The Grind Mastermind episode 8

Transcript

[00:00:00] Josh: Broadcast start streaming, and I think we are indeed and or in fact live for the Grind Mastermind episode Numero eight. Nice. Chris, how you doing?

[00:00:18] Chris: I am good. It’s been another couple of busy weeks, but catching up. Catching up.

[00:00:27] Josh: Busy

[00:00:27] Chris: is good. I worked on clients last weekend, so that was good. Taking a break a couple of days.

[00:00:34] Josh: Busy is good. It means, uh, the bank account stays alive and it means lots, lots of stuff to talk about right on the episode. Yeah. So, uh, all right. How about you? I’m doing pretty well. I, we, yeah, we had to bump this back a week because I got, I had a cold for like four or five days last week. I tested for Covid.

I mean, I tested once for Covid. You never know what those tests these days, right? But it was negative. So is

[00:01:00] Chris: Covid still a

[00:01:01] Josh: thing? It is, man. Like, never happen. So it, it is, I think maybe in certain parts of the world, like someone was telling me a few weeks ago that apparently they’re having huge cases reported in India right now.

Again, um, maybe some other countries, but I, I think they’re like, it’s just not as in the news. I, I don’t know. Right. I’m not a, I’m not a doctor, I’m not a statistician or whatever, so I don’t know, but. There was something going around in Canada, I think it might’ve just been like, sometimes when the seasons change, just people get mm-hmm.

You know, get the cold or whatever. And then, um, I heard it was going around India a little bit, so. I don’t know, maybe it’s just not in the news as much, or maybe it’s just in very concentrated areas. So, anyways, we’re back. We’re ready to roll. We’re ready to grind. So, uh, you want to jump in? For those of you, uh, tuning in for the first time, we do a quick update on the last two weeks of our business.

Then we talk about goals for the next two weeks to stay accountable. And then we talk about, you know, our favorite books and tools that we’ve seen in the last, uh, couple weeks. And that’s it. So, Chris, why don’t you jump in. How’d the last, I guess, in this case, three weeks? Go And, um, let’s pull up, let’s pull it up.

Actually, let’s pull up the notes you wanted to ab test, edit and review hot jar results for your landing page, and then review Facebook ads data.

[00:02:31] Chris: Yeah, so actually I stumble on a bit of a problem there. So I, I basically redesigned the simplified the landing page, which was a, basically, as a bit of background, I am testing this idea that I want to validate for an info product, which is basically an ebook for e-commerce business owners.

And I was running Facebook ads. Uh, but I realized that the page, my, the sales page that I’m sending people to for the signup is a bit long. It’s a bit more, too much story centered. So I wanted to simplify it basically. Uh, but, uh, so I did that, the page, now I have a variant, which is, uh, much, much shorter.

Focused on the actual contents of the ebook right away. But the problem that I realized is in the Facebook ads, so what I didn’t know, because it was my first time running ads, it was the Facebook pixel. For some reason I thought that it was installed on my website. But then I found out that there’s a WordPress plugin that you can install on your site that basically they automatically installed the system.

And through that doing that, I realized that the Facebook pixel wasn’t installed at all. So I went ahead, I, I tried installing them. We basically follow up process and Facebook inevitably told me that I already have an ad account. I realized basically there would, there’s a mess between my business account and my personal Facebook account.

I have no idea how to manage that. Right. And basically now, and basically now I cannot fix it because for some reason there was a random Facebook ad account created and, uh, I cannot, I tried like deleting that account.

[00:04:33] Josh: I don’t know if you can delete it. I don’t. Yeah, you might not

[00:04:36] Chris: be able to. Facebook closed it.

Oh, but apparently I’m still limited by one ad account. I cannot add another one. So my Facebook pixel is situation, is basically stuck in limbo. Now, obviously there’s no real, there’s no way to access Facebook support. I tried sending a message, but obviously they didn’t get back to me. And yeah, I, I’ve, I’m, I basically have no idea it’s such a mess with all the personal business accounts.

Uh, I have no idea how to basically fix the situation because I have the ads, but I was running them through my personal account ra rather than the business account. Ah, but the, the pixel needs to be on the business account,

[00:05:21] Josh: so, right. But the, but then they canceled your business account.

[00:05:26] Chris: No, they cancel. I closed that ad account, which is separate from the Facebook business account.

It’s so fucking, it’s such a mess. There’s so many accounts, so many different screens. The user interfaces shit.

[00:05:40] Josh: But why, why don’t you, why don’t you grab the pixel from the ad account and stick that in? I cannot

[00:05:47] Chris: even explain it. It’s so complex.

[00:05:51] Josh: You might just wanna find, you might just wanna find it. Like you’re never gonna get customer support, I think unless you’re spending like six figures a month.

You, you can’t even talk to people. Why don’t you just find an expert, like pay an expert for an hour or two and I’m

[00:06:05] Chris: trying to ask some friends, but yeah, it’s hard. Yeah, I probably have to find someone who can just take a look at my account and. And understand what’s happened and what, what I, what I’ve done, because I basically did something wrong in the creation of the account.

[00:06:23] Josh: Yeah, I remember too. It’s very weird with like, what’s your personal, what’s your business, what you can do with each, and then they can’t connect, so they’re totally separate. So be careful when you’re setting up your ad accounts folks.

[00:06:35] Chris: Yeah, and, and also the problem is that whenever you go and look for, uh, uh, like a video, like, uh, Like a how to, uh, like a how to video.

The Facebook platforms is constantly updating and changing, so, right. Whatever video you watch is always gonna be updated and different. So, sounds like, seems like they do it on purpose. I don’t know.

[00:07:02] Josh: I, I, I would go find an ads expert. They, I, I bet you an ads expert can probably get that fixed in 20, 30 minutes or at least tell you what to do.

Pretty quickly, you know, anyone? Good question. I, I don’t off the top of my head. Let me think about it. If someone comes to mind, I’ll send you a message. Yeah, you can, you can ask around or like post in, uh, post in any of these slacks or discords that you’re in, any of the communities. Mm-hmm. I’m sure. Uh, Yeah.

Or heck ask on your email list. I bet maybe somebody listening can, uh mm-hmm. But yeah, that’s what I would do. I, I get that. It’s a mess. The, the account management for Facebook’s a mess, so it’s not fun. Make sure you get it set up right the first time and it’ll save so many headaches.

[00:07:43] Chris: So, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I basically shifted since this thing happened.

I wasn’t too much in control of it, so I basically shifted my attention a bit more towards, uh, content again. So I want to take the YouTube situation channel a bit more seriously. And yeah, I spent some time thinking about it. Uh, I, I basically created like a new setup. I want to start doing some videos, more of like a educational, like, kind of like monologue, but, uh, Edited, like nicely edited videos.

Mm-hmm. So I, I basically finalized kind of the setup that I want, uh, this morning also because the past two weeks it was a bit hard to take some time off and create some space in between client projects. So that’s what I was able to do this week finally. And yeah. So next week’s I want to record the first of those new videos.

Which have, are gonna involve like a script. So how I write this down, it’s serious. This is, this is one of the, okay. Yeah.

[00:08:52] Josh: So record first. Record first, first. Well, it’s not your like first video, but like first new YouTube video. Uh, yeah. It’s not really new format, you know what I mean? New video format. Yeah.

That’s a good, yeah. Yeah. Good

[00:09:09] Chris: terminology there. And, uh, And also, yeah, basically I have all this whole process, but the editing obviously takes some time, so I want to create an SOP or something for my assistant to take

[00:09:24] Josh: on. I was gonna ask how you’re gonna do the editing? You’re gonna use, uh, the

[00:09:28] Chris: va? Uh, yeah.

Yeah. It’s actually quite simple, so. I like, it shouldn’t take me like if I do it more than an hour because with the script, everything, so it’s super easy. I do everything with that.

[00:09:41] Josh: Yeah. How, how long, what are you thinking for the videos? Like five minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes? Yeah.

[00:09:46] Chris: Between five and 10.

Yeah. Okay. Too

[00:09:48] Josh: complex. Yeah, so I’ll say, um, Uh, create editing instructions for

[00:09:55] Chris: va. Yeah, that should be,

[00:09:57] Josh: yeah. Okay.

[00:10:02] Chris: Uh, yeah. I’m pretty, pretty stoked about that also because it’s, uh, feels challenging, you know? Uh, so it’s good.

[00:10:11] Josh: Yeah. I mean, I, I think, um, I actually think, and, and this is something I’ve been thinking of doing lately too, like almost like vlog style.

YouTube videos can be like pretty low hanging fruit opportunities. Mm-hmm. Where you don’t have to do crazy editing, right? Yeah. You sit in front of the camera, you have a, you know, in your office with the background. You talk for a minute or two, hit pause, talk for a minute or two, hit pause, talk for a minute or two, hit pause and then you’re done.

Yeah. You know,

[00:10:38] Chris: I’ll, I’ll send you a quick clip that I’ve done that I, I’ve recorded this morning. It’s actually pretty good. Oh, cool.

[00:10:44] Josh: And yeah, I didn’t, the other thing, man, you should, you should look at some AI tools, right? You might be able to like drag and drop the video into an AI tool that’ll edit the whole thing for

[00:10:52] Chris: you.

Especially. Yeah, I thought about that, especially for the thumbnails, just because I have no idea how to create thumbnails or what works. Yeah, if there’s, there’s probably gonna be some two

[00:11:03] Josh: up there. From now on, like anytime there’s like a manual task, just like Google it with AI at the end and see what comes up.

Cuz there’s probably something, um, so yeah, or I wonder if you can use like Dally, like that’s the photo AI one. Like the Yeah, but I, but I don’t know if it does. I’m not sure. I don’t know if it would do like YouTube optimized thumbnails. Maybe not. I don’t know. Worth trying though. Can try. Yeah. But I mean, all you, all you really need is like, you could use something like Dolly to be like, You know, take this photo and make it look like a YouTube thumbnail, and then you can go into chat G b D and be like, mm-hmm.

You know, type me out a, uh, an SEO optimized headline and then just copy and paste it over top. So that’s cool. Yeah. So we’ll see. Uh, okay. So for next two weeks, record, first new YouTube video format. Create editing instructions for va. Yeah, I

[00:11:59] Chris: mean, third, we can also put, uh, Fix Facebook ads,

[00:12:06] Josh: face fix Facebook ads, and get pixel set up and anything on the client side to talk about, or it’s just like, Hey, you’re, you know, I’m just doing client work, like not too much to talk about. Um, how’s that going?

[00:12:20] Chris: Yeah, no, it’s been going well, especially keep improving how I use chat G p T for that. So I’m pretty stoked about it.

[00:12:31] Josh: Are you using it a lot? Like how, how are you using it? What are the best use cases?

[00:12:35] Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, research. So it’s really good, especially if you, like, when you are new to, to, to a field, to a market, you basically give it, uh, let’s say that you run the first customer interviews, so you know the pain points, uh, the problems, the challenges that these people have.

Then you can just input them in charge G p D, and then you can ask them, ask it something like, um, write, uh, diary entry from a first person perspective of, uh, type persona role. Hmm. Who’s experiencing this category of pains, problems? And then you list all the pains, problems that you, that you’ve found, and then it writes you like literally the, the diary entry of this person and you, and it’s basically like reading someone’s mind and you get a lot of like useful, uh, sentences that you can use for headlines, for vivid copies.

[00:13:34] Josh: So, so it’s, it’s like you, you almost don’t have to go interview. I mean, you should, but you almost don’t have to like go interview the target market. Right.

[00:13:42] Chris: Yeah, like if you wanted to like do a super simple 80 20 thing, you could just do this thing basically using whatever things you can, information you can find out online.

[00:13:53] Josh: It’s crazy. It’s crazy. The people who still don’t think it’s gonna like improve everything, I think are nuts. But anyways. Cool. Uh, anything else? There

[00:14:07] Chris: was, there was this guy, uh, who I follow on a podcast. Uh, Scott Galloway and he said something like, um, something like AI is not gonna, is not gonna steal your jobs, but people who can use AI are gonna steal your jobs.

[00:14:24] Josh: I saw, I saw you posted that on LinkedIn. I was like, that’s brilliant. That’s brilliant. Yeah, I totally agree. And, and I’ll, I’ll mention all these in this show notes, so if you’re listening or watching, um, every, all these tools, people that we reference, I’ll, uh, I’ll list them in the show notes, uh, or in the description below.

So, uh, yeah, yeah, I totally agree. Probably,

[00:14:47] Chris: and, and probably the biggest takeaway on that is not that, like with using ai, that doesn’t mean like, Knowing how to write a prompt, because formulas don’t work with ai. It’s always like different, it’s always like, uh, it’s always changing and predictable. So you actually need to understand the, the, the fundamental principles of how to ask questions, uh, step by step, like how to instruct it.

So all the, like, those deeper fundamentals are. How will you use interact? It’s more of a, an interaction with ai. It’s not like using tools, like graphic tools. Yeah.

[00:15:26] Josh: I mean, we’re, they’re probably already our jobs posted right now for like ai, prompt engineer or like, you know, AI, prompt, whatever. So. Cool.

Anything else before we, uh, flip over? No. So just to summarize, record first, new YouTube video. Create editing instructions for va, fix Facebook ads and get pixels set up. Uh, okay. Well flip over to me. Yeah. Last week I was sick, so it was a little bit slower. That’s why we bumped this episode back. But it’s been a busy.

Busy few weeks in, in a few ways. Um, continue cold call outreach. I’ve been doing that. In fact, I’ve been even ramping it up cuz we’ve made that just even more of a priority. Um, so just, yeah, I don’t know. I’ve been in kind of improving my script. Every day that you do it, you get a little bit better, right?

Just like anything nice, you get a little bit more comfortable. So

[00:16:22] Chris: I’m.

[00:16:24] Josh: Yeah, it’s done. It depends on really two things I’ve found. Number one is how many other calls do I have booked that day? So for example, like today I already have three or four demos booked. So I obviously can’t be cold calling while I’m, you know, on those calls.

And then secondly, I find that like, it depends how lucky you get. Cuz for example, like some days you’ll call 20, 30, 50 people. And you’ll get like nine, you know, you’ll get like 98% of them go to voicemail or like they’re really quickly not interested or whatever, right? And then what happened to me twice now, this week since I’ve gotten some good advice from one of our advisors and shifted my strategy a little bit, is you might get a couple people that pick up and it turns into a five, 10 minute conversation.

Or better yet, you pick up and you convert to an immediate demo. So what I mean by that is what I typically do, like, and, and this is one piece of advice I got that was really good, is in sales, you need to be always closing the next step, right? You don’t have to sell every time you talk to the client, but you have to close that next step, right?

So in our case, the cold call next step is usually a demo. So, Get them on the phone. Hey, is this something that could be a good fit, blah, blah, blah. If yes, all right, can we, you know, can we schedule a demo for tomorrow? 3:00 PM right? Mm-hmm. What, what I was told to do earlier this week was if they seem interested, just ask ’em if they want the demo right now.

Right. So this happened to be twice in the last two or three days, which gets you pretty fired up when you, when it happens is you’re like, oh, hey, do, do you have 15 minutes right now and I can show you our platform? And twice they were like, yeah. So I emailed them a Google Meet link. Bam. All of a sudden you have them right on a, on a live demo.

Nice. So that’s kind of like a cool little tip that I learned that maybe people can apply. Um, so, but like, when that happens, that’s a 40 minute, 20, 30, 40 minute session, right? So this is a long winding way to answer your question of saying probably in the range of like 30 to 70, depending on per day, depending on how many WOW calls I already have booked, and how good they go, right?

How well they go, how responsive that portion of the list is, you know what I mean? So I’m gonna put, for the next two weeks, I’m gonna put, um, 30 plus because like I said, some, some days are busy and I don’t have enough time. But I think most days I can get minimum 30 cold calls in usually more, but. Just so that it’s not crazy, um, overseas team running and first free trial.

So we, we, we, we’ve been to, to make a long story short, we turned off the overseas team for now cuz it just didn’t work that well and we’re seeing more, um, we’re seeing more traction within Canada. So we’re just gonna focus all of our efforts in Canada for now and then expand out from there, touch up and improve join page.

So I did that. Um, I touched up the join page and I did letter growth. So the other, the last item was prep letter growth outreach, and send to 10 newsletters. I sent to five or six, so I still have to do five more. I’ll just say another 10 cuz two weeks. It’s pretty easy. But I wanted to talk to you about that in just one second.

10 letter growth outreach. And I’m gonna just write a little bit more subjectively. Um, Oh no, I have to do this. Anyways, finish new demo script. So, um, I, I also got some really good feedback. So we have one sales advisor and he even joined a few of my demos and gave me some feedback on like how to show off the platform, good questions to ask, how to frame pain points, stuff like that.

So I have to kind of like, Touch it up and add notes. What I’ve found, man, is if you just have notes or a script for anything, it makes it way easier and way less stressful. Right? Yeah. Um, for a cold call, it’s the same for a demo.

[00:20:28] Chris: Yeah. It’s the same thing for, for the YouTube videos I realized. So I thought you, yeah, you, I thought that you just needed to jump on a YouTube video and do everything perfectly.

Actually, if you take some time to write a script, And then while you are recording you, you can actually take your breaks, just read the script and then edit those parts. It doesn’t, it doesn’t need to be. Yeah. Everything done at this, like the

[00:20:51] Josh: first shot. Well, let me ask you this. Um, are you gonna script the whole video word for word?

[00:20:59] Chris: Probably just doing an outline. Yeah, and maybe ex expand on some of the more technical points, but yeah, not, not fully script,

[00:21:08] Josh: not okay everything, because that is my style. I, I don’t really do random YouTube video, not, yours won’t be random, but I don’t, I don’t do YouTube videos anymore. I do, once in a while I’ll do like a book review video.

If anyone’s interested in, you’re already watching us on YouTube. You can check out some of the book reviews. Some of them have actually done pretty well, but I’ve found, What I like to do best was just do an outline introduction, one or one sentence first top, you know, what’s the first key takeaway from this book?

What’s the second key takeaway? Just like one sentence. And then I would just talk and I’ve, I like that more because number one, it takes less time than writing out a full script. And number two, I find it sounds less robotic if I’m just like, okay, this is what I’m gonna talk about. Okay. Just talk and see how it goes.

And if it doesn’t come out well, you just delete it and record it again. Right? Yeah. Um, but I know that some people, especially some of the bigger, you know, content creators will write every word of the script out ahead of time and kind of read off of it. Yeah. So I guess it depends on what you’re trying to do and how confident of a speaker you are.

Right. If you’re not a great off the top of your head speaker, it could be intimidating and, and writing it out ahead of time might be better. So yeah, it’s

[00:22:21] Chris: gonna be a learning curve, but I’m pretty excited. I watched the. Like to kind of see what other people do. I watched a couple of Skillshare videos. Hmm.

Share courses. Yeah. Marque, Marquis Brown, you know the tech, big tech review guy? No, he is, he is got a super, super short one hour course where he basically walks through his entire process and he’s, he, he is one of those that scripts literally everything but. It’s got a huge budget, obviously like a super, like huge studio, so it makes sense.

Yeah. What’s another one, which is by Nathan, Nathaniel Drew, another pretty big YouTuber, different style. But yeah, those were really good as far as giving me like an idea for how these guys go about like the whole process and how they think about videos and, yeah. And, and, and also Skillshare, if you, you can go, you can do like a one month free trial.

So, and do as many courses. Take as many courses as you want. Hmm. So I’m probably just gonna deactivate the trial in a bit. Yeah.

[00:23:28] Josh: If you got what you needed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. All right. I threw Skillshare in the show notes as well. Uh, cool. And then the last thing I wanted to touch on and ask you about was, so for letter growth, uh, that’s for newsletter.

You know, cross promotions. I sent email so they don’t have, the first thing that shocked me was he doesn’t have in-app messaging, right?

[00:23:50] Chris: No, no, no. The only way is to email other people. How does

[00:23:53] Josh: he not have in-app messaging? Dude, I actually, I like letter growth. I’m in there Discord as well. What’s his name?

Paul. Yeah. I told you, Paul, you gotta get on that man.

[00:24:02] Chris: Yeah, yeah, I, yeah. But the problem is that I told you he builds that platform with uh, no code. Yeah,

[00:24:10] Josh: but there’s got a solution. I’m sure like the big no-code solutions like buffer and stuff allow you to build in-app messaging. No. Yeah. Also,

[00:24:18] Chris: also depends on your budget, right?

So if that’s gonna be expensive that you’re still not making any money out of that.

[00:24:25] Josh: I guess so I, but I was shocked, wanted to

[00:24:28] Chris: build the it, it’s still an M V mvp, so I think it makes sense still.

[00:24:32] Josh: Right. I think you did mein, uh, mention that. So I wasn’t like fully surprised, but I was like, wait, what? I gotta go email these people.

And so what happened was I emailed like five or six of them and only one of them’s responded, right? So I’m like, ah, these emails going to spam. I’m a random person, you know what I mean? Anyways, one of the guys responded yesterday, so, uh, we’ll see how it goes. So I’m gonna send another 10 more out. Um, just, you know, requesting across promo.

I got a pretty.

[00:25:02] Chris: I got a pretty good conversion out of 16. I got 15 responses. Wow. So maybe it’s just figuring out the type of newsletter that might be interested.

[00:25:13] Josh: I mean, I looked up newsletters that were smaller around my size, had a few of the keywords that we’re matching. Yeah, personalized each one a little bit.

So I don’t know. We’ll see. I mean, I only sent them out like two, three days ago. Yeah, so maybe a couple more will trickle in. Um, but,

[00:25:31] Chris: uh, I would recommend, I would recommend reaching out to the bigger ones as well, because I got, I got on a couple ones that were way, way bigger than mine. They don’t really care as much, as long as you show them that you have a good open rate, a good sized list does, even if it’s like a hundred people, 200, they don’t really

[00:25:49] Josh: care.

Oh, wow. Um, so what kind of, do they want, like favorable terms? Are they like, Hey, our list is way bigger, so, oh, wow. Okay, so let me note that down. So, 10 letter growth outreach, and I’ll say, um, improve copy and don’t. Uh, and try some bigger lists.

[00:26:12] Chris: I can send you my, the emails that I sent them if you want.

[00:26:16] Josh: Yeah. If you don’t mind, because clearly whatever the heck you were doing was working, so might as well. Right? Uh, okay. Yeah. So that’s, that’s it for me. 30 plus cold calls a day. Finish new demo script, and, um, 10 plus letter growth outreaches, and we’ll see how that goes. Do you want to get into arguably my favorite segment in the last one of the show?

What we have been reading and tinkering with over the last two, three weeks?

[00:26:51] Chris: Yeah. Uh, so I finished for the second time, I worked by Scott Adams, which, who’s, um, artist. Or comic book. Mm-hmm. And the book is called How to Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big. And it’s very, it’s probably as close as possible to my philosophy of life.

Like there’s so much stuff that resonates from like, using, uh, like seeing life as a, like using your energy as a. Yeah, it’s kind of like, uh, telling you what’s good, what’s bad in your life, routines, using systems versus goals, but then it goes into basically everything like fitness, nutrition. And, and it’s funny as well, but it’s a lot of, it’s really counterintuitive type of thinking, which is what I enjoy and sticks with me.

So that, that was really good. Even the second time I actually got the paper back for that. Hmm, right here?

[00:28:04] Josh: This one. Oh, nice. Yeah. If you’re, if you’re listening, then uh, make sure to check out this episode video on YouTube. As Chris holds up the book. So what’s the key, what’s the key answer to that statement Of like, like what?

Just keep trying and even as you fail, you’ll slowly figure things out or like, what’s that key

theme?

[00:28:27] Chris: No, it goes way, way deeper. A lot of lessons. But one, um, a really good point that he makes is that, uh, Like success is habit forming. It says, so it’s not that you need to, you have to follow your passion.

That’s probably not gonna work. But when you start doing a lot of things and get good of a lot at a lot of things, that even if they are unrelated, that success, uh, pushes you to be successful at other things. So the more you things you try, the more you are open to opportunities. All of that basically con is going to contribute that making, making you a, a more interesting person, uh, and a more successful person in general makes sense.

It’s physically taking, makes sense. Taking the approach from the other end. So rather than letting your passion, whatever it is, guide you start doing things, a lot of things and, uh, And that success will basically propel you to more success and to actually enjoying what you are

[00:29:37] Josh: doing. Got it. Let me, uh, I’ll put the book name.

What’s the author’s name? Scott Adams. Scott Adams. You like your Scott say, what’s the title? Yeah, we’ll get it after. Um, I’m just, I’m muting myself when I’m not talking for anyone who can hear. There’s of course, starting this morning as we started to record, there’s somebody doing, uh, construction right above us.

But anyway, so I apologize. Um, cool. What’s, what’s next on your list?

[00:30:09] Chris: I just started out with, uh, bad motherfucker, which is the biography. It’s not the autobiography, but a biography of Samuel. L Jackson. It is very interesting. Very, very, very cool. Which actually cool is basically the main subject of the, of the book.

[00:30:31] Josh: Hmm. All right. It’d be interesting to hear how that goes. Um, on my end, I just finished Buffett, so what’s it called? Biography on Buffett. Called the, I think it’s called the making of an American capitalist is like the subheading. Oh, it’s by Roger. Somebody, I forget. I’ll put it in the show notes cuz there’s a million biographies on him.

Right. Um, but this one’s really good. Reread, I read it years ago. Really enjoyed it. And uh, man, he’s, he’s an interesting, it’s not short, it’s probably about, I think 400 pages. Ah, very good. Uh, yeah, it’s certainly not one of the shorter biographies I’ve read. Not the longest, but yeah. More on, on the longer end.

But I think worth every page, like, I think the whole story, go into detail about him as a kid. You know, first side businesses he was running as a kid. Uh, this banging is so stupid. Anyways, uh, can you hear it, Chris? Mm. The construction? No. Oh no. Okay. Cuz it’s showing up on my recording software, so I think our listeners can hear it, so I apologize.

But anyways, um,

[00:31:40] Chris: Yeah. How we, I have a question about, I have a question about the, like, biographies in general and how you see them, especially because sometimes when it starts out with like, some biographies starts telling you the story about like the, the mother, the father, the, the, the grand grandfather.

So sometimes I think like, Wow, there’s, there’s a very long way before getting to the actual person I’m interested in. So how do you think about like these biographies telling all the, these backstories, how do you interpret the backstories into actually giving you some lessons that you can use or do? Do you just listen to them as like entertainment?

[00:32:24] Josh: Uh, well, I, I find the good ones don’t go into too much detail on the, on the family, on the, on the pre-assessing family, right? Mm-hmm. So, for example, I thought this book did a really good job of like very quick history of how his family came and settled in America, for example, and. They really just highlighted what I think was important.

Right. So for example, like his parents and grandparents were grocers, right? And how that mm-hmm. Influenced him, right? So basically I think, I think that it should be kept short, but it’s important to highlight. How the person that the book is about was influenced by the family, right? Because we’re all influenced by our family in one way or another, for good and for bad.

And the reason why I think it’s important is it because it puts the person in context, right? Like Warren Buffett didn’t just appear at the age of 25, right? He, he had all of those years of. Of growth and, you know, whatever. And you’re, you’re influenced so heavily, right, by your parents. So I, I like the books that give you a little bit of background on the family.

I would argue now, I mean now I’ve read probably 20, 30, 40 of these biographies that some people have heavier influences from their families than others. And so if you do have a heavier influence, there might be a little bit more of the book dedicated to the family. But if it’s not a heavy influence, then it might just be like, oh, you know, he was born here, his parents did this and that, and they were pretty involved, or they weren’t involved, and then they kind of move on.

Right? Um, yeah. Does that make sense? Uh,

[00:34:07] Chris: yeah. Yeah. Uh, because I’m, I’m also still reading sometimes it’s not like a continuous effort because it’s an effort. It’s like a thousand page biography of, uh, Rockefeller and I’m kind of half through it. I’m, I’m listening to the audio book. But yeah, they, the author goes back and forth super deep into the family history, so it’s kind of, it’s not an easy read for

[00:34:33] Josh: sure.

Yeah. I, I would say that’s more up to the author, right? If, if the author does a good job on, or like, what’s the book about? Is it about the Rockefeller history or is it about, you know, That one person. But most of the biographies that I’ve read are like, you know, entrepreneurs within the last decade or two or three.

And I find that on average the authors do a good job. They give you a little bit of background on the family so that you can see how the person was influenced and how, you know, a little bit about how they are, how they became what they are today. But it’s mostly focused on that main character, right? So, Yeah, I think it’s a great read.

Highly recommended, um, almost anything you read from or about buffet. I think you’ll learn a lot. I also found, and I just wrote this in my email, uh, this morning, I think, so make sure if you guys like the podcast, Chris and I both have, uh, daily emails that you can sign up for. The links will be in the description and I was talking about how Buffett’s kind of interesting and like, he’s not your quote unquote traditional entrepreneur, right?

Like most of the biographies that I read about and a lot of yours as well are, you know, the Bezos, the mosque. The crock, you know, it’s like person starts a business person grows that one business that does one thing, right? Or eventually grows into doing a few things. But Buffet has made most of his fortune investing in businesses, right?

And not necessarily operating them or starting them. And so that was really cool because it talks a lot about his approach to evaluating businesses, investing in in businesses. Being an investor in a business, right? So how hands-on or not was he the importance of trusting management? You know what I mean?

Stuff like that. Mm-hmm. So I thought that was super, super interesting. And just the fact that he was, he like, I don’t think most people realized that Berkshire Hathaway used to be a textile mill that just like pumped out. You know, schmatta and stuff, and now it’s like, you know, a multi, a hundred plus whatever, billion dollar company.

Mm-hmm. And they have a staff of like 15. Right. All they do is manage and grow an investment portfolio. Um, you know, yeah. So like that, that, that hasn’t really been done. Like, you know what I mean? Like his investment record is like borderline incomparable Right. To almost anybody else. Mm-hmm. So, anyways, crazy story.

Highly recommended Reid. Super smart guy. The last thing I’ll mention is I’ve also read, um, uh, what’s it called? It’s called like the letter, uh, the letters of, I think it’s just called the essays of Warren Buffett, which is for the last few decades. He writes a letter as part of his annual, um, report, like, uh, yeah, stakeholder or shareholder, uh, report for Brookshire and um, You know, there’s gold in there, right?

He’ll write like pages of how the company’s doing, his thoughts on business investing. Somebody compiled them all into like a, a, an order that makes sense. You know what I mean? Almost like a textbook. Yeah. But it reads much less boring than a textbook. Uh, and you’re just getting like business advice for Warren Buffet.

So highly recommend it as well. I’ll put that in. Let me note it down in the show notes. And

[00:37:57] Chris: by the way, if you. Want to get some couple of nuggets, uh, from books, just go into charge PT and ask it for any summary of any book before 2021. You’ll get the summary. It’s crazy.

[00:38:15] Josh: Yeah. For the quick hits. It’s great.

I think it, if you, if you still want the full lessons, then it’s worth reading them, but uh, yeah, it’s certainly a good hack. Sure. Cool man. I think that’s it for me. Anything else on your end? No.

[00:38:34] Chris: Everything’s good. Alrighty. Plan together a couple of busy

[00:38:38] Josh: weeks, so we will then see everybody in the next episode.

Again, if, if, if you’re interested in any of the books or tools that we mentioned, just check the, uh, description. Whether you’re listening to this on a podcast or watching on YouTube, I’ll, I’ll note them down in the description. We’ll be back in two weeks. And, uh, thanks for tuning in. Make sure to check us out on our websites as well, Christopher sylvestri.com, rine.com.

Those links will be in the description if you wanna follow us a little more closely. And we’ll see you in the next episode. Chris, always a pleasure.

[00:39:15] Chris: Pleasure, man. That’s it out.

[00:39:19] Josh: All right.