Alright. We're live, Sean. I've got a story for you. And this story,

I'm gonna take a weird take on this. I have a weird take on this. And I'm gonna appeal to all the young single men out there. Alright. This is your specialty. Young single men. Let's go.

Alright. Listen.

The story is about Ed Thorpe. Have you ever heard that name? Ed Thorpe? Sounds like a swimmer. No.

It does sound like a swimmer, but he's not. So, Ed Thorpe, I'm reading his biography called man for all markets. So, Ed Thorpe, today he's ninety one. So what does that mean? He's born in the nineteen forties, nineteen thirties.

Ed Thorpe, he grew up as a math whiz kid. He was, like, a a prodigy at a young age. He grew up in a very poor household, didn't have a lot of money, But as a young kid, when he was, like, twelve and thirteen years old, he got moved up a bunch of grades, and he took, a bunch of standardized tests. And at the time, when he lived in California, he got something like, the highest scores in California for high schoolers when he was like thirteen years old. And at the time, they didn't have calculators, but they had, like, counting devices, and he would take these tests without these counting devices because he couldn't afford them. And he still crushed it. He killed it. So eventually, Ed Thorp, he gets a scholarship to Berkeley, and then he goes to UCLA where he gets his PhD in mathematics.

And he becomes a professor. And he starts going down this track where he's in his thirties, and he's this brilliant professor, and whatever,

But then he does something interesting.

He gets interested in applying his theories

to real life situations. Because he's, like, reading these academic papers, and he's, like, this is cool and all, but we gotta apply this stuff.

And his specialty was probability and statistics.

And he got super interested in how he could use his theories to beat Black Jack. Oh, this is the gambling guy. I saw this guy on Tim Ferris. So this guy's interesting. It's because he's done so much more than just these few little stories I'm gonna tell. But, basically,

you could actually verify this Black Jack is what? Fifty one percent chance the house is gonna win. Is that right? Is it, like, fifty one forty nine? Fifty two something like that. Yeah. So it's a small, margin.

But back in the sixties, when he was kinda getting going, he had this theory where he thought that if he saw the the cards on the table, he could have a higher probability of getting twenty one because he basically could count cards changing the ratio of fifty one percent in the,

users

perspective. So

he was fifty one percent chance of winning. The house was forty nine percent chance. So he creates this paper where he explains all of this and inevitably, people are like, Man, this is just some academic theory. There's no way that you're gonna be able to do this.

And so Thorp is is is a fun guy, and he's like, we gotta prove it. So he builds out this blackjack table at his house, and he gets his wife to smoke cigarettes and blow cigarettes smoke into his face while she's talking to and, like, annoying him. And then he has friends come over who, like, are drinking alcohol and, like, yelling in his face as if he's at a casino to distract him. And he spends a handful of months doing this. And it starts working. And he's like, I think this actually can work. I think I can do this. And he publishes this paper and all these people reach out. He gets hundreds of letters.

But eventually, he gets this one letter from this guy named Manny. And Manny, he doesn't really know it at the time, but after a while, Ed, kinda, realizes that Manny is basically in the he helped make bootlegging a thing in the twenties when alcohol was illegal.

And Manny goes, hey, Ed. Let's see if you can actually pull this off. I'm gonna front you ten grand, and we're gonna split the winnings.

Ten grand at the time, the sixties, is something like eighty grand. So it was a lot of money, particularly for a professor who's making the equivalent of a hundred hundred and fifty thousand dollars back then. And so they go and they spend this week, this weekend at a casino in Las Vegas, and they make eleven thousand dollars in profit.

And Ed's like, holy moly, this thing works, but he doesn't really wanna become, like, totally a professional gambler, but he's really interested in proving his theories.

And, eventually, he writes a book, on this. And if you Google Ed Thor blackjack book, he wrote this book at the sixties that was a massive hit

And to head to Ed, this was all just a big, like, fun game, a way to, like, prove that his research wasn't just academic, but it could actually be used And this book was a massive hit, and it was one of the first times that academic research was, like, used in real life, and it went straight to the masses as opposed to him publishing more papers.

But this meant now that he was known in the casino world. In the casino world back then, Vegas was just getting going, and so it was small enough that they all the casinos could know what Ed looked like, and all the dealers would know what he looks like and what his name is. And so he eventually goes back at every handful of weekends, and he has to wear disguise.

And he's but he still ends up ends up cleaning them all out. And next, he goes, well, Black Jack was cool. Let's see if I can do this with roulette. And so he goes, you know, roulette is a little bit unlike blackjack where I don't even know if there is necessarily at least it doesn't appear, so there's a lot of skill because it's all, like, where the ball lands on the spinning wheel. But he has this weird theory that if he can see if he can, like, quickly count how fast the wheel is going and where the ball starts and where it hits the wheel. Somehow, he's able to calculate

fifty one percent in his odds where the ball is going to land. And this sounds like a crazy idea. Right? I mean, that just sounds

impossible to me as somebody who has spent a lot of time at roulette wheel,

being able to figure out

while the wheel is turning,

where the ball is gonna land, and it I mean, when the ball hits, it bounces, like, in a random direction based on the spin and the speed and everything. Like, for somebody to do that in their head would be I'd have to see that to believe that. It sounds impossible. Right? And that's what interested him is is he was a math nerd, and he was really fascinated with the game of proving his theories correctly.

And so what he did was he took a small, computer, and he basically assembled a small computer. And the way it worked is he would have a two person team And so he would be at the table placing the pet, and he had had two people on the side, and they had these little small computers, and they had little buttons in their shoes. And they would calculate where they thought the ball was gonna roll to, and they would tap their feet in order to keep the cadence of the wheel. And it would help him predict where the ball was gonna go, and that music, the the the taps, it kinda sounded like music, would go into his his earpiece that he was wearing, and he would make a bet.

And this was actually the world's first wearable, you know, like an iPhone or, like, like, an Iwatch as a wearable. This was the world's first wearable. And it worked. And he killed it. He made a lot of money, and he wrote a book on this. He did it again.

But now, gonna fast forward to him ten years doing these experiments.

He's got some money, something like a hundred thousand dollars at the time, which was a lot of money for a professor.

And he needs to invest his money because he just doesn't want it sitting there. And so he spends a few months learning everything he can about basically just reading books. He just read lots of books. And as he said, he wanted to understand the math behind all of this. And so he starts in investing in publicly traded companies, and he loses a lot of money at first. He said I had to pay my tuition to mister money market because it gets a lot of it wrong. But then he discover discovers options.

And this part is a bit out of my expertise to explain how he does this. But it involves both shorting a company and buying the company's actual stock. So predicting the company's stock is going to go down while buying the stock But in doing that, he studied the the the option that he was going to purchase as well as the current stock price. And in doing that, he was able hedge it, so he would only lose a little bit amount of money, but make a whole bunch of money. And for him,

he actually didn't look at any of the stock information as in what the company was selling. So, you know, you have guys who, like, do value investing, and they're like, well, I think that this brand is undervalued. That wasn't him. It was all just a math game to him. But after a year or two, it starts working. And he starts making a little bit of money. And so now we're in the seventies.

And there's another professor at his university who starts hearing that ed now investing in stocks, and he's doing quite well. He tells some of his coworkers, he's like,

I might make more of my more than my salary this year investing. It's going quite well.

And so one of his professors

has invested his money, the professor's money in this small little fund called Buffet Associates.

And, of course, it was run by this guy Warren Buffett out of Omaha.

And this professor was like, hey, this guy who I invested in Warren, he's gonna wind down his fund. He's crushed it for me, but he just wrote this letter saying he can't find any more good deals, which in the seventies, Buffet actually pause investing for, like, five years. He didn't want to invest because he's like, I can't find any good deals right now. I'm just gonna sit and do nothing. I'm gonna wind down my fun. And the professor goes, hey, look.

This guy is running down his fun. Why don't you you know, he's got some free time. I'm friendly with him. I'm gonna invite him over to my house. I'll bite you over, and we'll just shoot the shit, and maybe you'll have a new friend in the investing industry, because you don't really know anyone else doing this. I'll I'll help make the introduction.

But it comes over for dinner, and Ed Thorpe and him get along beautifully.

Hand in hand, like pots and pans. They're they're really close.

They become great friends, and they love hanging out that debt. And a few weeks after the the dinner, the professor goes, hey, look, Ed. I was kinda testing you. I kinda wanted Warren to, like, like, kinda see what's up with you. He gave he gave a thumbs up. He said you're really smart and that your I ideas are good. Can I take this money that I got back from Warren Buffett and give it to you to invest? And it's like, taking other people's money. That's not really what I'm I've been doing. I I've just been doing this for my own.

I guess I'll try it. And so he teams up with another guy, and they raised something like five million dollars over the course of six months. And they have Buffett stamp of approval.

And so they start basically one of the very first hedge funds ever. And particularly, a he's a quant, which is common nowadays, but Eddorp was the first quant where he didn't really look at the companies.

He just looked at the numbers, and he killed it. So over the course thirty years. He made something like twenty to twenty five percent per year, which is massive. I don't know what what is Buffet made. You know? Probably something but over the course of Moffett's just like twenty. Yeah. Yeah. It's like twenty, but over the course of, like, sixty years. Yeah. Yeah. For a lot longer. Alright, guys. Really quick. So back when I was running Pustle. We had this premium newsletter called trends. The way it worked was we hired a ton of analysts, and we created this sort of playbook for researching different companies and ideas and emerging trends to help you make money and build businesses. Well, HubSpot did something kinda cool. So they took this playbook that we developed and we gave to our analyst, and they turned it into an actionable guide and a resource that anyone can download, and it breaks down all the different methods that we use for spotting upcoming trends, for spotting different companies that are gonna explode and grow really quickly. So if you wanna stay ahead of the game and you wanna find cool business ideas or different niches that most people have no idea they exist, This is the ultimate guide. So if you wanna check it out, you can see the link down below in the description. Now back to the show. And so, Ed Thorpe,

basically, invented counting cards with Black Jack Mhmm. And then made a book on it. He invented,

this roulette game and the world's first wearable, which all of these things, by the way, eventually became illegal. They weren't illegal or I don't know if it's illegal or against the rules, but they basically are banned in casinos

because of him. And he parlays all of this learning and all this experience into creating the world's first hedge fund. And becoming the one of the first quants, and he knocks it out the park. The guy kills it. I think he made something like eight hundred million dollars. And then eventually, fast forward to today or at more like two thousand and five, he shuts down his fun because he's like,

I have enough. I don't need anymore. This has been fun while it lasted. I'm out. He's one of the few guys to just be winning, and he just says, That's enough. I'm done. So he completely shuts it down. So now

he's ninety two years old. He still does push ups and pull ups. He's really into fitness. He does not look ninety. I I saw him on the Tim Affairs podcast. I can't have been that long ago. He was eighty nine then on that Tim Affairs podcast. Like, he looks honestly like somebody's early sixties.

He looks great. Yeah. And here's the part where I promise I'm gonna try to weave this into advice to the young man.

Ed Thorpe is so fascinating to me. And the reason he's fascinating to me is because I don't know if you'll admit to this. You probably will if you did Did you ever read that book, the game? Did you ever read, like, books on, like, how to meet women? Not only did I read the game.

Not only did my girl in high school, buy the game for me before I went to college as a goodbye gift.

Was that her breakup gift? It's okay. We're not

gonna stay together, but let me help you out

Not only do those two things happen.

Two nights ago, I reread the game, and I'm a married man. I reread the game because I was like, that book was amazing I wanted to learn the style of it. I was like, what was great about that books? I went back in. Right? Reread it two nights ago. So it's crazy you brought it up. So it that's great book. So anyone most men in their in their thirties nowadays probably read that when they're fourteen. It was, like, the Bible because all of us nerds were, like, I desperately wanna be loved. How do I be loved? Whatever And there was a lot of bullshit in that book, brother. The number of times I used the cube test, like, there's not a woman on Duke Campus that didn't get the cube test for me. Which one was the cube test?

It's like a cold read where you're like, I want you to close your eyes. Imagine a cube. It's, it's inflating in the desert. How big is the cube? But if they say it's big, they're self confident. If they say it's small, they have no ego. Is the cube see through? Is it colored? Oh, it's it's kind of see through? Well, you'd you don't let people in easily, but when you do, you really do connect with people at a deep level. So me. And then you just go on, so on and so forth about their relationships and about their the way they view the world. And by the end of it, they're like, this guy, this guy's gonna be in the friend zone. It's really what happened to me, but this I think for for better looking people, it probably worked better than that. They were like a cat, and you were just holding string just, like, trying to entertain them and they're like, yeah, I'm done with you. That's another thing about cat string theory. That's actually another principle they have. Well, then and this is where it gets really nerdy, but one of the parts of that book and that whole movement, there was a lot of bullshit in that book and in that movement. But one of the parts that I always took to heart was the best way to attract others, both men and women, is to be an interesting person.

And what that means is basically

People like ambitious people and being passionate about hobbies is under that umbrella of being ambitious.

And I remember as a kid, I love that because I'm like, wait. You're telling me I could just, like, work on myself and I'll attract others. That sounds like the greatest thing ever. And and and I believe it to be true.

As I've gotten older, I've noticed I've gotten less interesting. And the reason I've gotten less interesting, there's a few reasons there. The first is that I've developed higher expectations towards most things that I do, or rather I've just developed expectations

as opposed to just doing something just for fun. Like, you do think as a kid just because you're intrigued, you know, like, I don't know where this is gonna go, but I'm just gonna I'm just gonna follow it. Whereas now, There's expectations for everything that I do. And I wanna have I'm I'm a little bit more interested in the outcome.

The other thing that I've noticed lately about me and why I've become less thing is because I've been distracted with social media just like how you're typing right now as I'm talking to you. It's so much easier to be distracted nowadays, but Twitter and Slack and email and text, I find myself getting so distracted and so I don't have a significant amount of, like, deep thought or, like, going deep on something. It's more so, like, I'm being on the defense where people throw information at me and I react to it as opposed to, like, spending time pursuing something that interests me just because it interests me.

And so

the reason why Ed Thorpe, the reason why I I like reading about him and particularly for young men listening is He's kind of inspired me to just pursue more hobbies just for the sake of learning. And here's an example,

when he was developing his roulette game, He basically went and bought a old roulette table at an auction for, like, five hundred dollars.

And he just sat at home in the evening with wife. And they're like, hey, let's just see if we can, like, count this game. It it was almost like, what's that one board game called settlers of Catan? Yeah. You know how, like, people just, like, get into that random stuff. And they're like, let's just see if we can master this game. It sounds fun. And that's exactly how it started with him. A lot of these things that became massive outcomes for him, they were just, like, interesting little hobbies for him, and they started very rudimentary. Have you ever read about doctor Richard Faimon?

Of course.

So Faimon was one of the guys who was important for a variety of reasons, including

helping make the atomic bomb and all these things. And he had little, like, weird things about him. Where's, like,

Why can dogs smell so good? And he's like, well, I asked myself that. And then I just

put my head close to the floor, and I noticed I can smell things on the floor. And, like, that's, like, and, like, it's, like, really simple ways to, like, prove or disprove a theory where you start at, like, very basic principles and you're like, let's just see if this works. You know, Justin Khan used to call himself he had some tagline for himself when he was making content. He used to say, hey, it's me. It's Justin, your favorite founder's favorite founder. And that was, like, how you always talked about yourself? Your favorite founders, favorite founder. And I feel like Feynman is kinda that. It's like your favorite gurus, favorite guru, or your favorite thinker's favorite thinker. It's like everybody

who you love their thoughts, they love Fynman and the Feynman technique, and they love all of Feynman's books and his writings. However, do you respect respects Finynman? Yeah. I think Tim Ferris's holding company is called Fynman Inc or something like that. Dude, that's actually genius to just be like, Feyn and Ferris associates.

There's put yourself with them. Just like, Yes. This is the Purian Musk consultancy. Well, how can I help you? Yeah. Just, like, borrow from their credibility But there's guys like Simon, and Ed Thorpe is now in that sphere

where they just get interested in something that seem so silly and they do it at a very rudimentary level, and it goes from level to level to level to level, to level, but it starts at level one. You know, it's exactly like this. Jack Smith. Jack Smith is like that. Yeah. Jack Smith is he's one of these guys. Jack is a buddy of ours. You're really good friends with them. I think you've known him for a lot longer than than I have, but he is such an interesting He built companies. And so he built a company called Vungle sold it. His whole origin story was one of the very first podcasts on this feed. So if you go back, Jack was in there, and he talked about, you know, he was a high schooler, what he was doing, flipping things on eBay, and then how he hacked his way into an accelerator. Then once he was in the accelerator, how he figured out this ad tech company, how the experts told him there's no way son, you don't understand how the ad business works. He's like, yeah, that's my strength. I don't understand how this works. So when I approach it, it's I'm gonna approach it differently. And what he did was the whole the way the whole ad industry work was all based on CPM impressions. So it's a billboard. How many people are gonna see this billboard? That's how I charge you. He's like, well, that's kinda stupid. If I was advertising, I don't want people to see it. I want people to buy from me, or I want people to download my app. I want the action. So what if we just paid for the action? And it became CPA instead of CPM. And so he reinvented in a way. That's a little bit generous, I would say. There's other people doing this, but Jack and his co founder created Vongles, sold it for seven hundred million dollars, and it was really based around this mobile gaming ad network that was gonna do things a little differently the way other people were doing He sold it for seven hundred and fifty million when he was twenty nine years old, like crazy stuff. And for example,

again, thinking from first principle. So, like, what should the ad be? Everybody else did video ads.

And so you would be playing a game. It would stop. A video would take over the screen, and it would be a video commercial. And then you'd be like, when when can I click the x? So I get back to playing a game. And what Jack realized was, he's like, well, the best way to advertise a game is actually just play the game for a second. Oh, it's it's about shooting the ball into this hoop. Well, like, let them try to shoot a couple times. They miss, and they wanna make it. And they make it. And then now they got a sample. They created an ad unit that was just a mini version of the game that worked way better than the video ad. And it was again many times over of just thinking from first principles. How can I do this? But now since selling the company, He had his Thorpe

enough moment where he did not need to go create another company and instead got really into other things. He's like, you know, I need to buy an office chair. He goes and he looks just kinda uninspired. He's like, well, certainly there's been some studies on the best way to sit. So what is the best way to sit? And he'll go and he'll read research papers about the best way to sit, and then he'll chairs, and he ultimately ends up building this crazy ergonomic chair himself in his garage over the period about six or eight months. Did you see the chair? Yeah. It looks like a dentist chair. He's laying in this crazy position, and it's like a a work chair. But at any time, if you ask him, like, hey, Jack, what are you up to nowadays? He felt zero pressure or at least caved to zero of the pressure, of having some important sounding answer because he just did what was important to him rather than what sounded important to others. So he'd be like,

just, you know, just messing around. You're like, no. What does that mean? Like, what do you do every day, Jack? He's like, well, I'm really working on trying to build a chair. You know, I got really interested in chairs and you know, sitting. So I sit for six hours a day, and I just thought, well, why don't I sit in a better chair? So I could start researching chairs. So I've bought fifty two chairs and I've been testing them. And then I've decided to build my own this the best of each of these. That's what he'll do for one year. And then next year, he'll do something completely different just off of his curiosity.

And the cake one year for his birthday, the cake that his wife made for him at his party was shaped like an Amazon box because he'd orders so many chairs or so many whatever things that he's interested in that the he had a room in his home just dedicated to all the boxes. Yeah. He had a small, like, FBA fulfilled by Amazon facility in his in his pantry just to test out every single product. And at one point, they'd banned them on Amazon. They ban him on Amazon for returning too much stuff because he would buy all of this stuff to test it out. But, yeah, Jack is perfectly like that. But does this resonate with you where you're like, I need to just pursue more things without having a big outcome

in mind. Well, we haven't been talking a ton, but that's become the theme of my I don't know, the last twelve, fifteen months or so. I heard this quote. They've all said this thing on some podcast, and he goes,

too many of us live where we're doing things today for some future reward, some future payoff. I'm not doing what I wanna be doing now. But I'm putting in the time. I'm putting in the work. I'm putting in there for some future payoff. And he goes, that's understandable. We all start there. He's like, but the day you start doing things where the The thing you're doing in and of itself is the reward,

that's the day you've retired. People think retirement is when you stop working, you go sit down, you chill, you do nothing. It's not that you do nothing. It's that you do the things you wanna do because the act of doing them itself is the payoff,

and you're not sure. There might be some upside in the future, but that's not why you did it. And when I heard that, I was like, okay. That's what I need to be doing. I don't know how I'm gonna get there. And I've many times had little detours off of that where I start to do something opportunistic because, oh, it's gonna pay off in the future. But I've just continued to bring myself back to that that moment, which was I want this next chapter in my life to be all about. I'm doing things where the only criteria is. The act of doing it has to be rewarding enough for it to have been worth it. And that one criteria eliminates, like, ninety eight percent of the possible things I wanna do. Because if I'm honest with myself, and I say, well, why do I wanna do this? It's because it might make a bunch of money or it might pay off in this thing later. It doesn't but it could be business related. It could be relationships related.

Why do I wanna meet this person or go to this event? Oh, because it might lead to something. Wanna know. I'm only going to this event if the event itself is the payoff. Only hanging out with this person. If the hangout is the payoff, not because it's gonna lead to something else. It can be But did you determine what that is? Do you determine have you Well, what I actually that's actually really hard. Figuring out what the play is. What I realized is it's less of a thing. So I thought, like, you're just asking me this question. I thought it's a thing. I gotta find my thing. My new thing that's the thing just love to do, and I'm doing it for the sake of doing it. What I realized is is it's fundamentally different. It's not a thing. It's a approach and it's a filter.

And so, actually, it's a question that I ask at the beginning of any anything I'm gonna do that day, which is am I doing this for some deferred payoff, some deferred benefits.

Or am I doing this because I actually enjoy doing this? And so it changed the way I did everything. So for example, with my workouts, there was a version of workouts that I did because whatever. Just just bite bite the bullet just do this and you're gonna it'll pay off later when you get fit versus, well, why don't I just do workouts that the workout itself is so satisfying? And, of course, I do that, I'm gonna do it more often. I'm gonna do it with my full effort, and I'm gonna still get the reward in hand. So I started working with this like boxing coach or playing basketball, different things that I wasn't doing before,

because I was willing to settle for

doing something that today kinda sucked. But in the future, maybe it's gonna turn out great. And I realized I had lived basically, like, thirty five years of my life with the this kinda sucks now. But, oh, it's gonna it's all gonna pay off in the end. I realized it's a false choice. You don't have to do that. You can just filter every activity on. Is the act of doing this gonna be worth it? Even if it's challenging, it doesn't mean everything is so happy. But is the act of doing this the reward or am I doing this of future payoffs. So it became a a filtering criteria, not a one thing. So for example, I told you, I was reading the book the game the other day.

Did I do that? Why was I reading a book in the middle of the day, especially an old book that I'd already read before that had no relevance to me because I'm not trying to be a pickup artist or or hit on women anymore. Right? That's not what I was doing. But it was the thing I was most interested in that moment. And so I did it because the act of doing it was the reward because I was most interested in it. And I've done that with other hobbies, like, picked up playing the piano, and I started doing other things. Are all falling into this bucket. And I've never been so you can hear it in my voice. I've never been so switched on after making this sort of shift in the way I chose what to work on. And that's a very I'm gonna say the p word. That's a very privileged way to go about it, which is if you hit the lottery, like, maybe we have or, I mean, we've worked hard, but we've got lucky as well, where that's a very privileged way to go about it. And so I do think you have to shit for a certain period of time and also get some luck. But,

yeah, I'm very drawn to this way of living. I'm not sure that that's true. Looked one hundred percent true. The reason I say that is.

First, whenever somebody calls you privilege,

I'm like, that's a I think they they mean it as an insult. They people use it as an egg. Not you, in this case, but I'm saying most people, if you call someone privileged, you're trying to tear them down.

I want my life to be described as one of privilege. That's the point. You're giving me a compliment. That's like saying, wow, you're really good at this or this comes effortlessly to you or whatever. I want my life to be described that way. That is a goal of mine. And I just mean that because most people will treat that as a negative, and that they try to make themselves smaller. Right? So a little bit of, like, the tall poppy syndrome where

if you have the freedom to do something

and you are not doing it because you're worried about how it looks or how it sounds or how it others don't have that privilege, you're wasting your privilege. And I think that's a it's a bad thing. Let me let me answer the other part, which is I would say that the most successful project I've ever done More than any of the companies ever built or any job I ever had has been this this podcast.

This podcast from

usage.

Like, people listen to this. They like it. So customers are happiest financially.

It's a very lucrative product that affords a very good lifestyle. But also just the my enjoyment of it, the act of doing it. I don't do this episode

for some future payoff. I do this episode because

it's gonna be fun to do. Enjoy this conversation, this conversation up. By the time we click stop, I've got my payoff.

And when I started the podcast,

I literally wrote down that I'm gonna lose money doing this, that I expect that nobody will listen to this, and I'm gonna do it anyways because it'll be so fun to record these episodes, talking to interesting people and learning that it'll make it worth it. And I wrote down, I mean, I have this Google doc. I'll share it. It says, my forecast is I will lose ten thousand dollars a year doing this. My forecast is that really nobody but my mom is gonna listen to this thing, and it's still worth doing. What were the other predictions? So I got into this position because I made a choice like that four years ago.

Right? Like,

that that and so I don't think I also thought, well, you gotta eat shit for a while before you get to go do the fun things. I don't believe that that's actually true. Know a lot of That's one hundred percent true. Think about it. Let's say you're a a forty year old landscaper. One way kids.

It is one way to do things. I know a bunch of engineers

who work on projects that they are personally interested in. They build for personal projects, and one goes kinda nowhere. Two goes kinda nowhere. But it doesn't matter. They're building up their skills. They're having fun doing it. And sure enough, by the third, the fourth, the fifth, either they built up skills where they're a highly valuable person that gets brought into a project that's already working. And they get paid handsomely for it, or they're one of their projects takes off. But the whole time, they were just doing the thing that they really like to do. I think that there is one way to win, which is grind and eat shit

and pay your dues, work up the ladder, pick whichever cliche you want, and that that is a way to win. I know several people that from the beginning, they were driven by working on the things that were interesting to them, like Indian Thorepe type of guy. Right?

And when they when they're working on things that were interesting to them, it led to good comes because when you work on things that are interesting, you work on it longer, harder than than a person who's just doing it for a reward, you get better at it. And when you get really good at something, that's when the payoffs tend to come.

Well, I believe that can be true, and also it can be true that it's more challenging logistically for certain people. For example,

you're a blue collar labor with three kids at forty years old, you work from six AM to seven PM, and you're like, there's just no time, and I just gotta pay the bills. I do think that it's just more challenging. For many of the people listening right now, I believe you are totally right, which is we probably have a lot of college educated, particularly college age kids who don't have too much responsibility

And they should lean into this this thing. And I completely believe that to be true. And I believe it also to be true that as you grow,

This type of mindset gets stamped out of you. The world wants you to be vanilla. Yeah. Absolutely. Let me ask you a different question. Of the people we know that are successful, just Give me a rough number.

What percentage do you think got there through the

grind do shit they didn't like?

That paid off in an unsexy way. And then now they work on things that are more interesting, pleasurable to that they're driven by curiosity, they're driven by passion, they're driven by whatever. Versus people that

made it by following things they were curious about, maybe it was a bit of a lonely road for a bit. Maybe other people maybe it wasn't a hot market. But it became hot, but they were there already. Right? That happens a lot. What percentage would you say in each? I'm just curious roughly how how you would think about it. Is it, like, only five percent

got successful

through following their own their own interests fundamentally,

or do you think that it's fifty fifty? They got it got successful falling the interest versus following what was more proven. If I had to guess, sixty to seventy percent of the people who we know, who we would consider wealthy enough that money doesn't really matter. Probably made money in a way that looking back, they were like, that was really hard and miserable. And I don't think I can do that again. And then a large percentage of them. Now I would say only fifty percent of them then go and pursue something that truly interests them. And the other fifty percent, just do the playbook again and are miserable

while earning a great living. Yeah. So roughly, let's say, twenty, twenty five percent, you maybe we're in the the bucket that I'm talking about, which is they were just doing what's interesting to them, and that happened to become something that was very successful versus people who chose things that were not as interesting or not as fun for them, but they thought we're gonna have a payoff and it did. And here's why.

Why Combinator

is like the stereotypical

Silicon Valley, like, story.

You go to Y Combinator. How long is y Combinator? Eight or twelve weeks? Three months? Three months. Yeah.

Okay. So you go with one idea, and you only have twelve weeks to decide if this is gonna work or not. And by week six, they say, Dude, this sucks. You should pivot this amazing idea you had to do credit card processing or to do something else that people want to give you money for. And so they just go, ah, fuck it. Whatever. I gotta go down that path, but that path that they're signing up for is a ten year journey or more And so there wasn't too much thought with it. And so they're just like, man, I just gotta get a win however way I can. And I only have another six weeks until I've gotta go do demo day. So I've gotta just settle on something and move forward and do it. And I think that that mentality

is often what a lot of internet based businesses are built on.

So I think that's a little unfair to YC because, for example, if I think that does happen,

but

one of the things that happens in those pivots I've invested in a lot of YC companies that pivot. And, also, if you read a program essay, one of the things Polygram advises heavily against is the, what he calls, playing startup. It's like playing house where you sort of just try to manufacture a startup idea that you think might work or think might be good. He's like, the best way to figure out a startup idea is to scratch your own itch. And to look at your own life and figure out, in what place am I already living in some future that other people aren't, but I could build a product that would help them get there. Or what's a pain point we've discovered along the way of doing this that we could solve. So, yes, they pivot quickly and they pivot in the middle of YC, but usually the advice is that You should pivot to something. The pro like, the itch that you want scratched, the problem that you are currently having, or the thing you you uniquely understand because of the way you live your life, versus,

what other people do. And the biggest successes out of YC have typically been that. Right? I agree that that The Airbnb guys, renting up their own apartment to make hay or Brian Armstrong, doing coinbase because he lived in Argentina and dealt with the currency issues that was interested in Bitcoin. These were not ideas that fundamentally sounded good. The biggest successes, I think, are done that way. Yeah. But not the average success.

I think that's exactly right. I think the most successful people work way, but the average or the majority are not that way. And I think that's probably the true statement.

I I'd have to go look through white commander companies, but there's many twenty three year olds that know anything about payroll processing software. But there's a lot of twenty five year olds or whatever who have created something really cool like that. Our friend, Jack. Why did he do Vungal? I think he was curious of solving problems, but he didn't have a problem. He wanted success more than he wanted. He wanted he was like, this just seems intriguing, I guess. Like yeah. Let's just He's he's what he made a shift. I would also say some there's a con confounding factor, which is that for a lot of the people who are our friends,

the thing that they are interested in is the game.

So it's not the industry that they that was the passionate thing. The passionate thing was playing the game of business.

Can I give you two related things that came up for me? I don't know if you remember this, but when the open AI drama was going on, when they fired Sam Altman,

One of the things that came out was maybe they have AGI internally. And everyone's like, no. They probably don't have AGI internally, but maybe there was some breakthrough because he had gone at some conference and said, There are these moments with open AI where you're sitting in a room and you get to see a demo and your mind gets blown. You've seen the future. The world is not the same because of what you just saw. He goes, that just happened about three weeks ago. And people didn't know what it was, but he was kinda just, like, teasing a little bit. And just he wasn't even trying to make a hype thing. He was just trying to say, like, what it's like to work there. He's he was trying to use it for some other reason, but people took that and they're like, man, they must have something. Sam Auburn said that or an employee said that. Sam Alvin had said that. And so people started speculating, what is it? And then these leaks happened, they started talking about this thing called q star. Do you remember this? Do you remember this q star thing? Yeah. I don't know what it is though. So q stars, I, I mean, I'm not a AI PhD researcher, so I don't know exactly. But the idea is, like, there are different algorithms or different methods you can use to do something. And q star is a certain technique. And so people were like, oh, q star. Does that mean they're using the q either the q technique of technique or whatever, that's not what people are using today, but maybe there's something there. And so this thing leaks.

It's not been confirmed yet whether that's was or wasn't a thing. But what ended up happening was there was a whole bunch of smart people that suddenly started sniffing around that technique.

And just recently, a bunch of research papers got published saying that they're seeing amazing performance using this technique.

And so as this guy came on and he talked about that this is actually a phenomenon

that happens frequently. So, I'll just tie this together. This guy Robert Kwanzy was tweeted this. I don't I don't know this guy, but he tweeted this little story that I liked. And he said, Claude Shannon once told me that as a kid, he had ever been stuck on a jigsaw puzzle. And his brother was passing by and said, you know, I could tell you something that would help you with this puzzle, but now I'm not gonna do it. That's all the brothers said. But that was enough of a hint for Claude to solve the puzzle. The great thing about the hint is that you can always give this to yourself. So, basically, there's this this phenomenon that happens in human behavior, which is that

If you knew that there might be a win,

you don't even need to know what the thing is, that alone will increase your probability of success. You don't wanna know what else Claude Shannon did. Do you remember how I told you Ed Thorpe went to the roulette table and it required two people to be in the crowd? He was his buddy. That was the other guy. So in fact, if you look it up, the there's, like, it's called I think it's, like, the Thorp Shannon principle, and it's, like, the theory of so Claude Shannon, who this guy is referencing, he was the guy who was tapping his foot to tell at Dorpes, which is pretty funny. So the second story that's the same principle is about Caggle. So Caggle is this online competitive place for solving, you know, problems, riddles, puzzles, puzzles, whatever it is. I think I don't know if it's all coding or if it's just map puzzles. So this guy replied in the thing. He goes.

One of my favorite Calgal facts is that anytime that the leader board gets stagnant for a while in in any competition,

If one team suddenly makes a jump, that will automatically cause multiple independent teams to quickly reproduce the same breakthrough with no knowledge of how the first team made the breakthrough.

And isn't that kind of amazing how it's, like, it's the four minute mile. Right? What's the good name around the So when, prior Roger Bannister running four minute miles, people were only, like, three seconds, like, four zero three, four zero four, which is quite a long distance. Away from four minutes. But, basically, when Roger Bannister did it, roughly

four other runners also broke four minute miles within, like, three months Roger Bannister doing it. Right. So the same thing just happened to me in one of my businesses. So in one of my businesses, we had there was a marketing tactic or channel that we had looked at. We'd even kinda dabbled with. But we didn't exactly know how to do it. It kinda seemed like a puzzle. We didn't know how to solve, so we put it on a shelf for a while. And

Then I heard a whisper that somebody else was just crushing it using that channel.

Now I don't know what they're doing, I don't know the technique that they're doing. I don't know how much they're crushing it. I just heard enough to know that they are crushing it.

And immediately,

We mobilized.

And that same channel that looked kinda like a dead thing before to us, we didn't really know how to make any progress. We still didn't have any technique. Nobody gave us a tool of how to make progress Just the knowledge that somebody else was making progress in that same channel, fired us up, got us going, and we immediately found a breakthrough. And over the weekend, we did, like, thirty grand in revenue on this one channel.

And it reminded me of the same principle

of

just the knowledge that there is a solution

actually increases your probability of getting to a solution.

Just the knowledge that somebody else has found a solution without telling you how at all will increase your probability.

And I think that's one of the things about this podcast should help people. That's one of the ways to use this podcast

is that you're not gonna do exactly what any of the stories we tell in this podcast do, but just hearing

Other people's success, just hearing other people run a four minute mile will make you run a four minute mile. We've had this with our friends too. People who are saying, within,

you know, I'm gonna make x amount of money in y months. Right? We had a friend that was like, I'm gonna try to make a million dollars in three months.

And just hearing that question,

I didn't have that question before. Just hearing that question got me to start thinking about ways you could do it. Then hearing that somebody did it immediately made me wanna figure out how. And even though I was not gonna do any of the things that they did, it allowed me to figure out a solution that would be able to do that. I think that's one of the most underrated learning techniques you can have or or, like, success techniques you could have. What's that called? The MFM paradox that you can the become more successful following somebody else, even though you don't know what they did, just the fact that they did.

This and this is, like, way less cool than

artificial intelligence. But, similarly, when morning brew and the hustle were first getting going with the newsletter business,

we had the exact same thing happen multiple times where eventually I became one time Austin came over after we had both sold, and I was like, hey. You wanna see something cool? And I go pull up your computer. I'll pull up mine. I know you got a document that shows everything that you guys were doing per month. Let me show you mine and you show me yours. And it was the exact same thing, by the way. It was we were we were seeing little inklings of what the other person was doing as it was happening, and we kinda replicated each other excess, and it absolutely happened the same way. Before we started this podcast, you said, what topics do you have? I'm feeling a little uninspired.

And I have to say,

you win a blue ribbon today because you have completely

put a beautiful

bow tie on this thing that I brought you. You brought so many good interesting tidbits to add to the story of Ed Thorpe. That was pretty good. Well, can I can I leave you with one framework? I have one story. So the framework is You know when Ed Thorpe was beating Black Jack or beating roulette,

what's the first step that he had to do before he beats the house? What is step absolute step zero? Before he even figured out how to beat the house. I don't know. Just how to do it at home?

Believing that it could be done. Right?

Believing that it could be done. And this is cheesy, but it is very true. And by the way, things that are cheesy, but true are underrated.

Because smart people write off cheesy things because they're cheesy because they've heard them before, but they haven't actually acted on it. So their underpriced assets are things that are cheesy and true because they're ignored by other smart ambitious people. I remember when I went to this Tony Robbins event. On the second day, there's another guy who who host it. So the other guy, he starts off with a game of Simon says to kinda warm up the audience. And you just think there's a warm up because they want you to be engaged as an audience. They want you to be active. Do something interactive. Crowd work to start. So he starts with Simon says here. We're gonna play Simon says. Now this is a room of about six thousand people. So there's six thousand people we're gonna play Simon says, and he's like, winner gets to come on stage or, like, that the yeah. The winner gets to come on stage, and you're gonna get this thing. I forgot what it was. Some some good prize. But again, there's six thousand people. So, you know, whatever. Good luck.

So he starts. And he says, Simon says blah blah blah, and then, like, he immediately gets, like, half the people on the first one. So for example, he goes, alright. You guys ready to play? Stand up. And everybody stands up. He says, he didn't say Simon says stand up. So you only do the thing what it says. Simon says, but if he just says an instruction and you do it without saying Simon says you're out. This guy clearly read the book the game. Exactly. So he's got us on the Cat string theory. We are just obeying his commands. So the game starts people get out on the first round. It whittles it down. Within five minutes, he's down to the winner. Winter gets up on stage, blah, blah, blah, and he had the final ten people. He said stay standing. You don't get to come on stage to stay standing.

And,

then he called on somebody. He's like, the guy who's standing, you got to the final ten, the guy next to you, when did you get out? Like, I got out in, like, the second round. He goes, let me ask you something.

Did you believe you were gonna win?

And the guy was like, no. I mean,

so many people a silly game. I don't know. I didn't even think about it. He goes, that's interesting. Ask an expert. Did you believe you were gonna win No. He goes, so raise your hand if you when you started the game, you believed that you could win. Only like

percent of the audience, raise a man. He goes, so all of you thought you were competing with six thousand people.

The only competition was amongst these fifty people. Who actually believed that there was a way to win. And he's like, I'm gonna leave you with two two ideas. Number one, if you're gonna play the game, decide to win. That's so funny.

Like, you don't have to win every game. But if you decide to play, you should decide to win. And he goes, the second thing is that in life, you believe you're competing with a much bigger pool of people than you actually are. Because the majority of people aren't even playing the game and of the people who play in the game, most of them don't even believe that they can win. You are only competing with the people who actually believe that there is a way to win. And so similarly, with the sky cracking Black, or cracking roulette, that's a game I thought was impossible to crack. Until I read the book, I think it's called bringing down the house or something like that, that's their Blackjack card counting book. And immediately,

my mind shifted into oh, Blackcheck is a beatable game. We can beat this game. And suddenly I started to learn things. Suddenly I

started to to understand how do you actually beat the game of blockchain? It compelled me into action. Alright. Let's pause real quick. I gotta do the thrill of the shill. I'm gonna give you a thrill here. I'm gonna teach you something that I think is a very important principle that any founder should know. And I'm gonna tell you about a company that's doing it well. Alright. So the thrill of the show is

Have you ever heard of the law of category?

Are you familiar with this? I've not. I think it's from the book, the twenty two immutable laws of market And in that book, it's talking about marketing, how do you actually stand out? How do you do the hard thing in business, which is stand out, get your brand out there, get customers, and get them coming to you versus you just chasing them down and hunting them one by one. How do you get market pull? And the law of category is a very simple principle, which is that You'd rather own a category than participate in one. If you can't be the first in a category, you'd rather create a new category altogether.

And that is something that many people have done. So, for example, I'll give you I'll give you one in the podcasting space. So we're we're a podcast, and this podcast started off very undifferentiated.

We started off just as interviews with successful people. Just what? That's what every business podcast is interviews with successful people. How did you do it? It's all past past phasing. How did you do it?

We started to stand out when me and you got on here. We started going a little future phasing, which is Hey. What trends? What opportunities do you see? What's going on right now in the market that you think somebody could be capitalizing on? So suddenly, we were in a new category. So how many podcasts were there that we're talking about? Stuff that, you know, opportunities and trends that you could be capitalizing on for the next twelve months versus what did you do fifteen years ago, a successful person? And even when we invited guests on, we said, you gotta bring some ideas. What opportunities do you see today? Now we're not just gonna ask about the thing you did in the past.

Even further than that, is you ever seen hot ones that show where the guy interview celebrities, but instead of just interviewing them, they're eating hot wings while they're doing it, escalating in in hotness,

It's the law of category. That show became super popular. It gets millions of views on YouTube, and he gets the best guess because he's the only podcast that does that. He's the only show doing that. He created his own category. And now if you came in and you tried to do a show like that, guess what they would say? Oh, it's kinda like hot ones. They own that category. They own that that niche. And so the law of category is a very small principle, which is that without taking more effort, if you simply just define a new category,

You now have a a reason to buy an RTB, a reason for a customer to come use your product, come use your service.

Well, the company that sponsored today's podcast Wander is a great example of exactly that. These guys basically said, well, you have luxury hotels. You got the four seasons. You got what's that fancy one, Aman, that everybody's going to nowadays? You got the luxury fancy hotels,

and then you have stay in a house like Airbnb, where you get the home, you know, you get stay in a home, multiple rooms, and a kitchen, and all that. But it's not as luxury and turnkey and just a beautiful everything's taken care of your experience.

So they created a new category, which is hotelified

homes. So luxury homes that are on par with the NICE luxury hotels, but it's a house instead of being in a building in a skyscraper. You get a you get a a backyard, a pool, a sauna, you get a kitchen, you get everything you want in a home, but you get the guarantee that it's gonna be luxury unlike an Airbnb.

So I think that they've done a great job as why they've grown so fast they did. I think, like, twelve million in bookings in the last twelve months because they created their own category. There isn't anybody else who's really in that category where they actually manage the property and therefore can guarantee a certain quality of service. Great thrill.

Pretty good chill. I love the chill. And for my show, please. No. I think your show was great. So if you wanna use them, wanda got wanda dot com slash MFM, what do they get? I think they get three hundred dollars off. The first thing. If they if you go to water dot com slash MFM, so that's our personal code. That's just for listeners of this pod. You download the app. If do that, you get three hundred bucks off of stay. So you get three hundred bucks off, and you're entered into a giveaway. That's gonna be they're giving away a free wander stay. So If you're one of the people who are doing this and remember the principle that's in this podcast, you if you enter, you gotta believe that you can win. Go ahead and enter, and you might win the free wander travel thing. So check it out. Wanda dot com slash m f m. I think you said last time I go. You know, I'm not sure how many people are gonna do this. So if you're one of the people that actually does it, you've got a pretty good chance of actually winning Exactly.

So that's w a n d e r dot com slash m f m. Alright. Back to the episode. So I have a funny story to I'll I'll tie it up with this, which is that people have heard of a vicious cycle.

That's a vicious cycle, and they'll say it's, you know, poverty is a vicious cycle. You don't have money. So therefore,

you don't, you can't buy the best food or or or education. And therefore, you end up staying, you know, you you don't get the best opportunities. And therefore, you stay poor. Vicious cycle. Right? We've all heard of vicious cycle.

Well, a good thought experiment is what is the opposite of a vicious cycle?

A virtuous cycle. What's a virtuous cycle? On a virtual cycle, virtuous cycle is, like, in a Tony Robinson, is basically,

if you believe So if you have high conviction that something can happen, we've all had moments in our life where we are, like, I am convinced that I could do this or that it can happen.

Then you'll take a different level of action. So belief drives action. The amount of belief drives the amount of action. So little belief will drive little action, which drives a little result.

A lot of belief takes you to drive take a lot of action, which drives a bigger result. And guess what? Once you see that result, it reinforces the belief. So if you start with a little belief, you take a little action, get a little result, you'll be like, I knew it. I knew this shit wasn't gonna work. It lowers your belief even more, takes even lower action, lower result. And the opposite happens where if you're a heavy believer, you take a shit ton of action, shit ton of action will start to yield a result, and your belief will say, I knew it. I knew we could do this. I I knew we'd get progress. You take even more action, and it just becomes a virtuous cycle. And so that is one of the things that I think is

most important. If you are stuck or if you're at a plateau or you're not exactly where you wanna be. Step zero is you have to somehow

trick yourself into raising your level belief that it is possible. One way is to read books about other people who have already done it or talk to other people who've done it. Imagine yourself doing it. Whatever. Ask yourself questions until you are worked up into a fever

that this this this is gonna work because that's the only chance you have of taking enough action to actually get a result.

I wanna hear from the listener.

The people who have made it this far, if they feel like I feel right now, which is like I wanna run through a fucking wall,

You've just, like, you're like a guy. You're like a pastor right now. You know, you're, like, one of these, like, black churches where you're, like, dancing at a scream it and shit, and I'm just, like, in the crowd, like, dancing as well. I feel good. You're gonna hate me.

Yeah. So now let me tell you a quick black check story of this. So I read this book and I become convinced that we could do this. I tell my buddy, Trevor, and I said, Trevor, we could do this. We could bring down the house. We can count cards. We can get rich off Black Jack. He says, say no more. Trevor's a Trevor's a believer. He's down. What age are you? Perfect part perfect trait to partner being down. We're, I don't know, twenty one years old and we're seen in a college. Did you read the whole book? Read the whole book. Alright. But again, because we have a ton of belief, we find a way to take living in North Carolina. There's no casino in North Carolina. What am I gonna do fly to Vegas?

No. No. No. The belief drives action. The belief causes me to find a way. I realize Hey, in South Carolina, there's a riverboat,

and that boat was,

like, boat out into international waters, and then you can gamble because in international waters. That's the beauty of the world. It's got international waters. Anything goes. So we drive down to South Carolina. We get on this riverboat,

and we drive out. But before we do that, we spend three weeks practicing.

And the same it's the same system. You have a counter

who's gonna be keeping count.

You have a signaler

who's gonna signal in the whale. So Trevor's the counter. Trevor's got the focus. I'm the communicator. I'm the signal guy. And our buddy Dan is gonna be the whale. And what was your signal? The whale's job is to

come over. He's act he's a gregarious character because the the trick when you count cards is you need to wait till the deck is stacked in your favor where there's more, let's say, aces and bad the low cards are out so the count is high. And then you need to vary your bet size. So that's actually how you win, is you bet more when the deck is hot, you bet less when it's not. But if the casino sees you varying your bet like that, kick you out. So that's why you need two players. You need one guy who's counting, and the guy who comes in to make the bet, he needs to start with a big bet. So he only comes in when the deck is hot. And so he comes in and we're like, Dan, you gotta act like a drunken idiot, and you're just plopping down your whole stack on this one hand And then you're just gonna and then you're gonna double oh, screw it. We went, play it again. As long as the deck is hot, and when the deck is not hot, we're gonna signal you to leave. What's your signals to them? So we have two signals. You have the signal where you're supposed to come over, which is basically it was me with my arm, like, you know, kind of like like this where I want I'm holding my arm like this, but I'm behind it's like standing behind me. It's hard to do. I'm sitting down, but just a standing posture. So I'm standing behind Trevor. Trevor's counting. Trevor has a verbal signal to me. So you create a a word for every number. So let's say, you know, the deck is if the count is one, which is a very bad count, he would just say, oh, man. He's he's just like, alright. Alright. Unomas. Unomas. Unomas. Like, one more hand, but that just signals me. The count is one. One. If there was two, he'd be like, oh, shit balls. Bowls. We got two bowls. That's why there's two. And then he'd be, like, three. And he, he'd he'd be, like, you know, he'd have to think for three. And we use, like, basketball player names or whatever. And, like, we have And you wanna get the guy in on the counts like ten, eleven, twelve, something like that. And he'd be like, dude, I've had a dozen chances now. And so we practice for weeks on this. And we're in our dorm room. We're skipping class, and we're just practicing, practicing, practicing signals, boom, boom, boom, bets. And we're running simulations. So we have our friend This girl, like, who was our friend, she was the dealer, and she would deal it out. We were, like, every time cleaning up, this shit works. And so we drive down to South Carolina We get on the riverboat. We go. Dan's got his drunken drunken tourist costume on. Trevor's the the the guy who's just bored. He's just sitting there. He's betting the minimum. But he's counting, and I'm the signaler. I'm Trevor's buddy. And so, and so what ends up happening is,

count gets hot. We get to ten.

And,

I signal.

But in the real world, conditions are a little different. Dan's not Oh, they're a lot different. Because he's so busy being in his drunken character that he's actually acting like an idiot. He's not paying attention to anything that we're doing. So he's actually getting a drink, so he misses ten. Count starts to drop. But it's at eight. And I'm like, okay, whatever. Still eight's still good enough. Let's signal. It might go back to ten. So I signal him, Dan sees the signal. He starts coming over. Now our dorm room was kinda small. He's at the he's farther away, so it takes him a little bit of time. By the time Dan gets the table and he tries to cash in his he tries to put down the bet, when the counts, like, you know, six or something like that. And he puts his money down. They're like, well, we have to color it up first. We have to exchange your cash for chips. No bet on this one.

So the Oh. The hand gets dealt out, it nukes the count back down to two.

Dan's hand is visibly shaking.

He cashes in, like, a thousand dollars worth of chips. This is, like, big money for us. He takes thousand dollars worth of chips. He's ready to bet big. But the count is now two, and Trevor's like balls, man. There's, ugh, balls, dude.

And

and Dan, he's supposed to take balls. He's supposed to leave.

Dan is in. He's blacked out at this point. He's not drunk and blacked out, but he's just got tunnel vision. Like, he's so locked into his character. And these stupid things that he's saying to the dealer, he's completely ignoring the signal. And so he just puts the thousand dollars on, and we're both, like, balls. Well, buzz, buzz, what's happening? Why are you betting? This is the worst time to bet, and we just get wiped

out into

and lost all your money. Lost all of our money. And we were like,

the book made it seem a lot easier than it's gonna

it immediately works, and it starts a series of events that just escalates into them being ballers.

And,

yeah, that was it's sort of like the game. It's kinda the same thing after me with the game. Okay. So we go back home. We're licking our wounds. We're like, damn. What the hell man? And he's like, I'm sorry. It was harder in real life. We're like, alright, whatever. It's all good, man. We gotta get the belief was still high that, hey, there's a way to use BlackTech to make a lot of money. So we said, you know what?

Screw. What if we're the house? And so we decide to create an Underground BlackTech club at school, where we'll dispute the house. These movies go one or two ways. Now you're on you're on option b for a great movie. Exactly. So we we try to become the house. Now we're playing Molly's game, basically. So we, again, start running these simulations. We're like, this is great. Like, the house has an edge. We're winning. This is, like, it's a no brainer.

So we,

and our friend, the whole time, was just, like, you guys are idiots. Like, you've already wasted, you know, one month of time on the stupid plan number one. Now you're on stupid plan number two. He's like, this isn't even a dumber plan. We're like, dude, what are you talking about? We're the house. You ever heard about the house's edge? Like, we can't lose. We're the house. And he's like, okay.

So we're we're, like, again, two weeks into our, like, every night we're simulating this. We're trying to run, like, we're, like, typing the Excel, like, how much money you're worth, like, so many people you're losing.

You're not gonna cheat. You're just gonna No. We're just gonna be the house. That's it. And,

so he's like, okay.

Watch this. So our friend comes in and just, like, owns us. He walks in and he's like, alright. Yeah. I wanna bet. He bets. He loses or a bet more.

Loses and we're like, see? Told you. Told you this convert. He's like, cool.

And he's like, hey, give me all my fucking money back.

Like, no, dude. He's just like, you're gonna give me all my money back right now, or and we're like, what are you gonna do? Be this up? He's like, No. I'm just gonna call the cops, tell them you're running a Blackjack ring in your room right now. That's actually, like, a, like, a, you know, that's, like, a serious crime. And you're gonna get kicked out of school, or you're gonna give me my eight hundred dollars back.

And we were like, oh. You win? Yeah. Again, of the inner dollars back, we were like, damn it.

Yeah. You you didn't see the part of, the scene in Molly's game where she gets beat up for doing this. And this guy just instantly

pointed out the fatal flaw, which is basically, you know, this is a crime. They can, at any time, just bust us. We would have to move the game every week. And, like, somehow know that this guy's not gonna screw us over, but every player who loses money always have the ultimate leverage. So that's what I learned about leverage. And I learned that leverage is more important than an edge.

You should have went back to the casino. It sound like this stupid idea actually could have maybe worked if your buddy Dan got a shit together. The reality is that

casinos

I I don't know why people don't I mean, I guess people do talk about this, but casinos use six decks and they use auto shufflers now. And so the ability for the deck to get really hot has been cut down dramatically.

And so, you know, they basically use six decks, which will smoothen out the variants, and then they auto shuffle and they shuffle before you get through the whole shoe. So the whole point was, like, you need to get where a lot of the cards have been used. There's only a small number of cards left and that that small number of cards gonna have a higher proportion of a face cards for you, but that just doesn't really happen anymore. So I don't really know where the edge is. I don't think there's an edge.

This has been a roller coaster.

I feel like, I've got my money's worth after listening to this episode. And I should've just been learning how to code the whole time in college. I should've just been learning how to code, and I would made a lot more money than all of my hair brained schemes to, to make money. Or playing league of legends.

One of the two. This was very good. This was a good episode. One episode. Is that the pod? That's it. That's the pod. Alright. That's the pod.