agree with all those things right i just go like wow this sounds hard to analyze right and there's so many different ways it can go and at the end of the day there's no intrinsic value everything is only worth something because everyone agrees it's worth something for sure but there's no product that bitcoin creates that i can buy there's no profit there's no multiple where you can kinda of value bitcoin to me it's at the end of the day it's all speculative and it's all about what the wisdom of the crowd is and whatever everyone dictates and so to me i just go wow that's fascinating and i'm kind of bullish on bitcoin i guess but to me it's no different than you getting excited about buying euros because you believe that they'll be the strongest currency in the world over the next twenty years i would probably say to you well wow that's crazy you really an expert currency trader and hey if you look back at the richest people in the world very few of them are macro traders or currency traders most of them are people who bought real estate or bought private businesses things that you can value based on cash flows that's kinda of my pushback on it i think what with so many people playing commodity trader and currency trader i think that's potentially a recipe for disaster you can afford to you could lose twenty five percent you'll be fine forever i'm worried about the waitress and the cab drivers you're doing the same thing i agree i would not advise other people to necessarily follow what i do i'm okay i came to terms with hey i'm okay with losing the full amount that i invested i believe this has a asymmetric upside so i believe the most i'm gonna lose here is 1x x i believe i'm more likely gonna make ten x plus and you know i have i i'm not doing this off someone else's tip i'm doing this because everything i've learned about businesses you know the businesses that i'm into which are marketplaces and network effect businesses tells me that this is an extremely strong network effect that gets in the value of those is created before the cash flows come in a traditional business and this there's never gonna be a cash flow it's not about it being a business but i see the network getting stronger and stronger and i know that these when these networks get stronger it goes exponential and so that that was just my rationale for it it it looks to me like facebook early on but it's instead of being a network about people it's a network about money the big bitcoin bros gonna roast that's twitter i'll just instantly say my next one my best bet for twenty twenty one is bitcoin okay what about for you guys what is your prediction best bet for twenty twenty one if you were investing your money you know for twenty and where would you put it my approach to all this stuff is to sell pick access to gold miners right so instead of owning bitcoin i'd rate way rather coinbase base i'd rather own coinbase right i get away to bet on crypto as a trend versus an individual currency they are diversified across all cryptocurrency if you think cryptocurrency has a you know runway for twenty years why not sell pick access to gold miners and make a fuck ton of money from all this speculation while taking no risk i think that's interesting and then stripe as well same theme all these startups ups can go they can take tons of risk at the end of the day you're just gonna make a percent on every single person who does commerce of any kind on the internet i would love to own either of those businesses besides things that you're involved in personally which don't count do dubai individual public sucks yeah totally i'll buy anything i think is if i can find a better deal in the private market i'll do that but if i don't have anything better to do with my money and i see a great opportunity in a public stock then i'll buy it what's the most amount of money you've ever spent personally on one public stock maybe like five six million bucks wow that's crazy i've never bought the only public stock i've ever bought is a atlas season in facebook besides that i've never bought i went write so many times like where i'll have a lot of conviction like i bought facebook when it crashed down to like a hundred and twenty five bucks but i sold it you know once i had a twenty percent return because i had a better opportunity in the private market but i missed the huge run i had to apple at eighty dollars pre split you know five seven years ago again better in the private market so chipotle same thing i've had a lot of like really good bets but i always end up pivoting back to private because private you can make you know forty percent or a year on your money without taking a lot of risk and you know i'd rather have something that i control and have a minority position in something so my answer for this is i don't think i'm gonna buy any i i don't buy stocks i only do index funds i'm boring okay andrew you were talking about kind of one of our next questions which is what did you lose money on what predictions or calls did you get wrong either in twenty twenty or or you can go a little bit further back if you have a better one yeah i got a good one so february twenty fifth or so chris and i were having a meeting and we started panicking about covid we've been watching it for a month we felt that it was gonna be you know everyone's underestimating the risk and that it's gonna be a really big deal and it could have a lot of effect on our business we own a lot of services businesses we felt that you know the first thing people do when they start panicking is they start canceling service contracts and big you know r and d stuff and that kind of stuff so so what we ended up doing is we said okay well how can we ins inflate ourselves let's make a bet let's buy a whole bunch of put options on the s and p five hundred adding that the market's gonna cool off and if it does we'll do really well so we bought five hundred thousand dollars worth of puts on the s and p and in two weeks where were they dated though well they were dated in may or june or something like that so far out and i think the market drops by about thirty percent in two weeks and we made five million dollars so that was crazy we saw five hundred k turn into five million dollars and we said okay this is an amazing return let's just cool it we sold the position and then for two days we kept reading the news the news was so bad and we said we've made a big mistake we bought this as an insurance policy we don't have our insurance policy anymore we should double down if we really believe this gonna get worse so we bought two million dollars worth and then chris i looked at each other like two gambling addicts and we said we need let's let's double down we have high conviction just like sean on bitcoin and we doubled down and we lost every single dollar of it as the market rebounded now there's two ways to look at that one is we gave to like the gambler fallacy doubled down and stuff the other is hey insurance doesn't it always it and insurance doesn't hit and when the bad thing doesn't happen you don't pay your payout well the bad thing didn't happen in our businesses were okay so that's how i sleep at night oh you still that was very three million one no no we put it all in we ended up doubling everything back down into the bet because we wanted the insurance calls and we usually go a little over to you're like alright we if we put it all in and let's actually a little further or so we're not breaking yeah we've even lost our original investments yeah that was that was my my worst call the year so this question is what did you lose money on and what predictions calls you got wrong i'm gonna tell you a call i got wrong that involves you andrew and i didn't lose any money i didn't have any money at play but super cast i would have predicted that two thousand twenty it was the year that super cast took over the world what happened it has not taken over the world it's not done bad and it still their show plenty of time to win i could swore that super cast was gonna take over the world this year well i mean super cast is quietly doing well it's growing mr and you know we're actually really happy with where it's at but i'm incredibly frustrated talking to people with large podcast podcasts i mean you guys included i'm like why the hell don't you guys have an ama extra episode once a month or whatever and charge all your audience for it there's all these other people like me who would love to hear you guys pick apart their business idea or ask questions i think a lot of people just don't really get it because there's no example i wanna convince like tim ferris or someone huge to do this and then share it and the problem is that the people who are on super cast are making a lot of money don't don't really wanna talk about it they don't wanna talk about it there's people on there making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month but yeah nobody wants to come out and say to their audience that you know have making a hell a lot of money and so the listener the super cast is a company that andrew do wait tiny owns it right yeah we own it you guys started it and that raised a little bit of venture capital money it's basically paid subscription podcasts i like it i think it's cool we've used it a little bit but definitely not as much as we should have but i could swore and i actually still with bet on that but i got it wrong in that i thought this year was gonna take off it hasn't taken off yet it's it sounds like it's done good but not taken off yet and i still i i think i need like somebody huge to be willing to do a big deal like i i we would love to write like a five or ten million dollar exclusive contract like sirius did with howard stern and basically say look we're gonna do the monetization we're gonna pay you all the money you would have made for ads and show people what we can do but yeah we're waiting you're a friend we'll do it for four okay we'll do it or give you the friendly and and we'll make it happen what about you sean your answer is what do what what got wrong what we're my big miss okay i'm gonna put a tweet in the chat here this is my tweet of me bragging about selling my tesla stock earlier this year i sold it at two hundred seventy eight dollars a share so i bought it at a hundred dollars a share it has since gone up to the equivalent if because split so it's hard it did a five to one split or something like that so it's hard to to equate but i essentially missed out on like a thirty x return on tesla stock and i missed out on it because i was spooked by a whole bunch of the sort of tesla queue people on on twitter who were telling me showing me all this stuff about how tesla was potentially en ron and he elon friends we talked about this we talked about some podcast about a year and a half ago about like here's the thing so i know people the work at tesla who are awesome i used to own and model s like i love the product i think it's great and i have no comment i don't think it's the next on or anything like that but that said this is a crazy price like i think i was looking at the other night and it's like gm toyota ford can all sit inside the market cap of tesla right now and they ship like a tiny fraction of the number of cars so it's like yeah maybe you sold aol too soon but you missed it dropping down back down to five bucks right i think like you still probably made the right decision and you said hey this is crazy speculative highly valued and i'm gonna take my money and run that's not a bad call yeah i also just thought it was near death and i thought like i at one point they had like fun on a fourteen cfo leave and i was like you just followed the cfo the cfo no what's the state of the business and when you see them join for free months and leave that is like the worst signal a company can have and so i i don't regret that part but this is by you know this is i would say the biggest miss that i was actively in there's other things oh i could have invested in and i just missed out but this one i was literally anne and i sold and that was a that was a miss for me keep going at number five sean if you could invest in one person and share in their earnings over the next ten years who would it be okay so i'm going with a guy i've talked about on this podcast before his name is vis michelle harp he is a young you know sort of wannabe be george so in a way like this guy is i think twenty one twenty two years old now i've known him for a couple years he was eighteen years old he was a dc deployed like on a six million dollars before he was twenty one years old and dropped out of college is he's the one who first really deeply educated me about bitcoin in a way beyond like oh look numbers go up and so he is the one i attribute a lot of my bitcoin conviction to his goal in life has to become a billionaire his singular goal and when you take a really talented person who is willing to throw away all other parts of his life like he is you know he doesn't work out doesn't have a girlfriend doesn't wanna a girlfriend doesn't wanna work out doesn't wanna make friends he only wants to become super fucking wealthy so if i was just gonna buy it someone's income stream i think he is a low price stock that he's gonna go way way up and he recently just convinced multiple kind of hedge fund billionaires to back him in a humongous fund and so i think he's very well positioned now to do well you've talked this i have nicely good job i'm gonna go with ramon van me or he was the second guest in the podcast he's the bet that i would make where maybe the return when maybe maybe not be billions of dollars but no matter what i would get the money back and likely have a good return how about you andrew one is a fellow guest of the pod brent be sure i had dinner with him i i followed him on twitter for a long time but i got to have dinner with him a couple months ago i just think he's super smart and i think what he's doing is really low risk so he goes out and he buys really kind of old school businesses glass businesses pool installation often from baby boomers who are retiring he buys them for you know a fair price and then kind of improves them and lets them run and hold them for the long term doesn't use any debt i think it's a very very low risk way to make money it's a lot of work for sure and these are complicated businesses but i would bet on him for fifty years for sure he's doing what you're doing but you do it with internet businesses he does it with brick and mortar we're i i say we're laser than he is because internet businesses are easier to there's fewer moving pieces can i answer this next one first yes so the question is what's your wildest prediction meaning low probability but you see there being a chance for the future okay so i've got two the first i think san francisco is gonna continue being the center of the tech world and it's gonna bounce back potentially the government is gonna collapse and it's gonna be rebuilt a little bit more moderately but still left and it's gonna be the center of the the tech world for decades to come the second i think porn hub and the rest of the large porn companies i think that they are it's gonna be normal to pay for subscription on all of them anyone who looks at porn a lot of us are gonna have paying subscriptions whereas in the we'll however her lump porn been around for on the internet for the last couple of decades paying for porn has been like what not a chance i think it's gonna be the norm that you're gonna pay for that stuff interesting that's actually how i started though almost everything was pay and then point came along and that's why point hub was so successful i think it's gonna go back then andrew turned thirteen before the internet k okay ed what do you have for wildest prediction about the future do you think i'm right on any of that i think the san francisco and i totally agree with in theory i think there's always gonna be like there's something to seeing people in person right i'm not somebody who flies across the country for a board meeting or something but when i wanna meet someone and really trust them and get a sense of them i like to do that in person and i think at the end of the day if all the vcs are still on sand hill road people are still gonna kind of at the very least spend a lot of time there it'll be the locusts that said is someone who's built a tech company in canada in the middle of nowhere i think remote is the long term trend in terms of operations and a huge advantage i agree though i think san francisco will be fine it's not dead it's definitely not dead mine would be that no one's gonna give a shit about covid in a year we're all gonna totally forget it i think when nine eleven happened you know everyone was saying like in the wake of nine eleven and everything is different within a year people were back on planes yeah there's a few different security measures but life didn't change no one live lives in bunker you know isis isn't in the street and the united states i think it's gonna bounce back much faster than people think and everyone's gonna completely forget about it and it's gonna be a blip yeah that was my exact one which is a lot of people think this is the world will never return and sure some things are different like i think people will travel less for business act because they're like you you know what like zoom is now like not seen as a as a total you know red hat of step child type of thing it's considered normal but i would say by and large like the only thing that i remember changing from nine eleven was like tsa at airports and that's because it was kinda like regulated in it's not because society decided hey we are all gonna do something differently i think you can already see this dude if you go to like certain states people are partying like crazy people are you know casinos are full bars are full people really just don't give a shit and the pandemic still going so i think a lot of people in silicon valley keep talking about how it's all gonna change and i don't think that that's true which big company is gonna be acquired and which companies go in private sonos will be acquired by amazon sounds was almost like inside ridley such boring it's like such a non event you guys sonos is awesome they just it's not awesome though once once people make in ceiling speakers that integrate with airplay and all these and google and stuff sonos is gonna become irrelevant very quickly in my opinion i think they're great because they've got like the receiver already in there the set up process is so shitty exactly this is why amazon should own them yeah let's go to the next section ideas what was your favorite idea from the podcast this year so this one's from the podcast specifically be something you remember that comes to mind we'll start with sam andrew maybe it doesn't remember this but sean reminded me a few days ago do you guys remember you know how mister b launched clout kit like a clout kitchen we talked about that in february student he totally nailed that he predicted that and he was totally right that was one of the best ones i also looked back at our notes in february we were talking about creating a a variety of different card and collectible sites and we talked about someone should buy heritage auctions and make it a little bit better well someone ended up buying p what did they buy sean psa psa nat turner we nailed those two and i think those were great ideas by the way i nominate that nat turner purchase of psa as one of the under the radar moves of twenty twenty i think that was a absolutely brilliant move by the right person and has a lot of potential from there andrew what did you have favorite idea from the pod this year the one that i remember was always on airpods so this idea of being able to like kind of passively chat with your friends or whatever it's interesting to me that nobody's nailed this that i'm aware of i think apple's best position they had that shitty walkie talkie thing but i don't know if you guys remember but in like the nineties at least in canada we have these phones called mike's and you could basically walkie talkie all your buddies we call them next tell i think yeah but no one's duplicated that and it was magical right the idea that i could like hop on with my business partner and my best friend just be like y dude what are you doing and have it know it's gonna go through to him i think it's super cool obviously this is like apple should totally do this but i think that's an amazing idea right now the limit of that is only apple can do it the way they implemented airpods so if they either change it or do it that's the bottleneck for that one okay i had one actually andrew this is your idea that you gave on the podcast i think you are doing which is the hyper local newsletters so creating a newsletter you know i live in lafayette city in california and creating a newsletter for lafayette people living in lafayette about lafayette that just has kinda like one or two writers podcast and your basically of replacing the local newspaper through newsletters i love this idea i think i've asked you can i invest in this idea i think this is this is such a good idea that i would like this is something i would go do if i wasn't super into what i was currently doing because i think this is brilliant it's super cheap it's going really really well we hired a ceo we gotta do way more experienced editor we started rolling out and acquiring other publications so we have the news you know newsletter and then we also have something called tasting victoria which is all about food which is like a big instagram account and then a few others and then we've started monetizing it so we finally have a salesperson and stuff the big realization is this has gotta be a labor of love it might break even we might make a little bit of money which i'm happy to do but sean i mean if you were pouring a lot of time into it it's like a you know maximum million dollar two million dollar a year kind of business so you gotta really be doing it for the or you're talking about all cities for for one city you could probably get to that level but it's a lot of fun i mean it's the only business i own where i've been stopped at cafes and people are like holy shit are you the guy who's doing capital daily thank you so much for this so that's really meaningful like doing something in your community where people know who you are you're connecting people in a community that's the cool part of it but as a business it's more just satisfying because you look like a genius for doing something that's obvious to us and is actually relatively easy whereas you're just competing with these s yield newspapers and at one point even at the beginning you had a pretty meaningful percentage of i don't know which city it was victoria is not a city right it's a kind of like the city the you had a pretty percent of of the population california is a country right yeah exactly so should bought as like the united states that's like on the east coast okay like americans are not required to know about any other country that's how it go we're just we're just we're just your hat it's fine we look we don't call it like the the prime minister suite it's called the presidential suite okay america from all i think we even we even called the president's suite up here i know it's we don't call it the prime minister suite for reason you okay so that was that one let's do the next the next mill award which is favorite guest on the pod this year who did you enjoy that came on to the pod let's start with andrew so mine was ryan big i thought he was super interesting i love hearing from people who are operators he'd like who have hands on experience and then also think like investors and understand finance so i thought he was super interesting and i can't wait to see what he does so everyone betting that andrew would say ty lopez your tickets rip them up they're not worth anything he did not go with tyler he was the worst i'd say he was the worst guest the year wow sadly what did you have i think it was two thousand twenty or it could've been winter of nineteen but one time sean and i ever a recording in the office and lance armstrong just walked in because him and i had a mutual friend and they were using our office for a meeting space and lance just walked in while we were recording and that was my favorite moment and my favorite guest because he was so cool i like that one alright i have one from that area so the guest i actually personally enjoyed the most in our conversation was back then when we were recording in person daniel gross and the audio kinda sucks and the that pacific was early on when the audience was much smaller but i was like fucking charmed i you know like that emoji with the hard eyes i was like this guy is amazing he's super smart super well spoken walked in he didn't even know the fucking premise of the podcast he's like oh brainstorming cool and then had like five hundred interesting thoughts and so i thought he was amazing and he's my guest of the year even though wasn't this year let's go next to least favorite idea this is such an easy one so this guy was one of my favorite guests acts like craig clement who he's a friend of mine i like him a lot but i think it was him that had the idea listen to this and i know this one but what am i gonna say dog vr dog vr oh my god he's said dog vr was like really what's the what's the idea he's like i wanna create oc for dogs he's like my dog is bored all day imagine if i could entertain my dog by having like a vr type of setup where they can go into vr and have fun like he loves his dog and wanted his dog have fun someone made facebook for dogs dog book and ended up getting acquired by facebook and i think it kinda acquired for stock and i think the guy made like hundreds of millions or billions of dollars so you never know maybe this is the navy definitely maybe that's for sure but that was my in my opinion the worst one i didn't have one for this andrew did you have one a at least favorite idea i have so many there's so many times i was talking to about my business partner before this and there's so many times where you guys were talking about some idea and i'm like screaming into my headphones it's going like no no is a terrible terrible business my number one most recently with digital art i think this the stupidest fucking idea i've ever heard the idea that someone would sell a photo of a rose for what was it like a million dollars or something like that that seems totally insane i could be way off based on that let's do a bet so five years out digital art or not so the so the way to test this okay so people is the is the banks see of the digital art world for he's a guy that for thirteen years published a piece of digital art on his instagram for free every single day for thirteen years which is kind of incredible he just wakes it up to start to finish and post it before midnight he just did a auction of of his digital arts so he's been putting he publishes for free but he sold kind of like what they call n t's which is non fungi tokens it's like a crypto thing basically it's like he created two hundred of this one piece of art and you could own one of the two hundred so it in a just like a normal artist would do like a limited run of a dish of originals and so he created these originals he created this like art frame using this thing called i think impossible objects or something and improbable objects or something like that it's says like a frame that has the digital art just like kind of on a screen and he did three point five million dollars worth of sales of his pieces in one day the other day and so the question will be in five years from now is the people aren't gonna be worth more or less than the three point five million and if we forget five years you can go let's go two years now so we can actually ten i i love ten years okay fine that we'll do it and we'll do it on long bet long bet dot org i think that's the the domain long bets dot org and so we'll place a ten year bet of the value of the people are i'm going way over you would i assume go under the three point five million yeah okay that's good some other bad ideas the other one you guys i think you guys talked about this so all these people are going out they're buying amazon fba businesses and i think this could have been a good business opportunity before everyone else realized it was because basically you could buy these businesses these are amazon fulfilled by amazon businesses right so it's like someone creates like a sand bag and they sell it on amazon and they become the you know one of the top results they go and sell this business and because it's such a ten us business with no mode or anything like that you can buy these businesses for like one and a half to two times earnings right you could i think now everyone's caught onto this so the opportunity is probably gone but basically the idea is you go and you buy a hundred of these you suddenly get this business they have this one called t that's does like hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue and the ideas is you're so diversified across all of them that it's like a junk portfolio and you can't lose or buying them all cheap or whatever i think charlie mu said what is it if you put raisins with turd you've still got turd right it doesn't matter if you group together a bunch of shit it's still shit we've looked at tons of these businesses they're are just so their sand castles so i'm really interested to see i could be wrong but i really think those are like not a great place of money i agree with i asked you about these businesses and you set a different awesome phrase which is it's like picking up pennies in front of a steam roller is that also a among quote i don't know if that is but yeah i i i'd say this very apt yeah that that's a good i agree with that one let's move to the next one and so you guys have least for favor at a moment of the year and do we have that i don't think no i thoroughly enjoyed andrew and thai fighting i was just auditor though that was that wasn't even on the pod but that is okay we you reap the benefits of it sean so i thoroughly enjoyed that what's your prediction on what happens with all the businesses that he bought i think it's just gonna be business as usual what are the potential outcomes like fraud or something is what is that what you're saying no not necessarily i think you know all my skepticism towards him it's all about the tactics that he uses and i think that he sells you know anybody who sells himself as being way richard and more successful than they are and uses that to propel themselves i'm always very skeptical of that and i saw a facebook ad that he had done where he was raising money to go buy those businesses that's where his money comes from he goes on facebook he buys a video ad it shows him and his business partner getting out of a private jet and then it says hey you should invest with us and so he's basically doing a kickstarter and go and buy these big buy i went through the whole flows i saw the ad i clicked the ad i go through i put in my friend i wanted to see how do they do this end to end because by way you can't just raise money like that from the public can't just solicit that way you know maybe they have some technical why they're by they're able to do it but basically you get to like a webinar in the webinar some guy asked a question like you know what's the valuation of this company you're kinda buy like a like you know totally reasonable question and the guys got so aggressive time in his business partner and what's his name alex or something at alex alex mayer or something by the way i this is what what tipped me off and he just kept calling him a doctor because he's he's got a phd and something and how that was like supposed to lend all this credit and nasa scientist yeah yeah so i was like okay this guy's like an internet entrepreneur who made a dating site like let's be real he didn't even sell it for all that money he got kicked out when what what's the site is it zoos or one of those zoos yeah yeah he got kicked that way before it sold for two hundred million the other thing about ty and this is just going out legal documents that that i somebody shared it on twitter but there's a great yeah there's a great youtube summary which i can link but basically someone sold they they what was it they bought a business from somebody and the guy sold it to them and then he they just never send him the money and then now he has to sue them to get the money back right that's not exactly a good sign that's fully fraud as far as i'm concerned in my opinion allegedly i don't know i there's a lot of red flags with those guys we should stop because sam friends with them and and and likes the guy so here's the problem here's the problem with guys like ty pest there so much for charming out with they're so charming they're so charming until you do business with them look i'm friendly with everyone he was very nice to us i definitely think there's tons of red flags in the way they do their business i think that the business idea they have is actually a phenomenal business idea to take establish brands and sort of very cheaply acquire the e commerce rights exclusively it's a very high upside low downside scenario so i really love the idea i think that the fundraising thing they're doing is a little weird and a bunch of stuff he says is ridiculous so you know he's a ridiculous character that entertain me alright let's move on to this next question which is best product or project you worked on this year personally so i we'll start with you sam trends i did a marketing campaign that i stole from sean who he stole from other stuff i'm on and it was wildly successful that's the best thing i did this year and i was the the email you sent out which you replied to andrew i responded to i was like dude you fucked up i was you fell for the whoops will sale yeah so we baked close to seven figures in recurring revenue from that one email wow awesome so for me the news thing was a lot of fun we did a deal we bought girl boss sofia company i know you guys had her own as a guest her and i've been friends for a couple years and it was so much fun taking this amazing brand and you know business that already had so much momentum and then just detox it off of vc money right so they've kind of been they'd raised a lot of money and then they're owned by attention capital and they're still kind of in hyper growth mode and then when we bought it we just said hey forget all that crazy stuff let's just do base hits and focus on the core of it and so we're doing courses newsletter rebooting the podcast just really really simple stuff sticking to the dna before we go and we do all the more exciting projects and i'm just having a blast helping the team there we've got a really awesome team and it's just you know when you just hire all the right people and it just works and your thesis is right that's what happened there it was and you you you did the classic andrew move you put a job board on the website yep totally and it's amazing like people forget that they always think of it like you know when you walk out of a grocery store and there's like the chocolate bars and stuff in line it's just that one more thing that you can easily add on to add extra revenue i think that job word i think it did five thousand dollars last month we did ten thousand dollars a month before and we just use job word fire dot com which is like a hundred bucks a month to spin it up and it's one of those things where you're like wow that plus some upwork contractor to help us you know administer it and we made an extra five grand like why not amazing who's the ceo we're just recruiting right now we've got a couple candidates awesome my answer for this is the all access pass i did it was the hardest project i did it worked it was lucrative it was fun it was super challenging i i always felt like i can make content that is interesting to people like i really feel like i can be a great teacher to people just by learning myself and then sharing what i'm learning as i go and this was like a boot camp for that it was like okay for ninety days straight every single day you're gonna do that and you're gonna be like militant about content and it was hard but fun and so i i i'm glad i did that one you still doing it like is that gonna be a business sign i go forward it no i shut down the i shut it down because it wasn't sustainable i knew it wasn't sustainable but like i was supposed to do for four i did it for three because it was just super unsustainable but i i then pivoted it to doing it on a more sustainable basis but for at and for free and so i turned off the revenue stream i turned off a fifty k month revenue stream in order to do it for free to a large audience and the large audience that the free audience is growing like we added ten thousand email subscribers in the last two weeks which is great it's pretty huge alright which one you wanna go to what space slash industry are you keeping your eye on for this twenty twenty one gear where where are you sniffing you know andrew where you were sniffing around shopify back in twenty ten twenty thirteen that was the right place to be sniffing at that time and that paid off big where are you sniffing now this isn't really a space but we're we're thinking a lot about failed startups which is gonna sound weird right now there's not a lot of them but i think there probably will be i don't know when but in the next couple years and one of the crazy things is when a technology company or a venture backed startup fails they usually shut down so they actually throw away all their code they throw away whatever customer base they have and they just shut it down and maybe they do an aqua hire or people just going to new jobs and we've been learning about well what happens to those companies they go to these guys who like restructure them and sell off assets and stuff and so we've been thinking about you know that it might be interesting to look at some of those businesses before they get to that stage and you know try and find ones that are at scale because often these businesses have you know got ten or fifteen million dollars of revenue and there's just topic that sean brought up a while ago remember you products went graveyard and andrew you were actually the first person that that told me about that because i was like hey if i was gonna buy a business where would you go and i was thinking about going and finding these kind of small niche businesses and he said hey look especially with your network if you just go into your network of vc funded startups that have gotten somewhere but not all the way there you're absolutely right i've been in position where have to shut it down and it's like you're literally just throwing away years of value that's accrued because it didn't hit the billing usually didn't work because of customer acquisition cost or something like that like imagine if you are an influencer and you have this big audience in like commerce marketing and you're like man i have you know a hundred thousand followers if i sold them a tool i could probably do that a i could do it for free because i've got this massive audience and so you could go on product hunt find something that's failed six months ago that's a simple marketing tool because they were trying to acquire people with ppc and then you just say great i'm gonna acquire for five grand and sell it to my audience so i think there's tons of opportunities like i know this is a good idea because while you're saying it i'm like no no don't say don't say it i don't like don't let the cat out of bag and that that urge only happens when i'm like this is really this is the thing is there's endless there's endless opportunities that the thing i've learned like doing super cast that people with big audiences are kinda spoiled like influencers are kinda spoiled they and what i mean by that is they don't wanna do any extra work they don't think like business people they don't wanna juice the lemon like they just are like you know what i'm gonna do my paid sponsorships and that's easy i don't wanna do an app or i don't wanna do a subscription and i think they're missing a big opportunity because of that but they're diva right that's why a being a talent agent is a crappy job even if you make a lot of money sam where you where are you sleeping where are you keeping your eye on for for twenty twenty one trucking trucking trucking i talked about it a lot in two thousand twenty i'm gonna keep talking about it i'm very fascinated with trucking i think that it didn't entirely happen this year but there a huge shortage of truck drivers and i think something's gonna happen with that in twenty one and then they're all gonna get wiped out in twenty five when self driving trucks already i don't think that will be the case i think that still gonna need someone there and it's not gonna happen for we we got another long bet okay we should do another ten year bet there's no way of truck gonna be able to tracking is the first thing that's gonna go automatic automated because highways are easy there's no there's no stop sign but that doesn't mean that there's not gonna be a human being there there may be a human being there for a while i think the question is well the real question is who owns the fleets is there one big consolidated fleet across the entire united states or is it regional where it's like okay like you know the some guy in alabama owns a hundred self driving trucks or whatever that could happen and maybe the margins just get way better or the margins get crushed because anyone can do it i'm not sure what's gonna happen but i think i'm eager to follow because i think that we forget about trucking a lot and i think that as we start buying more stuff online it's just so much more essential than ever before and i love the the thing you talked about rig up i thought that was really good because it's un unacceptable it's a long term need you're always gonna have people who work on oil rigs well not always but for a period that's gonna always be in demand or whatever that seems like maybe more more sustainable than the trucking piece i don't know i i think that the trucking industry is so large that it's okay that i think that you can be a really big winner by being third or fourth place i think the e com only makes up what twenty percent of all ball retail and it's just gonna get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and the can't talk shit about trucking to sam it's like you know can't it's like dis jesus to krishna i know it's just look the average trucker is like sixty years old the bride on the wall something interesting is gonna happen it has to have otherwise we're not gonna be able to buy all the shit that we think it's just like the risk is you're investing in carriage companies and the years like nineteen fifteen right no that's not what i'm saying i'm saying instead of i'm i don't give a fuck about the carriage company i just care about the space so the space i'm keeping an eye on is what i think about is like the third wave of e commerce which to me is live video selling i thought it was things saying you're not a believer in i other question sir we're on the believer one oh the believer here okay sorry sorry space you're keeping an eye on for twenty twenty one mine is is live video selling whether it's influencers just going live and selling product and people being able to one tap buy or it's shopify like the equivalent of when you walk into a store and somebody's like hey can i help you more of that is gonna happen because more and more shopping is happening on e commerce and the way e commerce looks today where it's just a static grid of products and it's up to you to figure out if they're are any fucking good or not and people don't trust reviews anymore like literally the way intercom has a little live chat trying to help you you know by text somebody's just gonna have live sales agents that are holding up products answering questions demoing things and encouraging you to buy if you just think about the economics of it a live agent is gonna cost you twelve dollars an hour depending on where they're based fifteen maybe you know the average sale price on a on on most stores it's like forty fifty sixty dollars and so you know one sale and you're paying off that salesperson for the hour one additional incremental sale you're you're you've already the profits and i think that when you're sending thousands of people to your website every day you're gonna want ways to convert them better and i think live video sales gonna be an answered i don't know what form it's gonna take maybe it's its own app like china maybe it's a widget on top of shopify i'm not sure but i'm especially for cars and stuff right like imagine like today i'm not gonna go buy a new car without putting on a mask and go to the showroom room but i might do that if i could like video with one of the salespeople people and they could walk around the other thing that could be interesting is like with intercom you can set auto responses and kind of have like an ai con and then if you need to you escalate it you could do that with video too and say like you know here's the forty questions i can answer about the car have a super slick produced video and then if you need to then you jump into a salesperson or whatever yep and i've seen a bunch of crazy stats about influencers that are able to sell could move a huge amount of product just through you know internet live and other tools like that so i'm i'm very interested i think we're gonna look back on wow e commerce was just literally a grid of of photos with a add to cart button and it's gonna look fucking primitive and we're seeing this first with the collectible space i've been talking a lot about trading cards you go on it's a live stream video you click buy the guy opens the packet right there and you see what you got and you either you got the luca don rookie card or you got a bunch of junk i dropped five hundred dollars this weekend just buying packs and of sports cards trying to get you know one of the zion or luca rookie cards and of course at the end i like shit i just dropped five hundred dollars and got a bunch of crap but it was a lot of fun and it was totally different than my short normal shopping experience which tells me that that's a little bit of a peak of the future can we move to the the what's a popular trend this year that you're not a believer in because i haven't answer answered that similar to what you guys are saying and that's that company called fast do you know fast yeah i think this is the stupidest thing i think that they are very popular right now they've raised many tens of millions of dollars i don't know how much but a lot hot on twitter that i think that that business it's never gonna work and they'll be out of business and then that wouldn't or however many people to have on staff whatever that burn is just multiply that by how much cash they got less that's when they're gonna go a business so many people miss vcs entrepreneurs the idea of feature not a product right i think this is something it's like kind of like what's happened to dropbox dropbox has found in niche but at the end of the day it was a crazy amazing product that everybody needed and then over time all the os just built this in google and apple now have icloud drive and google drive or whatever and i think this same thing is true with fast at the end of the day why wouldn't the e commerce platforms just make their checkout outs faster and i'm not gonna want this custom piece nor are the platform gonna want that to be a piece of the platform by the way they already did shopify pay is super fast amazing and defaulted into every store basically totally i'm glad you or i i mean that's cool you agree i guess we'll find out couple years if we're right but i wanted to get that i wanted to be on the record of saying that so i i think lambda school is awesome just as a to start with right i think awesome you wanna talk about about trucking but be careful but talked a shot about fighting i think i think austin is a couple super smart i think lambda school will do well no matter what what i don't think everyone is totally grasping is that it is probably not a winner take all market and there's nothing unique about and that everyone else will roll this out right so c academy like do any of us remember c academy do any of us remember general assembly like tree hosts like all of these guys that were super hot in the day and at the end of the day it's just everyone's gonna copy that model and i i think it's great for the world it's positive austin will do well etcetera but i think people are kinda over playing the importance of lambda as an individual school gonna not be defensive i'm gonna take three deep breaths i'm gonna move on so hey sean i got another one this one's gonna go straight to the heart oh no he's like these people over overrated the last episode you talked about what was the go pop competitor you invested in i didn't invest you yet but fridge no more okay fridge no more okay so i was listening to that and going like exactly the same thing feature not a product i think at the end of the day amazon is just slowly but surely crushing all competition and getting closer and closer to your door until they actually unlock the lock with ring and i think at the end of the day amazon is the best position they're just gonna put amazon goes everywhere and they'll have drone own delivery or whatever so this could be a picking up pennies in front of the steam roller business maybe they get acquired maybe if the infrastructure is valuable but it doesn't sound like it's that hard to copy so my bet would be the gop pop and that business are gonna be very very challenging okay i like it we'll go to the next one because we got a whole bunch of these left so the next oh okay wait do have one okay no i should answer mine mine for that is startups that are doing remote i think that is a bad idea that everyone is talking about that i don't believe in i think that working together is a competitive advantage and when you're a startup speed agility creativity those are the things that you do better than most companies i think for big companies and medium sized companies remote is fantastic i think for low innovation companies remote is fantastic i think if you are trying to be a disruptive company you're putting yourself at a disadvantage to not have people in the same room that are gonna be able to work big collaboratively and simple ideas and come up with and like basically breed that culture that you want in person that's one trend that i think everybody's into that i'm not into so if you're a startup i think starting out remote is setting yourself back and the other one in into do agree with that i totally disagree degree i mean i've been running a company remote for fifteen years i think it's like saying fifty years ago we didn't hire women right so we're just gonna miss fifty percent of the pop no no hear me out it's like saying like we're not gonna hire fifty percent of the population because of x quality and in the same way i'd say you're missing out on all of the world do you have access to all the world's talent versus the talent with one within one area code that's the issue with hiring in one place is yeah it's fine if you're in silicon valley but you're gonna pay a massive premium and you could otherwise have a weighed greater diversity of talent from all over the world for cheaper so i think that startups are such big winners that it's not about cost savings for for talent google facebook others they would happily pay you know five times more for the right talent than save you know twenty percent on talent when they are but you're competing emerging when they're point is you're you're less likely to get that talent because you have endless competition in silicon valley what are the odds that you're gonna get the ten smartest people in silicon valley you actually don't need the tenth smartest people like most startups aren't the tenth smartest people they are you know one or two people who really understand a certain market and have a market insight that they know how to build for and then a bunch of hackers who will you know throw you know a bunch of energy at making a product great over time i went to duke and coach k is like the basketball coach there he's is the olympic coach and he has this thing he always tells because he recruits amazing talent from across the country and he always says this thing he's like look we have five players you're each like a you know if i if i open up the palm on my hand it's like these five fingers he goes but if we you know come together and he makes a fist he's like a fist is much more powerful than anything anything that these five people are gonna do and that's how i feel about the remote thing it's yeah you can save money and yes you can find a wider pool of of talent if you go global but you're not a fist you are not as tightly you know as as tightly communicating and glued together as you know four people living in a house eating sleeping breathing their startup i think that like optimal value creation is basically like three hackers that live in a house they you know they order food every day and they you know they're the only thing they do besides sleep eat and talk to customers is like go for a walk sign and so i think the closer you can bring your startup up to that the higher chance you have of creating a really big outcome in the i wouldn't i wouldn't disarm because that's optimal i just think it's hard to get that so that's the point of the question what is something a lot of people believe that you disagree it so it sounds like we are on the opposite side of that okay let's do this one let's do we're doing a game called fuck murder or mary real quick fuck murder mary s f austin and miami sam your first kill miami the mary san francisco bang austin i'm not a miami seems okay i just don't really like it andrew what do you got i said fuck miami mary austin murder s f i'm in the same boat i can't believe you didn't shoot the fuck miami that's what miami is four so that's that's a good one alright let's jump for the next one favorite podcast newsletter or twitter that you recommend people should check out in twenty twenty one what do you got andrew so i really like this news that are called the new consumer by dan f he's a performer forget where he worked but he's like a pretty famous journalist and it's just always interesting it only comes out i think once every week or two and it's just about consumer trends usually it's about something interesting in retail like coffee shifting to mobile or you know how chipotle is evolving in the pandemic or whatever but i never missed it and i can't say that about many newsletters so that one's awesome this is when we all probably follow but i like jack butcher on twitter man those little inspirational one off pictures i i love them i think i'm a big fan of them and i've become friends with them over the year and that's my favorite follow i'm enjoying your bro with him yeah if you put jack butcher in a truck watch out i love it i like the the cute he just did he just did a really funny thing today he said tweet your podcast name at me and i'll make you album cover and he's doing all these amazing little cover our designs it's it's cool he seems like an unique guy yeah sean replied and he got my first million mate it was a million dollar bill yeah there two people did it alright mine is gonna be i'll give you a twitter follow that andrew bet you probably like this guy seems trend griffin i don't know if i know if he's great from mike a lot of people follow him he's i don't know much about it he's kinda like an old guy on twitter that like talks a lot about like value investing he with microsoft guy i think he was like childhood friends with bill gates and paul allen he went school with him and he's been there since the beginning and he also worked with craig in the nineties and they rolled up like a ton of cellular businesses and made a lot of money he's a he's a really cool guy he's a really smart guy he tweets out interesting things and he's not pre contentious which is like what's his blog call it's like a twenty i learned or something or twenty five iq twenty five iq yeah he's pretty nerdy guy he's like a grandpa paul like we we'd be friends even though we look like opposites you know i i like but i love that guy's brain i think he's really smart and great i learn a lot from him now we're shifting into life we're gonna try to go a little bit fast on these so we'll go rapid fire as best as we we say that but we don't really okay let's do this first one best book read in twenty twenty and or next book on the shelf what do you got tons of which wichita the biography of the koch brothers andrew what you got for books i read lights out which is the story of ge and it's failure under jeff and it was just fascinating seeing like a business go from one of the world's best in two thousand when jack welch left and then basically you know being a shell of its former self by twenty twenty is really really good hybrid read paypal wars in twenty twenty i love that book there's nothing particular i love it except for the fact that it's about the early days of paypal with peter t and max le gen and elon musk and it's like a dc you know like comic book superhero with dc marvel like where all the superheroes are in the same movie that's what the paypal wars book is like because it's all these people who go on you know read often goes on to create linkedin this guy goes on to create youtube this guy goes on to create tesla and they're all in their like early days and it's written by like one of their released employees i thought that was great book that's habit you picked up of twenty there's this book everyone kept talking about called breasts by james nest and i was like oh man this is just gonna be don't know how there could be a whole book written about this so i did the blink and it basically the sum submission of the entire book is that you should breathe through your nose and you should try and breathe five seconds in five seconds out and you should put your tongue on the roof of your mouth when your mouth is close and i thought this is the stupidest thing i've ever heard but i said okay i'll try it for a few days and i've been doing it for maybe a month and i just felt way calmer i think i'm someone who gets kinda anxious and then i start mouth breathing so it sounds like a stupid thing but i think it's actually a really calming nice habit that's amazing good tip and i'm glad you distilled it because i also saw that book and i was like what the fuck yeah you know what is this gonna be about mine's boring personal trainer just working out regularly what about you sam drinking top chico for every drink so instead of drinking diet soda just top chico it's just carbonated water you know it's really funny because the next question is what's the worst tab you picked up in twenty twenty and mine is that i drink like ten fizzy waters a day which i thought was innocent but now i've learned they have this chemical called p in them and top chico actually has quite a bit in it like the worst so you may be poisoning yourself i saw that look here's about which is like i don't care i don't care it's definitely better than coke because like i'd rather have dirty water that just c i mean like i'm not trying to live a vice free life for a perfect life i'm just trying to live a little bit better logic totally so give it to me get my worst habit in twenty twenty is i now open up tiktok right before i sleep every single night and i can't help it and i do like thirty to forty minutes of tiktok and it's kinda great because tiktok is kinda great and it's like either funny or just interested like i don't know just like random up stuff but i know that that can't be good and you know i got hooked on the what i call the chinese crack the chinese crack is tiktok and i'm i'm hooked on the chinese crack right now mh how about the red screen at night do oh do i do like the this one one yeah i do i do a red tint at night and i've noticed that i can sleep way easier and i can look at my phone before bed she'd test that out i always thought all these like kinda sleep like like optimizations that people do you know they just always seemed kinda woo to me like oh i gotta do night shift i gotta remember my big glasses perfect sense no makes perfect sense seriously i i've noticed the big difference doing it what's your belt pleasant surprise of quarantine sean okay i'm gonna mix this with the next question for me which is food of the year pears i'm eating a shit ton of pears it pears are fucking great okay pears not an apple not a strong taste pears are like look we're chill we're not like trying to be the most out there fruit we're just chill we go great with a salad we go great with goat cheese we go great with just plain pairs of the shit and pairs have been my pleasant surprise of quarantine in twenty twenty i think we just found the moment of the year for my personally this is the quality content people people pay for dude go to pair pairs are amazing you're you're gonna laugh and then today at the grocery store people are gonna be like fuck fucking i'll pick up a pair and you're gonna not regret that decision i do paris the past july starting in january i got pretty shredded i sent a lot of shirtless picks i think to sean and ab bra i got shredded i've since got not shredded but for a minute i was ripped that was my the surprise for me it's just that you can adjust almost anything i'm a pretty big extra i'm a member of a lot of like business groups and social you know lots of repeating social events and stuff at losing that it was super super hard but i feel like within a within about a month and a half i almost forgot we were in quarantine and life seemed back to normal almost so it's kinda neat just to realize that you know you can adjust pretty easily to something also not commuting commuting blows everybody knew it and now that i've never do it i'm like you can't make me go back and do that again the best where i live in canada there's no commute i mean you driving downtown takes seven minutes from my house i live right on the water and then i drive seven minutes and i get to my office and my office is you know nice and chill and i think you guys are blowing up at being in big american cities let's do best purchase over a hundred dollars sean okay bitcoin again no i'm sure so so i spent about three hundred fifty dollars on black friday this brand that's called thirty two degrees which is just like i don't know ran a brand i found at costco it's kinda like the nike under armour like material it's kinda like sports wear material but it's not like super snug it's not like super tight or whatever they make good stuff and on black friday they hit a crazy deal where everything was like six dollars and so i spent three hundred fifty dollars just buying twenty of the same shirt the perfect shirt that fits me well that feels great to wear and i did the same thing with bam socks i just bought a hundred pairs of the same black sock and so now i just my wardrobe is just all the same thing that i like i like to wear and it's always i always have a clean one ready and i don't have to think about it and i just have this pile right next to my desk of thirty two degree stuff and that's been my best purchase of it's the best purchase of like increase my quality of life per dollar you know so that's my answer mine would be power blocks do you guys what power blocks are is that a weight lifting thing or it's the weight lifting thing it has dumbbells zero to a hundred twenty five pounds all in one little oh it's like the bow flex dump i love power blocks and then the second one i ball out and i bought an eighty five inch tv the other day and it's just awesome it's like everyone says spend money on experiences it's kinda like an experience so it's awesome yeah that's gonna be my contra and thing it's like y have you guys ever had things things are pretty dope too yeah like i like that shit like wiz khalifa tweeted this out yesterday to had like fifty million re tweets or whatever he was like man i can see why it i can see why people just sit around watch tv day some of these shows a most of fucking great it's like true like there's such amazing shows out there that a a great tv is is well worth it what about you andrew so i would say i gotta like q two this year which is like amazing it's like a eight thousand dollar super fancy camera and a friend of mine i like buying new gear right i like getting into a new hobby researching the best stuff or whatever and i was kinda looking for a new hobby and i was talking to a friend and he's like dude look like photography is the perfect thing because when you're old there's nothing you're gonna want more than amazing photos of your kids right like that's the greatest thing to have and so i went out i spend all this money on it i was thinking like i just you know i don't need this i've got my iphone camera the difference is shocking like the photo quality is absolutely insane and while the iphone is amazing now you don't realize how much better it can be so i've just been loving that it's been super fun and it's nice because it's a hobby that doesn't relate to work in any way i can't really make that into a business that's a good one i'm the opposite i bought one of those fancy cameras and i'm like i just like having the camera in my pocket at all times like dia the thing just collects dust for me it doesn't work for me what about you sam did you do your oh you did your over what about your under under a hundred dollars purchase active and that's so stupid it's a wait it's a fitness thing an apt subscription my lane okay i had i bought a foot massage for my wife because you always asked me to do foot massages and i hate doing it and so i bought this little thing off amazon that's a foot massage and now every time she asks i just bring it right over to her she puts your feet in it and i'm hands free again i can do whatever the hell i want that's not the point sean yeah she tries to tell me but i'm like hey like you asked for this you didn't ask for quality you asked for a phone side i got you a foot massage andrew did you have under a hundred dollars one yeah i i was gonna say the meg safe iphone wallet so i had like i love i get so much pleasure out of like kinda like your sock thing right like little things that make my day a little better and i had this super thin metal wallet that was always in my pocket and i got a lot of pleasure out of replacing my big fat wallet a couple years ago and now i have this tiny little meg safe wallet that sticks on the back of my iphone and it just feels like i've got a little bit less stuff in my pants when i walk around super subtle but i've been really enjoying that i like it how about this one what's a lesson you learned about yourself this year sam what did you have for this one so i used to shit on new york all the time i shit on francisco call the time now that i'm not living in like a major city living in major cities even though i used to show on it i love it i do love it i like being in the action i learned that i actually love it even though i would complain about it all the time i miss it how about you i had one which was there's levels to this which is like even things that i thought i was good at like i i kinda pride myself on having a really positive mindset and really like great outlook on life and then i met my trainer and he's like levels better than it than me and so what every part of my life which whether it was like fitness business brain i was lucky this year to spend time spend a lot of quality time with people who play that part of the game at a much higher level and it was just like very obvious to me like how much more i can improve in each one of those areas and so the the the lesson i i wrote was that there's levels to this on each one of those father like oh and you andrew i think like i've kind of built like this narrative that chris and i have this super chill life up in canada and we don't work that hard and that's certainly been true in different periods but this year was a fucking grind like i worked so fucking hard i was working you know nine ten eleven hour a days i was constantly on email i ended up having a really busy calendar and we're doing a lot of big projects and stuff but it was a kind of a reminder of like if you wanna do big stuff you kinda have to work hard and you're gonna have busy periods and not and that you know that whole narrative of working smart not hard is not always totally true even for us where we have had periods were really chill you wanna do just one or two more sean your pick you pick okay well just do how about two more cool white pack what's one thing you did to improve your relationship i can go first which is we hired an accountant we've never done that but finally we did and we go to all the meetings together as opposed just one person just making all the decisions nice school mine mine's kinda funny so my wife and i we don't really fight very often but when we do it's usually about like logistics so it's like you know what do you wanna do this weekend or what are we having for dinner or what time are you gonna be home from work and so i went through apple shortcuts and i have all these automated reminders so every day at three thirty i got a shortcut that pops up and says what time will you be home and i choose the time and it text my wife i have one for planning our weekend to remind us to do that and it sets a a format and stuff and then i also have one to remind us meal plan and it's been shockingly effective way fewer weekend fights mine is i created this thing called happy hour which is it's not actually a full hour it's actually only twenty minutes that it happens every day from five forty pm to six pm and in that time i'm gonna everything i can to make her happy so i'm not just like like usually that's when i stopped working and what do you to happen is i i'm done working for a bit i'm like okay i'm take a break do some family time and i would go but i'm my mind is still on work i'm still kinda i'm just kinda tired and i'm hungry usually and i was there but i wasn't like on my a game and so i just created this time i was look for twenty minutes you told me to take out the trash i'm gonna waltz and take out the trash like what can i do for you did you want that box moved into the garage up into the attic for no reason i'll happily do that now and so for twenty minutes i just do anything i can to make her happy i'll her wishes my command and she thinks it's kind ridiculous and i think it's kind of ridiculous but it's kinda fun and it's such a short amount of time like of course i can be amazing for twenty minutes i can be like you know the husband of the year and so i do none of the things that annoy her and only things that she wants and every day she plans out like oh i'm gonna have him like rearrange those plants that are annoying the she finds these tasks that she knows i won't wanna do and she does them during happy hour so that's been a a great little wife hack you guys talked about but the love language thing like what is my wife really care about and i'm just gonna it's like taking up garbage or just basic things that stuff is so important so we're at the last question this one is gonna be a fairly big andrew hugo first which is resolutions what do you wanna get done what do you wanna do in twenty one you know what i've been talking a lot about this but i wanna do no calendar for the whole year and that doesn't mean no no calendar what it means is if someone emails me and they wanna do a meeting i'm not gonna agree to a set time i'm gonna say call me on this day anytime after nine or whatever and i'm gonna see how that works obviously there's exceptions if someone who's some big shot needs to talk and they wanna set a time i'll do that if i've got a board meeting i have to do i'll do that but i really wanna get away from having a calendar i think my calendar just breaks up my day and kills my focus and my flows day and what about you sean i don't do resolutions like like that you know i don't wait till the new year basically at like anytime i realize something i'm like okay that changes like now not like on january first but i would say i have some like intentions or some focuses i do this thing i'm gonna publish it actually but i do this thing that i had learned from this book called design your life the book is whatever but like this exercise is really good and basically it's like look everyone's life like the things you care about fall these like same four or five categories it's like work health love play and i added one last one which is like self respect it's kinda like what's the reputation you have with yourself and so every year i scored i do a reflection at the end of year i did mine yesterday i scored myself on each one of them i looked back at out where i was at last year what i scored last year what i scored this year and then i write out like almost like a software update so like the way i think about is like every year of my life i is like you know sean version three point two that's sean at thirty two years old here's the bugs that i'm fixing and here's the new features i'm adding and i just write the release notes like i would write it if i was writing it to my customers like here's here's what's changing with me i have these new abilities and i have these bad habits and bugs that i'm i'm squash and that that's what's new in this release so i write that out but it's not a new year's resolution mine is i'm gonna run twenty two seconds of two hundred meter dash that doesn't mean anything to you guys it just means i'm gonna run fast for a sprint that's the only goal i ahead what do you think are the odds that you'll be able to do that one hundred percent i almost hit it this year when i was barely trying it but i got sick the so i would say the odds are ninety percent know they say if you're you're if you set a goal where your odds are ninety or hundred percent you're really not ambitious enough so maybe we should drop it to twenty one seconds or so i will not my buy i'm too old but i can't do that i could definitely twenty two is a big range i didn't say twenty two point zero zero it could be twenty two point nine nine those are that's a huge difference but i'm gonna run twenty two seconds for the two hundred meter dash which is very very good for a guy my age and very good for anyone so that's what i'm gonna do i love that you added the very very good very excited my age and very good for anyone it's like even for a high school that's great but for very genius for a thirty year old who who's not an athlete on on a regular basis it's very very good okay that's it is that it done give do this whole list we skipped a couple questions but it's all good we all know the tv show of the year was cobra kai these season comes out january first andrew i know you're on the cobra kai train sam are you cobra call or no no are they a sponsor dude oh my god they're so you you actually not watched it what is that it it's a tv shot karate kid i i've even seen the karate kid and i got absolutely hooked this was like the ultimate mood booster it's amazing great show on netflix go watch it alright andrew thanks for coming on and doing this sorry we went double the length but i think people will like it it's a good kinda chill out end of the year let us know what you think tweet it us twitter it be treated sam tweet and andrew let us know what you latest this episode alright we're out of here twenty twenty one let's do it