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Kind: captions Language: en when I saw you went and did the watch site hodinki uh first of all Sean have you ever read that like when I when I heard I was like a Blog I like watches I have Rolexes as like a Blog for luxury watches what the hell is this guy thinking did you did you just say that it went from like a million or two in revenue and now it’s Sam said it’s over 100 million yeah yeah we’re over 100 million in Revenue now man that is why it’s insane [Music] laughs what’s up all right in this episode we are sitting down with Kevin Rose uh a lot of you know Kevin because he’s an internet OG he created dig back in the day he was a seed investor in Twitter and a bunch of other cool companies he was been a he’s been a VC he’s been a Founder he launched it recently launched an nft project that’s done hundreds of millions of dollars worth of nft sales and so um Kevin’s has been around for a while and the cool part of the interview if you if you listen to it you’re going to see very chill guy very um down to earth very humble and um not a kind of like oh my God I’m gonna go take over the world you know bubbling over with ambition and a big chip on his shoulder seemed like a happy dude who was enjoying himself and had a ton of success in the process and I like that I like seeing diff people who play the game with different in different ways and he’s definitely somebody who’s interested we talked about um a bunch of his projects that you may not know about so for example is creating watchville this Niche project for watches That Grew From one million in Revenue to now over 100 million after it got Acquired and merged with hodinki um then also we talked about how he hires writers we talked about um you know how he got into Twitter as an early investor and what does he do with his money so he’s got a bunch of money uh how does he invest it where does he put it and uh the answer is not not what you may have expected the last thing we did at the end is we did the crypto debate so Sam is sort of a uh a crypto skeptic Kevin is obviously a crypto believer and one of the kind of most well-known guys in the crypto scene and we had a little debate 8 where we talked about is it all [ ] or are there some use cases so I hope you enjoyed this episode with Kevin Rose I liked it I think he will too we should give like a brief overview overview but like your resume we don’t really talk too much about like resumes and stuff but your resume is like crazy long so I’ve been following you forever uh so I’ve known about your work so you started dig which was when did you start that in 04 2004 that’s right yeah and so you were it was like one of the original like site like link aggregators and it was like a cultural phenomenon and that was crazy and you were like was it Time magazine that you were on the cover of Like Your Business Week business week it was like here’s this young kid taking over Silicon Valley what’s the internet and who’s this kid controlling it type of thing uh and like it had all this hype but like dig didn’t turn out maybe as wonderful as like we we all thought maybe it could have done but then you like had your finger on the pulse of all these other things you’ve done a dig you done is it I read it all the time but is it pronounced hodinki yeah oh dinky a watch blog that also like sells watches you’re a partner at Google Ventures you have this app called zero fasting that I use I love partner at trueventures which I still think you’re at now you’ve got the uh you got the uh the oak uh uh meditation app and then I have a feeling there’s like five or ten other things that you just have Brewing that like I don’t even know like most people probably don’t even know about but you’re basically my point is is like you’re kind of an Internet OG and you are incredibly prolific I mean does that kind of summarize it yeah I mean the most recent thing I started was proof which is our our Venture into the world of nfts and so that’s that’s the only thing uh missing from from that and that that’s about um 10 months old now so that’s that’s on the newer side so from the outside if I look at this kind of like collection of or like the career path it looks very random it’s like you know from you know from venture-backed to Angel vesting to venture investing to kind of like Niche communities uh you know these like kind of apps that are like simple like like meditation or fasting uh you did a podcast you did a show you know you’ve done a bunch of content you did a bunch of different things was there a method to the madness is this do you just describe it as random or is there kind of like some underlying theme to this whole thing yeah there’s I would say that I’ve always been one yeah ever since I was a little kid to just tinker and just to to play and if there’s any method to the madness it is this common thread of exploration and just wanting to if I see something that doesn’t exist that should exist I want to go build it and I’ve done that a handful of times um you know probably at least 10 to 15 businesses of which you know 90 of them go to zero and then there’s a few that pop and become you know pretty big so um it’s just this idea that uh I don’t want to sit on the sidelines if there’s something that’s exciting that needs to be built I I’d rather just spin up a team and go after it of all those projects and I’m actually going to exclude proof from that because uh I want to talk all about that in a little while but of all those projects that I mentioned which one has been the most financially successful for you personally that’s a good question um certainly I would say when I was in the middle of Web 2.0 which was the the when dig was at its its peak which was um about a 2000 early 2006 um you know we were hit around 38 million people a month using the site it was you know of the web 2 properties it was one of the largest um it it led me to sitting down and you know dinners and conversations and hangouts with the You Know Jack dorsey’s and Evan Williams and zuckerbergs and all the household names that became these big products and they were just friends and so because of that um it was more like hey well you know do you want to invest in my new thing and and so I would say the investment side has definitely been the the best financial returns I did start a media company um that uh well I would say there’s there’s two things that that well three that are too unrealized in hodinki um which is is is going to be crazy it’ll you know it’s over 100 million Revenue a year now which is nuts whoa really um and then we have um you know uh the stuff I’m doing a proof right now which has just been another crazy rocket ship but in terms of like true exits of businesses that I’ve started um revision three uh where I was the co-founder as a media company that became um Discovery Channel’s digital arm and we sold that for 35 million dollars back in uh 2008 or something like that so that was probably the biggest company sale that I’ve had um but you know they’re much larger on the more Angel investment side and maybe that sale gave you the the ammo to do the angel of it to do Angel Investing or would you have been able to do it without it a bit but I was already starting to do small Investments uh prior to that so I I didn’t have any money I didn’t come from money um but when dig really took off and we were a couple years in to dig investors and this is a very common practice it doesn’t get talked about a lot but investors come around and they’re like hey you know you’re doing this round of financing can we take a little pressure off of you as an entrepreneur and buy some of your stock personally right and so I sold a little bit of my dig stock enough to give me the ammo to go and do small C checks you know and put you know 25k into you know Twitter’s seed round and and put you know 25k and or it was more into Facebook but um they’re a little bit later stage and and so it was it was those little tiny checks that you know when they turn into multi-billion dollar businesses uh were pretty meaningful how much does 25k into Twitter and Facebook early on actually turned into it at millions of dollars I mean that that math is even hard to comprehend and Twitter’s seed round what was evaluation then well it was difficult because they were a podcast company uh doing podcast software and then they they did a new round they they pivoted into Twitter and so oh gosh I’m drawing a blank on the name of the podcast audio that’s right they were audio so um yeah I didn’t invest in audio they had become Twitter and I asked EV who I was the tightest with at the time because I didn’t really know Jack that well at that yet and I asked to have a huge CEO and I was like you know can I can I invest and there was no round available at that point they but he’s like I got this engineer that um Blake that was leaving and had some stock and was like do you just want to buy some of the stock and I was like yeah that sounds great I’ll just buy something I think Gary vaynerchuk said the same story yes yes so here’s the funny thing yeah so I bought in from Blake and then I I told Gary that Blake was selling some and um then Twitter ended up actually they had a preemptive round come along that really like like five or ten extra evaluation and then Blake was like oh whoa well no there’s a new valuation now and he charged carry the new price so Gary’s still pissed at me because I got this like really cheap price for Twitter stock you know and then uh and then Gary had to pay the more expensive price but that was a funny little what do you think Blake’s saying right now I mean Blake probably just he did he held on to like half or more and so you know he probably I don’t know he if I had to guess he made 50 plus 75 plus million dollars or something on it he I’m sure he’s okay did uh at the time because Twitter kind of had like a well there’s like audio kind of failing Twitter who knows uh and then there was like this like small community of people in Silicon Valley that were like using it back when it was like texting the the your updates out um like when you’re when you were writing that check did you feel like this is the you know the next big thing or was this kind of like I don’t know my friends are smart let’s see or where was it like it was the next big thing because there was I I loved so as someone that was building a social graph of sorts at dig you know there was always this idea back prior to um excuse me prior to Twitter that was um bi-directional friendships so you know on MySpace you and Friendster and all the others they did come prior to Twitter you had to actually know the person to see their content so it was like I would you like to send a friend request yes do you accept this friend request yes right and it was like same thing with Facebook and when Twitter came out with that model of just this idea of following and and it allowed like there was no celebrities on the platform it was like me and Lee LaPorte and a couple others that were the top followed people on the platform at the time um but I I thought to myself like wow if this catches on with the celebrity crowd it’s just gonna be insane it’s gonna be because everyone will just want to see and also the barrier to entry a lot of back then it was it was um it was impossible to get uh you know celebrities to sit down and kind of um do technical things because that we didn’t really have smartphones but the fact that you could text to that number that short code just what you were up to anybody can do that it doesn’t require any special software it doesn’t require you sitting in front of a computer and so it was just so dead simple to use it felt as though as I saw the tech crowd you know um kind of catching on uh it I knew eventually it would spill outside of that that small vertical of users into the mainstream and if that when that would happen that was the bet when that would happen uh if and when that would happen that would it would it would blow up and and it did so that was that was awesome and I remember I’ve also seen uh you did a video back in the day when Square was like a prototype it was like a YouTube video I remember you you’re like hey yeah check this out like you know here’s this little square and you could plug it into your phone you could take credit card payments you’re like and it was not even released yet and you were like you know promote I think you did you invest in that too because that would have been like yeah so that’s a great story because I hit jack up and I was like hey I heard you’re doing this new credit card thing I’d like to be an angel investor and he’s like oh dude it’s over subscribed I’m sorry like we’ve closed the round like blah blah and I was like damn it I’m like well let me see if I can help you in some way and so he gave me a prototype and um I just went and recorded a video and it got a lot of traction and it got a lot of people excited about this new product and it was like an early glimpse of what was to come and it started getting you know tens of thousands of views on on YouTube and he calls me back and he’s like I had an investor drop out I’ve got some room do you want to do you want to put a check in and so that’s what got me into um to their seed round which was which was awesome what was it like uh you know I lived in San Francisco from 2012 up until somewhat recently Sean’s still there it’s definitely a bit different now because like startups are are quite popular and and Jax and Jack Dorsey is like basically a celebrity Mark Zucker was obviously a celebrity what was it when back then in uh the the you know 040506 uh you know 2010 when these things were just getting going did you actually think that a guy like Jack Dorsey was gonna be like this kind of like Titan of of Industry like he kind of is like what was it like being around some of these folks early on when they were just you know you guys were just messing around well it was you met a lot of entrepreneurs back then and there was it was clear there was a few people that stood out as just being um wildly creative and and just deep thinkers and I was really drawn to those folks I wanted to just like pick their brain more and get to know them better and so you know um one of the things that struck me is just how mature Mark Zuckerberg was when he was younger like it was you know I’m quite a bit older excuse me than he is and um how old is he now he’s still only like 38. he’s younger than that oh my God yeah so how old is Mark that’s oh yeah you’re right he’s 38. yeah he’s still that’s still I mean it is 30s that’s pretty wild yeah it it’s it’s it’s crazy um he was he was really young so yeah so when I met him was 2005 I want to say so he was 21. wow so he was 21 years old and I remember just thinking about how put together he was and how well spoken and just what a deep thinker he was about the space and he wasn’t winging it he was taking it very seriously and um that was that was a big big shock to me um I remember just those conversations being like I was like Wow for 21 I was definitely not as put together as as he was at 21. what’s something he said that made you made you think that well you know one of the things that I was always uh frightened by uh as an entrepreneur in my in my youth was just this idea of would people take me seriously um and could I admit when I didn’t know something and it was it was it okay to I tried to hide my vulnerabilities as an entrepreneur and he just came in and was asking so many pointed questions and um you know I asked him about some of his hiring and firing practices and how he would edit his team how he ensured that he made the right hires on the engineering side because it was it was that was a very challenging thing to do back then to scale websites you were like racking your own servers and you know it wasn’t the aws’s of the world and we were talking a lot about that and um it was just it was one of those things where he just told me that um he just you know it’s obvious stuff he’s surround yourself with people smarter than you and then you ask a lot of questions and you’re not afraid to ask those questions so um you know back then I had some great investors and and board members but at times I was a little hesitant to be like hey I I don’t quite understand how this works can you help educate me and I think it was due to my lack of like for some reason I thought because I was a College Dropout that I I had to hide that and and they would be like if I asked a question that I should have learned in college that it would have looked uh had it had egg on my face and so there was a lot of um of of nervousness around that and just to see Mark just be so open and just curious um and there was no it was clear that if he if he didn’t know something he was going to get to the bottom of it right away um it was it was inspiring I had a I had an experience just like that when we were selling our last company um I met with all the big companies Facebook Google and Amazon whatever we also met with Discord and I go in I meet Jason who’s the CEO of Discord and I’m like pitching him on like you know basically if you bought our thing like it would add this Dimension to Discord it would be awesome and what I was so used to was most Founders if you if you’re just kind of saying how awesome they are and how they can take over all these different how there’s so much more they can do how this is just the beginning and how there’s all these different ways that they can expand normally they’re like yes yes yeah yeah totally we can do that too we can do that too it all sounds good and he was just sort of like you know I would acquire you guys because I like you and I like that you came in and you had this like whiteboard and you just like painted a picture for um but we won’t do any of that and he’s like um no that’s not what Discord should do what we should do and he said no and he was like we should just be this one horizontal utility that does this one thing and um that’s our that’s that’s the right strategy for us and he was the first guy that said no when I was like kind of giving him some ice cream of like you could have this too right right and I just thought oh that’s what like this is this is probably what Zuck was like you know this is probably with somebody who was focused was like because back when Zuck was building Facebook it was like Myspace was adding music and then TV shows and doing these like brand deals and like he was just like nope real names simple profiles we’re just gonna let you like you know communicate and add photos and do this stuff and like he said no to a bunch of different things which is why Facebook was some such a cleaner sight than Myspace and all the other competitors that were out there yeah I would argue they’ve lost a lot of that because they say yes to a lot of the cloning of features of other other competitors but yeah you’re right that Relentless um focus is is so essential and oftentimes it’s it’s more what you say no to than what you say yes to on the product side you know I I that totally agrees and Vibes with me for sure do you sort of uh when you’re doing all these projects uh back to the project do you have like a set of rules like for example I know a guy who is incredibly successful um I talked to him one time his name is Kevin or a couple times his name is Kevin Ryan he started like mongodb Business Insider Guild group all these like amazing companies and he was like well I just do back of the envelope math and then I give each project six months and me and my partner typically fund it with three hundred thousand dollars and we kind of like feel it out it’s a little mathematical but it’s also like let’s just see what happens in six months and see if this is promising and we’ll decide uh and so he’s like six months 300K can we make something cool and I talked to Atomic Labs the other day you know Atomic Labs they’re like that incubator that’s they’re not really an incubator they like start companies and they said something like they’re like yeah well like sometimes we’ll only spend 50 Grand and like two months or something like that do you have uh like something like that when you’re starting a bunch of your projects like the fasting app or the meditation app where you’re like I think you did another one milk or is that the name of the production yeah that was the name of the the kind of incubator Studio yeah yeah do you like have like rules for what you’re looking for yeah I mean it’s there is um I guess the question really comes to when you decide to kill something or sell it off or get rid of it or move on to the next thing and and oftentimes it’s um because your original kind of thesis around either the market size or just the concept behind it just didn’t take hold and so I don’t have any like hard set number of months sometimes you’re early so you know uh the fasting app for example um you know when I launched xero it’s sad at you know tens of thousands of users for the first eight months and then fasting hit and it became more of a household thing and people were talking about intermittent fasting it was all over TV and different you know places were picking it up and so people were just naturally searching for fasting in the app store because that’s just what they do and then that’s when it exploded to you know hundreds of thousands and you know a million plus monthly active people doing fast um and but it was it had I shut that down after the first six months um you know it would have been too soon so something like that if you if you just believe the market is not quite mature enough I typically put it into a little bit more of a maintenance mode you know I got it to that first version where I felt like this is a useful utility for people that are looking to learn more and get into fasting um now let’s just uh let it kind of organically build from here and we were seeing you know nice slow consistent kind of week over week month over month growth but nothing explosive like you you’re used to seeing in a in a high growth startup so um if that one that one in particular was just like let’s just just wait around and then other times you know you create something and you’ve just clearly missed the Mark it’s it’s like we created this app called tiny which was a fun little photo sharing app that was um yeah I liked it oh you did awesome yeah it was these little little size uh looping videos with no audio and we thought it would just be like a little bit more quick a little intimate way to show kind of how you’re traversing throughout your days and weeks rather than having to take the time to set up to look all perfect in front of your perfect Instagram there was less pressure literally because it was small right exactly that part was actually kind of true yeah and and that was a crazy one because you know we launched and it just it caught fire immediately and we had you know hundreds of thousands of downloads in the first week and then it just died off completely and everyone was like ah that was a fad that was a that was a fun little fad and that one we shut down pretty quickly after that because it was clear that it was a fun little thing but but there was no depth to it it was a it was a feature not not a real product so um yeah it varies from product to product I guess the best answer I can give you cool um okay so uh you talked a little bit about like you know which one was the most lucrative okay yeah obviously Angel Investing in Twitter and then getting into you know Facebook and others is it works out well which one was the most fun so which chapter uh was the most fun and kind of with that is I’m on this Mission I just you know like after selling companies like I got time and so I was like all right well what’s the party now I was like I want to find out who’s having the most fun in their career and like because that’s what I want to do now I just have the most most fun type of crew who’s having the most fun with their life right now so I want to know for you which of your projects the most fun and then who do you see who who’s a blueprint I could look at where you’re like this I met this person they’re having a blast with what they do yeah well I would say that the you know there’s the nice thing about starting your own businesses is you’re you’re doing it because there’s a personal Drive behind it like I’ve never created anything because I thought here’s an opportunity to make money it’s never been that it’s it we were talking about this as we were just you know prior to hitting record or whatever about the little podcast case holder on Amazon right and like there’s there’s there’s sometimes there’s these little businesses where you see a broken piece of an industry and you’re like well gosh if I went out and created this I could sell X number of units per year and it’d be a great little profitable business and like that’s never really interest me it’s more about the this the creativity of it all and just the exploration of an idea that I’m drawn to and so I I no startup is fun they’re they’re all they’re all roller coasters loop-de-loops like there’s the chaos of all those things right especially as you grow your team and there’s HR issues and people getting sick and products not getting shipped on time and customers being upset and you know that there’s there’s it’s never going to be just like this perfect dream but um that said as long as it’s something that you’re just naturally drawn to I’m always having a good time and and I’d I’d say though that said that’s kind of a you know a little bit of a dodging the question but um more recently when I’ve got it gotten into the art in nft side of things uh that world in the world of cryptocurrency is probably the most fun because it is so blue ocean and there’s just so much to be built there it’s not building yet another app and competing on on CAC in the App Store it’s like it’s it’s really um there’s there’s so many different directions you can go um and and very few well there there’s there is a decent amount of of high quality entrepreneurs in the space but not as as much as say you know building something for the App Store so I enjoy kind of more the blue ocean aspect of that world man and I remember when so basically I started this company called The Hustle it was like a daily email and we sold it for we bootstrapped and sold it for tens of millions of dollars it kind of It kind of sounds a little bit similar to what you were saying about your story I lived in San Francisco and I started a media company because I was like I’m not capable of starting a tech company but I wish I were and also I’m good at writing when I saw you went and did the watch site uh hodinki uh first of all Sean have you ever read that like when I when I heard I was like a Blog I like watches I have Rolexes as like a Blog for luxury watches what the hell is this guy thinking like he just like he he he like it started as something else right you started it as like watchville or it was like a it was something else you got acquired or merged and you became like the CEO of this I remember looking at that just being like I have no idea what the hell he’s doing I don’t wear watches so I had no I was completely out of touch with it and it just seemed like you know a hobby project at the time and then I started looking into it and I was like oh wow there’s like a huge passionate base around this and this company makes a lot of money then has been around I don’t think in time I don’t think it did make a lot of money did it like I remember I read that and I was like I like this business because I’m into it but like this guy’s frankly way above this what is he thinking like this is he’s like this thing’s needlessly hard well watch Phil was so I again like just kind of like personal passion stuff so I was into watches mainly because when my father passed away he left me with a single watch and it’s something that I wear every once in a while and it was for him it was like to afford a single Rolex in a in a middle class household is a big deal like that’s like back in the 80s you know when my dad bought that he was just like I’ve made it you know I have it and I’m not talking about one of the crazy relaxes I’m talking about just the standard day-date kind of like you know simple relaxing like that was like the one thing he was really proud of you know that is like GMC pickup truck right and so um those that was something I was left with and then I started reading uh some of the content so Ben climber created hodinki the actual blog and I created Watch Phil which was an aggregator in an app that brought together all these different sources so that people could read this stuff on the mobile on their mobile phone because a lot of as silly as it sounds back then most of the excuse me most of the watch sites didn’t have mobile versions of their site so they were on just like old old software publishing software that what that was just horrible so I I I made it all very readable push notifications like all the stuff just a kind of a wrapper for like all this great content and it just started growing and growing and growing and I had a lot of eyeballs like some of the the biggest collectors were Now using the product and um you know I I hodinki was the most kind of best prominent source of this content that took it very seriously so it was um you know they had had a couple full-time writers and so I talked to Ben and said hey you don’t have the tech team here let’s let’s merge and combine forces so we um we merged the two companies together um he was three or four people and I was three or four people um I moved to New York became CEO at the time he was doing uh maybe a million and a half to two million dollars a year in Revenue so just enough to kind of do payroll and um we grew it from there and then turned on e-commerce and then started selling uh and creating Partnerships with the big watch brands and now you know as authorized dealers represent you know several dozen of the big watch brands that are out there and that just became a massive um it was still a relatively unknown back then whether or not people would actually spend large sums of money over Apple pay right and so um I remember we had someone from Apple that was um you know helping us on when you get to a certain size they kind of give you a little bit more concierge help on the apps stuff and they said that they had seen their a 250 000 transaction action come through Apple pay on an American Express and that was like the largest known transaction at that time that had been done over Apple pay for a site unseen uh vintage Rolex which was uh which was kind of crazy but anyway yeah so that I mean new new luxury watches or double-digit billions of dollars in a year um in terms of Market size so it’s it’s a big industry that that many people uh it’s not as apparent in the states uh when you go overseas uh it you’ll see how in in Europe there you know watches are so much more uh kind of a a type of thing that is is worn versus smart watches or more of the normal no watch at all uh here in the states did you did you just say that it went from like a million or two in revenue and now it’s Sam said it’s over a hundred million yeah yeah we’re over 100 million in Revenue now man that is why that’s insane and a lot of it’s Commerce I mean you guys like when people talk about content and commerce I think most of the time it’s nonsense like BuzzFeed talks about it and I’m like I don’t know man I don’t think people are going to be buying a lot of branded BuzzFeed pillows and [ ] like that or like they had that tasty thing I was like I don’t think people are gonna buy a buzzfeed of it I just don’t think that’s gonna happen and you guys did it and I was like I don’t know is this like gonna be a thing it seems so challenging but you guys are a perfect example of that and you know the other good example I bet you go to bring a trailer do you go to bringatrailer.com I’ve been to bring a trailer many times yeah it’s one of his favorite sites actually they are awesome and so they’ve done the same thing but with cars where basically it’s like this perfect tie of like I just I I bought one car from actually uh those websites and um but I read it every single day I’m like let’s just see like what they’re gonna write about what cool cars out there and then you guys did it with watches and I loved your videos with John Mayer where he talks about his watch collection and all that [ ] it’s awesome but what um what other verticals or what other like Industries have you thought man maybe I could actually do this model I’ve always thought software but like that’s not nearly as sexy and cool as Watchers in vintage cars but is there any it’s like when you were like thinking about this model I I bet you’re at night you’re like I’m not gonna do it but I bet you I could apply this here here and here yeah I mean in some sense that’s kind of what we’re doing right now in the world of nfts where they’re everyone that’s armed with Photoshop can create a digital um piece of art on the blockchain and there’s this mad rush into the world of nfts but there is just a ton of clutter right and and just a ton of of of of projects to sort through so what we created with proof was this this idea of you know it’s the same thing with hodinki it’s the same Playbook it’s this curation with a point of view where you can have a strong editorial team come in um that isn’t talking about the flipping side of the industry that isn’t talking about how to make a quick buck in nfts that is really talking about what would you buy and hold for the next decade plus right and the Playbook that that hodinki nailed so well was that we took editorials so seriously and really hired out just a absolute Stellar team of writers that had a deep understanding of the World of Watches and not just a announcement this is a new watch that was dropped but an understanding of the the mechanics of the internals of the watches so they could tell you about the different movements and escapements and why certain complications were harder to pull off technically than others and so it was a real Geeks blog and with that technical hardcore writing developed trust and so you and once you have the trust of your readers then you’re able to extend Commerce in a meaningful way and it’s not asking them to buy you know a microwave or some like inexpensive or a throw pillow it’s it’s it’s saying we have your trust this is what we believe to be a very important you know watch or collectible and because of that um you know you’re willing to pull the trigger on a on a 20 30 50 000 purchase so um it’s trust is so essential do you think that well I at the hustle we’re trying to we hired a bunch of riders Sean hired some red as well for his thing is a crypto thing and I I’ve always debated this in my brain I’m like do I hire good writers and teach them about business or do I hire smart business people and teach them how to write what did you find was the best way to do that for uh watches yeah I mean the best way to do that was to find people that had the natural organic built-in love for uh horology like just this decide for for all things mechanical watches so you know we would have writers that um if you take for example like the speed master though the the watch that made it to the Moon from Omega um you know they could tell you every single variant and movement change and the reasons why and they were just super geeky on this stuff and they may have been just like b-plus writers where you get them but they had the technical knowledge in their brain and that’s a lot easier to fix because you get them to put that that technical information out in draft form and then you just apply an editorial layer over the top of it where you have copy editors that come in and help you know stitch together a better more cohesive story before you actually publish it out to the world yeah I love that this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of HubSpot HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated well I can see the client’s whole history calls support tickets emails and here’s a test from three days ago I totally missed HubSpot grow better you’re a pretty chill guy when do you get like really fired up like what what gets you excited and or in a good or bad way like um you know I get really enthusiastic about the most random [ ] like the most uh it’ll be like a creative project that I’m like I bet I could pull this off and I just go like I just get too excited about it Sam has that same thing but he also has it where if he feels these wronged Sims like you know willing to fight to the death about it until he gets really pumped up what gets you really pumped up rage is my fuel I love I love fighting yeah so I for me new ideas and working with creative people is the the most kind of like um strongest source of fuel for me so when I get together with an artist or a fellow entrepreneur and I actually it doesn’t have to be someone that has created something big it has it’s rather someone that just has wild ideas that that are potentially uh just new new ways of looking at the world and so you meet a lot of entrepreneurs that are opportunistic iterative entrepreneurs where they’ll see something they’ll say oh there’s some the rough edges on that particular product I’m gonna go sand them down make it easier for consumers and go launch a business and they have great success I like the ones that are just like really thinking about um entire new verticals or just flipping something completely on its head in new and creative ways um so that is what I’m really drawn to from just a straight idea a point of view and so entrepreneur-wise and when I invest in some of these startups those are my favorites are are those those crazy uh more world-changing entrepreneurs um in terms of the the rage side of things um yeah dude you’ve had you’ve had a bunch of Rage inducing moments I’ve followed your career I’ve seen I’ve seen you throw the [ ] raccoon we saw that one I’ve seen people protest outside your house I’ve seen you get in trouble for like I don’t know wanting to demolish like a historical building I don’t know like the whole story but like you’ve had you’ve kind of been a Target yeah I mean those that those all have their own unique story that the historical building thing was definitely not true that that was a that was a pretty funny one in that um but but that was uh that was just people wanting to keep an old house up in the neighborhood and they called it historically even though it really wasn’t um uh we wanted to take it down because it was filled with asbestos which we didn’t want to live in a house they had asbestos in it but that’s a whole other story uh the rage stuff you know the the the the last four to five years of of my life has been spent um trying to to kind of Master my own mind and and I I think that if you can’t um come to grips with your own Emperors like personal peace of mind uh it’s it’s a horrible place to be and so you know I remember as a young entrepreneur just kind of being on this 24 7 hustle to go build build I gotta win I have to win I have to win and it created a level of anxiety that was not good for me and and so I think that’s probably why you saw me kind of do things like the meditation app and other other things because I it was just a natural forcing function for my my own self to like take some of that stuff more seriously and so you know I just want to be able to to be able to sit and not have to have my mind be always on and that that’s kind of been my goal and it’s something I’m still I’m still working on so that it’s not like I remember there was this interview with Elon Musk and I’m not comparing myself to Elon Musk but there’s one thing that I I can certainly relate to where he talks about how his mind sometimes just never shuts off and he’s always thinking about things problems new ideas like all these things and um and it’s it’s uh for me it’s always been um that that has been not a blessing but something that has just been has weighed on me and and I’ve always tried to um I guess the the big push in the last few years has been to try and Wrangle that what kind of gets you all hot and bothered now where you’re thinking about like the new Industries or the things that excite you what what ideas would you have one caveat that you’re that you’re not currently pursuing so uh because it’s easy to say I’m excited about this project I’m doing I think uh like for example Palmer lucky was on the last episode and he was talking about all right we’re like you’re doing Andrew you did Oculus what are the ideas that are on your kind of like oh that’s interesting but like I only got one me so I can’t go do it because I think that’s that’s the most interesting to the audience um and to into ourselves and that’s actually the origin of the podcast me and Sam have more ideas than we have time to do them and so we’re like well if we just say them out loud here maybe people will take them and run with them or or find something interesting in it by the way have you ever talked to Palmer Kevin that guy is wild no I’ve never I’ve never chatted with them I I have to go back and listen to that episode though I’m really curious to know I’ve I’ve seen some written interviews but never never anything on video form it went live yesterday it sounds like you our YouTube and um most of our listener ships on like podcast uh feeds he is he’s something man that dude that guy’s eclectic he’s just like enthusiastic about everything he like knows a lot about a lot he’s like biology but more but almost he’s as smart but is more common do you know what I mean like for some reason I can relate to him even though I know that he’s just like so much more smarter than I am yeah I I had read some stuff and and I I don’t know how much of his true but some of his his company stuff that he was creating around drones for tracking people and and some controversial yeah I just it doesn’t it doesn’t fit well with my ethos so I I haven’t really followed his careers as closely but um I’d be curious to listen to the interview for sure I think it was probably it was probably our best guest episode uh we’ve done a bunch of them and and the reason why is he’s like you know he’s like um a he took pretty genuine like he’s pretty uh he’s high energy but he’s like direct so it’s like you know why why do you do this or how did you think about this and he’s like for example he’s like I thought about you know I’m kind of overweight could I like solve obesity and he’s like you know but here’s what doesn’t work telling me to eat less of foods that I don’t like the taste of and blah blah and so he’s like he’s like my solution was and I started prototyping this in my house was to just instead of beyond meat and stuff where they tried to make like a burger out of chickpeas he’s like I wanted to just make fake food out of oil zero calorie food that tastes amazing because oil tastes amazing and we can manipulate oil into anything we could turn oil into candles we could turn it into waxes we could turn it into this into that he’s like I created a grilled cheese sandwich that was zero calorie that tasted delicious using and we’re like dude that sounds kind of insane and like he’s like the pro we’re like why didn’t you do this crazy idea you sounded pretty passionate you went pretty far he’s like well there just simply wasn’t going to be enough oil supply to do it and he’s like we would have had to take the oil out of the sewage system and centrifuge it to the recycling it he’s like I and I realized you know even I couldn’t do that and I was like wow this guy’s like you know half genius uh half crazy and I you know I don’t even know where the line is but I find it fascinating that he a thinks like this and B doesn’t just think about it you know literally he’s like yeah in my house we converted the dining room into like this lab in order to like do these you know these sorts of projects and like you know out of one of them came Andrew the eight billion dollar company and the other one was gonna be this crazy like you know oil-based fake food that’s crazy that is awesome I love yeah see that’s the type of Entrepreneurship that I’m I’m really drawn to it’s just like people that are hacking on stuff um at night you know for me uh a lot of the stuff that that I think about in that that vein I tend to Outsource and get other people to to work on it um a lot of the stuff around um longevity I’ve been interested in specifically uh uh a drug uh called Rob mycin where it’s been proven now to extend life and in in various animals and now apply to dogs so myself and um Jack Dorsey and Brian from coinbase and a few others all have been putting money into funding studies out of the University of Washington um to to Really prove this out in dogs and canines and then eventually move it into human trials so you know some of that stuff and the biohacking stuff I still put a lot of effort and time and attention in and I I try this stuff out on myself as well you know I’m I’m trying some of these experimental things um not because I I’m not one of these people that wants to put you know young people’s blood in them and live forever I I I want to die I just you know I I do like the idea of not since I am an old I am an older dad I didn’t have my first kid until my four until I was 40. I I would like to be around a little bit longer for them that’s that’s all well I’ve heard of people doing this I know Tim’s doing this with the what’s it called silosylum uh like mushrooms um yeah and uh how much does it cost to fund a study and what do you get out of it other than like the altruistic of like well we’re just contributing to like the grand thing but is there is there like a direct outcome that you can get from it like we can use this to fund a company no no not not in this particular case Yeah Tim was also uh put some money into this one as well and there there was there’s nothing you get out of it other than just trying to help further science you know a lot of these um in this particular case the study was funded but be depending on the sample size and how many canines you have involved you can only detect um certain levels of of um of output you need a larger sample base uh it is called like a properly powered study in order to detect smaller little nuances in the data and so we wanted to make sure it was powered enough to detect I believe up to 10 lifespan increase and so to power it was to add another million dollars or so into the study um to make sure that they could bring on the additional canines required to make that happen and you know I put my dog on it as well and and he’s um 12 now and he still runs around like a pup and and um I attribute some of that to a cycle of this that he did um but yeah it’s it’s nothing other than just like you you you’re figuring out ways in which you can like there’s there’s all these different Avenues on the philanthropic side where you’re like what what is Meaningful to me personally and um uh this this this particular study you know I think even if it just worked for dogs would be fantastic like forget humans if if I could have my dog live for an additional five years like what a win you know so that it was kind of a win-win study dude I I talked to this guy that was like building I think it was called is it called a ageless RX I forget his the name of his company but he was he’s trying to like you know do longevity stuff uh supplements and [ ] like that and uh things are going well for him but I was he was kind of explaining his reasoning he was like you know a lot of people are afraid to take these medicines but we’ve been thinking if we told them it’s good for their dog they’re actually will give it to their dog and he was he was kind of like hypothesizing to me and like brainstorming with me in real time he was like maybe we should just like do this for dogs and just give it to dogs and if once people see that it makes their dog live longer then they’ll be like yeah yeah you know [ ] it give me that pill I’ll take that thing uh because there’s there’s so much easier to commence to give it to their dog I’m with Kevin oh for sure dogs live forever well genome-wise there’s so much more overlap and and and and connection there between canines and humans and there is a lot of other animals out there so um but you know the back to your question though about um you know out of curiosity what what would I go pursue right now in terms of startups that I’m not doing um I believe and it’s very very clear now that AI in the next five years is gonna change everything um we’re seeing open Ai and a lot of the projects they put out there recently um whether it be creative writing or I believe Fiverr as a company it will just be non-existent um it’s going to destroy the low end of the creative Market initially and then work its way up the chain and you know just the the outputs that you’re getting now from prompt based art um you know the future versions of Photoshop are are not going to be about moving uh Mouse and pixels around it’s just going to be telling the computer what to do on your behalf you know you’ll highlight an area and say you know change this aspect and and it’ll all be done via prompt and and meaning you type in what you want to see change and the AOL we’ll just make it happen we’re seeing that today and I’m seeing you know advancements on the a side in in medicine uh obviously all the creative side there’s a probably a half dozen or so tools now that will complete uh you know write complete paragraphs for you if you’re writing sci-fi you give it some initial kind of prompts of where you want the story to go and the writing is quite good I I have no doubt in the next five years we’ll see a New York Times bestseller that was 90 written by AI so it’s it’s I I there’s just so much interest in with the interest and excitement flows the engineering Talent so I’ve seen a lot of um friends that are these you know a lot of people I worked with at Google and and other places where you know they’re they’re very insanely amazing Engineers you know previously working on distribution systems and some of these hard problems that they were trying to solve and now said hey I’m I’m actually going to Pivot into this this new world of AI and anytime you watch that kind of flow of high quality engineering Talent go move into something you you pay attention so I’m looking for at a lot of investments in that particular sector um and I’m very bullish on it and something I don’t have time to work on but I believe some great businesses are going to be built there what would be an application you would want to do in that space of all those kind of like threads where it’s like creative work medicine um you know writing an AI book is there an application that you can think of that you’re like I feel like AI can solve this because I think that’s that’s it’s a hammer in search of nails at this point uh that’s when I talk Sean you made a joke you made a joke I I always teased Sean about web3 because I’m not the biggest fan of it and he was and we were joking about how uh he was like coming up with ideas with AI he’s like finally a use case we found it and like with AI it seems like there’s actually way more obvious use cases right but uh yeah what what application excites you oh I’d love to have that web 3 debate at some point too but um on the AI side you know it we’re already seeing this right so so figma was purchased by Adobe you probably all saw that it was crazy acquisition um you know probably that the the the the the standard these days for prototyping and and creating interfaces for everything from mobile apps to websites to to you name it um we’re seeing uh already built-in plugins to figma that allow you to prompt based build uh anything in in just a matter of seconds so you can say hey give me an interface for a mobile app that has these five options uh in this color with this futuristic type style and you know you get something back in real time in in in 25 seconds and it’s it’s rough but it’s giving my design team and other designers out there um just a great starting point and it saves them a ton of time and effort but this is like inning one like two three years from now it’ll be doing 90 of the work versus you know the first right now with probably 20 of the work so um that is is is super exciting and the assistance and and time to market for new ideas new projects I think is going to be compressed even further it’s it’s the same thing that we what happened with the kind of like late web 2 when we went from racking our own servers to fully deployed in an automated managed you know AWS instances that in some of these databases that just Auto scaled as you threw traffic at it it really compressed the time to the go to market time you know uh by quite a bit I think we’ll see the same thing on on the design side so the speed at which we can develop uh and deploy new ideas is just going to be uh you know probably uh in order to order magnitude better than it is today um so I’m excited for that where do you uh a question that we started asking people and it’s actually uh I’ve always learned so much from this but what message boards or Facebook groups or websites uh what corners of the web are you lurking in right now like for me I I love Facebook groups there’s always like a weird Facebook group like a tiny example is over Landing do you guys know what over Landing is it’s like no it’s like um I don’t know the exact definition but it’s like you know how you see like Toyota 4Runners or F-150s that have like campers on it and it looks like they can go in the desert for like two weeks so I started like joining over Landing groups like three years ago because I was like oh this is kind of an interesting turn that’s picking up or another one that we got really into a couple years ago was Mobility so like all these grown men not caring about yoga but they called it mobility and it was all about like stretching and it’s like what’s going on with there’s like all these weird Instagram guys like doing all this stretching [ ] it’s kind of intriguing and like a lot of times it’s like instead of instead of therapy Executive coaching uh you know yeah yeah that’s what happened from uh from yoga to Mobility yeah they just changed like mayo naoli and uh it totally worked it’s awesome like I love Mobility now and like for example for the body stuff Tim Ferriss was always pretty good at that like he’d be talking about all this weird stuff like fasting it’s like dude what the hell is this fasting thing what are you talking about uh and uh that was like a really cool corner of the web to like look in on and like see like how are the Geeks behaving now so I can learn like how the rest of the normal like Average Joe is going to care about in the next five or ten years yeah where is it Chris Dixon quote are you familiar with it yeah this is what the Geeks Who are playing with on the weekends will become like what we’re all using like if several years later it’s something some version of that yeah so like what geeky places are you hanging out right now for for Shawna Knights like a lot of Twitter people so we’ll find like specific people in Twitter who are like quirky and we’re like what the hell is this guy talking he’s talking crazy I mean it’s really cool yeah I mean I I follow a ton of people in in crypto Twitter so I pay attention to all the on you know the what’s happening on web3 via VIA um Twitter and then also you know mostly Discord it’s just a lot of private discords it’s a lot of private telegrams small groups and Gatherings of peers they get together discuss new ideas new projects um these Dows uh these uh decentralized autonomous organizations where people get together to discuss and collect and purchase things um so it it’s a lot of I I’ve never spent so much time in Discord it’s like it’s crazy that the conversation has shifted there in in Twitter largely um dude I hate that by the way I love the fact that like I dig or read it or something exists where you can just like if you Googled it and found it like you could participate now I’m like oh what the [ ] man Kevin’s probably got this crazy ass telegram group that like there’s I don’t even I can’t get in because I don’t even know exists no you can join proof it’s fifty thousand dollars and you’re in bro it’s easy no it’s I think it’s more like it’s people realize that they wanted a little bit more intimate conversation so I have a feeling that like there was a there was a lot of of this move to do smaller private discords and smaller telegram groups because it would lead to just not the masses flooding in and the chaos that you would see on Reddit and so I that’s kind of been the move that that I’ve seen in in the Dr the reason behind a lot of that but um it’s not hard to get into you just have to actually show them that you you know what you’re doing like you have to you know get in there and embrace web3 which it sounds like Sam you may not be the biggest fan of but you have to you have to get in there and and and and talk the talk and know where to go and people will tell you like this is the place to be hanging out or I’m enjoying this Discord over here and you’ll learn about this and this is where the AI discords are or whatever it may be and um that’s just kind of the new it’s the new Facebook Facebook’s uh it’s it’s it’s I’m sure it’s good for some things but it’s it’s dead when it comes to web three you want me to tell you my why I’m not a fan of this and yes please I’m gonna get you I’m gonna try and get you fired up here and then yeah let’s try talk about proof I do it sounds like I’m making an easy out which I kind of am but basically like I am I’m I’m decently educated just by hanging out with Sean and so I have to admit that like some of my beliefs are a little bit loosely held uh and and I’m not the most educated on the topic but my opinion on web3 is basically it’s a bunch of like it’s just this kind of circular economy of a bunch of people making making products to serve an industry that has yet to like truly figure out or I don’t know what you call an industry a movement that has yet to truly figure out like what the what the thing is that they’re doing and there’s so many examples where people I think are fairly like egotistical and elitists about it saying like Web 2.0 is old and like the way this has to be decentralized or this has to be that’s why it’s like man just because you’re putting web 3 in front of something that doesn’t mean that there’s actually a problem here and I think you’re just wasting so much time and energy working on something that is just like a circle jerk that doesn’t actually solve a problem better than the web Point Web 2.0 version also I thought it’s pretty dogmatic where it’s like decentralize everything it’s like dude I want some stuff centralized like can you imagine like calling customer service on a decentral like it’s like no I like there are some things that I want like to have a to be centralized and I thought that they’re a little bit too dogmatic and I thought that they were oftentimes I’m saying like they like you people uh like you guys like didn’t always have wonderful Solutions you were just making [ ] up in order to like get in the game and I just thought that it it kind of bothered me yeah I mean I I feel your frustration there and that I too am someone that um when I look at what’s being built in web 3 if it’s it’s just for the sake of calling something decentralized and there’s nothing behind it or no structural Advantage for that being the case um I think it’s it’s it’s it’s silly you know it’s like I’ll give you a great um we’re we’re working on um there’s a lot of things that you want to do in web3 some of them are high value and some of them are low value when you were talking about working with the community so we have a community of people that come together to do all different types of things and some of it is what we call token gated content so it’s like a membership model where you have to be a member of something or hold a certain nft in order to unlock certain access to videos or content or whatever it may be some of those things can be high value uh items where you receive an nft or something that is um actually has some Financial like you know something behind it that is a case where you want to actually have that Hardware wallet and pull it out and and do it in a way that is secure and that is protected and um but the rest of the time you don’t need that you can use a Google login it’s okay to use a web 2 login it’s okay to use your email and password with two-factor authentication like we don’t have to throw away a lot of the Fantastic technology that’s been built in web 2. there’s other things like for example some decentralized uh maximalists and I think maximalist is really what we’re talking about here because anyone that is a maximalist uh on uh this means what you just like extreme it just means that you are so into something that you can’t see any other way and it’s like it’s your way or there’s no possible there are people out there that say there is no other cryptocurrency than Bitcoin that’s the only one pumps are our Buddy isn’t pop like don’t they call them online a Bitcoin Maxi I don’t think he I think he is a maximum coin and and you know dorsey’s in that camp too where he’s like trying to extend Bitcoin and says that’s that’s kind of the only currency and I I think this applies to so many different things like I don’t want to get into Political talk but anytime you get to the fringes of anything where it’s like this is the only thing that matters you get into Crazy Town in my point of view and so you know I think that is a danger of web 3 where there’s a lot of that kind of idea that if if it’s not pure web 3 it’s not right and I’m with you I 100 agree but that said like I’ve seen this idea and a lot of the defy tooling when I say defy I mean decentralized finance a lot of the D5 tooling that’s being built on the blockchain uh in a performant way in a cost-effective way in a way that when you think about Wells Fargo as an organization with you know 150 000 employees I’m just making that up by maybe it’s fifty thousand or seventy five thousand somewhere in between that that range where that is just a lot of bloat and in because of that bloat and because of that in insane monthly not that that company has to cover um you know those dollars are are not not flowing to the right people and so there are examples of more efficient ways of doing Finance on the blockchain that that can be done in a trustless way written into smart contract code that will mean for better outcomes for the consumer now those can be paired with centralized Solutions right like coinbase is a centralized organization you have a email address you can send it if something is wrong with your crypto account but they hold and keep decentralized currency right and they and they do things like decentralized staking where you earn four percent on your ethereum but they’re a centralized company that gives you that customer support so I’m not I’m I’m a I think that the the ones that really win here yes there are going to be the people that say self-custody is the only way there’s this famous saying that if it’s not your keys it’s not your crypto like like you have to hold your own private keys I’m not in that camp I do that personally and use safety deposit box and a whole slew of things to safeguard that for some things but there’s other Solutions where where a hybrid approach makes more sense so know that your argument is completely valid and that a lot of entrepreneurs that are building a web 3 completely agree with you and that let’s not throw away the baby with the bath water here there’s a lot of great things but there are also some great advantage is that come with being decentralized or a whole slew of other Technologies that’s being built on web3 um that that I could point to that you’d say like oh that yeah actually that that does make more sense than the old way of doing things so let’s let’s do this real quick so you’ve probably seen just like anybody else these like uh there’s like these permanent uh like just like there’s permeables for crypto there’s Perma bears and their mission in life is to basically find every stupid use case of crypto and highlight it or every bad investment or every sure clip of a a pro you know some dude at a16z who goes on a podcast and says something dumb about crypto when asked about a use case um and you talked about me because I was just on their podcast two weeks ago so no no they I haven’t seen you but Dixon but like you know there’s there’s people that sort of are are focused on on poking holes and I think there’s some value in poking holes but there’s also you know it’s a little bit embarrassing to spend your whole day poking holes on something you know but let’s put it this way I’m on this podcast I’m the the crypto believer I’m the one who puts a significant portion of my net worth I have a crypto Media company I have a bunch of belief in crypto but for this use kit for this exercise here I’m gonna point out two things that I think uh all would be would be you know strong and valid points against crypto to somebody like you who is also a crypto believer so I want you to kind of argue against these and I hope that uh this doesn’t get clipped as like you know famous investor X fumbles the ball uh when trying to explain you know crypto thing so let’s try to do better than that yeah let’s do it okay so the first would be around uh nfts right so you’re a big nft guy and there’s nft art which I think pretty hard to argue against at this point like digital art cool their ability to own digital art that’s one use case for nfts but a lot of people who believe in nfts will also say but that’s just the beginning and if Jesus is a file format it’s a protocol there’s all these different use cases for nfts and um I saw the founder of of openc I think uh talked about this yesterday on a podcast where he’s like they’re like why he you know he’s like oh in other use cases NFC tickets and they’re like so why would there why would you want to have an nft ticket he’s like well because then you it’s you know you could plug it into defy and you could take a loan against your ticket and then people were like why the [ ] would I want to take a loan against my 60 like concert ticket like is that right really what the hype is about and it’s sort of a silly use case so I would like you to give me the non-silly nft use cases that you’re excited about so like yeah and the well let’s let’s take an example let’s take the ticket example and and the art one is easy it’s a new canvas but let’s actually let’s cover that first the art one is easy it’s a new canvas you can do things and pull from uh real-time data to display our in very unique fun creative ways right like it’s really not that much different than your than Rolexes I mean like there’s no reason why a Rolex is 150 000 other than like a lot of people think it’s cool so I would say there’s a difference there because it’s something you may not know about Rolex is they make over a million Rolexes per year and so Rolex it hides that number and the reason they hide that number is because if they didn’t have a sense of scarcity around it and they they do this specifically when you go in their stores they’ll always be next time you walk by an actual true Rolex boutique notice how there’s like some missing spots and and when you go inside and that’s all play it’s play because they’re like oh they’re sold out they’re not available but we can put you on this list and in in three to four months we might you might get a phone call guess what you always get the phone call and and the watch is coming because there’s they’re making a million a year the nice thing about you know the the one of the things that I was always so confused by is I was a common comic book collector way back in the day and I bought Wolverine number one because I love Wolverine it was like my childhood like I always wanted to own one right and so I bought Wolverine number one and it always hovered around fifty dollars and I was like why is this not going up it’s a very first Wolverine launched in the 80s right it wasn’t the first appearance of Wolverine but it was the first Wolverine Comic and I finally got a hold of a really well-known collector and he goes oh he goes you don’t know they knew by that point that Wolverine was a hot character and so they printed over 300 000 copies of that first edition I was like oh [ ] like that’s why there’s just a flood of these in the market so you know nfts the beautiful thing about this when you have an artist produce a piece it has proven provenance so you know where it’s come from has proven scarcity so you can’t like create you know additional add-ons or duplicates because it’s all recorded on the blockchain and then you have the unique ability to do very creative things like animation uh oracles work the art can change based on the stock market price or time of day or phase of the moon and there’s just so much more extension it’s a new vertical for art fine that’s great awesome like digital frames are going to be getting better it is going to be a thing like there’s no in my mind there is no argument to be had there that this won’t be because I don’t that against the the future or the inevitable and art is the easy use case for nfts the ticket thing is different right so the ticket thing I I I’m with you like I understand that people are in in web 3 are trying to like create these fancy financial instruments to like Leverage you on anything that you own they’re like hey you have a ticket to that upcoming concert that’s sold out you know spin into this defy unit and take a loan against it and then you can buy it back and use the money in the short term and it’s like that’s all [ ] man that nobody’s gonna do that right it’s it’s it’s don’t get me wrong there’s there’s there are specific use cases where that does make sense like loan against nfts is going to be the same thing that happens when Christie’s gives you a loan against your Picasso right like these these happen this happens all the time it’s just a parallel for the digital world there are certain types of of assets digital assets that getting loans against them if it’s something you want will make sense the tickets thing for me is very confusing but while I will tell you is interesting and I’ve talked to actual rock stars about this like I had Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park on my show and he’s a huge nft fan and he creates them and um you know awesome awesome Flex by the way you know I’ve I’ve talked to some rock stars about this that’s cool I think it’s cool I think it’s important because like you you want to get the artist to buy in on this totally too because it just keeps saying it’s cool yeah yeah he’s a he’s an awesome guy very approachable very approachable in the terms of rock star guys but Noah will tell you that like well what we talked about which is an obvious one is like okay imagine the tickets well let me step back one thing I believe to be true 90 plus percent of people that interact with nfts over the long term I believe won’t even know it as they’re doing it as an nft it’ll just be something where they have a digital wallet an app or something like that and they have a ticket there right they’re not going to know that behind the scenes that is powered by the blockchain and recorded by the blockchain right so I think what’s gonna happen is the nice thing about the blockchain is because it is a ledger in an immutable Ledger that is that is a way to say improve that you have done something that you either attended an event or you’ve you know you’ve actually physically done something there’s a ton of possibilities that I can unlock right if I go and I see Mike Shinoda play five shows or ten shows maybe he says okay now according to the blockchain in our app and again the consumer doesn’t need to know about this anyone that’s attended 10 of my shows gets a VIP meet and greet before the show right and there’s a thousand different things that you can do that you want to have that security of the blockchain behind the scenes so it’s not being forged so there’s not being copies of it being made so there’s not like a way to fake it and that’s the nice thing about the blockchain is it provides you a way to have the security and knowledge that something is not being faked and you can imagine that’s broadly applicable to a whole slew of different Industries um I don’t think we’ll be calling them quote unquote nfts you know it’s just going to be a great piece of tech it’s just another database that’s all it is it’s a distributed um immutable database that is decentralized it’s that’s all this is which unlocks a bunch of fun new use cases let’s caveat it all right so let’s say because I think I get when I get what you’re saying but I also get the uh the eye rolls that people get when it’s like cool tell me like how this is going to make my life better and it’s like well the cool thing about a blockchain is that it’s provable scarce it’s like it’s like what you’re telling me about the Under the Hood part whereas for example if my mom is like if I’m like Mom you should set up an email address and she’s like what the heck is email I don’t need that and it’s like well no check this out like you know you send letters or you you know you send letters to your sister who lives across the country like watch this if you do it this way it’s free and it’ll be instant and like oh wow that’s cool and hey you know it’s even better because it’s all digital you can just type the word and it’ll find that file you don’t have to keep it organized somewhere in a folder in your house yeah all right so I can I don’t have to tell her how it works at all I can literally just say it made your life better by being by giving you you know more time More Money More whatever and so I think the question is what does nfts give what what does what will an nft give a person that makes their life better without explaining how how the tech works at all sure I’ll give you I’ll give you a great example of one that hasn’t launched yet but something that that I’m personally working on so I I I’m working with um a well-known like very culty kind of wine producer out there and um you know wine at the highest level at the high end it’s a tricky it’s a tricky business because there’s you know forgeries there’s fake labels there’s they’re putting holograms on the side of them they’re putting um chips inside of the labels so that they can be scanned to to prove that they’re authentic right um that’s one piece so the first question is if I’m buying off the secondary market and not directly from the producer am I getting something that’s legit excuse me the second piece of that is once I received that bottle you know how do I store it to ensure that if I’m going to keep something and I want this asset to appreciate over time um and I want to drink it a decade from now or two then you know how do I ensure that it is being stored the right way so one thing that is happening in the next four months will be the issuance of nfts to people that is going to be from a major well-known Winery where it will represent one physical bottle of wine there’s a couple advantages here one you don’t have to take possession of it right away you can let it sit in its proven perfect storage conditions and age for decades to come you can let it appreciate in that in those storage conditions and you can hold on to the proven ownership of it as an nft let’s say that bottle of wine for four or five x’s over the next decade you don’t ever have to then pull the wine in out of the cellar take ownership above it find a third party to sell it and then resell it where that person is questioning the authenticity of that wine instead you can just transfer that nft to a buddy you can gift it to them for a special occasion or an anniversary and then when they decided hey I want to drink this they press two buttons and that bottle of wine that has been stored perfectly for a decade shows up at their door that is efficiency that eliminates fraud there is just so much to love in that equation and that’ll be applied to the watch industry to the luxury world to all these different verticals and it just makes sense like what about that I’m just curious as you hear me explain it it doesn’t sound like a better world like in in terms of fixing a bunch of problems I think uh if I was gonna if I was going to argue against that like just a steel man the argumentation I think it would be cool uh like maybe it’s gonna maybe these are certificates for Collectibles most you know it’s not gonna that doesn’t impact most people’s lives because most people are not collecting high-end bags or wines or this where there’s huge problems of forgery like that uh that may be one thing which is it’s not going to impact that many people um in that sense oh you’re telling me and if he’s at this game-changing world changing technology but that’s a really Niche specific you know one percenter type problem and then the other is like you know um sounds like an nft is like a digital certificate um you know you could have done that with it with another type of certificate um or another type of database maybe and but maybe this is better uh like I do agree it’s better but like it was possible before it didn’t take the impossible make it possible it made the uh the possible made it maybe made it more efficient or a little bit more convenient for the consumer and so I think that would be maybe one argument against it but I don’t want to go too far in the weeds yeah the other thing that I think that to add on to that though is that because you have well I’ll give you an example like back and you know the back to the rock star example of an artist um you’re Reliant upon if you did want to do some type of Rewards program or something for well actually let me step up one more point the point you made about the one percenter problem and is this applicable to those people you’re absolutely right like there’s only a certain number of people that are going to collect art at the highest level and one at the highest level and all that I mean granted these are double digit billions of dollars of year like big markets to go after but you’re right these specific use cases that I’m giving are are very Niche right um I think on the more broadly uh on on the on the idea of just membership and access and prove where you’ve been what you’ve done to unlock loyalty and rewards over the long term and think about you know replacing the AmEx points or you know other point type systems or reward systems with blockchain the beautiful thing about it being decentralized and this is one argument for decentralization is that it’s forever on the chain and you’re not dependent upon a company being around for that for that to exist so if an artist is engaged with a startup that is working on a Loyalty Rewards program for them and they run out of capital and die three years later as long as they stored their information on the blockchain that artists can then just pick up where they left off and it just it continues forward and we’ve already seen this happen where there’s been several startups that have stored their information on the blockchain where they go out of business because they just their their idea didn’t hit and then someone fills the the void and comes and says I have a better take on this and now let me tap into that public data and use it going forward so that not All Is Lost which is kind of a A New Concept in rather than just a database going away it’s always going to be there and can be reused which I think is pretty pretty compelling the really simple two-second example of this is you play a game you you get really into fortnite you go buy a bunch of skins you you dress up your character you got the cool you know like glider and you bought all that stuff and you know a year and a half goes by your friends have moved on they’re all playing Call of Duty now you’ve sank 350 dollars into fortnite you don’t own those items you can’t resell those items you can’t recoup any of that value nor could you take those items into any other game so in a web 3 world either another game could come out that says hey we accept item we we plugged into this protocol so you can bring your cool sword from game one to game two that makes the sword more valuable because now it can be used in multiple games so maybe we’re seeing this already the interoperability between multiple web3 platforms saying that this is a defined standard and now these items can digitally move between platforms it makes a ton of sense now those items are more valuable because they can be used in more places and the other one is that if I’m just done with the game I could just dump it on to the next person who’s really interested in fortnite and I can recoup some of my investment which will make more people want to spend in games because it’s not just a mighty pit it’s an asset that they could resell all right so that’s like the quicker example maybe I love that you joined my side is on your side but I have to argue the other way uh in order for this to be interesting yeah at the end you’re like I get it I’m in there’s another crypto nerd argument would be okay for years people have been saying that Bitcoin is this this inflation head or this currency that that’s that’s uh that doesn’t inflate and oh my God you know how lucky for you guys the US government starts printing trillions of dollars inflation is at record highs it’s in the news every day wait what happened to that awesome inflation hedge ask them why is it down 50 when inflation is is is is the bigger problem than ever shouldn’t this be shouldn’t this be your time to shine Bitcoin so yeah what say you to that yeah I mean it’s it’s a real shame that that Bitcoin has been so spiky because if it hadn’t been this linear growth to 20 000 to where it is today we’d all be like this is the most amazing thing ever like like if you just take the spikes out and make it look linear it it still looks like an incredible asset like you know just go back five years look where it is now versus five years ago so it’s the spiky nature of it that that that hurts it in the end I would say that um you know I I’m a fan I think Bitcoin is is a tough one because it’s I I don’t like that it’s not a green currency and I don’t see a clear path ever being the um and I know everyone’s trying to extend it in new and exciting ways and try to make it more ethereum-like and so that it can do more than just be uh this type of digital gold um for me you know when I when I think about those types of assets it’s I’m responsible in that I I’m not betting the farm on this but is it a small percentage of my portfolio absolutely and I just considered another asset class that provides me a little bit of um of diversification across the board so you know the majority of of my you know personal Holdings is is still um standard you know index funds uh that that are pretty vanilla the low-cost index funds you know the Vanguard Way right yeah and I was actually going to ask that what what is your liquid portfolio look like like where like I was at I was been waiting to ask you that Sam is like a ETF low-cost ETFs and bonds dude I’m 80 in Vanguard index funds 20 bonds that’s all and then I build private businesses yes Sean like has put everything into I’m like investing crypto and then like you know five companies I believe in and you know a little bit of index funds like it’s like yeah zero like it’s like five percent or something like that I keep ten percent in cash or something and so what would your or what would your pie chart look like and obviously it changes over time yeah so so my pie chart would be essentially this um you know 80 percent well I think there’s an important thing to caveat here is that as a venture capital uh partner over true Ventures I have a lot of um risk on the table there in in Venture early stage Investments did you have to put your own money into that or is that just your character I do yeah I had to put my own money into it as an investing partner you also invest alongside the fund so um that is my bucket of risk right so just setting that aside and saying okay you know I have carrying the fund that’s my pocket of high high risk too much capitalism right you put like I don’t know what like quarter million dollars or a million dollars or something like that into that it depends on the size of the fund it’s it’s a it’s it’s a percentage of the fund we just closed our latest fund which is 750 million and so the partners put in a percent of of um in back into the fund uh I’d have to look at what the exact numbers are but it’s it’s substantial they want you to have skin in the game when you’re investing um so you know I consider that to be like those are those are the big high risk buckets so everything else I do I want to be just super vanilla and it’s it’s that it’s that Vanguard index fund um keep it you know keep it really simple I don’t do bond funds I’d rather rely on people to buy Bonds on my behalf um you know I am laddering into uh uh bills right now because you’re getting four plus percent in the short term and so you know just just Ladder into to to those makes a ton of sense right now um you know anyone out there that has 10 grand that’s sitting round that doesn’t go by an eye bill right now that’s earning over nine percent is just insane like that’s the most no-brainer scenario for for someone that’s listening to this podcast by the way there’s like one week left of that right I was like yeah that’s right obviously not investment advice but you are getting the full faith of the US government as the backer and it’s over nine percent and you can do ten thousand for yourself and ten thousand for your spouse which is uh amazing so um anyway it’s I keep it really simple and then and then the rest is is is the crypto the crypto side of things is like you know let’s call it uh 50 nfts and 50 uh digital assets and that’s you know probably ten percent overall okay so so 90 of non-venture stuff is in just an index fund yeah yeah in multiple index funds that cover a variety of markets but yeah do you touch real estate at all or no not really other than just you know my own stuff do you own or rent I own uh we’re we’ve always had this debate and I know you got to go to them and I hear your alarms going off but we always have this debate well we both agree I I own I wish I would have rented dude I just want to rent everything I don’t want to own a lot of stuff do you regret owning or or do you like being an owner um you know the the thing is when interest rates were low you can just take a bunch of capital back out of your house and pour it back into the market assuming that you’re going to beat that you know if you could get uh own a house uh take a loan out against against that house and get you know a two a couple couple of points and and earn five to seven in the market like I’ll take that Delta all day long so um that’s kind of the way I play it cool well dude you’re uh I’m really happy we got to talk I um I used to work out of the Reddit building at uh third in Bryant and I remember seeing you walk by and I was like oh [ ] that’s Kevin I wish I would have said hey that was in 2012. so it’s only been 11 years later 10 years later but uh I’m happy that we were able to talk um I’ve been a big fan of yours I know Sean has as well so it’s really uh exciting to be able to meet you I love that you guys are doing this show I mean it reminds me a lot of like the the kind of fun little hash out debates that Tim Ferriss and I have when we do our random shows like they’re just fun right you gave a couple of friends together and shoot the [ ] and some some crazy discussions uh it could come out of it so that’s that’s great dude those were I can’t believe how big those were back then I remember the the Kevin and Tim shows I think they call that he like had a funny name for you like Tim Tim top yeah oh I call him Tim Tim still and it is Kev Kev but yeah we just shot one here uh in person uh maybe two weeks ago which was fun it was good to see Tim again I hadn’t seen him in in a minute but uh little things you like I remember you talked about Wim Hof back been and I was like oh and that you know next day I’m on my floor like breathing everything yeah on purpose you’re gonna remember your wife Dr Dara is that her name Daria yeah Daria like it’s funny it’s like that stuff was so I mean it still is but it was like particularly when I was in 22 and just getting into Silicon Valley like I really looked up to you guys I was like just show me how to Silicon Valley you know what I mean it was really cool yeah that was that was a fun I was I I miss not living in the same city as as Tim because we we always have get into some trouble when we’re together so yeah you guys thanks for doing the blueprint for us in in terms of like hey if you could find somebody you got chemistry with and you shoot the [ ] and like what’s your content your content is just yo I’m super curious and interested in a bunch of things and this becomes my outlet to summarize you know my set of experiments and rabbit holes I’ve been going down and like you know we would have never done a podcast of like oh the ad Revenue will be enough it’s like no it’s not really like [ __ ] that it’s not really relevant um and we’re seeing you know Tim and you and how oh actually it’s these relationships and these Investments and there’s these little side projects you kick up and actually you can make this whole thing work without having to go you know do this like you know traditional kind of venture path of uh yeah of raising money to go do this thing so that was pretty uh inspiring so yo thank you for that I think you know just seeing a blueprint is like that Roger Bannister four minute mile where you’re like oh I can have the lifestyle I want but on my terms and yeah if these guys can do it then we can do it oh I mean it’s it’s congrats to you both it seems like uh from from what I heard here at the beginning of this episode you guys have done quite well and and uh congrats on your success it’s awesome congrats to you too and thanks for kind of Paving the way we appreciate it and thanks for coming thanks for having me