March 25, 2026 – Airline Owner Andrew Schmertz Jim Goes on a Rant about Tim Ferriss

0:04 Intro 1 : Broadcasting from am and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration award winning school for startups radio where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk or passion. Jim Beach,

0:26 Jim Beach : Hello everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for startups radio. I hope you’re having a fantastic day and enjoying the roller coaster life of being an entrepreneur. There is nothing more fun than that. This is a special episode. I have an amazing guest, and then I’m going to do something a little different. I used to do it every once in a while, but that was 10 years ago, eight years ago, and I haven’t done one in a long time. As a matter of fact, I don’t remember the last one that I did. I’m going to go on a rant, not a rant, just an extended discussion, and the topic will be Tim Ferriss, the guy who wrote The Four Hour Work Week. So it’ll be fun. I’m not going to go mean or anything, but that will be in the second part of the show. Right now we’re going to meet a man who owns an airline. I’m excited to welcome back to the show, Andrew schmertz. He is the CEO and co founder of hopscotch air it is an airline based in the Northeast. Started off as an air taxi company in 2009 and has been growing as the major airlines start pulling back from some of the regional roots. He was on the show a couple years ago, and we had a great conversation, so we’re excited to welcome him back. Andrew, how you doing?

1:41 Andrew Schmertz : Hey, thanks for having me back on. It’s exciting to be back. I had a good time last time, and looking forward to talking again.

1:47 Jim Beach : Yes, I remember last time you said I was the best host you had ever had, and

1:52 Andrew Schmertz : I will say that again. And in

1:54 Jim Beach : Return, you were the best guest I’ve ever had. So

1:57 Andrew Schmertz : I reiterate both of those positions

2:01 Jim Beach : Today, you went and got a law degree. Is that more useful than just about anything running an airline? I bet that 90% of your job is figuring out the rules and regulations at every place. And seems to me like a law degree would be more useful as the CEO than a pilot’s license. What do you think?

2:19 Andrew Schmertz : You know? I think if you can read you can kind of figure out any of the regulations. The law degree helps when you kind of walk into a room, because everybody’s afraid of lawyers. But, you know, it comes down to understanding the regulations. Certainly the law degree helps in that network, but having a pilot’s license is pretty cooler. I would say it’s certainly a

2:43 Jim Beach : Good cool factor. Yeah, that is cool. I mean, there’s nothing cooler than being able to just go and fly your airplane over the weekend. That’s definitely true. You know, the horrible joke about, how do you know if someone’s an airline pilot?

2:57 Andrew Schmertz : No, but I’ll let you tell it. They’ll

2:59 Jim Beach : Tell you in the first three minutes. You know that

3:02 Andrew Schmertz : I’m surprised it takes three minutes.

3:05 Jim Beach : So tell us the story of hopscotch. Yeah.

3:09 Andrew Schmertz : So, you know, we launched, as we discussed last time, in 2009 and the the air carrier is designed as an air taxi, providing affordable, regional on demand aviation, and we have done that and grown the business over the course of now 15 years. There’s covid, of course, hit that we scaled back on the fleet size. We’ve been rebuilding the fleet. We service, you know, New York, northeast area, Boston area, Philadelphia, southern Canada. And we do so with single engine serious aircraft. For those not knowing what the Cirrus aircraft is, it’s the airplane with a parachute. Probably seen it in the news. So it’s an extremely technologically advanced aircraft, very safe. The customers love the aircraft. Most of our customer and most of our businesses return business, which is obviously a validation of the service we’re offering. So, you know, a typical flight, for example, may be from White Plains, New York, to Nantucket, which is just about an hour. That’s the perfect range for this type of service, and there’s very little competition. You know, other other companies have tried it through the years, not saying we know anything or that we’re smarter than anybody, but we have outlasted everybody, and so we operate within a niche space, a growing space, within the charter industry.

4:35 Jim Beach : All right, I’m on your website. Is the plane you use the Cirrus you said? Is it the blue paint, blue plane with the propeller on your website,

4:45 Unknown Speaker : That is one of the best. Okay, same plane

4:48 Jim Beach : Passengers. Will that hold passengers?

4:52 Andrew Schmertz : But I quote this statistic all the time, the average charter customer is 1.5 people. So. Half a person is flying with somebody. So it’s weird that we need to get a larger aircraft. We can always if apart six people came, we could find them what we would say, lift in this industry, we could find them an aircraft to take them, but at a substantially higher price point. So most of our flights, honestly, for business customers, one person for couples, two people going to their vacation homes.

5:25 Jim Beach : Well, I do remember the last time I bought a golf stream. I bought so many of them. Now it gets confusing. Luggage capacity is a huge issue. Will this plane have enough for my skis or my golf bag?

5:41 Andrew Schmertz : Yeah, so we can take with with two, three people on board, we could take an additional 100 pounds of bags. Over the years, Cirrus has increased the weight limitation of the aircraft, so we’re comfortable with the luggage capabilities of the airplane. We haven’t run into situations where customers have too much bags. That has not been a problem for us,

6:02 Jim Beach : Because the last time I tried to get a Rolls Royce on my Gulf Stream

6:06 Andrew Schmertz : And that work that could be a little tougher,

6:10 Jim Beach : 37 cargo to get that happen.

6:13 Andrew Schmertz : So there are 5000 public use airports throughout the United States. 90% of commercial airliners only use 30 of them. Now, in the northeast, there’s probably about 300 different airports we fly out of. And what’s great about the service is, if you’re going to Montauk, which has a 2500 foot runway, we can access Montauk. But you know, Delta Airlines isn’t going to Montauk, or Block Island, which has a 2000 foot runway, or Fisher’s Island, which is, I don’t know if you know Fish’s Island, it’s off the northeast, northeast corner of New York, right southern Connecticut, has a 1900 foot runway, all of those runways and airports we can access. So the service works perfectly if you need to go to one of those destinations, or if you’re going on a business trip. For example, we had a customer years ago who was going to Collegeville, Pennsylvania, and they said, okay, the nearest airport is Lancaster. And I said, well, there is an airport in Collegeville. It’s a runway with a windsock, but it’s an airport, so we were able to take them right there. And so that’s the story of the business, of how the business can help people use air service more efficiently. Of course, we go into all the big airports. We’re in and out of JFK and Boston, Logan, more than I’d like to be, but we can access those airports as well. So we have a wide platter of services at these airports that people can access and use, making their days more efficient, certainly if they’re traveling on

7:40 Jim Beach : Business, so you’re on a dozen regular service, a dozen airports

7:50 Jim Beach : Every week. Oh

7:52 Andrew Schmertz : Yeah, that’s probably about, right, you know, on average, we’re probably going to a dozen different airports, but we could access, as I said, you know, up to 300 here in the

8:03 Jim Beach : Northeast, right. And the prices are competitive, a little bit more expensive than first class.

8:13 Andrew Schmertz : So it depends if you have two people on board, probably first class service, you know, some locations are more competitively priced than others, but, you know, if you can’t get to that airport on a commercial airliner, then there’s no competition. There’s no competition. You know, we try to keep our prices in line with what people can afford. You know, the Charter Business has not grown at all over the decades. It’s 1% of the 1% of the people who could afford to fly, let’s say, on a private jet. Ever use the charter services? However, with us, we have found that 50% of our new customers have never been on a private plane before. So we think we’re growing the business with that said, it’s still a premium service, and we try to keep prices in line. But as you know, especially with what’s going on in the world right now, there are costs that keep going up, and so we believe at scale, we would be able to bring down those prices. And so we have a plan that we’re promoting right now, a public offering, to hopefully raise enough money to acquire 20 more aircraft which we can fly. There’s enough demand for those airplanes in the summer, and that should be able to drive down the pricing a little bit.

9:30 Jim Beach : All right. So on the website, say to Martha’s Vineyard, it lists the price for 2800 is that for all three seats? Or per person? It is all three seats. Okay? So my wife and I go, it would be that’s a one way price, right? That’s a one way price. Okay, tickets, I think you’re getting really competitive, you know?

9:51 Andrew Schmertz : Yeah, I think so too. Plus, if you have a dog, your dog can sit right next to you, yes, bring your bringing your dog

9:58 Jim Beach : With you. That demographic walk. To travel with their support.

10:02 Andrew Schmertz : Oh yeah, we do know. We do know that,

10:08 Jim Beach : All right. And then Burlington. I went to school in Vermont, so I know the Burlington work very well. We used to go almost every Friday on what was the airline back then, people’s Express. And oh yeah, good old people’s Express, I would fly home to Atlanta for free every year. So yeah, of course, they went out of business really fast, because I guess people like me doing that, but

10:33 Andrew Schmertz : Well, the airline industry drove them out of business. And honestly, because they were shocked that you could offer a low cost carrier. Now, the low cost carrier even existed back in the days when, you know, three or four major airlines dominated the space in the United States, and they could, they got together and basically drove people’s Express out of business, right?

10:55 Jim Beach : Well, I think they’re doing the same thing, switch that spirits doing it to themselves now, and they’re

11:01 Andrew Schmertz : Doing it to themselves. They’re just horrible airline. Yes, they as a race to the bottom. And what has happened is that worked out for a while, people wanted to travel for $85 to Florida, to Miami, but at some point the customer service and experience got so bad that airlines and customers basically started moving up market. And so, for example, the best performing mainline airline today is Delta Airlines, which has moved significantly up market. It is probably one of the more expensive mainline carriers, but the service matches that pricing because Americans are comfortable now paying for a better airline. I used to say, if you want a better airline, pay for a better airline. Don’t complain if you book yourself on spirit about the flight being late or the flight canceled, or you have to sit in a crowded seat, you don’t get food, you don’t get drinks.

11:58 Andrew Schmertz : You paid for that.

12:00 Jim Beach : Yes, well, I’m in Atlanta, and everything in Atlanta revolves around delta, so it’s yes, definitely a hometown market for them. Also, with your flights, I get to choose the schedule, right? It’s not correct. Did you say Correct?

12:16 Andrew Schmertz : Yes, yes, correct. It’s on demand, which means you get to choose the schedule. So if when you want to fly works with our schedule, we can make that work however, you know, we also will say, Well, if you wanted to go at 11am we can’t take you at 11am but maybe we can do it at noon. We also talk to customers who have a flight booked and say, well, this customer really has to go on this time. Can you maybe move your flight so it takes a village, I like to say, to keep the trains running on time and on schedule,

12:44 Jim Beach : All right? And how many planes do you currently have? We currently have five in the fleet, okay? And you’re trying to get 20 more. So that’s a very aggressive

12:55 Andrew Schmertz : Yes, yes, so but, but we will scale it accordingly, and it’s really important in the aviation industry, needless to say, to maintain your safety standards and your customer service standards. So we’re very cognizant of that airlines have gotten themselves in trouble when they’ve expanded way too quickly. So we’re not going to put 20 airplanes tomorrow on the field. We’re going to expand five airplane chunks along the line. Right?

13:19 Jim Beach : Makes a lot of sense. I used to teach entrepreneurship at Georgia State University, our big downtown school, and every semester or so, one of the groups would propose and southern airline that does exactly what you do, flying to Amelia Island and Pensacola and all of those beach locations. Would that model work? Will you eventually grow into the Atlanta to Savannah market and stuff like that?

13:51 Andrew Schmertz : We are looking at other markets because we need to offset the seasonality. One of the challenges of the business is it’s highly seasonal. So we are looking at markets where we’ve expand to, and Florida, for example, is one of those. We like the Ocala West Palm Beach route for a number of reasons. It would work, but you also have to make sure that the customer base is there, so you can’t just show up in this industry and hope that they come. Can’t build it and they will come that doesn’t work. You really need to research it correctly, because keep in mind, this type of service is foreign to most people. They won’t know about it. They won’t understand it. You know, we’ve explained it over the years. We’re comfortable now with our positioning in the marketplace. But if we showed up, for example, to Atlanta tomorrow, people would be like, Huh, what do you guys do? So we’d have to have a corresponding market plan, or anyone would have to have a corresponding market plan to work their way into the market, because it is

14:54 Jim Beach : Something so new. Well, the idea that we always thought the best was the Atlanta airport is to. 20 minutes south of downtown, all of the customers are 30 minutes north. And there’s a tiny airport north of Atlanta called PDK, peach Street, DeKalb, Peachtree. I know well, there’s a bill big billboard right there, and we always said your airline flies from right here with an arrow pointing straight down as our favorite marketing idea. Because, you know, the people on the top end of the highway right there, you have to go past that sign, everyone will see it.

15:30 Andrew Schmertz : So yes, and that, that is exactly the marketing that you want. Because, by the way, a lot of people who live right around that airport don’t even know that airport probably exists, because they don’t fly out of it. They never have. So you have to first tell people that, okay, you live near an airport that’s closer than Atlanta, that this airline can service that airport and go to locations that are popular that you want to fly to.

15:56 Jim Beach : I heard from your publicist that you were going to offer me a vice president of southern expansion job.

16:02 Andrew Schmertz : We’re going to be conducting interviews next week.

16:07 Jim Beach : I heard I was already on the third interview. Okay.

16:11 Andrew Schmertz : Well, that’s fine. You’re close, you’re close, you’re close. Lie all the time. We love Laurie 10 years she’s done a terrific job, and she’s a great customer of ours, by the way.

16:26 Jim Beach : Oh, really, yeah, I’m paying her too much if she’s affording your airline. What about gas prices? Does gas up and down the $108 a barrel? Does that affect you and your margins?

16:39 Andrew Schmertz : Absolutely. Gas. Gas gas prices are our second biggest cost behind labor. Now, even though the planes burns, this aircraft burns only 17 gallons an hour of fuel we use, what’s known as AV gas, which is the worst possible fuel anybody can use, but it’s what you have to use with a piston aircraft. It’s the only thing available, and that pricing in New York is encroaching on $8 a gallon now, so any variations in fuel prices obviously impacts the bottom line.

17:11 Jim Beach : I heard that a lot of airlines right now can’t go to Cuba because they can’t refuel sufficiently there, because of all the price possible Cuba,

17:21 Andrew Schmertz : Yeah, that’s possible. But those problems also occur in the United States. There’s, there’s also there’s fuel shortages from time to time at airports, because there’s, there’s jet fuel, there’s different types of fuel for different types of aircraft, and so they the the people who pump that fuel, known as fixed base operators, have to maintain enough fuel supply for everybody.

17:46 Jim Beach : Caymans would be a good market for you as well. That’s right.

17:49 Jim Beach : I like that idea too. All right. So what are your biggest issues now? Access to capital, access to pilots, access to airports. What worries you the most

18:01 Andrew Schmertz : Well, so access to capital is one that we’re driving on right now. There is a pilot shortage, a nationwide pilot shortage, actually a worldwide pilot shortage. So we can always get more airplanes, but I always ask the question, can we get the pilots to fly them? That is a challenge for the entire industry, the airlines. If you spoke to Delta Airlines today, they would say, Do you have any pilots who can fly for us? So that’s, that’s a that’s a pain point as well. So it’s capital, it’s pilots, to some extent, it’s it’s airplanes. Airports are also under pressure. There’s a, there’s community opposition to many airports, and many airports, for example, here in New York, East Hampton Airport has been in the news. The community of East Hampton has been working to close that airport, even though the vast majority of people who live in East Hampton support the airport because it’s an economic engine for the community, it’s just a select few who are upset about the quote noise. Well, you moved next to the airport. What do you expect? But that is, that is a pain point for the industry.

19:05 Jim Beach : And what about the new cool airplanes that we see, the vertical takeoffs and the electric airlines. I know yonda has a pretty good look in the airplane that’s electric, I think. What about the what are they called? E balls,

19:22 Andrew Schmertz : Vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. Yes, we have deals with with various electric aircraft makers, including one of the larger EV toll companies. There are questions as to whether and when those planes will become reality and whether there’s a market for them, but our business model matches their business model exactly if those planes are developed. So we do have conversations with them. We you know, look, I think innovation is terrific. And aviation, there has very been very little innovation since people who invented the airplane, since the Wright Brothers first flew, still wings and an engine on the on the. Front of it, but the move to electric aircraft is going to be a very big kind of change. Disrupter in the in the industry. The big challenge for them, of course, is twofold. There’s battery technology. They still have to get the batteries to have the range, because they weigh a lot. It’s not like a Tesla where you could put, you know, 1000 pounds of batteries, or whatever they put in a Tesla. You can’t do that in an airplane, and the infrastructure to recharge them, there is no infrastructure right now, but I know these companies are working on those problems.

20:34 Jim Beach : What about AI? Does it play into you and your business at all?

20:38 Andrew Schmertz : Sure. So we are looking at AI solution, scheduling aircraft utilization pilots. So you know, we have a little bit of the traveling salesman problem, which you probably taught when you were at Georgia State University, in that an airplane will fly to Nantucket. Now we have a request, let’s say, to go from Nantucket to or from Martha’s Vineyard, right next door to, you know, let’s say Bangor Maine. How do we utilize aircraft in the most efficient way to maximize the revenue that fits all of the other models that we have to also be cognizant of, like pilot rest time and duty time? How long hours can they? Can they work our passengers on time, so AI, I think will play a significant role in reducing that

21:26 Jim Beach : Friction, all right, and with your offering now to raise, build new airplanes and acquire them, or is it a normal equity deal? What is the structure of the deal? What do I get in return for my money?

21:40 Andrew Schmertz : Yeah, so there’s two folds. If you live in a state and you live in Georgia, actually, we are qualified for Georgia. So if you live in a state that has qualified, B, what’s known as a Regulation A offering, we have documents filed with the SEC. The SEC has qualified. It the states that have to qualify the offering, and as I mentioned, Georgia is one of them, Connecticut, New Hampshire, the first three states that have done so, we could offer private we could offer those shares to the public. And it is equity. It’s equity in the holding company, which is known as hopscotch go Corporation. That’s the holding company of hopscotch air. It’s all asset is hopscotch air. We’re also offering a private placement for anybody else to invest as well. So those conversations are happening with like private offices and such. So there’s there’s two, there’s two kind of paths to investing, but we are offering trade equity.

22:28 Jim Beach : How much does a Cirrus cost?

22:32 Andrew Schmertz : So the new cirruses, and I’m not saying we would go buy the new one, so they’re amazing. Airplanes are about 1.1 million, but we can get a late model, serious that’s still under warranty, and the warranty is key here for about six to 700,000

22:46 Jim Beach : Okay, cool. I don’t know if I told you this story the last time we spoke, but it’s my favorite airplane story. When my father was young, he bought an airplane with another doctor, and they were flying taking lessons in Orlando, and the friend the other guy, flew his entire family into the tallest mountain in Florida, which I think is 75 feet, and killed. He and his entire family, and dad was at the airport two or three weeks later, kicking some tires, kicking the wings. Do you say? Kicking the wings? What do you say? What are you shopping for? An airplane, and his instructor came up to him and said, By the way, the friend that just died was the good pilot between the two of you. Well, that’s hard, so they bought a house at Daytona Beach instead.

23:33 Andrew Schmertz : You know, look track, tragically, good pilots. You know, have accidents, you know, to way too frequently. However, I like to say when people ask me about that, you know, we’re not our pilots. Are not the Sunday weekend pilots. They’re not weekend warriors. These are professional, commercially trained pilots who go through an extensive training program with us, an extensive Frank checking program every six months with our operations team. So they never really on their own. They are the top tier pilots of the entire population. But it is, it is an unfortunate reality of the business in you know, private flying, if you’re a private pilot, if you are not at the top of your game, if you wake up in the morning and you have a splitting headache, you have to think twice about getting to the airplane.

24:25 Jim Beach : What about complete takeover of AI flying the plane? No pilot, just the AI flying that I think, like 80% of wrecks are caused by pilot error, right?

24:38 Andrew Schmertz : That is true and and you know, Airbus will Airbus, which is an entirely fly by wire airport, will tell you that the computers will always make the right decision and the pilots will often make the wrong decisions. Certainly, automation helps, I am not for pilotless aircraft right now, or probably in the next five. Or 10 years, I don’t think there’s gonna be marketplace acceptance for it. I mean, would you get into an airplane without a pilot? Maybe, maybe not. I don’t think so. But automation to assist the pilots on board has improved over the last 20 years significantly, and that is very, very effective, but you need to know how to use the

25:18 Jim Beach : Automation. What happened to MH, 370

25:24 Jim Beach : Sorry, that’s been missing for 12 years.

25:28 Andrew Schmertz : It’s probably aliens. Probably had something to do with it. I think I honestly believe, I don’t know. I mean, there’s all sorts of theories, but I think the the most obvious one is probably the one that has has occurred. And those two leading theories are, there was a devastating fire on board that knocked out the pilots. That’s the most benevolent theory. The most malevolent theory, obviously, is that the that the captain crashed the airplane

25:59 Jim Beach : Where, though, in the South Indian Ocean off of Australia.

26:04 Andrew Schmertz : It could be off of Australia. I was watching a documentary last week. It could be, they could be searching entirely in the wrong location of the ocean. My understanding is the Indian Ocean is pretty big and it’s very deep, and at this stage, it’s probably very, very difficult. An airplane isn’t that big compared to the ocean. To find that aircraft, you know, the best comparison would be to the Air France jet that they that they found in the Atlantic that crashed off to a factor leaving Brazil a number of years ago. They found that after more than a year, but it was a different environment. The black boxes were still pinging after what is a good 1010, plus years or so, maybe longer. I don’t know

26:48 Jim Beach : If they’re ever going to find years I saw comparing it.

26:53 Andrew Schmertz : Yeah, go ahead. No, no, they found that in two years. This has been 10 plus years. I think it’s gonna be harder to

27:00 Jim Beach : Find your theory of the aliens, I’m not far off of that. There is a another conspiracy group that says that the US has a ability to zap things and move them to another space, and that they do that out of Diego Garcia, which is right where that plane could have been headed there was some fascinating documentaries about that too. So I’m kind of, I hate conspiracy theories, but when you rule out everything else, maybe this, Diego Garcia US has technology that we don’t know of yet, and that the whole thing was to slow the Chinese down and say, look what we can do, Mr. China president, you better not mess with us. And so that theory is out there too, and I’m not far from that now, because,

27:49 Andrew Schmertz : Yeah, there, there, there is that. There are, there are a lot of wild theories out there. And you know, I don’t know, unless we find the airplane, we’re never going to really solve it. Because there’s also, you know, the theory that it was, you know, like the Korean air jet from 30 years ago, 40 years ago, that it was, off course, it was entirely a spy aircraft. You know, there’s going to be all these theories out there, but I still come back to the most obvious theory is probably the correct one.

28:18 Jim Beach : Yeah, I know the Korean airlines that you’re talking about had a Atlanta rep, our member of Congress for the house, one of those was on the plane. And so we talked about that wreck all the time. The Korean airlines wreck. So that was shot down. Yep.

28:39 Andrew Schmertz : Yeah. You know it is. You have to remember, there were 200 transit people on board. It is ultimately very sad.

28:47 Jim Beach : Yes, yes. Andrew, how do we get to find out about your offering? You get to look at it and decide if we want

28:54 Andrew Schmertz : To invest Sure. Go to fly hopscotch.com and click on the investor tab. Complete us free form. Just give me your name and email address, what state you’re in, I will send you the offering documents, and you can schedule a call with me as well. I’m having meetings all day, happy to talk to anybody about the offering. Fantastic.

29:13 Jim Beach : Andrew, thank you so much for being with us, and we’d love to have you back sooner than the last time.

29:18 Andrew Schmertz : Different. Thank you. Thank you, Jim. And once again, you were the best interview I’ve ever had.

29:24 Jim Beach : You’re the best pilot and the best airline owner.

29:28 Andrew Schmertz : There you go. How many owners, airline owners do you know?

29:31 Jim Beach : Ron Allen, CEO of delta, 10 years ago, got fired, had a wedding shower at his house. So Oh, perfect. Andrew, thanks for being with us. Great stuff, and we’d love to have you back.

29:42 Speaker 2 : You back. Absolutely great. Thank you so much, and we will be right back. You.

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30:34 Intro 2 : Well, that’s a, that’s a that’s a wonderful question, actually, oh my gosh. I love the opportunity to do this. Thank you, Jim, wow, that’s, that’s, that’s a great one. You know, that is a phenomenal question. That’s a great question. And, and I don’t have a great answer, that’s a great question. Oh, that is such a loaded question. And that’s actually a really good question. School for startups radio,

30:57 Jim Beach : Welcome back to the show again. Thank you so much for being with us for the rest of the show, I want to talk about Steve Ferris, Tim. Steve Ferris That was mean, I’m sorry I did that totally by accident. Tim Ferriss in the book The Four Hour Work Week. Let’s just establish this right from the start. I am very jealous of him and his publishing career. I would love to have sold as many millions of books as he had. So if you want to be mean about me attacking him, and I’ll just go ahead and be mean to me first, right? He has sold a lot more books than I have, and deserves all of the acclaim and credit that he has achieved. You know, I totally give him. He deserves it all, as it also does Simon Sinek, he also deserves complete credit for what he has done. I put them in the same category. I think they’re both wrong, though, and that’s the unfortunate part, Steve or Simon Sinek has been on my show, and I don’t want to say that we argued. We certainly did, did not get along with each other. It was one of the rougher shows that I’ve had, and I bet he would say that. I don’t know if he would even remember, but if he were to listen to it, I bet he would say that. And so anyway, what’s the guy? Tim Ferriss has never tried to get on my show. And let me explain how I get people on the show and how I got Simon Sinek, when you publish a new book, you go to your publicist. The publicist come to people like me. And so one of the smartest things I ever did with my show was I never went out and tried to get particular people like Tim Ferriss or Simon Sinek on. I went out and introduced myself to as many publicists as I could find and said, Here I am. I have a show, and please send your clients to me. And you know, every once in a while, Simon just published a new book, and then his publicist would email and say, Can Simon Sinek be on your show? And I would say, of course, yes. And so if you look at the incredible guest list that I have had over the years, almost all of it is because of publicist and my relationship with them. So anyway, get that out of the way. So let me tell you what I think I know. He started off and graduated from Princeton in 2000 and got a degree in East Asian Studies back then. I graduated a decade earlier, but I also got sort of an international degree type thing in Japanese. And there were a lot of us doing it back then, because we all thought that, you know, the small, flat globe and all of that kind of stuff, and that the world was flattening and everything was going to be international. And you know how that played out. Anyway, he started a company called Brain Quicken, which was an online nutritional supplement company. At that point, supplements were very popular still today as well. You know, with the gncs and all of the companies that make the athlete and celebrity endorsed ideas, and you see the YouTubers and the tick tockers with their own supplement brand or their drink or whatever he was. You know, it had been around since the 50s, that industry certainly exploded in the 70s, and then again in the 90s, and so he was writing a good run there. I would want to say something about the supplements industry. I have very mixed feelings, because some of it is so bad and so dirty and so gross, and some of it is incredibly impressive and really well done. Obviously, he did it very well, because he sold it for a trunk truckload of money. They brought in trucks for a week, just dumping money into his front yard. And most of them are not like that, right? He was certainly the 1% maybe even of the 1% but he did do very, very well, and, you know, good for him. I applaud that everyone who gets rich, I love the space, though, is still kind of up in the air with me. I have been to supplement factories. I know some of the supplement owners. I know I know some of the International supplement owners, and. So I wouldn’t want to buy something from someone that maybe the FDA should endorse these things. They don’t regulate them now, which is part of their advantage, but they certainly should get in there and do it. If you are buying from an international source, if you really want to talk to them, they can become very difficult to find. They are required by the FDA, to have one way to get in touch with them, and email is sufficient. That doesn’t really satisfy me, especially if you’re risking your body and your health on it. So I don’t know that I would go, I would, I would check the source and see if there’s anything you can find out about that company. Because I have been in the factories. I know some of the owners. I have been in the factories. They are used to be NASCAR car repair shop buildings right next to the road, and now they have a supplement factory in there. And that is a literal example that I am thinking of. Anyway, supplements, those are my thoughts. Tim wrote, at that point the four hour work week book and sold that came out in 2007 and it sold became a number one New York Times bestseller. It was an incredibly good book. It was a fantastic read. I enjoyed the daylights out of it. The problem with it was, though it was a bad advice, and I will stand by that. I think that a lot of people, I’m not, certainly the first to say that. I don’t think he’s going to come and shoot me or anything like that, but it’s the idea that you can skip all of the hard part, and it was just too easy. You don’t sit around and jump to the four hour work week. You know, he had been doing a lot of work for 20 years. You know, the rest of us entrepreneurs have been working really hard for a long number of years, and so kind of silly and resentful when someone says that four hour is the standard, or something that you could hope to achieve in your your own personal entrepreneurial career. So let’s just say, call that for what it is. Is a, it’s, it’s a movie idea. Anyway, it did have a billion downloads, and it became one of the and he became one of the most successful long term interviewers, with top performers, including guests like Arnold Schwarzenegger and LeBron James and Tony Robbins and people like that. I had a run in with Tony Robbins, and maybe run in is the correct word, and maybe I’ll just tell you the story. So I was invited. Four people from my company were invited to go see Star Wars one on its world premiere the very first day in Hollywood, and it was in not the man theater, but I don’t know what it was. I don’t remember. I could find it if I had a map, and the place was just absolutely packed. And we had to send off to get our laminated badges so that we could get in and had our photo ID copied and then put in there. And so for a week or two, we were without our ID IDs to go and get into this event. And we got there, you know, two hours early, and walked up to the back of the line, and everyone was, you know, we holding out our laminated badges because we were sure we were going to pass all these people. And so we kind of asked the guy at the very back, and he was the lead singer of the eagles that we had just asked Sonny hotel, California guy, and with his kids hanging there trying to get in line, in front of him was Danny DeVito and Raya Perlman and their kids. And I mean, we were at the back of line, but after us, tons of celebrities came in and were there as well. So anyway, we got seated and went in, and we had horrible seats. Guess who sat down next to me? Tony Robbins and his wife, and they went ballistic. They weren’t there throwing anything, but they certainly made it very well known. And I felt so sorry for the people that had to handle him, because I think he did go too far with it. But anyway, Tim Harrison had an amazing show in a billion downloads. He also became an angel investor around this time, and had some huge success there. Invested in Uber Shopify, Facebook, du lingo, which is a great product, by the way, my daughter is doing Japanese right now, and I absolutely love the way she’s using it and having fun with it and all of that kind of thing. And then in his later career, he sort of turned toward philosophy and writing and what he called selectivity, from, say, 2018 until present. So basically the last decade and he has expanded his brand. Other books have included, there was a whole series of four hour everything, Four Hour Chef in the four hour everything, four hour sex and any anyway, I don’t know all of them. I Oh, I’ve not, never bought any of them. He also wrote tools of Titan and members of. Tribes, and was on a bunch of boards and everything, and he became more a curator of wisdom, he said, more than an operator. And if we were to sum up his career, it was sort of say he started as a scrappy e commerce guy, became becoming a best selling author, an experimentalist, an elite interviewer and a top tier angel investor, and now he is a philosophical curator and a very impressive, very impressive career.

40:32 Jim Beach : So I want to go back to the book and reinforce how it is nothing more than CS Lewis type fantasy, right? Because the promise of the book is just not there that the dream working four hours a week with an automated income, where you don’t have to do anything, and it automatically goes into your desk, and you automatically, you know, and then it automatically appears in your bank, where you outsource everything, and then you travel the world learning philosophical, smart things, and Sit on the beach and money just falls from trees, just falls like the gods just throw money. And I’m just interested that I said that. Go. Now look at the cover of my latest book, The Real environmentalist. And in the cover, money is falling from the top, and then it slowly morphs into leaves and the bottom, so they’re changing. And if you go to the website, the real environmentalist.com, we have an animated leaf thing that falls. That’s really cool, right? So anyway, that was the dream. And he said it can be done, and that four hours a week is enough. The really problem only you can do that, though, is after you’ve already built something really valuable. And that part, you know, that 10 year grind part, gets left out of the story. I’m not implying that, you know, that Tim left it out or anything. I’m just saying that, you know, when you have a sexy story to tell, you leave out the part about the hard work, the overnight success, right? That kind of thing. And the overnight success says, I’ve been doing this for 25 years, you know? So anyway, most entrepreneurs do it kind of differently. I don’t want to describe that so you know what the opposite looks like. It’s long hours, many years long learning curves. The first phase of building anything is not outsourcing, right? You have to do it yourself first, so you can figure it out then, and then you can teach it. You can’t outsource the learning of the knowledge of the business. You have to know the knowledge of the business and what the secrets are and how you get things done in that business that can’t be taught to you. As the CEO, you’re the one that has to discover that. And so when you do that, you get immersed, and you become 100% in your business. And that’s the opposite of a four hour work week, right? The immersion takes a long time for it to happen. It’s not something that is quick and easy and all of that. So just keep that in mind. And I do think that this has had huge impact on the entrepreneurial culture and the entrepreneurship world everywhere, right? The book launched this idea that there’s something bigger, this culture of lifestyle, entrepreneurship, fantasy land, right, where Ricardo Montalban just makes absolutely all of your dreams happen. And the problem is, you don’t know what the secret cost of that is, until it bites you on the ass, right? And so this whole fantasy lifestyle, we all bought into it, and we were all trying to get there.

You know, I was a young, snappy entrepreneur during that time, too. I started my first business in 1994 and so I was certainly living this time and trying to grow and do it, you know. And I was in VCs offices and learning about what pitches were working and bricks and mortars and how our business was cool because it had a virtual online component and an incredible bricks and mortar component as well. And so it all made sense, and yada yada yada, right? So we were all playing these fantasy games, and the kind of the dream melded into what everyone wanted was the passive income, the automated businesses, the nomad lifestyle, working out of Thailand and then Romania the next day. And just the work from anywhere, freedom, the work from any time zone, the work from any cafe, right? The thing is you have to build the cafe first, right? I hope everyone sees that and understands that and understands what I mean, you have to get the real thing first. And so the result of that was 1000s of people at WeWorks trying to start businesses and drop shipping and affiliates and content creation and being a what’s the word, a promoter? No, that’s not it, an influencer. All of these things, right? The thing is, though, you have to have some real content, some real value, some real knowledge, some real talent to be able to make that work. And a lot of people who do that. Stuff doesn’t and some people need to find their space. Some people are best with the 32nd Second tick tock. You know, I prefer to talk for four hours, because there’s that many implications of all of the things. Oh, I just used up my entire work week, according to Tim Ferriss, four hours just for the lecture. And so that’s not going to work. That’s not how you know is going to work out right? The real path is obsession, and then you encounter competence, then you figure out how to scale it, and then you get that financial freedom in the fourth phase. And most of us, depending on who you want to count and who how greedy and egotistical you want to be are in phase one, two or three, right? And if you figure out how to get into the fourth phase, you need to understand it deeply enough to remove yourself. I remember the first time I went away on vacation for my first business. We went to Hawaii the same resort with Bill or where Bill Gates got married. It was my wife and our nine or 10 year old, month old baby, who was that Christian? And when we left, our bill was $10,000 right, whatever for the room and food. And then they go, and Mr. Beach, you also have this bill, and it was my telephone bill. And my telephone bill was larger than the bill for my room and food. And so this is in the 80s, no 90s, mid 90s, mid 90s. And we didn’t have cell phones back then that you could call Hawaii. And so the bill at the hotel was astronomical, more than the hotel bill. I then went on vacation two years later, and we arranged the system so that they would leave a certain signal. You know, we had, like a CIA level Dropbox thing and everything, and never got contacted. Once everything went fine. That was a two week trip. We went to Greece. This was 96 I remember, went to Greece and to Turkey, and I was blown away how much nicer Turkey was than Greece. And you know, that was the year that Atlanta had the Olympics, and Rome did not. I mean, Athens did not get the Olympics, and they were still mad. And I was like, people couldn’t have held the Olympics now and then, when they did do it, what? Three times after that, they were barely ready then. Anyway, let me get back on to Ferris. I don’t know how I got so lost on there. Anyway. The reason I brought this all up is just about a month ago, Ferris released a new position paper, or I don’t know what they were calling it, and he realized that he wants to pull back a little bit on it. He’s saying that he and a whole bunch of other people got in a self optimization trap, where he started questioning the culture of constant bio hacking and becoming the best me that I can be in constant optimization and focusing nothing more than on making me a better person, and then blogging about it so everyone else can do it in The fascinating because their Four Hour Work Week helped create that culture. And now he seems to be pointing at it and going, maybe optimized life is not the point. Maybe there is something more valuable, something more important that we need to be doing, and maybe the optimized life could look at something else. I just want to throw out my thoughts on Jeff Galloway. He is my first cousin. He’s 80 years old. He was a famous Olympic runner. He was in the 72 Olympics. He did things like in the US trials. He quit one yard short so that the guy who would now come in third got to go to the Olympics because he had already qualified in another event. And by doing that his friend could go to the Olympics as well. In the 72 Olympics, they came in like eighth or ninth. He didn’t win any medals, but he devoted the rest of his life to his passion of running. This is a great example of you entrepreneurial passion, people. He devoted the rest of his life to running. He created famous races. He had racing organizations. He organized races for other companies, things like that, and his passion was just never doubted. And his entire life was running anyway. He wrote a book called run, walk, run, or the other way, run, walk, run, walk, run, whatever it is, and it became a whole methodology. He ended up writing 30 books. In the end was one of the icons of the industry. He just passed this last month, was the reason I brought it up. Had an aneurysm at the age of 80. They even made a joke about him on Saturday Night Live, Colin Farrell and Shay. I think that’s their names. Anyway, I should get back to the topic, because Ferris is now realizing that optimized life, just like with Jeff, is not the whole point. Maybe the whole point the real takeaway should be something different, that the goal is not to escape your work. The goal is to build something so cool and meaningful that it doesn’t require every minute. It, and that that freedom is what is earned, and you can’t hack that, right? So maybe we should all pull back a little bit and,

50:10 Jim Beach : You know, just realize that it’s created an unnecessary amount of pressure on us, and that is the exact opposite of what we’re trying to get, which is freedom from the misery. And the startup drudge at the very beginning, right? So the problem that really is created is that there was this side effect culture, this whole generation that began chasing freedom without mastery. They all thought that they could skip the hard parts. And if you know anyone who is 25 to 40, maybe you see this in them. I have some people that I can think of that are in this they’re hard working, but they just expect stuff too fast and too much they they’re obsessed with passive income and the having three vrbos or the Airbnbs, and now we have the V the whole crash of that industry, right? And, you know, Nomad life is awesome until you know you want to date somebody or something like that. And a lot of business models don’t totally embrace that, right? So the fantasy became an unrealistic goal that not necessarily was a valid place to go. And so maybe we need to go back to how you’re supposed to learn things that there’s an order to it. You’re supposed to learn a skill, get good at something, create value, right? And then figure out how to build a business and a system around that, where people are going to pay you money to do those things, right? And the systems are absolutely so important, because that’s what allows freedom. When you have a system, you can personally step out of it and not be part of it. And what Ferris did was reversed the steps. And started with, yeah, he’s reversed the steps. And so he started at the end, the number five step, which you can’t do unless you’ve done the years and the hard work and the sweat and of, you know, building the business. So anyway, we need to start wrapping up here. What Ferris is now sounding like is different. He talks much more about mental health and meaning and relationships and boundaries and simplicity. He’s not so obsessed with the hacking and productivity and making every sentence better in every second count. You know, he’s trying to get away from that, and it tells us something important. It does point to a life where even a person who popularized optimization eventually realized life is not a system to needlessly optimize, right? And then you could think about religion and all of that, and have to decide that for yourself, right? And again, I don’t want to stress that I’m attacking Ferris I love his change over time. I believe that that is what normal people do. I think you should become more passionate and concerned with relationships over time and less concerned about the politics. And I hate seeing politics divide us. That just makes no sense at all. Anyway, I need to wrap it up. The Four Hour Work Week is not just a business model, it’s a thought experiment about freedom, and the real path is build something valuable first, then you get the freedom right. So anyway, I hear the music, which means I am supposed to stop talking. Thanks for being with us today. We are back tomorrow with another great show. Bye Now