Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en i think that you’ve said a lot of amazing stuff for the past two years i think what you just said right there actually might be one of the most valuable rants in terms of just money that you’ve ever said i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what what’s up it’s me sean and sam the vanilla gorilla all right we have a good episode today sean just said he thought this was an amazing episode we talked about a lot of different stuff you have a list what do we talk about we talked about uh the surprisingly big business of greeting cards and e-cards uh we talked about the crazy chick-fil-a tech stack and some ideas around that and creating a consulting company around that we talked about this crazy fbi takedown where the fbi basically tricked thousands and thousands of criminals with a pretty genius app um what else you did a good bump boxes breakdown and bumps a guy who’s built a business that sells uh subscription boxes to pregnant women and and uh their their their babies and it’s like 40 million dollars a year the babies don’t buy it they they might but it’s meant for the babies right that does 40 million a year in sales and we talked about how this article that came out about rich people not paying taxes well we talked about how they actually get money to live which was kind of mind-blowing to me and we talked about one of my favorite childhood actors and childhood movies how that act young child actor has become a crypto billionaire and then i got excited saying he’s the billy of the week but that’s all to come in this episode and do me a favor go to your spotify go to your itunes there’s a button that says subscribe or follow follow if you’re on spotify subscribe itunes click that button because when you click that we go up in the charts we go in the charts we get more listeners when we get more listeners we can record more stuff please do that thank you and have a good episode well first happy birthday you are uh you’re what 31 32 32 now okay great yeah good i was feeling bad i’m 33 and you’re always like yeah we’re basically the same age we’re both 30 31. well i do it to slight you i do it as a joke because you’re only a year older than me but i want to make it clear that you’re all of the be still yeah yeah yeah and in my head i immediately stop listening to everything else you say and i just start thinking in my head [ ] i’m older than sam and then i have to be like why does that matter who cares and then i get back and i don’t even know what’s going on yeah 35 okay great i do it this will feel even worse now um my my trainer by the way he’s at a 40 41 something like that and he looks great looks like he’s 25 and anytime someone’s like oh wow i didn’t know that you know once they find out his age or whatever he’s just like um he’s like i’m living to 105 and he’s constantly watching videos of people who are like 105 but healthy or like 100 and they have like you know they’re still like madly in love with their husband or wife and he’s just constantly watching these videos these outlier examples to be like that’s me i’m going to have that life do you care about living until you’re like really old yeah well i tell everyone 1 30. i say okay great i say i’m gonna be 130 but i’m gonna i’m gonna act like a current 70 year old so like my like the 70 year olds now that’s what i’m going to be when i’m 130. okay why 130 where is that number from nice ambitious but realistic number i think that so i went out with this guy the other day and he’s a um no i’ll i’ll name drop you look out can i name drop i went out with lance armstrong i got dinner with lance dude you weren’t gonna say that you were just going to say i went out with this guy the other day yeah well yeah amazing i i i i ha the reason i’m saying that is like it come from a reputable source uh and he had this uh guy who worked at adidas and nike with them this like huge rip guy who was like he’s probably 55 or so and he was telling me that there’s a direct correlation between lean muscle mass and age so like longevity so the people who have more muscle at an older age are more likely to live longer and so that was like a realization to me so uh anyway that was uh so two for one you get to be jacked now and live forever yeah um but um wait what were we talking about oh yeah but i do but so we just did this little thing let’s get back into it i got a card an email from my aunt my aunt debbie who’s in her 50s called i forget what it was called but it was american greetings was the name of the company or the main i whenever i get like one of these things i scroll straight to the bottom and it says like the name of the brand but then it says like copyright american greeting right the like terms and conditions part yeah i’m like all right that’s the good stuff so i always like wikipedia um and it was this company it’s a greeting card company that just closed can i pause you one second that thing you just said that this podcast has like rewired my brain where that’s all i do now i’m like oh cool this thing is in my life who’s behind this how much do they make what’s the company what’s the backstory is there an epic founder behind this i was at the dentist and he’s showing me an x-ray of my teeth yesterday and instead of looking at he’s like pointing out something in my teeth he’s like oh yeah who makes that machine i’m looking at the name of the software in the top left corner it’s like vm you know vm imaging and i’m like i’m like hey can you hand me my phone real quick i need to just i need to write this down i’m gonna go look up this company i bet it makes like billions of dollars doing this x-ray software for dentists office or like he was like scraping my tooth with some tool and i was just thinking why isn’t there like better divide this is the same scraper they’ve been using since like i was 10. uh who if every dentist is buying these things these things can’t cost they have to cost a lot of money who’s what’s the company that makes these little devices and are they innovating why not you know blah blah blah so my brain has been like i have like this chip in my brain now that that has to get to the root source of every product i feel which is what you whenever i sent you a birthday card well when i see a building like a huge warehouse if that where like if it’s a massive warehouse and there’s a sign on it i always look up what’s the story of that right i always do that so yeah i was thinking like you know people are excited about ar or like when google glass came out and they’re like oh it’s great you’ll be able to read your email or you’ll be able to like see directions you know like the map will be in front of your eyes and i was like the killer app of this is i just look at somebody and it tells me who they are like i can just like you know like when you you stalk someone you see someone interesting you like try to look them up you find their instagram you see what their life’s all i think it’s gonna be amazing when we just have contacts or glasses and i could just look at you it’ll be like sampar ceo of the hustle blah blah your last two tweets next to your face floating above you you have no idea that i just have like well there’s also interrogated you there’s also practical stuff me and sarah were walking on the street the other day and sarah saw a guy with college shirt and she’s like i think we know that person but i can’t tell because all white guys with collared shirts look look the same to me there’s some practical there’s some practical implications dude when i was a kid and i would use my fake id i had a fake id and the guy was a white dude but he had like a shaved head and it was like he had clearly had black hair but if you go to the indian or the black stores with like a black color like a different a clerk of a different race they all thought that like always looks just like you so the joke was you have to go to a like a person who’s not white because they all think we look exactly the same did you ever do that when you’re a kid like you go to like you got to go to the white collar i didn’t realize that hack um but that makes perfect sense to me yeah do you think all white people look alike uh no not all white people look alike but definitely like you know john jeff and jacob you know i might mix them up from time to yeah in time same way that you know i look like you know i’m sorry to everybody you know what i mean like yeah but we were talking about american greetings american greetings and the reason i bring this up huge company and it’s just crazy that this [ ] still exists um but i guess it’s not that crazy it’s funny just to explain in simple terms they do e-cards so you can send it to somebody 20 a year yeah 20 year membership and uh they do above a billion dollars in revenue they own multiple smaller brands so they own like jackie lawson have you ever heard of jackie lawson by the way no you should google this name so jackie lawson go look at her website and uh like welcome to 1982 so just i i mean whoever’s doing the video on this you’ve got to pull up the job literally okay so that the profile photo looks like you know some bootleg carmen san diego and then it says jackie lawson and then like there’s like there’s like a mouse like a computer mouse is like like part of the n because probably like when she invented this it was like new to be like on the computer sending cards to people and uh this thing is incredibly popular people love jackie lawson cards she’s like a really well-known solder company i think to american greetings and um i ran a company for a period of time maybe a year or two it’s called birthdayalarm.com by the way i didn’t start this company but the company’s kind of remarkable i’ll break it down so um michael and xochi birch were the investors in my previous company this was their first win so michael is a programmer at an insurance company he’s like ah this is boring wants to go do a startup he comes up with this big idea to do a self-updating address book meaning like what if you had a contact list that was like dynamic so i’m in your address book if i ever move i can just change my address or my my email address or whatever and it’ll automatically update in everyone’s contact list uh you know dynamically so you have this idea of this um you build this product it’s really complicated it’s not really going anywhere but he adds one feature to the address book which is uh birthday what’s your birthday and um which is ironically the thing that doesn’t change you don’t need a dynamic address book to do that but he started sending a reminder so like a little reminder would come out like i should have got a reminder yesterday that said hey it’s sam’s birthday today wish him happy birthday and um and this was before facebook so this is actually an incredible you incredibly useful thing so people used to email him being like hey um thanks so much for that birthday reminder i would have totally forgot my aunt’s birthday you know you saved me on that one or you know i looked like husband of the year because of that birthday reminder and um so he’s like [ ] nobody likes my thing but they just like this one feature so he makes that the product so he goes he makes it birthdayalarm.com and all it does is it reminds you of your friends and family’s birthday and um immediately the the site starts to like do a little bit better but not like not gangbusters yet so he says okay well how does this product work i should be able to email all my friends and family and say hey add your birthday to my my birthday alarm calendar and um and then he does he at the time there was no term for viral marketing but he’s like i don’t have a budget to do you know i quit my job to go try to make it big in the startup world so i don’t have a marketing budget so i need one user to recruit another so here’s what i’ll do when i email all my friends and families to add their birthday to mine and they go type in june 15th then it’ll say do you want to save sean’s birthday and your calendar and they’re like oh yeah sure why not you know tit for tat he just asked for mine i’ll take his and then it says cool your birth your calendar has one birthday in it who else’s birthday do you want to know send this to your friends and family so that became the viral loop and all of a sudden he started getting tens of thousands of members still a free product but tens of thousands of users at the time to him felt like a million dollars it was like oh my god i’ve actually made something that’s growing and then he’s like all right how do i make this even better so he’s just he went all in on this virality piece he didn’t try to figure out the business model and he’s like how do i make this even more viral and so he’s like well today there’s still all these steps involved i gotta type in each person’s email address i have to figure out what to write so he starts one by one changing these pieces he’s like oh instead of you having to think what to write i’ll write it for you just copy paste this right here’s a copy button to copy this into your email a client and then he’s like could i just send this to their whole email address book and at the time nobody was really doing this and so he wrote one of the first scrapers for hotmail where he where you could just log into your hotmail and he’s like great i imported all your contacts just hit send and it’ll send to all of them and um he’s like dude this is kind of crazy like he’s like for sure hotmail is going to shut this down in 10 days but uh whatever 10 days of growth let’s do it and so immediately he wakes up next morning and there’s like 100 000 members and it just keeps growing exponentially after that and you know here we are he started that website in 2001 so 20 years later you could still do that thing in hotmail at gmail where you import your address book they never were able to like fully shut it down and so he’s like that hack that i thought would last 10 days lasted 20 years and the site started growing exponentially so now it has you know it’s had over i don’t know maybe a hundred million members at this point um add their birthdays making like five million dollars a year every single year so at that point it’s free now what happens is his buddy morgan um he who’s like a a friend of his sends them a link to uh i don’t know what it was it was either jackie lawson american greetings blue mountain one of these websites he goes dude you should do e-cards um i made a i made an e-card website you should add e-cards that could be the business model sell birthday cards right don’t just remind them of the birthday let them wish them a happy birthday turns that on immediately starts making ten thousand dollars a day or whatever numbers are not exact in fact we re-released his episodes you can go listen to the exacts but basically starts making money that business with just like pretty bare bones so it was him working on his wife working on it you know his sister-in-law did the books and there was like you know cousin did customer support it ran like that for a number of years and just had like you know outsourced people making ecards and it was making at its peak four or five million dollars a year of revenue with most of that being profit like maybe 80 profit at that time and it ran like that for a number of years he used that to self-fund his next startup a social network called bebo and then because he self-funded it with birthday alarm when he sold bibo for 850 million dollars the husband and wife duo they owned like 70 plus of the company because he had self-funded it using it this using this e-card website and so when i went to go run his idea lab that was still the cash cow that was paying for that fancy office you saw all those silicon valley engineers most of it was because birthday alarm was still cranking two million dollars a year of profit even though nobody was working on it and there had been no updates for like multiple years at that point and so then i took it and we tried to like turn it around and make it grow again and so it started to grow again um you know after we worked on it but because of that i looked into jackie lawson and american greetings and jib jab and all these different companies and this space is actually pretty big yeah well that’s why i brought this up because i knew i would get a story out of you like that there’s also one other company that somebody who listens to the podcast had told us i’ll give them a shout have you seen this app called givingly no so it’s a it’s a new age version of this same idea so giving me what they do what they make easy is that they’re like not just good looking cards but a gift card to like any service so uh like it was my trainer’s birthday i wanted to get him something i had forgotten to give him a gift and so i sent him a givingly which was like a beautiful little e-card i made on my phone in like you know five minutes and then i was able to attach like 100 door dash pass to it so it’s like oh dinner tonight’s on me is what i sent him and um and so it was like so easy to send a gift and a gift card and i was like oh this is actually kind of interesting and so i talked to the founders and their stats honestly pretty impressive people send a ton of these and the way that they grew is a little unconventional they grew as a snapchat mini app which like you kind of don’t hear anyone talking about like do you ever hear about snapchat minis no i don’t even know what that is they released this like app platform called and like you never really hear anybody talking about it and then when they showed me their numbers i’m like dude where are you getting like hundreds of thousands of users and they’re like oh snapchat like people on snapchat just send little cards back and forth to each other all the time we’re the number one mini and it’s like what and so i went and looked in the little mini store and sure enough they were like one or two uh at the time so i thought that was kind of interesting and it made me think oh i should do a deep dive into minis and see what else is actually working here that’s that’s fascinating and that’s we’ve talked about this like idea of like you need distribution first and if you have that you have everything and that’s why i like chrome plugins that’s why i like uh wordpress plugins i didn’t even know about minis yeah and you know i don’t know if you need it first there is definitely like a case for that other people will say no you need a product people love and other people say no you need a great team and like the way i think about it is this guy near ayal who i think also listens podcast he wrote this book called hooked and oh he’s a listener that’s cool i’ve i’ve read that book yeah and so he uh it’s awesome book and so he he had told me this once in my office he goes uh every business is like a three-legged stool you have growth you have engagement and you have monetization gem and he’s like uh you know when you start your startup you have none you just have like you know a stool with no legs and then you need to get your first leg on there it can be growth or it can be engagement like a sticky product that people love um he’s like a good startup will have two and if you have two you have a pretty good shot of figuring out the third the problem is there’s a whole bunch of people here with one-legged stools uh trying to go raise money and uh i thought that was so spot-on and so then when i looked at companies i thought to myself oh do they have all three legs figured out two of the three i’m okay with one of the three i’m gonna wait dude i dig it i and i completely agree with that um we have like a ton of ideas here i’m i’m really excited can i tell you something really quick though that i learned yeah so do you remember is it called pro republic what was that article that got released with rich people i think pro republic was the name it was like the billionaire taxes i didn’t read it by the way so i don’t know you don’t have to have read it but there okay so there’s something going i didn’t read it either but it’s not important because it’s the general topic of this of like how rich people pay little taxes and they do that by basically and like i don’t know how to bring this up without sounding like a total douche but when you make little money like you get access to loans that are like 1.5 percent or 1.2 or whatever it is it’s it’s based off of like a lot of times they’ll be watching people get the most free [ ] whether it’s or cheap capital or cheap anything yeah basically like when you sign up for like a big bank you get a line of credit like i think it’s 75 of your of the amount of money you have in there uh at like a one percent rate or it’s like based off the london bond exchange and i was curious about this but basically a lot of folks like elon and just most people who are wealthy or a lot of people who are wealthy they take loans and that’s what they use to live on but in my head i’m like but you still gotta pay that back so how are they doing that and i went and talked to some bankers and you know how this like do you know what the expectation is here the expectation is that you actually live on those loans forever forever yeah and your estate pays it when you die is that crazy is that a crazy thing to think about i kept thinking like but how does the bank get their money back and it’s like oh no no like we expect that it’s going to be an outstanding loan for like 50 years and we’re just going to keep loaning and loaning and loaning and then when they die they’re not trying to make their money off you the wealthy person they’re trying to take all of your millions and millions of dollars and lend it out to other people who are gonna pay higher rates so they’re like okay we need to lend money where do we get the money let’s get the money from rich people how do we get the money from rich people we offer them amazing terms okay then how do we make money well we’re going to take that money and we’re going to lend it to people who don’t have as much and we’re going to charge them more right kind of sounds screwed up when you say it but that’s the business model here i believe yeah it’s just like something that i didn’t understand i feel like if i’m wrong i might be wrong because i’m not a banker nor am i a bank nor have i thought about this stuff it’s just weird i just thought that was weird and that was totally like that was one of those things where it’s like well it’s funny why this is how the world works i was like i didn’t know that i’m just like well it’s funny because like you’re like oh um you’re the ceo how much do you make oh wow this ceo came out and said he’s taking a one dollar salary for the year what a great guy he’s like no obviously that that just means he doesn’t make his money off his salary he makes it off something else okay he’s getting stuck okay great wow he’s getting all the stock stocks going up you must pay a ton in taxes no no he he doesn’t why is that well he doesn’t sell the stock so he doesn’t realize any gain okay then how does he pay for like that jet oh because he just like len he gets a big loan or line of credit off of his stock as collateral and so wait so he lives for free off that loan yeah yeah he does he just has to pay you know one percent or two percent or three percent interest oh wow that seems pretty good okay even better let’s say he takes that money and uses it to invest now that interest payment is also tax deductible so it’s like just gets like kind of crazy how the advantages sort of stack up against each other it was just he bought real estate great now he’s gonna take this huge depreciation you know uh on on the real estate he bought and then if he sells it for a gain he’s gonna 1031 exchange it into another real estate property and pay no gains it’s pretty amazing i um when i learned this i felt like i was sitting like i went to a fancy dinner table for the first time they finally showed me like that small fork is meant for like taking crab meat out of the claw i was like oh that’s that’s for oh like well goddamn that’s the kid’s fork yeah i was like that was the little people i don’t know what that is anyway i that was like it’s just like hit me in the head i’m like duh so that was the so i had a call with a tax guy a tech strategist um i’m paying for this like tax strategist because i’m like okay where did you figure this stuff out my brother-in-law had found somebody through a thing he and he saved him a bunch of money and he was telling me about it i was like i gotta talk to this guy so i talked to him it’s got jeff and um he’s like okay you know so what are your goals here you know and i was i want to learn what the rich people do to pay less taxes and then you know decide or try to do some of those things if they apply to me and he’s like okay and i was like so walk me through here like if i make this much money in a year i’m just doing this i’m just writing this huge tax bill tax check you know every year what do they do where they don’t have to do that and he was like just kind of like amused at my line of questioning but in the end he was like super helpful he really like kind of outlined all the things and then at the end i was like all right how does attorney-client privilege work here i was like let’s just say i tell you that you know this uh this part of my house that’s my home office deduction sometimes i nap there and like also i store my dog stuff there right like this unrelated to my office um i said how honest can i be with you and he goes you can be totally honest and i recommend you do but there’s no attorney like rivers i can be subpoenaed he goes i’m not to do anything wrong because i don’t have to you’re okay great you basically just need to ask for like red light green light yellow light like now he’ll be like they’ll be like yeah so like are you active or passive on that i’m like suppose i was active what would the number be at the end and then suppose i was passive and then i will give you my answer by the end of this and he’s like reading between the lines of like oh okay i understand we haven’t even actually gotten into any of my stuff but i wanted to ask all the questions up front to him about like uh like i i’m more fascinated with how the tax thing works i don’t even have like a very complicated setup there’s not really anything i could do uh because i’m not like elon i don’t have this like complicated structure and all these shares i can borrow against in that same structure but i’m more i’m paying this guy to tell me what other rich people do and uh i’m fine with that i think that’s a great trade do you want to talk about you want to go uh i’ve got one idea so so i i i well uh uh you want to do mine first i mean i can give you a summary then we can get into it later yeah do yours okay do you know who paul singh is i never met him but i’ve heard about him and my buddy is his business partner great so paul a baby bump bump boxes bump box so yeah sorry so you’ll actually know more about this than i do so i reached out to paul because uh i don’t even know how i contacted him but paul singh is a guy who started this thing called 500 startups they’re not really around too much anymore but yeah they didn’t start it right did he start it dave mcclure yeah maybe he didn’t start it but he was like there at the beginning and so uh yeah i i don’t know if he helped start maybe it’s the right word and he was just he was a guy there um he helped make it popular and somehow he uh started traveling in an rv that was his shtick was like i he actually left san francisco before it’s cool he goes i just want to travel in an rv and years and years and years ago he started a coasting company like a web hosting company and he wouldn’t talk to me about it too much because it’s kind of private but he’s like basically i make millions of dollars a year from cash flow from and i invest a large amount into privately held companies both brick and mortar and tech startups every single year and i would travel just to meet new potential investments and at one point i met these folks who had this thing called bump box it wasn’t very popular and so it sounds like you know the people from bump box right yeah i know it’s super well oh well then you probably know a lot more than i do but let me tell you what i know so he met these folks and he bought into it um he didn’t start it and he didn’t buy it outright but i think he bought into it so for like two or three hundred thousand dollars something like that he bought a portion i don’t know how much it was but basically the whole shtick was we know uh statistically like where you should be in your pregnancy and like the the feelings that you’re gonna have and the products that you’re gonna need um and so we sell you a monthly box for fifty dollars well let me simplify that part i think it’s more like when you get pregnant especially for the first time there’s like all these new things happening inside your body outside your body you’re trying to figure stuff out and there’s like a million things that you’re supposed to buy and get to do but you don’t know what they are and even if you know what they are you don’t know which product to buy because you want to buy the one that’s safe but also effective but also whatever into a lot of reading reviews trying products and so what bumbox did which is pretty genius was they just said look we’re gonna find the best products for every phase of your pregnancy first trimester second trimester third and then post and we’re going to package it up into a subscription box so you’re just it’s just going to show up on your doorstep you don’t even have to think and worry about the stuff anymore and so paul came in and he’s like yeah they’re doing you guys are this is okay it’s pretty good i think we could think of just a tad bit bigger and we could turbo charge this and so now their vision is basically from conception to like 18 19 20 years old a mother is handling lots of different stuff and we want to be the place that she turns to for a variety of different like needs to care for her kids right and the company’s pretty interesting it’s like 40 million dollars in sales his goal is to grow the company 2x every single year and of that 40 million in revenue 60 is from subscription boxes and 30 is from this 30 to 40 is this other stuff and paul came into this business and he goes these boxes are great but let’s just make more and more and more stuff for this person so let’s figure out everything the mom needs and let’s just make it and so now 30 or 40 of their business comes from medical equipment which i don’t even know what that means whatever i don’t know what they sell so like i don’t know if they’re selling this yet we might have to take this out i don’t know if it’s out yet but like for example uh a breast pump so when you when when you’re breastfeeding you’re gonna pump in between feeds or whatever and uh insurance covers it and so you know these things are expensive devices that you need medical devices that the doctor sort of gives you that you’ll use for the first year or so of your pregnancy after birth and the other stuff they sell is they’ll figure out that you want this and they’re going to call you and one of their insurance agents are going to call you and say here’s the 50 best types of insurance companies that you should check out if you want to buy this breast pump or whatever they’re it’s all covered by insurance and then they make a cut off that lead so kind of an interesting company um that i wanted to talk about and i wanted to talk about because there’s a few things going on here first this is a guy who has made a lot of money angel investing in tech companies and he told me i never want to raise money i want to own as much as this business as i can and we can either distribute profits to ourselves and our employees or we could sell for a [ ] load of money and b i just think that it’s kind of interesting it’s not like it’s it’s out of my world that you know i don’t have kids i’m not a woman uh it’s kind of interesting what do you know about this um so leland who’s the uh the the founder and hit leona’s wife i don’t remember my name top of my head but they started this thing they’re amazing he’s been so helpful to me in e-commerce um he really knows his [ ] and just awesome guy i think they’re based in illinois or something like that and uh you know super super nice in the midwest built this company out it’s kind of a great company and i think subscription is really hard to do but when you do it it’s fantastic and i think they’ve done a pretty good job of actually actually pulling it off and the way he says that he’s like we’re not a box company we’re a mom acquisition machine and i’m like that’s absolutely right and that’s why they think bigger than just what what’s one product we could sell them okay box might be the first what’s the second what’s the third what’s the fourth because we’re just gonna acquire moms um at an insane insanely good rate and be able to offer them products that they’re going to need for you know the period of their uh of their child you know child care time and i said to paul i go you know like this is great but you are doing a lot of stuff that i think is a bad idea but it’s a great idea i mean clearly you’re making it work which is you are not just stan you’re not focusing exactly you’re you’re focusing on the mother category but you’re launching loads of different stuff and he goes yeah that’s actually our goal and the reason we’re doing that is uh our our whole unique strategy is that we’re gonna move quickly but he’s like when you think about it a hundred years ago at some board meeting the guys at p e or kellogg or whatever it is the big conglomerates nowadays they go you know like look we could start building you could start selling more soap or we could just buy all the soap and then buy all the razors and just buy everything that like you possibly use in your home and own the whole category as opposed to focusing on this one thing and even though tech focuses on this one thing let’s just do the opposite and say you know why can’t we build a family of companies and i thought that was pretty cool it broke my frame it’s a little different than what i’ve heard um or what i would have done and i think it’s neat to see something that’s the opposite of what i like i think they did focus on getting boxes core to work for a number of years right that’s not new obviously yeah so so you you buy yourself the right to try a bunch of new things by getting your core to work really really well and get to scale so i think they did that part they weren’t doing i don’t think five different things before the other thing is like this idea is so simple and but when you talk to leland you’re like oh you’re like a badass operator like he’s in the nitty-gritty he’s like oh yeah and facebook ads i can put i can copy paste this over here and if i do that it’s like it’s just a little bit better the platform doesn’t even really support it but i can do it manually this way or you know um they’ll use it you know like they’re when they’re marketing to people they’re like yeah we actually call i don’t know if you’ve ever heard of this have you heard of like ringless voicemail no this is like this marketing tactic that he’s like oh yeah we call our customers i was like don’t people hate getting calls he’s like oh it’s not a call it goes straight to voicemail i was like what is it yeah there’s a way to call somebody that goes straight to voicemail you leave a message so it’s a great way to like that’s staying in the email inbox and you’re buried under 5000 of their emails the person might get one or two voicemails a day and one of them can be from us and people like hearing from us and they hear a voice of a human being talking to them i’m like he’s just doing a thousand of those small operational wins every year and i’m like oh that’s why you win because this is a simple idea that i think nine out of ten entrepreneurs who tried this same exact idea would have failed same idea a portion of it if he’s a powerhouse he just needs some help early on i think they needed some capital and i think they met paul pretty impressed by him and i think he’s been a good kind of partner for them but you know if you if you offered them a deal now i don’t think they would take it right because he’s in a different position now than when it’s just like i mean he started the company him and his wife were like i think they were like at a conference or something like that and they were just like walking it you know like the parking lot or the water the hot dog stands like you know far away because everything’s even convenient at an event and while they were walking there they basically like had this idea they’re like screw it why don’t we do this like let’s start a business why don’t we just go for it and they just like kind of decided to do it and so you know at that point you’re really green you don’t know anything and then now he knows obviously a lot because he’s been doing this for i don’t know whatever seven years or something have you heard of i’m making a quick pivot have you heard of this thing called the anti-galloway index i don’t know if it’s a real thing i know that a lot of people basically make fun of scott galloway for being absolutely wrong about all his investment advice and predictions so there’s this guy someone turned it into an actual festival no no no um so there’s this guy named scott galloway scott galloway i’ve had lunch with him he’s been nothing but nice to me but a lot of people dislike him because he makes some crazy statements he’s um they tease him for being real woke he makes these predictions where he puts like the my the winners and losers of each year and he makes these really bold predictions yeah and a lot of people attack and a lot of people in general make fun of them because his predictions i mean i’m sure some of them are right but like a lot of them are wrong like really wrong massively wrong like one time he said that macy’s is gonna crush amazon and that’s just an example and some who i love made a thing called the and if you so basically if you would have done the opposite of everything he said since 2019 uh tech companies that professor galloway has predicted would fail have outperformed the s p 500 by a whopping 61 percent no no they’ve outperformed as you’ve heard and have the return itself is 61 percent sorry you know during the time and you know even if you it says even if you exclude tesla which was one of his big bets that he said was fail and it took off and said even without that one still 23 percent uh return that’s crazy isn’t it this is hilarious who made this let’s give him a shot i don’t know okay that’s hilarious this is cool uh yeah let’s so okay here’s the idea by the way which is um is there i think there is there’s some new products that are coming out that let anybody create a basket of stocks that’s like like for example i think there’s a company called doji that’s doing this doji and what they do is uh you can go cr i can go create the sean index and it’s five stocks that i’m investing in and you can actually put your money into my index and buy it buy those stocks and then it’ll show over time how my index is performed um and i can make the tech index and i can make my like high-risk high-reward index or whatever that’s my understanding i haven’t used the product but my understanding is it’s kind of like that which i think is an awesome idea by the way what do you think of that idea yeah i mean why can’t you do that on um i i’ve mentioned him before i think it’s called bull bull something there’s that one uh there’s a one israeli robin hood uh competitor and they’ve done this it’s called copy trader and you can create weeble is that what it is um and you could do this on that platform i think it’s sick i think it’s awesome yeah it seems really cool i don’t know if i get some incentive by like sharing my basket but that would be like a really cool model where essentially i get a small cut of the assets that are invested into it if we perform or something like that and and then you can see like who’s right who’s wrong and not just people who cherry pick oh i invested in this one thing and it’s done great but they don’t tell you about the five losers they had here it’s like all on the record what you what you picked and then you know you can see like the gallow index uh i think it’s amazing so you want to talk about some of your ideas uh yeah sure uh which one do you want to do so uh have you heard about this phantom secure thing i thought this was pretty sweet no so um okay so there was a story the other day about the fbi had this huge crackdown on criminals and i was like okay that’s interesting tell me about it and so i was reading it and in there they were talking about this um the story okay so there was this app called phantom secure and phantom secure was it was marketed basically as a as an app that you can use if you don’t want you know anybody to see what you’re writing here right so obviously criminals are like hey that’s interesting i’d rather right there than on gmail right where my stuff is stored on a server somewhere and i can get you know those those records can get subpoenaed or whatever and so phantom secure at its peak had 20 000 users um it would make 80 million off those 20 000 users so just like math because you would pay to use it right because for you you’re like this is a business tool for me if i’m a criminal uh i need secure messaging i’ll pay for this and so they were making four thousand dollars per user and just for like comparison whatsapp makes like two dollars per user so you know four thousand dollars per user was it’s like an enterprise product for criminals but why were they paying for that versus like the other things like telegram or whatever it is because this was even more secure what you were getting here is you’re not just getting an app you’re getting a phone that has been wiped all the uh all the other apps are gone there’s only a secure messaging app on the phone that secure messaging app will self-destruct under certain conditions if you’re like you know arrested or you trigger it or whatever somebody misses that mess up the password three times so it’s a like it’s a burner device designed for criminal communications cto gets arrested um the only way you could even get into the app was through referral right so so this thing existed they arrested the guy and criminals were like oh [ ] we don’t have this app anymore so the fbi these i don’t know the story is like these two detectors were out to lunch one day and they’re like why don’t we create another phantom secure but we own the thing we own the bag channel so they created this app called anon like anonymous and they put it on 12 000 phones it took and they let it be out there for 18 months for criminals to use and start to trust and refer other criminals onto it and the whole time every message is going to the fbi secure servers but they just waited they just let the thing spread like a virus all throughout the criminal organizations and then they just took everybody down and i was like that is a badass story how did you find that props i don’t know i saw this story and i just clicked it it’s amazing so do you think okay so i think that i actually think this is amazing idea by the way it sucks that people were using it that way but i i think it’s an amazing idea kind of like silk road is like an amazing idea where it’s like yeah like it’s cool to create like a marketplace where you can sell anything but it’s kind of shitty like i don’t want to support anything where like right now who are the people that want a marketplace that’ll sell anything even different stuff than i can sell on ebay oh right you know drug dealers in it like you know assassins it’s like weapons like i’m not like in favor of actually everything you know i’m not actually a true libertarian because i do think that like some stuff should be illegal right right um but i am incredibly bullish on things like what’s it called the so there’s duckduckgo do you see duckduckgo they just took took a bunch of funding i didn’t see that no yeah they sold 100 million dollars worth of um secondary shares and they’re doing over 100 million in revenue right and then also do you know proton is it called protonmail right the the laughing so the funny thing is all these ideas i remember hearing about like duckduckgo six years ago i remember reading about it being like oh that’s kind of weird like i thought it was like huge does anyone care like do people really care oh no it doesn’t seem like they care move on protonmail signal all these apps and then they were right their core insight which is that people are gonna care about privacy people are gonna care about not being tracked by big tech companies not being advertised to and they’re going to care about not having their all their messages stored forever in a way that could get leaked or hacked and uh you know you get cancelled or you get your business secrets you know outed like sony did right and so all those ended up being true and at the time and for years they looked like non-winners people weren’t really using them at the time i totally agree i thought it was stupid i’m like doctor go what are you talking about now i uh it’s my it’s my it’s what i use you use that as your default uh uh i use it often and i’m starting to use that as default yeah and um do you use brave because brave is the new one that i think fits into this category break brown no i haven’t yet because switching from chrome is shockingly challenging right but switching from anything switching from mail messaging they’re all they’re all google’s a bit easier is it why like switching my search thing yeah oh i mean i could probably get good results on bing or google i mean i i i i’m just really trying to go to the wikipedia or quora or facebook or twitter right i’m pretty i’m pretty sure that uh private browsing basically you know like a brave brave or a brave like company five years from now we’re gonna look at it and it’s gonna be just like duckduckgo or signal um in that like it just takes over slowly but surely i agree and i think that ten years from now we’re gonna say like i can’t believe you used to use x y and z and you would just do that like that’s shocking to me right you used to just give up your location to to anybody to be advertised to right you used to like alexa right you used to just have like a hot mic on in your house all the time right so those are going to seem like strange strangers the other day if you didn’t listen we had this guy named mike maples on and he was kind of a genius and he was he talked about inflections and he’s like what i i invest in early stage and it’s pretty impossible to predict what’s going to be big so i try to use some frameworks and i just basically think like you know what interesting things what interesting inflections are going to happen in 10 years that’s going to make x y and z possible but it’s not possible right now and i’m going to try and get into it so like for example uh uber what made it possible was everyone started having really great phones that had gps’s in it without those gps’s it would have been very challenging to do this right and one of those inflections that i believe to be true and i’m trying to put my money where my mouth is and invest stuff like it is this privacy thing i believe that that i believe that to be true i believe that’s going to be a big thing coming up i don’t know who’s going to win or what the uh what the end result will look like but i believe right right you know what to look for and you know what’s going to look strange now right we talked about guardian that app on your phone that like it’s like a auto vpn for for your mobile apps brave browser i think fits into that you know when mike maples was on he said something really fast that i thought was actually super insightful that we didn’t really go into he goes he goes every like kind of era of tech um the old valuable thing becomes like completely commoditized and there becomes a new valuable thing so what does that mean so he goes you know back when it was like at first you were selling pcs and all the money to be made was in the hardware and then you had like microsoft and others basically come up and they’re like cool ibm you be the hardware we’re gonna be the software and then like all the money shifted from being made into hardware to the hardware became completely commoditized and all the money was made in software applications and then it was like oh software applications are you know like where all the money’s made and then people started making services like google and facebook it’s like wait it’s a free software application so then how do you make money it’s like because data data’s the valuable thing you don’t realize that right microsoft doesn’t realize that they’re going to charge you for the software we’re going to give away free software but we’re going to make all the money on the data and it’s like okay great and the shift that’s happening now is that data is the thing that makes money we’re gonna make our data open open source we’re gonna make our blockchain open anybody can build on top of it and uh we’re gonna go open data so then where’s all the money to be made and then you have like kind of like a new answer that comes after that and so i thought that was like such a spot-on observation and it’s like that’s how you observe that’s how the next you know 100 billion 500 billion dollar company looks nothing like the last one if you’re just looking to match what’s the next microsoft you’re never going to think it’s facebook this college social network that’s free right you’re never gonna think it’s google the search engine that’s free you’re gonna think it’s supposed to look more like more like microsoft this like enterprise paid software thing but no it keeps switching because they they react to it in that way and so like that’s why you know i got kind of made fun of when i was talking about bitcloud but big cloud i think is an example of this where they took the most valuable part of facebook and twitter which is the social graph and the data that’s uh that’s underneath it and they were like nope that’s going to be freely available anybody can take our data you can make a better version of big cloud you can like you can make a new skin make a new client you can make a fork off this the data is all open open chain which facebook would never give you access to their database that shows you every person their photos and their friends you can never get access like that it’s their most prized possession and big cloud basically says that’s now free instead we’re going to make our money on these crater coins right a different method i think that you’ve said a lot of think this little rant right here might be the most like not valuable in the sense of like whenever you talk about like fluffy [ ] that’s useful of like i need to have confidence yeah like that is useful i call it fluffy but it’s incredibly useful i think what you just said right there that you’ve ever said i think that um i think that i do not have the ability to build pretty much any of the things that you’re discussing i don’t you might have the ability but i certainly don’t i don’t think you do either but i think that if you are listening to this and you think you have the ability to do some of this some of this stuff i think like there you we’ve very clearly just said a thesis of what like the world’s gonna be like in 10 years and i would bet my own personal money that that actually is going to be true and i think it’s going to be um not just true little but like true a significant amount right and there’s not just one trend happening at once right like i remember talking to alex to the founder of calm and he just believed that like mindfulness and being and you know calm and meditation was going to become a bigger thing and there was multiple years where it was not getting it was not growing very fast because it wasn’t a thing and then sure enough people started to feel really fatigued with technology they started to feel really busy and constantly on and the mobile phone was too much and then wow there’s this app that like is actually designed not for me to constantly use it and check it keep checking the notifications over and over and over again this app is to calm me down and mindfulness and mental health became a and it’s like yeah mental health became a thing and he was prepared he was ready with a solution for that that he had been baking for years yeah so i i think it’s bullish or bullish i think it’s amazing i think it’s gonna be a thing you want to do a couple more you want to do this chick-fil-a thing so i read this i read this blog post this article that the chick-fil-a tech team put out and um if i’m not the biggest chick-fil-a customer i’m top five easily in the country so uh you know so anything chick-fil-a i’m gonna read and what they were talking about was like chick-fil-a using ai machine learning blah blah and i was like oh let me see what this is some [ ] and i started reading it it was actually pretty interesting first of all 90 of it was just over my head but i thought it was pretty fascinating what they were saying well first two things they kind of like they put their stake in the ground which i appreciate they go chick-fil-a is you know a restaurant that’s sort of different than others we’re only open six days a week but we do more sales than people that are open seven days a week i was like baller like strive to be chick-fil-a you know like i want to be the chick-fil-a i want to work less and make more uh than somebody who’s working more and the you know the other thing i thought about was like a lot of people hate chick-fil-a because they’re like kind of like overly christian and like have like like anti-gay marriage and stuff like that um and i’m like oh that sucks but like this chicken is so good i’m gonna eat here you know like the chicken wins and then what i would always say it’s like i can like r kelly’s voice but not like him like i can admit that i believe i could fly is like a banger and also say he’s a horrible human being also you’re not invited to my daughter’s birthday party yeah like i could do hope it is possible to do both and so with chick-fil-a it’s like i want to stuff my mouth with chicken and then be like you guys you guys are wrong you know like that’s how i want to be so anyways i’m i’m like you want to be like chick-fil-a a product so good that you can actually be batshit crazy or even offensive and still the person who disagrees with you they need your product it’s that good it’s must-have so then they were talking about their tech and they were like well our stores when we designed them we thought they were only going to handle like let’s say just for simplicity say 100 orders 100 customers a day or whatever but the actual usage the demand is so high for chick-fil-a that we get three times more output than the store was designed for and he’s like so how do we do that right once you design the store it’s kind of it’s already built you can’t really go back and change it so we’ve had to use technology to get 3x the output that the thing was designed it goes so the first thing we tried to do was can we like predict demand better right so if you want to pump orders out faster instead of waiting until after the order happens i should i should just say hey there’s always a lunch rush at noon so i’m going to throw a bunch of fries in and i’m just gonna know that i get this much demand he goes but the problem is there’s too many variables you know a soccer game ends nearby you get a rush of customers the weather changes and that causes a dip in customers um you know there’s too much traffic on the highway that’s caused the dip so it’s too unpredictable you can’t just say fridays at noon are always gonna have this much demand um too many external variables but he goes so what we did do instead was we put like hundreds of sensors inside of a store so that in real time i’m basically taking the you know like the order as the person’s typing it into the to the machine and that’s that’s uh being matched with a sensor that tells us how active the fry machine is and then it gives a signal to the worker to basically like hey dude put more fries in there’s going to be more demand or whatever right like they’re taking all these signals and how many people are in the drive-through times this times that and basically making predictions of what do they need to make so that they can get that extra 20 of orders done per hour for throughput and so i thought this was kind of interesting and i don’t even fully understand the model and i’m kind of like i’m kind of like um what’s like it’s not like mansplaining i’m like dumbsplaining the thing i just said is not actually what they do but it’s the essence of what they do uh which is they take a whole they have a hundred hundred like sort of smart devices like what this whole podcast is is we just said like they just it just it just bump boxes all they do is they just sell [ ] that like i mean need that’s all right they’re not like expert at facebook ads or experts at like deal making for like supply chain stuff i mean they just do that right so so the point is there’s like 100 smart devices in the chick-fil-a that are feeding into a machine learning algorithm to put something out there so that a front-line worker who makes i don’t know 16 an hour is able to be more effective and they’re able to get more source more sales per square foot and so i started thinking like first of all i had no idea that like kind of old-school companies like chick-fil-a are that deep into like adding technology into their stores and their services and it made me think two for two ideas the first is those people should spin the engineers working on that should spin out of chick-fil-a and then go offer this as a service to every other restaurant is basically like hey chick-fil-a spent 50 million dollars over the last five years developing the technology to make their store smarter um so we generalized it and it’s a product for you right that’s my my old export framework they should export this idea from chick-fil-a and make it available to any any restaurant chain so that’s like the first idea the second idea is what are the companies that are like mckinsey or like a consulting company because i assume chick-fil-a when they go out in the job market they’re trying to hire machine learning and ai engineers i bet they’re finding it pretty hard to compete with like google and facebook open ai and all these other companies like what what great engineer is going to work for chick-fil-a right like i think you’d be surprised um you know who who crushed it with um tech stuff or relatively speaking was walmart um walmart had this amazing thing called the walmart innovation lab in silicon valley yep it was pretty sick and i went to um i was reading the other day about the most beloved brands amongst young people and it’s like uh target it’s like vans starbucks one other one and like the number one most loved brand is chick-fil-a right so fair enough graduate is going to work for chick-fil-a and they’re cutting against the grain but i think most people are going to go towards more traditional brands which really told me the way most companies are going to solve this is not by having as much in-house tech talent as consultants that basically take good tech talent but like hyper hyper charge them to get them to go faster and so i’m curious i bet this exists but i’m curious who’s building like a mckenzie type of company like a badass consulting company that is only tech consulting it’s hardcore engineer it’s engineering specifically around like the new age stuff of machine learning and ai and i think that you could build a new mackenzie deloitte pwc that is basically when your company needs tech when your company needs tech answers you basically hire this high price consulting firm that comes in and these guys are not suits that are great talkers these are and make great pitch decks these are engineers who come in and they actually build and they teach your team how to build and they build themselves i know that mentor or all these guys offer that you think they do offer it but i think their brand is not branded as this and i think there’s an opportunity to come in and say we dress differently we talk differently we don’t even do we don’t have these 10 other offerings that mckinsey has we are actually the best if you really want to hire the best when it comes to engineering you know all of our guys are straight out of facebook google stanford harvard uh that’s our crew and these everybody’s got a computer science degree you know this is our ceo look he’s a nerd he’s got cheeto dust on his shirt like that’s who you’re dealing with here um whereas today i know that mckinsey and others are like offering offering these as part of their services and in addition to like tax planning and like 10 other things that they’re gonna do you know like financial audits and like other [ ] so i think there’s an opportunity to create like a big four type of consulting company if you just went all in on engineers i’m on i’m on board i think it’s cool i i think that any engineer who’s smart though would never want to start this business because that would be hard as but i do think that um there’s so many cool things that started as agencies that eventually they create their own software and it becomes badass so for example i do think it would be cool to do this for five ten years and then eventually just make the software and you could become it would be a really easy way or not easy straightforward way to have a bootstrap software company so have you ever heard of consensus no what is it so consensus is a uh it’s it’s a tr it’s a version of this um it’s in the crypto space so it was started by this guy joe lubin who was like one of the first kind of like six guys backing uh ethereum so he was like he was like ethereum pre-launch i think he was one of the main funding sources essentially he came from the finance world and uh he believed in ethereum and so he he’s known as one of the co-founders of ethereum guy basically became a billionaire off of ethereum takes the ability he takes that he basically spins off ethereum launches and instead of sticking with the ethereum foundation he creates consensus consensus is like we have an office in new york la shanghai whatever right like tokyo whatever they like kind of a traditional consulting model and um but they weren’t just doing consulting but what they do is they they had like in-house projects so for example metamask which is like the most popular ethereum wallet i think that’s built into a browser uh was like either incubated there or they like kind of like found the guy who built it and brought him into consensus and that was one of their projects um but they basically they make like they’ll go to like mastercard or visa and be like you guys keep hearing about blockchain right don’t you need like just a group of blockchain like specialists who can come and teach your company how how you should be using blockchains and we’ll consult with you that will build projects for you and like we’ll be kind of this like hybrid like agency incubator consulting company type of thing and they do like i think they said they forecasted like 60 million of revenue in 2021. um now i should say i personally think consensus is kind of a shitty company they hired like a thousand people uh i don’t think they had like the business fundamentals to support any of that um you know so so i don’t think consensus itself is gonna be that successful but that’s an example of somebody who said cool all of the fortune 500 is interest is curious and interested in this new age technology we can brand ourselves as the like de facto group of if you’re a big fortune 500 come talk to us and we’re about blockchain this this consensus company’s [ ] nuts started just recently right oh no 2014. yeah it started right after ethereum they do did this guy joseph lubin’s help create ethereum yeah like i said he he was basically one of the big kind of like financial backers early on and kind of helped when they were pre-launched he was involved when there was like you know group of seven or eight people that were helping build it and they each had a different role this [ ] is creating in such a more short time is crazy like do you know that one guy um okay so what was that disney movie called like the secret service kid or uh the first kid you remember first kid okay yeah i don’t know where you’re going okay you remember that movie remember the kid actor uh i don’t remember mike he was also in the movie um mighty ducks oh which one was he in mighty dex um i don’t actually know what he was in my what the name was but his name’s brock pierce okay do you know who brock pierce is he’s also in sinbad yeah well no sinbad was the uh the the lead secretary security guard first kid okay remember i remember this movie i love this movie yeah it’s great right okay this guy’s name is brock pierce he’s a bitcoin billionaire now what yeah dude google brock pierce so he was a kid in mighty ducks he plays young gordon bombay so he’s not one of the the kids he’s he’s the flashback of gordon bombay as a kid yeah but he was like a well-known actor like he was in um first kid was a thing he was in little big league he just did all like the 90s like kid movies yeah every movie everyone if you if you are born in um in the 80s you recognize who this kid is if you’re 31 like me and sam then you uh you recognize who this guy dude google him he’s a bit he was worth like a billion dollars hilarious you’ll recognize him he’s got he’s a bitcoin crypto guy he wears that stupid hat he wears a stupid hat now that’s just google i go to images go get brock pierce oh okay yeah i’ve seen him is that yeah he’s a stupid hat leather vest guy like that’s what he wears he goes to puerto rico dude that guy is a is a billionaire now because he was in on crypto in like uh 12 13 14. he’s like he’s okay i need to i need all those royalties from the first kid we’re putting it into eth we’ll put it in the east crown cell let’s do this it’s just the amount of wealth that this is has created and so quickly it’s just crazy um it’s just it’s fun it’s such a fun story but brock the [ ] first kid gordon bombay when he was a kid whatever the guy’s name was he’s a bitcoin billionaire billy of the week that’s it two of my favorite things two of my favorite things in my life were mighty ducks and bitcoin and uh this guy’s involved with both of them now i don’t know but on i read his wikipedia the other day he’s got like some shady [ ] going on where i mean obviously you kind of look at him he kind of screams shady but he like his partner was like raping kids i mean it was pretty [ ] up and like if your partner’s doing that i’m not saying you’re guilty but i’m saying like you probably like are involved like yeah like where there’s smoke there’s fire type of thing it’s kind of [ ] weird to me and uh so there’s like a this guy’s got a lot of this guy’s going to be like the modern day mcafee you know like yeah he’s just max v he’s like he became a billionaire and then also like uh like did some crazy [ ] in uh botswana or where the [ ] he went that’s what this guy’s gonna do but anyway brock pierce crazy right that’s crazy um okay by the way i also have this a little calculator in excel that i should publish which is will the winklevox get the winklevoss twins get the last laugh which is what does the price of bitcoin need to be for them to end up wealthier than mark zuckerberg for taking and taking their idea and making facebook and uh and then i thought about it i was like i wonder if zuck just owned some bitcoin as a hedge to be like you’ll never you’ll never pass me but i don’t think he’s got that petty streak i’m thinking about selling my facebook stock because i think like i’ve totally done 180 i think facebook’s whack as [ ] now but uh why it’s just lame like who uses that now i mean twitter’s just kicking it’s just whack and instagram i think is even stupid now i love how you’re like who uses that like a billion people could raise their hand and be like me every day multiple times a day i just think that um it’s just lame i think tic toc is so much better and more positive i like it more um but i think that um zuck is someone i would never bet like i just think that he’s just the greatest in terms of did you see the video of him spear hunting recently no what is he doing oh dude you gotta google this uh google mark zuckerberg spear and there’s this video so he like went hunting or whatever he went on a hunting trip i think that might be separate then he’s like at this little like kind of like a throwing range and there’s like a giant target and then you see mark zuckerberg in slo-mo running up at it with a spear and then launching the spear and getting a bullseye in the target and it’s just like it’s everything you would expect out of a zuckerberg video which is like you know two parts awkward robotic one part like sort of fearsome and weird at the same time i’m yeah i’m looking at it now i mean this is just yeah wow he got it by the way you said tick tock you should um follow this tic-tac account it’s amazing it’s called vitalik doing things so vitalik who’s the co-founder of ethereum he’s also like zuck like hilariously awkward i really love the guy i think he’s like when he talks yeah he might have like kind of an awkward way of talking but i love his thoughts i love his brain basically he seems like a very genuine guy um he doesn’t just like shill ethereum and like crypto and say it’s the best thing ever and all that like he’s just like way more reasonable and clearly like mission driven i’m looking at it now his story is kind of amazing by the way like what’s he like like an adopted russian kid or something do you do you know how this guy like got started in crypto no he’s 18 years old he like discovers crypto he starts by just he agrees to write free article or write articles for bitcoin magazine back when bitcoin was like super underground at the time and you know bitcoin magazine paid him 3.50 per article and he’s like writing all about bitcoin and like all the cool things you’re going to be able to do with cryptocurrencies he’s just like a kid and he used to like go to different crypto projects and meet them and be like hey i’d love to like help or like intern or like kind of like write about you guys and he started just getting known as kind of like this little blogger boy and then like little blogger boy goes on to like he helped write the white paper for one idea uh called colored coins that was like gonna be for this other project and then eventually decides like you know what i have all these ideas about how i think crypto could change the world like i’m just going to make it myself i’m going to make ethereum and so he invents ethereum at like age 18 or 19 and like is the youngest crypto billionaire in the world um since where’s the name come from russia what’s that mean oh no oh i don’t know why you named it ethereum um ether is like kind of like it’s sort of like i don’t know if you know what ether is it’s sort of like this um it’s like out of the ether it’s like this like it’s like the substance of the war it’s basically i don’t know how you describe ether really it’s like a it’s like matter it’s like it’s like a word like matter uh in the universe and so i don’t know why he called it ether i think it was like i don’t know i don’t know the backstory i should really speculate well you should have figured that out i thought you’re like betting your life savings on this um i saw i took one look at this guy and i was like i’m gonna hitch my wagon to this nerd this this guy’s taking me to the top i think that’s a good i think that’s a good bet to be honest but the tick tock channel vitalik doing things is amazing comedy um because he’s just a very unintentionally comedic guy dan posted it so he goes i immediately realized that i liked it better than all the other alternatives that i’d seen i suppose it was fact that it sounded nice and it had the word ether referring to the hypothetical invisible medium that permeates the universe and allows light to travel right yeah that’s the guy you want to bet on all right i think that’s the show right yeah that’s it what i want to i put my all in it like no days off on the road let’s travel never looking back