In this episode of the My First Million podcast, hosts Sam Parr and Shaan Puri discuss their favorite Twitter accounts to follow, focusing on those that provide unique insights into finance, business, and market analysis. They explore the value of following “niche experts” who share data-driven perspectives rather than generic content, highlighting how these accounts can offer a competitive edge in understanding market trends.
Topics: Twitter, Social Media, Finance, Investing, Business Analysis, Content Creation, Market Trends
Introduction [00:00]
Sam Parr: Like they used a thumbnail that I looked stupid or a title that maybe sound like an idiot. And I was like, “Ben, I don’t like that.” He goes, “Oh, you thought that selling out to the algorithm was going to feel good?”
Shaan Puri: All right, we’re live. Let’s do this. Um, you want to get right into Twitter or no?
Sam Parr: Yeah, let’s get into Twitter.
Shaan Puri: Wait, let me tell you something really quick. I just remembered I was going to tell you about this. I did a body fat scan the other day, yesterday.
Sam Parr: Okay.
Shaan Puri: Bad news for all of us, man.
Sam Parr: Why? What happened?
Shaan Puri: I was 15%.
Sam Parr: Why is that for all of us? Because if you’re 15%, then I’m 30%.
Shaan Puri: If I’m 15%, yeah. If I’m 15%, like, yeah. If I’m 15%, like, that sucks for everyone else. I felt like I was like 11.
Sam Parr: No, that’s just because that’s just because people bullshit. Like, people who are like, “Oh, I’m 6% body fat,” and then like doctors are like, “No, you are not 6% body fat. You would be like, you know, sick if you were 6% body fat.” That’s just not the case. So I think like what people say is 6 to 8% body fat is actually 12 to 15, or like 12 to 14 or something like that. And so I think 15 is great. I was 26 last time I did a DEXA scan. 26, 27, something like that. And my goal was, actually, I don’t even remember what it was. I think maybe my goal was to get under 25, and I was 28 or something like that.
Shaan Puri: I was amazed at how high mine was.
Sam Parr: I do it every three months. That’s good. I was amazed at how high mine was. It, uh, because like, I don’t feel like completely ripped, but I feel like fit. Like I don’t have a stomach anymore, and I and it was still 15. I was shocked by that.
Shaan Puri: We’ve all seen the picture. If you go to my Twitter, we’ve all seen the picture. You’re ripped. You’re actually the perfect amount of ripped, uh, because, you know, there’s an obnoxious ripped where if you look like, “Oh man, this guy’s just, he’s just, it’s like a girl who’s like, uh, got like hair extensions, eyelash extensions, uh, nail extensions, and like tons of makeup caked on.” It’s like, “Oh, this is sort of trying too hard,” and it’s like a high-maintenance person that I don’t really want. Like, I don’t really want to go out to dinner with you because you’re just going to order like broccoli and and, you know, like raw chicken or whatever. So, you know, you’re like the right amount where it’s like, “Oh, many he might live an active lifestyle.” Like, maybe he surfs, and like maybe that’s why. Uh, it doesn’t look like someone who is like, you know, gym bro who just lives in the gym 4 hours a day and everything centers around that in their life.
Sam Parr: Well, the point is is that it just shocked me at 15%. But I just wanted to to to let you know that that happened. Uh, you let’s talk about All right. So we’re going to talk about
Shaan Puri: You’re officially canceled as a fitness influencer. You can’t be a fitness influencer at 15%.
Sam Parr: I know. 12 is okay. Anything above 12, I I got to get my shit together. Let’s talk about
Shaan Puri: Well, you could just you could just do it as the start of your fitness journey.
Sam Parr: Is this the am I I’m still a before? I feel like No, now you’re a before. I feel like I’ve been a before picture for the past 5 years. I’m still a before. Fuck.
Shaan Puri: Damn. No, we already said there’s before before. I’m a before before. And then there’s a before you’re a before now. No, I’m just kidding. You’re you’re more like an after. Uh, I’m now a before, but I was a before before. You just got to know your system. You just got to know the ranking system. It’s not about body fat percentage. Um, all right, let’s get into it.
Sam Parr: All right. So we’re going to what’s the what’s the topic of what’s the the title of this segment?
Shaan Puri: The title of the segment is Sam and Sean cross 1 million downloads a month for the podcast. They get intoxicated by the growth. We’re on pace for 1.3 right now, smashing old record highs of 900,000. And with this intoxicating growth, they say, “We’re going to whore out, double down, and we’re going to make a list.” And so we’re going to do list episodes. That’s what’s actually happening here. Now, what list did we decide to start with? Well, we didn’t go ultra-tantalizing, ultra-drama-filled list to begin with. We’re going with our favorite Twitter follows. So I think we’re going to have like 12. Is it 12 total? So our 12 Twitter follows that we recommend. Now, these are going to be I think in most cases, not the obvious people. So you’re not going to hit my goal is even there’s a lot of people that aren’t even on Twitter. So if you’re not on Twitter, maybe start or not. Uh, you know, just subscribe to my 5 Tweet Tuesday newsletter. If you’re not doing that, if you’re on Twitter, I bet at least half of these are going to be people you don’t already follow. That’s my guess. That’s my goal if we do this right. So they should be kind of under the radar, rising stars, and we’re going to talk about why we like these people’s feeds and some stuff that we’ve seen from them that’s pretty cool. So we’ll go back and forth. Uh, let’s start with uh candidate number one. Are we going in order of like the best? No.
Sam Parr: Okay, so mine are a little bit more popular than yours. So Okay. Are you going to go How many do you have? You have five?
Shaan Puri: No, I only have three.
Sam Parr: Okay. I was like researching Well, no, here’s the problem. I was researching I was trying to find ones that people the the ones I love are people that everyone knows. But and so I was trying to Okay, well, you might have to bring up a few. Or I think I bet when I say some, you’re going to think of some others just based off that. Okay, so we’re just going to name 12-ish of them, and we’re going to go back and forth. Let’s trade off until Sam runs out. So, uh, I’ll go first because you’re going to run out faster, otherwise. So Okay, the first person on my list of Twitter Twitter people I think you should follow is Postmarket. Do you follow Postmarket? It’s post_market.
Sam Parr: No. By the way, you follow thousands of people. I follow up until recently, I was following zero people.
Shaan Puri: Literally zero. Now it’s like 40. Just to be cool?
Sam Parr: I just I was getting addicted.
Shaan Puri: Okay, so I have a list and this person’s on my list. So it’s a Postmarket is an anonymous account and um or like a pseudonymous account, I should say. So it’s not like a this is not their real name or whatever. Post_market. We’re going to put the full list in the description of this podcast. So if you want to find them, uh you could do that. Or maybe what we’ll do is we create a Twitter list that you can just subscribe to. Uh that that might be easier. So, uh who’s this person? I don’t know what they do by day, but there’s something in the financial world, stock, you know, a trader, hedge fund person. Uh I don’t know what it says exactly in their bio, but basically what they do is they have like hot takes on the market. Uh on and it’s not like hot takes like CNBC where it’s like, “Oh, you know, um the Dow is up 5 points.” It’s like basically they’ll take a stock and they’ll just rip it to shreds if it doesn’t make any sense. So like, for example, the like one of their um one of their ones that they were killing right now is something called the called Grove Collaborative. I don’t know if you saw this. It’s like a it was like a D2C brand. It was like one of the winning D2C brands. It was a unicorn. It goes public and then uh here’s the tweet. It says, “Please make it stop. Here is a mostly D2C organic cleaning products business. It’s doing 6% revenue growth at 2 billion valuation, has no plan to make profits anytime soon, and a greater than 5% uh 5X sales multiple. Grove Collaborative, not going to make it.” Um and then it basically pulls out things from their like investor presentation that show like a fairly so slow growth, low margin business that is overvalued.
Sam Parr: What does Grove Collaborative make? I’ve never even heard of that.
Shaan Puri: They’re kind of like a subscription, almost like a Whole Foods, Costco type of model where you can go buy products uh from them, I believe.
Sam Parr: And what valuation are they trying to get?
Shaan Puri: I’m not trying to get, they’re they’re publicly traded at, you know, 2 2 billion or whatever.
Sam Parr: Yikes. Okay, that’s this is a good find.
Shaan Puri: Um and so and so this person because they’re pseudonymous, they can just kind of um talk about whatever they want. They’re not really they don’t pull any punches. And so like they’ll go after um they’ll go after like Chamath for, you know, most most people are kind of afraid to like poke the bear in a way. But Chamath in reality had a bunch of really shitty SPACs where he made a bunch of money and people who invested in his SPACs on the whole like just got ripped to shreds this year. And um and so this Postmarket account will like call out basically bad stocks, bad behavior, um across the board in the stock market. So I like that. Like for example, um our buddy Moyes tweeted something. He goes, “Honest company went public in 2021. Uh it raised 400 million that day. The shares closed at a valuation of 2.7 billion. Since that day, it’s lost 2 billion in value and is now worth less than 800 million.” And then he says, “Public markets are brutal. Be careful if you IPO.” And Postmarket replied and said, “Public markets are not brutal. Private markets are a facade.” And it’s like, “Ah, I like the I like the um the hot takes. I like the intelligence and I like uh that they don’t pull punches.”
Sam Parr: All right, I like this one. Yeah, I’m going to subscribe. I’m going to follow. Um all right, I’m going to give you one. See, some of mine are popular, but I’m going to give you three examples of why I like them. Uh, Rameet Sethi. Do you follow Rameet on Twitter?
Shaan Puri: I don’t follow I actually I do follow him on Twitter, yeah. That’s true.
Sam Parr: So there’s There’s two reasons why he’s amazing. The first is when people criticize him, he’ll sometimes say, “That’s a good that’s a good criticism.” Other times he’ll be like, “No, you’re an idiot for these following reasons.” Right. And he also, that’s reason number one. So he’s an entertaining follow. And reason number two is he tweets out loads of personal finance stuff and he’ll find an article that’s going viral and if he disagrees with it, which oftentimes he does, he’ll explain why it’s bullshit. For example, uh a lot of people, particularly people who aren’t necessarily wealthy, have financial advisors who charge 1%. And he’ll tweet out a whole thread about why that’s total bullshit and you shouldn’t pay 1% advisor. The second thing, everyone talks about buying a home and how it’s a wonderful investment and he’ll tweet out this awesome math saying, “No, buying a home is not an investment. Buying a home is like buying a car or something like that where you should just use it and not do it for financial reasons because more often than not, it’s not a good investment at all.” Um and finally, uh he’s got this really cool tweet on how to automate money. So I actually linked to it in that sheet and I actually set up my my accounts based off that tweet.
Shaan Puri: What do you mean by how to automate money? What does that mean?
Sam Parr: So click um so click I believe it was this one where it says uh how he like like where the money goes. Like for example, where do you have your bank account set up so like a percentage goes here, a percentage goes there? Or like your um your paycheck.
Shaan Puri: No.
Sam Parr: Really? So where does your money go to?
Shaan Puri: Well, I don’t get a paycheck.
Sam Parr: But you’re you get paid for the Hubspot podcast, you get paid for your business. So where’s your income go to? Straight to a checking account?
Shaan Puri: Straight to a checking account and then your boy moves it into whatever investments I want to make.
Sam Parr: Really?
Shaan Puri: Yeah.
Sam Parr: I think you need to read some Rameet Sethi some because like it should the way it should work is like all your money should go or not you could do however you want. Oh the way often times I think it’s easier is your money should go to a checking account and then it takes money out and like let’s say that you have a really simple setup, put this much in wealth front, put this much in a mutual fund, put this much in a What do you even use to do that? I didn’t even know that’s a possibility that you automate the like clawing out of your checking into various other services.
Sam Parr: Yeah, you could do it with Coinbase if you wanted to. You could do an automatic thing for Coinbase.
Shaan Puri: Oh, you go Okay, so what you do is you go in those services, you go into Wealthfront, you say, “I’d like to do a auto saver plan,” and you just ACH connect.
Sam Parr: Yeah, exactly. And you just set it up so it’s all automated. So it’s just like basically like you know based off of your monthly income roughly that you want this much cash in your checking account at all times and it automatically and you kind of know roughly the intervals of when you’re going to get cash and you just funnel it into different accounts.
Shaan Puri: So okay, so so one of the reasons I didn’t do that was one of when I was getting the last thing I had, last job I had when I was at Twitch, one of the major sources of of income was just stock RSUs that were going into Amazon stock, like automatically. So that was already that was already varied. I wasn’t selling because my basis for when I when we got acquired was lower than the amount at the RSU grant and I didn’t want to sell and rebalance because it was going to trigger taxes uh on the on those gains. Um as as the price kept going. Have you sold any of those shares?
Sam Parr: Uh have I sold? Yeah, I sold a small amount, maybe 15%. Are you ever going to sell any of them?
Shaan Puri: I hope not. Uh yeah, I’m on that beg borrow die shit now. So uh you know, that’s the that’s the that’s that new game plan.
Sam Parr: It’s awesome, right?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, it’s it’s awesome till it’s not awesome. It’s probably the probably the right answer like most things. Okay, I’m just going to read these Rameet’s money rules. All right. Have one year of emergency fund cash, okay? Fair enough. Uh I don’t, but yeah, you can. Um save 10 10% and invest 20% of your gross income. You do that? Or you go higher?
Sam Parr: Uh much higher.
Shaan Puri: Yeah. Um pay cash for large expenses, 20% down minimum on a house. Okay, fair enough. Yes, I do that. Uh never question spending money on books, appetizers, health, or donate to a friend’s charity razor. Agree completely. Business class for flights over 4 hours, agree completely. Um no limit for spending on health or education, agree completely. Buy the best and keep it for as long as possible. I disagree with that.
Sam Parr: Really?
Shaan Puri: I I either buy the best or I buy extremely cheap disposable where I don’t have any stress about it because I didn’t invest hoping it was going to be the best. Like a razor? Like it’s like a barbell. Like uh I’ll give you an example. Uh for Black Friday, there’s this brand called 32 Degrees. Do you know them? They’re like the Costco They’re like the Costco brand of Under Armour. Or like Nike. So they’re like I’m going to buy stuff from that now. Is it awesome? They make like they make like athletic wear and uh it’s actually like pretty good, but I don’t think it lasts as long as Lululemon. It doesn’t last as long as Like Gymshark. Yeah, like it’s it’s just not going to have that same durability, but I like their stuff. Uh like I like it when I wear it and it fits well uh on my whatever, fits well for me. So I you know, for Black Friday, they have this insane deal where like everything goes down like 85%. Uh they just like want to move all their inventory. So you’ll go buy like whatever, like athletics, you know, like a hoodie or like a fitted, you know, long sleeve shirt or whatever, and it’ll be like $4.99. And so I just load up. So I buy like almost $1,000 worth of their 32 Degrees stuff that day. You can just see on my floor here. There’s just pile the the boxes came and there’s piles come out like it’s as if I’m a wholesaler for them. And so I’ll buy like 15 of the pants I like. I’ll buy like 25 of the shirt I like. And because of that, I don’t worry about like A, losing anything, getting a stain on anything, something wearing out. It’s like, no, I I bought this. It’s so much laundry you have to do though. Got a cleaner for the laundry, bro. Uh, all right. All right, you’re good. All right, your turn. I know it’s bad for the the real argument is it’s terrible for the environment and like, you know, fair enough, but uh you know, birds got to fly. So here we go. Uh uh here’s here’s his last two his last three rules. Earn enough to work only with people I respect and like. I think that’s a great rule. Uh marry the right person. Okay, fair enough. Doesn’t seem like a money rule, but I get it. Uh prioritize time outside the spreadsheet. What does that mean?
Sam Parr: Um so like when you’re I do I have a problem with this all the time. I’m constant I have a spreadsheet with all my net worth and my finances and I’m constantly optimizing it and I’ll like do different scenarios like, “Oh, in five here, if in five years if this happens, then we’re going to be here. If it goes worst case scenario, we’re going to be here. Therefore, we should do this, this, and this.” So I’m like constantly tinkering with it and doing I’m like, “Oh, 3% uh if you only spend 3% of your net worth over this many years, but it grows by this, that means by the time we’re 50, we’re going to have this.” Right. And that takes like that’s it takes up so much time. It’s so fun, though. I see. Uh and also this wealth advisor thing. So we both have the same advisor, but he doesn’t charge us any fee, right? Correct?
Shaan Puri: No, we he only gets paid if we buy uh some of the funds that he’s going to sell us.
Sam Parr: Right, okay. Fair enough. It’s pretty sick, right? So I think that’s kind of a hack. I think that’s that’s a pretty good hack.
Shaan Puri: I think it’s a great deal. Um okay, so let’s do uh let’s do another person. Okay, so you got we have Postmarket, we have Rameet. Uh I’m going to do another one. Let me do Okay, I’m going to give you a a double a double dose because they’re kind of the same same type of account. So um my buddy George Mack and then um there’s this account called Marketing Examples. Do you follow these?
Sam Parr: No. What is this one? Marketing Examples?
Shaan Puri: So Marketing Examples, this guy I would say is one of the best content creators um on the internet.
Sam Parr: What’s the handle?
Shaan Puri: I think it’s just Marketing Examples. Is it good? Is it Yeah, Harry’s Marketing Examples. So there’s this guy Harry Dry.
Sam Parr: Harry Dry. He works with us sometimes. I think we we we I discovered him a long time ago and we tried hiring him and uh it didn’t work out, but we’re we love him.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I uh I really, really respect. I don’t know this person. I don’t I don’t know him well. I’ve DM’d him just kind of showing respect. Uh I don’t think most people know him. He’s not like widely respected in the You know, you know there’s like the circle jerk of like we all kind of like the same things in the same the same circles. I think he’s like 18 or 19. Yeah, I think it’s probably a little older than that, but if he whatever he is, he’s amazing. His content is so good. I um I I think most people when I see their content, I’m sort of cocky where I’m like, “I could do better.” If I like if I wanted to, I could do better. I see his shit and I say, “Ooh, I should be copying things he’s doing.” So that’s like a very, very high compliment in my book. Uh where I want to copy your shit because I think you’re doing such a good job. So um so I think he’s his account’s really great. And um and then George George Mack is similar in that George Mack basically tweets out kind of like cool marketing hacks, mental models, um just interesting stories. And uh and so George is really, really good as well. And he’s also kind of like outside the scene, meaning like he wasn’t a he’s not a Silicon Valley person. He’s not a founder or VC that like is super well connected in this area, but I think has earned a lot of people’s Twitter respect. You know, he’s probably got I don’t know what, like 70,000 followers, maybe 100,000. I don’t know what it is. Um so George is really good also. So they’re they’re the ones I would say to follow if you want examples of what good content marketing is as well as kind of like uh marketing/psychology hacks is what I would call them.
Sam Parr: Yeah, this guy Harry Dry has some of the best stuff. He’s like, he just basically takes landing pages and he goes, “This is why this is good.” And he does it very simply. Have you seen his his Kanye West thing?
Shaan Puri: What did he do?
Sam Parr: I remember something like that. So Ben, pull this up. Go to go to thekanyeweststory.com. I think that’s what it’s called. So basically, this is like a blog post that he just like tricked out. It’s like exhibit knocked on the door and was there to pimp his blog. And uh maybe I got the domain wrong. Maybe it’s not the It’s the kanyestory.com.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, the kanyestory.com. And uh it’s basically this epic website blog post that’s just like a scrolling story about the day he got in touch with Kanye West and how it all went down. And so it’s like it starts with it starts with this like epic photo of Kanye, then you scroll and it’s like a slide. It’s like from lying in bed with with zero ideas to negotiating with the biggest superstar on planet Earth. And then it’s got this little like outline on the left. It’s like the idea, going viral, coding it, launching it, reborn, billboards, Yeezy. And then it says that those are the chapters of this story. And he just tells a great very simple, you know, hustler story. But I just love this like domain, the way he designed this blog. Again, this guy’s an artist and I’m like, I really respect him and when I come up with shit, I think I like use him as one of my mood boards of inspiration of like something that I’ll I’ll copy or I’ll I’ll steal uh inspiration from at the at the least.
Sam Parr: This kid’s amazing. Yeah, he’s he’s 25 years old. I was way off. I think when we I want to do something with I want to like launch something with this guy. I don’t know. I I I my new thing is like I find people who are just awesome and I find an excuse to collab with them. And I would put both George and Harry in that bucket. All right, your turn.
Shaan Puri: Um all right, we’re going to go with uh the pessimistic What’s this called? The pessimist What’s the full one? The Pessimists Archive, that’s what it’s called. Uh the handle is like just pessimistic pessimistic arc. Uh so basically what it is is it’s incredibly fascinating because it’s a Twitter handle that looks back at history and brings up topics that people complain about today. So, for example, there’s a um a tweet from November 16th, 1918, or uh a news article and it says, “I would rather spend the rest of my life in jail than wear one.” And it’s talking about a guy who doesn’t want to wear a flu mask. And then there’s another example of of someone saying like uh, “Oh, here’s a quote from Martin Luther King saying like, you know, there’s too many books out there. People are trying to write too much and become famous.” And it’s basically he’s talking about like influencers. Uh and it’s kind of funny. And then there’s This is great. There will be another one where it’s like, “Technology is just going to kill our brains,” and they’re like referring to like a telephone. And so it’s and it’s real and so if you read just the tweet part, you would think that they’re talking about now, but then they show you a different year and then they show you a a picture of the article and it’s from from a newspaper from the 1800s. And so it’s kind of cool because people complain about the same shit all the time. And so you’ll think like, “Oh, our country is more divided by divided than ever,” or like the wealth gap is like crazy or Right. Same problem, same narratives. It’s like, man, that it’s like, “Yeah, all those things could be true, but like oftentimes people think it’s worse than ever before.” And maybe that’s not the case because people have been complaining about the same shit forever. Like, okay, there’s one with school shooters and it’s like, um, these, you know, these guys were addicted to books and they were reading these these gory books and that’s why they shot up their like their local town. Instead of video games, they’re blaming like this uh the novel, the dime novels, whatever those are.
Sam Parr: And it really and my takeaway here is to two things. The first thing is that we react this oftentimes human beings react the same through for for centuries. And if you study why people react the way they do, you can begin to predict to predict this. And so if I can if I figure out in history what have been some of the common reactions to action X, Y, and Z, I can kind of look into the future and or at the present time being like, “Okay, I think people are going to react by doing blank blank and blank,” because that’s just how we’re wired. Um the second thing that it does is it like brings you to like senses a little bit when you’re like, “Okay, I need to be calm. People have complained about this literally for 150 years and we’re doing okay.” And uh so that’s interesting. And I was reading this book, Human Nature by Robert Greene. Ben, I don’t know if you read this or not. Maybe you can tell me, but I’m almost positive somewhere in this book that they said that one of the very first bits of written language that they’ve found was a people complaining about the younger generation and how they aren’t going to keep the cultures that the old or keep the traditions that the older generation has created. You know what I mean? So this idea of like old people complaining about young people being lazy, like one of the very first pieces of evidence of of written language, it was a story of complaining about that. So anyway, I like seeing those patterns. So that’s mine.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, that’s uh you know, what’s what’s the phrase? History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. Yes. And uh that’s that’s like what this account is, you know, in a nutshell. There’s some really great ones on this. I have a similar stash uh in my swipe file that I’ve been keeping for for years. I I kind of forgot to update it recently, but it was called Smart People Saying Dumb Things. And I would store anytime somebody who is clearly smart and successful said something that was very wrong. So for example, you know, Warren Buffett uh was very, very dismissive of like, you know, certain technologies. What you know, Bitcoin today, but before that, you know, internet and technology stocks. Um that he just didn’t understand the he didn’t understand them and so therefore made some disparaging comments. Or um Like Ray Dalio predicting like a crisis in the 80s. Yeah, or um you know, Steve Ballmer laughing and saying, you know, when he’s cackling and saying, “Nobody will ever buy a $1,000 phone.” Like they just don’t get it. Apple will you know, Apple will fail or whatever. So I did that partly because there’s like a in the moment, there’s like a junk food fun of it, which is like, “Ha, yes, wrong.” You know, there’s there’s a joy when when somebody successful is pointed out to be very wrong about something. But there’s more than that. The real reason I did it was to remind myself that like it’s very easy to kind of go into hero worship mode and to idolize certain people or put them on a pedestal and just because you’re smart in one thing doesn’t mean you’re smart in another. Or just because you’re right a lot doesn’t mean you’re right all the time. It’s a very important lesson because I made big mistakes. Like for example, I think I missed out I bought Tesla stock very early on. I think I bought it at under $100 a share and I think if you uh if you adjust for the splits, I think it’s now over like $5,000 a share. So I think I I would have made about $5 million on a stock buy that I had. Really? If I just held and um and the reason I didn’t hold wasn’t because I wanted to take profits. It was because I got spooked by first there was like a lot of people at a given time that were called Tesla Q. Do you know about that? Uh was that the thing where they said that like the it’s fake, like the factories are fake? Yeah. It’s not that the factories are fake, but that there’s sort of like fraud, deception, that the fundamentals don’t make sense and that Tesla’s going to go to zero. Tesla will be bankrupt. Was it Josh Wolf, the guy like spreading those? Yes, exactly. So Josh So there was mostly anonymous accounts on Twitter and Reddit. And so I read it and I was like, “Okay, I I always want to learn what is the other side.” I was so bullish on Tesla. At this at this point, Tesla wasn’t even anywhere near where it is today, right? Um and so it was like, “Okay, you know, Tesla’s gone from $90 a share where I bought it to $380 a share. Great, but like, you know, I still think it’s got a lot of room to run.” And and I was reading I I always want to know what is the other side. I was so bullish on me say and what’s their argument? Do I do I believe it? And so I read it and I was like, “Wow, there is some weird stuff like, wow, they’ve gone through 25 CFOs.” Like that sounds strange. Like, why does the CFO keep leaving? And like the people would have this like drone footage of like parking lots just full of Teslas that they’re taking like, “Why are they stashing Teslas in these parking garages? Look at this. Every car in this six-door car garage is a Tesla. Why is it here? Why are they are they faking deliveries and sales? Like what what is this?” So there was a lot of like, if there’s smoke, there’s fire. Was there any truth in any of this? Honestly, well, here’s my honest take. I actually think that there was a lot of truth to what what was going on. I think that and the reason why I say this is I don’t think it’s as bad as they said, but I also don’t think it’s as good as Tesla portrayed it. Meaning, I think there actually was a period of time where Tesla almost died, where it actually almost did go bankrupt because um of like this the combination of the production ramp up was going to slow, they had the production line was not moving fast enough. Uh the subsidies were there, but they could have gone away and like all this stuff. And I think there was like a lot of um kind of like, you know, fake it till you make it going on there. And Elon has even come out and said in the past, he goes, he was talking about when um when Clean Tech was big and the government was giving money to this I think it’s called Solyndra or something like that. And he came out and he said, the same thing happened with Enron where it was like five weeks before it went under, they were like, not just saying everything’s going to be okay, they were saying everything’s better than ever. And he and Elon came out and was sort of like, “What do you want people to say?” He’s like, “You know, it is in the incentive of somebody, of the captain of that ship to go down with the ship and the whole time be saying, ‘Oh, we’re so close to our destination.’” Basically, he was like, “They’re never going to come out and say, ‘Yeah, we don’t know, we might not make it.’” Because then that will guarantee you don’t make it because people will sell the stock. It’ll put so much negative pressure on the company, it’ll hurt the morale inside the company. And so you can’t ever come out and say, “I don’t know, we might not make it.” So you always have to say, “Make it. Of course we’re going to make it. We’re thriving.” And like, you just hope it actually comes true. He said something to that effect in an interview once I read and I was like, I feel like he’s describing what actually was going on inside Tesla. That’s amazing. That’s a good story. And so, anyway, the long story short was I didn’t believe it, didn’t believe it, didn’t believe it. I was sort of like reading it, but I didn’t pull the trigger. And then Josh Wolf, this guy is a very, very smart guy, successful VC, not an anonymous Twitter egg account who’s like just shorting the stock and trying to like spread fear. Um, he was really shitting on it consistently for the course of a year. And at some point, I was like, “You know, what will I regret more? Selling the stock now and taking my profit if I’m wrong, or seeing all these signals and not like going with what seems to be a mounting amount of evidence?” How much did you buy? Guess what? I was wrong. Tesla becomes a Elon becomes the richest man in the world. Tesla becomes a $600 billion company. I bought it at a $6 billion valuation or something crazy like that. And so, you know, I missed out on a 50 to 100X uh, you know, somewhere along the way. And uh and so yeah, I do regret. I actually turned out to be wrong. I I would have regretted more this scenario happening, but it seemed improbable. Wait, so you bought 100 grand worth of Tesla stock? I didn’t buy 100 grand. I think I bought like I don’t know. I don’t even know what it was. It wasn’t 100. I don’t think that’s that’s not what I was buying back then because this was like I I was like 23 years old or something at the time. It it was a long time ago. And basically, I think I had bought like 30 or 40 grand of the stock at a certain price. And I because I remember doing the math and thinking, “Okay, they’re valued at like 5 or 6 billion now. What is Ford and GM valued at?” Okay, they’re valued at 25 billion. Okay, on one hand, that seems crazy that they’re only five times less when they deliver like 200 times less cars. But I was like, “I really think like the cars are going to go electric, that these old fucks are never going to switch.” And he’s got this like vertically integrated it’s like actually a battery and energy company. It’s not even a car company. And this was before self-driving. So I was like, “That’s a good pick.” So it was a good pick. I mean, yeah, but you know, you if you get it wrong, you get it wrong. So I got my face. And by the way, on this note of the the pessimist archive, I saw this YouTube video that was um I don’t know if you heard about this. A few years ago, Elon Musk negotiated a very unique compensation package. Do you know about this? Uh yeah, basically he gets some crazy bonuses if some crazy goals happened. Yeah, so he had he had set up this thing where he gets absolutely it’s his entire compensation was tied to the um the market cap of Tesla. And like it was at 50 billion, I think at the time when he had done it. And um it was like every 50 billion dollars increments, he was going to get more. And so it was like at a if I get us to 100 billion, then I get X. I get I I think he would get uh like 1% or 2% more of the company each time. I I I I should have I don’t know we’re going to talk about this. I could have mapped it out. But basically, he was going to get a percentage more of the company for every 50 billion they go up in market cap as they also have to hit certain um like revenue and earnings uh at that time. And he had no guaranteed income. So basically, if Tesla just went from 50 to 99 billion, he would get zero during that time. Oh my god. And he had five years to do it and the top of the compensation plan was if they became a $600 billion company, then he was going to become like he was going to get this like he would own like 10% of whatever he would own some ridiculous amount that would be unlocked for him and he would be essentially the richest man in the world. And there’s all these there’s this clip of uh uh what’s his name? Andrew Sorkin or whatever his name is, the guy on CNBC, Fast Money or whatever. Um of them to they’re outlining the plan and they’re laughing. They’re just laughing at him. They’re like, I don’t even know why they included these tiers. Like, for Tesla to get that would be I mean, there’s no way. And they’re all laughing. They’re like, there’s no chance. And they’re like, this is such a weird thing. Why did he do this? And they’re like, basically laughing at him and saying how outrageous the top end of it was where it just made no sense. It’s like, well, to do that, Tesla would need to become like the fifth most valuable company in the world or third most valuable company in the world. And they’re like, that’s ridiculous, but I guess, you know, aim high, I guess. He gets no guaranteed compensation of any time of any kind at all. He gets no salary, cash bonus, equity. Uh he only gets equity that that vests over time, but only if he reaches uh these hurdle rates which are, dare I say, crazy. So right now the company is worth $59 billion. Mhm. They run it $50 billion increments. So if he gets the company to $100 billion Wait, you’re just talking market capitalization, not based on revenue, not based on the number of production. So there’s there’s going to be there’s going to be two metrics at each step. So the first step is he has to get the company to $100 billion and reach these operational and adjusted EBITDA and revenue number. If he doesn’t get either of them, he gets nothing. That’s kind of a weird way to break it down based on market capitalization. If he gets to 150 and has to hit the operational numbers. But I mean the market can be irrational. So can’t control that. At each 50 At each $50 billion number, he collects 1% of the company. If somehow, magically, he would get the company to $650 billion, which is literally what the plan calls for, if you can believe this, uh he would collect the equivalent of about $55 billion in compensation. Otherwise, he gets absolutely nothing. Okay, what if you get it to $650 billion and then it immediately And then sure enough, he he’s like I think he just hit it or he’s about to hit that that last final thing and sure enough he’s the richest man in the world now. That’s badass. I want to Bet on yourself. I I need to go back Well, if you’re him. Um All right. I’m going to tell you a a handle that would have helped you. So, you know who Ryan Holiday is, definitely, right? Yes. Uh Ryan Holiday is an author, just kind of like a personality, but mostly an author and he does stoicism stuff. And I included him, but I’m going to actually tell you the one you should follow. So, I like Ryan Holiday because he’s got these things that are not business-related but help me in business and help me in life. And so he’s got five lessons from Seneca. Seneca was a Is he Greek? I actually don’t know what he was. Uh he was a philosopher. Uh and so they are we suffer What was he? I think he was Greek. I didn’t look it up. He was Roman, Ben. Thank you. Uh we suffer more in imagination or five stoic lessons from Seneca. We suffer more in imagination than in reality. Associate only with people who improve you. The greatest remedy for anger, this is the best one. The greatest remedy for anger is delay. Nice. Value your time more than your possessions and death is not in the distant future. We are dying every day. And he’s got these amazing things that I love. But he’s got this other Twitter handle called The Daily Stoic. I love The Daily Stoic and they just like tweet out all these like interesting stoicism tidbits. That’s his, right? It’s his brand? It’s his. And it’s incredibly useful. This stuff is like it’s one of the stoicism is one of the few philosophies that’s like actively um it’s practical and you can use on a daily basis. And so I like following this account. It reminds me to do certain things. So Okay, so so correct me if I’m wrong. So uh I had heard about stoicism from Ryan Holiday, Tim Ferris, bunch of others. So I go, I buy Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. I sit down, I start to read it and I’m I’m sort of just trying to understand what the heck is this philosophy. And there were some things I thought were really cool. Like the tweet like that tweet you just read out, those five principles, like that resonates with me. But there was like a part of it which was sort of like feel neither the highs nor the low. It seemed almost like a philoso and I think I’m wrong, so I want you to correct me. It seemed like a philosophy which was sort of like feel nothing. Yeah. And I think that your almost right. And feel nothing doesn’t seem very fun. Why do I why do I want to feel nothing? So tell me that. So that’s my big That’s my actually a really good criticism in my opinion of stoicism and it’s my criticism of stoicism, which is a lack of joy. And a lot of stoics, this is me steel arm steel manning by the way. A lot of stoics will say, um, no, like there’s joy. Like if you read it differently, there’s room for joy or they never say you can’t have joy. And they’re not wrong, but oftentimes it’s how to deal with pain and misery. And the idea is basically you accept the fact that you’re going to come into contact with a bunch of idiots all day who are going to want to hurt you and steal from you, but that’s okay, just accept it. You do like a negative visualization, right? You like imagine things going wrong, which again, just feels very not so fun for me and not the way I have not not that’s not a formula that’s worked for me. In fact, the exact opposite has worked for me. That formula has worked for me actually. So what I do is like, all right, today I’ve got cancer. I can’t get out of bed because I’m like That’s harsh. You do this every day? I do it a lot. Or I’ll be I’ll be like, “Look, like like if I’m feeling sad, I’ll be like, my I just got my leg cut off. Like I can’t walk. I wish I could go run sports.” And then I’ll be like, “Wait a minute, I have both legs. I’m don’t feel sick. Let’s go celebrate and exercise.” Or you know what I mean? Or like, you know, I’m happy my dog is not dead. And I’ll go and it makes me appreciate him. Yeah, it’s called negative visualization. I think it’s incredibly useful. There’s a there’s this is this is to me, so I I will disagree with this. There’s a this to me is the argument of, well, there’s kids starving in Africa. Like in any given moment, you could just sort of remember, oh, there’s kids starving in Africa. There’s kids starving in Africa. Oh, my boyfriend broke up with me. Well, at least I’m not a kid starving in Africa. And um and I I get the utility of it. I’ve used it myself. But in my experience, I’ve learned that it’s a bit of a roundabout way to a destination of gratitude and like you don’t have to go to feeling the stress and the pain and the suffering of bad in order to feel the gratefulness around the good. And so I found it I guess my personal experience has been, I think it’s a roundabout way to gratitude and like, I might as well just go straight to gratitude. Don’t need to uh don’t need to think about all the bad things. But think about all the bad things that could happen and go there. It’s it’s not been useful for me. I remember like when I get a sore throat, I always feel this way and when I get like a toothache, I’m like, “I wish I could go back to the days where my tooth didn’t hurt.” Like if you’re at like a toothache is like the most pain you could be in. Or sometimes. And I’m like, I like I I you’re like, “I I don’t remember like sometimes my if I All the women who have given birth are like, “What the fuck is this guy talking about?” Well, yeah, but like a toothache is the worst pain you could feel. Or like a like in my like whenever I get earaches and toothaches, I’m like, you know, it’s like it’s like this internal pain. It’s like I can’t make the pain stop and I just have to deal with it until I have an appointment in three days. And then you get like two days in and you’re like, “I don’t remember what it felt like to not feel this pain.” And so I got into the habit. I’d be like, “I would be so thankful if I could if my throat didn’t hurt today and I could just swallow food. That would make me so happy.” And days when I don’t, I’m not sick, I try to think back. I’m like, “This is exactly what I wanted. I wanted to feel happy that I’m not sick today.” And so I I think about that stuff all the time. So anyway, Ryan Holiday and The Daily Stoic is a good follow. You’re up. All right. Um by the way, I know we didn’t do stoicism justice for people who are like diehards. Sorry. Uh people should look I don’t think it is no emotions. I think it’s like more subtle than that, but But that’s a really good I think your criticism is great, which is like I think it’s what a lot of people run into when they get excited and then they’re like, “Wait, but wait, is this what I want?” Yeah, it’s like where’s the room for fart jokes? You know what I mean? I’m going to give you two niche experts. They’re in different niches, but I like them. Okay, so uh I should link their accounts here for you to Uh this first guy, I don’t know exactly how you say his name. His name is Aviral Bhatnagar. Uh and I’m going to link you his Twitter. It’s Aviral Bot and uh I’m going to put it uh where do I put it? I put it on the sheet that we have. Okay, you got it. So this guy Aviral Aviral Bhatnagar, he is a venture capitalist in India and his blog is ajuniorvc.com. This guy puts out really, really high signal stuff around what’s going on in India. Um like for example, he has a tweet that he put out yesterday or that that was, “India now exports more software, 133 billion, than Saudi Arabia exports oil, 113 billion.” We are the India is the largest engineering population in the in the world. Uh what an amazing story that’s come come out over the last 40 years. How’d you find this guy? This is the best this one’s the best one in the This is the most helpful one on the list. Yeah, and so like I I do a lot of investing in Indian startups and I was like, “Okay, if I’m going to invest in these startups, I’m not on the ground. I’m not the like local domain expert.” So what did I do? I invested in a fund. I became an investor in somebody else’s fund that’s India focused. And I was like, “Okay, cool. I’m going to get insights from him and I can bounce any deal off him to see if he wants to participate and maybe he has a local view that I don’t understand.” And then this was another guy that I thought was really smart. So I wanted to find who I wanted to basically see who’s the thought leader in that space and then how do I subscribe to them. And so his um you know, his like blog, I think has 50,000 subscribers now. So he’s not like, you know, a no-name. Uh but he’s very niche and he talks about kind of like the Indian tech scene and what’s going on, you know, at a macro level, whatever. So I found this guy to be I think he’s doing a really good job of content creation. So I’m going to pick this guy in one niche. Is there Is there such a thing as this for China? Uh I’m sure there is. Actually, this is this is a good idea. I should just um like find this person for like Latam, for Europe, you know, for different parts of Europe, uh for for India, for China, and for Australia maybe. Um and if there is none, be this guy. This guy, there’s a valuable position to become. Super valuable. There’s this guy named Bill Bishop, I think his name is. Bill Bishop had a newsletter uh called Sinism, I think it’s called. You know what I’m talking about? No. Um Sinocism. I don’t know what that means. Uh Sinocism. Um S I N O C I S M. For a long time, he was the most popular guy on Substack and his entire newsletter is it’s called Get Smarter About China and he just tells you about the business of China and you can see all like the latest trends coming out of China. It would be really This is a great arbitrage to do, by the way. If you uh instead of trying to compete in the same pond as everybody else, like go provide a really useful bridge into one specific market or one specific uh geography. Um like I I I’ve told the story before, I think, but like one of the most influential people in my life was this teacher named Lisa Keister at Duke University. And she taught this class called Getting Rich. And her story was she graduated That was the name of the class? The name of the class, yeah. Did everyone take that? It was the it was one of the hardest classes to get into because it was a great name, great title, right? So you already know this person is not just like every other professor. Like she understands like her customer, her market. The second thing was it was she was the highest rated professor on like ratemyprofessor.com and she had a chili pepper next to her name, so she was like hot, too. It was like, oh, it was everything. So I I wake up at 5:00 in the morning, we go to the library to get on the high-speed internet connection and as soon as the course listings open up, we like jumped on it and we got into this class. And I go in and she was she tells her story. She goes, “Actually, I was a student at Duke 10 years ago or 11 years ago, whatever it was.” She goes, “I graduated with a degree in Mandarin because that’s just what was interesting to me.” And at the time, everybody was making fun of me. Actually, she was older than this now, but she had started teaching back when she was like 32 or something. Now she might be 42 or 50 or something like that. But she goes, “I graduated with this degree. All my like friends were like, ‘Good luck with that. You know, how’s that Mandarin degree going to going to help you out, get a job here because I’m a I’m going to go to med school. I’m going to be a lawyer. I’m going to be a consultant. Like, what are you going to do with that Chinese degree?’” And she’s like, “Well, I bet I can get a job in China.” And they’re like, “What?” And so she bought a one-way ticket, just goes to China and she just starts waving her hand. She’s like, “Hey, people in China, like, I know English, I know companies in the West, um and I would love to learn about you and then I’ll be a bridge.” And she became a bridge basically between companies in China and companies in America. If an American company wanted to do business in China, they would do it through her because she like could translate the not just literally the language, but like she knew who to talk to. She became like the local expert there. She and this like to me, this guy on Twitter, he’s my bridge into knowing what’s going on in the scene in India. And so she what her story was, she made a killing doing that because it was really valuable. Companies in China really wanted to do business with the companies in the West. Then she invested all of it in the tech in the tech stock market because she’s like, “No, I can sell tech companies are the ones that are doing well.” So she and then right before the bubble burst, she pulled it all out to be like, “Oh, I want to do real estate now.” And she like just timed it perfectly accidentally. Invested all in real estate from 2000 to 2008, right before the real estate crash happened, she took it out again because she just wanted to do something else with her life. And basically by 32 was retired and like, you know, uh was like, “What do I want to do? I want to go teach and teach kids what I wish I knew back then.” How wealthy is she got? Uh I think she made like, you know, a few million dollars at least and like, you know, probably like five, $7 million and like um, you know, she she lives in in in Durham and she teaches at the school. I mean, I have no idea how much she has. So what was the class about? Totally I’m totally guessing. So the class was basically it was, you know, like Rameet Sethi, it was like personal finance, which is actually like you probably need she wanted to teach what she wish she learned when she was in school. So she’s like, “I wish they taught you about how to manage money.” So she would show us like the power of compound interest over time, like why you should save early and versus saving more money when you’re 30 versus saving even a little bit of money when you’re 20. And then like, what is a mortgage and like how does that work? And like then so and then every other class she would just invite in someone who made it, like someone who’s successful financially, but doing a completely different thing, just to expose you to like, look, there’s like 50 paths. Dude, this is it’s like this podcast pretty much. Yeah, one would be this girl who started a t-shirt company licensing university logos and she would tell her story. Then she she got Jamie Dimon on the phone and like Jamie Dimon is like, you know, the head of whatever Morgan Stanley or something or whatever. Uh and like then then she had this hedge fund guy from San Francisco come out and he’s like, “Yeah, I here’s what I He’s like, he surveyed the room. He goes, “Do you guys use uh Microsoft or Apple products?” And they’re and people are answering. He goes, uh he asked like three questions and we were like, “Why did you ask that?” He goes, “Because then I’m only going to make one decision this year and it’s whether to invest like hundreds of millions of dollars into Apple or not.” And um and he’s like, “So all I’m doing is I’m just trying to figure out what is the right decision on that.” And I was like, “Whoa.” That’s a job? That’s a that’s epic. And he he had said in his when he was in the class, he goes, “By the way, uh all you guys are going to just have the same resume. He goes, “You’re all trying to do the same thing. You’re all trying to get grades and then like these internships. He’s like, “So the first three-fourths of your resume, think about it. It’s going to look the same as everybody else in this room. Like I’m not really going to be able to tell the difference. He goes, “The only thing that’s going to differentiate any of you is that bottom section where it’s called other, like other interests. He’s like, “So at this school, everybody’s going to teach you to like work on that top three-fourths of the resume. In reality, you should be working on the bottom the bottom one-fourth of that resume because that’s what guys like me look at. Everybody’s got a degree. Everybody’s got good grades. Everybody went to a good school. I’ve never Wait, have I told you about the bottom fourth of the resume? No, what is that? That’s so funny that you you even use that fraction. I always tell my when when I own the company, I would say, “I just care about the bottom fourth.” I’d always say, “Just tell me this.” Wow. And I would always say that and I’d be like, “One of the greatest People would ask me, “How do you find good writers?” I was like, “Well, here’s one really easy way. Ask them about the bottom fourth.” And they go, “What do you mean?” I was like, “Well, just it doesn’t matter what they studied in school. Ask them, um, okay, so you majored in philosophy. What was your favorite uh philosophy class or favorite philosophy teacher?” And if they can’t tell me a story about something that they spent four years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on, then they’re just not going to be a good writer because they’re not interesting enough. Right. And so I would always ask about the bottom fourth of the resume for all types of roles because I’m like, “If you’re just if you can’t entertain me for this conversation, then you just don’t have any passion and I don’t want to be around you.” Right. That’s amazing. Okay, so maybe this becomes one of the the core frameworks. That’s a that you know, one one person saying it, that’s just a dot. Two people saying it, that’s a line. I interviewed uh I got that from uh Gold Brian Goldberg who founded uh Bustle and he has this amazing article and he says, it’s headlined, “Losers exist, stay away from them.” And it’s basically like how to only hire winners. It’s from Pando from years and years ago and he’s a brilliant writer, but he doesn’t write anymore because he’s kind of a loose cannon. But it was titled, “Losers exist, how to avoid them.” And it talks about uh one of the best ways to ask about the bottom fourth. And if you’re a you’re a loser if you can’t like be passionate about something that you spent four years studying. Uh no, dude, this article is gone. It’s is it Pando, you know, like Pando died. Let me see if there’s a cash version. There is a cash version. Uh okay, we we’re we’re back in luck. The headline is, “Losers exist. Don’t hire them.” Yeah, awesome. Um okay, let’s do uh let’s do a couple more. I’m going to give a couple quick ones. Uh okay, this other person who I think is a niche expert is this guy Willie Woo. Do you follow him? No, I’m looking him up now. I’m following all these people. The the Indian guy is the best one so far, but let’s look at Willie Woo. Yeah, I don’t think you’ll like this one because it’s very crypto specific, but this guy Willie Woo is I think the leading crypto analyst. And um you know, in most things like these people who analyze charts and stuff like that, they’re like it’s a little bit like horoscopy. They’re like, “Oh, look, the trend is going this way and like if you draw this T-shape, it’s going to be the iron cross pattern.” And like, you know, so buy, buy, buy. And um in crypto, there’s one unique thing which is that all the data is there’s a lot more transparency. All the, you know, everything that’s happening is happening on a chain, on a public blockchain. So you can actually go analyze it. So like he looks at all these metrics that are like um you know, it’s he won’t just look at the price, for example. There’s things like what is the actual average buy-in price? Because it’s one thing for the price to go up or for people to like not be selling because they bought it in 2013 and they you know, their cost basis was like $5 and your cost basis now is $50,000. So it looks like, what the actual price people buying in? What is the average price people bought in for? And that tells you like if it’s low versus the actual price, you’re like, “Okay, um you know, it’s mostly, you know, it’s mostly just like same coins in old hands.” Versus if it’s higher, you realize that people are buying in at the current price levels and that’s pulling the average up. Um and so there’s there’s a whole bunch of things like that like um coin age, like um are old coins moving? Meaning like if OG believers start selling, that’s kind of a signal like it’s like when a CEO starts selling their stock. It’s like, “Wait, why are you selling your stock? That doesn’t seem quite right.” Um what’s the reason? And so like when a bunch of old hands start selling, that’s actually a signal that comes before the price changes. It may it may not even affect the price yet, but it’s an indicator of something to come. Damn, that’s badass. All right, let me give you one. Um Rohin Dwaar. I actually don’t know how to spell Rohin’s last name or say Rohin’s last name. It’s D H A R. So this guy uh founded this company called Priceonomics. You remember Priceonomics? Yes, I’ve followed this guy. This guy’s good. Okay, so he’s interesting. Priceonomics was interesting. We actually recruited a bunch of people from there and I love that company. I don’t know if it’s really around anymore, but it’s just a blog. But his new like started as a side hustle. Now it’s kind of like a full-time thing and I actually showed you two examples. Even Suli is commenting on it. And this guy, he owns, I think 12 or 10 or eight, somewhere in that 8 to 12 range. He owns eight single-family homes uh in New Mexico, in California, Hawaii, wherever. Um and you can go and look and he’ll kind of show you where they are and he’ll show pictures of them and he rents them out on Airbnb. And sometimes when his kids are on vacation or not in school, he’ll go and stay in his homes. And he reveals all of the numbers and all of the updates. So on December 6th, he tweeted, “These are my monthly mortgage payments on each of the homes in my small uh portfolio vacation rentals.” Uh another one is he’ll say like, “You know, currently we’re seeing this type of occupancy rate and we actually just added a surfboard to our house in Hawaii and we noticed that we could get more money for it.” or something like that. And he takes screenshots and he shows all of the revenue that he’s making as well as how much money things have cost uh cost him to buy. And he’ll even do things like recently he posted a couple listings. He’s like, “I think I could turn this into an Airbnb.” And he’ll just like link to the Redfin house listing and he’s like, “I think I can get these numbers.” So it’s actually really cool to see him in real time make it all happen. Yeah, I like this. This is awesome. Uh I didn’t realize that he was doing this. This is it’s kind of new. Uh he’s been at it for a while. He’s been at it for now his new stick is He’s been doing it for six years, but I don’t think he was I don’t think he was as public about it before. He wasn’t as public about it. He was not as public about it, but now he’s like all in on it and it’s so fun. Uh it’s a really fun handle to follow because sometimes his properties are like a quarter of a million and he puts down 20%. So he puts down or sometimes even less, I think. So he’ll put down like $40 or $50,000 on these properties and that’s pretty attainable for a lot of people. And so it’s kind of interesting. Right. Um okay, I have a Okay, let’s do a couple funny ones. Um Okay, have you heard of this account, James Friedman? It’s F Jamie 013. Uh was it on this list? No. So what is it? James Friedman? F James Friedman or I don’t know, maybe it’s Friedman, but it’s F R I D M A N. Uh no. Who who what what’s this? Okay, so uh so he is uh he’s got two million followers, so he’s definitely popular. He’s the Photoshop guy. So basically, people will Photoshop like, uh, “Hey James, my boyfriend’s wearing this Calvin Klein foot the same Calvin Klein t-shirt in every um in every photo that we I take with him. Can you just remove the the logo of Calvin Klein?” And then like he he does he does the request, but he doesn’t he’s not actually just photoshopping it. He makes it hilarious. So like this is very visual, so you know, you need like YouTube to be able to see what I’m saying here, but like he photoshopped the the this guy’s wearing Calvin Klein shirt of like it you know, just says across the chest Calvin Klein jeans. And uh so he like photoshopped it with that ripped off. So that little section ripped off. Now you can just see his chest and uh and so it’s like fucks it actually like fucks up the photo. It doesn’t make it good like the girl wants. Uh and it says Calvin Klein tattooed on his chest now instead of on the shirt. Um and so it’s like uh like people will just be like, you know, um you know, we here’s my wedding photo, uh but we forgot to wear a mask during our wedding photos. Can you Photoshop a mask on instead of photoshopping a COVID mask, he’ll put like, you know, the green mask from Jim Carrey’s like the mask on their face. So it’s just like people request it and then he does the like he does the request, but he does it wrong in a way that they’re not happy with. Um they’ll be like, you know, my my arms look too big here and then he’ll make them like absurdly tiny or whatever. And so it’s just hilarious. He’s got two million followers. He’s like I look funny with one arm and then so he just or uh you can’t see my other arm, so it looks funny with just one arm. And so he just deletes the the the second arm, so the person is armless. Yeah, exactly. Uh and I think he has like a book or something like called the Joy of Photoshop. It’s it says uh asking the wrong guy for help. This is awesome. This is cool. I’ve never seen this. I’m going to follow him. Uh you want to go do a a few more quick funny ones? Uh yeah, let’s do another one. Uh we have a friend Nikita Beer. He’s pretty funny in like the tech world. Um what do you think of his account? Hilarious. He’s a shit head. Yeah, he’s I’m actually amazed that he does some of the stuff that he does and that’s why I like him. Well, it’s kind of like the Donald Trump rule, right? Which is like you say one offensive or weird thing, um you know, you’re canceled, but you say all offensive and weird things, uh you’re you get like, you know, you get the pass. How did he get away with so much? That’s the that’s the key is like if every post makes fun of something, that’s cool. If if only one does, then you’re an asshole. All of his stuff is making fun of something. So I think it’s a great follow. And his profile picture is hilarious. Yeah, his profile picture is uh is good. Um all right, you want to do one more? Um Yeah, okay, I like this one. I don’t know if you know this guy. I don’t think you do. I don’t know if you’d be interested in him. His name is Harala Bob. What’s he do? So Harala Bob’s story is kind of crazy. Is this a crypto guy? So he’s he’s actually he’s transitioned from being the the the one thing guy to the next thing guy to the next thing guy. Okay, so he started off he got famous because he was a big sports better. And he famously one year, and I think the year 2000, like just absolutely raked it in in Vegas because he found an arbitrage uh that he could bet on and he just like milked it. And uh he realized that like I think it was something he had he’s had a few of these where he basically finds he would find inefficiencies in the sports betting market and that’s how he made like millions of dollars. So he found like one year that what they would do is um let’s say that that they would have an over under, a total points for a game. And let’s say it’s 200 points for the game. Um now, Vegas is like weirdly accurate with over unders. Like they will get it like so spot on. It’ll come down to like the last possession and like it’ll flip over or under. So they’re very good at doing that. That doesn’t seem like there’s much of inefficiency there. But like in basketball, what happens is that the first half of basketball, you just play and then you go to halftime. But at the end of the game, there’s often this situation where the losing team will start fouling the winning team to like stop the clock, make them shoot free throws and then try to like they’re trying to make threes while the other team can only shoot two free throws at a time. So what it led to was that the second half had more points than the first half. But Vegas had this small bet called the they would take the over under and it would say, you can bet the first half over under and it was just dividing it by two. So it’s like dividing the total by two. So the total was always really accurate, but the first half over under was underpriced. It was like too frequently to uh too high. So he was just betting the under. So he’d find these like little inefficiencies or he’d find certain refs are really foul prone. Um and so he would know that, okay, when that ref is reffing this game, that team is going to score more than their normal average. And so he would just bet for a whole season on just the refs. Um and he actually un I think he figured out before the NBA uncovered that that ref Tim Donaghy was like cheating basically because like there was always weird shit happening on that guy’s games. Uh and so he and so he I’m paraphrasing because he doesn’t like totally out his whole strategy, but like he’s talking about it before. Like he’s talking about when um when Clean Tech was big and the government was giving money to this I think it’s called Solyndra or something like that. And he came out and he said, the same thing happened with Enron where it was like five weeks before it went under, they were like, not just saying everything’s going to be okay, they were saying everything’s better than ever. And he and Elon came out and was sort of like, “What do you want people to say?” He’s like, “You know, it is in the incentive of somebody, of the captain of that ship to go down with the ship and the whole time be saying, ‘Oh, we’re so close to our destination.’” Basically, he was like, “They’re never going to come out and say, ‘Yeah, we don’t know, we might not make it.’” Because then that will guarantee you don’t make it because people will sell the stock. It’ll put so much negative pressure on the company, it’ll hurt the morale inside the company. And so you can’t ever come out and say, “I don’t know, we might not make it.” So you always have to say, “Make it. Of course we’re going to make it. We’re thriving.” And like, you just hope it actually comes true. He said something to that effect in an interview once I read and I was like, I feel like he’s describing what actually was going on inside Tesla. That’s amazing. And so anyways, the long story short was I didn’t believe it, didn’t believe it, didn’t believe it. I was sort of like reading it, but I didn’t pull the trigger. And then Josh Wolf, this guy is a very, very smart guy, successful VC, not an anonymous Twitter egg account who’s like just shorting the stock and trying to like spread fear. Um, he was really shitting on it consistently for the course of a year. And at some point, I was like, “You know, what will I regret more? Selling the stock now and taking my profit if I’m wrong, or seeing all these signals and not like going with what seems to be a mounting amount of evidence?” How much did you buy? Guess what? I was wrong. Tesla becomes a Elon becomes the richest man in the world. Tesla becomes a $600 billion company. I bought it at a $6 billion valuation or something crazy like that. And so, you know, I missed out on a 50 to 100X uh, you know, somewhere along the way. And uh and so yeah, I do regret. I actually turned out to be wrong. I I would have regretted more this scenario happening, but it seemed improbable. Wait, so you bought 100 grand worth of Tesla stock? I didn’t buy 100 grand. I think I bought like I don’t know. I don’t even know what it was. It wasn’t 100. I don’t think that’s that’s not what I was buying back then because this was like I I was like 23 years old or something at the time. It it was a long time ago. And basically, I think I had bought like 30 or 40 grand of the stock at a certain price. And I because I remember doing the math and thinking, “Okay, they’re valued at like 5 or 6 billion now. What is Ford and GM valued at?” Okay, they’re valued at 25 billion. Okay, on one hand, that seems crazy that they’re only five times less when they deliver like 200 times less cars. But I was like, “I really think like the cars are going to go electric, that these old fucks are never going to switch.” And he’s got this like vertically integrated it’s like actually a battery and energy company. It’s not even a car company. And this was before self-driving. So I was like, “That’s a good pick.” So it was a good pick. I mean, yeah, but you know, you if you get it wrong, you get it wrong. So I got my face. And by the way, on this note of the the pessimist archive, I saw this YouTube video that was um I don’t know if you heard about this. A few years ago, Elon Musk negotiated a very unique compensation package. Do you know about this? Uh yeah, basically he gets some crazy bonuses if some crazy goals happened. Yeah, so he had he had set up this thing where he gets absolutely it’s his entire compensation was tied to the um the market cap of Tesla. And like it was at 50 billion, I think at the time when he had done it. And um it was like every 50 billion dollars increments, he was going to get more. And so it was like at a if I get us to 100 billion, then I get X. I get I I think he would get uh like 1% or 2% more of the company each time. I I I I should have I don’t know we’re going to talk about this. I could have mapped it out. But basically, he was going to get a percentage more of the company for every 50 billion they go up in market cap as they also have to hit certain um like revenue and earnings uh at that time. And he had no guaranteed income. So basically, if Tesla just went from 50 to 99 billion, he would get zero during that time. Oh my god. And he had five years to do it and the top of the compensation plan was if they became a $600 billion company, then he was going to become like he was going to get this like he would own like 10% of whatever he would own some ridiculous amount that would be unlocked for him and he would be essentially the richest man in the world. And there’s all these there’s this clip of uh uh what’s his name? Andrew Sorkin or whatever his name is, the guy on CNBC, Fast Money or whatever. Um of them to they’re outlining the plan and they’re laughing. They’re just laughing at him. They’re like, I don’t even know why they included these tiers. Like, for Tesla to get that would be I mean, there’s no way. And they’re all laughing. They’re like, there’s no chance. And they’re like, this is such a weird thing. Why did he do this? And they’re like, basically laughing at him and saying how outrageous the top end of it was where it just made no sense. It’s like, well, to do that, Tesla would need to become like the fifth most valuable company in the world or third most valuable company in the world. And they’re like, that’s ridiculous, but I guess, you know, aim high, I guess. He gets no guaranteed compensation of any time of any kind at all. He gets no salary, cash bonus, equity. Uh he only gets equity that that vests over time, but only if he reaches uh these hurdle rates which are, dare I say, crazy. So right now the company is worth $59 billion. Mhm. They run it $50 billion increments. So if he gets the company to $100 billion Wait, you’re just talking market capitalization, not based on revenue, not based on the number of production. So there’s there’s going to be there’s going to be two metrics at each step. So the first step is he has to get the company to $100 billion and reach these operational and adjusted EBITDA and revenue number. If he doesn’t get either of them, he gets nothing. That’s kind of a weird way to break it down based on market capitalization. If he gets to 150 and has to hit the operational numbers. But I mean the market can be irrational. So can’t control that. At each 50 At each $50 billion number, he collects 1% of the company. If somehow, magically, he would get the company to $650 billion, which is literally what the plan calls for, if you can believe this, uh he would collect the equivalent of about $55 billion in compensation. Otherwise, he gets absolutely nothing. Okay, what if you get it to $650 billion and then it immediately And then sure enough, he he’s like I think he just hit it or he’s about to hit that that last final thing and sure enough he’s the richest man in the world now. That’s badass. I want to Bet on yourself. I I need to go back Well, if you’re him. Um All right. I’m going to tell you a a handle that would have helped you. So, you know who Ryan Holiday is, definitely, right? Yes. Uh Ryan Holiday is an author, just kind of like a personality, but mostly an author and he does stoicism stuff. And I included him, but I’m going to actually tell you the one you should follow. So, I like Ryan Holiday because he’s got these things that are not business-related but help me in business and help me in life. And so he’s got five lessons from Seneca. Seneca was a Is he Greek? I actually don’t know what he was. Uh he was a philosopher. Uh and so they are we suffer What was he? I think he was Greek. I didn’t look it up. He was Roman, Ben. Thank you. Uh we suffer more in imagination or five stoic lessons from Seneca. We suffer more in imagination than in reality. Associate only with people who improve you. The greatest remedy for anger, this is the best one. The greatest remedy for anger is delay. Nice. Value your time more than your possessions and death is not in the distant future. We are dying every day. And he’s got these amazing things that I love. But he’s got this other Twitter handle called The Daily Stoic. I love The Daily Stoic and they just like tweet out all these like interesting stoicism tidbits. That’s his, right? It’s his brand? It’s his. And it’s incredibly useful. This stuff is like it’s one of the stoicism is one of the few philosophies that’s like actively um it’s practical and you can use on a daily basis. And so I like following this account. It reminds me to do certain things. So Okay, so so correct me if I’m wrong. So uh I had heard about stoicism from Ryan Holiday, Tim Ferris, bunch of others. So I go, I buy Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. I sit down, I start to read it and I’m I’m sort of just trying to understand what the heck is this philosophy. And there were some things I thought were really cool. Like the tweet like that tweet you just read out, those five principles, like that resonates with me. But there was like a part of it which was sort of like feel neither the highs nor the low. It seemed almost like a philoso and I think I’m wrong, so I want you to correct me. It seemed like a philosophy which was sort of like feel nothing. Yeah. And I think that your almost right. And feel nothing doesn’t seem very fun. Why do I why do I want to feel nothing? So tell me that. So that’s my big That’s my actually a really good criticism in my opinion of stoicism and it’s my criticism of stoicism, which is a lack of joy. And a lot of stoics, this is me steel arm steel manning by the way. A lot of stoics will say, um, no, like there’s joy. Like if you read it differently, there’s room for joy or they never say you can’t have joy. And they’re not wrong, but oftentimes it’s how to deal with pain and misery. And the idea is basically you accept the fact that you’re going to come into contact with a bunch of idiots all day who are going to want to hurt you and steal from you, but that’s okay, just accept it. You do like a negative visualization, right? You like imagine things going wrong, which again, just feels very not so fun for me and not the way I have not not that’s not a formula that’s worked for me. In fact, the exact opposite has worked for me. That formula has worked for me actually. So what I do is like, all right, today I’ve got cancer. I can’t get out of bed because I’m like That’s harsh. You do this every day? I do it a lot. Or I’ll be I’ll be like, “Look, like like if I’m feeling sad, I’ll be like, my I just got my leg cut off. Like I can’t walk. I wish I could go run sports.” And then I’ll be like, “Wait a minute, I have both legs. I’m don’t feel sick. Let’s go celebrate and exercise.” Or you know what I mean? Or like, you know, I’m happy my dog is not dead. And I’ll go and it makes me appreciate him. Yeah, it’s called negative visualization. I think it’s incredibly useful. There’s a this is this is to me, so I I will disagree with this. There’s a this to me is the argument of, well, there’s kids starving in Africa. Like in any given moment, you could just sort of remember, oh, there’s kids starving in Africa. There’s kids starving in Africa. Oh, my boyfriend broke up with me. Well, at least I’m not a kid starving in Africa. And um and I I get the utility of it. I’ve used it myself. But in my experience, I’ve learned that it’s a bit of a roundabout way to a destination of gratitude and like you don’t have to go to feeling the stress and the pain and the suffering of bad in order to feel the gratefulness around the good. And so I found it I guess my personal experience has been, I think it’s a roundabout way to gratitude and like, I might as well just go straight to gratitude. Don’t need to uh don’t need to think about all the bad things. But think about all the bad things that could happen and go there. It’s it’s not been useful for me. I remember like when I get a sore throat, I always feel this way and when I get like a toothache, I’m like, “I wish I could go back to the days where my tooth didn’t hurt.” Like if you’re at like a toothache is like the most pain you could be in. Or sometimes. And I’m like, I like I I you’re like, “I I don’t remember like sometimes my if I All the women who have given birth are like, “What the fuck is this guy talking about?” Well, yeah, but like a toothache is the worst pain you could feel. Or like a like in my like whenever I get earaches and toothaches, I’m like, you know, it’s like it’s like this internal pain. It’s like I can’t make the pain stop and I just have to deal with it until I have an appointment in three days. And then you get like two days in and you’re like, “I don’t remember what it felt like to not feel this pain.” And so I got into the habit. I’d be like, “I would be so thankful if I could if my throat didn’t hurt today and I could just swallow food. That would make me so happy.” And days when I don’t, I’m not sick, I try to think back. I’m like, “This is exactly what I wanted. I wanted to feel happy that I’m not sick today.” And so I I think about that stuff all the time. So anyway, Ryan Holiday and The Daily Stoic is a good follow. You’re up. All right. Um by the way, I know we didn’t do stoicism justice for people who are like diehards. Sorry. Uh people should look I don’t think it is no emotions. I think it’s like more subtle than that, but But that’s a really good I think your criticism is great, which is like I think it’s what a lot of people run into when they get excited and then they’re like, “Wait, but wait, is this what I want?” Yeah, it’s like where’s the room for fart jokes? You know what I mean? I’m going to give you two niche experts. They’re in different niches, but I like them. Okay, so uh I should link their accounts here for you to Uh this first guy, I don’t know exactly how you say his name. His name is Aviral Bhatnagar. Uh and I’m going to link you his Twitter. It’s Aviral Bot and uh I’m going to put it uh where do I put it? I put it on the sheet that we have. Okay, you got it. So this guy Aviral Aviral Bhatnagar, he is a venture capitalist in India and his blog is ajuniorvc.com. This guy puts out really, really high signal stuff around what’s going on in India. Um like for example, he has a tweet that he put out yesterday or that that was, “India now exports more software, 133 billion, than Saudi Arabia exports oil, 113 billion.” We are the India is the largest engineering population in the in the world. Uh what an amazing story that’s come come out over the last 40 years. How’d you find this guy? This is the best this one’s the best one in the This is the most helpful one on the list. Yeah, and so like I I do a lot of investing in Indian startups and I was like, “Okay, if I’m going to invest in these startups, I’m not on the ground. I’m not the like local domain expert.” So what did I do? I invested in a fund. I became an investor in somebody else’s fund that’s India focused. And I was like, “Okay, cool. I’m going to get insights from him and I can bounce any deal off him to see if he wants to participate and maybe he has a local view that I don’t understand.” And then this was another guy that I thought was really smart. So I wanted to find who I wanted to basically see who’s the thought leader in that space and then how do I subscribe to them. And so his um you know, his like blog, I think has 50,000 subscribers now. So he’s not like, you know, a no-name. Uh but he’s very niche and he talks about kind of like the Indian tech scene and what’s going on, you know, at a macro level, whatever. So I found this guy to be I think he’s doing a really good job of content creation. So I’m going to pick this guy in one niche. Is there Is there such a thing as this for China? Uh I’m sure there is. Actually, this is this is a good idea. I should just um like find this person for like Latam, for Europe, you know, for different parts of Europe, uh for for India, for China, and for Australia maybe. Um and if there is none, be this guy. This guy, there’s a valuable position to become. Super valuable. There’s this guy named Bill Bishop, I think his name is. Bill Bishop had a newsletter uh called Sinism, I think it’s called. You know what I’m talking about? No. Um Sinocism. I don’t know what that means. Uh Sinocism. Um S I N O C I S M. For a long time, he was the most popular guy on Substack and his entire newsletter is it’s called Get Smarter About China and he just tells you about the business of China and you can see all like the latest trends coming out of China. It would be really This is a great arbitrage to do, by the way. If you uh instead of trying to compete in the same pond as everybody else, like go provide a really useful bridge into one specific market or one specific uh geography. Um like I I I’ve told the story before, I think, but like one of the most influential people in my life was this teacher named Lisa Keister at Duke University. And she taught this class called Getting Rich. And her story was she graduated That was the name of the class? The name of the class, yeah. Did everyone take that? It was the it was one of the hardest classes to get into because it was a great name, great title, right? So you already know this person is not just like every other professor. Like she understands like her customer, her market. The second thing was it was she was the highest rated professor on like ratemyprofessor.com and she had a chili pepper next to her name, so she was like hot, too. It was like, oh, it was everything. So I I wake up at 5:00 in the morning, we go to the library to get on the high-speed internet connection and as soon as the course listings open up, we like jumped on it and we got into this class. And I go in and she was she tells her story. She goes, “Actually, I was a student at Duke 10 years ago or 11 years ago, whatever it was.” She goes, “I graduated with a degree in Mandarin because that’s just what was interesting to me.” And at the time, everybody was making fun of me. Actually, she was older than this now, but she had started teaching back when she was like 32 or something. Now she might be 42 or 50 or something like that. But she goes, “I graduated with this degree. All my like friends were like, ‘Good luck with that. You know, how’s that Mandarin degree going to going to help you out, get a job here because I’m a I’m going to go to med school. I’m going to be a lawyer. I’m going to be a consultant. Like, what are you going to do with that Chinese degree?’” And she’s like, “Well, I bet I can get a job in China.” And they’re like, “What?” And so she bought a one-way ticket, just goes to China and she just starts waving her hand. She’s like, “Hey, people in China, like, I know English, I know companies in the West, um and I would love to learn about you and then I’ll be a bridge.” And she became a bridge basically between companies in China and companies in America. If an American company wanted to do business in China, they would do it through her because she like could translate the not just literally the language, but like she knew who to talk to. She became like the local expert there. She and this like to me, this guy on Twitter, he’s my bridge into knowing what’s going on in the scene in India. And so she what her story was, she made a killing doing that because it was really valuable. Companies in China really wanted to do business with the companies in the West. Then she invested all of it in the tech in the tech stock market because she’s like, “No, I can sell tech companies are the ones that are doing well.” So she and then right before the bubble burst, she pulled it all out to be like, “Oh, I want to do real estate now.” And she like just timed it perfectly accidentally. Invested all in real estate from 2000 to 2008, right before the real estate crash happened, she took it out again because she just wanted to do something else with her life. And basically by 32 was retired and like, you know, uh was like, “What do I want to do? I want to go teach and teach kids what I wish I knew back then.” How wealthy is she got? Uh I think she made like, you know, a few million dollars at least and like, you know, probably like five, $7 million and like um, you know, she she lives in in in Durham and she teaches at the school. I mean, I have no idea how much she has. So what was the class about? Totally I’m totally guessing. So the class was basically it was, you know, like Rameet Sethi, it was like personal finance, which is actually like you probably need she wanted to teach what she wish she learned when she was in school. So she’s like, “I wish they taught you about how to manage money.” So she would show us like the power of compound interest over time, like why you should save early and versus saving more money when you’re 30 versus saving even a little bit of money when you’re 20. And then like, what is a mortgage and like how does that work? And like then so and then every other class she would just invite in someone who made it, like someone who’s successful financially, but doing a completely different thing, just to expose you to like, look, there’s like 50 paths. Dude, this is it’s like this podcast pretty much. Yeah, one would be this girl who started a t-shirt company licensing university logos and she would tell her story. Then she she got Jamie Dimon on the phone and like Jamie Dimon is like, you know, the head of whatever Morgan Stanley or something or whatever. Uh and like then then she had this hedge fund guy from San Francisco come out and he’s like, “Yeah, I here’s what I He’s like, he surveyed the room. He goes, “Do you guys use uh Microsoft or Apple products?” And they’re and people are answering. He goes, uh he asked like three questions and we were like, “Why did you ask that?” He goes, “Because then I’m only going to make one decision this year and it’s whether to invest like hundreds of millions of dollars into Apple or not.” And um and he’s like, “So all I’m doing is I’m just trying to figure out what is the right decision on that.” And I was like, “Whoa.” That’s a job? That’s epic. And he he had said in his when he was in the class, he goes, “By the way, uh all you guys are going to just have the same resume. He goes, “You’re all trying to do the same thing. You’re all trying to get grades and then like these internships. He’s like, “So the first three-fourths of your resume, think about it. It’s going to look the same as everybody else in this room. Like I’m not really going to be able to tell the difference. He goes, “The only thing that’s going to differentiate any of you is that bottom section where it’s called other, like other interests. He’s like, “So at this school, everybody’s going to teach you to like work on that top three-fourths of the resume. In reality, you should be working on the bottom the bottom one-fourth of that resume because that’s what guys like me look at. Everybody’s got a degree. Everybody’s got good grades. Everybody went to a good school. I’ve never Wait, have I told you about the bottom fourth of the resume? No, what is that? That’s so funny that you you even use that fraction. I always tell my when when I own the company, I would say, “I just care about the bottom fourth.” I’d always say, “Just tell me this.” Wow. And I would always say that and I’d be like, “One of the greatest People would ask me, “How do you find good writers?” I was like, “Well, here’s one really easy way. Ask them about the bottom fourth.” And they go, “What do you mean?” I was like, “Well, just it doesn’t matter what they studied in school. Ask them, um, okay, so you majored in philosophy. What was your favorite uh philosophy class or favorite philosophy teacher?” And if they can’t tell me a story about something that they spent four years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on, then they’re just not going to be a good writer because they’re not interesting enough. Right. And so I would always ask about the bottom fourth of the resume for all types of roles because I’m like, “If you’re just if you can’t entertain me for this conversation, then you just don’t have any passion and I don’t want to be around you.” Right. That’s amazing. Okay, so maybe this becomes one of the the core frameworks. That’s a that you know, one one person saying it, that’s just a dot. Two people saying it, that’s a line. I interviewed uh I got that from uh Gold Brian Goldberg who founded uh Bustle and he has this amazing article and he says, it’s headlined, “Losers exist, stay away from them.” And it’s basically like how to only hire winners. It’s from Pando from years and years ago and he’s a brilliant writer, but he doesn’t write anymore because he’s kind of a loose cannon. But it was titled, “Losers exist, how to avoid them.” And it talks about uh one of the best ways to ask about the bottom fourth. And if you’re a you’re a loser if you can’t like be passionate about something that you spent four years studying. Uh no, dude, this article is gone. It’s is it Pando, you know, like Pando died. Let me see if there’s a cash version. There is a cash version. Uh okay, we we’re we’re back in luck. The headline is, “Losers exist. Don’t hire them.” Yeah, awesome. Um okay, let’s do uh let’s do a couple more. I’m going to give a couple quick ones. Uh okay, this other person who I think is a niche expert is this guy Willie Woo. Do you follow him? No, I’m looking him up now. I’m following all these people. The the Indian guy is the best one so far, but let’s look at Willie Woo. Yeah, I don’t think you’ll like this one because it’s very crypto specific, but this guy Willie Woo is I think the leading crypto analyst. And um you know, in most things like these people who analyze charts and stuff like that, they’re like it’s a little bit like horoscopy. They’re like, “Oh, look, the trend is going this way and like if you draw this T-shape, it’s going to be the iron cross pattern.” And like, you know, so buy, buy, buy. And um in crypto, there’s one unique thing which is that all the data is there’s a lot more transparency. All the, you know, everything that’s happening is happening on a chain, on a public blockchain. So you can actually go analyze it. So like he looks at all these metrics that are like um you know, it’s he won’t just look at the price, for example. There’s things like what is the actual average buy-in price? Because it’s one thing for the price to go up or for people to like not be selling because they bought it in 2013 and they you know, their cost basis was like $5 and your cost basis now is $50,000. So it looks like, what the actual price people buying in? What is the average price people bought in for? And that tells you like if it’s low versus the actual price, you’re like, “Okay, um you know, it’s mostly, you know, it’s mostly just like same coins in old hands.” Versus if it’s higher, you realize that people are buying in at the current price levels and that’s pulling the average up. Um and so there’s there’s a whole bunch of things like that like um coin age, like um are old coins moving? Meaning like if OG believers start selling, that’s kind of a signal like it’s like when a CEO starts selling their stock. It’s like, “Wait, why are you selling your stock? That doesn’t seem quite right.” Um what’s the reason? And so like when a bunch of old hands start selling, that’s actually a signal that comes before the price changes. It may it may not even affect the price yet, but it’s an indicator of something to come. Damn, that’s badass. All right, let me give you one. Um Rohin Dwaar. I actually don’t know how to spell Rohin’s last name or say Rohin’s last name. It’s D H A R. So this guy uh founded this company called Priceonomics. You remember Priceonomics? Yes, I’ve followed this guy. This guy’s good. Okay, so he’s interesting. Priceonomics was interesting. We actually recruited a bunch of people from there and I love that company. I don’t know if it’s really around anymore, but it’s just a blog. But his new like started as a side hustle. Now it’s kind of like a full-time thing and I actually showed you two examples. Even Suli is commenting on it. And this guy, he owns, I think 12 or 10 or eight, somewhere in that 8 to 12 range. He owns eight single-family homes uh in New Mexico, in California, Hawaii, wherever. Um and you can go and look and he’ll kind of show you where they are and he’ll show pictures of them and he rents them out on Airbnb. And sometimes when his kids are on vacation or not in school, he’ll go and stay in his homes. And he reveals all of the numbers and all of the updates. So on December 6th, he tweeted, “These are my monthly mortgage payments on each of the homes in my small uh portfolio vacation rentals.” Uh another one is he’ll say like, “You know, currently we’re seeing this type of occupancy rate and we actually just added a surfboard to our house in Hawaii and we noticed that we could get more money for it.” or something like that. And he takes screenshots and he shows all of the revenue that he’s making as well as how much money things have cost uh cost him to buy. And he’ll even do things like recently he posted a couple listings. He’s like, “I think I could turn this into an Airbnb.” And he’ll just like link to the Redfin house listing and he’s like, “I think I can get these numbers.” So it’s actually really cool to see him in real time make it all happen. Yeah, I like this. This is awesome. Uh I didn’t realize that he was doing this. This is it’s kind of new. Uh he’s been at it for a while. He’s been at it for now his new stick is He’s been doing it for six years, but I don’t think he was I don’t think he was as public about it before. He wasn’t as public about it. He was not as public about it, but now he’s like all in on it and it’s so fun. Uh it’s a really fun handle to follow because sometimes his properties are like a quarter of a million and he puts down 20%. So he puts down or sometimes even less, I think. So he’ll put down like $40 or $50,000 on these properties and that’s pretty attainable for a lot of people. And so it’s kind of interesting. Right. Um okay, I have a Okay, let’s do a couple funny ones. Um Okay, have you heard of this account, James Friedman? It’s F Jamie 013. Uh was it on this list? No. So what is it? James Friedman? F James Friedman or I don’t know, maybe it’s Friedman, but it’s F R I D M A N. Uh no. Who who what what’s this? Okay, so uh so he is uh he’s got two million followers, so he’s definitely popular. He’s the Photoshop guy. So basically, people will Photoshop like, uh, “Hey James, my boyfriend’s wearing this Calvin Klein foot the same Calvin Klein t-shirt in every um in every photo that we I take with him. Can you just remove the the logo of Calvin Klein?” And then like he he does he does the request, but he doesn’t he’s not actually just photoshopping it. He makes it hilarious. So like this is very visual, so you know, you need like YouTube to be able to see what I’m saying here, but like he photoshopped the the this guy’s wearing Calvin Klein shirt of like it you know, just says across the chest Calvin Klein jeans. And uh so he like photoshopped it with that ripped off. So that little section ripped off. Now you can just see his chest and uh and so it’s like fucks it actually like fucks up the photo. It doesn’t make it good like the girl wants. And it says Calvin Klein tattooed on his chest now instead of on the shirt. Um and so it’s like uh like people will just be like, you know, um you know, we here’s my wedding photo, uh but we forgot to wear a mask during our wedding photos. Can you Photoshop a mask on instead of photoshopping a COVID mask, he’ll put like, you know, the green mask from Jim Carrey’s like the mask on their face. So it’s just like people request it and then he does the like he does the request, but he does it wrong in a way that they’re not happy with. Um they’ll be like, you know, my my arms look too big here and then he’ll make them like absurdly tiny or whatever. And so it’s just hilarious. He’s got two million followers. He’s like I look funny with one arm and then so he just or uh you can’t see my other arm, so it looks funny with just one arm. And so he just deletes the the the second arm, so the person is armless. Yeah, exactly. Uh and I think he has like a book or something like called the Joy of Photoshop. It’s it says uh asking the wrong guy for help. This is awesome. This is cool. I’ve never seen this. I’m going to follow him. Uh you want to go do a a few more quick funny ones? Uh yeah, let’s do another one. Uh we have a friend Nikita Beer. He’s pretty funny in like the tech world. Um what do you think of his account? Hilarious. He’s a shit head. Yeah, he’s I’m actually amazed that he does some of the stuff that he does and that’s why I like him. Well, it’s kind of like the Donald Trump rule, right? Which is like you say one offensive or weird thing, um you know, you’re canceled, but you say all offensive and weird things, uh you get like, you know, you get the pass. How did he get away with so much? That’s the that’s the key is like if every post makes fun of something, that’s cool. If if only one does, then you’re an asshole. All of his stuff is making fun of something. So I think it’s a great follow. And his profile picture is hilarious. Yeah, his profile picture is uh is good. Um all right, you want to do one more? Um Yeah, okay, I like this one. I don’t know if you know this guy. I don’t think you do. I don’t know if you’d be interested in him. His name is Harala Bob. What’s he do? So Harala Bob’s story is kind of crazy. Is this a crypto guy? So he’s he’s actually he’s transitioned from being the the the one thing guy to the next thing guy to the next thing guy. Okay, so he started off he got famous because he was a big sports better. And he famously one year, and I think the year 2000, like just absolutely raked it in in Vegas because he found an arbitrage uh that he could bet on and he just like milked it. And uh he realized that like I think it was something he had he’s had a few of these where he basically finds he would find inefficiencies in the sports betting market and that’s how he made like millions of dollars. So he found like one year that what they would do is um let’s say that that they would have an over under, a total points for a game. And let’s say it’s 200 points for the game. Now, Vegas is like weirdly accurate with over unders. Like they will get it like so spot on. It’ll come down to like the last possession and like it’ll flip over or under. So they’re very good at doing that. That doesn’t seem like there’s much of inefficiency there. But like in basketball, what happens is that the first half of basketball, you just play and then you go to halftime. But at the end of the game, there’s often this situation where the losing team will start fouling the winning team to like stop the clock, make them shoot free throws and then try to like they’re trying to make threes while the other team can only shoot two free throws at a time. So what it led to was that the second half had more points than the first half. But Vegas had this small bet called the they would take the over under and it would say, you can bet the first half over under and it was just dividing it by two. So it’s like dividing the total by two. So the total was always really accurate, but the first half over under was underpriced. It was like too frequently to uh too high. So he was just betting the under. So he’d find these like little inefficiencies or he’d find certain refs are really foul prone. And so he would know that, okay, when that ref is reffing this game, that team is going to score more than their normal average. And so he would just bet for a whole season on just the refs. And he actually un I think he figured out before the NBA uncovered that that ref Tim Donaghy was like cheating basically because like there was always weird shit happening on that guy’s games. Uh and so he and so he I’m paraphrasing because he doesn’t like totally out his whole strategy, but like he’s talking about it before. Like he’s talking about when um when Clean Tech was big and the government was giving money to this I think it’s called Solyndra or something like that. And he came out and he said, the same thing happened with Enron where it was like five weeks before it went under, they were like, not just saying everything’s going to be okay, they were saying everything’s better than ever. And he and Elon came out and was sort of like, “What do you want people to say?” He’s like, “You know, it is in the incentive of somebody, of the captain of that ship to go down with the ship and the whole time be saying, ‘Oh, we’re so close to our destination.’” Basically, he was like, “They’re never going to come out and say, ‘Yeah, we don’t know, we might not make it.’” Because then that will guarantee you don’t make it because people will sell the stock. It’ll put so much negative pressure on the company, it’ll hurt the morale inside the company. And so you can’t ever come out and say, “I don’t know, we might not make it.” So you always have to say, “Make it. Of course we’re going to make it. We’re thriving.” And like, you just hope it actually comes true. He said something to that effect in an interview once I read and I was like, I feel like he’s describing what actually was going on inside Tesla. That’s amazing. And so anyways, the long story short was I didn’t believe it, didn’t believe it, didn’t believe it. I was sort of like reading it, but I didn’t pull the trigger. And then Josh Wolf, this guy is a very, very smart guy, successful VC, not an anonymous Twitter egg account who’s like just shorting the stock and trying to like spread fear. Um, he was really shitting on it consistently for the course of a year. And at some point, I was like, “You know, what will I regret more? Selling the stock now and taking my profit if I’m wrong, or seeing all these signals and not like going with what seems to be a mounting amount of evidence?” How much did you buy? Guess what? I was wrong. Tesla becomes a Elon becomes the richest man in the world. Tesla becomes a $600 billion company. I bought it at a $6 billion valuation or something crazy like that. And so, you know, I missed out on a 50 to 100X uh, you know, somewhere along the way. And uh and so yeah, I do regret. I actually turned out to be wrong. I I would have regretted more this scenario happening, but it seemed improbable. Wait, so you bought 100 grand worth of Tesla stock? I didn’t buy 100 grand. I think I bought like I don’t know. I don’t even know what it was. It wasn’t 100. I don’t think that’s that’s not what I was buying back then because this was like I I was like 23 years old or something at the time. It it was a long time ago. And basically, I think I had bought like 30 or 40 grand of the stock at a certain price. And I because I remember doing the math and thinking, “Okay, they’re valued at like 5 or 6 billion now. What is Ford and GM valued at?” Okay, they’re valued at 25 billion. Okay, on one hand, that seems crazy that they’re only five times less when they deliver like 200 times less cars. But I was like, “I really think like the cars are going to go electric, that these old fucks are never going to switch.” And he’s got this like vertically integrated it’s like actually a battery and energy company. It’s not even a car company. And this was before self-driving. So I was like, “That’s a good pick.” So it was a good pick. I mean, yeah, but you know, you if you get it wrong, you get it wrong. So I got my face. And by the way, on this note of the the pessimist archive, I saw this YouTube video that was um I don’t know if you heard about this. A few years ago, Elon Musk negotiated a very unique compensation package. Do you know about this? Uh yeah, basically he gets some crazy bonuses if some crazy goals happened. Yeah, so he had he had set up this thing where he gets absolutely it’s his entire compensation was tied to the um the market cap of Tesla. And like it was at 50 billion, I think at the time when he had done it. And um it was like every 50 billion dollars increments, he was going to get more. And so it was like at a if I get us to 100 billion, then I get X. I get I I think he would get uh like 1% or 2% more of the company each time. I I I I should have I don’t know we’re going to talk about this. I could have mapped it out. But basically, he was going to get a percentage more of the company for every 50 billion they go up in market cap as they also have to hit certain um like revenue and earnings uh at that time. And he had no guaranteed income. So basically, if Tesla just went from 50 to 99 billion, he would get zero during that time. Oh my god. And he had five years to do it and the top of the compensation plan was if they became a $600 billion company, then he was going to become like he was going to get this like he would own like 10% of whatever he would own some ridiculous amount that would be unlocked for him and he would be essentially the richest man in the world. And there’s all these there’s this clip of uh uh what’s his name? Andrew Sorkin or whatever his name is, the guy on CNBC, Fast Money or whatever. Um of them to they’re outlining the plan and they’re laughing. They’re just laughing at him. They’re like, I don’t even know why they included these tiers. Like, for Tesla to get that would be I mean, there’s no way. And they’re all laughing. They’re like, there’s no chance. And they’re like, this is such a weird thing. Why did he do this? And they’re like, basically laughing at him and saying how outrageous the top end of it was where it just made no sense. It’s like, well, to do that, Tesla would need to become like the fifth most valuable company in the world or third most valuable company in the world. And they’re like, that’s ridiculous, but I guess, you know, aim high, I guess. He gets no guaranteed compensation of any time of any kind at all. He gets no salary, cash bonus, equity. Uh he only gets equity that that vests over time, but only if he reaches uh these hurdle rates which are, dare I say, crazy. So right now the company is worth $59 billion. Mhm. They run it $50 billion increments. So if he gets the company to $100 billion Wait, you’re just talking market capitalization, not based on revenue, not based on the number of production. So there’s there’s going to be there’s going to be two metrics at each step. So the first step is he has to get the company to $100 billion and reach these operational and adjusted EBITDA and revenue number. If he doesn’t get either of them, he gets nothing. That’s kind of a weird way to break it down based on market capitalization. If he gets to 150 and has to hit the operational numbers. But I mean the market can be irrational. So can’t control that. At each 50 At each $50 billion number, he collects 1% of the company. If somehow, magically, he would get the company to $650 billion, which is literally what the plan calls for, if you can believe this, uh he would collect the equivalent of about $55 billion in compensation. Otherwise, he gets absolutely nothing. Okay, what if you get it to $650 billion and then it immediately And then sure enough, he he’s like I think he just hit it or he’s about to hit that that last final thing and sure enough he’s the richest man in the world now. That’s badass. I want to Bet on yourself. I I need to go back Well, if you’re him. Um All right. I’m going to tell you a a handle that would have helped you. So, you know who Ryan Holiday is, definitely, right? Yes. Uh Ryan Holiday is an author, just kind of like a personality, but mostly an author and he does stoicism stuff. And I included him, but I’m going to actually tell you the one you should follow. So, I like Ryan Holiday because he’s got these things that are not business-related but help me in business and help me in life. And so he’s got five lessons from Seneca. Seneca was a Is he Greek? I actually don’t know what he was. Uh he was a philosopher. Uh and so they are we suffer What was he? I think he was Greek. I didn’t look it up. He was Roman, Ben. Thank you. Uh we suffer more in imagination or five stoic lessons from Seneca. We suffer more in imagination than in reality. Associate only with people who improve you. The greatest remedy for anger, this is the best one. The greatest remedy for anger is delay. Nice. Value your time more than your possessions and death is not in the distant future. We are dying every day. And he’s got these amazing things that I love. But he’s got this other Twitter handle called The Daily Stoic. I love The Daily Stoic and they just like tweet out all these like interesting stoicism tidbits. That’s his, right? It’s his brand? It’s his. And it’s incredibly useful. This stuff is like it’s one of the stoicism is one of the few philosophies that’s like actively um it’s practical and you can use on a daily basis. And so I like following this account. It reminds me to do certain things. So Okay, so so correct me if I’m wrong. So uh I had heard about stoicism from Ryan Holiday, Tim Ferris, bunch of others. So I go, I buy Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. I sit down, I start to read it and I’m I’m sort of just trying to understand what the heck is this philosophy. And there were some things I thought were really cool. Like the tweet like that tweet you just read out, those five principles, like that resonates with me. But there was like a part of it which was sort of like feel neither the highs nor the low. It seemed almost like a philoso and I think I’m wrong, so I want you to correct me. It seemed like a philosophy which was sort of like feel nothing. Yeah. And I think that your almost right. And feel nothing doesn’t seem very fun. Why do I why do I want to feel nothing? So tell me that. So that’s my big That’s my actually a really good criticism in my opinion of stoicism and it’s my criticism of stoicism, which is a lack of joy. And a lot of stoics, this is me steel arm steel manning by the way. A lot of stoics will say, um, no, like there’s joy. Like if you read it differently, there’s room for joy or they never say you can’t have joy. And they’re not wrong, but oftentimes it’s how to deal with pain and misery. And the idea is basically you accept the fact that you’re going to come into contact with a bunch of idiots all day who are going to want to hurt you and steal from you, but that’s okay, just accept it. You do like a negative visualization, right? You like imagine things going wrong, which again, just feels very not so fun for me and not the way I have not not that’s not a formula that’s worked for me. In fact, the exact opposite has worked for me. That formula has worked for me actually. So what I do is like, all right, today I’ve got cancer. I can’t get out of bed because I’m like That’s harsh. You do this every day? I do it a lot. Or I’ll be I’ll be like, “Look, like like if I’m feeling sad, I’ll be like, my I just got my leg cut off. Like I can’t walk. I wish I could go run sports.” And then I’ll be like, “Wait a minute, I have both legs. I’m don’t feel sick. Let’s go celebrate and exercise.” Or you know what I mean? Or like, you know, I’m happy my dog is not dead. And I’ll go and it makes me appreciate him. Yeah, it’s called negative visualization. I think it’s incredibly useful. There’s a this is this is to me, so I I will disagree with this. There’s a this to me is the argument of, well, there’s kids starving in Africa. Like in any given moment, you could just sort of remember, oh, there’s kids starving in Africa. There’s kids starving in Africa. Oh, my boyfriend broke up with me. Well, at least I’m not a kid starving in Africa. And um and I I get the utility of it. I’ve used it myself. But in my experience, I’ve learned that it’s a bit of a roundabout way to a destination of gratitude and like you don’t have to go to feeling the stress and the pain and the suffering of bad in order to feel the gratefulness around the good. And so I found it I guess my personal experience has been, I think it’s a roundabout way to gratitude and like, I might as well just go straight to gratitude. Don’t need to uh don’t need to think about all the bad things. But think about all the bad things that could happen and go there. It’s it’s not been useful for me. I remember like when I get a sore throat, I always feel this way and when I get like a toothache, I’m like, “I wish I could go back to the days where my tooth didn’t hurt.” Like if you’re at like a toothache is like the most pain you could be in. Or sometimes. And I’m like, I like I I you’re like, “I I don’t remember like sometimes my if I All the women who have given birth are like, “What the fuck is this guy talking about?” Well, yeah, but like a toothache is the worst pain you could feel. Or like a like in my like whenever I get earaches and toothaches, I’m like, you know, it’s like it’s like this internal pain. It’s like I can’t make the pain stop and I just have to deal with it until I have an appointment in three days. And then you get like two days in and you’re like, “I don’t remember what it felt like to not feel this pain.” And so I got into the habit. I’d be like, “I would be so thankful if I could if my throat didn’t hurt today and I could just swallow food. That would make me so happy.” And days when I don’t, I’m not sick, I try to think back. I’m like, “This is exactly what I wanted. I wanted to feel happy that I’m not sick today.” And so I I think about that stuff all the time. So anyway, Ryan Holiday and The Daily Stoic is a good follow. You’re up. All right. Um by the way, I know we didn’t do stoicism justice for people who are like diehards. Sorry. Uh people should look I don’t think it is no emotions. I think it’s like more subtle than that, but But that’s a really good I think your criticism is great, which is like I think it’s what a lot of people run into when they get excited and then they’re like, “Wait, but wait, is this what I want?” Yeah, it’s like where’s the room for fart jokes? You know what I mean? I’m going to give you two niche experts. They’re in different niches, but I like them. Okay, so uh I should link their accounts here for you to Uh this first guy, I don’t know exactly how you say his name. His name is Aviral Bhatnagar. Uh and I’m going to link you his Twitter. It’s Aviral Bot and uh I’m going to put it uh where do I put it? I put it on the sheet that we have. Okay, you got it. So this guy Aviral Aviral Bhatnagar, he is a venture capitalist in India and his blog is ajuniorvc.com. This guy puts out really, really high signal stuff around what’s going on in India. Um like for example, he has a tweet that he put out yesterday or that that was, “India now exports more software, 133 billion, than Saudi Arabia exports oil, 113 billion.” We are the India is the largest engineering population in the in the world. Uh what an amazing story that’s come come out over the last 40 years. How’d you find this guy? This is the best this one’s the best one in the This is the most helpful one on the list. Yeah, and so like I I do a lot of investing in Indian startups and I was like, “Okay, if I’m going to invest in these startups, I’m not on the ground. I’m not the like local domain expert.” So what did I do? I invested in a fund. I became an investor in somebody else’s fund that’s India focused. And I was like, “Okay, cool. I’m going to get insights from him and I can bounce any deal off him to see if he wants to participate and maybe he has a local view that I don’t understand.” And then this was another guy that I thought was really smart. So I wanted to find who I wanted to basically see who’s the thought leader in that space and then how do I subscribe to them. And so his um you know, his like blog, I think has 50,000 subscribers now. So he’s not like, you know, a no-name. Uh but he’s very niche and he talks about kind of like the Indian tech scene and what’s going on, you know, at a macro level, whatever. So I found this guy to be I think he’s doing a really good job of content creation. So I’m going to pick this guy in one niche. Is there Is there such a thing as this for China? Uh I’m sure there is. Actually, this is this is a good idea. I should just um like find this person for like Latam, for Europe, you know, for different parts of Europe, uh for for India, for China, and for Australia maybe. Um and if there is none, be this guy. This guy, there’s a valuable position to become. Super valuable. There’s this guy named Bill Bishop, I think his name is. Bill Bishop had a newsletter uh called Sinism, I think it’s called. You know what I’m talking about? No. Um Sinocism. I don’t know what that means. Uh Sinocism. Um S I N O C I S M. For a long time, he was the most popular guy on Substack and his entire newsletter is it’s called Get Smarter About China and he just tells you about the business of China and you can see all like the latest trends coming out of China. It would be really This is a great arbitrage to do, by the way. If you uh instead of trying to compete in the same pond as everybody else, like go provide a really useful bridge into one specific market or one specific uh geography. Um like I I I’ve told the story before, I think, but like one of the most influential people in my life was this teacher named Lisa Keister at Duke University. And she taught this class called Getting Rich. And her story was she graduated That was the name of the class? The name of the class, yeah. Did everyone take that? It was the it was one of the hardest classes to get into because it was a great name, great title, right? So you already know this person is not just like every other professor. Like she understands like her customer, her market. The second thing was it was she was the highest rated professor on like ratemyprofessor.com and she had a chili pepper next to her name, so she was like hot, too. It was like, oh, it was everything. So I I wake up at 5:00 in the morning, we go to the library to get on the high-speed internet connection and as soon as the course listings open up, we like jumped on it and we got into this class. And I go in and she was she tells her story. She goes, “Actually, I was a student at Duke 10 years ago or 11 years ago, whatever it was.” She goes, “I graduated with a degree in Mandarin because that’s just what was interesting to me.” And at the time, everybody was making fun of me. Actually, she was older than this now, but she had started teaching back when she was like 32 or something. Now she might be 42 or 50 or something like that. But she goes, “I graduated with this degree. All my like friends were like, ‘Good luck with that. You know, how’s that Mandarin degree going to going to help you out, get a job here because I’m a I’m going to go to med school. I’m going to be a lawyer. I’m going to be a consultant. Like, what are you going to do with that Chinese degree?’” And she’s like, “Well, I bet I can get a job in China.” And they’re like, “What?” And so she bought a one-way ticket, just goes to China and she just starts waving her hand. She’s like, “Hey, people in China, like, I know English, I know companies in the West, um and I would love to learn about you and then I’ll be a bridge.” And she became a bridge basically between companies in China and companies in America. If an American company wanted to do business in China, they would do it through her because she like could translate the not just literally the language, but like she knew who to talk to. She became like the local expert there. She and this like to me, this guy on Twitter, he’s my bridge into knowing what’s going on in the scene in India. And so she what her story was, she made a killing doing that because it was really valuable. Companies in China really wanted to do business with the companies in the West. Then she invested all of it in the tech in the tech stock market because she’s like, “No, I can sell tech companies are the ones that are doing well.” So she and then right before the bubble burst, she pulled it all out to be like, “Oh, I want to do real estate now.” And she like just timed it perfectly accidentally. Invested all in real estate from 2000 to 2008, right before the real estate crash happened, she took it out again because she just wanted to do something else with her life. And basically by 32 was retired and like, you know, uh was like, “What do I want to do? I want to go teach and teach kids what I wish I knew back then.” How wealthy is she got? Uh I think she made like, you know, a few million dollars at least and like, you know, probably like five, $7 million and like um, you know, she she lives in in in Durham and she teaches at the school. I mean, I have no idea how much she has. So what was the class about? Totally I’m totally guessing. So the class was basically it was, you know, like Rameet Sethi, it was like personal finance, which is actually like you probably need she wanted to teach what she wish she learned when she was in school. So she’s like, “I wish they taught you about how to manage money.” So she would show us like the power of compound interest over time, like why you should save early and versus saving more money when you’re 30 versus saving even a little bit of money when you’re 20. And then like, what is a mortgage and like how does that work? And like then so and then every other class she would just invite in someone who made it, like someone who’s successful financially, but doing a completely different thing, just to expose you to like, look, there’s like 50 paths. Dude, this is it’s like this podcast pretty much. Yeah, one would be this girl who started a t-shirt company licensing university logos and she would tell her story. Then she she got Jamie Dimon on the phone and like Jamie Dimon is like, you know, the head of whatever Morgan Stanley or something or whatever. Uh and like then then she had this hedge fund guy from San Francisco come out and he’s like, “Yeah, I here’s what I He’s like, he surveyed the room. He goes, “Do you guys use uh Microsoft or Apple products?” And they’re and people are answering. He goes, uh he asked like three questions and we were like, “Why did you ask that?” He goes, “Because then I’m only going to make one decision this year and it’s whether to invest like hundreds of millions of dollars into Apple or not.” And um and he’s like, “So all I’m doing is I’m just trying to figure out what is the right decision on that.” And I was like, “Whoa.” That’s a job? That’s epic. And he he had said in his when he was in the class, he goes, “By the way, uh all you guys are going to just have the same resume. He goes, “You’re all trying to do the same thing. You’re all trying to get grades and then like these internships. He’s like, “So the first three-fourths of your resume, think about it. It’s going to look the same as everybody else in this room. Like I’m not really going to be able to tell the difference. He goes, “The only thing that’s going to differentiate any of you is that bottom section where it’s called other, like other interests. He’s like, “So at this school, everybody’s going to teach you to like work on that top three-fourths of the resume. In reality, you should be working on the bottom the bottom one-fourth of that resume because that’s what guys like me look at. Everybody’s got a degree. Everybody’s got good grades. Everybody went to a good school. I’ve never Wait, have I told you about the bottom fourth of the resume? No, what is that? That’s so funny that you you even use that fraction. I always tell my when when I own the company, I would say, “I just care about the bottom fourth.” I’d always say, “Just tell me this.” Wow. And I would always say that and I’d be like, “One of the greatest People would ask me, “How do you find good writers?” I was like, “Well, here’s one really easy way. Ask them about the bottom fourth.” And they go, “What do you mean?” I was like, “Well, just it doesn’t matter what they studied in school. Ask them, um, okay, so you majored in philosophy. What was your favorite uh philosophy class or favorite philosophy teacher?” And if they can’t tell me a story about something that they spent four years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on, then they’re just not going to be a good writer because they’re not interesting enough. Right. And so I would always ask about the bottom fourth of the resume for all types of roles because I’m like, “If you’re just if you can’t entertain me for this conversation, then you just don’t have any passion and I don’t want to be around you.” Right. That’s amazing. Okay, so maybe this becomes one of the the core frameworks. That’s a that you know, one one person saying it, that’s just a dot. Two people saying it, that’s a line. I interviewed uh I got that from uh Gold Brian Goldberg who founded uh Bustle and he has this amazing article and he says, it’s headlined, “Losers exist, stay away from them.” And it’s basically like how to only hire winners. It’s from Pando from years and years ago and he’s a brilliant writer, but he doesn’t write anymore because he’s kind of a loose cannon. But it was titled, “Losers exist, how to avoid them.” And it talks about uh one of the best ways to ask about the bottom fourth. And if you’re a you’re a loser if you can’t like be passionate about something that you spent four years studying. Uh no, dude, this article is gone. It’s is it Pando, you know, like Pando died. Let me see if there’s a cash version. There is a cash version. Uh okay, we we’re we’re back in luck. The headline is, “Losers exist. Don’t hire them.” Yeah, awesome. Um okay, let’s do uh let’s do a couple more. I’m going to give a couple quick ones. Uh okay, this other person who I think is a niche expert is this guy Willie Woo. Do you follow him? No, I’m looking him up now. I’m following all these people. The the Indian guy is the best one so far, but let’s look at Willie Woo. Yeah, I don’t think you’ll like this one because it’s very crypto specific, but this guy Willie Woo is I think the leading crypto analyst. And um you know, in most things like these people who analyze charts and stuff like that, they’re like it’s a little bit like horoscopy. They’re like, “Oh, look, the trend is going this way and like if you draw this T-shape, it’s going to be the iron cross pattern.” And like, you know, so buy, buy, buy. And um in crypto, there’s one unique thing which is that all the data is there’s a lot more transparency. All the, you know, everything that’s happening is happening on a chain, on a public blockchain. So you can actually go analyze it. So like he looks at all these metrics that are like um you know, it’s he won’t just look at the price, for example. There’s things like what is the actual average buy-in price? Because it’s one thing for the price to go up or for people to like not be selling because they bought it in 2013 and they you know, their cost basis was like $5 and your cost basis now is $50,000. So it looks like, what the actual price people buying in? What is the average price people bought in for? And that tells you like if it’s low versus the actual price, you’re like, “Okay, um you know, it’s mostly, you know, it’s mostly just like same coins in old hands.” Versus if it’s higher, you realize that people are buying in at the current price levels and that’s pulling the average up. Um and so there’s there’s a whole bunch of things like that like um coin age, like um are old coins moving? Meaning like if OG believers start selling, that’s kind of a signal like it’s like when a CEO starts selling their stock. It’s like, “Wait, why are you selling your stock? That doesn’t seem quite right.” Um what’s the reason? And so like when a bunch of old hands start selling, that’s actually a signal that comes before the price changes. It may it may not even affect the price yet, but it’s an indicator of something to come. Damn, that’s badass. All right, let me give you one. Um Rohin Dwaar. I actually don’t know how to spell Rohin’s last name or say Rohin’s last name. It’s D H A R. So this guy uh founded this company called Priceonomics. You remember Priceonomics? Yes, I’ve followed this guy. This guy’s good. Okay, so he’s interesting. Priceonomics was interesting. We actually recruited a bunch of people from there and I love that company. I don’t know if it’s really around anymore, but it’s just a blog. But his new like started as a side hustle. Now it’s kind of like a full-time thing and I actually showed you two examples. Even Suli is commenting on it. And this guy, he owns, I think 12 or 10 or eight, somewhere in that 8 to 12 range. He owns eight single-family homes uh in New Mexico, in California, Hawaii, wherever. Um and you can go and look and he’ll kind of show you where they are and he’ll show pictures of them and he rents them out on Airbnb. And sometimes when his kids are on vacation or not in school, he’ll go and stay in his homes. And he reveals all of the numbers and all of the updates. So on December 6th, he tweeted, “These are my monthly mortgage payments on each of the homes in my small uh portfolio vacation rentals.” Uh another one is he’ll say like, “You know, currently we’re seeing this type of occupancy rate and we actually just added a surfboard to our house in Hawaii and we noticed that we could get more money for it.” or something like that. And he takes screenshots and he shows all of the revenue that he’s making as well as how much money things have cost uh cost him to buy. And he’ll even do things like recently he posted a couple listings. He’s like, “I think I could turn this into an Airbnb.” And he’ll just like link to the Redfin house listing and he’s like, “I think I can get these numbers.” So it’s actually really cool to see him in real time make it all happen. Yeah, I like this. This is awesome. Uh I didn’t realize that he was doing this. This is it’s kind of new. Uh he’s been at it for a while. He’s been at it for now his new stick is He’s been doing it for six years, but I don’t think he was I don’t think he was as public about it before. He wasn’t as public about it. He was not as public about it, but now he’s like all in on it and it’s so fun. Uh it’s a really fun handle to follow because sometimes his properties are like a quarter of a million and he puts down 20%. So he puts down or sometimes even less, I think. So he’ll put down like $40 or $50,000 on these properties and that’s pretty attainable for a lot of people. And so it’s kind of interesting. Right. Um okay, I have a Okay, let’s do a couple funny ones. Um Okay, have you heard of this account, James Friedman? It’s F Jamie 013. Uh was it on this list? No. So what is it? James Friedman? F James Friedman or I don’t know, maybe it’s Friedman, but it’s F R I D M A N. Uh no. Who who what what’s this? Okay, so uh so he is uh he’s got two million followers, so he’s definitely popular. He’s the Photoshop guy. So basically, people will Photoshop like, uh, “Hey James, my boyfriend’s wearing this Calvin Klein foot the same Calvin Klein t-shirt in every um in every photo that we I take with him. Can you just remove the the logo of Calvin Klein?” And then like he he does he does the request, but he doesn’t he’s not actually just photoshopping it. He makes it hilarious. So like this is very visual, so you know, you need like YouTube to be able to see what I’m saying here, but like he photoshopped the the this guy’s wearing Calvin Klein shirt of like it you know, just says across the chest Calvin Klein jeans. And uh so he like photoshopped it with that ripped off. So that little section ripped off. Now you can just see his chest and uh and so it’s like fucks it actually like fucks up the photo. It doesn’t make it good like the girl wants. And it says Calvin Klein tattooed on his chest now instead of on the shirt. Um and so it’s like uh like people will just be like, you know, um you know, we here’s my wedding photo, uh but we forgot to wear a mask during our wedding photos. Can you Photoshop a mask on instead of photoshopping a COVID mask, he’ll put like, you know, the green mask from Jim Carrey’s like the mask on their face. So it’s just like people request it and then he does the like he does the request, but he does it wrong in a way that they’re not happy with. Um they’ll be like, you know, my my arms look too big here and then he’ll make them like absurdly tiny or whatever. And so it’s just hilarious. He’s got two million followers. He’s like I look funny with one arm and then so he just or uh you can’t see my other arm, so it looks funny with just one arm. And so he just deletes the the the second arm, so the person is armless. Yeah, exactly. Uh and I think he has like a book or something like called the Joy of Photoshop. It’s it says uh asking the wrong guy for help. This is awesome. This is cool. I’ve never seen this. I’m going to follow him. Uh you want to go do a a few more quick funny ones? Uh yeah, let’s do another one. Uh we have a friend Nikita Beer. He’s pretty funny in like the tech world. Um what do you think of his account? Hilarious. He’s a shit head. Yeah, he’s I’m actually amazed that he does some of the stuff that he does and that’s why I like him. Well, it’s kind of like the Donald Trump rule, right? Which is like you say one offensive or weird thing, um you know, you’re canceled, but you say all offensive and weird things, uh you get like, you know, you get the pass. How did he get away with so much? That’s the that’s the key is like if every post makes fun of something, that’s cool. If if only one does, then you’re an asshole. All of his stuff is making fun of something. So I think it’s a great follow. And his profile picture is hilarious. Yeah, his profile picture is uh is good. Um all right, you want to do one more? Um Yeah, okay, I like this one. I don’t know if you know this guy. I don’t think you do. I don’t know if you’d be interested in him. His name is Harala Bob. What’s he do? So Harala Bob’s story is kind of crazy. Is this a crypto guy? So he’s he’s actually he’s transitioned from being the the the one thing guy to the next thing guy to the next thing guy. Okay, so he started off he got famous because he was a big sports better. And he famously one year, and I think the year 2000, like just absolutely raked it in in Vegas because he found an arbitrage uh that he could bet on and he just like milked it. And uh he realized that like I think it was something he had he’s had a few of these where he basically finds he would find inefficiencies in the sports betting market and that’s how he made like millions of dollars. So he found like one year that what they would do is um let’s say that that they would have an over under, a total points for a game. And let’s say it’s 200 points for the game. Now, Vegas is like weirdly accurate with over unders. Like they will get it like so spot on. It’ll come down to like the last possession and like it’ll flip over or under. So they’re very good at doing that. That doesn’t seem like there’s much of inefficiency there. But like in basketball, what happens is that the first half of basketball, you just play and then you go to halftime. But at the end of the game, there’s often this situation where the losing team will start fouling the winning team to like stop the clock, make them shoot free throws and then try to like they’re trying to make threes while the other team can only shoot two free throws at a time. So what it led to was that the second half had more points than the first half. But Vegas had this small bet called the they would take the over under and it would say, you can bet the first half over under and it was just dividing it by two. So it’s like dividing the total by two. So the total was always really accurate, but the first half over under was underpriced. It was like too frequently to uh too high. So he was just betting the under. So he’d find these like little inefficiencies or he’d find certain refs are really foul prone. And so he would know that, okay, when that ref is reffing this game, that team is going to score more than their normal average. And so he would just bet for a whole season on just the refs. And he actually un I think he figured out before the NBA uncovered that that ref Tim Donaghy was like cheating basically because like there was always weird shit happening on that guy’s games. Uh and so he and so he I’m paraphrasing because he doesn’t like totally out his whole strategy, but like he’s talking about it before. Like he’s talking about when um when Clean Tech was big and the government was giving money to this I think it’s called Solyndra or something like that. And he came out and he said, the same thing happened with Enron where it was like five weeks before it went under, they were like, not just saying everything’s going to be okay, they were saying everything’s better than ever. And he and Elon came out and was sort of like, “What do you want people to say?” He’s like, “You know, it is in the incentive of somebody, of the captain of that ship to go down with the ship and the whole time be saying, ‘Oh, we’re so close to our destination.’” Basically, he was like, “They’re never going to come out and say, ‘Yeah, we don’t know, we might not make it.’” Because then that will guarantee you don’t make it because people will sell the stock. It’ll put so much negative pressure on the company, it’ll hurt the morale inside the company. And so you can’t ever come out and say, “I don’t know, we might not make it.” So you always have to say, “Make it. Of course we’re going to make it. We’re thriving.” And like, you just hope it actually comes true. He said something to that effect in an interview once I read and I was like, I feel like he’s describing what actually was going on inside Tesla. That’s amazing. And so anyways, the long story short was I didn’t believe it, didn’t believe it, didn’t believe it. I was sort of like reading it, but I didn’t pull the trigger. And then Josh Wolf, this guy is a very, very smart guy, successful VC, not an anonymous Twitter egg account who’s like just shorting the stock and trying to like spread fear. Um, he was really shitting on it consistently for the course of a year. And at some point, I was like, “You know, what will I regret more? Selling the stock now and taking my profit if I’m wrong, or seeing all these signals and not like going with what seems to be a mounting amount of evidence?” How much did you buy? Guess what? I was wrong. Tesla becomes a Elon becomes the richest man in the world. Tesla becomes a $600 billion company. I bought it at a $6 billion valuation or something crazy like that. And so, you know, I missed out on a 50 to 100X uh, you know, somewhere along the way. And uh and so yeah, I do regret. I actually turned out to be wrong. I I would have regretted more this scenario happening, but it seemed improbable. Wait, so you bought 100 grand worth of Tesla stock? I didn’t buy 100 grand. I think I bought like I don’t know. I don’t even know what it was. It wasn’t 100. I don’t think that’s that’s not what I was buying back then because this was like I I was like 23 years old or something at the time. It it was a long time ago. And basically, I think I had bought like 30 or 40 grand of the stock at a certain price. And I because I remember doing the math and thinking, “Okay, they’re valued at like 5 or 6 billion now. What is Ford and GM valued at?” Okay, they’re valued at 25 billion. Okay, on one hand, that seems crazy that they’re only five times less when they deliver like 200 times less cars. But I was like, “I really think like the cars are going to go electric, that these old fucks are never going to switch.” And he’s got this like vertically integrated it’s like actually a battery and energy company. It’s not even a car company. And this was before self-driving. So I was like, “That’s a good pick.” So it was a good pick. I mean, yeah, but you know, you if you get it wrong, you get it wrong. So I got my face. And by the way, on this note of the the pessimist archive, I saw this YouTube video that was um I don’t know if you heard about this. A few years ago, Elon Musk negotiated a very unique compensation package. Do you know about this? Uh yeah, basically he gets some crazy bonuses if some crazy goals happened. Yeah, so he had he had set up this thing where he gets absolutely it’s his entire compensation was tied to the um the market cap of Tesla. And like it was at 50 billion, I think at the time when he had done it. And um it was like every 50 billion dollars increments, he was going to get more. And so it was like at a if I get us to 100 billion, then I get X. I get I I think he would get uh like 1% or 2% more of the company each time. I I I I should have I don’t know we’re going to talk about this. I could have mapped it out. But basically, he was going to get a percentage more of the company for every 50 billion they go up in market cap as they also have to hit certain um like revenue and earnings uh at that time. And he had no guaranteed income. So basically, if Tesla just went from 50 to 99 billion, he would get zero during that time. Oh my god. And he had five years to do it and the top of the compensation plan was if they became a $600 billion company, then he was going to become like he was going to get this like he would own like 10% of whatever he would own some ridiculous amount that would be unlocked for him and he would be essentially the richest man in the world. And there’s all these there’s this clip of uh uh what’s his name? Andrew Sorkin or whatever his name is, the guy on CNBC, Fast Money or whatever. Um of them to they’re outlining the plan and they’re laughing. They’re just laughing at him. They’re like, I don’t even know why they included these tiers. Like, for Tesla to get that would be I mean, there’s no way. And they’re all laughing. They’re like, there’s no chance. And they’re like, this is such a weird thing. Why did he do this? And they’re like, basically laughing at him and saying how outrageous the top end of it was where it just made no sense. It’s like, well, to do that, Tesla would need to become like the fifth most valuable company in the world or third most valuable company in the world. And they’re like, that’s ridiculous, but I guess, you know, aim high, I guess. He gets no guaranteed compensation of any time of any kind at all. He gets no salary, cash bonus, equity. Uh he only gets equity that that vests over time, but only if he reaches uh these hurdle rates which are, dare I say, crazy. So right now the company is worth $59 billion. Mhm. They run it $50 billion increments. So if he gets the company to $100 billion Wait, you’re just talking market capitalization, not based on revenue, not based on the number of production. So there’s there’s going to be there’s going to be two metrics at each step. So the first step is he has to get the company to $100 billion and reach these operational and adjusted EBITDA and revenue number. If he doesn’t get either of them, he gets nothing. That’s kind of a weird way to break it down based on market capitalization. If he gets to 150 and has to hit the operational numbers. But I mean the market can be irrational. So can’t control that. At each 50 At each $50 billion number, he collects 1% of the company. If somehow, magically, he would get the company to $650 billion, which is literally what the plan calls for, if you can believe this, uh he would collect the equivalent of about $55 billion in compensation. Otherwise, he gets absolutely nothing. Okay, what if you get it to $650 billion and then it immediately And then sure enough, he he’s like I think he just hit it or he’s about to hit that that last final thing and sure enough he’s the richest man in the world now. That’s badass. I want to Bet on yourself. I I need to go back Well, if you’re him. Um All right. I’m going to tell you a a handle that would have helped you. So, you know who Ryan Holiday is, definitely, right? Yes. Uh Ryan Holiday is an author, just kind of like a personality, but mostly an author and he does stoicism stuff. And I included him, but I’m going to actually tell you the one you should follow. So, I like Ryan Holiday because he’s got these things that are not business-related but help me in business and help me in life. And so he’s got five lessons from Seneca. Seneca was a Is he Greek? I actually don’t know what he was. Uh he was a philosopher. Uh and so they are we suffer What was he? I think he was Greek. I didn’t look it up. He was Roman, Ben. Thank you. Uh we suffer more in imagination or five stoic lessons from Seneca. We suffer more in imagination than in reality. Associate only with people who improve you. The greatest remedy for anger, this is the best one. The greatest remedy for anger is delay. Nice. Value your time more than your possessions and death is not in the distant future. We are dying every day. And he’s got these amazing things that I love. But he’s got this other Twitter handle called The Daily Stoic. I love The Daily Stoic and they just like tweet out all these like interesting stoicism tidbits. That’s his, right? It’s his brand? It’s his. And it’s incredibly useful. This stuff is like it’s one of the stoicism is one of the few philosophies that’s like actively um it’s practical and you can use on a daily basis. And so I like following this account. It reminds me to do certain things. So Okay, so so correct me if I’m wrong. So uh I had heard about stoicism from Ryan Holiday, Tim Ferris, bunch of others. So I go, I buy Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. I sit down, I start to read it and I’m I’m sort of just trying to understand what the heck is this philosophy. And there were some things I thought were really cool. Like the tweet like that tweet you just read out, those five principles, like that resonates with me. But there was like a part of it which was sort of like feel neither the highs nor the low. It seemed almost like a philoso and I think I’m wrong, so I want you to correct me. It seemed like a philosophy which was sort of like feel nothing. Yeah. And I think that your almost right. And feel nothing doesn’t seem very fun. Why do I why do I want to feel nothing? So tell me that. So that’s my big That’s my actually a really good criticism in my opinion of stoicism and it’s my criticism of stoicism, which is a lack of joy. And a lot of stoics, this is me steel arm steel manning by the way. A lot of stoics will say, um, no, like there’s joy. Like if you read it differently, there’s room for joy or they never say you can’t have joy. And they’re not wrong, but oftentimes it’s how to deal with pain and misery. And the idea is basically you accept the fact that you’re going to come into contact with a bunch of idiots all day who are going to want to hurt you and steal from you, but that’s okay, just accept it. You do like a negative visualization, right? You like imagine things going wrong, which again, just feels very not so fun for me and not the way I have not not that’s not a formula that’s worked for me. In fact, the exact opposite has worked for me. That formula has worked for me actually. So what I do is like, all right, today I’ve got cancer. I can’t get out of bed because I’m like That’s harsh. You do this every day? I do it a lot. Or I’ll be I’ll be like, “Look, like like if I’m feeling sad, I’ll be like, my I just got my leg cut off. Like I can’t walk. I wish I could go run sports.” And then I’ll be like, “Wait a minute, I have both legs. I’m don’t feel sick. Let’s go celebrate and exercise.” Or you know what I mean? Or like, you know, I’m happy my dog is not dead. And I’ll go and it makes me appreciate him. Yeah, it’s called negative visualization. I think it’s incredibly useful. There’s a this is this is to me, so I I will disagree with this. There’s a this to me is the argument of, well, there’s kids starving in Africa. Like in any given moment, you could just sort of remember, oh, there’s kids starving in Africa. There’s kids starving in Africa. Oh, my boyfriend broke up with me. Well, at least I’m not a kid starving in Africa. And um and I I get the utility of it. I’ve used it myself. But in my experience, I’ve learned that it’s a bit of a roundabout way to a destination of gratitude and like you don’t have to go to feeling the stress and the pain and the suffering of bad in order to feel the gratefulness around the good. And so I found it I guess my personal experience has been, I think it’s a roundabout way to gratitude and like, I might as well just go straight to gratitude. Don’t need to uh don’t need to think about all the bad things. But think about all the bad things that could happen and go there. It’s it’s not been useful for me. I remember like when I get a sore throat, I always feel this way and when I get like a toothache, I’m like, “I wish I could go back to the days where my tooth didn’t hurt.” Like if you’re at like a toothache is like the most pain you could be in. Or sometimes. And I’m like, I like I I you’re like, “I I don’t remember like sometimes my if I All the women who have given birth are like, “What the fuck is this guy talking about?” Well, yeah, but like a toothache is the worst pain you could feel. Or like a like in my like whenever I get earaches and toothaches, I’m like, you know, it’s like it’s like this internal pain. It’s like I can’t make the pain stop and I just have to deal with it until I have an appointment in three days. And then you get like two days in and you’re like, “I don’t remember what it felt like to not feel this pain.” And so I got into the habit. I’d be like, “I would be so thankful if I could if my throat didn’t hurt today and I could just swallow food. That would make me so happy.” And days when I don’t, I’m not sick, I try to think back. I’m like, “This is exactly what I wanted. I wanted to feel happy that I’m not sick today.” And so I I think about that stuff all the time. So anyway, Ryan Holiday and The Daily Stoic is a good follow. You’re up. All right. Um by the way, I know we didn’t do stoicism justice for people who are like diehards. Sorry. Uh people should look I don’t think it is no emotions. I think it’s like more subtle than that, but But that’s a really good I think your criticism is great, which is like I think it’s what a lot of people run into when they get excited and then they’re like, “Wait, but wait, is this what I want?” Yeah, it’s like where’s the room for fart jokes? You know what I mean? I’m going to give you two niche experts. They’re in different niches, but I like them. Okay, so uh I should link their accounts here for you to Uh this first guy, I don’t know exactly how you say his name. His name is Aviral Bhatnagar. Uh and I’m going to link you his Twitter. It’s Aviral Bot and uh I’m going to put it uh where do I put it? I put it on the sheet that we have. Okay, you got it. So this guy Aviral Aviral Bhatnagar, he is a venture capitalist in India and his blog is ajuniorvc.com. This guy puts out really, really high signal stuff around what’s going on in India. Um like for example, he has a tweet that he put out yesterday or that that was, “India now exports more software, 133 billion, than Saudi Arabia exports oil, 113 billion.” We are the India is the largest engineering population in the in the world. Uh what an amazing story that’s come come out over the last 40 years. How’d you find this guy? This is the best this one’s the best one in the This is the most helpful one on the list. Yeah, and so like I I do a lot of investing in Indian startups and I was like, “Okay, if I’m going to invest in these startups, I’m not on the ground. I’m not the like local domain expert.” So what did I do? I invested in a fund. I became an investor in somebody else’s fund that’s India focused. And I was like, “Okay, cool. I’m going to get insights from him and I can bounce any deal off him to see if he wants to participate and maybe he has a local view that I don’t understand.” And then this was another guy that I thought was really smart. So I wanted to find who I wanted to basically see who’s the thought leader in that space and then how do I subscribe to them. And so his um you know, his like blog, I think has 50,000 subscribers now. So he’s not like, you know, a no-name. Uh but he’s very niche and he talks about kind of like the Indian tech scene and what’s going on, you know, at a macro level, whatever. So I found this guy to be I think he’s doing a really good job of content creation. So I’m going to pick this guy in one niche. Is there Is there such a thing as this for China? Uh I’m sure there is. Actually, this is this is a good idea. I should just um like find this person for like Latam, for Europe, you know, for different parts of Europe, uh for for India, for China, and for Australia maybe. Um and if there is none, be this guy. This guy, there’s a valuable position to become. Super valuable. There’s this guy named Bill Bishop, I think his name is. Bill Bishop had a newsletter uh called Sinism, I think it’s called. You know what I’m talking about? No. Um Sinocism. I don’t know what that means. Uh Sinocism. Um S I N O C I S M. For a long time, he was the most popular guy on Substack and his entire newsletter is it’s called Get Smarter About China and he just tells you about the business of China and you can see all like the latest trends coming out of China. It would be really This is a great arbitrage to do, by the way. If you uh instead of trying to compete in the same pond as everybody else, like go provide a really useful bridge into one specific market or one specific uh geography. Um like I I I’ve told the story before, I think, but like one of the most influential people in my life was this teacher named Lisa Keister at Duke University. And she taught this class called Getting Rich. And her story was she graduated That was the name of the class? The name of the class, yeah. Did everyone take that? It was the it was one of the hardest classes to get into because it was a great name, great title, right? So you already know this person is not just like every other professor. Like she understands like her customer, her market. The second thing was it was she was the highest rated professor on like ratemyprofessor.com and she had a chili pepper next to her name, so she was like hot, too. It was like, oh, it was everything. So I I wake up at 5:00 in the morning, we go to the library to get on the high-speed internet connection and as soon as the course listings open up, we like jumped on it and we got into this class. And I go in and she was she tells her story. She goes, “Actually, I was a student at Duke 10 years ago or 11 years ago, whatever it was.” She goes, “I graduated with a degree in Mandarin because that’s just what was interesting to me.” And at the time, everybody was making fun of me. Actually, she was older than this now, but she had started teaching back when she was like 32 or something. Now she might be 42 or 50 or something like that. But she goes, “I graduated with this degree. All my like friends were like, ‘Good luck with that. You know, how’s that Mandarin degree going to going to help you out, get a job here because I’m a I’m going to go to med school. I’m going to be a lawyer. I’m going to be a consultant. Like, what are you going to do with that Chinese degree?’” And she’s like, “Well, I bet I can get a job in China.” And they’re like, “What?” And so she bought a one-way ticket, just goes to China and she just starts waving her hand. She’s like, “Hey, people in China, like, I know English, I know companies in the West, um and I would love to learn about you and then I’ll be a bridge.” And she became a bridge basically between companies in China and companies in America. If an American company wanted to do business in China, they would do it through her because she like could translate the not just literally the language, but like she knew who to talk to. She became like the local expert there. She and this like to me, this guy on Twitter, he’s my bridge into knowing what’s going on in the scene in India. And so she what her story was, she made a killing doing that because it was really valuable. Companies in China really wanted to do business with the companies in the West. Then she invested all of it in the tech in the tech stock market because she’s like, “No, I can sell tech companies are the ones that are doing well.” So she and then right before the bubble burst, she pulled it all out to be like, “Oh, I want to do real estate now.” And she like just timed it perfectly accidentally. Invested all in real estate from 2000 to 2008, right before the real estate crash happened, she took it out again because she just wanted to do something else with her life. And basically by 32 was retired and like, you know, uh was like, “What do I want to do? I want to go teach and teach kids what I wish I knew back then.” How wealthy is she got? Uh I think she made like, you know, a few million dollars at least and like, you know, probably like five, $7 million and like um, you know, she she lives in in in Durham and she teaches at the school. I mean, I have no idea how much she has. So what was the class about? Totally I’m totally guessing. So the class was basically it was, you know, like Rameet Sethi, it was like personal finance, which is actually like you probably need she wanted to teach what she wish she learned when she was in school. So she’s like, “I wish they taught you about how to manage money.” So she would show us like the power of compound interest over time, like why you should save early and versus saving more money when you’re 30 versus saving even a little bit of money when you’re 20. And then like, what is a mortgage and like how does that work? And like then so and then every other class she would just invite in someone who made it, like someone who’s successful financially, but doing a completely different thing, just to expose you to like, look, there’s like 50 paths. Dude, this is it’s like this podcast pretty much. Yeah, one would be this girl who started a t-shirt company licensing university logos and she would tell her story. Then she she got Jamie Dimon on the phone and like Jamie Dimon is like, you know, the head of whatever Morgan Stanley or something or whatever. Uh and like then then she had this hedge fund guy from San Francisco come out and he’s like, “Yeah, I here’s what I He’s like, he surveyed the room. He goes, “Do you guys use uh Microsoft or Apple products?” And they’re and people are answering. He goes, uh he asked like three questions and we were like, “Why did you ask that?” He goes, “Because then I’m only going to make one decision this year and it’s whether to invest like hundreds of millions of dollars into Apple or not.” And um and he’s like, “So all I’m doing is I’m just trying to figure out what is the right decision on that.” And I was like, “Whoa.” That’s a job? That’s epic. And he he had said in his when he was in the class, he goes, “By the way, uh all you guys are going to just have the same resume. He goes, “You’re all trying to do the same thing. You’re all trying to get grades and then like these internships. He’s like, “So the first three-fourths of your resume, think about it. It’s going to look the same as everybody else in this room. Like I’m not really going to be able to tell the difference. He goes, “The only thing that’s going to differentiate any of you is that bottom section where it’s called other, like other interests. He’s like, “So at this school, everybody’s going to teach you to like work on that top three-fourths of the resume. In reality, you should be working on the bottom the bottom one-fourth of that resume because that’s what guys like me look at. Everybody’s got a degree. Everybody’s got good grades. Everybody went to a good school. I’ve never Wait, have I told you about the bottom fourth of the resume? No, what is that? That’s so funny that you you even use that fraction. I always tell my when when I own the company, I would say, “I just care about the bottom fourth.” I’d always say, “Just tell me this.” Wow. And I would always say that and I’d be like, “One of the greatest People would ask me, “How do you find good writers?” I was like, “Well, here’s one really easy way. Ask them about the bottom fourth.” And they go, “What do you mean?” I was like, “Well, just it doesn’t matter what they studied in school. Ask them, um, okay, so you majored in philosophy. What was your favorite uh philosophy class or favorite philosophy teacher?” And if they can’t tell me a story about something that they spent four years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on, then they’re just not going to be a good writer because they’re not interesting enough. Right. And so I would always ask about the bottom fourth of the resume for all types of roles because I’m like, “If you’re just if you can’t entertain me for this conversation, then you just don’t have any passion and I don’t want to be around you.” Right. That’s amazing. Okay, so maybe this becomes one of the the core frameworks. That’s a that you know, one one person saying it, that’s just a dot. Two people saying it, that’s a line. I interviewed uh I got that from uh Gold Brian Goldberg who founded uh Bustle and he has this amazing article and he says, it’s headlined, “Losers exist, stay away from them.” And it’s basically like how to only hire winners. It’s from Pando from years and years ago and he’s a brilliant writer, but he doesn’t write anymore because he’s kind of a loose cannon. But it was titled, “Losers exist, how to avoid them.” And it talks about uh one of the best ways to ask about the bottom fourth. And if you’re a you’re a loser if you can’t like be passionate about something that you spent four years studying. Uh no, dude, this article is gone. It’s is it Pando, you know, like Pando died. Let me see if there’s a cash version. There is a cash version. Uh okay, we we’re we’re back in luck. The headline is, “Losers exist. Don’t hire them.” Yeah, awesome. Um okay, let’s do uh let’s do a couple more. I’m going to give a couple quick ones. Uh okay, this other person who I think is a niche expert is this guy Willie Woo. Do you follow him? No, I’m looking him up now. I’m following all these people. The the Indian guy is the best one so far, but let’s look at Willie Woo. Yeah, I don’t think you’ll like this one because it’s very crypto specific, but this guy Willie Woo is I think the leading crypto analyst. And um you know, in most things like these people who analyze charts and stuff like that, they’re like it’s a little bit like horoscopy. They’re like, “Oh, look, the trend is going this way and like if you draw this T-shape, it’s going to be the iron cross pattern.” And like, you know, so buy, buy, buy. And um in crypto, there’s one unique thing which is that all the data is there’s a lot more transparency. All the, you know, everything that’s happening is happening on a chain, on a public blockchain. So you can actually go analyze it. So like he looks at all these metrics that are like um you know, it’s he won’t just look at the price, for example. There’s things like what is the actual average buy-in price? Because it’s one thing for the price to go up or for people to like not be selling because they bought it in 2013 and they you know, their cost basis was like $5 and your cost basis now is $50,000. So it looks like, what the actual price people buying in? What is the average price people bought in for? And that tells you like if it’s low versus the actual price, you’re like, “Okay, um you know, it’s mostly, you know, it’s mostly just like same coins in old hands.” Versus if it’s higher, you realize that people are buying in at the current price levels and that’s pulling the average up. Um and so there’s there’s a whole bunch of things like that like um coin age, like um are old coins moving? Meaning like if OG believers start selling, that’s kind of a signal like it’s like when a CEO starts selling their stock. It’s like, “Wait, why are you selling your stock? That doesn’t seem quite right.” Um what’s the reason? And so like when a bunch of old hands start selling, that’s actually a signal that comes before the price changes. It may it may not even affect the price yet, but it’s an indicator of something to come. Damn, that’s badass. All right, let me give you one. Um Rohin Dwaar. I actually don’t know how to spell Rohin’s last name or say Rohin’s last name. It’s D H A R. So this guy uh founded this company called Priceonomics. You remember Priceonomics? Yes, I’ve followed this guy. This guy’s good. Okay, so he’s interesting. Priceonomics was interesting. We actually recruited a bunch of people from there and I love that company. I don’t know if it’s really around anymore, but it’s just a blog. But his new like started as a side hustle. Now it’s kind of like a full-time thing and I actually showed you two examples. Even Suli is commenting on it. And this guy, he owns, I think 12 or 10 or eight, somewhere in that 8 to 12 range. He owns eight single-family homes uh in New Mexico, in California, Hawaii, wherever. Um and you can go and look and he’ll kind of show you where they are and he’ll show pictures of them and he rents them out on Airbnb. And sometimes when his kids are on vacation or not in school, he’ll go and stay in his homes. And he reveals all of the numbers and all of the updates. So on December 6th, he tweeted, “These are my monthly mortgage payments on each of the homes in my small uh portfolio vacation rentals.” Uh another one is he’ll say like, “You know, currently we’re seeing this type of occupancy rate and we actually just added a surfboard to our house in Hawaii and we noticed that we could get more money for it.” or something like that. And he takes screenshots and he shows all of the revenue that he’s making as well as how much money things have cost uh cost him to buy. And he’ll even do things like recently he posted a couple listings. He’s like, “I think I could turn this into an Airbnb.” And he’ll just like link to the Redfin house listing and he’s like, “I think I can get these numbers.” So it’s actually really cool to see him in real time make it all happen. Yeah, I like this. This is awesome. Uh I didn’t realize that he was doing this. This is it’s kind of new. Uh he’s been at it for a while. He’s been at it for now his new stick is He’s been doing it for six years, but I don’t think he was I don’t think he was as public about it before. He wasn’t as public about it. He was not as public about it, but now he’s like all in on it and it’s so fun. Uh it’s a really fun handle to follow because sometimes his properties are like a quarter of a million and he puts down 20%. So he puts down or sometimes even less, I think. So he’ll put down like $40 or $50,000 on these properties and that’s pretty attainable for a lot of people. And so it’s kind of interesting. Right. Um okay, I have a Okay, let’s do a couple funny ones. Um Okay, have you heard of this account, James Friedman? It’s F Jamie 013. Uh was it on this list? No. So what is it? James Friedman? F James Friedman or I don’t know, maybe it’s Friedman, but it’s F R I D M A N. Uh no. Who who what what’s this? Okay, so uh so he is uh he’s got two million followers, so he’s definitely popular. He’s the Photoshop guy. So basically, people will Photoshop like, uh, “Hey James, my boyfriend’s wearing this Calvin Klein foot the same Calvin Klein t-shirt in every um in every photo that we I take with him. Can you just remove the the logo of Calvin Klein?” And then like he he does he does the request, but he doesn’t he’s not actually just photoshopping it. He makes it hilarious. So like this is very visual, so you know, you need like YouTube to be able to see what I’m saying here, but like he photoshopped the the this guy’s wearing Calvin Klein shirt of like it you know, just says across the chest Calvin Klein jeans. And uh so he like photoshopped it with that ripped off. So that little section ripped off. Now you can just see his chest and uh and so it’s like fucks it actually like fucks up the photo. It doesn’t make it good like the girl wants. And it says Calvin Klein tattooed on his chest now instead of on the shirt. Um and so it’s like uh like people will just be like, you know, um you know, we here’s my wedding photo, uh but we forgot to wear a mask during our wedding photos. Can you Photoshop a mask on instead of photoshopping a COVID mask, he’ll put like, you know, the green mask from Jim Carrey’s like the mask on their face. So it’s just like people request it and then he does the like he does the request, but he does it wrong in a way that they’re not happy with. Um they’ll be like, you know, my my arms look too big here and then he’ll make them like absurdly tiny or whatever. And so it’s just hilarious. He’s got two million followers. He’s like I look funny with one arm and then so he just or uh you can’t see my other arm, so it looks funny with just one arm. And so he just deletes the the the second arm, so the person is armless. Yeah, exactly. Uh and I think he has like a book or something like called the Joy of Photoshop. It’s it says uh asking the wrong guy for help. This is awesome. This is cool. I’ve never seen this. I’m going to follow him. Uh you want to go do a a few more quick funny ones? Uh yeah, let’s do another one. Uh we have a friend Nikita Beer. He’s pretty funny in like the tech world. Um what do you think of his account? Hilarious. He’s a shit head. Yeah, he’s I’m actually amazed that he does some of the stuff that he does and that’s why I like him. Well, it’s kind of like the Donald Trump rule, right? Which is like you say one offensive or weird thing, um you know, you’re canceled, but you say all offensive and weird things, uh you get like, you know, you get the pass. How did he get away with so much? That’s the that’s the key is like if every post makes fun of something, that’s cool. If if only one does, then you’re an asshole. All of his stuff is making fun of something. So I think it’s a great follow. And his profile picture is hilarious. Yeah, his profile picture is uh is good. Um all right, you want to do one more? Um Yeah, okay, I like this one. I don’t know if you know this guy. I don’t think you do. I don’t know if you’d be interested in him. His name is Harala Bob. What’s he do? So Harala Bob’s story is kind of crazy. Is this a crypto guy? So he’s he’s actually he’s transitioned from being the the the one thing guy to the next thing guy to the next thing guy. Okay, so he started off he got famous because he was a big sports better. And he famously one year, and I think the year 2000, like just absolutely raked it in in Vegas because he found an arbitrage uh that he could bet on and he just like milked it. And uh he realized that like I think it was something he had he’s had a few of these where he basically finds he would find inefficiencies in the sports betting market and that’s how he made like millions of dollars. So he found like one year that what they would do is um let’s say that that they would have an over under, a total points for a game. And let’s say it’s 200 points for the game. Now, Vegas is like weirdly accurate with over unders. Like they will get it like so spot on. It’ll come down to like the last possession and like it’ll flip over or under. So they’re very good at doing that. That doesn’t seem like there’s much of inefficiency there. But like in basketball, what happens is that the first half of basketball, you just play and then you go to halftime. But at the end of the game, there’s often this situation where the losing team will start fouling the winning team to like stop the clock, make them shoot free throws and then try to like they’re trying to make threes while the other team can only shoot two free throws at a time. So what it led to was that the second half had more points than the first half. But Vegas had this small bet called the they would take the over under and it would say, you can bet the first half over under and it was just dividing it by two. So it’s like dividing the total by two. So the total was always really accurate, but the first half over under was underpriced. It was like too frequently to uh too high. So he was just betting the under. So he’d find these like little inefficiencies or he’d find certain refs are really foul prone. And so he would know that, okay, when that ref is reffing this game, that team is going to score more than their normal average. And so he would just bet for a whole season on just the refs. And he actually un I think he figured out before the NBA uncovered that that ref Tim Donaghy was like cheating basically because like there was always weird shit happening on that guy’s games. Uh and so he and so he I’m paraphrasing because he doesn’t like totally out his whole strategy, but like he’s talking about it before. Like he’s talking about when um when Clean Tech was big and the government was giving money to this I think it’s called Solyndra or something like that. And he came out and he said, the same thing happened with Enron where it was like five weeks before it went under, they were like, not just saying everything’s going to be okay, they were saying everything’s better than ever. And he and Elon came out and was sort of like, “What do you want people to say?” He’s like, “You know, it is in the incentive of somebody, of the captain of that ship to go down with the ship and the whole time be saying, ‘Oh, we’re so close to our destination.’” Basically, he was like, “They’re never going to come out and say, ‘Yeah, we don’t know, we might not make it.’” Because then that will guarantee you don’t make it because people will sell the stock. It’ll put so much negative pressure on the company, it’ll hurt the morale inside the company. And so you can’t ever come out and say, “I don’t know, we might not make it.” So you always have to say, “Make it. Of course we’re going to make it. We’re thriving.” And like, you just hope it actually comes true. He said something to that effect in an interview once I read and I was like, I feel like he’s describing what actually was going on inside Tesla. That’s amazing. And so anyways, the long story short was I didn’t believe it, didn’t believe it, didn’t believe it. I was sort of like reading it, but I didn’t pull the trigger. And then Josh Wolf, this guy is a very, very smart guy, successful VC, not an anonymous Twitter egg account who’s like just shorting the stock and trying to like spread fear. Um, he was really shitting on it consistently for the course of a year. And at some point, I was like, “You know, what will I regret more? Selling the stock now and taking my profit if I’m wrong, or seeing all these signals and not like going with what seems to be a mounting amount of evidence?” How much did you buy? Guess what? I was wrong. Tesla becomes a Elon becomes the richest man in the world. Tesla becomes a $600 billion company. I bought it at a $6 billion valuation or something crazy like that. And so, you know, I missed out on a 50 to 100X uh, you know, somewhere along the way. And uh and so yeah, I do regret. I actually turned out to be wrong. I I would have regretted more this scenario happening, but it seemed improbable. Wait, so you bought 100 grand worth of Tesla stock? I didn’t buy 100 grand. I think I bought like I don’t know. I don’t even know what it was. It wasn’t 100. I don’t think that’s that’s not what I was buying back then because this was like I I was like 23 years old or something at the time. It it was a long time ago. And basically, I think I had bought like 30 or 40 grand of the stock at a certain price. And I because I remember doing the math and thinking, “Okay, they’re valued at like 5 or 6 billion now. What is Ford and GM valued at?” Okay, they’re valued at 25 billion. Okay, on one hand, that seems crazy that they’re only five times less when they deliver like 200 times less cars. But I was like, “I really think like the cars are going to go electric, that these old fucks are never going to switch.” And he’s got this like vertically integrated it’s like actually a battery and energy company. It’s not even a car company. And this was before self-driving. So I was like, “That’s a good pick.” So it was a good pick. I mean, yeah, but you know, you if you get it wrong, you get it wrong. So I got my face. And by the way, on this note of the the pessimist archive, I saw this YouTube video that was um I don’t know if you heard about this. A few years ago, Elon Musk negotiated a very unique compensation package. Do you know about this? Uh yeah, basically he gets some crazy bonuses if some crazy goals happened. Yeah, so he had he had set up this thing where he gets absolutely it’s his entire compensation was tied to the um the market cap of Tesla. And like it was at 50 billion, I think at the time when he had done it. And um it was like every 50 billion dollars increments, he was going to get more. And so it was like at a if I get us to 100 billion, then I get X. I get I I think he would get uh like 1% or 2% more of the company each time. I I I I should have I don’t know we’re going to talk about this. I could have mapped it out. But basically, he was going to get a percentage more of the company for every 50 billion they go up in market cap as they also have to hit certain um like revenue and earnings uh at that time. And he had no guaranteed income. So basically, if Tesla just went from 50 to 99 billion, he would get zero during that time. Oh my god. And he had five years to do it and the top of the compensation plan was if they became a $600 billion company, then he was going to become like he was going to get this like he would own like 10% of whatever he would own some ridiculous amount that would be unlocked for him and he would be essentially the richest man in the world. And there’s all these there’s this clip of uh uh what’s his name? Andrew Sorkin or whatever his name is, the guy on CNBC, Fast Money or whatever. Um of them to they’re outlining the plan and they’re laughing. They’re just laughing at him. They’re like, I don’t even know why they included these tiers. Like, for Tesla to get that would be I mean, there’s no way. And they’re all laughing. They’re like, there’s no chance. And they’re like, this is such a weird thing. Why did he do this? And they’re like, basically laughing at him and saying how outrageous the top end of it was where it just made no sense. It’s like, well, to do that, Tesla would need to become like the fifth most valuable company in the world or third most valuable company in the world. And they’re like, that’s ridiculous, but I guess, you know, aim high, I guess. He gets no guaranteed compensation of any time of any kind at all. He gets no salary, cash bonus, equity. Uh he only gets equity that that vests over time, but only if he reaches uh these hurdle rates which are, dare I say, crazy. So right now the company is worth $59 billion. Mhm. They run it $50 billion increments. So if he gets the company to $100 billion Wait, you’re just talking market capitalization, not based on revenue, not based on the number of production. So there’s there’s going to be there’s going to be two metrics at each step. So the first step is he has to get the company to $100 billion and reach these operational and adjusted EBITDA and revenue number. If he doesn’t get either of them, he gets nothing. That’s kind of a weird way to break it down based on market capitalization. If he gets to 150 and has to hit the operational numbers. But I mean the market can be irrational. So can’t control that. At each 50 At each $50 billion number, he collects 1% of the company. If somehow, magically, he would get the company to $650 billion, which is literally what the plan calls for, if you can believe this, uh he would collect the equivalent of about $55 billion in compensation. Otherwise, he gets absolutely nothing. Okay, what if you get it to $650 billion and then it immediately And then sure enough, he he’s like I think he just hit it or he’s about to hit that that last final thing and sure enough he’s the richest man in the world now. That’s badass. I want to Bet on yourself. I I need to go back Well, if you’re him. Um All right. I’m going to tell you a a handle that would have helped you. So, you know who Ryan Holiday is, definitely, right? Yes. Uh Ryan Holiday is an author, just kind of like a personality, but mostly an author and he does stoicism stuff. And I included him, but I’m going to actually tell you the one you should follow. So, I like Ryan Holiday because he’s got these things that are not business-related but help me in business and help me in life. And so he’s got five lessons from Seneca. Seneca was a Is he Greek? I actually don’t know what he was. Uh he was a philosopher. Uh and so they are we suffer What was he? I think he was Greek. I didn’t look it up. He was Roman, Ben. Thank you. Uh we suffer more in imagination or five stoic lessons from Seneca. We suffer more in imagination than in reality. Associate only with people who improve you. The greatest remedy for anger, this is the best one. The greatest remedy for anger is delay. Nice. Value your time more than your possessions and death is not in the distant future. We are dying every day. And he’s got these amazing things that I love. But he’s got this other Twitter handle called The Daily Stoic. I love The Daily Stoic and they just like tweet out all these like interesting stoicism tidbits. That’s his, right? It’s his brand? It’s his. And it’s incredibly useful. This stuff is like it’s one of the stoicism is one of the few philosophies that’s like actively um it’s practical and you can use on a daily basis. And so I like following this account. It reminds me to do certain things. So Okay, so so correct me if I’m wrong. So uh I had heard about stoicism from Ryan Holiday, Tim Ferris, bunch of others. So I go, I buy Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. I sit down, I start to read it and I’m I’m sort of just trying to understand what the heck is this philosophy. And there were some things I thought were really cool. Like the tweet like that tweet you just read out, those five principles, like that resonates with me. But there was like a part of it which was sort of like feel neither the highs nor the low. It seemed almost like a philoso and I think I’m wrong, so I want you to correct me. It seemed like a philosophy which was sort of like feel nothing. Yeah. And I think that your almost right. And feel nothing doesn’t seem very fun. Why do I why do I want to feel nothing? So tell me that. So that’s my big That’s my actually a really good criticism in my opinion of stoicism and it’s my criticism of stoicism, which is a lack of joy. And a lot of stoics, this is me steel arm steel manning by the way. A lot of stoics will say, um, no, like there’s joy. Like if you read it differently, there’s room for joy or they never say you can’t have joy. And they’re not wrong, but oftentimes it’s how to deal with pain and misery. And the idea is basically you accept the fact that you’re going to come into contact with a bunch of idiots all day who are going to want to hurt you and steal from you, but that’s okay, just accept it. You do like a negative visualization, right? You like imagine things going wrong, which again, just feels very not so fun for me and not the way I have not not that’s not a formula that’s worked for me. In fact, the exact opposite has worked for me. That formula has worked for me actually. So what I do is like, all right, today I’ve got cancer. I can’t get out of bed because I’m like That’s harsh. You do this every day? I do it a lot. Or I’ll be I’ll be like, “Look, like like if I’m feeling sad, I’ll be like, my I just got my leg cut off. Like I can’t walk. I wish I could go run sports.” And then I’ll be like, “Wait a minute, I have both legs. I’m don’t feel sick. Let’s go celebrate and exercise.” Or you know what I mean? Or like, you know, I’m happy my dog is not dead. And I’ll go and it makes me appreciate him. Yeah, it’s called negative visualization. I think it’s incredibly useful. There’s a this is this is to me, so I I will disagree with this. There’s a this to me is the argument of, well, there’s kids starving in Africa. Like in any given moment, you could just sort of remember, oh, there’s kids starving in Africa. There’s kids starving in Africa. Oh, my boyfriend broke up with me. Well, at least I’m not a kid starving in Africa. And um and I I get the utility of it. I’ve used it myself. But in my experience, I’ve learned that it’s a bit of a roundabout way to a destination of gratitude and like you don’t have to go to feeling the stress and the pain and the suffering of bad in order to feel the gratefulness around the good. And so I found it I guess my personal experience has been, I think it’s a roundabout way to gratitude and like, I might as well just go straight to gratitude. Don’t need to uh don’t need to think about all the bad things. But think about all the bad things that could happen and go there. It’s it’s not been useful for me. I remember like when I get a sore throat, I always feel this way and when I get like a toothache, I’m like, “I wish I could go back to the days where my tooth didn’t hurt.” Like if you’re at like a toothache is like the most pain you could be in. Or sometimes. And I’m like, I like I I you’re like, “I I don’t remember like sometimes my if I All the women who have given birth are like, “What the fuck is this guy talking about?” Well, yeah, but like a toothache is the worst pain you could feel. Or like a like in my like whenever I get earaches and toothaches, I’m like, you know, it’s like it’s like this internal pain. It’s like I can’t make the pain stop and I just have to deal with it until I have an appointment in three days. And then you get like two days in and you’re like, “I don’t remember what it felt like to not feel this pain.” And so I got into the habit. I’d be like, “I would be so thankful if I could if my throat didn’t hurt today and I could just swallow food. That would make me so happy.” And days when I don’t, I’m not sick, I try to think back. I’m like, “This is exactly what I wanted. I wanted to feel happy that I’m not sick today.” And so I I think about that stuff all the time. So anyway, Ryan Holiday and The Daily Stoic is a good follow. You’re up. All right. Um by the way, I know we didn’t do stoicism justice for people who are like diehards. Sorry. Uh people should look I don’t think it is no emotions. I think it’s like more subtle than that, but But that’s a really good I think your criticism is great, which is like I think it’s what a lot of people run into when they get excited and then they’re like, “Wait, but wait, is this what I want?” Yeah, it’s like where’s the room for fart jokes? You know what I mean? I’m going to give you two niche experts. They’re in different niches, but I like them. Okay, so uh I should link their accounts here for you to Uh this first guy, I don’t know exactly how you say his name. His name is Aviral Bhatnagar. Uh and I’m going to link you his Twitter. It’s Aviral Bot and uh I’m going to put it uh where do I put it? I put it on the sheet that we have. Okay, you got it. So this guy Aviral Aviral Bhatnagar, he is a venture capitalist in India and his blog is ajuniorvc.com. This guy puts out really, really high signal stuff around what’s going on in India. Um like for example, he has a tweet that he put out yesterday or that that was, “India now exports more software, 133 billion, than Saudi Arabia exports oil, 113 billion.” We are the India is the largest engineering population in the in the world. Uh what an amazing story that’s come come out over the last 40 years. How’d you find this guy? This is the best this one’s the best one in the This is the most helpful one on the list. Yeah, and so like I I do a lot of investing in Indian startups and I was like, “Okay, if I’m going to invest in these startups, I’m not on the ground. I’m not the like local domain expert.” So what did I do? I invested in a fund. I became an investor in somebody else’s fund that’s India focused. And I was like, “Okay, cool. I’m going to get insights from him and I can bounce any deal off him to see if he wants to participate and maybe he has a local view that I don’t understand.” And then this was another guy that I thought was really smart. So I wanted to find who I wanted to basically see who’s the thought leader in that space and then how do I subscribe to them. And so his um you know, his like blog, I think has 50,000 subscribers now. So he’s not like, you know, a no-name. Uh but he’s very niche and he talks about kind of like the Indian tech scene and what’s going on, you know, at a macro level, whatever. So I found this guy to be I think he’s doing a really good job of content creation. So I’m going to pick this guy in one niche. Is there Is there such a thing as this for China? Uh I’m sure there is. Actually, this is this is a good idea. I should just um like find this person for like Latam, for Europe, you know, for different parts of Europe, uh for for India, for China, and for Australia maybe. Um and if there is none, be this guy. This guy, there’s a valuable position to become. Super valuable. There’s this guy named Bill Bishop, I think his name is. Bill Bishop had a newsletter uh called Sinism, I think it’s called. You know what I’m talking about? No. Um Sinocism. I don’t know what that means. Uh Sinocism. Um S I N O C I S M. For a long time, he was the most popular guy on Substack and his entire newsletter is it’s called Get Smarter About China and he just tells you about the business of China and you can see all like the latest trends coming out of China. It would be really This is a great arbitrage to do, by the way. If you uh instead of trying to compete in the same pond as everybody else, like go provide a really useful bridge into one specific market or one specific uh geography. Um like I I I’ve told the story before, I think, but like one of the most influential people in my life was this teacher named Lisa Keister at Duke University. And she taught this class called Getting Rich. And her story was she graduated That was the name of the class? The name of the class, yeah. Did everyone take that? It was the it was one of the hardest classes to get into because it was a great name, great title, right? So you already know this person is not just like every other professor. Like she understands like her customer, her market. The second thing was it was she was the highest rated professor on like ratemyprofessor.com and she had a chili pepper next to her name, so she was like hot, too. It was like, oh, it was everything. So I I wake up at 5:00 in the morning, we go to the library to get on the high-speed internet connection and as soon as the course listings open up, we like jumped on it and we got into this class. And I go in and she was she tells her story. She goes, “Actually, I was a student at Duke 10 years ago or 11 years ago, whatever it was.” She goes, “I graduated with a degree in Mandarin because that’s just what was interesting to me.” And at the time, everybody was making fun of me. Actually, she was older than this now, but she had started teaching back when she was like 32 or something. Now she might be 42 or 50 or something like that. But she goes, “I graduated with this degree. All my like friends were like, ‘Good luck with that. You know, how’s that Mandarin degree going to going to help you out, get a job here because I’m a I’m going to go to med school. I’m going to be a lawyer. I’m going to be a consultant. Like, what are you going to do with that Chinese degree?’” And she’s like, “Well, I bet I can get a job in China.” And they’re like, “What?” And so she bought a one-way ticket, just goes to China and she just starts waving her hand. She’s like, “Hey, people in China, like, I know English, I know companies in the West, um and I would love to learn about you and then I’ll be a bridge.” And she became a bridge basically between companies in China and companies in America. If an American company wanted to do business in China, they would do it through her because she like could translate the not just literally the language, but like she knew who to talk to. She became like the local expert there. She and this like to me, this guy on Twitter, he’s my bridge into knowing what’s going on in the scene in India. And so she what her story was, she made a killing doing that because it was really valuable. Companies in China really wanted to do business with the companies in the West. Then she invested all of it in the tech in the tech stock market because she’s like, “No, I can sell tech companies are the ones that are doing well.” So she and then right before the bubble burst, she pulled it all out to be like, “Oh, I want to do real estate now.” And she like just timed it perfectly accidentally. Invested all in real estate from 2000 to 2008, right before the real estate crash happened, she took it out again because she just wanted to do something else with her life. And basically by 32 was retired and like, you know, uh was like, “What do I want to do? I want to go teach and teach kids what I wish I knew back then.” How wealthy is she got? Uh I think she made like, you know, a few million dollars at least and like, you know, probably like five, $7 million and like um, you know, she she lives in in in Durham and she teaches at the school. I mean, I have no idea how much she has. So what was the class about? Totally I’m totally guessing. So the class was basically it was, you know, like Rameet Sethi, it was like personal finance, which is actually like you probably need she wanted to teach what she wish she learned when she was in school. So she’s like, “I wish they taught you about how to manage money.” So she would show us like the power of compound interest over time, like why you should save early and versus saving more money when you’re 30 versus saving even a little bit of money when you’re 20. And then like, what is a mortgage and like how does that work? And like then so and then every other class she would just invite in someone who made it, like someone who’s successful financially, but doing a completely different thing, just to expose you to like, look, there’s like 50 paths. Dude, this is it’s like this podcast pretty much. Yeah, one would be this girl who started a t-shirt company licensing university logos and she would tell her story. Then she she got Jamie Dimon on the phone and like Jamie Dimon is like, you know, the head of whatever Morgan Stanley or something or whatever. Uh and like then then she had this hedge fund guy from San Francisco come out and he’s like, “Yeah, I here’s what I He’s like, he surveyed the room. He goes, “Do you guys use uh Microsoft or Apple products?” And they’re and people are answering. He goes, uh he asked like three questions and we were like, “Why did you ask that?” He goes, “Because then I’m only going to make one decision this year and it’s whether to invest like hundreds of millions of dollars into Apple or not.” And um and he’s like, “So all I’m doing is I’m just trying to figure out what is the right decision on that.” And I was like, “Whoa.” That’s a job? That’s epic. And he he had said in his when he was in the class, he goes, “By the way, uh all you guys are going to just have the same resume. He goes, “You’re all trying to do the same thing. You’re all trying to get grades and then like these internships. He’s like, “So the first three-fourths of your resume, think about it. It’s going to look the same as everybody else in this room. Like I’m not really going to be able to tell the difference. He goes, “The only thing that’s going to differentiate any of you is that bottom section where it’s called other, like other interests. He’s like, “So at this school, everybody’s going to teach you to like work on that top three-fourths of the resume. In reality, you should be working on the bottom the bottom one-fourth of that resume because that’s what guys like me look at. Everybody’s got a degree. Everybody’s got good grades. Everybody went to a good school. I’ve never Wait, have I told you about the bottom fourth of the resume? No, what is that? That’s so funny that you you even use that fraction. I always tell my when when I own the company, I would say, “I just care about the bottom fourth.” I’d always say, “Just tell me this.” Wow. And I would always say that and I’d be like, “One of the greatest People would ask me, “How do you find good writers?” I was like, “Well, here’s one really easy way. Ask them about the bottom fourth.” And they go, “What do you mean?” I was like, “Well, just it doesn’t matter what they studied in school. Ask them, um, okay, so you majored in philosophy. What was your favorite uh philosophy class or favorite philosophy teacher?” And if they can’t tell me a story about something that they spent four years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on, then they’re just not going to be a good writer because they’re not interesting enough. Right. And so I would always ask about the bottom fourth of the resume for all types of roles because I’m like, “If you’re just if you can’t entertain me for this conversation, then you just don’t have any passion and I don’t want to be around you.” Right. That’s amazing. Okay, so maybe this becomes one of the the core frameworks. That’s a that you know, one one person saying it, that’s just a dot. Two people saying it, that’s a line. I interviewed uh I got that from uh Gold Brian Goldberg who founded uh Bustle and he has this amazing article and he says, it’s headlined, “Losers exist, stay away from them.” And it’s basically like how to only hire winners. It’s from Pando from years and years ago and he’s a brilliant writer, but he doesn’t write anymore because he’s kind of a loose cannon. But it was titled, “Losers exist, how to avoid them.” And it talks about uh one of the best ways to ask about the bottom fourth. And if you’re a you’re a loser if you can’t like be passionate about something that you spent four years studying. Uh no, dude, this article is gone. It’s is it Pando, you know, like Pando died. Let me see if there’s a cash version. There is a cash version. Uh okay, we we’re we’re back in luck. The headline is, “Losers exist. Don’t hire them.” Yeah, awesome. Um okay, let’s do uh let’s do a couple more. I’m going to give a couple quick ones. Uh okay, this other person who I think is a niche expert is this guy Willie Woo. Do you follow him? No, I’m looking him up now. I’m following all these people. The the Indian guy is the best one so far, but let’s look at Willie Woo. Yeah, I don’t think you’ll like this one because it’s very crypto specific, but this guy Willie Woo is I think the leading crypto analyst. And um you know, in most things like these people who analyze charts and stuff like that, they’re like it’s a little bit like horoscopy. They’re like, “Oh, look, the trend is going this way and like if you draw this T-shape, it’s going to be the iron cross pattern.” And like, you know, so buy, buy, buy. And um in crypto, there’s one unique thing which is that all the data is there’s a lot more transparency. All the, you know, everything that’s happening is happening on a chain, on a public blockchain. So you can actually go analyze it. So like he looks at all these metrics that are like um you know, it’s he won’t just look at the price, for example. There’s things like what is the actual average buy-in price? Because it’s one thing for the price to go up or for people to like not be selling because they bought it in 2013 and they you know, their cost basis was like $5 and your cost basis now is $50,000. So it looks like, what the actual price people buying in? What is the average price people bought in for? And that tells you like if it’s low versus the actual price, you’re like, “Okay, um you know, it’s mostly, you know, it’s mostly just like same coins in old hands.” Versus if it’s higher, you realize that people are buying in at the current price levels and that’s pulling the average up. Um and so there’s there’s a whole bunch of things like that like um coin age, like um are old coins moving? Meaning like if OG believers start selling, that’s kind of a signal like it’s like when a CEO starts selling their stock. It’s like, “Wait, why are you selling your stock? That doesn’t seem quite right.” Um what’s the reason? And so like when a bunch of old hands start selling, that’s actually a signal that comes before the price changes. It may it may not even affect the price yet, but it’s an indicator of something to come. Damn, that’s badass. All right, let me give you one. Um Rohin Dwaar. I actually don’t know how to spell Rohin’s last name or say Rohin’s last name. It’s D H A R. So this guy uh founded this company called Priceonomics. You remember Priceonomics? Yes, I’ve followed this guy. This guy’s good. Okay, so he’s interesting. Priceonomics was interesting. We actually recruited a bunch of people from there and I love that company. I don’t know if it’s really around anymore, but it’s just a blog. But his new like started as a side hustle. Now it’s kind of like a full-time thing and I actually showed you two examples. Even Suli is commenting on it. And this guy, he owns, I think 12 or 10 or eight, somewhere in that 8 to 12 range. He owns eight single-family homes uh in New Mexico, in California, Hawaii, wherever. Um and you can go and look and he’ll kind of show you where they are and he’ll show pictures of them and he rents them out on Airbnb. And sometimes when his kids are on vacation or not in school, he’ll go and stay in his homes. And he reveals all of the numbers and all of the updates. So on December 6th, he tweeted, “These are my monthly mortgage payments on each of the homes in my small uh portfolio vacation rentals.” Uh another one is he’ll say like, “You know, currently we’re seeing this type of occupancy rate and we actually just added a surfboard to our house in Hawaii and we noticed that we could get more money for it.” or something like that. And he takes screenshots and he shows all of the revenue that he’s making as well as how much money things have cost uh cost him to buy. And he’ll even do things like recently he posted a couple listings. He’s like, “I think I could turn this into an Airbnb.” And he’ll just like link to the Redfin house listing and he’s like, “I think I can get these numbers.” So it’s actually really cool to see him in real time make it all happen. Yeah, I like this. This is awesome. Uh I didn’t realize that he was doing this. This is it’s kind of new. Uh he’s been at it for a while. He’s been at it for now his new stick is He’s been doing it for six years, but I don’t think he was I don’t think he was as public about it before. He wasn’t as public about it. He was not as public about it, but now he’s like all in on it and it’s so fun. Uh it’s a really fun handle to follow because sometimes his properties are like a quarter of a million and he puts down 20%. So he puts down or sometimes even less, I think. So he’ll put down like $40 or $50,000 on these properties and that’s pretty attainable for a lot of people. And so it’s kind of interesting. Right. Um okay, I have a Okay, let’s do a couple funny ones. Um Okay, have you heard of this account, James Friedman? It’s F Jamie 013. Uh was it on this list? No. So what is it? James Friedman? F James Friedman or I don’t know, maybe it’s Friedman, but it’s F R I D M A N. Uh no. Who who what what’s this? Okay, so uh so he is uh he’s got two million followers, so he’s definitely popular. He’s the Photoshop guy. So basically, people will Photoshop like, uh, “Hey James, my boyfriend’s wearing this Calvin Klein foot the same Calvin Klein t-shirt in every um in every photo that we I take with him. Can you just remove the the logo of Calvin Klein?” And then like he he does he does the request, but he doesn’t he’s not actually just photoshopping it. He makes it hilarious. So like this is very visual, so you know, you need like YouTube to be able to see what I’m saying here, but like he photoshopped the the this guy’s wearing Calvin Klein shirt of like it you know, just says across the chest Calvin Klein jeans. And uh so he like photoshopped it with that ripped off. So that little section ripped off. Now you can just see his chest and uh and so it’s like fucks it actually like fucks up the photo. It doesn’t make it good like the girl wants. And it says Calvin Klein tattooed on his chest now instead of on the shirt. Um and so it’s like uh like people will just be like, you know, um you know, we here’s my wedding photo, uh but we forgot to wear a mask during our wedding photos. Can you Photoshop a mask on instead of photoshopping a COVID mask, he’ll put like, you know, the green mask from Jim Carrey’s like the mask on their face. So it’s just like people request it and then he does the like he does the request, but he does it wrong in a way that they’re not happy with. Um they’ll be like, you know, my my arms look too big here and then he’ll make them like absurdly tiny or whatever. And so it’s just hilarious. He’s got two million followers. He’s like I look funny with one arm and then so he just or uh you can’t see my other arm, so it looks funny with just one arm. And so he just deletes the the the second arm, so the person is armless. Yeah, exactly. Uh and I think he has like a book or something like called the Joy of Photoshop. It’s it says uh asking the wrong guy for help. This is awesome. This is cool. I’ve never seen this. I’m going to follow him. Uh you want to go do a a few more quick funny ones? Uh yeah, let’s do another one. Uh we have a friend Nikita Beer. He’s pretty funny in like the tech world. Um what do you think of his account? Hilarious. He’s a shit head. Yeah, he’s I’m actually amazed that he does some of the stuff that he does and that’s why I like him. Well, it’s kind of like the Donald Trump rule, right? Which is like you say one offensive or weird thing, um you know, you’re canceled, but you say all offensive and weird things, uh you get like, you know, you get the pass. How did he get away with so much? That’s the that’s the key is like if every post makes fun of something, that’s cool. If if only one does, then you’re an asshole. All of his stuff is making fun of something. So I think it’s a great follow. And his profile picture is hilarious. Yeah, his profile picture is uh is good. Um all right, you want to do one more? Um Yeah, okay, I like this one. I don’t know if you know this guy. I don’t think you do. I don’t know if you’d be interested in him. His name is Harala Bob. What’s he do? So Harala Bob’s story is kind of crazy. Is this a crypto guy? So he’s he’s actually he’s transitioned from being the the the one thing guy to the next thing guy to the next thing guy. Okay, so he started off he got famous because he was a big sports better. And he famously one year, and I think the year 2000, like just absolutely raked it in in Vegas because he found an arbitrage uh that he could bet on and he just like milked it. And uh he realized that like I think it was something he had he’s had a few of these where he basically finds he would find inefficiencies in the sports betting market and that’s how he made like millions of dollars. So he found like one year that what they would do is um let’s say that that they would have an over under, a total points for a game. And let’s say it’s 200 points for the game. Now, Vegas is like weirdly accurate with over unders. Like they will get it like so spot on. It’ll come down to like the last possession and like it’ll flip over or under. So they’re very good at doing that. That doesn’t seem like there’s much of inefficiency there. But like in basketball, what happens is that the first half of basketball, you just play and then you go to halftime. But at the end of the game, there’s often this situation where the losing team will start fouling the winning team to like stop the clock, make them shoot free throws and then try to like they’re trying to make threes while the other team can only shoot two free throws at a time. So what it led to was that the second half had more points than the first half. But Vegas had this small bet called the they would take the over under and it would say, you can bet the first half over under and it was just dividing it by two. So it’s like dividing the total by two. So the total was always really accurate, but the first half over under was underpriced. It was like too frequently to uh too high. So he was just betting the under. So he’d find these like little inefficiencies or he’d find certain refs are really foul prone. And so he would know that, okay, when that ref is reffing this game, that team is going to score more than their normal average. And so he would just bet for a whole season on just the refs. And he actually un I think he figured out before the NBA uncovered that that ref Tim Donaghy was like cheating basically because like there was always weird shit happening on that guy’s games. Uh and so he and so he I’m paraphrasing because he doesn’t like totally out his whole strategy, but like he’s talking about it before. Like he’s talking about when um when Clean Tech was big and the government was giving money to this I think it’s called Solyndra or something like that. And he came out and he said, the same thing happened with Enron where it was like five weeks before it went under, they were like, not just saying everything’s going to be okay, they were saying everything’s better than ever. And he and Elon came out and was sort of like, “What do you want people to say?” He’s like, “You know, it is in the incentive of somebody, of the captain of that ship to go down with the ship and the whole time be saying, ‘Oh, we’re so close to our destination.’” Basically, he was like, “They’re never going to come out and say, ‘Yeah, we don’t know, we might not make it.’” Because then that will guarantee you don’t make it because people will sell the stock. It’ll put so much negative pressure on the company, it’ll hurt the morale inside the company. And so you can’t ever come out and say, “I don’t know, we might not make it.” So you always have to say, “Make it. Of course we’re going to make it. We’re thriving.” And like, you just hope it actually comes true. He said something to that effect in an interview once I read and I was like, I feel like he’s describing what actually was going on inside Tesla. That’s amazing. And so anyways, the long story short was I didn’t believe it, didn’t believe it, didn’t believe it. I was sort of like reading it, but I didn’t pull the trigger. And then Josh Wolf, this guy is a very, very smart guy, successful VC, not an anonymous Twitter egg account who’s like just shorting the stock and trying to like spread fear. Um, he was really shitting on it consistently for the course of a year. And at some point, I was like, “You know, what will I regret more? Selling the stock now and taking my profit if I’m wrong, or seeing all these signals and not like going with what seems to be a mounting amount of evidence?” How much did you buy? Guess what? I was wrong. Tesla becomes a Elon becomes the richest man in the world. Tesla becomes a $600 billion company. I bought it at a $6 billion valuation or something crazy like that. And so, you know, I missed out on a 50 to 100X uh, you know, somewhere along the way. And uh and so yeah, I do regret. I actually turned out to be wrong. I I would have regretted more this scenario happening, but it seemed improbable. Wait, so you bought 100 grand worth of Tesla stock? I didn’t buy 100 grand. I think I bought like I don’t know. I don’t even know what it was. It wasn’t 100. I don’t think that’s that’s not what I was buying back then because this was like I I was like 23 years old or something at the time. It it was a long time ago. And basically, I think I had bought like 30 or 40 grand of the stock at a certain price. And I because I remember doing the math and thinking, “Okay, they’re valued at like 5 or 6 billion now. What is Ford and GM valued at?” Okay, they’re valued at 25 billion. Okay, on one hand, that seems crazy that they’re only five times less when they deliver like 200 times less cars. But I was like, “I really think like the cars are going to go electric, that these old fucks are never going to switch.” And he’s got this like vertically integrated it’s like actually a battery and energy company. It’s not even a car company. And this was before self-driving. So I was like, “That’s a good pick.” So it was a good pick. I mean, yeah, but you know, you if you get it wrong, you get it wrong. So I got my face. And by the way, on this note of the the pessimist archive, I saw this YouTube video that was um I don’t know if you heard about this. A few years ago, Elon Musk negotiated a very unique compensation package. Do you know about this? Uh yeah, basically he gets some crazy bonuses if some crazy goals happened. Yeah, so he had he had set up this thing where he gets absolutely it’s his entire compensation was tied to the um the market cap of Tesla. And like it was at 50 billion, I think at the time when he had done it. And um it was like every 50 billion dollars increments, he was going to get more. And so it was like at a if I get us to 100 billion, then I get X. I get I I think he would get uh like 1% or 2% more of the company each time. I I I I should have I don’t know we’re going to talk about this. I could have mapped it out. But basically, he was going to get a percentage more of the company for every 50 billion they go up in market cap as they also have to hit certain um like revenue and earnings uh at that time. And he had no guaranteed income. So basically, if Tesla just went from 50 to 99 billion, he would get zero during that time. Oh my god. And he had five years to do it and the top of the compensation plan was if they became a $600 billion company, then he was going to become like he was going to get this like he would own like 10% of whatever he would own some ridiculous amount that would be unlocked for him and he would be essentially the richest man in the world. And there’s all these there’s this clip of uh uh what’s his name? Andrew Sorkin or whatever his name is, the guy on CNBC, Fast Money or whatever. Um of them to they’re outlining the plan and they’re laughing. They’re just laughing at him. They’re like, I don’t even know why they included these tiers. Like, for Tesla to get that would be I mean, there’s no way. And they’re all laughing. They’re like, there’s no chance. And they’re like, this is such a weird thing. Why did he do this? And they’re like, basically laughing at him and saying how outrageous the top end of it was where it just made no sense. It’s like, well, to do that, Tesla would need to become like the fifth most valuable company in the world or third most valuable company in the world. And they’re like, that’s ridiculous, but I guess, you know, aim high, I guess. He gets no guaranteed compensation of any time of any kind at all. He gets no salary, cash bonus, equity. Uh he only gets equity that that vests over time, but only if he reaches uh these hurdle rates which are, dare I say, crazy. So right now the company is worth $59 billion. Mhm. They run it $50 billion increments. So if he gets the company to $100 billion Wait, you’re just talking market capitalization, not based on revenue, not based on the number of production. So there’s there’s going to be there’s going to be two metrics at each step. So the first step is he has to get the company to $100 billion and reach these operational and adjusted EBITDA and revenue number. If he doesn’t get either of them, he gets nothing. That’s kind of a weird way to break it down based on market capitalization. If he gets to 150 and has to hit the operational numbers. But I mean the market can be irrational. So can’t control that. At each 50 At each $50 billion number, he collects 1% of the company. If somehow, magically, he would get the company to $650 billion, which is literally what the plan calls for, if you can believe this, uh he would collect the equivalent of about $55 billion in compensation. Otherwise, he gets absolutely nothing. Okay, what if you get it to $650 billion and then it immediately And then sure enough, he he’s like I think he just hit it or he’s about to hit that that last final thing and sure enough he’s the richest man in the world now. That’s badass. I want to Bet on yourself. I I need to go back Well, if you’re him. Um All right. I’m going to tell you a a handle that would have helped you. So, you know who Ryan Holiday is, definitely, right? Yes. Uh Ryan Holiday is an author, just kind of like a personality, but mostly an author and he does stoicism stuff. And I included him, but I’m going to actually tell you the one you should follow. So, I like Ryan Holiday because he’s got these things that are not business-related but help me in business and help me in life. And so he’s got five lessons from Seneca. Seneca was a Is he Greek? I actually don’t know what he was. Uh he was a philosopher. Uh and so they are we suffer What was he? I think he was Greek. I didn’t look it up. He was Roman, Ben. Thank you. Uh we suffer more in imagination or five stoic lessons from Seneca. We suffer more in imagination than in reality. Associate only with people who improve you. The greatest remedy for anger, this is the best one. The greatest remedy for anger is delay. Nice. Value your time more than your possessions and death is not in the distant future. We are dying every day. And he’s got these amazing things that I love. But he’s got this other Twitter handle called The Daily Stoic. I love The Daily Stoic and they just like tweet out all these like interesting stoicism tidbits. That’s his, right? It’s his brand? It’s his. And it’s incredibly useful. This stuff is like it’s one of the stoicism is one of the few philosophies that’s like actively um it’s practical and you can use on a daily basis. And so I like following this account. It reminds me to do certain things. So Okay, so so correct me if I’m wrong. So uh I had heard about stoicism from Ryan Holiday, Tim Ferris, bunch of others. So I go, I buy Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. I sit down, I start to read it and I’m I’m sort of just trying to understand what the heck is this philosophy. And there were some things I thought were really cool. Like the tweet like that tweet you just read out, those five principles, like that resonates with me. But there was like a part of it which was sort of like feel neither the highs nor the low. It seemed almost like a philoso and I think I’m wrong, so I want you to correct me. It seemed like a philosophy which was sort of like feel nothing. Yeah. And I think that your almost right. And feel nothing doesn’t seem very fun. Why do I why do I want to feel nothing? So tell me that. So that’s my big That’s my actually a really good criticism in my opinion of stoicism and it’s my criticism of stoicism, which is a lack of joy. And a lot of stoics, this is me steel arm steel manning by the way. A lot of stoics will say, um, no, like there’s joy. Like if you read it differently, there’s room for joy or they never say you can’t have joy. And they’re not wrong, but oftentimes it’s how to deal with pain and misery. And the idea is basically you accept the fact that you’re going to come into contact with a bunch of idiots all day who are going to want to hurt you and steal from you, but that’s okay, just accept it. You do like a negative visualization, right? You like imagine things going wrong, which again, just feels very not so fun for me and not the way I have not not that’s not a formula that’s worked for me. In fact, the exact opposite has worked for me. That formula has worked for me actually. So what I do is like, all right, today I’ve got cancer. I can’t get out of bed because I’m like That’s harsh. You do this every day? I do it a lot. Or I’ll be I’ll be like, “Look, like like if I’m feeling sad, I’ll be like, my I just got my leg cut off. Like I can’t walk. I wish I could go run sports.” And then I’ll be like, “Wait a minute, I have both legs. I’m don’t feel sick. Let’s go celebrate and exercise.” Or you know what I mean? Or like, you know, I’m happy my dog is not dead. And I’ll go and it makes me appreciate him. Yeah, it’s called negative visualization. I think it’s incredibly useful. There’s a this is this is to me, so I I will disagree with this. There’s a this to me is the argument of, well, there’s kids starving in Africa. Like in any given moment, you could just sort of remember, oh, there’s kids starving in Africa. There’s kids starving in Africa. Oh, my boyfriend broke up with me. Well, at least I’m not a kid starving in Africa. And um and I I get the utility of it. I’ve used it myself. But in my experience, I’ve learned that it’s a bit of a roundabout way to a destination of gratitude and like you don’t have to go to feeling the stress and the pain and the suffering of bad in order to feel the gratefulness around the good. And so I found it I guess my personal experience has been, I think it’s a roundabout way to gratitude and like, I might as well just go straight to gratitude. Don’t need to uh don’t need to think about all the bad things. But think about all the bad things that could happen and go there. It’s it’s not been useful for me. I remember like when I get a sore throat, I always feel this way and when I get like a toothache, I’m like, “I wish I could go back to the days where my tooth didn’t hurt.” Like if you’re at like a toothache is like the most pain you could be in. Or sometimes. And I’m like, I like I I you’re like, “I I don’t remember like sometimes my if I All the women who have given birth are like, “What the fuck is this guy talking about?” Well, yeah, but like a toothache is the worst pain you could feel. Or like a like in my like whenever I get earaches and toothaches, I’m like, you know, it’s like it’s like this internal pain. It’s like I can’t make the pain stop and I just have to deal with it until I have an appointment in three days. And then you get like two days in and you’re like, “I don’t remember what it felt like to not feel this pain.” And so I got into the habit. I’d be like, “I would be so thankful if I could if my throat didn’t hurt today and I could just swallow food. That would make me so happy.” And days when I don’t, I’m not sick, I try to think back. I’m like, “This is exactly what I wanted. I wanted to feel happy that I’m not sick today.” And so I I think about that stuff all the time. So anyway, Ryan Holiday and The Daily Stoic is a good follow. You’re up. All right. Um by the way, I know we didn’t do stoicism justice for people who are like diehards. Sorry. Uh people should look I don’t think it is no emotions. I think it’s like more subtle than that, but But that’s a really good I think your criticism is great, which is like I think it’s what a lot of people run into when they get excited and then they’re like, “Wait, but wait, is this what I want?” Yeah, it’s like where’s the room for fart jokes? You know what I mean? I’m going to give you two niche experts. They’re in different niches, but I like them. Okay, so uh I should link their accounts here for you to Uh this first guy, I don’t know exactly how you say his name. His name is Aviral Bhatnagar. Uh and I’m going to link you his Twitter. It’s Aviral Bot and uh I’m going to put it uh where do I put it? I put it on the sheet that we have. Okay, you got it. So this guy Aviral Aviral Bhatnagar, he is a venture capitalist in India and his blog is ajuniorvc.com. This guy puts out really, really high signal stuff around what’s going on in India. Um like for example, he has a tweet that he put out yesterday or that that was, “India now exports more software, 133 billion, than Saudi Arabia exports oil, 113 billion.” We are the India is the largest engineering population in the in the world. Uh what an amazing story that’s come come out over the last 40 years. How’d you find this guy? This is the best this one’s the best one in the This is the most helpful one on the list. Yeah, and so like I I do a lot of investing in Indian startups and I was like, “Okay, if I’m going to invest in these startups, I’m not on the ground. I’m not the like local domain expert.” So what did I do? I invested in a fund. I became an investor in somebody else’s fund that’s India focused. And I was like, “Okay, cool. I’m going to get insights from him and I can bounce any deal off him to see if he wants to participate and maybe he has a local view that I don’t understand.” And then this was another guy that I thought was really smart. So I wanted to find who I wanted to basically see who’s the thought leader in that space and then how do I subscribe to them. And so his um you know, his like blog, I think has 50,000 subscribers now. So he’s not like, you know, a no-name. Uh but he’s very niche and he talks about kind of like the Indian tech scene and what’s going on, you know, at a macro level, whatever. So I found this guy to be I think he’s doing a really good job of content creation. So I’m going to pick this guy in one niche. Is there Is there such a thing as this for China? Uh I’m sure there is. Actually, this is this is a good idea. I should just um like find this person for like Latam, for Europe, you know, for different parts of Europe, uh for for India, for China, and for Australia maybe. Um and if there is none, be this guy. This guy, there’s a valuable position to become. Super valuable. There’s this guy named Bill Bishop, I think his name is. Bill Bishop had a newsletter uh called Sinism, I think it’s called. You know what I’m talking about? No. Um Sinocism. I don’t know what that means. Uh Sinocism. Um S I N O C I S M. For a long time, he was the most popular guy on Substack and his entire newsletter is it’s called Get Smarter About China and he just tells you about the business of China and you can see all like the latest trends coming out of China. It would be really This is a great arbitrage to do, by the way. If you uh instead of trying to compete in the same pond as everybody else, like go provide a really useful bridge into one specific market or one specific uh geography. Um like I I I’ve told the story before, I think, but like one of the most influential people in my life was this teacher named Lisa Keister at Duke University. And she taught this class called Getting Rich. And her story was she graduated That was the name of the class? The name of the class, yeah. Did everyone take that? It was the it was one of the hardest classes to get into because it was a great name, great title, right? So you already know this person is not just like every other professor. Like she understands like her customer, her market. The second thing was it was she was the highest rated professor on like ratemyprofessor.com and she had a chili pepper next to her name, so she was like hot, too. It was like, oh, it was everything. So I I wake up at 5:00 in the morning, we go to the library to get on the high-speed internet connection and as soon as the course listings open up, we like jumped on it and we got into this class. And I go in and she was she tells her story. She goes, “Actually, I was a student at Duke 10 years ago or 11 years ago, whatever it was.” She goes, “I graduated with a degree in Mandarin because that’s just what was interesting to me.” And at the time, everybody was making fun of me. Actually, she was older than this now, but she had started teaching back when she was like 32 or something. Now she might be 42 or 50 or something like that. But she goes, “I graduated with this degree. All my like friends were like, ‘Good luck with that. You know, how’s that Mandarin degree going to going to help you out, get a job here because I’m a I’m going to go to med school. I’m going to be a lawyer. I’m going to be a consultant. Like, what are you going to do with that Chinese degree?’” And she’s like, “Well, I bet I can get a job in China.” And they’re like, “What?” And so she bought a one-way ticket, just goes to China and she just starts waving her hand. She’s like, “Hey, people in China, like, I know English, I know companies in the West, um and I would love to learn about you and then I’ll be a bridge.” And she became a bridge basically between companies in China and companies in America. If an American company wanted to do business in China, they would do it through her because she like could translate the not just literally the language, but like she knew who to talk to. She became like the local expert there. She and this like to me, this guy on Twitter, he’s my bridge into knowing what’s going on in the scene in India. And so she what her story was, she made a killing doing that because it was really valuable. Companies in China really wanted to do business with the companies in the West. Then she invested all of it in the tech in the tech stock market because she’s like, “No, I can sell tech companies are the ones that are doing well.” So she and then right before the bubble burst, she pulled it all out to be like, “Oh, I want to do real estate now.” And she like just timed it perfectly accidentally. Invested all in real estate from 2000 to 2008, right before the real estate crash happened, she took it out again because she just wanted to do something else with her life. And basically by 32 was retired and like, you know, uh was like, “What do I want to do? I want to go teach and teach kids what I wish I knew back then.” How wealthy is she got? Uh I think she made like, you know, a few million dollars at least and like, you know, probably like five, $7 million and like um, you know, she she lives in in in Durham and she teaches at the school. I mean, I have no idea how much she has. So what was the class about? Totally I’m totally guessing. So the class was basically it was, you know, like Rameet Sethi, it was like personal finance, which is actually like you probably need she wanted to teach what she wish she learned when she was in school. So she’s like, “I wish they taught you about how to manage money.” So she would show us like the power of compound interest over time, like why you should save early and versus saving more money when you’re 30 versus saving even a little bit of money when you’re 20. And then like, what is a mortgage and like how does that work? And like then so and then every other class she would just invite in someone who made it, like someone who’s successful financially, but doing a completely different thing, just to expose you to like, look, there’s like 50 paths. Dude, this is it’s like this podcast pretty much. Yeah, one would be this girl who started a t-shirt company licensing university logos and she would tell her story. Then she she got Jamie Dimon on the phone and like Jamie Dimon is like, you know, the head of whatever Morgan Stanley or something or whatever. Uh and like then then she had this hedge fund guy from San Francisco come out and he’s like, “Yeah, I here’s what I He’s like, he surveyed the room. He goes, “Do you guys use uh Microsoft or Apple products?” And they’re and people are answering. He goes, uh he asked like three questions and we were like, “Why did you ask that?” He goes, “Because then I’m only going to make one decision this year and it’s whether to invest like hundreds of millions of dollars into Apple or not.” And um and he’s like, “So all I’m doing is I’m just trying to figure out what is the right decision on that.” And I was like, “Whoa.” That’s a job? That’s epic. And he he had said in his when he was in the class, he goes, “By the way, uh all you guys are going to just have the same resume. He goes, “You’re all trying to do the same thing. You’re all trying to get grades and then like these internships. He’s like, “So the first three-fourths of your resume, think about it. It’s going to look the same as everybody else in this room. Like I’m not really going to be able to tell the difference. He goes, “The only thing that’s going to differentiate any of you is that bottom section where it’s called other, like other interests. He’s like, “So at this school, everybody’s going to teach you to like work on that top three-fourths of the resume. In reality, you should be working on the bottom the bottom one-fourth of that resume because that’s what guys like me look at. Everybody’s got a degree. Everybody’s got good grades. Everybody went to a good school. I’ve never Wait, have I told you about the bottom fourth of the resume? No, what is that? That’s so funny that you you even use that fraction. I always tell my when when I own the company, I would say, “I just care about the bottom fourth.” I’d always say, “Just tell me this.” Wow. And I would always say that and I’d be like, “One of the greatest People would ask me, “How do you find good writers?” I was like, “Well, here’s one really easy way. Ask them about the bottom fourth.” And they go, “What do you mean?” I was like, “Well, just it doesn’t matter what they studied in school. Ask them, um, okay, so you majored in philosophy. What was your favorite uh philosophy class or favorite philosophy teacher?” And if they can’t tell me a story about something that they spent four years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on, then they’re just not going to be a good writer because they’re not interesting enough. Right. And so I would always ask about the bottom fourth of the resume for all types of roles because I’m like, “If you’re just if you can’t entertain me for this conversation, then you just don’t have any passion and I don’t want to be around you.” Right. That’s amazing. Okay, so maybe this becomes one of the the core frameworks. That’s a that you know, one one person saying it, that’s just a dot. Two people saying it, that’s a line. I interviewed uh I got that from uh Gold Brian Goldberg who founded uh Bustle and he has this amazing article and he says, it’s headlined, “Losers exist, stay away from them.” And it’s basically like how to only hire winners. It’s from Pando from years and years ago and he’s a brilliant writer, but he doesn’t write anymore because he’s kind of a loose cannon. But it was titled, “Losers exist, how to avoid them.” And it talks about uh one of the best ways to ask about the bottom fourth. And if you’re a you’re a loser if you can’t like be passionate about something that you spent four years studying. Uh no, dude, this article is gone. It’s is it Pando, you know, like Pando died. Let me see if there’s a cash version. There is a cash version. Uh okay, we we’re we’re back in luck. The headline is, “Losers exist. Don’t hire them.” Yeah, awesome. Um okay, let’s do uh let’s do a couple more. I’m going to give a couple quick ones. Uh okay, this other person who I think is a niche expert is this guy Willie Woo. Do you follow him? No, I’m looking him up now. I’m following all these people. The the Indian guy is the best one so far, but let’s look at Willie Woo. Yeah, I don’t think you’ll like this one because it’s very crypto specific, but this guy Willie Woo is I think the leading crypto analyst. And um you know, in most things like these people who analyze charts and stuff like that, they’re like it’s a little bit like horoscopy. They’re like, “Oh, look, the trend is going this way and like if you draw this T-shape, it’s going to be the iron cross pattern.” And like, you know, so buy, buy, buy. And um in crypto, there’s one unique thing which is that all the data is there’s a lot more transparency. All the, you know, everything that’s happening is happening on a chain, on a public blockchain. So you can actually go analyze it. So like he looks at all these metrics that are like um you know, it’s he won’t just look at the price, for example. There’s things like what is the actual average buy-in price? Because it’s one thing for the price to go up or for people to like not be selling because they bought it in 2013 and they you know, their cost basis was like $5 and your cost basis now is $50,000. So it looks like, what the actual price people buying in? What is the average price people bought in for? And that tells you like if it’s low versus the actual price, you’re like, “Okay, um you know, it’s mostly, you know, it’s mostly just like same coins in old hands.” Versus if it’s higher, you realize that people are buying in at the current price levels and that’s pulling the average up. Um and so there’s there’s a whole bunch of things like that like um coin age, like um are old coins moving? Meaning like if OG believers start selling, that’s kind of a signal like it’s like when a CEO starts selling their stock. It’s like, “Wait, why are you selling your stock? That doesn’t seem quite right.” Um what’s the reason? And so like when a bunch of old hands start selling, that’s actually a signal that comes before the price changes. It may it may not even affect the price yet, but it’s an indicator of something to come. Damn, that’s badass. All right, let me give you one. Um Rohin Dwaar. I actually don’t know how to spell Rohin’s last name or say Rohin’s last name. It’s D H A R. So this guy uh founded this company called Priceonomics. You remember Priceonomics? Yes, I’ve followed this guy. This guy’s good. Okay, so he’s interesting. Priceonomics was interesting. We actually recruited a bunch of people from there and I love that company. I don’t know if it’s really around anymore, but it’s just a blog. But his new like started as a side hustle. Now it’s kind of like a full-time thing and I actually showed you two examples. Even Suli is commenting on it. And this guy, he owns, I think 12 or 10 or eight, somewhere in that 8 to 12 range. He owns eight single-family homes uh in New Mexico, in California, Hawaii, wherever. Um and you can go and look and he’ll kind of show you where they are and he’ll show pictures of them and he rents them out on Airbnb. And sometimes when his kids are on vacation or not in school, he’ll go and stay in his homes. And he reveals all of the numbers and all of the updates. So on December 6th, he tweeted, “These are my monthly mortgage payments on each of the homes in my small uh portfolio vacation rentals.” Uh another one is he’ll say like, “You know, currently we’re seeing this type of occupancy rate and we actually just added a surfboard to our house in Hawaii and we noticed that we could get more money for it.” or something like that. And he takes screenshots and he shows all of the revenue that he’s making as well as how much money things have cost uh cost him to buy. And he’ll even do things like recently he posted a couple listings. He’s like, “I think I could turn this into an Airbnb.” And he’ll just like link to the Redfin house listing and he’s like, “I think I can get these numbers.” So it’s actually really cool to see him in real time make it all happen. Yeah, I like this. This is awesome. Uh I didn’t realize that he was doing this. This is it’s kind of new. Uh he’s been at it for a while. He’s been at it for now his new stick is He’s been doing it for six years, but I don’t think he was I don’t think he was as public about it before. He wasn’t as public about it. He was not as public about it, but now he’s like all in on it and it’s so fun. Uh it’s a really fun handle to follow because sometimes his properties are like a quarter of a million and he puts down 20%. So he puts down or sometimes even less, I think. So he’ll put down like $40 or $50,000 on these properties and that’s pretty attainable for a lot of people. And so it’s kind of interesting. Right. Um okay, I have a Okay, let’s do a couple funny ones. Um Okay, have you heard of this account, James Friedman? It’s F Jamie 013. Uh was it on this list? No. So what is it? James Friedman? F James Friedman or I don’t know, maybe it’s Friedman, but it’s F R I D M A N. Uh no. Who who what what’s this? Okay, so uh so he is uh he’s got two million followers, so he’s definitely popular. He’s the Photoshop guy. So basically, people will Photoshop like, uh, “Hey James, my boyfriend’s wearing this Calvin Klein foot the same Calvin Klein t-shirt in every um in every photo that we I take with him. Can you just remove the the logo of Calvin Klein?” And then like he he does he does the request, but he doesn’t he’s not actually just photoshopping it. He makes it hilarious. So like this is very visual, so you know, you need like YouTube to be able to see what I’m saying here, but like he photoshopped the the this guy’s wearing Calvin Klein shirt of like it you know, just says across the chest Calvin Klein jeans. And uh so he like photoshopped it with that ripped off. So that little section ripped off. Now you can just see his chest and uh and so it’s like fucks it actually like fucks up the photo. It doesn’t make it good like the girl wants. And it says Calvin Klein tattooed on his chest now instead of on the shirt. Um and so it’s like uh like people will just be like, you know, um you know, we here’s my wedding photo, uh but we forgot to wear a mask during our wedding photos. Can you Photoshop a mask on instead of photoshopping a COVID mask, he’ll put like, you know, the green mask from Jim Carrey’s like the mask on their face. So it’s just like people request it and then he does the like he does the request, but he does it wrong in a way that they’re not happy with. Um they’ll be like, you know, my my arms look too big here and then he’ll make them like absurdly tiny or whatever. And so it’s just hilarious. He’s got two million followers. He’s like I look funny with one arm and then so he just or uh you can’t see my other arm, so it looks funny with just one arm. And so he just deletes the the the second arm, so the person is armless. Yeah, exactly. Uh and I think he has like a book or something like called the Joy of Photoshop. It’s it says uh asking the wrong guy for help. This is awesome. This is cool. I’ve never seen this. I’m going to follow him. Uh you want to go do a a few more quick funny ones? Uh yeah, let’s do another one. Uh we have a friend Nikita Beer. He’s pretty funny in like the tech world. Um what do you think of his account? Hilarious. He’s a shit head. Yeah, he’s I’m actually amazed that he does some of the stuff that he does and that’s why I like him. Well, it’s kind of like the Donald Trump rule, right? Which is like you say one offensive or weird thing, um you know, you’re canceled, but you say all offensive and weird things, uh you get like, you know, you get the pass. How did he get away with so much? That’s the that’s the key is like if every post makes fun of something, that’s cool. If if only one does, then you’re an asshole. All of his stuff is making fun of something. So I think it’s a great follow. And his profile picture is hilarious. Yeah, his profile picture is uh is good. Um all right, you want to do one more? Um Yeah, okay, I like this one. I don’t know if you know this guy. I don’t think you do. I don’t know if you’d be interested in him. His name is Harala Bob. What’s he do? So Harala Bob’s story is kind of crazy. Is this a crypto guy? So he’s he’s actually he’s transitioned from being the the the one thing guy to the next thing guy to the next thing guy. Okay, so he started off he got famous because he was a big sports better. And he famously one year, and I think the year 2000, like just absolutely raked it in in Vegas because he found an arbitrage uh that he could bet on and he just like milked it. And uh he realized that like I think it was something he had he’s had a few of these where he basically finds he would find inefficiencies in the sports betting market and that’s how he made like millions of dollars. So he found like one year that what they would do is um let’s say that that they would have an over under, a total points for a game. And let’s say it’s 200 points for the game. Now, Vegas is like weirdly accurate with over unders. Like they will get it like so spot on. It’ll come down to like the last possession and like it’ll flip over or under. So they’re very good at doing that. That doesn’t seem like there’s much of inefficiency there. But like in basketball, what happens is that the first half of basketball, you just play and then you go to halftime. But at the end of the game, there’s often this situation where the losing team will start fouling the winning team to like stop the clock, make them shoot free throws and then try to like they’re trying to make threes while the other team can only shoot two free throws at a time. So what it led to was that the second half had more points than the first half. But Vegas had this small bet called the they would take the over under and it would say, you can bet the first half over under and it was just dividing it by two. So it’s like dividing the total by two. So the total was always really accurate, but the first half over under was underpriced. It was like too frequently to uh too high. So he was just betting the under. So he’d find these like little inefficiencies or he’d find certain refs are really foul prone. And so he would know that, okay, when that ref is reffing this game, that team is going to score more than their normal average. And so he would just bet for a whole season on just the refs. And he actually un I think he figured out before the NBA uncovered that that ref Tim Donaghy was like cheating basically because like there was always weird shit happening on that guy’s games. Uh and so he and so he I’m paraphrasing because he doesn’t like totally out his whole strategy, but like he’s talking about it before. Like he’s talking about when um when Clean Tech was big and the government was giving money to this I think it’s called Solyndra or something like that. And he came out and he said, the same thing happened with Enron where it was like five weeks before it went under, they were like, not just saying everything’s going to be okay, they were saying everything’s better than ever. And he and Elon came out and was sort of like, “What do you want people to say?” He’s like, “You know, it is in the incentive of somebody, of the captain of that ship to go down with the ship and the whole time be saying, ‘Oh, we’re so close to our destination.’” Basically, he was like, “They’re never going to come out and say, ‘Yeah, we don’t know, we might not make it.’” Because then that will guarantee you don’t make it because people will sell the stock. It’ll put so much negative pressure on the company, it’ll hurt the morale inside the company. And so you can’t ever come out and say, “I don’t know, we might not make it.” So you always have to say, “Make it. Of course we’re going to make it. We’re thriving.” And like, you just hope it actually comes true. He said something to that effect in an interview once I read and I was like, I feel like he’s describing what actually was going on inside Tesla. That’s amazing. And so anyways, the long story short was I didn’t believe it, didn’t believe it, didn’t believe it. I was sort of like reading it, but I didn’t pull the trigger. And then Josh Wolf, this guy is a very, very smart guy, successful VC, not an anonymous Twitter egg account who’s like just shorting the stock and trying to like spread fear. Um, he was really shitting on it consistently for the course of a year. And at some point, I was like, “You know, what will I regret more? Selling the stock now and taking my profit if I’m wrong, or seeing all these signals and not like going with what seems to be a mounting amount of evidence?” How much did you buy? Guess what? I was wrong. Tesla becomes a Elon becomes the richest man in the world. Tesla becomes a $600 billion company. I bought it at a $6 billion valuation or something crazy like that. And so, you know, I missed out on a 50 to 100X uh, you know, somewhere along the way. And uh and so yeah, I do regret. I actually turned out to be wrong. I I would have regretted more this scenario happening, but it seemed improbable. Wait, so you bought 100 grand worth of Tesla stock? I didn’t buy 100 grand. I think I bought like I don’t know. I don’t even know what it was. It wasn’t 100. I don’t think that’s that’s not what I was buying back then because this was like I I was like 23 years old or something at the time. It it was a long time ago. And basically, I think I had bought like 30 or 40 grand of the stock at a certain price. And I because I remember doing the math and thinking, “Okay, they’re valued at like 5 or 6 billion now. What is Ford and GM valued at?” Okay, they’re valued at 25 billion. Okay, on one hand, that seems crazy that they’re only five times less when they deliver like 200 times less cars. But I was like, “I really think like the cars are going to go electric, that these old fucks are never going to switch.” And he’s got this like vertically integrated it’s like actually a battery and energy company. It’s not even a car company. And this was before self-driving. So I was like, “That’s a good pick.” So it was a good pick. I mean, yeah, but you know, you if you get it wrong, you get it wrong. So I got my face. And by the way, on this note of the the pessimist archive, I saw this YouTube video that was um I don’t know if you heard about this. A few years ago, Elon Musk negotiated a very unique compensation package. Do you know about this? Uh yeah, basically he gets some crazy bonuses if some crazy goals happened. Yeah, so he had he had set up this thing where he gets absolutely it’s his entire compensation was tied to the um the market cap of Tesla. And like it was at 50 billion, I think at the time when he had done it. And um it was like every 50 billion dollars increments, he was going to get more. And so it was like at a if I get us to 100 billion, then I get X. I get I I think he would get uh like 1% or 2% more of the company each time. I I I I should have I don’t know we’re going to talk about this. I could have mapped it out. But basically, he was going to get a percentage more of the company for every 50 billion they go up in market cap as they also have to hit certain um like revenue and earnings uh at that