Alicia McKenzie (00:02.52)

This episode is brought to you by Relive Health, a modern wellness clinic helping you look and feel your best from the inside out. From peptides and hormone optimization to vitamin therapy, their team makes proactive health simple and approachable. Visit Relive Gaithersburg to start your personalized wellness journey today.

Alicia McKenzie (00:24.128)

And what's really interesting is that now that you're talking about energy and just levels or just motivation as a midlife person, anybody who founds a company in their like 40s or 50s, I don't know how they fucking do it. Welcome to Married to the Startup. I'm Alicia McKenzie, a wellness entrepreneur and digital creator. Alongside me is my amazing husband, George, the CEO who's always ready for a new challenge.

We've been navigating marriage and running startups for over a decade, and we're here to share the real unfiltered journey with you. Join us for insights and candid conversations about integrating love, family, and entrepreneurship. This is Married to the Startup, where every day is a new adventure.

Alicia McKenzie (01:15.848)

Welcome to episode 50, The Retake. I'm your host, Alicia McKenzie.

And I am your lovely co-host, George Macintype. I am, thank you. Maybe call this pod more often. I get so many compliments.

You are lovely.

Alicia McKenzie (01:33.704)

version one of this podcast, it was a really good.

It was amazing. was the best podcast. It was great.

except we had some awful audio.

and some technical difficulties.

And normally, I'm a huge fan of done is better than perfect. But the thought of sending a choppy, annoying podcast into the world is just something I could not bring myself to do.

George McKenzie (02:03.694)

Yeah, it was the choppy audio and then the cut at like 27 minutes.

So the new puppy.

Fitzgerald, Grant III.

he actually chewed through the power cable of the podcast mixer and it completely like just cut off everything in the middle of our segment. And then it did not work again because

was great.

George McKenzie (02:31.662)

Yes, we had to go find another alternate power cable, which you would think would be an easy accessory to buy from the website that sells you said mixer, but nope.

one would think, but rather than selling the power cable to it, you can just buy a whole brand new mixer.

or rounds around and finally that is mostly compatible.

Anyways, so that this has been a journey. Welcome to episode 50.

but the puppy made it. There was no electrical shock.

Alicia McKenzie (03:06.114)

Which completely blows my mind because how did he chew through a power cord and not shock himself?

Yep, no breaker was tripped. Everything was good. Episode 50, Half a Century.

wild.

half a century and when we started this, was just to give Georgia platform to.

Talk. Get my words out.

Alicia McKenzie (03:27.438)

get his words out, right? He's like, he's like the baby. And you're like, why do you talk so much? And she's like, I just have a lot to say. All right, Maya, let's go.

It has been a long day. That's her favorite saying that.

She has very long days. She lives one hell of a life. If I die and come back as another person, it needs to be Baby Maya.

It's similar to the FedEx lady that was dropping off the package that she could be reincarnated or be rebirthed as a child. She'd want to be ours based on all of our Halloween decor and animatronics.

And the fact that they're just happy kids.

George McKenzie (04:04.386)

That they are. What's not to be happy about?

But episode 15, Milestone, it feels like a pretty big one and it is our first sponsored episode. And I'm not a fan of doing sponsored ads and whatever, but I do tend to promote things that I love and I genuinely use. And that's where Relive definitely comes in, right? I've been with them for, I want to say three years right before I got my surgery. So...

No, how about that?

Alicia McKenzie (04:36.206)

I've been with them since like June of 23 and I've done a battery of tests and I've done all my blood work and I've done all my IVs and everything there. They prescribed my peptides. And the reason I really trust the FNP functional nurse practitioner is because she spent 10 years in general medicine and she left because she did not like the one size fits all reactionary approach to medicine. And I...

fully support that. It's just everything needs to be personalized, in my opinion. And I love that more people are jumping on this wellness, biohacking, whatever you want to call it, trend, because it's really important. And now that I'm approaching my 40s and people are starting to throw the word perimenopause around, like, what the fuck is that? Like, I've had more conversations about hair loss.

itchy feet, like just random symptoms that I had no clue could even exist when it comes to perimenopause and hormone health and all of this stuff. But it just felt like a really authentic partnership with Relive. And that's what we're about.

Yeah, and I think we both have benefited from it. And I think, you the things that we talk about a lot and we've had a couple podcasts about really is being able to measure, you know, your health and how do you do that? Like the annual physical go take the same, you know, cough test or talk to the doctor and then do blood work, whether just looking at three or four indicators is not really, you know, prescriptive of a long healthy life, a long lifespan or health span.

So being able to get the data around how your body is actually doing and looking at all the markers and then saying, okay, what do I need more of? And then getting help and focus on the things that you need. And unlike, you know, women have perimenopause and you have these more... But you know, men go through similar things. You just call it midlife crisis.

Alicia McKenzie (06:43.261)

Nuanced health issues.

George McKenzie (06:50.178)

when your testosterone drops, you don't feel like the same person you were before. And you compensate from buy those things. Like, I'm going to buy a sports car. I'm going to do this, that, or the other to help with my mental health because I am low on testosterone or I'm putting on visceral fat or I'm having a hard time getting the energy up to work out or to do the things that I used to do or find joy in the things I used to find joy in. So being able to see

you know, what are the things my body's deficient in? And then finding a way to address those. Yeah, I think that's where relive comes in, you know, large.

Absolutely. And what's really interesting is that now that you're talking about energy and just levels or just motivation as a midlife person, anybody who founds a company in their like 40s or 50s, I don't know how they fucking do it.

Yeah, it's all different people. I find the same thing odd when I look at some of these like NFL players or NFL coaches and they're like in their seventies. Yeah. They have so much energy and you're like, shit, what the fuck is he on? I want some.

Absolutely. We met this one guy. Have we talked about the the winemaker on this vodka? No. So we met a winemaker in Napa and he is the owner of this very, very well known vineyard. end winery. His neighbors are like, think of, it, who's the guy that makes his moonshine? Yeah, like he's got a bunch of really

George McKenzie (08:22.892)

Knoxville.

eclectic neighbors.

well-known neighbors, but this guy is like in his 60s or 70s and he is jacked and had more energy at 10 o'clock in the morning than I could ever have. And we somehow got on the topic of peptides and like him running his business and he comes out with this huge bag of peptides and just like...

Thanks.

It's his stack and he dumped it on the table and he's like, yeah, I injected this one on this time and I do this before I drink and I do this. Like it was mind blowing.

George McKenzie (09:00.77)

Yes, he had quite the drugstore of Peptide.

But he's like his bicep I shit you not was like the size of my thigh and he was such a character and it was just so much fun to talk to him and like he we actually interrupted him when he was doing his his vitamins like sorting so he had it apparently all over the bed and it was just it's really cool to just figure out what other people and other founders are doing to stay at the top of their game

Because running a vineyard is not easy. You're drinking, you're entertaining, you're doing all these different things. And he had his stock to help him stay at the top of his longevity.

Yeah, and because of the fact that he drank so much, he was doing peptides that were specifically targeting liver health, helping him to be able to combat the damage he's doing by drinking so much. And yeah, there's tons of peptides out there too that help with mental health and clarity and to help you be, you on it.

I always say I've wanted to try Adderall. Yeah. But my fear is that I would try it and love it so much and get like addicted to that shit.

George McKenzie (10:12.482)

Yeah, I could see it. It's like someone said, limitless was a two hour commercial for Adderall.

That movie, if any movie made you want to try Adderall, it was 100 % limitless. And it's, I'm already very high functioning. And could you imagine if I leveled up? No, I could not. The amount of shit I could get done. It's almost like that episode of Saved by the Bell with Tori when she was on those caffeine pills. She's like, I'm so excited. I'm so scared. That was such, that was a very impactful episode for me.

You're a man.

Bye.

George McKenzie (10:46.344)

That was one of the deeper episodes where they had to confront her.

Yeah, they did a little intervention exactly. It was great, but I don't even know where we're going

We were talking about relive. Yeah. We've had great results. Like for me, I've been on a couple of the peptides that have helped me, you know, increase my muscle mass and also lose visceral fat at the same time, which for a man in his late 40s, it is very difficult to continue to grow muscle mass. And right now, you know, I'm still in the growth phase, but eventually I'll just maintain, but it's trying to get back to a weight that makes you feel like you again. And also,

keep your muscle mass that you used to have that you would go to the gym three to five times a week, be super jacked about it and excited to throw a lot of weight. Now I just want to get in the gym twice and have enough motivation to get through it and not feel like ass for a week or not for myself is the bigger part. But then also to be able to stimulate new muscle growth, which I've been very happy with the peptides that I'm on that have helped me with that.

Yep. So bottom line, take control of your health and stop accepting that one size fits all.

George McKenzie (12:02.04)

Yeah, and I think that your mother had a health care recently which really, know, jumpstarted us into recommending, you know, to everybody we talked to basically, you to go and see what your blood work looks like, not just, you know, an annual physical. If that's all you can get done, sure, great, but try to get a more in-depth analysis and blood work so you can see your deficiencies and...

You know, that one size fits all medical approach was, know, I think when your mother got ill, it really pinpointed for us that that one size approach is very, yeah, it doesn't work. And it's very much, we're going to treat symptoms and we really don't know a lot of times what the root cause is. And we're not going to spend too much time trying to figure it out. We're going to treat symptoms.

Absolutely. But if your symptom is what looks like normal to them, they're not going to do anything about it, which was really frustrating. Like my mother, she's a high achieving woman. She did 20 years in the Marine Corps. She runs an IT services company where it's service disabled, veteran owned. Like she owns a majority of it. She does everything for this company and it's been what, 10 years?

And when she retired out of the Marine Corps, she was one of two chief warrant officers that were female. So, achieved a lot in our life.

If you know my mom, like she's a badass and like she just doesn't stop. So the fact that we had to call 911 and bring them to the house to, and they're like, it wasn't a stroke, it wasn't a heart attack. There was no real symptoms of anything other than that she was swollen and very just not like herself. She couldn't turn her neck well. Like there was just a bunch of weird symptoms that no one could give us an answer to why they happened, which was

Alicia McKenzie (13:54.654)

more frustrating than knowing why it happened, right? Because if you know what you're trying to fix, you can do different things to make it better. But if it's like, well, we have no clue, we don't, she looks okay. I'm like, nope, she doesn't look okay. She's really swollen. She is in pain, give us something. And they're like, nope, sorry.

Yeah, this is not normal. Well, here's some Tylenol.

Yeah, exactly. Here, maybe take some Advil. They literally told us to take better Advil. Yeah. Which I will say her Advil was expired.

I could see why that could.

But it's like when we're healthy people, we don't take a lot of medicine. We take peptides and we take vitamins and we're on the pre-active, proactive? Proactive. Proactive, pre-emptive. Pre-emptive, proactive. Mix those two words together. can flight the two. yeah, so I think, so when that happened, we took her to go see Nikki, who is my FNP, my functional nurse practitioner.

George McKenzie (14:43.192)

Yeah, so.

Alicia McKenzie (14:56.364)

She did her initial blood work. We saw some things that were kind of off and we made changes to her diet, to her supplements, to her movement to help support her wellness. And six months later, it's been exactly six months since that scare happened, she went back and all of her blood work is within the normal range and doing what it's supposed to be doing. So now we're going to get her on some different peptides to help with just some joint and just wellness issues and

We're just going to keep optimizing and improving. You don't know what you're trying to fix if you're not tracking it.

Exactly. can't manage what you don't measure. Same within business, right? So you can't create a strategy in a business without having any lead or lag indicators to know if your strategy is successful. So you need that same approach to your health span.

Absolutely and it took six months. So if you're running a business and you're constantly pivoting How do you know how do you know what's working and what's All right, moving on let's talk about vibe coding

Yes, how do you know?

George McKenzie (16:01.685)

Vibe.

Do you Well, now you know what vibe coding is.

Can you explain it for our listening audience? You need to explain it.

I don't want to explain. So vibe coding is when you use plain English inside of an AI platform to create code such as like an app, right? So you go in and you say, I want to create an app that will track your weight every day and it will create a graph and it will be

Okay.

Alicia McKenzie (16:38.946)

beautiful and aesthetic and then the AI platform like ChatGBT or Claude or Lovable, they will spit out code and then you take that code and you put it into another platform and it creates this app. Okay. Right? So you're not coding based on technical skill, you're coding on your vibes and what you want it to look like.

So it's moving away from actually learning a programming language like C++ or C sharp or bash or anything else.

Absolutely.

Do people still take those classes?

I think you still need to because at the end of the day, the code that gets spit out by Claude or whatever AI hell you're using still needs to be, you need to understand the code because when you go to put it into another interpreter and have it run, there could be errors or bugs or things aren't working exactly like you want them to. And being able look at the code and understand what it's doing is still a skill set that's needed. mean, obviously you could feed that into another

George McKenzie (17:41.16)

LLM and try to fix it and keep going round and round. go. Even LLM's not there now, which will do code verification. you upload your code and get or whatever to it. It'll analyze the code, know your existing code base and say, hey, this new module or these new 20 lines of code that you developed while you were vibe coding are going to have this impact on your code base. And it's going to mess up something or there could be an overflow somewhere and create some other issues.

Absolutely.

George McKenzie (18:10.059)

It's an interesting concept. think it'll definitely.

It's lowering the barrier of entry to development.

Right. You know, your time to market will be a lot faster because you can go from idea to beta or alpha code in a week.

Yes, but what are the limitations, right? Like you can go in and you can do this vibe code and you can get this spit out, but what about the databases? What about the backend? Where are you hosting all of this? So on and so forth. What kind of knowledge base do you need to have in order to make an app function in the real world?

Yeah, I think that's where we're going and that's where I was I think hopefully going with that conversation was it's really around being more of a product manager than a coder. I think that's the skill set going forward. Is understanding the architecture that needs to happen and really being able to articulate to the LLM in the beginning of what exactly you want your code to do. So to your example, hey I want an app that tracks my weight and graphs it. Great.

George McKenzie (19:14.176)

spit that out relatively quickly. And then it's, now I want to add, I want it to be multi-user. OK, and then I got to re-architect the entire thing because I did not have any kind of role-based access controls around the weight that was entered or I didn't have any way to attribute the weight to a user. got to rewrite all that. And I got to change the back-end database. now I want it to be a SaaS platform to support millions of users. I got to re-architect it again. And then, now I want

historical data to be able to graph that out year over year and show percentages. Now I got to re-architect again because the database was, we just had the data in there. We weren't doing any sort of trend analysis or doing math calculations and saving that week over week. You can see how that just starts to cascade.

Absolutely. So the thing is like people have great ideas and I'm sure there's a ton of apps out there that have a use case for them. If you wanted to do this the right way, let's say, okay, George Mackenzie is going to build an app. How would you do it? Like what is the process? Like what you need to structure? What, what, what, and where and do what?

Yeah, mean, think it's first you have to understand what it is you want the app to

So you need it from start to finish.

George McKenzie (20:27.63)

Yeah, you have to kind of wireframe it up. That's exactly what I want it to do. You don't have to know it all in the beginning. Obviously, you're going to modify and you're going to add on, but you just need a basic understanding of what you want it to do, but be more specific in how it's going to operate. And then, you know, don't use all your tokens in these vibe coding doing, you know, change this font to green or change that to green. Being able to use those tokens more effectively of, okay, let me...

whiteboard out exactly what I want this thing to do, iterate on it, and then go to the LLM and start coding it out. So, similar to what you did when you were coding it yourself, you wouldn't just sit down and start coding. You sat down, you did a wireframe, you did some, you know, visualization, UI, UX design of exactly what you wanted it to look like or things you wanted it to do. And then in that course, you would start to uncover some of these other things that we talked about, like

Yeah.

George McKenzie (21:24.974)

What does your database need to be? Is it a flat file? Is it a MySQL? Is it going to be structured or unstructured?

What is common? What's common for a database? Like a backend.

And all that's nothing common. It depends on your use case, the speed and things that you need, how much data you're storing. Like MySQL is an easy one that most people use to get off the bat.

And then what's the next iteration of that? Let's say you needed to level it up.

I mean, could just be actual SQL. It could be a larger database, an Oracle database. It could be a lot of who knows. It depends on what you need. Not as up to speed on SaaS apps.

Alicia McKenzie (21:59.458)

Yeah, interesting. I bet if we asked Chachi Butte, they'd be able to tell us.

Probably.

But I mean, there's a good, there's a use case for it, right?

No, think live coding is the way we're going, right? It's like copilot. It's going to be able to assist people to be able to generate more code more quickly.

My fair is you're just going to have a bunch of shitty apps flood the market now.

George McKenzie (22:24.024)

Well, that's probably what will happen in phase one. Everyone will now be an app designer. Get something out quick, which will be a derivative of the last one that LLM wrote because it's using the same code base and all that's said to continually spit out the same stuff. Then you'll have an app for every feature you want versus a app that has all the features that you want.

Yeah, I actually saw Gary Vee. He was talking to his AI LLM and he was having like a full, I think he had like a 12 minute voice spoken prompt to his LLM, right? It's almost like the conversation that we guess we were talking about.

Yeah, that people have conversations with Croc in the car and the Tesla.

Yeah, and didn't you send me an article for that?

Um, I don't know if I sent you article, but I, I've, I've known someone that does that, that actually has, he's, you know, has conversations on the drive with the car. And then he said, it's great. It's like having your wife in the seat next to you only she's, you know, up to speed on every current event and everything that's going on all the time. So you can just have, uh, you know, a conversation.

Alicia McKenzie (23:34.626)

Definitely. it was Gary Vee, he was saying that his it's almost it's prompt engineering, right? That's what it's going to. You were now going to be hiring people.

to be prompt engineers that know how to ask the right questions because I don't know how many times I've done it it's you sit there and You know, you're not completely precise and what you want to come out the other end Yeah waste tons and tons of tokens back and forth of I want you to give me this marketing slick. Yeah I want it in this format look like this. Do you want a new PDF? Yes. I wanted a PDF. Do you want it now? Yes I want it fucking now

Would you like a PNG to go along with the PDF? No, I just want the fucking PDF.

Yeah, yeah, it's a lot of back and forth unnecessarily. Okay, and this is the article you sent me. was a public speaking expert. Here's my secret to making small talk less awkward and more meaningful.

Yeah, and that was you have Chad GPT give you stuff to say. Yeah Give me conversation starters or hey look up this I'm going to this networking event this person will be there Give me all the public information from their LinkedIn and otherwise to create Three conversation points that I can relate to my product

Alicia McKenzie (24:49.774)

I'm not sure how I feel about that. I can see it from both angles in a preparation, right? Like when I'm moderating a panel or something, I will do all the research I need to on the women that I'm speaking to, right? To just understand and just to know how they operate, right? Like I want to know, I want to hear them speak. I want to make sure I'm saying their name properly, so on and so forth. But also the art of interpersonal conversation, I feel like it's just dying.

Yeah, why do you need it?

Because it's like how to make things less awkward. feel like everybody needs to go through that evolution of being like uncomfortable and unsure of what the hell they're doing. That's growth, right? Like you can't go into every situation and be 100 % on. I feel like it's just like your skin in the game. Yeah. Right. It's like a stepping stone into becoming a better human.

It's like the same with public speaking or any skill, right? You're never going to be great at it in the beginning and you're going to be nervous and it's uncomfortable and you got to continue to work. It's repetition. It's, you know, failing. It's learning.

Yeah, right. This is saying based on a person's LinkedIn profile, what are three conversation starters I could use?

Alicia McKenzie (26:12.344)

That feels like cheating.

I mean the good part here is it's just kicking the kicking it's just the kickoff right so you have the three conversation starters but then you still have to maintain the conversation. But what if you can't? Exactly that's what I was talking about. There's nothing worse than that. And someone's like oh you wrote a book tell me about your book and then you start to talk about the book and then that's it next question oh you did this oh you did that and you're like okay you didn't

that. Yeah.

double click on anything I said, we didn't have an actual conversation. You just asked me three questions and you had zero fucks to give about the answer. You just wanted to get to the next question.

Yeah, right. just, feels so inauthentic and useless.

Alicia McKenzie (26:57.162)

I feel whenever I go somewhere, people end up telling me their life stories and I don't know why, right? There are those people that some people can just talk to and tell them everything. I will know your whole life story by the end of our like 10 minute conversation. And it's not to say that I'm really great at public speaking or I'm really comforting. just, I don't know, is it the prompting or is it naturally good at interviewing people?

Maybe. I just think if you show genuine interest in someone else. Yeah. Everyone's the art of making friends and influencing people. Like everyone's favorite word is their name, which is not true to me. I hate it. But everyone wants to talk about themselves. So when you give them the opportunity to talk about themselves and you ask insightful questions and you seem to be genuinely interested in their story, they continue to elaborate. And then when you show empathy and you show shared

experience and some capacity for what they're talking about, then you form that bond instantaneously and then they continue to open up to you.

Yeah, it's kind of nice.

There's the bakka-bata.

Alicia McKenzie (28:06.849)

Is there?

What? can't remember. The guy was a CIA officer and he was very good at being going undercover and blending in. that was the secrets is really, and he taught tons and tons of classes around it. It's about how do you, you know, you don't want to be noticed, but you want to be able to make friends and talk and negotiate with anybody. And he found, you know, here are the key steps that make him, you know.

Very helpful.

Alicia McKenzie (28:32.61)

Yeah.

George McKenzie (28:37.826)

good at his job and it was really around, you know, bonding with that person to share shared empathy and listening, insightful questions and not just repeating what they said back to you, right? And imperative back, you know, going deeper into the question being genuinely interested.

Maybe it's because I hate talking about myself so much.

Maybe.

I feel like that could be it. Anytime you ask me to introduce myself, it's going to be a really quick 12 seconds. Because it's just, I don't know, it feels braggadocious maybe.

think that's common for women. think that's the men are probably more raggedy, just naturally. But yeah, if you ever go around rooms and you hear people do their introductions, it's only the guys that talk forever.

Alicia McKenzie (29:30.58)

That might be my favorite part of sitting in the office with you is when you're on a call and you have like a ton of men that have done like exits or so on and so forth and you go through and you just listen to them talk about themselves. like, you love the smell of your own farts, don't you?

Rich maha.

It's great. It's great. Moving on. Can we chat about private equity?

We can.

And what happens when the CEO does not get along with the private equity company? Okay. I'm thinking about a situation that I told you about last week where the CEO is no longer a part of the PE.

George McKenzie (30:27.438)

Yeah, I mean, most times the CEOs are either brought in through acquisition or they're hired in. So they're really not part of the PE, they're just part of the company. So in this sense, the CEO and the private equity group that was the majority shareholder had a disagreement on how the company should be run. And they left. Not so gracefully.

Yeah.

Alicia McKenzie (30:48.632)

Yeah.

Alicia McKenzie (30:52.375)

Yes.

Alicia McKenzie (30:55.84)

Yes. But this seems to be a common thing.

I mean, it can be. It's I think that's it could be private equity. I mean, you just got to think about like a lot of CEOs, especially ones that were founders or ones that have that kind of background, see the world through a different lens. Right. Like, yes, founders or normally not I wouldn't say penny pinchers, but they have their eye on the wall. They know about, you know, cost of capital. They understand that.

you when you make investments, want a return on that investment and you want to be able to grow, but also be profitable. the founder, especially in a bootstrap company, you you have to be profitable or you cannot exist. And that melts well with private equity philosophy, only private equity, you know, most times are really short-term focused and they want returns, right? So it's, want, you know, stronger EBITDA.

Yeah.

George McKenzie (31:56.532)

I want more efficient operations. I earnings before income, before interest, taxes, debt and depreciation.

And they want to maximize their return. They want to be ruthlessly efficient. They want to be not really investing in long-term strategies. It's more of, want to invest in something that's going to have an immediate return. I want 20 % year-over-year growth. I want strong 20-plus percent EBITDA so I can be a rule of 40 company. And I want to exit for 10, 12, 15.

whatever X EBITO or revenue. And that's the goal.

Okay, so when a private equity company agrees to exit the company for pennies on the dollar, what went wrong?

it could be a myriad of things.

Alicia McKenzie (32:50.21)

But let's just say like.

In today's marketplace, there's, yeah, maybe, yeah, it could be a lot of things. It's probably they had an investment thesis that was wrong.

What happened? Something? Did they misread the market?

George McKenzie (33:08.334)

Right? And then, or they have shareholders, which are LPs that are saying, hey, I don't like what's going on with this fund. I want a return or I want my return faster. Or maybe they had another thing in that portfolio that did not do well. So now they have to, you know, backstop it with this one or vice versa. Or this was the one that's sinking and they want to save their portfolio. So they'd rather just get out of this and continue to focus and grow the other.

Can I say that you're not a fan of private equity? Is that safe to say?

I think it works. It works in some cases. Yeah. Yeah, I could see it working in some cases.

I think more, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I'm not a huge fan. I don't think I would do it again.

No. Would you ever start a fund? No. No? No. Why or why not?

George McKenzie (34:03.054)

I'm just not that much of a rest taker.

BOR-

I know I'm not at the stage of my life anymore, but I think it's it's

If you were younger, let's see if it was like 15 years ago, George.

her

George McKenzie (34:19.918)

Yeah, I probably would have done it then. It's just right now I would have a hard time. I have a hard time not getting like super involved or emotionally attached to things. Like if I was investing in it, I'd want to be, probably not be a great private equity partner because I'd be too much like an operator versus someone who's going to sit back on the board and look at lead lag indicators and have patience and bless a strategy and then not second guess it.

Okay. You're a terrible patient. Okay.

Probably, yeah.

When you're, you you have the, you know, the ownership and the responsibility and accountability to deliver returns to your LPs, right? So, you know, you're accountable for that. So you got to make sure it's successful.

Okay, so as a founder, you have a different kind of brain. When you see other companies, do you have a hard time not strategizing how to scale or what they could be doing better?

George McKenzie (35:21.134)

Yes, 100%. Yeah, they're always trying to see it from their side. Like, you know, why are they doing X or how could they get better or be better? Yeah. It's hard not to see the world that way. It's like when you're a professional athlete and you go watch, you know, another game of the same sport, you're always you'd be you're analyzing X, Y or Z like, oh, why did the player do that? Why did the coach do this? What if they did that?

Yeah.

It's like having friends who are restaurateurs. She's a terrible person to go out to eat with because it's constantly like they should be doing that better. They should be doing that better. They're absolutely killing it here. Like they're failing there. Right. It's it's you can't enjoy. I don't know. It's like once you see something you can't unsee it.

Yes.

George McKenzie (36:10.22)

Yeah, a friend of mine, we used to have the same talk about, know, once you're a founder and you've been a part of success and then, you you've used a lot of the motivation tactics and you've seen, you've experienced things and what you've seen behind the curtain, so to speak, it's really hard to go then into corporate life and not like,

just look at some of the stuff and be like, that's bullshit. It's manipulation. I know you're saying that you're trying to give me a title or do this so that you don't pay me more. Or you're doing this because, you're trying to lower your indirect. all these things that you're trying to sell me on that are great for me, this balance and work life and all this stuff that you're saying, not true. I know why you're saying it because I've been behind the curtain. I know the levers you're pulling to get.

to goose he bit or to drive this quarter's profitability or like all these things that you're doing to the workforce to get the outcome you want and you're selling it as one thing. So once you're behind the curtain, you can kind of see it and it's hard to go back in front, know, go back and be in the audience and not know the special effects that are happening. Imagine being a magician and then going to a magic show, you're like, it's not any fun.

Yeah.

Alicia McKenzie (37:24.75)

Absolutely. Yeah. was telling us when there's a roller coaster at Disney World? Is it Space Mountain that if you ever rode it? Yeah, if you rode it with the lights on, you would never ever get on it again. Yes. Because the bars and the rails are that, like, eerily close to your head. Yeah. So it's completely in the dark for a reason. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. That's right.

Space Mountain.

our tour guide.

Alicia McKenzie (37:55.726)

All right. To celebrate the 50th episode, George and I are actually doing a giveaway and it will be held on social media. It's going to be a little box full of our favorite wellness products. So I would say head to social media. But one thing that I do want to ask, if you've made it through these 50 episodes and you have gotten any form of help or inspiration or assurance or anything, please do me a favor.

and go leave a review. The more reviews we have, the further the reach will be and the bigger of an impact that we can make. And yeah, it's just really, really important. So please and thank you.

that subscribe button. No, that's not what you say.

That's the wrong platform. Damn it. We're going to have to put you through like a social media 101. It's necessary evil. Is it? It is. It is. Just ask Gary V.

thank you.

George McKenzie (38:54.766)

I don't know who that is. No. Wouldn't the fox carry me? I don't.

You're joking. You don't know who that is? Okay, I'm going to go teach George some things and we'll be back next week.

I out.

Thank you for tuning in to Mary to the Startup. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you did, please take a moment to like, rate, and subscribe to our podcast. Your support helps us reach more people and keeps the conversation going. If you have any questions or topics you'd like us to cover, drop me a message. I love hearing from you guys. Until next time.

George out.