Ep. 21 - A Life Well Lived with Cam Houser | Gross To Net

Cam Houser co-founded 3 Day Startup and ran it as CEO for a decade, growing it to 13,000 students across dozens of countries and helping launch founders who went on to raise more than 150 million dollars and sell to companies like Google and Etsy. Then he did the thing most founders never do. He stepped out of the CEO seat on purpose and rebuilt his working life as a one-man shop, trading the org chart for autonomy. Today he runs Actionworks, teaches entrepreneurship and AI to clients from the State Department to the Navy SEALs, and still lectures at UT. In this one he and George compare notes as two people who both walked away from the top job, and they get honest about what it actually costs.

Most of the conversation lives in the gap between what AI can do and what it cannot. Cam built an AI product on GPT-2 back in 2019, fine-tuned it on business books, and watched ChatGPT wipe it out almost overnight, which taught him more than any win would have. His throughline is that the hard, human parts of building are still the whole game. Relationships are the real moat, the tool is only the teacher if you actually use it, and the thing that changes a career is usually not a clever post but a scary message you almost did not send. He is bullish on AI and clear-eyed about its limits, and he makes the case that learning still happens best by doing, out loud, with other people.

He also gets into the part nobody warns you about. The CEO seat is lonely, the freedom he traded up for has its own bill, and after fifteen years without a job he is now thinking about taking one, not for the money but because he misses building shoulder to shoulder with people he respects. His mantra is a life well lived and a dent in the universe, and this is a warm, funny look at what that costs and what it is worth. Cam also promised George a sequel to the free hot sauce course they made together, so that is happening. Find Cam at camhouser.com and his newsletter at camhouser.com/newsletter, his company at actionworks.co, his video gear list at actionworks.co/gear, the free hot sauce course at actionworks.co/hotsauce, and on X at x.com/cahouser.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Hey everybody, welcome to Gross to Nut, the podcast that asks what you're really optimizing for and what it costs to get there. Today's guest built a global organization from scratch, 13,000 students, dozens of countries a decade as a CEO, and he watched the founders he trained raise over 150 million dollars sold to companies like Google, Etsy. Then he did something difficult, which I'm pretty familiar with. He walked away from the CEO seat on purpose to become a one-man shop. No team to manage, no empire to defend, just a camera, a curriculum, and total autonomy. He had a number of factors that pushed him toward the camera in the first place. He's been teaching people to use it ever since. For clients from the State Department to the Navy SEALs, he picked a different scoreboard other than the one he built his career proving he could win. Please welcome my friend Cam Hauser. Welcome, Cam. So nice to see your face. Thanks, George. Pleasure to be here. And just such a huge fan of your work and Yellowbird.

SPEAKER_03 1:18

So pumped to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:19

Thanks, man. I'm a I'm a I'm a huge fan of your work. And we did, I didn't mention this in the intro, but we did a uh Cast was it 2018? We did a how to start a hot sauce business course online. Yeah. So I met you at a party.

SPEAKER_03 1:32

Yeah. And I was really hyped to meet you just because I love hot sauce. And then the pandemic happened, and this was in the very early stage of the pandemic. And I reached out, you said, hey man, I know we none of us can leave the house right now. Could I just interview you and see what happens? And you know, there might be something. I think there's people who want to know how to make a hot sauce. So we could like slap this together in a little course just for fun. And I get about that was in the pandemic.

SPEAKER_02 1:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:55

I get a sign-up to this thing about every other day. Right. Someone who did the yeah, it's still a big deal. There's just not much of this. And I think also it's a testament to the fact that Yellowburn has become such a phenomenon. But this thing is still kicking. It it is still uh just the pe people download this thing. I I got an email last week saying, hey, you've clearly built the audience of hot sauce fiction autos. We've got a distribution platform, let's talk. And like so it's just quite funny how resonant that has been. Just I think it's a testament to you just shared a lot of brilliant stuff from the trenches, which is what people want when they want to learn how to do this stuff.

SPEAKER_00 2:30

Yeah, it's it's I'm I mean, I'm glad that's cool that people are still listening to it. I credit all of the competition that we have in the market now to the fact that we put that course out for free. Everybody who wanted to do it now has a free pass to go do it. So go download, check out the show notes. There's the link to I I actually should put the link to that to that class. Is it still free?

SPEAKER_03 2:53

Actionworks.co slash hot sauce. Yeah. And yeah, you just gotta dump in an email and it sends you the whole thing.

SPEAKER_00 3:00

That's awesome, man. Well, I had a fun time doing that course. Um it is I I mean, I think the the the funny thing is like how little education there is on doing that sort of stuff. Like if you're like if you're like, oh, how do you start a business? The the like old school way was to go get an MBA. Like that's how you learn how to start and run a business. And I know that you've done a lot of stuff with coaching and teaching entrepreneurs because you were at you taught at UT for a while, right? Like didn't you teach entrepreneurship or tell me tell me tell me your Yeah, so I can I can walk you through the whole story if you want, yeah, and kind of hit the UT stuff.

SPEAKER_03 3:42

But I grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, beautiful place where at the time nothing was happening, and Austin was where it was at. So I moved to Austin to play in hipster indie rock bands and start tech companies or work for tech companies. I did both those things, but I was much better at working in companies than I was being a musician. So then I started two companies, two tech companies myself, and they both failed. And I kind of didn't know what to do with my life, so I made a very expensive decision to go to grad school at UT. And the education there was phenomenal, but it was very theoretical. And I just have really strong beliefs around the best way to learn how to do something is by doing it. And that was, I met other people who felt the same and was just always really, I'd never been able to shake the entrepreneurship bug. So we started this boot camp program called Three Day Startup. I met people from different parts of campus, and it was just a student organization, just something we kind of slapped together, shoving young people in a room, getting them hopped hopped up on Red Bull, and having them start companies. And turns out this particular approach at the time, this was 2010, was pretty wild. This was this was a new thing, and to your point, like you had to go get a formal education and read a bunch of books. And this model, it just worked out really, really well. It was something new and different. And a lot of the folks who came through it, uh, yeah, one of them ended up getting acquired by Etsy eight months later, which was kind of wild for a bunch of idiots, I mean us not knowing what we were doing. And then another company got into Y Combinator. And so those two wins was like, wow, we really have something. Um, we had some exchange students from Germany who loved it and said, Hey, can we try to do this in Germany? And that worked. And for us to see it work in Germany where they don't have the angel funding, they don't have the resources, they don't have the reputation of a startup ecosystem like Austin does, said, All right, we're we're doing this. So yeah, that's when I became CEO and spent the next 10 years taking this thing all over the world, which was a real joy. But the the UT piece is that about four or five years in, the University of Texas came to me and said, Hey, we've seen the success this program is having. This is great. We'd love to have one formally within our walls. And I know how much business schools make at this point. So I quoted them a very large amount of money and they spit their coffee out. And they they did not like how much money I asked for them. But I said, Hey, listen, I've always wanted to do professor work. Is there any way we could work out some arrangement where I restructure some of this into a professor class? And they uh they were up for that and ended up being really great. We did that for a long time. And part of the reason I want to do that is I've always dreamed of being a professor, but also my style is very intense and fast moving and sometimes kind of casual. And as we grew globally, you know, we're learning how do we convince the Ministry of Innovation of Portugal to give us a bunch of money to build startup programs. And and that, if you say we're gonna give young people Red Bull, that does not work. So, or it it'll, it's a short sale. Whereas when being on the faculty at a prestigious university like the University of Texas, I noticed that I my hunch was that that would change those conversations, and it very much did. So again, I love teaching, but also from a prestige factor for again, wooing government audiences. Sometimes they the only thing they trust is a well-regarded university. When again, as an entrepreneur, my bias is a little more towards, hey, I'm I'm really curious about who are the people in basements on a ratty couch building things. Like that's kind of the the groups I index on. And so part of the reasons I've been quite successful at this is being able to manage both audiences well and both kind of flows. Um Do you want me to just keep going into everything else?

SPEAKER_00 7:16

Or I don't I don't know if you want to No, I mean let's put let's pause on some of that stuff a little bit because I I uh I I mean I like some of the I like a lot of this stuff, right? And I do get the uh our sponsor this week is Red Bull. Have a Red Bull start a company is their slogan as their sponsor here. But uh no, I I I think that there is this thing that I've you know thought a lot about and talked a bit about, right? Probably not as much as you, but there's this thing in entrepreneurship where there are, I mean, there are all types of people who start businesses, big, small, whatever, right? Um and not all of them have MBAs. There's a lot of like learning through doing. Like that's really important for me. I'm a I'm a learn learn through doing it kind of person. Like if I had started, I don't have an MBA, I have a degree in you know, theater and music. And so like if I if I had uh if I had gone through an MBA program, I still wouldn't I wouldn't know how to start a business. I would know, like you said, the theory of it. But then when you go to do it, like when you go to like call a supplier or like your your books don't reconcile for the first time, and you're like, oh, that's not what the textbook said was gonna happen. Like these numbers should all cleanly reconcile. And it's like the first time that happens, and you're like, wait a second, this is the like you're in the real world now, and it's kind of like there the only thing that I've ever been able to do to train for that is just go do it and have the and have the issue come up and then find a place to s to solve it. So I think that that's a lot of the type of stuff that I think you're doing, and some of the like there there are a lot of creators out there. There's you know, resources like the Udemies and of the world, Coursera's of the world, where it's kind of like you you can run into an issue and then say, How do I go learn to be? Because I ran into this in my like career at being CEO at Yellowbird, where I was like, okay, the very first thing I have to learn is like finance and unit economics, because none of it works without that basis. So like I went and learned that. And then you get to a point where you're like managing 50 people and you're like, oh, I don't have any management skills. So I went and learned that. But like if I had just put it in a box and been like, okay, I'm gonna go spend two years learning the basics of finance and management skills, and it's like, what how do you how do you practice? Like, if I didn't have like, uh for me at least, and probably for a lot of people, if I didn't have like, okay, I'm going through this management course, and then I can turn around and try that in in real time with like an issue that I'm having, like getting a, you know, like I I will say that I had a lot of like when I had to start managing people, being really clear about our policies and like equally enforcing policies. Like, I didn't think when I started a hot sauce company that I needed a bunch of like HR policies, but once you have 50 people that work for you, now you need HR policies. And now you have like people knocking on your door several times a week saying, like, well, hey, so-and-so took off for their doctor's appointment, and I've got this other thing, and my kid has to do whatever, and it doesn't, it's not fair. And it's like, okay, well, how do how do you like manage that? How do you manage the expectations of a large group of people when they don't and not everybody sees what's behind the scenes? Anyway, that's there, there, there's a whole bunch of stuff there, but like that was a thing that I did where I was like, okay, now I need to figure out how to manage people and how to create policies and how to deal with like a sales organization, a marketing organization, how to put KPIs out there for people. Like it would have been helpful if I had had all that information starting a business, but I probably wouldn't have retained it in the same way to see the difference it makes when you do it versus when you don't do it.

SPEAKER_03 11:04

Yeah, I just there's I've had too many academic experiences in my life where I got some information and when the situation were that information was useful, it wasn't relevant. I didn't remember it well enough, the context was a little bit different. And that's the reason I love learning by doing is that learning by doing also if you have a deep authoritative voice and a towering presence and you're a leader, that ought to like sometimes means people will just take you seriously to begin with. And so the advice that person needs is different than if your voice is really if you don't command authority and you can't make good eye contact, like that type of manager needs a different set of skills. And learning by doing help if because you were applying this stuff, you figure it out. But yeah, like if it, you know, if you're doing brain surgery, I don't want my brain surgeon to learn by doing my pilots, I don't want them learning by doing. But so many other endeavors you can learn on the job. And I also find it quite interesting how many people, again, that's just the nature of work. So I'm really interested in how quickly I can get going on my own. And of course, the failure, your own failures or those learnings stick. Whereas when you didn't get a great grade on a test, I don't know how well that really sticks with you.

SPEAKER_00 12:13

Well, I also think just to, I mean, I I think that like pilots and brain surgeons learn through like technological simulations of the things that they're doing. And so like technology creates the ability for like you to go get, you know, a thousand flight hours without put without putting anybody's life at risk, including your own. Yeah. I know they don't count those flight hours the same, but it's like there I there I do still think that like there are so many there's so many industries that value the doing it, you know. Like I know I I had this is this is a total aside, but like I I had it was my like annual blood work time like uh this week, and I was sitting outside the room and the technician was like new and I heard the I heard like the lead tech talking to the like you know the the technician who was about to stick me with needles and pull my blood out was like I just I'm not very I'm not super comfortable with it. I've never really done it on people before and in a clinic and they're and the lead tech was like, you're gonna be fine, I'll be right here. And then they were like George Milton, and I was like, oh God, oh, is this the person you know like uh and the he did fine, like he was he was fine, but like it was like learning by doing is really important, is what we're saying. And I think that there are a lot of industries that like that believe that like is true too. So like people are still like practicing whatever whatever the thing is where you practice on like a water balloon or something before you go jab somebody's arm. So yeah.

SPEAKER_03 13:48

Yeah, and another thing that that stops us from learning by doing sometimes is we're afraid of failure or looking stupid. And I have always found it quite interesting that people know my current company and they know my last company because that one was quite successful. But the first two, like my best friends, don't even remember the names of my first two failed companies. So like my best friends, yeah. Like these were big chapters of my life, and I was putting everything in them, and they don't remember. So if they don't remember, no one else does. And once you learn that, I find it very freeing because that is what stops us from learning by doing sometimes is that fear of failure. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:22

I I just try to remember, like, I think when I think about the fear of failure, because what you're talking about is like people are so it's like self-involved is maybe not the right word. That's a selfish sounding word, but it's like people are like worried about you know, global war and the environment and like are like their is their job gonna get replaced by AI? Like, are there how are their kids doing in school? Like, whatever. Like people are worried about so many things that is not like whatever you just did or said or what, you know, like you're really important to you, but maybe not to everybody else in the whole world. So it's like, I don't know. How how much time how much like energy do you spend kind of trying to get people to not be afraid to look stupid or to fail a lot, but in kind of an indirect way.

SPEAKER_03 15:11

It's because it doesn't come to our forebrain, it's not top front and center in our mind that we're scared. We find excuses. And everybody does this, I do it a lot too. But a lot of times the most important thing we should be doing, we don't do. Instead, we make sure our landing page or our website is really good, or we organize our desk again, or this system that is going to be really useful when we're scaling to the next 50,000 orders. We spend time thinking about that instead of doing the I need to send a cold email to someone, or I need to go knock on this door, or I need to go try to get this meeting with this person who doesn't know who I am. We just find ways to not do that. And so I'm really big, I spent a lot of time thinking about it, but again, as you know, I I'm more interested in what do we do about it. So I teach a lot of outreach these days. I we'll get into the AI piece. I actually built an AI product back in 2019 and that that kind of informed a lot about teaching AI. But when it comes to outreach, I think making connections to people, that's a network is something that's just going to be valuable no matter what. And so learning how do you send someone a message. And people are pretty scared of this. Uh not only are they scared of it, but it's a muscle that atrophies. So if we don't send a lot of DMs or a lot of messages, again, it gets kind of harder to get going on it. So I do an exercise where we, you know, here's the good principles, here's how to do this the right way, make it really short, get be direct, and we have people write it. But then, like if we're in a classroom, we will put on the big screen, we'll have people come up to the front of the stage, plug their laptop in, and the whole room looks at the message, looks at the draft, and we'll say, Hey, you got five paragraphs, like maybe we shouldn't do five. So we'll trim it down. But before the person can leave, they have to hit send on the message. So the entire room gets to see, gets to see them send. And one, it's it takes away some of that resistance. But you know, then we have the next person go up and there's something really valuable at seeing this outreach and looking at it, but then for forcing them to hit send. And the other thing is that I have this theory that if you're alone at home by yourself, hitting send on a message, it's all on you. But if you've got a room full of people, either IRL or virtual, and you hit send, and you know that this room, like they're they're rooting for you. Like everyone there is, we're supporting each other. It makes a lot of that apprehension go away. And again, a lot of this stuff is just how do we manage our emotions? Doing hard things is usually not about like grind core hustle mode. How do we do that? Um, a lot of times it's we're just scared. And if we can remove that, we'll do it. And I think that happens best through groups of people getting together to do this kind of work. So that's why I love this kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_00 17:37

I love that idea. Like, how many people have included in their message? You know, by the way, I'm doing this and I'm writing this email in front of a room of 200 people, because that would get my attention if I was on the other side. If I was in your class, I would include that.

SPEAKER_03 17:51

Yeah, we we never do that, actually. We we we we're really big on the PSs. Uh it's really weird how people read a PS and a message. So sometimes like that's actually the most important thing is you send that message and your signature and then PS. And occasional drop-in like that, but we're more likely trying to the PSs for some reason, people read that a lot. So we'll try to hit a lot of the payload there. But it's just a really scary thing for people. Like sending a message, again, doesn't seem like it'd be that hard. But uh it's I also find that the things that change a person's life or their business or their career is like usually not a really banging social post. Uh, it's usually not some great idea they had. Usually the thing that changes the trajectory for an entrepreneur or a professional is like sending a message to someone. When you, when you like backwards look at okay, where were the points that were my trajectory changed? A lot of times because you sent someone a message and asked about a job or asked about a meeting or if they'd invest in your company, that sort of thing. So that's why over time I've gotten really into that. And just because as I mentioned with the AI thing, I think the skill in doing that, the value of that is only going up.

SPEAKER_00 18:58

Yeah, I agree with that. I and I think that there's we could talk about AI at any point. I'm very interested in it as well. I know that you are too. So I have that kind of teed up for us, but I do think that I think in general, and it sounds like you're kind of saying some of this stuff too. I think that there's in general at work, in knowledge work, especially quote unquote like knowledge work, the laptop class, whatever you want to call it, like people whose most of their work is like at a computer in some way. It's it's really easy to, I don't want to say waste time because that's not right, but it but it's it's really easy to kind of like procrastinate the things that actually move the needle with stuff that feels meaningful, right? Like rebuilding a spreadsheet, rebuilding a cost model for the eighth time feels like meaningful work, right? And you can fill your week up with it. The same way that you can like fill your week up with like vibe coding something on codex, right? And you I've I think that right now there's a whole group of people who feel like they're doing really meaningful work and the outlet is like Claude or Chat GPT or something, right? Where they're just like sitting by themselves using their computer, and it doesn't, and in a in a in a lot of s instances, doesn't really make any impact out in the real world, right? Maybe they turn it into an app or a business, or maybe they're implementing it, but a lot of this like I'm sitting by myself on my computer rehashing a thing for like the 90th time, you're kind of like just procrastinating doing something that is difficult, like sending a message. You're right, it's so difficult. And I've like, I've had several this this week that I've you know sent uh that were like difficult to put together. And I have a I have a little thing that I do where I have like a folder on my desktop that is just for email drafts. So like I don't ever write, like I sent you a couple emails for this show. I I revised the I look at those emails and revised them like probably an average of five times. Like if I send you an email or a DM on LinkedIn or whatever, like I have probably revised that five times or something, and it's usually to make it shorter. Like what was the what was the quote? Uh that I there's I love this quote and I always forget who to attribute to.

SPEAKER_03 21:14

If I had I'm sorry for how long this message is, I didn't take time to make it shorter.

SPEAKER_00 21:18

Yeah, if I had more time, I would have I would have written a shorter book or something. It's uh anyway. Uh but I love that I love that idea, and I think that it does take like what you're saying is like there is like a message that you can send or a call that you can make or like an action that you can take in the real world that has like that has like real consequences that really moves the needle. Where like I I don't know if I had to estimate how much time people spend delaying the important work, it's I would estimate most of it. I would estimate that most of it is like delaying the important work. Well, we're good at that.

SPEAKER_03 21:55

We're good at actions for ourselves. Yeah. And again, like I think a lot of it is. Just scary. Like it takes a it's it's it's painful to send a bunch of emails and not get responses. And it's good to develop that muscle to not be affected by it. But it is where a lot of the change happens. And I vibe code a ton of stuff, but uh you know, I'm in communities of people who like have vibe coded a billion things. Have they talked to users? Have they they've built more things, but the user growth has not changed. And so a lot of my language is like, hey, who told you no this week? Because that would be a huge win. A huge win if you showed what you built to someone and they weren't interested. That would be great. Uh the and I push people for that a lot and to not talk about how, oh, we shrunk the code base by 50%. Like it we're more efficient at doing nothing. We're not effective, right?

SPEAKER_00 22:43

So the code base for whom? For whom is this code base? Yeah.

unknown 22:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:49

Well, let's talk. Um, because I think we're we're gonna go to break here in a minute, and then I want to come back and maybe dig into AI. Let me talk about because I think we've got maybe some stuff in common. You've founded this company, it you know, it was renowned, it was well known, and it probably took up a thousand percent of your life. I don't know if we've ever talked about this specifically. But deciding to step back from that, like, is that something you want to talk about? Yeah, I'd be happy to.

SPEAKER_03 23:19

It was a heavy thing for me. It was my identity for 10 years. Like you said, it was definitely a thousand percent. And I'd finally found this thing that I was really good at. And I finally had my first win. I had a lot of young man status anxiety. Uh, Austin is such a founder, founder town that when you're young and unproven and a little more insecure, you're like, well, I'm I I'm worth nothing if I don't start a successful company. And so I I did, and also like was a company where I got to figure out what I loved doing, which it was a joy to be able to build this organization and have it have all this impact. I love being, I love helping founders and I love being an entrepreneur while doing it. I as I said, I'm a professor at the University of Texas on the side, but I just teach one very small class a year because I love teaching and I can call myself a professor. I'm not a real academic in the sense of I don't do research and um, I don't, and I'm not teaching a full semester class there. Um so again, well, I'm an entrepreneur who I have customers and clients like governments and various universities and various uh accelerator programs and other groups that need entrepreneurship to be working better in their community. And so I've got to do this all over the world and it gives me a lot of joy. Um, but at 10 years of being a CEO is a long time, and you were a CEO for a long time. There are only so many, like the when you're the CEO, it's it's very, very lonely as well. You are you have to be Superman and invincible to your charges, the people below you, and your investors or your board, you can't really show weakness or vulnerability to them either. So it's a very kind of isolating role. Uh, one of the things I do these days is I'm a moderator in a community called Hampton, which does this whole thing. It's nothing but a group for CEOs to get together and share the things that they can't share with anyone else. And so I really enjoy that kind of work. But when I was a CEO for we can go into this if you want, but I spent after a few years of having a board, I was like, this is I love having a board, but I still can't tell them everything. So then I emailed my friends and said, Hey, idiots, you're now my personal board of directors. And the next time we hang out, um, I want to talk about we're gonna do this thing. And we did. It became this really magical part of our friendship to give some structure to because men also don't really talk about our problems. You know, we watch the game and that's about it. And I was curious about exploring that. But anyway, so 10 years of being a CEO, I was ready for something different. Uh so handed the company off to my lieutenant and hung around in an innovation kind of capacity, just building new things. It was hard for a lot of reasons, but it was definitely hard for the person I handed it off to. Because when we walk into rooms, everyone's looking at me, you know. Uh important that that was really hard for her to do her job when the guy who is the face of the company, the founder, CEO for a decade. Um so so that was uh made things quite difficult. And it's uh it's also like you have to learn how to bite your tongue, because leadership's got to do things the way they want to do it, and you were gonna you would do it a different way. So it also became a a lot more formal. Uh, you talk about HR policies and that sort of thing, and we added a process layer that you know is what a company does, but it also slowed things down a ton. And in my world, like speed is really, really important. But I would for months after, and it it took a long time to to reconcile like how do I feel about this and watching from afar. And eventually the best decision was for me just to separate, which I did, and you know, rooted on from the sidelines. But man, that uh emotionally it was it was rough.

SPEAKER_00 26:45

Yeah. Yeah, man. I feel that. I feel all of that. I think that it is like my my experience mirrors your yours a lot. And I think that the it is like I I've found that like the loneliness of being a CEO is exactly what you've said, right? It's like the people that you report to, like there's nobody else in your organization who does what you do or has your level of responsibility. And so like the people who report up to you, it's like you don't you don't want to lay those problems on them. You can't lay those problems on your board or your investors, right? Because you're the solution, you're like the solutions guy for everybody. You're like the confident solutions guy for everybody. So like who's the solution person for you? You know, like where do you put like where do you put the incredible burden that you bear for like from each side of it? And it's like a you know, the boohoo, right? Like everybody kind of has this idea about like, oh, boo-hoo for CEOs. Like, hey, not all CEOs are like Elon Musk and like none of them are trillionaires except for one, right? So like this idea that like CEOs are what like some people like when I start when I was first became a CEO, it was so that I had something in my uh in my email signature so like people would return my calls or like it was honestly like the first time that I called myself a CEO was not like this is before we had investors. It was so that I could get somebody, it was so I could get like suppliers to take me seriously. So I could say, like, hey, we really like I really am pricing this shit, like this equipment or whatever. It's like I couldn't get I didn't get a call back until I put CEO in my title and people took it seriously. So like I took I did not take on that job with like the gravitas that it I guess earns out in the world. I took on that job lightheartedly to get a response from somebody. And then like several years later I was like, oh shit, I'm actually the CEO, right? And and so like there is this, there is there probably most CEOs in the in the world are not, you know, are getting underpaid for what they're for the for the level of responsibility that they have, right? Like we all kind of look at the like big tech CEOs who are billionaires or hundred millionaires, and we think that's what a CEO is, but it's like it's usually some guy or girl who's like just overworked and doesn't have anybody who's really qualified to be their therapist or like be their support group. Yeah. Except for maybe other CEOs who are like, yeah, man, I get it. I get it.

SPEAKER_03 29:20

Um CEOs are not swimming, they're not, they're not leading wildly profitable companies, leading a wildly comfortable life. But there is an assumption that, yeah, you have to be the answers person who knows everything and the buck stops with you. But uh it it is a very wild existence. Like I'm I don't know if I'm ever gonna be a CEO again.

SPEAKER_00 29:42

Yeah. We uh we should do another course. I might cut together some clips from this and create a course uh by George Milton and Cam Houser called How Not to Be a CEO. Well, hey man, let's take a let's take a quick break. I want to come back and talk a little bit more about uh moving on from the CEO life and what you're optimizing for now. And we could talk about AI. Guys, stick around for AI. If you came here for AI, you're gonna hear it with Professor Cam Hauser. Be right back. Can I call you Professor? Does anybody call you Professor? Nobody calls me that, but you can. All right, Professor. Let's let's talk a little bit more because I feel like we were just getting into kind of like, you know, stepping out of the CEO role. And and I've talked to a number of people about that. It's one of those things where like there's no, right, nobody has any sympathy for you except for like other people who have done that. Nobody cares, right? Who whoop de doo. But I care. It was a big thing, right? It was and it took up, it took up all of your life. How how did you kind of like think about because I think one of the things you know I put in the intro is that you were thinking, you know, you've focused on kind of like smaller things, smaller teams after that. And I kind of feel I mean, I kind of feel the same way. I feel like maybe I've managed the biggest company that I'm ever gonna manage.

SPEAKER_02 31:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:57

So I I I mean, I'm guessing I'm I'm I guess the question in there is like, what was it like because if you're anything like me, and I know that you're a you're a fan of stoicism as well, so if you're anything like me, well I am as well, right? So like you probably thought about it a lot. You probably reflected on it a lot. Like, what what were some of the things that you kind of meditated on or that you found out or realized like that you hadn't really paid attention to in 10 years, like stuff that you were interested in that maybe didn't get its time in the in the limelight? Like how how were you thinking about that?

SPEAKER_03 32:35

I mean, that's a really important question. There was a lot of life that I think I had just not even been aware of. I I think a lot of our life is what we're aware of and what we notice. And I think the lens that I had developed for that was very, very specific and very goal-oriented. I I stepped away in August of 2019 and I started my next company in September of 2019.

SPEAKER_00 32:58

Okay. Hold on, let me do the math. That's uh not very Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 33:03

I think it was a restlessness of I just needed to do something. And and I had something in mind very specifically, which was this was the first time I'd ever in in 2019, like around that time, it was the first time I ever encountered a language model. OpenAI, no one knew what that company was at the point, but they had GPT-2, right, which was a precursor model, like one of the early models before ChatGPT and everything else. And I just remember the first time I saw words appear on a screen that had never existed in that order before. Like this was different than Google, right? Google goes and finds stuff that's on the internet. And this was this weird thing that makes it, you know, GPT2 was not a great model, but it was just like I had this thrill of this is different. There's something here. And so I kind of flipped out and was like, this is incredible. And had a friend who is a technical co-founder who does like AI research. And so he helped me build a product with this. So we what we did was we took GPT-2, this, you know, before we ever had GPT-4.0 or any of these other models, and we did a process called fine-tuning. And fine-tuning is when you it's just a it's like a post, it's not training, but it's a way to change a model in a certain way. And effectively, if what I do and what I love doing is helping founders, what we did was we took this foundation GPT-2 model and we fine-tuned it on business books. We figured we'd build this like business advice chatbot because in 2019, no one knew that that was a terrible idea. So we built it and it was very incoherent. It was not a very, like it didn't make sense a lot of times. It would, it was going off its training data. And so, like our the the corpus of text that we'd use to train this model was overweighted in books around Scandinavian shipping books for some reason. For something that had a lot of books around that in the corpus. So you'd be asking it questions about like, how do I find a mentor? And it would tell you about Norwegian shipping lanes. It was really weird. It would talk about Viagra a lot too, which is because I think some of the training data had a lot of that in it. And this was again before the product was mature. But um, people were just not, no one knew what it was. We we built this thing, a prototype, and we put it in front of people, and they'd be like, Oh, this is like Google, right? And I would explain that's not how language models work. It's actually very different. And that was really hard for people to understand. It's one of those things like, you know how your parents, a lot of them think that Facebook is the internet? It was that kind of thing. And we've said Facebook not the internet? Exactly, exactly. So it was interesting, but it wasn't providing anything of value and kind of just confusing people. And then ChatGPT happened. And ChatGPT out of the box was amazing. It was so much better than what we had built that we just immediately we had the honor of being one of the first companies, one of the first products wiped out by an open AI product update. So that really sucked. But at the same time, getting that early to language models was a real advantage. It means I was familiar with them and how they worked. And a lot of my work is when I'm trying to convince, you know, the Ministry of Commerce of Ecuador to hire me to build a startup program to teach the entrepreneurs in their region, to get deals like that, you have to put together these 80-page proposals that are really long and dry and they have no personality. And at the time, that's how AI wrote. So I was actually able to, like in the past, I would need four people to put together these proposals to submit for these opportunities.

SPEAKER_02 36:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 36:35

But because I was really good with AI with ChatGPT and you know 3.5, we were able, like I was able to win a bunch of deals that I probably shouldn't have won. So even though the product got wiped out, just being early to AI was really, really helpful. So these days I do a lot of like education around that stuff. Most of the education that exists around AI sucks. So the thing that I'm most into is how do we get people together using, I think that like to some degree, uh, the best learning is social learning. So again, learning by doing and building stuff, but doing it with other people. Because when you build stuff by yourself, it's pretty lonely. So I love running cohort programs where there's structure and we teach how do you do things. But the real value is not the smart things that I say or someone on my team says. The real value is that we pick a goal, what they want to do, they try to do it, and we all get back together in a Zoom room or all get together in person and say, oh yeah, here's what I did. This was awesome, or I'm still struggling with this. And that makes it feel like you're part of something bigger. You got other people to talk to. But that's where we found people have the biggest wins and the most fun. It also works really well that if you teach people how to do good prompting, well, great prompting changes every three months, right? The ways to do this. So keeping it project-based and just get doing it with other people tends to work a lot. So these days, I a lot of this will give it a fancy name, like a fellowship program, which is just so people will brag about it on the internet. But really, um, because they're not always sure they want to start a company. If it's not really a startup accelerator, if you're not sure you're building a company. But a fellowship program can be for anyone. That I get a lot of joy out of building kind of environments like that where, hey, it's a month-long program, we get together, we sprint, we build stuff, we share what's worked, share what's not, and that that sort of collective experience is where a lot of the magic happens.

SPEAKER_00 38:15

Yeah, I love that. That's awesome. I want to do one. Yeah. I I I have found that too, right? That there's like uh I I didn't get into like a I kind of got into it when it was, you know, when ChatGPT came out to the public in like 2022, whatever. So like you got entered way earlier than me, but I've been a huge nerd about it ever since I did get into it. Like I was in in terminal trying to build agent loops in like 2023 before I knew the what the term was. But like there there is like I I agree with what you're saying, that like that, and I think this is kind of what we're talking about about startups like earlier or just like getting these communities together. I'm in a couple of communities of of people who are like working on this stuff, and so to like get together for a dinner or workshop, or like, you know, like a working session, there'll be like two or three hours, and somebody's like walking through a problem, and all of a sudden it'll like click something, like maybe you've got something that you've worked on where you're like, oh, try this because the you know, store your store your keys in the one password CLI. That'll just give it a, you know, you can bring that with you everywhere. And you're like, oh, that unlocks something for them, but then something that they're doing is like, oh, I actually didn't know how to get a you know, agents to program their own subagents. Like that was one I was at a yeah, I was at like one of these workshops, and somebody was like, Oh, yeah, I just have the agent like hire the subagents it needs. And I'm like, I'm over here writing like all these agent MD, subagent MD files, and it's like just have it hire the ones it needs. Like it was like stuff like that. I I I love it. Well, what are what is the stuff like what why don't we start here, right? Because I think that I think that you you were like back in 2019, people didn't even really know what a LLM was or what it did. I would argue that here we are in 2026. Probably most people who use these things don't know what it is that it's doing. And I think there's I think that there's a big under misunderstanding about like what AGI is or like where we are, like what is the intelligence that is actually happening in these models? It like, especially since you were like building products on this seven years ago, way before anybody was even thinking about this in the mainstream. How can can you explain LLMs to my audience so that we can maybe educate some people right now?

SPEAKER_03 40:37

I'll do my best, but I find that most people are less interested in my explanations of what the tech is and what it is, and they're more interested in like what can it do for them. Sure. And and and giving them frames to do that. But the way I kind of explain an LLM is I just say, hey, if I say to you one, two, three, four, and point at you, you know that the next thing you should say is five. Right. And that is, you know, pattern matching. There's like that's what's going on there, and that's what LLMs are. That is helpful to help, because a lot of people's mental model is that there's actual, again, we use these terms like it's the model's thinking and all this kind of stuff. And it's useful to understand those frames, but uh honestly, sometimes the best way to understand them is understand what they can do and what they can't. And what I I'm very interested in the question of what should we be focusing on now? What should the humans be thinking about? And so I spend a lot of time like, how do I get better at critical thinking and discernment and and and like what's valuable, what's going to be valuable in this new world? And it's changing a lot, but I I've done so many experiments that failed and went nowhere. But getting your your muscles good at that is also just a really, really good skill. Building stuff that doesn't work is better than reading articles about AI. So I don't know, like to the AGI stuff, that's a whole like philosophical discussion of are we headed towards a Terminator 2 like scenario? And who knows, right? And it's pretty exciting when the government bans, you know, the fable models bianthropic, that kind of stuff, um, which apparently last night got unbanned. But it's those sort of things about when, you know, how's the economy gonna change? What's like really like uh the more predictions I make, the less confident I am. But uh what I just feel like this is a time of opportunity. I do believe pretty strongly that while there will be great change, I think that overall, again, the entire history of technology has usually created more opportunity, more jobs, improve prosperity for people. I actually think that's gonna be the same thing with AI and not worry about it killing a bunch of jobs. I do think it will be tough. I think it's gonna be a lot of change. But this is what humans are. We're resilient creatures that learn and adapt. And what I find interesting is when we get new technologies like this, they're also they they give underdogs a chance. Like I think it's I do a lot of work abroad. I do a lot of work in countries that are underdog countries that, you know, the the gains of the internet really, I mean, it it benefited everybody, but certainly the technological hubs in the United States benefited the most. Right now, AI gives an opportunity for some of the people in in underdog countries to learn this quickly and how can they use it and leverage it in these ways? And maybe it'll be more egalitarian than the way the internet did. So I don't know. As a curious, optimistic person, I'm pretty pumped about AI.

SPEAKER_00 43:18

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I I am too like skeptical of some things, but I do think like one of the things I think about, because that version of like, hey, it's really, really advanced auto-complete. You know, it's advanced pattern matching. But that's like, it's also that that's all that also becomes difficult for humans because like if you go do an IQ test, like a classic IQ test, most of it is like pattern matching. Most of it is like it, most of it is stuff like we're being asked to do, I don't want to say non human things, but like this judge of like, am I an intelligent person at like the university level or like the grade school level that judges. Of like, am I an intelligent person? A lot of it is stuff that like these large language models crush. It's like recall, it's pattern matching, it's context, it's like that sort of stuff where like I mean they don't do great at math unless they get like a Python coding environment or something like that. But like there's still like if I there's still this like kind of angsty thing of like, well, if they're a million times better at like pattern matching and autocomplete than I am, and that's what I was told was intelligence, then uh like I agree with you about like critical thinking. Like like critically critically thinking your way through novel scenarios is just like a human thing. It's not a thing that LLMs will that it's not really how LLMs work, right? Unless that critical thinking can be done through autocomplete.

SPEAKER_03 44:53

Yeah, and I mean we we have a the models do a thing we call reasoning. And again, that we're we're just using these terms because they're the close thing we we have to it. But the thing that I find so wild is the the pace of how how fast it's happening and where we are now with GPT 5.5 or whatever compared to what 3.5 was. And I I'm deeply clawed code pilled. Like I like you, I spend a lot of time in the terminal now, and I wasn't doing that before clawed code. And the fact that it can is this good is wild. It's also insane to me that for all of human history, we had to find someone we knew and ask them how to help us. Yeah. And then we had to, in the early internet, we had to go find forums and subreddits and all this. And it is, again, I don't think most normal people have accepted the fact that wait a second, if I can't get this thing to do what I want, I can ask it how do I do this thing? We call that the the tool is the teacher, which is just the way to remember up top, okay, whatever it's not doing, it's not working for you, you can ask the thing itself to try to accomplish these goals. Yeah. Yeah. And that's that's just a wildly new concept. And it's like, again, I'm very interested in how do we make good decisions about I don't need to predict the future perfectly, but I want to be directionally correct. And which direction to go in, I think there's a few bets you can make. I think having a strong network, I think being really good at marketing and distribution, people knowing your name, knowing showing up in a genetic search and being known for something is powerful. But it is not easy to know what bets to make right now. Uh and I say this as a guy who, again, spent a lot of time and energy and money building a product to get wiped out almost instantly by ChatGPT. Oh man.

SPEAKER_00 46:27

That I mean, there's a lot of people who have that experience now. Like they're, I don't know, poised to ripe, wipe out whole industries.

SPEAKER_03 46:35

Yeah, and and we'll see. Like humans also, like the that's the thing. So much of building anything in the past was like development time was the bottleneck.

SPEAKER_02 46:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 46:43

And it's it's gotten significantly easy to build things, but human behavior only adapts so fast. And like Amazon, like, you know, their whole thing is we just customers are never gonna get mad at getting their stuff cheaper and faster. And so everything they do orients around those two north, those two poles, right? Those two goals. And with with humans, like again, we like I'm quite surprised about how many companies, you know, some accounting firm in Idaho using software that hasn't been updated since 2010. And that's because they don't want to adapt, they don't want to vibe code some new solution, right? Yeah. So again, we we have to keep remember that you and I are nerds and we love this stuff and we're gonna play with it. But uh market doesn't necessarily follow the same drives and incentives.

SPEAKER_00 47:23

No, you're right. I I and I agree with that. And I think that it's like whenever I have these conversations or read this stuff about like how long until like Salesforce gets displaced by this stuff, like a long time, I think. I I don't think Salesforce is going anywhere. Obviously, they're gonna like integrate all these AI tools and stuff. But like if a most companies that use Salesforce, like anybody we don't use, we've never used Salesforce, but like most of the companies I've talked to that use something like Salesforce are like, oh, it's 90% of the stuff we don't even use. Like it's too they're they're overpaying for this is a lot in SaaS, right? Where you're like, you're you know, if you use Monday.com or you use HubSpot or whatever like platform you're using that costs, you know, tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, depending on your deployment, you're like only using five or ten percent of it. So it's really not hard to like vibe code in a weekend like that five to ten percent that you use. But then I think the problem, and I think people have written about this a lot, is the problem becomes maintenance. Like there's a many billions of dollars maintenance problem because it's like you can have somebody, you can like stand up a system like that, but how robust is that system that like you or I vibe coded in a weekend? Like the answer is we'll see.

SPEAKER_03 48:41

Yeah, yeah, we will see, which is fun and exciting. But to your point, like like I've uh I do some of the things I've vibe coded, like there's a couple tools I don't pay for anymore, but the maintenance is a big one. And uh, there's I have this concept called the signature layer, which is that once I buy something or I've got a teammate who's giving me something, I'm gr I'm great if they used AI in it. But if it sucks, I'm blaming them. Like whatever they they're deliverable, whatever they submit, whatever they offer, yeah, they need to take responsibility for it. And you know, I when I have to do a a new deal or something, of course I'm using Claude to help like get the legal stuff done. But I still give that stuff to the lawyer to look over and he knows that what I'm paying him for is like if the contract's bad, he knows it's his fault. And so that's what I'm buying with that. Cause because I don't trust myself to know if what claw generated was good or not. Sure.

SPEAKER_00 49:30

It's a really good, it's a really good way to do a first pass, right? Like to say, hey, if I this might have cost me 20 hours of legal time and I can cut it down to five by saying translate this to English. Because like that that like lawyers I don't think are going anywhere, but like the ability the ability to translate a contract from legalese into English, like plain English, is is is huge, right? That's like what is this port like what does this whole three pages of my T-Mobile contract mean? Like it's it's it's not even like these big industrial like corporate contracts. Like I might have a huge contract with a supplier or you know, something like that, or a retailer, a distributor, or something where I'm like, yeah, I want the lawyers to look at that. But even like personal, like you sign up for T-Mobile and you don't, you're like, they give you a 72-page contract and you're like, okay, well, I can download that as a PDF. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna spend, you know, 20 hours of lawyer time reading my T-Mobile contract.

SPEAKER_03 50:32

But a lot of these are just like efficiencies around certain things. I think the bigger piece is that if you think about like the lawyer, I know him and I trust him.

SPEAKER_02 50:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 50:40

If you think about what Yellowbird is, this is a set of relationships. Like the fact that you have vendor relationships and distribution, that is priceless. A lot of times we think that what a business is, oh, you make hot sauce. Yeah, no, hot sauce is actually a small part of it. The fact that you have these relationships, you have trucks, you have all these relationships with other entities, with businesses and with people, that's the thing that's insanely valuable. And that AI can help us build new products, which is awesome. But those relationships we don't have if it's a brand new world, right? And so that's why, again, I'm I'm a fan of think I just think a lot more about like the customer list is the important thing, the vendor list, the stakeholders, the having a team that you trust, like the relationships are what matters. And AI have not seen facilitate this in any meaningful way thus far.

SPEAKER_00 51:26

Yeah. I I agree with that. I mean, I think that like every there's every every sales outreach group is using AI to send out a bunch of trash. Not everyone, but like there are a lot that are like, hey, I don't want to go write these hundred outreach emails. So like AI can do it and AI can send it, and they're fine. You know, they're okay, but it's like it's not really the same as like building actual relationships. And you're right, like like Yellowbird's business and most businesses are built on, you know, they're built on all these different nodes. Like, can I make, like, do I have a good recipe? I feel like to talk about hot sauce, and we probably talked about this, like having a good recipe is like 2% of the problem to solve. Yeah. You know, like having a good recipe is table stakes, but it also isn't like, I don't know, like when you talk to people who are like, who are like really passionate about some recipe they've got, it's like, great, that's great. That's a great recipe, but like there's 98% of the race that you still have ahead of you. And it's like a lot of that is going to be like people, like a lot of those nodes are like, how do you find the right person, right? Whether it's because for us, like, especially being a smaller brand, we've started out as a very small brand, as a zero brand. And and so like finding somebody who will believe in you is like those are those are human, like those are human relationships, and you can't be like, hey, Claude, go form human relationships for me. Like you can't farm that stuff out. I feel like people want to, but you can't do it 100%.

SPEAKER_03 52:53

And then they take time, right? Like you went into restaurants banging on their doors saying, Hey, do you guys want to buy our hot sauce? And they said no. And then you went back a month later, and then you go all you all picked up steam and then they came around. Like, this just stuff takes time. And I think that these will be a lot of the bottlenecks of the AI era. But I'm I'm just really interested in trust and how do we establish it. And you've probably noticed my really heavy-duty video setup. One of the big parts of that is that when you see someone's face and you hear their voice, that fast forwards trust in a way that reading a blog post doesn't do. Yeah. And so I'm very interested in how can people know me and they either like, okay, this is the guy we're looking for, or no, he's not our style. But you know, either way they can figure that out. Whereas you just don't have a lot of information when you're reading text. Um, I think that's very telling.

SPEAKER_00 53:36

Well, you've leaned hard into video. Do you do you want to talk about that a little bit? Because you're, I mean, you're you're kind of touching on it right now, like the value uh of video. I agree with you. I and I envy your, I already told you I envy your video setup. I showed up, I showed up in like my spare bedroom with like backlit in a horrible way. So, like talk to me about video communication because you made a very intentional pivot to this. And I think you do it, I think you do it very well. And it's obviously like one of the one of your pillars. Thank you.

SPEAKER_03 54:05

So, right after ChatGPT wiped out RAI products, I was thinking, okay, what next? And I still I was always doing, you know, entrepreneurship education work and this kind of stuff, but I wanted something to differentiate. And so we were very unlucky with how Chat OpenAI wiped us our RAI products. But the next thing we did was we got, I got quite lucky was starting video stuff again, pandemic era when everyone was on Zoom a lot more. And my reasoning for that was I'd done some video projects before where I noticed that again, if you do sales work, and I kind of have the belief that almost like everything is sales. And for me, like my true joy in life is teaching founders. In order to get the privilege of being able to do that joy, I have to convince some government, some university and whatever to pay me. And that's sales, right? And so when you're in a meeting in Zoom or Google Meets and they see great lighting and they see great audio and great production, that does a lot of good things for you. It fast forwards a lot of trust. There's research on this, but I've seen this anecdotally true as well, is that people think what you're saying is more important. They think that you're smarter and that you're more trustworthy. And if these things could come across just from having a good video setup, hell yes. The other thing is that a video setup, you only have to get it right once. It's a short-term investment of time, energy, maybe get a light. Like, yeah, this camera is not, it's a Sony A60400, not that handy. And I have a gear list that we can put in the show notes along with the hot sauce thing if you if anyone looks at this wants wants a gear list. But all you gotta do is get it right once. And then everything else, like anytime you're in a meeting, you just turn your light on, turn the camera on, and it's this really positive head start it gives you in every meeting. And you know, sometimes I like to think I'm brilliant and I'm just dropping these gems in a meeting. Sometimes I'm not. Sometimes I'm saying stupid things. And if I have the camera and the lighting and the audio working for me, that's offsets the dumb things I say. Yeah. So yeah, I started a course called Minimum Viable Video, and it was uh modeled. I'm really into education and ed tech, and so there was this big era called the cohorts, cohort-based course era. There was this time when it's very normal to run a six-week online course that's live, you meet in Zoom, and people would pay a lot of money for these things. They'd pay two or three grand. And so I ran a course that did this for around three and a half years. I still do it privately for companies. So I've done this for Intel and for Silicon Valley Bank and a couple universities, but so I'll do it kind of white label now. But basically, it's getting three things it's production, so lighting, audio, video, all that stuff. Number two, the you know, the camera confidence part, which is just a way of saying how do you not feel like a weirdo on camera? Most of us feel awkward and pretty weird on camera. And so if you can get over that, it's a superpower. And the third thing is just on-camera storytelling. How do you learn how to tell a good story when you're looking at the camera lens? It doesn't ramble too much, uh, that sort of thing.

SPEAKER_00 56:57

Yeah, that's really cool. So if you're gonna say stupid stuff, say it with good lighting.

SPEAKER_03 57:03

Yeah, it goes a long way. It gives you a lot of slack, you know, it's um, you know how lookism is the idea that like good-looking people just they can get away with more in life? I think the same thing applies to your production. So good lighting, good audio, all that stuff gives you just a little more leeway for how this stuff can come up. Whereas you look like you're in a hostage video, that's not gonna help you getting the person on the other side to say yes or agree to whatever it is you're doing, buy what you're selling, give you that job, that sort of thing.

SPEAKER_00 57:29

Yeah. And I've you you probably have encountered this much more than me, but I have found in my career and life that many of the smartest people have the worst camera setups because it's like they're worried about all these brilliant things that they're working on, and that like that just like what the quality of their camera and their lighting, and like how much junk you see in their office is like just at the bottom of their list. And then you show up on a call and you might be a potentially big deal for them as a client, and they show up on a call and they're not you know, the same, the same, like the same way that you wouldn't like wear Bermuda shorts to like a really important sales meeting. It's like the camera lens is like how you show up for a lot of these things, especially if you're creating content, which you know, we're creating content right now, and I'm you know, it's just in the spare bedroom here. So I gotta you look great. Mainly I got you on here so that you can uh so you can fix my fix my camera setup.

SPEAKER_03 58:32

I'd be happy to. Well, I I that would be my way to repay you for bringing Yellow Bird to the world. Uh just it's in my fridge right now. It just gives me joy that this thing exists and to see the story of it and how it's evolved has been real joy. So no, I'd be happy to.

SPEAKER_00 58:47

Yeah. Well, you can drop the drop that gear list. Um I'm gonna I'm gonna provide a bunch of links for people. But before we before we break, I I wanna maybe touch on something that is really important to me and I think is important to you too, is like you you made the decision to kind of like step down as a CEO of a company that you founded that you put all of your time, all of your thought, all of all of your energy into. Like, what are the things that you're optimizing for in your life now? Like you're spending your summers in Savannah. It feels like you're doing more, I don't know, it feels to me like you're living your life with a little more ease and with a little more grace. Maybe that's just because you present so well on camera, but uh what what are the things that you're optimizing for now? Is it it doesn't seem to be like max revenue or max growth or or max like I don't know, social status. Like what are the things that are important to your life?

SPEAKER_03 59:45

My life mantra is I want to have a life well lived to make a dent in the universe. That's what I'm going for. I was a little more aggressive about that when I was a CEO because you lived and breathed it and your identity is inseparable from the company. So yeah, stepping away was more focusing on the thing that I love doing, which is I love being an educator. And if you're educating people around something that's high leverage, like teaching people entrepreneurship, entrepreneurs make, they can make big changes, they can do big things, they have a real high-agency approach to life. And so teaching them that skill through learning by doing just gives me a lot of joy. I never wake up and wonder what I'm doing in my life. And once every couple weeks, I get an email from someone who went through one of my programs who says, Hey, we just raised, you know, five million dollars, or hey, we just had an exit, or hey, the company is like finally doing really well. And like those are that getting those emails is the best drug in the world. So the I I did, I've spent in this life doing this kind of work. I did spend time with, I'd always bring in panels, judges for these startup programs and competitions, and I'd meet people who, you know, net worth was in like north of a hundred million dollars. And I would ask them questions like, hey, so you know, what was the best time of your life? And a lot of them said it was when I was in a dorm with my idiot roommate building a stupid idea. And that and I was like, really? That was the best time? Like, oh yeah, without a doubt. And that was a nice, a nice insight around, hey, maybe you know, chase money if you're having fun with it, but you know, all that all that research about above a certain dollar amount, which is not very high, your happiness doesn't actually increase that much. So I've been optimizing for a lot of autonomy, being able to couldn't I work a ton, but I I love this work. So I don't know if if you're it's like hard to compete with someone who's having fun. So if I have the time and energy to try new projects, um, I'll do it. The only thing I've been thinking about lately is I haven't had a job in 15 years, and I might actually get a job. And the reason I might get a job is the loneliness thing, is I'm um I miss working with awesome people. So what I'm optimizing for is if I get a job working alongside awesome people shoulder to shoulder, chasing a goal, and I do kind of like the idea of not being the CEO who has to make every single decision. So that's what I'm optimizing for, but I don't know, I'm pretty happy. So, you know, working on meaningful stuff makes me happy. So as long as I'm doing that, I feel pretty good.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:09

I love that, man. I hey, if you want to get a job, I am rooting for you. But we should also uh I think we said this off off the recording, but uh we're we're committing to doing a part two of how to start a hot sauce company. I like it how you're saying it out loud on the podcast.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:26

Now I have to agree with you.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:27

I'm gonna lock it in. Well, you said it off mic and you're like, well, we're both too busy for that. Well, now I'm saying it on the mic. You heard it here, folks. Cam, it's been a pleasure talking with you, man. I I hate that I was just in Savannah and didn't realize you were also in Savannah. But next time.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:47

Yeah, most definitely. I'll probably be back in in town in October. And I don't know if you are the one thing you might enjoy is like I'm running some startup programs next year in Austin. If you want to come in and mentor or give a talk or something, or just even hang out to soak up the vibe, man, consider yourself invited.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:01

Hey, I will say on the record that anybody who listens to me, I'm happy to talk at them. Anybody who wants to listen to me, I'm happy to do it. Guys, we've been talking with Professor Cam Hauser. Cam, thanks so much for joining us. I hope you have a lovely uh rest of your day. And uh thank you all for joining both of us as well. I'm gonna provide links uh for where you can find Cam. Cam, tell us really quick where you can find uh where we can find you. Hit me up.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:28

I'm pretty active on X and I answer my DMs. So my my Twitter, my X handle is CAHER. I am very lazy on Instagram. You can find me at ActionWorks Co. So you can try me there, but I'm I'm pretty slack. I'm on LinkedIn. I mean, LinkedIn is a, you know, you kind of like die inside when you're there, but I am there because the people that I, you know, the governments I work with and the companies I do, I do a lot of corporate innovation work, all those people are on LinkedIn. Um, but you know what? You should join my newsletter. If you like the way I tell stories and you want to hear more about the weird adventures of building, doing all these projects and building AI companies and doing all this stuff, camhouser.com slash newsletter. Or just go to camhouser.com. Join my newsletter, it's free, it's awesome. I used to write a lot of high-minded like business theory stuff, and what my readers care about is the wild stories of like almost getting kidnapped on a you know, on a scooter in India. So like I just share weird stories of helping founders in interesting places, and you'd probably dig it.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:22

We're not set, we're not gonna do that story on the podcast, so you gotta subscribe to the newsletter if you want to hear about getting almost kidnapped in India on a scooter. Thanks again, Cam. It's been a pleasure. Uh have a great rest of your day. All of you guys and gals have a great rest of your day, too. Uh, I love you. Bye-bye.