Okay, I just got back from New York. I was there for a week. It was probably the most fun business trip of my life. And I wrote down five bullet points I have here that I think we could dive into. And the first one I want to dive into is...
When was the last time you've been to New York City?
Oh, dude, it's been like 10 years since I've been to New York. Like, I just don't really go.
Well, you had a great time. That's good. Whenever people come here, I feel like I want to be a steward where I want to be like, "Look, it's not that crazy to live here." And it could be awesome and it's exciting. And I'm not like one of these guys that's like I'm not a Knicks fan. I'm not like a New Yorker. I just live here. So, I don't want to like pretend that I'm like a, you know, that type of person. But I felt proud to show you around.
Yeah. And you did. Also, I think a lot of people had that in New York because it would be like, "Hey, we're going to hang out with this person." And it would be half hangout, half city tour because there's a lot going on and, b, I think there's a lot of pride in knowing the city and being a part of the city and bringing friends from other places to the city, which I think is pretty cool. So, one is trust, trust as a service. The next one is marketing. Third one, proximity. Fourth is city brands. The fifth is what is it really? Okay. So those are my five key phrases. Which one you want to start with?
Yeah, we use that word all the time.
Proximity. So, what do I mean by proximity? Proximity is being closely together. So I want to read you some notes from one of my hangouts. So I hung out with the comedian Hasan Minhaj, and he's been on the pod before. He listens to the pod sometimes. We've gotten to become friends from afar and I got to go to his office and hang out and meet his team and see how they work. I'm a big fan of watching how different people work, you know, go to their office, that sort of thing. He saw that me and Ben were together and now Ben lives in Austin. I live in San Francisco Bay Area. So, we're not together. We don't work together in the same office, but him and his team do in New York City. He commutes in from like wherever, Connecticut or something like that to the city to work.
Is his main job his podcast?
I don't know if that... I don't think he would say that. I think his main job is just being a creative, of which a podcast takes up maybe half of his pie chart and the other half is movies and his tours and things like that. So like Netflix specials, those sorts of things. So he said this thing, he goes, "As soon as you walk into a creative office and there's the hot secretary and the all glass windows and the fancy matcha in the kitchen," he goes, "You've already lost the plot. You've already forgotten what it's all about." And so he was like, it's not about all that stuff. It's not about the glass and the hot secretary and the matcha. It's not about any of that. It's about this. And he hands me the yellow legal pad where he's handwriting his script. And he's like, it's about these sticky notes on this wall and it's not even enough space. But we got to figure it out. Act one, act two, act three. This is the work. And he goes, "I wanted it to be tight. I wanted us to have close proximity." He's like, "It's a covalent bond." And he was talking about the power of proximity. He goes, "You know what? I even take it further." He goes, "Whenever anyone's in New York, like you're in New York right now, come to the office. Come hang. Come be a part of this. You need to work for a day here. Come work right here. Oh, you're shooting this movie. You need a place for hair and makeup, do it right over there." He goes, "Because it's when you're here and we're just doing things, you know, we get to sort of bump into each other." Like, you know, our atoms get to bump into each other. Good things happen. I pick up a little bit of what's going on in your world. I figure out a way to help you. You figure out a way to help me. And that proximity, I realize, is something I really miss. You get it a lot in San Francisco in the tech world. New York, I would say, is even a level above that because it's even denser. Everything feels very high proximity. Like we did a different thing every hour, I would say. Like we were hanging with somebody, you know, for probably 90 minutes at a time and then we would go do something else. There was no more than like 10 minutes of transit time between anything that we were doing. It was insane. We were just hopping from one thing to the next. And so I thought his note on proximity, proximity with your co-workers, proximity with peers who you think are interesting and remembering like what is it all about? Is it about the space and the gloss and the remote work and all that stuff? Or is it about the sticky notes and the close proximity and smelling each other's, you know, deodorant?
Yes. But also like the time that you were here, you were going, going, going. You got nothing done. You know, I think that you were educated, you were inspired, which is important. And also, if I'm Hasan and I'm writing all the time, which I kind of am for this podcast, like 2 hours before this podcast, I need quiet time. No one talked to me. I'm in a room by myself. So, he actually gave me some good inspiration for that too. So he goes, I'm here, you know, whatever, a couple days a week and we stack it because I met up with him. I think I went to his office like 10, right? Yeah.
Yeah. I was like, I was with you at dinner and then I was like, hey, we got to go meet someone. They're like, what? And we went, I think I got to his office at 9:30 or 10.
Was it people were there?
Him and his whole team was there. I thought he was just maybe hanging out for us. No, he was in a meeting. We waited for him for, you know, 20, 30 minutes and then we hung out for another 2, 3 hours, then he took the train home. It was insane. He goes, "No, no, these days I stack them. I tell my person like, you know, top to bottom meetings, meetings." Like that's where we're talking. He goes, "Because then the next 3 days it's quiet time." And he said he, I think what he did was he like, he's like, I rented an office space above Dunkin' Donuts, like the smallest little writer's room you can imagine. He's like, and I go there when it's writing time. The other thing he said was he goes, we were talking about like maker time versus manager time, like the Paul Graham essay.
And you got to know which schedule you're supposed to be on. Are you on a manager schedule where every 30 minutes back to back to back you're, you know, you're context switching, you're meeting a different group, you're making decisions, or are you on maker time where you need long blocks of uninterrupted creative time that might feel unproductive for an hour of it, but you needed that time to kind of get in the groove and then you get flow state and you start working. And he goes, I told my team like I need to be above this Dunkin', I need to be in that room alone, no Wi-Fi, no nothing, just me and the legal pad. I don't even take a laptop because I could produce pages. When I produce pages, it's like a magic trick. Money rains from the sky when I do that. So, you got to give me time to generate these pages. And I don't know. I just took a lot of inspiration. When you meet someone who's a creative and an artist at the top of their field, it feels very different than just meeting an entrepreneur. You know, there's a couple different like inspiring versions of this. Like if you walk into like, you know, Elon's factory where he's building things, right? Or when we did the MrBeast tour. He's like, "This is the largest sound stage in America. That guy's trapped in that room for a year and we're building this set over here."
Now, an athlete, or when you talk to an athlete and you see their schedule and you see how they think about all these little things, how seriously they take their body, their recovery, forget the workout, the recovery is impressive. And so there's these little pockets of like world-class people when they make you realize like, oh, that's what it looks like when you dial up to 12. Whether it's athleticism, whether it's building, or in this case, it's about the creative process, creative work. And so that was pretty inspiring. So you have, I went to your office too and got to see, you know, you built basically a place for proximity. In what ways do people underrate it? In what ways does it unlock you? Give me something on it.
Yeah. So I have a door right over here and it has a recording light on there so people know not to come in here right now and I keep that on a lot even when I'm not recording. But then every probably 40 minutes, I quit what I'm doing and I just walk around and people get mad at me at my office because they're like, "You're just staring at me." And I'm like, "No, I just want to like pop in on different conversations and listen." And I do that all the time. I think that there's a phrase, what's it called? Like managing by wandering, where it's like, you know, like the CEO would like walk around like the factory floor with zero intention other than just to learn and see what's going on and occasionally find a problem and help solve it. And so I do that all the time and I love it. It makes me happy. And so there's a joke where you can kind of see it. We have like frosted glass now because they say that I would just like stare at people in the office. But like I sometimes...
Yeah. Sometimes I'll just like pop into meetings and I'll just sit and I won't say a word and then I'll walk out. And I love doing that because it helps me learn what's going on and how people feel and what people's opinions are. And I frankly love doing that. But I do require like lots and lots of quiet time.
Yeah. It's like a barbell strategy, right? You want to have extreme high contact, ground truth, close proximity, serendipitous interactions. And then you want to have structured, isolated thinking time, working time that's like highly secluded. And that seems to be the optimal is to be able to have the ability to go far in either direction and not just stay in the kind of like weak middle where it's like a lot of Zoom calls and, you know, some Slack messages and a bunch of light touches but never really going deep on anything with any people or any work.
And I also hired a cheap designer. My office isn't particularly fancy but I wanted it to look aesthetically pleasing because I wanted to be here. So I took a little bit of a different route than him. What are the other few?
All right. So, I had...
All right. So, this episode is all about excellence. A while back, I shared my personal framework for building excellence in my own life. And the team at HubSpot turned it into a 30-day operating system that you can check out right now. It breaks down the systems that have taken me 10 years to figure out and shows exactly how I use them day-to-day. These are systems that genuinely changed my life. So, if you want to build a good life, scan the QR code or click the link in the description. Now, let's get back to the show.
I had marketing, I had trust, I had city brands, and I had what does it really mean?
What does it really mean?
Okay, so this has been a long recurring theme. What I mean by that is everybody's typically looking for some new insight. I actually value a repetitive insight because it means there's more to learn. It means there's probably higher signal. Like, if the same lesson comes up three or four times in a two-year span, I add more weight to it. Whereas, I think most people... Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. I think that's how most people treat things that they've heard before. So, I think on this podcast I mentioned a couple years ago, I was at an event with the guys from Tiny, Andrew, and his business partner Chris, who's much less well-known, and I was sitting at a dinner and this guy was talking about a business he had failed in. And he said the thing that every... oh, you know, but I learned so much.
And then Chris goes, "What did you learn?" And then the guy's like, "Oh, so much." He goes, "So, what's the main thing you learned?" And then the guy was like, "Uh..." He was fumbling and stumbling. He couldn't really figure out what to say. And then he said something that was like, I don't remember the specific example now, but it would be like if I had started a restaurant and my restaurant failed and then I was like, I learned you shouldn't start a business when it's rainy season. It's like, that's what you learned? It's like that you didn't even learn the right lesson. And Chris basically pointed this out. He goes, I've talked to so many entrepreneurs. He goes, "Very rarely do I feel like somebody actually learned the right lesson from the thing." And this kept coming up. You know, this has come up for me many times. And so, what does it really mean? I think it is a very important question. I don't think people sit with enough. And so, let me give you maybe a couple of examples. So, we met up with Gary Vee's right-hand man, Nick Dio, who we've talked about on this podcast for a very unique job. So, Gary Vee, big public persona, but he can't be everywhere at once. So, he's got this guy Nick, who's his right-hand man, and he's basically an extension of Gary. Nick will host dinners for people in the Gary orbit who he thinks are cool, and they just pay the bill. They bring cool people together. Gary's not even there. He met up with us. He's like, "I just got off a flight from the Cannes Film Festival." And he was there all week in Paris and then was like, "Oh, you guys got to come next year." And...
Did Gary tell everyone that he went to Cannes?
Oh, I think Gary was there in this case, but it's like they needed more manpower. And so we were talking to him and I was like, I think the simple explanation that everybody... you know, I kind of asked him, I was like, what does everybody think you do? He's like, "Oh, everybody thinks I basically just go party and like, you know, drink and wine and dine with like, you know, Gary." I said, "So what do you really do?" And it's very interesting when you ask somebody, "What do you really do?" And he goes, "That's a..." He goes, "You know, most people don't really ask that, but you know, I think you're genuinely asking, so I'll tell you." And he gave me two stories that I thought were pretty dope. The first thing he said was, he goes, "Every room that you're ever in socially, there's some slack. The room is slacking in some way." So he goes, there's a social slack that nobody can really put their finger on, but maybe the music's too loud. Maybe it's a little too cold. Maybe that guy doesn't know who to talk to. Maybe there's no drinks and we all need some drinks. Maybe there's two groups. They don't really know each other. They haven't bridged the gap yet in this room. Maybe they will in 3 hours, but can I do it in the first 30 minutes because it'll change the way the night goes. He goes, "There's always this social slack in the room." And what I'm really great at is identifying that social slack and picking it up, finding a way to like stir the drink so that it tastes better in every room that I'm in. And people don't really even necessarily notice what I did, but the goal is to elevate the experience for everybody in the room,
but they benefit from it in some capacity. And what's an example?
Yeah, exactly. So, he gave a couple of examples. So, I don't know if you saw this when the Knicks won the championship, there was a viral clip of Jalen Brunson toasting in this small restaurant and he basically was like, "FWI..." and then somebody had recorded it, he didn't mean for it, but somebody had recorded it and it leaked and it went mega viral. Well, that was happening. The Knicks after their championship game, they went to Gary's social club, his place, Flyfish, and they were in the room we were in where they have this like omakase sushi room. And he's like, "Dude, dude, that was the chair right there. Look, watch the video. This is the exact spot." And so he's like, you know, through the relationship building I had done, when they decided, hey, we want a cool place to celebrate, they decided to come here. That's obviously very good for the brand of like if that's where the Knicks celebrate their first championship in 50 years, it's obviously going to be very good for our restaurant chain or for our concept, right?
And it's good for our members club. So that's like one example. He gave another example of like being very intentional. So he's like, if Gary starts to get into streetwear and new fashion, then he's like, then I basically go and I try to meet the 150 most interesting people doing interesting things in streetwear and fashion. I go into them with no agenda. I'm just trying to meet them, understand them, help them, do whatever I can with them, but now they're part of our network. And then sure enough, like one of them is raising money. We invested in, and boom, it's this like, you know, this hit product that comes out of it. He's like, we didn't know going in that would be the win. Who knows? It could have been something else completely, but we don't have to know where. We know we have like five touch points. It's like maybe they're going to come on the podcast, maybe it's going to be an investment, maybe they're going to be friends, maybe they're really insightful, they'll teach us something, maybe it's that, who knows what it is. I don't need to know what it is up front. I'll go in with no agenda and pick it up on the other side.
All right, everyone. I'm going to make this quick. So, if you're an OG listener of My First Million, then you might remember a guy named Ben Wilson. Ben Wilson was Sean and I's producer early on in the podcast. He also has his own amazing podcast called How to Take Over the World, which we love. And he's been battling cancer and he just announced it. We've known about it for a little while, but he just announced it on Twitter the other day. And the reason I'm talking about it here is because when he made his announcement, he did say that he had a GoFundMe that you should check out. You should look him up on Twitter and he linked to that. But he also explained that he had stage 4 high-grade neuroendocrine carcinoma, which I don't know too much about that, but he said it's in his brains, his bones, his lungs, and his liver. And he's trying to get hold of a very specific and uncommon type of drug called tarlatamab. I'm sorry I can't pronounce these things, but it's a very specific thing. And so if you have ever gotten value from My First Million and also if you are in this world where we're just trying to raise awareness for what Ben's going through, then you can look up Ben Wilson on Twitter. He has a 16-minute video that's quite inspiring where he addresses his diagnosis and what he's facing and I find it actually quite inspiring. He's got this amazing line where he's like, you should live like you're living, not live like you're dying. And so you should watch that, but also if you do want to support him via his GoFundMe and also he leaves his contact information. So if you're in this world where you can help him in any way, his information is all there. So look him up, Ben Wilson on Twitter. We'll also link to this in Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube.
Gary's easy to make fun of because, first of all, I love him. I think he's awesome. I'm not making fun of him, but people give him a hard time online because he's like loud and he's been doing content and he says silly fun stuff. And this is another thing where people would maybe mock like, oh, he just hires this guy to go party for him. And so I want to acknowledge that, but I think this is awesome. I think that Gary has done so many things that have been a bit ahead and he makes a ton of predictions and he's not right all the time, but like the fact that he's been doing social media like he's been doing for forever and he was totally right. And then just like having this, I'm like, "Huh, this sounds like ridiculous and awesome and it could be very beneficial."
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I think it too. I told him, I said this is the equivalent of if you ever hear that stat that LeBron James spends a million dollars a year on his body and it's like, whoa, that's a lot. Like, you know, is he crazy? It's like, "No, are you crazy? He's LeBron James. His body is the product. Of course he's going to... What an incredible return on investment. He's now playing in year 23 in the NBA." Like, I think that million just unlocked another $40 million contract twice. Like, are you joking? That's obvious. So, what is the equivalent in your niche? It's a very good... It's one of my favorite like kind of thought experiment questions, like what would be the equivalent of spending a million dollars a year on your body for whatever you do? I think I've told this story about like my executive coach. He spent a million dollars of his own money learning from the best coaches of all the different modalities. Like if somebody's really good in like whatever, somatic therapy, I don't even know what that is, but like whatever. He'll go find the best in the world, he'll approach them and be like, "Hey, is there any way I could get kind of two weeks of immersive one-on-one training in this? Name your price." And he did that with like, you know, 15 of the best coaches in the world over a period of two years and like spent a million dollars. And because of it, he's like, a, what a cool experience, and b, like I made myself more valuable as a coach because I now like I'm well-versed in different domains and I started with a deep dive with the world's best, then I continued for years after that of my own self-practice.
All right, go to number four. I think it was New York brands.
Yeah, city brands. So I think it's really interesting how there's only a few cities in the world that have brands. Like New York has a brand. New York has a look. It has a feel. It has a sound. It has an attitude. It has an aura. It has a reason to go there. It has, like any great brand, it has loyalists who swear by it. It has haters. Like I grew up in Houston. Houston has no brand. Got a lot of people. Got a good economy. What's the brand? Like it's like, yeah, gas town kind of. What does that even mean?
It's just that it's kind of new. Like oil and gas is like a relatively new thing. It's only, I mean it's many decades, but yeah, it's kind of new. Like Detroit, you know, has one. I think New York has one, but yeah, a lot of places don't.
Las Vegas has a brand, San Francisco, LA have a brand, New York has. There's not that many places that have brands. And I think there's a... it's kind of a miss, you know, like I think if you're actually like trying to make a city attractive, you want to have a brand and be intentional about it. I actually think I told this to an NBA team owner too. Very few NBA teams have a brand. And when you're not a brand, you're a commodity. You're basically saying coming and playing here is just the same as coming and playing somewhere else. Now, there's a couple teams that have a brand maybe because the city they're in, right? Miami, LA, New York. The brand is really the city, not the team. But there's been a couple examples of teams that have brands.
I'm not a basketball guy at all, but like I know that like was it the 76ers or the Pistons? Who was the tough guy? The...
The Bad Boy Pistons is an example of a brand. They gave it a name. It was cool. They made merch. They brought players in that reinforced the brand. It became a thing. It embodied. It stood for something. Some people hated it. They thought they were dirty. Other people loved it. They said they were tough.
Or the Fab Five in Michigan. I think...
Fab Five was an... Exactly. Fab Five was another one. They wore all black socks, baggy shorts, right? What does a brand do? It has a look, an aesthetic, an icon, a visual, a brand, a logo. And so the same thing right now, the only team I would say that truly has like kind of a brand is the Miami Heat. They have this thing, every reference is called Heat Culture. And it's like, oh, well, there's Heat Culture and Heat Culture is basically like, they don't... it's kind of like Navy SEALs, like when you come, you get weighed in every day with your weight and your body fat and you have to be under a certain body fat or you don't get to play. And like a lot of other NBA teams cater to their stars and, you know, they don't really, they don't want to like rock the boat. Whereas Miami is like, no, this is Heat Culture. This is part of Heat Culture. If you came here, you should know what Heat Culture is all about. And if you think about the best companies, the best cities, they have a culture, they have a brand. And then the people who get there's people who get attracted to that who come there for that. And when even people who didn't come there for that, they will change their behavior to fit the culture, to fit the brand. If I know that this place only rewards and respects people who are bold, people who take action, people who do XYZ, then I'm going to bring that version of myself to the party.
That's pretty cool. That's a good observation. I think UConn had that because I saw the 60 Minutes guy or the coach on 60 Minutes and he was like, people are like, well, winning is everything. He's like, in our culture, winning is everything. Like we're here to win. And then I think SF has one.
SF has one. I would say it's a little less intentional and it's not really... it's like there's the tech scene in SF and then there's SF. SF kind of hates the tech scene.
Despite it being the driver of growth in SF, and then there's the tech scene which has its own little brand. But it just kind of like stood out to me that like I think it's hard because there's nobody who like... it's not a company, right? There's not like a...
Yeah. But the mayor has four years to kind of like somewhat...
Yeah. And but like, you know, who's the mayor and are they the kind of world-class leader that can build this and then can you kind of hand it off from one person to the next. It's a really tough thing, but man, when you have it, what an incredible competitive advantage because right, like you recruit, you move there, and so did our other friends that we all visited. They all moved there. It's not like they were born and raised in Manhattan. You know, it attracts talent and when you attract talent, you attract certain type of people. You attract earning power. You attract all kinds of things and then, you know, there's a flywheel that spins.
What about the number one thing? What was number one?
Trust. Okay. So, one person I bumped into at Gary Vee's Club or whatever was this Instagram creator called Jack's Dining Club. Do you know this guy, Jack?
He's the hottest thing going.
What was his exact name? It's a Diner Club.
He's like, I follow him. I think he's 22 or 23 and he has tens of millions of followers.
All right. Jack's Dining Room is the name. And then he's got this brand called Yes Chef. So, met this guy Jack and, you know, Ben was like, "Oh, dude, I love your videos." Everyone's like, "I love your videos." I was out of the loop. I didn't really know any of his content, but I started... I grabbed Ben's phone. I started watching some of his content. Pretty fascinating what this guy's doing. The core video hook of what he's doing is we're here at the best sandwich place in Paris. This is a... And then he's like, he's got a sandwich. He's like, this is a cheese and mayo dijon sandwich whatever. And he's like, the croissant. And he's like, "Dude, this thing is a..." And he takes a bite and he loves it. And this guy's brand is pretty incredible. Like, he has these things he does now. Have you ever seen his like reserve club?
No, but he has a whole suite of brands called Yes Chef.
Go to his Instagram and watch one of the reserve videos if you can see it. Basically, it's these like you pay like a thousand or more than a thousand, like you say thousands of dollars to go as a group of like let's say 10 on like an unreal culinary experience. Like we get on a private jet, we fly to this place. On the jet, there's the best sushi chef is making, you know, omakase on the plane. Then we land, we get the champagne. It's just like some overly indulgent like food,
like a dinner on the sand in a fancy beach.
Yeah. But like look who's there. It's like Machine Gun Kelly, Leonardo DiCaprio. These are like fans of his content. They're like, "I've seen your videos. I actually tried that restaurant because I saw that you said they had the best chicken sandwich in LA. I drove an hour to go get there." And he's like, "Wow, that's incredible." Leonardo DiCaprio, thank you for saying that, dude. And then it says like if you go to his Instagram, it goes to Yes Chef Guides, Yes Chef Festival, Yes Chef Reserve, Yes Chef Supply, Yes Chef Run Club, Yes Chef Group. He has a whole like thing around this whole ecosystem going.
All right. So, what I thought was really interesting about this was just the idea of trust. So, when we were in New York, there was these... every place we went to was like, "This is the hottest steakhouse in New York, the hottest sushi." I was like, "Bro, you got to stop saying that. These can't all be the hottest restaurant. How many hottest restaurants in New York are there?" It's this kind of word of mouth thing. And one thing I thought about was like, man, there's brand if you think about just the general idea of if I really wanted to have great food, who do I trust to tell me where the great food is in any city?
Just like a... Yeah, I don't know. A smart friend.
Well, smart friend, but that smart friend has to be like well-traveled, well-versed, like, you know, and not everybody has this guy's job, Jack. He's basically your boy who knows the spot in every city. And I thought, man, he's kind of sitting on a gold mine of trust. I think trust is going to be the thing that is in lowest supply over the next 10 years. Like, dude, every video I see on Instagram, I'm like, is this fake? You know, whenever I see like an ad, I'm like, okay, that's an ad. And then I see a normal funny video, I'm like, that might have been a deep fake. Yesterday I saw this insane thing where you can create like a UGC character. So, it says a new era of influencing, right? So, like check this out. You see this girl? Okay. So, it's a pretty... they're all pretty like Instagram, hyper-realistic. I don't know if you can see the detail, but like hyper-realistic looking person, right? This is an AI-generated person. But then it's like we can keep the character exactly the same. So, the face, the eyes, the jewelry, the style, the hair, and so you have one character and it says one character, endless content. So, like this is like catfish heaven, right? Like I'm going to be able to make this character, then I'm going to be able to put her in every scene. She can be the face of my brand. She could just be an influencer on her own. She could do videos. She could do anything. And you're just going to be able to create a hyper-realistic looking person. Post content for them. And no one will ever know that this entire thing is fake. And like even if this is only mildly impressive to... this is very impressive to me, but if this is mildly impressive to you, cool. Fast forward 12 months. Like we're going into like peak fakeness around the world. And what happens when everything is easy to fake? Trust becomes incredibly important. That's crazy. I think podcasters like us are well positioned because people know we're real human beings and like in a flood of endless content, you're just going to gravitate towards people you trust. I think this guy Jack is sitting on a gold mine of trust. So where do you get food recommendations today? Yelp. Yelp is the default answer. And it's like, dude, Yelp sucks. I've never seen anyone be like, "God, I love Yelp so much." Like, you know, "I trust Yelp so much. So Yelp always knows the best place to go when I want ramen in my city." And so I was like, this guy, I pitched him this idea. I was like, look, you're selling hats, wonderful. You're selling these like thousand, you know, fun private jet experience. I'm sure that's a blast, but it's obviously not that scalable as a business. I was like, you should create Jack's List as Yelp. You should try to compete with Yelp. You should create an app that I just say I want the best burger, the best pizza, the best taco, the best ramen in any city and you better have it and it's your pick. It's like here's number one, maybe number two or three and that's it. That's the whole app. And I was like that is what you should do with this trust is you should go after Yelp.
And then him and his business partner were like, "Ah, yeah, but blah blah blah." And I was like, I was so convinced. I was like, "Actually, you know what? You're right. How about I just build it and you just let me use your name and face. All right, you just give me... I'll give you... you don't believe in it. Great. I'll give you 10, 20% like let me build this because I'm so bullish on this idea that like he should create this as the... how do you do like a huge swing or like 500 million, you know, to $2 billion swing as a creator. Like every video you have gets 100,000 likes of people who are like wishing that they could go to this place. That's incredible. That's like, you know, that's an unbelievable, you know, 10 million people are watching you eat this froyo in Vermont. If that's really the best froyo in Vermont, like you should just create your list and curate it and have it be the trusted place, way more trusted than Yelp. I think trust is sort of like, you know, gold right now.
I've been... what's the thing called? Sorro. What's the music one?
So I bought a subscription to there a while back and like I taught my daughter how to pee on the potty because we have a song. We made this artist called Noah Flan. You know, he's kind of like Noah Kahan, but he's like, I don't know, the cheap version. We call it Noah Flan. And we have a song called Let It Flow. And it's him singing like, what's the Elsa song?
Let it go. And it, you know, it goes, let it flow, let it flow, let the pee fall from your body. Let it flow, let it flow, pee into the potty. Let it... And it's like this like folk song. And so whatever...
Is it on your phone? Play it.
Yeah. Let me see. Hold on.
Listen. Pull those pants right down. Plant your feet and sit. Take a breath. Relax. And here it comes. That's it. Let it flow. Let it flow from your body. Let it flow. Let it flow into the body.
It's great, right? What a hit. Holy [ __ ]. Okay, Miss Rachel.
So, I created Noah Flan because I'll be like, 'Hey, you know, I could tell she has to go to the potty.' I'd be like, 'Hey, do you want to let it flow with no flon and like we'll, you know, we'll sing and uh...' So I'm creating a series of songs for like, I use pseudo all behaviors for like all behaviors and like because I hate listening to like the same Moana song over and over again and I like folk music. I'm like, I'm just going to make something that I think you might like and I will like, and so now we sing like, 'Let it flow. Let it flow.'
A great prompt word by the way because if you say folk it becomes almost too folky Americana. Just use the word Americana. It'll add a little bit of that edge you want in it.
Well, now I have Noah Flan like he's like a saved character and so I personally like, I made a YouTube page for it and I'm like uploading his songs and uh, and so anyway like AI has been awesome. I know that we can hate on him but like that's not real artists but I'm telling you what, we love Noah Flan. We sing no FL at our heart. What was it start? You don't know where it's going when it starts like pull your pants down. It's like what's going on? Well, we have this uh, there's this company called um Live Live uh Love Every, you know, Love Every.
Yeah, like the toy company.
Yeah. Yeah. It's like a toy company and uh they like send these books and they we got we bought a book for them on potty training and like they tell a story about a kid going poop and like he's like, 'Oh, I ate these pancakes. My stomach is growling.' And then they show them on the toilet and then they actually show the poop and I'm like, 'That's disgusting.' And it totally worked. It totally helped her. And so what I'm learning is that when you like have to like teach children things, you need to be pretty explicit in the stuff that like a grown-up doesn't necessarily want to talk about. I talk about it anyway. And it like goes into like detail. Like you have to push and it falls out of your body. Like these things actually helped her and it's pretty freaking gross. But like yeah, that's what I'm doing with No Flon.
By the way, I was very touched and impressed by seeing you as a dad in New York. I also want to give you a shout out. You're a great dad.
I don't know if you know you're a great dad. I think you do. I think you actually do know.
