[Bootstrapped] Ep.73 - The First 100 with Matt Higgins, Founder of RSE Ventures | Guest on Shark Tank | Burn the Boats

Matt Higgins is an American entrepreneur, investor, and media personality with extensive experience in various industries such as sports, technology, media, and marketing.

Matt is the co-founder and served as CEO of RSE Ventures, a sports and entertainment venture firm. He has been involved in numerous successful ventures, including co-founding the digital advertising agency Omnigon and serving as Vice Chairman of the Miami Dolphins football team. He also was a Guest Shark on Shark Tank for around two years.

Matt Higgins: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-higgins-rse/
Burn the Boats: https://www.burntheboatsbook.com/

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Transcript

 Let's do it. Let's do it. Broadcasting from around the world, you are listening to the first 100, a podcast on how founders acquired their first 100 paying customers. Here's your host, ha Radwan.

Good to have you on the show, Matt, how are you doing today? I'm doing great. Thank you for having me. Amazing, amazing. I'm very glad we got this, uh, happening because I have so many things. I've been a fan. I've got to know you since, uh, you know, you have a lot of articles in this sports space with the Miami Dolphins, but most notably on a Shark Tank because me and my wife, We like to sit and watch these long episodes cause we are business people and I'm pretty sure a lot of our listeners are as well.

But I'll do a quick introduction just in case people don't know who Madigans is. So you're an entrepreneur, investor, and media personality. Specifically an industries like sports, technology, media and marketing. You're also the co-founder of, uh, RS E Ventures, which is a sports and entertainment venture firm.

And, uh, you've been in the past, uh, with sports teams, like I mentioned as Miami Dolphins, and you have been a guest at the famous Shark Tank for around two years, I think season 10 and 11, if I'm not mistaken. So, Before we dive into the show, did Young Matt exhibit any flashes of entrepreneurship early on?

Great question. Uh, young Matt did, and actually a lot of my early version of my life was really about just trying to survive, and so I grew up in. Abject poverty. And so I would do everything to make ends meet. I would sell, uh, scalp tickets. Well, actually I would have to wait online on behalf of a scalper all night long.

They would pay you to wait online and then they would to get the tickets right. So that was one, that's a business that doesn't exist anymore since this all automated. But I would sell flowers. I was that annoying kid that would bang on your window and a street corner from Mother's Day. So that was it.

But then my first business was actually. Going to bars, I created a one 900 number where the bars would then give me their specials and people would call in and pay whatever it was, a dollar 99 a minute, and I owned the number and I would get paid from that phone call. So for the bars, it was free. So I guess I was a platform business, but I learned a very few of some painful lessons.

One, if your customer. It doesn't open its doors or answer the phone until five o'clock a night. That's not great. It's, it doesn't scale well. My acquisition costs were pretty significant coming out of blood, sweat, and tears and so it was called MT Services cause I did it with my brother. I've never talked about this on a podcast before.

That was my very first business and I lost a lot of money for a kid, a couple thousand dollars and shut it down. Amazing. But at least you had fun with your brother because it's always fun to do early on with family where. There's not, I mean, you had responsibility, but you're still young. You'd be enjoying that.

Well, well, you know, it's funny, growing up in poverty, it's interesting to watch how different people respond to it, right? So I feel like in my neighborhood, I had every case study. You know, I had the one making very terrible choices, and then running with a gang and ending up dead. I have people who turn to alcohol and drugs.

I have people who turn to, um, complacency. End up sitting on that same porch 40 years later, different. And then there's the outliers, which I was part of, which say I was not meant to have this life, that I was not destined to be a victim. And the fact that I was born into these circumstances will not dictate how I die.

And so I joined that, that group. Now, when you're young, there aren't many ways for you to. Effectuate that mindset, right? So one is the hustle and the things I just talked about, and then there's like multi-level marketing schemes that you begin to embrace and you're like, well, if everybody around you is poor, how am I gonna send the, sell them a big thing of detergent, that's not gonna work.

Start your own business. You know, you kind of start, I've been cycling through that mindset ever since I was a kid, all because I decided this was not my destiny. Every person as they're growing up, there is this catalytic moment that turns the boy to a man. What was that moment in your life that turned young man to, to the grown person who suddenly wanted a breakout?

Uh, And success. I feel like I was always a bit of an empath ever since I was a kid. I would always feel people's pain very acutely, and that is both a gift and a liability. And on the liability side, you begin to think the rest of the world is like that, especially as a naive little boy. And so what I found is I was shoulding more and more of the responsibility of taking care of a disabled mother.

But even just generally, the system isn't designed to lift you out of poverty or to also, the system isn't designed to accommodate the fact that you're working overnight at a deli and try to make school work for you. It's like the system is designed for the average situation, not for the edge cases. And I was in edge case, and so as an empath, you go through this period of disillusionment, we're like, doesn't everybody feel the pain or feel my pain?

And then you start to realize, well, they don't feel your pain, unfortunately. Now, this is where you have a fork on the road decision as a human being. Are you gonna choose to be bitter and resentful about that? Or are you gonna choose to take custody of your situation but retain the empathy? So later on, when you meet somebody who is in the same situation, you extend to them what nobody extended to you.

And I made a decision early on, I'm gonna be defiant. I'm gonna take custody, but I'm gonna try to retain my empathy right throughout the course of my life. So the decision where I, before that boy became a man, was really desperate and frustrated that I was taking care of my mother, living in squalor, no friends coming over my house.

And I had an epiphany realizing that the most important thing I need to do is make more money. And the way to make more money, I saw an ad in a newspaper, was to become a college student. And so I made a very radical decision actually based upon my mother. My mother had no education abused as a child.

She went and got a G E D in America, which is a high school equivalency diploma, and she was able to enroll in community college as a 38 year old woman and then go to college, and I thought, Well, why don't I just do that on purpose? I was like, so for my mother, it was like a byproduct of her situation, but I saw it from another angle.

Say I could start college at 16 technically, and then I could get going to work, and that's exactly what I did. So love the way you framed it. That's when the boy became a man. Although, I don't know, I'm still struggling to become a man, act like a boy, a child half the time. But that was technically the moment.

Amazing story. Thank you for sharing that. Sports Business Journal selected you 40, under 40 as the most outstanding executives in sport. You were the vice chairman of the Miami Dolphins. Tell us, how did you get into sports? I have always had this, uh, view that it's one, number one, never let anybody put you in a box.

When you retrace people's regret at the end of their journey, what you find are these moments in which. Not somebody else subjugated them. We're very, very rarely are we truly subjugated by another. We subjugate ourselves because we put ourselves in a box and we define who we are. Very narrowly. It's like we stop evolving.

And for me, for whatever reason, I always feel like a blank canvas. Canvas. And I get to define who I am. And the reason why I'm starting here is the following. I used to work for the government when I was younger, Matt Higgins. I was the press secretary of the Mayor of New York at 26. Crazy job, right? I was going to law school at night.

I was gonna college, right? Fundamentally, I was working for the government. After that job, I was on the ground with the mayor. On nine 11, I managed the response to the worst terrorist attack in history and as a result, became one of the first employees of a new federal agency whose job it was to rebuild the World Trade Center.

So I helped oversee the largest design competition in history. Which was the memorial and the creation of the Freedom Tower. So now you're talking about pretty extensive high level government experience. But I don't believe I was designed to be a government employee right now, forever. I could have that moment on say I work for the government.

That's what I am. But if I zoom a little about is like, do I work for the government or am I somebody who thrives in chaotic situations where there is no template, where you have to bring together disparate communities and figure shit out? And so I chose to define myself that way as a result of defining it that way.

When the New York Jets needed somebody to help build a stadium in the middle of Manhattan rather. Then I was the perfect person. But if I had define myself as a government employee, I'd be like, well, this is a sports team. What do you know about sports? And that's a question I, what'd you know about sports?

Absolutely nothing. But what I did know about is how to bring together disparate communities to build something. So I leveraged second point of the book. My book burned the boats. I talk a lot bit about. Leverageable assets, you always wanna keep an eye. What's a leverageable asset that I possess that I can use today to bring me closer to my ultimate goal?

So the leverageable asset that got me to sports was my ability to do land use, right? And it just in a different context, and my entire career has been about that. So I started with the Jets, helping deal with their stadium issues, but ultimately ended up running the business of the team and how I got to the dolphins.

Steve Ross is an incredible entrepreneur, biggest. Real estate developer in the United States, one of, but also just a true entrepreneur. He bought the Miami Dolphins and in the early days he was trying to put together a culture of people who matched his mindset. But I didn't want to be a sports executive anymore.

It was like I'd been there, done that, but we had an alignment of interest. I could oversee a sports team, uh, the business of one, nothing to do with on the field. No one would want to put me in charge of that, but I could oversee the business. And at the same time, I wanted to build companies and opportunities, and I wanted to identify them using the calling card of a sports team.

When you own a sports team, everybody wants to do a deal with you, Pinterest and Snapchat. In the early days, like everybody did, I had a vision of let's leverage that. Insight and ability to supercharge technology to put together an incredible consumer investment firm. And that's where the marriage of interest.

So, but my leverageable asset via V dealing with Steven Ross was my knowledge of how to run one, and I didn't wanna do it anymore. So a lot of times I say to people, you just gotta make sure you're moving in the general direction of your ambition. The next move doesn't have to solve everything, it just has to bring you closer.

So, I'm just being honest, like I was like not so excited to run a sports team. I just knew that was my path to being an entrepreneur. Amazing. So our show is about the first a hundred paying customers you co-founded R S E Ventures, and I'm pretty sure you see plenty of startup founders tell us, has anyone impressed you with a very.

Creative acquisition strategies that you haven't seen before. And he said, oh, this is an amazing entrepreneurs. They're creative. They know what they're doing. I wanna invest in them. Hmm, such a great question To the ones that impressed me the most are. There's, well, this, look, the ones who watch the movies are the ones who believe I gotta go raise my money, raise a round.

I need my first million and a half, right? That's like a certain subset, but every once in a while I'll, I'll meet someone who used all the available tools to create a fake Instagram account. AB tested, built a brand that doesn't even exist yet. Managed to bootstrap their products, you know, themselves in their mom's basement, and sold those few ones.

And the reason why I say that, Is because they lowered the bar, not raised the bar. People subconsciously, sometimes inadvertently raise the bar to getting the business off the ground, and the entrepreneurs that I found are most fascinating are the ones who just did it without having any of the pieces in place.

And so I'm actually in my mind remembering different examples of people being like, I focus grouped it to a hundred people. I said, how'd you do that? And I went ahead and then I bought the drop, shipped it from China, and I built these and I sold these a hundred products. That to me, when somebody bootstraps and does it, sort of face it till you make it is very predictive of successful outcomes.

Less so than the ones who believe that they had to put together the proper series, you know, seed round and raise the millionaire. So I don't have specific examples. I have a General Prince philosophy that when I see that scrappy hustle and being able to do it with nothing, and here's why that's so predictive, I.

Success in business is not determined about how you press opportunities. It's how you navigate, you know, horror, right? Which happens every like three months and in my case, every morning in some different way. And it's the people who iterate and pivot are the ones who are very successful. So if you show me that in the formation you were scrappy, you're probably gonna be scrappy in how you overcome, uh, crisis and how you pivot.

I think it relates to your previous history as well, because if an entrepreneur is resourceful, if any problem comes into their way and they can find a solution that's in a very attractive trait, especially when you are betting on someone early on, which you don't know the direction, the company can either go to a billion dollar or it can go bust 95%.

It goes bust because that's the statistic out there. How important is resourcefulness in your mind? Oh, I love that. I love the way you're saying it. It's a, you did it a lot shorter than I did. Resourcefulness is so important, but, and now to take it a little bit, people ask, well, what do you look for in an entrepreneur?

And so if I'm giving a philosophical answer, because again, you're a lot of it's prediction, right? You're trying to forecast. Not just how really the business is gonna do, but how are they gonna do under various different fact patterns that are impossible to test before you begin? Right? So what I look for is a blend of two traits that one could think on the surface are actually in conflict, right?

Or mutually exclusive. And that is confidence and humility. And so why it's so important is because, like we said, success of business is dependent upon the various iterations and pivots you make along the way when shit doesn't work out the way you planned, right? But where confidence and humility. So why is confidence, humility, why do they go together?

One, it's, it's the confidence to go ahead and look within and question whether things are really working and the fearlessness to do it, because everybody can identify when things aren't working, but only few do. Universe is very benevolent. It will give you infinite opportunities, of course. Crap before you crash into that iceberg.

And technically even in the Titanic it did. Right? So that's a metaphor for our life. Few take advantage of it. What makes you take advantage of it is the humility to acknowledge that I'm not perfect and the confidence to do something about it. So, Back to the beginning of the first hundred sales. When I see somebody who is crazy scrappy, especially when they already had stature or they were willing to do that type of work, that shows me they have the humility that they're gonna be able to pivot along the way, and they have the confidence to believe they were gonna figure out and make those 100 100 sales.

And so that's how it all relates to my ultimate, you know, prediction of founders. You wrote a book called, Burn the boats about how to toss Plan B our board and unleash your full potential. If you were to give us your, the masterclass version, is there a winning formula to help you embark on a journey like this for a breakout success?

Yeah, there is. Number one, the reason why it's called Burn the Boats is because if you go back to the beginning of recorded history, every culture, uh, has a fable General where their back was against the wall. They were out numbered a hundred to one, and they do the same general thing. They sabotage retreat.

Now, this was a literal retreat. But, and I'm using the word as a metaphor, so they destroyed their retreat, the boats and their food provisions, because what military strategists know intuitively is what we reject as adults, which is humans perform better when we have less choice. Not more choice. So I'm pulling this metaphor forward from soon Sue in 500 BC to now, and I ask the question, is that still true?

Because we've been socialized to believe that more is better, choice is better, right? And what the research shows is a great study at Wharton in 2014, which I talk about in the book, is that merely thinking about a plan B while you're pursuing your plan A does two things. One, limits the likelihood that you'll be successful, but two, it'll make you care a lot less.

It's a fascinating study. No one had ever studied this in an empirical way, right? So what my book reinforces that any entrepreneur intuitively knows that when you're trying to do something, I'm breakout success. I'm not talking about something that's habituated. If you wanna learn B, you know, lose weight.

Burn the boats might not be for you. All you gotta do is have my Fitness Pal and enter your food every single day and keep and operate in a calorie desk. So that step and repeat when you're trying to do something really hard, I inject something into the universe that doesn't exist before. That's breakout success.

That requires 110% of your energy, not 95 or even a hundred. So what gets in the way? It's these metaphorical boats in our life that signal, I want to retreat, I wanna escape. It's anxiety, imposter syndrome, shame, all these different things. And so what I'm doing with the book is saying you have to figure out how to put yourself in a position to fully, totally commit.

Now why don't people do that? We all know that we need to probably commit, and we are conditioned to think that having backup plans is prudent. And so what I'm doing with the book, the masterclass is. We all have to contemplate risk. Contemplating risk is different than having a backup plan. Contemplating risk means asking yourself four fundamental questions.

What's the worst that's gonna happen? What would I do if the worst thing were gonna happen? We humans underestimate our capacity to mitigate things. We know we can just get a soul crushing job. Anybody listening here and already knows their backup plan, you don't need to spend. 10 seconds. You don't even need to tell me.

It's that shitty job that you rejected when you became an entrepreneur. Number three, what's the statistical probability or likelihood that that bad thing is gonna happen? Pretty remote. Usually it's reputational and no one's gonna talk to me. My wife's gonna leave me, like your life will go on. But number four is the why, which is why.

Am I doing this and what pain would I be willing to experience or endure or humiliation to achieve my plan A, for me, and I'm sure people listening to this, for me to go from a kid with a G E D I I teach at Harvard Business School for, to go from a kid with high school dropout to teach on the faculty of Harvard Business School.

I would not eat for like 40 days. I would walk on glass and I know everyone here who's pursuing a big dream plan A, it's the same thing. So I'll finish with this on this point when you. Try to simultaneously pursue plan A, but keep an A one eye on plan B. The amount of energy that you go ahead and you lose is enough.

It's measurable is enough to dramatically undermine your plan A. So my message to everyone is, Process risk at the beginning, before you undertake what you're doing right now. Trying to get those first 100 sales right, but let it go. You don't need to revisit it. Your primitive self somewhere and deepen your amygdala or your frontal cortex, wherever it is, will save you.

So forget about it. Amazing. I think you touched on an important point, that we know our flows. We are afraid to take that step. If we go out and do this exercise, let's say I'm a person who's working nine to five. I wanna go and start my own business. I do that exercise. I notice nothing is wrong. I. But as you can tell, the anxieties take over.

Are there any exercises or tactics or maybe mentorship advice that you could give so that someone gets unstuck even if they a hundred percent are sure they shouldn't continue in their job? No, I love that. But that leap of face is needs that push. Yeah, that's why I broke my, the metaphor, I'm not usually a metaphor person, but I feel like it worked for this book.

So burn the boats, broken up into three sections. Get in the water. Stay in the water effectively, and then build more boats because the joy of living is in striving and constantly reinventing. But we are all human. We take on water, continuing the metaphor we take on water. Even when we did what I just said, process risk at the beginning.

Why is that? Because we're human. You get anxious Also, people undercut us. Well, none of us can completely mitigate is the impact of those around us and those we love questioning whether or not we have what it takes, because lots of us, we marry the wrong person or we work for the wrong boss, or we, you know, whatever it is.

My, you're, you know, and people have a lot of impure motives and so what I always say, If you wanna steal yourself for the journey and limit anxiety, one of the most important things is to focus on loss. The fear of losing things actually makes us much more risk adverse, and I'm broadly defining things to include reputation, credentials, money-making capacity, health, whatever.

So, The more things I have, the more success I have on life. Ironically, actually inhibit my willingness to take risk. But I want to take risk cuz I'm not done growing right until the day I die. So what I do and talk about this in a book is I do anything I can to meditate on defining what I need as narrowly as possible.

I consciously think, okay, Matt and I do all the time, what do you really need? Okay. I don't ever want to go back to poverty again. So I need enough money to make sure that nobody can ever tell me what to do again. I married my best friend, so I need to stay married to her and hang out with her cuz that makes me happy.

I have the best kids in the world and I need to eat. That's it. And so now look on the list. I didn't say I need the Harvard credential. I didn't say I needed my company. I didn't say I needed a boat. You know what I mean? So what I would say to anybody, if you really want to go all in on that first 100 sales in your business and whatever, make sure that you're consciously reminding yourself you don't need a lot.

And that enables me to, when I get the incoming, I'm like, all right, maybe you're right. Maybe this is gonna fail, but you know, I don't care because I already have what I need. Amazing. Thank you for sharing these insights. So you were a guest on Shark Tank. And you get to meet all of these entrepreneurs.

You have few hours maybe to assess them. Every shark sitting there has access to the same information. Now, the entrepreneurs who are very good, everyone will bid on them, but there is that entrepreneur who's in the middle and you're indecisive if you want to go in or go out. What are key characteristics that you look at and key red flags that would determine, you know what?

There's something behind that. Person, even though maybe their revenue figure is not as big as I want it, or their valuation is not as interesting as I'm looking at, because it's like a speed dating. You have to pick. Within the other five sharks and get that opportunity. It's a great question. And so let me give you some facts, right, cuz it's even more pronounced than what you're saying.

Cause it actually be, would be a great study, right? Somehow. But, um, you only have a max 40 minutes on average. So each pitch, even though it's condensed to seven minutes on tv, it's 40 minutes. But the seven minutes is a pretty perfect representation of the 40, which I think is incredible how the, when I've been on it and I watched the seven, I'm like, I don't remember what you edited.

You know, so. It's pretty accurate. That's number one. Number two, the entrepreneur, like you said, the sharks don't know anything about the entrepreneur when they walk in the room, so a lot of it is think about what you're doing simultaneously. You are both competing and assessing, which is rare in life, although I do think actually less rare than we realize, right?

You always wanna win the deal and then decide if you want it, but when you're a shark, you are trying to assess, but also at the same time, trying to put yourself in a position to win. And they don't. It's not like a moment where like the assessment period is over. Now we shall decide. Do we want the deal?

So a lot of the communication is happening. Now, if you're a newcomer to the Shark Tank, you're at a disadvantage because the person didn't research you. Maybe they don't know you as well. Mark Cuban's been on for a decade, right? It's Mark Cuban. So you have to figure out how am I gonna differentiate myself?

I share that only to say it's a different exercise because you're trying to figure out how am I gonna win the deal and whether I really even wanna win the deal. So you only have 40 minutes. The more, more the work honestly goes to assessing. The liabilities and the downsides and the opportunity, the opportunities are, I went in there with a very clear objective.

I would back businesses that are scalable and available, and what I mean by that is available to the audience at the moment they're watching because that's the best use of Shark Tank, right? And um, scalable. That once it's on the show, they could become very big. And that rules out like brick and mortar because you know, if you have to be in a random city in order to take advantage of the shark tank picture, that's not as valuable.

Right? That's my overall paradigm. So what am I looking for? I go into it with a bias. Towards tells cuz this is now about signaling, it's not gonna be concrete. So I'll give you my number one tell. This applies to anybody listening when you're seeking money, I believe there are these little proxies that say what kind of person you are.

Are you confident? Are you deceitful? Are you competent? So I'm gonna skip. Know your numbers cause that's like master of the obvious, obviously should know your numbers. The one tell that I look for a lot is when one of the sharks will criticize something fundamental about the business, by the way, from largely a position of ignorance, it's like not everybody could be an expert of them.

I'm amazed by some of the sharks acting like they have like a PhD, but whatever that they think they know and then they'll criticize and then the entrepreneur. For example, like, I don't know, your name sucks, by the way. I don't see how this, you know, even though they've invested seven years, like, you're right.

Okay, I'll change the name. So when somebody is too quick to concede to the shark, that tells me a couple things. Either one, you're very weak, right? Which isn't a great scalable attribute, but two. That you would do anything to get a deal done, compromise your values, and one that's naive because even a shark isn't gonna change the trajectory of your life.

But two, that's, so what I look for actually is the person who resists pressure that I actually believe is unnatural. And that little moment, it'll happen somewhere, somebody will say something, you see a, and you see a look in their eyes, they're like, I wanna be respectful because my life is on the line and I really want this deal, but I'm not willing to compromise my self-respect.

And by the way, you don't know what the hell you're talking about. When I see that under unnatural pressure, I get very interesting. But I got like five of those, you know that. But that's just one of them. This is very interesting. Thank you for sharing that. You know, Richard Fineman is an extraordinary physicist.

He has the saying where he's saying, the first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. Have you ever fooled yourself? Oh, I love that statement. Uh, first of all, I like that we're bringing physics into this, but, uh, that, uh, physicist rather, I used to always say, because like, I'm very good at communicating.

Obviously I had done press. As a young person, that was my job, and I would always say to my team, like, let's not believe our own headlines. And for me, I would say don't believe you're on hype. So I'm always very frustrated when people can't differentiate what you are putting out to the world, which a degree of puffery or like you have to represent your product.

You have to be confident, you have to believe in yourself. And then you know, you have a meeting internally and it's like, wait, no, you're just believing the thing that was written about us. I'm amazed like when somebody generates a puff piece and then they use the puff piece to confirm what they know intuitively.

It's covering up a lot of flaws and so I have to be honest, I don't believe that I am fooled by me. I actually think I have the opposite problem, which is I spend an inordinate amount of energy auditing what I did not get right. I don't experience. A ton of joy out of the adulation. I just don't, and it's not, it's not like a humble ego brag.

I actually think it's healthy to have a degree of, um, affirmation move you. But I feel that if I'm moved by adulation or the headlines, um, I'm dependent upon it. And I don't like being dependent on anything. It's a byproduct of how I grew up. It makes me very nervous, so I don't want to need the attention.

So I don't think I fool myself. I think unfortunately, I deny myself the glory. A little bit of the success. Somebody listening here might be like, I know Matt. Well, that's not true, but I actually don't. I think that's pretty accurate. I love the statement though you, when you're a founder and you're representing a product, you do need a little bit of disassociation and a little bit of discipline that comes with disassociation.

Be like, okay, I exist on this front. I need to show up in the world. I need to talk about my product. Right? But I also need to remember your Amazon ratings suck. Like, and you better do something about it just because you're getting away with it right now and it hasn't knocked you down because you're great at generating articles about yourself.

If you know that you have an Achilles heel, spend your energy on that. Cuz otherwise you're in the land of hope where you're like, ah, maybe no one will notice. Like they just don't notice right now, but they will. Amazing. What do you think is the key to living a fulfilling life? Being intentional. I think that the absolute key is being intentional, and I think people are really afraid to be intentional.

They don't like the answers when you're intentional. One, they don't like the, I hate it. I hate planning when I have to plan anything to do with my schedule. It frustrates me because I'm losing optionality and I have to make choices. So my number one friction in my relationship. My sweet wife when she's like, Hey, the flight is tomorrow and so we're going to Korea.

I'm like, ah. Damn. I don't like, I love like losing the op optionality, but I sure the, my desire to maintain optionality causes so much duress and stress for me and others. So I think being intentional. And then the other reason why people don't want is like, let's use an example of somebody listening right now who had an epiphany and in the middle of the night at 3:00 AM they hate their job or they hate their life.

They clinging to the epiphany because they're worried they won't have another one. And they don't wanna ask the hard questions cause they don't wanna be denied. They don't wanna deny themselves. Right. But that's not being intentional. And by virtue of that, you wake up three years later and you're like, wait a second.

I didn't a adequately weigh the opportunity cost of this thing. I did that. I came to me at three in the morning and now I'm in a business I don't really like, that doesn't serve my needs. And two, had I been willing to be intentional and scrutinized that idea, I probably would've come up with a better one that is now only obvious in hindsight.

So I think. All bad choices largely come from not being intentional. Amazing. And by the way, just to be clear, cuz I asked to Rick the shit outta my own book, burn the Boats, I can't totally implement this advice. You know, I always feel the need. I'm like, back to your point about, um, fooling myself, I'm very conscious of hypocrisy and very conscious of the fact that when put, we put out these, um, wise Instagram quotes.

That you're subconsciously, you're purporting to the person who's receiving it, that you've got it figured out. And I believe that is a mass lie that we tell at scale. Nobody has it figured out, all humans progress and regress. And so for me, I'm, I just wanna make sure I'm asterisking the fact, even though I said the key to an intentional life is to live intentionally.

The debate I talked about with scheduling is like this morning with my wife, so I feel like I'm on this earth partially to impart what I've learned, especially under duress, but it doesn't mean that I can implement it, and I often say I wrote my book, so I'd read my book. Amazing. Thank you for sharing that.

Matt. One last question. If you were to say something to someone, they're not anymore here, and you regretted that, you didn't tell them before that, what would that be? If there's anything, anybody in particular or just generally, generally. I feel like because I do try to live intentionally, that I leave hard feelings from people who are wanting to get access to me and.

I would have liked to explain to them that I was under a lot of pressure in ways that weren't visible on my personal life, that I keep private and I meant no harm. It wasn't you. It wasn't even me. It was something you couldn't see. And I wish I had more to give, but I had a short period of time on this earth.

Now I'm meeting you because we're having this conversation. We're both dead. Which at least is good. We can make amends. And I feel like I, in a lot of ways am misunderstood because people don't have visibility to it. And the second thing I would add, as a subpoint, I'm a very introverted person. I'm being extroverted because I'm very passionate about what I'm trying to convey.

But, and the only way to do that is to be extroverted. But I'm actually very content to be alone. My thoughts in a dark room for years on end. And so most people don't know that about me. But now that the guy's dead or the woman, they would've known that cuz they got the answers to everything. So we probably don't even need to have the conversation.

Thank you very much for sharing this thoughtful and, uh, heartwarming, uh, regret. But, uh, what's next for Matt? So anyone listening, I'm so passionate about this book. I por, I bled on those pages. It took me three years to do. I largely, during a pandemic, I wrote this book for those who are not self-possessed for the 40 per 8% of the people on a random trained platform.

And if you said you have a plan B, they'd say, yeah, I'm working on it right now. I wrote it for the people who feel like they have, they don't have a champion. In their corner or they have something that they're carrying that they can't put down. I wrote it to hold up a mirror to the risk-adverse, and so I know that to read my book.

Not everybody, some people are cynical, are like, this is stupid or this is unrealistic, but to everybody else who really has a dream but maybe doesn't have people in their corner, I get messages every single day, couple a day. Let's say, Matt, you changed the trajectory of my life that makes my life feel like it mattered in a way that not a single thing I've ever done on this Earth has made me feel.

The credentials are bullshit. Shark Tank is lovely. I don't care. Packaging it though in this book, makes my life feel like it mattered, and so I am not going to allow myself to look beyond this book. I'm going to come within an inch of my life to disseminate it. And that's all I care about right now. I assume there'll be a new dream cuz I usually have one.

It's the weirdest point in my life. I actually don't have another ambition other than Ken disseminating the book. Not because it costs, makes my money like cost of fortune, but. It just feels like why I'm here, so I don't have a, a next. Amazing. Where can people find the book? The book is on Amazon. If you're overseas, the book is, uh, distributed around the world, but Amazon's probably the best place.

I have a website called, um, burn the boats book.com. We're doing, I've turned the website into a living version manifestation of the book where we have a way to interact with me via ai. So I can answer questions, which we're launching next week. It's a bot and it's a repository for every interview I've ever given and the salient points from the book, but also the studies and the science behind it.

So you can be like, Matt, I think you're an idiot and I don't agree with you. Like now you can ask my chat bot, who needs a name, by the way? And all the studies is gonna be on the website. So my vision of this is to create a community of boat burners. And the reason I'll, I'll end on this. You asked me before about the catalyst, what made the boy a man.

Sometimes we read something that moves us, right, or confirms what we have, and then there's a loss, a mourn. As we move further away from the catalyst, we try to reach back and and hold onto it, but it fades and it's like a sadness. Like I wish I could go back to the moment I experienced it, Reddit, whatever.

I want to try to retain that feeling because I know it's fleeting and I want to do it via communications, my website, the chatbot, cuz I feel an obligation to those who I help cross the threshold to sustain the momentum. So that's where my head's at. I don't wanna move beyond this project. I wanna stay here.

So Matt, where does the name of the book come from? I'm so glad you asked that because the name comes from, it goes back to the beginning of time. There is all these different instances of a military general who's been outnumbered, you know, 10 to one, whatever it is, and they resort to the same strategy, which is to burn their boats, eliminate retreat, right?

And so there's, uh, the first reference I could find is actually 500 BC for a soon, Sue. But what's interesting culturally, The, the idea of the strategy is attributed to er Anne Cortez in 1519, right? He came over with 12 boats to, uh, attack the Aztecs and his, uh, troops were very unmotivated. So they woke up one morning and all their boats were on fire.

And that has become the story. Now, the problem with that are twofold. One. It's not the first instance, but two generally. He was considered a genocidal maniac. And so what I find fascinating is actually when you go back in time before Cortez, there was Tariq Zi who was a Muslim warrior and he conquered the Iberian Peninsula, Spain.

What did he do? He burned the boats in 7-Eleven ad and what I find fascinating is young Cortez who was sitting in class in Spain, probably read about Tariq conquering Spain, but interesting. Now, the people in the Muslim world know this story, but, uh, people in the western world attributed to Cortez. So Tariq came before him.

I, this thing, Cortez had a better marketing campaign, but then if you rewind in 206, an incredible battle to unify, China took place. And the Chinese general burned the boats. Uh, the Chinese actually have a word for it in 200. So there are these moments throughout history. I mean, you're talking about China and the the Arabic world, but they're kind of forgotten and they're eclipsed by Cortez.

So what part of the book and me talking about it, I like to tell that story cuz it also shows you, no matter all these different disparate cultures, we're united by this idea that to get the most out of ourselves, we need to give ourselves no choice but to win. Amazing. Thank you for stopping by, Matt.

This was amazing. Very insightful. We wish you the best of luck on your journey. Thank you so, so much. Good luck everybody. Get those a hundred sales.

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