#129 - Why Health is SO Important in Business with Nick Huber I The Corey Ganim Show

#129 - Why Health is SO Important in Business with Nick Huber I The Corey Ganim Show Speaker 2: All right, everyone, welcome back to the show. So we've got a very special guest today. Today's guest is Nick Huber, otherwise known as Sweaty Startup. So if you spent any amount of time on Twitter, otherwise known as X, you've probably seen Nick's tweets. He's gone viral many times over the years for his controversial takes on business, parenting, recently on AI, health and longevity, a lot of different topics. But I wanted to have him on the show today to talk through some stuff that he doesn't normally share on interviews. Most of his interviews are about his story and his businesses, but we're going to get into some off the wall topics today, some stuff that he doesn't normally discuss. Now, a quick background on how Nick and I came to meet. So Nick recently published a book called The Sweaty Startup, which I highly recommend you get. I've read it through and it's fantastic. During the launch phase of that book, he actually did a promotion where if you bought 75 copies of the book, he would have you out to his country club in Athens to play a round of golf. I saw that as a great opportunity. So I bought 75 copies, got to go down there to Athens, hang out with him for the day, play a round of golf, go to dinner. And we had a good time and had a good conversation. As a result of that, I invited him on the show and he said, yes. So we're going to go into his story and talk through some stuff that he doesn't normally talk about. Welcome, man. Excited for the next 45 minutes or so. Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks for having me, man. You can play some golf. It was fun meeting your cousin and your buddy. So yeah, man, great day in Athens. Speaker 2: Yeah, I appreciate that. No, I'm still learning, but you know, getting better every week. So I enjoy going out there. Why don't you give the 30-second elevator pitch for the folks that might not have heard of you before. What is it that you do and what are you all about? Speaker 1: I was born in Southern Indiana to two middle-class parents. My dad worked for a developer. Mom was a school nurse. Went to college to run track and field in Ithaca at Cornell. Met my business partner, started a moving and storage company called Storage Squad in 2012. We were moving boxes. Built my first self-storage facility while that business was operational. We raised some money and built a building in Ithaca. It went really, really well. Three years later, we sold StorageSquad and went full-time into the real estate private equity, raised $30, $40 million to buy about $100 million worth of self-storage, have a team there. So that's kind of my main business, my main focus. Also started a cost segregation firm that's fairly large now, about 90 employees. And bought, raised much money to buy somewhere.com, which was a pretty big business, about 160 employees. So yeah, I'm an opportunist. I'm very ambitious, but I sometimes bite off a little more than I can chew and I have a lot to learn still. So take everything I say with a grain of salt. Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I love that perspective, right? Because I think a lot of people aspire to get to that point. And they think that, especially if they want to go like the private equity route, or they want to start acquiring businesses, It's like there's a big jump a lot of times from where people are to getting to that point, but I love how you took it one step at a time. You started with an unsexy business of simply moving boxes for students and storing them during the summer, doing things that weren't scalable to grow that business and then eventually exiting that and then stepping up the next rung of the ladder, which I really admire. Speaker 1: Business is crazy because it's all about momentum, man. It's like a snowball rolling down a hill. 12 years ago, I was literally, actually 10 years ago, 2015, I was in dorm rooms, sleeping in warehouses, moving boxes with 30 grand in my business operating account, hoping I could make a deposit on a new warehouse in Boston. Fast forward three or four years, we had our first big piece of liquidity when we refined a self-storage facility. Fast forward three or four more years and all of a sudden Twitter is a big part of my life and I'm able to access new people and level up again. It's a journey for sure. Speaker 2: And it's a great point that things can change so quickly, right? When you're in the trenches every day, when you're making things happen, you can make decades worth of progress in a year or two, right? Speaker 1: But it's also crazy. The other side of that is that like two years will go by and it feels like nothing has happened. Even five years will go by and it's like nothing happened. And then all of a sudden, bang, it all happens all at once. And it's when you least expect it. Speaker 2: And then there's the other end of the spectrum where people sit on their ass for five years and Five years go by and they're in the same place that they were before. Speaker 1: So yeah, it's a marshmallow test for adults. You really have to do work now to potentially get paid maybe five years from now and it turns out not a lot of people are willing to do that. Speaker 2: Yeah, delayed gratification is a huge part of being a successful entrepreneur. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Well, so in today's show, right, we had said we want to talk about some of the topics that you don't normally get to talk about, at least not in these interviews. And one thing that I've noticed in your X content specifically is So you built your audience talking about self-storage and real estate mainly, analyzing deals, breaking down deals. But you've shifted recently, I've noticed, to talking a lot more about health and longevity. And that's actually what the bulk of our discussion was in Athens when we played golf. You gave us some great insight on You know, things to look out for, blood markers to look out for, really just general health and longevity knowledge that I wasn't aware of. So I guess the first question is what caused the shift? Like, was there a specific moment or realization where you're like, hey, this is important and I need to start talking about it more? Speaker 1: Well, I think there's a point in everybody's life. It happened to me when I realized, holy cow, I have a little bit to lose here. I'm not wealthy beyond my wildest dreams. I'm nowhere near many of my peers even in my town. So this is all at scale. But I realized like, wow, I have a lot to lose. I have a beautiful wife. I have three kids. I have a home that I've worked really hard to kind of make feel like the place that my family's comfortable. I have businesses that I'm proud of. I have people that depend on me. And it's fun. I'm doing exactly what I want to be doing all the time, which is working a lot, of course, but also doing other things with my friends, my family, my hobbies. So there was a point where I'm like, okay, what could mess this up? And I think everybody I know who's over the age of 50, they care about two things. They care about their grandkids and they care about their health. So I started getting into longevity. I took a executive health retreat in early 2023. So coming up on two years ago into Boulder, Colorado, I can Happy to make anybody an introduction. My email, by the way, is nickatsweatystartup.com. Me and my team read all those. If you want to learn more, I have a document, actually an 80-20 document. Corey, I don't know if you could maybe even just put it in the show notes, but I've spent two years going deeper on how to do this in a balanced way. Because there's Brian Johnson who is measuring plastic in his semen. And then there's me who wants to hang out with Corey and drink five or six Miller Lights and have a great day and then go eat greasy Mexican food after. I want to have both sides. I want to have the flexibility and balance to go do and live and hang out and have fun and enjoy my life. And I also want to make sure that I'm taking care of the things that could derail this. And when I started looking into it, I realized that there's a couple things that the odds are can really derail this. It's heart disease, which is the number one killer in men, especially women have a lot less prevalence. And that's actually statistically why they live, you know, three, four or five years longer, depending on your race and culture. Um, it's heart disease and it's cancer. Then there's other metabolic health factors, your metabolism, your blood sugar, these other things that are super important as well. But 75% of people in America have like a chronic disease, whether that's insulin resistance, their metabolism is messed up, they have heart disease, they have hypertension, they have high blood pressure, whatever it might be. So I realized that those two things are actually very controllable. Which nobody told me that. My PCP didn't tell me that. No friends told me that, that, hey, you can go in, you know, your PCP won't do this. They'll argue with you, but you can, you can find a way to get your blood drawn and figure out, you know, where your cholesterol levels are, your lipid panels are, and you can say, hey, look, I'm going to need a stent at 55 years old. I have a very, very close friend. I told you this story. I'm going to keep him private, obviously, who is close to me. And I said, man, like, do you know what your cholesterol levels are in your heart? Have you gotten a CAC scan? Have you gotten an angiogram to look at your heart? Because his father, his mom's dad had passed away at 52 years old of a massive heart attack. He didn't know. He didn't know. He went in and got the scan and the test and realized that he had a lot of plaque, artery plaque. He's in his 30s. He's ripped. He's a college athlete. And he was on pace to need a stent in his late 40s and have serious heart issues in his 50s. Did not even know. And this is a man who has a family, has a lot going for him, has a high net worth. So that just didn't sit well with me, Corey, that these things can be going on for people and you don't even know it. Speaker 2: And so obviously the goal is to educate yourself, right? And then to now build awareness for others too, because obviously a lot of people in your audience are business owners and are probably in a similar boat where they've got a lot to lose. And you're basically shouting from the rooftops like, hey guys, this is important. Figure this stuff out, get checked, figure out where your deficiencies are and fix them. And it's funny, ever since Ever since our conversation there, I actually, I didn't even have a primary care physician. Like I hadn't gotten a physical since I think senior year of college and only because I needed one to go abroad. And since our conversation, I actually have a primary care physician, went to see him last week and I have a blood test tomorrow at noon, full blood panel to. Speaker 1: Did you talk him into including ApoB, lipoprotein little a, testosterone? Speaker 2: I don't think so. So maybe after I go tomorrow, I'm going to do that then. Speaker 1: Well, make sure you don't do the draw. Don't do the draw and pay for it unless those things are included. Speaker 2: Okay. And that's good to know, right? But the bottom line is, again, I understand this stuff's important. Speaker 1: It's a recipe. Like unfortunately, your genetics is 90% of it. So people think, If I eat healthy, if I work out, if I sleep well, I'm going to be fine. That's just simply not true when it comes to heart disease. Genetics is, okay, maybe 50%, but I think it's more. I think it's 75% of this is genetics. Obviously, if you're eating McDonald's every day and not sleeping and smoking a pack of cigarettes, that's a different story. But if you live a reasonably healthy life like most people I know, It's 90% genetics and it's a recipe. It's how much cholesterol, the bad type of cholesterol is floating around in your blood and what other markers do you have in your blood that are potentially going to calcify that stuff in your heart. So I would encourage to the too-long-didn't-read for the people who want to know what's going on is that your PCP will tell you that if your LDL is 120 and your APOB is 85, they're going to tell you that you're fine, that you're not a cardiac risk in the next 10 years. I don't want to know. I don't care to know if I'm a cardiac arrest in the next 10 years. I want to know where I'm going to be at when I'm 65 years old. And if your ApoB is 80, which nobody even knows their ApoB, and your LDL is bottom, middle of the range, 30th percentile, you are going to get heart disease. And there's pharmacology, very good pharmacology, three different types. You don't even have to do statins now if you don't want. I'm on something called Repatha. It's a PSK9 inhibitor. It helps my liver like pull more of it out of my blood. Cost me a little bit of money because insurance wouldn't cover it. It's $450 a month. But that takes my risk down significantly of the number one cause of death. Speaker 2: And if you can just fix that one thing, right, that's a game changer for most people. Speaker 1: It's going from 72 to 82 in life expectancy. That one thing, Corey. Speaker 2: You're talking about a 15% increase, more or less? It's 10 years. Most people would do anything for a 10-year increase in life expectancy, but they don't know what they don't know. And this is one of those things where they probably put it off and think, oh, I can do it in a couple of years or I can do it later, but clearly very important. Speaker 1: Yeah, and I'm actually gonna pull up the document so that I don't misquote some stuff. Yeah, so sub 70% on your LDL is top 2% of all humans. My LDL is 68 now that I'm medicated. Top 2% of all humans, all men and female, male and female. 80, 130, 130 LDL is 50th percentile. Your doctor, your PCP will say you are fine. Corey, you're good. Go about your day. Would you want to go about your day being in the 50th percentile of risk for heart disease when the average person gets it and it's the number one killer of men by three to five times? Speaker 2: Absolutely not. No. Speaker 1: No. And when it comes to ApoB, when it comes to ApoB, 100 plus is like, hey, you're going to have heart disease at 50. You're going to have significant calcification at 50. You're going to have likely some heart issues at 60 and you're definitely going to have a heart attack in your 70s. Mine's at 46. Speaker 2: And is that due to the medication you're saying that, okay, right. Because I understand that makes sense. Speaker 1: Yeah. So yeah. And then there's something called lipoprotein little a that amplifies everything. If it's above 20, 30, it means it's a, it's genetic. You cannot do anything to lower it. And that being in your blood makes calcification in the heart much more likely. And it just puts, it makes me even, I have it, I have high, I'm 35 is my APO little a, or lipoprotein little a, just puts me at, you know, pretty serious additional risk. So that makes all my numbers even more important to keep down. Speaker 2: So I'm with you and I'm buying what you're selling here, but I bet there's a lot of people listening to this that are like, Nick's full of shit. He's not a doctor. How is he qualified to say these things? And I mean, kind of a legitimate question. Is it just the research you've done? Is it the people you know? What makes you so confident in being able to talk about these things for which are outside of your main profession? Speaker 1: Yeah, I form my opinions by doing deep research on Peter Atiyah, I'm Walter Longo, longevity specialist, people who are in the business of longevity and they spent 30, 40, 50 years of their careers. And if you went in and saw Peter Atiyah and you have to pay a million dollars a year to be a patient of Peter Atiyah, but luckily he has enough content on that ChatGPT can tell you exactly how he feels about everything. If you called him and said, Hey, I want to live, I want to feel really good at 90 years old. My ApoB is 85. And my LDL is, you know, 120. My PCP said, I'm fine. He'll say, no, you're not like, let's go. Like how, how aggressive you want to get. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: So it's like, look, if, if you're trying to figure out how to make rent, if you don't have a job, if you don't have your life figured out, then obviously focus focusing on these things is not in your 80, 20 of life. But, um, if you've got a lot to lose and you want to get serious about preventing some of these things, it's an absolute no brainer. And then there's cancer, which is the number two. Yeah, you can do things to keep your body from getting cancer, mainly fasting. That's where Valter Longo, my longevity doctor and I follow Valter Longo, V-A-L-T-E-R. He's an Italian longevity doc. He found out that when you fast for 72 hours, when you don't eat for 72 hours, and I'm not talking about intermittent fasting. I actually think that's really bad for the metabolism. Eating breakfast is super important. When you fast for 72 hours, your body starts to eat itself. And those last 10 hours, it's eating your bad cells, your morphed cells, the ones that could become cancerous cells. It's called autophagy. And your body heals itself. A lot of genetic expression happens where your body goes into hyper-recovery mode. Stem cells increase massively in your blood, which repair everything in your body. So fasting is super, super healthy. And in my opinion, a main preventer of cancer. Speaker 2: And you do that 72-hour fast, that's once a quarter, right? Would that be the prescription for most people is, hey, just do it, literally just do a 72-hour fast once a quarter? Speaker 1: I would definitely, just since we're in a public forum, I would encourage folks to talk to their own doctor. If you have a history of eating disorder, if you're a kid, if you're pregnant, nursing, like there's a lot of reasons why people shouldn't fast. But it cures diabetes. It cures insulin sensitivity. Your cells are full of sugar. It can't process all the sugar. When you starve yourself for three days, those cells empty out of sugar and your insulin stays good and diabetes is in remission from fasting. But yeah, we spend, the American economy spends over a trillion dollars a year to treat people from diabetes with all these meds. Speaker 2: Right. Well, and that's the point I was going to make is this just seems like it goes so far against conventional wisdom. It's like if it were that simple that, hey, if you have diabetes fast for 72 hours and you're going to significantly reduce those symptoms or, I mean, are you saying that it can eradicate it entirely for certain people that have it? Speaker 1: No, it puts it in a temporary remission. Like healing a messed up metabolism is really, really hard. Um, there's, there's something to, to like, everybody knows their A1C, like their, their, their blood sugar levels. Um, there's another figure here that is more important. Let me, uh, I just want to, I don't want to misquote it. Let me pull it up out of my doc. Speaker 2: Yeah, I do feel like that's something that, again, most people would hear that and think that that's absolutely crazy. But it's one of those things that most people just don't know what they don't know. And these things aren't talked about. And of course, they're not talked about because Big Pharma is making a trillion dollars a year, keeping people medicated and keeping people having these diseases, right? I hate to say it, but that is in their best interest for people to stay as sick as possible. Speaker 1: So the third one, the three headed monster is, in my opinion, Heart disease, cancer, and then insulin resistance, diabetes, at least a bunch of things. Your metabolism being messed up. So looking at your blood sugar, your A1C numbers, knowing that is really important. Under 5 is like top 1%. You have to be so disciplined and genetically a specimen to get under 5. Under 5.5 is amazing. I'm at 5.3. Very, very happy with that. Doctors see people all day who are at 7, 10, 15, 20. Their blood sugar is totally messed up and their metabolism cannot function. It leads to inflammation. It messes them up. There's a leading indicator of that called fasted insulin. It's a number you need to make sure that's in your blood test tomorrow, Corey. Know what your fasted insulin is. If that's sub five, It's very good. Mine is two, which is phenomenal. My body's very good at clearing sugar. But people who have a really good A1C could have a horrible fasted insulin. It's a five to 10 year leading indicator. Those things like diabetes and metabolic health. So doctors don't even check it. Your PCP is gonna be like, Corey, why the hell do you want this? You're healthy. Because it's a leading indicator. It tells us that there's a smoldering fire in the basement instead of looking at flames pouring out of the roof. Speaker 2: At this point, it's probably too late, right? Speaker 1: Exactly. The modern day medical field is phenomenally good at end-of-life care and dealing with people who are incredibly sick. Your PCP, Corey, who you have been seeing, has people sitting in front of them all day with 150 LDLs, 100 APOBs. They have heart disease. Their metabolism is all messed up. They're pre-diabetic. He's just looking at them all day. So there's no attention to you and I about how to prevent these things. Speaker 2: No, I mean, it makes sense. They've got to cater to the masses and the people that are most likely to be at risk. Now, on that note, talking about going against conventional wisdom, I feel like there's so many health and longevity Quotes are just things out there that people believe to be conventional wisdom that when you dig into the data you find out are complete BS. Speaker 1: Carnivore diet. I hate the carnivore diet. I hate intermittent fasting. My wife's a Harvard-trained dietician and yeah, it's a disaster. Speaker 2: So what would you say is the number one piece of conventional wisdom that the average person thinks is true that you're like it's total BS? Speaker 1: Losing weight really fast is a total disaster. Speaker 2: Yeah, horrible. Speaker 1: Your body is very good at not starving and dying. It's very good at staying alive. And when you starve it, when you put it through a cut cycle where you're going to lose 30 pounds in six months, um, your body does every single thing genetically possible, you know, biologically possible to put that weight back on. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: And your metabolism actually slows way down. You're resting. The amount of calories you burn at rest drops. My wife has a machine where I can put my head in a machine. It's called an indirect calorimeter. It measures what I'm breathing and it measures my calorie burn at rest. She has 200-pound people that go in there, Corey, and burn 900 calories a day at rest. Speaker 2: That's horrible. Speaker 1: I burn 2,700 calories a day at rest because my metabolism is strong. It's healthy. I've never put on weight, gained weight. I've never skipped breakfast. I've never done intermittent fasting. I've never done a carnivore diet. I've never done Whole30. I've never done Hard75, whatever these things are. People have to be very careful. Getting in shape and healthy is a five-year goal. Get your metabolism healthy first. Build good habits that you can sustain live a balanced life that you can actually enjoy and then start getting healthy. So Yeah, the fad diets Really really really bad. Speaker 2: I Agree with that a hundred percent. I can't because I'm not that I'm in the fitness space, but I've been lifting for 13 14 years now it's my biggest hobby one of my biggest passions and I I've seen every flavor of diet imaginable. The people that, you know, they lose the 25 pounds in like a month because they just starve themselves and then their metabolism is completely shot. And the next thing you know, they're trying carnivore, then they're trying keto, then they're trying Whole30 and they're trying all these different things and it's just ruining their metabolism. They're just digging themselves into a hole. A great example of this is one of my roommates from college. He was slightly overweight, probably like 220, 230. Diet was atrocious. He would eat candy for lunch, but his logic is that, well, if I only eat a breakfast and then, you know, a few snacks throughout the day, I'm only eating 1500 calories a day. Then he'd go to the gym and just run on the treadmill all day. And his metabolism is shot and then he has one big meal or one cheat day and he gains five pounds because... Speaker 1: It's not calories in, it's not calories in, calories out. The amount of calories going out changes. It changes. It's like, imagine your body is a sports car that when it's almost out of gas, gets 150 miles per gallon. And when it's full of gas, it gets five miles per gallon, meaning you're burning a ton of calories. And then as it gets empty, as you starve yourself, as your body gets more, you know, efficient to try to keep itself from starving, it burns less, it burns less. So, um, that's one, that's, I think the number one most misunderstood part of health in general is balance. Like I have so much room. I have such a strong fitness foundation. I have so much room. I have so much room to live my life because I burn 4,000 calories a day if I walk 10,000 steps. I can eat what I want to eat. Of course, I'm disciplined. Of course, I try my best, but I can go on vacation and I'm okay. It gives you so much more flexibility to live a good life. Speaker 2: 100%. To put a bow on that, my favorite technique for, for example, right now, I'm the heaviest I've ever been. You know overweight, but I am trying to lose, you know, five to seven pounds my strategy if I'm trying to lose or whether I'm trying to gain is I will do a Three week basically a three one So I'll do three weeks and a slight deficit right now if I'm trying to lose and then a one week in a surplus, right? So you kind of keep the body guessing and it prevents you from mm-hmm. I'm not just gonna lose ten pounds in a month I don't want yes, I might lose two or three pounds in a month. maintain for a week and then restart that cycle and it's like you actually have this consistent weight loss where I'm still getting stronger but I'm losing fat and still building muscle in some capacity and then when I'm trying to gain, same thing. Three weeks in a surplus, one week in a deficit and just alternate or sometimes I'll do six and two. Speaker 1: You can find a dietician in eating disorder clinic that has an indirect calorimeter. 150 bucks, you can go in, lay down. Speaker 2: I'd love to know. Speaker 1: You can go in and lay down and know how many calories your body burns at rest. And as you diet, you continue to do it. And if you see that really drop, warning, warning, warning. Speaker 2: You're going too fast. Right. And I track my food religiously, like pretty much if I'm eating at home, even when I'm eating out, I try to track. Generally, I'm around 3,000 a day as kind of my maintenance, but obviously that fluctuates like we said, but yeah, it's interesting. So anybody listening to this that's in the fitness world, another podcast I recommend, these guys are really, really sharp and they're based on science. They're not peddling anything that would be detrimental. A podcast called Mind Pump. I don't know if you've ever heard of that, but they're one of the top. I do fitness and entertainment podcasts and they've got really good stuff. Ever since listening to them, they actually kind of helped me narrow my focus. Speaker 1: I have a lot of other things that I'm interested in. Microdosing, psilocybin, hormones are important. Gut microbiome is really important. I've done the 80-20 of getting plastic out of my house. I filter my water. I do the necessities. I talk about why. So yeah, check out this 80-20 doc that Corey can put in the show notes so that folks can get a feel for the 80-20 of this stuff. Because yeah, it's easy to go too deep and get too obsessed with it, but having balance is the key. Speaker 2: 100%. And yeah, guys, we'll put that in. The show notes, if you're listening on Apple or Spotify, and if you're watching on YouTube, we'll put that in the description. I've read through that document before and it's good stuff. So one more question on the health and longevity front. And this is one that I think is interesting because you've tweeted a lot about being anti-video game, anti-vaping, a lot of these common vices that, well, I'd say mainly teenagers, but a lot of people in general have. And it's funny because I love video games. I've been a gamer forever. It's been one of my hobbies, but there are obvious things like vaping that's not going to benefit anyone. So of all those vices, of the things that you're really strongly against, what's the worst? What's the one people should quit doing right away? Speaker 1: I think there's the big three. And four, if you really want to be in the top 5% of humans, I think sports betting is a life ruiner. Speaker 2: Yeah, 100%. Speaker 1: Vaping is a disaster among college kids today. I think video gaming, there's a lot of success stories, especially in technology, video gamers. There's also a ton of folks who it has really ruined their life, their social life, and they don't have shit figured out at 35 years old because they're gamers. Those, in my opinion, are the big three. You can avoid those three. You're in the top 5% as far as people, in my opinion. The fourth being pornography. If you can avoid pornography, you're in the top 1%. Speaker 2: I think that's a good, good take for sure. Because again, there's a lot of people that, you know, if you're doing all four of those things, you've got to figure something out. Speaker 1: People struggle with different things, right? You know, if alcohol doesn't agree with you, stay away from that shit. Speaker 2: Yep. Agreed. No, and that's, that's a good take. Again, that's something I've seen you talk about and I was just curious on your thoughts. Now, let's kind of switch gears a little bit. So you've got three kids, right? You've been married for a number of years. And one of my all-time favorite tweets of yours is, it was a picture, I think, of your son with an ice cream cone. And it went super viral. I don't remember exactly how many views, but it was multiple millions. Speaker 1: 50 million views across Reddit and Instagram. Well, my post got 3 million, but it got screenshotted and shared all over the internet. Speaker 2: Explain that tweet. Speaker 1: It's a picture of my four-year-old son at the time crying in an ice cream store. Got no ice cream. Speaker 2: So good. Speaker 1: And I said, my son worked all week, did his chores. He made $5. We came to the ice cream shop on Friday and he bought this ice cream cone with his $5. He took one lick and dropped it on the floor. And I said, I didn't replace his ice cream cone. Lesson learned. Which was not true. I replaced his ice cream cone. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: But there's a little bit of truth to this and why people got so enraged is because they could see me doing it. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: That's when I saw it. Speaker 2: I was like, I bet he didn't replace. I bet that was actually true. Speaker 1: Yeah. I'm a pick. I just make up things on the internet to piss people off if it's a harmless fib. Sometimes I take that too far, but that's who I am. I can't help but making the woke idiots just enraged sitting in their mom's basement somewhere. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: When it comes to parenting, I firmly believe that kids are put in a bubble today. Parents do every single thing possible to prevent their kids from feeling pain. They're putting them in a bubble. They're gonna stop them from getting made fun of. They're gonna stop them from falling down. They're gonna stop them, if they lose their phone, they're gonna replace it. They're gonna just do everything they can to make their kid have an easier life. And they mean well. I'm not saying these are bad parents. They want their kids to succeed and live a great life. That's why they're doing this. But what is the unfortunate truth that so many people in this world are afraid to actually admit is that life is hard for everybody. You cannot end suffering in the world. There will always be hungry people. There will always be broke people. There will always be homeless people. There will always be drug addicts. You cannot stop suffering and pain. Throughout history, it's the one commonality. And no matter what your kids have going for them, my kids, Corey, your kids, life is going to be hard for them. They're going to lose sporting events. They're going to fail tests. They're going to crash a car. They're going to get broken up with. They're going to be made fun of. They're going to get fired from a job. They're going to go for a job that they're not going to get. They're going to try to start a business that's going to fail. All these very hard things are going to happen to them. Hopefully it's not hunger, abuse, you know, the really hard things I'm talking about. You know, I think pain is relative by the way. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: Um, Life is really hard. So why in the world are these parents stopping their kids from building that muscle of learning how to deal with pain and suffering? Pain and suffering, dealing with it is a muscle. You have to exercise it to get better at it. I can have very stressful things happen to me and sleep like a baby at night because over time I've gotten better and better and better at dealing with stressful, hard, difficult things because business is freaking hard, no matter how successful you are. I don't care who you are. So these parents put their kids in a bubble and I firmly believe, I strongly believe that that's a big mistake. And you don't have to abuse your kids. You don't have to be mean to them. You don't have to make them feel insecure. You don't have to be irrational. You can be very logical. You can be very dependable, predictable. Your kids can live an amazing life and have almost everything that they could ever imagine. My kids are very spoiled. We fly in a private airplane, like they got a lot going for them. But I take every opportunity I can to tell them no. And why? And if they make a mistake, they're going to have consequences for that. If my son trips my daughter and pushes her down on purpose, like we're going to leave without him to go get ice cream. He's going to stay at home with the nanny and he's going to freak and he's going to cry and I'm not going to give in. Speaker 2: Right. Well, I think one of your, uh, one of your takes that I definitely agree with now, I don't have kids yet, but that's definitely in the plan. Somebody asked you, I think it's, they said something along the lines of, it's like, well, how do you, how do you raise kids? And an extremely privileged and wealthy family like yours is that don't grow up to be rich, spoiled assholes. And I think your response was along the lines of you've got to teach them to suffer with grace for the same reasoning that you just gave. It's like everybody's going to suffer. You've got almost manufacturer suffering for kids in your kid's position because they have so many things going for them in life. It's like you've got almost, yeah, manufacture some of that hardship because they're not going to go through the ringer like some certain kids are. Speaker 1: And I'll give you a good example of what these kids can become if you just give them everything and give into everything, especially if you have means. Speaker 2: Oh, trust me. I've seen it. Speaker 1: It's really hard. It's really hard to, everybody sees the kids. I'm going to give you actually a little bit of a different example, but it's, We were at Disney. This was three weeks ago. We did the VIP tour. You pay a lot of money to have a tour guide take you to the front of all the lines, drive you in the back entrance of the parks. You can ride 20, 30 rides in a day instead of four and you don't have to sit in lines. It's insane. You interact with a lot of the other VIP families. I watched a grown woman, 45, 50 years old, throwing an absolute fit at her husband and the tour guide, yelling at them. Speaker 2: For what? What was she freaking out about? Speaker 1: Because things are stressful, Corey. Life is stressful. People get hungry. People get tired. People like you're at Disney. You're trying to do everything. There is some lines. You have some things go wrong. Okay. There's a line for food. Like the tour guide is not a magician that can pull a five star meal out of a, out of a back pocket. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: That's what you, that's what it can happen. That's what happens when somebody doesn't know how to deal with life stresses with grace, 100% marriage advice, marry somebody who knows how to suffer with grace. Because having kids is freaking hard. Going on vacation is hard. Missing flights is hard. Spending all night in airport. All these things in life are hard. If you have somebody beside you who cannot deal with stressful situations, good freaking luck. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yup. And again, I've seen it play out with people I know. I mean, yeah, it's, it's tough for sure. And a good, a good example of, I hate to say this, he's, he doesn't listen to the show, but one of my very best friends, uh, a couple of weeks ago was buying a new car. He's got a great job. His wife's got a great job, but he wanted to buy a new car. So he's going to the dealership. His parents flew down and her parents flew down to assist them in negotiating with the dealer and then slid them 10 grand to help with the purchase. And my friend's successful. He's a smart guy. He's a sharp guy. But I'm like, dude, come on. That to me, I don't know. I think it's crazy. But again, that's a somewhat mild example compared to... Speaker 1: It's the bubble. It's the bubble for 35-year-olds. Imagine the bubble when they're 15. Speaker 2: Right. Yeah. Yep. So again, you're preaching to the choir here, but I, I think the takeaway for me again, eventually when I do have kids, it's like, you've got to, you've got to manufacture that suffering at some points, especially if they have it as well as your kids do. And as well as hopefully my kids have it as well. Speaker 1: Yep. And I'm telling you, suffering is very relative. Joy is relative. Wealth is relative. My kids are no happier or less happier than a lot of very poor kids. So if I can manufacture suffering in little ways and have them deal with consequences in little ways and have them practice making decisions, allow them to make mistakes and then live with the consequences, I'm going to raise good kids. I think that's number one. Speaker 2: Is there anything specific that your parents did? Speaker 1: They manufactured suffering. When I was 12 years old, my dad's boss who owned some real estate, he was a developer, he owned some real estate in my local town. I needed to find a new lawn guy because the guy who was mowing the lawn had a heart attack. He was fine, but he just couldn't mow the lawn for the rest of the summer. My dad volunteered his 13-year-old son, me, to mow these lawns. I lived 15 minutes away. I had to hire a high school kid to drive me to town. He put me on a payment plan for the lawnmower. He showed up and bitched at me the first day when I mowed up a bunch of trash in the lawn. It was not freaking easy. I think I was 12. I was about to turn 13. Not easy. Speaker 2: Most 12 year olds these days, they have an iPhone or they're glued to the iPad and they're just like playing Minecraft or like scrolling TikTok or something. Speaker 1: By the way, we drove 10 hours to Disney and no iPad in the car for either, for any of the kids. Speaker 2: That's something that I see. And again, I think I've even tweeted this before and I got so much shit because people are like, you don't even have kids. Like, what do you know? But it hurts me to see whether we're in a restaurant or wherever we are, Young kids, like young, young, I'm talking like two or three, glued to the iPad. And I'm not talking, you know, it's one thing to be watching like a Miss Rachel or something that's somewhat decent, but they're just watching like whatever the Netflix show du jour is that's just, you know, it cuts every six seconds. It's just training their attention span to be TikTok-ified. Speaker 1: Having really young kids, I'll say that having really young kids is really hard. I've done that in a restaurant before because I don't want to disturb people around me. My kids are now, my youngest is really different. She's a girl. She's chill. She's almost four years old and my boys are eight and 10. I can talk logic to them. They can read books. They're excited to do that. When they're really young, I don't like seeing the big pink iPad that they carry everywhere with them. I think that's pretty ridiculous, but sometimes you got to get through a dinner. What I really hate is seeing these 12, 13 year old kids playing phone games at restaurants. Just kills me inside. Speaker 2: And I get that. Like I get trying to make it through a dinner, but part of me, it's like, I see some of these people in that situation and part of me thinks it's like, well, it's probably not just, they're not just trying to make it through this dead end. Like this is probably the MO. Speaker 1: They got Mountain Dew in their sippy cup as well. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Which again, I, I'm not one to talk. I don't have kids. Speaker 1: So I'll say that this is hard stuff, man. Like I'm, I had to talk this yesterday. Me and my wife had a team meeting after we got the kids out of the door because I was, I was not, I was being an asshole. She's like, you got to stop yelling at your kids, Nick. This is freaking crazy. It's hard. You got to really give yourself some grace. You got to be calm. You got to try to always be logical. Communicating with these kids is way harder than just yelling at them and telling them to do things. Speaker 2: Right. Yeah. I feel like that doesn't accomplish much very often. Speaker 1: So yeah, you got to give yourself some grace. I have a lot of respect for all parents out there. I'm not trying to talk a lot of trash, but if you can do some of these little things, I think it's just going to pay so many dividends later on when you're going to have well-behaved and respectful and humble kids. Speaker 2: Yeah. Again, I mean, talking about delayed gratification, it's the same in business. Raise your kids by yelling at them and just medicating them with an iPad and just doing everything you can to make that easier. But then you look up 5-10 years down the road and you made your life a lot harder. Same in business. You can just take the easy way out and just work the W2 job and veg out at night. But then 5-10 years later, you're no better off. So I think it's very similar. Speaker 1: So it started with me a little bit about two months ago. This is after we played golf. I realized that I'm just hooked on my phone, man. I'm hooked on it. I'm addicted. It was hurting my sleep. It was hurting my relationships. It was hurting my desire to get up and go do things with my kids. And so for a week, I said, I'm going to turn my phone off at 7 p.m. I'm going to turn it back on at 7 a.m. That was unbelievably hard for me, Corey. It was very hard. I would be anxious. I'd wake up and I'd wake up at 6. Me and my wife always have coffee from 6 to 7. 7.20 I take the kids to school. It was uncomfortable and difficult. And I realized that I just could not keep up. I get 30 text messages a day. Text messaging is the new email. I could scroll through and show you. It's actually getting a lot better. But I kind of made a commitment to myself to make it okay. Be hard to reach. It's okay. The people closest to you will understand if they get upset. So be it. You can still be respectful. You can still spend good time with people. You can still show love and care. But every time somebody sends you a note, a message, you don't have to respond. The random text messages that you get, you don't have to respond. You don't have to jump to do this. You don't have to say yes to every request. That was really uncomfortable for me because I'm type A and it goes back to us scheduling this thing. I had a lot on my plate. I was busy. I had a lot going on. I was hard for you to reach. And I think being at a little bit of peace with that is difficult, but it helped me. And now my screen time is down to like two and a half hours a day on my phone. I forget it. I forget it in my truck some nights. I don't take it with me when I leave to go run errands sometimes. I have so much healthier of a relationship now with my phone. Really encourage people to do that because a lot of parenting as well as kind of leading by example. Speaker 2: And I struggle with that too. I mean, that's something that I've, I think I've been getting better at, right? I definitely think I have, but even to the point of just batching all my text messages at the end of the day, every day I have on my calendar from 4.30 to 5 to clear all my inboxes. And so if you've texted me really between 5 p.m. and a given night, and I'm not going to respond to you probably until 4.30 of the next afternoon. Speaker 1: And I think part of it is keeping a notepad. If you're going to do this, if you're listening, I encourage you to do this. Keep a notepad and a pencil with you at all times. Write your to-do list down. Every time you need to order something on Amazon, you don't need to go find your phone. You can write it down. Every time you think, Oh, I need to message Corey back. He messaged me last night. I need to message him. I read it, but I didn't send him a text back. Oh, I'm going to, you know, wake up. I'm going to text Corey at 9am. And then, you know, yeah, it's like you can, you can, as the things pop up in your head that make you want to reach for your phone, take a note of them and don't reach for the phone. Speaker 2: Right. And one thing I love doing is I love going on walks. I mean, I'll walk outside. I always do one 30 minute walk in the morning. Sometimes I'll do a second one. And my big hangup is like, I know that I should be walking without my phone because I know that's when I get the best ideas. I'm just thinking. I'm just thinking about long-term goals. But then I'm like, well shit, if something comes up that's important, I need to write it down. I need to make a note and usually I just throw it in the notepad on my phone. But to your point, it's like you don't need to do that on the phone. You just have a notepad and a pencil and it accomplishes the same goal. When you get home, just copy it from the notepad into the phone because I find that on those walks, even if I have my phone but I'm consciously just trying to think, Naturally, I find myself on my phone looking at messages, Slack, email, whatever. So I think that's a really good takeaway. Just do, like you said, a 72-hour fast fast for your health. Do a 72-hour phone fast. And if you can't do it for that long, at least do it from, like you said, 7 to 7 or 8 to 8 or whatever that timeframe ends up being best for you. Speaker 1: Me and my wife can trade phones now. For a while, I could only order Chipotle app on my phone. I could only do the daycare swipe on my phone. Now, I can take her phone with me and she can have my phone with her and that helps because I can't run through my normal routine of checking Slack, checking my four emails. When you run a couple of companies, it's really hard to not want to be on your phone because you get notifications every time you close a deal. You get revenue every day. You got all the leads. I get notified of all the leads. And add social media and Twitter on top of it. It just gets insane with the dopamine access. So yeah, I highly recommend it. Speaker 2: It's funny when you showed me your, I think you guys have a Slack channel for somewhere.com where every time, I guess not even just the lead comes in, but every time a deal closes, you get a Slack message. I was like, dude, I would be on that. I would be glued to that thing every 10 minutes. Speaker 1: I don't get notified of it, you know, honestly, but it's, it's highly motivating for everybody in the team to see when we're making money. I like data and the companies, I highly recommend doing that. But yeah, it's a slippery slope. Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. Well, let's talk about, I know we've only got about 15 minutes or so left here. I've got a bunch of questions, but we'll try to run through them quick. Now, one of the ones that I've been meaning to ask you is in talking about business from the perspective of luck versus skill, because I've seen some people who are not very smart and who are not very skilled do extremely well because they take advantage of the right opportunity at the right time and they don't quit. So I guess the question for you is how much of business is What is luck, luck being right place, right time, right people versus skill, skill being you're actually good at what it is that you're doing? Speaker 1: Man, that's a really, really, really hard question. And I think I've actually changed my mind on this over the last three or four years. I would have said that it's half luck. Now I think it's 90% skill. I think a lot of people aren't cut out for it. And one really good decision can set you up for life. It really can. It can set you up for life, making one really good decision. How many people are going to put themselves in that situation to make that decision? How many people are going to be able to build the trust of the other person that maybe they bring on or that one sale they make or that one hire they make? It takes a unique person to be able to do it. And then a lot of it is right place, right time. A lot of it. Moses Kagan doesn't, So like you got to get lucky. It's kind of like playing a really good round of golf. You got to have the foundation. You got to be a ball striker. You got to make, you put putts online, but some days it just happens. Um, and you know, are you going to make a, you get, what were the odds that Bryson hits that bunker shot to four feet? I think the odds were one in a thousand that he could hit that shot that close to win the PGA. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: Business is the same. Like you got to get really lucky on a couple really key things, but you also cannot do it unless you're phenomenally talented. So yeah, I know a lot of, I know a lot of not that impressive people who have gotten very wealthy as well. They always have that one thing about them though. They, they always have that. Maybe it's the charisma, maybe it's the likability, maybe it's just the intensity. Maybe they're not likable at all, but they have that intensity and they're a good leader maybe. So yeah. I go back and forth. Speaker 2: Or they're just a dog and they just don't quit. And it's funny because I look at my journey of the last three years or so, really beginning around the time that I started making content. I mean, everything about the last three years for me has been luck. I'll be the first to admit. But it's luck that I spent the previous five years, I guess, putting myself in a position to have everything from cold DMing guys who are now my very good friends to try to get on their podcast as somebody that had no audience. And then I was about to not follow up. And I was like, you know what? I'll just follow up and see what they say. He saw that one. They put me on the podcast. That's what launched my entire social... Without that podcast, I wouldn't be here today, wouldn't be on social media period. Some people call that luck. Right. I mean, it is to a degree, but again, what I like to say is I spent five years leading up to that point. It's like grinding and then got really lucky as a result. And then from there, six months into this social media career, getting lucky, quote unquote, meeting Chris Grant and Nate McAllister, who invited me to do the Wholesale Challenge, which is my first info product launch. And we did that three times and made more money in 15 minutes than I made in a year and a half at my corporate job. Like it's just all these dominoes fell one after the other and I'm like, damn, I'm the luckiest guy in the world. But in hindsight, I got lucky because one, right place, right time, right people. But two, again, the work that went into the front end of that. I'm sure you've got plenty of examples of that in your life. Speaker 1: Oh, I have some phenomenal strokes of luck, some amazing people that I've ran into. But yeah, you got to do the work to put yourself in the position to get lucky. Speaker 2: Absolutely. No, 100%. Now, another business-related question for you, and then I've got a couple on the AI front. So, one thing that I was really intrigued by when we were playing golf is, and I think you even said this to me, you're like, yeah, I'm very much in the weeds of the day-to-day operations of all my businesses, right? Not just somewhere, not just RE Cosag, but full storage as well. And I feel like conventional wisdom from a lot of people is, oh, work on your business, not in your business. We've heard it a million times. So what made you take a more active role in your businesses versus trying to be the guy who's above everything and putting the pieces in place and letting people go to work? Speaker 1: I came from an operations background. I hired my first employee when I was 12. I ran a phenomenally stressful business, that storage squad, for 10 years. I learned how to lead people. I learned how to make decisions. I built the muscle of making mistakes. So I'm an operator. I know how to do these things. A lot of people who just rise up as influencers on social media might not have the background that I have of actually running businesses. So yeah, when I realized the sales team is not where I want it to be at somewhere, I go find the sales team. I get on the calls. I close a bunch of deals. I retool the script. Then I train all the sales guys on how to do it. Then I step back. Okay, we're not sourcing the best candidates. Okay, I'm going to go into the sourcing team. I'm going to figure out everything we're doing. I'm going to do every job. I'm going to rewrite all the emails. I'm going to make it all better and then I'm going to step back out. There's not a lot of people that can do that. I'm a very good delegator. As soon as I'm not needed, I just know how to get in, look at the right data, ask the right questions, figure out what needs to happen. If I don't think anybody else can do it, I have no choice but to get in and do it. You can't run three, four companies that are pretty large without some serious stressful things happen and nobody there to actually solve the problems except for you. Sometimes I find myself in there. Speaker 2: Do you see yourself as more of like in the typical visionary versus integrator? I'm sure you've heard of that dichotomy. Do you see yourself as more of an integrator? I mean, that's kind of what it sounds like. Speaker 1: I don't know. It's really hard to say because I have the ambition to try the new things, to go after the new stuff. I'm definitely steering strategic shifts, whether we're going to change everybody at the company to variable compensation, which I've done at almost all my businesses in the past year, or I'm going to build my sales teams in South Africa, like I've done in the last year. So the strategic planning, I'm very involved in, but I do get in the weeds. So I don't know. I think I'm a mix. Speaker 2: And I was going to say, I was like, you might be one of those rare people that is a high-performing mix of both. I think, and again, I'm just pulling this from that book, Traction by Gino Wittman, which I'm sure you've read. I am hardcore visionary. Like I obviously have done operations in my businesses before. It's not my strong suit. I think he talks about, there's like, you know, 5% of people who are truly gifted at both. And I am not one of those. Sounds like you might be, but I've definitely made the mistake in the past with my businesses of Almost pigeonholing myself into that visionary role to be like, well, hey, I'm the visionary. I'm steering the ship. I'm working on strategy. Not that I'm above operations, but it's almost like I just wouldn't get in the weeds when sometimes I knew I should because I kind of had myself, again, pigeonholed into that visionary role. That's more of a personal problem for me than anything else. Speaker 1: It's hard because it's hard to have that balance because you get sucked in and it's really hard to pull yourself back out. So yeah, I can see it for sure. I think the visionaries are the folks that get the most built, I think, generally. Speaker 2: For sure. No, that's really good insight. So another business question, then I've got a couple on AI. So if you were starting from zero today, so you had no money, you had no audience, let's even say no credit, what business model or industry would you enter and why? Speaker 1: Holy shit, man. That's, that's tough. I'm, I'm something with sales. If I was getting a job, I'd go to get a sales job because I think it's just one of the few, every single thing in life is sales oriented. If you want to make real money, um, whether you're a CEO, even a COO selling his team on doing what he needs them to do or actually going out and making it rain and drumming up business, which I think is the most valuable part of any company. So, I'd get into sales. Maybe I would build a door-to-door pest control sales company because you can spend that up pretty quick. You can sell a couple of pest control owners on, you know, only pay me if I bring you clients and you can get out there and just hustle and grind with a polo on. Speaker 2: A friend of mine here locally actually did exactly that. The company's Aruza Pest Control. He sold it to private equity, but he's, I think even a year younger than me, 28 or 29. I built a whole business on door-to-door sales using college kids as interns as the salespeople and crushes it. If you can sell door-to-door, which I'm pretty sure you've done quite a bit of in your day, I did for years just selling pressure washing services door-to-door as like a side hustle during the summers in college. Best sales experience out there. And I'm one of those sickos that kind of enjoys it. It's a game. It's like if I can sell something to a stranger at the door, you can sell anything. So I think that's a good take. Now, shifting gears a little bit, talking about AI. So a tweet, I'm going to read it verbatim here that you tweeted recently. And well, I guess the first question is how much of this was rage made and how much of this do you truly believe? But the tweet is AI is going to go down as a disaster of colossal scale. My electricity bill in Athens, Georgia is up 60% since 2023. Six increases in the last 24 months. Just approved 20 plus data centers under construction in the region. What gives? Quality of life is dropping for 99% of people. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Is that a legitimate opinion? Speaker 1: Yeah. Think about how much quality of life humans gain because of electricity from our dishwashers to our heating and air conditioning to our homes, our lights in our homes. And think about the new competition for that electricity that is drastically understated, by the way. They're hiding it. The whole industry is hiding how much actual electricity they're burning and using. I would not be surprised if it comes out in a couple of weeks that this whole Amazon Web Services disaster over the last two days is a byproduct of energy shortage of some kind in the Virginia region. I don't know. I don't know that to be true. I've demoed a hundred AI tools. I've implemented seven of them into my company. We've gotten rid of all but two. I'm just not seeing it. I'm not seeing it. Every CEO in the whole country, all the fortune 500 companies are running around saying, we need AI. We need AI. We need all of it. And we need it now. And then you ask them like to do what? And they say, we don't know. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: So I really, really, really worry about the electricity usage. And I think it's just like self-driving cars when it comes to as a technology that the first 90% is the easiest and the last 10% is 10 times harder than the first 90%. So getting it to where it can actually replace the judgment and job of a human being, we are a long way from that. So I don't think it's, I think the bubble is absolutely going to burst from a valuation in the tech sector for sure. Do I think AI is here to stay? Yes. Do I think it will do amazing things in the future? Yes. Is it drastically overblown now? And is it an electricity disaster? Yes. And will it make the quality of life for almost everybody go down? Yes. Because ChatGPT, if it was market of how much actual energy is using, should cost people $250 a month. It's been subsidized all the way up. All the way up the chain is getting subsidized by VC money. When that money runs out, our electrical grid is a disaster. We are 30 years away from nuclear power. It's not going to work, man. It's not going to work. Speaker 2: So of the seven tools that you guys installed and the two of which you kept, which two do you still use? Speaker 1: Fathom and Zapier. Speaker 2: Yeah. I had a feeling Fathom was going to be one of them. I wasn't sure if you were going to count Zapier as one as well, but yeah, both fantastic tools. I've been using Fathom for the last few months. Zapier is something I'm inside every single day. What are some things that you guys are automating? Speaker 1: When a normal person, when their electricity bill goes from $150 to $300 a month. Speaker 2: Something's wrong. Speaker 1: Where's the money coming from like to live the rest of their life? They're cutting. Whether it's the car they drive, where they send their kids to school, how many restaurants they eat at, some area of their quality of life is getting cut. Who will benefit? The massively wealthy people who can afford to use it to automate everything. Who will not benefit is the people who are trying to pay rent. Everyone else. It's really nice. It's really nice to have Peter Attia in my pocket. Really nice to when I'm planting my, you know, getting my garden ready for tomato season next year. And I know now to plant crimson clover in my garden because I know that it's a annual, it's going to die off and it's going to provide nitrogen fertilization for my soil. That's all really nice to have. It's nice to have, but at what cost? Speaker 2: Right. It's also not like, yeah, I get what you're saying completely. Speaker 1: So if I were building an AI startup right now, I would get the hell out before the bubble pops, A. I'd figure out where to add value in the actual economy and I would buckle up for a tough five years before the winners of AI start to really come out the other side. Speaker 2: Right. And I think that's a fair take completely. Speaker 1: But I could be wrong. I hope I'm wrong because a lot of my friends are in the space. A lot of jobs depend on it and AI has a lot of potential. All the smart people I know tell me that AI has all the potential in the world and it's just getting started. The last ChatGPT 5 update made ChatGPT worse in my opinion. So it's already starting. Speaker 2: It's also way better for in terms of views to be bearish on AI. So I get that being probably part of the story. Speaker 1: I was bearish on AI eight months ago and I was the only one. Speaker 2: Well, right. That's what I'm saying. Speaker 1: I was getting shit. I was getting absolutely shit on and lit up by everybody. Now it's finally coming around that, hey, this isn't sustainable from an electricity perspective. Speaker 2: Right. No such thing as bad publicity, I guess. Well, listen, last last question I have for you, I want to be respectful of your time. So you recently published a book, right, called The Sweaty Startup. I bought, well shoot, I bought 75 copies to get that round of golf. I've read it cover to cover. I've given a few away as well. The feedback from the people that I've given it to has been positive. But one thing that you mentioned, and I think you mentioned this publicly, so I don't feel uncomfortable asking you, is you said it didn't perform as well from a sales perspective as you had hoped. Why do you think that is? Speaker 1: Yeah, HarperCollins gave me a really nice advance. Their team was amazing to work on. They wanted me to sell 25,000 copies in the first year. I've sold 6,000 copies. Speaker 2: Why? Why so under the projection? Speaker 1: Because people don't want to hear it. People don't want to hear that they have to work hard for five years at something to make money. People don't want to hear that the virtual reality thing was a phase, the crypto thing was a phase, the NFT thing was a phase, AI bubble might pop. The next get rich quick thing is probably done. Like even the people who got really hyped up on Amazon selling four or five years ago and then it just got really freaking hard. There's a small window in time. There's a very small number of massive winners in each space. That's the fad that everybody jumps in. So do you want to jump into a space and compete with everybody, all the smartest and most brilliant in venture capital money in the world? Or do you want to go do something boring like sell? And make good decisions and delay gratification and do something hard for five years. The lessons in the book are it's the blueprint, in my opinion, on how to be successful. It's pretty clear that people don't want to hear it. Fair. Speaker 2: I mean, again, that's, I think that's a perfectly valid take. And I mean, you talking about, you know, most people want to go do the sexy new thing. I think an analogy you've used in the past is like, well, why would I want to go, if I'm going to play basketball, why would I want to go play against LeBron James? LeBron James being the big sexy opportunity that everybody's going after when I could instead play against the fifth grade girl, which is, The landscaping business in town that is still using a copier or the land clearing. I saw on Twitter last week some 19-year-old kid dropped out of college, bought a bulldozer to start a land clearing business. And he's like a month and a half in and he just cashed a $15,000 check. And his tweet was like, I think he said, he's like, it's crazy that the market has decided that this service is worth $15,000. And I'm just shaking, waiting for the check to clear. And I saw that and I'm like, that is so awesome. Speaker 1: He's 19. He made 15 grand and 99.9% of AI startups will never make 15 grand of revenue. Speaker 2: 100%. Yep. And I think that's a good place to end it. So Nick, thank you so much for your time. Highly recommend people go check out the book, The Sweaty Startup. Nick, where else do you want to point people? Where can they follow you or what do you want them to do? Speaker 1: Yeah, I'll put the link to the 8020 Health down here. I will make people give me their email address to see that. Then you got to get my emails about living a better life and raising better kids and having a better business and making more money. But you can always unsubscribe. So yeah, my email is nick at sweatystartup.com. If anybody has some feedback, I look at all those emails. Can't guarantee I'll respond to all of them, but I read them all. Speaker 2: Sounds good. Well, Nick, thank you so much for your time. Speaker 1: Corey, appreciate you.