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Kind of cool to get their perspective. So, listen, learn grow with the HubSpot podcast Network at HubSpot.com / podcast Network in our copywriting program. We say, be clear, not clever,
clear, not clever. It's
really hard to be Crystal Clear. It's super easy to create Market. He's and be clever, but in the grand scheme, We Believe Clarity wins.
I feel like I could rule the world. I know, I could be what I want to
put my all in it, like a Days on the Road Less Traveled never looking back. Alright,
so ramit have you, you could be honest. Have you ever listened to the podcast?
I've heard your clips and I love them. All right, good answer. You know what you're getting into. Yeah, you know you're getting into and you're all so we'll just say it. You're one of the reasons you're here is because I like you we're friends. Another reason is you're smart and good at the stuff. But the third reason is you just had a podcast come out and you'd been talking about doing a podcast forever. Now you actually have one. It's about are they the people are not a miss right there. It's Anonymous couples. Having discussions about money. Well, most of them use their real names.
And they're all real voices. So I always wanted to listen in on couples fighting about money, discussing money, but you can never do it. You know, the only place you've ever heard anyone fight about money is on a movie and now you actually get to listen to real couples sharing, real numbers talking about what's going on with their money. How do they disagree and then what do I help them do to get over it? And what's it called? Its called I will teach you to be rich with ramit
safety and
So this is a little bit. Like, what's your name? Esther perel? Is this sort of like her model? Where forget what her podcast is called is very good. She's like, kind of like a relationship coach and she has a couple coming. She's a
therapist. Yes, their pearls amazing, you know, she helps couples with therapy - not therapy. But if you imagine, for example, a couple where the classic example is, you know, he's an over spender. We don't have enough money for that, That's a classic one, but then it becomes much more. Interesting. For example, we have a
Will the guy hates hates paying too much for organic blueberries? He hates it. So when he orders blueberries, he has two tabs open. He's comparing notes. I know all your personal finance nerds. Listening to this or like, what's the problem? That's totally normal. No, it's not normal. He opens it up. He's comparing crossover. Guess his net worth. What do you guys
think? I'm guessing at I based on the set up. So, I don't know. We'll go over this a over over 10 million.
Sam. A million bucks, eight million dollars and he's comparing the price of blueberries and really what this shows is money is not just about math. In fact, we overvalue math and we undervalue psychology, which is what the podcast gets into. Did the launch go. Well. How'd the the First episodes do great? I mean we're learning right? So I know all the metrics cold for email and even social stuff but for podcast, we're like I texted
Some of my friends. Hey, what's good? And they don't be some numbers like, okay, so we released it now, so it's getting tens of thousands of downloads per episode. We're happy about that. I'm more happy that people are writing in and they go my wife and I finally talked about money for the first time. We've been married for six years. I'm like, yes, so the quantitative stuff seems to be good, but I'm more interested for a creative project like this in the qualitative.
The growing our podcast, we've talked about it a bit on this podcast which people like and sometimes don't like is talking about it too much but it's been the hardest thing that I've had to grow the why what you'll learn. I'm sure you've already learned. This is that. So with email you can advertise somewhere or you can write a blog post and you know exactly where the new email subscriber is coming from. And you know, you can guess how long they're going to stay with you with podcast. You don't really know that so like it's like iTunes won't tell you how many subscribers who have they're not exactly going.
You where they come from. You don't you don't know a lot of information. And so it's really, really challenging. And so when we grow up, we'll do a bunch of stuff and we're like, did it work? And it takes us a week and we're like, well, the numbers went up. Let's just continue doing everything we just did. Did it not work? No, it didn't work. All right. So let's just change. It's been it's been really hard since you anyway, but so you, alright? So ramit you have this. Your main thing is I will teach you to be rich and it started as a Blog. It's a book now and it's this major course.
- and that's actually what I wanted to talk about a little bit early on was course businesses, Shawn just launched a course called Power writing has called Power riding her riding it.
Wait, you don't even know the name of your own Partners. New course, what's wrong with you? Why do it was called? Power writing? I didn't know if it was like power riding and then like, you know - the how to write like shit. I don't know what the full I'm taking over this podcast right now. Shawn. Are you offended that number one? He didn't know the name of your course and number two that he hasn't bought it for full
price. Not at all. No, Sam. Basically taught me everything that I teach in the course. So, in a way, I actually owe him some royalties, really. And then the second thing.
Is when he asked that I just thought it's like a setup, you know, like, you know, when you kind of give someone an assist you're like, oh you are a book, right? What's the name of that book? You're just letting them plug their thing and it's like that's a podcaster old trick.
Okay, that didn't go the way I wanted. So look, it didn't look it's called. I know what it's called. That's called Power riding, but there's a sub-headline as well. Right? Sean.
No, there's no sub headline. It also also, I think I'm retiring from the course. I taught it just this time and it was like, it was really good.
And I'm like, unfortunately, I'm the type that gets bored of things really quickly. So just when we got it, we're like after the second one from the first one, the second one made double the money and it took a quarter of the time which is like exactly what you would want and it's should they answer should be go do it again and instead I don't want to do it at all. I'm just like, okay. I want to move on to
something else.
You written can say how you said the first time, how much it did. So can you say this time? How much did the second
time? Just double that? So for those of you following along to double the number? That's how much made this time?
Really? Okay? And in you're not going to do this again, you're done.
I'm going to teach something else. Something else. I'm interested in something that's like totally different, like which will be like kicking over the sand castle and starting over, which is kind of silly from a business point of view, but from a enjoying myself and entertaining myself point of view. It's the right move
but your courses are different than roommates. So roomy I bought your copywriting one again. I'm sorry. I don't remember the name of it just it was just called Matt. It was sale a bond sales Pages. What would which one did I buy?
We have our biggest one is called call to action. We have another one called behind the sales page where you actually watch me. Write a sales page that I think made millions and millions of dollars. So it's maybe one of those. Okay, I took it. I took it two years ago. I've taken a couple of yours, but your business is different than Sean's was the cohort. One. Have you ever have you done one of these cohort classes? Yeah, done several. In fact, I'm doing one as we speak right now. Cohort classes are definitely hot.
It's fun to watch this new model. If you trace the history of courses, I mean they've been going on for Generations. But let's just say in the last 20 years, you know, first off was ebooks and this is they were kind of hot in the early 2000s. You had dating ebooks. You had a famous ebook on How to Train Your parrot. Those were typically between $10 and about a hundred bucks. Then you started seeing video being added video, added higher pricing.
Um, and it was technically very difficult because they didn't have YouTube wasn't even out. When some of these started, then it went on to higher value. People got more sophisticated with topics, you added masterminds, which were hot and they've kind of fizzled out over the last few years. Now you have cohort based courses and there's some focus on completion rates, which we can talk about. That's a terrible decision to do. If you choose to do that, we can talk about that. But yeah, cohorts are hot doesn't necessarily mean they're
Lasting. But there are certainly hot right now.
So how many courses right now? Do you guys have we have between 20 and 25 life is your business doing north of 20 million in sales? I'm not going to share my sales numbers. I thought you might that I thought you might not but I respect that. You just you just told me that because if I ask someone and they're like, oh, you know, it's like just say, you don't want to talk about it. That's totally accepted. Yeah. Yeah. We have a private business. We have a great team and 20 to
I've programs and over 50,000 customers around, 50,000 customers. So, we're thrilled with
the you're not teaching these live. Then recorded.
Generally, they're recorded. The biggest ones, are we do, do some live ones to experiment with Concepts and it's just fun when you know, like you mentioned Sean, you like to be able to engage. And then you're like, okay, do we want to double down on that or are we done with that?
And what do you think, so? So I think some people are in your course business. I think more people would be interested in what you've learned about. The course business, having done a bunch of it being kind of like near the top of the game
there, which is like, first and foremost.
Who's crushing it when it comes to korres, is what the model? You look at. Where you say, just from a pure, like, respect of the way that that business works. I respect this course business. Who what stands out to you? Might be
wrong. I've heard a great great question because crushing it and who I respect are totally different. Because let me break that down who I respect. I respect people like Marie forleo who has a awesome business. She's runs it her way. She launches when she wants to which is sparingly.
It's beautifully done and she she just loves the way she runs her business. That's awesome. I also respect people like like some of the Legacy people in our industry. Jay Abraham, who I just saw for coffee, two days ago. He's one of my mentors and he's been around since the 80s. And in fact, even before Brian Dean high integrity, Matthew Hussey in the dating space. He's great. He's a friend of mine and then I think reform,
Age is interesting. Although I think that that is quite different because it's venture-backed than what the typical individual wants to create. So what I admire about all those folks, high integrity and we can talk about why Integrity is lacking in the course business because it is, they run the business the way they want to. Each of those could easily double their revenue easily. If they did a couple of different decisions, they don't and and and that's why I respect it.
John, do you know who Jay? Abraham is? No.
Okay, so he's I'm gonna guess probably in his 60s and he wears a he looks like if I like told you like imagine what like a in the 60s in the 60s, what a rich British guy would dress, like if he were like into hunting like on the countryside of England, that's what this guy dresses of Americans, like
impeccable, you know, the Hunter and Jumanji, that's what I just. That's what I got in my
head.
That's a really good. Yes. Okay. So Google it. He wears like a kind of like a scarf tucked into a tie and like you would imagine him smoking like a pipe, right? Where me and my wrong. Like you like bring it. Let me add to that. I once asked him Jay because we're close and, you know, he's been a mentor for many years. He tells me, you know, I food in Asia and, you know, I said, Jake what do you wear while you're on stage? Because he loves a sartorial. He's into it. He goes. Well, you know how many suits? I take for a three-day presentation, right? I hope one.
He goes 40. I said what? And he said they're hiring me. Not just for the information. I'm going to teach their hiring me to be theatrical. It's a show. And so at every break, he changes his suit. Now to the typical Silicon Valley, utilitarian throat. So stupid. What's the metrics? There's more to life than metrics. You Silicon Valley nerds. That's a huge mistake. That all these Roi attribution positive.
Sometimes in fact, the best companies, no, that's why they advertise in Times Square. They can't track that, but they do it because it's the right thing to do. And it's about Brandon Jay. He's a genius at doing that, that's why he's been at the top of the game for decades, and he's been at the time. He's better. He's been around forever. And if you go and study like a bunch of copywriting books, I think, was that his background. Was he a copywriter? Yeah, one of the best. Okay, so he's a copywriter and when I don't know him, I've seen them in person once or twice. I know, you know him well, but this guy has got this huge cloud of
Around them to me from the outside. And I think that's the VIP purposely gives so like, for all, I know he could be a billionaire. I have no idea like what this guy's story is, I he's just as like business, like, gu RI type of guy. What is his story? What's the truth about him? So that the truth is that he was doing highly Innovative marketing for the last 40 years. He would go into companies like gold companies, umbrella companies, all kinds of random Industries, dozens and dozens of Industries and he would
show them ways to exponentially grow their their sales IcyHot was one of his and he has a fantastic story. He bought Remnant radio advertising. He paid a hundred percent of the first fee to the radio station. So it was no risk to them and then he took the long-term profits and grew that business in a massive way. So I'll tell you what I like about. I like that his ideas are extremely powerful. In fact on my bookshelf. I have a very highly curated bookshelf of some of the best Market.
Books that I've ever read. I've two of his that are on that bookshelf. He takes a multi-dimensional approach to business. So for example, he would tell me early on ramit put your customers at the center of your world. I said, okay, what does that mean? And he's got this thing called the theory of preempts. He would say, look, tell them explicitly. Tell them you are here. You might not be ready to buy today. That's fine. Enjoy my free material to use it for as long as you want, when you are ready. I will be here and I
We'll be here for the rest of your life, which is totally true. And, you know, I do some things in my business that are very unconventional. For example, I don't allow people with credit card debt, to join our Flagship programs. The higher end ones that cost us millions of dollars every year and it's funny people will plagiarize our sales Pages, the plagiarize, our email, copy for some reason. They don't plagiarize that policy. I wonder why that is because 90% of their customers would disappear overnight. But when we do that, even though it cost us in the short term, it benefits us tremendously in the
Long-term so J helped us really articulate that Vision. Clearly. What does he sell? But what you're talking? About course, businesses that you like what's his course, he doesn't care. He doesn't care about that anymore. He's been doing that for general for decades. He does rare Consulting for Equity Arrangements. You can find most of his stuff free on his website. If you sign up for it, but he's not doing that anymore. He's done it. He's shared a ton of his Insight. Now he wants to work with
Selective.
It's did he tell you any good stories about Icy Hot or one of the brands that
he helped.
I see how it was, one of the one of my favorites in his book and he's told me all about it. He told me about gold and how he helped this gold business. That was sort of struggling and they repositioned the way they sold gold and it exploded their busy. He's got tons of great stories in his book. My favorite one. It has a terrible title, but it's a great book. Getting everything you can out of all you've got is really good. One page in that book helped me build a multi-million dollar product. I was sitting on a Wednesday Wednesday. I have strategy days and I just read and I
Ink and I read one of his pages and it will click for me and I launched a multi-million dollar program of ours called repeats Brain Trust and it was all because of that
books. Speaking of speaking of terrible titles. We have a podcast title. That is both kind of catchy, but also kind of cringey. I would say you also have a title, that is kind of catchy and kind of cringy, what? What? So, we've talked about, kind of our feelings on it. Give us your take.
Take on both your name as well as doing names like this. So give us the kind of like, what's your what's your mind? Says it? All Pros. Are there. No cons. Are there. Mix? How do you think about it
now? There's a lot of cons. I'll tell you I'll tell you the blood truth. So I created, I will teach you to be rich while I was a student at Stanford and I was helping my friends in the dining halls with their personal finance. And I had learned, and I build my own system because I took some of my scholarship money and put in the stock market and
Here, I am trying to help my friends and they were like, oh, that sounds awesome. Because I got an overdraft fee and they would never show up to my free classes. So I was like, okay. I got a name this to make it more catchy and then event and that didn't work. So, eventually I started the blog looking back. I want to First say, I was sober when I picked the name, okay, so, and it was catchy, but I will say, it's
Um with its downsides, for example, you know, I've been sitting on panels. There's like the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, another CEO or senior VP and then there's ramit Sethi CEO of I will teach you to be rich and the first reaction at some of these places is not good. Okay, but
Even though many of my really smart friends, including some Venture capitalists and others. They were like, you got to change your name. You got to change it.
Early on. I was like you might be right and then I started going. Well, there's some cause I've already invested all this time, didn't I? And it just became too difficult. And so I finally have really owned it. I will say that I know very well when people hear this name of this book or the site, they go, that sounds like a scam. So the conversations are seriously. It's not what it sounds like. Check it out. And then I kind of have come to love that. I love the push-pull they
Sounds like a scam. They come here. It's hyper tactical. It has the exact accounts to use. They go. Oh, this sounds like every other money person. Wait a minute. This guy graduated from Stanford. Oh, wow. He's in the, you know, Times Square. New York Times bestseller. So I love that push-pull. I don't mind a little skepticism because I trust our material is so good. That if they are ready, They will receive it.
And if you were going to Rebrand had you ever come up with a backup, what would you go to?
Yeah,
we've played around with some ideas. I do think there's room in our future business for an extension for different names. But with all that said, you know what I love clear names. Some of our best programs are find your dream job. We've helped people get $50,000 races. That's like right on the
money. Earn
1K help you earn 1K on the side and for many people turns into earn a hundred K on the side,
so I do love.
Clear names. And in
our copywriting program. We say be clear. Not clever,
clear, not clever.
It's really hard to be Crystal Clear. It's super easy to create Market. He's and be clever. But in the grand scheme, We Believe, Clarity winds, and you've been doing this since what? Like, oh, nine or something? When I started this title, 404, and do you think that this could last another? So you're at it. That's what 10 11, 12 6.
Teen years 17 years. Can it last like, what's it going to? What would a brand like this course business and your brand? What would it look like in 20 or 30 years? And are you going to continue doing it for that long? You think? Oh, yeah. I mean, I love what I do. So first of all sound, of course business. Sorry, just going to have courses, but we also have a napolitan, a Blog, a brand. So it's it's an education business. We have a book with over a million copies sold, right? You could just as well, say it's a book business because we sell more books, we set of courses.
Um,
but the I don't love the concept of quote, a course business, you will find that many of the successful course. Creators. They go women. There's lots of different ways to reach people. I'm going to do events. I'm going to do a podcast. So of course is simply become a nice
which which part of the Empire. So right, so I'm pretty fast that I've been studying this kind of what I call solopreneurs. Basically people who try to build like a personal Monopoly around some domain whether it's
A guy who there's a guy who's like, I'm the best dog trainer. I will just teach you everything. You don't know about training your dog. I'm just like I train dogs for the stars, but then I'm going to give you the information for free over here. I love that. I think these are, there is an infinite number of these like personal monopolies that you can create even within one. Right? As I say, your personal finance. There's personal finance for guys who want to be billionaires. People for who want to be lean fire. There's people who want to do it, where it's like, you know, you're only going to, you're going to maximize your time, right?
It's like the kind of 4-Hour Work Week style. There's a number of these person monopolies and I've been interested to look under the hood of these and see two things. One is
what's what does that business really look like? Because you only see ramit Sethi you right? You don't know like how many people you got
on your team?
Yeah, we have about 20 22 25 at a given, right?
So like even though it looks like an individual brand obviously there's a there's a full talented team of people helping out my hope my back, make it happen. And then you have like many different plates that you're spinning at. Once. You got the blog plate. You got the podcast plate, you got the books plate, the courses plate. There's going to be, you know, there's probably four more than a job board. Who knows what else you got? Which plate is the? So I would say the usually what I found and you tell me if this is true for you. I found that there's the
Audience core one which might be like the blog. Like the blog is our core thing for growing the audience, the free audience and then there's like and then there's this other thing which is monetizes kind of like the one to five percent of the audience the best and this is what there's where the money comes in to pay for these 25 people that work in my company. So what is it for you? Is it a newsletter or blog? What's the main thing on the audience side? And what's the main thing on the business side? Is it courses?
That's a great question. I think in general, your model is correct. I think that there are places that are better for audiences. And typically this will be things like social media. It's easier to grow that than to grow the number of customers. That's just sort of a given of the internet for us audience wise. I think social media for us, for sure. So we have people on Twitter, Instagram, some extent YouTube and now the podcast, I think that will end up being a pretty substantial.
Your part of the business, audience wise the
program. Those are all about each General. There's one that's like the
leader.
Well, Instagram is the best. It's the best and my Twitter because I am, I love it. It's like I'll get up and I'll start instagramming and tweeting and stuff. And now we've got a little iwt support in there. So we've got, you know, regular posting schedule. Those are great. And actually, we've learned how to monetize things like Instagram. You know, Instagram is a nice part of our business as well. You also wrote a reply to trolls on Twitter, which is awesome.
Instagram. I reply to all three worlds. Yeah. I love you waiting in my life for one smart troll, you know, I have helped over 10 million people. I have over a million books, sold 50,000 customers. Our team is amazing. I'm still praying one day. Can there be an intelligent troll out there and so far? No, it's it's very difficult. You know, the I get anti-vaxxers who write me, you know, I tell them, you know, you would
have trouble deciphering a
menu at all of garden and you're over here, giving me medical advice.
Yes, I don't think so. So, you know these guys they there and they're all guys, they really feel that they need some meaning in life and I'm happy to give it to him and show others how to respond to
trolls. What do you want to slap down trolls for a bit? But it I've for me it gets exhausting what? But you seem to thrive on it. You seem like even right now I could see little pep in your step. Just thinking about it. Well, I remember
listening,
A Navy. SEAL who said when others do push-ups, they get tired. When I do push-ups, I get strong and I found the same because dealing with trolls keeps me sharp, and I'll tell you why. But it's not just, you know, for kicks in to make fun of them. It's that in my life, you know, I'm hanging out with guys like you smart guys who are dissecting business models and healthy, whatever.
I don't get the chance to talk to someone who comes up to me and says, you know, vaccines are fake or these sort of crackpot that you're only doing this so you can make money. If I wanted to be rich. I would create a book on being rich, you know, I've candidly never had somebody come up to me in real life and say that, and in part, that's because when people come up in real life, they're actually very positive Pleasant. They usually have very nice things to say what typically happens.
With these trolls. Now, I've had conversations with thousands of them and I save and cross catalog all these conversations. So it's fascinating right over time. You can build a corpus of what's going on. Remember, I studied psychology at technology in Psychology at Stanford. So I'm fascinated with human behavior. So, I want to know what's going on in your life that you would reach out out of nowhere. To somebody who doesn't know you and go.
Fuck
you. So when they say that to me, I go. Hey, what's
Going on man. You having a bad hair day and we start talking. And so now I have metrics, 50% of them will never reply of those who reply fifty percent will go whole. Oh my God. I didn't know anyone would actually read this. Oh, I'm sorry. Hey, man, big fan which kind of leads to the question. If you didn't know any was going to reply why on Earth
would you send that that's kind of sad and then the remaining
50%, which is 25 of the original they will kind of double down. And that actually is a very interesting conversation to have like what's going on.
With someone that they would say that and so I don't always get to a resolution. But it holds my conversational skills and I get to understand and peek into the psyche of someone like that.
I love that. You have the like intellectual answer. When it's probably just really fun to just clap back at people are no no no explanation needed. We've all felt it. So Sam, I think you were going to ask something for work. I jumped it on the troll thing
was I'm still curious about the course business and I'll tell you why.
Why I'm curious about it. I'm curious about it because
Like I bet you you've been in this since 2004. There's I have a bunch of friends novel Noah you who were just I think you're maybe I think you're maybe eight years older than me. Who are old enough older than me? That? They'd seen like the beginning of like the web 1.0 course businesses. And there are some people that just crushed it. So we talked about ebbing Eben, Pagan. What was his name? David DeAngelo was his was his name and that's tough. I
I love hearing stories about that. It's so fascinating about all these guys just killing it on the internet. And it's just fascinating. It's like learning about like a drug cartel or something. Like it's just like you're intrinsically exciting to hear about like these. Like it's like Cowboys feeling type of business. And also on here, you mentioned the company Agoura and you're saying that I asked, you can one can, some of these course, businesses reach a hundred million in revenue. And you said you sometimes they can but it's incredibly hard but the ones who do they're really. Just the like huge.
That sell courses. So that's what I want to ask you. Okay, so let me take you back and I'm going to share a couple of stories from the history because we have created over 30 programs. And we have served, you know, tons and tons of people. So a few things I've learned. First of all, I remember our first major course, we launched was called earn 1K and the reason we created it was that I went on book tour and I went around to 13 different cities and I was like, hey, what should I create? This is way back in the day.
Nine in the depths of the recession and they go love your stuff on finances and automation. But I really want to know how to make more money. Okay, that was fairly unusual back at that time. So came home and we identify all these different areas of making money. We created a program on freelancing because we know it and we could teach it. We recorded that in the back of the automatic office. So we got hooked up with Matt. He was like, okay, you can record it in the back. We didn't have any fancy camera equipment.
But the content was good and we launched it and it was 497 dollars at the time and the think inverted way better than we thought it converted to. Well, it was around 2 percent if I recall correctly and I told people in the last email I was like guys this is actually converting way better than I thought. I'm going to raise the price and a lot of people are like haha marketing gimmick. Ha ha. That's so crazy. And then at the end it made $600,000 on our first launch.
CH and we raise the price and never lowered it again, ever. So it was hilarious because a couple weeks later people. Hey, can I get in at the original price? Were like, No. And so that was the first thing where we realized. Oh my gosh, packaging matters, topic matters, conversion rate, and pricing are profoundly meaningful in your business. So that taught us a lot.
Moving along, you know, we had other programs, we launched another business program. I think it did like five million or 6 million in one week and we wrote about that on the Tim Ferriss blog. You can see kind of the entire flow of how we did that. That's a great book. By the way. I wouldn't we launched Trends. I read that and reread it a ton of times. I think it's like five million dollar launch or something. Yeah, is that? Yeah. I figured yeah. Me too people behind the scenes because there's a, you have to understand. It's like think of all the movement.
Beyond launching a movie. Okay, we're not doing a movie but we're doing a launch. We write an entire book per launch and much of that gets discarded and we still end up with a book. That's how much we write and create. So we wanted to show people what goes into it because it's not just luck at certain levels. It's very strategic and there's an element of luck to you but then moving, you know, moving along. You see, a lot of other models that came and went for a question. Like, can you make it to a hundred million bucks?
You can, but a couple of things change one, you become an acquisition machine. You cannot make it to a hundred million dollars without a true massive acquisition machine. And that means that most of your business will be focused on acquisition and in the self-development world or money world, if that's what you choose to pursue. If you want to play that game, you have to become very, very mercenary. So, for example, you will see Facebook ads, they're basically like,
Like make a million bucks in a week. I'm being hyperbolic but you get why? It's that. That is what people respond to when you are doing a true acquisition machine. If you want to build a boutique business with high integrity, that is antithetical to that. So it's very important to know. For example, in software your you don't necessarily have to build a very hyperbolic business. Right? Look at HubSpot. They're not over there saying fix all your CRM.
Ten hours, that's not what they're saying at all, but in self development or in a course business, it becomes more and more aggressive the bigger and bigger you want.
And that's kind of like one of the one of the downsides of the business which is it's kind of like, you know, the hustle. We had a conference hustle con and a bunch of other conferences and it kind of sucked when that was our main stream of Revenue because the more money it made, the more people we had in, the more people that had the worse, it got. And that, that sucked. I hated that I hated that. I hated that, I hated that. And that was a huge challenge for us. Well, it didn't end up being a challenge because we're like, all right. It just can't be the main Revenue driver. I just got off the phone with
Airline and I had to tell three different people in this hour-long call. What I was going through, who I talked to you before, why I needed a new ticket and it was a nightmare may be so angry. Do you know why this happens? It happens? Because as your company grows, you've got lots of different employees talking to customers on loads of different channels. And it's a huge pain in the butt because when a customer contacts your company, they want to personalize and helpful experience. This my friend is exactly what HubSpot CRM platform. Does. It makes it very
Very easy, it integrates with your inbox. So, emails are automatically saved and stored in your contacts. Timeline. Sales reps and customer service can then make and record calls right within HubSpot and notes are saved for future. Reference on top of that. We have a universal in box that lets your team tackle live chat team email addresses. We even look at Facebook messenger and more. It's pretty unique. It's pretty amazing. And the airline that I called, I won't say their name. I wish they were using it. So learn about how you can scale your company without scaling complexity. Just go to HubSpot.com
But yeah, well, let's do a quick switch. I want to do some of your both business ideas because this is a idea podcast. And secondly, I want to ask you about some money hacks, but let's start with ideas. So what we like to ask everybody is cool. It's always fascinating figure out. How do you do what you do? How long you been doing it? Right? Like that's kind of pass facing but what I found is that anybody who's talented enough to build their own business like you have and is out there operating the field. They seen tons of other
Opportunities that you just, you have more ideas than you have time to do. Go do them. And so, or maybe you're not the right person to go do that idea, but you think somebody should somebody who loves so and so should go do that. What are some ideas business ideas that you've seen that? You think are genuinely interesting or worth more chat about and then we can toss them out to the audience.
Okay, I always focus on. Where's the demand? Where is their insatiable demand, you know, as we talked about in our earnable program, go where the fish are and the first one I would create would be business around pets. Okay. First of all, I don't have pets and I don't want pets. My wife is constantly telling me. Let's get a dog. I'm like we're never getting a dog ever. And I want to tell you why, because when I was a kid, my sister's wanted a dog.
And might, we couldn't because my dad was allergic. 16 years later. We found out. He wasn't allergic. That's a lie. That's always right. I love it to this day. I love that. My dad. Just point blank just lied to us for almost 20 years. I said God bless dad. And so now I will do the same thing if my wife is listening. I'm allergic as well. Tragic, its genetic so, but but for the people who have pets,
It's hilarious. They will literally spend anything. So one of my good friends. She said, oh, yeah, like, you know, I find it difficult to spend stuff on myself. But this new puppy. Like I don't care what it costs and they're getting this imported Swiss meat or something like that for the dog. I'm like you could feed. Can't you just feed a dog like what, you know, from Costco or something and she's like, no I said, this is a great business. So there are a variety of different models. I've seen the Box business, which is amazing.
There's a decorative items for dogs, which I love, because the more unnecessary they are oftentimes the more profitable. It could be right. I don't you're not buying a luxury sweater because you need it. You're buying it because you want it. And price is largely irrelevant. So, if I knew anything about pets and had any interest whatsoever in pets, I would definitely start a pet business. I have a friend who sells dog vitamins.
And I asked him, I go does it work? He's like, I don't know. Yeah, I was like, that's the greatest. This is the greatest thing ever. You have no idea what those I should say, that, that idea. And the next idea. I'm going to share with you. The other thing I would have to have would be no ethics whatsoever, because half these pet businesses are complete horseshit. And but, you know, again, I don't want to start it because I don't know anything. And I also do have some morals around this. But the pet vitamins, I mean, come on.
What is the dog? Giving
you a report card? Well, I
really feel. My scoliosis went away. Thanks to this vitamin. No. All right, what's next cosmetics?
Insatiable demand heavy rotation of using different types of face clean. You guys know, I you may not know as guys but you know that there's different lotions for your hands feet or head. Are you aware of this Sam? No II. Know exactly why we have different lotions for different skin color. That's all we have at our house. So I know that, but I didn't know.
Did I have like, put lotion on in at least 16 years? Like, it has been. It has been 16 years since I've last for lunch, huh?
Tori for the audience. They're like, What's lotion? Yeah, there's and by the way, there's more to cosmetics and skincare than lotion. Wait fun, you know where lotion? I thought that dark guys? Like you had to wear
lotion. Never wear lotion. Don't shun
children legs. Right now. I want to see if they have little
cracks from Ashy and I'm proud of it. Look there's no listen to what do
you got? Come on, dude.
Also, you know this whole like
It's a home like nighttime, skincare routine. Like, you know, I'm a toothbrush and out of there. It's over.
I gotta tell you. Okay, I gotta tell you. My favorite part about nighttime skin routines. This is my favorite thing on all of social media. So you'll be following someone and someone will post a question to them. Oh my gosh, your skin looks so good. What's your, what's your skincare routine and the person gets so excited to go. No, so glad you asked me. Well, you know, I like to
really keep it
simple. I'm
Just I'm all into simplicity. So here's what
I do. And then they obtained part process.
Yeah, they go. Well, I start with a serum then I give it a 15-minute break. I put on a lotion, but then I put a cream on top, you know, then I take a little break and let it breathe. Then I use the brush and then I iced it out and then and then by lunchtime, you know, I need to reapply and then you have 13 other parts for and I'm like, do you understand
that? None of that is
simple. Most most of the people I know are using like one Procter & Gamble product if that,
Thereby. Yeah, three and one baby, but I want to shampoo conditioner. Yeah, they're taking Dove and putting it on every part of their body and they're like, wow, I really nailed it today.
So I would
do a Cosmetics, your skincare. So
precise, both people old, you said, pets and cosmetics. Those are I'm with you, insatiable demand, like, pricing sensitivity, but obviously competitive. So, how do you think about going into a space? That's like, you're not the first person, I think of Cosmetics are
It's so would you be looking for if you were going to purchase? Would you be looking for some unique angle that you feel is underserved? Or would you just say no? Fucking I go I go swim. It doesn't matter how many other people fishing there. There's enough fish where I just want to make it. I just want to get my share. I want a small slice of a big pie. What? How would you approach it?
Packaging pricing and celebrities. Packaging is a huge tremendous part of it. And I think there's some opportunities there. Pricing what we're sending in. What do you mean? What opportunities? So, I spoke to a guy who did a hair care
product and, and I
was like, how do you develop it? He goes, we basically went to a factory and we were like whatever it needs to fit. This cost framework. He didn't care. So, this is again, why I say I would not get into this business if
I had any morals which I do. That's why I'm not doing it. I'm just telling you what he told me. He goes. Yeah, I know. We don't care what it is. It needs to smell good, but we spend 90% of the time on the packaging. I go. What? Let me get this straight. You're basically selling like whatever. Yeah. And but the packaging looks Lush. He goes. Yeah, that's what the entire business is. I go. This is crazy. Then this so in terms of price will, how big was that business or that entrepreneur? Like, how big
Their empire.
And I imagine that a bunch of them.
Yeah, that's a good question. I would say in the that's a good question. If I had to guess in the 30 to 50 million dollar range by the last time I checked that was several years, but you know, I didn't ask price.
Price is, you know, you see people doing boxes regular delivery upsells. There's lots of innovative opportunities that I think digital entrepreneurs are very, very smart at, in the old days. It was put it on the Shelf at CBS and hope somebody buys it and then comes back nowadays. You can do some really clever stuff. So I think that's an opportunity and then celebrity tie-ins who's known for having amazing skin, and if you think back to those acne commercials remember,
If they had top-tier celebrities, so I got really curious. How do they get these a level of celebrities? I started looking into it. The answer is they just write them a humongous check. So, there's opportunities with celebrity tie-ins that for skin care. Again. I am not trying to do this business myself. I've just been fascinated with it and I would love to see how someone would come in here and disrupt what people are normally doing.
Okay, I like it. And that did you have a third
one?
Kids anything on kids. I mean, it's wow. Talk about price insensitivity. Again. I don't want to do this business because I believe in less stuff for kids. I think there's more meaningful ways to parent, but just imagine the kind of toys learning opportunities, like, just arrived for
children. Could also talk is like, that's what a kid is.
Yeah, yeah, so, you know, there's some really smart stuff around these areas, but the key denominator on all these is insatiable demand. That's the first place I look, which is a little ironic because when I started, I will teach you to be rich. There's actually not that much demand for learning about money, especially when I started it. I focused on young people, so, but I didn't it wasn't a business when I started was just like, for fun. Over time. I found that there.
Is the man, but you have to be very clever in. How you reach.
And what about money hacks? So, I'd put down a thing on the notes. I said, I want to know you have all this. I Corpus of content, you know, just tons of tons of material philosophies Frameworks to tactics exercises, blah, blah, blah. What would be the three sort of money hack? So you think most people just don't do but if you could get them to do it, you'd feel good about it. So what are your kind of like, what are your three finance-related or money-related fact that people should be doing that? Get you a big gap, big outcome.
With not a huge input.
Well, I'm glad you asked, because most of my founder friends don't even invest in the market. I would say over 50% of them. What do you understand? How, you know, what does that even mean? That's so that's so crazy to me. I don't understand it. I'm about to tell you because these guys make me want to wring their neck. So, these are founders who have done very well in their business. Either. They have a high profit, business generating, considerable amounts every
year, or to
some extent, they've had an exit and now, they're doing their next thing.
I go. Hey, what you doing your money, they go. Oh, you know, I'm putting it into my business. I go cool. Like, what about investing Pig? Oh, no, I can make more money in the, in my own business. This is where my voice starts to tighten up and I bring out my hand as if I'm about to ring their neck. I go. How many businesses do you know that are still around 50 years later and they go. Well, not many I go. Do you think it would be good to maybe take a little off the table and put some in the market where you can get?
Get really good returns and it's just boggles their mind because they've never thought about they see themselves as an entrepreneur. Not a boring mom-and-pop investor. That is a very, very costly belief that they hold. So I always tell them like, hey, take a little bit, put in the market boring, Vanguard funds, do the stuff. And of course, they haven't read my book. Do this stuff in the book. And when you do that, you will be wealthier than you can. Possibly imagine. And you your risk will be decreased
dramatically.
I'm Sean, where did what do you think when you hear? So I follow a lot of what you say. I read your book. Sarah. My wife has read your book. You're going to talk about like talking to your partner, once a month, things like that. I do that all, but I want to ask you Shawn investing in the market. So Sean and I are almost complete opposites when it comes to money, not complete opposites or everything regarding money, but our risk profiles are very different. Sean. Do you invest, just a normal index funds at
all? Yeah. I have some in index funds.
I basically have a basket of technology companies that a few years ago. I said, okay, what companies do I think over a 10 to 20 year period just have they have an advantage today? That's just going to compound for 10 to 20 years and I'm happy to if I'm wrong with that. Okay, I'm wrong with that. But I'm going to have this basket of basically six companies that I think that I think are positioned to do that, and I was like Amazon. It was Google. So it wasn't like, some didn't take a genius, right? It was just like, I think these companies essentially are monopolies that that are riding this wave of like the Internet and mobile.
Still do well. And so I hold that. So I'd say about 30 percent of my money is in that that selection of stocks. I have probably one percent.
You can import a camera or the import tax on a camera that can record above. 60 Minutes is taxed at a video camera versus a picture camera. Therefore you can't record for more than 60 Minutes on a point and shoot camera. Are you kidding me? I'll still great.
That respect I was very now I just need you to tell me what to do about it, but we can do that off there. That was impressive. Yeah, I was so basically what happened to listeners. So it repeats camera went off. And this is like, a weird fact but point and shoot cameras cannot record above 60 minutes because they would be taxed
differently. It went down even better. He goes. I know what happened. We just hit 60 Minutes, didn't we? Yeah, and you have a point your camera. Don't ya. It's from Asia, isn't it? Yeah. It's like
Shit, Sam was saying, what are you doing? How do you know all this?
Sam was like Mike Wallace right there said well a lot of respect for you, bro. Yeah. Well I all right. We we went through this. So Shawn, you were saying that you have 30% in index funds. Where's that is not even in death
in a handful of tech stocks about six tech stocks. And then I have about 40 ish percent in crypto. I have a small amount, maybe 1% 2% still left in a Vanguard fund and then
What's left? Then I have, well, I'm not counting just like investments in private businesses like startup and stuff. That would be different. But yeah, the rest is like cash and miscellaneous. Random other pets,
is that crazy to you ever meet that? That's crazy to me. I'm not just like you shot because whatever floats your boat float your boat. That's so different from how I how I do stuff. I'm out. It's like a guy going to a buffet. Okay, and you both go to a buffet and then you go. Hey, let's just let's meet up at the table. That's so you. Get here, you going?
Get some rice. You get some chicken, some vegetables, and the other guy comes back with three different plates. 90% of all the plates, have chocolate cake on them. And then he has two pieces of white fish. And, you know, one piece of lobster that he cut in half and he threw the threw it on the floor. You go. What are you eating, bro? He goes. That's what I like.
That's what. Why? Because it's not Vanguard it out. It's not indexed out. Is that
why? It's not even?
Remotely diversification. Now again, if you want to be entertained, that's awesome. It's very
entertaining, though. I don't I think diversification. There's a great quote diversification is for losers. That's how I feel about
diversification. That's how most tech Founders feel and the cost of their belief is vast. It costs them, typically millions and millions of done. They don't care though. This is what it is. My point,
Sam. It's not that. I don't care anymore.
And I can undulant best. I went to meet some of the
greatest investors. The greatest investors in the world. Do take concentrated positions not Diversified position.
So, yeah. Yeah. Are you one of the greatest investors in
the world? I know what I know in my sphere. I'm an expert in my field. And so I feel confident and comfortable investing in my field. I'm not saying I'm one of the great Investments world, but I know that within the technology sector
I would bet on myself and that's what I'm choosing to do. Right within the technology sector. I don't I feel like I haven't Edge compared to what I can get sort of in the passively Diversified Index Fund world
everybody. Your last
10 years. I've compounded way faster than you know, the Vanguard ETFs or sp500 generically has
your strategy. Ramit. I am the exact same as you. I'm looking at my portfolio now, it's basically 90% index funds or includes HubSpot stock, which is
Index but it's 90% publicly traded stock. Most of which is is index funds, but what bothers me remain. Not bothers me. It just shocks boggles my mind about you. How can you not see that? There is another way to do it, which are the crazy people like Sean. When you and I both had tons of friends that are these crazy people that have made these ridiculous bad for. They only have a hundred grand, a put 90 grand into crypto and it turns into a hundred million dollars like you. And I know many of these people have done these stupid things or they appear stupid.
Pit and they totally work out. Well, there's definitely lots of different ways to achieve it. So, you know what I talk about in my book. There's there's lean fire. There's fat fire years, buying real estate, there's passive investing and on and on. So if you are optimizing for entertainment, great, if you're optimizing for concentrated risk, great, then that portfolio makes a lot of sense. If you are optimizing for
A diversified low-cost predictable return and mitigating risk, then, of course, that allocation makes exactly zero sense. So we want to know the game that we are playing and Sean you you articulated it very well. What I think the next question that a Savvy investor would ask is what are the risks that I am incurring? And this is typically where you get people especially a lot of crypto Bros. Who go. Oh like, what do I care? I'm swinging for the fences.
And you go. Okay. That's cool. What if it goes wrong? Now? If you're 21, you know, your risk profile is low right? Worst case, you know, you get a job, etc. Etc. Etc. If you're older, if you have kids, if you have a mortgage or if you simply do not want to go back to living on ramen noodles, then suddenly, you start to think about risk differently. Now, here's the catch. Most people doesn't matter if they're 35 or 50. They don't truly understand risk until something bad.
Bad happens. And when that happens, they do not take a look in the mirror and go. Oh shit, my allocation that I chose 15 years ago was poor, they go fuck the government or they rip me off. I need regulation, even though I called for no regulation for the last 15 years. So, unfortunately, this is one of those things that cannot be taught until it is experienced, and the market will go down. Tech will not always go up. This is a predictable cycle, the last 10 years have been extraordinary. There's no doubt about that. Even in
Index investor made over 15 percent annualized returns, which is insane. But the music doesn't keep playing. I agree with you. I promised disagree with people.
Hold on. Hold on. There's no right answer without saying what are you trying to do? Right? What is your goal? Because if my goal is to make X and your goal is to make why, then we're going to have totally different strategies like a different strategy would work for different person. What is your goal? Say, I'm comfortable with this much risk, or I have it. I have not.
Knowledge about this industry. Maybe my answer would be different or maybe my strategy would be different. You
know, the goals are different.
Yeah, I think it was a different for sure. What's your goal? Not? Just, not this, the Abyssal money go, right? Clearly. Our goals are different because you you intentionally avoid risk, right? Like, you know, the appeal of a lot of these Investments are you don't want to lose very you. Your risk tolerance is lower and you are you are you would feel worse if you lost, then you would feel good if you win and I'm the opposite. I would feel worse if I didn't follow my conviction.
And then if I
look at your goals, like, is there a point where you'll say? I'm gonna I'm gonna I don't want to take more
risk. Yeah, of course, over time it'll shift, right? As the as the principal gets large enough. Then you don't need to have so much concentration, because you can have more, you can play it safer, and you can take a smaller lower return. Will still yield will still let you live a lifestyle that you want. But if the principal small and you're trying to live off four percent gains, or five percent gains or 7% annual gains.
You're gonna have to sit there for 40 years and like, I'm just not interested in doing that. And I think another thing is like, what's your other situations? Like, how much income do you bring? I bring in a lot of income, so I'm not really worried about. Okay, what happens if the market goes down, either temporarily, or even permanently. It's like I'm bringing in a healthy income and I'm young. I don't really have to worry too much about protecting this investment asset versus I can play riskier than my dad who no longer can generate significant income and he needs to play it
safer.
Yeah, we have different, we have different, we have different goals.
Yeah, I think if you if you look at bodybuilders, for example, who are competitive eventually, all roads lead to chicken and rice, all roads lead to chicken and rice. Why? Because when you look at macronutrients and when you look at where you're getting the highest bang for your buck all professional bodybuilders, essentially eat the same. Okay, I'm being a little general here, but that's the case. When you look at investing, if you look at the research, and yes, you clarify your goals.
But remember that in investing, a lot of people do personal finances personal actually. Most people are mostly the same. Let me say that. Again. Most people are mostly the same. They mostly want to make good money, be able to travel a little bit and
cetera. So unless you are a wild
outlier, then all roads lead to low cost long-term investing again. There are outliers Sean. It sounds like
like you thought that through, but the principles of chicken and rice and low-cost investing where the same. Now, what are those principles? I talked about that in chapter 6, you know, there's a lot of people
tossing around these things about. Well, you know, I chose this because like the market went down a little bit. So I put my money in
here and like over time, all those timing, the market things have been blown out. There are the rare exceptions who win Sam, you were referring to that, you know, we know some people who have one. Yeah, you know, we also know a lot of people who lost a lot of money and they disappear.
They don't brag about their Russian fund that they picked anymore, that's called
survivorship bias. So it's important that we know the entire
game of play and then we choose otherwise, it's very emotionally tempting to be like, I'm a genius. I have an edge
Etc, but we have to all remember, we are
individual investors and even the pros who do this for a living with a bunch of other smart people and expensive technology. They failed to beat the market 80-plus percent of the time.
What are your money rules? You're talking about? You need to have money. Rules. What are yours? I have ten Money Rules. I'll share some of them. So the easy ones are things like always have a year of emergency fund cash. Okay, that's sort of a simple one, invest 20 percent of gross income minimum. That's an easy one. If you can't do 20%, do start with five percent, right, but the important thing is pick a number and automate that's critical. Then the larger the the
For once for me, my money rules are things like never questioned spending on books, appetizers health or a friend charity fundraiser. So that's unlimited. I've unlimited spend on and why like why am I talking about? Appetizers? It's meaningful to me, when I was a kid. We couldn't afford to eat appetizers. Now, when I go out and eat with a friend, I'm like, whatever looks good. Just order, right? We can, we can get everything here, and then it gets a little bigger, you know.
No business class on flights over four hours. That's a rule. I don't have to debate it or think about it. It's just boom, it's done. And be able to pay in full for large expenses like a wedding, a honeymoon, even a house. Does it mean I have to pay in full? I could Finance it if the interest is low or whatever,
but for the largest most important purchases in my life. I don't want
cost to be a factor. Now, if you're listening to this, some of these sound totally bewildering, maybe even,
Phyllis, okay. That's the point. My money rules are mine. They are not applicable to most people. Most people don't care about appetizers and most people can't buy a house. All cash. That's okay. What I want to encourage you to do is to really write
down your money
rules instead of having to make a thousand decisions every month about money, boil it up, roll it up to the things that are meaningful. And you'll notice on my mighty rules, which you can just Google ramit money, rules that the classic
Steak people make I say, hey, what are your
money rules? And they're all
restrictive never spend on premium. This never do that. Never done it. I go. Okay. Okay. It's okay to have a couple restrictive rules, you know, you want to save you want to invest but let's also make some rules
that are
Money is supposed to be fun. It's not about cutting back on lattes. It's about living a
rich life.
Sam. Do you have those?
Yeah, I have those written down or
just kind of like intuited like, you know, I kind of live by these are have you like actually sat down and said these are
mine. Well, so, when I was 25, I made a list, maybe I was 22. I made a list. I said, here's how much money I want to have by the age of 30. Here's how much I want to spend each month. Here's what I want to purchase like the spending that I the budget that I made each month was based off of what I wanted to own and what I wanted to do. And so I had this
Had similar rules that written down where it was basically, anything health-related. I am book and books. I don't look at the. I don't look at the price. I just buy whatever I want. I did not have any rules towards charity. Although that's changing. I do I need to get into that. But yeah, I had like, I worked backwards. I had like a target number based off of one. I wanted to spend each month, and I wanted to be able to hit that Target or I wanted to be able to make that.
Just off of my gains like my passive income from Index Fund investing and I wanted to be able to withdraw, only, 3% of that per year in order to pay for my monthly expenses. And I made that all up when I was like, 22, 23, 24. I forget the exact number,
but by the way, when people say that I want to withdraw 4%, do they actually withdraw it. You actually like, Remy do you actually sell down, 4% of your, whatever, your index, funds are whatever to pay for your lifestyle or do is that just a theory?
Cool thing, like I can, I could fund this off, just the gains, you know, just a portion of the of the, of the annual gains.
Well, I don't use a drawdown. I'm not in the D accumulation phase, so I have an income but eventually one day. Yeah, and in fact, do people do that. Yeah, every retiree does that the accumulation is done by tens of millions of people they sell off a little bit every single year if they've got it and that's how they fund them. So that's why it's called a fixed income.
And there's, but there's other, there's there's other ways you could do it. So for example, I just invested into this real estate fund. What's the? It's a big. It's a big one called oak tree or something and then black rock or was it. Blackstone? What's the big, the big, the big, you know, the big guy? It's like the it's like the trillion-dollar real estate thing. Everyone has access to it. And anyway, it pays I think a six and a half to seven percent dividend quarterly and you can live off that.
If you put, you know, a fair bit of Yeah, Shawn's a good question. There are other ways to. So Dividends are one another thing that really wealthy investors will do is they'll simply take loans against their gas.
That's kind of what I was talking about, was like that for a minute cause you're not paying tax on the like, yeah, you sell your shit. Are you take a dividend? You're going to pay tax. So your 6% is not six percent, correct? If you, you know, if you live off your loans, you keep your assets compounding. That seems smarter to me.
The, the blown thing is the craziest thing that I've just
Recently learned about this it is it's taken me so long to grasp this because it goes against everything that I thought was true. So basically illegal it feels illegal. So basically when you get to like, I don't know what the number is there's some number where you can start borrowing money from Big Banks right now, I think what's the rate like what my rate is one point, one percent one percent. Yeah, it's crazy. Okay, and so the the bankers was like, yeah. Look like and I like built a widget so I could like look at it. So let's just I'm just going to use a bunch of
Numbers. So let's just say that you have ten million dollars in a Equity Fund. Okay, you could borrow. I believe if you have Index Fund up to 70% of that so you can borrow seven million dollars and there's the the way the math works and it's different for each person based off of the stocks that you own. But basically you can withdraw, let's say 30% in the 30% of your 7 million and the market would have to drop by 68 70 percent in order for you to even have to pay back anything. Otherwise, you can basically have
of that outstanding forever and it's only accruing interest at a 1% rate and you could use that money to live off of. You can use that money to invest in other stuff. It's astounding to me a my roommate. You have a smirk on your face. So am I getting this wrong? Well, I have a, I was bored with a smirk on my face. So let's just, I'm smiling inside but I just look like this. So you in general, you are right in general, you are right. It is almost unbelievable. The average investor does not have
The ability to do this, they have access to it. They don't have enough money for it, but I do want to point one thing.
A lot of these seemingly too good to be true. Things have sprung up and become popularized in the last 10 years. Is there anything else that might have been going on in the financial markets for the last decade? Maybe that would have enabled. These things to become popular such as record-breaking bull market and historical low interest rates. Yes. So we need to
put this in context
of History. Yeah, you can borrow it a 1.
Percent rate. But if go talk to your parents, ask them what their mortgage rate was when they bought a house in the. Yeah, but these are, but these rates are based. What's it called? The London? What's it called? The Libor for you, about Libor Stanley, but do I believe? I went and I think, they'll, I think Libor has only been around since the 50s, but since the 50s, I think the highest has ever been is three and a half percent.
I and that's interesting. I have to look at that. I'm not sure about that. Is it fixed or variable its variable? So that's why it's dangerous. Yes. That's my point Sam. Let's talk about the danger. So again, I don't know if it has to drop by 68%. The banks can call in their loan. Once it breaks a threshold. So all of this is amazing
until it's not
and so, you know, I don't mean to be that sort
of blood I hear or the
boring voice.
This is unfortunately, what sensible investors get thrust into when there's an insane bull market. You have guys like me coming on
say, hey, it's cool. You want to put five ten percent of your money and some alternative investment. Awesome. But remember, this doesn't always last
forever. I've seen it myself three times in my life. And I'm not even 40 years old. I've seen in the 2000 crash 2008 and you could say March twenty twenty that was temporary, but people are real tough until
Oh things go wrong. And suddenly you see people lose fortunes when I went to Omaha to see Warren Buffett at his conference. One of the things that he and Charlie Munger said was we set up
Berkshire so we can never run out of money
and to me that is way more inspirational than I eked out, an extra one point five percent return at a much higher risk rate. So I want everybody to know the game. They're playing. Do you want to get
10 or 14, percent compounded annualized, return rates, you can it's possible. You will take on a massive amount of risk. And when you think about
it, it reminds me of what my trainer said, right? We were starting to lift heavier and heavier,
and I was like, oh, so like how have you should we go? When he goes, you know at a certain point you really want to ask yourself. Do you need to put on that extra plate? If you're competing maybe, but there's a risk that you're suddenly taking and we need to not just think about
Turns 14% me think
about what can go wrong as well. And for a lot of people, they have never done what you did Sam. They never sat out and plot it out how much money. They don't even know what they want to do with their money. And so I want people to think a little more deeply. This is one of the most important things in your life. And for most people, you will find that if they get a nice simple, eight percent annualized return rate over time and they continue contributing. They
actually have more money than they know what to do
with it. Takes time. Yes, but I want to challenge
people to really think about this
sensible. Yeah, I think one of the good things about what you do, but also one of the disconnect between what we talk about is your message to help a mass number of people as you have is a most people message. What I call my most real method, you're trying to find the advice that you can give that book. Most people took it what actually helped them out and they may not have an outlier in either direction negative or extreme positive.
And so you have most people advise our podcast, our broadcast is the exact opposite, our target audience of for people who are trying to escape. Most people results. They are trying to have a sort of out. How do you have? A disproportionately outsized, positive result, but it's because you built us because
I think it's a good clarification. I will say, I think
you earn the
right to have an outlier result. It is you hear stories about. Oh, let's do this. Start up and we'll make ten million dollars or fifty mil. That's great.
Wait, those are extremely rare and instead my Approach is layering.
So as I talk about it, I will teach great. Just not just about personal finance about a rich life, start off, get your Diversified portfolio. Never worry about that again, right? I spend less than one hour per month on my finances.
Then you want more start a business right? Making huge profitable business or if you want to do a venture back business great, but you earned the right to be an outlier. It is extremely rare and very unlikely that someone is
Oh, I have this cool idea for a dog
business. I'm going to make 50 million bucks. That's my personal
philosophy. Right? And I think the, the bodybuilder analogy you said earlier is correct, but it's actually a different point than what you're making, which is most people don't want to be bodybuilders. Bodybuilder diet is actually chicken rice and HGH, right? And and there's going to be a lot of a lot of downsides to the amount of, you know, stuff. They're shooting into their body, but they need to do it because that is that game, that is specific game. Same thing with venture-backed startups. Venture-backed startups is not just even business. It's the
Topics of business, right? It's basically saying billion dollars a bus. That's what you're signing up for. That's why it's really easy to, to shit on it care or call out fairly that. Hey, don't get caught up in the hype. There are many other ways to win that are often like easier, pleasurable and whatnot. But like, that is the Olympics. And that's why these get celebrated, right? We celebrate Michael Phelps, even though it took immense sacrifice for him to go earn those eight medals like, you know, he swam in six hours a day and eight twenty thousand calories a day.
Because that's what it took to compete at that level. And so, I think it's important people to figure out. What is the, what is the advice they want to take? Like, I always say this thing, I say I don't most people don't have good results, which is basically, you know, most marriages end in divorce. Most people are overweight most, if you just follow what most people do, you will get the results. That most people are getting right now, which is not very not really lined up what people want which is to be, you know, fit happy and successful. And and so you have to kind of figure that out.
And I would say we're probably pretty line on that. I think what you the what you offer is a path that will work for almost anybody. And what we sometimes talk about is a path that won't work for most people but for the few people who it will work for, it'll work in a big way and so it's like to kind of different two different ends of the same thing.
Yeah. I think that's an interesting approach, a different and interesting distinction to make between the two approaches. And what do you think you've been in both worlds?
Yeah, I so I kind of do this thing where I put I like to have I like to have I don't even know what I call it. But basically if everything goes to shit, I'm okay. So I like to have this base of security this this this Fortress of fuck you. And I like to have that and then anything above that I go incredibly balls-to-the-wall. Totally risky with
We're the same. I have what I call the jackpot of stability,
right? Where I, where I work or sorry, where I
live, the sort of basic fundamentals, Health relationships. That's all dialed in its relatively conservative, but then, it allows me to be risk-seeking on certain things. Like, oh, let me try this random podcast with no business model whatsoever, or let me try this experimental
program, etc. Etc. So I like that, but
again,
We need to know who we're what game we're playing at who we are. Right? All things. You know, what is Mike Tyson. Say Everybody's Got A Plan until they get punched in the face. Everyone's an investment champ until the market goes down. And in order to see evidence of this. All you need to do is go to any investment Forum including fat fire lean fire any fire, even the Bola heads form and cycle, back to what happened in 2008 cycle back to what happened in March, 20, 20, and you will or my favorite is go to the crypto subreddits, and you'll see.
People all the bravado
Fades away and they go. Oh my God. I just lost my kids college fund.
You do not want to be in that position ever. On the other hand. You can make a lot of money if you have a sensible investment or even a risk seeking investment. So, but I
used to do, you only
perpendicular
No none. Wow, I think what you and I slightly different are go different paths for me is why don't know if it's entirely true. But basically I see I have I've got so many friends that, like, if I told you what they do, well, you're in the world. So, you know, but if I told my parents, what they do, they be like, this is fucking nuts. And, and and they would be like, what are you talking about? Like, Shawn is like that, a lot of mean, Sean's friends. The guy Sean used to work for Michael Birch was like that. Like,
You are fucking crazy. This is nutty. This is not going to work. I have so many friends who they have made it work. And I and I understand that in order to have outsides results. You have to do some wacky ass shit sometimes. And I accept that you have to, you have to be weird the and I accept also that I'm not like
that. The other thing I'll point out is it is not always true that to get more reward. You take more risk. There are moments in time and wise good investor, eventually identifies these
And it takes time to develop this judgment. There are times where you can take low risk events that have disproportionate rewards and they're not often and it's easy to talk yourself into thinking that everything is like that. But but, you know, sometimes there's this myth that. So if you want rewards, you have to take massive proportional risk, and it's not always proportional and and those are actually the best opportunities. Those are the those are the ones that you should be like, pouncing on and maybe to others. It looks like you're doing something crazy. But if you have accurately assess it, you may
And that it was actually not as high risk, but still Hyrule
the way you do stuff. Sean, I think is just like the way I view is like, I think it's crazy and but I accept that your returns might be massive. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. I mean, everybody's playing their game, right? But you but to assess it you need to assess it over the correct period of time. And with the correct goals in mind Sam, you might be like, you know, let's fast forward, maybe two kids.
It's not going to do that. Sean. Might say, I don't care, or I put some money in the bank, Etc. There's a whole bunch of ways to evaluate, but I appreciate that. Sean. They're definitely different perspectives. And I appreciate hearing. You know, what game you're optimizing for. I think that that makes sense.
Yeah. And what I would be encouraging would do, is I would actually start with your stuff and learn learn the fundamentals. It's like, okay. Yeah. I sometimes do some Street bullshit. But like, you know, you can only do that. Once you first understand the fundamentals, you
Them for a while and then you start to identify. Okay. Where do I want to see if I'm am going to Stray From the Path, right? If I am going to not play by the book. I better have a really strong reason to do. So. I rather have some like some real conviction, a real knowledge or real point of view that I'm willing. And I'm actually understand what the heck I'm doing. I understand that the risks that I am taking with, we take those risks, right? So you want to start, they're not start with. I saw this dude on Reddit, did this thing? And so I'm going to go YOLO.
Oh, that's same trade. And I don't even know what the hell I'm actually doing.
Yeah, whatever you see on Reddit. You should immediately close that window and never listen to any Financial advice on that fucking side. Listen, you need to be able to answer some basic questions. If you want to do, all this risk seeking stuff, you know, what is diversification mean? What is the typical asset allocation for a 40 year old? And why, where does this eight percent return per your come from? Where's what is that? What's the rule of 72? When is my debt going to be paid off? What do I actually want to do with?
Money. If I had 500 cake, a million 5 million. If you can't answer these questions, you are not ready to begin taking all these astronomical risk. Again, none of this matters because none of these people are listening to me right now. They shut this off two hours ago. They're like,
fuck this old guy.
Rossio. I'm a risk-taker. He saw it. So whole know you will time will tell, but I would strongly encourage you to be able to answer some of these basic questions
before you choose your own path. And
many times, what I find is,
As people start off their really gung-ho, they get into the store. Like, oh shit. This is actually really easy. I spend less than an hour a month. My money is growing like crazy. I don't have to worry about it ever again. We're going to be multimillionaires. Let me go live my life. That's way, more exciting than optimizing, some
bullshit point five percent
return Sam, you know, I've been telling you about this too. That's why I told you stop talking about your 3% draw Downs. Like that's all great when you're 21, and it's cool. Now, let's talk about where you going on vacation. That is way.
You told me where to go. I booked my tickets. I had my European trip planned. It got cancelled because of Delta, but I do what you say by the way,
for me to hear your side of the story on the engagement ring. You gave Sam some advice on the engagement ring. What?
What? Okay, so, you know, Sam Sam is a very good listener, Sam. I have to say, I appreciate you. You, you ask for advice which is rare and you listen. So I'm always like, yeah, let's talk. So he comes. He's telling you about, you know, he's going to propose and you know,
No, I got married three years ago. So I went through the
whole process and
I got very deep into the whole wedding thing and all that stuff. And people like, oh was, was your wife like a bridezilla? I was like, if anyone was going to be a zilla, it was going to be this groomzilla right here. Because I knew like, all and I was loving. So just a couple context. Part of my philosophy is safe for the big things before you need them because you know, that they're going to happen. Most
Are going to be married. So I started saving putting money away for my wedding and my honeymoon like in my 20s. Before I even met my wife. Why? Because I knew it was gonna happen one day and I wanted to have an
awesome wedding. Awesome ring. Awesome
honeymoon. Again, my own Philosophy for you, important things in life. I don't have to look at the price. Okay. So a lot of people like, that's crazy. Why would I start saving when I'm not even in a relationship? That's weird. I go what's weird is to
To your wedding planning and not have enough money, or, you know, basically, just have to make all these short-term decisions. Some people, go into debt for their wedding. I don't believe I want you to have an amazing extravagant wedding if that's what you want,
or a beautiful honeymoon or whatever. I
want you to start planning early. So Sam comes to me, he goes. Hey, I'm thinking of getting this thing. I said. Oh cool. You know, how are you thinking about it? And he tells me. Yeah, I have this
like budget in mind. So my brush, it wasn't.
Yeah. Thank you. I was like you.
I was like, no, you're going to spend more than that. Now, why did I say that to him? Because I know how much money he has. Okay, and I know that
there are certain benchmarks and certain numbers
that if he had, if he was a school teacher, and he told me five grand, I would say, oh my God,
that's amazing. Like, she's
gonna love it. And then I went a little deeper because Sam got very quiet. Sam knew he was being cheap, but he didn't know how to articulate. He had a lot of emotions running through his body. I said, Sam,
let me ask you a couple questions.
It's because he
started off with this utilitarian, Silicon Valley, you know, I don't believe in diamonds. It's so fake. What? Why don't we just get this bullshit and I'm like, okay, Sam. Let me ask you a
question. Does your fiancé care about Rings? No, no. No, she's not that kind of person. I said, oh, okay. Okay. Hey out of
curiosity. Does she have a Pinterest board? He goes? Oh, yeah, I go. What's on that? Pinterest board relating to Rings? Oh, she's been like tracking rings for like the last
Years and go sit down. Have you talked to her about this? He goes? Well, she did mention that she kind of wants like and then he breaks down like the entire thing of what kind of ring she wants micro SIM.
You can afford it. This is important to her. This
is not about you and your dumb Vision as a 21 year old utilitarian. It's about what your future wife for the rest of your life wants. This one thing and Stan was awesome. Sam, you listened, you were like, oh, like he never thought about it like that because it's all Tech grows to Cops.
Someone who actually, you know, this is like let's talk about softer side.
And it was awesome. See him take it from there. What happened? When you went to get that ring? Yeah. I'll say yeah, I uh, I was going to spend five grand. I was like I can't do this anymore and I ended up I think I spent a lot. Twenty-eight twenty-nine thirty thousand dollars, bought it for about the money Sam will. It's not about the money. What why don't you do? What the details of the story? People want to know, right? They were the detail, the story. I'm giving the details of story and looking back the money.
It didn't matter at all and she was incredibly happy and I felt so proud, dude, my man, so I'm happy for you. I'm happy for your wife. I, I actually am. Glad you mentioned the numbers and you guys are awesome. On this podcast. You're always mentioning numbers, which is very rare. So, I love it. But what I want to emphasize is that at a certain point is actually not about the dollar value and people particularly
entrepreneurs and particularly Tech, guys are obsessed with monetization.
They're always talking about numbers. Yeah, you should know your numbers. Yes, but they're a rich life is so much more than your numbers. Just think about this.
When you went home to visit your
parents and you hug your
mom or your dad. Did you think about, oh, how much is this costing me in my hourly rate? Oh, how much did my mom pay for that chicken? Because we can get it cheaper at Costco know the most important thing in life are actually not quantifiable. So, what I
want to emphasize is that
We are. We're taught
from day one, and I started a Silicon Valley tech company. We raise
money. I've done all this stuff. So I know what I'm talking about. We are
taught that quantifying is the most important thing to do. What are your metrics? What's your attribution? What's your conversion
rate? That's all we talked about. And yet in the most important things in life, sitting outside on a
picnic, with our kids going being able to extend your lunch on a weekday with your friend from college who just happens to be in town.
Money is irrelevant. The number is
irrelevant. Being able to do it is Rich and so for Sam, Sam, I fucking love
it. You
did it the money part, irrelevant. You have the money, you could do it more important was
recognizing my wife wants this. It's important to her and I'm going to rewrite my old story
from when I was 21 into a new man and a new partner, and I'm going to use some of my resources to do it. And that that is
Active and amazing.
Well, thank you, and, and we'll have to end with that. Beautiful, that beautiful little monologue. There. You're the man. What's the name of the podcast? Again? I will teach you to be rich with Remis safety and I'm looking it up now. We're going to link to it. Thanks to. This is awesome. But you have a link that you go to to, right, you can go to IW t.com podcast or it's on Apple or Spotify.
Thanks, man. This is awesome. What do you say
Shawn? Yeah. Thanks for coming on, Sam. I think you and Sarah, should go on his pot and be one of the couple's,
that's why I'm down. I'm down. You guys didn't even easy. That would make me uncomfortable, but I would do it.
I feel like I could rule the world. I know, I could be what I
want to
travel. Never looking back.
