All right, Sam, we just had an insane weekend together. We got to talk about it.
We just lived in a house for a weekend with 25 other founder/entrepreneur types. Probably five to 10 of them were billionaires, a bunch of others were close. And we didn't just like talk or hang out — we literally like slept under one roof, sat in SaaS together, played basketball together, went to Walmart together a bunch of times. My Airbnb had bunk beds, so we bunked — we bunk bed together. It's as close as two men can get. So we had an experience, and I have in front of me several sticky notes of golden lessons learned. And I phrased each of them — I don't know if you do this, but I phrased each of them to make it fun, because nobody wants to hear your vacation story. That's one of the great rules of storytelling: just never tell a vacation story, because it's so fun for you, but they weren't there, nobody cares. But I think we should tell the biggest lessons learned with the story that backs them up, so it's real, not just a generic lesson. And I phrased all of mine like it's Confucius, like, you know, Bruce Lee whispered this into your ear.
Yeah, I dig that. And to give the background, basically, I think like three years ago you tweeted out, 'I want to play basketball with interesting people.' I think MrBeast like DM'd you and you're like, 'Wait, is this real?' You ended up phoning him and he was like, 'Yeah, come to my place. I want to meet interesting people.' The first year it was like you and Ben organized it. It was like 19 of us in an Airbnb and we were like, 'What are we going to do?' So we played basketball. The second year you organized it a little bit more and you had like an itinerary. This year you guys killed it. It was awesome.
It was an amazing event. I do like meeting interesting people. When I go to conferences or events, I just hate conferences or events. Like, I get a pit in my stomach when I have to go, and I know it's good for me, and I know in the end I'll meet some cool people. I just hate the format, I hate the structure. So I was like, well, instead of just complaining about it, what's a structure I would like? It's like, well, I don't know, what if it was just doing the thing I love, which is playing basketball with those people? We basically play ball all day and then we talk at night, and that was the core idea: is to use basketball as the icebreaker.
And you broke your knee in the first two hours.
Yeah, yeah. So this was an event where you could tear up your knee and be done in the first hour, and I still had a good time. That means it must have been a good event, because normally that's pretty brutal. I did have a little pity party for myself, but I feel better now.
Are we allowed to say who was there?
Yeah, I think we could say some of the people that were there.
Yeah, let's go for it. So MrBeast, who, like, you know, everyone knows him as the guy on YouTube with hundreds of millions of subscribers. I think he's a paper billionaire. I think that's public.
Yeah, he's one of the youngest billionaires in the world. I think he's 26 years old and he's worth a few billion dollars. He's one of the most famous people also in the world, one of the most recognized entertainers in the world. And when you hang out with him, he's also one of the most intense, fun to be around. You know, just wants to play all in. Like somebody said this once about Elon: they go, he's playing life as if the simulation theory is true. You know, Elon has a simulation theory — not just be one of many simulations — and so he therefore just goes all in because, okay, whatever, let's make this the most entertaining version of that simulation. I think that's how Jimmy plays life too.
So who else was with him?
One of the founders of Airbnb, who like on paper, like according to Forbes, is like the 100th or 90th richest person in the world. It was another billionaire who was one of the first investors in Tesla and SpaceX. It was the founder of Reddit. It was Jesse Lehrer, who's on the podcast, you, me, Al, Don, who runs like a quilting company that does nine figures a year. Tons of people: David Pell, Nick Huber. It was awesome.
All right, all right. So a lot of people watch and listen to the show because they want to hear us just tell them exactly what to do when it comes to starting or growing a business. And really, a lot of people who are listening, they have a full-time job and they want to start something on the side, a side hustle. Now, a lot of people message Sean and I and they say, 'All right, I want to start something on the side. Is this a good idea? Is that a good idea?' And again, what they're really just saying is, 'Just give me the ideas.' Well, my friends, you're in luck. So my old company, The Hustle, they put together 100 different side hustle ideas, and they have appropriately called it the Side Hustle Idea Database. It's a list of 100 pretty good ideas, frankly. I went through them, they're awesome, and it gives you how to start them, how to grow them, things like that, gives you a little bit of inspiration. So check it out. It's called the Side Hustle Idea Database. It's in the description below, you'll see the link. Click it, check it out, let me know in the comments what you think you want to start first.
Yeah, let's do it. All right, I got one for you. Here's one of the lessons I picked up, and this is about the business ideas that these guys were thinking about. So if you're out there and you're wondering kind of like, where's the opportunity, what should I be working on, here's what I picked up from some of the most successful people in America. And it says: fish where the fish swim, not where the fishermen stand. Confucius, aka me.
Did you just make that up? You saw me writing these five minutes before we... I thought you had heard that. Did you hear that somewhere else? There's a scratch out on it, right? But did you get like Chinese food last week and that was like a fortune cookie?
Dude, I've had my share of Kung Pao chicken. All right, let me just tell you some of the ideas that I heard from people who were at this event. So you, me, you mentioned Jesse Lehrer, and I think one of the public things that he's done is he got really into racing, like running, running endurance races. So he just followed his curiosity: 100-mile races. He started doing 100-mile races. While he's doing 100-mile races, he notices that the runners that are trying to do these amazing physical feats are drinking coconut water, and coconut water was a big part of that niche, super niche community. And he became a believer and spent time hunting down what he thought would be the best coconut water company. Ends up finding Zico coconut water, partners with them, and Zico now is a big success. They ended up selling, I think, to Coke, and you know, they're in Whole Foods, it's one of the big coconut water brands. And he found it when he was small and just exploring these uncharted territories.
So here's some other ones that I heard. There was somebody there who's making hundreds of millions of dollars a year selling board games. I never even had that on my bingo card. I didn't even know that was an option. I did not even know that you could do that. There was somebody there that was investing millions of dollars into women's sports, like, you know, and not even just women's sports, like they're trying to do things now where you just buy a piece of a college program. I didn't even know you could do that. Like, that's for sale? What is that? For sale? Where is this listed? I went to a talk recently with this billionaire who owned like the Timberwolves, Marc Lore or something, and he was talking about the Bucks, and he was talking about how he's trying to buy college.
Do you buy the rights? They're going to like the University of Alabama or whatever, and they're just like, 'Cool, we'll give you $500 million for the Alabama sports program, and we want to own 51%.' Do they buy the future earnings? Is that what it is?
They're basically, I think what's going to happen is, again, it's uncharted territory, you don't know exactly how this is going to play out, but I think the short version is the college will spin out the program, their athletics program as its own business entity. They'll sell equity in it, they'll use that equity to finance all of their sports, like women's lacrosse, like things that aren't going to be the big revenue generators. So they use it to fund all their programs and maybe even school stuff. And then the costs now are borne by the private equity person, but now it's this asset that didn't even exist before. Like these college programs can make a lot of money, media rights and all this stuff, but they weren't even for sale. But somebody was doing that.
There was somebody there that was like, 'Yeah, seven years ago I just got really obsessed with water.' Like, yeah, me too, I thought my whole life. He's like, 'No, no, no, like I got really obsessed. Like, do you know what kind of water you're drinking?' And I was like, uh, no. Like, is this bad? Microplastics? What's going on? And he was just like, 'Yeah, like I got obsessed, and so I just started studying where's the cleanest water from, where's the healthiest water from. And I realized that water was going to become like oil, that people were going to more and more be drinking not tap water, but they're going to want basically bottled water, canned water, things like that, and that water's going to have to come from somewhere. And I wanted to find the best sources of water, and so I went to West Virginia and I bought this aquifer, this spring, I bought this giant water source.' What? And he was like, 'You see that drink you're drinking right there?' It's like some popular brand, and he's like, 'That's our water. They use our water.' So that's good water, and I was like, what? This was just a side quest that he went on, and again, it was curiosity-driven.
Was this one of the billionaires?
Yeah, basically. I mean, not a billionaire, but yeah, like whatever, close enough. There's a guy there, Al, who started a quilting company with his mom, Missouri Star Quilt Company, and they sell fabrics for people who want to make quilts. His co-founder is his mom.
I have a planned vacation to...
So he owns this thing, the company, it's called Missouri Quilting Company, and he basically bought — he did a podcast three years ago with us where he explained where he bought — is it Hamilton, Missouri? — he bought like an 1,800-person town where they own every building, and they're building the Disneyland for quilting.
Dude, just the thought of that. So first, to go into quilting — smart guy, like, you know, could have done any business, goes into quilting. Like, what are you doing, man? You're throwing it all away on quilting. Yeah, does a business with his mom, right? Like, again, independent thinking, not just following the herd.
So then starts the business, his mom does the YouTube channel, he does the business side of it, business keeps growing, and then it's like, 'You know what we could do? We could create the Disneyland for quilting.' And he literally goes and buys a town.
Again, who is that for sale? Can you do that? How do you do that?
And that just kept happening, which was like people who were playing games that didn't even seem popular. Another lesson: there was a person there who had sold a piece of their company to Chernin, and Chernin is now kind of known — I first heard about it maybe like 10 years ago — and Chernin is this really interesting... they're most famous for, uh, yeah, they're, you know, Peter Chernin was the CEO of Fox, so he's like a big swinging dick, he's been a baller for years, but they're most famous amongst like normal people because they bought Barstool when it was nothing and helped make it something.
Correct. And they just had this, again, independent thinking where they were like, 'Hey, I think these things that other people see as small kind of toys, things that aren't going to make a lot of money, you know, media brands, blogs, YouTube channels, I think these things are going to be big.' I think basically, and they had this thesis which was content to commerce. It's like, I think if you're kicking ass at content, you're going to be able to, instead of just making your money through ad revenue and sponsorships, you're going to be able to sell stuff to those people. And they had this content to commerce thesis, and they go and they buy Barstool content and it ends up being a juggernaut with commerce. They bought, um, they bought Exploding Kittens, and they bought MeatEater, and they bought Surfline, all these niche content brands. We had a guy on the pod, the Plant Daddy. I met with them a couple times. There was like early discussions. Well, you know, three meetings that I had with The Hustle, and I was like, what the [__] do you guys know? Didn't get that one.
Right, turns out they know a lot. They know a lot.
Did he just like slide a P&L across the table and he's like, 'I'll leave you three minutes alone'? Like, they told me this story and I was like, 'You're full of [__], you don't know what you're talking about. Like, do you — you're talking about my company, right?' It's like, you know, like — but they were right. I think the premise was correct. But I, yeah, I didn't have that confidence that we're talking about now. And dude, they made a fortune because the market overlooked these brands. These brands were not valued like high-flying tech companies, but they became, you know, multi-hundred-million, billion-dollar brands.
I really admire what TCG did because they're the best. There's so many investors that all love to sound like they're smart and contrarian, and they're all just, 'What's your thesis? AI.' You know, 'AI is going to be the future of everything,' right? It's like, okay, you're not wrong in that, but like there's something really impressive about somebody who looked at just like this magazine or this blog or this — or who was on our pod. We've had a bunch, we've actually probably had three or four people who sold their companies on the pod to those guys, right? And they've been right, and they've been right in a very, very big way. So I'm very impressed by them. So to me, that's the principle: fish where the fish swim. So fish where the real opportunity is, not where the fishermen are standing, not where all the entrepreneurs are huddled up.
This fortune cookie says, 'Man does not sell chocolate. He must become chocolate.'
Okay, so what does this mean? Three years ago when we did the first version of this event, Jimmy, aka MrBeast, had launched his chocolate brand, Feastables, and it was like, okay, selling chocolate to little kids. I had the opportunity to invest, I think at a $40 million valuation, was like the Series A, and I passed in the Beast Empire or chocolate in Feastables itself. So I kind of thought about it, I was like, I don't really get — I didn't really know much about the chocolate industry. I thought his involvement was going to be like this normal influencer brand: 'I'm doing my thing, I create my content, oh, my manager hands me this, hey, buy this, smile, ding, yeah, put it down, move on with life.' So I thought he's just going to influence it. I thought he was just going to hold it up and buy it. What I didn't realize is that this guy was going to go so deep into the world of chocolate and end up knowing everything about chocolate and end up running this company like an absolute maniac founder. If I had known that, if I had known he was going to bring his full intensity at this, I probably would have thought about it differently. I thought he was just going to hold up the chocolate bar and see how many people click the link. I was dead wrong.
So I want to tell a quick story. You were there for one of the Walmart runs, right?
No, but I have a bunch of Walmart stories.
So we're sitting there, we're about to record, he walks in, he's like, 'Hey, before we do this, you guys want to go to Walmart?' Which I realized at the time sounded like a sort of a strange request. Nobody's ever asked me on a mandate to Walmart. We walk in and he takes us to the chocolate aisle and basically gives a like 10-minute master class on the chocolate industry right there in the aisle. And while he's doing it, he's not just like explaining, like, 'Well, this is how it works, this is how we do this, this is our revenues, this whatever,' he's also simultaneously restocking the entire aisle. Like he pulled the cartons up to the front because they were like three inches recessed, they were pushed back too far, some of the bars had fallen over, they were crooked. He straightens every single one of them out, he puts the right flavors in the right spots. If a bar was crinkly or broken, he's like — he'd throw it to his chief of staff like, 'Hey, can you buy this? I want to have — like, we should only have good bars, no broken bars up front.' And he would basically restock the thing, but his hands were moving at a speed which showed you this is not the first time this guy's done this. So he restocks it, one of the popular flavors was out, and so he takes out his phone and he's like, 'Oh, I have a badge,' and so he just badges into the back of Walmart and goes and gets the box himself and restocks it. And I was like, 'Does any vendor get to do that?' He's like, 'No, not exactly, but they know like I just do this. I care. I really care.'
And kind of two things stood out to me. The first was obvious, which was when high-intensity, obsessive people want to win, they do the same things that the rest of us do with the knob dialed up to 12. Like they just take the knob and they just crank it past even where you think it can go. And for example, he was like — I think you were there — he was telling the story about like missing a flight or something like this. He told a story about how apparently he flew to DC and had a connecting flight to North Carolina or something, wherever he lived, and he was like, 'You know what, screw it, I'm driving from DC to Greenville, North Carolina.' It's normally like, I don't know, a three-hour drive or something, but I noticed that there's 14 Walmarts in between on that route. I'm going to stop at every single one of them to learn. And it turned like a three-hour drive into like, you know, a 20-hour drive. And he told me at one point, he goes, 'I have scanned...' I guess he's got some app where you scan things in Walmart and it teaches you about each SKU. He said he scanned every single product in Walmart. And I don't know if he was like — if someone said, 'Oh no, I've scanned all of them,' you'd be like, 'Oh.' So it's like saying it's a thousand degrees outside, you're just exaggerating. But with him, I was like, 'Oh, I bet you literally have scanned every single one of them.' In the podcast we did, he was like, 'Yeah, yeah, like, you know, we want to do a thing where you buy every item in Walmart for somebody in a video,' and he's like, 'You know, but it's $16.2 million.' It's like he knew the actual cost of the total inventory if you bought one of everything in Walmart, like what it cost. I forgot what the number was.
But so, but I don't want to make this just a Jimmy love fest, because there was another guy who was a top seller in Target.
Yeah, man, I heard him nerding out. It was wild. He took us to the shelf and he was like, 'This shelf right here...' He gave us a tour of Target and it shows you how the store works. He's like, 'This shelf right here is the most profitable shelf in Target, it's the highest profit per square inch, which is how Target measures, you know, success.' And he's giving us this Target master class, and we were like, 'Are you also in Walmart?' He's like, 'Yeah, we're in Walmart, but we're not doing so well.' And I asked him, 'What's exciting for you coming up?' And this guy runs a billion-dollar-plus company. I assumed he was just going to say, 'I've got some board meetings to line up, I'm taking the family to Aspen.' And he goes, 'Actually, I'm working the next three weeks as a Walmart associate.' I was like, 'What?' And he goes, 'Yeah, I'm going to be — our sales in Walmart are not the same as in Target, and I've been trying to figure out why.'
What I found remarkable is that you expect the people who are the most busy, the most accomplished, the most high net worth to be above these tasks. Jimmy restocking the SKUs himself, this other guy going to be a Walmart associate for three weeks. You know, they don't have to do any of this, but they're going to do it anyways. They're not just doing it now that they're successful — that's how they got here. And so that was the first really big takeaway from this whole thing: was the intensity with which certain people play the game of business and how that leads to success.
That guy who you're referring to was the quietest person there, or one of. And there was a point where I was hanging out with them, he goes, 'Can I get your guys' opinion? You know, I'm thinking about potentially like making some type of business move which would value us at this valuation.' And we were like, 'What valuation?' And it was like in the billions. And we were like, 'Do you know who we are? Why are you asking us this question? Like, what are you talking about, man? Like, I don't know who you asked this question to, but not us.' Like, he was the most humble person there, and he was crazy successful. It was pretty wild, that guy who you're talking about.
All right, I have one: confidence beats IQ. So, you know, there are a lot of like really successful people out there. Like when I read Warren Buffett's biography, he does the opposite, where he was like, 'Oh, you know, I'm just this guy.' It's like, dude, you're a shucks-downplaying — you're a baby genius. Like he was like, when he was like four, he was like making 10 grand a month selling Pepsi. But in general, the group of people who we had there, there were some people for sure who are geniuses. I think Jimmy's one of them, actually. I think when you talk to him, you know he's like brilliant. But and like Mario from Oscar was one of them. Mario co-founded a company called Oscar, which is a health insurance company, which is one of the hardest things ever to do. It's publicly traded, worth $4 billion, so he's like the man. And he doesn't even speak English — or he does, that's a second language. So like, you know, he's from Germany.
So imagine, genius dude, imagine going to Germany and revolutionizing the German healthcare bar, you know what I mean? Like it's pretty wild. Extra degree of difficulty, just go to someone else's motherland and fix their [__].
Yeah, which is wild. But you know, he was a genius. But in general, dude, the wealthiest people there, I know we're not even close to the smartest. And here's an example: one of the billionaire guys was there, he goes, 'Man, AI is just going to change the world, you guys. I don't think you guys get it. Like, I use it every day.' And I was like, 'How do you use it?' He goes, 'I can show you right now.' And he pulls out his phone and he talks to ChatGPT and he goes, 'Hey ChatGPT, you know, I have a question,' and he like starts like reading a question to it, and then he's like, 'Now watch how amazing it is,' and he like — it repeats the answer. And I'm like, 'Oh, so you're saying that you just use ChatGPT like all the time?' He's like, 'Yeah.' And I was like, 'Well, like, have you like trained it?' He goes, 'Train? You can train it?' Like he didn't know that you could do these things. And this particular guy runs a company doing billions a year in revenue. I guess what I mean is like, the percentage of intelligence greater than me or you or someone else there versus impact or net worth was not like that. It wasn't.
Totally, totally agree with that. Which is that when you sit in a room like this, two things happen. One, you just get to sample — like it's Costco and you're just getting to sample different lifestyles. 'Oh, what do you do? Oh wow, you seem kind of stressed out. Gotcha, like not interested in going down that aisle. Yeah, hey, you seem like you're having a lot of fun. What do you do? How do you think about this? You got kids too? How are you doing both?' Right. And you get to sample people's lifestyle when you hang out with them like this for like, you know, 48 hours straight. On top of that, you also get to do the measuring stick thing, which kind of sucks because you're measuring yourself against like some of the most creative, successful, ambitious people in the world. But a big part of it is you're trying to figure out the diff, right? It's...
Like those, those little children's games, these two pictures, what's the difference between these two pictures? And on one side is me and the other side is them, and I'm always looking at what's the difference. And sometimes if it's like a Mario or whatever, it's like, oh cool, like his brain has an extra library in it, there's an extra wing that somebody donated to that brain. All right, cool, like I can, I can live with that, I can sleep easy. But there were other people where it was like, oh, it just seems like they didn't limit themselves. That's what I mean, they just kind of went for it, or their courage was just a little bit higher supply than mine.
And you're right that when you look at the diff, very, very rarely was the diff these people are smarter than me or they had some advantages I didn't have coming up, right? Like in fact it was usually the opposite. It's like, damn, they had this huge chip on their shoulder because their dad wasn't around and because of this happened and they were dyslexic. There's a bunch of people that were there that were dyslexic.
I wish I was dyslexic. Autistic was the goal. Dude, dyslexic, dude, every dyslexic guy there somehow was a good freestyle rapper. Did you not? Like, not only rich but also cool in a group of men huddled around together, right? Like, yeah, I wish I was charismatic like a dyslexic guy. Like, that's crazy.
