‘Think and Grow Rich’ Is a Lie. (But The Advice Still Works)

completely fake, and he's a total con man. What? What do you mean? None of it's true. I feel like I can root a word, and I know I could be what I want to.

I put my own in it like a day's all on a bright day. I have to play this story, so I'm rereading a bunch of old books, because I like rereading old books, and I started reading Dale Carnegie, How to Wins Friends, and influence people, have you read that one? I love that book, Sam.

Roll number one. Roll number one. A person's name is the fourth one. There will be the fourth one. The Golden Rule.

I love that book. I just, the reason I like these old books is because some of them, the rules have stood

the test of time, and the writing is always like all the writing for some reason.

It's like cute. There's something about that. Tell you something stupid I did.

“I took the book, and you know how people wear like your denim guy, you know this?”

Distress jeans. Oh, yeah. Distress the book. That's not the little bit. I made it look like this is an heirloom that's been passed down from Napoleon himself.

Did you like doggy or certain pages, even though you didn't even read the thing? Tattered. Tattered. Like folded, folded. Like a baseball.

First third pages, but like, I made this book look like it is already one friends and influence people. You just put it in the back of your pocket and just walk around with it. Wait, for people who don't know the, or you know, people have heard of the book, but if it's been one of those things like, you know, like the wire, it's like I heard

it's a great show, but it's kind of old now, and I just, I guess I'm out on that. If you know of the book, but you haven't actually cracked into it, get tell the quick story of it. Dale Carnegie, he originally was a public speaker and he taught public speaking classes then he created a book called How to Win Friends and Influence People.

And I think it's like 15 or 20 rules on how to basically make friends and make people like you. So it could be saying their name. It could be asking them questions. So they do most of the talking.

It's never arguing with someone because no one wins an argument when you guys fight.

And there's like how many 15 or 20 rules and it's just like an old-timer book, it was released in the 1930s, so it's almost 100 years old, and it's probably a sold 50 to 100-billion copies. And to this day, there's the Dale Carnegie Institute, which is a public speaking classes. And a lot of amazing people, including Warren Buffett, have said that that book influenced

them and helped them.

“And in fact, Warren Buffett, he was an instructor at the Dale Carnegie Institute, I believe.”

Love it. Okay, great. We're going to say, so you're re-reading this book, re-reading that one, I'm reading, I just got the power of positive thinking, that's another one from the 1930s. I just love these old books, and like I told you, I'm in the motivational phase of my

life right now. I'm back at it. I just want to be influenced to be motivated and happy and all that stuff. It's a girl dead thing. I'm saying like once you have a girl, you're just emotional here, and so I'm into this

stuff. One book that I started reading last night, and I was curious about it. The author, because it just got me interested, but it's called Staking Row Rich. Have you read "Thinking Row Rich"? A classic.

I've read again. I've read the first 30 pages. I loved it. So you've read 30 pages. You get it.

So let me tell you the story about "Thinking Row Rich." Thing Row Rich, one of the earliest self-help books. I think it predates how to win friends and influence people.

It sold around 100 million copies, making it one of the best selling non-fiction books

of all time. And to this day, it's still regularly lands on the New York Times by Seuler's list. I mean, it's a huge thing. And so basically the story is that there's this guy named Napoleon Hill. Can I say it wrong and you correctly?

“Isn't it something like he got commissioned by Carnegie?”

Oh, yeah. Yeah. And he went in and interviewed all these people or he hung out with it. What was it? What is the story?

It's even more epic than that. So basically Napoleon Hill is this guy from Appalachia, came from nothing. He's just really poor kid and makes his way to New York City and he's writing an article from magazine and he meets Andrew Carnegie, who at the time, this is like Elon Musk. He's the best of the best.

I Andrew Carnegie runs Carnegie Steel. This is Tesla. This is the biggest company in the world by far. And he's talking to Andrew Carnegie and Napoleon was like, look, I'm just trying to figure out what makes people successful.

And Andrew Carnegie goes, look, son, you seem promising. I want to tell you to do something, but can you promise me you'll actually do it? Because I have a feeling you're not going to fall through. But if you do fall through on me, I think you're going to be really successful. And Napoleon goes, look, I'm desperate for success.

I'll do anything you say. And Andrew, imagine Elon Musk saying, Sean, I need you to go out and talk to 500 people. The most successful people on earth. And I need you to tell me what made them successful because I want the world to know about this gospel.

They have to know what makes people successful. And I need you to study them for the next 20 years. And I will help find it. I will help make this a reality. Will you do that?

And Napoleon goes, hell yeah, brother. I am in. It sounds like the world's greatest mission. Let's do it. And so Andrew Carnegie introduces them to Henry Ford.

They introduce them to John Rockefeller, also one of the richest men in the world. And even introduce them to Woodrow Wilson and then FDR, the president of the United States. And Napoleon Hill spends a decade or two writing this book and it becomes, they can grow

And it basically distills down all of the amazing stuff that makes someone successful.

And it goes even further. And after this book, because Napoleon Hill got to meet all these presidents, he basically was there when Woodrow Wilson negotiated the end of World War One. And he helped give Woodrow Wilson the speech that he needed to convince Germany to back down.

And then it goes even further. Do you remember the famous line from FDR?

“He says, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Right. Napoleon Hill, baby. He wrote that form. Wow. Yeah, pretty amazing.

Great. Great. Over this country, he's shaped America. Well, not of its truth. What?

What do you mean not of its truth? Everything I just told you is a lie.

Except for Fakin' Grow Rich, amazing book.

One of the best selling books of all time. Everything else totally false. All right, I read a ton. I would say almost a book a week. And the reason I read so much is because my philosophy towards reading is I want to see what works for the winners that I love and what strategies they use.

And then I want to see what mistakes did they all make, where the common flaws that they all had. And I just want to avoid that. And so Hubspot asked me to put together a list of the books that have changed my life and I did that.

So I listed out seven books that made a meaningful difference in my life. And I explained what the difference is that they had on me or what actions I took because of the book. And then also I listed out my very particular ways of reading because I'm pretty strategic about how I read and how I read so much and how I remember what I read and things like that.

And so I put this together in a very simple guide at seven books that had a huge impact on my life.

“And you can scan the QR code below if you want to read it or there's a link.”

You guys don't have to do it. There's a link in the description. Just go ahead and click it and you'll see the guide that I made. So it's the seven books that had a massive change in my life and then also how I'm able to read so much.

So check it out below. So what do you mean? Where did this come from? Listed of this. So the polling hill originally was called Oliver in the polling hill.

That was his name. Married someone at the age of 16 or 17 eventually gets divorce because he goes broke and spends all of his money and prostitutes. He starts a lumber company and he gets arrested for fraud. It gets arrested again for stealing a bunch of cars.

And if you go to the MBD Master document, I actually list his rap sheet. So he got in trouble in 1908 for lumber fraud in 1908. Again, he gets arrested for catching big checks in 1909. He creates this thing called the automobile college which teaches kids how to work on cars. Turns out he actually kind of teaches them how to go and sell the course.

So it's a multi-level marketing scheme and he gets run out of town because he runs off a lot of money. It gets arrested again in 1910 for car theft and just like a history of just literally been in jail. We're talking like 15 or 20 times.

And he just tries business after business after business. He literally tries like 15 businesses. They all fail. He marries a woman. He convinces the woman's parents to loan him money for this farm or something.

And once a star that goes up, that goes broke up, banged up and he divorces the woman. I mean, real broke. Yeah, like, really bad. And so in the 1930s. So did the Carnegie part happen at all?

Did he even interview any of these people? So Carnegie died in 1919 and in the 1930s, he comes out with this book. He had written a bunch of books already that none of them were hits. This particular one was a hit and he tells the story of meeting Andrew Carnegie and how Andrew Carnegie asked him to do this.

This is your proof that he met Andrew Carnegie. And Andrew Carnegie, I've read actually three biographies on him. I got married at Carnegie Hall because I loved him so much. The book comes out, I think in 1929, Carnegie has been dead for 10 years and David now saw who wrote the best biography on Carnegie.

They're like, dude, Carnegie documented everything. There's no proof that Carnegie said now, our Carnegie didn't say anything about this. What about the people Wilson and FDR? None of it happened.

You'd never been out of these guys and nobody debunked it well.

“So here's the thing people did debunk it later on, but it's sort of like our Kelly”

and his music. You could separate the art from the artist. Do you know what I mean? Like I could still listen to the music and acknowledge that it's good music. But a lot of his his the book was so good and I could talk about some of the stuff in

the book. It was so good that it's known that he was a fraudster and that all of the story, it's completely fake. But the book is actually so good that he didn't get a pass, but people acknowledge the book's great and also he's full of shit.

So in the book, there's actually a bunch of amazing stuff. For example, have you heard of the term Mastermind? He created that. So he came up with this idea. Probably not.

Probably lies.

So you can't believe that. I think he was fooling once. Same on me. I don't pull me again. That's Andrew Napoleon Hill term.

So he created this idea of, I mean, he popularized it. Pop. But it's, I think it's the first time that someone has ever said that we're Mastermind or at least published.

He did a bunch of amazing stuff.

“So in the book, he says that you need to be, you need to have a specific goal, you”

need to write it down, and you need to repeat it to yourself every single day. Twice a day. That's been proven to be true. There's a lot of research that shows like if you write down goals, you repeat it to yourself. You are something like two times more likely to achieve your goal.

Another thing that he said was like this idea of persistence and grit and he goes to tons of chapters of like the importance of persistence and grit, Angela Duckworth. So I think we talked about it. It has this book called "Grit." And it's also been proven that grit is more likely to make you succeed than IQ.

And then there's other parts where he talks about like daily affirmations. And like this is all woo-woo stuff, but this is like proven to be true that if you like affirm that you're going to be successful and all these things, you are actually more likely to be successful. And so he's actually, does have a lot of amazing stuff.

There's some other weird stuff. He talks about how like sexual energy is the most powerful energy on earth and you need to harness it. There's a bunch of weird stuff in there. But there's a lot of really amazing stuff.

And so when I read about his background, I just thought it was like one of the craziest things that I've ever read about because it's so in depth about how he just lied about being tired back story. His whole life basically is a lie. Oh, and by the way, I've to add, if you read the book, have you noticed how he mentions

the secret? I don't remember that, but yeah, okay. So in the book he talks about, there's the secret to success. There is in fact a secret, Andrew Carnegie, the most successful man on earth, he conveniently dropped the secret into my pocket.

“And that's what I'm going to talk about.”

Well, in the book, taking a row of rich, he never actually outlines the secret, or sorry,

he never like explicitly says what it is. But what he does say is he goes, "I've written another book about this secret and I've outlined it." Like perfectly, I made it incredibly clear. Now the thing is, is like, I'm not even going to tell you the name of the book, it's going

to come to you when you need it. And it was called, this book was called The Law of Success. And it was a 14-volume course that you had to buy, it was very expensive. And so the book, Faking Row Rich, it's just the front door offer, it's like the cheap version, so like the $10 book that upsels you on the $2,000 course.

And so this is like one of the early versions of like an unclosed loop, like an open loop to like get people to go and buy stuff, and then you go and buy his seminars. And so his marketing prowess was like pretty amazing, and he totally worked. Napoleon Hill became like a seminar company, and it actually was somewhat successful before he stole a bunch of money and it got in trouble for fraud.

But his marketing was amazing, and the book actually has a lot of amazing stuff, but the whole backstory completely fake, and he's a total con man. That's pretty wild. Similar to like the what's going on with a Jay Shetty thing, right, you've seen this? No.

You know Jay Shetty, he's like me with green eyes. Yeah. So he's a very attractive guy. Very popular. His backstory is the monk.

I was a monk, you know, I was in trouble, I bought a lot, and I went, and I became a monk in India, or Nepal, or something, and then one day, and this is where I knew the story was bullshit immediately, one day, guess what happened, a monk at the monastery comes to him and says, you're not meant to be here. You're meant to do more, like, to do bigger things in this world.

You're meant to go back to America and start a podcast, essentially, what you told, you know, you're meant to go popularized this monk wisdom, which, I mean, come on, do we really think that a monk broke his silence and just randomly went up to him and was like, no, no, no, you, you are supposed to go do this other thing. Like, how convenient.

How convenient. We need you to start a seminar company, Jay. Yeah, it's bullshit.

So basically, it's questionable, I think, even if he was a monk, if he ever did, like,

a stint as a monk, like, being a monk, I think, is also, like, a kind of fun, a long-term commitment versus, like, I did a seven-day retreat at a thing or whatever. So, that part's questionable, definitely the part about the monk, telling him, like, you're

“your purpose in life is to go do this other thing.”

That's bullshit. He's only 30 years old. And he's been famous for, like, 10 years, so I'm just wondering, to be revealed he wears colored contacts. That's going to be the final straw for me.

But basically, you know, then, like, oh, he has this degree, and it's like, oh, wait, he didn't actually have that college degree. In fact, he has his own school that gives her own certificates for 10 grand. And that's where he got his certification from. It's like, the whole thing starts to fall over.

But you know what? Like, the thing he says, right? He took old ideas, he repopularized them in his book. You know, he's podcast, he gets people to open up, and he's a good podcast. Sure, you know, so it's hard, right? And art from the artist, as you said.

And so I think it's very, very similar.

They're like, you are meant to appreciate celebrity weddings.

I met a guy who was like his, like, brand coach, like early on.

“And I was like, I was like, tell me, is this really?”

He was like, I have no idea. And I knew better than to ask. I was like, okay, so I'm scared. Dude, that's crazy. I can't tell if the self-help industry is actually has a higher percentage of this sort

of like, yes, fraud and fakeery. And there's something about the nature of wanting to be a guru that is attracted. It's kind of like politics, right? The people who seek power tend to be people who are flawed in certain ways. The people who deserve power don't seek it.

And so I wonder if it's the same thing with like the kind of self-help guru space. Or if it's a conference, if it's a bias where you just really remember the cases where they are, they turn out to be frauds because it's so, so damning, right? Given that, given the front that they present. And so maybe it's just that it actually, like, strikes a bigger chord or is it actually

more frequent? I don't know. I know a bunch of self-help people. And I know that the majority of them.

“Well, for the said being, who do you know, what are you talking about?”

How many people's self-help groups do you even are there?

I mean, first of all, are some people like to us as self-help people to be honest.

So like we run in circles with people that like at least have a book about our in the self-help category, right? So like, and I know that like when I see them, I'm like, you sound of a bitch, you will listen to existence, and you know, I don't think, I don't know anyone who I would say they're fraudulent, but it's just like, you're just painting the best picture of the reality, which I don't

think is necessarily wrong, but who do you know if anyone that's in the self-help industry that you think is totally legitimate? Well, let me give you the nuance here. What does legit mean? So what I don't mean by legit is you live a perfect life because no one does.

So that's not, that's not the criteria. If that's the criteria that nobody should ever, if there is no such thing as assets. The second is that well, you had these problems, and that's why you know, you had these problems. Look at your broken past.

So it's like your present doesn't need to be perfect. Neither does your past because of course the people who get really into self-help are the people who needed it, right? They're the people who, if they had the pain, they had the wound, and therefore they went and studied, therefore when they overcame, they, you know, they have the deepest mastery

and understanding of it because they actually like self-actualists self did it. So I don't hold it against anybody, also, if they had sort of a broken past.

“The only thing I think is bogus is if A, the things you preach don't actually help people”

or they're like a lower form of success or your sort of help, this is sort of like the entertainment problem, right, like he might, or even to an extent, you know, there's people who are like fitness people who it's all about the grind and suffering. And so you're, you're actually giving people a dirty form of fuel, right? You're giving them a, you're popularizing a path that is not actually the best method,

right? It's like giving medicine, that's, you know, not as effective as the leading medicine when the leading medicine exists. Like as a doctor, you really shouldn't be prescribing, like medicines that are not as effective. You should be prescribing whatever the most effective thing is in the market.

That's, that's the first knock I have. And the second is you're actually lying about your past or you're lying about, you know, your, your presence. Like the lying I think is obviously a, do you have a breaker? It's obviously a trust buster. So yeah, you know, that's kind of what I think.

You said, who do I think is legit? Okay, my honest opinion that I'm afraid to say, because I think it'll, it'll be immediately to attack. But Tony Robbins, I think is legit in the, in the two definitions I just gave. One, I think his advice is extremely helpful.

And I think it is sort of the best medicine for, for, you know, a broad scale of people. So I think what he preaches is actually extremely helpful. And I don't think he's lying.

I've never seen, what is there to lie about?

What claims is it? I've never seen evidence that he lies about like his past or whatever. You know, does he embellish their exaggerate or, you know, like, you know, like, make this conveniently trim the timelines for the story. I don't know, I don't, I don't go on at that.

You know, I think the criticism of him is twofold. One is like, did he get me to and like, is, did he do that stuff? I don't know what, what that situation is. And the second is, is it a cult? Like, is he almost so effective that it becomes like a cult?

Like he's sort of an abuse of power. If people are falling so far into his rabbit hole that like, somehow that's a negative thing. I personally got a lot of value from it, so like, I guess that's my bias on this. I've read his books, I like him, I don't know anything about his personal life though.

out with them for collectively eight hours, so not that much time, but also talking to dozens

of his employees, Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary Vaynerchuk. Interesting. I have nothing but positive things to say about Gary Vaynerchuk. And he's one of these guys who gets criticized for hustle culture.

“I think he works actually that hard, which you could argue is not good, but everything”

that I've seen him say online, I have heard his employees who have worked with them for years, back it up and say it was totally legitimate, and he's a wonderful man. I have another one, Jesse Itzler. I've now spent a lot of time with Jesse Itzler, and, you know, if you think about when

you meet people, there's sort of a thing about like in math terms, there's like the

Y intercept, which is where the points, the line starts, it's like, how high up does this start, that's usually your expectations or their reputation, you know, people, you know, we met like Ty Lopez, and we met the guy from Fire Festival, right? So they're low on the Y intercept, you come in with an extremely negative perception. And there's other people who you come in with, extremely positive perception of, like, are

they really as good as it is, and then there's the slope of a line from there. Does it doubt? Does it slope, downward? Does it slope, upward? Jesse's one of the few people that was, I came in with a high expectation, and then he's

only ever beat it, like, and I've been to his house and his family, his kids have done multiple events where he came, and then he hung out, we've done podcast together, like, I'm not his best friend, I'm not with him all the time, but I've every time I'm around this guy, I'm like, wow, he's the real deal, holy, Phil, this is really like he lives what he preaches, and he's just a genuinely good dude, like, genuinely there for you.

And I just haven't been able to detect the normal flaws that come with this sort of stuff, whether it's narcissism, or it's an extreme self-interest, and they're money-motivated, underneath the hood, or they're fame-motivated, or they're really protective of their image, or they kind of have this, like, weird tendency to, like, brag, or dominate the room, or, you know, things like that, he's got none of that shit, and I've literally asked him,

I'm like, how did you just lay the money monster? You don't see, you're the only guy in this room that's not just still chasing more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, um, success, or how did you, you know, they were talking about this, and you actually have done more than all of them in the room, but you didn't say anything, he said, well, I didn't feel a need to, like, well, what do I do? I don't need to prove

something, I didn't mean, why did I, why would I have needed to do that? I was there to learn, I wanted to learn, I wanted to hear, and I was like, wow, this guy's just he's also an up in a great way. Today's episode is brought to you by HubSpot, did you know that most businesses only use 20% of their data? That's like reading a book, but then tearing out 4/5 to the pages. Point is, you miss a lot, and unless you're using HubSpot, the customer platform

“that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business, the insights that are”

trapped in emails, call logs, transcripts, all that unstructured data makes all the difference because when you know more, you grow more. And so if you want to read the whole book, instead of just reading part of it, visit HubSpot.com. Can I talk to you about one more thing? Yeah, check this out. All right, Sam puts this photo here of the extremely jacked man who's clearly a body builder, clearly some sort of athlete, clearly that's his profession. Do you know who that guy is?

This is the open claw guy, right? Is that incredible? Okay, so could you tell the back

story of open claw, because it's a pretty amazing thing, and I think you actually know a lot more about it than I do. So this guy named Pete, so he's an Austrian dude, he learns to code, he builds like a PDF side project of sorts called PSPDF kit, and it actually becomes like the gold standard for like a PDF library for developers. It's used by like Apple and Box and DocuSign, and he basically boosts traps the thing. He ends up selling a majority stake. I think he sold it for

a lot of money, like a hundred million dollars, a hundred million dollars, tries to retire early. He's like golf sucks, has an existential life crisis like what all I want to do. Decides, all right,

“I'm going to keep building. That's what I've enjoyed doing. So he starts building open source projects.”

He launches like, you know, 40, 50 different open source small little tools or projects before this, and then he decides to create like Jarvis from the movies. He's like, why don't I just have an AI assistant that lives on my computer, like on my desk, and I just tell it to do things, and it could just do it. And the problem with most AI tools before this was that they, you know, you could talk to, you could go to that AI app, you could talk to it, it could tell you things,

but it couldn't do a whole lot, right? Because it didn't have access to your different apps in your accounts, and it couldn't message somebody, it couldn't control this, it couldn't control that. And he was like, forget it, I'm going to give it to God mode. I'm going to give it access to this stuff. And the reason why I can do that is I'll put it on my own little computer here instead of in the cloud, and it will run as an open source project locally on my computer. So he releases

this thing initially called a cloud bot, and then the anthropic who makes cloud was like, hey, we kindly suggest you change your name. If you want to ever see your mother again or something, you know, they say he gets forced to change. He changed it once twice. He ends up becoming open claw.

thing. It starts of revolution. People are buying Mac minis, the price of Mac minis is going through the roof. And then recently he gets acquired, acquired by open AI for an undisclosed

sum of money that people speculate could be a very large sum of money. Is this a one person billion

dollar acquire? We don't know what this is. And now he's part of open AI. So that's the story.

“That's what people online were saying. They say it was a billion dollars, but I have no idea”

if that's true. Nobody knows. What's crazy is you talked to, I think Blasher, you said the word of 2025 is generative. So Ari, do me a favor, share your screen again, and click his GitHub link. Look at how many projects this guy has put out with the last one being open claw. But is that amazing how many projects or little products that this guy tried to make before he got to the huge win? It's not shocking. Let me put it that way. I think it's awesome. But it's not shocking because

this is a pattern. You'll see over and over and over again, which is that the people who are the best, they make the best quality stuff, tend to also make the highest quantity of stuff. They just take a lot of shots on gold. They're prolific. They're generative. Often is because they start earlier, but even if it's not that they start earlier, they just attempt more than you. And that's a good example. In fact, levels had this great tweet about his hit rate.

Levels being Peter levels who we've had on the pod and he's kind of helped invent this word of indie hacker. He probably makes, I would say he's the most famous indie hacker. He does something

like $2 million a year with just him making a lot of these projects and he's pretty amazing.

All right, check this out. Same tweet, same idea from level. So he says four out of the 70 plus projects I did ever made money in group. 95% of everything I did failed. My hit rate is only 5% so ship more. And then he had basically a list. It's like all projects. And then he has projects that made good money in group. No mad list, remote talk, free base, and YouTube network for electronic music. Those are the four out of 70 that he did to try to make this successful. I've joked before. He's

like the Jordan logo for indie hackers, which is his like sitting on a couch, shirt off, and his boxers just typing on a laptop, sitting in Bali or whatever. And he basically showed that he has a 90 something percent failure rate that it took him whatever 50 plus projects before you had a hit. And all the revenue, all the success comes from like three or four projects that he did out of such a long list. Incredible. I'm not, I don't view myself as a prolific person.

“I think you're blind to it, dude. You did. Here's the projects I know that you've done,”

just projects, right? Sam's attempts to make a thing and be successful. Okay, hot dog stand. Next one, moonshine company, selling moonshine stuff online, right? Book club that you did in San Francisco, events business, newsletter business, blogging business, paid subscription business, Airbnb rental business, Airbnb community, mastermind community, that's I'm on 10 and it's been 10 seconds, right? I don't even know the shape that you've done.

What's funny is keep going. What else is there keep going? Well, conferences meetups. I do a lot of meetups and conferences. I create a copywriting thing. I'll copy that that comp. Copywriting workshop. You hosted it at my office one weekend. I'm gonna school Sam's List. You're a Sam's List. List of accountants. Okay. What else? I've made $3,000 from a website that taught you how to get a roommate in San Francisco. roommate matching, roommate finder, roommate infographics.

I made a thing to carve my renter, which was a universal rental application. This podcast, money-wise podcast, your Instagram influencer content attempt. What else? I don't view those as attempts. I guess that's kind of the point, which is a point. When it's just like, you're just like doing things in your free time that seem like hobbies. And I don't know your family office over. You could decline to answer this. But you have siblings.

In the same amount of time, let's say that was like a 15-year period and we named at least 17 things just down. Maybe there's probably 20, 25 things total. If you really thought about all the things, right? How many do you think the average person or even a sibling in your own home will group at the same environment as you? What have attempted? Is it one-to-one ratio? Is it half as much? Is it a quarter as much? Is it a tenth as much? What is it? It's less than a tenth.

Less than a tenth. I have a sister. Same thing. And there's no knock on them. They're great people. They're wired. They want to do different things in life. They have different goals. Maybe. But just to kind of just, again, drive this point home, which is that, like, quantity is the path

“to quality, right? And that you have to be prolific. You have to be generative in the amount of”

things that you're trying. And you almost always, when you think you have a quality problem,

you have a quantity problem underneath the hood. And it's quantity of iterations, right?

a lot of things. And the beauty of it is just that it's like dating or anything else in life. You only need one to work, right? Like, you don't need one. And your whole life changes. Yeah. I was a big a joke. I was like, you know, dating like business. You only need to be right once. You could, it only has to, has to work out one time. And it's worth it. Yeah. By the way, here's a blog post from him called Finding My Spark again. And he basically shows

his GitHub commits for the year after he sold his business. So he sold his business and he tried to do other things. He just felt empty afterwards. And he just got back into making stuff, just committing code, writing code, building tools, building products. And he basically was like,

the spark returned because building was always the thing that gave me joy. And it just clicked.

I had an idea, started hacking. I realized my spark is back. And like, to find meaning, it wasn't therapy. It wasn't Iowa's guy. It wasn't going to another country. I had enough of my own bullshit. And I realized that you don't find happiness by moving countries. You don't find purpose. You create it. So you don't find purpose. You create it. I think it's like a pretty, like, powerful tool is that that he was blogging. That blog post was from June of 25. So is that mean

that open claw was six months old? Yeah. Open claw is like brand new dude. It's like, well, I'm sorry. I know it's brand new. But like, he don't even working on it for six months. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy, right? Incredible. That's incredible. I don't know enough about technical stuff. Is he considered a great developer? Yeah. I don't know if this is true. This is now like, I'm just going off of random tweets. I've seen,

but I think the story is that he vibe-coded open claw. And he didn't even read the code afterwards. Which is why there's like a lot of like security concerns and like,

“post-central vulnerabilities. And he's even said, like, why do you need to join open AI? He's like,”

when I had this thing take off, dude, I mean, imagine the DM, it's like the most popular AI projects in the world, the AI is the most popular industry in the world. And so, you know, his DMs are flooded with acquisition offers, job offers, investment offers, like, turn this into a company. You could be the

next chat GPT, et cetera. And he basically was like, I don't want to build a huge company.

That's not what makes me happy. Want to build an AI agent that actually does the thing that I'm trying to build here. Like, that's my best shot of doing that is joining open AI. And so, he went there and he's like, yeah, I agree. There's a lot of problems with open claw. He's like, I'll leave it open source. You know, there's these issues. It's hard to set up. There's security vulnerabilities. Yes, agreed. And what? I'm going to go here and try to make a better version of

that that will be without those problems. My co-founder installed it. And he was like testing it out. I haven't installed it because I'm nervous. And we just got this, he installed it just in our work Slack. And he made like a marketing bot that would update the whole company on like, you know, how many people signed up the day before or whatever. And this morning, any called Stanley or something like that. Like, Stanley, the marketing bot, and Stanley would give updates. It would be like,

hey, I'm Stanley on the marketing bot. I want to, you know, that these many people signed with Hampton, yada, yada, yada, yada. Today, we get all we add our company. We all got a message just said, hey, I'm Jerry. I fired Stanley because he made a bunch of mistakes. And I want to let you know

“that the previous air was xy and see the truth is this. And today, this is how many people signed up.”

And we were like, why didn't they buy itself? Buy itself. I get a notification. It said, I fired it and give it feedback. It just decided. I get it to go. I got a notification in our team channel. And it said, I had to fire this person and it changed its name. Okay, so that's great. But did Joe say to the thing, you're making mistakes, make a better version of yourself? Did he tell it that or it just did it? He did not. He said that he did not tell it to do that. All right, that's scary.

That's funny and it's very scary. That's crazy. So we had to uninstall it. Like he uninstall it because we were like, this is just getting to be too much. This is weird. But it based, yeah, it alerted us. Poor decisions lately. Sam is now tied up in an underscore location. I'll be making decisions from here

on out. It's pretty incredible, isn't it? I was using um, Claude Cobrick yesterday, where I was

saying analyze the the slot conversations between my partner Joe and I and tell us what we can do to have like to be the best leader or like analyze to make us like have the best relationship possible. It was amazing. That's hilarious. By the way, he said a great thing. So people took his project list and they started tweeting like, look at this. He failed 40, he did 40 or 50 different projects. It didn't work before finding open claw. And then he like, when you guys talk about he's like,

all those things were basically like mini tools that open claw used. Like, that wasn't random. Like, great. It makes for a good story. But that's not true. Here's the truth. And it's like, if you weren't jacked, handsome, and rich already. Now you're honest, who got damn it. You know, like, this guy, this guy seems great. Today's podcast is about to buy my friends at Mercury.

“They make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I used Mercury for”

all my businesses. I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking

account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo in Chase. I'm just all in on Mercury. Why I like products

“that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have. So like,”

it's really easy to make a joint account with my wife. Very easy to spin up virtual cards. One click and I get savings yield. It just has all the stuff that I need in one place. So if you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury. I will fistfight anybody who disagrees with me on that. Go to mercury.com/personal and learn more. Mercury is a fin tech, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services provided through choice financial group and

call them an A members FDIC. There was another example of this like many projects thing, quantity thing that was on the pod that was a while back. Christina from Fanta came on the pod case. The episode is popular, but I feel like there's really one takeaway from this episode. She told me the story about the pottery experiments. Kind of a semi-famous example if you read a bunch of books, but most people don't read books. The story is there's a professor in a college in

Florida. And actual stories, I think it was about photography, but they kind of changed it to be about pottery for some reason. So he gives the he has a class and he wants to prove a point, which is that to be a great creative. Again, it's about this commitment. And so he says, half the class he tells

“you will be judged at the end of the semester on quality. I want you to make the best thing you”

can make. So all year, you don't have to do anything, but turn in your best pot at the end of the

semester and I will grade you only on the best pot you make. Okay, great. That's first half of class.

Second half of class he says, I will grade you only on the quantity of the number of pots you make. They can be bad, they can be good, don't care. As many as you turn in, your grade will be a function of quantity. All right, the two groups go on. So at the end of the semester, what happens? Obviously, the quantity group made way more pots as you would expect. The surprise, the spoiler, obviously, is that they also made the better pot. So like the higher quality pots also came from the quantity

group, who was not focused on quality at all. They're only focused on quantity. And he and they found out that the quantity group had a higher measured satisfaction rating. Correct. So when across the board, you made more stuff, you had more fun doing it and you made the better stuff. Okay, so you sort of swept. Now, why is that? Obviously, if you do things a lot, you get a lot of shots on goal. A lot of more attempts to make something great. If you do things a lot, your skill level

goes up. So your ability to make something great goes up. And the last thing is, you remove your filter. When you just try to do things that are, you try to make a lot of things, you don't self-adhib it. So you don't count yourself out, which you don't, you're not afraid to create, which usually pushes you towards doing safe projects. With this, they were willing to experiment a lot more widely. And because they were able to go wide, they did things a little more original

and novel. Okay. So that's the kind of the story from that. So she was saying, like, that changed my life. So today, Christine is the CEO of this, I don't know, five billion dollar tech companies, close to 10 billion maybe at some point, called Vance App. And so I asked her about her process getting there. And her story was like, she was like an associate, VC, or something at Union Square

Ventures, had never learned to code in her life and decided to teach herself to code. She, like,

would dress up like she's going to work, go to a co-working space sit at the same desk every day, like, treated it like a job. And I was like, I'm going to make shit. I'm going to make a lot of shit. And so she shared this list of projects on her website. So these are, like, you know, ruffling, she goes roughly in chronological order. Most of these things never saw the daylight, which is probably for the best. And it's like at a 25 different little mini projects that she built

during this time. And so she was making a lot of pots. And then she, so she tells the story about the Potter experiment, how this had this, it changed her thinking, how she built all these different projects. And of course, the last one, which really didn't even use code. It was just a spreadsheet in Excel, which was, let me help. Let me see if I can make a useful spreadsheet in Excel for any company that wants to get their sock to, you know, security certificate. And so she,

and she just did it in Excel, did it manually and started helping companies manually. And eventually turned that into software. And that eventually became Vanta, which now does hundreds of millions in annual revenue, which is like this pretty crazy stress. And she had this quote on the top of her website of her personal site. They just, it was from the book Art and Fear. And the quote was this, it says, "The function of the overwhelming majority of work is simply to teach you how to make the

“small fraction of your art that's source." And like, and I think if you take that mentality,”

you have a very different result. Then if you take the mentality of, "I need to make something great," and then you try to make one thing and then you sort of disappointed in your results and you sort of get to see go down a discourage mentally. Wow. And so this lady, I listened to that. I didn't realize how impressive she, she might, she had billionaire now. She might be one of the youngest self-made women billionaires. Yeah, I think I started the podcast with like, in the four,

four-drank-ter-like, you know, over Katy Perry and under Oprah or something. Like,

That's pretty cool. I didn't know what Vanta did. Also, I guess, frankly, I still don't entirely understand it because I don't know what Saktu entirely means. I guess it means compliance for all of those subjects is best stepped around. Yeah, it's like a word that you read about

all the time in a book, but you never want to say it out loud. I've read Harry Potter 30 times,

and when I watched the movie, I was like, Hermione? Yeah. What the hell? It's been 10 years of her mowing. Yeah, she's impressive. When you meet her, you're like, "Oh, okay, I get it." You know, sort of has that, what was that word? You say, "Oh, the oven burns hotter?" The oven burns hotter. Like, you're just wired a little bit better than us in the brain.

“It's all good. She also was the first investor in Repplet early on, which I think, if I look at”

now this like projects, she says, "Interactive Repplet to teach Python." It was one of her projects, which might have been the reason that she invested in Repplet first, and I don't know. I'm just guessing there that maybe had something to do with it. And, you know, Repplet's now, like, I don't know.

What is it? $3,45 billion company? Damn, dude, because soon as awesome, we should do a follow-up,

because that was like two years old, I think, that podcast. Yeah, that'd be fun. All right, Sean, I have it announcement. I've been thinking a lot about this, and I'm finally ready to announce it. I am resigning from business, and I'm starting a new career, and I need Ari to play a clip in order to get some context. News, I just got called out in the mill, Robin's podcast. I'm officially a dating expert check it out. But one of my favorite people,

who I really admire, is my friend Sarah's husband, Sam Park. Whenever I talk to Sam about dating, he talks about what he did to make himself a more desirable partner, and he really had a strategy

“for it. So, for example, he said, "I think it's really attractive when people have passions,”

so I'm going to work on developing a hobby that will be interesting to talk about, and he got really into denim." And when he was meeting up with girls, he would say, "I'm going to this denim swap this weekend." Let me tell you about Japanese denim, and that's kind of cool. Yeah, they would find it interesting. He really stood out. He was memorable. World-renowned, pick-up artists, dead-up, worked. It was just endorsed you on LinkedIn for this.

Oh, my gosh, I'm going to be hosting dating seminars over the next couple of months, and if you guys want to sign up, please let me know. I just have to warn you, Sean. I know you're married. Do you not walk up too much women and tell them that you're in a denim, otherwise they're just going to be booked full with dates. Right. Yeah. You seem visibly excited. This is the most excited I've seen you in six months.

It's just so funny. I saw that. I was like, there's no way, they're only telling the story because it worked. But if I told you that I walked up to a girl, and Esther, if she wanted to go through a denim slot, it's like, hey princess, want to come see my bug collection. I like how you doubled down and you're wearing denim today, too. Like, follow. I am what I am. And you've had fitness influencer, business influencer, now dating

influencer. Do I miss one? Professional scapegoater, professional casual scapegoater, yeah. White man who can jump. How funny is that? That was that made by day. I've just been walking around my office asking if anyone needs a mentor for dating. Dude, what's the story with Mel Robbins by the way? Do you know, do you know her backstory? I actually don't have any idea who she is, but she has a ton of followers. What is it? She used to work for James Currier at their start-up.

She was like a marker. And it became like this life coach, extraordinary type person. And I think I mean, I don't know what bridged that transition. Obviously, lots of hard work and useful things for people. But I feel like she's a self-made. Well, I feel like she decided like I now shall do self-help. And then she like intentionally went into it and did it. You know what I mean? Like,

“made a pivot into that career. Well, I remember that Rick and Rene came in the podcast and”

who was James's partner and he said, you know, I was just like my wife was listening to a podcast. And I was like, "That voice sounds familiar." And he was like, "Wait, I used to have a intern or a marketing manager named Mel. Is that?" Oh my god, that's the lady who worked for me, Mel Robbins. And he had no idea that she was into this stuff. And so I guess she kind of

manifested it. She's a manifest cowboy. She's got her the five-second rule. You know the

Mel Robbins five-second rule? Like where you could eat self-hout the floor. You would think, right? Some world famous. It turns out this is the alternate. So her five-second rule, this is her book, which is basically if you are procrastinating or you have self-doubt. So let's just take an example.

am I gonna approach her and say something to her or not? And her rule is basically you count back or it's five, four, three, two, one. And then you just physically move towards doing it before your brain could stop you. So you sort of the body overrides the brain. You don't let yourself be an overthinker. That one principle is like her most famous principle or most useful thing that is spread the idea that is spread the furthest. That's been great. I mean, that's the weird

coincidence. Because since I've been a pickup artist expert for the last 24 hours, I've been teaching this idea of the three-second rule, which is if as long as you see that

“whenever you see a girl who's cute, you have to go up and talk to her within three seconds.”

So great mindset is like print. You have to run. It doesn't matter the distance. You have three seconds to see that. And the first slide is I was staring at you and I just wanted to let you know. And then you just say the first thing that comes to your mind. This is, by the way, this is a perfect coincidence that you're talking about manifesting into a self-help guru, because I have a crazy story to tell you. Wait, before before you go there, can I tell you one more

five-second rule story? This is why this is just useful to the, you know, if there happens to be a young single man that listens to his podcast, I know absurd. But if there was, such a guy, this might be useful. My trainer is telling me this story. So my trainer is one of the best

humans I know. He's also super funny. Always in a good mood. Gets along with everybody's

super fit. He's like incredible. He's a catch. And he's a whole single. He's single right now. And the crazy thing is he's so it's almost like, you know, when people like, I'm going to work on myself for a little bit. And they like, like, Mel Robbins was saying that you did, right? You made yourself a more desirable partner. He just kept doing that, kept investing in himself made himself the most desirable partner, right? Like, such a such a great guy. So I told him I said this year.

I was like, I got this inkling. I'm going to introduce you to somebody this year. I have this gut instinct that I'm going to find the right person for you. I don't know why. I have somehow

“good dots are going to connect. And he's like, I think I'm here for it. And he goes, I have the crazy story.”

I was at the gym like a year ago. And I saw this girl. And there was this five-second rule moment where like, I shoot, she made eye contact. But we were kind of far away. She was in the middle of the set. I was in the middle of the set. I didn't walk over to her. And I kind of overthought it for

a second. And I was like, dude, I never do that. But he's like, she was just, she just seemed great.

So I was like, I just missed it. He's like, but I told myself, if I ever see that girl again, I'm going up to her. He goes, so yesterday, I'm across the street. And I see that same girl at this bus stop. And he's like, I ran across the street. I was like, I run over to her. He's like, I just told I goes, he goes, he goes, hey, he goes, hey, he goes, I have to tell you this. Crazy story. I saw you at the gym like a year ago. And at the time, I was too nervous to come up to and talk to you. I thought

you were really cute. But I just, I fumbled the ball. And I, I told myself, I said, if I ever see that girl again, I'm definitely going to come up and talk to her. And I just had to come up and say, hi, that she loved working. And then they went on this day. And they went and gray. And I was like, this is that, that is a great story. Because I feel like every guy has kind of has been in that position of the first part of the story. And you can turn the L into a big W by using it, actually,

not like just being ashamed of it or sort of kicking yourself about it. But actually use it as the line when you go up to the girl. Because I was very flattering. To date one happened to date one happened, went well. And we'll see what happens. But if there are any women out there that we're looking for the happiest man I know, the guy who has got the best mindset who is just an absolute joy to be around, he hit me up. You slide into my DMs. If you're, let's say, you're a good,

wholesome person who likes to have fun. Good sense of humor. You're looking to have a family. And you just haven't found the right guy yet. Maybe he's the guy for you. Slide into my DMs. I believe I'm connecting the dots to this year. It's happening. That's pretty interesting that you, you know, you're going from a business person. You're writing a book in creativity.

“Did you make her to Matt and Pam? Pam. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. All right. How do you feel?”

I feel great. I didn't comment on this. But where in the Ralph Lauren bear sweater, I own a

few of them. I've never won them because I thought you were going to mock me. And frankly,

I think it's great. I think a girl man should wear a teddy bear on their chest once in a while. I'll wear my next time. All right. Well, that's it. I think on that point, that's it. That's the part. I feel like I can root a word. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like the days on a bold less travel. Never looking back. All right, my friends. I have a new podcast for you guys to check out. It's called content is profit. And it's hosted by Luis and Fanzi Kameo.

After years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like Red Bull and Orange Theory Fitness, Luis and Fanzi are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue. In each episode, you're going to hear from top entrepreneurs and creators and you're going to hear them share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit. So you can check out content is profit wherever you get your podcast.