Sam and Shaan discuss the unconventional business model of a strip club mogul who built an $800 million empire, while also sharing personal stories about their own experiences with private jets and the importance of finding purpose in life.
Topics: Entrepreneurship, Business Models, Private Jets, Life Purpose, Strip Clubs, Wealth Building
The Strip Club Mogul [00:00]
Sam Parr: All right, we’re live. Sean, you look nice. We’re both updating our studios. Looks like yours got done first.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, sorry to, uh, steal the show, but we switched it already, so I don’t know what I don’t know what else to do. The grand reveal would have been cooler if we both did it at the same time, but whatever.
Sam Parr: Well, that’s all right. It’s yours isn’t entirely done. Mine’s going to get Mine’s getting worked on this weekend. Dude, so basically for the listeners, we’re making our studios look nice, whatever. And it’s like totally limiting my options for like my lifestyle. Like I like I I’m now thinking about this. I’m like, oh shit, I need a bigger house so I can have like, uh, you know, a guest room as well as a podcasting room, uh, as well as like potential baby rooms. It’s it’s and like, what if you want to travel? This freaking podcast, it’s taking things over.
Shaan Puri: Not easy to be a podcaster.
Sam Parr: No. Like like, poor me. I can’t travel for two months at a time.
Shaan Puri: Or you can. Just do it in both houses.
Sam Parr: Dude, I’m thinking about like my lifestyle and like where I want to live, which I’ve talked about a lot of on here. Um, I don’t know what to do. I I don’t know where I’m going to end up. I I don’t know what I’m going to do. It’s driving me mad.
Shaan Puri: Yeah. By the way, we should do a episode that explains how we thought through when we when we do the the full studio, when the when the whole thing’s done. Like mine’s like, you know, 70% done, yours is 0% done so far. When we’re done, we should do an episode explaining, you know, how we thought about it, how we pulled it, how we did it without a big headache, all the shit we bought, how much it all cost. Uh, we should do a full breakdown as a separate like video on YouTube.
Sam Parr: All right, I’m down. Yeah, we got to and we’ll pimp out the guy who did it, Kevin. Uh, but yeah, we can do that.
Shaan Puri: Yeah.
Sam Parr: Okay, cool. Let’s jump in. Uh, what what topic you got? You want to go first?
Shaan Puri: Um, all right. I’ll start off with something interesting. I want to give an award that I’m calling the Chad Bro Chill Award to this guy named Eric Langen. Um, so listen to this guy’s story. I just randomly came across this because my uh my friend Alex showed it to me. But it’s kind of like a a true rags to riches American dream story. So, hear me out. So this guy named Eric, he’s um 21 years old and he starts dating this woman and she sees that uh her her place of work is not exactly treating her respectfully. And he says, you know, where should this woman works, I think this is an interesting business and I think if I created a business that treated my employees a little bit better, I think I could retain them better and build a better business. So, he’s 21 years old. Somehow he’s accumulated all this this these really nice baseball cards over the past 10 years of collecting. He takes them to a convention, he sells his baseball cards and he now has $44,000 in cash and he goes, I’m going to go and start my business. And what is that business? It’s a strip club. He was dating a stripper. And this guy Eric, he he takes this Well done. Well done with the story. Enjoyed that. Yeah. Yeah. So he takes this company and he like buys he has one strip club. He starts another. Eventually, he takes it public. Yes, this is a publicly traded company that owns a bunch of strip clubs and the symbol is Rick. It’s just Rick.
The $800 Million Business [03:18]
Shaan Puri: So now, at this point, it’s $800 million market cap and it’s basically a free cash flow like a a wonderful cash flow. Yeah, a wonderfully cash flowing company. It’s $800 million in market cap. Does something like 300 million in revenue and like 80 million in cash flow. And it’s kind of interesting because they basically buy mom and pop strip clubs, which is I don’t know if that’s like an oxymoron, but Just pop and pop. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, something like that. Yeah, you know, just like your just like your standard, you know, local mom and pop strip club. He buys them for one or two times revenue, puts a little operational process in there and he’s also got a crazy clientele where guys like Drake and Pitbull and all these people like rap about his strip clubs. You know, and I want to be honest, I’ve only been to one strip club in my life. I went to one strip club ever. It was in Vegas like four years ago. Have you ever been to a strip club?
Shaan Puri: Same story. I have actually a funny story with this. So we go to the uh for the first time to a strip club, I think 21 years old maybe. And um you know, I didn’t know what to expect. I I didn’t know if this was the start of a of a new hobby or if this was, you know, the start of a of a bad day. And and and so we go um you know, in Vegas, there’s the guys on the street who are like, boys, looking handsome. You guys want, you know, free limo and free drinks? And you’re like, yeah, no questions. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That sounds like a good offer. I have no further questions. We get in this limo, we’re like, hey, do we get to choose where it goes? It’s like, no. We’re dumping you off at this like place five miles away and you’re going to go into our establishment. And so we we get dropped off at this place. We’re like, oh, I guess we’re at a strip club now. Like, wow, I guess we probably should have thought that one through. We go in and it’s it’s four friends. And um my buddy, I I won’t say their names, but uh so we go in and I’ll just tell you the characters. There’s me, I’m the the the the group, uh I’m like the jester. I’m the I just I’m just there to make jokes. And I’m like, oh, this is this I’m going to thrive here. There’s going to be so much so much funny material. But I’m not the I’m not the one who’s sort of the most I’m not the most prude, I’m not the most kind of aggressive when it comes to to to to women. There’s one guy who’s like the ladies man. Everybody this guy always gets all the girls. And when we go to the strip club, we’re just sort of expecting him to take the lead. It’s like, yo, balls in your court here. You you tell us you’re the man, you tell us boys what to do. And then we have one guy who’s been in a relationship for like 95 years, just got out, uh looks like a dad and we were like, you know, okay, you just stay at the back. You you’re not going to know what to do here. You you’ve been in a relationship for 95 years. We walk in and within two minutes, we’re like, hey, where’d dad where’d the dad go? Like, he’s gone. And we see him while we were nervously just like ordering drinks at the bar, like as if that’s why we came to the strip club, was like to go get a drink at the bar. Uh and we’re using the free coupons the guy gave us off from the street. Um we’re like trying to tear them and be like, does this count two of any drink? And like we’re like, what’s the spirit technically? And like, you know, because they’re like, it’s applies to any spirits. And then we’re like, where’d he go? And then we see him holding hands with a stripper, walk into the back. And we’re like, what the? We’re like, the back? We can’t even see him anymore. We don’t know what the like, how does he know what to do back there? Uh we were all just like, you know, befuddled, but now we’re all like sort of like challenged. It’s like, okay, challenge accepted. Uh we don’t see this guy for like 45 minutes. So we let 15 minutes go by, we assume he’s going to come back. This guy’s nowhere to be found and we’re like, what is going on? What is he doing back there? And then so we kind of get nervous, we go back and so each of us picks a a a stripper and we all we each go to the back. So, ladies man goes with the, you know, some super hot stripper. Like in the same room? No, we don’t know. You just go behind this curtain. Now we don’t know I don’t know where my friend is. I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again. So, ladies man takes the hottest stripper, goes in the back. Spoiler, he ends up falling in love with her. He literally falls in love with the stripper. He’s like, dude, she’s the best. And like he’s like, but he’s like, no, it’s not about her looks. Like her heart was so pure. So he he fell in love. That’s what happened to him that night. I go back with one. And now they’ve got three kids. And I’m like, so how does this work here? I got questions. You know me, right? I I started a podcast because I got questions. So I start I’m like, how does this work? What does this do? What do I sit here? Can I sit anywhere? Like, um and I’m like, do I tell you or you tell me? Like, who’s in charge? And I’m got so many questions. She she literally asked me if I’m a cop because I have so many questions. And I’m like, no, I’m just a curious guy. So that’s my experience back there. I just used it as an interview, an unrecorded podcast basically. And then our buddy, the dad finally comes out. We’re all done. We all just like 15 minutes, $75 later, we’re like, I I don’t know what the hell just happened. I’m I spent all my money. And he comes out and we’re like, dude, what what what what happened back there? And he told us two things. So we go, we asked him two questions. We said, where did you go for so long and how did you have the confidence to do that? And the second was, why’d you pick her? Cuz she was like not she was like, you know, she was not the best looking, you know, uh in the bunch. And so he goes, oh, I just asked her for a tour. And so she gave me a tour of the whole building. He’s like, oh, we didn’t do a lap dance. No, no way. And I was like, oh, you we thought you were doing something cool and then we all got peer pressured and it turns out we were wrong. Second, we were like, why’d you pick her? He goes, oh, I didn’t know you get to choose. He goes, I thought it’s like Harry Potter, like the wand chooses the wizard. That was like the epic line. And so forever we’ve just always said that the wand chooses the wizard whenever you end up making a bad decision.
Sam Parr: That’s hilarious. I actually lied. I I I didn’t remember the first time I went to a strip club. It was in Neville Madorra. My buddy in in Texas was taking me to my Thursday 6:00 p.m. flight and he goes, let’s actually go at 2:00. I want to we let’s go out to eat. And I go, all right, cool. He goes, I got I got the perfect place in mind. And so he takes me to a strip club next to the Austin, Texas airport called the Landing Strip at 3:00 uh on a Thursday and we get there and I’m like, what uh what do we do? And I remember and he’s like, well, let’s just get lunch or something. And so I ordered like chicken fingers and fries and the lady comes up to me as I’m sitting down and like puts my like her hand on my shoulder. She’s like, hey, you need anything? And I was like, uh, yeah, like Ketchup. Some ketchup. Some ketchup would be nice. And she like is like all like defeated and brings the ketchup and and I remember texting my girlfriend at the time, now wife, and I was like, hey, Sarah, I’m at a strip club. We’re just getting lunch. Do I like tip them extra? Cuz I didn’t All I did was ate lunch and it was only $6. Like, what do we do? Um, it was the same thing, incredibly awkward situation, very uncomfortable. But I care I read I read about this company and I thought, how interesting. And this guy, his name’s Eric, he um the CEO of the company is called um what’s it called? It’s called um Rick. Uh it’s called Rick. That’s their that’s their ticker. It’s called RCI Hospitality Holdings.
Shaan Puri: The CEO is pretty present on um on social media. His his Twitter handle I think is Rick’s CEO. And um and so you know, he’s he’s pretty active. And I think the other thing that’s interesting is uh like we were going to do this for the Milk Road because strippers know a recession is coming before anybody. And so we were going to send our writer to talk about like, hey, what’s going on in the markets? I was like, oh, just go to a strip club and just ask the strippers, they’ll tell you. Like we’ll be one week ahead of the news. And he’s like, what? I was like, yeah, they know. Like the tips, they they understand like what’s going on. They know the psychology and the state the the the psyche of all men and then they they know where they’re at financially as well.
Sam Parr: Dude, well, he does his earnings call on Twitter. Uh one time he did it and the host was Liquidity, that Twitter guy. And he he does his earnings like Elon I don’t know, but Elon Musk was like at was sat through one of the earnings calls and it’s incredibly interesting. He’s also trying to they’re also coming out with a uh like a new like only fans thing called Admire Me, which is like an only fans but for their dancers. He calls them entertainers. And so like if you’re an entertainer at the strip club, you know, you can uh like create a small side hustle with your clients. And I just thought this was like I was like, well, this this is like a pretty fascinating uh pretty fascinating business. I never heard of I never in a million years thought a strip club conglomerate would be publicly traded and pretty fascinating, pretty fascinating company.
Shaan Puri: Yeah. Um all right, well, I don’t have much to add. The sort of one chooses the wizard was my the ending of my knowledge about strip clubs. So at that point, I I I retired from the game.
Sam Parr: By the way, are are you doing something for Black Friday? Like for your your with my family? No. Are you like selling discounts and stuff? What as an e-commerce owner, what’s your opinion on Black Friday?
Shaan Puri: So I I think I’m doing it wrong because everybody else is like Black Friday, Black Friday, biggest time of the year. People are sending memes in the group chat that’s like uh like, you know, the 300, the Spartans when they’re charging and they’re like, we’re ready. We’re ready for Black Friday. And for two years in a row, Black Friday has been you know, a big disappointment. And um the reason why, I think I guess like people think about Black Friday, it should be. What it should be is like basically November should be double your other sales months. So you should kind of get a 2X. With that 2X, you’re going to get have a lot of profit. So like that’s I think that’s why they call it Black Friday because you end up in the black. Um I don’t know if that’s true or not, but like yeah, that’s somebody told me that one. You just make that up? You generate a lot of your profit for the year during this kind of like this this last push of the year. This is how you go from the red to the black. And um I think it requires, you know, a large like, you know, repeat customer base. So Black Friday is basically an excuse. It’s a sort of a trick in the mind of a consumer that like it’s a license to spend when you didn’t even need to spend. And um so you get a lot of returning customers coming back. So without having to do more marketing necessarily, you’re going to get them back. But you’re also steeply discounting. Then if you’re marketing at all, like you’re you have your marketing spend, you have your discount spend. So I’m like, where where is all this profit that other people speak of? Hasn’t worked for us. We’ve had way bigger months outside of November both years. Uh this this year’s doing good, but like I don’t know. I don’t I don’t get all the fuss is about. I I like it more as a consumer than I do as an e-com store owner. Um but then again, I might just be a crappy operator and there might just be like a better way to do it. But I’m doing all the things that are like the best practice thing. You know, I’m sending an email every like 42 minutes. It’s like, you know, that’s what you got to do. You just keep spamming the hell out of everybody, discount the things like crazy and um, you know, hope and pray people show up.
Sam Parr: Do you buy stuff as a consumer for Black Friday?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I um I shop, you know, uh that brand 32 Heat, 32 Cool, the like Costco Costco performance wear brand. No, but that’s awesome. You must know these guys. Basically, there’s like a I think it’s I don’t know if they’re made by Costco or they’re just sold in Costco, but it’s called 32 degrees is the name of the brand. And so they make like, you know, like a Under Armour, Lululemon style thing, but like the cheap version. But on Black Friday, these guys have had the most ridiculous sale, like you’ll just get a shirt for $4 or $6. That’s normally like, you know, $30. It’s like 80% off. They just move they just try to move all their inventory during this part of the year. And so for the last couple years, I have dropped like $500 and bought like and un got like huge boxes arrive at my house like it’s furniture. And inside is just 32 degree stuff that I just give out to my whole family and I wear, you know, throughout the year. But uh that’s the only thing I did on Black Friday and then sometimes I’ll go scroll Amazon and see what they got.
Sam Parr: Dude, I think we need to boycott Black Friday. Black Friday is the worst. I think it’s just we are people buy, you know, George Carlin said this funny thing. He’s got this whole like skit, it’s a famous comedian on on stuff and he’s like, a house is just basically a pile of stuff with a cover on it. And you buy a second house, it’s really just so you can store more crap. You can store more stuff. I I am so anti stuff at this point in my life. I don’t want to buy more stuff and we need to get like all MFM listeners to just boycott Black Friday. I hate these this idea of buying stuff that you don’t really need that just then you got to go and pay more money. You know what’s the worst, the biggest kick in the ass is when you got to pay money to have someone come and throw away the boxes of all the stuff that you bought off Amazon. That is the worst feeling. I cannot stand that and I refuse to do it. Now I have a trash can that’s a metal trash can that I just burn it all. I hate buying more stuff. I cannot stand all this stuff that we buy on Black Friday and I refuse to do it and I think we got to get everyone to to not do it.
Shaan Puri: Do you actually burn your trash?
Sam Parr: Yeah. Yeah, I have I have videos of me doing it because Sarah Sarah like has this like funny meme that she shares with our family. It’s like, you know, no matter what happens, we can’t we’re never going to change him. But uh dude, I’m not paying money to throw away Amazon boxes. I refuse to do that. That’s crap.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I paid like $600 to have uh 1800 junk like come haul away a bunch of boxes for crap that I bought. So I I get the feeling. But um like this isn’t Vietnam. You can’t just like go burn your trash. This is not India. You can’t do that.
Sam Parr: I I think legally you can. I think you can. You’re allowed to have a little You’re allowed to have fires in your yard. Oh man. Wow. Incredible. Um I want to talk to you about uh Twitter. So Shocker. This This Twitter thing that’s playing out with Elon running Twitter is um wildly entertaining. And I guess I guess like there’s two things I want to say. The first is, you know, before when I heard about Elon Musk and how he did things, um I admired him, but there was a part of me that felt bad. It’s like, man, I’m just a lame duck compared to this guy. Like this guy is achieving the incredible. This guy is um, you know, must be just this execution machine. He must be this like strategic genius. And now that I see him running Twitter, I don’t feel so bad after all. I don’t feel the edge has been taken off a little bit. Are you from like, if we if there’s a scale and all the way to the left is AOC and all the way to the right is just total fanboy, where do you rank?
Shaan Puri: I’m more towards AOC, but it’s not like so black and white. Like uh Right. Obviously, the guy is super smart, obviously he’s super successful. Obviously he’s done some amazing things and he’s built some really amazing products. Those are I mean, inarguable. Um I find him corny and I find him to be a virtue signaler. Uh and sometimes he gets them like crossed, you know, like he gets the signals crossed. He’ll be like, you know, um you know, he’ll be like, like uh yesterday he tweeted something out like there or he like reinstated Trump and they were like, yo, why don’t you reinstate Alex Jones? Alex Jones, yeah, I saw that. And he was like, he’s like then he like wrote a poem and then they goes like, what? And then he wrote a poem about like, you know, the suffering of children, blah, blah, blah. And then they go, no, but really, like by the same logic of why you would reinstate one person, why would you not reinstate, you know, Alex Jones? You know, it went I don’t agree with him, but I’m just curious about that policy decision. And he goes, um, you know, um, my first child uh died in my arms. I felt their last heartbeat and I will never uh, you know, so I can’t I I will never allow somebody who who like used the suffering of children for profit or fame or gain in some way. Right. Um, fair sentiment. Okay, great. The very emotional sentiment, you know, that’s fine. But at the same time, constantly be talking about free speech and and like how uh, you know, it shouldn’t be one person deciding, you know, whatever. It’s like, well, that’s you now deciding, you know, where you’re drawing the line off of your random personal experience that traumatic and sad, you know, is a little bit strange, right? So like, you know, whether you disagree or agree with Alex Jones, it’s sort of irrelevant. It’s just sort of like his virtue signaling about like his like sad experience got crossed got on the crossfire with his virtue signaling about how hardcore he is about free speech. He said this himself, I’m hardcore about free speech. I’m hardcore that as long as you’re not doing something as long as you’re not like, you know, uh breaking the law with what you’re saying, then you should be allowed to do this. And so I think there’s, you know, some things there. Anyways, point is, I think he’s obviously really talented. He’s probably going to have us have success with Twitter, but um, you know, definitely has like, you know, I consider myself to be somewhat impulsive. This guy’s like impulsive to the max. And on one hand, I think there’s like a a kind of a brilliant method to his madness of what he’s doing. Like, he basically came in and just did a hardcore culture reset. He’s like, let’s just get rid of everybody who’s in charge. So day one, fired the CEO, CFO, CMO, all of them. Walked them out the door. All right, that’s day one. Leaders are shot the leaders. You know, they’re out. Next, he like basically cut like half the employees, then he cut another half after that. Um, trying to be like, yo, this is going to be hardcore work environment and like none of that soft shit anymore. And like I think ripping the bandaid off the way he did, while harsh and like, you know, not that graceful, just like doing it via an email saying like, you know, reply hardcore by 3:00 p.m. or you’re out. Um, you know, probably could have been a better better way to do it, but like nonetheless, it’s very effective and ballsy. So I like that. Yeah. I like that too. Along with that comes cutting a bunch of the burn down. So trimming a bunch of the fat, making it a more financially healthy thing. But now I’m like, okay, what are the scenarios? Like how can this how can this play out? Like what what are the different ways that this can go and like what’s the bet? And so I kind of wrote some of these out. I’ll give you my uh my three scenarios. Okay, so I’ll do them from And I and I’ll rank if I agree with which with each of the three. I’ll I’ll rank most likely. So you you want me to go from worst to best or best to worst? Uh uh least funny to most funny. Okay, least funny to most funny. Least funny Least funny is the the mid case, the the base case, the expected case. So he makes Twitter more financially viable, right? He’s cut down costs, he um adds this, you know, $8 a month subscription that it, you know, uh let’s say he can make it more and more valuable so people opt in. It makes it a little less dependent on ad revenue. Um the initial reaction where advertisers pulled out gets like subdued a little bit, people come back to the platform, they realize, okay, he’s not, you know, evil um or going to like, you know, there’s not going to be other people impersonating their brands, so they come back. So he he resets the culture, resets the cost structure, makes it more viable, uh makes it a little more moderate, like he gets rid of a little the like the the the hardcore left lean. Um he cleans up some of the bot problem, he gets some like solid wins like, oh, you can edit your tweet, you can uh post long form videos, you can like, you know, just make search better. He he just improves the product in ways that the power users will appreciate. And the end state is, you know, he gets a kind of a one to 2X on his money, um, you know, from where it is today, like put it to 40 billion. I don’t think I don’t think this is a likely scenario. This is a very this is far too reasonable. This is the reasonable scenario. So I and and personally, you know, he gets a kind of a a win, you know, a moral victory. Uh you know, it’s net positive for the company. Twitter’s net positive, you know, moved in a positive direction and financially it wasn’t disaster. No, this is like this is like asking Picasso not to paint or John Lennon not to make music. Like it it just that that that’s just an unreasonable request. Regardless if it’s if it is in fact reasonable for most, it is incredibly unreasonable for this human being. And I’ll I’ll say this, he came in and did the hard part where he gutted the fish and he changed the culture and he’s going to recruit good talent, but he’s going to but in order to do this, he would need to replace himself as CEO within the next six months basically, and then that person stewards it from there. He did the deep cuts, he did the hardcore like shock therapy, and then somebody’s going to take it from there if this is going to happen. Um, because I don’t think he’s going to do that over a three-year span, you know, running a steady ship. Okay. Now let’s go to the generous scenario, the best case scenario, what he says he wants to do. Okay, so what he says he wants to do. Um, if you heard his like stated plan, like what his like goal is with it. I heard where he said he wants to make it like the like the town square. He wants to make it like an everything app and he wants to add video and a bunch of other things like that. Yeah, I think the everything app is the the the strategically what he’s trying to do. So what he basically looks at WeChat. And for those who don’t know, WeChat is basically WhatsApp plus YouTube plus bill pay plus Amazon plus like everything rolled into one plus Venmo. Yeah, it’s hard to it’s hard to fathom if you if you don’t use it. It’s basically like it’s the WeChat is just a connector between people and then all the things that people do, let’s say I want to send you money, I can do that. Let’s say I want to message a business, I can do that. Let’s say I want to uh pay my utility bills for the month, I can do that on WeChat. Let’s say I want to uh post a video or watch a video or something like that, I can do that. And so it we WeChat is like this super app. And there’s been a lot of people that have been waiting for when is this going to happen in the West? And it never happened. Like all these things were siloed into different apps. And there’s people who sort of are like, oh, that sucks to have eight different apps. This should just be one app that just does all the things. Everyone nods like, yeah, all in one, makes sense. But then the reality is like, go build the all-in-one app. People aren’t just going to ditch You’re not going to be as good at those things that those other apps specialize in. Plus people aren’t just going to change their habits and just ditch eight apps for one because you want them to. So, so his idea is to create the super app. Uh DAUs, you know, daily active users would need to go from like 200 million to a billion, so it becomes like a Facebook, a WhatsApp, a YouTube, it Twitter jumps to that like the big boy table. Because basically right now, Twitter is of like the eight or 10 social networks, which include Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsApp, Reddit, and a few others, it’s the least popular in terms of uh users. Correct. And um and so you know, best I would say the best case scenario, he goes for the super app, maybe some things go his way, like maybe TikTok gets banned in the US and Twitter quickly grabs short form video, although Facebook and YouTube would probably have something to say about that, but like, you know, maybe they go for that. Um, you know, he he cleans up the bot problem, he improves the ad platform, like both me and you have tried to run Twitter ads, it’s god awful compared to Facebook. And not like performance. I think it’s it’s good. I think I think it’s the system sucks. Like the actual The system does suck. I just I just bought Twitter ads yesterday and like I kept getting errors when I was trying to set it up. Uh so like the tech is bad. But a lot of people are saying that right now because 50 of the top 100 advertisers have pulled back and usage is all-time high that their CAC is five or 10 times better than it used to be six months ago. Oh wow. Okay, that’s interesting. That’s a good good But that’s not necessarily a sustainable thing or a that’s not a win for Twitter. That is a loss for Twitter. That is well, no one’s using it. Therefore they win for small advertisers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That that that’s not actually like a a win for them. Yeah, exactly. But let’s say he like gets it to be a Facebook level of ad system, um grows it, you know, he has to figure out something with short form video or something that’s more appealing like um but let’s say he does it and the end state is it’s now like culturally up there with all the other social like the big social networks, the the sort of Facebooks, YouTubes, uh TikToks of the world. It, you know, he turns the profits around because he’s got this lean leaner team that’s doing that and it’s like a 10X return and he’s the goat. Everybody’s like, God, this guy did this too. This is like, you know, the next level thing. Now he owns one of the big social platforms. He single-handedly turned that shit around and uh he did what nobody could do. He did what Jack couldn’t do, he did what Ev couldn’t do, he did what Dick Costolo couldn’t do. He did it and he did it like as his third job side hustle. This guy is the goat. This data is wrong every freaking time. Have you heard of Hubspot? Hubspot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated. Whoa, I can see the client’s whole history, calls, support tickets, emails, and here’s a task from three days ago I totally missed. Hubspot, grow better. Fairly unreasonable as well. I actually think it’s more unreasonable than the first scenario that you gave. Right? Well, it should be because it’s like this like amazing outcome. Um okay, so now what is the the bad case, the worst case scenarios? I think it’s basically like there’s this um super cycle like going downwards, like a downward cycle. It’s what it’s what a lot of what’s happening in crypto right now. One thing in crypto blew up and then people who had taken loans to invest in that thing, now their loans, they’re defaulted on their loans. So the people who lent them money, they’re out of money, they blow up. Then the people who had stored their money with that bank or exchange, now they lose their deposits. It’s just it’s just like daisy chain of bad news, uh all stemming from a lot of leverage in the system and some a few people being reckless or fraudulent. And so let’s say in this case, what it would be is like Tesla stock, I think is down 50% from last year or more. Uh he’s personally lost $100 billion dollars of personal net worth. Um Tesla stock is not the more attention he puts on Twitter, people feel like he’s taking his eye off the ball. So basically, overall economy is going down. We had enter a recession, people slow down buying these like really expensive Teslas. Um stock is crashing. Um he still has this interest payment he owes. He owes a billion dollars a year in just debt service on Twitter and I think Twitter’s net profit was less than that. So he can’t even currently, the profits from Twitter can’t even just pay the debt, let alone any profits above debt. And so uh let’s say advertisers keep pulling out on the Twitter side. Uh the initial spike from Elon’s watching Elon’s chaos goes away. Um maybe he even makes some mistakes, maybe the maybe they they fired too many of the infrastructure people. There’s the fail whale. Maybe it gets hacked because the security system is now more vulnerable as they make all these quick impulsive code changes and they fired a bunch of long-time engineers. And so you get maybe hacks, maybe leaks, DMs get leaked, maybe um uh maybe the the site’s just going down. Meanwhile, Tesla stock’s going down. Meanwhile, he owes all this debt. Um if all this starts to happen, basically like a financial sort of like cave-in occurs. And you know, Elon ends up and and he’s getting sued by ex-employees, he’s getting sued by advertisers who said, hey, our brand got damaged because you verified some fake account for $8 that then said, you know, we don’t like Jewish people or whatever, right? Like, you know, that’s so he’s getting sued on all ends and Elon ends up, you know, fat and broke, right? So that’s the like worst case scenario on that side. React to that one. So, you know, you and I both watch UFC and boxing and stuff like that. And there’s this like famous sentiment that says like basically all nearly all champions, they leave the career on their back, meaning, uh if you don’t get out on top, which only a few people have, Khabib, Mayweather, George St. Pierre, only a few people have these guys if if you don’t follow that, these those are like the best people and they all quit when they were uh winning. If you don’t leave at the top, which very few people do, you get knocked out and with a injury that devastates your life and you end up like Muhammad Ali and you can’t talk. And I think that that is the same what what what’s true in boxing and UFC is also true for business. And if we look at history, that tends to be the case of people who keep pushing and pushing and pushing, inevitably you’re going to lose at at one point. But the bigger you get, if you keep taking these really big like bet the farm type of risks, you’re just going to you’re you’re you’re you’re you’re going to lose more and more and more. And I think that there’s some examples of like a um Jeff Bezos saying like, all right, this is this this fucking worked. You know, I got to pass on the torch. I don’t think that a a guy like Elon has the ego control in order to do it. And I think that what you are saying for this final scenario is more likely to happen than the other two. I don’t think he’s going to be able to hand over the reins. And I think that potentially this will be a I don’t the the phrase isn’t career ending, but like a uh maybe like a power ending move or or something like that. Right, a fall from grace. Yeah, a fall from grace. I I think that could definitely could happen. I I I think that even, you know, you think about a guy who’s worth 100 billion or whatever he was worth and you think like, well there’s no way a person like that can blow that. And I actually think that regardless of the fortune size, you can blow it. And buying a $50 billion dollar asset that isn’t quite working wonderfully is a really good way to blow it. And I think that I think that that that that could be the case here. But I don’t think he’ll admit because he’s just like he’s he’s he’s crazy. I don’t think he can admit admit a lot of like weakness or fault. Yeah, his his core assets, Tesla and SpaceX are like high risk like assets. They’re not like um these, you know, it’s not whatever, the railroad company that’s just like steadily a steady utility company that’s just, you know, you know, print, you know, cash and growth 2% a year. Uh you know, these are these are these are themselves pretty volatile assets that the market has really pumped up. And as the market has turned, like those are going downwards for sure. Now, how fast and how hardcore and you know, if he keeps selling Tesla stock in order to keep Twitter alive, it’s going to be like Elon’s distracted, his priority is Twitter. He’s selling the stock and what else is he supposed to do? Where else is he supposed to get money in order to like fund a money burning business like Twitter. And so, um, so I think you know, there are some downside scenarios. Do I do I think he ends up broke? No, I think the guy will never be broke. Uh do I think that he goes from where he was, richest man in the world and probably considered the greatest entrepreneur in the world to two years from now, Twitter ends up as a disaster, maybe bankrupt or sold, takes a, you know, $20 billion dollar loss there, plus Tesla stock in the meantime has has lost him maybe another $100 billion dollars or more and he’s no longer the richest man in the world. He’s no longer seen as this, you know, Iron Man invincible type of dude. He’s been hit with lawsuits and me too’s and uh, you know, news leaks constantly is what I predict is going to happen in the next two years. For sure. It’s going to be he went from Golden Boy to now he’s going to be guy who can’t do anything right. It’s just going to be constant leaks and hit pieces, I think for the next two years for him. I think the Elon case study is not necessarily how smart a human being is. You know, I think of Elon before and I was like, this guy’s a genius, he’s amazing. I actually think it’s more a case study. It is he is intelligent. I think that there are prob there there’s definitely other people as smart as him. I think what this is more so a case study of the capacity to suffer. And what I am am continually shocked by is his ability to suffer for longer periods of time and to add more suffering. Just, you know, just like there’s just people are just dumping suffering into his in his in his truck. They’re just tossing it on there and it’s like, when is this truck going to break? And I’m shocked it hasn’t so far, but I believe in like there are everyone has a a limit and I’m just shocked we haven’t hit it yet. Maybe this is it. But it’s pretty amazing like if you talk to people about him, I do and and he’ll even he at one point he said, death would be a relief to me. Someone was like, are you afraid of dying? He goes, no, it’s it’ll be a relief. And I think that he just has done a a decent job of being funny and laughing in in spite of suffering. But I think that he’s lonely and I think that his life sucks. I think he I have I think he lives a generally unpleasant, unhappy, suffering life and um that’s what he’s chosen to do and there’s going to be a limit to it and I think that this could be that limit. I think that is true of of all the greats, they were most of the greats, right? They’re sort of tortured souls. Uh you know, uh so I think that’s that’s true for a lot of people. Um one other signal that I think is kind of in his favor or kind of bullish. Do you know this guy George Hotz or Hotz? Love him. We got to get this guy in the pod. This guy is one of those freaks that I love. He is a total freaking weirdo and and and just he’s he’s a punk rocker is what he is. So tell people his background and then I’m and then I don’t know if you’ve been following what he’s doing with Twitter, but I I want to tell you that. So, years ago, when Sean and I both lived in San Francisco, I think he started out of like a hacker house, didn’t he? Where like it was like just a hacker house with a bunch of like computer guys and he starts building a self-driving uh not a self-driving car, but technology that you can add to most cars and it’s called comma.ai, I believe. And he starts this self-driving car and he makes these crazy predictions and like there’s one story of like a journalist coming to see his self-driving car technology and he’s driving throughout San Francisco and they’re like, this is amazing. When did you get this to work? He’s like, oh, just this morning. Like he’s just like a cow he’s like a cowboy that builds this stuff that is incredibly illegal, uh unregulated and he just plows through and he does it anyway, raises all this money. It ends up flaring out and not working out and he quits and leaves. But he’s very outspoken, very opinionated, clearly a smart guy and a kind of a punk rocker in terms of like self-driving cars. He makes fun of all his competitors including like GE and Ford and all this stuff. And so he’s kind of a a loose cannon, but kind of in a good way in my opinion. So, two things. One, I I don’t think comma has has flamed out. Like I think it’s still going. I don’t think it it has not become the winner, but he did resign as CEO, president or whatever. Uh so the the company’s still alive. But before that, you know his backstory, I think he was the first guy to jailbreak an iPhone. Um so so I think And he jailbroke like a Tesla too, I think. He jailbroke an iPhone, then he hacked the PlayStation. So he hacked Sony, um which was pretty huge. And then um and then he was doing something with the Tesla and I remember at the time there was some story. I sorry, I don’t have this in front of me, but there was some story where Elon basically offered him a job or something like that. Yeah. So Elon offered him it is what he claims. Elon offered him $12 million minus so basically he’s saying, I’ll give you 12 million, um or let me explain it differently. He did a demo that showed he had the self-driving car technology and it wasn’t using at the time what was the kind of the core technology for the vision system, which I think was Mobileye. Mobileye was the the hot company. It’s what Tesla was using. George Hotz made a version of that without using Mobileye. And Mobileye was kind of limiting, it kind of sucked and kind of expensive. So Tesla wanted to get off it. So he says that Elon made him an offer which was, I’ll give you $12 million for this technology, minus $1 million for every month that it takes you to do the task. So like if you give it to me today, it’s 12 million. If it takes you nine months, you get 3 million. It’s a it’s a a pissing match between two uh uh people ready to take that play that game. Exactly, exactly. And uh he’s like, if you can create a driving system that replaces Mobileye uh that Tesla was using at the time, and then uh they kind of walked that back and whatever and so and they they basically discussed, you know, do you want to come work, whatever. No. So then he creates comma.ai, which was the idea was like, yo, you don’t need to buy a Tesla that has like self-driving. Like what about all these other millions and millions of cars that exist? What are they going to do? Just be left in the dust? He’s like, no, I’m going to build a retrofit system. So you could put this on a Honda Civic and install this thing on the top and this thing in the dash and then it it will be able to be self-driving, right? Like we’ll install the cameras and the and the technology so that your car can be retrofitted to be self-driving. That was the dream of that system. So he’s this hacker guy, brilliant, brilliant uh programmer. Also very, very entertaining guy. Like he’s sort of like um we’ve talked about Martin Srelli’s live streams where he like looks at stocks and finance and things like that. And then this guy George does the same thing. He’ll live stream himself, figure things out. So the other day, He’s the real deal, I think. I mean, I think that examples like that you’re the real he’s I I don’t think he’s full of it. I think he I think he’s a loose cannon, but I think he’s the real deal. Yeah, agreed. So the other day he goes live on um on on Twitter live streaming video and he’s like, let’s see how Twitter works. Sorry, I’m just going to like I’ve never looked at the Twitter source code, but like let’s and I I I don’t work there so I don’t have access, but like just right click inspect and let’s see what they’re doing. Okay, so what is this? Okay, this is the login prompt. What if I remove this? And he starts messing with it. He’s like, so how does this work? And he’s like trying to play with it. He’s just talking live while he’s doing it. What platform is this on? Uh so he was doing it on Twitter. He he streamed it live on Twitter as the video. Then he goes he he does Twitch a lot and things like that. So then he tweets out to Elon, he tweets out about the hardcore he tweets out Elon’s like hardcore email and he’s like, this is great. This is like exactly what it takes to win and like, you know, people should be jumping on this. And immediately he starts getting backlash. People are like, oh, yeah, you know, so this guy’s asking you to work twice as hard for less money and you know, or you know, without giving you extra pay, like, oh yeah, we should all just be slaves to this billionaire. And people are like ragging on him in the comments. And he goes, dude, can you imagine the excitement of getting to work on this right now? Like this is amazing. Screw it. I’ll put my money where my mouth is. Hey Elon, I’ll do a 12-week internship. Uh I’ll work for free and um I want to come help you fix Twitter. And he took it. Elon goes, sure, let’s talk. And then George goes back, you know, here comes the pissing match. He goes, my number hasn’t changed, which is just a hilarious thing to be like, you know, you call me and let’s let it be known, you have my number. That’s what he said. He goes my that’s what his reply was. He goes, great, my number hasn’t changed. And then Oh my god. And then so so he agreed to so he’s there now. So he he joined Twitter. He agreed to Elon gave him the problem. He goes, you’re going to fix Twitter search. You have 12 weeks to do it. And um so he’s publicly trying to fix Twitter search right now and he’s tweeting out every day the shit he’s doing and he agreed to work on this for just the cost of living stipend. He said, I think he said he makes uh he he’s going to make uh two two grand a week, I think is what he said. The cost of living in San Francisco. So eight grand a month. And this is a guy that like he’s a multi-millionaire, basically cannot be hired for a job. He’s a he’s like a, you know, an entrepreneur that could snap his fingers and get funding again. Well, and he’s tweeting as he goes. I just saw him tweet something and the first line was, I don’t know if I have the authority to do this, but and then he like said what he wanted to do and I was like, I’m in. You got me. That’s a beautiful first sentence. I I’m following your journey. And one of the things he did, he goes, all right, I’m trying to fix the search thing, but I need somebody to just he wanted somebody to do like just a front-end design task, which like most programmers, most real programmers aren’t good at that stuff. And so he’s like, I want it to just autocomplete. Like, you know, when I open search, he goes, for some reason, it shows me like just this random follower of mine’s name. He’s like, no, it should prompt me on the ways that I can search. Like search people, search for hashtags, search for my search within my likes. Like show me what the things I can do. He goes, don’t send me a resume, don’t tell me it can’t be done. Uh just send me a code snippet that I can plug in and it works. If you if you do that, you’re hired. That’s the interview. And so it’s wildly entertaining to watch this guy do it. And I think this is part of the bull case of well, if Elon can get like real hackers and real people who are like ready, it’s kind of like a movie when it’s like all the old gunslinger, they go to his house, he’s retired, but he agrees to dust off the old boots and get back out there. Like if he can get like Hey John, we have a final mission for you. Yeah, exactly. Like if he can get like I told you I’m retired. be like, yo, this is Oceans 11. We’re going to go do this shit. It’s like a three-month gig, just get off your ass and come do this. It’s also the the the bear case though, because that sounds great and all when you’re just getting something going. It doesn’t sound good when I have all types of private stuff in my DMs that I would not want to be public. Uh, you know, I share like intimate things, like, you know, like I’ll complain about other people or I’ll like say like, hey, how are you solving this problem? I can’t figure it out. I don’t like the fact that people are are doing things this way when there’s already 300 million users and there’s a lot of like payment information and like intimate information on this platform. So I would say it’s also a bear case. Yeah, by the way, on that, he so Elon goes, all the messaging should be encrypted. I shouldn’t if a gun was to my head, I should not be able to reveal what’s in somebody’s DMs. So we need to go end-to-end encryption. And he he told the employees that and he goes, and then I’ve same thing. I reached out to the original founder of Signal. He’s willing to help us, you know, like think through how to do this, you know, like or like help us implement this end-to-end encryption quickly. And um, same thing. He’s like, you know, basically like, oh, that guy that the guy who started Signal, he sold he was the guy from WhatsApp, right? Sold it to Facebook, um, then regretted it and was like, F this, these guys are like basically screwing with my baby. They’re they’re reducing the encryption, they’re adding in ads, they’re mining the data, whatever, quits out of principle and starts Signal, a like completely encrypted messaging tool because he like really believes in this. Um, I forget if he’s the one who founded it or he was the funder. He was maybe the main main funding source. Yeah, whatever. He was involved. He was involved. He put like 50 million in. Um, but yeah, that’s the uh, that’s another example of people, you know, getting getting kind of like world-class people involved. But Do you realize that Someone’s got to go do the work every day for like the next five years. Who who’s that who’s that person going to be? The last eight weeks or so have been kind of a gift gift from God in terms of just like drama. And I’m just chopping at the bit every morning to go and look at my Twitter app or like to go and look at the news. I’m I’m loving this, man. This is a soap opera and I’m on board. I said I was off board originally when uh Elon was doing Twitter and now like with FTX and all this other drama, I’m back. They got me back. Like this has just been awesome. It’s been a dopamine hit like every single day, you know, I’m and I’m feening. I’m waiting for that next hit every morning. I check it. And so this has been just a I’m kind of the opposite, dude. I’m going the other way. I um I can’t resist sometimes. What’s that the the is it the R Kelly thing where he’s like, my mind’s telling me no. He’s like, but my body, my body’s saying yes. And like that’s the that’s how it feels. Like my mind is like, this is all a distraction, unrelated to you. Go read a book, go outside, go build something. Go do This is the opposite of what you stand for. Go read a book. Have you ever read a book in your life? I you the other day you told me about a book you were reading and I was like, oh, that’s great. You you’re like, yeah, I’m only five pages in though. You literally were telling me about a book that you were reading and how impactful it’s been. And then the next sentence was you said that you were five pages in. Do you remember that? It was like about like yoga or some bullshit. It was like quicker the better. And now you’re telling me to get off Twitter and read a book. I didn’t know you read books. I tell other people to do it. When was the last time When was the last time you read a book from beginning to end? From beginning to end? Okay, that is that is a bit of a challenge. I read probably one book a year from beginning to end and I read probably 10 books from beginning to 35 pages in a year. That’s so funny. Yeah, I think I by the way, I think that’s the optimal way to read books. Like I most books you can get the general principle and if it if it doesn’t compel you to finish it, you should have no problem putting it down, saying I took what I I took what I needed from that and I’m ready for the next, you know, interesting little nugget or principle because these books are a lot of filler. Tell me about this this jet thing that you’ve had on here twice now. By the way, our M so we have this document, it’s called MDB Master. It just stands for million dollar brainstorm. I don’t know if you saw this. It’s across 200 pages. So we’ve Sean and I have this document that every day in the morning we like write our topics. It’s it’s it’s it’s 50,000 words now and 200 pages. That’s worth deleting. We’ve delete I’ve deleted a bunch of topics off this. Like once we’re done with that, I just delete them. It’s pretty wild uh how long this document is. But you’ve had this thing in here about jets. What what what about it? Okay, so um I forgot who was saying this, maybe Andrew Wilkinson, somebody else. Andrew. He was saying this about um empty legs. So basically private jets are obviously really expensive, really awesome. Have you ever flown private on your own dime? No. Have you ever flown private on anyone else’s dime either? I flew I flew private a a couple times. One time Andrew paid for it. How was it? It was sick. Like, yeah, like, you know, like there’s things that like maybe like um fancy socks and like that’s basically it. That’s like things that like it doesn’t matter, just buy the cheap ones. They’re just as good as the fancy ones. And then there’s things where you spend money and it actually makes a difference. And unfortunately, for all the plebs out there, flying private’s one of them. Uh I’m a pleb too, by the way. I don’t fly private. It costs too much. But flying private, it is game-changing. Yeah, when I did it, I was like, okay, this is awesome. I kind of imagined it to be similar to the strip club experience where I would constantly feel like I need to be doing something to like maximize the opportunity. Like I can just imagine myself standing up and just stretching repeatedly. Like I don’t know, am I is there caviar? I don’t even like this. Dude, I read I read a newspaper when I flew when he flew me. I read the Wall Street Journal. I’ve never read a newspaper in my life, but I picked up the newspaper and I opened it up. I opened it up and just had it and I and I like flopped it and like smacked it to like get the crease out of there. That’s what I did when I flew private and it was an amazing experience. Yeah, I feel like I would need to like pick up some new hobbies and like wear leather if I was going to be flying private. So You’re going to get into Sudoku. So he tweeted this thing about empty legs. So basically private jets, I think some really high percentage, maybe 25% or 30% of all private jet flights are completely empty. It’s just the jet relocating from one place to another in order to be ready for the next flight. And so there’s this arbitrage then of empty empty legs uh with basically like, hey, this was going to fly anyways. It’s just going to cost, you know, 40 grand to do this flight and it’s getting it’s you know, there’s no value. It’s just a burn. Could you basically give people the opportunity to hop into these empty legs? And so I found there’s this website uh or there’s there’s several, but like there are websites that will let you fly private. You don’t need to own the plane. You don’t need to sign up for some membership. It’s literally just like, hey, if this is going from here to there, if you want to go, 20 grand and it’s like it’s this is yours, you know, you you and six people can go on this thing. Um that’s kind of interesting. Have you seen Have you heard about this? No, but that’s awesome. You must know these guys. Basically, there’s like a I think it’s I don’t know if they’re made by Costco or they’re just sold in Costco, but it’s called 32 degrees is the name of the brand. And so they make like, you know, like a Under Armour, Lululemon style thing, but like the cheap version. But on Black Friday, these guys have had the most ridiculous sale, like you’ll just get a shirt for $4 or $6. That’s normally like, you know, $30. It’s like 80% off. They just move they just try to move all their inventory during this part of the year. And so for the last couple years, I have dropped like $500 and bought like and un got like huge boxes arrive at my house like it’s furniture. And inside is just 32 degree stuff that I just give out to my whole family and I wear, you know, throughout the year. But uh that’s the only thing I did on Black Friday and then sometimes I’ll go scroll Amazon and see what they got.