Zach, we got to set the table.
Zach, how old are you?
I'm 19.
You just sold your company.
You just sold your company for how much money, Zach?
All right, what's up?
Zach, you're here, 19 years old.
The last time you called on this podcast, you were in high school.
You, I think were like between third and fourth period or on lunch break, and you did a podcast recording with us in front of I don't know a quarter million people or something like that.
And now we fast forward, I don't know, a year and change later, and you just sold your company.
You just sold your company for how much money, Zach?
I can't reveal how much we sold for unfortunately, but I can tell you that, Right before selling, we finished 2025 having done 30 million in revenue.
And now the company's grown in January.
We just did $5.7 million in revenue.
$5.7 million in January.
So if you were to multiply by 12 and say what we could do this year, you're talking about a 50 million plus revenue company.
But $30 million last year.
Dude, that's amazing.
Just the way you say it.
You say it so calmly and like a grown-up.
But can we just take a second Sam, just to be amazed and just give the kids some props?
That is incredible.
You're a teenager who built an app with your friends.
You got it to $30 million in annual revenue and sold your company just now to MyFitnessPal.
And last time we talked to you you were on, I think, literally your lunch break and you were in high school.
I know that you were applying to college.
And on the podcast, you were saying, I think I'm going to go to college.
Are you on your lunch break at college now?
Is that where you are?
Are you at a dorm?
I mean, I'm not going to lie.
I've missed many classes this semester.
I'm at the University of Miami.
I am a freshman.
Okay, so you're a freshman at Miami.
And I believe, by the way, I remember being outraged on Twitter by this.
I think I was one of your defenders here, where you applied to a bunch of colleges you wanted to go to and you got rejected which is insane to be a teenager who's got an app that's doing tens of millions in revenue.
And the college admissions office was like
We didn't like your essay or whatever.
Your SAT score doesn't show that you're exceptional.
Obviously, you were exceptional.
Can you tell that story of maybe facing a little bit of rejection and how that felt?
Yeah.
I mean, right after the podcast that we did last time, yeah, I was submitting everything.
I applied to every single Ivy League school, Stanford, a few others.
Stanford was my top choice that I wanted to get into.
And just one by one, rejection, rejection, rejection, rejection.
And I mean, I tweeted about it because I had a 4.0 unweighted GPA at the time I applied.
My company was doing, I think, 15 million a year when I applied.
And I had on paper what most people need to get in, but I was just rejected from everywhere, which I felt was pretty surprising.
Why do you think that was?
Do you know?
There's no way to know, really.
It's a black box.
But do you have any suspicions?
There's no way to know.
Well, your post kind of went viral.
Did anything happen from that?
Did anybody reach out?
Yeah, to be honest, it was actually great that, like it might have been better that I got rejected from colleges than got it into any, because I posted it got like 40 million views on Twitter.
And I had a ton of really cool people like the mayor of Miami, texted me afterwards and we actually met up.
That's part of the reason i even decided to go to you miami, was the support from him and a bunch of other cool people like alex ohenian and a bunch of others that had like reached out to support me after that.
That's awesome.
Yeah, you kind of needed that.
Nobody wants a team that's too perfect and successful, so you kind of needed a little bit of likability, a little bit of rejection uh, in the backstory.
So i think in the end, it's it's a good thing.
Yeah, but I didn't get any sympathy from the post.
They were just like all mad at me.
Yeah, I don't think that you deserve sympathy.
I don't think you deserve it.
I think I think I think it's things have worked out as they should.
Are you did the University of Miami or any of them?
Did they ask you for a donation already? the first freshman to have a library that he donates?
No seriously, because they have really good processes for identifying whales and reaching out to people.
Yeah, you actually should hire one of them.
They'll kind of help your onboarding flow.
The university donation.
People are exceptional.
What's your dating life like?
Like when you're in college and you're 19 and you just sell an app for a hundred million dollars and even before that you own an app that is doing tens of millions in revenue?
Are you by yourself all the time working or are you able to have fun and is is the world's easiest pickup line actually successful for you?
So I'd say the first semester I
I had way too much fun.
I was doing too many things.
We had thrown a bunch of parties me and a couple of my other entrepreneurial friends who were living in Miami with me at the time.
We all moved into this house together.
And so every like every couple of weeks we'd throw a house party.
And I'm not going to lie.
It was definitely like I had a lot of aura throwing these parties.
And the word got around the college that this is like the Cali.
They call me the Cali guy or calorie boy.
Those are like my nicknames.
That's that's amazing.
Calorie boy.
OK, so by the way, we didn't say what your app is.
So your app Cal AI is basically a app on your phone where you could take a picture of the meals that you're eating, and it kind of uses AI to track and log your calories so you don't have to type in that you had six ounces of chicken breast with the skin or whatever.
You don't have to do all that logging.
You just take the picture and it does the thing.
And so that's what you guys had built.
And for those who haven't seen the first episode, give just a quick origin story.
You did the full one before, but just do a quick one here.
Sure.
So I started programming when I was seven years old.
I was obsessed with video games and I wanted to learn how to make my own.
So started building By the time I was a freshman in high school, I built my first company.
I built an unblocked gaming website that let students play games in school unblocked.
It was actually kind of accidental that I stumbled into turning it into a real company.
First I just built it for my friends at school, but it spread really quickly and it grew to five million users through mostly me just making TikToks about it.
It was generating $60,000 a year by putting banner ads on the website.
And then when I was 16, I sold it for $100,000.
After that, I got into the app space, started building a few small projects.
And then Cal AI is really the one that I went all in on and it really took off.
It exceeded all expectations.
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Now back to the show.
And you just, I mean, you're not like you started programming early, but like you're not.
Albert Einstein, out here.
You're not Mark Zuckerberg.
You're not a prodigy in terms of coding, correct?
Like.
What makes you unique, it seems like, was the blend of good enough at building and then you know, good enough or great at marketing and just being an entrepreneur.
And the combination is what's important.
I think that's important to call out, because I remember when I was on the come up, I sorta had this misconception that I needed to be some.
I needed to be some sort of 900 IQ giga brain in order to enter a space.
And what I didn't really realize was that you know, if you just kind of, even if you know nothing today, if you just give it six months of full focus, you'll be good enough to be dangerous.
And that's kind of all you need at one of the skills.
And you just got to stack two others.
And it's the combination of the skills that's really valuable, not having to be world-class at any one thing.
Was that your experience or was it different?
Yeah, I would definitely agree with you.
I mean, especially now, like coding is just becoming easier and easier with AI tools.
And I'd say my skills now are Being able to code has really helped me understand how to lead a team.
I always think that the most important thing is the Pareto principle.
Learn the 20 that gets you the 80 of results, and that's what's necessary to actually hire someone that's smarter than you and being able to manage the team.
So i've i've pretty much done that in all these different areas and it's allowed me to build great people around me and put in the systems.
I think your biggest skill is your audacity.
I think that uh, what sean left out was maybe the most like.
One of the more interesting things is that uh, like when you were starting to build, i think you made a tweet or a video and you said uh, in the next three years i think you were 15 you, I'm going to have an app that does 50 or 100 million in revenue.
You said some audacious thing.
And then I think you even tweeted that out.
And so there's this like interesting combination of audacity to think that somehow you, a young kid, are good enough to like figure this out.
And then also the tenacity and IQ and get after itness to make it happen.
We found that video of you in your kitchen, basically when you're I don't know 13, 14 years old, saying I will do this.
Matty is sort of speaking the words into existence.
Yeah.
I mean, it was honestly pretty crazy.
Like, looking back, that I did that.
My plan was that I was going to make a YouTube series out of it, but I just made that first video saying that I was going to make a million dollars before graduating high school.
That was my goal.
And I always, I kind of, from a young age, always believed in my heart.
I was going to do it.
I just I wanted it so badly that I needed it to be true.
And I think self-belief has gotten me so far because it's helped me get over so many points of life where I could have just said like Oh like, if no one's like, I have to go to college before I'm able to do this.
Like, I have to take a class.
I have to get a degree.
Like, no way I could do it before.
But no, I always believed, like, I can do it.
I can do it now.
You forgot to add the per week.
I want to make a million dollars before I graduate high school per week.
So you said, like, I always had that.
But I'm going to question that for a sec.
Because, you know, maybe some of it you were born with.
Maybe some of it you just kind of came out of nowhere.
It's just aura, natural auras, as you would say.
But me and Sam, we've both been on our little motivational arc, right?
Like I was a big Tony Robbins guy.
I went to the seminars.
I used to listen to the audio tapes and go for walks.
And he had this like walking series where you would walk and he'd be like all right, every four steps you're going to say this thing.
You're going to believe this.
I'm going to ask you this question, whatever comes to your mind.
And it's, you know, I got Tony Robbins in my ear.
And Sam, I'm sure you had a similar experience um, sort of self brainwashing where you worked on it.
You practice the muscle or self-belief.
I'm curious, Zach, I don't know you very well, but I'm curious.
Did you work on the muscle of self-belief in any way?
Well, it's honestly a great question.
I, of course I had doubts like in my head.
I was like, like, shit, like this is a crazy goal.
Can I actually do this?
And yeah, I remember there's this one story that, or when I was really young, I was in the car with my mom and I asked her like mom, if I'm rich when I'm older, I want to do this.
I said something along those lines.
And then I was like, wait, and I changed it.
I was like, when I'm rich, I'm going to do this.
And I think I've been always conscious about like, shifting my language to a when, not an if, even though I, of course, I had doubts.
I was like, can I really do this?
But yeah, I had those doubts.
And the motivation arc, dude, I used to be obsessed with motivational content.
I still am, but not as much.
But especially, it was like the year before I started Cal AI.
I curated my TikTok for you page.
I would only interact with videos of motivational speakers.
And so my entire feed was just David Goggins yelling at me get back to work, get back to work.
And all these other people.
And that's actually why I started my first app, which was a motivational alarm clock where you could choose people.
Basically, I identified by watching these TikToks.
Everyone in the comments was like, this got me so pumped up.
I want to make this my alarm clock.
How can I do that?
And there was no way to really easily do that.
So I was like, shit, I want to build an app because I want this for myself, too.
And all these people clearly want it as well.
That lets you set these motivational sounds as your alarm.
And so that was the idea behind Grind Clock.
Grind Clock.
And thus Grind Clock was born.
So Zach.
Dude, I would use that now, by the way.
So you're rich.
Now what, uh?
How do you feel?
When did the?
When did the wire hit?
It's march 4th uh, wednesday.
When did i think?
You announced this?
Uh, a few days ago.
How's it feel when the wire hit?
We announced it on monday, but the sale actually took place in december.
We couldn't speak about it until now, and so the wire hit hit the same day.
It closed and honestly, like i'm just gonna be real, The excitement hit me like when they first made the offer, like over the phone.
But then I was like, wait, but it didn't happen yet.
We don't have anything signed.
So quell the excitement, quell the excitement.
And then it never felt as good as that did.
And how long did the process take?
And was it miserable or was it all right?
Was it smooth?
It was honestly much faster than it would normally be.
And some of that was like the timing.
Like.
Part of the reason we didn't share anything until now is because peak season is January and February.
And so we didn't want to really like influence anything.
Yeah.
So real quick.
Okay.
So let's tell the story about the acquisition.
And one of the reasons I want to do this is because the acquisition, the exit part of it for any entrepreneur is such a huge deal, right?
It's literally, it's probably the biggest deal you'll ever make in your life.
Most people don't really talk about how it goes down.
They don't talk about how it feels.
They don't talk about what they did.
They don't talk about the ups, the downs, the techniques that actually really made a difference.
Right before we started this podcast, you were mentioning that you had watched.
I'd made this video a long time ago, actually for Sam's conference.
I was Sam.
You were like you want to come speak?
And I was like, yeah, I gave a talk called how to sell a failing company.
Now, your company wasn't failing, but mine, I would say, was meaning it wasn't achieving the goal I had for it.
And there wasn't, like you know, just huge companies knocking at the door every day, offering me briefcases full of cash.
I had to sell the company.
I
I felt like every story I'd ever heard about somebody selling was everybody was knocking on our door.
They wanted us and we picked.
And I was like, well, that shit, that ain't me.
And so I had to run a process and essentially create an auction, and it had a good outcome, but nobody really talked about it.
I think the line, Sean, is a bunch of Silicon Valley big shots say, companies are bought, not sold.
And I remember hearing that and I'm like, oh so people aren't hollering at me all the time, then I'm a loser.
And then the reality is that's not the reality.
That is the reality.
Maybe for some people, but for other people, that ain't it.
It wasn't it for me.
I had to figure out how to sell it.
And I shared some of the lessons.
So you were saying real quick that you would watch that.
That was somewhat helpful for you.
But can we talk about that?
That's why I want to talk about the acquisition, because I feel like it makes a huge difference.
Founders get very few reps.
You get very few chances to practice doing it.
So it's kind of useful to hear stories of how it all went down.
Yeah, great point, honestly, on that.
Because going into this, it was my first time with everything.
So it was honestly scary and stressful, and I kept overthinking things.
But hearing stories was helpful.
By the way, you sold to a company that's owned by Private Equity.
So it's your first time.
They're basically pros.
It's like sitting down with Magnus Carlsen for your first game.
This is what they do, whereas this is your first time doing it.
Yeah, yeah, 100%.
The process honestly started back in May of 2025.
It was right before I was... Like a few months before going to college.
And so...
I kind of was thinking, like you know what, maybe there's a world where I can be a normal college student and get a normal freshman experience, where I don't need to worry about a company at the same time.
So let's just let me just talk to some people and see what they're feeling, see if they're interested.
So I kind of ran a sales cycle at that point.
I made a list of the 10 companies that I felt were made the most sense.
And out of all of them, we were extremely undervalued, to be honest.
Explain the details.
You make the list.
Great.
Now what do you do?
You email them, call them.
How do you, hey, just wanted to see if you maybe would want to do something, right?
Who'd you do?
Corp dev?
Who'd you talk to?
And how'd you talk to them?
So I was recommended that, or I heard somewhere it's you lose leverage if you're just cold outreaching.
So I made, I tried to get people that I knew to make warm intros, kind of saying something along the lines of like Hey, I think you guys should meet.
This is a cool company.
I just thought of this, like as if it was his idea, not it was me asking him.
And so he made all those intros, got on calls with a lot of the CEOs of these companies and a lot of them immediately just kind of shut it down.
Like, oh, nice meeting you, but we're not interested.
Some even in the email were like, cool company, we're not interested.
But then a few, they were interested.
We did a few calls, just met some of the team.
And honestly I was surprised that like only after a couple meetings, it was like very quick to get an offer.
It wasn't like I imagined.
It would be like I don't know, talking to the team, getting to know them for a long time.
But, like you could, just they, just some of them.
It's different for everyone but, like a few of the people we were talking to, they were like this is the information we want to know.
Okay.
Hop on two calls with the team.
Okay.
Like this is, you know, a number.
What do you think?
Right.
And you said the offers at the first round were low.
What were you, did you just have crazy expectations?
Was it, was it, were they not actually low?
Do you crazy expectations or were they actually low?
It's like you know uh, you know one X revenue or something like well, what were they offering basically at that time?
Uh, whether you thought they were too low, less than we would make in a year in profit or revenue.
It was like about what we would make in a year in profit okay wow, so what?
Your one x profit type of thing.
So you just politely turn them down.
What'd you say?
And, by the way, did that ignite some rage in you?
Did you get a little fuel from that?
Well, after that i guess we did kind of.
I politely did turn them down and After that I was kind of like wait, is my company just not sellable?
And then I was looking at it and I was like, wait, Weight Watchers just declared bankruptcy.
All of these companies like, how much money do they really have in the bank?
Are we just not going to be able to sell?
Is this just going to be a cash flowing business forever?
And I kind of started to accept that idea in my head that we are just going to be a cash flowing company and like actually started to move some things in place, like looking for a potential CEO to bring on.
So like I could step away and move on to something else.
And so like the next few months, that's really what I believed.
And I think what changed was I spoke to another founder who sold his company and And he told me that will work for him.
He basically explained how bankers work, M&A bankers.
You go to them, they create a list of all these companies you've never even heard of before.
And, like these companies that are about to go public, they just want to roll up all these smaller companies into them.
And so they're willing to give you actually fair market value for your company anytime you want.
Dude, your experience is very similar to mine, except you were 10 years younger.
And.
But I think it's.
I think it's a similar experience to many entrepreneurs, which is you build a company.
You have these huge aspirations of selling it.
And I've talked to so many people who have done this.
You go through your first process, massive letdown.
You think oh, this company, like they lowballed the offer and it's like it's equity at a privately held company that's overvalued.
So it's basically worth nothing.
Then you go through this process where you got, you got your hopes up, then you're defeated.
You're defeated for 10 days.
And then you're like, all right, I have to go back to work and like maybe I'm just going to own this for forever.
So I might as well just like build the company to last for forever.
Then months later, years later, sometime later, then you get the second round.
You care a little bit less and your company is a little bit better because you've just assumed it's going to last longer.
And it's exactly like dating.
The second you don't want to date someone or you don't really care. they start coming to you.
And so this is like the exact same process I've gone through.
I have probably five to 10 friends who have gone through this exact same emotional process.
And by the way, yours was actually faster.
I think you said it was like a low stress.
You kind of implied it was like, oh, it went pretty smoothly.
It didn't feel smooth if I had to guess going through this.
It felt kind of defeating.
And this is the exact same process, except oftentimes that's like a five-year process.
Yeah, that's exactly what happened.
And I just resonated with that fact.
And then actually, and this goes into, Sean, what I was saying before.
So then the second time, so I was set on building the company into a long-term, enduring business.
It's going to bootstrap, whatever.
Let's just figure out how we make it endure long, long term.
Dude, you're just making a potential buyer weak at the knees by saying those things.
Yeah, so... on that note, we were thinking like, okay, we really want this company to last.
We probably want to think about making it freemium, because any company that's been around for 10 years, that's like really big in the app space that I could think of.
They're all freemium.
So that's what we started to work towards.
And you know, who's really good at freemium?
My fitness pal.
So I wanted to hop on a call with their CEO and Squeeze whatever information about freemium I could out of him pitch it.
I was like catching up But just try to ask him questions about freemium.
Reached out, got on a call and They did not answer a single question about freemium.
And it makes sense.
I mean like it would definitely be not in their interest at all to help us.
But yeah, like they I.
They actually spun the conversation from talking about that to OK, maybe something else makes sense.
Maybe the companies, maybe a partnership or whatever.
And that's how things really started.
That's so great.
There's a moment that in Ben Horowitz's book The Hard Thing About the Hard Things, he talks about a few kind of key moments that happened.
It feels like when it's happening in your company, it's unique to you.
But then you read these books and you realize, oh shit, every company goes through these moments.
And so one of them, he calls like the wefo moment, which is the we're effed, it's over.
And it's like, you'll hit a moment where you feel like you're just screwed.
And yeah, but that's common.
And what you realize is actually a pretty high survival rate, from that moment when you feel like there's no survival.
Another one I would say is the no one's coming to save us moment.
And that's not from Ben.
That's just from this conversation is all three of us basically had that.
It's like oh, so I guess we're not just going to get a magical offer and it's all just going to work out.
Like, I guess I have to actually make this company work for me.
And there's no, there's nobody coming to save us.
All right, cool.
And that actually just really strengthens your resolve.
And so some of these things that seem bad in the moment are actually exactly the sort of dose of medicine that a founder needs when it happens.
Yeah.
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Zach, you talked about you.
So you then the conversation picked up.
Can you give us like, you know, Zach's acquisition corner here real quick?
Like.
What do you think if you're now advising the next to you, the next 19 year old kid who's going through acquisition talks?
What are sort of the do's and don'ts of how to do how to how to have that conversation?
Literally, like.
Do you throw out a number?
Do they?
How do you react?
How do you position yourself or present yourself?
Well, meeting in person versus doing it over the phone.
You know like give us some things that you felt you learned out of this experience.
Yeah.
So, like Sam said, very similar to girls like you basically want to play hard to get kind of.
You don't want to be too interested.
You don't also not want to be, you don't not want to be interested at the same time.
So it's kind of like the push and pull.
It's like what I describe it as is.
You could let them know you're interested, but you let them also know that, regardless if they get on board or not, I'm going some places.
Exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
That's a great way to put it.
What helped me the most was that I had friend.
I actually had a couple people that have been through acquisitions who were.
I was constantly getting on the phone with them and they were giving me advice throughout the whole process.
So if you're trying to sell your company and you know someone that's that has gone through an acquisition, just having them help you through this, I think is super valuable.
Just to talk through things.
Like, like you said, things are very similar along any company, even if you think they're not so like I
They've seen things that I'm going through right now and they would give me the right things to say.
Zach, have you seen Good Will Hunting?
You've seen that, Sean, of course.
And there's this one scene where Ben Affleck, he's like, talking to Matt Damon, who doesn't want to go work for the NSA and get this fancy job.
And Ben Affleck is like, no, F that.
You're not doing it for you.
You're doing it for me.
You're doing it because my favorite part of the day is that second when I honk the horn to pick you up to go to our construction job.
I hope that you don't come to the car because you're off doing something amazing and fancy.
You owe it to me.
And when zach was talking about, he was like i just, i just want to go to college and have a normal experience.
There's like all these people that are like no f that you go build this company and you do that for me.
You're not doing it for you.
That's how i feel when i hear he's like he has everything that you know.
It played to my 20s, 30s.
Uh, that i would have begged to have you had it at 18.
It's so funny hearing you go through this experience because i remember when we were talking to you before You were like I want to go to college.
I want to do this.
And you're the man.
You're the best.
But in our head, I imagine both Sean and I were like, but you have this gift.
You're blowing it.
Actually, I think you did what we told you, which was like, go for the social life.
But this is your path.
This is what you're good at.
This is what you should do.
Don't worry about the classes side of things.
Did you feel when you were in college...
Like you have two different lives.
Like, were they separate?
Do the professors all know what the hell's going on?
Do they, do they put some respect on that name?
Did the other kids know what's going on?
Or did you just sort of have this dual life where you're trying to be a normal student and they treat you like a normal student?
They don't really know what's going on.
It was a pretty dual life.
There were times when it was close together.
So, as I mentioned, I was living in a house with a, And so when we were throwing parties, it was like all the entrepreneurs and then a bunch of college kids.
And we would invite our other entrepreneur friends too.
So the actual going out aspect, that was very cohesive, I would say, which was really interesting actually.
It was the wildest thing to experience.
Zach, I got a question for you.
You had what is, I think, pretty normal for a teenager, a college student.
You had a little douchebag arc.
So you go and you're doing this amazing thing.
You come on the pod.
You're this upstanding guy, you're this self-belief, work hard, build this app, doing well with his friends, trying to be a good student, good grades all that good stuff.
And then you're like You launch a course, you release a video where you're standing on a Lamborghini, you're humping a Lamborghini, throwing money in the air.
And we were like, oh, what is this?
Where did he go?
He went, he went entertain on us.
What happened?
Can we talk about the douchebag?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
So the guys I started the house with the entrepreneurs uh, We kind of decided at first.
The idea was let's just get a house live together.
It's a beautiful city.
It's Miami.
And we're going to all build our companies side by side and we'll share learnings.
And that's going to be great.
We'll all grow very quickly together.
Then we were like, wait, we're all super talented individuals.
Why don't we?
And this is a really interesting thing that we're doing.
We're all young, having fun and building companies.
Let's record it. let's make some content out of it.
Then it became oh wait, hiring videographers and editors and all the backend systems in place actually is going to be pretty expensive and take some time.
How can we monetize it?
And so that's when the idea was like okay, let's make a course to help other people learn how to make apps too.
And then we could continue to do what we do, make cool content, and we're at least breaking even.
And a lot of people's criticism on that was like you're already making so much money, why do you need to make more?
It's because we're business people at heart.
We want to break even.
But then, when we were thinking about angles to launch this and everything, we decided to go the super controversial route.
Like you said, the Andrew Tate, it was like sell the dream, sell the lifestyle instead of sell the product.
And It was interesting.
I don't think it's definitely not a real representation of any of our characters.
We very intentionally wanted to rage bit people.
But yeah, definitely.
I mean, it worked.
It took over the Twitter timeline, but it definitely started a lot of beef with people.
That might have not been great.
Yeah.
Looking back now, are you like good move, bad move?
What's the post-game?
I think that it makes the story more interesting, but if i were to do something again, i would definitely take a little bit of a different angle.
I mean, to be honest, there was no reason to even launch on twitter, given what we were trying to do.
Like the twitter people was not we're not who we were trying to make videos for.
So that was kind of just like our native platforms.
We decided to take over, but Yeah.
I don't think it was like the right strategy.
What's um?
What's the first dumb purchase going to be, or have you already had your dumb purchases from the cashflow?
I guess like, uh, you're 19 years old, just sold your company.
I'm you.
You can't say the number, but I'm just gonna say I think it probably was a number close to a hundred million dollars.
That's my guess.
Um, so I I'll just make a guess for you cause you're not allowed to say anything.
Um, what's the dumb purchase going to be?
You got to do something dumb.
What are you going to do?
So I, I already had the car, the dream car I wanted.
That was out of the way.
Um lamborghini, the one in the video uh green yellow, what'd you do?
What color did you go with?
It's matte black, matte black okay, gotcha.
The funny thing is you look like the guys who um walk up to a guy in a lamborghini and say hey uh, you're on tick tock.
You have a little fake microphone and you're like hey, what do you do for work?
And it's supposed to be an old real estate guy or like a shipping magnate and that.
But you're also the guy in the car.
It's crazy.
It's like uh, the spider-man meme.
Okay, so you got the car already.
What do you want to get now?
You're a Long Island kid.
You're a watch guy, if I had to guess.
I mean, I didn't get any crazy watch yet.
Maybe I'd get a watch, to be honest, soon.
I do have one, but I'm not a huge collector of anything yet.
However, what I did do, and I wanted to do this for a while, is...
I kind of threw out where I'm going to donate everything in my closet.
And last week I went shopping with a stylist and I redid everything.
So a whole new wardrobe.
And honestly, it's been great.
I feel like it's awesome.
That's pretty cool.
That's such a great move.
And by the way, that costs so much less than people think to do something like that.
I did that when I was 24 years old.
I'm 15 years later.
I don't wear any of that stuff anymore.
But it was such a great move.
I think at the time I think I paid something like three grand or something for the stylist to come with me for a day or two.
Maybe I found like kind of I literally post on Craigslist originally and got a bunch of applicants.
Um, and I just told her, I was like, yo, I don't want to buy like a $500 belt.
Like I'm not trying to wear Gucci.
Like that's not the goal.
Like I just want to look good and have clothes that fit me.
Right.
Uh, cause I don't really know how to do any of that stuff.
Can you help me out?
And she was, it was amazing.
It was such a good process.
Like uh, I think every young guy who comes into a little bit of money it's like one of those purchases that sounds a little silly.
It's like, kind of don't want to say you did it, but actually is a, is a great move.
Yeah, no, I think it's definitely worth it.
So are you, are you working at MyFitnessPal now?
Yes, I am.
I'm still the CEO of Cali.
How long are you going to work?
Do you have an earn out or like a, like, are you there for two years?
I can't say exactly on this, but there is a period where I'm staying before I leave.
Okay.
Okay.
They bought a hundred percent of the company though.
Like they own it now.
You don't have to like, it's not like an investment that you then it's not an investment.
It's actually an acquisition.
Yes.
I looked up the, uh, my fitness pal CEO.
Uh, it looks like Mike Fisher, he was at, um, Etsy.
So, you know, huge company.
And then I think if I had to get my, uh, West point, like made an article on him.
So I assume he graduated from West point.
I think that would be, that is going to be really cool for you to learn from this guy.
I, if I had to guess.
He's an operator, he's probably pretty rigid and in a good way and uh, that's gonna be like you'll probably learn a lot yeah yeah, it's been good so far.
We catch up like about once a week and it's nice.
Can you teach us some of the tactical good decisions that made a difference for you and actually building the app right?
We're kind of glossing over the fact that, like you built this app.
A lot of people build apps, but your app actually started to work and grew and scaled a lot.
We talked about this a lot on the first episode, about your TikTok strategy, how you basically would message tons of people, have them create content that would be talking about the app in an organic, native way, and then that would lead to awareness and downloads of the app.
But are there small things like either product decisions or a marketing hook that you stumbled into that kind of changed the way you guys thought about things?
Oh, we thought it should be X, And then actually we.
I remember one day we realized this other thing was the way to way to do it.
Um, can you tell a story like that?
I love those stories.
There were two things here that I would say were crucial to the growth of the business.
As I mentioned, the last time I came on influencer marketing is what started us and it took us really far.
We got to about $2 million a month just from influencer marketing.
The thing is, after that, we kind of plateaued a little bit.
And what really got us over the hump.
The next step was running ads performance ads on Instagram and TikTok and Facebook.
And So invested a lot more time learning and scaling ads.
And that's actually what's fueling most of the growth at this point.
So there's a lot of learnings on that.
How much how much are you spending a month?
Can you reveal that or no?
Well, it's scaled over time.
In January, we spent maybe.
A little over a million.
Oh, wow.
That's pretty efficient then.
And I saw a post where you said that you bought like a 400000 ad with Mr Beast and the guest or the host was like was that profitable?
And you were like, I don't know.
Yeah, so we did an ad with Mr. Beast.
We paid him half a million dollars for him to put us in one of his videos.
It was basically this contestant that was brought on.
He was locked in a gym until he lost a certain amount of weight.
We met him when he was filming the video.
We met him while he was filming.
We were at a studio and he's like, my friend has been locked in this gym for 100 days now.
He's got 200 more to go.
And so we went and visited him in the zoo.
This was like 16 months ago.
That's how long they were planning this video.
Yeah, that was a wild video.
I think it was one of their best performing videos in a long time when it came out.
And so they were making a second video on their second channel, which was like did he maintain his body weight after the video or did he just regress?
And I, we were offered to sponsor that video.
I knew someone that like was on the team.
And so he helped us sponsor it.
And so they let me fly out to actually see it happen.
And then they offered me to do one of the takes to come in and talk about the app.
So it was cool.
They ended up using that take in the video.
I'd say that the results of that right away definitely was a little bit unprofitable.
It's always hard attribution because there's no way.
Most people are going to the app store directly and downloading.
Not many people are clicking a link, so you don't know exactly how many people went and downloaded.
But looking at the time overlap, looking at promo code usage and a few other metrics that we use to determine this stuff, we probably made 350000, maybe 400000, just from that, 500000 promo.
And the rest of it actually I believe we were profitable long term.
And if we're not yet, we're going to be.
Because, having the brand name Mr B, saying we were in a video, we were able to do way more deals afterwards.
We had way more credibility with our brand.
And so the profit from those deals that's enabled for us has exceeded the total amount.
How big's the team?
The team is about 30 people, a little more than that.
And how many hours a week are you spending going to class?
Well, first semester, I took, I think it was four classes a week.
So it wasn't that crazy of a schedule.
It was like an hour and a half.
What's your major?
What are you studying?
Are you like rocks for jocks type of schedule where you're like I'm an athlete here and just I need to pass?
Or are you like, I'm trying to be a computer science major?
I first joined the business school, or I applied into it, but I switched out and went undecided because I wanted to do more of kind of what Steve Jobs always talked about, how he took like the calligraphy class that really enabled him to build the Macintosh operating system.
So I was taking like.
VR class, which was really cool.
It was like all about the metaverse a class on a design class to a business class, and the professor there was actually a really awesome guy.
Did you know how?
Like China like raises, like super athletes, like they get like two seven-foot people and they like make them breed it.
Like they like set them up to it at the age of 12, the kid has everything they need.
This is like you for business, like you already have an exit and Running a company.
You're downloading Steve Jobs ideas and like going through.
I'm impressed with your decision making.
Like even just that little thing of like.
You know what like business would be, that kind of maybe obvious choice for you.
But saying I'm going to go undecided so that I have freedom to take interesting classes that just spark my curiosity, maybe outside of my normal path, of things I'm familiar with, because long-term that's actually gonna help me maybe right, like i feel like so many of your decisions um, have been good.
In fact, probably that's the most impressive part about you right, you're a well-spoken guy.
You've obviously hustled, you built a cool app, like.
All of that's great, but um yeah, the decision making is actually what stands out to me in a way that like, is not common amongst people in general, but definitely amongst younger people, right?
Like I have friends that.
I have friends that make terrible decisions and I I see you and I'm like this guy's kind of consistently making good decisions.
Are you a big like mentors guy?
Do you have like a person you call for a lot of questions or you just figuring this stuff out on your own?
Are you a journaler?
Like what, what's your, what's helping you here?
Thank you.
First of all, it really means a lot.
I think I definitely had mentors that supported me.
One, someone who was my co-founder with Cal AI, Blake Anderson.
He's helped me a lot with so many things, not just business life, but personal life too.
So I learned a ton from him.
And I'd say that's that's definitely helped me.
The biggest thing is he's helped me shape a lot of decision-making frameworks.
So how to analyze when to make certain decisions.
He kind of taught me about what EV is and all of these different principles to help make smart decisions.
Tell us some of those.
I would like to learn.
What are your frameworks for making good decisions?
What comes top of mind?
Sure.
Well, EV is a good one.
So gamblers obviously know this, where it's like the percent chance of winning something and then the prize, and you multiply them together.
And then it's like whatever you have a 100 chance of getting versus the chance of losing it all, versus the prize money you could have, whichever is greater like that's which one you should often pick, And so using that was very helpful for when thinking about okay, selling the company and what we think makes sense in terms of what we're willing to sell for.
It's like, what do we think the EV is of like, what's, what's the chance of us getting to this?
What's the chance of it falling apart?
What's the chance of this?
And so that, that was helpful.
It's like one good decision-making framework.
Yeah, that's a.
It's a great one, especially for selling, because you let's say, let's just pretend somebody offers you a hundred dollars for your, your business.
So you have a hundred percent chance of the a hundred dollars, or maybe not even a hundred, maybe 90, cause it might not close, but okay.
So yeah you basically, the expected value of that let's call it is a hundred dollars, a hundred percent times a hundred dollars.
And then you say, but if we keep going, we could get to, what if we could get to 500?
Okay, great.
What if?
Sure.
Then you ask the question, well, what do you think are the chances you could get there?
There's a 10% chance.
Okay, so 10% times 500 gives you 50.
So it's a better decision to take the 100 expected value over the 50.
Right.
Or let's say you think it's a 20 percent chance.
So now you're even.
OK, but what's the percent chance it all falls apart, goes to zero?
Right.
There's going to be if you keep running it, you have some risk, ongoing risk of it falling apart.
Even if you think that's a 10 percent chance, you have to factor that in.
And so once you do that, you get a more objective way of making a decision, versus just going on pure emotion or your mood in the moment, or fear and greed based on whatever, whatever day the weather is for you.
Yeah, that was a perfect example.
And selling for, in my opinion, selling for you, that's just such a no brainer.
It's a no brainer because the liquid money that you have is going to compound.
I mean to have what you have.
I don't know what you have, but seven or eight figures, I don't know.
At that young age it's going to compound like crazy.
And also I think people underestimate the clout that comes with a sale.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's true.
He's like, I don't underestimate that.
Okay.
So where to from here?
So you're just going to go to college now.
You're going to like, eventually in the future, you want to start something new.
If you start something new, do you, you're like, I have to go bigger.
Are you going to fall into that trap?
Like what, what's going to be the mindset going forward now?
I have so many ideas always.
I'm very committed to making sure that Cal AI will endure long term.
And so I want to make sure that the transition is super smooth between the companies.
And I likely in a few months will start.
I don't know if I'm going to be as open with this one as I was with Cali.
I was so public about Cali, which I think was great.
Like so much upside, even though there was downside too, but way more upside.
When the next one, I'll probably be a little more stealthy.
And I think I know what I want to build.
I'm not going to share just yet, but I'm definitely excited to like work on something new.
I have a ton of new ideas.
What were the top three ideas that you're interested in?
I'd say the contenders like they don't really matter that much because I didn't believe in them enough to want to start them.
But there are there are many good ideas.
I mean, I just had this idea for other apps while building Kali.
I just constantly I'd like, oh, this would be a cool million dollar idea.
I could see this going super viral very easily and it's not hard to build.
But, like at this point, it doesn't really make sense for me to spend my time doing it, because I'm shooting for like a billion dollar company is my goal.
And so one idea that I actually tweeted about two days ago is that someone should build a semantic search for your followers on either Instagram or X, wherever you want, so that you could look through.
And this could be helpful for so many reasons.
Let's say you're looking to date someone like Instagram.
A lot of people don't realize, but like it's one of the it's one of the biggest dating apps.
So many people are meeting from Instagram today.
So being able to semantically search for your type through your followers and then going through being able to semantically search for who are the entrepreneurs that follow me, who are the cool people,
I mean, my tweet just blew up and I had so many people follow me and I'm looking through and I'm like, oh shit, this really cool person's following me.
I had no idea.
And I didn't get a special notification.
So even being able to be alerted of stuff like that, that's definitely an easy, like few million dollar idea that someone could build.
Pretty cool.
Yeah.
I've always wanted that.
I would pay for that.
Uh, same thing.
I don't go through who follows.
And so I'm like I don't get alerted if somebody interesting follows me, somebody that I would want to know.
And it's a hard thing to exactly say, well, who would you want to know about?
Um, I don't know, but it's –.
I can't give you one rule, but there's somebody who could figure – if you could figure that one problem out, there's a lot of people who would be interested in that, whether it's on the search side or the alert side.
I'm a believer in that.
What are some other cool ideas?
So if there's somebody who's the sort of 17-, 18-, 19-year-old version of you –
Are you guiding them to be like build apps?
Is that the play you still see as the juiciest?
Or is it specifically around AI?
What are the ideas you would brainstorm for, kind of the next version of you who's sitting somewhere listening to this episode right now?
So if they are just trying to get started, it's like one of their first projects.
They're not trying to swing too big.
They're trying to swing to something reasonable like build a million dollar company or make a few million dollars from it, then I think apps is such a great space to build in right now because there are so many apps that are just possible to build now, especially enabled by AI.
But even without AI, for example, some that have spun up.
Recently my friend built an app called Quitter.
It is an app that helps guys quit porn.
It doesn't really use AI.
It just kind of gamifies the process gives you a streak, gives you a roadmap, rewards like meditation guides.
And that's been super helpful for a lot of people.
And now it's making over $5 million a year.
That's awesome.
What are some other cool apps that we not on our radar?
But just people who are doing well, people who are crushing it, people who have cool ideas.
Yeah.
Did you guys see Claim?
No.
How do you spell it?
No.
Okay.
So it blew up on Twitter a little bit.
It was made by one of my friends.
It's basically an app that allows people to get into class action lawsuits where like, let's say, you drank Pepsi and then there's a Pepsi class action lawsuit.
You could sign up so that when it's settled, you get like 10 bucks or 15 bucks.
How do you spell it?
Yeah.
C-L-A-I-M.
It actually got taken off the app store unfortunately, but they made like a million dollars in their first 30 days of launching.
Playing make them pay.
When Shard and I were like 22, there was a app that got released in San Francisco that was amazing.
It was called Do Not Pay.
And I don't know, is that still around?
Oh, yeah, it is.
But it was magic.
When it got released, basically in San Francisco, it was famous.
In New York.
I imagine the same way where, if you get a parking ticket, sometimes you're like I'll just get two parking tickets a month instead of paying for parking and it's going to be a better deal.
And it would somehow automatically tell you, before you even got back to your car, that you got the parking ticket and it's going to like fight it for you.
And it was amazing.
But it would you.
It would scan the ticket and be like look, he wrote the number but it went outside of the box that you know, the box where you're supposed to be in.
Technically, you don't have to pay now.
Right.
Or you didn't fill this in or this the visibility on that sign is low.
So you don't have to pay.
And then I think the city like banned it and it went away.
But apps like that were amazing.
And this is the same thing as claim, where it's like just just go, go and find me money or save me money.
Go ahead and just do that for me.
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What's your framework you use to think of – you use to filter good, bad idea here.
Is it I work backwards from the ad?
I think about what the TikTok would be, and if it makes for a juicy TikTok, then it's going to be a good app.
Or is it?
I want an app that makes you money or helps you stop a problem or start a thing that you want to do.
I guess walk us through how you think about these.
That's a great question, because I think a lot of people always ask like oh, how do you come up with ideas?
The first question I always get when I tell someone about Cal AIs, how do you come up with that?
And everyone's trying to think like, I want to come up with these huge ideas.
How can I do it?
I think that learning how to come up with ideas, that is a skill, but I think the more important skill and the better skill is a framework to validate what is a good idea, and Because you could come up with ideas all the time but you need to know okay, which ones are good, which ones are bad, so you could filter through really quickly.
And the way that I validate them, I think it needs to be a little bit different for everyone.
Because it depends on your skill set.
I validate good or bad ideas.
That are good or bad for me, like stuff, I'm interested in stuff, I think I could kill and really blow up.
And so for me, I look for ideas that I know are very marketable.
They can go super viral.
And I look for things that I've personally experienced, have some firsthand experience with, or I know people that are experiencing it.
So I know who I'm building for very specifically.
And I've seen enough companies where I can have an idea like okay, this company that's adjacent to this one, to the idea I have.
The adjacent company is doing this much in revenue, so I think I can at least get to here, if not all the way, or surpass it.
And so it gives me a good, quick way of thinking, like, how far can this go?
But before building that intuition, you could always analyze the TAM of a space.
You could analyze the competitive landscape.
And there are a few other metrics that you could look at that just help you kind of objectively assess is this something worth pursuing?
But what's your checklist now?
So for TAM, what's your TAM size?
To be honest, TAM is one of those things where I kind of always look at my gut for this.
I'm not like doing Google research.
Okay, what's the?
I didn't look up what's the TAM of a calorie tracking app before starting CalAI, but I kind of saw okay, this other app is making 200 million a year.
So I know that's like the minimum ceiling, the lowest floor of what we could get to.
And so that's how I validated building one.
But I think a lot of people are detoured by seeing that another app or another product is doing what they do.
No, it should be the opposite.
It should say that's proof.
Yeah, exactly.
That's prove it works.
And the market is so big that all of these apps can be successful.
I mean, if a company is still growing, that means that there's still a gap.
There's still people that are underserved and can use it.
Like I hear all the time I was in the entrepreneurship class.
People were pitching their ideas.
Everyone was like, wait, that already exists.
That already exists.
And it like deters them.
But it shouldn't.
Yeah, that's so funny.
That is the first thing.
Oh, that already exists.
Okay.
So we're looking for non-existent business ideas.
You know how few ideas fall into that?
I mean, there are some that are in that category, but that doesn't describe most.
That's a pretty crazy mistake that people make.
I had a friend who was an out-of-state person and he was looking at University of Miami and it was 100000 a year to go.
Are you paying for your own tuition?
I am.
I do have a scholarship.
My parents actually paid for my first semester, which was nice, but now I am paying going forward if I do want to stay.
I paid for this one and after this I'll probably just honestly drop out, so it won't be an issue.
That's so funny, are you?
Like it wasn't?
Until i was like 33, i got off my parents cell phone bill, like it was just too much of a pain in the ass.
You still sean, are you on your parents family plan still?
I think i was till literally last year.
Yeah, like um, it was.
By the way, it was exactly as much of a pain in the ass as i thought it would be like four hours in the att store with my three kids.
It was horrible.
Zach, i got a question for you where um, what are you curious about right now?
Like what's exciting to you?
You probably are.
You know you're young and you're kind of technology forward and you hang out with different people.
That are, you know, kind of people who do shit.
That are young.
Um, so I'm always interested in what kind of your generation is more is, is interesting.
Like, are there certain types of businesses that you admire?
Are there certain technologies that you're playing with?
Like you'd mentioned VR, for example, are there companies you think are really cool?
Are there spaces?
You know white papers you're reading.
You know researcher reading.
That that's kind of got your interest.
Let's just play a game of like, what's been interesting to you lately.
Yeah.
I mean something interesting which honestly it's a little bit scary too, is that people like Elon Musk are saying all the time that we're going to have so much abundance that like it seems like the need for entrepreneurs is kind of going to go away pretty soon.
And that money won't matter anymore.
Like he's saying, you shouldn't save for your retirement.
And so that's like a super interesting concept.
I already feel like the world I live in now, since when I was like maybe 10 or 11.
I feel like it's completely different.
A lot of that is just like a lot of the beliefs that I held that I was taught in school.
They're just completely flipped on their head.
And now I believe the opposite.
But it really seems like we are going to experience an entirely new world pretty soon.
If these AI labs reach the goals that they're setting out to achieve And that's a little scary but exciting at the same time.
Yeah, so what do you do?
Because that's paralyzing, right?
I flip-flop between, oh, my God, there's so much opportunity.
I'm going to make so much money.
Then an hour later, oh, I'm obsolete.
Then the next one, wait, money is actually obsolete, right?
Like I'm just flopping between these different extreme things.
Like, where's the puck going?
And it's very hard to figure out.
Well, what do I actually do with my time and my my energy and my talent now?
Like, what's going to matter if you believe that it is going to be a whole new world?
OK, so do you just wait?
Like, what do you do?
Yeah, no, it's honestly a great question.
I was actually at dinner with Steve Cohen last night and he was he was kind of saying that the like 50 billion dollar owner of the Mets, Steve Cohen.
Yes.
Yes.
It was very cool, very nice, great to meet him in person.
But the most interesting thing he was saying was that right now he's just trying to figure out how to kind of invest or extend the timeline of his companies or ones that he's looking at investing in like three years.
Just survive three years and then figure it out after that.
Like no one knows where the future is heading.
So you just have to figure out how to survive in the intermediate period and then after that figure out okay, what do we do next?
Did you learn anything else at that dinner?
He's a pretty uh i mean, he's kind of he kind of super interesting.
Up there with elon and a few of these other guys.
His insights are probably as uh wide.
We had very interesting discussions on kind of where society's heading with all this different possibilities and, like the timeline, the chance of it getting there.
It seems like it may take well.
What's interesting is a lot of people are thinking about the AI part.
Like, okay, we solve AGI, then overnight everything changes.
That's kind of what people are assuming.
But the software is one problem.
Software is one small problem.
The hardware, like building out these humanoid robots that are going to execute these tasks.
That's a whole, nother problem.
And so there are cool companies like Physical Intelligence that are trying to solve this.
But that is potentially just as hard.
And so people are underestimating that.
Are you interested in getting in to some of these like really, really big ideas that require a lot of venture capital and can be tens of billions, hundreds of billions of companies?
Or do you prefer to stay in the consumer space and kind of stay in the same industry that you're into now?
A bootstrappable thing.
I really enjoy building products for consumers.
I just love.
It's the biggest compliment to me hearing that someone else uses something that I built, especially when they love it.
Like with Cal AI I've It's actually pretty.
Every once in a while now, someone's like oh yeah, I use that when they hear that I built it.
And it's so awesome to see.
So I definitely want to keep that.
I think that whether that's hardware or software, though, both are cool.
I do definitely want to build a company that does have a hardware component to it, maybe not exclusively hardware, but something that can be either software or hardware, like both that we sell.
Sean, do you have a take on what he was talking about with AI?
So where do you generally land of when you oscillate from?
I'm going to make a ton of money and money doesn't matter.
All right.
That's a complicated question.
So I do think both of the first parts are true of what I said, meaning there's never been more opportunity.
And also there's going to be a ton of creative destruction.
So meaning, oh, my God, there's so much opportunity.
Also, man, some of these things I own or operate could get wiped out.
I think so.
I think both of those are true.
Similarly. oh my God, I'm all powerful.
I can do so much now with AI.
Also, I might be obsolete.
Also, that's also both true if I don't actually build up skills to use AI well.
If I just think that, oh, I'll be in my little bubble here and I'll just keep doing things the way I've been doing them for the past 10 years when this, like, new super weapon came out, that's also a little bit silly, right?
That'd be like having an army with like muskets or something like that and you know, tanks and whatnot just got invented.
Um, so I think both of those are true.
Now the question that Zach's asking, which is like so what do you do if kind of AGI is around the corner?
And that corner is, depending on who you believe, one to 15 years away?
And, um, you know, and so what do you do in that situation?
Well, there's kind of two approaches.
One is you join the AGI race, right?
So you go and join one of the labs, you try to build something in that space.
Another thing you do is you build something that will be wind in the sails, right?
So there's some companies that every time the model gets smarter, their product gets better, right?
So they're building tools for lawyers, let's say.
And every time the models get smarter, they're just better at building things for lawyers.
Like their tool for lawyers got more useful.
And then there's things that AI can't touch, right?
And you're like, okay, so what are things that AI is not really going to touch in the near term.
So this is like you know real world things, community religion, you know gyms, you know things that are like exercise, right.
Like what are going to be the things that people will do are kind of the last man standing in a world where AI gets smarter and smarter smarter, better at doing digital work.
And so you could go in that direction, right?
Like I, famously.
Not famously, but I have a friend who talked to a famous investor who And he was like oh man, AI is going to be crazy.
We're going to do this and this and this and this.
So what do you think I should do?
He goes, I think you should buy railroads.
And he is basically saying like, not literally railroads, but basically what's something that won't get touched by AI.
Sounds like you don't know what the hell is going to happen.
You should go find something physical that is going to be like the farthest end away from AI.
So you have time.
To adjust to it, versus doing something that's just going to like here today, gone tomorrow, type of idea.
I think I'm like a huge history nerd, Zach, as Sean and many listeners know.
I love history.
I don't know much about AI, though.
And what I've learned through history is that humans have thought the same things about their period of time as every other person in that particular, at a different period of time, has thought.
And so there's this like famous story of Winston Churchill, who was the leader of England during World War Two.
They thought the Nazis were going to take over the world.
They thought that he thought the world was going to end.
He wrote he's like, I think the world actually might end and this is going to be bad.
And that's where the famous quote he has this famous quote.
He goes, if you're going through hell, keep on walking like you got to keep on going.
If you're in the middle of hell, you know, you can't stop.
You can't stop moving.
And, generally speaking, great smart people who are titans of industry and world leaders every decade, think that something bad is going to happen.
And we've mostly have been fine.
There's been a lot of blips in the story, but we've mostly been fine.
And I tend to think, I tend to be blindly optimistic, just because I have faith in human beings that, like it's probably going to be fine.
It's just going to be like it will be maybe a decade or two of uncertainty and perhaps pain for particular types of people.
But in general, It's probably going to work out.
Yeah, I think that's a very valid take, honestly.
And by the way, if it doesn't end up fine, doesn't matter then.
Didn't matter for you.
It's over.
That's why I invest my money in Chase Bank, because of like all the bank runs a few years ago freaked me out.
And I was like I'm going to sell my money in Chase because if I don't think it's going to fail and if it does, money doesn't matter.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's all, it's all over that.
But I don't, I'm not even talking about like the world ending stuff.
It's just kind of like what do you do with your time and your talents in a highly rapidly changing world?
Um, and I again, I think you either lean way into it, meaning you join the frontier, you do something adjacent where the more the frontier work advances, your cause benefits, you know your your, your specific utility benefits, or you go the exact opposite direction and you say well,
That stuff's going to get so abundant, what's going to be scarce?
And you go figure out what will still be scarce if that becomes really abundant.
If intelligence becomes super abundant, if the ability to get work done on a computer becomes super easy, that your AI is going to do better than you.
If drivers are obsolete because the cars drive themselves, okay, cool.
What's left?
What's still scarce at the end of the day?
And just go in that direction.
I think that's a pretty reasonable take.
The things that stay scarce seem to be a human connection is one that will stay scarce.
And then also like entertainment, so like sports games, live events.
These are things that will be more scarce, especially when, like AI is making like your feed on Instagram and everything you see is just hyper dopamine optimized content.
Right.
If everything's fake, then real becomes scarce and truth becomes scarce.
You're right.
Like with the sports things, because there's already chess bots that play chess better than all the chess players.
But we still like to play chess.
And watch people play chess, watch humans play chess specifically.
Nobody's watching the AI play chess, but we will watch Magnus Carlsen or whoever, as just a specific example.
And the same thing is true for sports, right?
Like running.
Well, there's machines that run way faster than humans, but people will still tune into a human running and not a machine running.
Um, or even if it's a car, it's uh, you know, it's a car being driven by a human and not drone racing um, which is, you know more, more automated.
And so those have been kind of almost proven to be AI proof in a way.
And so it's like, it's got some immunity and you're like, oh, okay.
They're, they're kind of immune to that.
Okay.
It seems like owning a sports team. is probably a good type of investment.
Whereas owning a call center is probably not an investment you want to be in anymore.
Zach, a question that we ask.
A lot of people who make a lot of money overnight we say well, what did you do with it?
Where did you invest your money?
So I'm curious, you don't have to say numbers, you could say percentages.
Do you have a strategy?
So my strategy is essentially that I want to take I don't like investing in other people, frankly.
I like to invest in myself.
I don't want to rely on someone else to multiply my money, like trusting their CEO to make the right decisions to grow their company.
I want to invest in myself.
So I am putting most of it in the S&P 500.
But generally speaking, The strategy is I want to take more outsized risks on my own, like putting the funds into my ventures.
So that's my plan.
I'm going to take money out and put them into my own as I start things.
OK, so you have 100 percent of a sum.
What percent are you going to keep in the SP and what percent are you going to put into your own company?
So right now, I believe it's 75 or 70 percent, something like that.
In the S&P, something like 25% that's in the money market or bonds, actually.
And then a few percentage points within those that are scattered like a tiny bit of Bitcoin, a tiny bit of gold.
I believe that's it, really, just those four places.
And then I'm going to be pulling out of mostly the or, I guess everything, when I need to invest in my companies.
Wait, 100% you're going to put in your own company?
Not 100, because I think for the next venture I will most likely raise money, just because now this is kind of like my nest egg.
I never need to worry about it.
I'm definitely willing to take risks.
But how much?
What percent?
In your head, you're thinking, let's say, hypothetically, you have $10 million.
What percent do you want to put in your new company?
Yeah well, I mean, maybe this goes to the EV question a little bit, because it really depends how confident I am in the idea.
Like that Elon story of He almost went bankrupt because he split up his wealth and gave half to Tesla, half to SpaceX and that saved both companies.
So if that's what it takes at some point, and I'm confident, then maybe that's what it will take.
You're an impressive young guy.
Is there anything you want to get back?
You're like, oh, I suck at this today.
I'm really poor at this area.
I need to figure this out.
What's an area you're trying to grow in?
That's a great question.
I want to understand the full picture of the world much better.
I'm not someone who really understands economic policy well.
I don't really understand GDPs of the world and how that influences things.
And building... a company like Cal AI, it doesn't really influence it.
But if I'm trying to build like a massive company, if I'm trying to build the next meta or the next open AI, the next Apple, the next Google, I think it is important to understand the general trends of where the world is heading.
Crazy dude.
We're.
This is like um, You know.
There's that story or that video where Obama makes fun of Donald Trump at the press dinner and there's a meme where it's like this is when Trump became the villain or this is when he decided to run for president.
It's so funny that we get to have you on here because we saw your come up.
We now are talking to you when you definitely have made it.
If you accomplish nothing from here on out, you're gonna be a 10 out of 10 massive success.
But like we're hearing you where you're at this, like fork in a road, where it's like, is this going to be Sean and Sam talking to Elon when he is 20 years old?
Because it definitely could be.
And you're saying things where it definitely indicates where I'm like this is going to be a very cool thing to look back on in 20 years or 10 years that we've been able to catch you so so early.
Thank you.
I'm very ambitious.
You should end every conversation with that.
Goodbye.
I'm very ambitious.
That's awesome.
Zach, thanks for coming on, man.
I appreciate you making the time.
Thanks for having me.
It's always fun.
Thanks.
That's it.
That's the pod.
I feel like I can rule the world.
I know I can be what I want to.
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