In this episode, Sam Parr and Shaan Puri discuss the concept of “unbundling” various industries, drawing parallels between the business models of Disney, CNN, and the WWE. They explore how modern creators and companies are leveraging niche communities and digital platforms to disrupt traditional media and entertainment structures.
Topics: Unbundling, Media, Disney, CNN, WWE, Creator Economy, Business Models, Startups
The Concept of Unbundling [00:00]
Sam Parr: The only thing I think people love more than their kid, or love as nearly as much as their kid, is their dog. And so I am surprised that there’s not a place like Disneyland for dogs that is basically the happiest place on earth for dogs.
Shaan Puri: Dude, Nick’s thing is kind of weird. Let’s see if it works.
Sam Parr: Yeah, what’s your prediction? Let’s do it. Let’s predict it now. Do you think this goes anywhere? Do you think it becomes worth something or no?
Shaan Puri: So the background here is our friend is this guy named Nick Huber, who goes viral all the time for writing about like storage units.
Sam Parr: Self-storage. He’s the self-storage guy on Twitter. His handle is Sweaty Startup.
Shaan Puri: I’m an investor in his, so I’ll just disclose that. I don’t know what that means here, but I’ll we’ll say it. Um, he created, he made this thread like as a joke, or he made a joke about tomatoes. I don’t even remember the joke, how he could grow tomatoes and sell them or something, and people like made fun of him, and it went crazy viral. And then he created a tomato NFT project called Bromatoes. Um, as a joke, but kind of not a joke. Do I think it’s going to go anywhere? No.
Sam Parr: Kind of like well-executed where you’re like, “This isn’t a joke. The art is amazing. The art is great.”
Shaan Puri: It’s great in the sense that it’s like well-executed bad art. Like it’s a tomato that’s a bro, that’s a guy. So, uh, do I think it’s going to go anywhere? Of course not. No, I don’t think so. Do you?
Sam Parr: There’s a chance. Uh, like I don’t know if you saw that he, uh, he posted a tweet from this account that’s called, I think, Cosmo De’ Medici or something like that. Did you see that tweet that he posted where somebody had He’s like, “Oh, this just got interesting.” And, um, that’s that is one of the most popular NFT curator accounts. They own like tons of punks and Bored Apes and whatever. And it’s supposed to be, uh, Snoop Dogg. Snoop Dogg is the one who runs that account. Snoop Dogg is the one who, uh, I don’t think it’s him who writes the tweets, because it’s like a totally different writing style, but he says it’s Snoop Dogg. Um, Snoop Dogg says it’s him, and they funded it obviously with like millions of dollars worth of NFT purchases. And so I thought that was kind of interesting that he’s got some, um, some, you know, some heavy hitters in this, uh, this NFT world, the NFT collector space together.
Shaan Puri: How did he do it? So like, he told me that I think there’s like either one or two or three, like there’s like 4,000, I don’t remember. Some like single-digit load thousands.
Sam Parr: Usually it’s usually it’s 10,000 or 8,000, but uh, doesn’t matter. But let’s just say 10,000 because that’s what most of the projects are.
Shaan Parr: How do you literally make an image? Because like his images are all different. Is it like some code where you’re like where you have like 18 different features and it’s and it swaps them?
Sam Parr: Yeah, exactly. So you have all these traits like hair, eyes, nose, mouth, body, shirt, pants, whatever. And then each one might have 10 variations, 12 variations, 25 variations. So there might be 25 hairstyles. And then you go through and you set you so you have an artist make 25 hairstyles, and it’s just the hair part. And then they say, you say the rarity. You say, “Okay, this is the most rare hairstyle, the golden mohawk.” And I only want that to appear 1% of the time. So you put that in all into a program, and it spits out a collection of 10,000 variations, 10,000 combinations of these things. And with the rarity, uh, so that some of them have the super rare attributes and then some of them have very common attributes. So that’s how all these work.
Shaan Puri: What program do you use for this?
Sam Parr: I don’t know what people use. I think it’s maybe just one smart contract or maybe there’s a special app for this. I’m not sure what what people use.
Shaan Puri: Damn, I mean, that’s crazy. That’s that’s crazy to me. But it’s it’s gotten so easy that like, you know, Nick can take his tomato meme and and get it done. Now, he hired a good artist because the art he has is like actually like really good. It’s 3D art. It’s really nice. But, you know, you see a different, um, 10,000 art collection drop, you know, every four hours or something in the crypto world right now. So like I bought one yesterday. So if you go to OpenSea, uh, .io, I saw this, and it’s really, it’s funny like these are such a it’s such degenerate gambling, um, but I saw this thing go, if you see it on Twitter early, you should basically go mint the thing or buy the thing. So I saw this thing called Chain Runners. It took off, uh, right away. I saw people, I saw interesting people on Twitter talking about it. I think, uh, the first guy who really I I think I the guy who kind of think kicked out kicked it off in the tech industry was the founder of Figma, who this guy Zoink. Um, and so the founder of Figma, which is like a multi-billion dollar design company, uh, he is a big NFT collector. He he owned one of the most rare CryptoPunks. So he changed his profile picture to this or or like, you know, posted about it. And immediately like I saw I started seeing every VC doing it. So I bought in and, you know, I made double my money in a day and, you know, you can get in and out of these things very quickly. Um, there’s another, uh, I’ll tell you about another one of these. This is kind of in the weeds, so I almost regret doing this early on in the show, but let’s do it. There’s this thing called Wolf Game. So go to wolf.game, and I think this is kind of a sign of something that’s to come. It’s a little confusing when you when you first go to it. I only understand, let’s say, 30% of it right now. But I the part I understood made me think, “Oh shit, this is something new.” So what is this? So crypto is now going into gaming, and what does that mean? It means like in the old way of gaming, you would put like, let’s say, a game like World of Warcraft. People who played World of Warcraft would spend thousands of hours grinding that game, playing that game, leveling up their characters, earning new stuff, and they would get zero economic value for it. So you would you would put, you know, thousands of hours in and you would get zero dollars in return, but hey, you got the shiny helmet and your character now says level 60. Congratulations. And it was that was still good enough. People did that. People all around the world do that. Then games like Fortnite come out. Fortnite says, “Hey, you can play this game. It’s about shooting each other, but you can have your character have all these special special, um, costumes. They do nothing for you in the game. They’re all it doesn’t make your character any better, but if you buy our in-game currency called V-Bucks, you can buy these special like capes and swords and helmets for your character.” All right, great. People spent billions of dollars on V-Bucks, um, and and bought tons of stuff in the game. And if they decide, like many people many people who were 12 years old playing Fortnite and dropped, you know, $180 in the game buying stuff, now if they’re tired of Fortnite and they want to go play a new game, that that money is lost. You cannot take your items to another game. So why is crypto gaming going to be big? It’s going to be big because when you buy an item in a game, you’re going to own that item, and then other games will allow you to bring that item in. So it’ll make it’ll make it way more valuable to buy things in games because you’re going to be able to use them, you’re going to be able to resell them later if you get tired of the game and somebody you want to sell it. That doesn’t exist today in most games. And secondly, you’ll be able to take it with you to other games. All right, so now let me tell you what this Wolf Game thing is. What Wolf Game is is it’s almost like a gambling system. So you imagine, uh, if you go to the website, it’s like a little pixelated art, like 8-bit art. Yeah, it it it looks neat. Like it looks like kind of punk rock a little. Like I all this this whole this whole genre of people online, it totally is like the freakers. What was it called? You know what I’m talking about? Like the um, uh, like the steampunk type of vibe. Yeah. Yeah, that’s definitely like there’s big overlap of like steampunk and crypto. So it’s neat. Here’s how the game works in in in a in a very, again, I don’t even understand the full game, but here’s how it worked when I when I went to it. You could buy a sheep. So let’s say you buy a sheep. If you if you stake the sheep in the in the barn, you make meaning you put your sheep in the barn, every day you’re going to get a every sheep produces 10,000 uh wool. And um, and so your sheep is kind of like working for you. It’s like farming wool for you, okay? And wool wool has some value. Wool wool is like a it’s the in-game currency. It’s like V-Bucks. So, so you buy a sheep, the sheep produces wool for you. Okay, that’s interesting. You could also buy a wolf. If you buy a wolf or you own a wolf, um, here’s how a wolf works. And this this this is the story of the game. The story of the game is, if you put your sheep in the farm, they’re safe because the farmers have made a truce with the wolves to say, “Do not attack uh the sheep in the in the farm.” And in exchange for the safety, it’s like a mafia. In exchange for the safety, you get 20% of the wool as a wolf as a wolf, as a as a bribe, as a payoff. This is so crazy. If somebody ever takes their sheep out of the farm, they can keep 100% of the wool for themselves, but there’s a random chance that the wolf will come eat your sheep and take all of the wool and maybe take your sheep or something like that. And so the wolf would then get 100%. There’s a small chance that you might lose your freaking sheep. And so you could play it safe and pay the tax or you can risk it for a bigger reward and you can lose your sheep. And so the whole game is basically about owning these sheep, owning these wolves, and then the the like random chance, the random probabilities of certain things happening. And the whole time you’re accumulating wool, which has some has some value in the game, right? It’s the it’s the in-game currency. And I thought this is very interesting. It’s kind of a stupid, silly game, but it’s interesting because um, it’s a game that didn’t just like add um crypto at the end. It kind of started with this like the game is designed around buy this character, the character earns you money, buy this other character, that character steals money or collects a tax. And it’s basically a game that’s made to make you money. And I don’t know if you know what’s going on with Axie Infinity, but this is like a kind of a phenomenon. Yeah, I mean the the the the the Infinity thing is like the biggest money maker in the world right now, it seems. Yeah, they’ve made like, I don’t know, over $2 billion, uh the game has made over $2 billion in like a year. And it’s this new model called play to earn. And play to earn basically just means, normally when you play a game, you played just for shit, you know, shits and giggles, but now, if you play and you do well in the game, you’re actually earning the in-game currency, which is like can be cashed out at any time. And so there are people, we have a friend that has a team of people in the Philippines just playing the game full-time. He pays them a salary, and they play the game for him, and they it’s like an investment property. They make back 25% yield on top of the salaries that he pays them. He pays them to play this game all day. Dude, who I I think I can I I I can imagine who it is, right? I don’t want to say because um, you know, people obviously see this, so it’s like kind of fucked up. Uh, I think a lot of people will have a bad reaction to that, so I don’t want to say their name because I didn’t ask them in advance. Oh my god. All right, that’s amazing. Do you want to um, all right, well, so like right now I’m looking at a sheet and you’ve got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 things here. Honestly, they all seem pretty good. Do you just want to like start banging through some stuff? Yeah, let’s do it. Uh, your boy went to Disneyland last week, had a ton of time. I had to skip one episode of the pod, but that made me get exposed to a bunch of new ideas. And then I got sick, so I haven’t been able to work. I’ve just been sitting there, you know, doped up on Benadryl. So I got all kinds of of crazy ideas that I want to bounce off you. The first one is around Disneyland. Okay, so I got this text from Sean saying, “I’m at Disneyland.” Or no, maybe it was a tweet. It was a tweet. I saw a tweet, you go, “I’m at Disneyland and all I want to do is land on Dilf of Disneyland. Dad, I want to Dad, I want to F of Disneyland.” Yeah, have you ever seen this Instagram account, Dilfs of Disneyland? They have uh No, but I understand it. They’re pretty much following. It’s basically just like hot dads that they take pictures of that are like happen to be at Disneyland that day and uh they’re always like doing something that’s hot to the mom, like, “Oh, he’s, you know, wiping the daughter’s mouth because, you know, he didn’t just leave it dirty, you know, he he’s picking he’s changing a diaper or whatever.” It’s like that’s what’s hot. Uh, so that was my goal. I did not make it on the Dilfs of Disneyland. Pretty upset about it. But, you know, I will recover. Um, okay, so Disneyland is kind of amazing. And when I was there, I was pretty blown away, and my wife was blown away. So my wife doesn’t really care about business. You know, she’s interested in it, but she’s not like a nut about it like you or me. Even she like basically grabbed my arm halfway through the thing and was like, “This is amazing.” She was like, “I’m kind of blown away by this guy’s entrepreneurship to create this place.” Because Disneyland is kind of a one-of-a-kind type of idea, and uh it’s meant to be, you know, the happiest place on earth, and it really is for a lot of people. When you’re there, uh you can really see um how happy people are. And in doing research for this, I went and watched this documentary about the starting of Disneyland, and in the comments, or at the end of the video, he goes, “That’s what that’s the backstory of Disneyland, but it means something different to everybody. In the comments, say what it means to you.” And the YouTube comments are like eulogies. It’s like essays about what Disneyland means to these people. It has like a huge emotional register. All right, so let me break you break you make out some of the numbers. So let’s start with the numbers and then the backstory. Some of the numbers. So Disneyland does about $3.8 billion a year of revenue. Every day, about 50,000 people come to the park. So, you know, just roughly speaking, they make about just over $200 per guest, um, per guest per year. And that’s that’s not counting the hotels, the flights, and the and a bunch of the auxiliary stuff. So a ticket into the park is like 120 bucks, and then you spend like another 100 bucks on food and merch while you’re there. Man, I feel like it was $100 when I was a kid. Yeah, actually, it started off. So I went back, I was like, “What was the initial price of this?” Because Disneyland prices have been inflating actually like crazy. There’s a chart showing inflation of Disneyland, and it’s like just up into the right. Disneyland started at $3.25 to get in back when it when it launched in 1955. So, you know, the the minimum wage back then was 75 cents, and I think the average person’s income was like 4 grand or something like that. So, you know, everything has gone up. Um, but now, you know, they they basically have a off-peak, peak time. So if you go to peak time, it’s going to be 200 something bucks. Normal is like 150 bucks and low is like $100, something like that. So, um, so what what happened? So Walt Disney basically, his story is kind of amazing. So he he grows up and he he’s actually from your your hometown. I don’t know if you know this. You probably probably do, but he’s from Missouri. And so I didn’t know that. Apparently, there’s a place in Missouri called Electric Park. Have you ever heard of this? No. Because this is the inspiration for Disneyland. When he’s 8 years old, he goes to this place called Electric Park. And Electric Park was kind of known for two things. One, it was a it was an amusement park. And the second is it was really clean. And that’s like one of the biggest things about Disneyland is Disneyland is really clean. So imagine having 50,000 guests over to your house, but somehow everything stays really, really clean. Um, and that was like he’s fanatical about this. When he designed the park, Electric Park in in Kansas City. Yeah, I see it. When he um, when he designed the park, he made it so that I think every 30 feet, there’s a trash can, because he watched guests at amusement parks, and he would see that if you if the trash can was further than 30 feet away or whatever, they would just be like, “Ah, fuck it.” They would just leave it on the ground or throw it on the ground or whatever, just dispose of it in a bad way. But if there was a can within 30 feet, they would like make the effort to go toss it. And so he made it so that at any point, and I tested this out when I was there. I was I would often like check, “Okay, am I 30 feet within a trash can?” And sure enough, like it’s actually like legit. There’s always a trash can near you, and this place is super clean. So he goes to Electric Park, and he wants to be a cartoonist. He uh ends up working at an ad agency, and then he creates his first business. It’s called Laugh-O-Grams, and he’s basically doing these like kind of like animated uh cards. But, you know, a bad business deal leads to it starts working, but then he cuts a bad business deal where uh he’s owed a bunch of money by one client, and then they don’t pay him, and uh the business goes under. And so he says, “Okay, let’s go to Hollywood.” And um and he tells his brother, “Let’s go to Hollywood and let’s create a new another business.” And so they go and they create Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio. And this is where they create Mickey Mouse. This is where they create Snow White. That’s the first big hit. So the company goes from like in debt or making no money to making millions of dollars off of Snow White. That was like the big win. And so he’s like, “Okay, um this is kind of working.” And um the business is doing all right. It’s not going gangbusters, um, but it’s a float. And he’s working on his next stories. He’s working on Pinocchio, he’s working on a couple other stories. And he’s always had this crazy idea about amusement parks ever since Electric Park. And he takes his daughter to the local merry-go-round, and he’s like, “Ah, this is like so boring. Like, why is it there’s something more grand than just this merry-go-round?” Like my daughter loves this, but like this is so boring for the parents. And this is just one ride. Like, what if I made a place that was um you know, what if I made a place that was fun for both the parents and the kids to go to? Uh, which is like a similar theme with all Pixar movies and Disney Disney movies, which is like the movie is enjoyable. Toy Story is enjoyable to an adult and a kid. It has like two layers to it. Both can enjoy a different piece of it. And so he’s like, and so what how did they actually come about this? How did they actually like figure out the idea? So they started by doing research. They went to every theme park they could find. They went to the World’s Fair, they went to a whole bunch of places getting inspiration and ideas and and thinking about what is bad about this experience, what can be made better. So things being dirty, blah, blah, blah. And he’s like, “Okay, um he starts thinking about the design of the place.” And Electric Park had this um train that went around the whole park. And so if you go to Disneyland, that’s still the thing. There’s right when you enter, there’s a train, and the train will take you around the whole circumference of the park. And he’s like, “All right, I’m going to build and he used to tell people, “One of these days, I’m going to build an amusement park, and it is going to be clean.” And he takes two guys off of Pinocchio, and he says, “Hey, listen, um I want you guys to start uh start working on like secret project X.” And um he’s like, “You know, it’s a shame that when people come to Hollywood, there’s nothing to see here.” Like people all around the world have heard of Hollywood. They come here, there’s the sign where it says Hollywood in the in the letters on the hill, but there’s nowhere to see Hollywood. Hollywood is a Dude, I I’m I’m so out of it. Is Disneyland in LA? It’s in LA, yeah. It’s in like Anaheim. Oh, it’s in Anaheim. Okay. I for some reason I thought it was in Florida. That’s Disney World. Got it. Dude, you you’re like not in Disney, you’re not in the Disney world at all. Okay. Um, so he I mean, I know a little bit, but I come on, Disney World and Disneyland, that’s an easy confuse. No, no, no. That’s that’s fair. That’s fair. Um, so he Disneyland came first. So he basically is like, uh, “Guys, if if anybody came to even see our animation studio, they just see a bunch of dudes hunched over over drawings. It’s not very not very impressive. Let’s build something amazing in Hollywood.” And the guys get super excited. They start doing research. But then reality hits. They have to they’re working on Pinocchio, they got to ship it. They’re working on Fantasia, they got to ship it. Then World War II happens. So all of the all of World War II happens. And then he comes back because he hires this guy, Kimball, to work in his studio. And Kimball’s like this junior kind of animator guy. And Kimball invites all the coworkers over to his house for like a barbecue or a birthday party or something like that. And in the back in the backyard of his house, he’s like, “Oh, by the way, you guys don’t know this, but my hobby is I build these little trains, almost like the steamboat style train, but like it’s like a life-size thing, but it’s very small. Uh it’s it’s like, you know, one one uh like whatever, one link of a train basically, but it’s like Have you Have you this guy’s name is Ward Kimball. If you Google him, he looks like a cartoon. And you can see his his train, too. So Walt goes to this thing. He’s blown away. The he’s seeing the train in up close and he’s like, “Dude, Ward built this thing? Okay, we’re the whole Mickey he says he comes back to the office, he sends a memo. He says, “Mickey Mouse Park is back on.” And he tells the shareholders. Shareholders say, “Don’t do it. Movie studio is already on on edge. This sounds like a big distraction. It’s against the charter of the company. Uh, we don’t want you doing this.” He says, “Okay, um, no problem. I understand. I’ll create a new company.” So he just creates another company to create the park. He’s like, “I’m still going to do this, but if you don’t want in, I’m going to I’ll do this by myself.” And um and he calls it like uh Red Law or whatever something like that, which is like, you know, uh Walter backwards uh is is kind of the name way he names it. He starts working on it. And so he’s like, “All right, how do I fund this thing?” He thinks it’s going to take $5 million to build Disneyland. And in actuality, it ends up taking $17 million to do it. And so he’s like, “All right, how do I fund this?” He um he takes his um his life insurance policy and he takes a big loan against that. That gets him like, you know, 100 grand or so to to go do this. Then he sells a house that he had in Palm Springs. So that’s like the next seed money. Uh that he goes through that pretty quickly. Then he then he goes, “All right, I need some bigger money. How do I get get millions of dollars for this?” Okay. He goes to ABC, the TV network, and he says, “Hey, ABC, you’re struggling right now. You don’t have much TV programming. I will create this this this program called like whatever, like The Wonderful World of Disney or something like that. I’ll create a TV show for you that’ll air every Sunday, if you invest in my park idea.” So Disney basically puts down half a million dollars plus another about six and a half of loans and bonds, and they own 34% of Disneyland. And so that’s how he got the next 7 million bucks. And then he did the same thing with two other companies, and then he sold some sponsorships. He he like he like accumulates together the $17 million. He hustled his way. He hustled his way into doing it. The other thing that he did was he was like, “All right, um, you know, this this thing works because um he’s like, “I I got to hire I got to have like the uh the rides work automatically.” And so he created this thing where if you go to Disneyland now, you sit in a ride and you go and it’s sort of like a it’s like a a stage play that plays out, but it’s all synchronized. When your little like roller coaster cart enters this room, the lights go on, the character makes a sound, and then when you leave the room, it all folds back into its thing. And that’s called animatronics. And so basically audio animatronics was like the thing he wanted to do, which was like he wanted live animals, but it’s too much work. So instead of live animals, he created these robotic animals. And he said, “I’m going to synchronize the movements to music on a loop.” And there’s this one guy who’s just working on only this, and he was kind of in front of a green screen trying to make this like puppet do this thing synchronized to music. And eventually they finally figured it out, and that was like the big breakthrough. So, okay, let me fast forward a little bit. They open the park. They build the whole thing in less than one year. They open the park, and he only invited like 1,500 people to it or something like that, uh like invite-only launch, but somebody counterfeited the tickets, and so double the number of people showed up with counterfeit tickets on day one. Because double the number of people showed up, uh everything breaks. The plumbing breaks because there’s too many people using water in the park more than the load was able to handle. So he the they come to him, they’re like, “Walt, we got a problem. The plumbing is broken. You have to make a choice. Toilets or water fountains.” He’s like, “Toilets for sure.” And so he uh there’s no water, there’s no drinking water that day. The asphalt was still so freshly poured that like women’s high heels was getting stuck in the cement uh because it was like caving in. It was basically a giant disaster. And he does some PR. He basically says, “Look, um we have, you know, we had to work out the kinks. Give me a month and basically they give me give me some time and this thing will be smooth.” And sure enough, within a month, the the baby is humming, you know, humming. And in seven weeks, he does a million visitors. So it was kind of an immediate hit once he did it because it was such a grand idea. How famous was Disney right off the bat? Or at this air at this point, how famous were they? They were like I mean they were a big deal. They weren’t like a semi-famous. They hadn’t had like the I mean nowhere near what they are now, but like they were semi-famous. Really the ABC show, which he was doing while he was building the park, was almost like the hype video for the for the park launch. Was he just grinding the whole time? Yeah, crazy amount of work. And so he he creates this thing and, you know, it’s basically the sixth or seventh most visited tourist destination in the world now. And um, you know, it’s kind of in this crazy place. And I think I think, which is kind of shocking, I think Disney or the theme park division prior to COVID was the most profitable part of the company, wasn’t it? Except for well, not profitable because they had a lot of expenses, but in terms of gross profit, yes, because they had a lot of revenue and a lot of expenses. Um, but now Disney Plus is like the bigger thing because Disney Plus is like pure profit. Disney Plus basically took all that IP that people loved and created a streaming service that’s like But before that, before COVID, before Plus, I like Disneyland, it wasn’t it wasn’t a a project. It was a like a major a value creation. A lot of value was created there. I wanted to know, is this a is this a loss leader or is this a um a cash cow? And it’s it’s a more like a cash cow. It’s hard to tell because every company’s like accounting makes everything look like it’s like losing money, you know what I mean? Like accounting can make something look amazing or terrible regardless of it. But, you know, the park’s division, Parks and Resorts was doing, you know, billions of like I don’t know, like $30 billion a year or something crazy like that. So it was a, you know, obviously became a smash success. When he wanted to do Disney World in Florida, he creates five stealth companies because he’s like, “Disney was a hit. He’s like, “I’m looking for the second location. If anybody finds out where I’m looking, the price will go up.” So he creates five shell companies. He starts buying up land in Florida. Sure enough, it leaks out. The day after it leaks, the price per I think acre went from like $180 an acre to $18,000 an acre. So basically he couldn’t he couldn’t buy anymore once the news leaked. And uh and you know, he had this like kind of like inspiring vision. So he’s like, “Disneyland, I want this to be the happiest place on earth. I want parents and kids to have fun together.” He goes, “Um, with when it came to Epcot, he was saying, um, where is it? He goes, “I want this to be a living blueprint of tomorrow. I want this to be an always evolving thing. Epcot is never going to finish because tomorrow will always be different than today.” Uh, Disneyland itself will never be completed. It will go it will go on as long as there is imagination left in the world. And so since then, you know, they built the park for 17 million, but obviously they pour in like hundreds of millions of dollars every year to upgrading the parks, changing the the rides and the themes and all that stuff. Um, in order to to kind of keep it continuously evolving. So I thought it was kind of amazing. I original I I I I read a little bit about like odd billionaires and I’ve maybe interacted with one or two before. And does it do you have you ever met someone who’s like in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars who has like some weird shit where like like they have a a like for example, this is like public knowledge, Peter Thiel basically employed this this three lawyers, big shot lawyers and they’re and the basically when he was outed as gay by Gawker, he employed and this is a a great book by Ryan Holiday. I forget what it’s called, but he employed these three lawyers and I forget when he was outed, but something like 09 and he goes, “Um, however long it takes, your full-time job.” It’s like a decade, yeah. “Yeah, he goes, “Just wait for Gawker and those guys to screw up. And when they slip up, tell me and we’re going to pounce.” And he employed these guys the whole time. And there’s some crazy stuff about Peter Thiel. Like for example, in the book, they said that he has a black Mercedes with the engine on everywhere he goes in the world. So like that’s what it like he always he’s got a team and they they they have to have a car like at all times. And he also has land in New Zealand because he’s a little bit nervous about apocalypse. And so my question is, have you do you think you’ve ever met like a billionaire or someone like that who’s got some of these weird ass things like a like a security force who does exotic things like this? A fixer. Yeah. Um, I think so. So I worked with this guy. I’ve talked about him before. I worked with this crazy kind of like Like the Filipino guy? Yeah, in Indonesia. Um, crazy guy in Indonesia that was I talked about before. I mean, he’s like a dropout in grade school, self-made. I think he was worth $500 million, kind of like at his peak. And $500 million in Indonesia is like, you know, $10 billion here in America. And um, and you know, he he had a crazy elaborate like business, like his he him as my boss was really weird. Like he was a really insane boss. I told you, but he had a giant projector in the office, like on the wall that had everybody’s computer tracked and your productivity was like this like he bought the software from Boeing and basically used it to like show like your your little square would flash red if you weren’t being productive enough, and I don’t even know how it was like measuring that. Like just how much you were typing, I guess. I don’t know. And it was like this intimidation thing on, you know, he had four women that just managed his email. Um, like if you did good in a meeting, he would walk in the next day and just hand you keys to like a new Mercedes that’s outside. He’s like, “This is yours, drive it around.” And like, you know, he did crazy shit like that. Like I remember a meeting once where a friend of his came in from Singapore and they were basically just openly talking about like a insider trading/pump and dump scheme that they were doing, and I was like, “Whoa, that’s like crazy illegal.” And they were like, “Yeah, it’s great. We’re going to make so much money. It’s this is this is going to work. It’s going to be awesome.” You said that you said this is illegal? I didn’t say it. I was just sitting there in the room being like, in my head, I think this I’m 20 years I think I was 21 years old. Like I I didn’t know shit about shit at that point, but I knew enough to be like, “I think this is wrong what they’re talking about.” And then he would, you know, every day would after work would take everybody to the bar, or whoever his kind of like insider crew was, and two girls would be there, and those were like, you know, his escorts for the day or whatever, and like that’s just the way he did business. And he he bribed officials, and he did all kinds of stuff. He ended up in jail. He ended up dying in jail. He actually died this year. And um, you know, so it was like a pretty crazy life. Uh, and you know, I worked with this guy for only like three months, and then I left and I came back and started a startup here, but like, you know, that guy was wild. Like he lived a wild life. That’s awesome. Yeah, I’ve uh I I don’t know if I’ve had any first-hand knowledge of or if I’ve like been friends with people. Maybe I have and they just haven’t told me. But uh I do believe that like people like this guy, this Gogan guy, I don’t know, I I haven’t heard of this. I mean this is this Gogan guy is like on some Jeffrey Epstein shit, right? Like this is a modern day Jeffrey Epstein situation. Um, maybe I guess it’s not underage girls, I guess that’s that’s the difference, but like basically, you know, just like a harem of women and cover-ups and bribes and intimidation and he’s got this bunker and he’s like bribing police and like if these things are true, which you don’t know if they’re true or not, but this thing came out, it’s pretty crazy. Uh, it’s it’s a wild story. Yeah, this is crazy. I uh I didn’t know about this. I I would believe just based off what I I believe this is very this could be very true. Like this doesn’t shock me. Like knowing what I know a little bit, like and I have heard like rumors of people who I’m like second hand or third hand connected with that they’re freaks. And uh like I hear some stories about what they do to cover it up and I 100% believe this. And from Silicon Valley who are very successful, like things that I didn’t realize until I kind of got closer to I’m not inside that circle because I’m not like in that that tier, but had a couple friends in that circle and it’s like two things that are way more common than I ever would have thought. Swinging. Swinging is like super common in Silicon Valley. Dude, the swinger lifestyle. It’s weird. It’s weird. You know about this pineapple thing by the way? Tell me. So I I learned this from TikTok. I don’t know if this is real or not. But basically like this this the silent symbol for signaling to others if you’re a swinger or not, apparently is a upside down pineapple. So if you go to a house and they have a picture of a pineapple that’s upside down, it’s a wink to anybody else who’s in the lifestyle that, “Hey, we’re down.” Uh I had I had no idea. Dude, that’s crazy. Or if they’re wearing like pineapple earrings or something at a party. I got this I’ve got a girlfriend who does it and she uh and and she tells me about it and my wife and I were like I was like, “Sarah, like you know, like I’m not interested in this, just so you know. Like I don’t want to do this. This is this uh and she’s like, “Yeah, me neither, but it’s so fun to hear about.” Yeah, exactly. I’m like Uber Uber boy. I dude, I’ve got a couple friends that are into it. Down here in Austin where I live, uh these guys have this company, you know, Onnit. Um Aubrey Marcus and then he’s got this other guy named Kyle, uh who is a friend or works there. I’m not sure the relationship, but they like they mix work and play and they’re open about their how they’re they have open relationships and they talk about it. Uh Kyle Kingsbury, I think his name is. And they talk about it on the podcast, on their podcast that they they share they share relationships. Yeah, it’s I mean, you know, more power to you if it’s your thing. Uh I what I’m saying is I didn’t know how common that was or like swinging or that lifestyle, but it is very common amongst like successful Silicon Valley people. Same thing with drugs, uh like, you know, my either microdosing or normal dosing of certain drugs. Like I guess like there’s a certain level of uh party that I just never did and I never had the urge to do, um, that I think is like pretty common amongst uh amongst like this group of people and like, you know, good for them. Dude, I’ve I’m I’m such a prude. I’ve been out with like some like really powerful people who I looked up to and I saw them the whenever I’ve seen them do coke, I’m like, “Oh, I I don’t uh I don’t really like you as much as I used to like you.” Exactly. It just like it made me uncomfortable and I didn’t I didn’t feel I I didn’t like it. But uh this is crazy. and it is way more common than I than I thought living in Silicon Valley. I think what it is is like if you’re a nerd and you’re now worth a billion dollars or hundreds of millions, which is basically the same thing, and you could do anything you want, you want you want to do stuff and also if you are young and you have money, you have to up the ante consistently. So Dan Blazarian has this new book out and either in the book or in an interview about the book, he was saying how he’s like, “Man, I’ve had every woman that I could ever want. I have private fancy chefs. I drive the best cars, I fly private, I do I do the fanciest stuff. None of it makes me happy anymore because I have to go bigger and bigger and bigger in order to help my dopamine and make it work and and and now like none of it makes me happy. So I just like I’m I try to be simple now, although like it’s really hard. I I but all the items, they don’t they don’t bring me joy. Um, speaking of making me happy, I there was this thing that I saw that I thought was pretty cool. It’s not really like a business idea necessarily, but I think it’s worth a read. So let me put a link to it. Uh, where should I put the link? Um, one sec, let me grab it. Uh, basically there’s this guy, I want to give him credit because it’s a very interesting read. Um, and I’ll explain it while I’m looking for the link. So basically there’s this guy who uh Dan Lou, I think is his name. Um, How do you spell it? Dan, normal, and then L U U. And uh go to this link. So go just search uh or never mind, I’ll just slack it to you. Um, so go to this link and this guy has this post, and basically what he all he did was he’s like, “Hey, um, you know, there’s there’s all these like claims that you will hear commonly. You’ll hear them over and over and over again. And they’re referencing studies. And um they have fancy names, and then they reference studies, and then people take them as facts. And then if you ever He’s like, “Turns out, if you actually go read the study, the claim is either way weaker than what people use it as like a thing, or it’s literally the opposite.” And he gives four examples. And I loved reading this. So I I want to go through them real quick. So one is on happiness, which you just said. So we had talked about this before, which is people have this thing where they say, “There’s um there’s a link between happiness and uh and income.” And basically the the thing you’ll hear in in pop science is, “Beyond $75,000, you know, your happiness doesn’t go up beyond that amount.” So what does this mean? And it’s total bullshit. This means don’t chase money and um don’t chase money. You should you’re it’s not going to make you any happier. And so he’s like, so he goes and he’s like, so he goes and he’s like, “It’s become common knowledge that that money doesn’t make people happy. How much is enough? Um, you know, people have different things. If you Google it, if you say happiness income, it’ll say, um, household income of $75,000. After that, your day-to-day happiness doesn’t rise. Um, he goes, “This happiness uh correlate income like study was actually done multiple times, not just one time. And um and you know, the problem is like when people looked at the graph, it looks like happiness goes up, up, up, up, up, and then it flattens out. He’s like, “The problem is it’s on a log scale.” And like most people just don’t know how to read a log scale graph. A log scale graph means you’re going up by a factor of 10 every time. Sorry. So even if it’s even if it’s flattening out, that might be going from 10 to 50. It just doesn’t look like as big of a jump because it’s not like the the the increments are a log scale. So basically, if you actually look at it, uh if you actually look at the and you know, this got published in Dan Gilbert’s like book uh on uh on on behavioral, you know, economics and stuff like that. And basically, um if you actually look at the chart, the chart shows that uh if you look at it on a non-log scale, which he puts the graph here, it’s basically like the more money you have, the more your satisfaction goes up. And there is no flattening out. Um, it doesn’t go up at the same rate. So yes, it’s true that going from $0 to $30,000 to $75,000 gives you a bigger jump in happiness than going from 1 million to 2 million or 2 million to 4 million. But the happiness does keep going up. Uh your life your satisfaction does keep going up on on all the reported scales. And he’s basically like, you know, there may be some point where you stop getting returns, but we haven’t found it yet. You know, like, um, on average, people have not found that yet. So, um, you and it and actually there are things that like um that I and and if you dig in, he actually pointed out some that there’s there are some things that that uh contradict this claim. So what people used to say is, “Oh yeah, you’ll get that money and then you’ll return to what they call your set point of happiness. So you get all this money, you win the lottery. Yeah, within a few months you’re back to your set point of happiness. If you were depressed before, you’ll be depressed after. And um, and he’s like, you know, it turns out that that’s not true. Winning the lottery actually does make you happier if you look at the if you actually look at the study. So, I think that’s a great idea. It’s like, you know, if a couple of YouTubers got together, I think they could have, you know, I and I think it’s fan service, too. So I think you would just become more famous, you’d build fan love and you’d print like, I don’t know, $20 million every summer, um, running your camp. Uh, it’s a pain in the ass, but you could do that. And I I think like I went to a space camp from NASA when I was like in fifth grade or something. Did you really? The state of Texas sent every fifth grader to it. So it’s kind of amazing. What? Yeah, and they only did it once. So I was just lucky to be in that timing. Oh, I wanted to do that when I was a kid so badly. It’s an amazing thing. You go there and you get to be in a rocket ship and like you get to play commander and like do all this stuff. But I feel like for many jobs, there’s a version of that. Like I think people are fascinated with prisons. I think they’re fascinated with the police. I think they’re fascinated with the army. And like if you could create like amusement parks or simulations of that, where you get to take your pictures, you get to touch the stuff, you get to see how it works, you get to learn some things, uh people will pay for that. And I think they’re going to see more out-of-home experiences like that get built. Can we move on to the shitty Billy of the week? Yeah. Or do you want to go a different one? No, it’s good. It’s just a crazy story. I don’t even know what the point of this. I point of this one. Let’s go to a different one. Then we can do a different one. All right, let’s do a quick one. Quick idea. This I saw this and it kind of caught my eye. This guy, um, what’s his name? I’ll give him credit real quick. Somebody somebody sent this to us in the Facebook group and uh I thought it was really interesting. So it’s this a specialnames.cn. So, uh what’s the guy’s name? The guy’s name Mike Mike Benitez shared this. So specialname.cn. What is it? Basically, there’s a story that came out of this girl who paid her way through college. She basically made a few hundred thousand dollars and all she does is she names Chinese babies with American names. So so basically in China, every uh Chinese person typically will have a Western name. So, you know, if their name is hard to say, they know they kind of know that for for business purposes and travel purposes, it’s just easier to have to like be like, “Yes, I also go by Mike, or I go by Emerald, or I go by, you know, Samantha.” And so, um, but the problem is, you know, it’s not your native thing. So if it’s like if I tried to pick a Chinese name right now, I I might pick something that’s really weird or off. Like it doesn’t sound quite right. And so you see these things where Chinese people name their baby like Rolex, uh would be like their Western name. It’s like, “No, no, no, you shouldn’t have picked that one. Like, you know, that’s kind of a strange name.” If you were trying to have like a easy Western name, you actually like backfired. So what this woman’s services, she you can go to specialname.cn and the site is hilarious. If you go to the website, it’s like Are you on the website? It’s it’s like Yeah, I’m looking at it now. Look at the counter. It says, “The baby we named,” and it says a million, they they’ve named over a billion babies, but the English is is off. Yeah, it well, the the actual site’s in Chinese. I think it’s a Google Translate that you’re looking at. And uh you just say boy or girl, I think you submit some information or a picture of the baby, and she just closes her eyes basically and says, “Jasmine.” And then No, so you you you pick five attributes like um nice, honest, kind, eager, keen. And I did that and it gave me the names Zachary, Caleb, or Harvey. And it says, “The famous Harveys are Harvey Firestone, Harvey Ball, and then Caleb, Caleb Carr. I don’t know who that is. Is that a famous actor? I don’t know. Uh Zachary Taylor, I guess the American president. Yeah, it’s pretty funny. And so this uh site, I thought what a what an example of niches make riches and like just solve a simple problem for people. And uh you know, this girl’s made, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars just off this website. And uh I thought that was like, How does it make money? Just through ads? A really cool, really cool side hustle for a college kid. It just make they just make money through ads? I think, yeah, I don’t know exactly. I I thought you pay her to do it, uh but maybe you’re saying you just got a name right away. I just got a name. I was doing it on my phone. So it might be ads or it might be a premium upsell. And they and they and and the logo is just this generic looking white lady. Like that’s like the spokesperson. If that’s her or not. That’s definitely not her. So let me do this. Oh yeah, I know it’s like a cartoon. Um Yeah, this is awesome. So this is this is a hilarious little side hustle that I that I loved. Um okay, let’s do uh let’s do the shitty Billy of the week. I read this story and I was blown away. This is not really this is interesting only in that it’s a train wreck. Did you see this story about this venture capitalist that came out? Just now. So there’s this guy named Michael Gogan. He used to be a partner at Sequoia, right? Like the one of the biggest venture firms ever. Is he the one who stole money from them? No, he got fired because his girlfriend came out and accused him and like sued him for or like accused him of uh of like sexual abuse, she said, you know, he’s I’ve been in a relationship with him for eight years or 10 years or something like that and he’s extremely abusive sexually to me and blah blah blah. Uh she’s a stripper that he met somewhere and then she became his girlfriend and then whatever. And uh this the suit, he he didn’t lose the suit. He, you know, she kind of like he got acquitted or whatever. Um but you know, still Sequoia was like, you know, we decided it’s best to part ways. So a story came out in the Daily Mail. And you know it’s good because it’s in the Daily Mail, which is like, you know, just the the the trash of the trash, but it’s the junk food. You can’t resist. And um basically, there was some wild shit about this guy. So here’s the allegations that are in the article. The article says Michael Gogan, uh he basically after he left Sequoia, he goes to Montana and he basically sets up his like estate in Montana. He owns like, I don’t know, uh 100,000 square feet of like space in of of of houses in in in in Montana. He is like the big fish there. He owns a bar, under the bar, he created this thing called the Boom Boom Room. And the Boom Boom Room is where he takes like, you know, girls that he meets and he this so this guy’s on his fourth wife. The article talks about this spreadsheet of 5,000 women that he slept with. And it’s just full of Dude, have you have you done the Wait, say that again. Say the 5,000 thing again. A spreadsheet of 5,000 women that he slept with. It’s Okay, so do the math. If you so if you if this has happened over a 20-year period, Yeah. 365 days times 20 is 7,300 divided by 5. That means he had to have sex with a different woman every 1.5 days. Basically every other day. Yeah, every day and a half. Is that crazy? What? I don’t believe that. That doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t know if it’s true. I don’t know if he did it or he didn’t. So like the Wilt Chamberlain did this once where he claimed he slept with 10,000 women and people were like, “That means you slept with two women a day.” Like this doesn’t make any sense. Um Yeah, his response by the way, he was like, “Yeah, sometimes it was three though.” Exactly. Most pimp response ever. So this guy, this guy’s wild. So what so he basically um he there’s tons of so what happened was he had created this like security company to cover his tracks and it’s like a private security company. And he hired these like ex-military people to run it for him and they were kind of like his fixers. They’re the ones who came out and exposed this whole thing and are now suing him for $800 million. So they’re suing him because he basically made them do a bunch of stuff that like got them in trouble. So he’d have to pay off women that he would sleep with. Um and they would have he’d be like, “You need to do this.” Like, “Go I I’ll put money in your account, you pay her off.” And um and eventually one guy, so he had a friend who um the story is he he brings his daughters over to the friend’s house um with their babysitter, but then he leaves with the babysitter, has sex with the babysitter, and the friend is like, “Dude, what the hell are you doing? You just had sex with the babysitter in my house? Like, um this is messed up.” And he’s like, he calls him a pedophile. And he’s like, “Dude, uh like I don’t, you know, don’t don’t bring up my my flaws and like, you know, there’s a one-time thing and blah blah blah.” And the guy’s like, “No, this is messed up.” And he’s like, starts threatening the guy. He threatens the guy and says, “If you come out and say this, I’m going to like ruin you.” And um the guy’s like, “You know, F that.” He then sleeps with the guy’s wife as like, you know, part of this part of this process. So the guy gets really pissed. And he’s like, threatens to basically expose him for all the stuff that he’s doing. Um, while he’s meanwhile like an investor and all this stuff. You know, leading this professional life. The guy’s worth $5 billion by the way. So he’s he’s he’s a he’s a multi-billionaire himself. So the guy goes to his like security guy and says, “We need to kill him.” We we have this guy’s getting too, there’s too big of a risk. He threatens to bring everything down. We got to kill him and don’t and then and then there’s basically like in the article, it’s like, “Don’t like communicate anywhere except for Wicker, this like self-deleting text messaging app.” Um, and the guy goes to him and says, “Hey, hey, like talks off the ledge. No, let’s not kill this guy, whatever.” But that that was like one of the allegations. And so people have come out against this guy, but he bribes the police. And so like multiple police chiefs have like lost their job because they failed to investigate this guy because he basically bought them off. And he claimed How much do you think How much do you think you’d have to bribe a Montana cop to shut up? Like a million dollars? I mean, yeah, I think I think nine out of 10 police officers would take a million to shut up. Oh, in my deep experience bribing cops. I mean, I have no idea. Yeah, I think like half a million dollars would do, right? Like for a lot of these women, it’s like jewelry. Uh like he he slept with one woman and then she got the husband found out, got divorced and then he paid for her, he bought her a five-bedroom home and also paid for her side of the divorce and uh you know, that was like one of the things that he did. And so he just had this like elaborate web of, you know, crazy like this crazy sexual life layered on to crazy like payoffs and bribes and cover-ups. And then like a whole company dedicated to like this private security company, whatever that means. And then like police bribery. Like this is like a crazy ass three-part movie. And then you look at this guy and he’s just like this, you know, cookie cutter white VC looking guy. It was like such a wild story, I thought. And um, yeah, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. So I um, I read I I I I read a little bit about like odd billionaires and I’ve maybe interacted with one or two before. And does it do you have you ever met someone who’s like in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars who has like some weird shit where like like they have a a like for example, this is like public knowledge, Peter Thiel basically employed this this three lawyers, big shot lawyers and they’re and the basically when he was outed as gay by Gawker, he employed and this is a a great book by Ryan Holiday. I forget what it’s called, but he employed these three lawyers and I forget when he was outed, but something like 09 and he goes, “Um, however long it takes, your full-time job.” It’s like a decade, yeah. “Yeah, he goes, “Just wait for Gawker and those guys to screw up. And when they slip up, tell me and we’re going to pounce.” And he employed these guys the whole time. And there’s some crazy stuff about Peter Thiel. Like for example, in the book, they said that he has a black Mercedes with the engine on everywhere he goes in the world. So like that’s what it like he always he’s got a team and they they they have to have a car like at all times. And he also has land in New Zealand because he’s a little bit nervous about apocalypse. And so my question is, have you do you think you’ve ever met like a billionaire or someone like that who’s got some of these weird ass things like a like a security force who does exotic things like this? A fixer. Yeah. Um, I think so. So I worked with this guy. I’ve talked about him before. I worked with this crazy kind of like Like the Filipino guy? Yeah, in Indonesia. Um, crazy guy in Indonesia that was I talked about before. I mean, he’s like a dropout in grade school, self-made. I think he was worth $500 million, kind of like at his peak. And $500 million in Indonesia is like, you know, $10 billion here in America. And um, and you know, he he had a crazy elaborate like business, like his he him as my boss was really weird. Like he was a really insane boss. I told you, but he had a giant projector in the office, like on the wall that had everybody’s computer tracked and your productivity was like this like he bought the software from Boeing and basically used it to like show like your your little square would flash red if you weren’t being productive enough, and I don’t even know how it was like measuring that. Like just how much you were typing, I guess. I don’t know. And it was like this intimidation thing on, you know, he had four women that just managed his email. Um, like if you did good in a meeting, he would walk in the next day and just hand you keys to like a new Mercedes that’s outside. He’s like, “This is yours, drive it around.” And like, you know, he did crazy shit like that. Like I remember a meeting once where a friend of his came in from Singapore and they were basically just openly talking about like a insider trading/pump and dump scheme that they were doing, and I was like, “Whoa, that’s like crazy illegal.” And they were like, “Yeah, it’s great. We’re going to make so much money. It’s this is this is going to work. It’s going to be awesome.” You said that you said this is illegal? I didn’t say it. I was just sitting there in the room being like, in my head, I think this I’m 20 years I think I was 21 years old. Like I I didn’t know shit about shit at that point, but I knew enough to be like, “I think this is wrong what they’re talking about.” And then he would, you know, every day would after work would take everybody to the bar, or whoever his kind of like insider crew was, and two girls would be there, and those were like, you know, his escorts for the day or whatever, and like that’s just the way he did business. And he he bribed officials, and he did all kinds of stuff. He ended up in jail. He ended up dying in jail. He actually died this year. And um, you know, so it was like a pretty crazy life. Uh, and you know, I worked with this guy for only like three months, and then I left and I came back and started a startup here, but like, you know, that guy was wild. Like he lived a wild life. That’s awesome. Yeah, I’ve uh I I don’t know if I’ve had any first-hand knowledge of or if I’ve like been friends with people. Maybe I have and they just haven’t told me. But uh I do believe that like people like this guy, this Gogan guy, I don’t know, I I haven’t heard of this. I mean this is this Gogan guy is like on some Jeffrey Epstein shit, right? Like this is a modern day Jeffrey Epstein situation. Um, maybe I guess it’s not underage girls, I guess that’s that’s the difference, but like basically, you know, just like a harem of women and cover-ups and bribes and intimidation and he’s got this bunker and he’s like bribing police and like if these things are true, which you don’t know if they’re true or not, but this thing came out, it’s pretty crazy. Uh, it’s it’s a wild story. Yeah, this is crazy. I uh I didn’t know about this. I I would believe just based off what I I believe this is very this could be very true. Like this doesn’t shock me. Like knowing what I know a little bit, like and I have heard like rumors of people who I’m like second hand or third hand connected with that they’re freaks. And uh like I hear some stories about what they do to cover it up and I 100% believe this. And from Silicon Valley who are very successful, like things that I didn’t realize until I kind of got closer to I’m not inside that circle because I’m not like in that that tier, but had a couple friends in that circle and it’s like two things that are way more common than I ever would have thought. Swinging. Swinging is like super common in Silicon Valley. Dude, the swinger lifestyle. It’s weird. It’s weird. You know about this pineapple thing by the way? Tell me. So I I learned this from TikTok. I don’t know if this is real or not. But basically like this this the silent symbol for signaling to others if you’re a swinger or not, apparently is a upside down pineapple. So if you go to a house and they have a picture of a pineapple that’s upside down, it’s a wink to anybody else who’s in the lifestyle that, “Hey, we’re down.” Uh I had I had no idea. Dude, that’s crazy. Or if they’re wearing like pineapple earrings or something at a party. I got this I’ve got a girlfriend who does it and she uh and and she tells me about it and my wife and I were like I was like, “Sarah, like you know, like I’m not interested in this, just so you know. Like I don’t want to do this. This is this uh and she’s like, “Yeah, me neither, but it’s so fun to hear about.” Yeah, exactly. I’m like Uber Uber boy. I dude, I’ve got a couple friends that are into it. Down here in Austin where I live, uh these guys have this company, you know, Onnit. Um Aubrey Marcus and then he’s got this other guy named Kyle, uh who is a friend or works there. I’m not sure the relationship, but they like they mix work and play and they’re open about their how they’re they have open relationships and they talk about it. Uh Kyle Kingsbury, I think his name is. And they talk about it on the podcast, on their podcast that they they share they share relationships. Yeah, it’s I mean, you know, more power to you if it’s your thing. Uh I what I’m saying is I didn’t know how common that was or like swinging or that lifestyle, but it is very common amongst like successful Silicon Valley people. Same thing with drugs, uh like, you know, my either microdosing or normal dosing of certain drugs. Like I guess like there’s a certain level of uh party that I just never did and I never had the urge to do, um, that I think is like pretty common amongst uh amongst like this group of people and like, you know, good for them. Dude, I’ve I’m I’m such a prude. I’ve been out with like some like really powerful people who I looked up to and I saw them the whenever I’ve seen them do coke, I’m like, “Oh, I I don’t uh I don’t really like you as much as I used to like you.” Exactly. It just like it made me uncomfortable and I didn’t I didn’t feel I I didn’t like it. But uh this is crazy. and it is way more common than I than I thought living in Silicon Valley. I think what it is is like if you’re a nerd and you’re now worth a billion dollars or hundreds of millions, which is basically the same thing, and you could do anything you want, you want you want to do stuff and also if you are young and you have money, you have to up the ante consistently. So Dan Blazarian has this new book out and either in the book or in an interview about the book, he was saying how he’s like, “Man, I’ve had every woman that I could ever want. I have private fancy chefs. I drive the best cars, I fly private, I do I do the fanciest stuff. None of it makes me happy anymore because I have to go bigger and bigger and bigger in order to help my dopamine and make it work and and and now like none of it makes me happy. So I just like I’m I try to be simple now, although like it’s really hard. I I but all the items, they don’t they don’t bring me joy. Um, speaking of making me happy, I there was this thing that I saw that I thought was pretty cool. It’s not really like a business idea necessarily, but I think it’s worth a read. So let me put a link to it. Uh, where should I put the link? Um, one sec, let me grab it. Uh, basically there’s this guy, I want to give him credit because it’s a very interesting read. Um, and I’ll explain it while I’m looking for the link. So basically there’s this guy who uh Dan Lou, I think is his name. Um, How do you spell it? Dan, normal, and then L U U. And uh go to this link. So go just search uh or never mind, I’ll just slack it to you. Um, so go to this link and this guy has this post, and basically what he all he did was he’s like, “Hey, um, you know, there’s there’s all these like claims that you will hear commonly. You’ll hear them over and over and over again. And they’re referencing studies. And um they have fancy names, and then they reference studies, and then people take them as facts. And then if you ever He’s like, “Turns out, if you actually go read the study, the claim is either way weaker than what people use it as like a thing, or it’s literally the opposite.” And he gives four examples. And I loved reading this. So I I want to go through them real quick. So one is on happiness, which you just said. So we had talked about this before, which is people have this thing where they say, “There’s um there’s a link between happiness and uh and income.” And basically the the thing you’ll hear in in pop science is, “Beyond $75,000, you know, your happiness doesn’t go up beyond that amount.” So what does this mean? And it’s total bullshit. This means don’t chase money and um don’t chase money. You should you’re it’s not going to make you any happier. And so he’s like, so he goes and he’s like, so he goes and he’s like, “It’s become common knowledge that that money doesn’t make people happy. How much is enough? Um, you know, people have different things. If you Google it, if you say happiness income, it’ll say, um, household income of $75,000. After that, your day-to-day happiness doesn’t rise. Um, he goes, “This happiness uh correlate income like study was actually done multiple times, not just one time. And um and you know, the problem is like when people looked at the graph, it looks like happiness goes up, up, up, up, up, and then it flattens out. He’s like, “The problem is it’s on a log scale.” And like most people just don’t know how to read a log scale graph. A log scale graph means you’re going up by a factor of 10 every time. Sorry. So even if it’s even if it’s flattening out, that might be going from 10 to 50. It just doesn’t look like as big of a jump because it’s not like the the the increments are a log scale. So basically, if you actually look at it, uh if you actually look at the and you know, this got published in Dan Gilbert’s like book uh on uh on on behavioral, you know, economics and stuff like that. And basically, um if you actually look at the chart, the chart shows that uh if you look at it on a non-log scale, which he puts the graph here, it’s basically like the more money you have, the more your satisfaction goes up. And there is no flattening out. Um, it doesn’t go up at the same rate. So yes, it’s true that going from $0 to $30,000 to $75,000 gives you a bigger jump in happiness than going from 1 million to 2 million or 2 million to 4 million. But the happiness does keep going up. Uh your life your satisfaction does keep going up on on all the reported scales. And he’s basically like, you know, there may be some point where you stop getting returns, but we haven’t found it yet. You know, like, um, on average, people have not found that yet. So, um, you and it and actually there are things that like um that I and and if you dig in, he actually pointed out some that there’s there are some things that that uh contradict this claim. So what people used to say is, “Oh yeah, you’ll get that money and then you’ll return to what they call your set point of happiness. So you get all this money, you win the lottery. Yeah, within a few months you’re back to your set point of happiness. If you were depressed before, you’ll be depressed after. And um, and he’s like, you know, it turns out that that’s not true. Winning the lottery actually does make you happier if you look at the if you actually look at the study. So, I think that’s a great idea. It’s like, you know, if a couple of YouTubers got together, I think they could have, you know, I and I think it’s fan service, too. So I think you would just become more famous, you’d build fan love and you’d print like, I don’t know, $20 million every summer, um, running your camp. Uh, it’s a pain in the ass, but you could do that. And I I think like I went to a space camp from NASA when I was like in fifth grade or something. Did you really? The state of Texas sent every fifth grader to it. So it’s kind of amazing. What? Yeah, and they only did it once. So I was just lucky to be in that timing. Oh, I wanted to do that when I was a kid so badly. It’s an amazing thing. You go there and you get to be in a rocket ship and like you get to play commander and like do all this stuff. But I feel like for many jobs, there’s a version of that. Like I think people are fascinated with prisons. I think they’re fascinated with the police. I think they’re fascinated with the army. And like if you could create like amusement parks or simulations of that, where you get to take your pictures, you get to touch the stuff, you get to see how it works, you get to learn some things, uh people will pay for that. And I think they’re going to see more out-of-home experiences like that get built. Can we move on to the shitty Billy of the week? Yeah. Or do you want to go a different one? No, it’s good. It’s just a crazy story. I don’t even know what the point of this. I point of this one. Let’s go to a different one. Then we can do a different one. All right, let’s do a quick one. Quick idea. This I saw this and it kind of caught my eye. This guy, um, what’s his name? I’ll give him credit real quick. Somebody somebody sent this to us in the Facebook group and uh I thought it was really interesting. So it’s this a specialnames.cn. So, uh what’s the guy’s name? The guy’s name Mike Mike Benitez shared this. So specialname.cn. What is it? Basically, there’s a story that came out of this girl who paid her way through college. She basically made a few hundred thousand dollars and all she does is she names Chinese babies with American names. So so basically in China, every uh Chinese person typically will have a Western name. So, you know, if their name is hard to say, they know they kind of know that for for business purposes and travel purposes, it’s just easier to have to like be like, “Yes, I also go by Mike, or I go by Emerald, or I go by, you know, Samantha.” And so, um, but the problem is, you know, it’s not your native thing. So if it’s like if I tried to pick a Chinese name right now, I I might pick something that’s really weird or off. Like it doesn’t sound quite right. And so you see these things where Chinese people name their baby like Rolex, uh would be like their Western name. It’s like, “No, no, no, you shouldn’t have picked that one. Like, you know, that’s kind of a strange name.” If you were trying to have like a easy Western name, you actually like backfired. So what this woman’s services, she you can go to specialname.cn and the site is hilarious. If you go to the website, it’s like Are you on the website? It’s it’s like Yeah, I’m looking at it now. Look at the counter. It says, “The baby we named,” and it says a million, they they’ve named over a billion babies, but the English is is off. Yeah, it well, the the actual site’s in Chinese. I think it’s a Google Translate that you’re looking at. And uh you just say boy or girl, I think you submit some information or a picture of the baby, and she just closes her eyes basically and says, “Jasmine.” And then No, so you you you pick five attributes like um nice, honest, kind, eager, keen. And I did that and it gave me the names Zachary, Caleb, or Harvey. And it says, “The famous Harveys are Harvey Firestone, Harvey Ball, and then Caleb, Caleb Carr. I don’t know who that is. Is that a famous actor? I don’t know. Uh Zachary Taylor, I guess the American president. Yeah, it’s pretty funny. And so this uh site, I thought what a what an example of niches make riches and like just solve a simple problem for people. And uh you know, this girl’s made, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars just off this website. And uh I thought that was like, How does it make money? Just through ads? A really cool, really cool side hustle for a college kid. It just make they just make money through ads? I think, yeah, I don’t know exactly. I I thought you pay her to do it, uh but maybe you’re saying you just got a name right away. I just got a name. I was doing it on my phone. So it might be ads or it might be a premium upsell. And they and they and and the logo is just this generic looking white lady. Like that’s like the spokesperson. If that’s her or not. That’s definitely not her. So let me do this. Oh yeah, I know it’s like a cartoon. Um Yeah, this is awesome. So this is this is a hilarious little side hustle that I that I loved. Um okay, let’s do uh let’s do the shitty Billy of the week. I read this story and I was blown away. This is not really this is interesting only in that it’s a train wreck. Did you see this story about this venture capitalist that came out? Just now. So there’s this guy named Michael Gogan. He used to be a partner at Sequoia, right? Like the one of the biggest venture firms ever. Is he the one who stole money from them? No, he got fired because his girlfriend came out and accused him and like sued him for or like accused him of uh of like sexual abuse, she said, you know, he’s I’ve been in a relationship with him for eight years or 10 years or something like that and he’s extremely abusive sexually to me and blah blah blah. Uh she’s a stripper that he met somewhere and then she became his girlfriend and then whatever. And uh this the suit, he he didn’t lose the suit. He, you know, she kind of like he got acquitted or whatever. Um but you know, still Sequoia was like, “you know, we decided it’s best to part ways.” So a story came out in the Daily Mail. And you know it’s good because it’s in the Daily Mail, which is like, you know, just the the the trash of the trash, but it’s the junk food. You can’t resist. And um basically, there was some wild shit about this guy. So here’s the allegations that are in the article. The article says Michael Gogan, uh he basically after he left Sequoia, he goes to Montana and he basically sets up his like estate in Montana. He owns like, I don’t know, uh 100,000 square feet of like space in of of of houses in in in in Montana. He is like the big fish there. He owns a bar, under the bar, he created this thing called the Boom Boom Room. And the Boom Boom Room is where he takes like, you know, girls that he meets and he this so this guy’s on his fourth wife. The article talks about this spreadsheet of 5,000 women that he slept with. And it’s just full of Dude, have you have you done the Wait, say that again. Say the 5,000 thing again. A spreadsheet of 5,000 women that he slept with. It’s Okay, so do the math. If you so if you if this has happened over a 20-year period, Yeah. 365 days times 20 is 7,300 divided by 5. That means he had to have sex with a different woman every 1.5 days. Basically every other day. Yeah, every day and a half. Is that crazy? What? I don’t believe that. That doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t know if it’s true. I don’t know if he did it or he didn’t. So like the Wilt Chamberlain did this once where he claimed he slept with 10,000 women and people were like, “That means you slept with two women a day.” Like this doesn’t make any sense. Um Yeah, his response by the way, he was like, “Yeah, sometimes it was three though.” Exactly. Most pimp response ever. So this guy, this guy’s wild. So what so he basically um he there’s tons of so what happened was he had created this like security company to cover his tracks and it’s like a private security company. And he hired these like ex-military people to run it for him and they were kind of like his fixers. They’re the ones who came out and exposed this whole thing and are now suing him for $800 million. So they’re suing him because he basically made them do a bunch of stuff that like got them in trouble. So he’d have to pay off women that he would sleep with. Um and they would have he’d be like, “You need to do this.” Like, “Go I I’ll put money in your account, you pay her off.” And um and eventually one guy, so he had a friend who um the story is he he brings his daughters over to the friend’s house um with their babysitter, but then he leaves with the babysitter, has sex with the babysitter, and the friend is like, “Dude, what the hell are you doing? You just had sex with the babysitter in my house? Like, um this is messed up.” And he’s like, he calls him a pedophile. And he’s like, “Dude, uh like I don’t, you know, don’t don’t bring up my my flaws and like, you know, there’s a one-time thing and blah blah blah.” And the guy’s like, “No, this is messed up.” And he’s like, starts threatening the guy. He threatens the guy and says, “If you come out and say this, I’m going to like ruin you.” And um the guy’s like, “You know, F that.” He then sleeps with the guy’s wife as like, you know, part of this part of this process. So the guy gets really pissed. And he’s like, threatens to basically expose him for all the stuff that he’s doing. Um, while he’s meanwhile like an investor and all this stuff. You know, leading this professional life. The guy’s worth $5 billion by the way. So he’s he’s he’s a he’s a multi-billionaire himself. So the guy goes to his like security guy and says, “We need to kill him.” We we have this guy’s getting too, there’s too big of a risk. He threatens to bring everything down. We got to kill him and don’t and then and then there’s basically like in the article, it’s like, “Don’t like communicate anywhere except for Wicker, this like self-deleting text messaging app.” Um, and the guy goes to him and says, “Hey, hey, like talks off the ledge. No, let’s not kill this guy, whatever.” But that that was like one of the allegations. And so people have come out against this guy, but he bribes the police. And so like multiple police chiefs have like lost their job because they failed to investigate this guy because he basically bought them off. And he claimed How much do you think How much do you think you’d have to bribe a Montana cop to shut up? Like a million dollars? I mean, yeah, I think I think nine out of 10 police officers would take a million to shut up. Oh, in my deep experience bribing cops. I mean, I have no idea. Yeah, I think like half a million dollars would do, right? Like for a lot of these women, it’s like jewelry. Uh like he he slept with one woman and then she got the husband found out, got divorced and then he paid for her, he bought her a five-bedroom home and also paid for her side of the divorce and uh you know, that was like one of the things that he did. And so he just had this like elaborate web of, you know, crazy like this crazy sexual life layered on to crazy like payoffs and bribes and cover-ups. And then like a whole company dedicated to like this private security company, whatever that means. And then like police bribery. Like this is like a crazy ass three-part movie. And then you look at this guy and he’s just like this, you know, cookie cutter white VC looking guy. It was like such a wild story, I thought. And um, yeah, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. So I um, I read I I I I read a little bit about like odd billionaires and I’ve maybe interacted with one or two before. And does it do you have you ever met someone who’s like in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars who has like some weird shit where like like they have a a like for example, this is like public knowledge, Peter Thiel basically employed this this three lawyers, big shot lawyers and they’re and the basically when he was outed as gay by Gawker, he employed and this is a a great book by Ryan Holiday. I forget what it’s called, but he employed these three lawyers and I forget when he was outed, but something like 09 and he goes, “Um, however long it takes, your full-time job.” It’s like a decade, yeah. “Yeah, he goes, “Just wait for Gawker and those guys to screw up. And when they slip up, tell me and we’re going to pounce.” And he employed these guys the whole time. And there’s some crazy stuff about Peter Thiel. Like for example, in the book, they said that he has a black Mercedes with the engine on everywhere he goes in the world. So like that’s what it like he always he’s got a team and they they they have to have a car like at all times. And he also has land in New Zealand because he’s a little bit nervous about apocalypse. And so my question is, have you do you think you’ve ever met like a billionaire or someone like that who’s got some of these weird ass things like a like a security force who does exotic things like this? A fixer. Yeah. Um, I think so. So I worked with this guy. I’ve talked about him before. I worked with this crazy kind of like Like the Filipino guy? Yeah, in Indonesia. Um, crazy guy in Indonesia that was I talked about before. I mean, he’s like a dropout in grade school, self-made. I think he was worth $500 million, kind of like at his peak. And $500 million in Indonesia is like, you know, $10 billion here in America. And um, and you know, he he had a crazy elaborate like business, like his he him as my boss was really weird. Like he was a really insane boss. I told you, but he had a giant projector in the office, like on the wall that had everybody’s computer tracked and your productivity was like this like he bought the software from Boeing and basically used it to like show like your your little square would flash red if you weren’t being productive enough, and I don’t even know how it was like measuring that. Like just how much you were typing, I guess. I don’t know. And it was like this intimidation thing on, you know, he had four women that just managed his email. Um, like if you did good in a meeting, he would walk in the next day and just hand you keys to like a new Mercedes that’s outside. He’s like, “This is yours, drive it around.” And like, you know, he did crazy shit like that. Like I remember a meeting once where a friend of his came in from Singapore and they were basically just openly talking about like a insider trading/pump and dump scheme that they were doing, and I was like, “Whoa, that’s like crazy illegal.” And they were like, “Yeah, it’s great. We’re going to make so much money. It’s this is this is going to work. It’s going to be awesome.” You said that you said this is illegal? I didn’t say it. I was just sitting there in the room being like, in my head, I think this I’m 20 years I think I was 21 years old. Like I I didn’t know shit about shit at that point, but I knew enough to be like, “I think this is wrong what they’re talking about.” And then he would, you know, every day would after work would take everybody to the bar, or whoever his kind of like insider crew was, and two girls would be there, and those were like, you know, his escorts for the day or whatever, and like that’s just the way he did business. And he he bribed officials, and he did all kinds of stuff. He ended up in jail. He ended up dying in jail. He actually died this year. And um, you know, so it was like a pretty crazy life. Uh, and you know, I worked with this guy for only like three months, and then I left and I came back and started a startup here, but like, you know, that guy was wild. Like he lived a wild life. That’s awesome. Yeah, I’ve uh I I don’t know if I’ve had any first-hand knowledge of or if I’ve like been friends with people. Maybe I have and they just haven’t told me. But uh I do believe that like people like this guy, this Gogan guy, I don’t know, I I haven’t heard of this. I mean this is this Gogan guy is like on some Jeffrey Epstein shit, right? Like this is a modern day Jeffrey Epstein situation. Um, maybe I guess it’s not underage girls, I guess that’s that’s the difference, but like basically, you know, just like a harem of women and cover-ups and bribes and intimidation and he’s got this bunker and he’s like bribing police and like if these things are true, which you don’t know if they’re true or not, but this thing came out, it’s pretty crazy. Uh, it’s it’s a wild story. Yeah, this is crazy. I uh I didn’t know about this. I I would believe just based off what I I believe this is very this could be very true. Like this doesn’t shock me. Like knowing what I know a little bit, like and I have heard like rumors of people who I’m like second hand or third hand connected with that they’re freaks. And uh like I hear some stories about what they do to cover it up and I 100% believe this. And from Silicon Valley who are very successful, like things that I didn’t realize until I kind of got closer to I’m not inside that circle because I’m not like in that that tier, but had a couple friends in that circle and it’s like two things that are way more common than I ever would have thought. Swinging. Swinging is like super common in Silicon Valley. Dude, the swinger lifestyle. It’s weird. It’s weird. You know about this pineapple thing by the way? Tell me. So I I learned this from TikTok. I don’t know if this is real or not. But basically like this this the silent symbol for signaling to others if you’re a swinger or not, apparently is a upside down pineapple. So if you go to a house and they have a picture of a pineapple that’s upside down, it’s a wink to anybody else who’s in the lifestyle that, “Hey, we’re down.” Uh I had I had no idea. Dude, that’s crazy. Or if they’re wearing like pineapple earrings or something at a party. I got this I’ve got a girlfriend who does it and she uh and and she tells me about it and my wife and I were like I was like, “Sarah, like you know, like I’m not interested in this, just so you know. Like I don’t want to do this. This is this uh and she’s like, “Yeah, me neither, but it’s so fun to hear about.” Yeah, exactly. I’m like Uber Uber boy. I dude, I’ve got a couple friends that are into it. Down here in Austin where I live, uh these guys have this company, you know, Onnit. Um Aubrey Marcus and then he’s got this other guy named Kyle, uh who is a friend or works there. I’m not sure the relationship, but they like they mix work and play and they’re open about their how they’re they have open relationships and they talk about it. Uh Kyle Kingsbury, I think his name is. And they talk about it on the podcast, on their podcast that they they share they share relationships. Yeah, it’s I mean, you know, more power to you if it’s your thing. Uh I what I’m saying is I didn’t know how common that was or like swinging or that lifestyle, but it is very common amongst like successful Silicon Valley people. Same thing with drugs, uh like, you know, my either microdosing or normal dosing of certain drugs. Like I guess like there’s a certain level of uh party that I just never did and I never had the urge to do, um, that I think is like pretty common amongst uh amongst like this group of people and like, you know, good for them. Dude, I’ve I’m I’m such a prude. I’ve been out with like some like really powerful people who I looked up to and I saw them the whenever I’ve seen them do coke, I’m like, “Oh, I I don’t uh I don’t really like you as much as I used to like you.” Exactly. It just like it made me uncomfortable and I didn’t I didn’t feel I I didn’t like it. But uh this is crazy. and it is way more common than I than I thought living in Silicon Valley. I think what it is is like if you’re a nerd and you’re now worth a billion dollars or hundreds of millions, which is basically the same thing, and you could do anything you want, you want you want to do stuff and also if you are young and you have money, you have to up the ante consistently. So Dan Blazarian has this new book out and either in the book or in an interview about the book, he was saying how he’s like, “Man, I’ve had every woman that I could ever want. I have private fancy chefs. I drive the best cars, I fly private, I do I do the fanciest stuff. None of it makes me happy anymore because I have to go bigger and bigger and bigger in order to help my dopamine and make it work and and and now like none of it makes me happy. So I just like I’m I try to be simple now, although like it’s really hard. I I but all the items, they don’t they don’t bring me joy. Um, speaking of making me happy, I there was this thing that I saw that I thought was pretty cool. It’s not really like a business idea necessarily, but I think it’s worth a read. So let me put a link to it. Uh, where should I put the link? Um, one sec, let me grab it. Uh, basically there’s this guy, I want to give him credit because it’s a very interesting read. Um, and I’ll explain it while I’m looking for the link. So basically there’s this guy who uh Dan Lou, I think is his name. Um, How do you spell it? Dan, normal, and then L U U. And uh go to this link. So go just search uh or never mind, I’ll just slack it to you. Um, so go to this link and this guy has this post, and basically what he all he did was he’s like, “Hey, um, you know, there’s there’s all these like claims that you will hear commonly. You’ll hear them over and over and over again. And they’re referencing studies. And um they have fancy names, and then they reference studies, and then people take them as facts. And then if you ever He’s like, “Turns out, if you actually go read the study, the claim is either way weaker than what people use it as like a thing, or it’s literally the opposite.” And he gives four examples. And I loved reading this. So I I want to go through them real quick. So one is on happiness, which you just said. So we had talked about this before, which is people have this thing where they say, “There’s um there’s a link between happiness and uh and income.” And basically the the thing you’ll hear in in pop science is, “Beyond $75,000, you know, your happiness doesn’t go up beyond that amount.” So what does this mean? And it’s total bullshit. This means don’t chase money and um don’t chase money. You should you’re it’s not going to make you any happier. And so he’s like, so he goes and he’s like, so he goes and he’s like, “It’s become common knowledge that that money doesn’t make people happy. How much is enough? Um, you know, people have different things. If you Google it, if you say happiness income, it’ll say, um, household income of $75,000. After that, your day-to-day happiness doesn’t rise. Um, he goes, “This happiness uh correlate income like study was actually done multiple times, not just one time. And um and you know, the problem is like when people looked at the graph, it looks like happiness goes up, up, up, up, up, and then it flattens out. He’s like, “The problem is it’s on a log scale.” And like most people just don’t know how to read a log scale graph. A log scale graph means you’re going up by a factor of 10 every time. Sorry. So even if it’s even if it’s flattening out, that might be going from 10 to 50. It just doesn’t look like as big of a jump because it’s not like the the the increments are a log scale. So basically, if you actually look at it, uh if you actually look at the and you know, this got published in Dan Gilbert’s like book uh on uh on on behavioral, you know, economics and stuff like that. And basically, um if you actually look at the chart, the chart shows that uh if you look at it on a non-log scale, which he puts the graph here, it’s basically like the more money you have, the more your satisfaction goes up. And there is no flattening out. Um, it doesn’t go up at the same rate. So yes, it’s true that going from $0 to $30,000 to $75,000 gives you a bigger jump in happiness than going from 1 million to 2 million or 2 million to 4 million. But the happiness does keep going up. Uh your life your satisfaction does keep going up on on all the reported scales. And he’s basically like, you know, there may be some point where you stop getting returns, but we haven’t found it yet. You know, like, um, on average, people have not found that yet. So, um, you and it and actually there are things that like um that I and and if you dig in, he actually pointed out some that there’s there are some things that that uh contradict this claim. So what people used to say is, “Oh yeah, you’ll get that money and then you’ll return to what they call your set point of happiness. So you get all this money, you win the lottery. Yeah, within a few months you’re back to your set point of happiness. If you were depressed before, you’ll be depressed after. And um, and he’s like, you know, it turns out that that’s not true. Winning the lottery actually does make you happier if you look at the if you actually look at the study. So, I think that’s a great idea. It’s like, you know, if a couple of YouTubers got together, I think they could have, you know, I and I think it’s fan service, too. So I think you would just become more famous, you’d build fan love and you’d print like, I don’t know, $20 million every summer, um, running your camp. Uh, it’s a pain in the ass, but you could do that. And I I think like I went to a space camp from NASA when I was like in fifth grade or something. Did you really? The state of Texas sent every fifth grader to it. So it’s kind of amazing. What? Yeah, and they only did it once. So I was just lucky to be in that timing. Oh, I wanted to do that when I was a kid so badly. It’s an amazing thing. You go there and you get to be in a rocket ship and like you get to play commander and like do all this stuff. But I feel like for many jobs, there’s a version of that. Like I think people are fascinated with prisons. I think they’re fascinated with the police. I think they’re fascinated with the army. And like if you could create like amusement parks or simulations of that, where you get to take your pictures, you get to touch the stuff, you get to see how it works, you get to learn some things, uh people will pay for that. And I think they’re going to see more out-of-home experiences like that get built. Can we move on to the shitty Billy of the week? Yeah. Or do you want to go a different one? No, it’s good. It’s just a crazy story. I don’t even know what the point of this. I point of this one. Let’s go to a different one. Then we can do a different one. All right, let’s do a quick one. Quick idea. This I saw this and it kind of caught my eye. This guy, um, what’s his name? I’ll give him credit real quick. Somebody somebody sent this to us in the Facebook group and uh I thought it was really interesting. So it’s this a specialnames.cn. So, uh what’s the guy’s name? The guy’s name Mike Mike Benitez shared this. So specialname.cn. What is it? Basically, there’s a story that came out of this girl who paid her way through college. She basically made a few hundred thousand dollars and all she does is she names Chinese babies with American names. So so basically in China, every uh Chinese person typically will have a Western name. So, you know, if their name is hard to say, they know they kind of know that for for business purposes and travel purposes, it’s just easier to have to like be like, “Yes, I also go by Mike, or I go by Emerald, or I go by, you know, Samantha.” And so, um, but the problem is, you know, it’s not your native thing. So if it’s like if I tried to pick a Chinese name right now, I I might pick something that’s really weird or off. Like it doesn’t sound quite right. And so you see these things where Chinese people name their baby like Rolex, uh would be like their Western name. It’s like, “No, no, no, you shouldn’t have picked that one. Like, you know, that’s kind of a strange name.” If you were trying to have like a easy Western name, you actually like backfired. So what this woman’s services, she you can go to specialname.cn and the site is hilarious. If you go to the website, it’s like Are you on the website? It’s it’s like Yeah, I’m looking at it now. Look at the counter. It says, “The baby we named,” and it says a million, they they’ve named over a billion babies, but the English is is off. Yeah, it well, the the actual site’s in Chinese. I think it’s a Google Translate that you’re looking at. And uh you just say boy or girl, I think you submit some information or a picture of the baby, and she just closes her eyes basically and says, “Jasmine.” And then No, so you you you pick five attributes like um nice, honest, kind, eager, keen. And I did that and it gave me the names Zachary, Caleb, or Harvey. And it says, “The famous Harveys are Harvey Firestone, Harvey Ball, and then Caleb, Caleb Carr. I don’t know who that is. Is that a famous actor? I don’t know. Uh Zachary Taylor, I guess the American president. Yeah, it’s pretty funny. And so this uh site, I thought what a what an example of niches make riches and like just solve a simple problem for people. And uh you know, this girl’s made, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars just off this website. And uh I thought that was like, How does it make money? Just through ads? A really cool, really cool side hustle for a college kid. It just make they just make money through ads? I think, yeah, I don’t know exactly. I I thought you pay her to do it, uh but maybe you’re saying you just got a name right away. I just got a name. I was doing it on my phone. So it might be ads or it might be a premium upsell. And they and they and and the logo is just this generic looking white lady. Like that’s like the spokesperson. If that’s her or not. That’s definitely not her. So let me do this. Oh yeah, I know it’s like a cartoon. Um Yeah, this is awesome. So this is this is a hilarious little side hustle that I that I loved. Um okay, let’s do uh let’s do the shitty Billy of the week. I read this story and I was blown away. This is not really this is interesting only in that it’s a train wreck. Did you see this story about this venture capitalist that came out? Just now. So there’s this guy named Michael Gogan. He used to be a partner at Sequoia, right? Like the one of the biggest venture firms ever. Is he the one who stole money from them? No, he got fired because his girlfriend came out and accused him and like sued him for or like accused him of uh of like sexual abuse, she said, you know, he’s I’ve been in a relationship with him for eight years or 10 years or something like that and he’s extremely abusive sexually to me and blah blah blah. Uh she’s a stripper that he met somewhere and then she became his girlfriend and then whatever. And uh this the suit, he he didn’t lose the suit. He, you know, she kind of like he got acquitted or whatever. Um but you know, still Sequoia was like, “you know, we decided it’s best to part ways.” So a story came out in the Daily Mail. And you know it’s good because it’s in the Daily Mail, which is like, you know, just the the the trash of the trash, but it’s the junk food. You can’t resist. And um basically, there was some wild shit about this guy. So here’s the allegations that are in the article. The article says Michael Gogan, uh he basically after he left Sequoia, he goes to Montana and he basically sets up his like estate in Montana. He owns like, I don’t know, uh 100,000 square feet of like space in of of of houses in in in in Montana. He is like the big fish there. He owns a bar, under the bar, he created this thing called the Boom Boom Room. And the Boom Boom Room is where he takes like, you know, girls that he meets and he this so this guy’s on his fourth wife. The article talks about this spreadsheet of 5,000 women that he slept with. And it’s just full of Dude, have you have you done the Wait, say that again. Say the 5,000 thing again. A spreadsheet of 5,000 women that he slept with. It’s Okay, so do the math. If you so if you if this has happened over a 20-year period, Yeah. 365 days times 20 is 7,300 divided by 5. That means he had to have sex with a different woman every 1.5 days. Basically every other day. Yeah, every day and a half. Is that crazy? What? I don’t believe that. That doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t know if it’s true. I don’t know if he did it or he didn’t. So like the Wilt Chamberlain did this once where he claimed he slept with 10,000 women and people were like, “That means you slept with two women a day.” Like this doesn’t make any sense. Um Yeah, his response by the way, he was like, “Yeah, sometimes it was three though.” Exactly. Most pimp response ever. So this guy, this guy’s wild. So what so he basically um he there’s tons of so what happened was he had created this like security company to cover his tracks and it’s like a private security company. And he hired these like ex-military people to run it for him and they were kind of like his fixers. They’re the ones who came out and exposed this whole thing and are now suing him for $800 million. So they’re suing him because he basically made them do a bunch of stuff that like got them in trouble. So he’d have to pay off women that he would sleep with. Um and they would have he’d be like, “You need to do this.” Like, “Go I I’ll put money in your account, you pay her off.” And um and eventually one guy, so he had a friend who um the story is he he brings his daughters over to the friend’s house um with their babysitter, but then he leaves with the babysitter, has sex with the babysitter, and the friend is like, “Dude, what the hell are you doing? You just had sex with the babysitter in my house? Like, um this is messed up.” And he’s like, he calls him a pedophile. And he’s like, “Dude, uh like I don’t, you know, don’t don’t bring up my my flaws and like, you know, there’s a one-time thing and blah blah blah.” And the guy’s like, “No, this is messed up.” And he’s like, starts threatening the guy. He threatens the guy and says, “If you come out and say this, I’m going to like ruin you.” And um the guy’s like, “You know, F that.” He then sleeps with the guy’s wife as like, you know, part of this part of this process. So the guy gets really pissed. And he’s like, threatens to basically expose him for all the stuff that he’s doing. Um, while he’s meanwhile like an investor and all this stuff. You know, leading this professional life. The guy’s worth $5 billion by the way. So he’s he’s he’s a he’s a multi-billionaire himself. So the guy goes to his like security guy and says, “We need to kill him.” We we have this guy’s getting too, there’s too big of a risk. He threatens to bring everything down. We got to kill him and don’t and then and then there’s basically like in the article, it’s like, “Don’t like communicate anywhere except for Wicker, this like self-deleting text messaging app.” Um, and the guy goes to him and says, “Hey, hey, like talks off the ledge. No, let’s not kill this guy, whatever.” But that that was like one of the allegations. And so people have come out against this guy, but he bribes the police. And so like multiple police chiefs have like lost their job because they failed to investigate this guy because he basically bought them off. And he claimed How much do you think How much do you think you’d have to bribe a Montana cop to shut up? Like a million dollars? I mean, yeah, I think I think nine out of 10 police officers would take a million to shut up. Oh, in my deep experience bribing cops. I mean, I have no idea. Yeah, I think like half a million dollars would do, right? Like for a lot of these women, it’s like jewelry. Uh like he he slept with one woman and then she got the husband found out, got divorced and then he paid for her, he bought her a five-bedroom home and also paid for her side of the divorce and uh you know, that was like one of the things that he did. And so he just had this like elaborate web of, you know, crazy like this crazy sexual life layered on to crazy like payoffs and bribes and cover-ups. And then like a whole company dedicated to like this private security company, whatever that means. And then like police bribery. Like this is like a crazy ass three-part movie. And then you look at this guy and he’s just like this, you know, cookie cutter white VC looking guy. It was like such a wild story, I thought. And um, yeah, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. So I um, I read I I I I read a little bit about like odd billionaires and I’ve maybe interacted with one or two before. And does it do you have you ever met someone who’s like in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars who has like some weird shit where like like they have a a like for example, this is like public knowledge, Peter Thiel basically employed this this three lawyers, big shot lawyers and they’re and the basically when he was outed as gay by Gawker, he employed and this is a a great book by Ryan Holiday. I forget what it’s called, but he employed these three lawyers and I forget when he was outed, but something like 09 and he goes, “Um, however long it takes, your full-time job.” It’s like a decade, yeah. “Yeah, he goes, “Just wait for Gawker and those guys to screw up. And when they slip up, tell me and we’re going to pounce.” And he employed these guys the whole time. And there’s some crazy stuff about Peter Thiel. Like for example, in the book, they said that he has a black Mercedes with the engine on everywhere he goes in the world. So like that’s what it like he always he’s got a team and they they they have to have a car like at all times. And he also has land in New Zealand because he’s a little bit nervous about apocalypse. And so my question is, have you do you think you’ve ever met like a billionaire or someone like that who’s got some of these weird ass things like a like a security force who does exotic things like this? A fixer. Yeah. Um, I think so. So I worked with this guy. I’ve talked about him before. I worked with this crazy kind of like Like the Filipino guy? Yeah, in Indonesia. Um, crazy guy in Indonesia that was I talked about before. I mean, he’s like a dropout in grade school, self-made. I think he was worth $500 million, kind of like at his peak. And $500 million in Indonesia is like, you know, $10 billion here in America. And um, and you know, he he had a crazy elaborate like business, like his he him as my boss was really weird. Like he was a really insane boss. I told you, but he had a giant projector in the office, like on the wall that had everybody’s computer tracked and your productivity was like this like he bought the software from Boeing and basically used it to like show like your your little square would flash red if you weren’t being productive enough, and I don’t even know how it was like measuring that. Like just how much you were typing, I guess. I don’t know. And it was like this intimidation thing on, you know, he had four women that just managed his email. Um, like if you did good in a meeting, he would walk in the next day and just hand you keys to like a new Mercedes that’s outside. He’s like, “This is yours, drive it around.” And like, you know, he did crazy shit like that. Like I remember a meeting once where a friend of his came in from Singapore and they were basically just openly talking about like a insider trading/pump and dump scheme that they were doing, and I was like, “Whoa, that’s like crazy illegal.” And they were like, “Yeah, it’s great. We’re going to make so much money. It’s this is this is going to work. It’s going to be awesome.” You said that you said this is illegal? I didn’t say it. I was just sitting there in the room being like, in my head, I think this I’m 20 years I think I was 21 years old. Like I I didn’t know shit about shit at that point, but I knew enough to be like, “I think this is wrong what they’re talking about.” And then he would, you know, every day would after work would take everybody to the bar, or whoever his kind of like insider crew was, and two girls would be there, and those were like, you know, his escorts for the day or whatever, and like that’s just the way he did business. And he he bribed officials, and he did all kinds of stuff. He ended up in jail. He ended up dying in jail. He actually died this year. And um, you know, so it was like a pretty crazy life. Uh, and you know, I worked with this guy for only like three months, and then I left and I came back and started a startup here, but like, you know, that guy was wild. Like he lived a wild life. That’s awesome. Yeah, I’ve uh I I don’t know if I’ve had any first-hand knowledge of or if I’ve like been friends with people. Maybe I have and they just haven’t told me. But uh I do believe that like people like this guy, this Gogan guy, I don’t know, I I haven’t heard of this. I mean this is this Gogan guy is like on some Jeffrey Epstein shit, right? Like this is a modern day Jeffrey Epstein situation. Um, maybe I guess it’s not underage girls, I guess that’s that’s the difference, but like basically, you know, just like a harem of women and cover-ups and bribes and intimidation and he’s got this bunker and he’s like bribing police and like if these things are true, which you don’t know if they’re true or not, but this thing came out, it’s pretty crazy. Uh, it’s it’s a wild story. Yeah, this is crazy. I uh I didn’t know about this. I I would believe just based off what I I believe this is very this could be very true. Like this doesn’t shock me. Like knowing what I know a little bit, like and I have heard like rumors of people who I’m like second hand or third hand connected with that they’re freaks. And uh like I hear some stories about what they do to cover it up and I 100% believe this. And from Silicon Valley who are very successful, like things that I didn’t realize until I kind of got closer to I’m not inside that circle because I’m not like in that that tier, but had a couple friends in that circle and it’s like two things that are way more common than I ever would have thought. Swinging. Swinging is like super common in Silicon Valley. Dude, the swinger lifestyle. It’s weird. It’s weird. You know about this pineapple thing by the way? Tell me. So I I learned this from TikTok. I don’t know if this is real or not. But basically like this this the silent symbol for signaling to others if you’re a swinger or not, apparently is a upside down pineapple. So if you go to a house and they have a picture of a pineapple that’s upside down, it’s a wink to anybody else who’s in the lifestyle that, “Hey, we’re down.” Uh I had I had no idea. Dude, that’s crazy. Or if they’re wearing like pineapple earrings or something at a party. I got this I’ve got a girlfriend who does it and she uh and and she tells me about it and my wife and I were like I was like, “Sarah, like you know, like I’m not interested in this, just so you know. Like I don’t want to do this. This is this uh and she’s like, “Yeah, me neither, but it’s so fun to hear about.” Yeah, exactly. I’m like Uber Uber boy. I dude, I’ve got a couple friends that are into it. Down here in Austin where I live, uh these guys have this company, you know, Onnit. Um Aubrey Marcus and then he’s got this other guy named Kyle, uh who is a friend or works there. I’m not sure the relationship, but they like they mix work and play and they’re open about their how they’re they have open relationships and they talk about it. Uh Kyle Kingsbury, I think his name is. And they talk about it on the podcast, on their podcast that they they share they share relationships. Yeah, it’s I mean, you know, more power to you if it’s your thing. Uh I what I’m saying is I didn’t know how common that was or like swinging or that lifestyle, but it is very common amongst like successful Silicon Valley people. Same thing with drugs, uh like, you know, my either microdosing or normal dosing of certain drugs. Like I guess like there’s a certain level of uh party that I just never did and I never had the urge to do, um, that I think is like pretty common amongst uh amongst like this group of people and like, you know, good for them. Dude, I’ve I’m I’m such a prude. I’ve been out with like some like really powerful people who I looked up to and I saw them the whenever I’ve seen them do coke, I’m like, “Oh, I I don’t uh I don’t really like you as much as I used to like you.” Exactly. It just like it made me uncomfortable and I didn’t I didn’t feel I I didn’t like it. But uh this is crazy. and it is way more common than I than I thought living in Silicon Valley. I think what it is is like if you’re a nerd and you’re now worth a billion dollars or hundreds of millions, which is basically the same thing, and you could do anything you want, you want you want to do stuff and also if you are young and you have money, you have to up the ante consistently. So Dan Blazarian has this new book out and either in the book or in an interview about the book, he was saying how he’s like, “Man, I’ve had every woman that I could ever want. I have private fancy chefs. I drive the best cars, I fly private, I do I do the fanciest stuff. None of it makes me happy anymore because I have to go bigger and bigger and bigger in order to help my dopamine and make it work and and and now like none of it makes me happy. So I just like I’m I try to be simple now, although like it’s really hard. I I but all the items, they don’t they don’t bring me joy. Um, speaking of making me happy, I there was this thing that I saw that I thought was pretty cool. It’s not really like a business idea necessarily, but I think it’s worth a read. So let me put a link to it. Uh, where should I put the link? Um, one sec, let me grab it. Uh, basically there’s this guy, I want to give him credit because it’s a very interesting read. Um, and I’ll explain it while I’m looking for the link. So basically there’s this guy who uh Dan Lou, I think is his name. Um, How do you spell it? Dan, normal, and then L U U. And uh go to this link. So go just search uh or never mind, I’ll just slack it to you. Um, so go to this link and this guy has this post, and basically what he all he did was he’s like, “Hey, um, you know, there’s there’s all these like claims that you will hear commonly. You’ll hear them over and over and over again. And they’re referencing studies. And um they have fancy names, and then they reference studies, and then people take them as facts. And then if you ever He’s like, “Turns out, if you actually go read the study, the claim is either way weaker than what people use it as like a thing, or it’s literally the opposite.” And he gives four examples. And I loved reading this. So I I want to go through them real quick. So one is on happiness, which you just said. So we had talked about this before, which is people have this thing where they say, “There’s um there’s a link between happiness and uh and income.” And basically the the thing you’ll hear in in pop science is, “Beyond $75,000, you know, your happiness doesn’t go up beyond that amount.” So what does this mean? And it’s total bullshit. This means don’t chase money and um don’t chase money. You should you’re it’s not going to make you any happier. And so he’s like, so he goes and he’s like, so he goes and he’s like, “It’s become common knowledge that that money doesn’t make people happy. How much is enough? Um, you know, people have different things. If you Google it, if you say happiness income, it’ll say, um, household income of $75,000. After that, your day-to-day happiness doesn’t rise. Um, he goes, “This happiness uh correlate income like study was actually done multiple times, not just one time. And um and you know, the problem is like when people looked at the graph, it looks like happiness goes up, up, up, up, up, and then it flattens out. He’s like, “The problem is it’s on a log scale.” And like most people just don’t know how to read a log scale graph. A log scale graph means you’re going up by a factor of 10 every time. Sorry. So even if it’s even if it’s flattening out, that might be going from 10 to 50. It just doesn’t look like as big of a jump because it’s not like the the the increments are a log scale. So basically, if you actually look at it, uh if you actually look at the and you know, this got published in Dan Gilbert’s like book uh on uh on on behavioral, you know, economics and stuff like that. And basically, um if you actually look at the chart, the chart shows that uh if you look at it on a non-log scale, which he puts the graph here, it’s basically like the more money you have, the more your satisfaction goes up. And there is no flattening out. Um, it doesn’t go up at the same rate. So yes, it’s true that going from $0 to $30,000 to $75,000 gives you a bigger jump in happiness than going from 1 million to 2 million or 2 million to 4 million. But the happiness does keep going up. Uh your life your satisfaction does keep going up on on all the reported scales. And he’s basically like, you know, there may be some point where you stop getting returns, but we haven’t found it yet. You know, like, um, on average, people have not found that yet. So, um, you and it and actually there are things that like um that I and and if you dig in, he actually pointed out some that there’s there are some things that that uh contradict this claim. So what people used to say is, “Oh yeah, you’ll get that money and then you’ll return to what they call your set point of happiness. So you get all this money, you win the lottery. Yeah, within a few months you’re back to your set point of happiness. If you were depressed before, you’ll be depressed after. And um, and he’s like, you know, it turns out that that’s not true. Winning the lottery actually does make you happier if you look at the if you actually look at the study. So, I think that’s a great idea. It’s like, you know, if a couple of YouTubers got together, I think they could have, you know, I and I think it’s fan service, too. So I think you would just become more famous, you’d build fan love and you’d print like, I don’t know, $20 million every summer, um, running your camp. Uh, it’s a pain in the ass, but you could do that. And I I think like I went to a space camp from NASA when I was like in fifth grade or something. Did you really? The state of Texas sent every fifth grader to it. So it’s kind of amazing. What? Yeah, and they only did it once. So I was just lucky to be in that timing. Oh, I wanted to do that when I was a kid so badly. It’s an amazing thing. You go there and you get to be in a rocket ship and like you get to play commander and like do all this stuff. But I feel like for many jobs, there’s a version of that. Like I think people are fascinated with prisons. I think they’re fascinated with the police. I think they’re fascinated with the army. And like if you could create like amusement parks or simulations of that, where you get to take your pictures, you get to touch the stuff, you get to see how it works, you get to learn some things, uh people will pay for that. And I think they’re going to see more out-of-home experiences like that get built. Can we move on to the shitty Billy of the week? Yeah. Or do you want to go a different one? No, it’s good. It’s just a crazy story. I don’t even know what the point of this. I point of this one. Let’s go to a different one. Then we can do a different one. All right, let’s do a quick one. Quick idea. This I saw this and it kind of caught my eye. This guy, um, what’s his name? I’ll give him credit real quick. Somebody somebody sent this to us in the Facebook group and uh I thought it was really interesting. So it’s this a specialnames.cn. So, uh what’s the guy’s name? The guy’s name Mike Mike Benitez shared this. So specialname.cn. What is it? Basically, there’s a story that came out of this girl who paid her way through college. She basically made a few hundred thousand dollars and all she does is she names Chinese babies with American names. So so basically in China, every uh Chinese person typically will have a Western name. So, you know, if their name is hard to say, they know they kind of know that for for business purposes and travel purposes, it’s just easier to have to like be like, “Yes, I also go by Mike, or I go by Emerald, or I go by, you know, Samantha.” And so, um, but the problem is, you know, it’s not your native thing. So if it’s like if I tried to pick a Chinese name right now, I I might pick something that’s really weird or off. Like it doesn’t sound quite right. And so you see these things where Chinese people name their baby like Rolex, uh would be like their Western name. It’s like, “No, no, no, you shouldn’t have picked that one. Like, you know, that’s kind of a strange name.” If you were trying to have like a easy Western name, you actually like backfired. So what this woman’s services, she you can go to specialname.cn and the site is hilarious. If you go to the website, it’s like Are you on the website? It’s it’s like Yeah, I’m looking at it now. Look at the counter. It says, “The baby we named,” and it says a million, they they’ve named over a billion babies, but the English is is off. Yeah, it well, the the actual site’s in Chinese. I think it’s a Google Translate that you’re looking at. And uh you just say boy or girl, I think you submit some information or a picture of the baby, and she just closes her eyes basically and says, “Jasmine.” And then No, so you you you pick five attributes like um nice, honest, kind, eager, keen. And I did that and it gave me the names Zachary, Caleb, or Harvey. And it says, “The famous Harveys are Harvey Firestone, Harvey Ball, and then Caleb, Caleb Carr. I don’t know who that is. Is that a famous actor? I don’t know. Uh Zachary Taylor, I guess the American president. Yeah, it’s pretty funny. And so this uh site, I thought what a what an example of niches make riches and like just solve a simple problem for people. And uh you know, this girl’s made, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars just off this website. And uh I thought that was like, How does it make money? Just through ads? A really cool, really cool side hustle for a college kid. It just make they just make money through ads? I think, yeah, I don’t know exactly. I I thought you pay her to do it, uh but maybe you’re saying you just got a name right away. I just got a name. I was doing it on my phone. So it might be ads or it might be a premium upsell. And they and they and and the logo is just this generic looking white lady. Like that’s like the spokesperson. If that’s her or not. That’s definitely not her. So let me do this. Oh yeah, I know it’s like a cartoon. Um Yeah, this is awesome. So this is this is a hilarious little side hustle that I that I loved. Um okay, let’s do uh let’s do the shitty Billy of the week. I read this story and I was blown away. This is not really this is interesting only in that it’s a train wreck. Did you see this story about this venture capitalist that came out? Just now. So there’s this guy named Michael Gogan. He used to be a partner at Sequoia, right? Like the one of the biggest venture firms ever. Is he the one who stole money from them? No, he got fired because his girlfriend came out and accused him and like sued him for or like accused him of uh of like sexual abuse, she said, you know, he’s I’ve been in a relationship with him for eight years or 10 years or something like that and he’s extremely abusive sexually to me and blah blah blah. Uh she’s a stripper that he met somewhere and then she became his girlfriend and then whatever. And uh this the suit, he he didn’t lose the suit. He, you know, she kind of like he got acquitted or whatever. Um but you know, still Sequoia was like, “you know, we decided it’s best to part ways.” So a story came out in the Daily Mail. And you know it’s good because it’s in the Daily Mail, which is like, you know, just the the the trash of the trash, but it’s the junk food. You can’t resist. And um basically, there was some wild shit about this guy. So here’s the allegations that are in the article. The article says Michael Gogan, uh he basically after he left Sequoia, he goes to Montana and he basically sets up his like estate in Montana. He owns like, I don’t know, uh 100,000 square feet of like space in of of of houses in in in in Montana. He is like the big fish there. He owns a bar, under the bar, he created this thing called the Boom Boom Room. And the Boom Boom Room is where he takes like, you know, girls that he meets and he this so this guy’s on his fourth wife. The article talks about this spreadsheet of 5,000 women that he slept with. And it’s just full of Dude, have you have you done the Wait, say that again. Say the 5,000 thing again. A spreadsheet of 5,000 women that he slept with. It’s Okay, so do the math. If you so if you if this has happened over a 20-year period, Yeah. 365 days times 20 is 7,300 divided by 5. That means he had to have sex with a different woman every 1.5 days. Basically every other day. Yeah, every day and a half. Is that crazy? What? I don’t believe that. That doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t know if it’s true. I don’t know if he did it or he didn’t. So like the Wilt Chamberlain did this once where he claimed he slept with 10,000 women and people were like, “That means you slept with two women a day.” Like this doesn’t make any sense. Um Yeah, his response by the way, he was like, “Yeah, sometimes it was three though.” Exactly. Most pimp response ever. So this guy, this guy’s wild. So what so he basically um he there’s tons of so what happened was he had created this like security company to cover his tracks and it’s like a private security company. And he hired these like ex-military people to run it for him and they were kind of like his fixers. They’re the ones who came out and exposed this whole thing and are now suing him for $800 million. So they’re suing him because he basically made them do a bunch of stuff that like got them in trouble. So he’d have to pay off women that he would sleep with. Um and they would have he’d be like, “You need to do this.” Like, “Go I I’ll put money in your account, you pay her off.” And um and eventually one guy, so he had a friend who um the story is he he brings his daughters over to the friend’s house um with their babysitter, but then he leaves with the babysitter, has sex with the babysitter, and the friend is like, “Dude, what the hell are you doing? You just had sex with the babysitter in my house? Like, um this is messed up.” And he’s like, he calls him a pedophile. And he’s like, “Dude, uh like I don’t, you know, don’t don’t bring up my my flaws and like, you know, there’s a one-time thing and blah blah blah.” And the guy’s like, “No, this is messed up.” And he’s like, starts threatening the guy. He threatens the guy and says, “If you come out and say this, I’m going to like ruin you.” And um the guy’s like, “You know, F that.” He then sleeps with the guy’s wife as like, you know, part of this part of this process. So the guy gets really pissed. And he’s like, threatens to basically expose him for all the stuff that he’s doing. Um, while he’s meanwhile like an investor and all this stuff. You know, leading this professional life. The guy’s worth $5 billion by the way. So he’s he’s he’s a he’s a multi-billionaire himself. So the guy goes to his like security guy and says, “We need to kill him.” We we have this guy’s getting too, there’s too big of a risk. He threatens to bring everything down. We got to kill him and don’t and then and then there’s basically like in the article, it’s like, “Don’t like communicate anywhere except for Wicker, this like self-deleting text messaging app.” Um, and the guy goes to him and says, “Hey, hey, like talks off the ledge. No, let’s not kill this guy, whatever.” But that that was like one of the allegations. And so people have come out against this guy, but he bribes the police. And so like multiple police chiefs have like lost their job because they failed to investigate this guy because he basically bought them off. And he claimed How much do you think How much do you think you’d have to bribe a Montana cop to shut up? Like a million dollars? I mean, yeah, I think I think nine out of 10 police officers would take a million to shut up. Oh, in my deep experience bribing cops. I mean, I have no idea. Yeah, I think like half a million dollars would do, right? Like for a lot of these women, it’s like jewelry. Uh like he he slept with one woman and then she got the husband found out, got divorced and then he paid for her, he bought her a five-bedroom home and also paid for her side of the divorce and uh you know, that was like one of the things that he did. And so he just had this like elaborate web of, you know, crazy like this crazy sexual life layered on to crazy like payoffs and bribes and cover-ups. And then like a whole company dedicated to like this private security company, whatever that means. And then like police bribery. Like this is like a crazy ass three-part movie. And then you look at this guy and he’s just like this, you know, cookie cutter white VC looking guy. It was like such a wild story, I thought. And um, yeah, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. So I um, I read I I I I read a little bit about like odd billionaires and I’ve maybe interacted with one or two before. And does it do you have you ever met someone who’s like in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars who has like some weird shit where like like they have a a like for example, this is like public knowledge, Peter Thiel basically employed this this three lawyers, big shot lawyers and they’re and the basically when he was outed as gay by Gawker, he employed and this is a a great book by Ryan Holiday. I forget what it’s called, but he employed these three lawyers and I forget when he was outed, but something like 09 and he goes, “Um, however long it takes, your full-time job.” It’s like a decade, yeah. “Yeah, he goes, “Just wait for Gawker and those guys to screw up. And when they slip up, tell me and we’re going to pounce.” And he employed these guys the whole time. And there’s some crazy stuff about Peter Thiel. Like for example, in the book, they said that he has a black Mercedes with the engine on everywhere he goes in the world. So like that’s what it like he always he’s got a team and they they they have to have a car like at all times. And he also has land in New Zealand because he’s a little bit nervous about apocalypse. And so my question is, have you do you think you’ve ever met like a billionaire or someone like that who’s got some of these weird ass things like a like a security force who does exotic things like this? A fixer. Yeah. Um, I think so. So I worked with this guy. I’ve talked about him before. I worked with this crazy kind of like Like the Filipino guy? Yeah, in Indonesia. Um, crazy guy in Indonesia that was I talked about before. I mean, he’s like a dropout in grade school, self-made. I think he was worth $500 million, kind of like at his peak. And $500 million in Indonesia is like, you know, $10 billion here in America. And um, and you know, he he had a crazy elaborate like business, like his he him as my boss was really weird. Like he was a really insane boss. I told you, but he had a giant projector in the office, like on the wall that had everybody’s computer tracked and your productivity was like this like he bought the software from Boeing and basically used it to like show like your your little square would flash red if you weren’t being productive enough, and I don’t even know how it was like measuring that. Like just how much you were typing, I guess. I don’t know. And it was like this intimidation thing on, you know, he had four women that just managed his email. Um, like if you did good in a meeting, he would walk in the next day and just hand you keys to like a new Mercedes that’s outside. He’s like, “This is yours, drive it around.” And like, you know, he did crazy shit like that. Like I remember a meeting once where a friend of his came in from Singapore and they were basically just openly talking about like a insider trading/pump and dump scheme that they were doing, and I was like, “Whoa, that’s like crazy illegal.” And they were like, “Yeah, it’s great. We’re going to make so much money. It’s this is this is going to work. It’s going to be awesome.” You said that you said this is illegal? I didn’t say it. I was just sitting there in the room being like, in my head, I think this I’m 20 years I think I was 21 years old. Like I I didn’t know shit about shit at that point, but I knew enough to be like, “I think this is wrong what they’re talking about.” And then he would, you know, every day would after work would take everybody to the bar, or whoever his kind of like insider crew was, and two girls would be there, and those were like, you know, his escorts for the day or whatever, and like that’s just the way he did business. And he he bribed officials, and he did all kinds of stuff. He ended up in jail. He ended up dying in jail. He actually died this year. And um, you know, so it was like a pretty crazy life. Uh, and you know, I worked with this guy for only like three months, and then I left and I came back and started a startup here, but like, you know, that guy was wild. Like he lived a wild life. That’s awesome. Yeah, I’ve uh I I don’t know if I’ve had any first-hand knowledge of or if I’ve like been friends with people. Maybe I have and they just haven’t told me. But uh I do believe that like people like this guy, this Gogan guy, I don’t know, I I haven’t heard of this. I mean this is this Gogan guy is like on some Jeffrey Epstein shit, right? Like this is a modern day Jeffrey Epstein situation. Um, maybe I guess it’s not underage girls, I guess that’s that’s the difference, but like basically, you know, just like a harem of women and cover-ups and bribes and intimidation and he’s got this bunker and he’s like bribing police and like if these things are true, which you don’t know if they’re true or not, but this thing came out, it’s pretty crazy. Uh, it’s it’s a wild story. Yeah, this is crazy. I uh I didn’t know about this. I I would believe just based off what I I believe this is very this could be very true. Like this doesn’t shock me. Like knowing what I know a little bit, like and I have heard like rumors of people who I’m like second hand or third hand connected with that they’re freaks. And uh like I hear some stories about what they do to cover it up and I 100% believe this. And from Silicon Valley who are very successful, like things that I didn’t realize until I kind of got closer to I’m not inside that circle because I’m not like in that that tier, but had a couple friends in that circle and it’s like two things that are way more common than I ever would have thought. Swinging. Swinging is like super common in Silicon Valley. Dude, the swinger lifestyle. It’s weird. It’s weird. You know about this pineapple thing by the way? Tell me. So I I learned this from TikTok. I don’t know if this is real or not. But basically like this this the silent symbol for signaling to others if you’re a swinger or not, apparently is a upside down pineapple. So if you go to a house and they have a picture of a pineapple that’s upside down, it’s a wink to anybody else who’s in the lifestyle that, “Hey, we’re down.” Uh I had I had no idea. Dude, that’s crazy. Or if they’re wearing like pineapple earrings or something at a party. I got this I’ve got a girlfriend who does it and she uh and and she tells me about it and my wife and I were like I was like, “Sarah, like you know, like I’m not interested in this, just so you know. Like I don’t want to do this. This is this uh and she’s like, “Yeah, me neither, but it’s so fun to hear about.” Yeah, exactly. I’m like Uber Uber boy. I dude, I’ve got a couple friends that are into it. Down here in Austin where I live, uh these guys have this company, you know, Onnit. Um Aubrey Marcus and then he’s got this other guy named Kyle, uh who is a friend or works there. I’m not sure the relationship, but they like they mix work and play and they’re open about their how they’re they have open relationships and they talk about it. Uh Kyle Kingsbury, I think his name is. And they talk about it on the podcast, on their podcast that they they share they share relationships. Yeah, it’s I mean, you know, more power to you if it’s your thing. Uh I what I’m saying is I didn’t know how common that was or like swinging or that lifestyle, but it is very common amongst like successful Silicon Valley people. Same thing with drugs, uh like, you know, my either microdosing or normal dosing of certain drugs. Like I guess like there’s a certain level of uh party that I just never did and I never had the urge to do, um, that I think is like pretty common amongst uh amongst like this group of people and like, you know, good for them. Dude, I’ve I’m I’m such a prude. I’ve been out with like some like really powerful people who I looked up to and I saw them the whenever I’ve seen them do coke, I’m like, “Oh, I I don’t uh I don’t really like you as much as I used to like you.” Exactly. It just like it made me uncomfortable and I didn’t I didn’t feel I I didn’t like it. But uh this is crazy. and it is way more common than I than I thought living in Silicon Valley. I think what it is is like if you’re a nerd and you’re now worth a billion dollars or hundreds of millions, which is basically the same thing, and you could do anything you want, you want you want to do stuff and also if you are young and you have money, you have to up the ante consistently. So Dan Blazarian has this new book out and either in the book or in an interview about the book, he was saying how he’s like, “Man, I’ve had every woman that I could ever want. I have private fancy chefs. I drive the best cars, I fly private, I do I do the fanciest stuff. None of it makes me happy anymore because I have to go bigger and bigger and bigger in order to help my dopamine and make it work and and and now like none of it makes me happy. So I just like I’m I try to be simple now, although like it’s really hard. I I but all the items, they don’t they don’t bring me joy. Um, speaking of making me happy, I there was this thing that I saw that I thought was pretty cool. It’s not really like a business idea necessarily, but I think it’s worth a read. So let me put a link to it. Uh, where should I put the link? Um, one sec, let me grab it. Uh, basically there’s this guy, I want to give him credit because it’s a very interesting read. Um, and I’ll explain it while I’m looking for the link. So basically there’s this guy who uh Dan Lou, I think is his name. Um, How do you spell it? Dan, normal, and then L U U. And uh go to this link. So go just search uh or never mind, I’ll just slack it to you. Um, so go to this link and this guy has this post, and basically what he all he did was he’s like, “Hey, um, you know, there’s there’s all these like claims that you will hear commonly. You’ll hear them over and over and over again. And they’re referencing studies. And um they have fancy names, and then they reference studies, and then people take them as facts. And then if you ever He’s like, “Turns out, if you actually go read the study, the claim is either way weaker than what people use it as like a thing, or it’s literally the opposite.” And he gives four examples. And I loved reading this. So I I want to go through them real quick. So one is on happiness, which you just said. So we had talked about this before, which is people have this thing where they say, “There’s um there’s a link between happiness and uh and income.” And basically the the thing you’ll hear in in pop science is, “Beyond $75,000, you know, your happiness doesn’t go up beyond that amount.” So what does this mean? And it’s total bullshit. This means don’t chase money and um don’t chase money. You should you’re it’s not going to make you any happier. And so he’s like, so he goes and he’s like, so he goes and he’s like, “It’s become common knowledge that that money doesn’t make people happy. How much is enough? Um, you know, people have different things. If you Google it, if you say happiness income, it’ll say, um, household income of $75,000. After that, your day-to-day happiness doesn’t rise. Um, he goes, “This happiness uh correlate income like study was actually done multiple times, not just one time. And um and you know, the problem is like when people looked at the graph, it looks like happiness goes up, up, up, up, up, and then it flattens out. He’s like, “The problem is it’s on a log scale.” And like most people just don’t know how to read a log scale graph. A log scale graph means you’re going up by a factor of 10 every time. Sorry. So even if it’s even if it’s flattening out, that might be going from 10 to 50. It just doesn’t look like as big of a jump because it’s not like the the the increments are a log scale. So basically, if you actually look at it, uh if you actually look at the and you know, this got published in Dan Gilbert’s like book uh on uh on on behavioral, you know, economics and stuff like that. And basically, um if you actually look at the chart, the chart shows that uh if you look at it on a non-log scale, which he puts the graph here, it’s basically like the more money you have, the more your satisfaction goes up. And there is no flattening out. Um, it doesn’t go up at the same rate. So yes, it’s true that going from $0 to $30,000 to $75,000 gives you a bigger jump in happiness than going from 1 million to 2 million or 2 million to 4 million. But the happiness does keep going up. Uh your life your satisfaction does keep going up on on all the reported scales. And he’s basically like, you know, there may be some point where you stop getting returns, but we haven’t found it yet. You know, like, um, on average, people have not found that yet. So, um, you and it and actually there are things that like um that I and and if you dig in, he actually pointed out some that there’s there are some things that that uh contradict this claim. So what people used to say is, “Oh yeah, you’ll get that money and then you’ll return to what they call your set point of happiness. So you get all this money, you win the lottery. Yeah, within a few months you’re back to your set point of happiness. If you were depressed before, you’ll be depressed after. And um, and he’s like, you know, it turns out that that’s not true. Winning the lottery actually does make you happier if you look at the if you actually look at the study. So, I think that’s a great idea. It’s like, you know, if a couple of YouTubers got together, I think they could have, you know, I and I think it’s fan service, too. So I think you would just become more famous, you’d build fan love and you’d print like, I don’t know, $20 million every summer, um, running your camp. Uh, it’s a pain in the ass, but you could do that. And I I think like I went to a space camp from NASA when I was like in fifth grade or something. Did you really? The state of Texas sent every fifth grader to it. So it’s kind of amazing. What? Yeah, and they only did it once. So I was just lucky to be in that timing. Oh, I wanted to do that when I was a kid so badly. It’s an amazing thing. You go there and you get to be in a rocket ship and like you get to play commander and like do all this stuff. But I feel like for many jobs, there’s a version of that. Like I think people are fascinated with prisons. I think they’re fascinated with the police. I think they’re fascinated with the army. And like if you could create like amusement parks or simulations of that, where you get to take your pictures, you get to touch the stuff, you get to see how it works, you get to learn some things, uh people will pay for that. And I think they’re going to see more out-of-home experiences like that get built. Can we move on to the shitty Billy of the week? Yeah. Or do you want to go a different one? No, it’s good. It’s just a crazy story. I don’t even know what the point of this. I point of this one. Let’s go to a different one. Then we can do a different one. All right, let’s do a quick one. Quick idea. This I saw this and it kind of caught my eye. This guy, um, what’s his name? I’ll give him credit real quick. Somebody somebody sent this to us in the Facebook group and uh I thought it was really interesting. So it’s this a specialnames.cn. So, uh what’s the guy’s name? The guy’s name Mike Mike Benitez shared this. So specialname.cn. What is it? Basically, there’s a story that came out of this girl who paid her way through college. She basically made a few hundred thousand dollars and all she does is she names Chinese babies with American names. So so basically in China, every uh Chinese person typically will have a Western name. So, you know, if their name is hard to say, they know they kind of know that for for business purposes and travel purposes, it’s just easier to have to like be like, “Yes, I also go by Mike, or I go by Emerald, or I go by, you know, Samantha.” And so, um, but the problem is, you know, it’s not your native thing. So if it’s like if I tried to pick a Chinese name right now, I I might pick something that’s really weird or off. Like it doesn’t sound quite right. And so you see these things where Chinese people name their baby like Rolex, uh would be like their Western name. It’s like, “No, no, no, you shouldn’t have picked that one. Like, you know, that’s kind of a strange name.” If you were trying to have like a easy Western name, you actually like backfired. So what this woman’s services, she you can go to specialname.cn and the site is hilarious. If you go to the website, it’s like Are you on the website? It’s it’s like Yeah, I’m looking at it now. Look at the counter. It says, “The baby we named,” and it says a million, they they’ve named over a billion babies, but the English is is off. Yeah, it well, the the actual site’s in Chinese. I think it’s a Google Translate that you’re looking at. And uh you just say boy or girl, I think you submit some information or a picture of the baby, and she just closes her eyes basically and says, “Jasmine.” And then No, so you you you pick five attributes like um nice, honest, kind, eager, keen. And I did that and it gave me the names Zachary, Caleb, or Harvey. And it says, “The famous Harveys are Harvey Firestone, Harvey Ball, and then Caleb, Caleb Carr. I don’t know who that is. Is that a famous actor? I don’t know. Uh Zachary Taylor, I guess the American president. Yeah, it’s pretty funny. And so this uh site, I thought what a what an example of niches make riches and like just solve a simple problem for people. And uh you know, this girl’s made, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars just off this website. And uh I thought that was like, How does it make money? Just through ads? A really cool, really cool side hustle for a college kid. It just make they just make money through ads? I think, yeah, I don’t know exactly. I I thought you pay her to do it, uh but maybe you’re saying you just got a name right away. I just got a name. I was doing it on my phone. So it might be ads or it might be a premium upsell. And they and they and and the logo is just this generic looking white lady. Like that’s like the spokesperson. If that’s her or not. That’s definitely not her. So let me do this. Oh yeah, I know it’s like a cartoon. Um Yeah, this is awesome. So this is this is a hilarious little side hustle that I that I loved. Um okay, let’s do uh let’s do the shitty Billy of the week. I read this story and I was blown away. This is not really this is interesting only in that it’s a train wreck. Did you see this story about this venture capitalist that came out? Just now. So there’s this guy named Michael Gogan. He used to be a partner at Sequoia, right? Like the one of the biggest venture firms ever. Is he the one who stole money from them? No, he got fired because his girlfriend came out and accused him and like sued him for or like accused him of uh of like sexual abuse, she said, you know, he’s I’ve been in a relationship with him for eight years or 10 years or something like that and he’s extremely abusive sexually to me and blah blah blah. Uh she’s a stripper that he met somewhere and then she became his girlfriend and then whatever. And uh this the suit, he he didn’t lose the suit. He, you know, she kind of like he got acquitted or whatever. Um but you know, still Sequoia was like, “you know, we decided it’s best to part ways.” So a story came out in the Daily Mail. And you know it’s good because it’s in the Daily Mail, which is like, you know, just the the the trash of the trash, but it’s the junk food. You can’t resist. And um basically, there was some wild shit about this guy. So here’s the allegations that are in the article. The article says Michael Gogan, uh he basically after he left Sequoia, he goes to Montana and he basically sets up his like estate in Montana. He owns like, I don’t know, uh 100,000 square feet of like space in of of of houses in in in in Montana. He is like the big fish there. He owns a bar, under the bar, he created this thing called the Boom Boom Room. And the Boom Boom Room is where he takes like, you know, girls that he meets and he this so this guy’s on his fourth wife. The article talks about this spreadsheet of 5,000 women that he slept with. And it’s just full of Dude, have you have you done the Wait, say that again. Say the 5,000 thing again. A spreadsheet of 5,000 women that he slept with. It’s Okay, so do the math. If you so if you if this has happened over a 20-year period, Yeah. 365 days times 20 is 7,300 divided by 5. That means he had to have sex with a different woman every 1.5 days. Basically every other day. Yeah, every day and a half. Is that crazy? What? I don’t believe that. That doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t know if it’s true. I don’t know if he did it or he didn’t. So like the Wilt Chamberlain did this once where he claimed he slept with 10,000 women and people were like, “That means you slept with two women a day.” Like this doesn’t make any sense. Um Yeah, his response by the way, he was like, “Yeah, sometimes it was three though.” Exactly. Most pimp response ever. So this guy, this guy’s wild. So what so he basically um he there’s tons of so what happened was he had created this like security company to cover his tracks and it’s like a private security company. And he hired these like ex-military people to run it for him and they were kind of like his fixers. They’re the ones who came out and exposed this whole thing and are now suing him for $800 million. So they’re suing him because he basically made them do a bunch of stuff that like got them in trouble. So he’d have to pay off women that he would sleep with. Um and they would have he’d be like, “You need to do this.” Like, “Go I I’ll put money in your account, you pay her off.” And um and eventually one guy, so he had a friend who um the story is he he brings his daughters over to the friend’s house um with their babysitter, but then he leaves with the babysitter, has sex with the babysitter, and the friend is like, “Dude, what the hell are you doing? You just had sex with the babysitter in my house? Like, um this is messed up.” And he’s like, he calls him a pedophile. And he’s like, “Dude, uh like I don’t, you know, don’t don’t bring up my my flaws and like, you know, there’s a one-time thing and blah blah blah.” And the guy’s like, “No, this is messed up.” And he’s like, starts threatening the guy. He threatens the guy and says, “If you come out and say this, I’m going to like ruin you.” And um the guy’s like, “You know, F that.” He then sleeps with the guy’s wife as like, you know, part of this part of this process. So the guy gets really pissed. And he’s like, threatens to basically expose him for all the stuff that he’s doing. Um, while he’s meanwhile like an investor and all this stuff. You know, leading this professional life. The guy’s worth $5 billion by the way. So he’s he’s he’s a he’s a multi-billionaire himself. So the guy goes to his like security guy and says, “We need to kill him.” We we have this guy’s getting too, there’s too big of a risk. He threatens to bring everything down. We got to kill him and don’t and then and then there’s basically like in the article, it’s like, “Don’t like communicate anywhere except for Wicker, this like self-deleting text messaging app.” Um, and the guy goes to him and says, “Hey, hey, like talks off the ledge. No, let’s not kill this guy, whatever.” But that that was like one of the allegations. And so people have come out against this guy, but he bribes the police. And so like multiple police chiefs have like lost their job because they failed to investigate this guy because he basically bought them off. And he claimed How much do you think How much do you think you’d have to bribe a Montana cop to shut up? Like a million dollars? I mean, yeah, I think I think nine out of 10 police officers would take a million to shut up. Oh, in my deep experience bribing cops. I mean, I have no idea. Yeah, I think like half a million dollars would do, right? Like for a lot of these women, it’s like jewelry. Uh like he he slept with one woman and then she got the husband found out, got divorced and then he paid for her, he bought her a five-bedroom home and also paid for her side of the divorce and uh you know, that was like one of the things that he did. And so he just had this like elaborate web of, you know, crazy like this crazy sexual life layered on to crazy like payoffs and bribes and cover-ups. And then like a whole company dedicated to like this private security company, whatever that means. And then like police bribery. Like this is like a crazy ass three-part movie. And then you look at this guy and he’s just like this, you know, cookie cutter white VC looking guy. It was like such a wild story, I thought. And um, yeah, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. So I um, I read I I I I read a little bit about like odd billionaires and I’ve maybe interacted with one or two before. And does it do you have you ever met someone who’s like in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars who has like some weird shit where like like they have a a like for example, this is like public knowledge, Peter Thiel basically employed this this three lawyers, big shot lawyers and they’re and the basically when he was outed as gay by Gawker, he employed and this is a a great book by Ryan Holiday. I forget what it’s called, but he employed these three lawyers and I forget when he was outed, but something like 09 and he goes, “Um, however long it takes, your full-time job.” It’s like a decade, yeah. “Yeah, he goes, “Just wait for Gawker and those guys to screw up. And when they slip up, tell me and we’re going to pounce.” And he employed these guys the whole time. And there’s some crazy stuff about Peter Thiel. Like for example, in the book, they said that he has a black Mercedes with the engine on everywhere he goes in the world. So like that’s what it like he always he’s got a team and they they they have to have a car like at all times. And he also has land in New Zealand because he’s a little bit nervous about apocalypse. And so my question is, have you do you think you’ve ever met like a billionaire or someone like that who’s got some of these weird ass things like a like a security force who does exotic things like this? A fixer. Yeah. Um, I think so. So I worked with this guy. I’ve talked about him before. I worked with this crazy kind of like Like the Filipino guy? Yeah, in Indonesia. Um, crazy guy in Indonesia that was I talked about before. I mean, he’s like a dropout in grade school, self-made. I think he was worth $500 million, kind of like at his peak. And $500 million in Indonesia is like, you know, $10 billion here in America. And um, and you know, he he had a crazy elaborate like business, like his he him as my boss was really weird. Like he was a really insane boss. I told you, but he had a giant projector in the office, like on the wall that had everybody’s computer tracked and your productivity was like this like he bought the software from Boeing and basically used it to like show like your your little square would flash red if you weren’t being productive enough, and I don’t even know how it was like measuring that. Like just how much you were typing, I guess. I don’t know. And it was like this intimidation thing on, you know, he had four women that just managed his email. Um, like if you did good in a meeting, he would walk in the next day and just hand you keys to like a new Mercedes that’s outside. He’s like, “This is yours, drive it around.” And like, you know, he did crazy shit like that. Like I remember a meeting once where a friend of his came in from Singapore and they were basically just openly talking about like a insider trading/pump and dump scheme that they were doing, and I was like, “Whoa, that’s like crazy illegal.” And they were like, “Yeah, it’s great. We’re going to make so much money. It’s this is this is going to work. It’s going to be awesome.” You said that you said this is illegal? I didn’t say it. I was just sitting there in the room being like, in my head, I think this I’m 20 years I think I was 21 years old. Like I I didn’t know shit about shit at that point, but I knew enough to be like, “I think this is wrong what they’re talking about.” And then he would, you know, every day would after work would take everybody to the bar, or whoever his kind of like insider crew was, and two girls would be there, and those were like, you know, his escorts for the day or whatever, and like that’s just the way he did business. And he he bribed officials, and he did all kinds of stuff. He ended up in jail. He ended up dying in jail. He actually died this year. And um, you know, so it was like a pretty crazy life. Uh, and you know, I worked with this guy for only like three months, and then I left and I came back and started a startup here, but like, you know, that guy was wild. Like he lived a wild life. That’s awesome. Yeah, I’ve uh I I don’t know if I’ve had any first-hand knowledge of or if I’ve like been friends with people. Maybe I have and they just haven’t told me. But uh I do believe that like people like this guy, this Gogan guy, I don’t know, I I haven’t heard of this. I mean this is this Gogan guy is like on some Jeffrey Epstein shit, right? Like this is a modern day Jeffrey Epstein situation. Um, maybe I guess it’s not underage girls, I guess that’s that’s the difference, but like basically, you know, just like a harem of women and cover-ups and bribes and intimidation and he’s got this bunker and he’s like bribing police and like if these things are true, which you don’t know if they’re true or not, but this thing came out, it’s pretty crazy. Uh, it’s it’s a wild story. Yeah, this is crazy. I uh I didn’t know about this. I I would believe just based off what I I believe this is very this could be very true. Like this doesn’t shock me. Like knowing what I know a little bit, like and I have heard like rumors of people who I’m like second hand or third hand connected with that they’re freaks. And uh like I hear some stories about what they do to cover it up and I 100% believe this. And from Silicon Valley who are very successful, like things that I didn’t realize until I kind of got closer to I’m not inside that circle because I’m not like in that that tier, but had a couple friends in that circle and it’s like two things that are way more common than I ever would have thought. Swinging. Swinging is like super common in Silicon Valley. Dude, the swinger lifestyle. It’s weird. It’s weird. You know about this pineapple thing by the way? Tell me. So I I learned this from TikTok. I don’t know if this is real or not. But basically like this this the silent symbol for signaling to others if you’re a swinger or not, apparently is a upside down pineapple. So if you go to a house and they have a picture of a pineapple that’s upside down, it’s a wink to anybody else who’s in the lifestyle that, “Hey, we’re down.” Uh I had I had no idea. Dude, that’s crazy. Or if they’re wearing like pineapple earrings or something at a party. I got this I’ve got a girlfriend who does it and she uh and and she tells me about it and my wife and I were like I was like, “Sarah, like you know, like I’m not interested in this, just so you know. Like I don’t want to do this. This is this uh and she’s like, “Yeah, me neither, but it’s so fun to hear about.” Yeah, exactly. I’m like Uber Uber boy. I dude, I’ve got a couple friends that are into it. Down here in Austin where I live, uh these guys have this company, you know, Onnit. Um Aubrey Marcus and then he’s got this other guy named Kyle, uh who is a friend or works there. I’m not sure the relationship, but they like they mix work and play and they’re open about their how they’re they have open relationships and they talk about it. Uh Kyle Kingsbury, I think his name is. And they talk about it on the podcast, on their podcast that they they share they share relationships. Yeah, it’s I mean, you know, more power to you if it’s your thing. Uh I what I’m saying is I didn’t know how common that was or like swinging or that lifestyle, but it is very common amongst like successful Silicon Valley people. Same thing with drugs, uh like, you know, my either microdosing or normal dosing of certain drugs. Like I guess like there’s a certain level of uh party that I just never did and I never had the urge to do, um, that I think is like pretty common amongst uh amongst like this group of people and like, you know, good for them. Dude, I’ve I’m I’m such a prude. I’ve been out with like some like really powerful people who I looked up to and I saw them the whenever I’ve seen them do coke, I’m like, “Oh, I I don’t uh I don’t really like you as much as I used to like you.” Exactly. It just like it made me uncomfortable and I didn’t I didn’t feel I I didn’t like it. But uh this is crazy. and it is way more common than I than I thought living in Silicon Valley. I think what it is is like if you’re a nerd and you’re now worth a billion dollars or hundreds of millions, which is basically the same thing, and you could do anything you want, you want you want to do stuff and also if you are young and you have money, you have to up the ante consistently. So Dan Blazarian has this new book out and either in the book or in an interview about the book, he was saying how he’s like, “Man, I’ve had every woman that I could ever want. I have private fancy chefs. I drive the best cars, I fly private, I do I do the fanciest stuff. None of it makes me happy anymore because I have to go bigger and bigger and bigger in order to help my dopamine and make it work and and and now like none of it makes me happy. So I just like I’m I try to be simple now, although like it’s really hard. I I but all the items, they don’t they don’t bring me joy. Um, speaking of making me happy, I there was this thing that I saw that I thought was pretty cool. It’s not really like a business idea necessarily, but I think it’s worth a read. So let me put a link to it. Uh, where should I put the link? Um, one sec, let me grab it. Uh, basically there’s this guy, I want to give him credit because it’s a very interesting read. Um, and I’ll explain it while I’m looking for the link. So basically there’s this guy who uh Dan Lou, I think is his name. Um, How do you spell it? Dan, normal, and then L U U. And uh go to this link. So go just search uh or never mind, I’ll just slack it to you. Um, so go to this link and this guy has this post, and basically what he all he did was he’s like, “Hey, um, you know, there’s there’s all these like claims that you will hear commonly. You’ll hear them over and over and over again. And they’re referencing studies. And um they have fancy names, and then they reference studies, and then people take them as facts. And then if you ever He’s like, “Turns out, if you actually go read the study, the claim is either way weaker than what people use it as like a thing, or it’s literally the opposite.” And he gives four examples. And I loved reading this. So I I want to go through them real quick. So one is on happiness, which you just said. So we had talked about this before, which is people have this thing where they say, “There’s um there’s a link between happiness and uh and income.” And basically the the thing you’ll hear in in pop science is, “Beyond $75,000, you know, your happiness doesn’t go up beyond that amount.” So what does this mean? And it’s total bullshit. This means don’t chase money and um don’t chase money. You should you’re it’s not going to make you any happier. And so he’s like, so he goes and he’s like, so he goes and he’s like, “It’s become common knowledge that that money doesn’t make people happy. How much is enough? Um, you know, people have different things. If you Google it, if you say happiness income, it’ll say, um, household income of $75,000. After that, your day-to-day happiness doesn’t rise. Um, he goes, “This happiness uh correlate income like study was actually done multiple times, not just one time. And um and you know, the problem is like when people looked at the graph, it looks like happiness goes up, up, up, up, up, and then it flattens out. He’s like, “The problem is it’s on a log scale.” And like most people just don’t know how to read a log scale graph. A log scale graph means you’re going up by a factor of 10 every time. Sorry. So even if it’s even if it’s flattening out, that might be going from 10 to 50. It just doesn’t look like as big of a jump because it’s not like the the the increments are a log scale. So basically, if you actually look at it, uh if you actually look at the and you know, this got published in Dan Gilbert’s like book uh on uh on on behavioral, you know, economics and stuff like that. And basically, um if you actually look at the chart, the chart shows that uh if you look at it on a non-log scale, which he puts the graph here, it’s basically like the more money you have, the more your satisfaction goes up. And there is no flattening out. Um, it doesn’t go up at the same rate. So yes, it’s true that going from $0 to $30,000 to $75,000 gives you a bigger jump in happiness than going from 1 million to 2 million or 2 million to 4 million. But the happiness does keep going up. Uh your life your satisfaction does keep going up on on all the reported scales. And he’s basically like, you know, there may be some point where you stop getting returns, but we haven’t found it yet. You know, like, um, on average, people have not found that yet. So, um, you and it and actually there are things that like um that I and and if you dig in, he actually pointed out some that there’s there are some things that that uh contradict this claim. So what people used to say is, “Oh yeah, you’ll get that money and then you’ll return to what they call your set point of happiness. So you get all this money, you win the lottery. Yeah, within a few months you’re back to your set point of happiness. If you were depressed before, you’ll be depressed after. And um, and he’s like, you know, it turns out that that’s not true. Winning the lottery actually does make you happier if you look at the if you actually look at the study. So, I think that’s a great idea. It’s like, you know, if a couple of YouTubers got together, I think they could have, you know, I and I think it’s fan service, too. So I think you would just become more famous, you’d build fan love and you’d print like, I don’t know, $20 million every summer, um, running your camp. Uh, it’s a pain in the ass, but you could do that. And I I think like I went to a space camp from NASA when I was like in fifth grade or something. Did you really? The state of Texas sent every fifth grader to it. So it’s kind of amazing. What? Yeah, and they only did it once. So I was just lucky to be in that timing. Oh, I wanted to do that when I was a kid so badly. It’s an amazing thing. You go there and you get to be in a rocket ship and like you get to play commander and like do all this stuff. But I feel like for many jobs, there’s a version of that. Like I think people are fascinated with prisons. I think they’re fascinated with the police. I think they’re fascinated with the army. And like if you could create like amusement parks or simulations of that, where you get to take your pictures, you get to touch the stuff, you get to see how it works, you get to learn some things, uh people will pay for that. And I think they’re going to see more out-of-home experiences like that get built. Can we move on to the shitty Billy of the week? Yeah. Or do you want to go a different one? No, it’s good. It’s just a crazy story. I don’t even know what the point of this. I point of this one. Let’s go to a different one. Then we can do a different one. All right, let’s do a quick one. Quick idea. This I saw this and it kind of caught my eye. This guy, um, what’s his name? I’ll give him credit real quick. Somebody somebody sent this to us in the Facebook group and uh I thought it was really interesting. So it’s this a specialnames.cn. So, uh what’s the guy’s name? The guy’s name Mike Mike Benitez shared this. So specialname.cn. What is it? Basically, there’s a story that came out of this girl who paid her way through college. She basically made a few hundred thousand dollars and all she does is she names Chinese babies with American names. So so basically in China, every uh Chinese person typically will have a Western name. So, you know, if their name is hard to say, they know they kind of know that for for business purposes and travel purposes, it’s just easier to have to like be like, “Yes, I also go by Mike, or I go by Emerald, or I go by, you know, Samantha.” And so, um, but the problem is, you know, it’s not your native thing. So if it’s like if I tried to pick a Chinese name right now, I I might pick something that’s really weird or off. Like it doesn’t sound quite right. And so you see these things where Chinese people name their baby like Rolex, uh would be like their Western name. It’s like, “No, no, no, you shouldn’t have picked that one. Like, you know, that’s kind of a strange name.” If you were trying to have like a easy Western name, you actually like backfired. So what this woman’s services, she you can go to specialname.cn and the site is hilarious. If you go to the website, it’s like Are you on the website? It’s it’s like Yeah, I’m looking at it now. Look at the counter. It says, “The baby we named,” and it says a million, they they’ve named over a billion babies, but the English is is off. Yeah, it well, the the actual site’s in Chinese. I think it’s a Google Translate that you’re looking at. And uh you just say boy or girl, I think you submit some information or a picture of the baby, and she just closes her eyes basically and says, “Jasmine.” And then No, so you you you pick five attributes like um nice, honest, kind, eager, keen. And I did that and it gave me the names Zachary, Caleb, or Harvey. And it says, “The famous Harveys are Harvey Firestone, Harvey Ball, and then Caleb, Caleb Carr. I don’t know who that is. Is that a famous actor? I don’t know. Uh Zachary Taylor, I guess the American president. Yeah, it’s pretty funny. And so this uh site, I thought what a what an example of niches make riches and like just solve a simple problem for people. And uh you know, this girl’s made, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars just off this website. And uh I thought that was like, How does it make money? Just through ads? A really cool, really cool side hustle for a college kid. It just make they just make money through ads? I think, yeah, I don’t know exactly. I I thought you pay her to do it, uh but maybe you’re saying you just got a name right away. I just got a name. I was doing it on my phone. So it might be ads or it might be a premium upsell. And they and they and and the logo is just this generic looking white lady. Like that’s like the spokesperson. If that’s her or not. That’s definitely not her. So let me do this. Oh yeah, I know it’s like a cartoon. Um Yeah, this is awesome. So this is this is a hilarious little side hustle that I that I loved. Um okay, let’s do uh let’s do the shitty Billy of the week. I read this story and I was blown away. This is not really this is interesting only in that it’s a train wreck. Did you see this story about this venture capitalist that came out? Just now. So there’s this guy named Michael Gogan. He used to be a partner at Sequoia, right? Like the one of the biggest venture firms ever. Is he the one who stole money from them? No, he got fired because his girlfriend came out and accused him and like sued him for or like accused him of uh of like sexual abuse, she said, you know, he’s I’ve been in a relationship with him for eight years or 10 years or something like that and he’s extremely abusive sexually to me and blah blah blah. Uh she’s a stripper that he met somewhere and then she became his girlfriend and then whatever. And uh this the suit, he he didn’t lose the suit. He, you know, she kind of like he got acquitted or whatever. Um but you know, still Sequoia was like, “you know, we decided it’s best to part ways.” So a story came out in the Daily Mail. And you know it’s good because it’s in the Daily Mail, which is like, you know, just the the the trash of the trash, but it’s the junk food. You can’t resist. And um basically, there was some wild shit about this guy. So here’s the allegations that are in the article. The article says Michael Gogan, uh he basically after he left Sequoia, he goes to Montana and he basically sets up his like estate in Montana. He owns like, I don’t know, uh 100,000 square feet of like space in of of of houses in in in in Montana. He is like the big fish there. He owns a bar, under the bar, he created this thing called the Boom Boom Room. And the Boom Boom Room is where he takes like, you know, girls that he meets and he this so this guy’s on his fourth wife. The article talks about this spreadsheet of 5,000 women that he slept with. And it’s just full of Dude, have you have you done the Wait, say that again. Say the 5,000 thing again. A spreadsheet of 5,000 women that he slept with. It’s Okay, so do the math. If you so if you if this has happened over a 20-year period, Yeah. 365 days times 20 is 7,300 divided by 5. That means he had to have sex with a different woman every 1.5 days. Basically every other day. Yeah, every day and a half. Is that crazy? What? I don’t believe that. That doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t know if it’s true. I don’t know if he did it or he didn’t. So like the Wilt Chamberlain did this once where he claimed he slept with 10,000 women and people were like, “That means you slept with two women a day.” Like this doesn’t make any sense. Um Yeah, his response by the way, he was like, “Yeah, sometimes it was three though.” Exactly. Most pimp response ever. So this guy, this guy’s wild. So what so he basically um he there’s tons of so what happened was he had created this like security company to cover his tracks and it’s like a private security company. And he hired these like ex-military people to run it for him and they were kind of like his fixers. They’re the ones who came out and exposed this whole thing and are now suing him for $800 million. So they’re suing him because he basically made them do a bunch of stuff that like got them in trouble. So he’d have to pay off women that he would sleep with. Um and they would have he’d be like, “You need to do this.” Like, “Go I I’ll put money in your account, you pay her off.” And um and eventually one guy, so he had a friend who um the story is he he brings his daughters over to the friend’s house um with their babysitter, but then he leaves with the babysitter, has sex with the babysitter, and the friend is like, “Dude, what the hell are you doing? You just had sex with the babysitter in my house? Like, um this is messed up.” And he’s like, he calls him a pedophile. And he’s like, “Dude, uh like I don’t, you know, don’t don’t bring up my my flaws and like, you know, there’s a one-time thing and blah blah blah.” And the guy’s like, “No, this is messed up.” And he’s like, starts threatening the guy. He threatens the guy and says, “If you come out and say this, I’m going to like ruin you.” And um the guy’s like, “You know, F that.” He then sleeps with the guy’s wife as like, you know, part of this part of this process. So the guy gets really pissed. And he’s like, threatens to basically expose him for all the stuff that he’s doing. Um, while he’s meanwhile like an investor and all this stuff. You know, leading this professional life. The guy’s worth $5 billion by the way. So he’s he’s he’s a he’s a multi-billionaire himself. So the guy goes to his like security guy and says, “We need to kill him.” We we have this guy’s getting too, there’s too big of a risk. He threatens to bring everything down. We got to kill him and don’t and then and then there’s basically like in the article, it’s like, “Don’t like communicate anywhere except for Wicker, this like self-deleting text messaging app.” Um, and the guy goes to him and says, “Hey, hey, like talks off the ledge. No, let’s not kill this guy, whatever.” But that that was like one of the allegations. And so people have come out against this guy, but he bribes the police. And so like multiple police chiefs have like lost their job because they failed to investigate this guy because he basically bought them off. And he claimed How much do you think How much do you think you’d have to bribe a Montana cop to shut up? Like a million dollars? I mean, yeah, I think I think nine out of 10 police officers would take a million to shut up. Oh, in my deep experience bribing cops. I mean, I have no idea. Yeah, I think like half a million dollars would do, right? Like for a lot of these women, it’s like jewelry. Uh like he he slept with one woman and then she got the husband found out, got divorced and then he paid for her, he bought her a five-bedroom home and also paid for her side of the divorce and uh you know, that was like one of the things that he did. And so he just had this like elaborate web of, you know, crazy like this crazy sexual life layered on to crazy like payoffs and bribes and cover-ups. And then like a whole company dedicated to like this private security company, whatever that means. And then like police bribery. Like this is like a crazy ass three-part movie. And then you look at this guy and he’s just like this, you know, cookie cutter white VC looking guy. It was like such a wild story, I thought. And um, yeah, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. So I um, I read I I I I read a little bit about like odd billionaires and I’ve maybe interacted with one or two before. And does it do you have you ever met someone who’s like in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars who has like some weird shit where like like they have a a like for example, this is like public knowledge, Peter Thiel basically employed this this three lawyers, big shot lawyers and they’re and the basically when he was outed as gay by Gawker, he employed and this is a a great book by Ryan Holiday. I forget what it’s called, but he employed these three lawyers and I forget when he was outed, but something like 09 and he goes, “Um, however long it takes, your full-time job.” It’s like a decade, yeah. “Yeah, he goes, “Just wait for Gawker and those guys to screw up. And when they slip up, tell me and we’re going to pounce.” And he employed these guys the whole time. And there’s some crazy stuff about Peter Thiel. Like for example, in the book, they said that he has a black Mercedes with the engine on everywhere he goes in the world. So like that’s what it like he always he’s got a team and they they they have to have a car like at all times. And he also has land in New Zealand because he’s a little bit nervous about apocalypse. And so my question is, have you do you think you’ve ever met like a billionaire or someone like that who’s got some of these weird ass things like a like a security force who does exotic things like this? A fixer. Yeah. Um, I think so. So I worked with this guy. I’ve talked about him before. I worked with this crazy kind of like Like the Filipino guy? Yeah, in Indonesia. Um, crazy guy in Indonesia that was I talked about before. I mean, he’s like a dropout in grade school, self-made. I think he was worth $500 million, kind of like at his peak. And $500 million in Indonesia is like, you know, $10 billion here in America. And um, and you know, he he had a crazy elaborate like business, like his he him as my boss was really weird. Like he was a really insane boss. I told you, but he had a giant projector in the office, like on the wall that had everybody’s computer tracked and your productivity was like this like he bought the software from Boeing and basically used it to like show like your your little square would flash red if you weren’t being productive enough, and I don’t even know how it was like measuring that. Like just how much you were typing, I guess. I don’t know. And it was like this intimidation thing on, you know, he had four women that just managed his email. Um, like if you did good in a meeting, he would walk in the next day and just hand you keys to like a new Mercedes that’s outside. He’s like, “This is yours, drive it around.” And like, you know, he did crazy shit like that. Like I remember a meeting once where a friend of his came in from Singapore and they were basically just openly talking about like a insider trading/pump and dump scheme that they were doing, and I was like, “Whoa, that’s like crazy illegal.” And they were like, “Yeah, it’s great. We’re going to make so much money. It’s this is this is going to work. It’s going to be awesome.” You said that you said this is illegal? I didn’t say it. I was just sitting there in the room being like, in my head, I think this I’m 20 years I think I was 21 years old. Like I I didn’t know shit about shit at that point, but I knew enough to be like, “I think this is wrong what they’re talking about.” And then he would, you know, every day would after work would take everybody to the bar, or whoever his kind of like insider crew was, and two girls would be there, and those were like, you know, his escorts for the day or whatever, and like that’s just the way he did business. And he he bribed officials, and he did all kinds of stuff. He ended up in jail. He ended up dying in jail. He actually died this year. And um, you know, so it was like a pretty crazy life. Uh, and you know, I worked with this guy for only like three months, and then I left and I came back and started a startup here, but like, you know, that guy was wild. Like he lived a wild life. That’s awesome. Yeah, I’ve uh I I don’t know if I’ve had any first-hand knowledge of or if I’ve like been friends with people. Maybe I have and they just haven’t told me. But uh I do believe that like people like this guy, this Gogan guy, I don’t know, I I haven’t heard of this. I mean this is this Gogan guy is like on some Jeffrey Epstein shit, right? Like this is a modern day Jeffrey Epstein situation. Um, maybe I guess it’s not underage girls, I guess that’s that’s the difference, but like basically, you know, just like a harem of women and cover-ups and bribes and intimidation and he’s got this bunker and he’s like bribing police and like if these things are true, which you don’t know if they’re true or not, but this thing came out, it’s pretty crazy. Uh, it’s it’s a wild story. Yeah, this is crazy. I uh I didn’t know about this. I I would believe just based off what I I believe this is very this could be very true. Like this doesn’t shock me. Like knowing what I know a little bit, like and I have heard like rumors of people who I’m like second hand or third hand connected with that they’re freaks. And uh like I hear some stories about what they do to cover it up and I 100% believe this. And from Silicon Valley who are very successful, like things that I didn’t realize until I kind of got closer to I’m not inside that circle because I’m not like in that that tier, but had a couple friends in that circle and it’s like two things that are way more common than I ever would have thought. Swinging. Swinging is like super common in Silicon Valley. Dude, the swinger lifestyle. It’s weird. It’s weird. You know about this pineapple thing by the way? Tell me. So I I learned this from TikTok. I don’t know if this is real or not. But basically like this this the silent symbol for signaling to others if you’re a swinger or not, apparently is a upside down pineapple. So if you go to a house and they have a picture of a pineapple that’s upside down, it’s a wink to anybody else who’s in the lifestyle that, “Hey, we’re down.” Uh I had I had no idea. Dude, that’s crazy. Or if they’re wearing like pineapple earrings or something at a party. I got this I’ve got a girlfriend who does it and she uh and and she tells me about it and my wife and I were like I was like, “Sarah, like you know, like I’m not interested in this, just so you know. Like I don’t want to do this. This is this uh and she’s like, “Yeah, me neither, but it’s so fun to hear about.” Yeah, exactly. I’m like Uber Uber boy. I dude, I’ve got a couple friends that are into it. Down here in Austin where I live, uh these guys have this company, you know, Onnit. Um Aubrey Marcus and then he’s got this other guy named Kyle, uh who is a friend or works there. I’m not sure the relationship, but they like they mix work and play and they’re open about their how they’re they have open relationships and they talk about it. Uh Kyle Kingsbury, I think his name is. And they talk about it on the podcast, on their podcast that they they share they share relationships. Yeah, it’s I mean, you know, more power to you if it’s your thing. Uh I what I’m saying is I didn’t know how common that was or like swinging or that lifestyle, but it is very common amongst like successful Silicon Valley people. Same thing with drugs, uh like, you know, my either microdosing or normal dosing of certain drugs. Like I guess like there’s a certain level of uh party that I just never did and I never had the urge to do, um, that I think is like pretty common amongst uh amongst like this group of people and like, you know, good for them. Dude, I’ve I’m I’m such a prude. I’ve been out with like some like really powerful people who I looked up to and I saw them the whenever I’ve seen them do coke, I’m like, “Oh, I I don’t uh I don’t really like you as much as I used to like you.” Exactly. It just like it made me uncomfortable and I didn’t I didn’t feel I I didn’t like it. But uh this is crazy. and it is way more common than I than I thought living in Silicon Valley. I think what it is is like if you’re a nerd and you’re now worth a billion dollars or hundreds of millions, which is basically the same thing, and you could do anything you want, you want you want to do stuff and also if you are young and you have money, you have to up the ante consistently. So Dan Blazarian has this new book out and either in the book or in an interview about the book, he was saying how he’s like, “Man, I’ve had every woman that I could ever want. I have private fancy chefs. I drive the best cars, I fly private, I do I do the fanciest stuff. None of it makes me happy anymore because I have to go bigger and bigger and bigger in order to help my dopamine and make it work and and and now like none of it makes me happy. So I just like I’m I try to be simple now, although like it’s really hard. I I but all the items, they don’t they don’t bring me joy. Um, speaking of making me happy, I there was this thing that I saw that I thought was pretty cool. It’s not really like a business idea necessarily, but I think it’s worth a read. So let me put a link to it. Uh, where should I put the link? Um, one sec, let me grab it. Uh, basically there’s this guy, I want to give him credit because it’s a very interesting read. Um, and I’ll explain it while I’m looking for the link. So basically there’s this guy who uh Dan Lou, I think is his name. Um, How do you spell it? Dan, normal, and then L U U. And uh go to this link. So go just search uh or never mind, I’ll just slack it to you. Um, so go to this link and this guy has this post, and basically what he all he did was he’s like, “Hey, um, you know, there’s there’s all these like claims that you will hear commonly. You’ll hear them over and over and over again. And they’re referencing studies. And um they have fancy names, and then they reference studies, and then people take them as facts. And then if you ever He’s like, “Turns out, if you actually go read the study, the claim is either way weaker than what people use it as like a thing, or it’s literally the opposite.” And he gives four examples. And I loved reading this. So I I want to go through them real quick. So one is on happiness, which you just said. So we had talked about this before, which is people have this thing where they say, “There’s um there’s a link between happiness and uh and income.” And basically the the thing you’ll hear in in pop science is, “Beyond $75,000, you know, your happiness doesn’t go up beyond that amount.” So what does this mean? And it’s total bullshit. This means don’t chase money and um don’t chase money. You should you’re it’s not going to make you any happier. And so he’s like, so he goes and he’s like, so he goes and he’s like, “It’s become common knowledge that that money doesn’t make people happy. How much is enough? Um, you know, people have different things. If you Google it, if you say happiness income, it’ll say, um, household income of $75,000. After that, your day-to-day happiness doesn’t rise. Um, he goes, “This happiness uh correlate income like study was actually done multiple times, not just one time. And um and you know, the problem is like when people looked at the graph, it looks like happiness goes up, up, up, up, up, and then it flattens out. He’s like, “The problem is it’s on a log scale.” And like most people just don’t know how to read a log scale graph. A log scale graph means you’re going up by a factor of 10 every time. Sorry. So even if it’s even if it’s flattening out, that might be going from 10 to 50. It just doesn’t look like as big of a jump because it’s not like the the the increments are a log scale. So basically, if you actually look at it, uh if you actually look at the and you know, this got published in Dan Gilbert’s like book uh on uh on on behavioral, you know, economics and stuff like that. And basically, um if you actually look at the chart, the chart shows that uh if you look at it on a non-log scale, which he puts the graph here, it’s basically like the more money you have, the more your satisfaction goes up. And there is no flattening out. Um, it doesn’t go up at the same rate. So yes, it’s true that going from $0 to $30,000 to $75,000 gives you a bigger jump in happiness than going from 1 million to 2 million or 2 million to 4 million. But the happiness does keep going up. Uh your life your satisfaction does keep going up on on all the reported scales. And he’s basically like, you know, there may be some point where you stop getting returns, but we haven’t found it yet. You know, like, um, on average, people have not found that yet. So, um, you and it and actually there are things that like um that I and and if you dig in, he actually pointed out some that there’s there are some things that that uh contradict this claim. So what people used to say is, “Oh yeah, you’ll get that money and then you’ll return to what they call your set point of happiness. So you get all this money, you win the lottery. Yeah, within a few months you’re back to your set point of happiness. If you were depressed before, you’ll be depressed after. And um, and he’s like, you know, it turns out that that’s not true. Winning the lottery actually does make you happier if you look at the if you actually look at the study. So, I think that’s a great idea. It’s like, you know, if a couple of YouTubers got together, I think they could have, you know, I and I think it’s fan service, too. So I think you would just become more famous, you’d build fan love and you’d print like, I don’t know, $20 million every summer, um, running your camp. Uh, it’s a pain in the ass, but you could do that. And I I think like I went to a space camp from NASA when I was like in fifth grade or something. Did you really? The state of Texas sent every fifth grader to it. So it’s kind of amazing. What? Yeah, and they only did it once. So I was just lucky to be in that timing. Oh, I wanted to do that when I was a kid so badly. It’s an amazing thing. You go there and you get to be in a rocket ship and like you get to play commander and like do all this stuff. But I feel like for many jobs, there’s a version of that. Like I think people are fascinated with prisons. I think they’re fascinated with the police. I think they’re fascinated with the army. And like if you could create like amusement parks or simulations of that, where you get to take your pictures, you get to touch the stuff, you get to see how it works, you get to learn some things, uh people will pay for that. And I think they’re going to see more out-of-home experiences like that get built. Can we move on to the shitty Billy of the week? Yeah. Or do you want to go a different one? No, it’s good. It’s just a crazy story. I don’t even know what the point of this. I point of this one. Let’s go to a different one. Then we can do a different one. All right, let’s do a quick one. Quick idea. This I saw this and it kind of caught my eye. This guy, um, what’s his name? I’ll give him credit real quick. Somebody somebody sent this to us in the Facebook group and uh I thought it was really interesting. So it’s this a specialnames.cn. So, uh what’s the guy’s name? The guy’s name Mike Mike Benitez shared this. So specialname.cn. What is it? Basically, there’s a story that came out of this girl who paid her way through college. She basically made a few hundred thousand dollars and all she does is she names Chinese babies with American names. So so basically in China, every uh Chinese person typically will have a Western name. So, you know, if their name is hard to say, they know they kind of know that for for business purposes and travel purposes, it’s just easier to have to like be like, “Yes, I also go by Mike, or I go by Emerald, or I go by, you know, Samantha.” And so, um, but the problem is, you know, it’s not your native thing. So if it’s like if I tried to pick a Chinese name right now, I I might pick something that’s really weird or off. Like it doesn’t sound quite right. And so you see these things where Chinese people name their baby like Rolex, uh would be like their Western name. It’s like, “No, no, no, you shouldn’t have picked that one. Like, you know, that’s kind of a strange name.” If you were trying to have like a easy Western name, you actually like backfired. So what this woman’s services, she you can go to specialname.cn and the site is hilarious. If you go to the website, it’s like Are you on the website? It’s it’s like Yeah, I’m looking at it now. Look at the counter. It says, “The baby we named,” and it says a million, they they’ve named over a billion babies, but the English is is off. Yeah, it well, the the actual site’s in Chinese. I think it’s a Google Translate that you’re looking at. And uh you just say boy or girl, I think you submit some information or a picture of the baby, and she just closes her eyes basically and says, “Jasmine.” And then No, so you you you pick five attributes like um nice, honest, kind, eager, keen. And I did that and it gave me the names Zachary, Caleb, or Harvey. And it says, “The famous Harveys are Harvey Firestone, Harvey Ball, and then Caleb, Caleb Carr. I don’t know who that is. Is that a famous actor? I don’t know. Uh Zachary Taylor, I guess the American president. Yeah, it’s pretty funny. And so this uh site, I thought what a what an example of niches make riches and like just solve a simple problem for people. And uh you know, this girl’s made, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars just off this website. And uh I thought that was like, How does it make money? Just through ads? A really cool, really cool side hustle for a college kid. It just make they just make money through ads? I think, yeah, I don’t know exactly. I I thought you pay her to do it, uh but maybe you’re saying you just got a name right away. I just got a name. I was doing it on my phone. So it might be ads or it might be a premium upsell. And they and they and and the logo is just this generic looking white lady. Like that’s like the spokesperson. If that’s her or not. That’s definitely not her. So let me do this. Oh yeah, I know it’s like a cartoon. Um Yeah, this is awesome. So this is this is a hilarious little side hustle that I that I loved. Um okay, let’s do uh let’s do the shitty Billy of the week. I read this story and I was blown away. This is not really this is interesting only in that it’s a train wreck. Did you see this story about this venture capitalist that came out? Just now. So there’s this guy named Michael Gogan. He used to be a partner at Sequoia, right? Like the one of the biggest venture firms ever. Is he the one who stole money from them? No, he got fired because his girlfriend came out and accused him and like sued him for or like accused him of uh of like sexual abuse, she said, you know, he’s I’ve been in a relationship with him for eight years or 10 years or something like that and he’s extremely abusive sexually to me and blah blah blah. Uh she’s a stripper that he met somewhere and then she became his girlfriend and then whatever. And uh this the suit, he he didn’t lose the suit. He, you know, she kind of like he got acquitted or whatever. Um but you know, still Sequoia was like, “you know, we decided it’s best to part ways.” So a story came out in the Daily Mail. And you know it’s good because it’s in the Daily Mail, which is like, you know, just the the the trash of the trash, but it’s the junk food. You can’t resist. And um basically, there was some wild shit about this guy. So here’s the allegations that are in the article. The article says Michael Gogan, uh he basically after he left Sequoia, he goes to Montana and he basically sets up his like estate in Montana. He owns like, I don’t know, uh 100,000 square feet of like space in of of of houses in in in in Montana. He is like the big fish there. He owns a bar, under the bar, he created this thing called the Boom Boom Room. And the Boom Boom Room is where he takes like, you know, girls that he meets and he this so this guy’s on his fourth wife. The article talks about this spreadsheet of 5,000 women that he slept with. And it’s just full of Dude, have you have you done the Wait, say that again. Say the 5,000 thing again. A spreadsheet of 5,000 women that he slept with. It’s Okay, so do the math. If you so if you if this has happened over a 20-year period, Yeah. 365 days times 20 is 7,300 divided by 5. That means he had to have sex with a different woman every 1.5 days. Basically every other day. Yeah, every day and a half. Is that crazy? What? I don’t believe that. That doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t know if it’s true. I don’t know if he did it or he didn’t. So like the Wilt Chamberlain did this once where he claimed he slept with 10,000 women and people were like, “That means you slept with two women a day.” Like this doesn’t make any sense. Um Yeah, his response by the way, he was like, “Yeah, sometimes it was three though.” Exactly. Most pimp response ever. So this guy, this guy’s wild. So what so he basically um he there’s tons of so what happened was he had created this like security company to cover his tracks and it’s like a private security company. And he hired these like ex-military people to run it for him and they were kind of like his fixers. They’re the ones who came out and exposed this whole thing and are now suing him for $800 million. So they’re suing him because he basically made them do a bunch of stuff that like got them in trouble. So he’d have to pay off women that he would sleep with. Um and they would have he’d be like, “You need to do this.” Like, “Go I I’ll put money in your account, you pay her off.” And um and eventually one guy, so he had a friend who um the story is he he brings his daughters over to the friend’s house um with their babysitter, but then he leaves with the babysitter, has sex with the babysitter, and the friend is like, “Dude, what the hell are you doing? You just had sex with the babysitter in my house? Like, um this is messed up.” And he’s like, he calls him a pedophile. And he’s like, “Dude, uh like I don’t, you know, don’t don’t bring up my my flaws and like, you know, there’s a one-time thing and blah blah blah.” And the guy’s like, “No, this is messed up.” And he’s like, starts threatening the guy. He threatens the guy and says, “If you come out and say this, I’m going to like ruin you.” And um the guy’s like, “You know, F that.” He then sleeps with the guy’s wife as like, you know, part of this part of this process. So the guy gets really pissed. And he’s like, threatens to basically expose him for all the stuff that he’s doing. Um, while he’s meanwhile like an investor and all this stuff. You know, leading this professional life. The guy’s worth $5 billion by the way. So he’s he’s he’s a he’s a multi-billionaire himself. So the guy goes to his like security guy and says, “We need to kill him.” We we have this guy’s getting too, there’s too big of a risk. He threatens to bring everything down. We got to kill him and don’t and then and then there’s basically like in the article, it’s like, “Don’t like communicate anywhere except for Wicker, this like self-deleting text messaging app.” Um, and the guy goes to him and says, “Hey, hey, like talks off the ledge. No, let’s not kill this guy, whatever.” But that that was like one of the allegations. And so people have come out against this guy, but he bribes the police. And so like multiple police chiefs have like lost their job because they failed to investigate this guy because he basically bought them off. And he claimed How much do you think How much do you think you’d have to bribe a Montana cop to shut up? Like a million dollars? I mean, yeah, I think I think nine out of 10 police officers would take a million to shut up. Oh, in my deep experience bribing cops. I mean, I have no idea. Yeah, I think like half a million dollars would do, right? Like for a lot of these women, it’s like jewelry. Uh like he he slept with one woman and then she got the husband found out, got divorced and then he paid for her, he bought her a five-bedroom home and also paid for her side of the divorce and uh you know, that was like one of the things that he did. And so he just had this like elaborate web of, you know, crazy like this crazy sexual life layered on to crazy like payoffs and bribes and cover-ups. And then like a whole company dedicated to like this private security company, whatever that means. And then like police bribery. Like this is like a crazy ass three-part movie. And then you look at this guy and he’s just like this, you know, cookie cutter white VC looking guy. It was like such a wild story, I thought. And um, yeah, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. So I um, I read I I I I read a little bit about like odd billionaires and I’ve maybe interacted with one or two before. And does it do you have you ever met someone who’s like in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars who has like some weird shit where like like they have a a like for example, this is like public knowledge, Peter Thiel basically employed this this three lawyers, big shot lawyers and they’re and the basically when he was outed as gay by Gawker, he employed and this is a a great book by Ryan Holiday. I forget what it’s called, but he employed these three lawyers and I forget when he was outed, but something like 09 and he goes, “Um, however long it takes, your full-time job.” It’s like a decade, yeah. “Yeah, he goes, “Just wait for Gawker and those guys to screw up. And when they slip up, tell me and we’re going to pounce.” And he employed these guys the whole time. And there’s some crazy stuff about Peter Thiel. Like for example, in the book, they said that he has a black Mercedes with the engine on everywhere he goes in the world. So like that’s what it like he always he’s got a team and they they they have to have a car like at all times. And he also has land in New Zealand because he’s a little bit nervous about apocalypse. And so my question is, have you do you think you’ve ever met like a billionaire or someone like that who’s got some of these weird ass things like a like a security force who does exotic things like this? A fixer. Yeah. Um, I think so. So I worked with this guy. I’ve talked about him before. I worked with this crazy kind of like Like the Filipino guy? Yeah, in Indonesia. Um, crazy guy in Indonesia that was I talked about before. I mean, he’s like a dropout in grade school, self-made. I think he was worth $500 million, kind of like at his peak. And $500 million in Indonesia is like, you know, $10 billion here in America. And um, and you know, he he had a crazy elaborate like business, like his he him as my boss was really weird. Like he was a really insane boss. I told you, but he had a giant projector in the office, like on the wall that had everybody’s computer tracked and your productivity was like this like he bought the software from Boeing and basically used it to like show like your your little square would flash red if you weren’t being productive enough, and I don’t even know how it was like measuring that. Like just how much you were typing, I guess. I don’t know. And it was like this intimidation thing on, you know, he had four women that just managed his email. Um, like if you did good in a meeting, he would walk in the next day and just hand you keys to like a new Mercedes that’s outside. He’s like, “This is yours, drive it around.” And like, you know, he did crazy shit like that. Like I remember a meeting once where a friend of his came in from Singapore and they were basically just openly talking about like a insider trading/pump and dump scheme that they were doing, and I was like, “Whoa, that’s like crazy illegal.” And they were like, “Yeah, it’s great. We’re going to make so much money. It’s this is this is going to work. It’s going to be awesome.” You said that you said this is illegal? I didn’t say it. I was just sitting there in the room being like, in my head, I think this I’m 20 years I think I was 21 years old. Like I I didn’t know shit about shit at that point, but I knew enough to be like, “I think this is wrong what they’re talking about.” And then he would, you know, every day would after work would take everybody to the bar, or whoever his kind of like insider crew was, and two girls would be there, and those were like, you know, his escorts for the day or whatever, and like that’s just the way he did business. And he he bribed officials, and he did all kinds of stuff. He ended up in jail. He ended up dying in jail. He actually died this year. And um, you know, so it was like a pretty crazy life. Uh, and you know, I worked with this guy for only like three months, and then I left and I came back and started a startup here, but like, you know, that guy was wild. Like he lived a wild life. That’s awesome. Yeah, I’ve uh I I don’t know if I’ve had any first-hand knowledge of or if I’ve like been friends with people. Maybe I have and they just haven’t told me. But uh I do believe that like people like this guy, this Gogan guy, I don’t know, I I haven’t heard of this. I mean this is this Gogan guy is like on some Jeffrey Epstein shit, right? Like this is a modern day Jeffrey Epstein situation. Um, maybe I guess it’s not underage girls, I guess that’s that’s the difference, but like basically, you know, just like a harem of women and cover-ups and bribes and intimidation and he’s got this bunker and he’s like bribing police and like if these things are true, which you don’t know if they’re true or not, but this thing came out, it’s pretty crazy. Uh, it’s it’s a wild story. Yeah, this is crazy. I uh I didn’t know about this. I I would believe just based off what I I believe this is very this could be very true. Like this doesn’t shock me. Like knowing what I know a little bit, like and I have heard like rumors of people who I’m like second hand or third hand connected with that they’re freaks. And uh like I hear some stories about what they do to cover it up and I 100% believe this. And from Silicon Valley who are very successful, like things that I didn’t realize until I kind of got closer to I’m not inside that circle because I’m not like in that that tier, but had a couple friends in that circle and it’s like two things that are way more common than I ever would have thought. Swinging. Swinging is like super common in Silicon Valley. Dude, the swinger lifestyle. It’s weird. It’s weird. You know about this pineapple thing by the way? Tell me. So I I learned this from TikTok. I don’t know if this is real or not. But basically like this this the silent symbol for signaling to others if you’re a swinger or not, apparently is a upside down pineapple. So if you go to a house and they have a picture of a pineapple that’s upside down, it’s a wink to anybody else who’s in the lifestyle that, “Hey, we’re down.” Uh I had I had no idea. Dude, that’s crazy. Or if they’re wearing like pineapple earrings or something at a party. I got this I’ve got a girlfriend who does it and she uh and and she tells me about it and my wife and I were like I was like, “Sarah, like you know, like I’m not interested in this, just so you know. Like I don’t want to do this. This is this uh and she’s like, “Yeah, me neither, but it’s so fun to hear about.” Yeah, exactly. I’m like Uber Uber boy. I dude, I’ve got a couple friends that are into it. Down here in Austin where I live, uh these guys have this company, you know, Onnit. Um Aubrey Marcus and then he’s got this other guy named Kyle, uh who is a friend or works there. I’m not sure the relationship, but they like they mix work and play and they’re open about their how they’re they have open relationships and they talk about it. Uh Kyle Kingsbury, I think his name is. And they talk about it on the podcast, on their podcast that they they share they share relationships. Yeah, it’s I mean, you know, more power to you if it’s your thing. Uh I what I’m saying is I didn’t know how common that was or like swinging or that lifestyle, but it is very common amongst like successful Silicon Valley people. Same thing with drugs, uh like, you know, my either microdosing or normal dosing of certain drugs. Like I guess like there’s a certain level of uh party that I just never did and I never had the urge to do, um, that I think is like pretty common amongst uh amongst like this group of people and like, you know, good for them. Dude, I’ve I’m I’m such a prude. I’ve been out with like some like really powerful people who I looked up to and I saw them the whenever I’ve seen them do coke, I’m like, “Oh, I I don’t uh I don’t really like you as much as I used to like you.” Exactly. It just like it made me uncomfortable and I didn’t I didn’t feel I I didn’t like it. But uh this is crazy. and it is way more common than I than I thought living in Silicon Valley. I think what it is is like if you’re a nerd and you’re now worth a billion dollars or hundreds of millions, which is basically the same thing, and you could do anything you want, you want you want to do stuff and also if you are young and you have money, you have to up the ante consistently. So Dan Blazarian has this new book out and either in the book or in an interview about the book, he was saying how he’s like, “Man, I’ve had every woman that I could ever want. I have private fancy chefs. I drive the best cars, I fly private, I do I do the fanciest stuff. None of it makes me happy anymore because I have to go bigger and bigger and bigger in order to help my dopamine and make it work and and and now like none of it makes me happy. So I just like I’m I try to be simple now, although like it’s really hard. I I but all the items, they don’t they don’t bring me joy. Um, speaking of making me happy, I there was this thing that I saw that I thought was pretty cool. It’s not really like a business idea necessarily, but I think it’s worth a read. So let me put a link to it. Uh, where should I put the link? Um, one sec, let me grab it. Uh, basically there’s this guy, I want to give him credit because it’s a very interesting read. Um, and I’ll explain it while I’m looking for the link. So basically there’s this guy who uh Dan Lou, I think is his name. Um, How do you spell it? Dan, normal, and then L U U. And uh go to this link. So go just search uh or never mind, I’ll just slack it to you. Um, so go to this link and this guy has this post, and basically what he all he did was he’s like, “Hey, um, you know, there’s there’s all these like claims that you will hear commonly. You’ll hear them over and over and over again. And they’re referencing studies. And um they have fancy names, and then they reference studies, and then people take them as facts. And then if you ever He’s like, “Turns out, if you actually go read the study, the claim is either way weaker than what people use it as like a thing, or it’s literally the opposite.” And he gives four examples. And I loved reading this. So I I want to go through them real quick. So one is on happiness, which you just said. So we had talked about this before, which is people have this thing where they say, “There’s um there’s a link between happiness and uh and income.” And basically the the thing you’ll hear in in pop science is, “Beyond $75,000, you know, your happiness doesn’t go up beyond that amount.” So what does this mean? And it’s total bullshit. This means don’t chase money and um don’t chase money. You should you’re it’s not going to make you any happier. And so he’s like, so he goes and he’s like, so he goes and he’s like, “It’s become common knowledge that that money doesn’t make people happy. How much is enough? Um, you know, people have different things. If you Google it, if you say happiness income, it’ll say, um, household income of $75,000. After that, your day-to-day happiness doesn’t rise. Um, he goes, “This happiness uh correlate income like study was actually done multiple times, not just one time. And um and you know, the problem is like when people looked at the graph, it looks like happiness goes up, up, up, up, up, and then it flattens out. He’s like, “The problem is it’s on a log scale.” And like most people just don’t know how to read a log scale graph. A log scale graph means you’re going up by a factor of 10 every time. Sorry. So even if it’s even if it’s flattening out, that might be going from 10 to 50. It just doesn’t look like as big of a jump because it’s not like the the the increments are a log scale. So basically, if you actually look at it, uh if you actually look at the and you know, this got published in Dan Gilbert’s like book uh on uh on on behavioral, you know, economics and stuff like that. And basically, um if you actually look at the chart, the chart shows that uh if you look at it on a non-log scale, which he puts the graph here, it’s basically like the more money you have, the more your satisfaction goes up. And there is no flattening out. Um, it doesn’t go up at the same rate. So yes, it’s true that going from $0 to $30,000 to $75,000 gives you a bigger jump in happiness than going from 1 million to 2 million or 2 million to 4 million. But the happiness does keep going up. Uh your life your satisfaction does keep going up on on all the reported scales. And he’s basically like, you know, there may be some point where you stop getting returns, but we haven’t found it yet. You know, like, um, on average, people have not found that yet. So, um, you and it and actually there are things that like um that I and and if you dig in, he actually pointed out some that there’s there are some things that that uh contradict this claim. So what people used to say is, “Oh yeah, you’ll get that money and then you’ll return to what they call your set point of happiness. So you get all this money, you win the lottery. Yeah, within a few months you’re back to your set point of happiness. If you were depressed before, you’ll be depressed after. And um, and he’s like, you know, it turns out that that’s not true. Winning the lottery actually does make you happier if you look at the if you actually look at the study. So, I think that’s a great idea. It’s like, you know, if a couple of YouTubers got together, I think they could have, you know, I and I think it’s fan service, too. So I think you would just become more famous, you’d build fan love and you’d print like, I don’t know, $20 million every summer, um, running your camp. Uh, it’s a pain in the ass, but you could do that. And I I think like I went to a space camp from NASA when I was like in fifth grade or something. Did you really? The state of Texas sent every fifth grader to it. So it’s kind of amazing. What? Yeah, and they only did it once. So I was just lucky to be in that timing. Oh, I wanted to do that when I was a kid so badly. It’s an amazing thing. You go there and you get to be in a rocket ship and like you get to play commander and like do all this stuff. But I feel like for many jobs, there’s a version of that. Like I think people are fascinated with prisons. I think they’re fascinated with the police. I think they’re fascinated with the army. And like if you could create like amusement parks or simulations of that, where you get to take your pictures, you get to touch the stuff, you get to see how it works, you get to learn some things, uh people will pay for that. And I think they’re going to see more out-of-home experiences like that get built. Can we move on to the shitty Billy of the week? Yeah. Or do you want to go a different one? No, it’s good. It’s just a crazy story. I don’t even know what the point of this. I point of this one. Let’s go to a different one. Then we can do a different one. All right, let’s do a quick one. Quick idea. This I saw this and it kind of caught my eye. This guy, um, what’s his name? I’ll give him credit real quick. Somebody somebody sent this to us in the Facebook group and uh I thought it was really interesting. So it’s this a specialnames.cn. So, uh what’s the guy’s name? The guy’s name Mike Mike Benitez shared this. So specialname.cn. What is it? Basically, there’s a story that came out of this girl who paid her way through college. She basically made a few hundred thousand dollars and all she does is she names Chinese babies with American names. So so basically in China, every uh Chinese person typically will have a Western name. So, you know, if their name is hard to say, they know they kind of know that for for business purposes and travel purposes, it’s just easier to have to like be like, “Yes, I also go by Mike, or I go by Emerald, or I go by, you know, Samantha.” And so, um, but the problem is, you know, it’s not your native thing. So if it’s like if I tried to pick a Chinese name right now, I I might pick something that’s really weird or off. Like it doesn’t sound quite right. And so you see these things where Chinese people name their baby like Rolex, uh would be like their Western name. It’s like, “No, no, no, you shouldn’t have picked that one. Like, you know, that’s kind of a strange name.” If you were trying to have like a easy Western name, you actually like backfired. So what this woman’s services, she you can go to specialname.cn and the site is hilarious. If you go to the website, it’s like Are you on the website? It’s it’s like Yeah, I’m looking at it now. Look at the counter. It says, “The baby we named,” and it says a million, they they’ve named over a billion babies, but the English is is off. Yeah, it well, the the actual site’s in Chinese. I think it’s a Google Translate that you’re looking at. And uh you just say boy or girl, I think you submit some information or a picture of the baby, and she just closes her eyes basically and says, “Jasmine.” And then No, so you you you pick five attributes like um nice, honest, kind, eager, keen. And I did that and it gave me the names Zachary, Caleb, or Harvey. And it says, “The famous Harveys are Harvey Firestone, Harvey Ball, and then Caleb, Caleb Carr. I don’t know who that is. Is that a famous actor? I don’t know. Uh Zachary Taylor, I guess the American president. Yeah, it’s pretty funny. And so this uh site, I thought what a what an example of niches make riches and like just solve a simple problem for people. And uh you know, this girl’s made, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars just off this website. And uh I thought that was like, How does it make money? Just through ads? A really cool, really cool side hustle for a college kid. It just make they just make money through ads? I think, yeah, I don’t know exactly. I I thought you pay her to do it, uh but maybe you’re saying you just got a name right away. I just got a name. I was doing it on my phone. So it might be ads or it might be a premium upsell. And they and they and and the logo is just this generic looking white lady. Like that’s like the spokesperson. If that’s her or not. That’s definitely not her. So let me do this. Oh yeah, I know it’s like a cartoon. Um Yeah, this is awesome. So this is this is a hilarious little side hustle that I that I loved. Um okay, let’s do uh let’s do the shitty Billy of the week. I read this story and I was blown away. This is not really this is interesting only in that it’s a train wreck. Did you see this story about this venture capitalist that came out? Just now. So there’s this guy named Michael Gogan. He used to be a partner at Sequoia, right? Like the one of the biggest venture firms ever. Is he the one who stole money from them? No, he got fired because his girlfriend came out and accused him and like sued him for or like accused him of uh of like sexual abuse, she said, you know, he’s I’ve been in a relationship with him for eight years or 10 years or something like that and he’s extremely abusive sexually to me and blah blah blah. Uh she’s a stripper that he met somewhere and then she became his girlfriend and then whatever. And uh this the suit, he he didn’t lose the suit. He, you know, she kind of like he got acquitted or whatever. Um but you know, still Sequoia was like, “you know, we decided it’s best to part ways.” So a story came out in the Daily Mail. And you know it’s good because it’s in the Daily Mail, which is like, you know, just the the the trash of the trash, but it’s the junk food. You can’t resist. And um basically, there was some wild shit about this guy. So here’s the allegations that are in the article. The article says Michael Gogan, uh he basically after he left Sequoia, he goes to Montana and he basically sets up his like estate in Montana. He owns like, I don’t know, uh 100,000 square feet of like space in of of of houses in in in in Montana. He is like the big fish there. He owns a bar, under the bar, he created this thing called the Boom Boom Room. And the Boom Boom Room is where he takes like, you know, girls that he meets and he this so this guy’s on his fourth wife. The article talks about this spreadsheet of 5,000 women that he slept with. And it’s just full of Dude, have you have you done the Wait, say that again. Say the 5,000 thing again. A spreadsheet of 5,000 women that he slept with. It’s Okay, so do the math. If you so if you if this has happened over a 20-year period, Yeah. 365 days times 20 is 7,300 divided by 5. That means he had to have sex with a different woman every 1.5 days. Basically every other day. Yeah, every day and a half. Is that crazy? What? I don’t believe that. That doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t know if it’s true. I don’t know if he did it or he didn’t. So like the Wilt Chamberlain did this once where he claimed he slept with 10,000 women and people were like, “That means you slept with two women a day.” Like this doesn’t make any sense. Um Yeah, his response by the way, he was like, “Yeah, sometimes it was three though.” Exactly. Most pimp response ever. So this guy, this guy’s wild. So what so he basically um he there’s tons of so what happened was he had created this like security company to cover his tracks and it’s like a private security company. And he hired these like ex-military people to run it for him and they were kind of like his fixers. They’re the ones who came out and exposed this whole thing and are now suing him for $800 million. So they’re suing him because he basically made them do a bunch of stuff that like got them in trouble. So he’d have to pay off women that he would sleep with. Um and they would have he’d be like, “You need to do this.” Like, “Go I I’ll put money in your account, you pay her off.” And um and eventually one guy, so he had a friend who um the story is he he brings his daughters over to the friend’s house um with their babysitter, but then he leaves with the babysitter, has sex with the babysitter, and the friend is like, “Dude, what the hell are you doing? You just had sex with the babysitter in my house? Like, um this is messed up.” And he’s like, he calls him a pedophile. And he’s like, “Dude, uh like I don’t, you know, don’t don’t bring up my my flaws and like, you know, there’s a one-time thing and blah blah blah.” And the guy’s like, “No, this is messed up.” And he’s like, starts threatening the guy. He threatens the guy and says, “If you come out and say this, I’m going to like ruin you.” And um the guy’s like, “You know, F that.” He then sleeps with the guy’s wife as like, you know, part of this part of this process. So the guy gets really pissed. And he’s like, threatens to basically expose him for all the stuff that he’s doing. Um, while he’s meanwhile like an investor and all this stuff. You know, leading this professional life. The guy’s worth $5 billion by the way. So he’s he’s he’s a he’s a multi-billionaire himself. So the guy goes to his like security guy and says, “We need to kill him.” We we have this guy’s getting too, there’s too big of a risk. He threatens to bring everything down. We got to kill him and don’t and then and then there’s basically like in the article, it’s like, “Don’t like communicate anywhere except for Wicker, this like self-deleting text messaging app.” Um, and the guy goes to him and says, “Hey, hey, like talks off the ledge. No, let’s not kill this guy, whatever.” But that that was like one of the allegations. And so people have come out against this guy, but he bribes the police. And so like multiple police chiefs have like lost their job because they failed to investigate this guy because he basically bought them off. And he claimed How much do you think How much do you think you’d have to bribe a Montana cop to shut up? Like a million dollars? I mean, yeah, I think I think nine out of 10 police officers would take a million to shut up. Oh, in my deep experience bribing cops. I mean, I have no idea. Yeah, I think like half a million dollars would do, right? Like for a lot of these women, it’s like jewelry. Uh like he he slept with one woman and then she got the husband found out, got divorced and then he paid for her, he bought her a five-bedroom home and also paid for her side of the divorce and uh you know, that was like one of the things that he did. And so he just had this like elaborate web of, you know, crazy like this crazy sexual life layered on to crazy like payoffs and bribes and cover-ups. And then like a whole company dedicated to like this private security company, whatever that means. And then like police bribery. Like this is like a crazy ass three-part movie. And then you look at this guy and he’s just like this, you know, cookie cutter white VC looking guy. It was like such a wild story, I thought. And um, yeah, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. So I um, I read I I I I read a little bit about like odd billionaires and I’ve maybe interacted with one or two before. And does it do you have you ever met someone who’s like in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars who has like some weird shit where like like they have a a like for example, this is like public knowledge, Peter Thiel basically employed this this three lawyers, big shot lawyers and they’re and the basically when he was outed as gay by Gawker, he employed and this is a a great book by Ryan Holiday. I forget what it’s called, but he employed these three lawyers and I forget when he was outed, but something like 09 and he goes, “Um, however long it takes, your full-time job.” It’s like a decade, yeah. “Yeah, he goes, “Just wait for Gawker and those guys to screw up. And when they slip up, tell me and we’re going to pounce.” And he employed these guys the whole time. And there’s some crazy stuff about Peter Thiel. Like for example, in the book, they said that he has a black Mercedes with the engine on everywhere he goes in the world. So like that’s what it like he always he’s got a team and they they they have to have a car like at all times. And he also has land in New Zealand because he’s a little bit nervous about apocalypse. And so my question is, have you do you think you’ve ever met like a billionaire or someone like that who’s got some of these weird ass things like a like a security force who does exotic things like this? A fixer. Yeah. Um, I think so. So I worked with this guy. I’ve talked about him before. I worked with this crazy kind of like Like the Filipino guy? Yeah, in Indonesia. Um, crazy guy in Indonesia that was I talked about before. I mean, he’s like a dropout in grade school, self-made. I think he was worth $500 million, kind of like at his peak. And $500 million in Indonesia is like, you know, $10 billion here in America. And um, and you know, he he had a crazy elaborate like business, like his he him as my boss was really weird. Like he was a really insane boss. I told you, but he had a giant projector in the office, like on the wall that had everybody’s computer tracked and your productivity was like this like he bought the software from Boeing and basically used it to like show like your your little square would flash red if you weren’t being productive enough, and I don’t even know how it was like measuring that. Like just how much you were typing, I guess. I don’t know. And it was like this intimidation thing on, you know, he had four women that just managed his email. Um, like if you did good in a meeting, he would walk in the next day and just hand you keys to like a new Mercedes that’s outside. He’s like, “This is yours, drive it around.” And like, you know, he did crazy shit like that. Like I remember a meeting once where a friend of his came in from Singapore and they were basically just openly talking about like a insider trading/pump and dump scheme that they were doing, and I was like, “Whoa, that’s like crazy illegal.” And they were like, “Yeah, it’s great. We’re going to make so much money. It’s this is this is going to work. It’s going to be awesome.” You said that you said this is illegal? I didn’t say it. I was just sitting there in the room being like, in my head, I think this I’m 20 years I think I was 21 years old. Like I I didn’t know shit about shit at that point, but I knew enough to be like, “I think this is wrong what they’re talking about.” And then he would, you know, every day would after work would take everybody to the bar, or whoever his kind of like insider crew was, and two girls would be there, and those were like, you know, his escorts for the day or whatever, and like that’s just the way he did business. And he he bribed officials, and he did all kinds of stuff. He ended up in jail. He ended up dying in jail. He actually died this year. And um, you know, so it was like a pretty crazy life. Uh, and you know, I worked with this guy for only like three months, and then I left and I came back and started a startup here, but like, you know, that guy was wild. Like he lived a wild life. That’s awesome. Yeah, I’ve uh I I don’t know if I’ve had any first-hand knowledge of or if I’ve like been friends with people. Maybe I have and they just haven’t told me. But uh I do believe that like people like this guy, this Gogan guy, I don’t know, I I haven’t heard of this. I mean this is this Gogan guy is like on some Jeffrey Epstein shit, right? Like this is a modern day Jeffrey Epstein situation. Um, maybe I guess it’s not underage girls, I guess that’s that’s the difference, but like basically, you know, just like a harem of women and cover-ups and bribes and intimidation and he’s got this bunker and he’s like bribing police and like if these things are true, which you don’t know if they’re true or not, but this thing came out, it’s pretty crazy. Uh, it’s it’s a wild story. Yeah, this is crazy. I uh I didn’t know about this. I I would believe just based off what I I believe this is very this could be very true. Like this doesn’t shock me. Like knowing what I know a little bit, like and I have heard like rumors of people who I’m like second hand or third hand connected with that they’re freaks. And uh like I hear some stories about what they do to cover it up and I 100% believe this. And from Silicon Valley who are very successful, like things that I didn’t realize until I kind of got closer to I’m not inside that circle because I’m not like in that that tier, but had a couple friends in that circle and it’s like two things that are way more common than I ever would have thought. Swinging. Swinging is like super common in Silicon Valley. Dude, the swinger lifestyle. It’s weird. It’s weird. You know about this pineapple thing by the way? Tell me. So I I learned this from TikTok. I don’t know if this is real or not. But basically like this this the silent symbol for signaling to others if you’re a swinger or not, apparently is a upside down pineapple. So if you go to a house and they have a picture of a pineapple that’s upside down, it’s a wink to anybody else who’s in the lifestyle that, “Hey, we’re down.” Uh I had I had no idea. Dude, that’s crazy. Or if they’re wearing like pineapple earrings or something at a party. I got this I’ve got a girlfriend who does it and she uh and and she tells me about it and my wife and I were like I was like, “Sarah, like you know, like I’m not interested in this, just so you know. Like I don’t want to do this. This is this uh and she’s like, “Yeah, me neither, but it’s so fun to hear about.” Yeah, exactly. I’m like Uber Uber boy. I dude, I’ve got a couple friends that are into it. Down here in Austin where I live, uh these guys have this company, you know, Onnit. Um Aubrey Marcus and then he’s got this other guy named Kyle, uh who is a friend or works there. I’m not sure the relationship, but they like they mix work and play and they’re open about their how they’re they have open relationships and they talk about it. Uh Kyle Kingsbury, I think his name is. And they talk about it on the podcast, on their podcast that they they share they share relationships. Yeah, it’s I mean, you know, more power to you if it’s your thing. Uh I what I’m saying is I didn’t know how common that was or like swinging or that lifestyle, but it is very common amongst like successful Silicon Valley people. Same thing with drugs, uh like, you know, my either microdosing or normal dosing of certain drugs. Like I guess like there’s a certain level of uh party that I just never did and I never had the urge to do, um, that I think is like pretty common amongst uh amongst like this group of people and like, you know, good for them. Dude, I’ve I’m I’m such a prude. I’ve been out with like some like really powerful people who I looked up to and I saw them the whenever I’ve seen them do coke, I’m like, “Oh, I I don’t uh I don’t really like you as much as I used to like you.” Exactly. It just like it made me uncomfortable and I didn’t I didn’t feel I I didn’t like it. But uh this is crazy. and it is way more common than I than I thought living in Silicon Valley. I think what it is is like if you’re a nerd and you’re now worth a billion dollars or hundreds of millions, which is basically the same thing, and you could do anything you want, you want you want to do stuff and also if you are young and you have money, you have to up the ante consistently. So Dan Blazarian has this new book out and either in the book or in an interview about the book, he was saying how he’s like, “Man, I’ve had every woman that I could ever want. I have private fancy chefs. I drive the best cars, I fly private, I do I do the fanciest stuff. None of it makes me happy anymore because I have to go bigger and bigger and bigger in order to help my dopamine and make it work and and and now like none of it makes me happy. So I just like I’m I try to be simple now, although like it’s really hard. I I but all the items, they don’t they don’t bring me joy. Um, speaking of making me happy, I there was this thing that I saw that I thought was pretty cool. It’s not really like a business idea necessarily, but I think it’s worth a read. So let me put a link to it. Uh, where should I put the link? Um, one sec, let me grab it. Uh, basically there’s this guy, I want to give him credit because it’s a very interesting read. Um, and I’ll explain it while I’m looking for the link. So basically there’s this guy who uh Dan Lou, I think is his name. Um, How do you spell it? Dan, normal, and then L U U. And uh go to this link. So go just search uh or never mind, I’ll just slack it to you. Um, so go to this link and this guy has this post, and basically what he all he did was he’s like, “Hey, um, you know, there’s there’s all these like claims that you will hear commonly. You’ll hear them over and over and over again. And they’re referencing studies. And um they have fancy names, and then they reference studies, and then people take them as facts. And then if you ever He’s like, “Turns out, if you actually go read the study, the claim is either way weaker than what people use it as like a thing, or it’s literally the opposite.” And he gives four examples. And I loved reading this. So I I want to go through them real quick. So one is on happiness, which you just said. So we had talked about this before, which is people have this thing where they say, “There’s um there’s a link between happiness and uh and income.” And basically the the thing you’ll hear in in pop science is, “Beyond $75,000, you know, your happiness doesn’t go up beyond that amount.” So what does this mean? And it’s total bullshit. This means don’t chase money and um don’t chase money. You should you’re it’s not going to make you any happier. And so he’s like, so he goes and he’s like, so he goes and he’s like, “It’s become common knowledge that that money doesn’t make people happy. How much is enough? Um, you know, people have different things. If you Google it, if you say happiness income, it’ll say, um, household income of $75,000. After that, your day-to-day happiness doesn’t rise. Um, he goes, “This happiness uh correlate income like study was actually done multiple times, not just one time. And um and you know, the problem is like when people looked at the graph, it looks like happiness goes up, up, up, up, up, and then it flattens out. He’s like, “The problem is it’s on a log scale.” And like most people just don’t know how to read a log scale graph. A log scale graph means you’re going up by a factor of 10 every time. Sorry. So even if it’s even if it’s flattening out, that might be going from 10 to 50. It just doesn’t look like as big of a jump because it’s not like the the the increments are a log scale. So basically, if you actually look at it, uh if you actually look at the and you know, this got published in Dan Gilbert’s like book uh on uh on on behavioral, you know, economics and stuff like that. And basically, um if you actually look at the chart, the chart shows that uh if you look at it on a non-log scale, which he puts the graph here, it’s basically like the more money you have, the more your satisfaction goes up. And there is no flattening out. Um, it doesn’t go up at the same rate. So yes, it’s true that going from $0 to $30,000 to $75,000 gives you a bigger jump in happiness than going from 1 million to 2 million or 2 million to 4 million. But the happiness does keep going up. Uh your life your satisfaction does keep going up on on all the reported scales. And he’s basically like, you know, there may be some point where you stop getting returns, but we haven’t found it yet. You know, like, um, on average, people have not found that yet. So, um, you and it and actually there are things that like um that I and and if you dig in, he actually pointed out some that there’s there are some things that that uh contradict this claim. So what people used to say is, “Oh yeah, you’ll get that money and then you’ll return to what they call your set point of happiness. So you get all this money, you win the lottery. Yeah, within a few months you’re back to your set point of happiness. If you were depressed before, you’ll be depressed after. And um, and he’s like, you know, it turns out that that’s not true. Winning the lottery actually does make you happier if you look at the if you actually look at the study. So, I think that’s a great idea. It’s like, you know, if a couple of YouTubers got together, I think they could have, you know, I and I think it’s fan service, too. So I think you would just become more famous, you’d build fan love and you’d print like, I don’t know, $20 million every summer, um, running your camp. Uh, it’s a pain in the ass, but you could do that. And I I think like I went to a space camp from NASA when I was like in fifth grade or something. Did you really? The state of Texas sent every fifth grader to it. So it’s kind of amazing. What? Yeah, and they only did it once. So I was just lucky to be in that timing. Oh, I wanted to do that when I was a kid so badly. It’s an amazing thing. You go there and you get to be in a rocket ship and like you get to play commander and like do all this stuff. But I feel like for many jobs, there’s a version of that. Like I think people are fascinated with prisons. I think they’re fascinated with the police. I think they’re fascinated with the army. And like if you could create like amusement parks or simulations of that, where you get to take your pictures, you get to touch the stuff, you get to see how it works, you get to learn some things, uh people will pay for that. And I think they’re going to see more out-of-home experiences like that get built. Can we move on to the shitty Billy of the week? Yeah. Or do you want to go a different one? No, it’s good. It’s just a crazy story. I don’t even know what the point of this. I point of this one. Let’s go to a different one. Then we can do a different one. All right, let’s do a quick one. Quick idea. This I saw this and it kind of caught my eye. This guy, um, what’s his name? I’ll give him credit real quick. Somebody somebody sent this to us in the Facebook group and uh I thought it was really interesting. So it’s this a specialnames.cn. So, uh what’s the guy’s name? The guy’s name Mike Mike Benitez shared this. So specialname.cn. What is it? Basically, there’s a story that came out of this girl who paid her way through college. She basically made a few hundred thousand dollars and all she does is she names Chinese babies with American names. So so basically in China, every uh Chinese person typically will have a Western name. So, you know, if their name is hard to say, they know they kind of know that for for business purposes and travel purposes, it’s just easier to have to like be like, “Yes, I also go by Mike, or I go by Emerald, or I go by, you know, Samantha.” And so, um, but the problem is, you know, it’s not your native thing. So if it’s like if I tried to pick a Chinese name right now, I I might pick something that’s really weird or off. Like it doesn’t sound quite right. And so you see these things where Chinese people name their baby like Rolex, uh would be like their Western name. It’s like, “No, no, no, you shouldn’t have picked that one. Like, you know, that’s kind of a strange name.” If you were trying to have like a easy Western name, you actually like backfired. So what this woman’s services, she you can go to specialname.cn and the site is hilarious. If you go to the website, it’s like Are you on the website? It’s it’s like Yeah, I’m looking at it now. Look at the counter. It says, “The baby we named,” and it says a million, they they’ve named over a billion babies, but the English is is off. Yeah, it well, the the actual site’s in Chinese. I think it’s a Google Translate that you’re looking at. And uh you just say boy or girl, I think you submit some information or a picture of the baby, and she just closes her eyes basically and says, “Jasmine.” And then No, so you you you pick five attributes like um nice, honest, kind, eager, keen. And I did that and it gave me the names Zachary, Caleb, or Harvey. And it says, “The famous Harveys are Harvey Firestone, Harvey Ball, and then Caleb, Caleb Carr. I don’t know who that is. Is that a famous actor? I don’t know. Uh Zachary Taylor, I guess the American president. Yeah, it’s pretty funny. And so this uh site, I thought what a what an example of niches make riches and like just solve a simple problem for people. And uh you know, this girl’s made, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars just off this website. And uh I thought that was like, How does it make money? Just through ads? A really cool, really cool side hustle for a college kid. It just make they just make money through ads? I think, yeah, I don’t know exactly. I I thought you pay her to do it, uh but maybe you’re saying you just got a name right away. I just got a name. I was doing it on my phone. So it might be ads or it might be a premium upsell. And they and they and and the logo is just this generic looking white lady. Like that’s like the spokesperson. If that’s her or not. That’s definitely not her. So let me do this. Oh yeah, I know it’s like a cartoon. Um Yeah, this is awesome. So this is this is a hilarious little side hustle that I that I loved. Um okay, let’s do uh let’s do the shitty Billy of the week. I read this story and I was blown away. This is not really this is interesting only in that it’s a train wreck. Did you see this story about this venture capitalist that came out? Just now. So there’s this guy named Michael Gogan. He used to be a partner at Sequoia, right? Like the one of the biggest venture firms ever. Is he the one who stole money from them? No, he got fired because his girlfriend came out and accused him and like sued him for or like accused him of uh of like sexual abuse, she said, you know, he’s I’ve been in a relationship with him for eight years or 10 years or something like that and he’s extremely abusive sexually to me and blah blah blah. Uh she’s a stripper that he met somewhere and then she became his girlfriend and then whatever. And uh this the suit, he he didn’t lose the suit. He, you know, she kind of like he got acquitted or whatever. Um but you know, still Sequoia was like, “you know, we decided it’s best to part ways.” So a story came out in the Daily Mail. And you know it’s good because it’s in the Daily Mail, which is like, you know, just the the the trash of the trash, but it’s the junk food. You can’t resist. And um basically, there was some wild shit about this guy. So here’s the allegations that are in the article. The article says Michael Gogan, uh he basically after he left Sequoia, he goes to Montana and he basically sets up his like estate in Montana. He owns like, I don’t know, uh 100,000 square feet of like space in of of of houses in in in in Montana. He is like the big fish there. He owns a bar, under the bar, he created this thing called the Boom Boom Room. And the Boom Boom Room is where he takes like, you know, girls that he meets and he this so this guy’s on his fourth wife. The article talks about this spreadsheet of 5,000 women that he slept with. And it’s just full of Dude, have you have you done the Wait, say that again. Say the 5,000 thing again. A spreadsheet of 5,000 women that he slept with. It’s Okay, so do the math. If you so if you if this has happened over a 20-year period, Yeah. 365 days times 20 is 7,300 divided by 5. That means he had to have sex with a different woman every 1.5 days. Basically every other day. Yeah, every day and a half. Is that crazy? What? I don’t believe that. That doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t know if it’s true. I don’t know if he did it or he didn’t. So like the Wilt Chamberlain did this once where he claimed he slept with 10,000 women and people were like, “That means you slept with two women a day.” Like this doesn’t make any sense. Um Yeah, his response by the way, he was like, “Yeah, sometimes it was three though.” Exactly. Most pimp response ever. So this guy, this guy’s wild. So what so he basically um he there’s tons of so what happened was he had created this like security company to cover his tracks and it’s like a private security company. And he hired these like ex-military people to run it for him and they were kind of like his fixers. They’re the ones who came out and exposed this whole thing and are now suing him for $800 million. So they’re suing him because he basically made them do a bunch of stuff that like got them in trouble. So he’d have to pay off women that he would sleep with. Um and they would have he’d be like, “You need to do this.” Like, “Go I I’ll put money in your account, you pay her off.” And um and eventually one guy, so he had a friend who um the story is he he brings his daughters over to the friend’s house um with their babysitter, but then he leaves with the babysitter, has sex with the babysitter, and the friend is like, “Dude, what the hell are you doing? You just had sex with the babysitter in my house? Like, um this is messed up.” And he’s like, he calls him a pedophile. And he’s like, “Dude, uh like I don’t, you know, don’t don’t bring up my my flaws and like, you know, there’s a one-time thing and blah blah blah.” And the guy’s like, “No, this is messed up.” And he’s like, starts threatening the guy. He threatens the guy and says, “If you come out and say this, I’m going to like ruin you.” And um the guy’s like, “You know, F that.” He then sleeps with the guy’s wife as like, you know, part of this part of this process. So the guy gets really pissed. And he’s like, threatens to basically expose him for all the stuff that he’s doing. Um, while he’s meanwhile like an investor and all this stuff. You know, leading this professional life. The guy’s worth $5 billion by the way. So he’s he’s he’s a he’s a multi-billionaire himself. So the guy goes to his like security guy and says, “We need to kill him.” We we have this guy’s getting too, there’s too big of a risk. He threatens to bring everything down. We got to kill him and don’t and then and then there’s basically like in the article, it’s like, “Don’t like communicate anywhere except for Wicker, this like self-deleting text messaging app.” Um, and the guy goes to him and says, “Hey, hey, like talks off the ledge. No, let’s not kill this guy, whatever.” But that that was like one of the allegations. And so people have come out against this guy, but he bribes the police. And so like multiple police chiefs have like lost their job because they failed to investigate this guy because he basically bought them off. And he claimed How much do you think How much do you think you’d have to bribe a Montana cop to shut up? Like a million dollars? I mean, yeah, I think I think nine out of 10 police officers would take a million to shut up. Oh, in my deep experience bribing cops. I mean, I have no idea. Yeah, I think like half a million dollars would do, right? Like for a lot of these women, it’s like jewelry. Uh like he he slept with one woman and then she got the husband found out, got divorced and then he paid for her, he bought her a five-bedroom home and also paid for her side of the divorce and uh you know, that was like one of the things that he did. And so he just had this like elaborate web of, you know, crazy like this crazy sexual life layered on to crazy like payoffs and bribes and cover-ups. And then like a whole company dedicated to like this private security company, whatever that means. And then like police bribery. Like this is like a crazy ass three-part movie. And then you look at this guy and he’s just like this, you know, cookie cutter white VC looking guy. It was like such a wild story, I thought. And um, yeah, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. So I um, I read I I I I read a little bit about like odd billionaires and I’ve maybe interacted with one or two before.