We hit record on our private strategy session

okay so this was supposed to be private but we decided to do it in public as any good influencer would do we said hey why do this if we're not gonna have the camera on i feel like i rude where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road less travel at look i guess the setup here is being sam on camera but you'll also see ari in cassie do gang and cassie is the new she's the new the new girl role on the team and she came on and we were supposed to do kind of like a strategy meeting of like what are we you're here to help with the podcast what are we trying to do again well what's the strategy and we said why don't we actually just record it and we'll just do it live and see what comes out of this session so that's that's what i'm here to do sam did i is that what you are expecting here yes and we all filled out something in advance you are the only one who did not submit yours already well okay yeah that's right i did but i'm like the i'm like the c okay so i and what what i like to do in these situation and i think anybody should steal this i stole this from amazon when we got acquired there i i learned this method which is you send a little bit of pre work in advance and it makes the meetings so much more interesting and so much more valuable because there's some people are fantastic at thinking on the spot and coming up with insightful accurate true honest things on the spot in front of a large group of people but that's like one percent of people most people don't think very well that way and so if you actually wanna get to the right answer a really good thing to do is to send out some questions or have people write in advance what they're thinking and then one person's like the the gather you gather all the materials together and they use that to have a good discussion and so i asked you guys ten or so questions and there were questions like what's working really well with the podcast right now what's not working what's your biggest because pet peeve what's something we're just stupid for not doing right now right like just very simple questions and so i gathered all that and we're not gonna use all of it but i wanted to share some of the most interesting findings can i can we just start with the most interesting findings the first one is sam you had a a bit on almost like the virtue of selfish ness you were basically like i wanna do the selfish thing and went with the podcast because the there's one way to look at this which is it's all about what should we be doing to be more successful how do we make this external thing work and you were just like you said wanna do this selfish thing and have fun and learn and improve myself i think others will enjoy that a lot more than us was trying to appeal to them in an ina way and it reminded me of the rick rubin quote of the best way to serve your audiences as to ignore them completely i actually think i was like nervous even put that on there because i'm like we're gonna do a podcast on this and i'm gonna go tell the audience to app themselves i just think that so originally you you started this podcast then i came on and for the first three years i don't think you and i ever looked at the data and i couldn't even tell you a bunch of the numbers frankly i i still don't really look at the numbers but every once in a while i get drawn and sucked into this thing where i look at the youtube numbers because of those are the most public and i started thinking in headlines and i started thinking and what can get the highest click rates and then occasionally i suggest we do some of those episodes and we do do some of those episodes and i noticed the night before i get the sunday scary out a tuesday night because we record on wednesdays i noticed that i dislike those the most and then i noticed there are so many times like when you will tell me a story or we will have a guest like ram weaver who i think ram weaver is popular so it's maybe the best example or sarah moore who you did a podcast with where we do these podcasts and i leave with more energy than i came in on and almost always that happens when it's not data driven and it's simply what am i curious about or if i read a book and i'm like i'm so excited to tell sean about this or sean goes and does something and he goes and visits austin and i just wanna hear his opinion of who we met and what was cool about it i am more excited and energized at the end of those than i am at the things where i've done based off of a headline that i think will be popular right that's so true i i think we should actually set the stage well i forgot to do this set the stage on where we're at so for those who don't know started this podcast six years ago we're eight hundred and twenty two episodes in i think we've done something like a hundred and fifteen million downloads of the podcast and the entire podcast is based off of a s which is four words does an empire built on four words dude have you seen this and and that's that's it and then it's basically sam saying that to me and i'm like no what is it and he tells me something that makes me that kinda gets me excited it blows my mind and then i tried to do the same for them and it's a a giving contest where being use it here and we try to do that that's how i see it six years into having a podcast we are basically a media company we have never we have never had a social media person i didn't even know that we had like social media because you do you don't know how many times somebody from hubspot has asked me like hey i anyone have the twitter login hey can can you can like cassie he yesterday was asked was like hey there's like a linkedin page do you know who made that i was like i have no idea didn't even know what existed we've got like in instagram account that for years nobody had the password too we had to like request like a reset yeah we're we're pretty comic like cartoon bad at some of these things hey so when i was prepping for this meeting i put all of our m m numbers our competitors our goals into a cloud prompt and it gave me a sixty day action plan for growing our channels i wanna give it away to you as well so if you head to the show us below drop your email will send you the prompt that you can use to grow your platforms as well which sean what do wanna do are there any new initiatives that you wanna do this year in the next twelve months is there anything that you wanna do you don't wanna do i think most of the things are things that don't wanna do meaning i could come over the list of like thirty possible things but i think the real question is like one are the one or two things that might actually change things for the better the the one i wrote right now is i think our core product is actually pretty good i think i you know i would like listening to this podcast and that's a good test i don't know if i would listen to the podcast podcast by default i might not even know it exists or know what what's in it you know what would hook me in to doing it in the first place and ironically like some of the things that would hook me and might be like a bigger name guest that i oh i'm curious to hear what this person has to say about this or oh there's an interview with this person i haven't seen what that person is saying or the topic they say is gonna be interesting but that isn't exactly what the main podcast is or it doesn't give me like feel for what the next episode might be totally different than what that one was for example it seems like the main way that podcast work today is you have the loyal listeners and then you have the sample and the sample are basically clips that you put in places where people already are that give somebody a bite sized taste of what the real podcast is like so for example i love this podcast basement yard i've never even listened to the a full episode of it but i've watched probably two hundred clips and if you tell me what do you think about that podcast oh my god i love those guys that podcast is amazing never even listened to it right but i've listened to so many clips that i feel like i know those guys i feel like i know the show and every everyone of the clips gives me the same feeling most importantly right like it's not like one is a really deep intellectual thing and the other one's funny now every clip is hilarious i think those guys are hilarious they seem super likable those guys are awesome and that show is funny if i ever wanted a funny show like that's where i would go and so i don't think we're doing a good job of giving out the samples of what's an m m to give people that frame or give people that that that inspiration or give people that story or the banter or whatever in a good enough way where people already are so on on i think a lot of our communities on x for example and and and and they can do amazing things like i was on chris what do you want you want ten or twenty clips a day which is fine that that sounds like a competitor i think that's that's probably crazy high let's take a normal episode in an hour the challenge would be how do you take three to four moments from that podcast that are like m m in a shot version and give that to people and architect those clips in a way that that you we mean and you would wanna share because oh yeah that was that was a great bit that we talked about it's edited tightly enough where people would under stand what it is right away and they would be hooked and they would get the payoff and if we do that and we share it where people already are consistently i think that's the number one thing that we don't do a good job of that seems to be the smart thing that every other podcast does like i was on chris williamson podcast we did an episode i don't know if the episode was fine like good you know if you looked at his youtube channel it wasn't like a ten x outlier was probably on the lower side of his normal episodes but for three weeks his team has just been clipping from that episode little stories little nuggets from that episode he put one up on on x and elon replied to the some story i told on there that same thing could happen maybe twenty times from m m and it doesn't happen and you just it it's like the dogs not barking we don't know what we're missing because it's not obvious it's invisible to us okay that sounds great that's a great idea awesome clips posted on social media where people already are instagram yep tiktok and an x and like yeah sure is this the my first million first viral going off well he's pretty quick to act there the dad instincts i kicked how do we go viral what if sam's apartment catches fire during the saves i think we should make this more meeting like what do you think sean he's saying it's boring as an episode or what you saying you're so different in strategy meetings i'm being different now you're being you're being podcast sean i wasn't aware of that but you're probably right what's the main difference you're more you're not harsh but you're just more like blunt into wait hang hang this is more of a dick leave this into this okay yeah just make it more how we talk when we're talking and or can get impression of how i am off off podcast when we're doing strat like when wherever we're talking about what we should do or not do alright what's not working let's see why are we doing this this is stupid yeah some we do something talk suck yeah we're doing three things like why are we doing that yeah sean cha size someone on the team and he gave his he goes that's a stupid answer give a better answer okay but his his last point is good basically we do need more clips we need him to be on x and we need to be on instagram know what's one of the things that we grew most from was when we made this bounty where we just said we're gonna get five grand to the person who clips the most that we like and we got twenty million impressions in one month the first month which interestingly there's all these like things called clipper armies now that was like doing of the that was like one of the first examples of doing that we even know what we were doing it it was incredibly successful we stumbled ass backwards into that where we were just like hey what if we honestly by the way the reason we do that we didn't trust ourselves to be doing a good job this is like don't think our own team gonna do good job this how about the crowd anybody who does this will give you a prize and two two very interesting things happen first it was awesome we got so so much spread from it the second the guy who had the most viral clips ended up creating a company doing short form content sold it morning brew and like you know how did the sort of successful business come out of the whole thing and then by the way in hilarious news we then immediately stop doing what was working forgot about it and haven't talked about it since since that's today so my opinion is we should a on our internal team we should post way more on all platforms and b we should do another one of those things and we can either do the exact same thing or we could just pay a cpm so for example if you have a video that gets a hundred thousand views you get i don't know what the going rates are but i think it's cheap i think it's like a dollar per thousand views something like that but basically it's like alright you got you got a hundred thousand views you get a grand or i can't do the math but you guys understand what i'm saying so ari told me that i should be more blunt and direct as i am in not this podcast format so i'll do that cassie welcome to the team you have lots of good ideas about community and this and that here's what we wanna do in the next ninety days i need you to raise a clipper army get this shit going and we should you know you have twenty four hours to basically set a target that makes sense like you pick you pick your goal but what do we fundamentally are trying to do is copy a a working playbook that you know has worked for everyone from tate to you know whoever else you know on on the clipping side and we want to use money to incentivize these like sixteen to twenty two year old kids who are just awesome at editing and making clips to post clips about our stuff on social not on our own brand account necessarily we'll take the best and we'll put it there but we want to set a very aggressive stretch goal and aggressively raise this army of clippers and we'll do that for ninety days and then we'll check in in at the end of the ninety days and decide whether we continue or not but you could be basically stupidly aggressive for ninety days so we get a clear answer versus tip toe into it and then we won't really know in ninety days because we're we just just getting started we haven't really found out yet like go i'll go all out spend more money than you think you need be a little bit looser with the controls about it and go you know go for more scale and let's see what happens okay so in my opinion let's make a list of only like one or two more big rock one clipper army okay let me get let me give you a couple one thing that i don't know one hundred sean if i wanna do it but which you consider it we've been talking about events for forever i think i would be open to like a two or three venue tour i would want it to make i would have to figure out if family can come or around and if we can make that happen but i would be open but the stick that we have needs to be easy because and i don't mean easy like in a lazy way but easy where we could kick ass it because performing in front of two thousand people like we had before it's kinda hard to make it entertaining and i've been to a lot of live podcast taping with a lot of people almost all of them suck and so we would have like really hone in on a format so i would say i would be open to turn an event but let me give you a few more the ideas wait hang before we do that let's stick to events like what would sean what would you do if you could if it was worth driving an hour for what would you do i think here's what here's my interest in an event i don't wanna do an event for money i don't wanna do an event for the ego hit i got that just for the record you would like to get paid for it sure sure make making money's fine but that wouldn't be the motivation to do it same thing with like it's awesome to walk into like a theater or an arena or whatever the thing is and be like wow all these people here for us is awesome and like there's a line of people try to take selfies and like showing my wife like look it's real like this is a thing and like yeah like you my kids do you is this am i cool to you yet and they're like no can we go so so that wouldn't be the main motivation that my only motivation with an event is i wanna know who the top one percent of m listeners are and this is extremely selfish request which is over time actually not through me but through my business part partner of ben levy people go to ben and they're just like dude i love m mfa so he'll be like oh you know this the founder of that really cool thing we we eat that that place we go that product we use yeah he loves and then i get to meet text i'm like i'm like it's insane that we don't know who the most interesting listeners are that's who i wanna do the event with and four and just purely out of selfish because i want to meet them and also it'd be cool i think if they met each other and i think that would just be the fun version of doing an event that i'm at most interested so if we could figure out what i call the m m one percent event that's what i wanna do okay got it so one percent means like a one percent in that most interesting so that means curated curated that means okay so you're thinking cure like hundred or hundreds or down hundred a hundred fifty curated people and let's make it awesome retreat hang out whatever let's invite some friends of the pod who are guests like let's get andrew and steph smith let's get other people that they they would also wanna meet okay but again like you if you if you curate it to me that's a room i wanna be in because i know i would have a fun time i would go meet i could in one day meet a bunch of awesome people who are like minded who are fans of the show that would be the no stress versus get on stage like travel somewhere already bad get on stage have to perform a like some live show for what you know i'm but i'm sure what i what do i want out of that i i really want anything out of that alright let's take a quick break and i got a question for you when a buyer asks ai for a solution like yours does your business come up most companies have no idea by the time they found out they've already lost the deal to another company that did hubspot has ae which helps you show up in the moments when threat buyers are looking for a company like yours before the first click before they fill in the form that is the moment hubspot ae is built for check out hubspot dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses here here's another version that i find interesting so i i like always brainstorming like what's the opposite so what's the opposite of the live tour the the big show and my brain went to tiny desk so you know like the npr tiny desk series that created on youtube like the vibe is imma it's cool because it's kinda small and an intimate rather than mega mega and you get to see the artist cook and so i've actually be would be curious like if we did our version of tiny desk so so you've seen like ro does a lot of these where he's he's doing his like workshops and somebody stands up it says i have this problem i'm this guy you know here's my business here's what i do blah blah he's supposed to give him the right answer as the kinda guru on the stage and it's it's good but it's very like a bit sterile right like the vibe of it is like we're in a cold conference room and you know we're here for for some some tactics whereas tiny desk has like a different aura to it a different vibe to it so i if we had a cool venue that was like almost like compact and we had twenty people who are you know entrepreneurs entrepreneurs whatever people who listen to the podcast were entrepreneurial and then we just kinda spit spit all with them like i think both me and you were pretty good at doing this with people like i've done this at a couple of events where i got paid to go do this talk and i threw i just on the drive there i just threw out my deck and i was you know what i'm gonna i'm gonna stand up and be like who's got bit you're here for you're here to get better and improve your business but you want some value out of this tell me what you're doing tell me your biggest problem let me try to help you right here on the spot and i did that with like twenty people and i felt like a magician because you get to do a magic trick of like they're stuck and you get them un stuck which talk are you referring to the mercury one number three one yeah because i watched that that was good okay so doing that together i think would be pretty fire yeah i agree that could be cool we could have like a cool set we do want in new york we do one in san francisco we do one and wherever else and we take our family we hang and you know it's it's like a creative event but that becomes the the trick is the live event is a experience but really it's the content you create off that meaning like you shit like what her is doing is pretty smart right like he chops that up into a thousand question and answer clips where somebody has a problem and then he helps them solve it and then they're like wow thank you so much like i'm my god yeah you're right that becomes like good clip content and so i think for us we could do that and i think it would be very interested pretty easy for us to do much easier than like going on stage and like performing comedy or essentially like live entertainment i'm more interested in that than like hanging out with really successful people like i for some reason i don't love like hanging out with like a like baller in these type of settings because a i don't feel like googling everyone in advance to seeing if they're on the epstein list but also it just feels like a it just feels like a pissing match yeah and i just like being with like the nobody's but yeah i'm interested in that okay bernie sanders of business over here like who's the guy mitt romney was like i don't like poor people whatever okay so maybe we do different events you do the everybody event in in venue a and i'll be with all the cool coolest successful people in venue b be great it's something for everyone something i wanna do less of a few things wanna do less of do do you like doing solo episodes i hate doing solo episodes i hate recording to and like looking at a bear screen do i i don't mind it i sometimes i like to teach if i have something but there's two types of solo one is solo just talking to the camera the other is like a when there's a guest in new york and it's makes sense for you to hang out with them in person and do the in person pod and i'm not there or or vice there's not like those either i i find those to be way less fun because i'm like oh okay this feels a little bit i like work but when we do them together it feels more fun it feels way more fun because it feels like because it's sort of like whenever you're around brothers and they egg each other on i love right the egg each other on mentality i don't love solo interviews or occasionally if it's someone who i know that you don't like or you don't care about their topics but it's super interesting to me i'm i would like the solo time just to go really deep on this one thing but in general i prefer duo versus solo for both interviews and talking about stuff me too the only caveat would be there is something cool about in person you pick up so much more than just doing a remote podcast where they pop on and they pop off at the end of the hour right and there's there's not a lot in between so so i think hanging out in person is pretty cool and i think the production value i i do like i i i i prefer to watch podcasts that are like that when people are together versus when they're doing a zoom and then lastly like some you know i let you you were pretty sacred about like what times you were gonna record whereas i'm like you know ari if you asked me like hey this person wants to record on the moon at two am i'm like yeah cool like right like i ever said no i'm basically like yeah sure what does it matter to me if it's nine am or pm i'm like i don't really care whereas i think sam for you're like that throws my whole day off have a more structured day yeah i think that's always other times where we where we do solo low is where you can't make it what do you guys feel about newsletter i know sean you you both sean and sam have experience in this realm but curious what your thoughts are on a brand newsletter too there has to be some type of way yes interesting there has to be some type of way where it never be where it doesn't become a liability and it only becomes an asset where at least is a liability a small amount of times because the problem with a because not i neither of us have time to write it the problem with saying yes to that is that you're gonna say something dumb you're gonna say something it doesn't fit our taste or it's just gonna be factual incorrect and if one of those three things happens in a her reputation to me i go never it again and so as long as we could der risk it which it will never be one hundred percent but as long as there's some type of trust there it is interesting but that's a huge thing to solve for right yep well what what to you guys would be interesting to like what would you read or what newsletters do you currently read that you're like hey this is something we'd wanna pull from or at least get inspired just takeaways from our episodes it's like i want that yeah exactly just like i don't wanna watch listen to everything like there's somebody to so that we have done where like i need a reminder of that we have eight hundred fifty just pull out like cool learnings yeah i think basically if it's here's what we just did here's who's coming up and have the just did you know here's like the three or four most interesting stories it's just in plain speak like oh you know he shared the numbers of how fast they grew it turns out your one was this your two was this year through he was just no gate like just here's the best stuff if you don't have time like just great here's this here's a quick summary but like that would make me wanna go listen or watch an episode and then if i knew oh thursday they have this person coming on that's cool and then if there was like a little just kind of bullet point section where we can be like oh yeah like check this out sam went viral for this we're doing this thing check out this product we bought like know whatever i'm i'm cool with like a little bit of extra so it's not purely an ai summary of like the episode i think that would be great and i i would be happy to like do the work on this and i'm not write it myself but like diego who's my head of contact was my lead rider for milk road so like you know i basically trained him how to write my style he did it for two years for milk road and was excellent you know he's really really good at this that's a lift that like i think i could have diego take on that would be worth it if we could drive enough people to it i think right now there's this conflict which is we tell people hey go to hubspot to go get this like offer so then that's where they would go so this would need to become the main place we're directing people to and i think by the way like way more people would subscribe because they would know like oh i'm just gonna be getting value from this all the time that's that's great this podcast guest 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 of my businesses 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 banking account so i have my personal account there i moved off of wells fargo in chase i'm just all in on mercury why i like products that are easy to use but i i like products that get me and the problems that i have so like it 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 stephanie mercury i will fist fight any way to hear 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 have you guys seen or sam do you remember when they were doing those like river community meetup type things yes so like that was kinda cool for a little bit people were going the reason i say it was cool is because when i met people who like the podcast they told me like oh i'm part of the m m denver meetup up and i'm like what and they're like yeah we meet up once a month and it's like nine of us and whatever nineteen of us whatever the number is it's not like a huge group but they all got to know each other and like we were the common like glue or bond well that platform has pivoted to becoming like a supper club like a dinner club and so it's like a decentralized way to just have like fans of the show opt in to go and getting dinner with like six other people who also like the show and yeah know this selfish does nothing for us in terms of like i'm not you there's no growth hack it's not money it's on any of those things we're not even gonna be there it's kind of the the barbell approach right there's some things that i wanna get i wanna do things that reach everybody and then it's like what are the things that would just change somebody's life because they would meet a c founder they would make a great connection or they would find like friends in their city that they don't otherwise have that are like the unique level of business door that they are as i don't know if we should do this there's like a lot of liability of like we're we're not we're in our heads we're like oh this is just you opt in and you it's not our experience but i think fundamentally they'll attribute the experience to us that's the downside but the upside would be i think this would be really cool for people to meet other awesome people in their city and that would good karma for the world what do you guys think of this we can call it just the other ninety nine percent you know i love this idea personally i think it's pretty cool i think it's pretty cool i i didn't i loved it and then you were like oh yeah it is not out of our it is out of our control and it they'll blame us if it sucks i i what i would be on board with is if we just said newsletter clips and meetups if we just did those three things for the next six months i'd probably be fine with that yeah i i love this idea it would be cool too what if you guys like showed up to one every once in a while surprised i did the dinner groups yeah i have i've showed up every once in a while it's great content too i know it's a little different but the v x team was doing this with gary for a bit where they were doing these branded dinners in different cities and capturing content in having these really organic conversations and people loved it dude you what what va does is hilarious one time gary vader vaynerchuk it his handle he dm tam me goes hey i'm having talking forever which we're we are friendly but not like buddies but he was like would come to dinner with me and i was like yeah that sounds cool and i show up and there's like fifty other people there and i was like where's is gary they're like oh well he doesn't actually come to these it just me nick i host them on his behalf behalf oh my god i like really gonna so that's pretty funny but yes well we won't do job yeah that sounds cool basically the and the last thing i think that we should focus on guess wise sean is i think that we should i think we don't aim high enough i think that our guests should probably be super mega popular people and we get them gonna talk about new stuff that they've not talked about like ideas or someone no one knows so like my mother likes sarah moore like a bunch of different people but it should be almost a little bar where we because i don't think we've done a good job of going after the one out of ten like popular person and i don't like having those people just because they're popular but i do like having them and with they talk about something new and then also i loved i've loved having someone who i like this was a nobody and they were the the most insightful person we've i've ever talked to don't so is the thing you're saying we should aim higher or or are you saying hey we do a lot of these ones in the middle and will let's stop doing those is that what you're saying like are you just saying hey let's invest one of the the ends or are you saying let's avoid the middle i'm mostly saying the first thing that you just said yeah another one of those memorable episodes is when sean brought his former he's your former chief of staff who is sean yeah when he was like twenty two yeah yeah yeah and that felt like yeah it was like a totally unique like no other podcast was gonna have him on like i feel on bringing on like the amish care trash man yeah yeah looks my favorite episode i love the amish kit so i would like to go a little bit higher and lower you know like i think i take a lot of pride that i am like this and our podcast is like this where i enjoy hanging out with the with you know world leaders and movers and shaker and also so i i enjoy equally enjoy hanging out with someone who has done something not impressive at all but is very insightful and has some wisdom that i wanna learn from and interesting related to that what i i've noticed i have found i've get the most joy out of is when we have old people so don't know a better way it to say that but i love having old people on i'm talking like seventy year plus i have loved learning from those types of people i like it we've done so many different episode types is there one type we should be doing a lot more of is there one type we should be doing less of is there a new type you're itching to do like does anyone have ideas on content types that we wanna double down abandon or try for some reason i'm i i think i'm a i think i'm a much softer person than you and i like i i enjoy some sometimes less hard hitting stuff but let's just say we talked about like raise raising children or like finding your passion or be or finding happiness which is like arthur brooks or parenting which i don't think we've ever talked about here does that stuff interest you sean on learning those things sure sure i think we should do more of those because when we had grand weaver on we do that right we do well it we only do it when it's ina inadvertently but graham weaver was a good example of that where to me he's an inspirational guy who has all these cool ways to live a wonderful life and it just so happens to be that he was really successful at business but i think that we could for sure have some of these i i don't know why to to describe it but like i i've listened to arthur brooks you know who that is yeah like love to talk to people like that but also there's like a variety of people in that category some of them are totally unknown but like they've done some cool research paper or some like data driven way to like raise better children or be happier or find your passion or die i thinking i lived a full life and i'm happy like things like that right okay down for that for sure the format i love is you guys are constantly consuming interesting things sean not so much books for you but we're working we're working on that hey and then you're turned of you leaf you're also everywhere yeah but but but you haven't a turned paper here right he just yeah debunked and your professional explain and it's like basically like if my best friend can explain like this book he or she has read in like twenty minutes like that's way more that's just a much more fun way of getting the information sam i wanted to hear what you thought about this because you read a lot you read a lot more than me you're a different stuff to me so i don't know exactly how this works i'm not trying to create a book club but i do want to find excuses where the reading i'm doing coincides with my m prep right like two for one and so is there a format where we could both like either whether we read the same book and we break it down or we each bring a book and like i tell you what you would get out of like i basically tell you what's in it you tell me what's in this and we kinda like rate it ourselves and so we know which books to skip which books to definitely go go check out are you interested in that yeah i think it should be quarterly so like the bat the the things that shaped my quarter like i'm reading of like i'm reading this maverick i almost finish with this it's about a brazilian business guy who it like runs his business via democracy is strange didn't hook me right away that that one hook you no but because i've only i highly recommended so i just it's in that weird category of like the probably good but i don't like it i'm still judging my opinion on it i just finished barack obama's biography u the biggest takeaway is that he seems like a nice guy but total psycho patch just like every other president he was like really telling he was telling michelle like hey i'm gonna run for president and she was like honey please don't do this we're happy i don't want this and he goes you're gonna not only go along with it but i'm putting you on stage and you're gonna start traveling and you're gonna campaign for me if you're was like please don't do that this he goes look michelle and then he turns it on and he goes for every young brown out there i could be the beacon of hope i can let them know that they can do anything they they set their mind to and she was like you fine that was my big takeaway that's story worry that was my favorite part for this book and then i'm reading an informal guy guide to work wear which is a style of clothing so long story short i love reading lots of books and i could for sure come with stories once a quarter on books that i and like what the big stories and takeaways are that i've learned patrick o's does a great thing at the end of every episode where you ask them what's the kind of thing anyone's ever done to you and it's like the softening question for every successful person where they give a little hard question story like either we steal that's exact question or we come up with our version of those questions i think one like tradition or ritual question would be great and like such a small thing but would add to what we do da ceo he did a similar thing where at the end of every episode he would have the guest write a question for the next guest and then he would tell them hey we have i guess i said you know barack obama was here last week and he wrote this question for you and it's just like this cool mechanic so i think one ritual question would be awesome so like ari you have ideas but like i kinda wanna like put that in your court and i feel like you might help us come up with something there the other one i was thinking about like acquired but for every man businesses so i get really into studying the back stories of random products that i see red little businesses so it's like you know that sauce bitch and sauce that's like in whole foods it's like a whatever is some sauce brand called bitch and sauce it's like you know there's gotta be a story behind some sauce called bitch sauce that ended up on the shelf of a whole foods in the last five years part of me is like would it be interesting if we picked these like businesses that are in everybody knows them but you don't know the story of them you don't know how they really took off and we we already do this during episodes or it's like oh dude i do you know the real story behind like the stanley mug it used to be for construction workers and then like it died pretty much and then these moms in utah picked it up and then was all about like moms staying hydrated and it became the status symbol and blah blah and like the guy who used to run cro now runs stanley he he's using the cro playbook there right like there's like interesting stuff there and so i wonder if we did a like kind of the acquired thing where we both pick a business turned out on it's just that one business it's kinda like how i built this but it's just same on r on what we thought was cool from the story for recognizable everyday businesses that we think have callback back stories that sounds great i just think that we do that i don't think we do it in a way that would be a standalone package so what would the standalone package i got so the package would be like the title and thumbnail basically make you a promise that like you're gonna learn this and then we both have studied it enough versus today typically one of us knows was a lot more about it than the other which is okay it's okay to do that but like and then we start the episode and we end the episode and we've delivered on that promise that like you're gonna hear about this thing and we're gonna tell you the story that ups the downs the the how they how do they how they made it happen the coolest stuff from this brand okay yeah i think that's great i just i don't know how to make it actionable but that sounds awesome like what you wanna do that i think maybe for now we just put our put it on our radar so that the next time uri thinks of a business like that or we see one or we start to hear the backstory of it we say hey let's try that thing and then we like use the the authentic interest in that thing that like in the moment before perish and we decide to like try this like a focused episode on that one thing and it's like what can we call it so we so we like can we reference this so cnbc does this thing on youtube that's called like make it it's like they're making do i love it and they do an amazing job of these right so like so they're they'll do one on like what's a what's popular they like they did one on the yee z's and it's like the story of how kanye built yee right and like alright so that's like yee i'm you know i maybe i see somebody wearing the slides i'm like that was the actual story and by the way i think i actually recently heard there's a very interesting story about this there's was a guy who built who built or bought the factory first and had this game plan and then went to kanye and then like you know figured it out i know the full story but like sounds like there was something inch interesting there that it didn't start from kanye it actually started from some guy who bought a shoe factory yeah so okay i know maybe we so we maybe we can as code named for ourselves call it these like make it like a make it style episode do you want do you like when we do screen chairs yes in theory like i love to see when somebody pops up a screen share sort of exciting like somebody took their shirt off or something i wanna do more artifact episodes or something like that where they like share their screen it could be if this would only work if the person was particularly interesting but it could be like if we're talking about someone's day it's like show me your calendar right now or if we're talking about a question that you ask or i you asked once and i stole it is how do you invest your money of like show me let's do a pie chart right now you we should do that with jess before in the pre prep we should have them send us a screenshot of their calendar maybe they're like home screen of their phone like what apps they have on their phone yes yes and like maybe when when chrome plugins ins they use like for example no i'm being serious i love looking at people's chrome plugins or i love looking like is their desktop clean or dirty and like how do they organize it right like i love like they can just like tell me how you organize your workflows it could be from chrome plugins to the website that that that that you use on a regular basis i love that stuff because i'm just looking for i hate using this word but every bit of alpha so it's like oh you use this it's like you sean used a chrome plugin or used to where it remind you of your goals and i'm like show me that yeah like it i also just think even if it's not like alpha it's just like takes them out of whatever routine they were in and we get we're gonna find something personal that nobody's ever asked them about or said you know it's something that's idiosyncratic to them right like how they how they roll you know if you if i see somebody's desk i learn a lot you know what i mean like i remember sitting in mona malicious house and i'm doing the episode with him and on his desk he's he got this name this like the sign that says trouble is opportunity and it's like wow there's gotta be a story behind that that didn't just land there by default that's a philosophy that's a story that's important to you if you look at warren buffett desk has a box called the two hard pile it's like what's that warm what is the two hard pile and then you know you wouldn't otherwise know those things i think if we can get like whether it's their calendar or their desk or their iphone home screen something like that i think will unlock a different angle with guests than anybody else is doing and then the last thing that i wanna bring up there we with there's only happened a handful of times but one thing that we have to try to do and i think ari this is gonna fall on you is making sure so whenever we have someone on who has a checkered pass for example martin sk i do feel sense of responsibility that we have to ask him about his behavior and with him it was okay but there's been times where i didn't know someone had a checkered pass and i'm like i don't feel like becoming a show that confronts people i don't want that energy right now but it's like i both i feel if we have that person on i'm like i have we have to mention it and also i don't wanna yeah there's a responsibility and then also is not what i wanna be doing so you want me to to do then in the recording and confirm you asking ari there what was the request to ari oh like somehow you have to like just make sure that there's nothing like crazy that you are aware that we that we are aware like for example we had the guy who dealt in with the guy in italy thomas and his story was amazing and then out of know where we found out that he was gotten trouble for fraud and i'm like you looked up the headline like mid recording and you were just like it's not good gosh i was like i have to call this out i don't want to i don't want we were getting a log so well but if you have to you have to say something and i just wanna minimize that amount or it has to be worth it where like i think martin squarely is worth it i think he's an interesting person and needs done stuff i don't like and we will say you have done stuff we don't like and also you're interesting so it just has to be worth it yeah because i don't think the answers we don't have anyone on who has no that's not what i'm saying liability right it's just like you have to mention it or ask about it and we have to make sure that that is the the it's worth it yeah just don't know what the solution you're suggesting really is like what do you wanna change is there a change you want or you just want us to know how you feel because that's also okay well a little bit is yeah i'm covering my ass no it's mostly just like ari just like in the way in the same way that ari protects us like for example she'll be like hey you said something here and that came off really bad you'd you'd like like one time i made for of simone vials or something and she was like the choked him land like when you said john morgan was smoking weed which i don't think this he did you did yeah just said i went double check by the it's pretty funny ninety nine percent the time or he's like hey yeah that part we should statement it right and was like what no awesome we with that but you never strike it and i'm like dude are you sure that was mine that was funny i guys i don't know just like keep an eye out is all i say i don't think i have anything else to say but basically like sean the takeaway for me is like newsletters cool i'm board clips onboard meetups ups onboard and talking about like happiness and parenting and some of that other stuff we're open to yeah so i i think if we were gonna say what are the three we're gonna do here's the rocks i see cassie gonna raise a clipper army and cassie i'm specifically saying this to you as a challenge which is like you're joining the team you're here to kick butt this is the butt you we want kicked and to the extent that we learn how much of a butt kicker you are will be you'll be judged on how good you do at doing this one thing even if you did five other really fantastic wonderful other things this is the thing we're asking you to do because we think this is the biggest thing and is it's not easy either to do this like this takes some figuring out this takes some clever this takes some like you know you're gonna have to i don't know get some discord and now you know go have some conversations with people so you can figure out how to how this all all this stuff works so that's the clipper army that's number one then in terms of guests i think sam you brought up like go hire go unknown and go into the areas of life that we are are important to us but we traditionally haven't done on the podcast which is sometimes it's kids stuff like know raising kids it's happiness it's like you know whatever topics that about the human anything yeah like what is there anything chu that you wanna add to that i i think there's probably just gonna be some others that come up when they come up like i would say actually investing has fall investing probably started in that category right like we were talking about business ideas whatnot then like you and i both also wanna become smarter as investors so we started asking questions there well now we're dads we wanna get better at that and like not in the boring sort of cliche way but like what's the non obvious stuff that matters by the way i also think we should ask our guests who got kids like what's something parenting wise you do that's pretty like atypical or an traditional that you believe in for example a bunch of entrepreneurs i know have told me the same exact thing which is they take a one on one trip with each kid when they become like six seven eight years old and that becomes like a sacred like core memory with them in that kid and it's a totally different dynamic because you're always with the the full group and the dynamic change where you go one zero one i've heard that like seven times okay i gotta be a dummy at some point not to just go do that if they all keep saying it but you know you wouldn't know otherwise unless you ask that question let's pair well let's add a third one a third third rock which is these like guest prep other angles so we talked about asking them for their their their screenshots of their their their space their desk their computer whatever as well as like asking them questions you know maybe a our version of the what's the kind of thing i anyone has ever done to like a a great closer question that we can just do ritual holistically and build a tradition off that i would say for now we don't also try to add meetups ups like i think we should do this and like spend ninety days like actually doing these things and then come up for aaron and if we've actually done these well then we've earned the right to go try and do more things awesome no comment i think yes think that was great okay great thanks for agreeing to do that in public guys and for people who listened to that i don't know hopefully that was interesting for you guys so we we thought we were do it in public maybe you could see how the sausage has made a little bit alright sam send him away alright god bless that's the pod wait what did i say last time god bless okay oh you're a blessing you're bluff i feel like i could rude wear i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never look at hey let's take a quick break i wanna tell you about a podcast that you could check out it is called the science of scaling by mark robe he was the founding ceo of hubspot and he's a guest lecturer at harvard business school the guy smart and he sits down every week with different sales leaders from cool companies like cla y and van and open ai and he's asking about their strategies their tactics and how they're growing their companies as you know head of sales or chief revenue officer if you're looking at to scale a company if you're a cro or a head of sales just look at to level up in your career i think a podcast like this could be great for you listen to the science of scaling wherever you get your podcast