My decision-making framework for which ideas to chase

today's episode is about one word excellence whenever i hear these stories about people who are excellent or what it took to become excellent what it took to make something happen that was truly excellent it makes me wanna run through a wall for the rest of day so that's the gift to a listener if you're if you listen to this in the morning you're gonna wanna run through a wall after he this i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never sam it's morning time would you like some fo pancakes because i'm about to drizzle some fo pancakes right in front of you for some reason what do you say the word drizzle i audit i'm out you're out yeah i've never been able to pull that word off yeah i don't think anyone has we as you know we're hosting our annual event mean and ben host the annual vet called hoop group with mister beast and we're hosting it in about a week and i was just catching up with ben ben takes the charge on on like everything in your life yeah yeah do doing the things and i just like keep lobbying in ideas and then i'm basically the most annoying guy it's like he said hey here's everything we i'm like can we just make it better he's like okay well wow i'm like i don't know just just think big and i say generic things like that and i'll be like you know i just got off the podcast with this guy what would he do and then he's like i don't know what do what did he you tell about like i know listen that you get inspired but it is the way you call lobbying ideas the that someone i'd said that to my egg coach their day and she goes that's called swoop and poop yeah when do you fly it or do you just leave a bunch of crap exactly they've been working hard and then you swoop in and you poop but i do it in the name of high standards and that's that's how you get away with anything that's how you get away with being an asshole you just say not an asshole have high standards but these my standards have been exceeded by what ben has pulled off with this event just need to tell you some things about this event okay if for those who don't know for the last few years every year we host a basketball camp so it's kinda like a basketball camper for billionaires was the the idea of the dream there's lots of different conferences there's lots of different networking events and i hate conferences and i hate network events and despite me talking a lot on this podcast i'm actually kind of an introvert i don't really enjoy going to events and we wanted to do something but the idea of just creating yet another thing that was very much like everything else that existed was not appealing you guys just sitting around our our conference is dev started with we should do one man we have a big audience we know all these interesting people what if we hosted shoot in an event and it's like great like a like a networking event yay it's was like no it be like i don't like people come and talk and we're like oh conference yay and so then i'd learned this from on my first business this guy told me like irritation leads to innovation so back then it was a restaurant business and he was telling me i was saying how much i hate food delivery and he's like well that's the opportunity make food delivery that doesn't suck and suddenly you'll take something that's really bad and just by like making it not suck the gap between where it normally is and where you are is really big and so similarly the idea with this was well what would be a conference we would wanna go to and so we just started spit balling with like a you know child like energy whereas like i don't know like instead of ice breakers like what if you just like what if it was based around sports we love sports we've combined two things we really love meeting interesting inspiring business people but then basketball and so the idea became we play basketball all day what if we got an nba trainer to come train us like a fantasy camp and we invite people who are really you know successful and interesting but they love to hoop and so we we all first play basketball it's the ultimate equal ice break people get to know each other and then at night you talk shop in the kind of like we all stay in a in a couple of houses and we all talk shop there and you've been into two of these that we've we've thrown so you you kinda get the idea yeah it's great seventeen billionaires are coming to this event which is pretty insane so i just wanted to tell you about like the first just give you a little bit of foam because you couldn't make it this year so i wanted to give me a little foam on who's in the room i think the only two people that gave me true fo there so well first of all actually way actually hold on let me think jesse it's is awesome so i like him i'm fortunate that i've been able to hang out with him i have less fo but he is amazing he's probably the best person i hung out with there last year but jesse cole and the nick mow he's that his name nick mow yeah probably those two guys those two guys are who who i'd wanna meet most yeah i also just wanna see shaq in person i think that's just gonna be incredible the i don't understand shaq doesn't seem like a guy who codes to sleep overs well he's coming to ours alright is he sleeping there or is he just popping in yeah he's coming he's he's an attendee okay and so i brag about how cool this event is but there are couple of downsides the first is the event is not a roster of names it's a vibe it's how you how it actually feels to be there and i'm really worried this year that we might have screwed it up by inviting too many kinda of big name people who are used to being the center of attention we got i think pretty lucky the first couple years that all the most interesting people were also great hangs just really down to earth really fun to be around which i don't think is gonna be true for like your average billionaire your average celebrity right like i think people just used to being kind of the center attention and being a little standoff office so i'm really worried about that hope we didn't screw it up i might be coming back on here in a couple weeks and say hey look you know it was fun but lesson learned you know too much of anything is a problem and the other thing is you know for everybody we got you know ben reached out to maybe there's twenty people who said no and just the effort that it takes to get people to come and to feel comfortable and excited to come to the middle of nowhere with people they don't even know you've never heard of me you've never heard of ben you don't know who any of us are so i appreciate the people who took a leave of it but also like it's you only ever hear about the hits and never the misses but for every hit there's nineteen misses on on people that we wanted to come so i thought just a counter balance it that would be fair i'm eager to see where shaq sleeps what's what does his bed look like bump beds buddy he's on top i'm on bottom he is the bed alright so this episode is all about excellence a while back i shared my personal framework for building excellence in my own life and the team at hubspot turned it into a thirty day operating system you can check out right now it breaks down the systems it took me ten years to figure out and shows how i actually use them day to day these are systems that genuinely change my life so if you wanna build a good life scan the qr code or click the link in the description now let's get back to the show alright so i just wanted to tell you a couple of the the philosophies that i think other people could steal to make cool of cool projects or events like this for themselves okay so i kinda wrote down because this was a point of pride for us i was like man this thing started as a pretty wacky idea that we tweeted out really didn't know where it would go and now this is your this is the fourth time we we're doing it and you were there the first year i mean it was like mostly just our friends sleeping in bunk beds no like programming or like idea of what we're supposed to do in the event there's jan but still very fun and it was still very fun it was like there was some was a sauce there's a seed of something special but it it was pretty jan it relative to like how it goes now it's funny the things that were unimportant were jan so the combinations a lot of people think the accommodations seem to be nice no they weren't it was i shared a room at four guys at debunk that perfectly adequate and fine yeah so we're we so here here's some of okay so the first one is what i said irritation leads to innovation so take something that bothers you or you think sucks and instead of just writing it off as i don't do that i don't like that blah being close minded to it just get playful with like well what version of this would it suck right you just take that as a brainstorm and like i don't know one out of every ten times you might come up with something interesting the second is what i call the yes test so as you get older and more successful in life you go from opportunity scarce to opportunity abundant meaning when you're when you're young you don't really have a lot of cool opportunities or things you could say yes to so you just need to be in the minds of saying yes to a lot of stuff oh this this person wants to get coffee i'll take a flyer on that hey the this person wants me to attend this i'll take a flyer and i'll go speak at this event i'll go do this i'll go do this and then the older you get both whether it's for family reasons your time gets a little more restricted or you just get more and more opportunities coming your way and you have to go the opposite way you basically have to practice saying no and so this creates what i call the yes test and the yes test for me has become the following what i do this thing for no money or losing money and the best projects in my life have been things where i've said yes to things that i would be willing to do for free or willing to lose money this podcast is one of them when i started this podcast i wrote a google doc and i said that stated plan was probably nobody will listen to this and i'm probably gonna lose ten thousand dollars this year in production costs but i'll have you know fifty interesting conversations with really interesting people back when it was more of a guest centric podcast and that was the stated plan but i was willing to go in and lose money doing it which is a good signal for like there's probably a lot of other intangible benefits of doing this if you're willing to do it for a loss this event we don't charge anybody anything we pay for it out of pocket it's gonna cost us maybe a couple hundred grand to throw this event and so that's just cost we eat and so the good thing of the bad thing is you lose money the good thing is the event has to be something you'd be willing to lose a couple hundred grand on like how good must that need to be for you to say yes to that and it's sort of this forcing function of like well it's got like then we gotta have a lot of fun being a lot of really interesting people it's gotta be a real core memory it's gotta be something unique to our brand like you know you you have to get all these other benefits in order for it to be worth that and so when i think about the think the best things in my life that i've done it's been things that i would say yes to even if i lost money and so this year for example playing the piano was a a money loser just one the best decisions i made coaching the high school basketball team has been you know food from my soul i loved doing it and i have you know i make no money i lose money doing that so i wanted to share the yes test with you it's so funny because so many things in my life that i have been thankful for doing i only did it because it made money or like i only did it because i wanted the end result like i don't i don't wanna lose weight this sucks i don't wanna eat this food i don't wanna like exercise and i just wanna i call some of those win lose especially not things like losing weight exercise because those are fully in your control but let's say it's like a business right those are what i call win lose which is hey if i get the result i wanted upfront then this was worth it it was a win but if i didn't i'm gonna be kicking myself right i'm gonna feel like i i lost i i wasted my time and i think there are other win win situations where you say well at the minimum i already win right with the podcast i was like at the minimum i'm gonna have an excuse to go at fifty dope conversations with awesome people i'm gonna learn so much i'm gonna get to know them better and so it's already a win even if nobody ever listened and i lost money but then in the long shot which was people started listening to the podcast and it started to make some money maybe from advertisers well then i i went double great so my two options where i win i went smaller or i went big and i just think that that's generally a better place to be when you actually are excited about the small win not like a moral victory or like a i guess you know could be worse right not that i'm saying you're you're genuinely excited even about the basic win but then there you'd leave yourself room for the upside so can you remind me the pod was started i think in july some type of like late summer of nineteen right yeah and i'm almost positive i don't think it made more than six figures for the first year and a half if i remember correctly yeah probably not i remember doing the first ad reit and the first ad was this brought episode is brought to you by nobody to think about it this could be you it's needed to sell one ad you how to pay i was renting a studio i was like can i pay for the studio time hundred dollars an hour i don't remember i think it was like it it didn't make any money like a year a half and then it made kind of a lot of money and then a lot more but yeah which is pretty funny okay and what of the second two okay i actually have three more so one is the bigger you go the easier it gets so there's a fallacy that people have which is that going for big things is hard is difficult so going for smaller things will be easier but actually whenever you're doing something that is like a new product that event anything that needs differentiation if you think smaller or you play more reasonably you actually are less differentiated you're less interesting and the actually the harder it gets to people get let's just take this event let's say this event was not about basketball it was just a normal meetup or event and let's say the guest list was a bunch of people you never heard of that i were easier for me to get in well it would just make it harder for me to do everything that i'm trying to do with this it'd be harder to get the next guess because why why would i come there's nothing special about this this is true for business too by the way the bigger your idea the better people you can recruit exactly and then the better people you recruit the easier it gets to do the thing right that's the third part right and so having a bigger thing where it's like yeah we're gonna get the most interesting people people with people that have like you know one name recognition i'm only able to get them because we're doing a unique thing but because we're doing anything and we get some of them it makes it easier to get more of them which makes it easier to do a more unique thing because now you have all these really special people coming and in your case shaq i not shaq mister beast was like kind of the the the tent pole the anchor the initial yeah how did you get in touch with shaq k o'neal cold email really actually sorry shaq was through kind of a it was like a cold request ben saw so the guy who started ring doorbell is coming and ben doing ben miracle things that only ben does he was like who are the investors in ring as he goes he looks at who's the first investors and ring saw that shaq was early investor in ring and presumably made a bunch of money off of the ring investment so he's like hey think shaq would wanna come to this thing i think i was like hey let me let me find and so kinda of made the made the intro and then went from there but jamie had never been himself so it's not like he could do like a hard vouch for it but ended up working out but he called emailed a bunch of people that like you know the founder of airbnb came because he cold emailed him and he knew hey i know growing up you were a ball boy for an nba team so like i'm guessing you love hoops just like i do i a ball boy too to check out this camp ben avi that's what this is the good job ben that's one of the principles is basically the product is you pushed out so my trainer told me this one time when i was like trying to figure out what to do should i start this company or this guy i do this or this and i was tell i was just mentioning it to my trainer in passing and he goes he goes what you mean you are the product i go what he goes you're the product he goes the product is just you pushed out so just do you but like turn the volume knob and so he's like look at the podcast what's the podcast do you have to think before you go on the podcast oh how should i act and what should i no you just you're just being you right and you and sam you just get on there and you hang out like you and sam would normally and he's like so the product is you pushed out and that's what resonated with people right that's the one that that that clicked and then he was showing me like and then another project that we did he's like that's just that's like you pushed out again and so with the camp the camp is basically like basketball which something me and been ob obsessed over but it's basically the mix of like on my end it's like my version of like a ted conference because we do these little mini talks every night and that's kinda like i even my twitter boss says i'm a idea dealer like that's the thing that i get off on the most is like the sharing of ideas and like wisdom and picking up these nuggets from each other and the thing ben loves to do is curate really interesting people and get them in a room together like ben is a he's not like a network or per s but he just loves to meet interesting people and he just gets lit up when he meets somebody who's done something interesting who's cool and so anyway i think finding something that's basically if you just look at the product and you say that's me product ties i feel like the hustle for you was in many ways you product big time in your writing voice but also the sort of punk rock attitude the hustle the name hustle the the conference that you did like a lot of that was just your dna but you wanna know where i screwed it up i built something i disliked and so which i think that have you ever done this with the company where you build a company or a project and then you go to dislike the people and the culture like not that they're bad but for example if i when i started we're doing i was twenty four twenty five and then by the time was twenty eight twenty nine thirty i was like well i'm a little bit different or a care about slightly different things or whatever and it's neither good or bad but have you really built a project that was like your own prison yeah you can outgrow you can outgrow a project i think it's generally usually an insecure dirty leads you to make a decision that's not in line with who you are and therefore you end up you do that six times and you end up in an almost unrecognizable spot and it's sort of like boiling water like you're you're you're in lukewarm water and it just is don't notice you don't know it's like too late right yeah and where did that poor decision where why did you start making those those turns like down the wrong roads and usually the root of it is some insecurity so for me when i've done this this thing you're describing it's i'm so afraid for this thing to fail and i so badly wanted to win i badly wanna make money that i start just like trying to conform into like maybe that will work maybe this is the thing yeah maybe this is the thing and then suddenly i've built a live streaming app for twitch streamers nor i do not stream video games i don't play video games i don't even watch twitch and yet here i am how it's like kids you might be wondering how did this happen i that that's that's where i ended up out of that insecurity of just wanna be successful i don't think that's bad by the way like you were a mercenary right and in a way i felt like i started as like a missionary where i was like this is my life this is what i'm all about and then it started of working and i was like okay well have to hire some people and this person's is good and you be sort of become a mercenary some some of the time and so i still am en nvidia of the people so for example one of the reasons why people are obsessed with dyson who you're you're were joking about why is everyone obsessed with dyson is he and brian c another guy at airbnb they appears though they started as a missionary and they've remained that way where they are all they are down for the cause and they refused to bend or in sacrifice but the thing is is that you can get mildly or very successful even by bending in sacrificing you don't actually have to stick to your values all the time in order to be a commercial success and oftentimes it bending your values and and and and doing what you think is expected of you not what you want to do is actually significantly more profitable and so there's been many times where i've made that sacrifice and i maybe got what i want wanted financially but i was and i was pretty upset with how i what i gave into and in turn the reality is i probably would have been significantly more profitable had i stuck the whole time it just would've have been more painful does that make sense well you're saying both things right you're saying i built something that i didn't even love which is for sort of a a painful feeling so that's kind of like a bad outcome but it was a commercial success so it's a good outcome yeah and so can you make a commercial success while being mercenary about it absolutely can you also make a commercial loose as while doing something in line with your mission or something that likes you up or something that you feel is like the type of thing that you you know you sort of or it's organic to you if you have good taste correct if you have good taste but to me i'm like if i can again one is a win lose and the other is a win win if win win is possible that i'm gonna pursue that but it's not always that dude my point my point is it's not always that i have so many i went to bell my university states some music school or it's a school that has a big music department i knew so many people that were like they're like we're gonna be musicians this is the stuff we're gonna play and it's like mildly interesting but it's not like a pop hit or anything and now we're all the same age i talked to them and they're kinda of bum and they regret their decisions they're like i wish i chased the money casey neistat sat has this funny thing casey neistat sat did you know that so casey and neistat i got famous i believe when he started vlogging every single day i think in two thousand fifteen he did not turn on ads on youtube he thought that that was ruining the art and he refused to do it and then he did a talk recently about a year ago where he goes how foolish of me that would have added up to like fifteen million dollars or something insane like that and he was like now my advice is the exact opposite take the money when you could take the money and and so i guess this this constant tension between like doing art and doing what's cool versus taking the money and so i think what you're saying is true and also it's maybe not true for everyone so in that example you're giving i think that so what are these called did are called dialect it's like two opposite two things that opposing ends of a spectrum which can both be argued to be very true and so you would think how is that possible that two things on the opposite end of the spectrum so for example patience is a virtue but at the same time a a lot of entrepreneurs would not be successful if they weren't very impatient at the same time saying six months how do we do this in six days right so like you have these opposite things and then you find the way that they link together so like my favorite one with the patients in imp comes from ball where he says patients with action patients with results and you're like that's it exactly because if you're patient with your action you just don't do shit if you're impatient with your results you give up too easily you get frustrated it leads you to make short sided decisions and so that's the right combo and i think there's a version of that here with like to what extent do i build the thing that i think is interesting that i think is cool that is more natural to what i want and be mission driven maybe to the impact i want or the type of thing i wanna build the type of company i wanna build the type of product i would built and also realizing that the more commercially successful it is the more interesting people you're gonna be able to hire which will make the product better which will let you do this for longer like right so there's a way where like disney said you know we don't make make movies to make money we make money so we can make great movies right and so you wanna basically realize like oh this is this this money thing is important and we have to understand where it's gonna come from and how this is gonna work we can't be blind to that at the same time that can't be the north star if it is we're gonna build something that's you know compromised in a way and i made that mistake i think i made that mistake of compromising because i've now done both now it might be argued that you do the compromise first and that gives you the freedom to take a bunch of shots on goal or gives you the confidence or it gives you the story now you have the skills or whatever i don't know but if i could rewind it i would go back and advise myself to just be like hey you should just keep building the things that you find most interesting were you not interested at all and i mean it's so funny you didn't play was interested in them because of their market potential i was like oh napkin and math this times this times this equals that's not that's not wrong i mean that's not wrong that's that's fine i do i don't think it is ideal right not right and wrong there's like you know there's good better best right there's different great for example i think mister beast is like i don't i actually that's an a question i don't know if he care does he care about making movies or he's a character just like this was the game that was set and set forth it and now i want i wanna win well he is interesting right because he's kind of both he was clearly he clearly loved to make content and wanted to be a youtuber almost like at an identity level more than anything that's why for six years nobody's watching and he just keeps making videos a year after year twelve years old thirteen years old fourteen years old fifteen years old six years or seventeen years eighteen years olds nobody's watched till use nineteen and so and even then it's not like it was huge or small even at that stage but he kept going and he had said front like okay i'm either gonna be in a famous youtuber i'm gonna die dive making youtube videos like i'm gonna try a die trying and so you know in that way he was pretty mission driven and i don't think he was yeah there was a lot easier ways to make money if he needed to make money right like over time he could have given up and and gone towards other things and also the types of videos he made were videos that you know he obviously found interesting at the same time you know i think his i think more than being an artist about like what is the what is the most artistic video i can right i think he's basically saying i wanna make the best youtube videos and best is defined as what people wanna watch i like making things that that entertain the masses that people wanna watch that is the version he likes you know i think the video he did the other day got like a hundred million views in a few hours and for some reason mister beast video never pop up my feet but this one like like all celebrities in it i didn't realize he was doing that thirty celebrities fight for a million dollars and it's like paris hilton and kevin hart and shit like that did you see that yeah i watch that one that's crazy today's episode is brought to you by hubspot did you know that most businesses only use twenty percent of their data that's like reading a book but then tearing out four fifth to the pages point is you miss a lot and unless you're using hubspot the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business the insights that are crafted emails call logs transcripts all that unstructured data makes all the difference because when you know more you grow more and so if you wanna read the whole book instead of just reading part of it visit hubspot dot com but did you have a third or fourth i got two more quick ones one is everybody it doesn't matter how rich you are everybody's a little kid so last year for example you know you got this room full of people who can buy anything that they want but what can't they buy right and so we rent out the stadium for the final game of our tournament at the at the camp and they walked in and there was jersey printed with their names and like everybody was so excited like a little kid and so it's these little moments in between the big things that actually create the feel of the event and so for example this year we're doing this little touch where we play basketball in the morning we gotta tell wait shaq cover your ears so we put bass all the morning and then we go to the house for lunch or whatever and at the house you'll already see on the tv screen like photos from that morning's game like little videos and and photos were you inspired by steve bartlett i heard he i heard he does that where you record a podcast with them and then when you're done with the podcast he hands you a book holly it's a photo album the podcast yeah which is a very very great touch we stole it from k academy coach k and they they have that there and so we're like oh that's a great idea so little things like after the the final game this time we're like how do we make it how do we give you that moment that you can't buy like you know what's the what what's the fun thing that like we're bring out the child like energy in these people and so we were taking them to locker room and you know like in sports like when you win a championship to like have champagne and like ski goggles and the locker room to do so we have that set up so it's like the winners are gonna get to go do that like i don't know just like have fun i think caring about these little details last time after the event we made this custom magazine it was cool with like photos of everybody almost like slam magazine back in the day and we sent it to each person it took me a week to work on that like they were just like what do you do you have a job what do you do you know like you know me in life i'm pretty not a man of the details that's not where i'm from but with this event it's like pick and choose a few areas where you're not gonna eighty twenty in life pick pikachu the areas were good enough is not good enough like okay this is one project where we're like we're gonna try to go all out to a ridiculous degree and they're gonna feel that they're gonna know that we went all out for our own amusement and for our own like just to see what we could do if we really create something that's special and so i'm i'm excited to do that have you been working on this all year no this is like the last six six weeks let's say wow that's a that's a lot you get done just in six weeks is this was this what you will focus on the whole time the whole six weeks no i'm not focused on it really at all i just meet with ben at the beginning say here's like here's some ideas here's what i thought it was good last time bad last time here's some ideas ben goes and does things and then he he we brought on some event organizers to help us this time and then every couple weeks we just sort of check in on like and he's not doing it full time either but like you know a big chunk of his time well the hard part is the inviting the right people and getting to say yeah what i was doing so told you i was trying to write that book i was like i basically become that family guy meme i don't know if you ever seen that episode of family guy where brian's been writing a novel and stew just trolling and was like how's is how's that novel going yeah how's got some pages chapters beginning middle end a little j position and he's like brian's is like classic writer who's like just six stuck in the mud like not making progress on this book it's like too big of a it's like intimidating him and so i've had this idea to write this book i've did all this research but i was like slowly like i would draft chapters but like wasn't like writing the book i just like drafting chapters you yeah i was like pretending so two weeks ago i was like alright who am i am i the kind of guys who's was talking about this book am i gonna write the book and so two weeks ago i decided i will have a prototype of the book so like not the full book but like a a cover opening intro first chapter second chapter printed physical book in to show these people in two weeks and in the last two weeks i wrote it print it's getting printed right now it'll be printed the date the last day of printed will be that is it any good i threw myself into it and it's good because it was such a good forcing function and there's a lesson i was telling ben like tony robbins says his phrase he goes peers aren't just the people around like near you like just the guy you see to right appear is somebody who has leverage over you and it's like what do you mean leverage over you he's like appear is somebody who you care about their opinion of you so they have some leverage over you and that can be a good thing or a bad thing but like the good version of that is if you get the right people around you and you care about their opinion and they value the things that you value well you will sort of rise in accordance with wanting to be seen well by your peers i guess it's very hard to just become a monk and reno be like i don't care what anyone thinks of me right like everybody likes to say that shit but then you're all on social media posting and trying to get likes like you know come on we all care what people think about us the trick is to pick who's gonna care about you and what those people care about and so you know if you're a mom and you're around other great moms then you're not gonna wanna look like a bad mom and the the result is good it helps you be a better mom january is like the biggest month of the january of two thousand twenty six might be the biggest month of your professional career in the last five years definitely the most productive i mean nobody tries to write it but oh i gave up two weeks and i went to the printer and they were like hey yeah you we need seven days i like oh good i got seven days to write this fantastic i pulled all night for seven days and and pulled her off wanna tell like can i tell a cool story about excellence that i think is actually related to this yes and it's probably the only time that the sports that i'm interested are going to overlap at this well but sports in general i mean that you might be interested in i guess does this sport not involve a ball or a goal of any kind no it's deal the only sports i've made two are are people beating each other up or running away from each other it's either it's it's it's chasing sub or what you do would you catch them so which one is this gonna this is a running or a fighting it's a running one i'd let more boring but way more inspirational okay i read this book a few years ago and i was watching a documentary on the same topic and and last night and and i really wanted to bring it up with you because i think you maybe heard it but i don't know if you knew all the details so in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies there was this coach his name was bill he was a tracking field coach up in oregon and he was the man he had served in the in the military in world war two and he was just like tough guy and kinda sort of had this like scientists way bottom where he was all about efficiency he loved efficiency and he was like what's the most what's the best way that i can get these kids that i'm teaching or coaching at the university of oregon how can i make them run faster other than making them train more and he got really nerd like nerdy on shoes and so he started taking apart different shoes and he started thinking how can i make these shoes better and originally like the the lore or or or the story is that he was like well if you're six feet tall you're gonna take this many steps per mile and if i can reduce that a weight the shoes by only one ounce that's gonna save you fifty pounds per mile that seems like a big deal and so he's hanging out with his kids one day and his kids at this point i think are in their twenties but they came over for brunch and the wife his wife bill's wife he's making waffles form and he was like i got it i know exactly what to do so he steals the waffle iron from his wife and he pours liquid rubber into it and he folds it down he folded it up and he's like this is it and this was the soul for his new shoe and so he used that and they called it the the waffle for the shoe and it kicked ass and now i think you know who i'm talking about right yeah nike it must be nike yeah bill bower bill bar was the c cofounder founder of nike the more famous c cofounder founder was phil knight phil knight was actually one of his athletes at university of oregon and phil knight had a class on an entrepreneurship class so are they like age gap by like yeah twenty years or something more i believe at least base off photos i think he was probably in his late fifties and phil knight was in his mid twenties he had created the idea of nike as a college student but at first when he started the company in the sixties he was basically just importing japanese shoes and he knew bill like the tinker with shoes but it wasn't until about five or six years in to did nike actually start saying bill let's actually just make the shoes that you are already making but they were partnered okay so they were in parallel phil knight is trying to start a shoe company yeah and this is like what is called blue ribbon or what what's it called the yeah they're basically importing japanese shoes and he called it blue ribbon so he importing other people's shoes and and then bill separately his coach is experimenting tinkering with shoes and then they come together it's what's to come together story do you know is there a well phil knight was was his athlete and so phil knight wore some of bills prototypes prototypes but they were really rough like people used to complain that they were kinda rough but they did work but i think they would only work for like two races like it's the shape of a circle from the waterfall ball yeah it was it was weird but it was really effective and then so they teamed up and he was like let's import these shoes and then bill you give them to the nike guys or to the oregon team and we're gonna go track me to track meats and it wasn't it was a company but it's almost like it was almost like if i started a honey company and i started going to like farmers markets like and somehow that turns into burp bees but it you know it it it it it doesn't cap it overnight okay so that's not the story that i wanna actually bring up what i really wanna talk about with steep pre font do you know who steve pre font was so he was a runner also was he like the first athlete you broke some record he's wearing nike is that his sorta kinda you're in you're in the leg or that's the canadian guy that's terry fox who i made fun of once in canada and they boot me on stage look let's see fucking with some of these jokes alright yeah basically terry fox is a guy who ran across canada with one lake that he lost a cancer and i saw a sign or like a statue form like all over like canada and sean and i did a life cod fast live podcast i was like who the hell is this terry fox guy these everywhere it did not land the definition of punching down yeah so google steve pre we're were talking about like kind of like punk rock and not compromising got a hon he's a hon right is this guy the hon of hon so steep by the way hon pretty under underutilized i think we can i think we should own that word is that what you wanna be known for is bringing back the word hon a few things i i put that top five steve pre he was born in like a small fishy town called k and he was badass it was badass in high school where he just like crushed everyone and at the time when he was this was in the late nineteen sixties bill bower actually basically pioneered the word jogging in america so running was not even a thing bill bower was like everyone you should run it's good for your health and that is when like house started running because previously people would see someone running in the street blows my mind by the way this is not that long you say it was like in the sixties or something wasn't it like the the jogging revolution was in the sixties and that's wins steep and then that's crazy that's like you know my dad is like a teenager or something that's jogging seems like it's just been around since prehistoric knowledge it wasn't a thing maybe that's an incredible marketing story how they got like america to jog do you know what to know what inspired bill was he was in world war two and he they were surrounded by germans at one point and bill was in was an outdoors he was in the physical fitness and hiking and he noticed that the more fit soldiers who he was around they were able to survive longer and he eventually like overcame this german they was surrounded by germans and the somehow he conquered them and made them surrender but it was at that time he's like i i realized how important fitness was and jogging is a really good example of how to get fit and so he's popularized jogging he wrote a book called jogging and it went viral was on the cover of sports illustrated in the sixties that's how ja seen a newspaper article that was like the strange phenomenon taking place in the suburbs of america yeah people are going outside and running like people something's come over these people like an alien you invasion has happened and and people are doing the strange behavior now that was bill so bill popularized this and that's one of the many reasons why when steve pre font was in high school running obviously not very popular now unless occasionally you get like a freak like you say in bolt and you're like that's really cool well bill bower was sort of that guy in the sixties and seventies where people like this guy invented ja how cool he's kinda neat but then it wasn't like a cool thing but it was like a neat thing but then this kid named steep pre font and he was the exact opposite of bill and i'll explain in a minute but he just crushed all these kids in high school and then he got recruited to the university of oregon to run for bill now bill is a very methodical scientific guy and what that means is that he hated front running his whole idea was it's your goal to win the race your goal is not to look cool it's not to lead the whole time it's to do the least amount of work to get the desired result which is to win that is not what steve on was about he said he has his famous c goes if i wanna do something i'm gonna do it with style and his whole s was that he would run the race from beginning to end as hard as you could he was short and he used to say that he wasn't gifted he was very gifted but he would kinda joke that he wasn't gifted and he would say to give anything less than the less your best is to sacrifice the gift and he also he had this other quote where he said a lot of people wanna race to see who's fastest i wanna race to see who has the most guts that's what he was famous for it was running all out as hard as he could hon hon right like in the book hon like attitude dude it gets even hon in the book that i read about him they used to talk about his gaze i don't know if you could google like steep fun a little too much now google's well hold on google steve this is important it's actually about branding google deep pre posters and he's famous for this like gaze he would like stare really hard at things and that poster is one of the most famous posters if you are like a nerdy high school kid who cares about running like you have this poster this guy was the boss and turns out in the nineteen seventy two olympics in munich he did his front running thing where with like three or four laps ago which there's still a lot left to go he takes hold and he leads the olympic race for the five thousand meters and it doesn't work out and at the very end the other guy's out kick him and he gets fourth and tragically he dies like a year and a half later in a car crash he was drinking and driving but he was nike first sponsored athlete and what phil knight says is the the the even though that jordan kind of made nike most famous that's how people know nike now they say that steve pre was the soul of nike this idea of like fierce independence of competitiveness he goes phil was like i didn't really have that that was steve everything steve was about i took it from him and i made it into a brand called nike that's six it's like if if the man was a brand and then they basically built like in that in that image right like that attitude it's badass yeah so before nike was nike it was called blue ribbon sports then they change it to nike and they're were like steve is the brand that we're trying to be like and the reason i i think this interests me is i love like these punk rocks like maverick renegade guy renegade guys but i also i'm interested in like stealing from the past so like finding good ideas and so yeah i was thinking about bill bower and he has his famous book called the men of oregon and steve p and was like what can they steal about his branding he has a bunch of really cool branding so for example when he was at his peak he was kicking everyone's ass someone made a shirt that said ghost steve go or said or sorry it said go pre and he made a different shirt that said stop stop pre yeah i'm looking at that ready put it on a stop sign and these t shirts got really popular stop pre where why why did he make the opposite because the first one's supporting him but he just was like no it was a joke but it was just kinda like like i'm so good that people have to stop me and it's pretty cool and so like that actually that t shirt is really cool i love that t shirt and then if you look at these quotes look at this quote no matter how hard you train somebody will train harder no matter how hard you run somebody will run harder no matter how hard you want it somebody will want it more i am somebody how good is that so he's got so many of these quotes and when you get this combo like athlete poet and you get ali or you get mac mcgregor or you get you know this like steve pro pre is the best and i think that you can have and so like a lot of times people don't realize this but there exists certain personality types and attributes that super seed a sport or a genre or niche totally so this guy i don't even care about running you don't care about running but i would buy this guy's shirt yeah or like lance armstrong was another one like lance armstrong you're telling me this guy gonna be the most famous athlete on earth for a couple of years for a handful of years via cycling are you kidding me right and even frankly i don't remember exactly but when i was a kid golf was a loser sport until tiger woods like yeah it wasn't like that big of a deal same with serena williams and the venus williams it was like kind of oak interesting but but then like that movie marty supreme came out and it's about table tennis and remember watching that table tennis support like i'm like oh my god this guy's punk rock i love tabletop table tennis now yeah so good i love when people like you said transcend the sport like i've told the story before but i was i always remember we used to at at our company we used to always like take breaks and just play fifa or like any kind of video game really but like a lot of it was fifa and i told you that steve bartlett used to used to work for us and he used to always play my cto for fe con like in fifa all night like we used to play for an hour as a break they would play for an hour as a break you go back to work and then starting at like nine or ten they would start playing fifa again and they would play till two or three in the morning every night and steve i think was getting the better of for kinda and he used to talk so much trash and the biggest like trash doc was he would say he's like even when i leave even when i go to the uk you're gonna remember me because i'm not a man i'm a concept i a concept i'm was just a concept and he just kept saying i'm just a concept and i'm i just laughing because i had no idea what he was even talking about has nothing to do with fifa but i've always remembered that like actually that is the highest things when you're a concept you're not even you're not even in your physical form anymore to me i'm like i see pre and i'm like pre is a concept and it's also it's kinda messed up but it's kinda of for the story it's better than he i think he was twenty six twenty five when he died and there's a bunch of these guys who died at a very young age and i'm like because they died so young it makes them significantly more the mysterious ness of it makes it way more compelling and so see p i don't know if we have we have a bill of the week i guess that i would be bill bower but steve would be in that category legend legend of the week alright let's take quick break because gotta to tell you a story let me tell you about the first time i tried to run payroll for my team i was using a traditional bank and you know the it's got a jan interface it's built like a two thousand and two tax form and it was open only during business hours and i hit send in froze they flagged the transaction they locked my account they put me on hold for forty five minutes and then they told me i gotta visit my local branch and that was the day i started looking for a new banking solution after asking a few founders what they were using i found out about mercury and so now my payroll is two clicks i can wire money i can pay invoices i can reimburse the team all from one clean dashboard that's why i use it for all of my companies and so do two hundred thousand other startup founders and so if you're looking to level up your banking head to mercury dot com and apply in minutes mercury is a financial technology company not a bank bank the services are provided through choice financial group call them man a and evolve bank trust members fdic so why does phil knight get all the props is because bill barb is not around anymore or or he took it over or what what's the deal bill was never particularly active he was sort of like the steve was in the act of how much did he own of nike did he like get to keep a chunk of it or yeah yeah yeah yeah his yeah they they're multi billionaires but he he he was much older so look at when he died did he die in the eighties i ninety nine oh oh he made it that long okay i didn't even know he died in ninety nine no he but he was out of the picture starting the eighties i believe at his passing his fake was worth three hundred ninety million he sold most of his shares during the nineteen eighties but stayed involved he was like the genius who phil and phil was the commercialization guy what's the genius to phil knight and what's his what's more of his story i have a red shoe dog by the way which i know is like supposed to be mandatory i started it and i was like yeah so i've only read shoe dog and i've read bill ba book so i've never read too much about phil and night other than that one shoe dog no i think that i think phil knight was a dog i think he was just like kept at it i think like he did not he he was he was relentless you know nike the book shoe it only goes for the first ten years of nike in the first ten years of nike was from like nineteen sixty eight to like nineteen seventy eight the jordan shit happen until the nineties i believe jordan was picking between converse and re bak and those were the nike of the era and so my guess from reading about them phil knight was pretty good at operating he was very scrappy he was good at hiring people let them do and letting him do their thing have you seen air the movie about the jordan signing yeah and in that in that movie they made phil knight kinda looks stupid which i think was very unfair i don't know if they've sensational like i know how accurate that movie is to to reality but but yeah they they they made it seem like he wasn't know particularly involved or particularly helpful in from what i remember in in the jordan signing i think that also like to think like a lot of people don't realize this because of like air force ones and shit like that nike was explicitly a running company like it started in then in the not popular or cool niche i mean i guess basketball wasn't particularly popular in the seventies either but it was a running company and so i guess it took like phil night to say i guess let's go after basketball but i don't particularly think he was the most creative guy ever who have you seen that does the nike playbook so what made nike such a powerful brand and then who's applied that in another space what comes to mind what would you say that nike playbook is is is sponsoring all athletes so i think i think they did obviously it takes a thousand things and you you sort of over over overestimate the credit to a to a small number of things but okay what what seemed to be the big levers okay so they fundamentally you have like you know of a simple brand that can be you know international so the check mark small name like cool that's the the you know the the foundation of the brand puzzle is your actual brand identity entity okay then what comes next so then they basically went down the athlete route where they were like let's get the greatest athletes the athlete athletes is aspirational and if the best athletes were nike that will sort of trickle down and then suddenly you have you know the dad odds walking around the neighborhood wearing nike like that's where you make your money you don't make your money off of the top prep athletes buying nike you make your money off of everybody buying nike and so how do you get them to do that and you know what they did brilliantly was they don't talk about the shoes alright so it's like counterintuitive right the ads are never about the product they don't tell you how many how many whatever squish are in there bubble and how many ounces are on the toe and how how many millimeters wide the heel is like don't know any of that and so they focus on the feeling the emotion the storytelling and the the simple fact that nike celebrates greatness the great athletes use nike and if you want if you consider yourself who's you know trying to be great nike you will become a default for you and so who's applied that in other area it's kind of interesting right like apple i think famously tried to do this with the think different campaign it worked right and it worked and he was like you know there's that great steve jobs speech where he's he's talking at some or maybe it's a apple brand meeting or something and he basically he's unveiling the campaign i think apple was sort of on the on a bit of a downs and they you know steve comes back and he simplifies the product line but then he also launches this brand campaign which was like the think different campaign where it's like einstein and gandhi and like in all these like kind of rebellious miss mischievous like world changers the people who changed the world and he's like if they they you know they didn't have computers but if they did they would use apple and then was like oh okay yeah i get it you know they sort funny right that's like the greatest influencer campaign ever i'm just gonna find people who are dead i can't say no make up a deal they literally can't refuse yeah and it's not even a deal i'm just gonna sit and so you know i think apple obviously did a good job but those are sort of cliche you know i'm seeing this a little bit in like the health space you know i think like invest company superpower and i think superpower is gonna try to do this i think you know other companies probably in like protein space if if tried to do this where it's like how do you create like a like a gyms shark athlete right where you basically sponsor all these instagram famous people because maybe that's where the attention is now and they don't have to tell you why that sweat is the best or whatever but you just know they are a it's not not like hey buy these pants it's i am a gyms shark athlete i am a whatever nick bear you know what when you remember do remember nick there yeah of course i don't remember if you were on the times that we talked to him i was yeah that was years ago i think pandemic time and he there's a joke in his fitness world which is like this thing called the hybrid athlete which is basically like a big ripped yolk meat head looking guy who also is really good at running and he's sort of in a lot of people's minds kind of invented that and there's like this joke on instagram like don't forget your hybrid athlete kit and it's like they're all wearing in the same hat you know like the same shorts and they're whatever he's he appears to have done that quite well with this hybrid athlete thing and nick's owns a company called bp vpn that sells protein and very rarely is he like promoting the protein or electrolytes but always promoting the lifestyle of lifting weights and running far yeah being a hybrid athlete and maybe even more like you know sort of the grind culture of workouts where they're like you know i didn't wanna wake up today but i do it know that that sort of thing where it's like you know i got it in today under these circumstances raining doesn't matter cole doesn't matter you know i wasn't feeling doesn't matter that that sort of attitude right so you can you can kinda elevate not just hey we're athletes but like well what kind of athletes like well we're more in that david go sort of like no excuses athletes and you could take something like that right like what pre data you could do it in other spaces i'm surprised this doesn't happen more i think it's hard to pull off like for example of course like the people who use but not just hard i mean it's hard emotionally so for example you told the story where you're like with my company with your e commerce company my business partner or or my friend su told me don't do anything except for spend this much money on facebook ads he didn't tell you to like do cool shit like sponsor you know cool people he said just do this because the roi is instantaneous and you know within twelve hours what's working what's not and you're gonna make small incremental changes and you are willing to do that because you have bills to pay and it will pay the bills but then just turning that off and doing stuff that doesn't make sense on paper but feels right potentially but also feels like a huge bet that's a scary thing to do yeah yeah it's true i think it's hard and scary in but it you know it's it's the big price brand is always the big price right because brand is you living in the person's head rent free rather than you paying for every impression that you get on facebook or a billboard or display ad or anywhere else right so like i think seth good has this great thing where he talks about like if i told you that hilton hotels was making a shoe do you even could you even imagine what that would look like but if i told you nike he made a hotel you could probably actually imagine what that might look like he goes that's brand i thought that was always a great like differentiator which is they own a piece of real estate they own a meaning in your head whether it's of quality it's of designs it's of greatness it's of excellence of health it's of wellness it's of recovery whatever it is like different brands can be about different things but a a simple test about the strength of the brand could be well what if they went into an adjacent space could you imagine what they would do and would you be excited about what they did with it that's actually really hard to think about and how to actually pull it off alright so if you think about how to pull it off well you have tons of employees like for example my company let's say we have twenty five employees like how do i get everyone to be consistent with the marketing it's actually really hard versus just following what's profitable so like for example at your company am my company if we're buying ads you meet once a week or every day and you'd be like let's change this image to this other image because the click rate will be higher because we know this other company is running a very similar image and you just are iterating you're there iterating yourself there to wherever it is you're trying to go but at no point do you say but wouldn't it be cool if we did this other thing that is just cool well that's kind of what i'm saying remember the thing at the beginning of like the opposites right so it's like on one hand you have this extremely data driven measurable scientific small iterations let the data decide approach to building to marketing to acquire customers and on the other hand you have the exact opposite it's emotional not data driven there's no scorecard immediately there's no immediate payoffs there's only long term payoffs and yet there's obviously examples of people who have been able to do one or the other or both the best companies obviously have been have been able to do both but you know what it's cool is you were just so you're using nike and we were using some other upscale brands you know what's it's funny i speaking of shaq shaq does general insurance is that what it's called one eight hundred that you know talking about i don't know so shaq is a spokesperson for an insurance company called the this spokesperson is a general it's a little general you know the the jingle it's like a it's called the general is it the general that's what i thought yeah okay so if i if i i'm almost he's standing next to this like mustache general okay and so that little general that company i think it's like a low cost provider mh and we've only been using fancy stuff but actually shaq is a great brand because shaq actually he's famous for i think he is a walmart spokesperson it's like for like icy see hot yeah like people who don't have a lot of money that wanna like acquire certain things like shack like the guy like and that's pretty cool that he's able to pull that off so i guess it's not just examples of of nike or ferrari or whatever that's what i was thinking of but shaq is a here's another one airbnb i think did it a great job of so airbnb spends you know are spent at least in the past i don't know what they're doing now but they spent a lot of money on google ads and things that you would need to do if you're in the travel space right like somebody wants to on a trip you need to be showing up as like a place to stay fantastic you're competing it's booking and ex media and all those other things but booking and ex ex and there's other kayak you know i feel nothing feel nothing no i recognize the name so it's not like they've done nothing they've built a brand right i could tell you those names off the top of my head could i tell you what's different between ex ex and booking and kayak no chance could i tell you anything about them anything about their story but what they represent about if i told somebody else that i use kayak does that somehow accrue status or value to me no right airbnb did an interesting thing which was airbnb could have been couch surfing there could have been here's the cheap way to get a place to stay sleep on someone's couch to bed their air mattress literally it started airbnb b as air mattress bed and breakfast type of thing and over the years they actually built the brand around traveling like a local and they made a hotel which is nicer provides more service is usually in a better location right if you just look at a hotel right like they have somebody who comes and cleans your your room and tucks the sheets in so tight that you're gonna have like kick them out and they do that for free every day and you know it's in a better location it's safer it's a more known quantity it standardize is it there's a commitment to a certain quality that you're gonna get and somehow airbnb made them seem like the generic choice like the the the sort of like well you could you know just choose to go stay in a box or you could authentically travel live like a local right and they they lean into like in the way that food does this to it's like you can eat from a chain yeah yeah fast food chain or you can eat from this like local you know this local joint and airbnb did a for great a job of basically like leaning into not the low cost sleep on a couch thing but traveling and living like a local when you travel and actually experiencing the city versus just being in the city and i thought that that was like a kind of a genius emotional thing because it travel is escape and you know either it's to a place where everything is handed to or it's still a place of authenticity right to actually experiencing the place you're going to and like clean your own shit pay an extra fee you don't know what you're gonna get there's like all these downsides but they make that seem like the upside like i talked to a guy who who ran events and he goes dude the best thing burning man ever did was something called radical what is it go radical self reliance he goes you know smart that is from an event front of you it means we're gonna do nothing for you oh you you got lost radical radical self alliance maybe it's not our fault right we don't have lighting over here radical stuff lines we don't have water fountains you gotta figure out how to get it from the community come on this is what it's all about this is the experience you paid for is that one to get some nothing i'm gonna steal that a good point i'm still up still not or hampton like oh you the office broke you was tougher line dude we're doing this thing so we're moving into this new office i think february twentieth or something and i'm implementing a new rule every tuesday at three o'clock between three o'clock and three twenty we're cleaning well we're all i saw you posted this used well who was it the japanese the ra yeah ra did it and i wanted to do it and i did it in my last company people freaked and it just did not stick been out moving into a new office because i hate clutter i hate clutter so much yeah it like makes me anxious when when there's shit all over and particularly in an open office plan and so i'm gonna like hold myself accountable to like stick to this hardcore dude nobody is giving more thought to like their their office and their culture than new right now i feel like you are really planting some seeds i'm very curious either in two years from now you're gonna be like i over indexed on that you know some of it was helpful a lot of it was waste energy i should have been focused on this or you're gonna be like it was the best thing for me i was i wasn't sure but i felt it in my gut i trusted it because i refused to be comment it made no sense and in two years you're gonna be like that was the best thing we ever did it's gonna be one of those two i just don't wanna make the same mistakes that i've done before or where i created my own prison you know what i mean i don't wanna do that and so the culture is just an example or just a you're happy specific what was the prison what was bad like what are you gonna real change this time for example i had a team someone who works for me and they wanted to lay off someone who worked for them but they only wanted to give like two weeks severance or something for this person that worked with us for a long time and they were like well that's like normal like that's like a fine that's fine like that's just it's was expected and i but this person has was here for two years and like they're a good guy they're just not getting results and this doesn't feel right to me and i went along with it i did the two weeks in it i remember that feeling it i hated it and so we got this value called bill with pride which basically the idea is like if i'm gonna lay someone off and i do actually pro ti reasons since one so i don't feel guilty and two like if you just have like this like halo effect of like you treat people well and i i'm just gonna shower you with significantly more severance than i think is actually the the the industry standard and so that's one example okay alright i like it yeah very curious to see how what i i think it will definitely be good it's just a question maybe of two things which bets have the biggest payoff i think you're gonna come out with a bunch of learnings on that like maybe it'll be the small things maybe it'll be the ten minutes of cleaning a day maybe it'll be you know this off site you do every year may whatever i don't know don't know which bets are gonna have the biggest return but they're not all gonna be even this i think you're gonna get a good learning from that and then the other thing is proportion so like seinfeld has this great quote where he says this they're like why didn't you do that one last season because he he holds the record for most money turned down yeah tv like eighth season or seventh season the i think yeah what are the last season is gonna be is a hundred and ten million he turned it down and they're like jerry one more season why didn't you do it he's like because in art it's all about proportion he goes too much of anything too much cake too much jokes too much anything too much anything there's too much of anything is a bad is is a bad thing and he's like the secret to making anything great is proportion and it's so true ever since i read that like i now see it everywhere because you know you i was more simplistic just black and white this is good and that is bad but like too much affection is cleaning this is sm right like in relationship too much space is distant is cold so it's not a question of vas affection good or bad it's how much and you can use that in any anything cook in a dish it's the proportion that matters and so i think i'm interested to see did you get the proportion right of how much time energy you're spending on you know the the leadership and the culture and the environment that you're putting together here there there also is a world where you think i'm spending more time than i really am wanted it just because i'm vocal about it but but you could be right yeah i mean we'll be we'll be interesting to see you know what to be funny is to see all these companies who we think have crazy cultures like the big guys we should go talk to i've i've always been curious to go talk like the middle management or like the new staff it's like are you drinking the ko aid what's the deal you know like like up like pat or something like that right i had the same idea yesterday i was in a restaurant and i was walking out and i saw the value i saw the values i i'd like an and not so great experience at the and i was walking out and it was like don't just serve delight was on the wall and i was like i just had the opposite of delight in this restaurant like you know ordered something gluten free for somebody who who's allergic to gluten they messed it up and then they are like refusing to like just give us a the gluten free version you know wanted us to like pay again for that one i was like what it's going on you almost killed somebody just now like what what are you talking about and i was thinking i was like it would be so funny to just go to hundred companies a guarantee you go a hundred companies and at every company you stand outside the office and you take a random sample first fifty people that come out of the building or walk into the building in the morning and he just say hey we're doing a little game a little test i'll give you fifty dollars for every one of the values of the company you can name like but you gotta get word forward word what the what the actual phrase is and i was like i'm just curious how many people will know any of the values and i think it's gonna be this his instagram really this is this chart that's like most people know zero or one almost nobody knows to and nobody knows three or more and i just want to have that for like a hundred different companies because i just think values are probably the most overrated exercise that companies do because if it's not in the people's heads what do you like then what was the point they're not doing it you one of know what's funny is have you seen you know netflix is famous her values i've heard you i've seen their culture deck yeah i was looking up but i was like what actually are the values you should oh look up it's like i know wanda is like we're a team not a family right like that's not even a like no like i mean like they literally have written out the values and it's like eighteen of them and it's like kindness it it's like everything curiosity courage tender selfless judgment creativity inclusion resilience it's just a it's pretty funny it's just a list stuff i was like oh they should just slip in like like a derogatory term in there and just see if anyone ever notices nobody would know he's he's slipping the f upward in between courage and inclusion and see what happens read reed hastings seems to like a pretty big baller he he he the ceo of netflix or pharmacy ceo of netflix and he was talking about the culture and i was listening to this podcast with patrick o's to about him and he was just you know he was saying the cool shit ever and then i go i was like well he's talking all about values let's go see what they are and go to the website and i see like this and honestly was like like do what like that's yeah that's way less intense than he sounded yeah exactly it's only about actions right not words so the question really is what actions do you take that are any different than anybody else what actions you take that are any different than what my default behavior would have been if i switched over from a adjacent company to yours right so like your severance example is a good one for example right like if your value is treat people like family or treat people well whatever it is and you're like cool here's an action here's the here's default actions our default actions are different than the other default actions so maybe there maybe these companies do have great like default actions or they i don't know many think that's impossible to do that when you get past a certain point should actually ask da mesh about this der wrote the culture code or the here we all have to drink the ko aid nobody can be honest about this when they're in their company who's gonna get on here say that's all shit they're all drink it's all nobody knows it's just a bunch of bodies to me like covid when we look at revenue and we try to figure out what's happening like that's what we do right like nobody's gonna ever be honest about that sort of thing until they're out and then they're like disillusioned and then they're scene as like crazy they went crazy if they were to talk about it well what we go from here is that it is that the pod yeah our value is the irish goodbye and we talk he love and then we suddenly decide i think i've said enough today alright that's it that's pop i feel like got rude wear i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a go less travel never looking back alright my friends i have a new podcast for you guys to check out it's called content is profit and it's hosted by luis and ph ka after years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like red bull and orange theory fitness luis and fo are on a mission to bridge a gap between content and revenue in each episode you're gonna hear from top entrepreneurs and creators and you're gonna hear him share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit so you can check out content is profit wherever you get your podcast