The Pursuit of Wealth: Barista to Billionaire - Andrew Wilkinson
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People just have all these weird ways of measuring your worth. And I just don't want to spend time around people who measure worth and things like that because it's a path to misery. Wearing a fancy watch does not help me meet my goals. It doesn't give me freedom. It doesn't help me connect with others. It doesn't help me be a good dad. And it doesn't help me give away money. I'd say spending money on material possessions is the height of misery. What you're about to hear is a conversation between me and Andrew Wilkinson, the first billionaire that we've ever had on the podcast.

A big topic

of conversation in this podcast between me and Andrew is that we are talking a lot about money. But we start off by talking about the downsides of being a billionaire. It's not great. There's lots of really interesting downsides that nobody thinks about. Having 25 million bucks or even 10 million bucks or 5 million bucks

is a lot better than being a billionaire in my opinion. I'm curious to ask why that is. So we talk about the power of delegation and anti-goals. We talk about what are the things you can spend money on that actually do buy happiness. We talk about the different challenges associated with fame. And then towards the end of the conversation, we riff a little bit about business ideas and the idea of building holding companies with small bets. Run a profitable business, pay yourself well, and live a good life the entire time instead of

deferring gratification for 10 years and then hoping you can sell it for some silly number. Yeah. I like cash flow. I've found that the best way to feel rich is to have cash flow.

Andrew, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing? I'm doing great. How are you doing? I'm doing really good. I am 75% of the way through the advanced reader copy of your book. So firstly, thank you for sending it over. Thank you for writing it. I've actually been following your journey for years now. I don't remember when I first came across MetaLab and started following you on Twitter. But when you announced the tiny stuff and then the error press stuff, I was just like, damn, Andrew. And then before I knew it, in my mind,

When I was in web dev Twitter, maybe 10 years ago or something, I was trying to build software stuff on the side in med school. You and MetaLab and stuff always kept on coming up. And then next thing I knew, you were like a freaking billionaire or something. That's pretty insane. Yeah.

It's pretty insane to me, too. I mean, I started as a barista about 20 years ago and got into web design kind of randomly. And my goal was, I just want to wake up whenever I want in the morning and make enough to pay my rent. And I somehow woke up here 20 years later. So it's a weird thing for me, too. And it's so bizarre how small the world is. I feel like it's all ships passing in the night. The tech world is like everybody is two degrees of Kevin Bacon. It's fun that you were aware of us.

Yeah. So one of the things that really, you know, we were talking just before this, like I really want to make a kind of main channel YouTube video about your book, which it's not the sort of book I would normally make a video about because normally I make a video about like an atomic habits or a clearly self-help how-to guide. Whereas your book, it's not really a self-help how-to guide, but it sort of is because I feel like

There was so much in it that really resonated with me. Your philosophy about money, even the title Never Enough, the question of when is enough enough is a question I've been grappling with for years now. And it almost feels like one of those books that I should just study because you are a few years ahead of me in terms of the career that you're in, in terms of

All of that sort of stuff. And so I feel just, I just have so much to learn by just really almost like studying the book and thinking, okay, I'm actually a very good target audience for this book. And I need to take the lessons because, you know, one of the quotes is, you know, wisdom is learning from other people's mistakes, that, that general sort of idea. Have you, have you had that sort of feedback from other people as well about the book?

I have. And, uh, it's funny people read the book and then they go, Oh my God, you figured it all out. And I can assure you, I'm just as miserable as you are still stressed out and just thinking about different problems. Uh, one of my, my business partner, Chris, um, has a really funny saying, he goes, stress is like water. It will find a way. And so if you eliminate one stressor, a new one will appear. And so, um,

You know, the book is really me working through a big existential. It's really my midlife crisis, honestly. I wrote it when I was 36 years old, which is about half the halfway point of most people's lives. And I was just feeling kind of lost and needed to work it out. And so I worked it out via writing. So I've changed my path. But yeah, I mean, I'm still just as stressed out and miserable and anxious as I've ever been.

Interesting. Okay. So normally on this podcast, what I like to do is just turn the interview into more of like a personal coaching slash therapy session. So I wonder if I could just talk you through some of the things I'm thinking about. And I would just love for us to riff on those sorts of topics, which very much overlap with the stuff you talk about in the book and the stuff that I know you write about. How does that sound? That sounds great.

Nice. Okay, so I'll give you a little bit of context. And you know, you might be familiar with some of this. But so I'm 29 years old, I used to be a doctor, and quit a few years into working the day job to go full time on my YouTube channel. And now I have a team of like 20 something people. And we make YouTube videos and sell online courses off the back of it.

And I'm at the point where, you know, I read Tim Ferriss when I was 18, decided to pursue the dream of financial freedom and passive income. And then I sort of got there. And if my 18-year-old self could look at, you know, we did 5 million in revenue last year with 60% margin. So that's like, you know, a decent chunk of profit. And if my 18-year-old self could look at that, it's like, obviously, you've already made it. And I speak to some friends and they're like, bro, you never have to work a day again in your life. But I still feel this

somewhat of this sense of scarcity that it's it's not enough and it's one of the things you say fairly early on in your book is when you ask even extremely rich people how much they need to feel safe the answer is always double or triple what they already have why why like i've i've heard this from so many people but like why why do i still feel the sense of it's it's not enough and i need to i need to strive for more what's going on here andrew yeah

I mean, it's bizarre. So I'll never forget. When I was pretty young, it was probably 10 or 12 years ago, I had this client who was an Irish entrepreneur named Jerry Kennelly, very successful guy. And I flew to Ireland in the south of Ireland,

in Cullorglin, and I was walking through town with this guy, and he had sold a business, I think for hundreds of millions of dollars, to Getty Images or something. And as we walked through town, he's pointing out all the buildings that he owns. You know, oh, I own that, I own that, I own that. Every single person in town is tipping their hat to him. They all know who he is. He's like the king of town. And we get to the pub, and we get to Pints of Guinness,

And I say to him, you know, what is it like? You know, you're where I want to be. What does it feel like? And he just kind of looks a bit sad and he goes, well, I'm drinking the same pint you are.

And I remember in that moment just kind of like dismissing that offhand. But at the end of the day, these people that have so much are still living their day-to-day lives. They're still fighting with their spouse. They're still sleeping poorly. They're still getting irritated by people at work and having interpersonal problems.

And so that just doesn't change. At the end of the day, it's kind of like travel. People think that if I travel to Bali, I'm going to feel good. But the problem with traveling to Bali is that your brain comes with you and your brain is anxious. Whatever chemical concoction is happening that day will happen in Bali or it'll happen in London. There's another story. I met a guy who was worth $2 or $3 billion. And we were talking about Jeff Bezos, right?

And he goes, oh my God, Jeff Bezos is just so fucking rich. And I said to him, I was like, well, you know, you're worth billions of dollars. What can Jeff Bezos do that you can't? And he goes a bit glassy eyed and he's like,

super yacht. He can buy a super yacht. And so it's just this bizarre thing as I've continued to work my way up the ranks and meet all these amazing people who have been profoundly successful. I just noticed that every single one of them in some way is still striving or competing. You know, you have

billionaires competing for another zero on the end or to be number 10 on the Forbes list instead of number 100. And I think it's just kind of human nature. People are inherently competitive and

and miserable. And it just doesn't stop. And so the book was really me pulling that thread for myself because I grew up with two parents who would fight about money. And so I decided that money was the bomb for all of my problems. And then I got money and it actually has lots of wonderful benefits, but it adds tons of complexity. And so trying to determine for yourself when to stop playing the money game is really hard. I read an incredible book that you should read called

um how to get rich by felix dennis have you read that yeah i read that about two months ago it's great yeah yeah and i mean if you read it's funny like i read the book about 15 years ago and in the book it's the story of him building a publishing empire he's the guy who had um i believe a bunch of technology magazines and maxim and a whole big publishing empire and he

In it, he says, I wish that I had stopped at age 35 when I had $50 million and become a poet because his true passion was poetry. But he was a money monster. He couldn't stop and he kept going. And I mean, that book is so poignant. It's one of the only books written by...

with a very garish title, How to Get Rich. But it's really a book about why you don't want to get rich. And so, you know, this is my own version of that. I don't think most people should want to be a billionaire. It's not great. There's lots of really interesting downsides that nobody thinks about. I think, you know, having 25 million bucks or even 10 million bucks or 5 million bucks is a lot better than being a billionaire, in my opinion.

I'm curious to ask why that is, but I'm going to ask you that in a moment. Because one of the things that I... Because I really enjoyed the book How to Get Rich as well. And I also saw that line in it, which was something like 40, 50 million. I wish I'd just quitted that number and then done the thing that I really wanted to do. I think I couldn't quite take that at face value because...

So thinking out loud, what was going through my mind as I was reading that, or rather I was listening to on Audible? It's really funny on Audible as well. The guy who's reading it is very dry humor, good vibes. But what was going through my mind as I was listening to that was,

Okay, so does that mean I should be aiming for 50 million as the goal? And also, like, this guy says that really poetry is his passion. But I think for me, the passion is, the passion genuinely is reading and learning and teaching stuff.

And I think you and I sort of have that in common that you have a shit ton of money and yet you still write books and write on Twitter. I often ask myself the question of if I had a hundred million in the bank, what would I do? And the answer is I would still continue to make YouTube videos. I still do podcasts with cool people I can learn from and I'd still want to write. And that's sort of what I'm doing. But then there's all sorts of like these extra, well, you could, you know, leverage your personal brand and build a software business or buy a software business. And then seeing the stuff that you've done with tiny and seeing the whole James clear thing and

Speaking to James Clear where he's like, yeah, I don't really want to do this. But then I thought the opportunity came by and then I'm going to work with Andrew. It's kind of cool. Is it like cool? Yeah, why not? And it's sort of, I guess it's sort of FOMO. I'm like, you know, I think I have the money that I want to live a very comfortable life. The stuff that I enjoy doing is the stuff I would do anyway. But there's all these shiny things around like...

should I do software? Should we do hardware? Should we try and buy boring businesses, Cody Sanchez style? Should we try and acquire tech productivity businesses, Andrew Wilkinson style, and use our audience to direct traffic to the tech productivity businesses? But then I don't really want to be the ones running them. But then there's the whole, well, you could hire a CEO and it becomes this whole like FOMO game, or I'm just like, not sure. So how would you go about approaching that? How would you go about like disentangling that?

So we've had a lot of different offices. So I've done everything from working in cafes to having really corporate, fancy, beautiful offices to Chris and I bought a house and we worked out of it. We've worked out of it for years. And no matter where you go, work will follow. And I think that whatever you do,

the stress will come, right? And so if you look at, you know, making YouTube videos, you probably think about your Halcyon days when you first started and how fun and scrappy it was and you're doing it all yourself. And now you probably go, man, I have to manage, I don't know how many direct reports you have. How many do you have? I just have one. I have a GM who then manages everyone else, which is super nice. That's pretty good. That's

and fed and you need to negotiate contracts and over time I think the more stuff you do everything has a cost and I guess the question is what is that taking from and I've always struggled with this because like for example I just bought a building I was there's this wonderful corner spot that I've had my eye on for for years near my neighborhood and I'm so excited about the idea of redeveloping this building and making it somewhere that's vibrant for the community but

But now that the initial excitement of buying the building has worn off, I'm realizing that I'm going to have to hire an architect and I'm going to have to hire designers and I'm going to have to go source businesses to rent space in it. And every single one of those represents a person who can be let down, who I have to have meetings with.

who cannot pay their rent. Suddenly my life has all these additional complexities. And so I kind of go through these periods of expansion and contraction. So I'll expand and do a lot of generative activities. I'll get really stressed out and then I'll delegate it all to CEOs and

And delegating CEOs is amazing. I mean, it's the abstraction of business. And it sounds like you've done that in a really, really smart way. If you have a great GM who runs all that and that's invisible to you. And what you're really doing is, I always joke, like you're building a machine and then you're putting the raw

materials into the machine and something's coming at the end. So if your raw material is sitting in front of your camera and talking to me and they'll go edit it, they'll do everything. You don't have to have that much involvement. That's a pretty magical thing and that's hard to reproduce. So I'd be very, very cautious about expanding unless you have great partners like you seem to have to do this stuff. But I mean,

I don't know. I think I always really respect people like James. So James Clear, I've known him for probably five years. And we've talked about doing a habits app for some time now. And he basically called me up a year ago and he said, look, we're going to build an atomic habits app.

I'm not going to put a cent into it. You're going to fund everything. You're going to build the team. I only want to do a few meetings with the team and oversee it and approve it. And then I'll just promote it and you can use my ideas and we'll work together on the content. And so for him, it's been this relatively seamless process, but that's only worked because he's working with us and we've done that a million times and we can abstract it away and we'll see how it goes. I mean, we just launched it. Um,

But even that, I mean, James has to now think about this. His reputation is on the line. You know, there's a lot that can go wrong. So I think the fundamental question to ask yourself is,

Are you Jiro from Jiro Dreams of Sushi? Or are you the guy who created Chipotle? You know, Jiro is a master chef who hones his craft. He does one thing incredibly well, and he does it in a very narrow band. Or the guy who created Chipotle, they have, you know, he created the concept and scaled it to 10,000 restaurants. Which do you want to be? And one has a financial payout, but the other one has a really intrinsic payout.

And I wrestle with this all the time. So I've abstracted business away, right? So what I've done in my business was I started a web design agency. I delegated the operations of it to somebody else. And it was a huge relief. And then I just started starting and acquiring more and more businesses and hiring CEOs. And what I found over time was that

I really missed having my hands on the tools. I missed a flow state. My life became Zoom meetings and contracts and deals. And I didn't produce anything. I wasn't generative. And so that's partly why I started writing the book. That's why I write on Twitter. That's why I do live events online.

that's where I get my flow state. But ultimately, the fundamental question as well is, you know, what's your ideal flow state and how do you design your life around that? Because I do think that is pure happiness. Like for me, a good day is a day where I lose myself in thought, reading, writing, something where I'm focused. One of the things I think you mentioned in the book is this idea of anti-goals. I thought that was interesting in the sense of

Whenever I speak to rich people, I always like to ask, what are the characteristics that make someone rich and happy as distinct from rich and unhappy? Because it seems to be like 50-50 from the people I've spoken to of like,

You're rich and you're happy or you're rich and you're unhappy, maybe even skewing towards unhappy rather than happy. And I thought the concept of anti-goals was interesting in that sense. But yeah, so what are anti-goals? And broadly, as a sort of two-pronged question, what are, in your view, the things that make someone both rich and happy rather than rich and unhappy?

Well, I guess the question is, are they happy in an adaptive way or a maladaptive way? And I think there's a lot of rich people who live an unexamined life, who are not self-aware, who ultimately are constantly just moving forward towards the goal, and they don't think about why, they don't think about the broader context of life.

you know, what they're going to do with the money. This is just what they do. They're like an automaton and they're designed to make money. And I think that's fine. What makes me sad, I think, is that some of those people don't allocate that capital to anything interesting. So they're like somebody who's baking chocolate chip cookies

And they have a warehouse full of them and they're not feeding them to anybody. Yes, their money is in a stock or a business or something, but there's no purpose to their existence. So I think that's one is people who live unexamined lives. The other is people who do exactly what they want. I know a few rich people like this. One is Jason Freed from Basecamp. Do you know him?

I've been reading his stuff for a couple years now.

Jason has a business, I would guess, I don't know, but I think it does probably over $100 million of revenue and tens of millions of dollars of profit, all recurring revenue. And he owns it 50-50 with his business partner. And more than any other person I know, Jason just doesn't do anything he doesn't want to do. So I remember we were negotiating a deal with Jason and

he just didn't want to sign a contract. I said, I'll give you free stock in my company. I just want you to advise me. I just need you to do this DocuSign. And he just goes, I don't like doing contracts. I'm not doing it. I'll talk to you on the phone once in a while, but I don't want the equity. So he was willing to sacrifice an opportunity and equity and upside just because he doesn't like contracts and he doesn't like doing that kind of thing.

And there's a cost to that, right? You miss, to your point earlier, there's a FOMO. You've got a bit of opportunity cost. You're missing out on things.

But Jason just doesn't do anything he doesn't want to. And there's such a power to that, to being a contrarian. I mean, by all logic, if you're going to run a software company that big, you should have hundreds of employees. You should be a public company. There's all these things that come with profound cost but are logical. And him and David, his business partner, haven't done any of those things yet.

So I think that that's incredible. And I really admire people like that. The third are people who have profound meaning. So someone like Elon Musk or, you know, James Dyson, where they believe that what they're doing makes the world better and is making an impact and they're innovating and doing great science and engineering. I think that those people have a lot of meaning. I don't know that they're happy.

I do think there's examples of those people being happy. But I think in the same way that having children is suffering in many different ways, I think it gives you a lot of meaning. And I think they have a lot of meaning. And I would assume, if not happy, that creates a lot of purpose in their life. And I think that is probably really meaningful. And then the fourth and last would be rich and anonymous people. So people who are incredibly...

successful and famous in a very, very narrow band. And their day-to-day life is completely unaffected by wealth. So I think of someone like Mark Leonard from Constellation Software. He's a Toronto-based multi-billionaire. He started a company called Constellation. And all they do is they buy SaaS software companies. They've been doing it for something like 30 years. And they're

And he looks like Gandalf. He's got a massive gray beard. He is completely anonymous outside of the nerdy little world of investing that he inhabits. So if Mark goes to a conference for investors, he's famous and everyone wants to talk to him. But if he's in Toronto walking around, I don't think anyone ever recognizes him. He doesn't have a public presence. He doesn't post on social media. And I think that's probably ideal. If you were to be a celebrity, just as an analog,

You don't want to be a Leonardo DiCaprio. You want to be Joel and Ethan Coen. Top, you're the absolute best at what you do. You're highly admired. But outside of a narrow circle, no one recognizes you or cares. What's your purpose and stuff these days? What was the conclusion of your soul searching around this? Well, I would say that ultimately, I realized that

A few things make me happy. One is a flow state, which we talked about before, which I was really missing based on the way I was structuring my work and how I was running my life.

Two is children, family, friends, connection, and things that foster that. Three is meeting interesting people. So I would say that those things really drive me, and I want to optimize for those. That's what I like in my day-to-day life. And then in terms of meaning...

What I was struggling with was that chocolate chip cookie problem. So I remember about three or four years ago, we took a company public and I'd always owned private companies. And so all I ever knew was what was in my bank account and how much cashflow was coming in. And when you go public, suddenly someone values your stock. They say, Oh, you know, Andrew has a hundred million shares and they're worth X amount. And when you look at what that, uh,

And what that appears as in your bank account, for me it was, I remember I looked and it was like $270 million. And that was just a small part of what I owned. That was one of my companies, one of my 40 businesses owned.

And so I remember in that moment, it would slap me in the face. I was like, what am I doing? Like, what am I going to do with all this money? For the first time ever, I felt guilty that I needed to figure that out. And so, you know, if you read the book, ultimately what I decided was that I was going to give it all away. That, you know, Felix Dennis is right. You really don't want more than $25, $50 million at most. Right.

ultimately it's really messed up to have all these chocolate cookies and not do anything with them. And so I'm still sorting out how to do good with that money. But my plan is to give away almost everything over the course of my life. My kids are going to be told that they're not going to receive anything.

much more than, you know, they'll be fine. They'll, you know, be able to go to college and they'll have enough money to maybe buy a house at some point. But that's it. I want all the money gone. I don't want to be funding, you know, third generation polo players or something like that. Yeah, when Morgan Housel released his new book and was doing the rounds on podcasts, you know, people would ask him the question of how do you not spoil your kids? And his conclusion seemed to be,

That you basically just give them less money. It sounds like that's the conclusion you've landed on as well. Yeah, I think money is a really toxic force for families and friends and everything. And, you know, I read about this in the book, but for me, growing up, I was always not the poor kid. I really don't want to, you know, I was middle class, but...

But I went to school. I went to a public school, but in a nice neighborhood. And all the kids around me were children of wealthy real estate developers and bankers and stuff. And I felt hard done by. And so I put this chip on my shoulder. And then I always...

So I was always the guy who was like bumming money off people. I'd be like, hey, can I borrow two bucks and I'll go buy a bag of chips in the vending machine. I'll pay you back in a week. And so when I finally had money, I wanted to share it and spend it with my friends. And I started doing that and it happened.

had all these weird unintended consequences of making people feel less than, or I'm being flashy and showing off, or I'm saying they can't afford it. And so, and that's a microcosm of a much broader thing that happens in society. When you have money, people want things from you. People expect things from you. You know, you don't know who your friends are. There's a lot of really bizarre problems. And when it comes to families and money,

Um, don't get me wrong. There's lots of wonder. I know lots of wonderful second and third generation, um, people, but I, I think it creates a lot of politics. Suddenly your family is a, it's like game of Thrones or something. Who's going to take over the business? Who's going to, how much are we going to inherit? Um,

they're tied to their name meaning something. Being a Rothschild means something. I don't want being a Wilkinson to mean something. I want everyone to do what they want to do. So I don't want to have it in my life long term. I mean, I'll have it in my life, but I don't want my kids to have to grapple with that. I think it just creates a lot of really negative things in families. So on the concept of anti-goals,

What I'm hearing is that something that I should be mindful of, and I guess by extension anyone listening to this, is that chasing success, generally monetary success, but also like, you know, I know a bunch of academics who just live for the academic publishing cycle and all that. Like there is always a game that we're playing in the work domain to some degree.

But chasing that at the detriment of other things that are more important, like time and flow state and not having too much shit in the calendar and being able to spend time with your family and friends and stuff. Is that where this idea of anti-goals comes in? Like figuring out what are the things you want to avoid? Yeah. So Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's longtime business partner, he has this great saying. He says, I think it's someone else, but it's,

show me where I'm going to die so I don't go there. So the idea would be you want to instruct yourself of all the bad things that can happen, and then you can avoid it and you can invert. And he says it's much easier to think in reverse. It's hard for us to know what will make us happy. You know, I might imagine that owning a bigger house will make me happy or,

buying a big screen TV will make me happy. But what I do know for a fact, everyone fundamentally knows what makes them unhappy. You know, for me personally, I don't like, I don't like owing things to people. I like to be able to dictate my own day. I don't like being overscheduled and having a busy calendar. I,

I don't want to feel guilty and feel like I'm being a bad dad. I don't like email. I hate being trapped in my email all day. And so about five or six years ago, Chris and I sat down and we made a list of what are all of our fears? What are all the things we want to avoid? If we were to design a most miserable life for us, what would that be? And then how do we avoid it? And so I've always found that has been a much easier way to...

to do almost everything. So when we hire a CEO, my favorite question is I say, what are your fears? How does this go wrong? Let's list them all out. Well, one would be, you know, we don't structure your pay properly. Another one would be, we don't, you don't hit your bonus. Another one is we have mismatched expectations for the business, or we're not aligned on strategy.

Maybe we just don't get along personally. And then we'll mitigate each of those. We'll sit down and we'll say, okay, how do we mitigate all of those things now instead of later? And I find it's an incredibly valuable way to think. And it's so simple, right? It's so freaking simple. What do you not like? Everybody knows that. To what extent do you think that there's this

It's easy to say this when you're already rich, but if you're hustling to try and make it, or a lot of people listening to this podcast and watching my channel are in their 20s, early 30s, some very optimisey, productivity-focused teenagers as well.

A lot of people that I interview are all about like the work-life balance and stuff. But when you look at their own past, they were often very, very hustly and sacrificed their work-life balance to get to a certain point. And then once they get to that certain point, they start saying, hey, it's okay to say no to money and all that sort of stuff.

So I guess, do you feel like this is a privilege reserved for once you've already made it, by whatever definition that is? Or do you think actually this idea of anti-goals, we can be like someone who's fresh out of college, who's in their first job and maybe wants to start their first business. Is it feasible for someone like that to employ this particular strategy? No, I think if you're aware of it. So for example, when I was running Metalab, the design agency that I started about 20 years ago,

I realized that I did not like traveling. And so I knew that and I did travel. I had to. I had to run the business. But once I identified that I didn't like it, I tried to design around that. And the way that I designed around that was realizing that, well, hey, there's all these people I know who are wonderful. My college roommate, Mark, for example, is a wonderful guy and everyone always likes him. He's just fantastic.

you know, super, super friendly. And I said, I wonder if I could teach Mark to have these meetings for me. And so, and Mark had never really traveled. And so he was super excited to travel. He was getting paid a ton and he was incredibly excited to do the thing that I hated. So what I've tried to do always is just design in reverse and say, okay, I hate this thing. How can I delegate it to someone who loves it? The same is true often of accounting, legal work,

administrative work. There's people whose brains just work in a different way. And so I think that ultimately...

Your job as an entrepreneur is to be Teflon for tasks. You want to avoid all tasks that don't bring you joy. And if you do that well, you'll be incredibly successful as a byproduct. So I think people should embrace this early. I think a lot of people get into this hustle culture and they think that they need to be sleeping under their desk and, you know, working weekends. I'll confess, I

I have never worked more than a six-hour day probably at absolute most. Often I work a two- to four-hour day. And I've been doing that for my entire 20-year career. I've just delegated really, really well. I've always known that if I take my foot off the gas, there's other people that are picking up the slack that I've delegated to. And that doesn't mean I'm not working hard. It means that I'm

I'm working the way I want to. And the only reason I was able to do that was because I didn't read all the business books and I read Jason Fried's books and Jason advocates for doing what you want. And I really tried to embrace that and it worked. That's fun. One of the, one of the things you talk about in the book is how you suddenly started, like once, once you made some money, started looking at watches and, you know, like mechanical watches and all this sort of stuff. Like,

Well, yeah, this is a question that's always intrigued me because people sometimes ask me that like, oh, why do you just have a basic Apple watch? And I'm like, I mean, I have never even tried to get into the world of watches. I know that lots of rich people collect watches for some reason. I know nothing about it. And I almost don't want to know anything about it because I know that like, if I can get into that world, it's just a dangerous place to be. Yeah. So what's your relationship with like fancy watches and I guess other forms of luxury? So I think that, um,

Think about when you meet... So, you know, you and I are both productivity nerds, and I'm assuming we like great gear. I've seen your videos on gear. I know you like it. I'm the same way. That's my favorite part of tech, right?

When you meet somebody and they're wearing an Android, a really shitty Android watch or they're, you know, a Chinese knockoff Apple watch. Do you have a bit of judgment? No, no, not really. Yeah. I think, I think it's like, um, there's, there's a unspoken status in every group. Right. And so if you're, let's say, let's, let's put it, let's give a really simple example. When I text with someone and they have green bubbles, um,

I'm like, oh, you know, oh my God, this is so annoying. I can't believe that they, you know, I have to use WhatsApp now. I can't believe they use Android. You know, I'm a snob, right? I'm an Apple person. The same is true of different circles. And so as your circle changes, let's say that your circle right now is all productivity nerds. But let's say that you, it sounds like you're really struggling with this question of, do you expand your business? Do you get bigger? Do you go for wealth?

And let's imagine that you do. Let's say that your friends start changing. Suddenly you're hanging out with people that are in finance in London or they're in business in London. And let's say that they're all wearing really beautiful watches, you know, Patek Philips and nice Omegas and Rolexes and stuff. They will judge you, which is ridiculous. Just like me judging the person for having the green bubbles or the ugly Android watch. Silly. They'll judge you a tiny bit.

You'll notice all these beautiful watches. What I've always found is that something called mimetic desire kicks in. If all of your five best friends get into cars and they all start driving new Teslas, you're going to suddenly have a desire to buy an electric car or a Tesla. It's just this natural thing that happens in groups and tribes everywhere.

people start doing similar things. And so I think that if you join a tribe, you have to be very careful what tribe you join. If you join a tribe where status comes from fancy things and going to St. Tropez in a yacht or wearing a fancy watch or what cool conference you're invited to or what clothes you wear, then you get yourself into trouble. And I think the important thing is to keep

your distance from those kind of people. I think that if you surround yourself with people who don't care about those things, then you'll be fine. And so I've gone down a variety of different routes like this. I mean, one has been buying nice clothes and others buying fancy watches, uh, you know, buying sports cars. I've bought a bunch of really ridiculous sports cars. Um, people, I find billionaires talk about what jet they have and they'll, they'll, you know, I remember, um,

I was talking to this billionaire. I won't, I won't say who. And, uh, he, he kind of was ignoring me, not very interested in talking to me. And then I said, uh, Oh, I, you know, I flew, I flew down here, blah, blah, blah. And he goes, Oh, what, what plane do you have? And I said, Oh, I just chartered, um,

like an old Citation Sovereign, which was like a 20-year-old plane. And he immediately lost interest, right? To him, if I'd said Gulfstream, he'd suddenly have this reverence for me and be excited. And so, which is absurd, right? So people just get, they have all these weird ways of measuring your worth. And I just don't want to spend time around people who measure worth and things like that because it's a path to misery. It's not made me happy in any way. Wearing a fancy watch

does not help me meet my goals. It doesn't give me freedom. It doesn't help me connect with others. It doesn't help me be a good dad and it doesn't help me give away money, right? So I really try and only spend money on things that actually deliver that. So an example of how I would use money in a positive way is I bought a cabin for our family and

And every summer I go up to the cabin and I just check out of work and it's this special place where it's like bait for family and friends. Everybody wants to go to this wonderful place and we just get lost there in the summer. I think that's a wonderful use of money. I think that...

caring about your time is a great way to spend money. I think that, you know, having somebody who can clean your house if you don't want to do that is wonderful. Having somebody go shopping for you. Those things are great. But I'd say spending money on material possessions is the height of misery. Okay, so spending money to save time. Very much agree. Spending money to create connection.

Definitely. What other categories are there in which you found or your friends have found that spending money actually leads to more happiness? So I would say that spending money on the only the only rich person thing, in my opinion, that's worth it.

is one, having a house with a view. So it could be a tiny little house, but having a view is one thing that psychologically, there's a bunch of studies around this. I think that, at least my friend told me there are, I'll try and find one. But apparently there's studies that show that you never get sick of a view. And I have this

I have a house on the water and I love looking out. I see eagles and seals every single day. That's special to me. That's worth investing in. And I absolutely love that. So that's one nice perk of wealth is being able to have a beautiful space and a calm environment and a view.

The other one is, I got to say, the only rich person thing that's worth it, private jets. That's one thing that is, it sounds so ridiculous. I'm sure lots of people are laughing right now. But the idea that I can go to Los Angeles and have dinner with someone really interesting is,

and be home to put my kids to bed is incredible. And it's the most absurd thing from a climate perspective. It's incredibly expensive, but that is the only thing that I've been able to identify that is worth it. And I've tried, you know, yachts, multiple houses, fancy clothes, watches, cars, all that stuff, nothing. But I would say that is very much worth it. And then the other is,

You know, getting to meet interesting people. So, you know, that could be traveling to them. The other would be I've flown people up to come and speak in Victoria and gotten to connect with them. That's how I met Shane Parrish. That's how I met Andrew Huberman.

I love doing that. I love bringing interesting people to my hometown, exposing them to interesting people and spending time with them. And then the other one is hosting events. So every year I host an event called Interesting People. And it's about 100 people that I invite, friends and new people that I just find interesting. And it costs a lot of money. It's a pain in the butt to put on. But I love doing it. And so those are great uses of money, in my opinion.

Okay, that's awesome. That very much vibes with what I've heard from others as well. Just sticking on this point briefly, one of the lines I highlighted from your book is you're telling the story of where you and Chris are going out to meet a bunch of billionaires and stuff. And you say, we had set out to glean some wisdom from these business titans, which we had, but had come away feeling they lived in a bottomless pit of envy.

I wonder if you can expand on that a little bit. What is it like inside the minds or, well, seemingly like inside the minds of a lot of these billionaires that you met? I said it earlier, but they're all in competition. And it's kind of like, I think if you own...

the most beautiful house on the block, let's say all the other houses are run down and you own the most beautiful house. I think that you have a bit of a sense of where you're at, right? You have context. You go, okay, I'm at, I'm at, I've got the nicest house. The problem is that

What these billionaires do is they do the equivalent of always upgrading neighborhoods and then seeing all these other beautiful houses. And so it's kind of like the 0.2% competing with the 0.1%. And they lose context of where they're at. They don't realize how incredible their lives are. And so you'll hear people say things like, oh, well, you know, his yacht has a helicopter pad.

His yacht has a tennis court. You know, that guy's got a global Bombardier global jet or whatever it is. And I,

I don't see a lot of people looking down. I see them looking up at others and competing with one another. And don't get me wrong. I mean, I have so many wonderful friends who are billionaires, multi-billionaires. They're amazing people. And there's some lovely, happy, calm people that are doing wonderful things for the world. But I still think there's just this...

this natural thing that happens where when they all congregate in one place and they don't have contacts, they compete to the same degree. What I was saying about watches is true with the Hamptons. You know, if you go to the Hamptons, it's every house is worth a hundred million or more and in, in certain areas, obviously, and they're all competing for who has the most toys and who has the fanciest house. I'll never forget. Yeah.

I was in the Hamptons and there's this famous house that some guy spent like $300 million building in the 80s. And one of the guys in his $300 million house, or sorry, $100 million house was like, can you believe it? Like, that's crazy.

And I was like, oh my God, like, dude, you know, people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. You have a hundred million dollar house, but he doesn't have context to him. It's this ridiculous thing. Um, so yeah, it's just this bizarre world. And, uh, I think it's human nature. I don't, I don't judge them to be honest. I really don't. I understand how it happens. Uh, and this is why it's important to stay out of places like that. It's an echo chamber.

Okay, so what I'm taking away from this is in my pursuit of growing my business, which, you know, sometimes there are, I think most of the time I view it as I have a fairly healthy relationship with it, which is sort of viewing it kind of like playing a video game.

It's sort of just like, you know, going from 5 million to 10 million in revenue. Yeah, it's not really going to change anything in my life. But you know what, it's kind of fun. It's fun to play the video game at a different level. As long as I as long as doing so does not lead to me having to do things that I actually don't want to do. And as long as I'm, you know, just chilling and reading stuff and speaking to cool people and reading books and making videos every now and then and doing talks, because that's fun.

That I'm in my happy place. And great if someone on our team wants to whip up a product or if I happen to want to work with a friend to build some software. Fantastic. Just good vibes all around. But it sounds like trying to chase the $10 million, the $25, the $50, whatever that is, for the sake of the money itself is probably a pretty terrible idea.

Well, I think you're already rich and you don't realize it. I think you already have $25 million. In a net worth statement, you do. So let's say your business does $5 million of revenue, $2 million of profit. If you value it, let's say it's growing at 20%, 30% a year, I think that business would be worth between $20 and $30 million. Now add on all the optionality of all the other things you can do, maybe more. And now I know that's made up, but...

But most things are made up. Even the stock market is made up in terms of valuation. It's just people kind of guessing what it's worth. And unless you sell it, it's not worth that. And so I think you're probably already there. And that's something I didn't really get. I think I would have relaxed a little bit more. I think that people like you and me who run cash flow businesses...

As I said earlier, they only know what's in the bank. And so they think, well, that's my net worth. But you're equivalent to somebody who has a $25 or even a $50 million business, maybe even more. So I wouldn't feel like you're a slouch. And in fact, I'm very jealous of what you have. You have a business where you're doing what you want to do when you want to do it, it sounds like, and you don't really have any direct reports. The business is abstracted away.

And it's funny, like, I think the grass is always greener. Maybe you look at me and you say, well, Andrew is involved in Aeropress and, you know, he's got his Yerba Mate company and he's doing the James Clear stuff.

But I would give almost anything just to focus on one thing every day, you know? And I'm trying to go your direction. I'm actually trying to focus more on writing and speaking and interviewing people and events. That's where I'm finding I'm getting the most satisfaction out of my life. So be careful what you wish for. Because, I mean, you read my book. You're almost done, it sounds like. I mean, there's a lot of weird downsides there.

Interesting. Yeah, so I had a really fun interview with Ryan Holiday a few years ago. I think this was when our business had just broken about like $1 million in revenue, in annual revenue. And as the business has grown, because I'm in this personal development space and been following Jason Freed's and DHH's stuff for like a decade and all that stuff, it's like I've sort of drunk the Kool-Aid of there is such a thing as enough. And so I asked Ryan Holiday this question and he said...

He said something interesting. He said that, you know, every now and then he gets the desire when he hangs out with his real estate friends to get into real estate. He thinks, oh, you know, they're making all this money in real estate. And then after a while, he realizes that all of his real estate friends would just love to sit in a library and write self-help books. And he's like, huh.

I've got that life that these guys kind of want. So let's just keep that in mind because it's so easy to forget, right? It's so easy to, you know, I look at what you've done and I'm like, oh man, tiny.com, that must have been an expensive freaking domain name. Nice. So that's cool. You've got these like 40 companies on it. That's like, it's really cool. And you can do whatever you want. And like, I guess Tim Urban has that blog post, which is, you know, life is a picture, but you live in a pixel and the happiness comes from what you're actually doing in the day to day. And if the day to day is good, it's like,

drinking the same Guinness, reading some of the books. There's a Pascal quote I love, which is, all of man's miseries arise from an inability to sit quietly in a room by oneself. And I think it's so true. I think that if you can sit quietly in a room by yourself and be content, that's a good life at the end of the day. What's fascinating about wealth too is that it has a cost. So think about...

I'll never forget, I worked with somebody, I won't say who, but I worked with somebody who is one of the wealthiest people in the world about 10 years ago while I was still at Metalab. And we were working on a project with them and there was a school shooting, a really bad school shooting in the United States. And I read it and I felt bad and it struck me. And then I moved on with my day and I met with this person.

And they were incredibly upset. They were much more upset than anyone else that I had spoken to about it. And the reason that they were upset was because they were working on gun policy. That was one of their passions and their foundation. And what happens when you have a lot of money is that you feel that you can impact the world, right? Yeah.

Right now, if you have just enough for yourself and your family, and maybe you take care of your couple friends or something like that, you don't feel a responsibility when something bad happens in the world. You think it's terrible. When you're a multi-billionaire, when you're one of the wealthiest people in the world, and you actually do have the power to

talk to world governments to fund projects, to make things happen, and a bad thing happens, I think you feel it in a very different way. And I think there's a lot of responsibility that comes along with it. And I certainly feel that. I'm nowhere near as wealthy as some of these people I'm talking about. But I feel this burden of the money, of giving it away. So think about, you know, I run my business and

And then I also have to figure out how to give the money away in my foundation. That's a whole second job that I've now got to do. And again, so it's, the money has a weight. I've got to figure out how to manage it. I've got to figure out how to, um, how to give it away. I've got to deal with my children. There's all these legal structures, there's liabilities. Uh, it, it's, it's like, it's a burden. And again, I don't want to like cry no tears for me. Uh, it's not, not, it's a, the ultimate first world problem, but it,

you know, you got to ask yourself a fundamental question of, is it better to be you or me? And I think it's probably better to be you. The only thing I don't like about what you've got is that you are,

tied to it. So let's say that you wake up one day and you decide you want to go and play violin and you don't want to do YouTube anymore. Well, there goes your business. One. And then two, if you keep getting famous, I think your life can get bad. So I don't know. I'm curious to ask you actually, how often do you get recognized? On average, like once or twice a day if I'm walking around London. If I don't have my glasses on, it's less. But if I have my glasses on, it's almost like a disguise where I try not to wear my glasses in public.

But I feel like it's a good level of fame. But then, you know, I read Tim Ferriss' blog posts and, you know, speak to other friends who are at similar kind of follower accounts who have experienced like stalkers and people coming after them and the press going after them because like I'm not mainstay, like the press doesn't care about me. I'm like niche famous. Well, you're not political in any way either. Exactly.

So it seems like a good level, but this is something that I've been talking about with my partner quite a lot in terms of when we have kids. I'm fairly open about the fact that our business does 5 million revenue a year. It's nothing compared to what you guys do, but I'm fairly open about it. And that is still a big number that potentially paints a target on my back. I'm fairly open about my personal life.

People know I live in London. There's this sense of if I continue on this current career trajectory, it will, and it goes well, it will result in me getting more famous. And I feel like I'm already at like a very strong sweet spot of fame. And so there's a sense of like my personal mission is to just continuing to continue to do the content thing and to write more books and give talks and stuff. But then the fame is going to trend into sort of downside territory, right?

And I'm actually not sure how to navigate that. Any tips? Well, Tim Ferriss has that post I think you're alluding to where he talks about somebody was having a psychotic break and was obsessed with him and sent him a video of them killing themselves, I believe. And he's had stalkers and all sorts of other stuff. So you're right. And you think about it as Tim Ferriss is a pretty harmless person.

I mean, he's doing productivity and life and philosophy, best practices. He's not controversial and he's experiencing that. And I think when I speak to people like Tim, they often say, I just wish my face wasn't recognizable. You know, it's one thing to have your voice recognizable, but your face. And I think being on YouTube is interesting. I, in the book, I share an anecdote where, so I,

I was really anonymous until about 2020. I was known kind of in the design world. But I started posting on Twitter more over COVID. I was kind of bored. And then I started going on My First Million, which when I started going on it was a tiny little podcast. I just was friends with Sam and Sean.

And then it blew up. And all of a sudden I started getting recognized. I'd be in a cafe and someone would walk up to me and say, I loved your podcast. Can we have coffee? And I'm very extroverted. So I really loved that. It was one of my, it's still one of my favorite things when people come say hello to me because I get to meet interesting people I wouldn't meet otherwise.

Um, but there's a story I share in the book where, um, one day I, I live on the water. Um, like I said, and I have a private beach and no one can get to the private beach other than by boat. And I opened my back door and have a coffee and I'm walking out onto my patio and there's a guy standing there with a sign on the beach and it says 15 minutes of your time.

And so I yelled at the guy, I'm kind of nervous. And I say, Hey, can I help you? And he says, I want to pitch you my business. And I said, Oh, okay. Like, I really appreciate the hustle, but you know, just send me an email. Don't come to my house. That makes me a bit uncomfortable. And,

And so I give my email and I promptly go and lock the door and get my dog spray and nervously wait for the guy to leave. And I get an email from him and I look at the email and it looks innocuous. And I think, okay, this guy is just an entrepreneur who took hustle too far, right? You know, he just miscalibrated a little bit. That's okay. And I don't respond to his email.

The next morning, I get in my car and I drive down my driveway and I open my gate. And right at the end of my gate is that guy. And he's standing there with his fist bared and he looks angry. And I say, what are you doing here? And he goes, you didn't respond to my email. And he's angry. And I just, I mean, I bolted my car, you know, was totally freaked out. And so that's a very...

That's an example of the sorts of weird things that can start to happen as you get more exposure. And I have way less exposure than you. I have way less exposure than Tim Ferriss. And so it is one of those things like, you know, Bill Murray's got this great quote, if you think you want to be famous, try being rich first.

right? I don't, I'm struggling with this too, because I wrote this book because it's meaningful to me and I wanted to share my story and I wanted to write, and I love being known by people. I love meeting new people and using that to meet interesting people. But it has a lot of downside as well. I think it's a really interesting question. Yeah. When I read that in the book, I was like, Oh, holy shit. Yeah. It was really freaky. You've hit the nail on the head in that I have a

a great thing going in that I can do what I want and make content about things I care about, but I've also hit the nail on the head on, I am tied to this right now. The business has no enterprise value distinct from my own, me showing up and sitting in the seat. And I was chatting to, you know, Chris Williamson, who you might also know, he's kind of going through the same thing of recognizing that, yeah, you know, the podcast is big, but it requires him to sit in the seat three times a week and do the interviews, which is fine for now while it's fun. But like,

We can both foresee a world in which like 10 years from now, 20 years from now, maybe it's going to be less fun doing videos or doing podcasts with the same frequency that we're currently doing. And so that's partly where, you know, my goal for the night, my kind of work themed goal is, yeah, you know, grow the business from five to 10 mil, but also kind of try and,

dissociate the business as a entity and as sort of the reliance of the business on me showing up and continuing to turn out YouTube videos and podcasts. Well, I think that's the best argument for acquiring or starting businesses that benefit from your brand, right? Like what's something that people look to you for and then how can you sell them a product that has high integrity and

Again, it'll come with cost. It'll have financial costs to do so. It'll have management costs. There's stress that'll come from it. But I do think having a backup plan... My goal is to be unbreakable financially. So my goal is that every single business I own could fail and I would still have enough money outside of that in conservative investments that I'd be okay.

And then in a worst case scenario, I even want to have like a second passport in New Zealand with $500,000 sitting in New Zealand, right? Like I am... There's a great quote by Andy Grove, only the paranoid survive. I have that in me. And so I'm like a prepper, but not in like the, you know, I want a gun and a backpack kind of way. I want... I'm a financial prepper. And that's how I got here. And I think you...

would be wise to have either a business or, I mean, an easier option would literally just be that you say you're going to take a million dollars a year and you're going to keep putting it into a bunch of dividending stocks and those div, you know, it'll dividend 6%. And once you get to a point where you pay for your lifestyle, well then you have that freedom. The problem is you might get attached to your lifestyle. You might say, well, I'm going to have kids and I bought a, you know, a beautiful flat in London. Uh,

Because I wanted to do something with the money. I've worked so hard. I wanted to do something with the money. So I bought a townhome and suddenly your monthly expenses go from $10,000 to $40,000 a month. Now your old dividending portfolio isn't enough. Never enough. And ad nauseum repeat.

Yeah, mate, literally the struggle right now. It's such a first world problem. It's hilarious. But it's applicable to everybody. I mean, I talk to people where they're making 30k a year and they say, if I could just make 60k a year. You know, it's just so universal. The human condition is to be ungrateful. Yeah, always more. And

You know, just a few years ago, I would get on a plane and I would scoff at the people who are flying business class thinking, oh, these people, they're so unenlightened. They don't know that it's the same airplane. Clearly, they don't realize it's getting to the same destination. They've just been, you know, swindled by the marketing. And now I get on a plane and I turn left and I'm like, oh, this is nice.

Totally. Like, ugh. I love Tim Ferriss about...

five years ago produced a, um, audio book called, I think it's letters to Euclid. Yes. I forget who the philosopher is, but there is this whole section about practicing poverty. So Tim Ferriss talked about, you know, um, once every couple months sleep on the floor for a night and eat bean, eat rice and beans and dress shabbily. And I do find, uh,

I don't do that exactly, but I do find roughing it or just, you know, having, having experiences where you, you know, you go traveling, you stay in a horrible hotel, you fly economy. Like I do that. I do that a couple of times a year. And it always is a nice reminder of, okay, I'm fine. Right. We get so attached to these silly little luxuries like that. Um,

But yeah, it is ridiculous. It's ridiculous. I'm sure people listening to this will be chuckling. They'll barf. Yeah, they'll barf. The other one I realized recently, so I have a Tesla Model 3 and I've been thinking, oh, you know, at some point we might

I went to LA and I was in my friend's Porsche Taycan. And I was like, Ooh, this is a nice little Porsche Taycan. At some point, maybe I'd like to get a Porsche Taycan. And then I moved back to London for a bit because my mom was having work done in the bathroom and she needed someone to supervise the builders. So it's like, cool. I'm chilling in my mom's house in a tiny house bedroom where I sleep and make videos from the same desk. And I'm like,

This is not so bad. It's actually kind of nice, except the drilling in the background is kind of annoying. And then, you know, I accidentally, like, crashed my car or something, like, in a parking lot. So it was out of action. And so we got this courtesy car, which is some tiny-ass, like, Peugeot 5,000-pound car. And driving that car was an amazing experience because I realized,

After like 30 seconds, driving a 5,000 pound car feels exactly the same as driving a 50,000 pound car. And I'm pretty sure that will be true for a 500,000 pound car as well. That was like, oh, you know, that thing of, is this the condition I so feared? Like, actually. Yeah, it was great. No, I have the exact same experience. And I would say that upgrades, I mean, there's...

There's intrinsic upgrades. So for example, when you upgrade software, right, let's say you go from, you have a tool you use and it gets way better. I love that. That's a really exciting thing. And I think it's legitimately useful. And I'd argue that with a car, unless it's giving you additional utility or something that you really desire, you're just going to get accustomed to it. It's just hedonic adaption. So don't get me wrong. I'm the same way. I, you know, I bought a Porsche Turbo, you

What was it? Two years ago. And I sold it. I was like, this is only negative, right? When people see me, they think I'm an asshole. It's loud. It's uncomfortable. It is not within my values, right? And I ended up just going back to a Tesla. And I feel very comfortable in the Tesla and I blend in. And for me, what I actually like about it is I like the software, right?

I like the design of it. And I can actually, I feel like that's something that I intrinsically appreciate. But yeah, I mean, it's just a, it's a slippery slope. Now the interesting, my business partner, Chris talks about this idea of grandiose humility. So that's when you see someone who's a billionaire and they wear a Casio watch and they drive a Honda Odyssey. You got to be really careful not to become one of those people because, and not to say it's negative to do so, but if you've, if you,

are grandiose about your humility where you say well I'm a billionaire but I wear a Casio and you say that to people or you you judge others based on that or whatever that can also be a very toxic trait in my opinion so it's it's kind of an interesting delicate balance how do you be authentic to your true wants without being flashy and ridiculous and how do you also remind yourself you don't need those things yeah I really like the stoic idea I think I

I'm sure the Stoics themselves didn't come up with this, but in William Irvine's book, The Guide to the Good Life, and I think also in Derren Brown's book, Happy, they talk about the idea of preferred indifference.

Like, yeah, applying business class, you know, I prefer it. But ultimately, business or economy, ultimately, I'm indifferent to it. At least that's what I try and tell myself. Being in a Tesla versus being in a cheaper car, preferred, but indifferent at the end of the day. I try and have that sort of arm's length relationship with like fancy things. One of the notes that I like from my little like podcast prep sheet is this idea of the personal monopoly.

And like, okay, so if you were, if you were my business mentor, Andrew, and I had to sign outside of your house, even though I wouldn't do that, I was like, Andrew, help me help, help, help me build a, help me like have a, build a durable business that is not reliant on me continuing to turn out videos.

Where would your mind go? Would it be software? Would it be DTC? Would it be like physical goods, like an AeroPress for productivity? Like what are the sorts of things someone in my position should be considering when it comes to trying to de-risk the business from the personal brand stuff? Yeah. So one of the most important things is learning to discern what a good business is and what a bad business is, what's easy and what's hard.

And the way I learned this was by starting a lot of really bad businesses. So what I did is I got lucky. I went, I started a web design agency, metal lab, and I got so lucky. I had the right skillset. Um,

There was no operating startup costs. I could just get moving. It was me and an internet connection. And I happened to stumble into all these great people that I worked with. And before I knew it, I was making a ton of money. So I thought I was a genius. I thought I was a business genius. And I...

I started making profit and I said, okay, well, I don't understand stocks and real estate or investing. So what I'm going to do instead is I'm going to start more businesses. And since I'm such a great entrepreneur, I'm sure I'll be successful. And so I started a skincare company. I lost all my money. I started a pizzeria. I lost all my money. I started a cat furniture company. I lost everything.

I could name like 10 or 15 different businesses where I failed. And with each of those, I learned something about a different business model and why it's hard. And Charlie Munger has that quote that you referenced earlier about, it's much better to learn from other people's mistakes, much less costly to read about their mistakes and avoid those.

It's really hard to do that. I think that everybody has hubris and everybody says, well, I'll be different. You know, it's like 80% of people think they're a better than average driver. Obviously, that can't be the case. And basically, what you end up having to do is stick forks into electrical sockets and try a lot of different things. And I think what you have to be careful about is not

walking into the gym and being the guy who says, I'm going to deadlift 300 pounds on day one, right? You're going to hurt your back. And so ultimately, um, what, what that resulted in was me, um, trying to understand, okay, what worked about metal lab? Why was that a good business? Um, and how can I recreate that? And as I began to, um, as I learned more and more, I realized that ultimately there's only a few things that make a business exceptional. Um,

Two specifically on the internet generally work. One is a network effect. And so that means if you're using a social network, you want to be on the one where everyone's at. You don't want to be on a social network if your friends aren't there. And so Facebook, the more people that join Facebook, the stronger the network gets, the more people join because that's where their friends are. That's very hard to compete with. So we own two businesses that have that. We have Dribbble, which is the largest social network for designers in

And then we also have Letterboxd, which is the largest social network for film buffs.

Now, those are really hard to compete with. If you took $100 million and I said, go recreate Letterboxd and compete with us, it would be really hard for you to get going because everyone would say, well, it seems really cool. It might be better designed or faster or have more features, but all my friends are on Letterboxd and all my reviews are on Letterboxd. I'm not coming over. So that's one. The other is a brand mode. And what I mean by that is, let's say that

You walk into a restaurant and you say, I'll have a Coke. And they say, we don't have Coke. We don't have Pepsi. We have Acme Cola. You're not going to want to pay for that. You want Coke, right? People expect Coke.

And they're willing to pay a premium, even though you can create Acme Cola and it tastes great and everyone agrees. They've done studies and they show that it tastes, it's preferred to Coke. People want Coke. And that is a brand moat. And that same thing can be true with, you know, business like Aeropress where, you know, there can be infinite coffee makers. People can copy it. At the end of the day, there's something to that name. An example of that would be Kleenex.

So Kleenex is a facial tissue, but it's the verb. It's the word. It's a category-defining brand. So something like that. And I think that what's wonderful about influencers is that people have parasocial relationships with you that can't be recreated. A parasocial relationship is a relationship that's one way where they feel they have a relationship. They know you, but you don't know them. You've never spoken to them. And so...

If you think about it, let's say that I like and trust Andrew Huberman and I listen to Huberman Lab and that's where I get my health information. That can't be competed with. He is unique. His personality is unique. He looks unique. And until AI can create virtual people that are far more engaging than normal people, which...

might happen. I don't know. Um, you have what I would call a personal monopoly. You have a monopoly over you and your personal brand. And I think that's really, really interesting. You know, the downside is like we talked about, you have to get on camera to operate your business. But at the end of the day, um, no one can compete with you other than just trying to create other productivity content. But if I've, if I have a three year parasocial relationship with you, um,

That's pretty incredible as a moat. I think I met Tim Ferriss about two years ago, and I felt like I'd known him for decades because I did. I'd read his books. I'd listened to hundreds of hours of interviews. Him and Kevin Rose have all these inside jokes that I knew. Very weird, right? It must be bizarre for him to meet me, and then I'm like, hey, we're friends, and he doesn't know me. You've got that with hundreds of thousands or millions of people. Yeah. Yeah.

It's very true. It's just like the question of how to kind of convert that into, I guess,

The thing that I defaulted to in this world was, oh, let's just make an online course and sell the online course. And great, it's taken our business to like 5 million a year. But then I met Sahil Bloom about a year ago, two years ago for the first time. And he came in, he came to London, we did a pod, we had dinner. And I realized his monetization strategy was recognizing he had all this social proof and personal monopoly. And instead of thinking, let me sell an online course, he said, let me build or buy an agency.

Because people were asking me, how do you grow on YouTube? And I thought, let's make a course. People were asking him, how do you grow in email? And he decided, let me buy or build an agency and charge high ticket prices. And it's just my course's business. Sure, I've got a big audience than him, but he's making way more money than I am. And in seemingly a more durable way, because the agencies are not relying on him to be lead gen, he posts one tweet and then they've got like the wait list sorted for the next like three years. And that's just like a different vehicle. I'm just like,

bloody hell, I've been on this Corset vehicle, but actually there's this whole like fricking agency vehicle. And so I've been, I've been on a bit of a mission to see like, okay, what else am I missing? Like, what are the vehicles out there? And in like, in your view, what are the sensible vehicles that someone like me should be thinking about? Well, this is, um, so my friend Sean Puri from My First Million, um, you know, they were, they were selling ads. They're making quite a bit of money from ads. Um, and

And he was doing some venture investing and some other stuff. But ultimately, I think he just wanted cash flow. He wanted to be making real money every year. And venture doesn't really achieve that. And ads are good, but they can only give you so much. And it's non-recurring. You're not building enterprise value. There's nothing you can sell in the future.

And so he went, he did something really smart. He bought, I believe, 10% of a company called Shepherd. And what they do is they recruit people in the Philippines and Latin America to work as assistants and salespeople and all sorts of other stuff for North American companies mostly. And he has the perfect audience for that. He's got all these scrappy entrepreneurs who want to outsource. And so he was able to connect people.

What's a thing that people ask him for? And he's going to own part of that business and just recommend it. And all he did was buy 10% and then start dropping it on my first million, talking about his investment, why he made it, why he loves the business, plugging it. And I believe because we...

are familiar with some of the numbers, he has grown that business to a staggering degree and he hasn't had to deal with any of the operating complexity. So he bought 10%, he tripled or quadrupled the value of the business, and then I don't know what his plans are now, but he's getting dividends and he can sell something in the future. And I think that if all the influencers only knew how much value they were adding to all the brands they're advertising, they would realize they're in the wrong business. I mean...

Someone like Squarespace has paid a lot of money for advertisement on podcasts over the last 10 years. But the founder, uh, Anthony has made hundreds of millions or billions of dollars from those podcast ads. And he probably only paid $20 million total, um,

for all the fees. So I think that ultimately, I think it's really smart for influencers to start building businesses that are durable and separate from them, whether that's as a minority shareholder or as a whole majority-owned business. I just had a bit of a dopamine spike as you were saying that because

One thing I've always been thinking is like, you know, a company might pay us 20K to advertise in a YouTube video. That's like, cool. I've always been saying to my team that like, if they're paying us 20K, they're definitely getting more than 20K of value. So surely if we just plugged our own product, we could make that, we could make more than 20K of value. But then we tried this and we generate less than 20K of sales for an online course if we plug it in a video, unless it's a very, very salesy plugin, but I don't like doing that. I like to do a casual mention. But what I haven't been taking into account is that

It's not actually 20K of cash flow that they're thinking about.

What they care about is enterprise value, which is a massive multiple. And so I've just been playing the wrong game. Yeah, it's not only that, but they make the money back. Let's say that they're selling SaaS software. So when I was running Flow, we had a productivity tool years ago. I might buy an ad and I'd pay 20K and then I'd get maybe 15K back in the first six months. But what you forget is that that customer stays with me for five years, right?

Some of them do, at least. And so the actual lifetime value of a customer is very, very significant. So let's say that you're selling...

Let's say it's monthly insurance for your computer, whatever. I'm just making stuff up. And they pay $10 a month. Well, if I pay $20, $30, $40 for that customer, that's okay because they'll probably keep coming for years. And then, like you said, the enterprise value of the business is so much bigger. So I think with Huberman...

We had advertised on Huberman and we realized there was a lot of value. And we went to them and we said, look, we're happy to keep advertising, but at the end of the day, you should really own some of these brands. That's why we partnered with him to buy Matina, the Yerba Mate business. And I think that's just an incredible deal. One of the biggest costs in a business is customer acquisition. And you solve that, right? You are the dream business partner to somebody because...

Their P&L is like, for every $100 they make, they spend $30 or $40 on customer acquisition and marketing. So by partnering with you, suddenly their P&L goes down, their expenses go down significantly, they don't have to raise money, and the enterprise value of the business is significantly larger. It's what I call 1 plus 1 equals 100. Right.

Okay, while I have you here, I'm going to mine you for some more advice. So I was very intrigued when James put out his tweet. Oh, was it you? Was it James? I follow you both. I can't tell about the Atoms app. And it was interesting that the ownership split was 60-40 in his favor. So I have a business partner in software and we're doing two software ventures. And the deal that we decided based on various factors before I heard about the James Clear thing was 20% me, 20% him. And then like,

you know, early employees, he's bullish on really incentivizing them with lots of equity so he can get like really pro people. He's like a third time founder. So he kind of gets it. I was like, yeah, that seemed reasonable. But then I looked at the James Clary thing. I was like, whoa, that's 60%, 60, 40. What's your sense of what should, how should, let's say a software deal be structured if, for example, I was partnering with a business partner and we were building productivity software, which is, I guess, is what you guys have done with James. Yeah.

Well, I think it ultimately comes down to who can add the most value and in what way can they do that. And I think that if...

If a smaller influencer came to me and said they wanted to do it, you know, maybe I would have struck a different deal. I had so much faith in James's ability to promote it via his massive audience that I was happy to ride shotgun. And I had enough people vouch for him in my network who knew him and said he was a good guy and straightforward and we'd known each other for a while.

So I was willing in that instance to take 40%, which for me is usually low. I like to own 60% to 100% of most things because I'm a bit of a control freak and I like to actually be able to implement what I want. So I would say there's no rules. I mean, if you guys made the decision to give a bunch of equity up to employees, I think that's wonderful. My only concern would be those employees can now vote you and take over the company if they own 60%. So you might have...

might be in a bit of a weird position. The other risk there is that a lot of those early employees might be really valuable in the beginning and not in year three or year five.

And so it sucks. Imagine if you started a restaurant and you gave equity to the general manager that was there for the first two years, but then he leaves and the restaurant goes on for 30 years and forever he gets 10% of the profits of the restaurant. Does that make sense? Yeah.

No. And so I think equity is thing that has to be thought about incredibly carefully. And I like to give equity to people who risk things. So I'll say like, look, I'm risking things because I'm starting the business. I'm putting in all the money. I'm signing all the credit agreements, blah, blah, blah.

And if you're willing to take a risk as well, then I'll give you equity. So if somebody's salary is $200,000 usually, I'll say, okay, would you be willing to take $140,000? And then I'll give you 5% of the company or whatever it is. So there's no rules. You can do it a million different ways. If you talk to 10 different people, you'll hear 10 different ways of doing it.

But I like to be thoughtful about control. And you've got to remember how much value you're bringing. You are bringing a profound amount of value because forever, as long as your name is attached to it and you're marketing it, you are giving them an insane amount of value because they don't have to spend money on marketing. If I was you, I'd try and do something where you're owning a lot of it because unless that business gets to a big scale, the 20% won't deliver that much cash flow to you.

Yeah. And I should care about cash flow rather than potential exit value? For now. I think...

I don't really think about exit personally because exit usually comes along with lots of golden handcuffs and complexities. And I prefer just to own a great business forever. But the only, in my opinion, the only reason to sell a business is there's two reasons. One is you think that that business is going to be disrupted or something or get worse over the longterm. So that's like if you own a newspaper in 1999, you might want to sell it.

And then two is that there's someone who's irrational, who's willing to pay too much for it. If someone comes along and says, you know, you look at this and you go, wow, over the next 10 or 20 years, I can harvest X amount, let's say $10 million into this business. And someone comes along and offers you 30. Well, it's probably pretty logical to sell. Interesting. Yeah.

Because I guess a lot of people play the game of entrepreneurship with this whole like build it and then sell it model. And I hadn't really questioned that when it came to the software. Yeah, it's the dumbest. In my opinion, it's a horrible way to live. I know so many of these people who they're rich on paper. There's these founders of like unicorn companies and they've been living like paupers for 10 years and they're desperate to sell their business because then they can live a good life.

I took a different approach. I took the Jason Fried approach of run a profitable business, pay yourself well, and live a good life the entire time instead of deferring gratification for 10 years and then hoping you can sell it for some silly number. I like cash flow. I've found that

The best way to feel rich is to have cash flow. The people who feel poor, you know, there's no point in having a big net worth number on paper if it doesn't actually equal money in the bank at some point. So the businesses, these 40 businesses that you have, 40 plus businesses that you guys own, these are all cash flow businesses. You're not trying to go for valuation and enterprise value and all that shit. Yeah.

No, no. We were simply, when we buy a business, we're asking ourselves one question. We say, how do we pay ourselves back in five years only using the cashflow of that business? So, uh, ultimately we're, we're betting if we buy your business, let's say you owned a business that's doing a million dollars a year.

If it's not really growing, I might pay 5x. So I'll pay $5 million and I'll pay myself back $1 million a year. If it's growing really fast, I might pay $10 or $15. But the business needs to double or triple in order for me to get my money back in five years. But that's the simplest way I can put investing. Just try to make your money back in five years via cash flow and you'll do very, very well. Okay, so...

I'm in the productivity space. It would make sense to buy or build a to-do list, a calendar, a note-taking app, the stack that a productivity bro or gal might want to use. Now, initially what I was thinking was, okay, I've got this business partner. He and I are great friends. He knows how to build software. I know how to market it. Fantastic. We'll do one to three different products each year and turn them into nice, easy cashflow businesses.

If we can get them to like a million or two ARR, great, fantastic, life is good. But then I was speaking to another friend and this friend was like, why bother with 10 small bits of software when you could go for one mega hit? Like why not put all of your eggs in like the ultimate productivity app? What if you could build the next notion rather than building a handful of like small to-do list apps or calendar apps and that sort of thing?

What do you reckon? Multiple portfolio of small, smallish cash flowing apps or, and double down on what works or go for a big ultimate productivity app to rule them all kind of vibe.

So I don't remember if it's in the book, but I started a company called Flow. Is that in the book? Do you know that story? I haven't come across it in the 229 pages I've read so far. So I don't think I put it in there. So I, like I mentioned, I started this design agency and I love Jason Fried. And what Jason Fried did was he started his own design agency, got sick of doing client work. And then...

And they started a project management SaaS software to help them manage the business. And eventually that got so big that they just shut down the agency and they started doing Basecamp full time. And so I wanted to do the same thing. And I was a productivity nerd. I still am. And I

And I found that there was no good way for me to do GTD, getting things done with my team. And so I started, you know, I took one of my developers and I said, hey, let's let's build our own productivity software. We're going to call it Flow and it's going to be GTD for Teams.

And we had this big splashy launch and announced it. And it just blew up. All of a sudden, I had $40,000 a month of MRR. And people are talking about it. It's in TechCrunch. And just like Jason Freed, I decided I wasn't going to raise any money. I was going to bootstrap this. And about six months after we launched, there was an announcement that the co-founder of Facebook had left Facebook and was building a product called Asana.

And I looked at it and I dismissed it. I said, oh, this is fairly, you know, this is ugly and it's done by developers and their mobile app sucks. And, you know, we're just so much better than them. We're going to win on merit. Well,

I underestimated that he was a billionaire and he'd raised hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital. And before I knew it, they were just outspending us in every way. First, it was just marketing. So I got annoyed because everyone was using their product because they didn't know about our product because we weren't marketing it. And then very quickly, they started outflanking us in terms of features and even design. They figured that out eventually. And

In the end, I realized it was like I was Fiji and he was the United States and I was trying to invade him. And that's really, really stupid. We all know how that ends. And so this is a the problem with productivity. And I just I ended up losing about 10 million dollars. And because I bootstrapped, it was all my own money. So that was 10 million dollars that today would probably be 30 million dollars if I just invested in Apple stock or something. And, um.

So the problem with productivity is that every day someone like you or me or a designer or developer wakes up and goes, I don't like Notion. I want to make a better one. I don't like calendars. I want to make a better one. And so there's infinite competition. And it's a terrible business because people are not loyal. You and I are not loyal. We try new productivity software all the time. We're always looking for the new hotness. And so it's not something where you build...

a loyal user base, unless you get very, very lucky like Notion or something like that, where people base their life around it. And the analogy I always use is, imagine if you were starting a pizza restaurant, let's say a pizzeria, a bucket slice pizzeria, and every day a new pizzeria opened next to you that was funded by venture capital and gave out their pizza for free. That's productivity. As far as I'm concerned,

Getting into productivity is crazy. Now you have something very unique. You have a very loyal following and you will be able to promote this and it will be successful. I promise you, you can start a software business that will be successful. But,

But to do it well, it usually requires building quite a large team to maintain that software and build the software. The R&D cost of building something on iOS, Android, web, making it good, it's probably going to be two years and it's probably going to be between $2 and $10 million to build.

So when you compare that to a course or something simple, a digital good that, you know, you can sell infinitely like that, it's kind of a brutal business. The only good part about it is it has recurring revenue. So what I would recommend is actually finding more of a niche. You know, what is something that all of your let's say that a lot of your audience are freelancers and they run their own businesses. What is something that you would recommend?

Well, one of the fears that freelancers have, at least in the States, is that they're not going to be able to have medical care if they need it. Right. And so, you know, for example, you could find an insurance provider that's cute and well-designed and awesome. And you go and you just buy a little stake in it or you get equity in it or you even buy it and you just say, OK.

Hey friends, if you need insurance, there's a lot of freelancers, you should use this insurance product. That's what Sean did. That's really smart. I think if Sean had tried to build a recruiting business even, that would be hard. It'd be okay. But yeah, you don't want to get into productivity software in my opinion. Now, be careful not to listen to, over-listen to my opinion because I'm someone who lost money there. Maybe if I'd done well, I would be saying a different thing.

Okay. That's very interesting. If we abstract productivity away from it, what's your take on the build one piece of software rather than build... You know, there's all these little cute...

software design firms that will spin up like a very simple Pomodoro app for the app store and sell it for $2.99. And that's a nice product or a very simple FTP client or a very simple something that does a very specific thing. It's cute. It's a vibey. It doesn't take, it's not too hard to build.

maybe iOS only, that kind of idea. Software as sort of these multiple bets, almost like the Nick Huber holding company kind of model, but for a cute little software versus, you know what, let's try and build something big.

I like that a lot more. I think, you know, if you did something like, you know, bartender, right, cleaning up your menu bar in Mac OS or a simple, a very, very simple piece of software. This is the thing. Simple, boring software is phenomenal. It's the best business model ever. Complex, multi-platform software with a lot of demands, right?

is really, really hard. I love that idea. I love the idea of a utility. So one really simple utility. The only downside is the recurring revenue is small and the lifetime value is small. So you're going to be chipping away and, you know, you might be able to do one YouTube video and you talk about this cool thing you built and, hey, if you want it, go buy it for $2.99. But it might not be logical to replace all your ads with ads for that.

What I would try and find, though, is like that insurance idea or, you know, something that's high value, high profit. Like I always say you're you really want to be selling to a you want to sell something boring to a rich person. You don't want to be selling to people who are you don't want to be selling a complex product to cheap people. Yeah. Yeah. Because my instinct was that trying to build something like Notion is really freaking hard. Yeah.

And I really want to build a utility for the Mac menu bar that tracks your word count across different apps. So whether I'm writing in Google Docs or in Notion or in Ulysses, it can tell me how many words I've written. And that's it. Totally. Totally. Something like that would be great. Interesting. Question on recurring revenue. So...

A lot of people in the creator world, the whole shtick these days seems to be launch a membership community, paid membership community type thing. Use schools, Hormozy's going all in on school, all that stuff. There's Circle, there's a bunch of mighty networks, all these different things.

And the idea is like, well, you basically get a SaaS in the sense that you get a recurring revenue product. So we've, as of like last week, launched a thing called Productivity Lab, which is a $100 a month membership thing that gives you, it's sort of like Peloton for productivity. You know, that's that general idea.

But then this is sort of theoretical recurring revenue, but every person I know who actually has a paid membership, their average customer length is about three months. And if they can do longer than three months or you're like, Whoa, you're wow. That's a really, really sticky membership. And so in the past, my theory was always like, well,

If the average LTV is three months worth, why don't I just sell a $300 course and just get that in one fell swoop rather than thinking I can theoretically create a recurring revenue product, but where the average customer is only staying for three months. Am I missing something? Like, is there value in recurring revenue, even if the average customer timeline or whatever the word is, is actually just three months? Yes. I would say that, um,

recurring revenue is incredibly valuable, especially if you're selling advertising primarily. I don't know how much of your revenue comes from advertising, but it smooths things out, right? It allows you to have a really weak quarter and not lose sleep because you know there's a certain amount coming in. The kind of recurring revenue that I like is where you do something you're already doing anyway. So, um,

I always say, if you own a sawmill, you should sell the sawdust that comes out, right? You have a sawmill, you create these big piles of sawdust. Well, it turns out you can take sawdust and you can convert it into wood pellets and you can sell those wood pellets. So-

An example of how you might do that would be every podcast episode like this. At the end of it, you do a rapid fire one minute or two minute with me and you say, who is the most insightful, impactful person that you've learned about in the last year?

What is one supplement that you take or health ritual that you do that keeps you sane? What are the three most impactful books that you've ever read? You know, what's one tech tool that you can't live without? And what you do is you cut that off. So on the podcast, you say, Andrew, you start it, you tease it. And then you say to keep listening, click the link in the show notes and you can keep listening to the premium feed and you'll get this extended thing. And you do that with every single guest. And

And what I find is...

With productivity, so with two things, with health and productivity, people will pay a lot of money for something like that. So when I listen to Tim Ferriss, I hear all these amazing people and their strategies and stuff. But what I really want are tactics. I want them to tell me the cheat codes, tell me what to do, tell me what to say, tell me what to take, what do I buy? And I think that I was encouraging Tim to do this. He still hasn't done it. But I really think that having that kind of

um, cheat code list is very valuable and it's incredibly easy to add and it costs you nothing. It adds two to five minutes to the interview. And I think that could probably equal, um,

between $500K and $2 million or more of recurring revenue. We have a business called Supercast that I started. I helped Sam Harris monetize his podcast and then worked with Dr. Rhonda Patrick, Peter Attia, Huberman. And we do the same thing to a varying degree. So if you can have exclusive episodes where you give away half the interview for free and then it cuts off, or you just have...

the tail end be exclusive, I think you can do very well. Hmm. Yeah. This is why I'm a paid subscriber to Sam Harris because it's like, Oh, I only get to see the first hour. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And I mean, the challenge might be that you're, you know, most of your traffic might be on YouTube. So you've got to figure out how to do that elegantly, but in the podcast player, it's very elegant. Like I've had it where I'm listening to an interview on, um,

the knowledge project and it's fascinating and then it cuts off and I actually pull over, pulled my car over and I subscribe to keep listening, uh, getting people at the moment of conversion where they want to keep listening, I think is really powerful. Okay. That's a very good idea. Um, general question. So with this new productivity community membership thing that we've launched, we launched it with annual billing only for now.

And I spoke to a couple of people who were like, well, why not offer monthly billing as well? And I was like, well, if I know that the average churn on these sorts of things is three months, why would I offer monthly billing? Why not just offer annual billing?

And the response was something like, well, if you offer monthly billing, it keeps you honest. It means you actually get a real sense of what your churn is going to be because people will vote with their wallet. Whereas if you do annual, really you're just fundamentally you're selling a one-off product because you actually have no idea what the sort of how many people will continue their subscription a year from now. And now you get back into this problem of very spiky revenue where you can't really make predictions and stuff. What's your view on

If you can sell annual, should you? Or should you offer monthly or quarterly for this sort of thing? I think it's like saying, what should the cost of an Apple be at the market? I mean, there's a pricing demand curve. There's math you can do around this. And you're really not going to know without quite a bit of data and experimentation. First of all, do you charge $100 or $99? $99.

Oh, well, we charge $19 a week, which is like $9.84 billed annually. But it would be like $9.70 a month kind of thing. Right, right. Okay. I mean, I'm really unopinionated because I don't know what your data is. I like if you have the...

the cojones to do it and just say, look, I know I'm providing a lot of value. It's, you know, it's $2.99 a year or whatever, whatever the flat rate is. If you want to be a part of it, that's what it costs. I'm a big fan of that. But other people would think differently and would want to do cohort analysis and try different things and stuff. Ultimately, I'd say that's a question for your business folks. Yeah.

But no, I don't have a great opinion there. And you can get pretty tricky in terms of psychology with saying,

it's, it's $8.99 a month if you subscribe annually and some of that stuff. I'm not a huge fan of that, but you can, you know, there's a lot of stuff you can do. Yeah, sure. Okay, nice. I mean, I like, I like the Coney's attitude of just like, it's either annual or nothing because it's like, it's a productivity community. What are you giving them? You're giving them like a Slack or what are you providing them? Oh, so it's a circle community, but basically three times a day there's Zoom co-working sessions. Every week there's a facilitated weekly review. Every month there's

monthly goal setting every month, we're going to do a book club and try and get the author of the book potentially to come on the thing. Do you get involved in this?

I will be facilitating quarterly planning sessions because I like doing those. But we've got coaches who are facilitating everything else and I'll just rock up as and when I feel like it. What I don't like about that is it's linear. So, you know, if you can't scale from 1,000 to 10,000 members because you'll have to hire coaches, I would try and do something that's nonlinear and I would price it lower. Like I would rather you charge $30 instead of $100, but there's no coaching and there's no people. All they're getting is something exclusive online

or that quarterly time with you. So what I do, people are like, oh my God, why? So I do Twitter subscriptions. I charge $29 a month to subscribe to my Twitter.

And the reason I do that is because I get so many emails from people saying, hey, would you mentor me? Can I pay you for your time? Like, you know, can I pick your brain? And so what I do is I root out all those people and I say, well, if you're not willing to spend $29, which is the cost of taking me out for lunch, I'm not going to engage with you. And if you are, I'm going to do a Zoom once a month for one hour. And anyone who wants can ask me anything on this Zoom. And so for one hour a month, I think I make

10 or $15,000 a month or something from Twitter, but I only do that one thing. And that can scale pretty big before it becomes a problem, right? All I'm offering is that one thing. I'm not going to do any more, any less, hire anyone else. You know, I don't even do like a Slack or anything like that because I don't want to administer it. So that's been my approach. Yeah.

Okay, interesting. So in our case, I thought my model was somewhat scalable because whether it's 1,000 people in a Zoom call or 10,000 people in a Zoom call...

It's a co-working session. And it just, it just means we pay more money to zoom webinar. Well, I think if, when you say coach, if it's not cohort based, based coaching, like if there's one coach for a thousand people, I think that's fine. But if it's one coach for every 20 people, I don't like that. Oh yeah, no, I agree. Yeah. We're, we're, we're thinking potentially down the line, like, you know, kind of like a nerd fitness does have, have maybe offering a one-on-one coaching service where one coach manages like 80 people. And it's like an accountability coach thing, but that's a,

further down the line type i would you know the one thing i don't like about that i don't i don't know how your what your conversion funnel looks like but i think that um you know if i was to go i've watched all your videos and i'm not aware of this right so it's like where how do i get converted and i think your conversion funnel has to be your videos right or your or your podcast and that's why i love like the podcast cutting off or click here at this you know for example if you were to say um

In order to listen to the rest of my interview with Andrew, click here and join my learning community. You get exclusive access to the podcast and this other thing or whatever. But I love like digital delivery where I can't be upset for getting 30 minutes of a podcast, but I can be upset if I join a Zoom and there's...

10,000 people there and it's like a cacophony of people talking and I can't really connect with anyone and it's not well facilitated and stuff. Right. It's easier to let your customer down. The more you provide them, the more hands on it is, the more you're letting them down. So I don't know. I'd be thoughtful.

The other one is AMA. You are perfect for AMA. So Huberman does an AMA every month. And if you want to ask him questions, which everybody does, because everyone wants to ask him weird health questions, um, they pay to access the AMA and listen to the AMA. Uh, that would do very well with your community. Nice. Thank you. That's very helpful to get, to get your take on this. Um,

So let's say someone's listened to this last hour and a half or hour and 50 minutes that we've been, that we've been recording. What, what would be your pitch for why they should buy and read the book? Well, I think we talked about the importance of learning from other people's mistakes. And what I've done is basically taken all of my mistakes from my life. And there's some I've omitted and more personal mistakes. But it's really watching me,

fail upwards. I mean, I made a million different errors throughout my career and I've put it into a book and I hope that people will read it and learn something from it. And, you know, ironically, we mentioned How to Get Rich. You know, that's a book, like I said, about how

you really shouldn't try and get super rich and how you should kind of stop at a certain point. I read that book. I didn't take the advice. Um, and maybe my book will be the same for a lot of people, but I think it peels back the curtain on something that not many people have talked about, which is what does it actually feel like to get super rich? And, uh, you know, I don't think it's that great. Uh,

You know, there's lots of things that are wonderful about it. Flexibility and comfort, obviously. But at the end of the day, I hope that it encourages people to focus more on their intrinsic values and what actually makes them happy and gets them out of bed versus trying to be, you know, a billionaire, which is kind of an absurd goal. If you think about it, being a billionaire, that is saying I need...

you know, $10 million or more a month, some crazy number to be happy. Most people need, I don't know, 20 grand a month to be happy. And then if you amp that up and give them a crazy lifestyle, hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. And I think not enough people work backwards from that. You know, what do I actually need in cash flow and cash in the bank to live the life that I want to lead? And I think they'll find that being a billionaire is really irrelevant.

Andrew, thank you so much. That's a great place to leave this. Thank you so much for taking the time. I am 75% of the way through the book. It's going to be my bedtime reading for tonight. And I can't wait to reread it multiple times to figure out my exact thoughts about it for a book club video on the YouTube channel. So thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it. Thanks, dude. This was really fun.

All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are gonna be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode.

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