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Episode 7-7-2026
Counter answer the two things that I think are the right way to use it, which is number one, how do we take every function of the business, take it from org chart based thinking to workflow based thinking and then saying, okay, this editor used to be involved in these six workflows. We actually only need him to be now involved in three of those workflows. And the other three, we can have AI do the vast majority of the work. And so all of a sudden we can 3.5x output. And so revenue per headcount on service based businesses should decrease, which means margin should go up. Now there's this great opportunity window right now where prices aren't really going to adjust for a minute, which means that your margins get absolutely stupid. And so like you should do that. So there's two flavors of that. One is the, the like I'm an advocate of like don't tell people you're using AI. Like go, go have a service business that people think is all humans in the background and then charge human prices and then have costs of tech and have the scale and operational or the, the lack of operational drag of tech. That's the good game, right? Or take it department by department so that you can just become more efficient at it. Right? So those are, I think the two good ways of doing it. To your point of like, well,
Like, I think it's cool that these apps exist. I've never, I've never needed to take notes to achieve my goals in business. Like, I'm just like, okay, what's the next most important thing to do? I'm going to do that thing. Okay, what's the next most important thing? I'm going to do that thing. I've never, I've never been like, okay, like, what did we say? I mean, and I've worked in, like, small companies, right? I've only, only been a founder. But, but that's just such an example of like, yeah, my meeting note system is like, so dialed. I'm like, okay, like, how much money have you made? Yeah. Okay, I'll say to counter answer the two things that I think are the right way to use it, which is.
I have a bunch of notes on my phone of a topic because right now I have probably like 10 books that are at different stages of. So I just mind dump wherever. And then once there's enough stuff that I think this is interesting, I'll then start the book writing process. But I'm a big believer in surface area of thought. Like, if you were to sit down and say, like, I'm gonna write a book about this and then you have two weeks, it's like you don't have enough experiences that are diverse in a two week period while you're writing to like, let the paint dry. So I kind of want to like have. I want to be in, you know, a totally different state talking to somebody and be like, I didn't think about that. And then I add it to the book. And so then all of a sudden it's like the density of thought and ideas per word is much higher. But I think you just have to do it by like spreading out the time that. So like, the time I'm thinking about a book is much longer than the time I'm writing the book. Is it purely thinking and you want a lot of thought to go into the different sections of the book or over the course of 18.
At the most basic level, you have to do work. And if it is not the work, then you have to have a very strong argument that is going to increase your output per unit of time period. And so if you have a three hour morning routine, and that's the first three hours a day when you're probably the cognitive, like the freshest, have the most energy, you would have to have an incredible. Do you curse on the show? We don't. Okay. A credible darn argument. You're welcome, our kids are watching. But by all means you have an incredible argument for why that's going to improve your output. And so like the morning routine that I'm a big advocate of is you wake up and then you caffeinate, you shut off your distractions and then you begin the work and how, how much you can compress the time from waking to beginning Work sure is the ideal. And you are the freshest whenever you are post sleep. Yep. And so I like, if you want to do that stuff, I'm like, by all means, go for it. But like just understand like you can. Plenty people have hobbies. You can have hobbies. Like there's nothing wrong with that. It's just, it's is this actually. And you also didn't need to work 16 hours a day in order to get what you want. I have plenty of friends who are super successful and don't work that much now. Did they work 16 hours a day to get there? Probably. And so this is the modeling the rise, not the plateau. And what's difficult is the plateau is what's more visible. Sure. What do you think about. And then you can make the content. Right? No one's making this part. No, no. What do you think about people sort of like staging at.
Like, I think people have lots of hardship that happens at different seasons in their life. Like, I've lost everything two times, two falls twice. But like, then it's like, okay, am I now post fall? It's like, well, I mean, I hope that nothing bad ever happens to me again, but I'm pretty sure bet shit's gonna happen to me again. And so I just commit to not stopping controlling the controllable, and that's basically all I can do. Do you have a good answer to pithy advice for young people? We got asked this on a podcast recently, and it was like the.
Out. If you do one thing for 40 years and you get better every year, you're going to fucking dominate. And so on some level, going after the tech opportunity, though they're for sure are the big mega winners. It's easier to compete against the people who are going after the pool cleaners. There's less sophisticated players, there's less capital. And so having a little bit of street smarts and a lot of work ethic can get you pretty far there. And you look at that compared to, you know, you look at the guy who's doing seven million a year, top line, two and a half million dollars in bottom line doesn't really work that much. Has a crew of guys. Is that the life you want? Yeah, because there's nothing, like, there's nothing wrong with that. And so I think it's deciding first to the younger guy, like, what do I want? Or what is an acceptable outcome? And then what of the many, many paths that are ahead of me? Have the highest likelihood of me getting there. And then once you pick that path, know that if you stick with that path for 20 years, the likelihood that you fail is basically zero. As long as you have some feedback loop for improvement. That's basically it. Figure out where you want to go, find the highest likely path of getting there, and then do not let the opinions of strangers or people who do not have what you want dissuade you from getting there. Yeah. What do you think about. There's this odd trend.
The first thing was I found any media editor, like an agency, and they're like three YouTube videos a week is what we do. And I was like, all right, then that's what I'll do. And so I just webcams, like. And I had a little suitcase that would open up so I could travel, because Layla and I were traveling for the year sale. And so that's what I did. Wherever we were, I was like, open up. And then. Because at that time, I didn't have really any work, so I had all these thoughts and I was like, I'm just going to get them. I'm going to dump them all out. And so that's basically what YouTube strategy 1.0 was. Yeah. I had somebody reach out, like, legit. Right as short started, they were like, I'll do everything. You already have YouTube stuff. I'm just gonna clip it. Just give me permission. Yep. And I was like, oh, cool. And so that's what I accidentally started clipping 100%. And so that was like. We were really early on shorts. So good. And then as soon as he did a pretty good job, he was like, you know, if I actually recorded you doing these, they'd do even better. And I was like, fine, but I only want to do one day, a quarter. And he was like, fine. So he'd fly out for one day. And we do 100 shorts in one sitting. 100%. I would just do 100. And that, that kind of style of filming and recording is pretty much how I still kind of rock that way. Which is like, I want. I prefer a marathon day. Like, I'd rather just start at, you know, six, and then just rock until every ounce of juice is gone. And then it's like, great, yeah, we'll do it again in a week or whatever. Yeah, we're sort of like that marathon every day. Yeah. Yeah. What am I? Questions is like, what goes into a two hour YouTube video? Because you'll do these, like, master classes. Two hours. And I'm like, that is insane. And then I'm like, I do three hours every day. So now it's become more possible. But I imagine that there's lots of. But the three hours was kind of like just going until we got tired. Yeah. Like, by three hours, we're usually like, okay, like, probably need to go to the bathroom. Probably want to eat some food. Yeah. And this show is much less.
But I'm pretty sure bet shit's gonna happen to me again. And so I just commit to not stopping, controlling the controllable. And that's basically all I can do. Do you have a good answer to pithy advice for young people? We got asked this on a podcast recently and it was like the closing question. It was like, you got one minute and I was like, you could talk for hours. Like, where do you even start? How do you think about packaging information like that? And I actually want your advice for young people. If you have one thing, it's so hard too. It's like, work hard. It's like good general advice. But then I've been in points in my life and I know people that are working hard on the dumbest thing and that ends up being the worst thing that they can do. What you accomplish is a direct output of the volume of activity that you do multiplied by the leverage of the activity itself. And so you have to pick the right boat. You have to pick the right opportunity based on your goals. Some people only want to make a million dollars. Some people want to make 10, some people want to make 100. Somebody make a trillion. Like everyone has different. So like the leverage that. What's interesting about that is that you just get to pick and it's going to be hard no matter what. I think Naval said this thing where it was like, it's really hard to build a restaurant that's really successful. It's also really hard to build a billion dollar unicorn. They're both going to be 80 hour weeks. And so, you know, and Stuart Schwartzman from Blackstone said, like, you might as well play big because level 10 talent has only attracted level 10 opportunities. It's harder to attract good people for bad opportunity because then you got to do it all yourself. Which is why I have so much respect for some guys like Peggy and Andrew cherng, who are Mr. And Mrs. Panda. Panda Express dude. Deca billionaires selling chicken. Passenger Royalty, dude. Like, but like so much respect for that level of grit. 45 years selling orange chicken, right? All that to say you will pick based on the level of awareness that you have at that time. Where it gets more difficult is that you learn more shit as you go and you realize that there are higher leverage opportunities. The difficulty is that if you're four years into one thing, year five of an existing thing that you have four years of reps on versus year one of even a slightly better opportunity, you have to compare year one versus year five of the other one, not year one versus year one, because time you can't get back. And so that's where the compounding of getting better at something at some point does have outsized returns, even it's an inferior vehicle. Yeah, talk about that idea of you're an A plus option.
We have a variety of beverages if you'd like. What's a category of business that you haven't built or invested in that you're excited to at some point? I'm still looking for the magical med spa. I think med spas are super. I love pseudo medical because what's maxing? Yeah, all of it. Well, think about it like, there's this aging population that has more money than anyone else. They don't want to age. They see the Brian Johnson's like, it is the zeitgeist of right now of like, I want to live forever, I want to look beautiful and young forever. And they have all the money. And so if you look at the demand side of that, it's huge. And look at the supply med spas are. They're still wildly understaffed. And I know this because I see business owners every single week. And so I've like, there's a handful of categories right now that I'll meet business owners and they're doing better than they should be. Like, there's some business owners. I mean I met a med spa owner when I first moved to la. They had started their business and within a year they were doing like 1, 1.2 million of like, like straight free cash flow off of like $400,000 invested. Yeah, it was like actually unbelievable. Yes. The entrepreneur in this case was like very talented because he watches this and he's. Oh yeah, he's great though. No, but this was, this was you know, years ago. But yeah, I'm surprised that also like differentiated shots at that category because if you look at like I would expect Brian Johnson to do something like this, right? Because there's a lot of people that follow him and he has, you know, as many, maybe he probably has like 10 times as many like critics as he does people that are like, I'm going to do exactly what he's going to do. But that group of people that will just like copy what he's doing is actually pretty, pretty meaningful. Right. And so meds bars, you go into these like high ticket kind of like procedures, treatments, things like that. To me that's where I think he could really start to print. He had 1200 people apply for his million dollar per year thing. 1200, do that math real fast. That's a lot of money. And then there was a $60,000 per year thing that was underneath and multiply that by just probably an order of magnitude greater, wildly underestimated. So you take that and then you have these 10,000 or 15,000 med spots that exist it's nothing and it's super fragmented because still no one's really gobbled that up. Well not that I've seen and to your point of when I asked them hey so what are you doing right now to get your 6 million a year top line and 40% margins and they're like kind of just you know we just opened up and put the sign up and you just did a good job and and you know, you know people, customers tell customers like you know that's not how it works. Yeah and it's not how it's going to work forever. No they're just in a completely supply constrained environment. They just don't know it because when you're on the inside you don't know you're like oh I'm doing a good job is part of the problem that a lot of the med spa like founders get a little bit too sucked into the biohacker nature of the.
Where we want the drama, we want the stakes. And so I don't think that's gonna change at all. I love the series that you've been doing with entrepreneurs that attend the conference. They stand up, they give you the. It's so, so good. I just love all those. Live, interactive. Live, interactive. 100%. I'm interested to know how you think legacy media will fit into your media strategy going forward. Is it about prestige? Is there actually an audience there still? Because you're part of the new guard, and yet you signed with CIA. I'm sure you have the ability to walk into a large media company and get a TV show. Does that make sense? Is that something that's interesting to you? What would the value be? I think it's distribution that I don't have access to. Okay. So I think one of the biggest unspoken advantages that exists right now in media is Dave Ramsey has been murdering for 30, 40 years because he has 600 radio stations syndicated. Everyone's like, radio status. It's like he's murdering it. And it's because no one's looking. So, like, I'm an equal opportunist when it comes to attention. Yeah. And so even if it's less or more, if it's something that's completely in this other bubble over here that I have since you, I have no access. And the beauty is, like, there's still, like, closer to, like, there's no monopoly online. Right. The feed is like, just get. Anybody can log on. And it's beautiful because anyone can log on. You don't have to have an audience. You can suddenly have an audience. Maybe it's one video, maybe it's a flat splash in the pan. But TV still, like, if you can figure out the right lane, you have this sort of, like, differentiated access to attention. So it's like a different group of people, and it's differentiated access that's not just like, log on immediately, have access. And when something super pops, like, you look at all the real estate shows that have come out, you've got selling Sunset. Sirhan has his show. There's a huge distribution base that they gain access to as a result of that. All you have to do is look at those stars, look at their social media. And I would say, I say this lovingly. It's pretty weak in terms of what they're doing. Sure. But their engagement. Exactly. But their following is still really strong because it's carried over. And so I'm like, if those people actually tried on this side and had someone and it's like, how do we get it all right? And that's kind of the. I think this is just underrated broadly for mostly tech people. They see the trend of the Internet growing exponentially or E commerce, and they think, oh, well, it's.
Sure. You know, I'm not against it. Yeah. I think some people just have the itch to, like, customize their own living environment. And I'm curious about how you see your living environment, because, I mean, from those first YouTube videos, like the monastic. Were you. Closet. You were in the closet? Like, that was my business. Thoughts? I don't know if that was intentional, but it was somewhat deliberate. You picked that space over a big living room. Right. And I'm wondering how you think about your living space, your workspace, your office space today. So I would say all of the time that when I work, I'm very intentional about that space. When I'm not working, it's whatever Layla wants. I don't care if she's 10% happier. I have a percent to percent correlation to my happiness, and me being more comfortable has no correlation back. So whatever she's good with, I'm good with. But in terms of where I work, it's almost all, how do I eliminate every sense of distraction for me personally? And so it's like, I don't have windows. Some people like having windows. I don't think anything wrong with that. For me, it's like I need no stimulation because I'm very distractible. And so I have to have, like, earplugs in. No light, all artificial. I have, like, soundproof, like, you know, like, I want nothing. Yeah. And then I can finally focus on what I'm trying to work on. Yeah. Can we go back to the early YouTube days on the latest channel? I think 2020.
Did you see this? I don't even know what you call it. Chrome extension. It's a chrome extension that lets you dim or hide all the mass produced fake brands on Amazon. So knockoff shopping. You remember I was asking for this a year ago. I was like, I want to shop on Amazon just from brands that have been over that are over 50 years old. Right. Because that just squeezes out the W, N, P E T H moe the A he. I'm not even going to say that. Y, X, Y, L Y, L, U and mm joyin tomy go Donliff Gondolph. That's what it looks like. There are. I have a flurry of sort of slop brands on Amazon and this Chrome machine you don't like buying from Coofandy allows you to dim them or even remove them entirely. Of course, a lot of people do their shopping on mobile, so. So you'll need to fire up the desktop in Chrome with the browser. But if you're doing some serious shopping, probably makes a lot of sense. Pete Oxenham says it's beautiful. He de slopped Amazon and it is a nice feature. I can imagine this being very popular. I liked that. This little tweaking of your Internet experience seems like the good news. Define says Chinese airdroppers deserve to make a living too. The funny thing is I don't think they're airdroppers. They're making the actual products. Yeah, they're manufacturers. Drop shippers. Well, they're. Yeah. What is drop shipping? Drop shipping is where you're using another manufacturer. You're not even necessarily even holding. No, this is straight from the factory for sure. Yeah. And I respect the hustle. I just, I find that a lot of these products end up, you know, not keeping around very long. Yeah. I love this because I imagine if you get a little bit of a community on here, it will automatically hide or dim or gray out the brands that are suspected to be slop or junk or knockoffs. But you can click on individual brand and say, trust this brand. This was a false positive. You can block this brand or you can dismiss for this particular item. Maybe it's fine, you can report it as a real brand. So they're going to be able to collect all of that information across the user base and, and then merge that together. So the system should get smarter over time, I imagine. But who knows how long Amazon allows this to go on? I imagine that the margins on some of these sloppier brands are potentially better and so there might be a financial incentive to prevent this type of plugin from running roughshod all over Amazon.com, but at least for now, you can go and enjoy it and take it for a spin at knockoff shopping. Amazon without the knockoffs filters out the trademark squat pseudo brands the Szhluxs and Horse. These are weird brand names. Very, very weird brand names. I'm surprised they don't come up with a normal name. Like if you're going to be a sketchy dropshipper with a knockoff product, it's pretty easy to go to an LLM and say, why not just be the silverware company of China? Well, that or you know, dog beds. Here the examples are Casper and Carhartt come up with another term, the Buddy Dog supply company. There's a bunch of words you could use. I don't know. It doesn't seem like rocket science, and yet it feels like a cat walked across the keyboard. With some of these brands.
Yesterday, the Topolino. It's coming to America. Tiny two seat electric microcar they're calling it. Starts at $14,000, almost half the price of the other electric golf cart that we talked about last. What was that last Thursday? We talked to him. But you can fit a lot more people in the amble. The amble, yes, that's right. I like this move from. I like this move from Fiat. You like it? I think that their cars are generally unserious and so I think it's good to just lean into that. Okay. Okay. And I think they're trying to price this so that when people are thinking, hey, I need a new car, should I go out and buy like a crossover SUV or there's no way anyone can consider this for their main car. It's impossible. No, but you can. If you typically roll around with a handful of people and instead of buying one car, oh, you buy a bunch of them for 60 grand. You'll need a trainer. You know how you know the range on this thing? 46 miles. 46 miles. I mean, I guess if you have a 10 mile commute, you can commute here. They launch an EV with 46. 46 miles of range. It's nothing. And they should have called it. They should have called it. How long is your commute? It's less than 10 miles. Less than 10 miles. They should have called it the Fiat Dice because every time you leave the house you're rolling the dice. It's £1,000. So you can deadlift it with another friend. Are you serious? £1,000? Yeah. This thing's tiny. It's really, truly like so, so small. They're saying it's the cutest car ever made. Look at the speed. The top speed tops out at 25 miles an hour. That's with a street legal low speed vehicle kit. By default, it only goes 19 miles an. So how long would it take you to get here? 19 miles an hour. 30 minutes. Yeah, 30 minutes. Wow. Not bad. Not too bad. Maybe, maybe you gotta do it. Okay, you guys are laughing, but you won't be laughing when I pull up to the office with fleet of these, with five of these. And you need a support car, like a multiple support behind you. Yeah. No, the Topolino is the support you just have here. You have a series of. You just go train mode. Well, our next guest is the owner of a Hummer Evidence.
This is obviously a more tech forward show, but like the vast majority of businesses are not tech businesses. Right. There's like H vac businesses all over the place. There's pool cleaners, There's a lot of shit you can do for money. And so I like, unless you want to be a trillionaire, you can be a billionaire in just about any boring business you look at. What's his name? Is it Brad Jacobs? Yeah, yeah. Six times. Yeah. Make a few billion dollars. Yeah, a few. And then he has a sequel, a few more billion. You guys are kind of, you guys are very. I never thought of you as home building materials. Yeah, there's just a lot of businesses out there. And so it just depends on like what the goal is. But any business done for like zooming all the way out, if you do one thing for 40 years and you get better every year, you're going to fucking dominate. And so on some level going after the tech opportunity though they're for sure are the big mega winners. It's easier to compete against the people who are going after the pool cleaners. There's just, there's like, there's less sophisticated players, there's less capital. And so having a little bit of street smarts and a lot of work ethic can get you pretty far there. And you look at that compared to like, you know, you look at the guy who's doing 7 million a year, top line, two and a half million dollars in bottom line doesn't really work that much. Has a crew of guys. Is that the life you want? Yeah, because there's nothing, like, there's nothing wrong with that. And so I think it's deciding first to the younger guy, like, what do I want or what is an acceptable outcome. And then what of the many, many paths that are ahead of me have the highest likelihood of me getting there. And then once you pick that path, know that if you stick with that path for 20 years, the likely that you fail is basically zero. As long as you have some feedback loop for improvement, that's basically it. Figure out where you want to go, find the highest likely path of getting there, and then do not let the opinions of strangers or people who do not have what you want dissuade you from getting there.