The Adventures in Small Business. This program is a collaborative effort by the U.S. Small Business Administration Hawaii District Office, the Small Business Development Center, the MING Center for Business and Leadership and the Veteran Business Center of the Pacific to showcase the local entrepreneurs, the stories of entrepreneurs and small businesses. I am Laura Hiromatsu from the Small Business Development Center and your host for today. We are fortunate to have Carrie Louie, who is the General Manager for Aloha Erobo's. Welcome Carrie. Hi, Laurie. And thank you for being here. Thanks for asking us. For me. We've been working together from the time you started and I would like you to share your experience in starting up the business and if you could also, what went well and some of the unexpected challenges that you faced as you started up the business? Well, I think what happened was it was fate because we ran a small restaurant and we made some beef jerky chips for our customers to try and that went over well and we decided well we should close the restaurant and do a beef jerky business. So lo and behold, we took the leap of faith with our eyes closed because shortly after that we found out you had to be USDA inspected to produce beef jerky and to resell it, which is what our plan was. And so we started the journey of learning all about USDA and all the complicated hoops and things you have to jump through and we had a customer actually who told us, hey, if you guys want to do this, you know, I have a warehouse out in YPO and we can build it out. So we did it. It took us over two years to get everything where it needed to be so that we could get inspected by USDA and have them give us our grant of inspection. So we started from a bare shell of a building and we learned all about plumbing, we learned about FRP on walls, our facility, you can shoot it down from the ceilings to the floors to clean it. We learned a lot of things and we also learned that moving your operation from a small thing to something large is, you know, there's a lot of things that go wrong because when you're increasing your production, you then have to, along comes all these things that happen, like maybe the jerky does not respond well in a bigger cooking, yes, dehydration unit and what we had to do to do it and then we had to figure out, oh, we need to take HASAP classes. So then we reached out to the UH system. We reached out to people on the mainland, Clevera Bundak. We hired a consultant and we knew this was all going to cost money so then we reached out to Laurie, you at Small Business Development. You helped us write our business plan. You guided us through a lot of things that we knew nothing about. So finally it came to the point where, okay, all our ducks are lined up, now let's go ahead and build. And even that was an adventure, right? Because the people building had their own opinions on what your plant should be. So they had their ideas and then, going to get back a bit, what is a HASAP? It takes a lot of, is it like a, right? So we had to learn about the Food Safety Modernization Act, which is FISMA, referred to as FISMA. Through that we also had to learn about HASAP plan, which is a hazard analysis of your critical control points. We had to learn about GMPs, good manufacturing practices. So our book is filled with all of that. Our book is about this thick, about three inches.   So what we have to do is, we can't touch anything until they come in. They have their flashlights, they shine it at all different angles, they climb into our dehydrators, they make sure that the, you know, the fan blowing has no dust on it, or they go through everything with a white glove. This is like not for the faint at heart, and you need a lot of capital, it took two years for you to do it. So you really couldn't produce or scale up your main product until you had your USDA sunlight facility. We could do retail sales, so that's, you know, just one-on-one, and really if you're building out that type of facility, it's not enough to cover the expenses. On top of that, you have your monthly expenses. We needed to hire an exterminator to come in monthly. And so, you know, I was explaining to someone just yesterday, they stole all the exterminator comes, they checked, if you have bugs and all this, yes, but along with that, you have to get someone who knows about food safety, because if they spray any kind of chemical that isn't, everything that's in that room or in the facility has to be thrown away because it doesn't contaminate correctly. So we hired Orkin, and you know, Hawaii, it's all about business relationships. So we hired Orkin because of our relationship with Lan Okamoto, just the best. We explained to him what we were doing. We explained to him the USDA side needs all of this. Our FDA side needed certain things, and so we've got that all in place. My Orkin book that USDA comes and inspects is another three-inch binder. It's another binder. And so you have all your safety data sheets and all of that there. And even that, you know, that's quite an expensive thing that you have every month. What a journey. Just to share with you the products. This is, I'm going to show the audience, this is one of the main products. It's a beef chip, thin as a chip and delicious. It's like beef turkey chip. Right.  So our beef chip, we have three different flavors right now. Pepper, which of course is self-explanatory. Traditional, which a lot of people on the keto diet like, because it's only salt, pepper and garlic. And your original, which is the teriyaki. Oh, this must be popular. The most popular is the teriyaki, right. And then after you did your beef jerky, I noticed you have other. So I guess there was some pivotal moment in your business that made you expand. Right. So we decided that, you know, there's, we couldn't rest all our laurels on just one product. And the company owner and our core group of people were all kind of crazy. So we, and we're all foodies. So we all have our favorites and we discuss things. And so the next product we came up with was our furikake potato chips. Both these? Yeah.  So we have that does really well. Then we said, okay, we got to do something else. And we always, for some reason, we don't stick in the same category. So we ended up doing this, an instant crème brûlée mix, and talk about instant. You mix the packet with four cups of heavy whipping cream. Bring it to a boil for one minute and refrigerate. And you get restaurant quality crème brûlée. So we have it in the original, which is a vanilla and Kona coffee. And we're really lucky because the owner's uncle is Stanton Ho. And Stanton Ho is touted to be the pastry chef of the millennium. He took the pastry team for the U.S. to Lyon, France. And that was the first team to ever get gold from the U.S. Oh, nice. So unfortunately, he passed away recently. But, you know, he left us this gift. And so we have this crème brûlée mix that does quite well. Then brainstorming again, we decided to start making doggy treats. Oh, my gosh. And that's it right there, 100% beef. If you're on a low-salt diet, that's wonderful. I eat that. Human consumption is OK. Yep. Same type of beef we use for the beef jerky. Your dog may not be too happy, though. Well, my dog loves it. And everybody's going to the healthier treats with their animals. Very, very healthy. So then a couple of weeks ago, in the next product we looked at, totally different again, called Jabba Lava. And it's 100% Kona coffee tablet. You drop the tablet into boiling water or hot water, stir it, and then you get Kona coffee in a cup. But the unique thing about this tablet is we've made it into different shapes. So one is a shell shape. One is a hibiscus. We're working on other shapes, and we're getting ready to launch this product in a couple of weeks. Oh, nice. This is going to be, where can you find this? Hopefully, you'll be able to find it at stores like Dai-Ai, or not Dai-Ai anymore, Don Quixote. You'll be able to find it at, perhaps, Safeway, Hostel Unlimited. That's where we sell our other items. And so because we've got that product almost ready to launch, we were sitting down again, and we came up with another new product. Our Fudikake chips did so well, we decided to make it into a cookie. You have a cookie here. So it's a Fudikake potato chip cookie with chocolate chips in it. And it's a very unique flavor. And one of my girlfriends says, I don't even like cookies, but I can't stop eating these. So quite addictive. So in the last few years, you went from your main product, which is the beef jerky, which is branded to chips, your creme brulee, your dog treats, your car. So new adventure. So what advice do you have for small businesses on surviving in Hawaii and making things work? You have to love your product, but not be in love with your product. You have to be willing to be like bamboo. You have to be strong, but you also have to bend. You have to rely on your resources. I mean, I have many people that are my mentors. Laurie's our mentor for business advice. We use resources like Aurora Salo and Lauren Tamamoto from the UH Systems. I use Klavera Bundak from the mainland, who's a great resource. We oftentimes call our consultant Kenny Olds. We have a number of people who can land a lot of light on many facets. So you build your team, make sure that you're always connecting with them, and then making sure that you network or make the connections. There's a lot of resources out there that you have shared. So small businesses are really highly recommended to reach out and then seek help when they need it, not too late. I like your saying about love your product, but don't be in love with it. Can you expand on that? And what brought you to that saying? Sure. For instance, I really like a lot of different types of food, but other people may not. So when we first came out with, for instance, a beef jerky, we had so many people telling us, oh, you know, I really want it a little bit thinner. Or on the other hand, I really want it thicker. I want it to be more traditional. I want this or that. And so we had to experiment. We do a lot of taste testing. We take it to events like Made in Hawaii, and we'll get customer feedback on it. And some of it may hurt. They may say, well, I don't really like this flavor at all because I don't really care for ginger, or I don't really care for teriyaki. But don't take it personally. You have to take it as really good advice and someone critiquing. Listen to your customers. Yes. We're going to take a short break here. And we'll be right back. Aloha. I want to invite all of you to talk story with John Wahee every other Monday here at Think Tech Hawaii. And we have special guests, like Professor Colin Moore from the University of Hawaii, who joins us from time to time to talk about the political happenings in this state. Please join us every other Monday. Aloha. Aloha. I'm Tim Apachella. I'm here with Cynthia Sinclair. And this is Trump Week. It's going to appear every Friday at 11 AM between Jay Fidel, Cynthia, and myself. We talk about Trump, the activities, and the news stories for that week as it pertains to the Trump administration. We hope you tune in and watch the fun. Aloha. See you then. Hi, welcome back to Adventures in Small Business. We have with us Carrie Louie from Aloha Edibles. Carrie, any words of advice? I know you were looking to export your products. Can you tell us the adventures in exporting? Oh, yes. OK, so what you have to do is you have to link up or partner up with people who really know the pitfalls of where you want to export to. So for instance, we definitely wanted to export to Japan. That was our number one goal, right? And then we found out Japan doesn't take beef products. So then we had to say, OK, well, we really want our crème brûlée there.  Oh, and your product is high in sugar content, right? I mean, it has one of the main ingredients. Right. So you learn all of this. And then we did research through Larry's office again. And we found out where the hugest consumption of beef products are. And so we're definitely looking to explore Canada next.  And then you have to link up with someone who knows that market. So we were in touch with someone who wholesales a lot to Japan. And they really help us a lot. So you still export to Japan? Yes. We do our crème brûlée product. We found out that people in Japan have very small refrigerators. Yes. Your small kitchen, everything is very compact in that market. Yeah. So then our crème brûlée makes quite a bit of dessert. So they have to make it when they are having a party. So it's a good experience for small businesses in terms of doing your homework, making sure they understand all the customs of tariffs, shipping, challenges, and so forth before they. So it gives a lot of capital to get there. It does. And then rely on SBA because they have classes. Right? The high step program, which is put on by the bed. They have classes that teach you about exporting. And that's a good way to start. Good to know. Any other advice that you have for small business as transitioning, what was the difficult part when you realized that some of your products that you just love were not as loved by others? So what did you do? How did you fall into all of this, make the transition? Did you look for people? Or did they come to you? How did that morph? Well, like I said, you can love your product. But you can't really be in love with it. So we've been experimenting with our meat. And we did a lot of taste testing. You have to have a thick skin. If there's a critique, it's not against you. It's not against your product. But it's really to make you stronger. So we've done that. We've tweaked our recipes. We're looking into offering other flavors that people like. A new one coming out is like a, it's a salt and vinegar. Because that's so popular. So salt and vinegar beef jerky. And there's many pitfalls too, right? So USDA would not allow us to do our sriracha flavor for a while because it would stain our cooking mats and things. And so we recently, in fact, last week, we found a way where it didn't stain. And so we're going to be bringing that back. So you have to really, one of the things is we have to have a passion.  Is that true? And then you just keep going. So what keeps you going whenever you have? Because you have had some multiple blocks and boundaries and everything that came at you. How did you keep going? What makes you keep going? I'm just one of those that if there's a challenge, I'm up for it. And it's fun. And so all the workers know if there's something that we have to overcome, yeah. Kara's going to dig in and we're going to go for it. So I'm the one who takes apart the band sealers to check out how they work. I'm the one who took apart our new coffee machine to figure out exactly what's going on. And I called in mechanical engineers and all of these things. And it's just I got to make it work. I have to find that solution. If I don't, I don't sleep. You're lucky to have you as part of the team to be able to drive all of that. In this tight labor market, is there anything that you recommend in terms of maintaining, keeping your staff? Because a lot of people are looking for good employees. What are the challenges and how have you maintained or kept your employees? Yeah, that's an ongoing problem, right? But we've been lucky. We have some key people that trust 110%. You know that they're going to show up. You know that they're going to give you 100%. They care about the product. So they want a quality product, too. And it is hard to find. But somehow, if you have that faith that you're going to find someone good, yeah, it happens. OK, so to keep them, what do you feel is too different than you think? To keep dog? Because everybody's looking for a good worker. So what do you do to, you know? Well, we take them. We try to, small things. You know, like when we stumble upon something, say, for instance, we stumble upon someone who makes a really good pistachio bread or something. We bring it in. We have everyone come in. And we all sit down and we just talk. Instead of having formal meetings, we do that more. So live it informal. Bring something in. Talk. We brainstorm. Talk about issues. Talk about future opportunities. And it makes it for a little bit more comfortable dialogue. So what it does is have a really formal setting with our agenda. Because we're a small company. So we can do that. I don't know if it would work in a large company, but it works for us. Yeah, it's nice. So what's the adventure next? When you started out, you first had to do a business plan. I'm going to backtrack a little bit. So you did a business plan. Is that something you highly recommend to small businesses to start sometimes if you're, or I don't have much time. And it takes a little time to do it. But how do you feel having to create the foundations when you start? I think it helped us because it set the direction that we needed to go in. And then we tried to stay with it. But then as time goes on, you do expand. And so of course, you have to update it. But it's like setting down your goals. So without your goals, you know who it is. It's like a roadmap for your company. Yes, it is. It tells you, and it's always changing. Like you change completely from when you're looking at your business plan now, it's so different from what you are now today, right? Correct. So sort of updating it, keep it going. Where's the next adventure for you? Well, we've decided dog treats is something that is very, very popular now. So we're actually working on a Marlin jerky dog treat. Nice. Marlin jerky treats. OK. Look forward to that. I know that that's a good one because we've done some test batches. And my dog personally whimpers and cries when she sees it. And she just can't wait to get it. So that's one opinion that I believe. That's great. I think that's interesting. And then I think you mentioned real quickly before we have to wrap up here is co-packing. Are you also going to be considering that? And what kind of businesses or food are you looking to assist? So we are looking at co-packing. And we've got two other beef jerky companies that don't want to invest the money into a larger facility, but do want to expand their product line. And so we will be co-packing for a couple of other companies. So besides beef jerky, somebody's asking, want to know can you make my cookies? Or are you willing to open up and discuss it with anybody who are looking for someone to help them co-pack and then get their product to scale up? OK, very good. We'll entertain anything. And then that'll be your next adventure as you expand. So this is very interesting.  And as you work towards growing the company, moving forward, your facilities there, any words to anybody else who wants to consider? Are you open to people looking at your facility to such a degree? They can give us a call. We do many tours if someone wants to see it. We're proud of our facilities. Are you the only USDA? We're not the only ones on Oahu anymore. There's one other. But I do know this. We're very, very proud that when USDA walks through and they tell us it's the cleanest facility they've seen so far in the state. And it's because we're new too, right? But it feels really good when they say, wow, no problems here. We're going to be wrapping up. But any other other words you'd like to share with us as far as the business or to impart on small business owners as they start to develop their team? What are the team members that you folks look for as you move forward with the company? I think the first thing you have to do is find people who you can have as mentors, like you. There are resources out there. The resources. And if you could share with us your phone number, your contact, your website information. So our website is www.alohaedibles.com. And our phone number at work is<PHONE_NUMBER>. And we're out in YPO. So if you'd like, drop by. Ours are governed by USDA. So we're there Tuesday through Saturdays from 6 AM to 2 30 PM. So they can buy all these products at your factory? Yes. And other than that, they're located at Don Quixote. And then all of these are located at Safeway. Not the whole line. Stores pick and choose. So we're at Hoso Unlimited. We're at some farmer's markets, especially Oneward Mall and Fourth Street Mall on Fridays. We're at Don Quixote, Safeway, Matamoto Shea Vice. You're all over the place. Nice. So. Yes. OK. But they can go to your website, and that will tell them where your products are located and how to get them. Or they can shop online? Yes, they can shop online on our website. OK. Good to know. Thank you for being here. I know that this has been a very, very exciting journey. Carrie has much expertise. She has whatever she puts her heart in, she has done more than 100%, 110%. And there's other resources out there as well for anybody who needs assistance besides us, the Hawaii SBDC. But we really enjoyed working with her. We'll continue to work with her going forward. I guess for other businesses out there besides exports, what other things can you share with us as far as running a business? Like you're back at the house. We're talking about your accounting, your bookkeeping. How critical is that to the business? Very critical. Are you a good accountant? From the beginning, right? Yeah. It's good to have a good accounting system from the very beginning before you start. Because once you wrap up, how is that? You had a system? We hired someone who's very good. And so he keeps us on point. And we'll get little text messages from him, love letters, right? Remember to give me this figure. Remember to give me that figure. You have this many more days to file this. Sometimes, especially December, you lose track of time. And as you get busy with operations, everything, especially if your orders start to increase, your accounting system is something that you really want to have in place at that time. But we're going to be wrapping it up. And we appreciate you being here. Thank you so much. Thank you. And thank you to the audience as well for joining us for Adventures in Small Business. Thank you.


This is the Blizzard Black Pearl 88. It's won numerous awards throughout the years and it's definitely been one of our best sellers And that's down to a few key design principles. Number one is the flip-core that it uses So flip-core is essentially the way that they layer up and press the ski within the mold and that's specific to Blizzard skis and What it really does it gives the ski a nice fluid handling it makes it effortless off-piece with lots of flotation But it makes it super user-friendly at the same time Mix into that a bit of carbon and we all know the properties of carbon It's very strong and it's very lightweight and that translates across the skis perfectly So we get great maneuverability, but we get Really responsive handling too so it's almost like super charging the ski But without the weight of a metal laminate inside there We've got an 88 millimetre waist so that gives us ample flotation But really it's kind of geared to more towards all mountain skiers someone who still wants something nice and agile on-piece too We've got women's specific design And that's the design ethos behind the ski keeping it lightweight using lighter weight materials to keep the agility there But keep the responsiveness levels up The kind of skier that is going to suit is quite a hard one to pin down really because it's got such a massive Performance bracket and ability bracket. We can put people who are wanting to get confidence in skiing softer snow But also we can put really good skiers on it as well, and they're both going to enjoy it just as much


Welcome back to the 21 convention 2020 over Lando, Florida being held for the first time ever at 21 summit For being held for its first time ever here in Lando, Florida Our next speaker is the founder of bulldog mindset is a millionaire software entrepreneur and a huge youtuber with over a Quarter million fans and I on YouTube you subscribers Without further ado, please. I'll be welcome for the first time ever to the 21 convention stage John the bulldog son man. That's how you guys doing today Alright, so I thought I would talk to you guys today about how to become a man And this is kind of funny This is one of the things on my YouTube channel I get the most shit for is because one of my intros is you know I teach you how to be a man and people say I don't need to learn how to be a man. I've got a penis. I'm a man But it's not true. It's not true because you've probably heard a lot of other speakers here today a lot of really good speakers Say something along the lines of that women are born and men are made and and it's very very true And I think it's something that you know, I'll talk about this a little bit, but Actually, we're yeah Well, I'll talk about a little bit when we get to the point of like why I put together this speech But I think it's something that we all need to learn as men and it's something that I didn't learn When I was growing up So I'll give you a little bit of background kind of introduction to who I am My name's John Sanmez, you know as as Anthony said, I'm the founder of Bulldog Mindset and Really the the purpose of Bulldog Mindset is to get rid of The victim mindset right so many people today in the world, especially men have the victim mindset You already heard Steve talking about this right when he was talking about basically having your own Center of origin like your mental point of origin of being yourself and not complaining about women not bitching about the problems in your life Right and taking responsibility, you know, that's the opposite of the victim mindset So what I really try to do with Bulldog Mindset is to teach men, you know How to become men but how to become high-value men who take full responsibility in their life so Bulldog Mindset is really based on stoic philosophy as the mindset and then I look at the areas of life that you need to learn how to master as a man from Fitness getting in shape, you know becoming a strong man as Elliot Hulse talks about a lot From the the financial aspect right becoming your own man a self-made man In fact one thing that's so important in the world today If you've noticed is that unless you have financial freedom as a man, you do not have freedom of speech anymore You will be silenced.   You'll be blackballed So it's really important to develop that and then finally The the dating relationship as a man you should be able to attract a woman You should be able to talk to them You should be able to cold approach a woman you should have those basic skills But so many men lack it today. So my story my background. I I went through quite a transformation That's why I created Bulldog mindset. That was really me in that picture there and You know, that's that's me as of recent. So What you see in the picture is a physical transformation but what actually happened in reality was more of an inner transformation because One thing I firmly believe is that your inner Your at your exterior is a manifestation of your inner So who you are inside it will it will show externally and and a lot of my transformation involved that But you know when I look at that that old picture, I don't even recognize the person I don't even know who that is because it's completely a complete change And this was before I learned what it was to be a man I didn't know at this at this point at this point. I would say in my life I'm what I would call a a full-grown boy Right, and I think that that's what a lot of a lot of men go through is that they don't ever make that transition Or they make that transition late, you know, I didn't make that transition probably in my life until I was Really probably about 33 so yeah, so I went through a huge transformation in my life and ended up Wanting to help other men to figure out the way, you know some some great people I see Jack Donovan here the way of men, you know books like way of men really guided me on that on that path If you haven't read that book by the way highly recommend it Okay, so I want to Talk to you I want to read something actually that I'd written When I was at actually another another great thing that helped me on the journey become a man at Elliot Hulse's Grounding camp actually Elliot Hulse was it was a big influence on me as well who spoke here as well But I wrote this when I was at his grounding camp Because he asked a question. What does it mean to be a man today and What I said was this I said what what does it mean to be a man today being a man today is the same as it's always been Men are made not born To be a man is to live with purpose To be a man is to trust in your own judgment and experience over everything and everyone It is to accept your full full responsibility for your life and to choose to reject the victim mindset To be a man is to feel deeply But not allow those feelings to control your action To be a man is to choose your own way To be a man is to live by your own principles instead of those dictated to you To be a man is to take risk to have courage to fight when necessary Make peace when possible To be a man is to reject weakness, but embrace vulnerability to be a man is to step up lead protect To take action and make decisions to be a man is to accept the consequences of your actions good or bad To be a man is to bring your gift to the world in love Even if the world rejects your gift even if you are crucified for it to be a man is to be respected among other men To have status among your peers among your tribe a Man is not swept away by emotion. A man has emotional mastery He feels the emotion, but he does not let it get a hold of him a man looks at disdain at Handouts and pity a man only accepts what he has rightfully earned To be a man is to never be finished never put the guard down Never drop the gloves fighting the battle anew each day Above all else a man seeks freedom a man seeks makes freedom in his life by conquering himself and exercising his own will So that's what it means That's what I'm gonna talk about today, and that's what it means to me to be a man So the first thing about being a man is Rejecting the victim mind so we already talked a little bit about what the victim mindset is But it's so so prevalent today That I really want to emphasize this point because many of us have the victim mind say we don't even realize it because We think that even if we are legitimate victims that it's okay to wear a badge of victim hood And we see this throughout society today. We see constantly The badge of victim hood being worn by people then being uplifted for being victims When you know truly strong men They don't want to be labeled as a victim even if they're a victim. I'll give you a story That that really presses this home point for me or this this point home for me I remember watching in the news. Maybe it's like a year and a half ago I remember seeing old Schwarzenegger at some event that he put together in South Africa and I remember watching this clip of this guy. He just runs across the the stage and he just drop kicks Arnold I don't know if you guys see that remember that okay, so This happens right and Arnold's like what he's like 70 something I mean, you know, he's still Arnold, but he's old. He's old man at this point Like he's getting getting pretty old and I remember him taking the hit and he I mean it was a big hit Like he moved forward. I mean it was he got drop kicked right and it hurt. It certainly hurt And then I think it was the next day on the news or maybe it was a tweet or something or someone's interviewing Arnold And he basically said they asked him they're like, oh, are you gonna sue him?  What's gonna happen? How did it feel to get kicked like that? Are you okay, right? Is there any medical problems and and Arnold basically responds with Did someone kick me I didn't I didn't feel I thought someone bumped into me Right Clearly he was in a lot of pain I mean you watch they played the video back while he's saying this and and he's clearly moved like two feet All right almost falling over right. I mean that was a hard hit but see Arnold Schwarzenegger is a real man. He doesn't have the victim minds it He doesn't even with the legitimate claim to victimhood.    It's you.  It doesn't change anything. The only thing that changes something is taking action So I could legitimize your victimhood. We could all everyone in this room everyone watching has some legitimate claim To victimhood, maybe you're bullied as a kid.  It's victim right, you know I've talked about some of the the migtail kind of things and again a lot of people say, oh well John You hate migtails. No, I don't I I love migtails by default as a man I'm migtail Okay, because I've always been going my own every man should be going his own way not someone else's way Right Steve just talked about his whole talk if you if you listen to Steve just talking before this That's the entire tea of his talk was go your own way But he didn't say bitch and whine and complain about it and blame other people Right, he said take full responsibility So that's the key is you want to get rid of the victim mindset You you think about what you can do what actions you can take how you can improve things and not the shit that you Can't control again This a lot of this come from stoke philosophy, right? If you haven't read stoke philosophy I highly recommend reading Seneca's letters to Lucilius. That's a great place to start if you want a little bit of a Soft introduction read the obstacle is the way by Ryan holiday Really good as well, but the whole idea is that the shit that you can't change Don't worry about it Focus on what you can change. In fact, I have a book up here by Victor Frankel man search for meaning So I'll give you a quick synopsis of this book if you how many of you read man search for meaning, okay? So Victor Frankel was a Holocaust survivor He wrote this book He was sent to a Nazi concentration camp. He saw his family killed his friends killed He was subject to all kinds of horrible torture and abuse Sexual physical whatever they did, you know what I mean and he wrote about all the things and The whole point of this book that that that he wanted to make was That you're not a victim because he didn't consider himself a victim what he said in the books He said that between when something happens to you and your reaction to it. There's a space and In that space you can interpret what it means And that's so key because that gives you power because here he was stripped naked in a concentration camp No sovereignty over his life from external appearances But he said I did not give up sovereignty over my life because I get to decide What I think I don't get to decide what the weather is or what people do to me how girls react to me I don't get to decide that But I get to decide how I interpret it and the and the story that I formed from that so That's how I highly recommend you read the book first of all man search for meaning But if anyone has a claim for a victim hood Victor Frankel does I mean not too many people have gone through what what he's gone through yet He rejected victim hood so whenever I hear someone bitching and whining and saying how they're a victim. I Can't hear it anymore. I can't hear it. I can't I don't have any empathy for it Because if Victor Frankel can go through the shit that he went through and not have the victim mindset Then then there's no excuse The next one is Developing emotional mastery This is another one that triggers a lot of guys when I when I talk about this because I Think Jesse Lee Peterson was was talking about this as well as that about anger anger So many people associate anger with a masculine as a masculine thing as a masculine emotion.   I mean am I the only one okay? Why is that? It's because you're not in control anymore, and so if you want to be a man if you want to be sovereign over your life How can you lose control? I don't get in very many fights anymore But I I used to be a little bit rowdy and get into some fights.  I'm not afraid of that guy. I'll knock that guy out He's lost control.  Because I know I know I know that guy is dangerous right we know it instinctually right That's the thing that's what anger so emotional mastery is so important as a man We always talk about how women are emotional. It's not a bad thing, but it's a female thing now I Have a system for developing emotional mastery, okay? I want to talk about three stages here of emotional mastery and by the way in this talk I'm gonna try and give you sort of my whole philosophy in life condensed so we'll see how much we get through it, but The first phase of emotional mastery is what what I call wearing your heart on your sleeve, okay? How many of you can relate to wearing your heart on your sleeve? All right. It's it's it's emo. It's it's going around crying and and saying oh gosh Nobody loves me this girl. She rejected me It's it's like it's the size like what's wrong with you Johnny. Oh Nothing just I don't know just I like this girl and she doesn't like me, you know, it's wearing your harness sleeve, okay? That that's where we mostly start. Okay. That's where nice guys are some of you are there right now. It's okay I was there When you're at that stage in emotional mastery Everything you feel you express Okay, it's very weak. It's very feminist childish.  And what happens? How do you determine what you do in life? You're completely controlled by your emotions. You feel good.    I'm invulnerable now You can't hurt me bitches and that was my my way of living and it worked I didn't feel any pain and no one could hurt me But you know what I had to get rid of in order to not feel any pain is I had to take off the I Had to put on Polarizing glasses. I had to see everything in black and white. I had to get rid of love as well I couldn't feel pain, but I couldn't feel love. I really couldn't feel anything at all.  It's like looking through the world and seeing everything in monochrome Instead of seeing in color like life is meant to be experienced to feel things Okay, but when you're in this stage, you're at least better than the first Because guess what you can be a man You can be more like a man on the stage because you can act without emotion You can let your analytical brain and your logic determine your actions, which is critical as a man But it's where a lot of guys get stuck How many how many of you feel like you're honestly you're stuck at level two like you figure this shit out You're not a nice guy anymore, but you're stuck here.  Okay. Well, did you feel anything? No, I have to keep on At some level, I'll feel something again. Right? It doesn't matter no matter how much your conquests is no matter How much if you are hiding from feeling experiencing emotion you're gonna be stuck so level three this is David Goggins right there, but big fan, but it's called feel the pain and keep on walking Okay now at this level What's happening is you're experiencing all the emotions there are you're not afraid of pain anymore You're not afraid of love anymore But you have something I'm gonna talk about in a little bit, which is called non attachment Okay, so you can fully experience emotions you're open to it But they don't control your actions Like they did when you were in your heart on your sleeve Okay, and what happens is now you're free You know, I love what Steve was saying in the previous talk when he was talking about About the guys are telling you don't be like a Don Juan don't romance and like just be this cold See you you if you're at the second level and you have emotional numbness you can you can you have to be that cold cold guy You can't actually experience anything you have to be careful. Oh, I don't want to give her validation I Don't want to you know do anything for a girl. I don't buy her dinner If you're a level three, you're like, hey, I'm the man. I don't care It's like I'm gonna experience and you know what if If you don't like me Doesn't matter I don't care. I feel the pain keep on walking. I'm experiencing life again All right, because now I was at level two for a long time It took me a long time to get to level three to be able to be to the point of being what I call being open Right because when we have emotions and obviously men have emotions, right? I think a lot of people mistake that they're like When it's like women are emotional little women are expressing emotions that they have See being a man is about Mastering the emotion you feel it, but it doesn't influence your action Not directly and so we have you know people who express their emotions level one we have people who repress their emotions level two not healthy and then Experiencing and letting go of emotions that's level three and by the way, I forgot to mention in the intro I'm trained for a hundred mile race David Goggins was a big a huge influence on me I remember reading the book living with the seal was running Like a 10 mile run and after I heard all the shit that that he did I I ran a full marathon the next day because I knew I could do it and some of it is just Understanding like seeing someone do it. All right, so let's talk about non-attachment So I think this is something really really critical. I did a video Maybe like a week or so ago that got some Some interesting responses. I called it why alpha males should fall in love right and What I talked about in this was this idea of again of this level three of emotional mastery where you're experiencing things You're experiencing the spectrum of life Because you're not afraid to get hurt because you can let things go see the problem with being blue pill. It's not There's there's like a surface level thing that that most people identify. Okay, this is Red Bull and this is blue pill Okay, this guy's a simp, right and this guy's this guy's not he's cold but The problem is not behaviors and actions because guys are like, oh should I you know I just had a guy that had asked me should I buy this girl a flower is it is it okay?  So what does that mean? I? was explained to One of my coaching clients I was like it means that you could go out and if you want to pick up a girl fine Okay, so you go out to a bar you pick up a girl and you fall madly in love with her for that evening and you Experience all there is to experience but tomorrow when she's gone You're willing to let her go now. I'm not suggesting that you have to do that or that you have to Pick up girls at bars. It could be a long-term relationship That at any moment you're willing to let it go What what it means is this and this is how you get to understanding what non-attachment is see everything I have in life It's not mine. It's all borrowed Including the atoms that make up my body Someday all of these atoms that I have are going to return from whence they came. They're not mine I'm only using them for right now the money.  It's a bonus. It's something that was given to you in your life in order for you to enjoy For a period of time it doesn't matter if that time period is a single night or ten years or a hundred years Right if you live that long No, it doesn't matter because everything is temporary and everything will go away And so the stronger that you hold on to things The worst that you are and I know for you guys They're suffering with the nice guy syndrome and have problems with women in relationships And why do they abuse and treat you badly? It's because you're trying to hold on to them like this butterfly You're crushing the butterfly. You have to let things go.  I'm glad it happened that way I've trained myself to do it because any other response to life is Insane and ridiculous Why? Because reality is what reality is If you don't like reality, it doesn't change reality. It doesn't mean I don't have a Motive in life and that I don't take action And I don't try and and make my destiny what it is, but whatever actually happens.  It's awesome. It's great. It should have happened that way you either win or you learn another step in Becoming a man that I discovered Is killing your father? Metaphorically, okay, I know you guys So what does this mean? It means this okay It means killing the idea of your father, right? So we when we grow up our fathers to us They're the king. They're the tribal leader We seek approval from our fathers Rightfully so we should as we're young men as we're boys as before we've gone through the initiation and What has to happen at some point is we have to throw off that value system, right? We have our father's value system We decide what is good and what is bad in relation to what does our father approve of? At some point we have to become the father we have to become the tribal leader and so we have to metaphorically kill The value system of our father. We have to say you know what dad. I Love you right but I'm my own man now and I have my own value system, and I don't need your approval. I Still love you But my value system what I think is right my judgment Rules my life. I am the king and It and so many guys that I work with so many guys I coach This is the final they can't do it.  We had a falling out for about a year and a half Maybe two years, you know, he's gonna watch this video because he watches all my my videos were the we're the best of Buds now because he's an awesome guy, but He very much was very controlling.  I was like, hey look dad. I said I love you, man But I don't allow anyone who treats me the way that you treat me to be in my life Doesn't matter like I don't accept. These are my boundaries.  Totally respect your position.  Hey, I Want to have a relationship with my son who's now a man and now we have a great relationship But I had to do it wasn't believe me It wasn't easy to be on the other end of that phone for one It wasn't easy to say what I had to say but for a second It wasn't easy to not get sucked in To the argument because I wanted to give him all kinds of reasons Why I was doing what I do but as a man one of the things I talk about is you don't complain explain or apologize Your word is your word what you said it doesn't need to be explained to someone You don't need to justify your actions you take the action And you accept the consequences of that action But you don't have to have everyone have buying You don't have to have them understand why you did what you did a lot of you that are stuck in the nice guy It's because of this is because I go well If they could just understand No, no apologizing one good exercise for you guys that are that are stuck with this is I Sometimes get to my email someone email me it's like three days later, and you maybe you've done this like you start to email and the very first thing You type is sorry, and then you got to delete that. Nope. You can't start with sorry, and then you say I said this conference for three. Oh now you're trying to explain.  You don't own explanation.     It's me My value system is the most important I I judge things by what I think if they're good or bad and so many of us have gotten away from that and we judge Things by whether other people think they're good or bad You can't be a man unless you have your own value system That's why you have to metaphorically kill your father because your father in this case represents the value system that you're adopting Getting approval seeking approval from the father from other people from society Seeking validation. You have to kill that the next one here is One also I struggled with which is conquering fear. I Had a good period of time where I was afraid to fly on airplanes. I Was I was afraid to go on roller coasters as a kid. I slept with the lights on some nights I Had this one moment in my life though that changed everything. Oh, there are two moments So one thing was I started to get these panic attacks. I remember going into work one day Felt like I was knocking in a deep enough breath Then I started to think about that and I couldn't stop thinking about it for two fucking weeks I couldn't stop thinking about it And I was afraid I was afraid I was gonna die and That that was the point in my life where I was like I could lose everything I could lose everything because of fear because what I always thought like the reason why Allowed myself to have this fear of airplanes and fear the fears that I had was because I thought okay, well Eventually the fear will go away But that's not how fear works what fear does is once fear as a foothold It takes more and more and more of your life and I found that I was being afraid of more and more things and so One thing that really changed things around for me as out of Tony Robbins seminar at date with destiny and Tony was on the stage and he said something that just struck me That impact it completely changed the course of my life There's not a very many things I could say that people have said that have completely changed the course of my life but he said He said the Now now I forget it Let me see he said Okay, all right the quality of your life is In direct proportion to the amount of uncertainty You can comfortably live with I'll say it again the quality of your life is in direct proportion to the amount of uncertainty that you could comfortably live with and so I Don't know if you guys have seen Final destination. I think it's too It doesn't really matter.   He might as well be dead rather than sit in the cabin Waiting it out to make sure they doesn't die for the next 30 or 40 years, right?     I got on a roller coaster I went for the I went and found the most ridiculous roller coasters that I could ever find and started riding those I Started taking out my walls. I Started allowing Myself to be open and to not care what other people think to not concern myself with all those things I conquered that fear because here's what I learned about fear is because I remember sitting on the airplane Trying to put my headphones on trying to play Nintendo DS and Trying to block out the turbulence and then and trying to like Trying to suppress the fear trying to say oh, I'm not afraid. I'm not afraid. I don't feel the fear See fear just like all emotions.  I'm not afraid You can't control fear. It's not your fault, but what I learned Now I wish I would have learned it sooner Is that you can always choose to have courage?  You never you don't have to get rid of the fear when you have courage and at any moment You can just make the choice to have courage. You cannot make the choice to make fear go away But you can always make the choice To have courage and once I learned that little trick then I started reinterpreting things I got I was talking about Victor Frankel man search for meaning about Being able to have a space between what happens to you and and your reaction and you get to interpret that So I started reinterpreting fear as excitement Right. I remember Back in the day when I was completely afraid to talk to women. I Be terrified what will happen? I changed that into excitement because I'll tell you what The highest high that you'll ever have in your life Is that moment right after you conquer fear? It's that it's that if you've ever ridden a roller coaster It's that after you come all the way up and then that drop when you first go over That's the that's the highest high that you'll ever have in life is when you conquer fear and You get addicted to that shit, but that requires to have courage So every time that I get into a fearful situation now, right? So maybe I was a little bit I mean I've I've spoken on stages a lot in the last few years But I was a little bit afraid to get on the stage today, but then I thought yeah, this is good This is exciting.  All right, I'll give you I'll tell you how I got over overflying on the airplanes So I don't remember the source of those. I decided but when I was doing the panic attacks and stuff. I had this I found I tried everything. Okay tried blocking it out tried, you know, I went to I got medication which I didn't take I went check my lungs all kinds of stuff, right? But I found this one it wasn't even a YouTube video some web page There's an audio and the guy was like, hey When you're having a panic attack, this is what you do. He said stop trying to block it out He said turn it up From a seven to an 11.    You see when when a dog's afraid, what does the dog do? If you if you have a dog and you yell at a dog, what does it do? It's like Like I can't see you, right? That's what we do So here's what you do. He said turn it up try to feel the fear as much as possible. So I said, okay I've tried everything else.    You've heard this But it's true. I was instantly cured Instantly cured instantly. I went back to work. No more panic attacks I did the same thing with the airplane.   I'm looking out the window. No headphones. Nothing. And then I'm like, all right when turbulence comes It's bouncy time. Let's let's jump in the seat. Let's let's let's scare all the other passengers, right? And that's what I did. I'm like turbulence is coming. I'm like, whoo Yeah Right people are looking at me.  They're scared now. They got phobias to fly on the airplane, but I was having a good all time Because I just let myself feel that I was afraid when I was going whoo But I was letting myself feel the fear And once you realize that that's as bad as it gets Fuck you've already experienced as bad as it gets, right? It's like when you have a really bad headache And you're like, well this headache is a 10 out of 10 Can't get any worse So then you just accept it and then and then the fear disappears And so that's that's my little tip if you're struggling with any kind of fear I did this for roller coasters.      This picture here is from uh, eliot hols's Grounding camp event lifting lifting a stone there You know This is something that I think all men need to To do And and it's not just because Be a big strong man There is some element to it for sure right But it's because What physical discipline does to mentally see Guys ask me all the time. How can I develop mental toughness? How can I be like you? How can I like run if you guys don't know I'm I'm training right now for a hundred mile race I'm about 230 pounds.  First of all, you're not built for you're not going to win it I don't I know all that But it's it's because of who I'm going to become in the process and I want to go through all that pain Because I know that that will make me stronger. See the the process of becoming physically strong Disciplined It develops mental toughness better than anything else. There's no other formula that will develop mental toughness guaranteed.   Right, you have to be able to it takes a lot To feel the pain and keep on walking. That's not easy So Really important as a man to become physically strong start lifting weights start going to the gym start pushing yourself To the physical limits Also, if you've never pushed yourself to the physical absolute physical limit, you don't know what it is to live because At the very greatest pain that is self-inflicted upon yourself through physical exertion Comes the greatest euphoria That's when you really know we're in your life when you can't breathe And you're you're huffing And you feel like you can't get enough air in your lungs and they're on fire and your legs are burning That's when you know you're really alive this one also important developing competency right as men We have to have some kind of skills some kind of value some kind of worth I thought about doing a talk about being a top 5% man But what I mean by competency here is The idea of being able to be a self-made man I've been able to procure for yourself, right? I have a video on my channel about About guys like 18 or i'm 30 and living from home and I rip into the guy I'm like, hey, you know, you're not a man if you're living from home And a lot of people don't like that video. They're like, oh, no, you don't know you don't understand You don't and and my whole point of this is that like as a man, you know We hear the protector and provider You need to be able to provide for yourself 100% But then have some left over to provide for other people And if if you think back in in time it makes fucking sense because if you're part of a tribe And you can't even take care of your own needs What value are to the tribe as a man? You're not any value. You should be surplus You should be able to take care of everything for you and then some For the others because not everyone in the tribe Can hunt Some people have to cook what the women have to you have to be able to provide for the women and the children You have to be provide for some of the men that are weaker or elder or not able to so To be a man to not have competency to not be able to at least take care of yourself Be self-sufficient is is to not be a man at all Oops All right, so I'll just give you a couple of ending thoughts here just a few points Since I didn't have time to expand on every single possible thing The first one I just want to say here and it's been talked about a little bit is don't be jaded There's a lot of content out here in the man's sphere today You know red pill content big towel content.   We have different viewpoints Okay, but I think what you'll find Amongst all of us here, which which I really appreciate about this convention Thank you anthony again for inviting me and putting this on Is that we all reject the victim mindset? We might think different things about cold approach or choosing singles or what that's fine. We can debate all those things, but as men We come together and we're not jaded. We don't we don't see things from a jaded viewpoint We see things as reality. I want to know what reality is clearly and I want to I want to thrive in that reality, you know, I need to know the rules of the game So I can play it correctly, but I'm not going to complain about the rules of the game One thing I'll say Again here is beside learning to be a man learn to be a man in a relationship Really important a really good book.    You got your money Right Again, you don't have to follow this, but I'm just saying from my experience. This is what I'd recommend I already talked about this one.  I had in life. I retired at 33 And it was the most depressing period of my life Because that was my goal for my whole life. It was was to retire young But what I'll say about this is that what I learned from that experience was that Don't make goals about what you get make goals about who you become Again, I talked about running a hundred mile races here The only reason why I'm doing it is because I want to become the man that ran a hundred miles There's no other goal.  I don't care about an accolade I care about becoming that person all my goals in life now or I choose goals based on who do I want to become And then I've said this but I'm just going to bash it in your head read stoic philosophy To me, there's there's no better guide for a rational approach to life, but So that's what I what I got here. We'll have some open for some questions in a second here, but uh, yeah, thank you guys All right, who's got some uh some questions Thanks for the the talk that was really informative really great been watching you for a while and I like what you do Um, I just wanted to ask so you described being Retired and then kind of having some some emptiness around that and then kind of making your own your own path And not being retired. I'm kind of searching for that that goal And I'm just wondering am I going in the wrong direction or was part of the path that you kind of went through First achieving that and realizing it wasn't what you needed Do you think that was necessary for your journey or could it be better achieved just by going straight to You know the the end goal of becoming what you want to be Good question. So it was necessary for my journey Probably it's not necessary for yours like a lot of this shit that I did was necessary for my journey so that I could come here and Be like be an example of what not to do so I could teach so I could empathize right And but but here's the thing it's like if you can learn the shortcut it's better right and the shortcut is this is that If you think that something Is going to make you happy you're wrong if you think when I was A dork I thought oh if I got the hot girl Then I just the one hot girl and then it was oh if I get 10 of them And then it was like oh if my notch count is no never it didn't matter It's a it's called a hedonistic treadmill doesn't matter When I get this much money when I retire right all those things I went through every single one of them I said when I have six pack abs. Oh, but then it's like not it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter all those things You'll you'll never be happy. You should be chasing fulfillment. Fulfillment is real simple.  That's what you should be after so Now part of that process can involve making money be retiring that that's great But you can't make that the end goal Right because there's nothing no matter what it was at one point.    I'm fulfilled.   It's how I did it And I live my life now based on the idea that I have to put in the work that the work itself is enough and the bavad Gita it said that, you know he says or the the bavad Gita says that You're entitled to your labor but not the fruits of your labor right, it's it's a really interesting concept. It's like That's the thing that's actually the thing the fruits of the labor is what we think is the thing It's kind of like dopamine right dopamine is a chemical in your brain that makes you have motivation It's not the people think that's like when you get something you get pleasure and you get dopamine. No, no It's the pursuit of it. It's the same thing you're entitled To your labor but not the fruits of your labor It means that the thing is the labor That's the thing you have to be think about putting in the work Not about what you get and you'll get the stuff It'll come if you put in the work But think about putting in the work and let that be the reward enough It's really really meaningful if I could just follow up real quick So chasing fulfillment and kind of focusing on that that makes perfect sense The fear and the sticking point for me is you know, I could go after what I really care about and not make a living and Kind of struggle that way and so it's it's more along the lines of like I can do what I What makes money and what I don't like right the the corporate cubicle life Or I could go after something that there's a lot of fear and a lot of uncertainty Maybe I can't make ends meet that way And so how do you how do you get past that don't shut off your logical brain make a plan? I mean it's still it's still fine to make a plan to do something that makes financial sense right Because again, it's not about what you do.   I don't I don't feel like it today. He's like, yeah, it happens a lot I'm like, all right.  So It's not what you do. It's how you do it.  I'm present. I'm doing the work I'm doing the Lord's work. Whatever it is. It doesn't matter what it is because it's how I do it It's not what I do.  Passion is something that you Bring it's not something you find You create passion. In fact, you know, I talked to a lot of black pill guys and I agree with them Life is meaningless. I can have a completely nihilistic viewpoint in life. I 100% agree, but guess what? We bring meaning to life.  We just created this whole this whole illusion of meaning behind this thing But in our own lives we create them We do the things that are meaningful and we make it have meaning the universe doesn't have to Maybe there is some order or some purpose of universe. I think there is but what my point is that it doesn't matter Is that we create the meaning and that's and that's how we live our lives. Thanks so much. Yep John, hello. Thanks for the talk You showed a before and after picture of the body transformation. How long did it take you to get from one to the other? So I mean to to go from the the first to like Looking looking pretty good like not at that level was probably about about two years But I mean those those photos are more than 10 years apart, right? I didn't really dial it in until the To the end so So when you are at your peak In terms of physical fitness and you're putting in a lot of time to build your body and your life your mind your soul and everything Obviously that's sometimes It leaves you with less time for a relationship and committing to someone and spending time to kind of develop that relationship How do you handle that commitment without making the other person feel that you're not giving them what they want Enough that they feel safe and secure to be with you That's not your responsibility so And this is I think this is really important I should actually put this on one of the points on the slide is that one of the things about being a man That's really important Is that The mission is first always And and and women want a man who does not put them first women always want a man who puts the mission The purpose first your purpose in your life Has to be number one and everything else has to come secondary to that And it's not your responsibility for people Feelings how they feel about that You have to do your mission as a man and it may mean that you're going to lose relationships It means that you're going to lose some people in your life Some people aren't going to like you believe me the courses I've taken in life have have ended many relationships with many people For various reasons But my mission is always going to come first my purpose in life I cannot be me unless I'm making my purpose and my mission in life come first and that it requires sacrifices But that's what it is is to be a man in my opinion so Thanks All right last last question and the problem that was actually a really good speech. I appreciate everything that was said Um, so when you talk about being stoic in the sense that hey like you have to perceive this reality in one way I know when people have this predetermined seat of knowledge that they're embedded like as far as like as they're raised like rearing from Either mom or dad or both Um, what if like the perceived reality that you want to go and see like as far as like, you know being a man Um, what if that conflicts with like someone that like kind of who you are like? I don't know if you have any like, um I guess Tips on how to like overcome certain biases that help you become You know the person that you want to be just because of like Knowledge that's conflicting or like what you're presented if you know what I'm saying So you're saying that What if like the values I presented here Conflict with who you actually are Or likes things that like they open your eye up But like you like it's kind of like you're just taking a minute to like sort of digest I guess If that makes sense like how do you what would you recommend like how like how would you Take it Give me like a real like This is the question. Yeah, sorry So like you're you're pretty much like given the certain set of like information or a certain aspect But you want like you yourself want to go and like look at it that way But it's kind of hard to like have you had that transition to like a real like a realization Oh, like this is how it's supposed to be like are there any tips that you can like give me?   It's like You can you can be upset and argue about the rules to the game Or you can say well, I just want to understand them so I can play the game as as best as possible It's a non-emotional decision Like the reason what trips us up is emotion is expectation, right? If you if you want to live a life where You're able to accept what has happened get rid of all expectations every negative emotion that you ever experience in life Comes from an unmet expectation Get rid of expectation you get rid of negative emotion and then you can accept things But you can't accept things When you have expectations on things All right, I really appreciate that. Thank you. Yep That's all the time we have give it up John summits


Good morning, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Snowflake Summit 23. Live from Caesars Forum in Las Vegas, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante on our third and final day. Dave, we're going to be talking about the future of generative AI with Snowflake and Neva. Yeah, Neva was a really interesting acquisition. It sort of closed really fast. And we saw it and said, okay, this fits into our model or our scenario where Snowflake is just bringing in different query types and different data types and all fitting together here this week. Yeah, it is coming into focus. We've got the co-founder of Neva and SVP at Snowflake, Shridhir Ramaswamy with us. Good morning, great to have you on the program. Good morning, thanks for having me, Lisa. Congratulations on the acquisition. Yeah, we appreciate you brightening early here. Thank you, excited to be here. Search is fundamental to how businesses interact with data and the search experience is changing so rapidly. Tell us about Neva, this acquisition closed last month, but give us the backstory. Yeah, so Neva was started four years ago. We make my co-founder and I started it. It started out trying to reimagine consumer search. You know, when we open up a new browser tab and type in, we get all of those results. That was the thing that we said we wanted to recreate from scratch. Ambitious mission for a small startup. You know, we were about 50 people, but we created a search engine from scratch. We crawled the web, we built an index of it, we served the data ourselves. And our big aha moment was last year when we saw the wave of gendered AI coming and we realized that all of a sudden, AI was almost like X-ray vision for web pages. You know, like when you tap on a link on your phone, you have no idea what's going to be there on the other side. Maybe it's a pop-up. Maybe they want you to email address. Maybe it's like flashing monkeys. But what AI lets you do is look at the content of those pages, be able to summarize it. We put all of these together and created the first generative AI search engine where you type in a natural language query and we actually give you an authoritative answer. ChatGPT can give you an answer even today, but you are left to decide for yourself whether you should believe it or not. But we would write out the answer. We would make sure that every sentence was referenced so you could see where that information came from. It was also real time because we ran a search engine underneath. It is really this combination of generative AI large language models and search. That was the magic unlock for us. That was the product that we released early this year. You know, fast forward to today. We are very excited about bringing retrieval, bringing search, bringing the power of language models to all of the things that happen within Snowflake. So what you just described in terms of the reference ability of the data, so very granular, not just a link at the end. That's right, that's right, that's right. Like Wikipedia page, go figure out where these sources came from. Like we want to do it at a sentence level. Okay, and so you started the company, I was going to ask you why you started the company. I think you said to sort of rethink, reimagine consumer search. Yeah. But then when you saw generative AI and ChatGPT, well, it was before ChatGPT, that's right. But you started to think about, wow, this enterprise use cases or was it? We were still on the consumer path. We used to, ironically, I used to run ads at Google. And I thought that ads had so dominated the experience both on obviously the commercial side, when you type in a commercial query into Google, you get piles of ads, that was my team, that was like my job. But then I also thought that organic web had become less and less about authentic content and more and more about SEO content, just like flooding its way up to the top. This is why we said we should reimagine the whole search experience. But as I said, generative AI was a big unlock for us because we said we can get away from giving you a set of links. You have to do the work to go figure out, maybe it's the 40th paragraph that has the answer to the question that you're looking for. What it let us do was figure out the right components of the page that supply the answer for you and give you this really pithy, understandable, but believable summary of what you needed to see. So, you well know, in the early days, people thought that ad-based search and keyword search and Google ads was a bad idea. VCs really weren't leaning in early on and it obviously became the greatest business known to humans. My kind has seen. It's crazy, yeah.  They let you control the experience and it was brilliant. Were you thinking about, what were you thinking about the business model at the time? Were you thinking that there was a new way to use generative AI to drive new sources of revenue? So, the business model from early on for Neva very much was consumer paid subscriptions. And, you know, as it turns out, a fairly decent number of people that were users became subscribers, three, four percent. You don't need a humongous conversion rate. What Neva as a consumer search engine struggled with was getting lots of consumers to adopt it as the search engine. And the big tech players don't make this easy. On your iPhone, for example, you cannot change your default search on Safari to Neva. It's not even possible. And then Google makes it super hard on desktop on Chrome. This was part of the reason why we decided that we were better off applying our expertise in search, in AI, to enterprise use cases, rather than continue down the path of essentially hitting our heads against these giant mountains that the various incumbents on the web had become. Well, the other interesting data point is you saw what Microsoft did with open AI. They kind of, Microsoft wasn't really even in the conversation with generative AI. Then they leapfrogged everybody with the business model. But it hasn't really moved the needle on Bing because people are hooked on Google to your point. And so, now you've, okay, so now they're refocused the mindset on enterprise. Which, of course, we're enterprise people, so we love that. And then Snowflake sees the potential. So let's talk about how it fits into Snowflake because it's a really exciting, we've talked all week about Snowflake as many, many query options and they're extending those and increasing that flexibility. So this is one of the many. So let's talk about that. Yeah, so Snowflake clearly is known as the safe, trusted, secure, and efficient platform for all enterprise data. So there's a wealth of information that is sitting out there. But all of us know that this act of actually getting insights out of that data takes work. You have to write the right kind of SQL queries or maybe you will write it in Python with something like PySpark, but you have to do the work to make those things happen. What we are excited by is combining our expertise in retrieval, in search, with the query engine, with other tools like visualization that's already there in Snowflake to create, for example, conversational experiences. We demoed some of this, but the magic with language models is that you can talk to them, which means that the number of people that can ask questions is 10 times, 100 times larger than what it was before, but they all don't need to be schema and SQL experts. You can generate the SQL, we can learn from previous things that have been run, and then we can also interpret the data and say, hey, it looks like the Western region's revenue is going up while these other regions are not doing as well. It is bringing that fluid interpretation on top of the query engine that we think we can be a big asset to Snowflake with, and honestly, that's the reason they bought Niva, the company. What's the number one differentiator of Niva and why Snowflake? I presume there were others interested. Yeah, so from a Niva perspective, the number one differentiator is that we are technologists that have built systems at incredible scale. Even with the Niva, even with the 50% team on a very small budget, we ran a crawl that every day fetched hundreds of millions of pages. Our index was five, six petabytes, and then we serve six, seven billion pages on machines that cost like $150,000 a year. Doing a lot of stuff with very, very few dollars. Similarly, when it came to generative AI, we knew we would go bankrupt if we tried to do things like use the open AI APIs for doing generative AI. So we fine-tuned our own models, we deployed them within our clusters, so we bring unparalleled expertise in search the technology, as well as machine learning and language models. And this is what Snowflake found attractive. And for us, Snowflake was a great place to be, first of all, because there was immense opportunity to bring our technology expertise to bear, that's one. But I would say an even bigger thing is the quality of the team that we interacted with, the engineering leads, the founders Benwa and Thirik, Christian, Greg, Frank himself, I spoke to him several times before the transaction happened. They made us feel incredibly welcome and made sure that they were invested in the collaboration that would need to happen for us to be successful here. So they were number one by a mile. So Snowflake started with SQL, obviously. But when you talked to Benwa early on, he's like, no, it's not a SQL database. You know, it's much more than that. And then, I don't know if there's the right sequence, but Snowflake added data frames, which is kind of the way. That's on programmers. Talk to data. Okay, then they add search, right? And so now with Neva, obviously they get that. And my understanding is they'll take all these different ways of querying data and different data formats and then translate that into a consistent experience for customers that's governed and secure. And that's the magic. Can you explain that a little bit? Absolutely, you know, Snowflake originally started as this amazingly efficient platform for data manipulation, whether it's bringing and transforming and bringing in data or being able to query it. But things evolve. And having your code run close to the data has been this dream that, you know, everybody has had for a very long time. And so over the past two waves, actually over the last seven, eight years, Snowflake has been on this mission, first of all, to make sure that collaboration on data is much easier and then to have applications also run on top of Snowflake. This is why we call ourselves a data cloud rather than a data warehouse. And that's very real. You know, Neva technology is still being developed and integrated into Snowflake, but we announced what are called Snowpark containers. It's a bit of an obscure name. But the point of it is that you as a developer, as a customer, can develop a piece of software and deploy it into a container that runs within the Snowflake security perimeter. So if you want to do a new computation, for example, if you wanted to use a language model to translate feedback text that you have in one of your tables into a different language, maybe it's in a different language and if you want to translate it to English, you can run a container to do this. You can download a model from Huggingface, push it into a container, have it be accessible for all of the code that you're running on Snowflake. And so this is us stepping up our game and saying, yes, there's the core strength of what we do. And our customers love that. You know, our biggest customers, they're so excited about what's coming up with Iceberg tables. On the other hand, they see the extensibility, they see the flexibility that we are offering and the increasing scope of what they can get done. And they're very excited. Things like third-party applications, native applications are enabled by essentially the same infrastructures, no-park containers. And that and the beginnings of companies like Alex's company, you know, where he talked about datasets that are now available for you, I think really represent the next frontier in data and applications really coming together. You know, we've been talking all week about how the Snowpark Container Service was the big announcement, right? And the power of that, you know, it's just coming into focus. I mean, NVIDIA, the announcement on Monday, Snowflake is essentially containerizing the NVIDIA stack and that brings it into the Snowflake environment. We've talked about the supply chain is a company called Blue Yonder, which is the old man logistics business. They're refactoring their business on top of Snowflake using relational AI, which is a knowledge database. And what that means is they can bring in all the legacy, man, logistics workloads, and now they can be first-class citizens in the Snowflake environment. So you start to see the power of all this. A lot of this is misunderstood. People, when they saw the Niva acquisition, a lot of people looked at it and said, well, let's consumer search, what's the point of that? Similarly, people I think are looking at the Mosaic ML, people, I had a VC text me saying it was Niva FOMO, but regardless, the truth is that, or the reality is that there's technology there that can be applied in a lot of different ways. And that's probably, it's certainly true for Niva and I'm sure it's true for Mosaic ML, but what are your thoughts on that? There are a very small number of groups on the planet now. This knowledge will definitely disseminate out but the ability to meaningfully train new language models, even if not the giant models, 30, 40 billion parameter models, but put them to good use is one of the most valuable skills that people can get their hands on. And we've done this at scale. This is part of what made Niva attractive for Snowflake. And there's definitely a realization on the parts of various companies that this is a really, really important skill, an important set of people to have within your company. What is exciting for us with things like Snowpark containers is whatever work we do, whatever work is done by the open source community, we can have like a simple script that one of our customers, you, can use to download the model, just run it and be able to use it. A lot of what powers cloud computing, modern computing, our phones actually came from things like open source came from Linux and we see a similar thing happening with large language models. So in that sense, I think this is an exciting time. It's also a positive time because this means that it's not the case that there are like, you know, just two players that know how to create language models, of course that promptly becomes trend seeking. And so I think this movement towards open source in language models is really useful for all of us. The money that you raised, I presume went into engineering. It wasn't like a lot of promotion and go to market. Is that true? At Niva, most of the money that you would, you know, you can think of Niva as roughly spending $10 million a year on Apex, 10 million on people and that's pretty much it. Yeah, and the reason I bring that up is because it's expensive to build these large language models. It takes talent and then you've got to get access to certain infrastructure as well. Is that true? At this point it is talent. It is some amount of infrastructure. The very largest, large language models, it is true, require like on the order of thousands of, you know, of GPUs. You can think of like, you know, an A100 GPU as costing about $8,000 a year. So if you want a fleet of 4,000 of these, that's like, that's a lot of money. That's $32 million a year. But for, you know, 50, 60 million, billion parameter models, you don't need those. And if all you want to do is fine tune one of the existing open source models and people are doing magic with this fine tuning, that's a thousand bucks. Like you and I can do this in one evening and that's the promise of what is to come. Well, that's what we're doing with the CUBE AI. I mean, you've seen it, it's amazing. We take all of our data from the last 10 plus years and we've created, yeah, and it was not expensive and it's extremely cool. It's the values in the data and what we do with it. It's not our ability to create a large language model. We're using open source to do that. Exactly, exactly. And a vector database and you know, our guys figured it out pretty quickly. And we want to implement things like the vector database, like like really good retrieval and search natively into snowflakes. So you as a customer again can say, I want to talk to this table. Can I bring up a Streamlet app to do it?  So you, I'm inferring that you didn't have a huge, it was more talent, not necessarily the infrastructure cost or did you have to incur a lot of infrastructure cost as well to, how did you do it through the cloud or did you do your own? We ran on cloud, we ran pretty much on bare metal. As I said, our in-front people costs were roughly on par. But let's face it, $20 million a year for a startup is a, that's a lot of money, it's a lot of money. And what works in 0% interest 2019 does not like work the same way in a very 5% 2023. And so you see a lot of startups reset and think about how they should navigate the future. And that's what we did. And we are very happy, honestly, this is a much bigger impact on a much larger group of customers and people. And so it's pretty exciting. Great timing. I mean, it's essentially the organizations like yours that got into it in the last three or four years are now in a position to help the next wave, which is developers like us to just low cost develop in a month and for 100 grand versus what would normally take six to nine months and a lot more money to get to just an MVP. That's the magic of scale. That's the magic of democratizing this kind of access. I think it is amazing that, you know, three kids like renting a database can create an application more or less for the entire planet.  And that's a fun place to be. And it's governed and secure and all the promise of Snowflake. It's incredibly important. So you talked about how NIVA is going to be really kind of a fuel inside Snowflake. What enterprises are going to be able to do from it? When you look out at the future horizon in terms of like future predictions, what do you see? What excites you about the power this is going to give enterprises in all industries? So, you know, it's the simple stuff. Make marketplace search, for example, much, much, much better. So you can just type in a query, you say like, hey, I want CPG data in the United States and we're like, here are some great data sets for you. Maybe you want it in Denmark. You know, we make that possible. It's simple things like that. We are very excited about powering much better catalog search. It sounds like, huh, that's like obscure. No, people really want to know what data they have. Some of our bigger customers have, believe it or not, 100,000 tables and to just make sense of it all so that one group can know what is available in a different group to make that stuff discoverable, easy, but do that really well. So it's things like that that are very immediate. There's also like a language model AI track that we are pursuing. You saw some demos. The idea is that any complex cognitive function like writing a SQL query, we want there to be an assistant that will make it easy for you. That understands your context. That understands the database that you're operating in previous queries that have been run on the database. But do it with language models that are within your perimeter where you're not sending data off to some cloud provider with unknown policies on what happens with those queries. And then make visualization easier. The Holy Grail, of course, is like this chat box where pretty much anyone in a company can type a query, a question, not a query, into and get the data and the visualization that they need. Honestly, I think we are a little bit away from that, but make it much easier to write SQL queries, easier to get visualizations. These are all very nice steps in the process. And we also want to enable our customers to be able to integrate their own APIs. So for example, if you are a FedEx, maybe you want to write an application that can call out to an API that can figure out where a package is. And you combine that with the data in Snowflake. So we call it a 2P, a second-party framework, instead of a first-party framework, which is basically how do you make language models usable by our customers as well? I've now described work that is going to take us more than a year. So if you're sitting here next year saying you can build an application with the data on Snowflake and your own APIs and do it in 30 minutes, that would have been an amazing year for Neva. Yeah, well, thank you so much. We, congratulations on the acquisition. We thank you for sharing the future of generative AI with Neva inside of Snowflake. And we look forward to watching this progress over the next year. So you got to come back. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Dave. Great to have you, Shradar. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. Our day three coverage continues. Up next, Snowflake is working with the New York Stock Exchange to take the Snowflake startup challenge to the next level. We're going to reveal the winner next. All of our content that we filmed this week on theCUBE.net, editorial on siliconangle.com. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage.