What It’s Like to Spend 24hrs with a Billionaire Who Plays Full Out

i have felt like a little bit of a like pinch me moment where i've realized don't all pinch me still say that one pinch me yeah i will pinch you if you ever say that again and i'll just say ow yeah i feel like i could rude where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a roll less travel a what's going on over there what has been going on we haven't seen each other in seven days and we've both talked to a bunch of interesting people have you enjoyed your time away i have by the way people are like why do they do these separate and it's like did we live on the other side of the i live in california sam lives on the far east coast and so for us to do it in person recording it's like would you like to fly across the country for this day today just to record this podcast and both of us have little kids we neither of us want to do so if you see us doing one on one interviews with people don't worry means and sam are still good we just we live really far apart okay so here's the deal in the last ten days both you and i have gone a dead podcast podcasts that have not come out yet i think this will come out before those with guests who are incredible so i think all i think all of them are either billionaires or soon to be billionaires but that's the the money is almost the least interesting thing about each one of them like what they did and how they how they roll how they live is more interesting and we did them in person so for example i went to las vegas i went to tahoe and i'm basically staying at the person's house and i'm hanging out with them all day and then the podcast is just kind of like a one or two hour recording in the middle of that day but i'm spending twelve twenty four hours with this person and when you do that you pick up a lot and neither you or i've have talked and bop both you and i are kind of students of the game of life and one of the ways you be a student of the game of life is you don't just try to do all the experiments on yourself right that's a pretty slow and painful way to do things a faster easier way is to go again a little costco sample of somebody else's life i never had a fig before let me try let's we at my feet almond butter and is this something i like am an almond butter got and so i went and sample these people's lives and you did too and so what i wanted to do if you're down for it is i think we each have three names of people we hung out with and i wanna take the one thing that stuck with you that was not in the podcast then we get to hang with so be amazing people it it absolutely wears off on you our world is business but frankly i find like just the money part to be a little bit empty and i think you agree with life is more more rich than just money but it just so happens that we like being people who are experts at their field and the field is business so we've there's probably only thirty five hundred or forty five hundred billionaires in the world and i feel like every year we get to hang out with like thirty of them and again the the the money is not the important part but the fact that it's just like so if there's only forty five hundred people of all the people on earth who are in this category it's pretty exciting to be around someone who's the best at their field and it one hundred percent wears off to you wears off on you where you start normalizing being in the one percent of whatever activity you're trying to be in totally yeah and your money point is right which is even if we were just like if i ran into ko on the street i'd be like this guy is the i'd be like honey this guy's is the greatest hot dog eater of all time now she wouldn't care to be clear but i would be like it'd be like meeting kobe right he's the kobe of eating dogs and so you know excellence in any form is interesting to me and anybody who is gets an outlier result in the field that many people to go try to choose because this was interesting how did you get that because if you're interested in becoming an outlier on your field you can actually learn from it in any field anyways so you're right that our quote unquote job gets us access this now the giving part here is we don't wanna be selfish to just kind of keep for ourselves you know what we picked up so let's let's jump in alright so i go hang out with this guy hayes barn most people don't know who hay barn is but his story is pretty crazy so the the short version of his story is guy grows up single mom kind of you know from the dirt in actually in in missouri and he ends up sort of hustling his way into a job a sales job did a tech sales job then he ends up at oracle and he works for oracle in the nineties when larry ellis was you know basically he was flop between larry ellis and bill gates is like the wealthiest span in the world and and he's it's so he becomes basically a competitive salesman and so he becomes a a top sales guy at oracle just by like working harder than everybody so he's like i would just get in earlier i would stay later i would work every weekend those guys you know most of the sales guys who were doing well by three pm they would leave they go play basketball or tennis or rocket ball and i would just stay the extra three hours and i stay the extra four hours and i would just do that every single day and it just added it up so he ends up becoming a top guy at oracle but he sees that some of the other top guys at oracle go leave and start these huge companies so mark ben off the leaves and go start salesforce this other guy leaves and go starts this other company and so he starts to think maybe i'm like them right and maybe i should go do that and so he leaves and he starts a a mortgage company where he's like maybe the same way i could sell complicated enterprise software using a call center and some online ads maybe i could sell a mortgage right most people at the time felt that mortgages were too complicated like you needed a in person you know a local bank branch with a local banker who's gonna talk to you and hold your hand and all this stuff and he's like i don't know i think with like radio ads and a call center in sacramento i think i could just sell mortgages over the phone the same way i've just been selling oracle databases did he know anything about mortgages or no but his friend from childhood is like best friend from like fourth grade or something like that he kinda knew a little about mortgages and he's knew a lot about selling so they leave to go start this thing in the o eight mortgage crash he survived because they had been underwriting conservatively so they were the one mortgage company that was like not giving out subprime loans so they survived the mortgage crisis but during that time he divers because he's like instead of just selling mortgages what if i go into the energy business what if i what if i branch what if i instead of just selling mortgages could we sell solar and help people with their utility bill so if if like what if i gave you a thing that's cleaner for the environment saves you money on your electricity so he starts a company that does that for solar now that solar company gets bought by solar city it it he ends up driving he's not actually installing the solar so like you know solar city would actually go install the solar if you don't know solar city was start by elon musk and his cousin and so he was selling the solar and then solar city would go install it at one point i think they made up like fifty percent of solar city's revenue it was like insane that he was driving so much revenue for them and so solar city acquire them solar city that ends up getting acquired by tesla for two or three billion dollars and and then you know tesla gone on this crazy run like you know whatever thirty then so here's this guy hayes who is you know he grew up nowhere in missouri he has d and former d he ends up flu out of the first grade because he can't read properly you know he works on a farm he's subway sandwich artist and somehow this guy is now one of the wealthiest men in america okay he's a self made billionaire now so i go i i wanna do a podcast with hayes so i hit him up on my hey would you do i know you don't do a lot of these what you do this he says yeah sure no problem now the thing about hayes though is that hayes does not do anything at like a chill level so like he was the most un unsure person i've ever been around well he's fun to be around he's actually extremely fun like he's it's very funny he's fun but like if he chooses to do something he doesn't half to do anything you know he's only this is his thing he says he's like we play full out so say sam normally when we book a guest especially like let's say one of the like more on the higher end of the range of success of guests what is the normal prep experience like maybe a week before just walk walk through that well so sometimes we wanna do a call with them but then other times if someone's really successful you're like embarrassed to ask them like can i spend like an hour of your time there's brainstorming and so sometimes ari will call sometimes one of us will call it depending on how successful they are to not disrespect them and so it's quite challenging the more successful they are it's like can i waste an hour of your time like just prepare or do i just show up with stories that i ask your friends and hopefully it goes great yeah and sometimes we send them a a like a dock which like hey here's some can you fill this out this will help us and then i would say half the time they do fill it out but half the time it's like they give us either nothing or half half filled out something like that just show we say alright we gotta make it happen we understand hope it works this experience was completely different so hey not only calls b he calls ben two or three times before the podcast and he starts discussing you know what could we talk about tell me what what's what you think is gonna be interesting how do we make this amazing it just keeps asking this question how do we make this amazing so instead of just saying what are we gonna talk about that's the average question here's was how do we make this amazing and he keeps calling back and he's basically like and he says this he's like no i don't say yes to many things but if i do say yes i go all out and so first in the pre prod the the pre pod prep he's you know really active and he keeps asking how how's this gonna be amazing this idea he comes up with these like you know most of the time you sit down and people ask the same five questions about like how'd do you do it you know what do you think about ai blah blah blah like these same questions and you get these robotic tech answers from these like you know these tech people and he's like let's do it different so he's like why don't you just come out to tahoe come to my house and let's spend the whole day together come do my morning routine with me it's a mate you're gonna love it's gonna be great alright a few episodes ago i talked about something and i got thousands of messages asking me to go deeper to explain and that's what i'm about to do so i told you guys how i used chat gb as a life coach or a thought partner and what i did was i uploaded all types of amazing information so i uploaded my personal finances my net worth my goals different books that i like issues going on in my personal life and businesses i uploaded so much information and so the output is that i have this gp that i can ask questions that i'm having issues within in my life like how should i respond to this email what's the right decision knowing that you know my goals for the future things like that and so i worked with hubspot to put together a step by step process showing the audience showing you the software that i use to make this the information that i had chat ask me all this stuff so it's super easy for you to use and like i said i use this like ten or twenty times a day it's literally changed my life and so if you want that it's free there's a link below just click it enter your email and we will send you everything you need to know to set this up in just about twenty minutes and i'll show you how i use it again ten to twenty ten today alright so check it out the link is below in the description back to the episode and so we go to tahoe and we're like cool we'll we'll be there tuesday we'll see you wednesday for the recording he goes awesome be at my house at five am oh my god am god what what are we doing here so we show up at five am and he's like boys good morning he's already like i'm like rubbing the like boo out of my eye and he's like awake and he's he goes let's go down to the lake okay so we go down to the the boat and we take this boat out for two minutes into the middle of lake tahoe it kills the engine and we're like okay what's happening it's completely dark out by the way sun hasn't even rose yet he's like so we're gonna do my morning routine he's like you're gonna love it he didn't just say like i hope you guys like this or thanks for you know like thanks for coming like i hope you have a good time he was just like you're gonna love this this is gonna be amazing he basically brain wash me before i'm even out there of like i do love this this is kind of amazing he was he's so cares about and he he was just having a good was genuinely excited that's the he's not like trying to sell us on it anything right like he's doing us a favor inviting us into his life but he was genuinely excited for us and he's like because except my my friends right out here this is great you're gonna love this so he heals the engine he turns on he's like there's a little woo but just would are you guys willing to play like just let's do this today and you'll like it so he puts on this breath work routine and he's like i met this guy you know on an island with from the guy you know the guy he started a cirque to sole guy or whatever his name is he's like i met this this kind of breath guru on his island and he's amazing i've been doing this for like twenty years since then or something like that and so he we do this fifteen minute breath work and then he's like alright boys stand up let's go we jump in the lake and we're like we do this kinda like cold plunge in the lake basically and lake tahoe in the summertime is still freezing yeah so we jump in immediately like you know lose all feeling in my body and then he's like okay we're gonna go down into a breath hold down underwater and for a minute and like this is gonna be great it's gonna feel like you're in space open your eyes like i don't have goggles he's like open eyes i okay and so we go underwater open my eyes and it literally looks like you're it's floating in space he's right by the way can only hold by breath for no joke seven seconds i don't know what happened well what it's freezing it's hard so i immediately go down and i'm like nope i'm done pop back up he's underwater so he comes up and he's like okay let's do that again i like okay yeah i need a a redo because that was i don't know it's pretty short so we do it again and then he's like you know what i heard this thing this is amazing thing hey and it said basically that like you know as you get older you really wanna make the most of your life you guys are still a little bit younger than me you'll you'll feel this too like you get the sense of urgency about like you realize you know your friends start getting sick you know your parents getting old older you realize like you know his time is not you know time is time is really precious and there's a time hack you guys wanna know the time hack yeah for sure what's the time act and he's like if you do something new every day you sort of mark the day because like mean if i ask you sam what you do five days ago it's probably pretty hard to remember what you did five days ago even yesterday it's pretty hard to remember and that's because when we're in these routines and routines do serve us but they it causes all the days to blend together but if you do one new thing a day it sort of marks today you you're not gonna remember every single day but it it makes that day more memorable she's he's like let's figure out what we could do new today and we're we're like back on the boat shiver and he's like you see those rocks i always see those rocks out out i this routine but i've gone out there you guys down to swim out there my yeah let's go i'm not gonna say no so we jump in the water and we start swimming and he's swimming like you know a shark basically out there we are like i'm like dying basically and behind me i'm like i even know if ben can swim i look back at ben like his glasses are like foggy i'm like well i know what's going on diego has like shoulder dislocation problems i'm like diego for sure gonna dis his shoulder and just sink like a rock to the bottom of tail oh we're all dying and anywhere swimming from rock to rock like little kids he's like let's wait playing tag basically he's like let's go over there alright race receipt to this one and we go and he wants to get to the big he's said look at that big rock let's get to the big rock we go to the big rock he ends up getting the big rock jump off the big rock i had this great moment come back to the boat and this is all like before eight am and he he's like i did this every day and i remember just having this feeling which is like this guy basically lives his life at a level he plays at a at a like a full out lovely he plays with a level of intensity on everything that he was doing whether it was like the podcast his morning routine like each of the things i would do at a seven he just does at a ten and if you think about that like how does that stack every single day right like that extra three units of intensity that he puts in and by the way it's not like he's it's not like hard work in a sense like he's just like he just goes for it right he's having more fun he's willing to play more than us and we went and play pickle ball with than we did whatever we did that day he was like this and he told the story during the podcast of this where you know he was a certain way but he's like once i worked for elon and he worked for elon for ten years he's like it broke my frame of reference because i was telling him i like you kinda broke my frame like i have a morning routine but it's not like this right like i have a and i was like by the way it's not the money like yes you've got this beautiful was it a sick house oh my god dude unbelievable and to the point where he was like he's like i prefer not to film this and i'm trying to show off i'm like yeah the people who try not to show off i have the things worth showing off of course and so i'm like it's even if i had that house what i like this is honest question i had i was like even if i had this house and i had that boat and i had this little like you get this like freaking like willy won elevator to get down from the house to the boat and i'm like would i wake up at five am every day and do this no chance i'd be cuddle up in bed with you know like i would be the little burrito tucked in with my just my eyes peeking out of the covers at five in the morning but he does right that's like kind of the difference between name in me is that he he plays full lap and so that was this the big takeaway for me from that whole experience was do you wanna live like that like i i like i think so when i'm around i've around people like this like they're crazy people and i think i admire so much about this and i wanna take a little bit but i don't i don't wanna replicate that like i don't i'm not a high energy person like that all the time i'm only a high energy person like that some of the time hey hayes was like at all the time i was around him he's energy rich yes i do wanna be like that because i think that because i think that well first the feeling i had by eight am i was like oh so i've conquered the world already like what what could you do to be today that's gonna make me feel bad right is anything really gonna mess with my mood or my you you myself today like it's pretty hard to do that when you like conquer the morning like that but like forget the morning routine i'm like thinking a five am like that's sort of secondary is it the point was if you're good to do something like just actually like do it fully and the thing you the prerequisite for that is to be energy rich to not be energy poor like i went there because i'm like oh this guy so successful he's money rich and when i walked away i was like the money rich thing is the is a byproduct and a complete secondary footnote to being incredibly energy rich and two of the guys said the same thing i don't if you remember this and said this when we went hung out with mister beast i was like this disguise like the energize bunny and we were talking about like literally the when he walks his walking pace it's faster than the average human being by like you know two notches the two two of the guys out and i came with this they're like does he how fast hayes walked out was like hard to keep up with them he's like just literally has a pep in his step and i think just i think being energy rich is one of the more attractive things like you see people who are contact rich it's like oh wow they know all these famous people you see people who are money rich oh wow they got all these dollars in the bay account to me energy rich is very very appealing to give like an example of this guy hey he's not talked about at all he's very under the radar for how big big of a big shot he is we're with you and me and a bunch of people were with jesse edge who is a very greg darius loud personality in a great way like he is also energy rich and i remember being in this room with these guys and in asana actually and hayes took over the room because of his stories and his energy and one thing it led to another and they are apparently haze hobby is that he used to be into hip hop and he loves to freestyle wrap which is a very strange thing because the sky is like hey he looks like me but like fifty five he's just like a blonde to hair mid missouri guy and he is it amazing freestyle rapper they went and freestyle rap and he was b boxing for like six or seven minutes and they went at they went and did this thing it was so good and i remember talking to him and being around him and i i don't think ever met someone whose oven burns that hot like he was on fire the whole time yeah exactly he's an incredible dude the other amazing thing by the way hung out with them maybe twelve hours straight and did he working literally taking the day off so he was like he's like i was dude hey you don't gotta do this man like i appreciate it but like you don't have to you know it's not like normal for a podcast to do this he's like no you guys came all way out here wanna make the time well i know i know you guys took time i wanna make the time i he's like i thought i thought this would be i thought that that'll be so rude if i just show up when we record and then you leave like no i wanna make the time one thing that he that's he did not check his phone a single time in twelve hours and i told him at the and i was like is that normal like i know you're getting emails i know you're getting slack message it's like just like all of us right like ten times more than all of us you run a ten billion dollar company he's the ceo of a ten billion dollar company and he did not check his phone a single time and he's just like well you know like if i'm with you guys i wanna be with you guys and if i'm working i'm gonna be working and i was like well if you say it like that then yeah i guess i'm a little bit for yeah me put this away then to no amount of people or stories that i can tell or probably you also can tell from that is gonna be the hayes carl hang session that was really good did ben and diego have a great time too oh i think ben is at home making valentine's crunch his right now he's just like i love that man i was like i do too honestly i do too what again he if you google his name too this is all public he like his side hobby was there's a famous hotel in tahoe or maybe reno i figured forget exactly where it is and he owns it and he was telling me about the renovation and everything like that and it was like an epic thing i forget exactly the story is the story is this he's in the lake doing the morning routine every day and he's like he's like i didn't think about like manifesting i don't even know what that word really means but he's like i was in the lake and i was thinking about my life and like you know what i and i was full i was just filling up with kind of like feelings that i wanted and he's like can i see this hotel and there's this hotel that was kinda like on the you know over the hill a little bit was on the on the other side of it he's like and it's too it's so literally like one minute from his house and he sees that hotel while he's in the while he's doing his cold plunge in lake tahoe and he just decides looking at it because i'm gonna buy that hotel i don't know how but i'm gonna buy that hotel and then he starts working on it he he finds out it's owned by larry ellis his old boss right his old boss's boss's boss or whatever and he goes and he purchases the hotel and they're turning it into a proper hotel in tahoe he he walked just through the construction of it or whatever and even that you know he's architect his life it's not like he's doing it to make money he was like we're gonna put pick career pool here this year this year all these activities he's like i want a place to do activities i want a place for my friends to come and stay during the summers like this will just make my life so much better if we if we if we generate this if we make this happen incredibly generative guy cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible but that's exactly what sandler training did with hubspot they use breeze hubspot ai tools to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch and the results were incredible click through rates jumped twenty five percent qualified leads quadruple and people spent three times longer on their landing pages go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help your business grow alright let's do the next with them alright man this is gonna that you you you start really strong there it's hard to follow alright this person i actually just hang hung out with i didn't do a pod with them yet because they refused to come on so i'm gonna say a little bit information about them enough to make it awesome not enough that i'm totally blow up their spot but have you heard of the buck mason fuck mason i've heard it what do they do i instead a g now what is it sorta sorta so they started in two thousand and thirteen and they started in two thousand thirteen selling something very simple a t shirt and their goal was just to make the best t shirt i'm actually wearing one of them right now and they didn't they tried to raise money he was like i i tried to raise as much money as i could that i got lucky because i was horrible at fundraising and i could raise no money and so they bootstrap this company i think it actually started with like a kick starter or some type of auction like that like a pay and then we'll make a type of vibe and they build this company and over time they've grown it and grown it and grown it and i suspect you didn't tell me but i suspect they do somewhere in the hundred and fifty million dollar arr a year range and the f forty two stores now so when you go to book mason dot com what do you see yes well i see this is like this nostalgic i see i see this like video of these guys from what is it maybe like the eighties or what i don't know what what error like it's like a california cowboy eighties vibe yeah yeah exactly and i see a bunch of t shirts and and colored shirts and jeans pants so i love this brand and i became friendly with them because i've dm him to get him to come on the podcast and he refuses to come on and i ask him why and he says i just want the brand to be the face i don't wanna like it too popular i i don't wanna be the face of the brand i'm with the brand to be the brand which is always like the whenever i hear someone say that i'm like oh you're the best you're you're gonna well say you're amazing yeah like oh so you're yeah whenever you hear someone say that it's like okay so you're absolutely going to win and you have the right attitude and so he started this company in two thousand thirteen and clothing companies are a pain in the butt you and i know people in this industry we know e comm guys it's really really hard and it takes a long time i think to figure it out but basically they got to the point in ten or fifteen years now it's two thousand thirteen so twelve years where it's really starting to fire on all cylinders he's grown to fifty two stores and i started talking to about the history and everything like that and i started realizing it's not that crazy to do this like it's really hard but i was thinking about every project that i've started since two thousand and thirteen so in two thousand thirteen i had just graduated college you remember where you weren't it was two thousand thirteen sushi era no that's when i moved to san francisco monkey for now so what was sushi eleven yeah two thousand ten eleven so imagine you starting a sushi store in twenty thousand eleven and you just you were chained to that company and you just had to stick with it you had no other options you just had to i have a feeling it would be a huge success and i have a feeling that if i had done the same with whatever i was doing that there's definitely a world where i would be five or ten times more successful than i am now because of just compounding of sticking with something and i i sort of felt first of all twelve years it sounds like not a long time but when i thought about well where was i in two thousand twelve twenty thousand thirteen and what all what all have i jumped from thing to think the thing and should i have just stuck to one thing and done that the entire time and where would i be now because he was telling me his story and i love where this guy sasha named sasha cohn i love to hear the story re now which is like i got this amazing team or firing on cylinders i just get to like work on the really exciting projects and it's just going great cash flow is not an issue whatever etcetera it doesn't feel like that leading up to it obviously it's really really hard and the majority of the time i would think you'd wanna to quit and the majority of time i would think a guy like can't even say i'm guessing if someone offered to buy the company from him at different weeks throughout the year i bet he would've said yes just because it's it's really freaking hard and but i just remember thinking like i wish i had the foresight to yes like i wish i would have i i i regret that a little bit when i see where i'm like i don't i don't exactly wanna pay the price that you had to pay because that was really hard but when i see where you are now it seems very attractive yeah that's a great one honestly actually that was pretty common amongst all the people i met with actually two of them even said this they go i have very high pain tolerance and what they were the reason why they were saying it was actually not as a brag they were like you know one of the problems is i have really high pain tolerance i will keep doing something even when it's not you know quite right or not obvious there probably was a better way or a better idea i could've done i don't know i'm just that's who i am i just keep going hayes even said this kinda off the record i was like what do you what do you think is the difference about like you know you and a bunch of other the people are like you know what i was really interested in was and i i probably didn't say this right but when we were talking about the morning routine he said he has a different friend come and do it with him every morning and so he was like yeah yes if whatever his like tony gonzalez did this with me yesterday the hall fame tight end and then he was like oh yeah over the he's like oh he had this thing on his knee and i was what happened about your knee like you got cut up there he's like yeah i mountain biking with i think it was linden like the the elon cousin from solar city he's said we were mountain biking yesterday we went you see that mountain we went all the way over there i was like god this guy so active it's unbelievably active this man but also like he's hanging out with hall fame like he was talking about elon and his son went and worked at spacex and he's like i oh you didn't have him come work with you and he's like no i wanted him to go see what it's like to work with elon he's like i just wanted him to like it took me a while to go see what the the hardest working person who tackle the biggest problems on earth you know i i work ten years in my career fifteen years my career before that happened i wanted my son to get like right away but yeah just incredible stick to it as for all of them because i'll do my next one yeah so next one is h so i go to las vegas and i hang out with alex h and a lot of people know h because he's so he make so much content i don't think i actually think alex h doesn't get enough credit every time i hang out with them i think to your you're really wise like that's is very legit so okay so i have a bunch of things that i could say is by taking me but i promised one so here's my one of h student of the game okay so what does this mean we're talking and i asked him said you know you i get a lot of emails but you put out so much more content you have a much bigger audience you must be getting a hundred emails a day entrepreneurs who want some advice from you or want some help or want you to invest and then he does these workshops every weekend with a hundred entrepreneurs so was like so you're saying another maybe five hundred plus maybe thousand plus entrepreneurs and your workshops that are in person and then you have all the deals that you look at maybe another few thousand deals that you look at probably looking he's probably meeting i don't know five thousand entrepreneurs a year of the minimum and i was like what do you think is the mistake the the biggest mistake you see them make i asked him this and he says they're only studying their business they're not a student of the game of business so what do you mean well when you start a company you're very like narrowly focused on your business your industry your business model so he's like you know sam you're doing a you're doing the hustle newsletter you probably knew a ton about newsletters right you know everything about other newsletters and you knew everything about maybe the media industry as a whole and i think you're very good about being student in the game but i would say most people were probably you know even one tenth as curious as you but then you might also have gone looked at the events business and then the saas business and other businesses to try to understand like oh is that a better business to be in and actually you started in the events business then you went into the media blogging business then you found your way into the newsletter business and you were like that's a better business to be and now you're in a paid community business it's actually a better business to be in than even the one one were before and the reason why is because you're a student of the game of business not just your business and alex basically was like i made this mistake you know i was basically a gym operator i had a one gym and then i had two gyms had three gyms and i was gonna own and operate gyms and i got really good owner operating a gym but the best thing he did was he went to this mastermind and i think russell b was there and they basically were like you're a ten out of ten entrepreneur going after a two out of ten opportunity like forget opening and running gyms it sounds like you're amazing at getting a gym to have no members to go to like a ton of members why don't you sell that create a you know sell sell the ability for any gym to fill up their to get more members and so then he's like okay that's smart and he goes and he learns about other business models he realizes that he should do this thing called jim launch where he would fly to a gym and he would basically say hey look if i can get you five hundred more members can i keep the first month of their membership and then you are you know the there's the six weeks of the of of pay that they're gonna pay up upfront and you get to keep all the recurring membership bad behind that they're like alright sure he's like got no risk to you you pay me nothing i'll run my own ads but i get to keep what i kill and so that became jim launched and that became the thing that was really really successful and now he's in a better business you know like let's say private equity and he's buying saas companies so he's gotten into it but even better business than that right private equity is a better business and so he's like i think most people are in the game a student of the game of business and so and at the end of we we basically talked for i don't know two and a half hours we do like a two part episode and he had before that he had done two podcast podcasts so this guy's done like you know basically eight hours straight of talking and where i think most people would be like passed out on the floor or just ready to go home or just wanna go eat or like just be like can you guys get out of my office now he was super curious still and he's asking me a ton of questions after the pod and he asked me questions like would you do differently if you were me and you know me i can't like hold my tongue so i'm like yeah honestly like i think this and i have a very blunt and honest answer of like i think you're amazing at this but i think this part of what you do doesn't do you justice i think it actually makes you with it's like bad for your brand and i think you're you're you shouldn't be doing that how did he receive that extremely well and this is kind of like kudos him for abe being curious and then b being not defensive and so he he text me the next morning didn't even give him my number but you he gets my number from somebody and he says this he goes i just wanna say thanks again for the pod i've been thinking a lot about what we talked about at the end then he goes it's her by the way and then he goes i'm gonna make some change it because some content changes i appreciate you caring enough to say something i thought i was just like a a a really kind message but also like you know a testament to him for for being extremely open minded and i'm being a student of the game and being like having that mindset of i'm here i'm gonna try to learn something for every single person i meet that's just such a positive attribute to have in general i'm good friends with a guy who bought one of alex's companies so alex started the thing called allen software and my friend was the buyer of it and that is an interesting place to be in so the person who you buy like the the buyer of your company they know all of your they know the truth they all your dirty secrets yeah they know all the dirty they do everything and i was like lloyd this is when alex first started getting pop before we ever even had him on the pod i was like lloyd is this guy legit like this seems too could be true and to this day lloyd is like he's the smartest person i know about business like he like knows everything about alex's that's what due diligence is and he is knows everything and he still is like this guy's the best where i need advice it's like your doctors given you a colonoscopy he's like yeah he's got a great cut yeah he he he and and so that like tells a lot about him and what's funny is alex comes off as a very serious guy and he is a a pretty serious guy but he's a lot more fun like i'm able to have fun with him whenever i'm with him he's way more fun that he gives off that was one of the things i told him i was like you come off so serious but you're actually you have a great sense of humor you should show that and show yourself having fun and not just like i paint the windows black and a grind right there that is part of you but there is another part of you and i think you don't really do self justice in like not showing that side this is so funny as we are texting my friend lloyd just texted me about alex a compliment about alex the same guy referring to this just out of that blue just now out of the at twelve forty nine this is it's twelve fifty two right now he just he just texted me a thing about how alex just you have some great advice which is pretty funny that's that's pretty awesome did you they're seminar our business so basically well a lot of people don't know this but acquisition dot com either buys or invest in companies whatever pretty normal but they also have like a seminar business which is like on paper if you were to think about it like the worst business to be in oh you you're selling your time for money yeah yeah they own u c's old headquarters and people spend five or ten thousand dollars to come a three day like seminar and according to alex but also i just like random the math i you could like see like the schedule how fold it is i think that thing is killing it so that that was my runner up takeaway which is turn there's a business more practical business lesson turn your cost centers into profit center so he said two things about this the first is the on the workshops that you're talking about or the seminars so he was like well we're doing acquisition dot com and we're because of that we're talking all these companies and we're diligent all these deals and i'm basically that's a big cost to me right i'm paying i have a team of people that's diligent all these businesses we meet the entrepreneur we ask a bunch of questions we dig into their business and you know we're only doing one deal out of every so many right so he's like all the others are just the cost of doing business and costing me a few million dollars a year so he has the idea like how do i turn my call center into a profit center so he's like well let me just try this so he says alright i'm gonna invite whatever fifty entrepreneurs out to our headquarters come spend two days with us we will dig into your business we'll learn what's working what's not working and we'll help you sort of unblock and like you know maybe if you're a great fit like you know we should have a conversation but like this is really about understanding what's going on in your business how to unblock you okay so that's what they did and basically he turned a thing that was losing him a few million dollars a year of people cost into i think like ten million dollars plus a free cash flow and he said the same thing about content he goes he goes i don't make content because i enjoy it i make content because it builds my brand and i was like i really i do it because i enjoy i i like to doing this he's like well is like the way i think about it is this the old in the old world let's say the tv era or the radio era you had to spend millions of dollars of your money to build your brand in the consumer's mind the crazy thing about social media is you get paid to build your brand so he he's yeah like i make all this content i i'm building my brand but i'm making money doing that so he again he turned a cost center into a profit center on the content side too and but he he loves it by the way i he absolutely loves that i think you and alex actually have very similar attributes which is you both like teaching yeah and so like i have been talking to him i've been buddies them for a little while and we'll just be talking about what what's up what are you doing and he's like oh i'm making a google document for my staff on how to sell better how to do this like he loves process and he loves teaching teaching yes yeah yeah that's that's all and i the part i think he really loves his writing like i actually like writing out the stuff like think almost in textbook style alright you wanna do another one or you want me to go alright here's a a a quick one do you know the company zapier yeah i do zapier was founded in two thousand eleven another company by the way that was founded way it's way older than i thought so zapier is a company that they now they're basically an ai company like they make ways for you to connect different ai stuff so like if you're can be like you know make a whenever i get a calendar invite do this and use chad to be do to do it whatever they start in two thousand eleven now i think they do something like four hundred or five hundred million dollars a year in revenue and they've only raised a million dollars of funding and they founded the company out of jefferson city missouri which is the capital missouri near where i'm from the smallest town you could think of it's like nothing it's like when you think of in the middle of nowhere missouri you're gonna say think of jeff city and i met wade because years ago i used to host this event called hu khan and you spoke there a bunch of other the people spoke there and wade showed up wade wasn't supposed to speak until like two o'clock and he showed up at like eight am and him and i sat backstage the entire time and we for two days actually it's a two day event he sat with me the whole time and the reason he sat with me is i would have all of the speakers come to the green room two hours in advance and i always lied to them and i think you know the story where i would say you have to come mic check but of course there is no mic check the mic works perfectly but we just wanted to hang out like there there's no bike check for a a conference like you just put the lapel on and it works it works i would tell people oh you have to speak at three make sure you're hear at one for mike check the reality was is i just wanted to hang out with them backstage and there was one time like i distinctly remember it was like casey neistat at the founder of we work it was wade from zapier and then like the founder of class pass and tucker max if you know tucker max and we were like all at a room and i was like how wild is this and i wouldn't say a word i would just listen to all these conversations people were having and wade was with the one guy who stayed the entire time with me and we just sat and listened to people talking and it was so fun and that's how i got to know it wade i had him on the pod last week because i wanted to see how he's using ai and it was crazy this guy because he's weights a billionaire so way is probably thirty five years old i think he started the call the company when who was a senior in college and i think he graduated college in two thousand eleven zapier they're they they did a funding round i think three years ago six or seven billion dollar valuation i asked them where do they think they're gonna be in five years he told me a billion in revenue so the i don't know what that means the company's worth but i know that it means that on paper he's a billionaire and i was like why are you living in jeff city missouri he was like well where my family lives and i like it here and i was like wait does anyone know how big of a big shot you are there who's was like no the people here don't use zapier why would like so they have no idea and i was like well do you have like a fancy house like do stick out he's like no like no one has any idea like i'm just like a guy and i thought that it was so cool to see because i was hanging out with sasha this guy who started buck mason in a very cool brand i was hanging out with eric who has founded rampant and is the hottest thing going and everyone knows in the tech world what ramp is and one of the fastest growing companies and people know zap and everything but they don't know wade the founder and it was so interesting how he was just a guy it was and he was just he was just guy that's all he was he and hey he very had that every man mentality or every man vibe and he came on the pod to talk about ai and he was just like da he was a nerd like he was in the weeds and he loved it and he was incredibly passionate and his he didn't have a fancy webcam it was him and it looked like a small very small office in his house and it was just totally una assuming and i loved it and so i think my biggest takeaway with him was how passionate he was about this game that he turned into a career and how inspired it i was that he was not flexing and he truly like it was the opposite of haze where not that hayes flexes i mean where haze is just full of energy and he's like i wanna manifest i wanna do this this was the opposite it was an introvert nerdy guy who just did what he loved and it just it worked out and he just was really happy to go lucky and it was really fun because i'm used to these hayes guys i'm not quite but like these like alpha like let's get it let's get after life let's the manifest let's have fun let's do this and it's awesome to get the opposite of that because i think when people listen to this podcast i hope one of the takeaways is that there's a million ways to get done what you wanna get done there's a million of ways to achieve your dreams there's a million ways to get rich there's a million ways to go to where you wanna go and where you wanna go to be anywhere and there's there are maybe some best practices but i can give you tons of examples of people doing the exact opposite and they're just as happening and just as effective so that was my big takeaway with wade i like that yeah there's you know you get to create your own little heaven on earth and this one of the cool things when you go and you meet these people you get to sample what they chose for themselves and you pick up like oh i really want that or in some cases oh i really wouldn't want that you know there was one guy who won't be won't be named that not in this trip but in previous one where this huge house and fancy cars and all this stuff but also like huge headaches with all of that oh i gotta get the this repaired in this and then that car got a scratch and then this is this and it was like man you own these things and then they own you and it's like oh wow like definitely for me is a tote that would be a total trap to fall into good i'm glad i saw it first firsthand so i can avoid that whereas with other people for them that is they're having on there they want that they they they actually prefer that trade off of you know and so you wanna it's good to sample the difference sort sort of styles so you can you know get a feel for what what do you think is gonna work for you i think people had this idea of like oh just gotta do what you want reality is you don't know exactly what you want till you're even exposed to certain things and then you sort of develop taste about what it is that you like and what it is that how you wanna be you could sort of you can modify yourself based on you know what you're what you're exposed to so you guys know this but i have a company called hampton join hampton dot com it's a vet community for founders and ceos but we have this member named la and la saw a bunch of members talking about the same problem with hampton which is that they spent hours manually moving data into a pdf it's tedious it's annoying and it's always waste of time and so la like any great entrepreneur he built a solution and that solution is called mo mo uses ai to automatically transfer data from any document into a pdf so if you need to turn a supplier invoice into a customer quote or move info from an application into a contract you just put a file into mo and it auto fills the output pdf in seconds and a little backstory for all the tech out there and built the entire web app without using a line of code he used something called bubble io o they've added ai tools i can generate an entire app from one prompt it's pretty amazing and it means you can build tools like mo very fast without knowing how to code and so if you're tired of copying and pasting between documents or paying people to do that for you check out mo dot a i m o l k u dot a alright back to the pod alright so let's do i'll do eric gl so for those who don't know ramp is a company that does credit it's like a basically a credit card for startups there worth something like ten billion dollars and i think they do eight hundred million in revenue eric who's the founder and ceo is thirty five years old and it's just absolutely breathtaking how fast they've built this company because i think the company is only four or five years old it like it's brand new still and my biggest takeaway i had two takeaways the first is that he was so nice so if you google eric gl nice there's all these posts that talk about how to nice this guy is but it's very you go home and do that did you google eric gl nice well i was like surely everyone talks about like like he was the kind person i've ever met like when he looked at me it was like i was the only one in the world that mattered at that moment and like i talked to ari i go ari who i only talked to him on the cell phone and i go alright was this guy a nicest guy you've ever met and he goes when he talked to me i fell in love like i like i wanted to keep talking to him he felt i felt like i was the only one that mattered to him at that moment and he did such a good job and like he wrote a follow up email and he wrote like i was truly blessed with by our conversation i am so thankful whatever he was so nice but what i found strange was you don't meet people who are nice and intense and so i asked him a question about something he goes look ramp is two thousand fifty three days old and we're only just now and was like wait dude what did you just say he he goes see ramp is two thousand and fifty three days old and i was like you know exactly to the day how old rampant is he goes yeah of course like i'm trying to get this done by this amount of time like i know exactly to the day and i just found it very strange that you can be both incredibly intense at having a company and intense about life and also a very generous kind nice person those two things typically are not in the same package and so my big takeaway with eric was how you can be not a jerk you don't have to be you know a big like pumping your chest big ego highly confident guy you can be very soft you could be really kind but also a complete killer and savage it's a weird dichotomy but you could be both yeah i talked to him before i think i told to story for before i but i met him many years ago before we ever started ramp and also super sweet guy and then what they that the other thing i've said before is i can't believe ramp one in that same way because at the time i remember that b was b looked like the runaway winner it was the yc company it was based in civil silicon valley it had raised a bunch of money i think it launched earlier than ramp and it just seemed like ramp this company out new york just seemed like the natural second place winner and instead ramp has crushed it and actually brexit is the second place winner in that space or third or whatever and he had a whole answer to that so most people when they start a company it's like it was cool or i had this problem or whatever he had a four point list where it was like well because i asked the i asked the same question i was you know was already around this was already around whatever and he's like well the frank dodd act or something like that was passed which meant this this and this and that also matt and then he had like it was a four point list and it was incredibly intentional and he's like i saw at capital one it took this many days to approve an account i figured if we could reduce that to only seven point three days and since there's this many potential businesses in the world if we do that and we do this many businesses per day it was like incredibly detailed and exact and precise way which isn't typically how i think about building a company a lot of times it's like off energy or like vibes like this feels a certain way it he did not have that at all it felt like everything like and it it was very intense amazing alright let me do one now this is a more practical business one i'll say with us with your brother yeah is my brother lost chief okay so this episode i think i think this one will have come out already but in the middle of it he tells the story where okay so the the headline of this is this guy basically my brother has built a real estate portfolio he owns basically over a billion dollars of real estate that he accumulated about ten years with no outside money and so no no no like he had like lenders but no no investors at the time incredible he's just like an act absolute animal at what he does and i always knew he was smart and i always knew he was like really like ambitious and was like you know he's just a winner i in that part i know i'm known the guy for ten plus years so like the fact that your six successful as you are ed your your your second place to a neuro a family maybe third i think my wife's dad is a pretty amazing guy too so yeah he he he wins and in not not not just the success but the guy's are saint so yeah he wins it in his own way alright so what is it about this guy that i picked up so this the the short version of the story is he he goes to law school gets his nba first in interns with a lawyer so he's like working on actually the the the scott peterson case like the least peterson or whatever and then he meets but he also in he has two interest so that's one internship he has a second internship with a real estate guy he's like the real estate guy always you know he's he's at home at a good time he's in his kid's life he's got passive income i'm like this seems like the better model i'll go towards that so he goes to real estate he has no money and so he can't buy any real estate so he starts off as a broker you know he does his first deal make sixty k but by the time he's like twenty five twenty six twenty seven he's making millions of dollars a year as a broker he would like he'd be like cool you got this empty space let me lease it for you you you wanna sell this let me buy let me be your buy side broker and your sell side broker and i'll lease it for y'all get all three i'll bag all three commissions somewhere along the way he basically makes a mistake and he's like yep this is where you know youth cuts up youth and like you know ego catches up with you so there's is one guy who's like ex he's like a jack in the box franchise so he's he's got like i don't know thirty jack in the boxes or something like that and so my brother lost and chief is doing deal after deal with him and so finally the guy is like at some point instead of just leasing the place to him but the guy would say i wanna be over there so he he's okay cool i'll buy it i'll build it for you and then i'll sell it to you so i'll i'll buy i'll develop it and i'll sell it to you and the guys like i want these twenty locations so he goes and he he takes out fifteen million dollars of debt to go by twenty locations like you know three days after it closes you know that guy gets pop for like he didn't pay his payroll taxes or something he goes to jail and said now my brother loves on the he bought he borrowed fifteen million dollars and now has these like twenty locations or whatever that need to be jack in the boxes that the deed is tied to that guy's name guy's now in jail he can't develop them so he's basically kinda screwed and you know he doesn't wanna declare bankruptcy so he decides he's gonna try to pay off fifteen million dollars even though he has nothing and so he's like okay how do i do this so he's he's just like depressed and his wife is like you know what like i don't know you've i've ever seen you like this you need to go to the gym i don't know what we're gonna do in business but just go to the gym so that you you know get out of this fun and he goes to the gym and while when he's there he this guy he he always used to see working out there at night he used to work out like eleven or midnight at midnight because like after work he would go there but today he went there in the daytime because he doesn't have shit else to do and the guy who he always sees working out was like behind the desk he's like y you work here he's like yeah dude i own the place he's like what he's like hey hey he's like yeah come check out the the office and when he's there the guy tells him like he's ready to sell he actually wants to sell the business and my brother works out a deal to basically buy the business from the guy with no money down because a little bit of money down he pawn his wife's wedding ring and they go all in they're you they're at this point they're living in their like parents like they're his old childhood bedroom and they owe fifteen million dollars and they're like i know how we're gonna get out of this pickle but i'm gonna basically i'll use the cash flow from this gym to just pay the monthly thing we owe and then we'll try to open up a second gym maybe and we'll figure out how we do this anyways he ends up building like the largest private gym chain eighty two gyms in california otherwise your brother law like really is he jacked yeah he he he was one of the first like indian body builders basically in college like he was gonna go pro and then like you know but he decided not to like go full on but yeah he he was he was huge before he's big now basically like this is this is the deflate version of me i say wow that's that's crazy so again whatever this guy chooses he does with like crazy intensity so with real estate i'm like so how does you okay all all that you told me so far is the gym business like how'd you do the real estate side so this is the business lesson so he's like you know along the way when i would go lease these gyms i realized i had a little bit of leverage right i'm coming in i'm as the like the the big tenant in the shopping center and so i just added to the lease an option to buy and he's like i just added a a a no risk option whereas i have the option to buy within five years or whatever i can buy this at four million dollars and at the time that sounded like a high price for the guys the guy had no problem putting it in free option and he's like by the way i have no money and no plans of how i would ever buy this place but five why not why not take an asymmetric bet where i have no downside but i have possible upside and so his start in real estate was he's working at the gym that a guy comes in to buy the building and the guy assumes that he owns the building which he didn't and he's like we would make an offer somewhere around the ballpark of seven million dollars oh got it and so he's like oh amazing and he's like cool i have an option to buy this before but i don't have any money so i actually cannot physically buy this but and i'll do a double escrow so if you agree to buy it on this date if basically it's like i'll sell this to you for seven i'll take the seven i'll give this guy four so i'll own the place and then i'll buy this and i'll sell you this thing i'll keep three million dollars by profit it's the old the hey mom says i can go if you say yes she'll say yeah you say yes right exactly and so he got his the entire empire built was because he baked in one asymmetric bet one no risk option i thought those was kind of inspiring like you know and he by the way he probably had ten of these that didn't pan out but the the one that did got him his start he took that three million dollars and then he used that to to buy and buy and flip buy and flip by and flip by and somebody compounded that over ten years into a billion dollars of real estate from that one option and i thought that was just like an incredible lesson or takeaway to have and and by the way now and so i invest with him now so i'm able to like it's probably my biggest investment of the past two years has been investing in his deals and i'm just getting incredible returns and one of the reasons why is because he keeps doing the same model so he just he's the master of der risking so he goes into a that's let's say there's a a shopping center with like of you know two big vacancies so he'll while he's putting it under purchase contract he already has leased it he has a signed lease and signed purchase contract so the same day we buy he has the tenant in place and he sells the thing of and so we get these things incredible returns because he's d risking all these properties so far in advance it's like a such a like the same it's like you know you find one unfair advantage and then you just keep playing it does they have an awesome house oh gia crazy house this house is crazy real estate guys always have obviously amazing houses the there there's one other little hack that he had that i liked i i think this another tidbit i think people can take so i was like when he's doing these things i'm like dude how do you do this like you were buying these properties there you know maybe there's a vacancy or whatever and like how are you cutting these deals beforehand to get them you know oh i know the buyer trader joe's i know the buyer at whatever chipotle i know the buyer at the the the real estate guy at this place and i'll get it under contract and then he's was like oh it's just relationship he always just said this is vague work oh you know real estate a relationship business and i i hate answers like that that sound like general and so i dug in with him i was i was like tell me how you approach this idea of relationships and he he said this great thing he was like you know if you think about the word commercial real estate it sounds like this vast universe like this huge industry right is like the trick is how do you make a big thing feel small like how do you break it down into an achievement like into a chunk that you could actually you know you could actually digest he's like kind of he's like one day i sat down a piece paper and i realized alright who do i who's my ideal person to know he's like well it's a national retailer who's still expanding and growing and they don't wanna own their own real estate because i'm a developer i wanna own the real estate i wanna lease it to them and he's like once i did that i realized it's actually like i don't know a hundred and fifty names and he's like i took this big idea of commercial real estate felt like a ocean and he's like i turned it into like a little goldfish pond a hundred and fifty like i could i could fit a hundred fifty people in this room i could meet a hundred and fifty people over the next two years if i tried and i could form a relationship with them and i could they could i could get so that they know me and i know them and they'll call me and i'll call them when we have something that fits and that's literally what he did and i just thought that was like a great like i don't know how don't know where else you could do that in other businesses but i suspect that that idea of taking something big but then ref framing it and in realizing it's actually much smaller and more achievable than you think is is probably something that applies to a lot of businesses is he a billionaire or a billionaire ish i was at like ish not not not there right because you know if you own a billion dollars real estate in his case i like forty percent or fifty percent is equity and the other half is like debt so you know on paper you know that's whatever that's let's say five hundred million dollars i don't know i'm just i don't know his actual thing to be clear but like hundreds of millions of dollars net worth of the six people that we talked about five of them are there or give or take the give or take there and i just think that that's i think it's crazy i think it's crazy i don't know how many billionaires are in the world five or ten thousand i'm not sure whatever is like forbes heads i would like multiply it by like some number and it's crazy that over the past ten days we hung out with five of them or something like that and get to learn from these people and again i don't i i'm almost embarrassed when i say to name my first million because what i tell people i'm like you know it's actually it's not always about money it's actually about like things greater than that and because i do think life's richer than just money but it is interesting to be able to rub shoulders with people who are in the point zero zero one percent of their field and it's it's lucky yeah and also like i think now we're a little bit like oh you know it's not about the money but like us ten years ago very much about same goals was like y get that money get that money and then figure out the money doesn't make you have you look sure i believe you it's not the end i'll be but i still want it i'm still gonna try to get i'm still gonna try to make definitely awesome stuff yeah exactly it definitely seems pretty great to have i'd rather have it than not have it and so you know i think as much as we're like oh you know i i think both are true like it is true that there's a lot more to life but also to these people and like you know you pick up a bunch of different things but also it is kinda of crazy to to to make that happen and it's fun also to make that happen you know if if if businesses your score well howard are points tallied they're tallied in dollars right there's a guy i don't pay attention to golf but i'm sure you do but do you know scott is it s sc he won what did you win this weekend us open open yeah i don't know about sports but i know that i saw like his one year old kid like crawling up the green to give him a hug and a kiss after he won so i guess scotty like one he set the trophy on the ground and his kid crawls up the to to to play with the trophy and nike took out this amazing ad the best at ever it was a two page ad or two like swipe on instagram the first one it says a picture of scott holding his son and it says you've already won and then the second slide is but another major doesn't hurt doesn't hurt and i think that's that's kind of like the takeaway here is like yeah it feels good to like i i've won already like i have a loving family i feel secure it don't hurt the you know sixty succeed a little more and i thought that was such a great and i thought that was kind of a representation of this episode that was a beautiful ad wasn't oh my god i nike at the top of its game and it does stuff like that yeah that was pretty good alright that was a good episode that's it that's the pod i feel like i could rule world to know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a road less travel never a looking bag alright my friends i have a new podcast for you guys to check out it's called content is profit and it's hosted by luis and ph ka after years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like red bull and orange theory fitness louise and fans are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue in each episode you're gonna hear from top entrepreneurs and creators and you're gonna hear share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit so you can check out content is profit wherever you get your podcast