Favorite Finds: From McDonald's to Twitter Famous, Pelosi's Finances & How To Close A Deal

he said this line that i love he goes that sounds silly i understand that that my whole day is just about posting on twitter but everything's everybody's just got a thing that's my thing okay and he's like we've all got one thing that's my thing then like i love it i feel like i could rude where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a travel alright we have a special episode we're gonna talk about cool content that we've consumed this might be short twenty twenty five minutes but you wanna kick things off yeah well i wanna say why i think this is a good type episode to do we you know one of the best ways to change your life is to change like your if you don't wanna change your body you'll go change your diet or your habits you're working on habits where you're eating habits if you wanna change your mind you need to change your info diet and so one of the questions i like asking and i know you do too which is like you're like it's like a the do question ever we probably should find a better way to phrase it no it's a great question but it's the answer is so good that we don't even care how lame the question sounds but it you i've heard you said this before like so what media are you consuming so what you're like what are you reading nowadays or like what what content do you like to consume which is i do that in job interviews and people will be like oh i read like the new york times i'm like no come on like what subreddit reddit are you like consuming do you use reddit what about twitter on instagram who do you follow what where are you getting who who's influencing you that's more lucky this we were like what reddit what's cell do you go on because his brain was and and it was like he's firing off all these awesome things and all these different areas it's like that doesn't just happen by accident that happens because he's got a set of interesting inputs that leads to a set of interesting outputs we as m mfa wanna be one of those interesting inputs for you so that you become a more interesting smart you know person based off of listening this but we're just one thing so what we wanna share is what are the best of the inputs that we read listen to or watch this week that maybe you should go check out so that's the premise of this i i wish more people did this of people that i find interesting i wish they would be more i wish they would curate for me like y here's the one or two best things i read or watch this week or listen to just to get my mind going and show me cool things i should go go do anyways that's the a spiel i want you to kick it off yeah i want you to do the top two yeah all three years are good so why you kick it off with the top one so one of the best things i watch this week is bill gi talk at all have you heard his his talk that he did at the all in conference yeah so he did a talk i believe it was about uber and regulation and like some of the surprising things they found so bill gu was the like lead investor in uber and he goes to all in and i expected him to talk about i don't know venture capital business investing but he's now retired he's a retired vcs so he's like kind of in the no given mode which is great like you know when you get a really smart person who now feels like they have nothing to lose they can go off and i feel like that's the best way to describe this it wasn't a talk bill girly win off and so what he does is the talk is titled i think it's like two thousand eight hundred fifty one or something like that some number and he he's basically the talk is like that's the number of miles between silicon valley and washington dc and what he does is he talks about regulation and how screwed up it makes business and so he goes through example of an example and if it to me it felt almost like a john oliver you know what when john oliver does those last week tonight things where he just has a monologue he's like exposing something that's screwed up or like coffee z does this on youtuber he'll go in and it'd be like logan paul scam people and let me just expose the whole the g he exposed the g of regulation and he's like dude look at this like covid happens so they passed these laws about covid testing and look at this the same test in the uk or germany costs like you know seven times less as it did in the us why because in the us it was mandated that only these two companies tests were gonna be allowed and in germany was a free market so the test the cost went way down or he would give an example of he's like you know here's the guy who passed this law and he says that these are the only three vendors that the government can use and so they charge this crazy amount and then guess what here's is linkedin oh what do you know five years later he's on the board as the chief whatever at that same company that he handed this prize to and it's like the g is real and the thing i loved about this because you're like dan that was a great talk he's like i've been working on this for like fifteen years he's like basically for the last fifteen years every time i saw something that was just complete g screw it's just a f up that part of the system i wrote it down i made a note and so he's like this talk is basically fifteen years in the making of me kind of observing what screwed up about the way that washington works at the end his mic dropped is basically like he's like i called this talk in a two thousand eight hundred and fifty one that's a number of miles between san francisco and dc and when i talked to people in dc and they ask you know how does ill silicon valley you know do so much innovation it's because we're so fucking far away from washington dc like we're just away from the poison of the way that that place works and we're the farthest possible place away on the map in the united states from from dc so i love that talk was there any like promising parts of it or like this is gonna change or is it like this well were like what do we do about this can this change like the first thing is this we have to like expose this right like you know you gotta shine light on it the you the bacteria sort of grows in the dark and the second thing was he was like you know it's hard because the incentive is the people who could change the laws that would say hey you know maybe if you write the laws about these companies you can't trade their stocks for example right like we send this on the pod yeah but the people who need to pass that law they're the ones who are profiting from this so he's like it's almost impossible to change that incentive like it's like they would have to do that they need so much pressure in order to make the changes because they're not incentivized to do in fact the opposite their entire incentive is to keep the system the way it is there's this interesting thing that's going on where i i don't know anything about the government i don't remember if it's the senate congress whatever it is but it was like one of the few things that both of handful of like hard right republicans and hard left democrats were agreeing on where they're like alright we're gonna create like a political index fund where you could only have if you're a politician you have to you can you can have money but it must be in this particular index fund and so like you're you you can't own individual stocks you know how nancy closes these accused of like doing whatever and then how i think it was the head of was it the new york stock exchange there's what what one of the companies like like two weeks before the government shutdown with covid they sold a bunch of stocks and like this all looks suspicious and so they're they're trying to like argue that there needs to be a political index it seems like a pretty cool idea actually by the way there's a startup that called autopilot i don't know if you ever heard of them if they do like like it's like a automated money management or like you know basically it's a way to what you can do is you put your money in the app and then you could be like oh i wanna copy the michael burr portfolio and you could just like copy their public portfolio yeah it's cool what they did that was released so the business is doing okay and then it's like growth took off and i was like dude what happened like incredible chart he's like we made this twitter handle called the pelosi tracker and they have the british tracker the pelosi tracker and whatever and the pelosi tracker has three hundred and thirty nine thousand followers and basically every time she makes a trade they they post about it and so they just dig through the filings and they told hilarious things and and her gains that she has and like of course somehow nancy pelosi like happens to be you know she you know she's you know happens to be thirty percent year to date like she's outperforming warren buffett she's outperforming your favorite hedge fund guy like it's insane oh does this government i you know official do this it's like well maybe they know some things before some things insane it's interrupt that was a genius growth hack that they did alright i'll give you one so this has been going around twitter but i went and watch the whole thing it's pretty amazing so dion sanders i i'm not a i'm not a football guy you're gonna know i'm not a sports guy you're gonna know a lot more about this than i am dion sanders he's now the coach of what is it colorado yeah the buffalo the buffalo and he he was on sixty minutes i think like two weeks ago and it was pretty amazing we did like a twelve minute segment on him and it was really fascinating because i remember dion sanders has been like this like cocky like show boat guy and he is still a little bit of that but he's incredibly insightful and so basically what's he what what university was yeah it was a historical black college it was a jackson state where he was yeah i forgot the name of it yeah some not very popular school he gets into coaching he he he does a decent job there then he gets recruited to go to colorado which is big deal but what he does is he he's doing two interesting things the first interesting things that he's doing is one of his sons is filming the whole thing it's like his gary v thing and so his son is like filming behind the scenes and posting it on youtube and driving interest it's really fascinating what he's doing you seen that it's amazing so one of his suns is the quarterback starting quarterback it's i think another son is on the team too the other son is like you know what the corner or the yeah i think he's a quarterback which is what dion used to play and then the other the the sun to stop blank football is basically the gary v vlog guy and he's just in the locker room he's he's documenting the whole thing and sharing it on social as they go and they're just doing a better job of it than like you know anybody's doing following that stuff yeah it's awesome and the second thing that it that he did was his leadership skills are really good and they're kinda shocking because i just thought that he was just like a meat head and he was just this really cocky guy nah man the guy's really insightful and so basically they show like a clip from one of his first meetings with the team and he basically he goes i'm here to encourage most of you to quit the reason being is you guys are the team's lost so much i think last year you like one in eleven so you lost most every game we barely won a game and the coaching staff they're all out we got rid of them i'm here i brought a bunch of my guys here who i know are good and look here's the deal the coaching staff is to blame but you know who else is to blame the kids because the coaching staff probably recruited a bunch of losers and i'm here to get you losers to quit and he and and the the guy on cnn was like hey man that's a little harsh like these are kids he goes well look if you are willing to quit the team because i said that you're probably weak and you're not an asset to this company and if you're gonna let words scare you i need you out of here and i need the tough guys to stay and i need you to be an asset and not a liability and he re revamped the roster he brought like forty play forty new players in which is half of a the football team roster and in fifty left in fifty left they went into the transfer portal portal and he goes he he he's like look truth is good for the kids this is what i'm here to teach you football i'm gonna teach you how to how how to live life and be a good man and what you guys need is truth i need to tell you the truth i need to prepare you for the real world and we're gonna i want a winning team and he does this other thing where he goes the the interviewer goes so who do you think is the best football football coach right now in the he goes well do you have a mirror so that i could hold up so i can see him he's like it's me he goes i'm gonna be the best coach but then he does a good job of beat like humble he's like well i i learned a lot from nick sa and he's forgot more about then i'll ever know and so i'm looking for a little crumbs from him but it was really inspirational because i think that this type of like pound your chest leadership the way that he delivered it was really good i i was very inspiring on how to lead a business yeah you know i'm usually not believe it or not that big of a believer in like the effect of the pre game or halftime time speech like that seems to be like probably overrated in terms of what a coach can do and vastly underrated is the systems and like habits and standards that you like enforce it instill and so what people are seeing a lot because it's super viral you share the halftime time speech you share the the the pre game speech or the post game speech and they're and dion i don't know if you know between football and this between playing and this he like became like a pastor like part time and he said he was like very religious and he was like given sermon i remember watching him on tv giving him sermon on a big white suit but if you but if you watch one of the other things he does he set a bunch of standards so he's like you know day one and almost in the like that book the score takes care of itself by the wall where it's like okay yeah we wanna win but the score will take care of itself if we do these inputs same stories like he makes the people answer the phone and the front desk of appropriately yeah and john wouldn't do the same he's like we're gonna learn how to lace up your shoes if you can't if you don't take the time and attention to figure out how to lace up your shoes just to make a point of like what we do out there is a result of how of what we put in let's let's understand that it is a direct result of what we put in and so we're gonna we're gonna monitor that and so one of the things i that they show in dion stuff and i saw this when i was at duke with coach k is like it's the little things that they set as the standards so for example he's like you know if you are on the field he's a put a he put a footage from the previous practice he's like look at what's happening here can anyone tell me what's wrong and it's like i don't know it's not even a play what are you talking about like something this is just us walking in between the drills like hey he's like exactly you're walking if we on this field we run we do not walk and he's like basically sit created a new set of standards and so he's like if you're in a team meeting where do you sit how do you show up do you use your phone do you and he's just like kind of like instill new standards so while the speeches are getting a lot of the the the the shine i think the more interesting thing is basically in the how we show up the daily standards of the inputs that go into it and now of course you know they're undefeated right now and they're doing really well and i think it's more because of that yeah it's awesome and he the he did a good job where he was like the guy was like when he did the whole thing like let me hold up the mirror and he was like well look here's the deal i tell my kids i go i expect you to be the best so i'm gonna be the best too and these like you're i think you can win the high trophy and i think i'm gonna be the best coach when and so he does a really good job of balancing this like cocky we're gonna take over the world and also high expectations so i thought that was really inspiring what do you got alright i'll do another one this is in the nerdy realm so and there's a guy who is a twitter kinda i really like called cfo secrets i love this guy he has a newsletter that i didn't subscribe to but i just saw one of his posts that was really great it was it was called uncovering the mystery of working capital and m and a i was like okay well that sounds like you know boring has a market size of like three people right now so it's like dude to when we when i sold the hubspot it took me a week to under to for them to explain what working capital was and i still don't understand it read this post it's really good so one of the things that i look for is i you know you can tell when somebody actually knows their shit and off honestly like sometimes when i go on twitter i go on youtube but i just wanna delete my account because i'm like it's so annoying that the most vocal people just don't know what the hell they're talking about and there and what what happens is some people know what they're talking about they produce content everybody loves it but then some people instead of taking that content and going and executing on it they're like i too will create content about how to be successful although i am not successful yet and then they do it and then there's like a ladder below that and they're like i will tell people how to do sales even though never done sales even though don't know anything on else sales even though i've only sold ten thousand dollars in my life right like and it just ladders down in that way and then and those people will have the most time on their so they're the most like active publishing stuff it's crazy so seeing these guy's news that i was like oh finally somebody who knows what to talk about so he has this thing about m and a and if ever sold a company so much of what he says ring true he's like so he he's like the post starts like i'm just gonna read you some of the best parts of it goes it always starts the same we're tired they're tired everyone's been sprint to get this over the line and we're sprint because time kills deals as like if you've done deals you know this momentum is what oils the deal wheels and he's like there's always a point where the deal is mostly agreed we've agreed on the headline valuation number and that took a lot of negotiating it's tired us out and now there's only two or three points left to agree in the deal he's like most of these are boring stuff like reps and warranties and the legal documents and we wanna leave that to alert there's maybe one commercial point left and so the other side picks up the phone and i say hey we just we just need to iron out this one detail about working capital peg and he goes i'll say something like oh thanks for the reiner been so busy on the on the documents i haven't had much time to give that thought i'll get back to you tonight but i've thought about it i've been thinking about it i've been thinking about the working capital this whole time i'm just setting up my position that way that oh i i haven't really brought it you know i haven't any put much thought into it and then i'm gonna bring them a very well thought through thing that i think is gonna make sense and he goes there's one last trade left in the negotiation in my experience this is one to three percent of your total enterprise value is just this last thing thought and it's a pure win lose negotiation between both sides you're tired they're tired who's gonna feel like screw it let's just get the deal done and i'm like and you know we just went through a negotiation so you know that by the way that's what i learned you about negotiating you're you had a line that actually changed me which was the the person who can be comfortable with the most amount of uncomfortable in this will will win exactly yeah this the short version that i say and every negotiation is the more stubborn party wins always from people think that the person who wins a negotiation is the one who has the stronger logical case hell no it's the person who is more stubborn who wins always and how do you be stubborn you need to be comfortable in the on in the discomfort and i would say honestly when we did this negotiation which maybe we should do by by way breakdown on the whole thing one of the last one of the things i think we did not do a good job of was this last bit the last point which is that last you know one to five percent of value and we were just so tight we wanted to get the deal done i don't think we did a good job like four months yeah and i think that the real way to do that is that's when you need to like dig in the most because it's that last deal point that like you can get and you'll think yourself later for it even though in the moment you're feeling tired it's like any workouts like do i push here or do i just say i'm tired i stop and like anybody who knows about workouts just like no push through yes you're tired but you'll feel so satisfied and all the gains will come on that those last two reps of pushing it so anyways he talks about this and then he gets into the nerdy part where he's like alright here's the spreadsheet like you know you have your enterprise value and then you have your your value your actual valuation what's the difference between in the two it's like well your enterprise value includes the debt and the capital that's in the business and then your valuation you know your the the actual equity values is what's left after that so i think just a very useful doc a very useful newsletter for people who are gonna go through that are going through that probably overkill to read this early but if you're gonna do m and a it really really pays to have somebody who's good m and a on your side when we were doing our negotiation i was basically trying to convince you hey let's have our buddy who's done more m and a than both of us like help us think this through at the beginning you did you did good you let that one and you did really good and i would say i'm still like intermediate maybe at the i'm at the early stage of intermediate there's people who are way more advanced and so anyways this a newsletter it's a very nerdy fine for m and a i'm gonna read this i i went through this i went through a deal that involved networking working capital i still don't entirely know what it means it was this was very challenging and the guys this guy's writing is really good he and he actually sets it up perfectly where like net working capital was thrown in at the last minute and i'm like oh i don't i don't even know what that is i'm dead i i wanna get this done it's supposed to close in eight days i just wanna get this done yeah hey guys really quick so you may know this but my beginning in business was being a copywriter on myself top copywriter and what that means is i figured out what motivated people and then i figured out how to use the written word to get them to do what i want them to do so that could mean selling them a product that could mean writing a speech or even giving a speech and giving someone to buy into a particular movement they could be recruiting hell you could do it for dating it just basically means figuring out what motivates someone and how to use the written word to take an action get them to take an action or to think a certain way and the way that i learned had to copyright was did this thing called copy work and copy work is this famous technique that's really popular anymore but it used to be really really popular and you basically take writing that is great writing that you love and you write it out by hand and you copy it and you make notes of what particular thing that that writer's doing that makes it special this is the exact same way that you learn how to play the piano when you wanna learn how to play the piano you learn how to play happy birthday and then you learn how to play like jingle bells and then maybe like a rock and roll song and then maybe like a hip hop song and eventually you can combine that together after few years and you learn how to make music that's your own same thing with writing that's how i learned how to write i walk myself in a room for six months and i just did this for many hours a day i created a program to make it easy so you can do it's called copy that copy that dot com you can go there and you could check it out to ten day exercise to make it really easy to learn how to write if you want you can just go do this on your you can find great writing it just literally copy it by hand i know it sounds crazy but it works really effectively but made something that makes it a little bit easier so check it out copy that dot com and we will talk soon and back to the pod you wanna go to to to the last one oh yeah okay so do you know this account cultural tutor on twitter awesome follow awesome follow so the story is kinda crazy i didn't really know about but he he went on david per pearls podcast which i think you you were going on to or something i just i just recorded an episode with him last week so david pro cool guy lives in i think austin and he's a teaches people like about writing online he's got a new podcast so he did an episode and the set itself is beautiful it looks like they're in like you know the royal library in the uk or something beautiful set so he has his guy i've never heard of this guy and then i was like oh i did see one of his threads go super viral he did a thread about like why all architecture designs all look the same now they're all minimal and that's being got like a hundred million lights or some shit like that it was really good viral and it's not even about like a thing you would think goes viral but it hit a nerve and so this guy he does his interview and i've only honestly i've only listened to the first ten minutes of this so like many book temperature man i got a lot of value out over the first ten minutes and i was sort of satisfied but he said something at the beginning so he's like this guy was basically working at mcdonald's literally he was like flipping burgers and doing french fries and he's like they had like a mutual friend guy harry drives cool and then david i think david like basically sponsored them he became like his patron he's like you wanna write what if i just paid you to write so he quits his job in mcdonald's he just decides okay i'm gonna write every day and david like funds him for whatever reason i don't know exactly how the shit worked but like i'm sure they explain it in the other fifty minutes of the podcast but the important part is not that the important part is this guy then decides okay i'm gonna write one amazing twitter thread a day and he says this line that's great he's like he's and then david's is like what's your schedule he's like he's like yeah i wake up at like four pm and then i just start thinking about my thread and i smoke cigarettes i go for walks i write and i go for another walk smoke some more cigarettes and then i you know i'll eat some food if somewhere in the middle there and then i'll just write and then i publish and then i pass out and i do it again the next day and he's like that's crazy he's like yeah i don't he's like you know i'm not the guy who's gonna tell you my morning routine don't follow me but like this is what i do and he's like i just my whole day he's about publishing one amazing toyota twitter said this line that i love he goes that sounds silly i understand that that my whole day is just about posting on twitter but everything's everybody's just got a thing that's my thing okay and he's like we've all got one thing that's my thing that's like i love it and he's like what of the results have been so far he's got one point three million twitter followers he's got an insane twitter following like he's built a in like a year is it making money i don't know i don't think it makes any money off it yet but he can right like you know it's not that hard to turn attention into money once you have attention you know it's harder to turn money into attention than it is attention into money to be honest he has one point five and he has hundred thousand person email list yeah he's doing fantastic that's that's incredible right so he's doing doing very very well for himself you know but i just love the intensity this guy was gonna bring to something and i've actually noticed this as a common trait which is if you bring a level of seriousness to something that everybody else considers not serious you can actually win much bigger than most people realize this is time we felt about newsletters i was like i'm the math i think this could be a legit thing and and we sold early but we definitely the business could make a hundred million dollars a year you know morning bruce is close to that and i always say one of the reasons why is people thought this was silly but if you did the math i'm like i don't know i think the math is out there i think this is gonna be a real thing i don't know i think that's the same thing with my latest business as well which is we're just taking something seriously that most uses as a hobby yeah i don't know if that's true is that true or aren't there like you know does why people not take the seriously do those guys not take it seriously they do but most the there's a there's a few that do but many many many others in the space they think that it's just like it's like a small thing that you charge a hundred dollars a year for or something like that it's there's a lot of there's a lot of hobby the better frame i think for what you're doing to be honest it's just the it's if we joke about but it is the beautifully done like i am trying to do that you're shit is just more stylish and more cool and more desirable for a variety of intangible factors ranging from design to people feeling fo to content to you know the the the the the first hundred members that you added to your thing like i remember getting sales calls to join whatever whatever vest or whatever hell they missed the mark they missed the mark well well what what i i loved guys like cultural tutor because what i do for a lot of my brands is i follow people like him and i look at like what was cool in the six season seventies that i can just reuse today so for example our color for hampton it's the color of this really cool jaguar car that was popular in the seventies right and then when i made the branding i found old rolex ads because i'm like what was cool then that could still be cool now there's another example have you seen the sunscreen company that's doing that shit vacation where it like it looks like in eighties or early nineties like who did vacation this guy jeremy summers he he's amazing with the branding for us for milk road oh he didn't really character but he helped us develop the whole brand and then the last bit was we didn't love the character and then we had a different guy to did the drawing the illustration for it but he did our branding yeah that for for mil jeremy did an amazing job and he's that's specifically his aesthetic is that kinda like i don't know if i shouldn't sit up he's really good at that aesthetic which is the like kind of vintage classy like you know nostalgic beautifully done sort of aesthetic by the way i'll we'll wrap up with a quick story about david pro i went to his apartment so basically he lives in austin he has an apartment in the building but then he also rented this other apartment and when you walk in it feels almost like an airbnb or maybe like you're walking in to like a restoration hardware store everything is perfectly set up he and david is really ocd and so like he's got this two bedroom or it was a three bedroom apartment they knocked down one wall so they went all in on this thing and then one room is like the studio where we sit and then another room is like the guest room where if you're a guest and you wanna fly in and you could stay there but like there's like a record on the wall or there's books in the shelf and i'm like david aldi of these have a meeting he goes he's of course you know me you know every single here every single thing here has a purpose and has a story and so he like perfectly like picked everything in the studio and what what is that oh would you like to see this cream colored book that's on my books shelf does it even have pages in it maybe this book says i don't think you see that what it say tango lessons tango lessons did i read this book no did i go on etsy because somebody said go buy cream colored books to put in your background makes you look classy better your dude everything at david's place is on purpose and it all has a story i sent you a video and i'm like we have to step it up this guy is so particular it's it's he's the dion standards in my world of podcasting right now he didn't outrageous come all of his standards were perfect and like i saw his trailer oh my god the guys sweat the details david's awesome he does a great job he's gotten way further with a topic that i think is incredibly boring like he makes millions of dollars year doing right of passage on getting people to become like fucking novel or something that's i don't know how he does that that's not even the thing i think people wanna do like you know right long essays like i'm a like to me that is you know ten out of ten execution on a four out of ten opportunity know he'll he is doing like whatever used car sales he'd be the he'd be like a trillion error right because it's dude he's obsessed with it though he loves it of course of course he's doing it for for the right reasons he's so obsessed for it i i think he said this publicly i met him two years ago and he's he's a he's jewish she ethnically i i i i don't know religiously i don't know if he was as well but he went to a bible study class every day or once a week and i was like why are you doing this bible study class he's was like well the bible is really important because it's just like particle of culture whole time yeah he's like i'm just so fascinated with like writing and like i've noticed there's a lot of bible references so we started doing this bible class while i see him again after about a year and he's like i've converted to christianity they got me like like i just read it so much and i thought you know i really wanna go in one step further and i wanna become a christian and see what the sings is all about like he is an academic in like a very act like in the coolest way possible but he's like i wanted bought into the whole thing hardcore i was trying to flirt with them said instead of sending nude i just sent him a font and he was over the moon about it loved it it's like oh that is that duran that made me weakened in the knees let's recap them real quick so we got the bill early talk that's a youtube video the david per interview with cultural tutor watch the first ten minutes it's great and what was yours yours was the dean sanders on sixty minutes dean sanders sixty minutes and then the secret cfo newsletter about nerdy m and a stuff there's like a series it's like a nineteen part series and i read to them and they're very good alright that's the pod yeah i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a travel never looking back