Podcast

Peter: Welcome to the show. Wow. It is an honor to be number one on the show, Kevin.

Kevin Mooney: Thanks for taking the time. It's an odd time, two o'clock on a Wednesday. I feel like it's an Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode right now, at a random place, timestamped at a random time.

Peter: A little bit, yeah. Episode 24, timestamp.

Kevin Mooney: Exactly. I think it would actually be really cool if I found intro music like It's Always Sunny. I don't know how to do these things, so I'm kind of trying to figure it all out.

Peter: I think it's great that you've taken this upon yourself to get a podcast put together and put it out into the world. I'm definitely honored to be here and be your first guest, regardless of what time of day it is. I've always enjoyed our conversations, and I always thought it'd be kind of fun when you brought up the idea of a podcast, just kind of make it casual, you know, little JRE-like or whatever, and see where it goes. So here we are.

Kevin Mooney: Yeah. I mean, minus kind of looking like him with the old baldness and stuff. I'm not trying to actually reproduce the Joe Rogan podcast.

Peter: Of course, you've got your own style, and you're going to figure it out as you go. I don't think anybody who creates content like this really has an idea of where it's going to go until it emerges a little bit and you get it out there in the world.

Kevin Mooney: Yeah, no idea what the hell I'm doing.

I was messaging you before this. I was in a webinar. Let me back up. There's this gal, her name is Adley Kinsman or something like that. She does viral video stuff, and she's turned it into a business where she sells a course on how to make viral videos. I'm kind of a sucker for these $200 buys, right? You follow their content, you like it, you get sucked into their funnel. Then they give you an ask and it's 200 bucks, and you're like, yeah, what the hell. So you buy it. And I look at the course and I'm like, I'm not really trying to make viral content. I actually don't know what I'm trying to make, I'm just trying to do content. Point is, because I bought that one thing, I'm getting hit with all this other stuff. She hits you with this promise of how you can monetize your content on social media. So I joined this webinar, and I'm sitting in there, and it's one of those old-school junky webinars packed full of testimonials and value and "here's our exact funnel," and you're just sitting there waiting for the ask the whole time. When's the ask going to come? Is this another $200 thing? I should clarify, it wasn't from Adley, it was from somebody else she knows.

Peter: Gotcha. So you paid to get into this webinar.

Kevin Mooney: You didn't have to pay to get into it, it was a free webinar. So I sat there for an hour listening to this process, which isn't bad, it's just very vague. And I'm waiting for the price. What's the damn price of this thing? You can watch in the chat, everyone's asking, how much does it cost? And they just deflect, deflect, deflect. Shields out, knocking down all the requests. I wait until the Q&A hoping there's an answer, and there's never an answer. What she ends up saying is, well, it's not a cost, that's a poor person's mindset, this is an investment into your future. Book a free call with me or my team and then I'll tell you the cost, and I'll tell you what's inside the program, which is what we were supposed to actually learn about in the free webinar. But we didn't get that. Just a bunch of fluff, value, and testimonials.

Peter: So they got you in this funnel, and they're explaining all the benefits, but they're not giving you the meat and potatoes. You don't get that until you're filtered out from everyone else and actually want to call and talk to them.

Kevin Mooney: Right. And then it's another free call, and then they'll tell you the number on that call. And here's the sad part, Peter. I'm going to do the call, and I don't know if I'm going to invest in this thing, but I'm in this mindset of, how do I ditch the ego I've had for most of my business career? You know all about my ego, you worked with me back in the ADV days, and I had really strict views on how business should be done. I was always about brand from the beginning. Since we closed the agency down and it's just me on my own, I've been thinking, I'm going to change the way I do things, I'm going to do it my way. And I have changed the way I do things, and I'm doing things my way, but the money isn't any different. I still have the same client-agency relationship problems I did before. So I've been thinking, how do I bridge the gap between this very ego-driven, brand-driven way of doing business, and on the far side of the spectrum, the kitschy, run-a-bunch-of-ads, sell-a-bunch-of-promises-and-beliefs, make-a-zillion-dollars approach? There's got to be something in the middle. I'm trying to figure that out, and I think part of the idea of having a podcast is talking about this, because there's a lot of people out there who don't want to do the kitschy sales thing and just make a bunch of money. Sure, everybody wants money, but that's the one thing. And then there are other people on the other side who are hard-headed, you've got to do it the right way, the long way, the hard way, but the right way. I've been doing that for years and I'm not really getting anywhere, obviously some success at the agency. But what I like about you, Peter, is you're on the opposite side of me in that philosophy, you just don't go to the gross part of it. I really like that about you. This is a long way of saying I'm trying to figure out how to create content, how to monetize it, and figure this whole thing out. That's me in a nutshell right now.

Peter: Your bag is full, that's a lot to unpack. Having been an entrepreneur for most of my adult life, I've realized everybody takes different journeys, and the journey is sometimes part of the process, coming to grips with your ego, or coming to grips with, this worked for the business, this didn't. You start to realize everybody is on different path points along that journey line. So you have this vast, dynamic thing throughout your life, dealing with different personalities, different situations, different perspectives based on where people are at in their journey. It's definitely challenging. Back in the construction days, early on, learning about the world and how it worked, doing blue-collar work, I found out fast there are all sorts of different characters out there. Some are there to genuinely help you, others are just there to collect a paycheck, others are there to do their own thing, maybe they've got a drinking problem or something, maybe not. Being a supervisor running job sites, you quickly realize everyone is wired a little differently, and dealing with different personalities is challenging. I'll probably lose my train of thought here, I go off on tangents. But coming back to one's entrepreneurial journey, figuring out what works and what doesn't, there's a lot you can relate to in meeting different types of people and trying to see things from a different point of view, whether it's your personal life or business life.

Kevin Mooney: I've had quite a few business partnerships, and that was always the hardest part, dealing with the people in the business. I want to do it this way, you want to do it that way, that back and forth. You and I had that back when we were selling dildos on Amazon.

Peter: I was wondering if that was going to come up during the podcast.

Kevin Mooney: It has to. To be fair, I talk about that in almost every sales meeting I have, because one of the questions I get asked a lot is, do you have any experience in my industry? And I'm like, probably not, but let me share a story about selling silicone wedding rings and dildos on Amazon, stand-up paddleboards, water bottle fruit infusers, whatever the heck it was. It didn't really matter what the product was. Dealing with everyone's different personality types, analytical and emotional, that's always been the biggest problem. Wes has gone through it, you've gone through it, Chris is going through it right now running a restaurant. A lot of the principles are the same, but we're in a different place now where it's so driven by social media, by content, and I've never wanted to play the content game. My brain cannot do it, it stops at the planning part. What do I talk about today? I have no idea. What am I going to write about every single day so I have content on a platform every month, every year? I have no idea how to do that, and nobody can teach me that, or at least get out of my own way, because if they wrote a content calendar for me I'd pick it apart and say that's stupid, I don't want to talk about that, that's what everybody else does. So I'm exploring these viral people and seeing how I can apply it to the creative industry. But now there's a bunch of gurus in the creative industry doing it too, and I can't keep up with them. I can fake my way through a lot, I can do good work when I put my mind to it, but the whole content world is a real struggle for me. So I'm learning, this is a process, and maybe something good comes out of it.

Peter: Absolutely. Social media, making content, it's hard, dude. Even making a product tutorial video, a lot of people think you can just shoot it in 30 minutes. If you've tried effectively communicating in a clear, concise way to get your bullet points across on camera in 30 minutes, good luck. Then you've got to edit the video, make a title, upload it.

Kevin Mooney: And a thumbnail, and do the thumbnail the same way Mr. Beast does it, otherwise you're not getting any clicks.

Peter: Right, and then you get inundated with, you're doing your YouTube videos wrong, you better do your thumbnail this way, pay for this course, I'll show you how, are you using the right keywords, do you have your description set right. All of these things. You and I have been down the e-commerce journey for a while now, so maybe to back up and give your podcast listeners some context, since I'm sure their ears perked up at silicone rings and women's pleasure toys. Kevin and I started an Amazon business together. It was basically an experiment to see if popular products being sold on Amazon could be rebranded, put a different label on them, and put them on Amazon to see if they'd sell. Really basic business plan. The women's toys part came into play, I believe, when 50 Shades of Grey came out. That was the rave at the time, all the women buying the books.

Kevin Mooney: 50 Shades of Grey, right? Wasn't there a website too, Adam and Eve? They blew up. It went bananas.

Peter: Oh yeah, I think all the adult product websites had a humongous spike in sales from that movie series. Kevin and I would typically brainstorm ideas after work over some beers. What's hot right now? I remember us talking about 50 Shades of Grey, and we just looked at each other and said, we should sell dildos on Amazon. No brainer. So we went down that path, placed a small order for something we thought would work. My number one piece of advice to anybody starting an Amazon business: don't buy dildos. Whatever you do, don't go down that path. We didn't even know we needed special account approval to sell those products on the platform.

Kevin Mooney: Well, maybe aside from the technicalities, the piece of advice is, when you're ordering that product from China on Alibaba, do your due diligence, make sure the packaging comes in English, make sure there are American-looking women on the package, or men if you're into that. Remember when we got those and had to unpackage all of them? We had to clean them because they were dirty and dusty, then repackage with a new insert because it was Chinese.

Peter: Yeah, this is a part of my business career I'd rather brush into the dustpan and toss in the garbage. But it's a funny story, because here we are with this grandiose idea that we're going to replicate what's going on online with this category of products, buy and sell, buy and sell, make a profit. And here we are receiving inventory that isn't sellable as-is, it has to be re-carded, repackaged, cleaned. Touching each and every one of those things with gloves in my garage.

Kevin Mooney: Sure, of course, in your garage.

Peter: Only to have sold maybe six in a year. I don't think we sold very many of those things.

Kevin Mooney: No, no, no. Your mom found the box of 492 of them during a garage sale.

Peter: Yeah, the story with that was, I wound up taking those out of my garage and putting them in the storage room at work, up in the attic, second floor blank room. The landlord let us store stuff upstairs, we popped it in the corner, a bunch of other stuff got stacked on top. My mom was actually helping us move out of that space, cleaning up, organizing, and she comes up to me one afternoon and says, you know what, I found this box with a lot of really weird stuff in it. I was like, yeah, I think that was Hans's.

Kevin Mooney: Poor Hans.

Peter: And she goes, he's into some really weird stuff, isn't he? So I think that box went right into the dumpster. Somebody down the line at the transfer station had some fun with it.

Kevin Mooney: To be fair, we did have some success in that Amazon business. I think about it all the time, those propellers crushed it for us.

Peter: Yeah, we did. So the propellers were this little RC quadcopter toy that you and I played with from the X Pro Heli days. We'd get bored in the shop and fly those things around in circles, little miniature drones, maybe the size of a cell phone. One thing was, we crashed one into the garage door going 30 miles an hour and all the propellers broke. Do you have any extra propellers? No. So we can't play anymore. Let's find that on Alibaba and see if we can put it on Amazon. And all of a sudden, it was this little niche product you wouldn't have thought would have any traction, and everybody else and their mother had the same problem, they couldn't find replacement parts. So all of a sudden we're buying 500 sets at a time, sending them to Amazon, selling little knickknacks.

Kevin Mooney: That was the crazy thing, you'd get a box this big from China, we'd spend $500 on it, and we'd double it, get a thousand dollars out of it, and sell through that box easily in a month, if not more. I remember labeling all the little dime bags with the propellers in them, one by one, putting a little UPC code from our little printer on it. That stuff was so much fun, and it came from a place of fun. We just played around, we were dicking around. We didn't make money, it made enough for us to go down to Wubba's and drink beer and eat nachos after work every day, and install a kegerator in the office. But we didn't make any money doing that, really. It was super fun though. I think about that a lot. When I started Delta, I wanted to have fun with it, make fun things. When I joined Hound, I wanted to make fun things and do creative shit. Every step of the way, even up until right now, doing the so-called agency work, it's just too serious. You've got to learn all these tools and tactics, produce this amount, say this, follow this sales script, value-based pricing, know exactly what to say when a client has an objection. It's this big giant game to get people to say yes. Where's the fucking fun? Where's the fun stuff we used to do? Like way back in the day with War Scooters, that shit was weird and fun. I hope it doesn't exist on the internet anymore, but it was still a lot of fun to do.

Peter: I still have a box of those War Scooters t-shirts in my container.

Kevin Mooney: No way, the t-shirts? That's so good.

Peter: You were cleaning out that same storage room because you had a few boxes in there. So for people listening, Kevin was running a small business for a friend out of the unit above X Pro Heli at the time. X Pro Heli was a small RC quadcopter drone aerial video company that my soon-to-be business partner started back in 2011, before DJI came out with all the advanced drones you see today. There's no way we would've been able to replicate anything like that, but with the little operation we had going, it was definitely a hobby.

Kevin Mooney: But it was cool, that was some cool shit you guys were doing.

Peter: You were running a really cool little business out of a small space, War Scooters, selling those little rollerblade-wheel scooters, aluminum stunt scooters. Parents buy those for their seven, eight, nine, ten-year-old kids, even fourteen, fifteen, seventeen-year-olds. Those things are super popular, and you had a really good time with that.

Kevin Mooney: It was super fun. It was in the early days of e-commerce. To be fair, the War Scooters brand was a cool little brand, waging war on doing nothing and getting outside and having fun, that was the manifesto they had there. And when Jared, to back up even further, when I was fired from that really shitty job right out of college, I called Jared just to see if there was any side work. He was like, well, I want to move down to Bariloche, Argentina, for a year.

Peter: Wasn't he in South America or something, on an ayahuasca journey?

Kevin Mooney: For sure. He said, I want to move down there for a year, and I need someone to run the company. I was like, sure, I know how to process orders, since I'd just come off that e-commerce company. It was really fun. It was in those early days of e-commerce when SEO was a big deal and social was kind of a big deal, but if there was any shift in the algorithm on Google, you could drop completely off the first page. We ranked pretty high, so orders just showed up every day. I'd run promotions and get compensation if I sold over a certain number of units. It was really fun. But the algorithm shifted, and orders slowed down a lot. At the time I was dabbling in the idea, why are we the middleman? Why don't we just go to the source and make our own scooters? Jared didn't want to do that, he was done with the thing, wanted to move on with his life, which was kind of a bummer because there was revenue, there was cash flow, we could have taken that and turned it into something. But anyway, during War Scooters, I was stuck up in that little tiny square box upstairs, and I'd come down the back stairs with Louie and let him run around, and I'd be like, hey Peter, what are you doing, you want to play, you want to hang out?

Peter: Yeah, I'd be downstairs just below Kevin's unit. There was a back door to the shop, and on the other side, I'd be at my workbench tinkering away, putting together a quadcopter or a drone, or soldering something. At the time we were working on these little two-axis brushless gimbals, a product that keeps the camera super still while you're holding it, any motion of the frame doesn't affect the camera. You'd put it on the bottom of a quadcopter or hobby-grade drone. That business just kind of came up, and we started making these products. Kevin would come down and be like, Peter, what are you doing? Sometimes I'd have my magnifying glasses on, looking like a total nerd, working on a phase conductor on this motor that's all out of whack, or soldering a circuit board together. Pretty funny. That probably happened for a good solid year, year and a half, just coming down during lunchtime to talk bullshit, grab some food. And all of a sudden you and I saw eye to eye on the e-commerce thing, bouncing ideas off each other, what are you doing for Google Ads, I don't know, what are you doing, I'm doing it all wrong. Have you heard of this thing called Amazon? Yeah, but I don't want to do that, it's kind of hard. And I'm like, yeah, it is, but it was crazy.

Kevin Mooney: Amazon was a game changer, man, in that early time period. It was so big, you could just list something on there and kind of go. All of those conversations sparked what we did together at ADV, just selling random shit, trying to rebrand it, repackage it, and sell it. Then we found out it was just a race to the bottom. Every product you'd get, you could sell for $9.99, and then some other person on Amazon is selling it for $2.99, and you either drop down to $2.99 and keep your sales, or you stay where you're at and sales disappear, and you go off the first page and no one ever finds you. That was a whole fricking disaster. But it was just a big giant learning process, figuring it out as we go. And that turned into Evo Gimbals for you, and I went and tried to run Delta, and that's a whole different story about what blew up there, which is how I got into the space I'm in now. What a crazy way to do it, playing around, whether it's our own money or someone else's, just figuring everything out as you go.

Peter: It's kind of one of these things where you start doing the core work of getting a product up online and figuring out what sells, and that whole process is a learning experience. It was our e-commerce upper education, diving headfirst into getting an offer up online, selling, getting feedback, dealing with returns and customers, figuring out that whole life cycle of shipping something to the customer. Wild stuff. It's so much work, and it's sad that there are so many people out there putting these courses together making it look easy, and people fall for it. They think, e-commerce sounds great, I'm going to take luxury vacations, buy a dream Lamborghini, money's just going to come my way. And then they realize, shit, there's actually a lot of work that goes into this.

Kevin Mooney: So much. Every time I talk to somebody through the agency who has an e-commerce store or a product company, and they're struggling. I had a client early this year with a really awesome product for contractors and developers to hold their paperwork, iPads, phones. He did the same thing I did at Delta, bought a whole shitload of inventory and then tried to figure out how to sell it. He came to me and said, I don't have any money, I don't have any resources, but I've got 2,000 units I'm trying to sell. I said, okay, what's our baseline here, do you have social media, do you have a website, do you have a brand? And sure, he had all these things checked off. Well, why isn't he selling it? Nobody knows about it. So what are we going to do, are we going to advertise this, develop some systems for marketing? He said, yeah, let's do it. I told him what I'd charge, and he said, well, I don't have any money. So now I don't know what to tell you. There are a lot of people who come to me with e-commerce stores who think they can just turn it on. My website is live, I can sell products, accept payments, I've got a printer for labels, Shopify does all this stuff. Even Shopify sells you that dream, the all-in-one built-in store. But nobody's accounting for, do people even want your product? If they do want it, do they have a reason to buy from you, because there's a million other people selling a product just like yours. Is the pricing right? How is it delivered, is the packaging nice, is the customer experience something they're excited about, or do they get a box inside a box inside a box that's all supposed to be branded but goes straight into the trash? You don't even realize the packaging part when you start an e-commerce store, you think you just need a product and a box. But designing a package and putting the right information on it is a whole entire thing. I used to watch you on the Evo Gimbal boxes the first year, taking the photos, trying to design it in Illustrator without really knowing how to use Illustrator.

Peter: Yeah.

Kevin Mooney: It's a whole fricking process, and people have no idea it exists. Or if they do have an idea but opt out of doing it, they wonder why their product's not selling, or why people aren't returning. It's like, well, you set them in a brown box and hand-wrote the label because you were trying to be cheap. It's crazy learning all of that, and thankfully we learned it through our own businesses or working for somebody else. It's just so much fucking work.

Peter: It is a ton of work. I don't know where I was going to go, but the whole process of figuring out what product you want to sell, if there's a demand for it, researching competition, figuring out how to fit your offer into a realm of ten other offers with these features, how do you make yours different and better. Finding a niche is super hard. What I think I've learned over the years is what makes it easier is doing something you're passionate about, whether it's a hobby or something. I find myself nowadays able to bring a product to market much easier than before, simply because I'm passionate about it. For those who don't know, I ride motorcycles, off-road motorcycles, and along my entrepreneurial journey, one of my thoughts was always to create a moto company, because that's something I was really into as a kid, one of the dirt bike kids building our own little track, riding with my brother, building jumps, crashing, building bigger jumps, crashing more, always fixing the bikes. I thought that was something I wanted to do as a career, but the path I took wound up not panning out that way, which is fine. Later in life, I'm like, well, I really like motorcycle riding, and I know things about making parts and bringing products to market. What can I do that's different, what am I passionate about?

Kevin Mooney: So is that how you landed on e-bikes, or was that just perfect timing? Because those things went bananas. When e-bikes came out, I was like, there's no way anyone's going to ride an e-bike, the point of riding a bike is to pedal. And now all of a sudden there's pedals, but it's more like, no, actually it's just a glorified dirt bike with an electric battery.

Peter: Right, that thing's coming up, and you've always been into motocross, riding, enduro. Did you see that coming, or did you fall into it? Be honest.

Kevin Mooney: Fuck you, man, that's so cool.

Peter: I fell into it. The only reason I fell into it is because Wes wound up buying a Sur-Ron, and I was like, wow, this thing is really cool, you can buzz around town and no one bugs you. This is back in 2019, I think. My wheels started spinning, pun intended. I didn't really dive into the e-moto, e-bike thing until it was more established. When I started my brand, Rippin Moto, I was into enduro and off-road trail riding at the time, so I thought I'd start a brand centered around CNC parts and accessories, just see how it goes. That's where I started the business. Then as the e-bike, e-moto industry started evolving, Wes bought that Sur-Ron and I was like, wow, these things are actually pretty cool. And then I thought, wait a minute, the brakes on these things suck. Why are they putting mountain bike brakes on a bike that weighs 80 pounds, when those brakes are designed to stop maybe a 15-pound bike with the rider? Me being a larger dude, 250 pounds plus, you go 40 miles an hour on the street and go to grab the brakes, and it's like, what brakes? So that's how I got into the e-moto part of the business, which is now the primary revenue driver, e-moto parts, e-moto brakes, wheels, accessories, and stuff like that. I developed a set of performance brakes for the e-moto bikes, and it was just something the market needed. It was well received, the branding was spot on to go with the product, and it kind of took off. I don't have a big warehouse, I don't have employees, I'm the guy wearing multiple hats, but it's become a full-time business.

Kevin Mooney: It's so awesome, that's so cool.

Peter: It kind of goes back to what I was trying to get at before. If you're an entrepreneur, have an entrepreneurial mindset, and you're looking to start a business, launch a product, there's a big difference, in my opinion, when it comes to doing something you really like doing. I think it's fair to say you really liked doing the scooter stuff at the time, during the War Scooters business.

Kevin Mooney: Yeah, I've contemplated going back, I'm not even shitting you. The scooters haven't changed. Kids haven't changed, it's the same stuff. In fact, I see Delta scooters cruising around town all the time, new ones popping up every day. When we closed the company, Josh decided he was going to donate or sell them off way below cost just to get rid of them. Some gentleman bought it, maybe he runs a church or something, he was like, yeah, I'll take them, and he just doles them out at warehouse cost. So you see them all over the place. Now knowing what I know, in strategy, brand, marketing, advertising, and now going on this journey of podcasting and content and social, I could crush it. Do I want to fire up those old contacts via Skype in China again and make it a thing? But no, the reality is, that was really fun. To be fair, when I left Delta and got into Hound, that was really fun too. There's still some fun in what I do now, but, and I'm not here to bash anyone or bash clients, anybody in the agency world will tell you the client-agency relationship is just really tough. It's very demanding, and nobody wants to pay you to have fun, let's just say it like that. They want to pay you to produce something that makes them money. And the reality is, if you pay somebody to have fun, they're going to produce something that makes you money. But you can't get past that weird language barrier, I need you to tell me step one, two, three, four, I need you to tell me what I'll receive on step one, two, three, four, and I need you to tell me what my return on investment can be. Whether you stumble through that or say something smart, sometimes they hire you, sometimes they don't. But at the end of the day, you should hire me for the way that I think. You should hire me because I failed miserably trying to sell dildos and silicone rings, then had some success in scooters, then had some success with an agency, and doing all these other things. It's part success, part failure. Even Evo was successful for many years until it became something it wasn't really in the beginning. Maybe from a technology standpoint, technology blew up and went past where Evo was, and you can't compete with that. That doesn't mean it was a failure, it just wasn't the success it was when you started it and loved what it was in the beginning of that industry. It's really all about getting back to just wanting to have fun doing what I'm doing. For me, this is a lot of fun. I love just talking, there's no time limit. I don't even know how long we've been in it right now, 50 minutes.

Peter: 51 minutes, I see the little ticker going. I feel like we've been talking for 20 minutes.

Kevin Mooney: Yeah, that's how long we've been in it, it doesn't even feel like it. Are you having a beer right now? I feel like I should join you. Let me look and see if I have a beer.

Peter: You probably should. That would be step one in the beer-drinking process.

Kevin Mooney: We'll cut this part out. I'm going to go through that door and see if I have a beer.

Peter: I'm going to get a refill.

Kevin Mooney: Dang, somebody drank all my beer.

Peter: Kevin, you're going to laugh, because I prepped for this podcast by slightly cleaning my shop, and I'm pretty far away from the refrigerator now. I knew I'd probably want a beer while we were talking, so I wound up bringing my cooler over here to the corner of the shop, right next to my little table.

Kevin Mooney: I'm ill-prepared for this. I thought there was beer left and apparently there's not. So no beer for me. I'm not set up for it, right. I've got this cool mic thing that makes me official, the camera up here, which is just my iPhone, my wife's microphone, and my wife's headset. I literally haven't bought anything for this podcast outside of the software. What I'm trying to figure out though is how to do the in-person ones. It's kind of a mess. I have the room for it, it's a big room, but I have to figure out what cameras to use. The reason it's hard to figure out the in-person thing versus this is that this just needs a laptop, you don't even need a microphone. Riverside, and I'm not even sponsored by Riverside, I should be, hey Riverside, you into sponsoring me? It takes care of everything, echo cancellation, all the AI eye-movement stuff, it fixes the video and audio. But in person you have to be able to record video and audio and have the tracks linked up, you need a camera going into an instrument, and a microphone going into that instrument, like a mixing board. A lot of mixing boards don't use USB-C, they use XLR. So I've got to plan for this. This microphone is nice because it's USB-C, but if I buy this one and end up doing in-person stuff, I need XLR, and then XLR has to plug into something, and then somehow it's got to get to a computer. You find these cool cameras like the Logitech Mevo, have you heard of this thing? It's super cool, this little box, completely wireless, and it's got the adapter where you can put your own lens on it, it's like a mirrorless camera, shoots up to 4K. I thought that'd be rad to mount somewhere around me. But then I found out you can't easily plug audio into it, so how do I get XLR out of this mic into that camera without running cables everywhere? I don't remember exactly what the issue was, but it's like—

Peter: And how do you switch the video back and forth if you're going to have multiple cameras set up with a guest in person?

Kevin Mooney: That's another thing. Riverside is great because we have two cameras and it automatically switches between us. But in person, you'd have to use something like OBS, and then you need somebody pressing buttons to switch the camera according to who's talking. I think Rode just came out with the Videocaster, which doubles as an audio and video mixer with an AI camera switch. So that's a thing, but now we're talking about two XLR mics, two mic stands, two sets of headphones, the mixer. You're probably in the neighborhood of $1,500 to $2,000. It's not the end of the world, my business has cash flow, but $2,000 right now is something I'm not interested in spending. I mean, it's not, geez, I'm 40 years old, $2,000 isn't a big deal, so it's probably in my own head, my own ego telling me not to spend it yet. But whatever, it is what it is, it's just very complex, and maybe that's why I haven't pulled the trigger, is that the right setup, what would Wes say, Wes would say just use your iPhone. So anyway, long story short, I want to figure out the in-person podcast because I'm back in my old suite, the big one, if you've been in it.

Peter: Yeah, over the O'Kane building.

Kevin Mooney: Yeah, I got the big suite back where Hound was, it's really nice, we have a whole living room area, I can bring people in, we can have beers and chit-chat before we go in, then walk into the studio and hit record and do this in person, and get to share beers. I don't have one of those cool vents you can smoke cigars through and it sucks the smoke out, but I think it'd just be really fun to do it in person. It's cool to look at you right here on the screen, but it's not really the same.

Peter: Totally, I think in person would be really, really different. I've done these types of things before, like Zoom meetings, but there's always some sort of delay. Right now our connection is super good, I don't think there's much delay, I can laugh in reaction to something you're saying and it doesn't interfere with what you're saying next. That's kind of cool. But the in-person part with the technology seems like it'll be a bit of a challenge to get ironed out, get the kinks worked out. I've listened to a couple of podcasts where the guys are just literally using the old-school wired iPhone headset with the microphone, passing it back and forth to each other, which is kind of a raw way to do it, but it still works, people still listen to the content.

Kevin Mooney: Yeah, that's the hope. Actually, you know what, I'm just going to say it right now, I don't give a shit if anyone listens. This is helpful for my mental health, right? As you know, all the years we've been hanging out and working together, it's just me talking. And it's not about the ego of hearing myself talk, I have to say things out loud for them to register up here. It's a really weird concept I've learned over time, after learning about my personality type and human design and all that woo-y stuff, it's like, I've got to talk, I've got to talk it out, and then somehow it solidifies in my brain that that's now the knowledge base for me. It doesn't mean it doesn't change, but I've just noticed, when I sit here by myself beating ChatGPT to death, no, you're doing it wrong, you're not getting it, I said get rid of the em dashes, stop putting the fucking em dashes in there, when I'm sitting there doing that stuff, I feel dumber, I've lost a step in the last year and a half. So the goal for me in doing this, in the short term, is to get back, sharpen those skills I had in the past, when I was at the agency bullshitting with Chris every day, working with clients and team members, you're at the top of your game when you're doing that. I'm sure the experience is similar for you at home running Rippin, you don't have that same dynamic you had in the past, where you'd go to the office every day and see that other person you worked with, and you could talk some strategy, even if you didn't like the person or what they said, you're just like, I need that thing.

Peter: Yeah, I think the work-life culture of everybody doing the remote work thing, it's good to some degree, for maybe spending more time with your family, and maybe for mental health, taking breaks. But there's definitely something to be said about having that office environment and getting the most out of your day without the leisurely distractions of home. I find myself running my business out of my house, and it's like, yeah, I'll get this done today, and then maybe I push it off until the next day, or all of a sudden it's the next week because other things come up. But yeah, I totally get what you're saying, getting back to executing and being at the top of your game, I think it's dependent on the environment and who you're around, what you're doing.

Kevin Mooney: Yeah. And for me it's talking, just talking and hearing someone's perspective. Part of the choice in guests for the show is finding entrepreneurs, not just local ones, entrepreneurs in other areas. Local is great, especially if I can bring them in person and talk to them and understand their perspective, that's going to help me sharpen the toolset I've got and also introduce me to new perspectives. I was with Chris at Hound for seven years or so, and then carried those philosophies over to kevinmooney.com right now, a personal brand trying to make it in the agency world. So it's like, I want to know why you are you, why you're so into SEO, for example. Why does that thing matter for your business? Because I have a lot of opinions on SEO and could argue it to death, but I want to know why you think it's super good, not because you were told it was good, but why you use it in your business and what you think is so great about it. I can share the opposite side, it's really easy to get people to search for the words you want them to search for, and you can rank pretty high for those, especially if they're made-up words. SEO doesn't mean anything, why compete with everybody else over there. Anyway, those are just some of the things I want to sharpen. But at the end of the day, I don't want the podcast to be a business podcast, or a cultural podcast, I think business will work its way in there, we've talked a lot about business, but we've also talked about other things. I just want it to be free-flowing, let people share whatever they want, plug their businesses if they want, talk about what they're struggling with right now, and maybe I can help, maybe I can't, maybe I'll be like, shit, I don't know, you can help me. So Peter, what are you struggling with in your business right now?

Peter: Oh man, if I'm going to be a thousand percent honest, it's just having more time in the day, which sounds silly.

Kevin Mooney: Is that just because you're traveling the world doing horse show stuff, or is it really having enough time in the day? Because it sounds like the business is doing really good, and you're traveling all over the place, going to horse shows, the Four Sixes.

Peter: Business is doing, it's where I want it to be right now. It's allowed me, as you mentioned, my wife competes in the rein cow horse circuit, so we actually travel the country quite a few times a year going to horse shows. That's something I've been doing quite a bit the last couple years, being a, I don't know what you'd call it, a horse show husband.

Kevin Mooney: Is that a thing? Is that really a thing?

Peter: Yeah. There's a lot to it, man, so I should probably back up and frame this a little better for people listening. I exited my business, Evo Gimbals, back in 2021 or 22, I can't remember the exact year. It wasn't a crazy successful exit, I didn't get a big multiple on the business earnings or anything like that. It was at a point in my life where I needed to reframe and refocus what I wanted to do, because I was getting burnt out. Burnout is definitely a thing, and people approach it differently when they're going through it. I learned a lot going through it. At the time, my partner and I wanted to sell the business, and it turned into, well, we're still friends, but maybe we don't want to run the business together anymore. We wound up parting ways, which is fine, we're still very good friends to this day. But at the time when we were both trying to sell the business, we thought we could get this much money for it, which would've been a sizable amount, a pretty good chunk to put toward retirement or starting another business. I still came out with a decent chunk of money, but it could've been more. It was the right thing to do at the time, to exit and not be pegged to a number, even though there was a number in both our heads that we wanted. It didn't work out that way, and that's fine. It was a learning experience, never having exited a business before, that process can be super stressful and daunting, talking things out, figuring out where things lay with assets on the books, equipment in the shop. It's a process, and as a business owner, it's something I never thought I'd have to deal with before, changing things up, selling a business, exiting, starting from scratch again. You don't think about those things when you get into entrepreneurship necessarily, that potential future outcome. It's a real thing.

Kevin Mooney: It's a real thing, man. When I, just to piggyback on that, then we'll get back to how that got you to where you are now, towards the end of the agency, that must've been '23, when we closed it down, and I had all of '24 off. Midway through '23 I was ready to go, whether it had to do with Chris, my partner, or the industry, whatever, I was ready to go. I was feeling the same things you're talking about, how does this go, what's a number, is there even a number, is this thing even worth anything. It took a lot of thinking and reflection and courage to come to the conclusion that I was going to leave this thing as it was. And the crazy thing is, we had just signed our biggest client, a mid-six-figure client, we hadn't sold anything quite that large before, we'd had a couple of low-six-figure engagements but nothing in the mid zone. So that was a big client for us, and I played a large role in landing it. I approached Chris and said, I have to figure something else out, I don't know what it is, I don't know where I'm going, but I have to do this. So I know that feeling, and the stress that comes with making a decision, and then what happens going through it, tax liabilities, assets, there's a lot you have to go through in the process of closing down a business or exiting a partnership and handing things over, papers to be signed. It took two years to get through the taxes, we'd converted from an LLC to an S-corp, so there were tax issues from that transition, and then I decided to leave while still dealing with the LLC-to-S-corp transition and taxes. It was just a mess. So I totally understand where you're coming from, that reality check, that gut check, where you have nothing to step into, right now, you haven't prepped and built something, you don't know what it is, you're just going to kind of go. It's a wild thing. If you've ever experienced it, you know what we're talking about, and if you haven't, it's hard to imagine, but I'd suggest thinking about what that looks like, because it's kind of wild.

Peter: Yeah, absolutely. Going back to that whole process of exiting, I definitely couldn't have done it without my wife, as far as keeping me grounded, keeping me thinking clearly, because you're not only leaving a business, you're also leaving a daily friendship. You don't get into business necessarily just to do the business thing, maybe some people do at a corporate level doing mergers and acquisitions, but for a lot of small businesses, family businesses, small regional businesses, if you're helping run a company, usually it's a family business, or it's businesses started by close friends who are working through things, figuring out what makes sense on paper and what doesn't. Sometimes it can get ugly, not that it got ugly with my situation, but I've heard lots of stories of partnerships that end not the greatest, people aren't friends anymore because somebody screwed the other person over. Looking back, I'm just super thankful that everything went as smooth as it could, because it did go relatively smooth.

Sorry, I got a bunch of security stuff popping up from Avast, trying to upsell me on the security subscription.

Kevin Mooney: Who runs security, you have a Mac, right? Oh my god.

Peter: I don't even know where it came from, I remember installing it a couple years ago and it's still on there for some reason, I need to go back and take that off. But yeah, getting back to my little story, because people are probably like, wow, these guys went off on a business tangent.

Kevin Mooney: It's all right, man, this is the way we talk. If they don't want to listen, there's the button, the X is over here, guys.

Peter: Yeah, I think at that point in time, it was kind of like, okay, I'm going to split off, start a new thing, I don't know what that new thing is yet, I've got to reinvent myself, start something new. I kind of already had Rippin Moto going in the background, like a little side project. So I thought, okay, maybe I'll start putting more time and energy into building this business. My wife said, we just need to take a quick break. And I was like, you're right. Bless her heart, she's been amazing as far as supporting my business aspirations, always saying, yeah, go do your thing, go do what you want to do. She's given me a lot of free rein. We don't have kids, so some would say that's super irresponsible, starting a new business at 38, 40 years old, when your previous business was relatively successful and could've led to retirement. But maybe if I had kids I would've approached it differently. Not having kids gave me the freedom to make that hard decision and put more weight into getting out and seeking happiness, in a sense. What I'm getting at is, we changed it up, and my wife and I were like, wow, it's 2020, there's COVID going on, what do we do? Do we take a bit of this money and buy a house, or should we be irresponsible and go buy a horse trailer and go travel around? That's what we did. We wound up buying a living-quarter horse trailer. Backing up a bit, my wife has ridden horses since she was six years old, she's now a professional equine trainer, she trains and shows horses professionally. At the time she said, I really want to get into showing cow horses. I said, okay, let's go try it, let's do it. For anybody who knows anything about horses, they know horses cost a goddamn lot of money.

Kevin Mooney: So much money, dude. You guys aren't messing with the cowboy cartel down in New Mexico, are you? Did you see that documentary?

Peter: Not yet, no. Is that on Netflix or something?

Kevin Mooney: Man, that's pretty wild, I don't remember, maybe Apple TV. It's basically about how the cartel got ingrained in quarter horses. Some guy, one of the leaders, had citizenship in the US, bought a ranch, started buying all these horses, flipping them, selling them through drug money, winning races. Pretty wild. I forget what town they were in, in New Mexico, but it's crazy to think, this little tiny town, and all of a sudden there's all this money. It's like American Made, that movie with Tom Cruise, where there's like a hundred new banks popping up in a little tiny town in Oklahoma.

Peter: Yeah, okay.

Kevin Mooney: Same exact thing happened, just Rolls-Royces going down the street pulling horses. No, I'm just kidding.

Peter: Gotcha, yeah. So diving a little more into my personal life, I'm like, honey, let's go do some horse shows. She's given me a ton of rein in building my businesses, and I'm like, let's go have some fun and pay a little money to go show horses. She wound up that year qualifying to go down to one of the celebration shows, a year-end show down in Fort Worth. She'd been showing and competing all year, built up enough points to qualify for this bigger show at the end of the year. I said, let's spend a bit of money and gas money to get down to Texas, go experience it, it was a lifelong dream for her to compete at a place like that. We did it that year, and then all of a sudden we were going down the road again the next year. We both really enjoyed the time we spent down there, and at one point we were actually considering moving to Texas.

Kevin Mooney: You were talking about moving, right?

Peter: This was simultaneous to all the COVID stuff going on. Texas was looking really good at that time, being an Oregonian from Eastern Oregon dealing with the mask mandates, social distancing, all the madness. Going to Texas and seeing, oh, this is normal life, they're living like normal people down here. So there were some serious considerations for a short period there, we were both telling each other, yeah, we're going to try to move there. We found out it didn't really make sense to move down to Texas, given our families are still here in Oregon, parents getting older. The cost of property down in Texas might be cheaper, but once you add up property tax down there, it's not necessarily that much cheaper than living here. Oregon is expensive, income tax, property tax. Being in Central Oregon is kind of like being on its own little island, Hawaii in a sense, food prices are definitely more expensive here, gas prices, you should know, you live in Bend, we've both seen Bend change crazy over the last ten years, how much it's changed, turned into this little Park City, Utah, or Colorado.

Kevin Mooney: Little California, whatever, all the places, it's wild. But I mean, the food cost is what's wild. We were just in New York City, and don't get me wrong, that was expensive, not a cheap trip. But simple things are cheap there, and that's what's not cheap here, simple things are still expensive. You're still at $10 for a dozen eggs. You can't get a slice of pizza for a dollar, where in New York it's two bucks and you're like, sure, it's not the best pizza on Dave Portnoy's Barstool list, but you can get a slice for that. You're not getting that here. I'm not going to go through every food category, but it's crazy how expensive it is here, and Bend's always been a little bit inflated. I remember when they were charging $4 for an IPA, and I thought, what are you talking about, PBR is 99 cents at the Westside Tavern, $4, I could drink four beers for that. Now, dude, they're like eight bucks. Not even at an event, we're not talking about a show or rodeo, they're eight bucks at the place. I don't understand it.

Peter: Right, you go get a pint at Crux Brewery or any of these well-known places, and you're spending seven, eight bucks on a pint. What happened?

Kevin Mooney: It's a can, back to, you know, we're just Coors Light people, that's all we do now, stick to the C-minus.

Peter: You can get a 30-pack for 25 bucks or whatever.

Kevin Mooney: Makes us sound kind of cheap, or maybe it just sounds like we're old. Remember when we were buying kegs of that gluten-free beer? Great Basin or Great Northern or something like that.

Peter: I can't remember, yeah, I remember drinking the beer but not what beer it was.

Kevin Mooney: I just remember thinking, well, I'm not going to get fat from this so I can have an extra pint. But I don't think that's true, I think I got plenty fat. Man, that was good. But moving to Texas, it sounds really nice, and I think what's really cool for you, and what happened in that process, was exploring. You were riding your bike a ton, and then, I'm not going to say we lost touch for two years, but you were just doing your thing. Sure, I was doing my thing too, but you were just not working, exploring, figuring it out, going through whatever you were going through. Then I remember seeing Rippin, and I was like, what is Peter doing, what's he working on right now, I don't get it. Then maybe the last time we talked, you were like, yeah, I make a gazillion dollars a millisecond, and I'm like, what, how'd you get there?

Peter: I don't make a gazillion dollars a millisecond, that's for sure.

Kevin Mooney: Either way, it's fun to say. So you were saying, God, this sounds like an interview moment, you said 32 minutes ago that your future business partner, does that mean you're going to be in business with somebody again? Were you talking about that as past tense?

Peter: No, no, I was talking about that as past tense. That was the X Pro Heli description of working there as an employee for my then-boss who became my business partner.

Kevin Mooney: Got it, check. I was like, are you guys going into business again, what are you doing, what are you working on. How are they doing, how's their business going?

Peter: They're doing good, really good. That was something I was concerned about when I left, is it going to be able to keep going.

Kevin Mooney: Sure, you did everything, you were the lifeblood of that thing, you knew how all the systems worked.

Peter: Yeah, and a lot of responsibility fell on my shoulders, documenting a lot of the process, to make sure it was a clean break. But it's all good, they both now have a kid together, it's great, we're still friends, all that fun stuff.

Kevin Mooney: Sure, we all miss you, Peter.

Peter: They definitely miss me, but it's been good, it's allowed me to really get out and explore, focus on things I wanted to focus on, and it's been great to see my wife kind of flourish, support her in her journey, see her grow as a person.

Kevin Mooney: Kind of flip those roles a little bit, yeah.

Peter: Yeah, so not to talk about my wife the whole time, but it's kind of a cool thing, she's been able to go from being a non-pro rider, competing with a whole bunch of different gals from across the country, to giving up her non-pro card and becoming a Level 1 pro, by taking on a client who wanted to get back into having horses and showing horses. For those not familiar with the equine industry, there are all sorts of different levels of professions, veterinary care, vet techs, assistants, all that, you can get into the care side of the animals or the training side. There's a whole subset of categories, colt starters, people who just do boarding, people who do lessons, some focused mostly on kids, some mostly on non-pro lessons and taking on clients. There's this whole industry out there I really didn't have the slightest clue about, even growing up here in Central Oregon, which is basically, if anybody knows Eastern Oregon, there's a ton of cattle, a ton of people who own horses, lots of people running ranches, cow horse people, people going to rodeos, raising bulls. There's a whole business out there, a whole industry that kind of goes under the radar sometimes, definitely old school, lots of businesses that are established but don't have very mature marketing. It's been cool to see the growth and changes in the particular cow horse industry my wife's been involved with, especially over the last five years with the introduction of that series, Yellowstone, with, what's his name.

Kevin Mooney: Can't think of it, I don't know why. John Dutton.

Peter: Kevin Costner, John Dutton. So you see that, and you get into that storyline, and by season one or two they start getting into showing horses at the Four Sixes Ranch, and that's basically the same type of stuff my wife does.

Kevin Mooney: I mean, it's really Rip and Beth that's what everyone, but whatever, mainly Beth, to be fair.

Peter: Right, exactly. Sliding stops, reining pattern, running cows down the fence, turning them.

Kevin Mooney: She's still doing sorting?

Peter: No sorting. She used to, and sorting has grown as well, I've seen a lot more sorting events than I used to. It's kind of interesting to see the whole industry flourish a little bit because of that whole cultural movement, I don't think people really understand how much influence Taylor Sheridan has had on that whole thing. It's really interesting to see the price of horses going up simultaneous with COVID happening, everybody's like, well, since we can't go to work, let's go outside and play, spend our money on hobbies we want to do, that's kind of what people did.

Kevin Mooney: Yeah, go out to the Prineville Rodeo, that thing is packed now, it's packed.

Peter: Right, it's huge, everybody wants to be outside, everybody wants to see people competing, wants to be around people like that, and it's cool, it's a really cool thing to see. It's been a little bit of a cool thing for me to see her growth and be able to also give my own guidance as far as how she could approach some of the business stuff. She's definitely been able to wrap her head a little more around some of the concepts, helping her do some of the basic takeoff stuff, like, how much does it really cost to take care of a horse and train a horse, and you start jotting down all the numbers, and all of a sudden you realize this person might be charging this much money, but they're kind of five years behind and not accounting for this, this, and this, and the rising cost. Given that she's running more of a boutique operation, not boarding 40 horses with a full training show program and 10 assistants, it's similar to myself running my business, kind of a solo entrepreneurship thing, you have to factor that into the equation, maybe I have to charge a little more money because I'm not able to spread the cost over 40 horses, you're in care of half a dozen animals.

Kevin Mooney: It's a lot, dude, it's a lot of work. I think there are so many stories like that, it doesn't matter what industry you're in, everything seems so glorious on the outside, and as soon as you're in it, or you've been in it for a long time, you realize just how much work it is. Something as stupid as getting chickens, we just got chickens at home, I've been wanting chickens for years, ten years or something, and we just got four chickens, and I'm like, every day I've got to go out there and clean that shit up, move them around because they're chicks right now, really tiny, so you've got to move them, they get out of the run and I'm chasing them around, I'm like, oh my gosh, I wanted 50 chickens, 50 chickens is not what I'm ever going to do, because I eat a lot of eggs, so I wanted a bunch of eggs, a bunch of chickens, but no, it's so much shit to do, man. Extrapolate that out to horses, do that in small business, hell, relationships, right, with your partner, it's all like, I wonder how we all exist on this planet with all the problems and variables we have every day, I don't know how we get along, it's crazy. That was a crazy sidebar, I apologize for getting you off track there, but as you're talking about it, I couldn't help but think about how fucking convoluted everything is.

Peter: You're good. Yeah, like, you've got so many things going on when you're running the business, and especially taking care of horses, taking care of the chickens is a similar type of thing, but maybe not exactly, luckily we have no horses that are going to stomp us out.

Kevin Mooney: Chickens aren't going to kill you, man, a horse can stomp you out.

Peter: Yeah, but we have a little yearling that's going to start here probably at the end of the year, and she's a little shit, probably 550, 600 pounds now, and luckily we've been able to handle her on a regular basis, for the most part pretty easy to handle, but there's that times when I'm just like, are you going to kick at me, you've got that twinkle in your eye like something's up.

Kevin Mooney: Right, don't you do it, don't do it. Oh my gosh, you know, that twinkle in their eye is actually a real thing. I don't know if I ever told you this story. Right out of high school I was working for Carlos, did I ever talk about Carlos, or did you meet Carlos?

Peter: Was Carlos the landscaper? Yeah, I vaguely remember Carlos.

Kevin Mooney: Yeah, so Carlos started a landscape company out of his Honda Civic right out of high school, literally putting the mower in the trunk. His parents had a ranch, always had different cows, horses, goats, chickens, all kinds of things, had some bulls there for a while. Somehow, because I worked for the landscape company, I was a ranch hand too. One of the heifers was giving birth, and we had to separate the bull so we could help, because the calf was coming out backwards or stuck. I had to get in the pen and get this bull out of the way, and here's nineteen-year-old Kev, willing to do whatever he needs to be paid, chasing this bull around, the bull chasing me around. We finally separate it, and Carlos goes, well, we're going to actually take its nuts off, we're going to put it in the shoot, and then put the rubber band on it. So they flushed the bull down the run, I slammed the chute, locked him in place, went around back, put the little back brace thing on. That bull looked me in the eye, into my soul, and it was like, if you touch my nuts, I'm coming after you, you're done. So I was a little terrified, but I go back, they have one of those guns, you reach under, put it on, pop the rubber bands off. He's pissed off. As soon as I get it on, Carlos opens the chute, and that bull runs out and turns straight around and looks right at me. I'm like, shit, what do I do now. It came at me, and I jumped on top of one of the gates. That's about the end of the story, at least all I remember, but it was a terrifying moment. I remember thinking how big and powerful these animals are, and that they're not stupid, they're looking at you and they know exactly what you're going to do, it's ingrained into them. They're not just, oh, I'm a cow, no, it doesn't work that way. Anyway, that's another stupid long story of mine, but I remember that same look you're talking about, not okay.

Peter: Totally, yeah, in the horse world there can be really good horses that are easy to handle and get along with, and then some with completely different personalities, super mouthy, nip at you, bite. It's interesting, horses are kind of like people, all the different personalities, kind of like what I was saying at the beginning of the podcast. It's interesting to be around animals, see different personalities from different breeds, that horse has a really calm temperament, that horse is high-strung, needs a lot more work, has a bigger motor, more energy, but then this calm horse over there can suddenly open it up and run down the fence like a race horse, and you wouldn't think so.

Kevin Mooney: Yeah, I'm dropping the hammer, baby.

Peter: Exactly, it's really interesting. I don't know where I was going with that.

Kevin Mooney: Doesn't matter, I pulled this way off track. This podcast is going to be a great large language model for an AI.

Peter: Is it really? You're going to craft my voice into an AI?

Kevin Mooney: No, no, no. Okay, I'll try to make this short, but remember where I'm starting, which is large language models and this podcast. After Mabel was born, I stayed home for the first year, took a year-long sabbatical, all of '24, I basically didn't work. I tried to work, but it wasn't really work. I started noticing a lot of fatigue, fogginess, anger issues, stuff happening in my body. I was trying to figure out what was happening and where it was coming from. I thought, well, I'm stressed all the time, I'm at home taking care of a baby, trying to get my wife to the point where she can go back to work, and I don't have any income, she's the sole income provider. So there was a lot of that going on. Long story short, somebody suggested I do a blood panel to figure out why I was hurting, sore, stressed. Turned out I had super low testosterone, like in the hundreds. So I've been battling to get that back. In that process, I thought I was losing my mind, losing my memory, thought I'd lost a step. So I thought, how do I train an AI agent or large language model on how I think? I can't just tell it to ask me questions and answer them, it doesn't have the tonality in my voice, the passion, the spark. I also can't just sit down and type out an answer, because my brain doesn't really work that way. I can type things out for a client, marketing, messaging, branding, because all I have to do is come up with a couple words or a sentence. But how do I take this business I'm in and put it into a machine so it can help me, because I felt like I was going insane, losing my mind, this was prior to learning it was just low testosterone. So part of the reason I wanted to start a podcast was to record not only my voice, but my thoughts on certain topics, how I think about things, how I respond to people, so I can program something to help me do what I do. In that process I came across this software called Delphi, have you heard of it?

Peter: Delphi, I've heard of it, but I'm not familiar with what it does.

Kevin Mooney: It basically creates a duplicate of you, Peter Coughlin, Kevin Mooney, but it's only as good as what you put into it, you have to train it, it needs audio recording, video recording, some sort of structure. It's not going to duplicate you in terms of working for you, but they've monetized the software so I could put all these inputs in, and then sell a subscription to the KevBot, and people could pay me $9 a month and talk to Kev on that thing, and it'll tell them everything I know, all the inputs I put into it. So will I actually use Delphi? I don't know, but this is part of the process of me documenting, talking, and the way I think, so that if it ever comes to that, I can shove this in there. The second part is training my own GPTs to help me do the work I do. For instance, brand strategy work, I've got a process I go through, it's kind of dynamic, it changes a little every time depending on who I'm talking with. The outputs are pretty standard, but the process getting there is different every time, because every client is different. What I've been trying to do is shove my process into the machine and work in it until it gives me something close to what I actually want, and then I say, great job, you've now learned how to do brand strategy, and I take it, make it a little better, and deliver it to the client. Making that GPT is somewhat challenging, and the more I can shove into it, the better, including video, audio, transcripts, captions, all that stuff. That's one of the reasons I'm doing this thing too, kind of selfishly.

Peter: Yeah, that's interesting. I'm still pretty green when it comes to the AI stuff, the capabilities. I've never programmed a GPT, never dove into Delphi or anything like that, I kind of know the basic concepts of what you're talking about, but I've never dove headfirst into actually doing it. I find it fascinating that you're going down that road, I think it's super cool.

Kevin Mooney: Dude, it's hard, there's so much happening so fast. I know AI is a huge topic, and all the podcast nerds are all over it, getting into the details, but I don't know anything, I know it's the Wild West, and we're all trying to figure it out together, or separately but together. There's a million versions of it. I just know I have ChatGPT, and I saw a button to create your own GPT, started talking to it, asking what I could do, and it gave me some ideas, and now I'm just kind of playing with it. Part of what I'm exploring is building a custom GPT for each of my clients, not if they just come to me for a website, but if they want to start in the strategy zone and work all the way through to marketing, I now have everything about their company, historical standpoint, goals, personality, target audiences, and as I build marketing campaigns for them I can put that into the GPT. So now you've got a pretty big database built specifically for them and how we arrived at those conclusions. Now you can just ask that GPT, hey, I need another marketing campaign for the Fourth of July or Christmas, what could it be based on what you know about us, and it can spit something out. You still have to massage what it spits out because it's not that great yet, but it'll get you pretty far. For people who don't know anything about marketing, it'll give a pretty alright campaign, not professional quality, but pretty okay. So I've been thinking about how I can add more value to what I deliver to clients, because I'm not the cheapest person in the world, and maybe that's an ego thing, but I charge probably two to three times what most people charge. So what else can I give them? Let me give you this GPT, this is yours now.

Peter: That's super cool that you're able to offer and increase the value proposition with that, I think that's really neat.

Kevin Mooney: Trying to. I don't know if people are going to buy it, I just started doing this with my last two clients, and I started doing it after I'd already started the engagement with them, I told them, hey, you're getting this, but I didn't tell them that in the sales process. So we'll see, it's pretty cool and pretty fun. Sorry I cut you off for the thing you were going to say though.

Peter: Gotcha, that's cool though. I have no idea what I was going to say, I was like, wow, this whole podcast could probably be used in some large language model. But yeah, I think it's awesome you're utilizing the tech that's available to do some upsells, because I think the one thing with our generation, you were born in what, '85?

Kevin Mooney: Yeah.

Peter: I was born in '83. Both of us have kind of come up through various stages in our generation that have way different technological growth cycles than what we're experiencing right now. I remember the first time I played a Nintendo or an Atari, and you had the little plastic cassette thing you had to blow into.

Kevin Mooney: Yeah, and channel two, or the U channels.

Peter: The little dial channel changer on the front of the TV. We've grown up and seen all these different technologies come about, but we've never seen anything like what we're seeing today. We've gone from cassettes to VHS to DVDs to Netflix by mail, which was crazy at the time, I don't have to go to Blockbuster anymore. Now you have full digital delivery of pretty much anything you can think of, on your phone and computer. Right now we're talking to each other in real time using a program that's switching video dynamically, instantaneously. At some point in the future there's going to be some large language model that's going to watch this podcast and program some sort of valid neuron into its little digital thing.

Kevin Mooney: It's going to create a Peter-Kev AI baby just from this podcast, and it's going to be a robot that lives in the digital world.

Peter: Totally, yeah, we're making a digital AI baby right now and we don't even know it.

Kevin Mooney: I didn't know it would feel so good, Peter.

Peter: It feels good to make AI babies.

Kevin Mooney: You hear people like Gary Vee talk about, I didn't start down the entrepreneurial path until kind of later in life. I mean, what were we, 30?

Peter: Yeah, maybe late 20s.

Kevin Mooney: Late 20s, 30, something like that. But the point is, Gary Vee started at a very young age, and it clicked in his brain, all these things that are available to you, all these resources available in the world, and he was able to watch as social media was being born and realize, I can take this and monetize it, I can make a business using this platform. I haven't really seen something like that in my head until now, where I'm seeing these boomers who are still business owners with no fucking clue about this AI thing. I'm in the place in my life and business where, if you don't integrate with AI at this point, you're going to be left in the dust, way far behind. You're working with these people way over here in this generation, and you're like, they're just done for it, their businesses are going to shut down very quickly. And then you've got the Gen Xers who are like, yeah, it's pretty cool, but I don't know, I'm moving into the boomer generation, right, I'm moving there. And then you have these millennials, and we are just—

Peter: Where'd you go?

Peter: Are we still recording? I gotta call Kevin. What happened? I don't know what happened, Kevin. I'm still seeing myself on the screen. Are you still there? It still says I'm recording. That's so cool, I have my cell phone in front of the camera. There you are, you're coming back, there you are, now you're on the left side of my screen.

Kevin Mooney: There it is.

Peter: Now I can look over here.

Kevin Mooney: Did it change for you?

Peter: You were originally on the right side of my laptop screen and now you're on the left. He bumped me over.

Kevin Mooney: Man, that's so weird. I don't know what just happened, but I was in the middle of an epic fucking rant.

Peter: I was like, that was it? We're coming up on two hours, I'm like, did we have a two-hour limit?

Kevin Mooney: That's what I thought, as soon as this thing kicked off. And then I tried to rejoin and it said, "you are not allowed to join," we can't connect to the internet right now, and now my echo cancellation is turned off for some reason. Man, this just ruined the whole thing. But I think where I was going with it, for real, AI, what the heck, Riverside technology, where's our AI, Riverside?

I guess what I was about to say, and then we can probably wrap this up, two hours is a good first fucking podcast, Peter, right? High five, dude. What I was saying is, for the first time in my business career, I'm seeing this huge shift in opportunity, and being like, I have to figure out how to capitalize on this thing and monetize it. And it's not just for money, right, it's like, how do we get exposure and create some of those freedoms?

Peter: Well, it's a new thing, it's going, whether you like it or not, the new AI technology that's coming out is going to be integrated one way or another into your business, or into your everyday life. It's kind of one of these things, like having a cell phone, you're going to have to learn how to use it at some point. There are still people out there hanging onto their flip phones, terrified of switching to a regular iPhone with a touchscreen because they're terrified of giving up the flip phone. I kind of look at it the same way with the AI large language models, or just the AI tools in general, people say that stuff scares the shit out of me, and it's like, well, yeah, I get it, there are some scary aspects to it, there is the potential of a Terminator-esque future, let's hope that doesn't happen. But at the same time, there are all these great benefits that can happen by learning how to use the tools, that will make your life easier.

Kevin Mooney: For sure. I think we have to think about it like this, we have to use it in a way that helps us, not does our job, because there's already a study out, I believe from Harvard, that people who use ChatGPT incessantly are now like 40% dumber. I say that because it's funny, but it's really more like they use 40% less of their brain, because they're relying on that machine to do it for them. That is fucking bananas, and I'm guilty of it, I've caught myself doing it, I sit down to write copy for an ad campaign and I go, I don't know how to do this, I see how it can do it. So I think if you use that to help speed up process or admin tasks, and don't pretend it's going to do your job for you, that's the right approach. And if it does do your job for you, you've probably worked yourself into a position where you're no longer needed, and it's just going to take over your job. So you've got to keep the thinking part going, just a little bit.

Peter: What do you think about the new humanoid robot technology that's kind of on the horizon? I read this article maybe eight months ago, and I haven't followed up with it because I got sidetracked, but it just popped into my head. There was a robotics company somewhere over in the valley in Oregon, maybe Hillsboro or one of the tech sector areas of the Portland metropolitan area, and the startup was building robots with no programming, because they knew the programming was going to come later, after the AI large language, physical models were available to program the robot. Whoever the investor group was, was like, we know how fast this is going to go, let's start production now on this robot, V1, knowing that the actual AI software tech stack was going to come later.

Kevin Mooney: Whoa. Holy shit, that's crazy.

Peter: I don't know where that company is today, but you kind of follow some of these other robotic companies doing AI physical language model learning, being able to interact in different environments, with people, and it's like, five years from now might be a much different landscape. You're starting to see it on social media, robots walking down the street, everybody's got their cell phone out videoing these little AI dudes, because they've never seen anything like that before. And it's kind of crazy, on his shareholder presentation six months ago, he talked about their line of robots, and another spinoff company, I can't remember the name, but the Optimus robot, I don't know whatever the name of the product is, they're working on it, they've produced like 2,000 of them this year. Basically you can buy one of these things and bring it to your house, and the goal is, you can talk to it, it can walk around with you, and you can show it how to do a task. Say I told my wife, the moment this is available to muck stalls, clean stalls, we're buying it.

Kevin Mooney: Right, buying it, baby.

Peter: If it's 20, 25 grand, and you didn't have to clean stalls ever again, and it did it perfectly every single time, you know how much extra time you'd have.

Kevin Mooney: My stance on it is, I don't know. I think the application you're talking about is really cool, and there are a lot of cool applications. I think Joe Rogan must've said, or somebody said, hey, if there were robot women, that'd be the end of marriage forever, you'd just get a robot woman. Maybe Joe Rogan didn't say this, maybe I saw it as a meme. But it's a slippery slope, and I don't think it's the Jetsons where we're integrated together, hey, can you just go play with the dog real quick. I don't know, you saw the robot that got angry at a human, right, and started going nuts and flailing at it?

Peter: Yeah, there was some Chinese production line, or Japanese production line, or something, it just went ape shit.

Kevin Mooney: Sure, and the robot went fucking bananas. It's like, dude, we're a little bit too close here, just a smidge too close to, is this okay?

Peter: Yeah, what happened that day, who got fired, who leaked that video?

Kevin Mooney: Right. And then all these other videos of people talking about having to pull the plug on AI because it was creating another language and talking to another AI model, in a language we didn't even understand. I'm just like, oh my god, is this shit happening already? We haven't even lived through a time period where the robots help us, give you a massage after a long day of work, dishes are done, house is clean, you come home and say, thank you, robot. Like, they're going straight to trying to kill us. I don't know, they're plotting against us, this is fucking crazy. And maybe I'm contributing to it, they're creating the Peter-Kev AI baby, and that thing is going to power a robot, and it's going to be like, I want to fucking kill anyone named Kevin or Peter. I don't know, it's a lot.

Peter: Another thing Joe Rogan talks about a lot on his podcast is the Twitter bots. With all the AI technology, especially the new GPT models, you can ask GPT, tell me, come up with all these different copies in this tone, specifically this tone, or this level of professionalism, or be loose, be like a beach bum, talk like, hey brah, what's up, you can really tell it how you want its personality to sound. In my head I'm like, maybe there's a lot to be said about all of our social media posts out there online, you don't have any idea who's behind a lot of the posts anymore. How many posts you see online, on Instagram, X, Facebook, how do you know that's even a real person?

Kevin Mooney: Well, it's even getting worse than that. I see all these products sold, like those jaw exerciser things, to get rid of your double chin or whatever, and there are videos, sleep apnea tools and things like that, and you'll see a real video of Joe Rogan or Andrew Huberman talking, and somebody has gotten that video and run it through AI, and it's so good now that these products are not endorsed by Joe Rogan, they don't even exist, that episode where he supposedly talks about it doesn't even exist. They've taken the video, taken the audio, and they can modify and sync the audio to the lips, and they'll promote their product, and you click on the link and it goes to some website, and it's like, how many people bought that jaw exerciser because they thought Joe Rogan or Andrew Huberman endorsed it? You can catch it if you're watching closely, the lips are off just by a smidge. I'm just like, this is fucking bananas, people are getting super rich off of this stuff. So not only is the content not real, it's overloaded with AI content. Sure, some of it's funny, that Yeti blog stuff is fucking great, but I think that's okay because it's pretty harmless. But the point is, everything is going in that direction, and how is my mom going to decipher what's real or not? Is Joe Biden alive? We don't know, we don't even know at this point. And even if he was dead for sure, guaranteed dead, with the AI programs, he's still, well, you still wouldn't know, you'd have no idea. It's just so crazy at this point, and I don't even trust anything out there, and it sucks because I'm in the industry of putting things out there so people will see it and buy something. I don't know, it's—

Peter: We can say for certain that this is a real, genuine podcast.

Kevin Mooney: How do you know? This thing just glitched right in the middle. How do you know that that's—

Peter: That's what an AI would say.

Kevin Mooney: I don't know, Peter, but this part of the conversation has been really good, where we're not just reminiscing about our past, it's less structured, more about, hey, did you hear about this crazy thing, yeah, that was bananas. That's really what I enjoy about these types of conversations.

Peter: Absolutely. I don't know which way is up or down anymore, when I'm on social media, or listening to the news, I don't know what's sideways, what's right, what's left, what's up or down. Everything is really confusing, and I don't think it's going away, I think it's going to get worse. I think it's been like that for some time now, and people are just now realizing it.

Kevin Mooney: Yeah, it's been like that for a long time, I think. Well, think about this, I was just talking, I don't know, maybe I was talking to you, I think I was talking to Brent, you see these people, Brent's doing pretty good, man, I'm trying to get him on the show at some point, just have him do a thing. But I was talking to him about podcasting and the power of podcasting, so much so that you see these people who have a setup just like me, they have their screen, their camera, their microphone, and they probably use Riverside, and they're just talking into the microphone as if they're talking to someone, but they never show the other person on the other side of the screen. And they're just like, oh my god, you should be doing this, you should be doing that, that's why you have to buy my package or whatever. They make it look like they're on a podcast and put that content out there, so they're just fake podcasters. It's like, holy shit, man, you could just fake anything on the internet now, if you have a headset and a microphone and a—

Peter: Let me guess, that's Wes?

Kevin Mooney: Heck yeah, Peter Senior.

Peter: Yeah, he just went back into the—

Kevin Mooney: Should I let you get going, Peter?

Peter: Yeah, I think we, if you would like to have me, I think we should do this again.

Kevin Mooney: I think we should absolutely do it again. I'm not the type of person who wants to do a show and then have like 50 episodes before I bring someone back. If you want to do the first 10 episodes, Peter, I am game, because we can talk forever, and that's what I really enjoy about you and doing something like this, it's really fun.

Peter: Likewise, likewise, like I said at the beginning of the podcast, I've always enjoyed our conversations and always had a really good time hanging out, talking shit.

Kevin Mooney: Hell yeah. I love it, Peter. Well, cool, thanks man, I'm going to—

Peter: You betcha. And just to confirm, like you said in the beginning before we started recording, I should not shut my laptop off, is it finished uploading?

Kevin Mooney: Don't do anything, so technically, we're done with it, right? I'll cut in this part, like, bye everybody.

Peter: Bye, see you next time.

Kevin Mooney: Okay, I'm going to hit stop on the recording, and we should be able to see—

‍