We decoded the business behind this influencer’s perfect life

when i was at the tony robbins event he was like you think i just woke up like this i created this tony robbins mother i decided that's who i needed to be and then i created him i feel like got could rude to where to know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a go less travel next looking i've got something that every woman listening to this is gonna be saying to themselves no duh but i think it might be interesting to you there's a chance that your wife has already ind you on this but have you heard this thing called baller farms why does that sound familiar what is it what's bell farms awesome i love that you don't know this alright so check this out so there's this woman named hannah neil and i started following her in instagram along with like twenty million other people she's got twenty million followers across all of her platforms so definitely wasn't not an early adopter you discovered her yeah so yeah you're welcome but basically her content is like these like warm lit videos where it's sort of a little martha stewart and it's her on her farm talking about how she's making like sourdough bread and she's making like she's making her own getting her own milk from the cows and making like different recipes and all this amazing stuff and it's blown up and it's this whole category of influencer called the trade have you heard that term trade wife i've definitely heard trade life definitely seen the tiktok which are like somebody turning their own butter yeah so it's sort of like that and frankly i don't think even hannah neil would call herself a tread wife but she's got twenty million followers across all social media and it's crazy because i think she has like nine kids and so part of her videos are like her kids running around barefoot fo and it's a very calming aesthetic and i think she's got she has a company it's called baller farms where they sell sourdough mix they sell electro like mix they sell i think they sell me and at one point they sold milk and i think it does like eighty or seventy million dollars a year in revenue that was some estimates that i that i saw on like some pretty reputable sites and it's kind of this phenomenon where now her store she has a physical store as well as an online store has become this destination that these young women just like are kind of ob over and i found this to be very fascinating for a few reasons but she was just actually in the new york times last week and let me read it to you let me read one of the paragraph she said you might recognize midway utah as a story book backdrop to hallmark christmas movies like christmas on duty and if you're from utah you might recognize it as a village that looks like it's from the swiss alps but if you're a woman with any degree of susceptibility of gingham apron hand ham sourdough knives milk cra ling on a thick layer of cream then you might recognize it as this place called baller farms baller of farms which supplies a store in this town is a working farm about half hour's drive away from midway and it's in between snow frosted mountains and kyle pastors of rural northern utah but it's also baller farms is also a woman named hannah neil who's a j trained baller arena who gave up dancing to become a farmer and mother of nine and it goes on to like explain the story of how this woman hannah has blown up but it comes with a lot of hate what she's done because a trade wife it comes with a lot of political baggage it also comes with a lot of i don't know if you describe it as jealousy of i'm a young woman i wanna live that life or if i don't like if i think that this is somehow like anti feminist like it comes with all this baggage but regardless of what like people think about it it's pretty amazing that this phenomenon is happening the article says that teen girls were lining up as if this was disney world and i think this is so fascinating and i wanted to talk a little bit about this like traditional life movement but more so what i wanna talk about is how she has gone all in on a lifestyle and i think that if you're creating a brand particularly around content i wanna talk about like the tactics that i think you can use this around this because i think it's super super underrated so you when you say lifestyle i almost think i'm not even sure if that's the right word it's either the word i would used is either aesthetic or escape so i noticed this with you know my wife and my my mom they love to watch bridge and it's lot the the crown and there's this fascination with like this kind of royal england lifestyle or bridge which is like this like version of that and i think that in the same way that dudes will get really into sci or game of thrones or different sort of air gladiator there's like you know the whole meme around guys fan about the roman empire i think that there's a handful of these kind of escape aesthetics yeah and if you position your your products as part of that escape aesthetic i think that you differentiate from the you can sell the same commodity product but differentiated and what i would wanna to see is instead of people doing it for apparel which is where this is most common right apparel is the classic way that people do this you'll find apparel brands that are golf brands and people wear who don't play golf people buy running shoes they don't run and people will buy you know aesthetics that are you know summer in the hampton or whatever it is and i think that it would be really interesting for people to do this with like dental care for people to do this with supplements to do this in categories that you wouldn't expect it in i think it would work i think that if you created the same you know whether whether it's like cr team collagen type of supplement brand but instead of just looking like every other supplement brand you look like you were part of a different aesthetic or same thing on any sort of everyday staples consumables i wonder what would happen and not sure if would work but i really wonder what would happen milk you take a milk you create a milk brand but the milk brand looks like way further down the the spectrum of like you know whether it's farm or or even you know maybe at a different less expected direction what do you think about that well what i'm describing is basically when i say lifestyle i'm putting an emphasis on life and what i mean by that is i have invested in a couple companies as well as i'm just a fan of certain bits of content where the person goes all in and they live a certain life and they bring me along with them and i find that fascinating and this woman hannah gets a lot of hate because her husband his father founded jet so he's if he's not a billionaire he's whatever he's up there he's very rich and so there's a lot of like well you can it's easy for you this and that you know which i think is nonsense but what i've noticed is that i've started following these people on instagram like there's this one kid who you actually showed me and he was like the opening line for his instagram was i just graduated college and i had barely any money but i've decided to move to rural virginia and opened up an airbnb and like the like there's this sp where people actually live the life that they are wanting to live and then they happen to sell a product that goes along with that life and what i'm the point i wanna make is that i think that that is super underrated and not enough people do it and brands could benefit from doing it a lot more than they currently are so i used to work for this guy named mike wolf mike was the star of the show called american picker which when it was on the on tv or it still on tv but it's prime it was like the second most popular show on tv i think that they would get like six or seven million viewers a week whereas david letterman was getting like one or two million and the way that mike got the show popular was he actually and this was in early two thousands this might it might have been in the late nineties where mike's job was he would drive around a country and go to old barnes find interesting stuff and meet the people and find the stories of the people and the objects that he was buying and he would bring like a literal cam corner this is before smartphones and it got picked up and it became this whole lifestyle it was called pick and there was this small niche that was quite large of people who identified with being picker they love collecting and taking it i also i'm an investor of this thing called 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 that you can check out right now it breaks down the systems that have took me ten years to figure out and shows how exactly i use them day to day these are systems that genuinely changed 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 there's this guy named brent brent was partners with ryan holiday and do you remember years ago i think in two thousand and fourteen or thirteen there was a old abandoned mind town that was for sale for like two million dollars it was five hundred acre acres do you remember that in california or utah where or where is california and then the pandemic hit and brent who was kind of the main guy leading the charge he was like screw i'm gonna go live in that town and now he has a youtube channel with millions of followers and if you go to youtube and type in ghost town living every single one of his videos gets a million views it's crazy and he's documenting how he's turning this town into a hotel and it's been a huge pain in the butt because like that's like a lot more work than making a cast iron skillet to sell but it's just like so fascinating to me because i think that going all in on something with your life is a more fun and will increase the likelihood that you will succeed and i think that there's a framework behind it i think that you have to find a thing that sings to you that you're interested in so the easiest one so basically the moment you start typing on a computer by the way this concept gets kinda lame and so this mostly only works for products where the creating of the thing is the content and like easiest ones are like farming or fitness those are like the easiest ones so for example i worked in finance or our i worked in tech and i said screwed it all i'm moving to a farm because i wanna eat better meat or i wanna drink better milk or i want to make some supplement or i think college or not collagen and what's the breast milk that comes out right with the baby's born in au yeah like that's like all the rage where it's sort of like this there's a story arc of i was this person i want to become this person come along this journey and for the few of you who truly are bought into this i happen to have a product that you can buy but the the making of the product needs to be the content this is timely because the world cup has gone on have you ever seen world cup dad so basically there's this guy zach duke and he posts on tiktok one day that he's i think he's thirty four thirty five years old he's like i'm thirty five year old dad who's never played soccer and i'm training to be on the world cup team but and he got kind of like a dad bought he's got a little bit of a gut and he but he's like you know he's kind of like he's definitely athletic at the same time and so he knows that he's like this weird like you know immediate visual hook of this una athletic looking guy but he's doing pretty athletic looking things and he says he's never played soccer then he's gonna make the world cup like what does that mean and he went mega viral so it was basically kinda dad never played soccer make it to the twenty twenty six world cup and he started training like hard every day he would he would post everything that he's doing and he would he didn't say like i wanna see what can happen he was like i will make it it was very like manifestation oriented like i'm doing this and so the haters loved it in the comments but then there were some people who were pretty inspired like what he was doing and like hey it's actually not bad he actually is looking way more fit hey actually he does have pretty good touch you know he's not bad and so he started doing this and he actually like you know he kinda made it pretty far so he got in legitimately great shape if you look go look at his videos we put him on the screen here he got really a pretty good soccer like if for a guy who never touched this soccer ball and then he started getting like all these like brand deals and opportunities to play on these like small like three on three seven on seven the adidas cup and so all this i got kind of amazing stuff happening like no he didn't make it onto the us you know national team but don't have to he tray he transformed his life you don't have to i bet his videos get more views than eight of the eleven guys on those the starting team on the actual worked up team so in a way he like yes he didn't make it make it but but ben how that's pretty impressive how far you just got changed his own life just with doing what i call like man on a mission content so i have these like different content buckets in my head one is called man on a mission another one is called is like you said like the sort of escape lifestyle where you say oh this is just how i live like i'm just the type of person who does this there's this woman who goes viral on twitter because she just walks every day and the eats like natural food so she'll just post a tweet i think we talked about her before she posts a tweet in the tweet space of like walked you know six and a half miles and ate a chocolate cake and it'll it'll just be pictures of like the the scenery where she walked at a giant chocolate cake that looks really great it'll have like ten thousand likes on that one picture and you just post the same thing every day that's the whole content stick i think it's kind of amazing this idea of like you can make this decision to become this person you don't have to be the person at first so for example one of the reasons i love the man the entrepreneur ralph lauren is because he had this great line where he was like you know some people he's like i'm a jewish guy from like new york city and yet i sell like western wear sometimes people would criticize me but the fact is is i would wanna be more brave and so i would sometimes wear like vintage military gear or i would wanna be like a little more adventurous and i would dress like a cowboy and you could kinda tease me for being cosplay but the fact is is that then i eventually like would go on a farm and i would dress like this and you become this thing like i i make a decision to become a little bit of a farmer and i own a ranch now the point that i wanna make to the listener is and also to myself i'm learning about this as well and i'm being inspired by it is you can sort of just change who you are publicly and you don't need to start at all in fact probably you could it's a better story to start at a horrible place where you're nothing like the person who you want to be or the aesthetic that you want to be and i just think that it's a more fun to do it and b it will increase the odds that you will succeed this is the guy who i'm gonna talk with on thursday his name's mark o o'brien so check this guy out so his old photos what what i used to look at him he was a normal looking real estate guy in new york city anywhere suit but he's guy ai he looks like ai no but this guy has a really striking look and now on all his more recent photos he's wearing like a white t shirt and he's doing manly stuff like restoring town homes and his whole stick which from an outside i'm wanna talk to him on on thursday so i'll get you a better yeah sense of it is he finds old brown stones in brooklyn and you literally will see him bring a sled hammer and start like renovating it like breaking the stuff and explaining the story behind it and this guy if you look at his old photos was wearing a suit and he just like at this normal real estate guy and he kinda like leaned into this like you know this lifestyle to where now i think he actually is that person and it's i've been enamored by by following his journey and i'm just realizing how powerful it is there's this other company called i think it's called maui knew they make beef jerky made out of the venison in maui you don't talking about right yeah and if you and if you go to their instagram handle it doesn't say anything about how they're actually like making the stuff or how like you know like for hunters and things like that you could actually show them like doing the hunt setting it up and how they're doing it ethically and why this is better i just don't think that there's enough brands who are doing a good enough job of bringing you along because it's scary it seems stupid at first you might look dumb and i just think that it's far more compelling and more people should do it i think you can like figure out what are the innate feelings that we all have right now i think that there's a innate feeling i think there's cat categories of like cleanliness both in terms of the food that you eat but you're home of like feeling clean and feeling tidy i think there's this whole mother category of how do you care and protect your children the best i think there's just another category of people who wanna master something and be craftsman and be great at stuff and i just think there's this massive opportunity it's always existed though to look at what popular shows and content existed in the nineties and two thousands and just redo that with your phone and bring people along with you you know you could be like the anthony bo where you look at restaurants and you could start selling products and i just think that it will people often and say well there's so many other people doing this well there's always room for more there's always room for better and it's just an underrated tool to go all in on a lifestyle and then eventually sell a product yeah on one hand what you're saying sounds like you're saying there's this great opportunity which i think make makes most people think there's this new opportunity no it's not and i think in this situation it's no what you're saying is not new it's being done it's been done and it will always be done and what it is easier than ever still be done and in some ways it's easier because it's easier than ever to create it's easier ever to be discovered and it's also harder than ever because it's more competitive right and you get to choose what which part of that narrative you're gonna feed your energy into i have a couple of examples that that work here first i'm just gonna read you from robert greene who came on the podcast really interesting guy wrote forty eight laws of power law number twenty five recreate yourself it says do not accept the roles that society fo on you recreate yourself by forging a new identity one that commands attention and never bore the audience be a master of your own image rather than letting others define it for you incorporate dramatic devices into your public gestures and actions your power will be enhanced and your character will seem larger than life that's exactly what we're talking about here exactly the power to reinvent yourself to dramatically do it and to never bore the audience have you ever heard of a guy named anthony i think his name is anthony my mah mah you know no what's he do well anthony jay he born into a a family that had a lot of trouble blah blah blah he ended up reinventing himself as a guy you might know named tony robbins and so that's tony robbins birthday and when i was at the tony robbins event many and years ago ten years ago maybe he tells a story where it was a part of the q and a wasn't really part of his like script he was like you think i just woke up like this you think i was just born like this you think i just stood up on a stage and suddenly talk like this you think i looked like this you think i had to power to compel people like this and he discussed you think i woke up with discipline i just well at one day i just had discipline suddenly and he was like no and he goes i created this tony robbins mother he goes i created him i decided that's that's who i needed to be and then i created him and he goes and you know now it seems like yeah that's just how it is but he goes you have to decide for yourself like who you are gonna make yourself into and i remember feeling like that was just a very powerful way of saying it there's no accident you know like the sort of the bitter and the hate the haters well we'll always say is i always lock you were given something it was yeah it's easy for you to say no no no no it's easy for you to say that it's actually incredibly hard to do what i've done and i think that people should should take pleasure in the fact that you can today on on a the drop of a hat you could right now you could be listed as podcast right now you could pause it you could open up your apple notes app and you could literally write down like you know yesterday i was this and today on this and you could start to reinvent yourself like starting in any given moment there's incredible power once you realize that and i think there's a lot of power by labeling yourself so like you wake up the next day i remember when i i was like mildly fit and i woke up the next day and i'm like i'm an athlete and i used to joke with you and but i wasn't a joke i was like i'm a fitness influencer no you said it with a smile but you weren't joking no i was like and i and i think that like you can tease me and make fun of me and all you want and i think i deserve it but like there is power to like labeling yourself as something and you are that not i'm working to become this there's this old school book it's it's impossible to read it's like so dense at this point the title itself actually tells you everything you need to know it's called your word is your wand i think it's by florence sc title basic idea is that the wars that come out of your mouth are like spells that you cast you cast on yourself you put yourself in a tran as well as others around you and so be very careful the words that come out of your mouth my trainer role always says that he goes when i say something differently than i used to say it you know one day i'm going to versus i am or or i do or i haven't done this yet the word yet is actually a very powerful word it implies that it's it is inevitable for example my my company that i named ten plus years ago before i had any anybody before i made my first million my llc was called inevitable outcomes and i've basically thought i was it's an inevitable outcome that i will be successful and i'm gonna invest in other things that i view to be inevitable as well that they will be successful you know my my trainer made these the shirt that said i am and it said the two most important words in the english language are i am because whatever comes after it def or defines your destiny just decides your fate just take it as a test just try to word like r off top you it i'm the kinda of guy who at what comes out after that is it i'm the kinda of guy who you know when think when things get tough i fold when and then you could define like whatever you say is true right it will be true it will always be true and so you know i think one of my super superpower is that i'm a pretty analytical guy by nature by training and if you can marry that with a little bit of the soft stuff right not just e q of how you deal with people but the sort of you know the sort of manifestation world that sounds like total hoc is poc but when you start to realize like actually the way you think will shape the actions you take right what you believe will change what you do and what you do changes your results once you realize that you you will approach things somewhat differently i think being willing to go kinda eastern western in that way i think it can take you very far my most annoying trait according to my wife and probably everyone who knows me is i'm like a stick for words so when people say like well it's just semantics i'm like yeah it's just semantics and it's just really important we are purposely using certain words so like for example i'll say to someone like well what do you think about what do you think about say i don't know it's like why didn't i ask what you know i said what do you think so maybe there's what's the point of words what's the point of words if we're not gonna use the right words that's right i was i remember being at twitch after we got acquired and on the ninth floor at twitch was the the the main meeting room and that's where the ceo emmett would in the coo at the time sarah she would said they said at the head of the table and then basically every thirty to forty five minutes a new team would come in so then the trust and safety team comes in the growth team comes in the mobile team comes in the international team comes in and they basically come in and they just dumped their problems on the table and then that ceo and the coo would try to help them you know work through it and i remember sitting at a bunch of these tense meetings and i thought for at the beginning i thought man this em guys is kind of a genius but he said idiot like he's really smart but man he gets focused he gets hung up on the dumbest things because he would always get hung up on words and you could tell that the teams hated it that he would get into these what he would call the soc democratic debates about things and he would just be debating the team endlessly about the most like minor sounding things and over time it came to appreciate that well there there were sometimes that he took it too far there's a cost doing it but there was a great benefit in doing it too i remember in one meeting he was talking to the team that decides the homepage and they said something like yeah but that's algorithm versus editorial and he just like got hung up on he's like what's what his editorial mean and then they like laughed and he's like no what's the debt what do you mean when you say the word editorial and they're like well there's like editors who pick it so it's editorial he goes and who are these editors and how do they pick it and he didn't it's not like he had some destination in mind that he was leading them into some trap he literally wanted to understand the specific meaning of the words that are coming out of their mouth and get a shared understanding of what each of the words mean because at his view and his view it was like we will never get to the right solution if you say words that mean one thing and i say those same words and they mean another thing we're screwed and so he would always go to this painstaking like semantic debates with people that for a while seemed like are we just going in circles here like what does this really matter and you know there was a bit of a method to his madness that you saw play out you know maybe not in that first meeting but three weeks from then a four weeks from then or seven weeks from that when the teams then realized they had to be really precise in their language and they to really know the details of their shit because it would be tested and even just knowing that he might ask made sure that they came in knowing everything about what they're gonna say in being way more precise about their thinking their level of clarity on their thinking my sophomore year of high school that we had to take a class of speech class that was the best class i've ever taken in my life and the best lesson that they taught us was you must always define your terms and i deeply believe that that to be true for anything that you're discussing you have to deeply define your terms the downside of that is that you look like an asshole and it's pretty annoying you it it is quite annoying when we do this where someone set like someone will say something you're like what do you mean and they'll say it again it's like those words don't make sense to me can you use other words and what you find is that if they have unclear words they have unclear thinking and so it becomes a really obnoxious and annoying but i do think it's really powerful i just saw this other story it was on sixty minutes last night or the week before you've probably have never heard of this it's called the mountain pass mine and the story on sixty minutes was basically these two hedge fund guys and i think that they were like mildly successful but they somehow raised money and they i think they raised twenty million dollars and they bought a mine and i think at the border of nevada and california and now if you google mountain pass mine i think the company name is called mp materials corp it's a ten billion dollar publicly traded company and the whole story which was really cool and it on and they had to use the platform of sixty minutes as opposed to their own and i think they should use their own was two hedge fund guys who knew nothing about nothing are now wearing hard hats driving an f one fifty and they're in the thick of it you know they like are literally learning this as they go although it's been ten years so they've probably have learned a lot but they're like these y who knew nothing about blue collar work now they're living that life and it's paying off and i i heard this story and i'm like i'm so in i'm so in on a mine i've heard of mp materials i didn't know the backstory of mountain pass mine how have you heard of that hedge fund guys well he went public it was like a spa right it was like a two mo back i'm pretty sure or or something like he did it i i either he did area to the pipe or something like that i'd i'd heard of it at that point i was like rare earth company and i was like what a rare earth anyways and how does this work so yeah i lot of i've looked at it you know just kind of been passing that way but i didn't know didn't know the backstory hey let's take a quick break you know that feeling when strategy is done the brief is written everyone's aligned and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content that someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow well the breeze assistant from hubspot can help it works right inside hubspot you can draft campaign copy blog posts emails all in your brand voice all using your actual customer data so you don't create just content you create content that converts check out hubspot dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses another kind of world cup thing that's going on right now you're probably seen this is all of the international tourists that are coming to america for the world cup and discovering america for the first time and it's sort like when a friend goes into town and suddenly you're like y go alcatraz and you've been living here for five years you've never been to alcatraz but because somebody's visiting you suddenly will go that week right now on on social media there's a whole swath of people have you seen these that are going viral so freddie la is one of them but basically this guy like comes to america for the world cup and he's just touring through america kinda like you did when you rode your motorcycle around america and he's still like this one for example we found another surreal surreal place on our way i know some people will say i'm too positive about everything but place is crazy and he's at an out like a bass pro shop outdoor world and it's just pictures of like you know there's just the the en of this place is a giant fish tank he's like there's a shooting range inside the store he's like they're literally selling rifles in here and so he's just been stopping at like buck ease and he's been stopping at like you've you know we found this river in chattanooga and we're in a tube and the guy said this and you know at the airport we asked this and the guy just gave us a ride it was incredible and so he's just like you know when you have kids and you get to like red the world again because your kids are discovering the world and it's like yeah you know what if you take like a straw and you like squish the paper down and then you drop a piece of drop of water on it it bands like a snake and you're like the and the their mind is blown and you remember when your mind was blown when you were seven and that happened but you just you know took a granted forgot about and just throw away all your your straw paper now and so this guy based on this is this group of of guys on on twitter and instagram that are coming to america that are just posting all these things that are very like run of the middle american things but they're amazed by it and it totally like makes you proud to be in american in the way and like red rediscovered like yeah you know what like america's pretty awesome actually and we have these kind of amazing things and actually have you guys been to waffle house i can't wait for freddie to go to waffle house right you you want them to go to the next sort of like part of real america it's like more entertaining than the world cup to me look at the title german tourist freddie is going viral as he visits louisiana on the way to world cup that's awesome what exactly there's this great book i'm sharing it now i don't know how a pronounce name but it's il and pet t american road trip i read this a few years ago it's so good so basically and and it has very few reviews on on amazon has forty reviews and paper back copy is four hundred dollars and so in nineteen thirty five well into the era of soviet communist russia two russians came over and they took a road trip throughout america and they described what they're seeing and this book is one of my favorites it's so good to hear the history of america from people and like what they're seeing and it's very similar to what you're what people would experience now just like it's huge and the everything's big and like there's processed food everywhere it's funny the same stuff in ending thirty five people would say today yeah i'm i mean it's so let me let me show you this one so this is this japanese guy and you goes usa a mexican restaurant we have not ordered anything yet and yet the food is already arriving chips salsa un requested free i stopped the waiter we have not earned these they just come with the table in my land hospitality is a debt every gift creates an obligation weighed carefully return to the proper this season with an interest of feeling here the gift arrives before you have even proven you could pay for dinner it is not an appetizer it is a declaration we trust you eat i eat with the gravity the moment deserved and then i must report calmly this basket is empty and new one appears did we refill it's bottomless bottomless they have wells of salsa the supply lines of this nature beyond anything my ancestors imagine my friend warned me don't fill up on ships dude too late i accepted three baskets honor or demand each one be finished an unfinished gift is an insult by the time my actual food arrived i was a ruined man i was not hungry i was uncomfortable i had been defeated by courtesy generosity arrived before the request can be repaid it can only be survived i know the rule now i made peace with my basket one basket two at most whom am i deceiving there's no number of baskets i refused the the trust of a nation is in that salsa and i intend to honor all of them beautiful there's no way that's real is that real i don't think it's real but it's hilarious so i don't if it's real or not but have you seen the the all the japanese like lore that's just being honored in america for the world cup have you seen what's going on no man world up deep i i'm i'm in new york city i just got done like burning down a bus because the knicks it's like you know one time i went to this basketball game and i was in the owner's suite and there was just all these like instagram hose basically there and they all have their phone out and i was like wow they're so like they're so into capturing like the second quarter of this game and everybody's if all the phones are pointed at them not at the game and that's me with the world cup right now i'm the h where i don't watch the game i only watch the crowd and there's this incredible thing with the japanese crowd where they're all waving these blue well looks like blue like kinda like is it flags what is no it's a trash bag and so they used trash bags to cheer and at the game it's kinda like their version of carrying a sign or waving a foam finger or a flag and they were like why are they all waving trash bags it's like oh because then we can cheer it makes sound it has a color but then we can just clean up after ourselves on the way out and they clean up their whole section using the trash bags at the end and they showed the locker room of the japanese national team and every single item is folded properly in the middle the locker room is pristine and that that's how the job japanese soccer team is leaving the locker rooms and i'm like god if japan couldn't go any higher on my list of like incredible cultures and people that you know you sort of have to see it to believe it they're just the stock continues to go up it's a it's un with reality before u was a thing there was called strike force and it was a japanese fighting league or whatever and it's they're the best videos to watch because in the crowd they're silent and then you hear you you hear the punches and it's really hard to watch almost and they only cheer on like the epic big punches and it's like very strange and awesome at the same time you know i think a guy who we both admire i think he's one of your heroes definitely one of mind is jesse it's and it's this idea of like buying the lifestyle and i think that in particular right now we're in this phase where people are trying to balance like how do i work hard in my job and particularly women how do i work hard on my job and be a good mother but same thing for fathers how do i work hard and be a family person while also being fit like i everyone did you see jesse's story on instagram the other day i just know that right now he's like he's like uncle rico jesse wrote the song for go new york knicks you know go new york and whatever the knicks start playing again that's his that's his story that it brings up and i love it i'm i'm not sick of it so he he was at madison square garden when they won i think game four maybe and he leaves and he sees this guy who's given like rick shaw rides or what yeah what do they call it in new york where it's like the guy's biking and you said in the carriage behind it whatever that's called you're like so he hops in as billionaires do and he was like and that guy's playing the go to new york new york out he's like that's my song and the guy's like no and he's like what's your name and he like looks it up he's like that's your song and he's like i gotta give you a ride around so he just wrote around all of new york with this guy and he's posted it and there's there's a small set of people that i feel like they they don't have any more time than the rest of us but they seem to be getting a lot more out of their time and there's something to be studied and learn and there's a reason that i get interested in these nick gray is one of these people i think jesse's is one of these people there's there's a handful of these people that seem to kinda go with the whatever way the ball of life is bouncing they seem to just experience more and have a sort of like tap dancing through life sort of experience even when even when they do hard things it just seems like you know enjoyable in this way because they're like surrendered into it i don't know i don't know what it is but that's something i think the art of living well is is not well understood and you know for me it's a it's a bit of a mission to understand what gets more out of the hours rather than like always feeling like if only i had more time then i get more and it's like actually i think kind of bullshit i think a you're wasting a ton of time either doing fake busy work or just on social media and two even if i gave you an extra four hours i don't think you'd get more out of life i think you just fill it with more of the same more of the same feelings you currently are having whether they're stress or anxiety or any of the others i've been meeting these people so i i live in a building in manhattan and and there's rich people and there's poor people in this building i really like that and you we were contemplating getting a big we got a great place but we we're like oh we get more space for more kids and all this stuff and then i met this family that has it's a family of four husband and wife and two girls twins and the girls are now eighteen or nineteen or something like that and they've lived in the same one bedroom apartment for thirty years so the mama and dad lived there and i was like how do you guys like what's your sleeping arrangement and they're like well mom and dad get the bedroom and we just we have like this murphy bed that we sleep in the living room and part of me was like obviously like oh i don't want that but then the other part they start telling me these stories and actually go to the apartment and we all hang out and i'm like there's a lot of inconvenience here but there's a lot of inconvenience here at the same time which is you guys are all together at the same time and it's kind of nice and i think that like we are looking at this other place and i'm like there's two living rooms why i don't want two living rooms i want one living room i want everyone to be in the same room at the same time all the time and i i think that like there is this inherent want that many of us have myself included of more and more and more bigger bigger bigger and i just don't think that that is oftentimes the answer to creating a memorable life and there's an amazing post that's kind of gone a little bit viral you might have read it by julie yeah zhao i read your comment on so the blog post is called yeah julie the blog post is called all to all the folks who are about to be rich and it was released the day before the spacex ipo and she basically starts with like you did congrats like all the hard work blah blah you've led you this day your stock is about to be liquid you're about to be rich and she i think when she was at facebook when facebook ipo and so she was kind of like telling a bit of the like almost like your older sibling like hey like you're gonna go to college like guess what it's gonna be crazy a little bit and here's some things that are gonna happen and so she's almost describing like what happens from here and there were so many incredible one liners in this and you know part of it is like you know scientific studies say that like in blah blah after one year lottery winners default to the same happiness that they were before yes exactly and so there's there's one line i love she talked she talked about like the three groups of people from when she saw the the facebook thing some of my former colleagues slipped away from tech like aquarium fish being flushed out into the ocean off to find their true homes engineers who decided they're not gonna code anymore i saw people become chefs hotel ears artists therapists writers teachers parents these groups always fascinated me because i watching some sort of cinderella transformation who would you bloom into once you were given the gift of true freedom so that's like group one she calls the fish and then group two she calls the the leisure class which basically people who say oh i'm gonna pursue this lifestyle of leisure so i'm gonna travel to all these wonderful places michelin star restaurants have a sleek new home with all the fancy furniture forget forget ikea i'm gonna do the disneyland vip tour coachella i'm gonna buy a five hundred dollar hoodie from japan and then she's like then there's the others who continued on the same track fintech intact they become vcs or founders they could continue to march to try to get a higher high for the next you know a few years they're chasing the thrill of the climb and she's not really saying one is better than the other but she she does sort of play and have her own take but she says i saw it play out in all three groups i know i know people for whom the money simply let them check off some goals like paying off their parents house or having enough for retirement maybe they upgrade their car or their house and largely they stop they didn't change how they carry themselves they didn't change who they hang out with they didn't they did not take up the game of more and so she talked about this idea of the game of more and she was i think the way she said it was like there is a game and that game is called more and once the money lands a question be waiting for you to think think deeply am i still playing and i just thought like if you just take this idea there is a game in a game called more but it's more of what what are you want more of do you want more leisure do you want more travel do you want more challenge do you want more impact do you want more authenticity to who you are do you want more joy do you want more kids like what do you want more of and i think this is a very powerful question of if you assume for a second that everybody's playing some game of more right we've not reno our desires we all wake up today we're gonna go do some shit but in the name of what and i just think it's actually pretty powerful to put a name on like what is the what is the game of more that you're playing right now i think it's takes you a really really hard question i think you might be embarrassed by the answer to those questions if you if you looked at your actions and you said what is this action in the game in the seek what am i seeking more of you know if i'm gonna post a story of my vacation right now on instagram what am i seeking more of i'm playing the game of more and that's a game of more validation more status more prestige you know i i like that i don't post stories because i've opted out of that but like i have opted into a game of more in other flavors and so i just think this a really really powerful idea i know what you think about that well i wanna know did she say which one she is found people to be most happy and amongst your friend group i i i believe she's mostly referring to people who overnight are now liquid which is a very interesting phenomenon i've seen it happen many time not rich to super rich yeah so versus like someone who has been a lawyer for a long time and they've like made money throughout their career i was in the category of if i wasn't and then i was all of a sudden i think you i have been like accumulating of all along i've as you've gone and but we know a bunch of people who have overnight made it have you noticed any similarities or commonalities of who ends up in a place that more people would desire to be in that place yeah i mean this is probably the thing i'm figuring out the most so i have some thoughts but i bet in five ten years i will have a much simpler wiser perspective on this than i do today is your question of what's the right answer or what's your question really well there's no right answer but i'm just saying like can you stereotype each bucket of what you've noticed i only have maybe one friend who has done the first one where he's opted out so here's here's a couple of observations i think there is actually a better and worse even if there's not a right answer i would say the the leisure path doesn't seem to result in anything good i you know completely agree sure sure take a take a take a few trips sure you could upgrade your car or your house whatever that's fine but the diminishing returns are a very real and very dramatic in that path and the people who seem to do that and seem to wander they sort of lose themselves in a way that like ever know every everybody sort of looks it's almost like funeral ass when people talk about them at at some point because they're sort of seeking something it but they're the wrong place right it's like searching for your keys but this is not where you dropped them and so that path actually does genuinely seem to be worse i would say very few people can do what i call slay the money monster so very very very very very few people can actually achieve financial independence by my definition so most people feel that financial dependence is the ability to buy whatever you want you have the freedom to buy two do two go to fly to to whatever and it's actually freedom from that you want financial independence to me is not the ability to buy whatever you want it's that you make decisions not based on money so sometimes that's about buying what you want right you might order a certain dish or buy organic or whatever you might buy things because you're choosing what you want and not based on the pricing but for the most part it's you choose to whatever your next project is you didn't do it because this could be a ten x or this could whatever right so freedom from i think is very very rare the second thing i would say is very very rare it seems valuable when you have it and by the way like jesse we've talked about earlier jesse is did a great example of this like i've talked him on the phone about ideas that can make a ton of money that we're like yeah that would make we could be making twenty million a year if we just did this and then we're both like i don't know man he goes i was do really wanna do jesse he's like i think i would just like to ride my bike he's like i wanna go do these races and triathlon and iron ironman he's like i think i just like riding my bike actually and because we both agree like money at a certain point has very little utility to you so at at the beginning of your money curve when you're let's say in debt money has a tremendous amount of utility when you have no savings and no safety net money has tremendous amount of utility and then as you get to be comfortable money has less utility but it can if it buys you back your time you don't have to work you get way more utility at a certain point you're trading very valuable hours of life energy for useless dollars that you have no ability to even spend to improve your life and i find that vast majority of our friends who have achieved that they still make that horrible trade of valuable life hours for useless dollars and so i think that that's like the probably the most common observation is man that must be really hard to kick that most people can't do that thanks podcast is brought to you by my friends at mercury they make the world's best banking product i think you know this already i used mercury for all my businesses i think i have like maybe seven or eight businesses we use mercury as our business banking across all of them and now they actually just launched a personal baking account so i have my personal account there i moved off of wells fargo and chase i'm just all in on mercury why i like products that are easy to use i like products that get me and the problems that have so like very easy to make a joint account with my wife very easy to spin up virtual cards one click and i get savings yield it just has all the stuff that i need in one place so if you're looking for the best banking product on the market it's definitely mercury i will fist fight anyway to who dis me on that go to mercury dot com slash personal and learn more mercury is a fintech not an fdic insured bank banking services are provided through choice financial group and call them an a members fdic the other observation i have is that you have like man needs a quest man needs a project but you gotta choose what is the quest of what is the project that is going to like you up and i don't think very many people are able to to do a very good job of that because we're incredibly creatures so if all our friends are starting companies we start companies if all our friends are investing we start thing and we we to rarely ask ourselves what do i really want you know there's this idea of like meme which is renee gerard and and peter t like really really popularized this idea around what we we want what we want because other people want it and so i think a very valuable trait in humans that i've sort of started to observe is people who are anti meaning people who seem to want things from their own internal vol position and not because other people want those same things tell me examples of people you know who fit in that category nick gray is incredibly anti he is surrounded by goof balls like us that are always on to the next company in the next investment the next this and the next that and mc gray was like i'm gonna prioritize hosting cocktail parties i'm gonna prioritize you know writing my blog i'm gonna prioritize going and traveling to india and living like a village in india he wants what he wants and he wants it because he wants it and you could tell because he's very lit up while doing it and you could tell the people who don't because they have everything and they're still not lit up why because they're choosing things that that other people want tony robbins told the story wants at his event where he he was talking about eating dinner with his wife and she said this thing which she was like you know the waitress brings out her burger and it's a burger with you know pickles and blah blah blah and then they were talking about this idea of like are you even doing what he really want or you just sort of still programming a conditioned by your upbringing by society by your friends by whatever and she's like whose burger is this like why do i even order it with pickle i would like pickles that much maybe i should start ordering differently right like and i think that that metaphor applies to a lot of life like a lot of what goods around you is a burger you ordered that's like is this even how i like my burgers maybe i like my burgers you know medium or rare you know maybe i like this maybe like that and so once you sort of become alert to it you might start to observe examples of people who who operate this way like i think palmer luck is incredibly anti med you know he was doing everything every project he's picked is incredibly unpopular when he picked it this is sort of the the test right like how popular is the thing you're doing amongst the people who you associate with or wanna be like and you know doing virtual reality goggles when he was nineteen living in a trailer park you know he was not like keeping up with the jones is you know and then even afterwards when it happened he's he stayed wearing his hawaiian shirts and his shorts and his flip flops he didn't suddenly start wearing you know designer clothes and and and this and app he didn't become a venture capitalist he didn't start worrying about his summer vacations he then went and worked to the defense industry started building weapons when that was incredibly unpopular to do in silicon valley you were seeing as sort of a block sheep for doing that it's hard to get funding for doing something like that because it was incredibly unpopular so you look for people who do unpopular things because to them it's what they want there's this book i read last year called the status and culture and it was just like ideas of what does high status mean and how does that impact trends whether it be fashion or whatever and the book's author his one of his points was to be ina authentic is the lowest status thing and if you look at all the people who you admire they're truly whether they've become that person or they born that way both are fine they are truly authentic and if you look at like who we admire for example i was just reading about this mathematician have you heard this guy his name's gregory pearl no who's that well he's one of the greatest mathematicians of all time and he won the nobel peace prize or sorry the nobel prize for math i guess or was economics stuff forget i think it's there's a math one and he turned it down and he's like not i'm not about this i didn't do this for this reason and then like someone calls him to like say hey you won the prize and his his famous quote was you're disturbing me from picking mushrooms and he hung up and he never collected the prize he never collected the prize yeah exactly not and you hear about these guys that are rebellious like this and and what i've noticed is that the worst thing that you can do if you're gonna be someone like for example i think i've fallen partially in two of the categories of the three that you've mentioned and i've been a little bit half pregnant with them and i think the worst thing that you could do is to be unbalanced about where you fall and to go all in on which type of person you want to be and to not half asset to go all in not yeah it's a very scary it's a very scary feeling but if you do go all so for example i don't like everything palmer lucky does or says but i respect the hell of the fact that he seems authentic and and and he he does believe the way that he acts and says and if you look at other people for example some of the times you'll hear elon say something and you're like dude that's cringe why is that cringe just like well it's cringe because i don't think that you truly feel that way and you're just doing this for laughs and like that's like the the the idea of authenticity yeah exactly look at an example of somebody who's incredibly anti warren buffett so warren buffett became at one point the richest man in the world he lived in the same house in omaha he drove the same car he liked his breakfast from mcdonald's he liked to drink coke you know he he loved to read so he read he resisted basically every every fad and trend he did not participate in the tech bubble basically he did not participate in tech altogether because he didn't understand it and it his stayed true to his principles right he loved to read so he read he loved to play bridge so he played play bridge he had certain small set of friends he stayed with them like he closed down his fund at one point because he was like i just don't see good opportunity goes i think every what everybody's doing in the market right now seems crazy i can't understand it and the fools are getting rich so i just i'd rather not play then play their way this literally like the definition of he literally closed down the buffet partnership after like had run it up to like a hundred million he gone from like a hundred couple sixty to to a hundred million in the yeah sixty sixties or seventy or something i'm like that and i'm like damn that's incredible and so and then i think you know practically speaking it's kind of like you know when you wanna get fit like if you were to advise me you're like alright sean if you talking about getting fit let's get real alright you wanna get fit here's the first thing you need to do here's the second thing you do what would be in the top three of things you need to do if you're if you're real about getting fit probably eat your body weight grams of protein okay so you take one metric that you're gonna optimize for that like is a a non negotiable daily set point that you're trying to hit okay next i would say probably walk ten thousand steps while lifting weights three days a week and then and what's usually the leak for somebody who's who's trying to get fit but they keep snacking are they eating like right what what's the solve for that because that's the that's the problem how do you solve that you remove barriers so for example the day you say you wanna get fit you immediately go to the gym and buy a one year membership or the day you wanna eat better you immediately throw everything away that you think is bad you have to remove all you don't have it in the house and so that i think there's what's the equivalent of that in terms of living life well or hell living this sort of anti medical life where you actually if we if we take this train of logic which is that you will be most lit up and happiest when you're living authentically and in line with what you really want and living in line with your own values to me it's basically like you if you spend all day you spend three hours a day looking at other people on instagram and tiktok in the way they're living their life i think you're basically the equivalent of having like a free vending machine of snacks in every bedroom of your house this sounds like such a silly hack but i've noticed whenever i wanted to become something in life if i un follow everyone on instagram and only follow the people i aspire to become you want hundred percent get closer to being in that person so like i remember when i wanted to get fit my instagram feed was literally only shirtless rep dudes yes immersion total immersion to dress better i un unfold with everyone i only file people i wanted to dress like tell you the story of when we were hanging out with mister beast and he told me the story about getting fit well i know that he painted a thing on his wall which you'd explain you gotta explain what that what he painted so i was hanging it out with him and was every we see him every year once a year so i was like dude did you got an incredible shape congrats man like how'd you do it was the what was the thing and he goes you see that really jacked right there and he points over it like hey guys thought it was like his bodyguard or somebody he's like that's my trainer he's just with me everywhere i go he's watching everything i eat everything i do and i just hang out with him a lot because then i told all my friends like you know he's boys that he's grown up with that he does you know all his videos with he's like hey i'm getting fit and this is gonna be a lot easier for me if you get fit too and you have to be as committed as i am otherwise i'm not gonna be able to hang out with you he's like because if i'm hanging out with you and you're eating pizza that's too hard for me i'm gonna have to suddenly resist pizza so like how about we just all do this or if you're gonna be the guy eating pizza just know that i'm not gonna be hanging out with you as much because like i just can't do that i'm this is my priority so i'm gonna do this basically like changing your peer group what usually means is like you go join a different set of peers you gonna move to a city of really ambitious people if you wanna you know go go start a company and move to hollywood if you wanna be an actor or you you know start to go to the gym with people who go to the gym every day because it'll become a part of your lifestyle well he was like for his own friends like you need to change your lifestyle because i'm changing mine and otherwise this is not gonna work we're not gonna be hanging out very much i just thought that's actually like again a very direct path to the outcome you brain yourself but use add you use your your loser brain or your monkey brain to your own benefit rather than having it used against you all the time you're just i'm just gonna steal this word for word as it as some of our ad copy for hampton thank you alright man well good talking to you on this podcast mahal mahal dog i'm not in know why but actually that's good that's good story that's i alright see you i feel like got can rude to world i know could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a go less travel never looking back alright let's take a quick break to talk about a podcast because if you're listening to this you like podcast and what's better than one podcast but another podcast and let me tell you another podcast you should check out it's called success story if you like hearing about different success stories and hearing q and a sessions with successful business leaders or hearing keto presentations or just checking out conversations about sales and business and marketing tactics this is a great podcast for you so check it out wherever you get your podcast