Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en [Music] okay first thing super quick so have you guys heard of this twitter account it’s called new york times first set have you heard of it no okay so it’s kind of just like this fun little twitter account where they track all of the articles being published by the new york times and then they find words that are published for the first time and it’s just kind of like a fun thing because i’ll send you guys this or i’ll post it in the doc this is a link to a couple of the ones uh that they publish so like dead ass for example was a word like first found in the new york times march 2019 doom scrolling may 2020 uh tech bro apparently was january 2022 like that surprises me so this is just kind of like a fun thing but i was thinking that this should exist for jobs so on indeed or glassdoor or something there’s a really really quick transition period these days between like just completely new jobs coming to market and i think there should be an account that tracks these like oh this is the first time i’ve seen like i don’t know where i saw this but there’s like professional falconer like what who does that how much do they get paid i don’t know but i’m surprised to know it exists and i’m sure there’s many more practical jobs out there that are coming to market that people should know about and so someone should just create the equivalent of this instead of the new york times it should be for indeed how do they do this that’s great how do they track every word and check if it’s ever been said before i think it’s just a scraper i mean i don’t know exactly how they set it up but i don’t think it would actually be that by the way this has 200 000 followers so for that person out there who’s just been grinding trying to put out great content that has like 3 000 followers just know you could have been tweeting out like single word things from the new york times and got 200 000 followers i actually think that’s a great idea have you guys seen the uh remember how we talked about this kid that was tracking elon musk’s private jet on twitter now he’s tracking all the private jets and private yachts of all the russian oligarchs great pivot and shout out shout out also elon offered him five thousand dollars and he turned it down he’s like no i’m going to keep doing my thing but both of his accounts have a lot of five grand for elon stop tracking him yeah yeah because elon was like i don’t want people to know where i am what a stupid thing if you’re gonna if you’re gonna come and offer someone money do it right five thousand dollars that’s how you should reply grand um i think this is cool stuff i actually think this is a wonderful idea um i also think that companies would pay for this right as in like companies that have competitors want to know what their competitors are doing and so like we’re launching something at hubspot soon and i’ve already gotten an email from someone who works at techcrunch who’s like hey saw this on your site or like they basically dug something up that we publish and they’re like what’s going on here and imagine you have the same thing where you’re like oh i saw like sales forces you know hiring for these roles or i didn’t know that was a role at netflix i think companies would pay for that intel that’s actually crazy fascinating if you could aggregate like let’s say that you’re in the me when i was at the hustle i cared about what like there’s like 30 companies that i cared about what they were doing it would be kind of interesting to act if i would have paid a monthly fee and i would have gotten a daily email with like the movement and people’s job job listings yeah that’s that’s what i was gonna say i don’t think it’s so interesting like the the falconer or whatever it’s like oh whatever someone made up a random job but oh like we see this a lot where it’s like oh netflix is hiring a web 3 engineer that means they’re probably trying to explore something in that space and so you can kind of get a sense of what direction somebody’s going oh they’re hiring enterprise sales okay they’re trying to go up market right so there’s a competitive intelligence that comes from these but i think that i do think that exists i’ve seen people tracking these i don’t know if they’re just doing it for their own fun or if there’s like a service that tracks that uh but it is kind of interesting i like that all right what else you got steph oh by the way i should say one more thing i love more thing about this hilarious story i went into work one day and my buddy neil who’s like a programmer at our company he was standing at the coffee machine making a coffee it was like 10 a.m and i hadn’t even said anything to him yet we were just standing next to each other and he just goes these are my first words he’s like he did he realized he hadn’t spoke that day yet he like got to work to the coffee machine and like he had started programming like his commute he didn’t talk to anybody he was at his destination he just started these are my first words and i thought that [ ] was so funny and uh it actually is great when he said that i realized how funny neil is and so we’ve replaced our marketing person with neil he’s uh our iphone programmer and he wrote all of the release notes for our apps because he was just hilarious and he was like loki hilarious but these are my first words i’ll never forget that how does that relate relate to that because it’s like a word tracker you know the first time the new york times said this word so that’s how i thought of that first time neil it’s interesting thing about what are your first words every day right like what’s coming at your mouth for the first time every day mine’s usually like like a grump it’s like a [ ] when i say enough you know what i mean exercise or something and i’m like oh [ ] it’s usually my first word well that explains a lot all right and then i forgot to tell you this but this is the most important thing uh i can’t believe we didn’t talk about this earlier to be honest with you because if you’re listening to this and you like what you’re hearing right now and you haven’t gone and subscribed to the my first million podcast wherever you get your podcast then that’s the thing you’ve got to do there’s nothing more important than doing that right now and don’t do it because i said to do it do it because you want to do it do it because that’s who you are all right what else doing uh i guess related to companies hiring so you guys are no mischief right it’s this like company that does these crazy stunts they’re on i think stunt number 70 and i their latest stunt i thought was really interesting and relates to this idea of just like creative hiring so if you scroll down tell me about what mischief is i don’t entirely get it because they raised funding but when you explain what they are i’m like who what grown adult would trust this child with money it’s like south park or saturday night live it’s a weekly show it’s like a weekly sketch uh but it’s just done through code they make a website instead of like a video making a joke they make a website that’s a joke yeah but is it exactly does it make money i think it does i don’t know how much they’ve made they’ve raised three and a half million dollars so i don’t know like you’re saying i don’t know who those investors are what they’re looking from mischief but just to give like two examples so one of them recently was i think it’s like called tuntin i don’t know why it’s called that but basically it’s called the game of death online which you sign up you get an account and you pay 10 to join the game and all you have to do is log in daily to stay alive and the last person who stays alive gets all the money so it’s just kind of like these silly quirky games but the last one they did was they also do like commentary through their game so it was a commentary on in this case the msat so they got people to pay fifty dollars to take the msot and the highest score one it’s basically like a their version of the sats um and the person who got the highest score won the entire pot so they didn’t actually have that many people did it they had 500 people who did it but it reminded me of something you guys talk about on the pod or have talked about on the pod which is you know the power of like crowdsourcing things like spacex if they want to develop some new technology they put out some competition and that tends to attract more interesting people than you know if they hire a bunch of recruiters to go you know find the people in theory they’re looking for the example the example i think you’re thinking about is they were trying to figure out some like were they trying to like decode some protein or something that helped with this aids um medication and they like turned it into a video game and they’d spent 10 years trying to solve it and then like a bunch of video gamers got it done in like three weeks yeah well there’s the spacex what’s what’s the spacex challenge the one that everyone knows um is it about x prize it’s just like they’re that’s not from space yeah but there’s also yeah that’s like a version of that where they basically just put out the bounty and then let people let anybody sort of enter to try to win okay there’s a i feel like there’s another one that spacex does but in any case like what i’m getting at is all i mean we work for hubspot there’s all these companies that are trying to attract like quote unquote top talent and they’re doing it in a way that in most cases like true top talent like are you going to want to be like dm’d on linkedin and go through like a traditional interview process like in most cases no and so my question is why isn’t there like a really like mischief style recruiting agency that puts out these challenges that the smartest people on the internet are like stoked to solve just out of the sheer pride that um they then can funnel potentially into these companies maybe it’s the case that these people just like would never want to work for these larger companies but i just wonder why there isn’t a more creative route i have something recruiting i have something for you so this is one of the very first articles the hustle ever wrote i don’t even know if you can google it anymore it was literally like we wrote it like two weeks after starting and it was about my friend named max and if you uh google uh ben the hustle google interview or the hustle secret google interview so my friend max was teaching himself some i i gotta remember all the details this was like six years ago he he was learning some type of coding some type of language it was it was like a rare language and he was typing in all these things on google like what does blank mean how do you do blank and after a while his his chrome browser like went like looked like the matrix and it said you look like you might belong to one of us and and it says we’ve noticed that you’ve been googling a lot about this type of language and we are hiring for that would you be interested in applying here that’s amazing and very few people ever saw this but we wrote an article about this this article got seen by millions of people what’s it say ben what was the language google has a secret interview process and it landed me a job that’s the headline and and he ended up working there and it worked it worked and uh it was wild that’s dope and you know only google can do that because they own the browser in the search engine but uh but what if you were just like what what if there was just like an app that just sat on your computer that basically just tracked everything you did i know sounds great but like gave you job opportunities based on what you do on your computer right like if it knows that steph is in all these different like subreddits and it’s like and she’s like looking at google trends and all this stuff that’s like a signal for what type of person you are like it’s actually like a much higher quality signal in theory than any job interview you could do where you’re just trying to like present yourself as a certain way versus like what you actually do on the internet right like oh you spend a lot of time in excel or what you actually do on your computer it’s like you spend a lot of time in excel you know so uh we’ve seen we’ve seen what your capabilities are okay if you’re doing macros in excel you could probably qualify for certain types of jobs and so i wonder if there’s like a thing you could do like for college students like hey put this on your computer and like do you want your first job out of college like we’ll help figure out what that job should be we’ll help get you like a job opportunity uh just by putting this like tracker on your computer quick interruption do me a favor scroll down and you’re going to see a link to the hustle so if you want to stay up to date on the tech and business news you need to know check out the hustle it’s a daily email i used to help write it i love it so check it out scroll down below sounds very naughty yeah i mean though yeah i mean i know it’s always like a oh tracking everything on your computer thing but the reason i thought of this is because i watched the q on documentary and in it they have have you guys heard of like cicada3301 no no no it’s they covered it in the documentary but basically it was like the epitome of these like crazy online puzzles i think there’s been three of them the first two were solved the third one still has not been solved and they are like you know there’s there’s like a picture online and there’s like a message and encrypted in that message there’s a bunch of numbers and then you have to know to like go to another website and put it in the point is a lot of people thought that this was actually a recruitment tool for like either the nsa or the cia and so i was like man there should be something maybe not that crazy but something like that online for a company did you guys ever do one of those i did this in college we found this website and it was like you know it said some like vague thing it was like the game has only begun but have you realized it like have you realized that it’s begun yet and it’s like you have to like right click view source and then the source code there’s a url you go to that url and then it downloads an audio file you listen to the audio file it sounds like nothing you listen to it backwards all of a sudden it gives you coordinates you go to those coordinates on a map the map deletion and it was like a 50-part game like mystery game and me and all my friends got totally obsessed with this we spent like hours and hours and now i don’t remember what the name this is back in college it was like 15 years ago but like the uh i remember at the end the the last puzzle we could never solve and i think the guy just made an unsolvable puzzle like i just think there was no solution and his name was mr wiggles or mr squiggles or some [ ] like that and he um he had this puzzle that was like the unsolvable thing at the end but it was so much fun and actually now that i think about it that is actually a great like filter and barometer for who might be good at certain times of what types of work like the type of person that would do that for fun and solve that problem i would love to hire that person right because i know well could you could you be like uh there’s this aw like if you’re that game maker mr wiggles or whatever like could you like do that as a service for a variety of companies uh and like make these games like hey we’re gonna try and find you but i bet it’s like hey i bet we’re gonna do this thing this and this thing and i bet you we’re gonna get you 20 new applicants every month yeah these silly games but they’re going to be high high quality steph what’s uh what’s newly so newly have either of you guys heard no of newly n-u-l-y i think with this is just a quick one but basically so it’s this company that is part of the urban outfitters subsidiary so urban owns urban outfitters anthropology free people and newly and newly is a different take so all those other businesses sell clothes in a very traditional way what newly is is a rental business so every month they send you six items you choose those six items on your own they send them to you you get to rent them for a month and then at the end of the month you have the option to keep them at honestly a pretty discounted rate somewhere between like 15 to sometimes up to 60 percent and they’ve a ton of brands in there including their own brands and the reason i thought this was interesting is you know there’s other rental clothing services out there but this is tacked on to existing businesses that weren’t renting clothes and it spoke to me because it was kind of similar to what amazon’s done turning a cost center into something that maybe in this case isn’t a profit center but is way more profitable i think than the traditional clothing business that they have so if you guys remember i think was it mark lore or um one of your guests talked about just how many returns there are for clothing it’s let me just pull up a stat right here 20 right yeah exactly and a return with clothing can cost up to 66 of the the cost of an item so actually a lot of these closing stores were just saying like look you can you can just keep the stuff you don’t even have to send back the item in this case newly not only uh it doesn’t have to like send items to people and not have them returned because it’s so expensive i’m paying newly to rent these clothes so they’re not losing money on the rental they’re now making money on the rental and they’ve structured it in a way where it’s actually really compelling and so i think newly i don’t know the exact size of it now but at least where i live i run into like at my co-working space all the girls there are wearing newly and i just like i wonder how this can be applied to other businesses so like what are those cost centers that could actually be turned into a profit center sean what’s the return rate on the things that you’re involved in through investments or whatever this is way lower um way lower than the 20 so like you know more like and i don’t know if that’s i don’t know if that number is uh like what percent of your orders get returned or what percent of your revenue what what what percent of revenue is the cost of returns so i’m not sure exactly what that what that’s meant to quote but you know of course any return is like a drain on the business and so you you know any way that you could turn returns into uh to either a neutral or profitable thing would be would be kind of amazing what do brands do with returned clothing or returned items they kind of like so typically you sort of like there’s like a it’s like an er right so the patient comes in and it’s like okay it’s it’s it’s a lost cause you just gotta dump it all right right or it’s like oh this could be patched up okay so you just need to like re-tag it it’s in good condition re-tag it put it back in back in packaging it’s all good to go sometimes you have to like clean it steam it whatever like and in fact uh there’s a guy sonny who follows us on twitter and listens to the pod and he has this thing called rock returns so i think he had an e-commerce brand he had like a suit brand like a nice men’s suit brand and returns were kind of like killing him because it’s like a very kind of like heavy thing to ship and it’s an expensive product and um he’s like well what am i supposed to do with this and his 3pl or like his warehouse was not like they weren’t willing to um like reprocess the suit and he couldn’t he couldn’t send out a questionable suit so he had to know that this is like if it did get if it is going to be set back out it’s in good condition and so he actually created his own returns warehouse and he’s doing it for himself and now a bunch of other brands right same as the aws model so he turned his cost center into a profit center and i think this business is better than his e-commerce business overall and he’s just becoming an expert of like oh yeah like here’s the efficient way to handle returns and now he’s doing it for himself and a whole bunch of other e-commerce brands and uh and he’s like nerding out about it hardcore he’s like dude i found this new way of like steaming the thing that like makes it you know where we get extra 10 of them back into circulation because they’re you know they’re better now or like we could turn it around at this cost and they just charge like a cost per return processed basically for um for for the brands damn that’s bad because usually what makes you good at processing returns is not the same thing as what gets you good at like warehouse a general warehouse with a bunch of pallets and boxes and shipping orders out it’s like takes like a different skill set in a way can we talk about uh one other idea yeah so what you talked about sean reminded me of so there’s all this real estate and i’m sure this is like an overdone idea but there’s all this real estate that people have access to and not everyone knows what it can be used for so maybe it could be used for a fulfillment center maybe your garage could be rented out and there’s a couple examples that i came upon that i thought were interesting and i wonder if someone could aggregate all of these different ways that real estate or parts of real estate can be used to gain some income so let me give you a couple examples a lot of people have heard of solar panels so companies will pay you so that you can install solar panels on your roof you’ll get into a licensing agreement and they’ll make money off of that that’s why they’ll often install it for free another example is churches so apparently due to the height of churches and specifically the steeples on churches different telecom companies will pay these churches for access to their steeple so an example is the national cathedral in washington is paid guess how much actually guess how much they’re paid by motorola every single year i would have thought like a thousand a month so 100 000 a year just for access to their 234 foot tower and some churches are even building steeples they don’t even have a steeple but they’re like look i heard this other church is getting 100k a year we want that so that’s another example one final example i’ll share is surfline my partner he surfs all the time he uses these surf cams to check you know how the waves are every day well where are these surf cams apparently they’re actually in people’s backyards so if you have a backyard that is in a strategic area to see the surf you can either sign up yourself or you can recommend or refer people to be like a surf cam house and they’ll come they’ll install it and then i believe you get i’m not actually sure in this case how much but you get paid a certain amount to have that surf cam in your backyard so those are three examples i’m sure there’s many more but i feel like there should be a site that says like oh you’ve got a house in this area you have a roof that gets this much sunlight or it’s this tall or it’s this much square footage would you go as far as to put this into cars too one time years ago shawn and i listened to this pitch of this guy who created a you know how cab cabbies have like advertising on top of their car he was doing that for uber drivers and uh i don’t actually know i i see him everywhere but i don’t know how the business what happened with the business huge valuation so so they definitely got some traction i think it’s like a multi-hundred million dollar company now it’s called firefly what um wow yeah and there’s another one that has like the screens have you guys been in ubers where it’s like a screen and it’s just playing ads those ones are i feel like the execution on that has been terrible but like that’s another example where it’s like oh you actually have valuable real estate which is the back of this car seat because you have people i have an idea for you um new side project for you it’s called the side hustle generator and we’ll put it on the my first million podcast website and it’s a side hustle generator oh it’s a giant quiz that leads you into a list of potential side hustles you could be ethical for so you’re like yeah you know in your thing it’s like do you do you own a church you know do you do you live by the surf do you um do you have a car that you don’t use all the time right like there’s all these different ways because i think you know people um people don’t realize the number of opportunities that are like literally at their fingertips it’s like do you own a phone do you know you get paid to test websites for companies all you have to do is go to the website and just talk out loud as you try to use their website usertesting.com right like my mom didn’t know that and then she knows that and that like kind of like changed her life a little bit right she like all of a sudden had this thing she could do every day that kept her busy that made her some money and she enjoyed it um then you know airbnb i remember telling my parents about airbnb it’s like you know took some you know somebody had to educate them about it but now they make six figures a year airbnb being their home and so there’s like how many of these your parents do yeah where do they go uh they’ll just go like you know to a hotel they’ll go to a vacation they’ll just leave the city they’ll come to my house they’ll go anywhere like they don’t care because because they can get like you know 700 800 a night for their home and they’ll go rent a hotel you know if 40 minutes away or an hour away they’ll go to wine country or whatever and rent a hotel for 200 and they you know they pocket the difference did you guys remember the company about stuff you do the penny hoarder yeah so the penny holder started as a blog it started by this guy named kyle he spoke at one of our events he’s a cool dude and then his business partner is a friend of mine and anyway he started it in 2012 and he started it where he would just talk about all the side hustles he was doing so for example he would go on taskrabbit and like get people’s groceries and we talk about how much money he was making he would become an instacart driver he would talk about how much money he’s making he would do uber driver and how much money he was making and he got really good at getting traffic and eventually he uber goes hey for every new driver you refer to us we’ll give you two thousand dollars instacart did the same thing taskrabbit did the same thing uh you user testing did the same thing and then like a person who like you need to answer surveys and so that’s what he did and he built this business this digital ad business he when he came to the event he brought his dog and i was like oh how’d you get your dog on the plane he goes oh i fly private and i was like what are you crushing it that hard he goes yeah we bootstrapped it and we’ll do about 70 million in revenue this year and he owned 100 of the company and he recently sold it for i forget the exact number but it was in the hundreds of millions of dollars and the whole premise was just on like talking about ways that you can make it was mostly lower income people like people like like maybe a mom who’s just trying to like make ends meet with just like 10 hours that she has available instead of taking care of kids and um he killed it this business crushed it you’ve never heard of the penny holder sean i heard i’ve heard it from you but i never went to it so i never like used it it’s just a wordpress blog that’s all it is uh sorry i was looking forward to stuff stock and realizing how many interesting ideas there are in here steph we have to do a two-parter so uh so yeah let’s let her bang out a couple more let’s give us one more i’ll come back any time i mean that was the worst ideas in the middle of the list was the best idea so that’s my feedback to you well why don’t you tell me what’s an interesting one that you you have you’re right i’m looking at some of these like trend success stories i think those are pretty interesting um that’s one i was kind of looking at just at the moment which one of those is your favorite hmm well i feel like okay so let’s call out a couple of them real quick so last time i was on i talked about like this idea of like your listicle is my opportunity a couple people have actually taken action on that they’ve created these sites that identify the healthiest versions of not very healthy things so one guy started a tick-tock it got hundreds of thousands of views in the first few days and then someone else tweeted about this actually this just last night let me see what they did they’re called fast food cravings where basically the headline says eat what you want not what you can and it lets you like put in a specific restaurant and find the healthiest version of the food at that restaurant we talked about insider trading at on one of the very first episodes i was on and this guy after that episode i think this actually existed before the episode but connor dm’d me and he was like so there are these sites that track insider trades but there are specific types of insider trades that are more interesting than others and specifically it’s stock grants to executives it’s not obviously a sure thing but he said he was like typically what that signals is the company trying to you know invest in a particular thing if the executives hit certain targets it’s generally a good sign obviously not investment advice but he created this community called spring loading and what he does is he started a scraper that looks for all the insider trades but then specifically vets them for this particular aspect like is the company granting a buttload of stock to a group of executives and he just he’s he basically shares these and then he i shared an example in the chat but he basically he sends the uh financial report he sends the grant details then he summarizes it he says look these people are getting this grant this is what i have you know what additional information i have and then he gives a conviction rating so some of his conviction ratings are like one like guys this is probably nothing maybe something if you want to take a bet go for it some of them he’s like this is a five so i shared one again not investment advice but he shared one for example for cloudflare a little bit ago obviously cloudflare with all the other tech companies is tanked recently but he was like this is one of the biggest performance grants i’ve ever seen with pretty massive price targets i don’t think there’s any news in the near future but i do believe that cloudflare has massive potential and the stock is down 35 over the last month and then he shares again the exact grant values what targets they need to hit so for example these execs have different price targets similar to you know you guys discuss like elon musk’s like crazy price targets if they hit i think um cloudflare today is at 95 or something like that their first price target is 156 dollars and it goes all the way up to 979 dollars so this is what these execs internally are tracking towards so i don’t know i thought that was like another interesting example i think he’s i think this community is pretty successful he’s charging people monthly fees by this idea did you bet on this i haven’t uh cal my partner he’s been in the community he did actually i mean again not financial advice but he bet on one and i can’t remember what company it was but it did one one day like go up but this was obviously also in the uh don’t even tell me more actually just leave it there and i’m convinced don’t even i don’t i don’t need anything else well i was gonna say i definitely like don’t want people to be go going and gambling their money on on that one anecdote but it is interesting to even just like be in there and and what i’ve found because i’ll just like dabble in the community i haven’t placed any bets but to see um what like i’m learning about a bunch of different companies that i’ve never heard of i’m seeing like how these different companies are structuring stock grants and like why and someone commenting on it and then of course there’s just like a bunch of um a bunch of people commenting like are you betting like oh [ ] like i’m 50 down like how are you doing and it’s so it’s kind of like a fun community as well you guys have this is awesome you guys have a uh like a like a degenerate budget or like a learner budget where it’s like okay this is my [ ] around with money that i can i can try different things or do you guys not do that same you’re shaking your head no i don’t but but do you it sounds like you do i do how much uh well let’s talk about like in percentage terms so it’s like you know what would that be it’s like don’t do percentage terms like literally how much like like 50 50 000 no more than that uh wow yeah for sure and so what will you do with that what’s an example of your of a dumb of a risky thing that you’ve done uh like i think i’ve told this story before but i remember watching uh so the idea with these is um i’ll just tell the story first i watched a youtube video of this guy no idea who this guy is uh some wall street some some hedge fund guy and basically he’s a prolific short trader this is kind of like the vibe i got from this video couldn’t tell you how to tell you his name couldn’t tell you what his track record was uh white guy looked reasonable enough and uh he basically was like he’s like yeah i’m uh he’s like my short pick of the year is tootsie roll and uh and all these i was like well i was listening i was a white white tootsie roll i didn’t realize it’s a public stock he’s like tootsie roll he’s like first of all who the hell eats tootsie roll he’s like do you think tootsie roll is growing he’s like no the people eat tootsie rolls are like you know 50 and up their dying market kids don’t want tootsie roll nowadays they want like all these other candies he’s like tootsie roll has zero innovation they refuse to change their product and um they don’t come out with anything new he’s like and then it’s also poorly run and not gonna be so it was like owned by some woman who was like i think it’s owned by like a 92 year old lady she passed away now but at the time this was like five years ago or something like that like that that this happened i don’t know where this was it was a while back and um i remember watching that video and i was like oh this guy’s totally right titsurl is [ ] dead i went that day and i better get stitcher roll i made a bunch of money just on this like zero thought process zero diligence like just like take it take a punt and uh you know do something on a whim and so that was the first time i realized like actually i want a designated budget and with crypto this has become like you know kind of a necessity with crypto you basically have like you have so many new things that are all interesting and you can’t get to high conviction because they’re new it’s rapidly evolving like the opportunities in front of you today and so you don’t have time to diligence all these you don’t have time to get to high conviction but you do know like where you know you can sort of sense certain signals like if a bunch of smart people are looking at it um if you see you know developer activity in that space if the premise is like you know interesting it might hit might not hit whatever you can basically take punts on things in crypto and you get paid off unlike the stock market right i think on the tootsie roll thing i made like i don’t know 20 35 something like that in crypto you can make like 20 x when you’re right on these things and so with krypto the odds just shift in your favor where yeah it’s super fast moving and things can go to zero but the the upside when you hit is so high it pays for all of your other bad bets and so i basically created a budget because i was like i can’t um i can’t overthink this i need to i need to intentionally underthink this so what does that mean it’s like there’s been in the last five years there’s been so many examples of things that i’ve come across my radar in crypto that i don’t take action on because i feel like i don’t have enough information to make an educated decision and actually if i had just made uneducated decisions i would have done far better than my like educated decisions turned out to be because the space is just um where there’s a lot of progress being made and you can’t keep up with all the different projects all different tokens so i basically set out a budget where i said if somebody tells me something that’s interesting i have money that i could just like dump into that it’s a small amount of money i don’t care if that money that money goes to zero and i’m not putting it all into one so i’m taking like a portfolio of these and let’s just see what happens and in doing so i get to actually learn how these things work um and so you know like i did one the other day and i put it in the milk road explaining literally step by step what this what this project was and why i’m why i’m going into it and how i have no idea if this is like a great idea a bad idea i didn’t audit the security of the project like i don’t have time for all that i’m just like trying to learn how these things work and i’m putting small bets in a bunch of different areas with money that i can afford to lose do you do that stuff so i don’t cal does uh i think it’s smart though because like sean saying these are the type of investments where like if you don’t have money sequestered for this it’s gonna it’s gonna capture your psychology that’s actually why i don’t dabble in these things but uh he’s done that a lot for nfts right so at first he was like steph i’m just gonna buy one obviously he’s bought bought more since then but he he has a certain amount and like that’s all he’s willing to invest if it goes to zero he’s happy with it um but he’s also probably sold a lot too early because he has a concentrated amount so he’s like oh i gotta sell this to buy another thing uh sean did you get into proof i feel like that was a big no i didn’t i didn’t do proof that’s that’s a great example of one where i’m like oh interesting kevin rose is doing this nft thing i should uh i should you know i should take a punt right like it’s i’m seeing this before most people um i should go in and like again like with these things it’s not gonna it’s not like gonna go to zero quote unquote it’s like you know so i can trade out of the thing if i want to and you know three months from now but like to weigh each to i don’t want every decision to be heavy and um and i you have you guys seen this meme that’s like the it’s like the curve i think it’s called like the midwit meme it’s basically like there’s an idiot on one side there’s a genius like i said on one side is the idiot he looks like a troll it looks like you know it’s like whatever shrek and on the other side there’s like a jedi master and then the middle which is like the top of the curve is like the average person and it’s like uh you know like for example like oh like the idiot would be like oh that monkey looks like that’s a cool looking monkey i’ll buy all right the genius is like oh this you know this has a chance to be an iconic you know like like whatever iconic nft bi i didn’t think about it more than that and then the like middle guy is like you know but why would anybody buy this picture of a monkey and like how do the tokenomics work and they try to like analyze the whole [ ] thing and they’re hey they’re just paralyzed that’s some sort of analysis paralysis where they don’t they don’t take action on anything and they overthink things so they miss the like the big simple opportunities that are in front of them a lot of times and um i heard the guy from yc who michael seibel talking about this he goes he goes this is often the case with startup ideas he goes a beginner like you know you out of college when you don’t know anything about anything you just think it’s all you don’t you don’t know how hard it’s going to be you don’t know what a good you don’t know how to vet opportunities you just be like oh that sounds cool like let me try that and then same thing with the jedi master the jedi master’s like oh like you know would it be cool if you could take a rocket to mars let’s try that you know that’s also the like you don’t need to analyze it beyond that at the beginning it’s like this fundamental decision is pretty it’s very simple and then like the person he’s like the person i hate talk to talking to is like the second time founder who’s trying to like over optimize their cap table and like try to get like really complicated about the like the valuation and this and then that and then they’re trying to do like this lean validation about every single and it’s like that’s the hardest person to deal with because they’re they know too much but not enough to know how to keep it simple and uh he’s talking about like the best ideas the best startup ideas they go to like that that idiot genius category where it’s like you know like you should make cars that are electric you know like we should we should sell books online yeah it’s like yeah what if we could buy a book online and it’s like that’s it right you don’t need to go too much further than that what’s uh what’s that video called uh it’s a it’s one of the y combinator it’s it’s michael cyble and this guy dalton caldwell they do like a split screen side by side and they just talk about something for 30 minutes and this is one of them uh i don’t remember the name of the video do you know the name of the title i can find it uh real quick while you guys talking but i don’t know by the way believe in that like this idea of the sort of like idiot genius like don’t overthink it thing well i just did the idea i just did the idea well go ahead step i’ll let you go first well i was just gonna say quickly yes i believe in it and yes i think it applies to like different things so i would say i’m the like would you call it like mid-twit or something uh somewhere in the middle for like midwit in in finance that’s why i don’t dabble because i’m like i over analyze things i hear one piece of news i’m out kind of kind of deal but um i think it applies to like with startups i think i’m maybe not that with other things i certainly am like just just terrible and so i think it i think our friendship applies a great example of this right like he saw nfts and was like oh that looks cool like i’m gonna buy one i’m gonna make one uh what should i make it of i don’t know like this i don’t know this diagram i already have like you know it’s like the simplest [ __ ] and the guys did millions of dollars this year how much how much do you think he’s made off those how much do you think he’s made on is he do you think he’s like wildly wealthy from those uh i don’t know you know he he’s done well for sure i think you know he he bought apes he bought he bought a punk i think he’s bought some of the like the projects that went up from like for sure you know and plural like you said like apes not not like one ap he’s bought multiple of all i think those were like priced at like you know i thought whatever like a thousand dollars like you know 18 months ago and now each one is worth like you know 250 500 000 so i don’t know if he held i don’t know what it was but even just the the stuff he made right like i know a lot of people are like oh web3 the metaverse i need to create an empty project he needs to have this and that and utility blah blah he’s like hey i minted a picture of like a you know a thing that says not like not like right click save as you know it’s kind of like just making fun of the space sold it for like fifty thousand dollars right like did that in an afternoon and uh that’s like the mid you know instead of being the midwit over analyzer logical you know processor of all things you know he went to the kind of the genius zone and uh just took a punt and it because he’s in the genius zone it’s not heavy it doesn’t take a lot of time or energy or money to like try it and so i i specifically carved out a portion of my investing budget to say look this is my my gamble like you know i’ll get rid of my gambling energy i’ll learn by doing this because i’ll do things that i wouldn’t otherwise do and i’ll have skin in the game so i’ll actually pay attention to it um and like who knows you know maybe i’ll maybe i’ll have some have some hits out of this and i bet i honestly think that that part of my portfolio is gonna do better than the the well thought through quote-unquote part of my portfolio by the way sam i think you do this really well when people like i’ve seen people come to you and they’re like sam i’m thinking of like starting this business and like i want to cover this topic and i want to blog and all this stuff and you’re like all right like what’s your first step or like you you’ll be like just right or something like that which just like simplifies to the like idiot jedi like just do the thing not like over analyzing the like 50 startup articles when sam says dying dog he just needed he goes randy jackson on him well i get i just get frustrated i think because i think that like i think that it’s good so if like building a business is step 0 to 10 and 10 is like you’re this billionaire or like your vision has been achieved you know you you you own all this property whatever it is it’s good to have number ten and then a lot of people are like all right that’s step number ten and then like steps three four five six seven eight nine i gotta figure those out in my mind i’m like no but the only thing that’s important is ten and one and one after you get done with one you’ll figure out number two just but until you get to number two don’t even think about worrying about number three it’s not important dude i have the same exact thing i i call it a b z literally like word for word your thing and i i went on jax to jack’s community he asked me to give a talk into his like uh visualize value community and i this was the one thing i told him i go you you have you’re at a that’s where you are z is the vision it’s the dream it’s good to have that it’s good to know what that is right that’s like the north star and like without that you know you don’t really have the motivation i don’t really understand like what the hell you’re trying to do but where everyone gets paralyzed is they think they need to know a step b c d e f g h i j and it’s like and then they get paralyzed or they start thinking about step d when they haven’t even done you know a to b yet and so i go a b z it’s all you ever need it’s like where you are you got to know that accurately the next thing you need to do you need to know that and then you need to know the end vision and everything else is irrelevant like just do that and so you just literally said the same thing with your own like with numbers basically instead that’s awesome great great minds think alike i mean that’s exactly how i feel because i every time i’ve ever had any bit of success or even when i’ve like done something and it didn’t work out i just think that like if you just start and you’re gonna see so many things that you didn’t even expect or realize were an opportunity and or that weren’t an opportunity you’re like oh i thought this it’s actually way different but that’s cool or that’s not cool we gotta quit uh you know what i mean and uh you just that’s why you just have to do something um i have this and i get really frustrated with inaction i’ve been saying this lately uh i love thin books and quick silence and so what does that mean like i love a thing did you make that up yeah i love a thin book because a thin book is like a simple idea presented without the fluff and that’s it that’s the value you know don’t try to you don’t need a thick book uh for everything so i’m a big fan of thin books now and the other one is a quick silence which is i call my buddy sue leo about every business question i have basically it’s like oh we’re starting the milk road hey what do you think about this and then there’s a quick silence like he says his it’s obvious that’s the answer and i was like building up in my head i need to like oh man i really want to sit down with him and talk it’s like within three minutes we’ve reached a good pause where it’s like well i guess nothing else really matters till we go do that right yep all right well i guess i’ll just do that obviously yeah check you later like and so that quick silence to me is like now what i want was i used to want to fill that silence with more detail more analysis more planning more uh nuance more like if then statements and like you don’t really need any of that like we talk by the end of my sentence he says his sentence uh sorry for i guess i didn’t really need a call i guess i could have just done a text and you know like i guess i kind of knew this to begin with like maybe i didn’t need to call you right but that quick silence is really showing me like that’s when i’m on the right track is when i get either a thin book or a quick silence is like when i’m on the right track and when i need more answers uh typically i’m just i’m actually going in the wrong direction altogether dude yeah that reminds me uh from coding if you uh if you run into an error and you’re on like stack overflow or something and you’re just like you’re you can’t find your answer it’s probably because you’re googling the wrong thing like you’ve completely messed it up you’re in the complete wrong direction um and i feel like that applies in in most cases if you find yourself asking like 10 questions it’s like hold up like you are you’re just like going in the complete opposite direction that you should be like pull back and revisit how many people reach out to you after each one of these episodes goes live stuff and said that they like want to pitch you on something or they want to recruit you to come join something well it grows and some of your buddies reach out which is always fun but i feel like um we’re talking about what we’re talking about i don’t want to drop anything dummy that sounds like a story what’s behind that no no i just mean like it’s cool because well also i should say like some people that i’ve really looked up to i don’t want to call out their names because i don’t obviously these are like private messages but people that i’ve looked up to that i was like oh i used to read your stuff or like i’ve literally read your book or like we’re from the same country i’m not naming eddie james but uh it’s been cool and it’s grown obviously because you guys have grown the pod a lot um so yeah that’s amazing well there’s few people i’ll get a fistfight over you are one of them steph so let me know who uh you haven’t broken your contract sam so you’re good uh well good i’m happy you came you have so much more to cover i think we should wrap up here though yeah sorry i actually apologize i ever do listen to this because steph had a bunch of gold and i feel like i took it in these really random directions so to make up for it we’re going to do a second part of staff if you’ll come back and we’ll do more of these ideas rapid fire and i’ll shut up yeah i’m down let’s do it