Burn The Boats - Greatness Has No Plan B With Matt Higgins

Speaker 1 We all have another level of effort, energy, and determination that we can only harness if we cut off our backup plan.

Speaker 2 This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network Production.

Speaker 2 We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month,

Speaker 2 taking the BS out of business for over six years in over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping necks and cashing checks? Well, it starts right about now.
Right about now.

Speaker 3 What's up, guys?

Speaker 1 Welcome to Right About Now.

Speaker 1 We're always getting right.

Speaker 3 We're always talking about what's now, what's next, what's interesting. And look, I got the CEO of What's Next.
He is the co-founder of RSCA Ventures. He is Matt Higgins.
What's up, Matt?

Speaker 1 How you doing? I like that. CEO of what's next, not what's last.
Don't care about what's now.

Speaker 3 We want what's now and what's next. Line them up, knock them down.
Let's go. That's what we're here to do, Matt.

Speaker 3 You know, Matt and I, in full transparency to the audience, Matt and I were like brothers from another, for like 20 minutes before the episode got going. I think we shared more

Speaker 3 background between Bitcoin and everything else. I was like, this is going to be, this is going to be good.
I knew it would be good, Matt. We had it going.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we shared all the good stuff, though.

Speaker 1 We got to resurrect it.

Speaker 3 I know. We got to bring it back around.
So how's life treating you, Matt?

Speaker 1 Life is good.

Speaker 1 I feel good. I had a lot of fun, stimulating stuff going on.
We're in this sort of go-go era. Everybody's lost their mind texting me shit coins all night.
It's great. It's good to be back.
Yes.

Speaker 3 You got your hands in so much, man.

Speaker 3 I want to set the table for our audience. I mean, you've been involved with NFL teams.
You've got a million and one investments going on.

Speaker 3 I can tell we're talking Bitcoin. We're talking land.

Speaker 1 And Abby Dobby, we got it. We got all.

Speaker 3 What makes Matt Higgins tick?

Speaker 1 Good question. Well, I got a book behind me, wrote a book about it, this idea of, you know, burn the boats and commitment.

Speaker 1 I think the simple answer to that is when I was very young, I had to make a really radical decision in order to escape out of desperate poverty.

Speaker 1 Grew up on nothing, selling flowers on street corners and eating government cheese and taking care of a sick mom.

Speaker 1 Anybody out there who's had to deal with the desperation of having a sick parent understands how that just changes your brain chemistry, to be honest, and your decision-making.

Speaker 1 And when I was young, I made a radical decision to drop out of high school at 16 to get my GD so I could go to college so I could get a job making eight bucks an hour.

Speaker 1 Literally, none of this is hindsight bias. That was my decision-making.
And everybody had told me at the time that you're going to be branded a loser for the rest of your life.

Speaker 1 And I had to come up against conventional wisdom to make that decision. And it was the single greatest decision I ever made in my life.

Speaker 1 That single decision to drop out at 16, start college at 16, pulled forward my entire career.

Speaker 1 And Warren Buffett talks about this all the time in the context of money, about compounding, but he doesn't talk about it in terms of career.

Speaker 1 The sooner you put your ambition into production, the more years you have to reap the exponential gains. We were just talking about being early on Bitcoin and all these other things.

Speaker 1 Like I was early on Matt Higgins. And I was early because I burned the boats on this one crazy radical idea.

Speaker 1 And so when you try to figure out how to hold together all these companies, these different careers, it's just this pattern playing out over and over again.

Speaker 1 I see something, I believe of something, and then I figure out how to overcome my anxiety and just go all in.

Speaker 3 I mean, Matt, I don't want to oversimplify it, but when I think about what you just said, and I think about burning the boats, it's almost like if you have, if you have a plan B, you don't have a plan A.

Speaker 3 And it's like, because

Speaker 3 the risk and the reward that comes from sticking to or, you know, your, your gut. And like you said, starting production on something, you got to go all in.

Speaker 3 And I don't, you know, it's not because it's careless or reckless necessarily, but there's a certain chutzpah, I don't know, and grit that I think comes from, you know, your background that I think probably drives you to that space.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 I think we got a little bit of nature and nurture going on, don't we?

Speaker 1 We do. There's a great YouTube video.
If you want to Google it, anyone out there listening, or there's a Navy SEAL, I don't remember his name, and I should find it out.

Speaker 1 But he asked the entire audience, everyone, stretch your arms up as high as you can. And everyone in the the room stretches your arms up, right? And you watch in a video, everybody's stretching.

Speaker 1 Now stretch an inch higher, and everyone stretches one inch higher. He's like, I thought you were stretching as high as you can.

Speaker 1 And the point of that is like, we all have another level of effort, energy, and determination that we can only harness if we cut off our backup plan.

Speaker 1 And this idea of burn the boats, a lot of people probably know it from Cortez, this idea that he burned the boats and he conquered the Aztecs.

Speaker 1 Like, I'm appropriating this war metaphor in a slightly different way.

Speaker 1 The boats that I'm talking about are the things that we all carry inside of our heads or in our past that make us hesitate when we have a vision for our own future that maybe isn't being validated by people around us.

Speaker 1 In my case, it was that I didn't know which spoon to use, you know, at the dinner table because I grew up so dirt poor, I was embarrassed by my background, you know, and that shame would make me hesitate.

Speaker 1 And so I wanted to write a book about to really prove, like, exactly what you said, the mere presence of a backup plan is exactly the thing forcing you to need one.

Speaker 1 And that there's tons of science and psychology around what happens when you fully commit to your plan A. I always say just

Speaker 1 burning the boats doesn't guarantee you'll achieve your dreams, but not burning the boats guarantees you never will.

Speaker 1 And the thing I hacked into, and it's against my nature, I am the most paranoid risk taker you'll ever meet. And so

Speaker 1 this doesn't come effortlessly to me, but I do think the thing I hacked into is I put myself in situations where I don't have the answers and I reverse engineer the the outcome by figuring it out.

Speaker 1 It's how I got onto Shark Tank, you know, when I had no business being there as a shark. It's how I ended up at Harvard Business School and the faculty as a person with a GD to a JD.

Speaker 1 And like, it's not because I'm so special. It's just because I had no choice.
I had a gun in my temple. And my mom was dying in the room next door.

Speaker 1 And the day I became press secretary, the mayor of New York, she died that morning at 10. Like, it was a gun.

Speaker 1 And that gun, though, made me hack into something I never would have discovered on my own because we're conditioned to believe that to play it safe is better than to play bold.

Speaker 1 And because my mom, God bless her, who always believed that anything that little boy set his mind to, he could figure it out, I landed on this burn the boat strategy.

Speaker 1 And ever since I've been sort of run the same play over and over again.

Speaker 3 That's powerful, man.

Speaker 1 And it's

Speaker 3 the paranoid risk taker.

Speaker 1 Let's be honest.

Speaker 1 The problem is if you're the guy who writes that book, a lot of people are turned off by the title and think like, oh, easy for you to say or it's reckless. I'm like, oh, no, no, it's not easy.

Speaker 1 And it's definitely not reckless. It's like, it comes with a lot of deliberation, you know, to get there.

Speaker 3 Yeah, man. I've lived, I think, a smaller version of that.

Speaker 3 I think you've been on a bigger stage in bigger places, but I have a similar mindset. And I think it's,

Speaker 3 I don't know what unlocks. You had a very specific thing that I think unlocked it for you.
Because I get asked, I'll go on chose two and I'll get asked, like, what unlocks it? How do you unlock that?

Speaker 3 You know, what are your tips and tricks? And I'm opening that question to you.

Speaker 3 And I, and I don't know outside of something that happened, you know, you're either wired that way or you aren't, or you have an event like you had, you know, that you pushed you into it.

Speaker 3 It's a tough thing to know exactly what that formula is that makes someone get to where they do those things.

Speaker 1 Right, where they fully commit to their own potential.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Because we're so comfortable, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's interesting you said that because when I wrote the book, like part of me has this geeky academic brain that would love to write like a treatise-y on,

Speaker 1 you know, on neuroscience, but that's not going to resonate with people. So instead, I chose to take a different approach.
I did it through storytelling.

Speaker 1 So in my book, I tried to dissect these moments where people had to sort of overcome their own objections and sort of fully commit.

Speaker 1 The number one piece of advice I always have for if you're not fully committing to what you know is true about yourself or the universe, right?

Speaker 1 It's usually because you have an enemy within or without.

Speaker 1 Either somebody in your foxhole, it could be a spouse or could be somebody who's telling, it's trying to hold you back, or something is happening within that you're afraid to face.

Speaker 1 The dad who never said, I'm proud of you. You know, the incident that you're trying to conceal.
You know, for me, it was the shame of poverty and like lack of refinement.

Speaker 1 But maybe for you, it's you did something wrong and you're not, you're afraid to confront it.

Speaker 1 And so I always think focusing on the enemy within without identifying what's preventing you, when you face it fearlessly, you're like, that wasn't that big of a deal.

Speaker 1 Then I feel like you can fully commit.

Speaker 1 it's usually somebody being blocked by something in my experience and my book is full these little vignettes of trying to say how the person was blocked and and again i always talk so openly about my anxiety and imposter syndrome so i could let people know like it took work you know i wasn't born this way kevin o'leary was born this way he's totally self-possessed but i'm not

Speaker 1 yeah he's exactly like he seems

Speaker 1 i love character i love archetypes like that because i crack he was on a cmbc interview for those who know kevin o'learry is obviously shark tank Tank, and he's my colleague.

Speaker 1 I love the guy, but he went on

Speaker 1 a CNBC and they were ripping him to shreds for FTX, right? And I've never, and this is his like home network. And it was such an uncomfortable interview.

Speaker 1 And I called him and I said, Kevin, like, first of all, I'm so impressed you handled that. But also, how do you, how do you handle that without feeling, you know, torn apart?

Speaker 1 He goes, oh, Matt, here's the thing. I just don't give a F.

Speaker 1 And I was like, but Kevin, I do. And he goes, that's your problem, baby.

Speaker 1 Yes, yes. Yeah.

Speaker 3 I do have a, I don't know, a pretty natural gift, and I give a shit.

Speaker 1 That might be,

Speaker 1 you know, like about what other people think.

Speaker 3 Because I know they're, I'm going to get judged no matter what.

Speaker 1 See, the thing for me, it's a little different. I am endlessly intellectual and curious to see if somebody might have a point.
And so I spent a lot of mental energy being like, do I agree with you?

Speaker 1 But I don't actually give a shit if you agree with my vision. I don't care at all.
I'm happy to be alone sitting with my little Bitcoin mining, you know, or whatever it is. But I, but I do care.

Speaker 1 I am interested when you project your negative energy at me. One, it triggers empathy.
I know it sounds nuts, but I'm always like, oh, what a waste of your life. That sucks.

Speaker 1 You're going to wake up one day and realize you wasted your energy directed at me. And two, do you have anything I can learn from this negative energy?

Speaker 1 And so it's a little more cerebral, but it's a waste of time. I would much rather be Kevin O'Leary and not Kevin.

Speaker 1 But I'm not.

Speaker 3 I might be somewhere in between.

Speaker 1 You might be a little more regulated.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't know. I'm not quite as, I don't know, fresh as Ian.

Speaker 3 And we're talking about Mr. Wonderful, right?

Speaker 1 Mr.

Speaker 3 Wonderful. Yes, Kevin Older.

Speaker 1 Kevin Older.

Speaker 3 How was your experience on Shark Tank, you know, beyond Kevin?

Speaker 1 I mean, it was, it was amazing. It, you know, getting through, I tell the story in the book, too, about Imposter Syndrome, who's a great proxy.
You know, Damon John is on Shark Tank.

Speaker 1 Damon grew up like a mile from me. A lot of similarities.
He's black. I'm white.
That's a big difference. But he worked at Red Lobster.
I was at McDonald's.

Speaker 1 So we kind of connect on this who's poorer than who thing, you know? And then I went to the dressing room and I was just honest with him. I was like, man, I'm so freaked out going on this show.

Speaker 1 And he was like, why? And I was like, I don't know. Just kind of feel like, what am I doing here? And he first MF'd everybody else.
He's like, look what we did. Look where we came from.

Speaker 1 And then he told me the one greatest piece of advice I love sharing to this audience. Like, because you belong here because you are here.

Speaker 1 And I always say it's like, oh, Plato or Socrates, like, you belong here. I think, therefore, I am.

Speaker 1 I belong here because I am here anyone here ever feels out of place there is no final arbiter of belonging no one's going to let you know you've arrived it's for you to realize if you're in the room you're meant to be in the room so after that little pep talk the experience was amazing everything you see on the show oddly is the way it is on the show and so because you i thought there'd be way more scripting yeah and it's like lights camera action and also everyone is so rude steps on each other like because it's real money at stake and when i say rude i'm being kind of playful Like, there's no, there, there, there, there's no like chivalry.

Speaker 1 Uh, everyone's trying to win the deal. And as a mental exercise, it's fun because when you're home, you're like, I would do that deal, and you're like doing the math.

Speaker 1 When you're like trying to sell somebody and make each thinking that you're the one you should, you know, you should take your money, but at the same time, you're assessing whether you want to do the deal.

Speaker 1 There's a lot going on in your mind at the same time, which I think is really interesting psychologically. Like,

Speaker 1 most fundamentally, how do you determine if somebody is truthful and worthy of backing, you know, in 40 minutes? Yeah.

Speaker 3 Do you think any of the sharks have no intent on betting or going in and betting? I guess it is betting. Freudian slipped, that's actually true.

Speaker 3 You know, investing,

Speaker 3 but just to pull someone else into a bad deal?

Speaker 1 No, I mean, it would be fun if that were the case.

Speaker 3 Maybe they're that calculating with each other.

Speaker 1 I wish I honestly wish there was more game theory like that.

Speaker 1 And like, I do think if anyone ever creates a winning iteration of Shark Tank, it's going to have more game theory about how to screw each other.

Speaker 1 But the answer is no. I mean, they real money, real intent to do the deal, real work.

Speaker 1 I mean, the part that is I'm kind of fascinated by, like, I was only on a couple of seasons and I just did Shark Tank Dubai, which was totally trippy, but we can get into that. But

Speaker 1 if I had been on many years, I don't think I would do it. I don't think it'd be worth it.
The amount of energy it takes. Like, look, you do a deal with somebody, you know, you write a check.

Speaker 1 You're also signing up for a job.

Speaker 1 And that job is got to answer the phone when you're, when you're, when your founder calls you and things are going terrible right and you got to monitor your money some of these have they have hundreds of deals and like these aren't the next like uh chat gbt right you know you aren't that much shark tanker they are right there are that many they're not that many squatty potties in the universe right so uh i don't know if i would have ever done it for all those years because it's so much work to hustle those deals yeah i mean i think

Speaker 3 For me, if I was them, it's the brand play.

Speaker 1 I mean, it is, but you can't get the brand play without doing the work of investing in the deals, and those deals heavy tax. That's why I admire Kevin O'Leary.
Kevin and I do stuff together.

Speaker 1 We're in a dumpling, a thing called Brooklyn Dumpling Shop, which we both love. That guy works, man.
Like, he works harder on the deal than I work on the deal. And

Speaker 1 he has, he's more spread thin. He's on TV all the time.
So, all the sharks really work because there's no other choice to make these deals play out.

Speaker 3 Well, if you're gonna,

Speaker 3 as we move on to something else, though, but

Speaker 3 summarize for me the common attributes of the sharks.

Speaker 3 Like, what are things that come to your mind?

Speaker 3 Even though they're all different personalities, different things, but like you said, all working harder, all more vested than you, than you realize, but those are all very successful people, yourself included.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 3 what if you're thinking about like, what's the common thread for all of them, for someone that's been on the show behind the scenes, you know what it is, maybe what comes to mind?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I would probably say the number one, I'm just responding, and no one's ever asked me this question, so I'm just responding like primitively, like, what's the first word that came to mind?

Speaker 1 And it was, it's optimism. Each one of those people is fundamentally optimistic that anything is possible and that anyone can do anything.

Speaker 1 That doesn't, I didn't say Pollyannish, which would have been another word, right? Like, or naive, but they are fundamentally optimistic.

Speaker 1 And I'm going through Lori and Barbara and Margaret. That's number one.

Speaker 1 And then two, fearless. Like, I've done deals with all of them when shit's not going right.
They don't panic.

Speaker 1 Like, I hate investors, even though I can be an investor too, but I'm fundamentally a builder and a founder. Like, investors, you know, they get so panicky and the first one to freak out.

Speaker 1 And they have to take a very myopic view. Wait, I'm going to lose all my money.
I was like, what about that guy who's going to have to go home and face his wife and kids?

Speaker 1 And he squandered the 401k for the business that didn't work out, right? Like, so what I've found is when things go poorly, they become more fearless, right? And working with all of them.

Speaker 1 And then three, I'd say everyone's a grinder. Like Mark Cuban, I'll give you an example, what I mean by that.

Speaker 1 I think sometimes when somebody doesn't have money and they're climbing up, they imagine when you get money, you're like, I'm not going to work.

Speaker 1 I'm going to be in the Caymans and other people are going to do shit for me.

Speaker 1 It's not true. The most successful people I have are shockingly, I know are shockingly tactical.
So what I mean by that is like Mark Cuban is the single most responsive person I've ever met on email.

Speaker 1 And in general, I don't know how he does it. And usually the response is the word no, but at least it's responsive.

Speaker 1 And each one of them gets involved in a level of work that I think if this audience heard that would be surprised. Like how granular.

Speaker 1 And the takeaway from that is if you want to be successful, like you got to grind out the details. There is no presiding at any level.

Speaker 1 There's no send it and forget it, unless we're talking about Bitcoin compounding over the next 15 years.

Speaker 1 So those are the three. So optimism,

Speaker 1 I would say, you know, grinding it out and fearless

Speaker 1 would be the three qualities that come to mind.

Speaker 3 You know what's interesting about that?

Speaker 3 The first one,

Speaker 3 you got to believe to achieve. It's really fucking easy to be a hater and to not believe and to doubt and to critique.
It brings me back to that statement.

Speaker 3 It might sound cliche, but we all hear, you know, no one who's getting shit done at a higher level than you is sitting around, you know, talking shit about you or where you are or how you do it, you know, because they're too busy believing in what they're doing themselves.

Speaker 3 And optimism, belief, I put all that into the same thing. I think it's just they've got a vision.

Speaker 3 They've got a belief in something, you know, like whether it's investing in something, whether it's doing their own thing, whether it's taking it forward.

Speaker 1 Like, if you're a believer, you just, you ain't got time for the bullshit.

Speaker 1 You, I always say,

Speaker 1 to make this understandable for people, I put this out on Twitter a few times, X. I never met a wildly successful pessimist.
And people will say, oh, what about short sellers?

Speaker 1 I was like, that person's optimistic. They think that they're going to go down.
They're not going to get anybody.

Speaker 1 They're like, they're going against the grain and they're willing to risk everything with unlimited downside because they believe that they're right. That's pretty optimistic.

Speaker 1 Pessimism is somebody who thinks the deck is stack against them. The system is rigged, all that crap.
Like, please, like, some of that may be true from time to time.

Speaker 1 But at the end of the day, we all have the power to change our circumstances. And the reason I love why we're drilling down on this.

Speaker 1 I talk about this in this book, this one phrase to always anchor me to what I believe in and what I'm doing. Opportunity arrives before the tipping point of evidence, right?

Speaker 1 And that's a simple way of saying like lightning and thunder. You know, you always see the flash of light first.
That's the opportunity. It travels.

Speaker 1 Light travels many times faster than the speed of sound. And evidence is thunder.
It's unmistakable, but everybody hears it.

Speaker 1 And so if you want to be wildly successful, you first have to be an optimist or else you won't even believe you saw the light, right? You'd be like, ah, it's in my head, you know?

Speaker 1 And then the ability to act on it is the thing that sets winners apart.

Speaker 1 And back to your point about belief, it's why burn the boats is so important because the time to burn the boats is when the opportunity arrives before the tipping point of evidence.

Speaker 1 When you burn the boats, when everybody knows knows about it, it's like, well, it's, you know, it's too late.

Speaker 1 You know, that being said, if you're an innovative and dynamic and optimistic person, when you think it's too late, it's still okay. Like we were just talking about Bitcoin having a fun conversation.

Speaker 1 Like it's not too late at all. It's actually quite early.
Yes.

Speaker 3 And I love it.

Speaker 3 I, I use this quote all the time with building brand and, you know, people talk about, you know, you know, we help people with podcasting and personal branding and that stuff for one of my companies, my agency.

Speaker 3 And I talk about it all the time that

Speaker 3 you have to have consistency doing tactics and strategies

Speaker 3 without the proof of definitive success.

Speaker 3 And it is exactly that. Like you have to, you keep grinding, you keep doing, you keep stacking it.
And then, because once you have the proofs of success, it's obvious.

Speaker 3 But the hard part is, and what, again, we're kind of building towards some themes here is like, you know,

Speaker 3 people don't have the kind of like, they need that reassurance. They need to see it.
They need evidence at all times. You know, we're conditioned to need immediate feedback.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 3 the ones that really get there are the ones that have the tolerance.

Speaker 1 And it's not because, look, we're all,

Speaker 3 you and I are a little ADD. We're not exactly patient people, probably.

Speaker 1 But at the same time, I always say, I'm urgent, but I can be patient. Yeah.
Yeah, let's play out.

Speaker 3 You have to be willing to kind of throw the chips in without knowing exactly what you're buying, but you have belief in it.

Speaker 1 And I get when I get objections to my book, which I love, right? I mean, there's a lot of things to object to. It's not safe or whatever, reckless.
I have to pay the rent.

Speaker 1 And I have answers for all that, by the way. Anybody here who wants to object, but

Speaker 1 read the book first.

Speaker 1 But one thing I do get that always tugs at me a little bit when somebody's like, look, like, I hear everything you're saying, but i got no resources i got no autonomy i got no power i'm just trying to survive i have no opportunity to burn the boats and i was like burn the boats or believing in your potential your ideas doesn't require you to act on them when you have no power just practice flex your potential for being right just by acting as if you did move on if you saw bitcoin seven years ago and you didn't have the money to invest in it so what it's the fact that you saw it right and so i'd say anyone out there is not in a position because they're you know they're work they're making 18 an hour and they're like, and they're, and they're, and they're in a situation that they don't want to be in and they feel like they have no power to express their ideas.

Speaker 1 Just practice identifying patterns of the universe and write down what you would have done if you had the power to do something about it. Those reps count.

Speaker 1 As long as you're being honest, like you would have done it. And I think sometimes people dismiss when they don't have the resources to go all in as if those ideas don't count.

Speaker 1 So when I was at the, in my dole, at the darkest days and I had no power to act on things, you know, I would still keep score. Like, damn, if I had some power, money, I would do this.

Speaker 1 And then the day came when I did. And it turns out, by the way, you make even worse decisions when you do because you can handle the loss, which is very corrupting.
You know, you're like,

Speaker 1 million dollars here on a shit coin. Oh, no, stupid NFT.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 but anyways, anyone out there who's listening who feels like they don't have the power, the autonomy, like the reps still count, even if you don't have the capacity to do anything about it.

Speaker 3 Talking with Matt Higgins, co-founder, CEO, the CEO of What's Next.

Speaker 1 I've given him that title. Great voice.
Although I'm going to emulate it right now. I'm going going to put on my radio voice.

Speaker 3 Talk to me about,

Speaker 3 you know, what all you're working on today. Like, let's talk here in the now.
What's, you know, we talked a little bit pre-episode. Yeah.

Speaker 3 What are the things that are, you know, at the front of Matt Higgins' mind today?

Speaker 1 Yeah, and this ties together a lot of the themes that we talk about. It requires a second of setup.

Speaker 1 But for those that don't know my early background, I was the press secretary to the Mayor Giuliani on 9-11, version 1.0 of Mayor Giuliani, America's Mayor.

Speaker 1 And then I ended up becoming chief operating officer of the World Trade Center site to do the rebuilding.

Speaker 1 So I was there standing under that building on the morning of 9-11 and witness horrific things.

Speaker 1 And fast forward many, many, many years later, I wrote the first check into the drone racing league, the sport.

Speaker 1 And as we were inventing all this technology for this sport, how to fly a drone at 100 miles an hour with a goggle with no latency, it doesn't crash into the wall, how to get radio signals in a complex environment with cinder blocks, like all these technological challenges.

Speaker 1 In that journey, a couple of years in, we had this feeling that, like, wow, what we are inventing could be used by terrorists. And this is probably going to be the future of warfare with drones.

Speaker 1 And we should spin off a company quietly, blow the radar, and make sure it's built here on American soil. I know this sounds like grandiose, maybe not in hindsight, right? But at the time.

Speaker 1 And so we created a company in stealth mode in Alabama called Performance Drone Works.

Speaker 1 And I spent the last seven years fighting for this with my co-founders to manifest this company, tens of millions of dollars, many lonely times when nobody believed in it.

Speaker 1 In the Department of Defense budget, there was like a tiny fraction for small drones. And then Ukraine happens, right? And we, and we, and then, of course, the entire battlefield is changed.

Speaker 1 And then Elon Musk is suddenly treating about drone wars. And

Speaker 1 this is incredible. On September 11th, 2024, a couple months ago, my company was awarded the U.S.
Army Programme of at Record for small drones, medium-range reconnaissance.

Speaker 1 And so, in that journey, is everything we've just been talking about?

Speaker 1 Because I stood under the Trade Center, it gave me the same feeling: like, oh my God, this is going to be the source of terrorist attacks in the future.

Speaker 1 And the United States must build up a drone ecosystem and get there first before our enemies do.

Speaker 1 I'm going to do something about it, which is probably the grandiose part, but I'm like, I'm going to do it. And then, okay, phase one.

Speaker 1 I see an opportunity arriving before the tipping of point of evidence. This is not just an opportunity, it's a necessity, right? I act on it.
I'm alone. There's no money.
Investors won't put money in.

Speaker 1 You know, the company almost goes under. I have to save it, right?

Speaker 1 There's no programs at the U.S. Department of Government, the Department of Defense.

Speaker 1 I got to act on it and I have to spend the time alone and endure the skepticism and the ridicule with my fellow co-founders. And then on the other side, we win the program of record.

Speaker 1 And then it becomes obvious. And so what I love about that is when people see it now, like, well, of course you're in drones.
What do you mean, of course I'm in?

Speaker 1 Like, do you know what what it took to build this thing? And so I love that because it's the most important work I've ever done in my life.

Speaker 1 I mean, it maybe competes with this book because the book is helping people reach their potential. But building this company is the most important thing I ever worked on for the home team.

Speaker 1 You know, I'm a patriot like you. Never served in the military, but this is my chance to do something.
And I love it. I love it because it was bold and courageous.

Speaker 3 And now we've created an exquisite product that is serving the elite warfighters in this country that's what i'm working on i love that man i love it from all different fronts number one the business number two the vision the the willingness to stick with it till without proof and then hey fighting the good fight for our men and women of the u.s that we lose track of or lose sight of probably more often than we should and keeping innovation at home instead of sending it abroad Yeah, it's more important than we realize.

Speaker 1 And I think one of the best things about like, people say, well, what did you really burn the boats for in your life?

Speaker 1 If you had to summarize, I burned the boats for autonomy because when you grow up with poor, with dysfunction, you have no power to save your family members or help them.

Speaker 1 You have no power to dictate your life. And I hated it.
And I'll never go back. And so when you get a little bit older, what are you going to do with your autonomy? I now have autonomy, right?

Speaker 1 Some wealth and reputation. I could spend it.

Speaker 1 I will not, I want to be around military members. Nothing brings me more joy and seems objectively, incredibly honorable than the U.S.
military.

Speaker 1 And so now I get to use my autonomy to put myself in situations like that. I was just in

Speaker 1 Poland, overseas. I've been all over the U.S.
in different bases.

Speaker 1 I finally feel like I know where I want to spend most of my time on. And that's the benefit of all this hard work that is behind me.

Speaker 3 Matt, can you talk

Speaker 3 that contract with the government? Like what it's ultimately, what the value of that contract is over, you know, three, five, ten years.

Speaker 1 I can talk about what we did. I mean, this gives you context to how much work goes into this.

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 we had done a million dollars of revenue last year in 2023 after six years of work, whatever the year, right? But then in the seventh year, we'll probably do $50 million of revenue this year.

Speaker 1 And we'll eventually end up doing half a billion dollars of revenue in another, you know, whatever, seven years.

Speaker 1 Like, because the thing about this work, it's called the valley of death for those who don't know how hard it is to build a defense tech company.

Speaker 1 And the reason it's called the valley of death is such a long delta between when you first make a prototype and you have all these early signals, like, oh, this is necessary.

Speaker 1 Government is great at like encouraging you. But the problem is, a programmer record, which is the thing that sustains you, takes years and years and years to go there.

Speaker 1 So there's this big value of death where it's very hard to raise money.

Speaker 1 But once you get a programmer record, you kind of get to the other side. So, what I love about our product, it's called the C-100.

Speaker 1 It was reverse engineered specifically for what does the warfighter need to call in

Speaker 1 their own air support? Like, how do we make something that really is responsive?

Speaker 1 Whereas I think a lot of things out there are like science projects where, like, oh, it would be really cool if we could do this. It's like, okay, that's great.
What happens when it rains?

Speaker 1 You know what I mean? Or like, like, all these practical things. And so, we've created an incredible company that marries operators and engineers under one roof.

Speaker 1 And so, the product is designed with the warfighter in mind. And so, that gives you some context of it.
But I'll tell you, it was no fun when the revenue was zero. And,

Speaker 1 you know, you don't really know what the future holds.

Speaker 3 The valley of death.

Speaker 1 Valley of death.

Speaker 3 That's not where most investors want to be, right?

Speaker 1 No, no, it is honestly like those, it is the worst possible space to invest in. But I didn't invest.
I built. Does that, you know what I mean? It's a very different.

Speaker 1 I decided, like, I'm going to go all in and

Speaker 1 we are going to put tens of millions of dollars into this. We're going to make it happen.
I was so confident about the vision, but you can't be confident you're going to win.

Speaker 1 People think like, there's so much criticism of the government, it's inefficient, all these things. True, Elon Musk would doge.

Speaker 1 I will say the government is very good, though, enforcing competition and making people do irrational things. And, like, to get here, we have to beat out the best.

Speaker 1 You know, this wasn't like no one's handing anything to you. You have to, you know, make a great product.

Speaker 3 So, you were, there were others competing for similar contracts.

Speaker 1 I mean, there were dozens of competing, but not only dozens, the biggest defense companies in the United States competing.

Speaker 1 But we just happened to, because I had the insight and because the company was born of this technology, the greatest experts in small drones in the world, we just were happening to make a better product.

Speaker 1 And I had a year head, and back to others who are listening to this who have their own vision for innovating in a category.

Speaker 1 You have a head start against incumbents because you've been thinking about it longer and you've been thinking about it from the outside.

Speaker 1 Whereas a Lockheed Martin or some other company might be thinking about a million things, we were thinking about one thing. The future of warfare is going to center around small drones.

Speaker 1 And here's how you make an amazing small drone. And that's that's the only thing we worked on for years and years.

Speaker 1 And that focus paid off in creating the best drone in this category, 20, 20-pound drone.

Speaker 3 Singular focus is incredibly powerful.

Speaker 1 Coming from the guys who have total ADD and do a million things. Yes.
Yes. But at least on each one, though.

Speaker 3 Each one.

Speaker 1 Exactly. That's what I say.
People are like, Matt, how do you square the fact that you teach at Harvard or you, you know, are on Shark Tank? Well, each one, I'm killing myself for that thing.

Speaker 1 Like, you know,

Speaker 3 but you have a singular focus on each one. And the strategy is, is a focus in itself for each thing.
You might be in 20 ventures, but each venture, you got to, you got to have focus.

Speaker 3 You got to have, and

Speaker 3 that singular focus

Speaker 3 bears results ultimately.

Speaker 1 I think it pays. It does.
And

Speaker 1 I do think there's a, where you and I are making a distinction that is really important, right?

Speaker 1 You, it's not that you have to only do one thing in life, but just make sure the one thing is about the one thing, right? And then make sure you're allocating enough bandwidth to make a difference.

Speaker 1 This is where I do struggle. I'm sure everybody listening, you probably struggle, right? I want to be stimulated.
I want to have fun.

Speaker 1 I do want to go ahead and buy, you know, whatever coin we were just talking about. You know, we're human beings, right? I don't watch Netflix.
I like I trade. That's my fun.

Speaker 1 But, but there is energy leakage that I always have to be mindful for. So I spend a lot of mental energy thinking about opportunity cost.
What is the opportunity cost of this distraction?

Speaker 1 And am I willing to pay that price?

Speaker 1 If I'm going to spend a half an hour playing around with Twitter and looking for for the next big idea, like I know that I could be using it out of one of my companies, but I, but I, and a lot of times, as long as it's about a relief valve, an escape hatch, we all need one, then I'm okay with it.

Speaker 1 But I would argue, everyone, the way to strike a right balance about focus is to constantly ask what's the opportunity cost of the distraction. And I, and I'm willing to pay it.

Speaker 1 As long as you've asked a question and you're willing to pay it, then it's okay.

Speaker 3 What makes Matt Higgins happy?

Speaker 1 It's also cliche. I've number one, I married my best friend, which is great.
I hang out with like, you know, truly my best friend. And so it makes days fun.
I love being around my kids.

Speaker 1 As long as I get that right, I'm okay. And I love travel.
I like being uncomfortable. I like being deposited in a place where I can't read the signs.
And I like seeing the world upside down.

Speaker 1 And I like being stimulated. So if I could, absent family, I would be on a plane and just be in airports all the time, just like looking at that board saying, where am I going next?

Speaker 1 You know, I love to be in strange places.

Speaker 3 If you look back, Matt, over everything you've done,

Speaker 3 what's a word of advice you would have given yourself 20 years ago? Like that now, because you've figured it out at a high level where a lot of people don't ever get to.

Speaker 3 But there's probably

Speaker 3 not things you do different, but maybe just advice or counsel you might have given yourself. What would have been?

Speaker 1 I want to give two answers answers because one I'm sitting with, I just, God forbid, turned 50 recently, and it does prompt a little bit of an existential crisis. So I'll give you the benefit of that.

Speaker 1 I didn't buy a Ferrari, but I've been probing my decision-making.

Speaker 1 The number one piece of advice I would give is that nobody cares. And

Speaker 1 like we, you and I talked about it off camera, I think, but we spend so much time self-censoring our own ambition in anticipation of how that ambition will be received by a boss or a spouse or the voices in our head.

Speaker 1 And we don't realize that nobody cared. And like, as you get older, you realize, like, oh, winners don't care because they're so focused on what they're doing.

Speaker 1 And the only ones that don't care are not deserving of your time. They're deserving of your empathy, right?

Speaker 1 Of like, oh, if you really care about me, that's so tragic because you're just, you know, wasting. So number one would have been nobody cared.
Number two

Speaker 1 would be for those who have born with scarcity and who have some degree of dysfunction or desperation, I do think it does something to your psychology of money, which is everything's about a lotto ticket.

Speaker 1 There's no way out of your hole. I remember there was no way out of my hole growing up with my mom.
So she would spend money on Omaha steaks. Like it'd be so bizarre.

Speaker 1 We would order these Omaha steaks. And I'm like, why? And the answer was like, tomorrow has no more hope than today.
So we might as well feel good today.

Speaker 1 And so there was a lotto ticket mentality that I think I was born with. The only way out of this is if I went a lotto ticket.
And I think that follows you through adulthood.

Speaker 1 And so my greatest regret with money is that I squandered the greatest gift everyone is given, which is time.

Speaker 1 Anybody on this call, on the listening, has actually the power to manifest wealth simply by taking advantage of compounding and time. And I did not learn that until half my life was over.

Speaker 1 And it's like, damn, I squandered that asset. Like we were talking about Bitcoin for some context, right? I mined Bitcoin starting in 2012.
And I was early, and I mined 290 Bitcoins.

Speaker 1 And I got disinterested with that idea. I lost hope.
I even put it in my book, Bitcoin Stupid. And I sold that Bitcoin in 2016.

Speaker 1 And if I had had not a lot of ticket mentality, but born with the recognition that compounding is everything, I would have stuck with the math of Bitcoin back then.

Speaker 1 And today, that position is worth $30 million.

Speaker 1 By the time I'm 70, it'll be worth almost 400 million. And by the time I died, actuarially, it would be worth a billion.

Speaker 1 So if you are listening and you're, and you have a heartbeat, the greatest asset you still have in your position, your possession is compounding.

Speaker 1 And I wish I had realized that, but because I was so anxious to escape that I didn't realize that pattern had taken hold of me.

Speaker 1 So I would have gone back in time and be like, Matt, you got it all wrong. Just put it in the SP.

Speaker 1 Dollar cost average, baby. Yes.

Speaker 3 You said dollar cost average a bunch. And I'm, and we have a very, we have like a 25 to 50 year old audience.
They're affluent, but explain that to our audience.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it just, it just means I always say this, uh, it's one of my favorite principles. It's hard enough to be right, it's impossible to know when you're going to be right.

Speaker 1 And I think people confuse those two concepts. They have an idea that like, I'm pretty sure self-driving cars are going to happen, and they go all in on something, right?

Speaker 1 But they didn't ask, well, when might that happen? It's probably going to take longer than anybody ever realizes, right?

Speaker 1 And that's the bottom line. You'll never get the timing of

Speaker 1 the arrival of your epiphany, right? So you need to structure your bets to account for that. The better way to approach a thesis is to do what's called dollar cost averaging, investing in something

Speaker 1 in regular, disciplined, formulaic intervals that you never change. And so for fun, I was doing this exercise last night.
I went to ChatGPT and I said, what will be the price of Bitcoin in 15 years

Speaker 1 based upon the previous rate of return? But let's take the rate of return down to just 5% at the end of the 15-year period.

Speaker 1 If I were to put $1,000 in every month based upon whatever number you come back, what will that be worth in 15 years? And the number was like staggering. It was like $9 million.

Speaker 1 And so dollar cost average simply means investing in regular intervals and not going all, not feeling like you got to go all in today. You got to go all into that coin or that idea.

Speaker 1 And it's how people like Warren Buffett got rich simply through compounding.

Speaker 1 Dollar cost averaging takes the idea of compounding, which is the more time things have to grow by simple inflation or growth rate, with the idea that you put your investment in at regular intervals so that you don't have to worry about timing the market.

Speaker 1 I have lost so much money and energy and emotional health by thinking I could time things when in reality, I didn't even need to bother. I could have just DCA'd.

Speaker 3 I love that.

Speaker 1 Now, somebody, by the way, somebody here who's listening might say, but I'm already 50. I don't have time.
Actuarily, you got to 77. you got 27 years, a long time.
You have a ton of time.

Speaker 1 You got a heartbeat, you got time. So I think that's the reason people, as they get older, say, I don't have time.
I need the lotto ticket. Like, no, you don't.
You still got time. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Plus, you really don't have time. Then you don't have time.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 3 Then you can just do the lotto ticket.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but honestly, then you just go on a cruise and eat fucking GR Gyros all day long, whatever it is.

Speaker 3 And eat some Omaha hot steaks.

Speaker 1 Yeah, do whatever you want, baby.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 3 Oh, Matt. Talk to me about where people can learn more about what you're doing, find your book, all that stuff.

Speaker 1 Great. So I'm on Instagram, M.
Higgins. I'm on LinkedIn a lot for those that are on there.
I'm on Twitter, same handle. My book is on Amazon.
If you read it, you like it, DM me.

Speaker 1 I burned the boats when I started it back to being very tactical. I was like, what's a way for this to be an enduring classic?

Speaker 1 And I decided I'm going to DM every single person that ever comments publicly on this book for however long it takes to get to a thousand reviews. And I am 27 away from that.

Speaker 1 Please put me out of my misery. It's been two years.

Speaker 1 So, if you read that book, DM me.

Speaker 1 And my theory back to doing things other people won't do was that if somebody were to write a review of the book, they probably are more evangelical and they're more likely to pass the word.

Speaker 1 Books become classics because people word of mouth. And so, my theory is if I could get more people to review it, it would eventually be an enduring classic and outlive my life.

Speaker 1 That was the goal I set, and I'm 27 away from achieving it. Yes,

Speaker 3 Matt, you got a lot of like, I feel like this combination of practical advice combined with some risk-taking that we all need to kind of get our shit together. I think it's refreshing.

Speaker 3 I really appreciate you coming on the show.

Speaker 1 No, thank you for having me. This is a great conversation.
We talked about things I never talked about. So this was fun.

Speaker 3 That's the goal, brother. All right.
Hey, man, you know to find us, ryanisright.com.

Speaker 1 You know why we're right?

Speaker 3 Guys like Matt Higgins coming on the show.

Speaker 1 Check out his book, Burn the Boats.

Speaker 3 And you'll find me on Instagram at Ryan Alford. We'll see you next time on right about Now.

Speaker 2 This has been Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. Visit ryanisright.com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities.

Speaker 2 Thanks for listening.