Solana Billionaires, MFM Goes Viral on TikTok, Right to Be Forgotten, and More

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 it’s almost a self-fulfilling prophecy there’s so much talent being sucked into this thing these guys are gonna build things that actually have use cases actually it’s actually gonna make it all work um you can’t have this much talent spend all day thinking about this and building in this and have nothing come from it [Music] all right we’re live what’s going on i’m self-conscious now because we’re blown up on tick-tock i just look at myself i’m like i should have shaved and uh now that i have to see myself and i see people and also the tick-tock comments are brutal um they’re they’re good but they you know they’re like just want to argue with every point that gets made so let’s talk let’s talk about now when i see myself i’m like [  ] this is going on tick tock i better i need to shave for the next one so basically 10 days ago or 15 days ago something like that like not long ago we told everyone that we’re gonna do this contest we’re gonna give five thousand dollars to like three people who take our clips and turn them into videos the best people are on tick tock so i actually posted the tags down there for you so i must have made a mistake i told people to say to to use the hashtag mfmclips but then i also i must have said clip as well without the s and so people are using two hashtag clips and clip mfn clip and mfn clips and some aren’t using both but if you use those links i i showed you we have um in the ballpark of around 15 ish million impressions from these videos and it’s mostly young folks who created these tick tock handles from scratch took our our content and some videos have over a million some of them have hundreds of thousands of likes they’re great and uh do you read the comments no what do they say do they make some of us any content creator you go through the cycle of like you get excited and you read the comment and the early comments are good and then the more popular you get the comments start to turn mean and then you just you everybody reaches a point where they oh no then the third phase is you say you don’t read the comments but you secretly do and then finally you know whatever these are the seven stages of grief or something uh social media grief you finally stop reading the comments because you’re like this is just too toxic so yeah they they basically just [  ] on us for whatever we say like if we say um you put down 20 to buy a house then all the comments are about ways that you can oh oh you can also not put down 20 if you do this it’s like all right okay tic.com enter you got me you are smarter than us you are gonna constantly find some like edge case loophole or um you know mistake in what was said do they make fun of how we look or talk or anything like they insult us no they don’t really they’re either like uh these guys are annoying like they’ll be like let’s say somebody cuts a clip of one of us breaking down you know our monthly expenses or something like that and then the comment would just but they don’t know like the vibe of the pod they don’t know why someone would just say that out of the blue right it’s not something people normally talk about so they’re just like why did he feel the need to tell us how much he’s spending on x or like why is he telling us his body fat percentage whatever they’re just like there’s that kind which is what a douche nobody asked you know why are you doing that then there’s the comments that are like you know actually actually it’s this other thing and then there’s some comments which are like bro i don’t i don’t want that future no no thanks you know because we’ll be like uh here’s how things are changing it’ll be like dude companies just only think about money and like you know comments like that so those are the three flavors of hater we get so far luckily so far nobody’s just [  ] on our like face and body oh that’s good that’s a that’s a surprise that’s a win as far as i’m concerned yeah i and it’s in general sticks and stones may break my bones but words about my appearance do hurt me yeah just like don’t make fun of my teeth or like hair you can make fun of my brain they um this promotion has been a home run like i i thought it was going to be pretty good i didn’t think it was going to be this good and so what we’ll have to do is there’s like a couple people who i’m recognizing because i watch them that are killing it we’re gonna have to have them on the pod and explain how they got so many views it’s pretty amazing right and let’s talk about this for a second because um i think there’s something interesting to learn here so you have said many times i’ve grown a lot of things i’ve grown an email newsletter to multi-millions i’ve grown a subscription business to multi-millions i’ve uh you know grown uh whatever you’re like a podcast is the hardest thing i’ve ever had to grow and you say that i think it’s just kind of a cool thing to say in general i agree with it in the sense of it there’s no like easy growth hacks to growing a podcast um there’s no just like button you can push paid ads don’t really work nothing really works like that the good news is once somebody actually subscribed to your podcast they become like a really loyal fan and they like feel like they know you so it’s got a lot of value but it’s hard to get that easy growth this is the first and we’ve tried a bunch of [  ] we’ve tried we did nothing initially then we tried placing it in our email newsletters we tried uh bringing on big name guests we tried um paid ads we tried a whole bunch of different things none of which really like kind of felt like it was really working but the pod kept growing organically this is the first thing oh by the way we also tried making our own clips paying an agency tens of thousands of dollars a month to be making really awesome animated clips of our content and they were great and they were high quality clips but it didn’t lead to this this was different this was hey anybody open playing field just go for it and we’ll give out prizes to the people who are actually good at it merit based right and what they’re good at is they understood tick tock whereas like we suck at tick-tock we don’t know how to create content there they pull clip they pull the right clips because they’re actually listeners and fans of the show so they know which clip is actually going to be interesting versus like you know some random employee at our company being like uh you know at the 42 minute mark let’s use that one for the clip these guys will put like 10 that they think are interesting and put them out there and um and they’re motivated because they’re like [  ] if i do this good i can get a million views on this and i could go you know i can get five grand from these guys like that’s a pretty sweet deal for for doing something you know pretty fun so this has actually worked yeah it’s pretty wild and like some there’s one guy who basically took our rob dierdick episode and i looked at his feed and he i’m not i don’t think i’m exaggerating it’s 50 clips in a row of like he basically just took it and just divided it up and like three of the fifties all he did was he just took our talking out and just fight every time rob talks he grabs a clip which is smart yeah and in his whole feed i looked at his feet it was all that one episode and like three of them had like 500 000 views yeah so go follow them i think mfm cuts is one on on tick tock and twitter there’s mfm clips and there’s a bunch of other variations of that name all right i want to tell you about something interesting i got a few interesting things to talk to you about okay um so let me tell you about something that i was thinking about this weekend so i’ve got a buddy uh you kind of know them and we i’m not gonna name them but a few years ago he did something he was accused of doing a crime that was a horrible crime one of the worst crimes you could commit and he was the uh he was an executive at a company and it made the news so six months later after he went to court and with the trial the government dropped the case because it was a horrible misunderstanding he didn’t do what he was accused of doing and they exonerated him and they go we’re sorry we were wrong we we called this one wrong and the first time the story went out it made all the headlines and if you google this person’s name it came up on top but what didn’t come up on top was like six months later it said charges dropped uh the the misunderstanding came about for this reason this person lost their job because of that and lost obviously a lot of money and i was i’ve always thought about this and i listened to a podcast this weekend and it was called um the right to be forgotten and it was by radio lab and so this is this idea of the right to be forgotten and it’s in europe it’s actually a law um i don’t know exactly what the law says but it says like if something isn’t particularly newsworthy but you’re writing about it anyway and it really hurts that person more than that provides value to the comment or to the a reader you have to take it down and there’s a couple of newspapers like the boston globe as well as uh in this particular podcast they looked at this uh company uh this newspaper in cleveland ohio and there are stories of like a cop emailing them and he’s like look you wrote about this time that i lied about uh some paperwork i ended up getting fired i didn’t hurt anyone and now i can’t get a job at another as a police officer anywhere else can i fill in the gap on the right to be forgotten for you here yeah so so basically it’s a law that says search engines should have to remove links about your past if under certain circumstances and it came about because there was a woman an actress who was in a movie and then he got dubbed um so there was that the film was called the innocence of muslims and then her her original line um uh her original line got dubbed over and then they made it made it so that it looked like she was saying is your is your muhammad a child molester right so that was the clip and she starts getting death threats and like people go crazy about this and she’s like what is this like why like okay this thing got dubbed now this clip got on to into the search engine and it comes up if you search my name or certain things and um it’s causing you know like harm to me in my personal life and so she sued google in 2014 and ultimately they they upheld it which was um you know uh like she would like to have it have the film forgotten and [  ] from youtube unfortunately the right to be forgotten which is recognized in the eu is not recognized in the u.s and so it’s a the eu does respect this as they’re tighter on privacy with gdpr and things like that and the us does not so yeah and so in the us we don’t have that but it’s kind of interesting because i personally have seen this hurt people but you think like right now like let’s say that you’re at a bar and you’re drunk and you call someone like a really bad word and it’s on uh reddit and they find your name you’re screwed like to the point of like your life is gonna be hurt meaningfully for like the next decade and like you should suffer some consequences for someone’s calling something something rude but not like that serious you know and so i’ve been thinking a lot about this business about this reputation management business have you ever researched it yeah my former co-founder used to work there so he used to tell me stories all the time great i want to hear all about it and i know a little bit about this because listen to this so one of the companies is called reputation.com so there’s this porn star named sasha gray so do me a favor type in sasha gray on your google and click images sasha gray doesn’t she’s not an actress anymore not a porn actress anymore but she was like a very prolific porn actress when you clicked images what do you see here we go i’m here okay so i see a bunch of head shots of her i see no real porn well i guess i guess some scandalous stuff but mostly porn yeah mostly just pictures of her fully clothed or like in a bikini so one time at the hustle right when we first launched i helped write this article about sasha gray and she hired this firm called reputation.com and she basically wanted to retire from pornography and become like an actor and whatever else something different uh and she hired reputation.com to hide or like basically blog a bunch and write a bunch in order to get the porn images to go down and i remember when we wrote this article reputation.com did something kind of funny and if i would go on my google analytics at night i would look at real time and there would be thousands of people reading this article and i saw that they searched sasha gray and so reputation.com manipulated it so the article that we wrote about reputation.com and sasha gray came up number one if you googled sasha gray and at night when people were gonna look at porn they googled sasha gray and they landed on our article it was pretty wild i would see it at night every week or every night it would go up and so i got crazy fascinated about reputation.com and so for this segment i wanted to talk about reputation.com i think there’s yext and their sprinkler and these are businesses that do like four or five hundred million dollars a year and all they do is reputation management what do you know about reputation.com so he used to tell me stories like you know i asked him i was like oh what’d you do you know before this what was your job before that and eventually he said reputation common i got fascinated like you i was like what is that so he told me he’s like you know here’s a scenario you’re uh a senator and your son who has the same you know john chambers junior sorry sorry danny john chambers out there it’s a hypothetical so your son who has the same name as you basically gets a dui or gets arrested for battery or something like that so now anytime somebody searches john chambers this mug shot’s going to come up or this bad news story’s going to come up and they basically they go to reputation.com and they say i would like this to disappear off the front page of uh i would like this to disappear a repetition.com says i can’t make it disappear the internet sort of is uncontrollable but i can get you off the front page of google and they’re like that would be amazing and they say for the low low price of 120 thousand dollars 75 000 whatever it’s expensive expensive significant because they know people are by the time you’re at reputation.com you’re bent over the barrel you they can charge pretty much whatever they can get away with so like you know a nascar driver a politician whoever people of interest people who wanted their their names or their kids names to get out of the bad news and so they had a team of engineers that were just it’s a constant cat and mouse game to figure out how to beat google so like my co-founder told me he’s like one of the big the biggest days at the company was when we figured out you know google has to auto complete right so you go yeah you type sampar it’s going to be sampar the hustle sampar net worth sampar wife sampar is gay it’ll be like all these likes the same 10 queries for everybody right and what he figured out was that when you type you know sampar if it used to say felony like f would now say friend instead of felony like it would they would figure out how to even finish the autocomplete because even when they were good at getting you off the front page by blogging by promoting other articles whatever getting them higher ranked if the autocomplete was still always suggesting felony then people would click it and they would search for felony it would be reinforcing then google would search for it more so they needed to clear that so there was just constant cat and mouse game to understand how is google doing how’s google deciding what goes where and then how do we content farm or manipulate this in some way that will change what the first page results are cause 98 of people don’t go past the first page or something like yeah and so it’s amazing to hear about that and then there’s a company called yext y-e-x-t they’re publicly traded and they do i think that they are just a direct competitor to reputation.com they’re publicly traded they did 390 million dollars i think last year in revenue their market cap is not very good it’s like four or five times revenue um are you looking at it i’m i’m on repute i went to reputation. i just wanted to see the latest like you wouldn’t even know when you go to this what they do because it says this is their headline first it looks like a hospital website like a nice health tech website or something like that then it says a world of interactions demands a platform of action it’s we’re a fixer is what i should say so but here’s the problem by the way maybe they change what they do i don’t i think they still do it i think they offer like a a smaller package um uh like like when we wrote the sasha gray article that was in 2016 they have like a 13 000 package um but the problem is there’s there’s kind of two problems with this the first is that the results aren’t guaranteed like you can’t guarantee that it’s going to work which is i guess that’s not a problem but that’s just how it works you know you when someone calls you i get these calls all the time because i own domain names and i forgot to hide my name it’s like hey we’ll put you on the first page of google that’s a scam you can’t just promise that but the second thing is that if you’re an individual if you’re just someone who like said some stupid drunken thing to someone one day and now your name’s all over the place you you it’s really really hard to to like unless you’re willing to pay a hundred thousand dollars which is what a lot of the stuff costs it’s incredibly challenged to manage your reputation if you’re just like a person and so i was thinking about like is there anything interesting in that space i actually think that there could be something i like this company called uh do not pay do you know what do not pay is yeah i love do not pay that guy the guy behind it’s awesome and it’s a great idea so do not pay it’s started by this guy and i actually didn’t research this so this is on the top of my head it started by this guy josh browder i think powder and he’s young like i’ve when he started it i think he was like 21. maybe oh 25. okay well no now i think he’s like 25. when he was started he was even younger yeah he was obviously and uh he was like uh like it was like a prodigy type of thing and originally the business existed to help you fight parking tickets automatically but now they have a bunch of features like it’s likely basically all sticking it to the man so another feature is like we will um sue we will sue cold callers on your behalf or something like that right we’ll also do like um you know we will unsubscribe you from stuff that you’re not using that you pay for you know just ways to save ways that you do not pay which is why it’s a great name and a great idea and i think there’s a world where like a do not you could use a do not pay service like this to help manage your reputation online and this is a need that i think we’re actually going to see more and more and more of it it’s like a very like exponential thing where it’s like more and more people are going to be written about and more and more people are going to need this and i don’t know it’s just something i’ve been thinking about what do you have any do you have an opinion i don’t know where the new opportunity is in this one because i think it really depends on it’s kind of like you need google to exist for reputation.com to exist and so really it’s about thinking okay there was a version of this on social networks that people were doing like um i remember this one guy came to me and he was a great entrepreneur he ended up not doing this idea but like i always thought it was a great idea others have done it which is um when you everybody has social media where they post stupid stuff uh when you’re younger or when you’re just drunk or whatever and so what they do is they go to companies and they say hey we ran a check on all your employees and we found these red flags and um you know you should be aware of how you’re what you know who you’re hiring as well as what they’re saying and representing your company how they represent your company elsewhere so they end up getting contracts with companies to monitor and clean up uh and they’re not like tattletailing they’re sort of like and hey like an insider helping you out saying hey you have this employee who’s saying this you may want to take action but the action might just be to letting the employee know that we we flagged this as potentially controversial and maybe they want to delete it and so it’s a monitoring service for social media reputations and social media controversies which i think is shitty great great idea it just sucks that you got to do that well it sucks that the world is the way it is it sucks well some people think oh it’s good he holds you accountable but in reality it’s just a bunch of like you know don’t don’t say what you really feel is really the result of most of this because people just get afraid to say anything because they’re worried about getting cancelled um so you and your buddy liked working at reputation.com but they like they were by the book he was like technically it was super interesting to figure out how we do all this stuff uh you know he’s like he always says this thing at one point we had indexed every person on the web and uh we had like them and their cluster and their reputation um and so you know i think it was technically very interesting but obviously like sort of soul sucking and boring as well so he you know bounced yeah i think i could see that but it is an interesting problem i’ve been thinking about um all right let me tell you about one more thing um all right so i was reading the information uh the information.com and they had an article about solano so i told you about this on slack so there’s this solana sorry i don’t know anything about it really other than don’t out yourself here as a yeah i’m not crypto nobody yeah i don’t want to act like i’m an expert here i’m not i just i i i’ve read a lot about it though but news articles so chris mccann i knew this guy named chris mccann because he had this thing called startup digest and that’s one of the reasons why hustlecon became popular is because i would email chris and i would say hey can you please put this in the email and he had this email called started up digest it started in san francisco and he would email email each week different uh events happening in san francisco different startup events this is when the startup community was much smaller and everyone wanted to go to events and it was just here’s a roundup of cool events happening he eventually expanded it to different cities he sold it not for a lot of money probably a hundred probably six figures i bet but he kind of worked his way into benchmark where he like was just an employee there and somehow or another invested hundred and fifty thousand dollars into uh what’s it called is it solano or solano salon i’m a [  ] noob he invested 250 000 into solana and the information wrote an article about how that 250 turned into a billion dollars is that crazy in probably i think three three years maybe four years max uh yeah it’s insane i sent you um i sent you somebody else who also has made multiple billions of dollars from their solana investment i said that uh last week to you but but basically solana has gone oh like the fun yeah so solana has gone from let’s see i mean it was like sub a dollar um not long ago and now it’s two hundred dollars uh per coin it’s basically it’s what is solana solana is a competitor to ethereum if you know what ethereum is if you don’t know what ethereum is just fast forward this segment you probably don’t care so um salon is like a competitor to ethereum and as recently as okay so this time last year solano was a dollar 54 when it launched when it did its ico was just under a dollar i think it was and so um and that was only that was you know a couple years ago two years ago or something like that so basically if you even just take last year a dollar fifty four you put a hundred thousand dollars into that and now you have i think twenty million dollars something like that um i’ll i’m actually gonna do some public math here for everybody yeah 20 million dollars so solana’s had this insane run-up and it sounds like he i think through he’s in this fund called red something red circle [  ] like that a race yeah race something um they were like the seat investors in solana and um you know that’s the right project to be a seed investor and is a crypto project that becomes a you know multi-billion dollar crypto asset and sure enough you could turning 250k into a billion dollars that’s kind of insane i don’t think it was his personal 200k necessarily but even if it was the fund the the article made it sound like it was but even if it’s not that doesn’t change much the insanity yeah it doesn’t change much because he still is gonna walk away with nine fig over 100 million some bigger like there but this article i was reading about it and they’re basically like saying there’s like a lot of really high profile tech folks at traditional tech companies giving up amazing things in order to like flee to this crypto thing and i’ll get and i want to ask you a question about that but example like this woman sandy carter vp of uh amazon’s cloud computing she left uh to join unstoppable domains brian roberts who was the cfo of lyft he left to join open c and he said i’ve seen enough cycles and paradigm shifts to be cognizant when something this big is just emerging and that we’re only at the beginning and it’s just gonna get bigger we had david marcus he basically led uh facebook’s cryptocurrency thing he bounced to start his own thing uh the uh this one dude left uh google in order to become coinbase’s chief product officer and when it went public his stake was worth 600 million dollars and then of course jack dorsey bounced from twitter in order to work at square and it’s like definitely involves crypto just renamed they renamed to block because they’re focusing on blockchain but um it’s crazy and my question to you is this have you ever seen someone create that much wealth that fast and do you have any stories of people who you know or know of that are doing this and like what their stories are because this is crazy well i’ll say the first thing is that you’re right that there’s basically a giant black hole that’s sucking up all the talent in the world and it’s called crypto and it’s almost a self there’s a lot of people who don’t believe that crypto is a thing or they think it’s massively overhyped and they say you know give me one example of a real use case of this thing nobody’s actually using it for payments or web three there’s no real web three products and it’s sort of there there’s some truth to what they’re saying i i wouldn’t say that they’re completely off base it’s like a valid critique um i don’t think it’s true but it’s a valid criticism but the this thing these guys are going to build things that actually have use cases and actually it’s actually going to make it all work that’s like the biggest like takeaway for me of like even if you’re the biggest crypto skeptic there’s a self-fulfilling prophecy here which is that it sucked up all the dev talent sucked up all the smartest people suck it sucked up like 20 billion dollars of venture capital every year now and uh all that funding all that talent is gonna is gonna create things that actually do work and do hit beyond what’s already there today so there’s that now to your question have i seen somebody get rich this quick i want to have my buddy on i have a friend uh who used to work work with me and i caught up with them and his story he basically went from like uh average like an average job like you wouldn’t look at this person say oh that’s a star career and um they’re good they were doing well obviously but they were doing like normal person well and they went from normal person well to making like to personally making like 15 million dollars in the last year just by they basically quit their job and they went down a crypto rabbit hole and started betting on things in d5 and they started playing with all the d5 projects investing their money in d5 and they didn’t have a huge base of capital they had you know call it half a million dollars that they put in and to turn a half a million dollars if you and if you have no path in your career to being like you know a deca millionaire right like if you don’t have a path where you’re like yeah i’m gonna have [  ] you money to go from no path no no like reasonable storyline that makes sense there you have a job at a company that pays you good salary and that’s that to that is amazing to me and awesome and you know just like blew my mind more so than these guys who become multi-billionaires who were like prodigies and like invented the protocol or invested 250k in a random token it’s like this is somebody who just took their own money out of the stock market and was like instead of investing in apple google and facebook i’m going to investigate crypto and turned a normal amount a normal like life savings amount of money into a life-changing amount of money and i want to have him on to tell his full story because it actually has like a bunch of twists and turns um that are like kind of amazing so i’m going to ask him if he’ll come on and share it they’re willing to yeah you know them um i don’t know if they’re willing to share but if they are it’s gonna make for an amazing episode uh i’ll ask them if you’ll do it next week did they um did they earn the did they uh sell do they have usd or like some type of stable currency um no they’re they’re still in crypto like 100 or 100 plus percent because they you know but but is it stable like a big like a popular thing uh it’s a mix of popular things and like something they make yeah everything’s liquid if they wanted to cash out and say i’m done i’m going to malibu and i’m going to chill i’m going to pretend that this year never existed and i basically won a lottery they could do that because we have a buddy in our chat group who said he made all this money in some crazy coin but he’s like i can’t sell it so it’s like that’s different that’s like uh those are like either illiquid like oh there’s this coin but it’s not listed yet or it’s liquid but there’s like no trading volume whatsoever on this coin and so like yeah if you have 10 million dollars and you go to even 100 000 it’ll crash the price of the coin that’s not what this is that’s that’s a different thing um that’s a what that is is i i make a million coins i keep 999 000 for myself and then i sell one of them for a dollar and oh now the total value of my thing is a million dollars and it’s like no it’s not really you there’s such a lit such a small amount of the supply out there being sold it’s not indicative of the true price this is what i’m talking about is not that situation is there any other person all right so you have a story of someone who did 500 000 to 15 million i just told you about this guy who in like 200 years this person non-technical never was a trader or financial person like they would own like a index fund or mutual fund before that didn’t know how to spell blockchain um you know like this person is that’s why this blows my mind it’s not just this like i know that amount is not the craziest amount of money it’s an awesome amount of money for anybody but what’s crazy is point a to point b it makes no sense it’s like how could those two points connect in that amount of time it’s mind-blowing to me so i told you a story about this dude chris who did 250 000 up to a billion you just said 500 000 to 15 million do we know anyone else that has this like crazy crazy journey uh personally you’ve talked about this guy you talked about somebody right that you’re yeah and a friend that that they they did one million to a hundred million yeah so at its peak when bitcoin was uh sixty thousand so i don’t whatever is that discounted okay i have another one uh there is a kid who i call him a kid because he was actually a kid he i built this a product called blab back in the days like kind of like clubhouse-y you could basically go hang out and chat with people and this kid used to come home every day from school he used to get on and chat and he didn’t chat in the other rooms that had 13 year olds he came to our rooms because he loved technology startups he wanted to be in the startup scene i think he was maybe 13 at the time okay so fast forward it’s been like six years since then so now he’s like let’s say 21 or something like that it’s been it’s been a while he created some but he was he’s a technical guy but he created a protocol like i was like oh what you been up to like how is your startup going and he’s like uh yeah startups okay we haven’t been focusing on it for last few months i was like i know man it’s tough you got just hang in there buddy you know just pivot and find something he’s like actually like we ended up creating this thing anonymously on one of these random like side chains and it was like blah blah some bunch of terms i don’t even understand it’s you know it’s a it’s a derivatives perpetual contract for you know adding liquidity to this blah blah i’m like okay i don’t even understand what you’re saying uh and he’s like yeah the market cap of it like you know basically like the market cap of it is like 900 million right now and you know i think he cashed out 10 million dollars in this he’s like he’s like dude it’s been insane the market cap went up like crazy now it’s at 200 and he’s like i was able to like take out like a life-changing amount of money he i took out 10 million he was he was like he was asking me because he goes i heard you guys talking about charities and charity water you told the charity water stores really moved like i’ve set aside seven figures to donate you’re like what i was like you’ve set aside seven figures like like are you seven years old how did this happen where what if what has happened to this amount of time like i used to talk to you when you would come home from eighth grade and get online like you’re donating millions of dollars to charity now like what is again a a and b it broke my brain and i don’t mean this as an insult to them like if they’re if they were only 15 then so they’re still only like 19. yeah i think they’re 20 now 21 something like that it’s been like seven years since we’ve made that thing so um you know it’s not it’s not mind-blowing to me that this person is successful in both cases i i really like this person that’s why i used to hang out with them that’s why i i used to work with one of them i think they’re really smart and we’re going to be normal person successful it’s like when you know oh i went like my sister went to high school with this girl lily galici who’s like this super famous instagram star now and she’s like has her own tv show on bravo and it’s like wait that’s the lily girl who used to come to our house after school like she was just like a normal girl like wait that’s her like that doesn’t even look like her anymore like yeah she’s had some work done right it’s like just mind-blowing to know a normal person who’s like yeah that’s a cool normal they’ll do well in life to be like no actually they’re like one of those crazy outlier stories and in a way that you wouldn’t have otherwise predicted you know it didn’t make any sense like you know it’s not it’s not that that was their skill set and they tried try tried that thing for 10 years and finally hit it’s like just i don’t know where they just did this thing and it hit and crypto is this amazing thing like that so by the way um i want to say something when i first talked to my friend i caught up with my friend i felt insanely jealous i was like so i was happy for him and i like him and all that but i was also like i was like in my head i was just like what the [  ] have i been doing with my life with the the friend that used to work for you both of them both the same reaction yeah because it feels weird because you’re like oh wait you kind of looked up to me now now i’m like you know way less successful than you uh so like what just happened you just like catapulted really crazy like yeah between the last time we caught up and now there is jealousy there it’s easy and i just want to say like you know an interesting thing to observe is what is your reaction to hearing stories like this um there’s a part of me that i’m not proud of which gets jealous of it but that used to be like it used to be i would feel that i wouldn’t really acknowledge that that’s what i was feeling and i would kind of find reasons why it was like ah that’s just luck or um like you know well they probably are taking a bunch of risk and they might lose it all and i’m kind of secretly rooting for it to not not all work out just so perfectly as it has that’s gone but i still got a little bit of that like jealousy pain left and i’d say the interesting thing is my coach said this to me he goes uh you know you’ll encounter people in your life where your success just reminds them of their failure and they’re not focused on your success they’re focused on their fail your success has reminded them of their failure or your abundance has reminded them of their lack and uh if you notice that in yourself you want to be aware of that and change that and if you find other people and you’re like oh these people are haters like uh you know just understand what’s coming out they don’t actually hate you it’s uh your success has reminded them of some feeling that they have in themselves and that’s where their attention is gone and so uh yeah i wanted to share that because i definitely felt this like crazy feeling that i hadn’t felt in a long time but these stories were so mind-blowing that i could i was like wow this i don’t even know what to say i feel lucky to know who i know which we have the same group basically that i’ve like these stories that sound unbelievably true um a big yeah i know that person um i saw it it was wild so like an example is muay’s ali is selling native deodorant for 100 million dollars two years after starting it i was in he we shared an office when he was starting it and i saw him try to learn facebook ads like i saw the thing come to fruition i saw it right in front of my eyes every single day for like six or ten months um and that was almost half the journey it’s actually pretty amazing you know and i think about like this isn’t like a one-to-one correlation because there’s other components here but like i was thinking about this i’m like jamaica is a very small country there’s not a lot of people there but they just dominate the 100-meter dash obviously there’s some genetic there’s a lot of genetic factors going there but it can’t be significantly different than america and um and i was thinking like man one of the reasons being is they just are just surrounded by like it’s just normal to be great at something and then and that makes it normal to work hard and you’re like well i should be running these times in practice and you don’t like freak out you just get it done because that’s what’s expected and i kind of feel that way in terms of making money because of our friends are who they are it’s like well you just want to spend something up and if yeah if you’re willing to dedicate three years like you definitely can add eight figures of net worth to your like for sure like it’s easy it’s not easy but it’s simple and it’s kind of cool to like be around people where you start seeing like yeah look it’s really simple you just do this this of course you gotta dedicate every right you have to dedicate tens of hours you know 50 60 hours a week for like many years but yeah it’s very simple straightforward well the first example you gave with moyes was starting it literally at the table i think he sat at the table next to you right like in the yeah yeah and founders dojo or whatever those hacker dojo founder dojo founder’s dojo like i think he was interested at first if i remember correctly he was like what should i sell should i do mattresses and he was like ordering mattresses and like measuring them and like seeing like oh that’s too much work measures are too big what else is there by the way the public story is like my sister was pregnant and she couldn’t find a deodorant that would have didn’t have chemicals which might harm her baby so i wanted to create that product it’s like dude i know you you were like all right how do i build i want to make a business i want to sell some [  ] what do people want oh people like kleenexes mattresses ah too big to ship okay yeah scratch that off the list deodorant small under one pound ships easily people will use it every month it’s a renewable and there’s a niche and there is a genuine problem for it but i know you dude there’s a there’s a real story and then there’s the narrative it’s just like stories not narratives it’s not bad he was just like seeking problems to solve like boom found it and i respect that uh i i like that and that’s how i think so you know it’s normal to me the there’s something to when you see it being built day by day brick by brick you’re like there’s a just a respect and and for me like total joy i never feel the jealousy in that case like for example i remember when you started the hustle i remember when you were doing just the event and then you were like i’m gonna do this thing and then i came to your office with you and john and it was like like it was like we went into a room that was like a conference room that was like the size of a bathroom and like you had a presentation and like i listened to it and i was like okay this is cool but like what about this this and this some of you guys are like i don’t know we’ll figure it out and then you like you started with these like long form your original thing was long-form stories and you like kind of was working but not really you’re like i’m thinking about switching to this like newsletter thing just daily news skim is doing it it’s working these guys are doing it i think we could do it in our nation i think it’ll be even better and so seeing that then it’s like cool seven years later sam whatever i don’t know how luck’s been seven years was it seven uh we sold it at about five okay five years in sam sells the thing and is successful nothing but props respect and and joy of like wow that’s so cool i got to sit there on the journey with you there’s a difference of that watching somebody build it brick by brick and a difference of actually this happened in 12 months you didn’t get to see the hard work that was obviously going in and the risks that were being taken so you all you hear is like i tried this thing it just hit 100x 200x like what uh you know it’s it feels more like a lottery and it feels less like the hard work thing and i think that happens a lot in crypto there’s a little difference there the second part is i remember when uh i moved so i moved from australia to silicon valley without having a game plan i think you were kind of the same way didn’t you just like come to silicon valley like showed up just showed up i did the same thing i was sitting in australia i went i remember specifically i went to a meet-up and they asked me to speak about the about lean startups about startups and i went and i spoke and everybody at the end was like yay you know great talk people afterwards were like wow that was really great talk and in my head my buddy was like what’s wrong because he could see i was just like kind of upset he’s like what’s wrong he didn’t like it and i was like i was like i don’t know anything about startups and i’m like the thought leader here this is like i’m doing something wrong like this is like i feel like not imposter syndrome i feel like idiot syndrome it’s a blind leading to blind it’s like these guys know zero about startups i know point one about startups but if i’m the smart guy here then that where are the actual smart guys they’re not here and i asked i was like yo what are the success stories in brisbane about like startups you guys are not yeah these guys did great oh where are they they don’t come to these events no they moved to san francisco these guys moved these guys moved and i was like oh all the smart people move okay maybe i should move so i changed my phone number first just to mentally be like all right i have a silicon valley area code i don’t know why for me that was just like i think i could just do it like over like i did it in one night before i could move it was like faster than moving was just to change my phone numbers make a statement and then i remember being like all right i’m gonna move there i’ll figure it out and i quit my job you know on the spot and i was like i’m just gonna move there i play poker for three months to hold myself over while i applied for a job literally one job and uh they didn’t hire me they were like kept stringing me along and i was like i’m [  ] up this was the one i ended up working at monkey inferno there was like a slow process two-month process so finally i was just like all right [  ] i’m just gonna move there and if this doesn’t work i think i’ll get this job but if it doesn’t work i’ll get some i’ll do something else what was the title which is product manager uh like i was it was first pm there so i i finally came and when i came they were like all right why’d you move like why’d you why’d you come here and i was like well uh you know i wanted to see what’s in the water here right like if this is where all the smart people are that’s where the startups are like what do you guys know that i don’t i don’t know and i was thinking it’s about tactics it’s about operations maybe people are just like literally this is the cream of the crop these are just the smartest people and there’s certainly some of that but i’ll tell you what to me was the actual this was the actual difference the thing that made coming to silicon valley work i went to this coffee shop you remember the creamery or there’s like a it’s like this like yeah that’s where everyone would be an ice cream whatever it was in south park second in brandon i think yeah exactly so this place called the creamery it’s kind of famous for where people take meetings and i went there and i just sat there for like half a day i was just eating i didn’t i didn’t have anywhere to go i didn’t have an office i didn’t have an apartment so i was like well i’ll sit here and then i’ll go search for apartments later and i remember just seeing table after table next to me somebody would come in and they’d be like just pitching their idea to either an investor or a buddy like trying to make a co trying to like a co-founder or two friends catching up or an investment pitch and it was always like these like hair brained ideas it’s like oh you know linkedin but for you know cat doctors or whatever this is these stupid ideas and i remember just sitting there thinking oh that’s a stupid idea that’s a stupid idea and then i was sort of realizing like oh that’s actually kind of cool like the normal conversation here the coffee shop conversation here is i get to i got this idea i’m going to change the world i got this idea it’s going to be huge i was like everybody kind of has bought into this and like if you go to hollywood that’s what happens like the waiters and waitresses i’m going to be a star and new york is a different thing and it’s it’s silicon valley it’s basically i get those i got this idea it’s going to be big and that’s normal whereas before everywhere i lived if you were the guy who’s got an idea and you’re going to quit your job to go do it you’re crazy you’re the crazy guy here you’re the normal guy here if in silicon valley if you’re like i work at jp morgan you basically have to like bow your head in shame uh you have to like come up with some excuse it’s like you know because my wife is pregnant with twins and i’ve really got to pay the mortgage but as soon as that’s over you know like i’m back in the game i’m going to go back into the startup game like if you’re a con if you work for mckenzie anywhere else that’s great if you work for you know mckenzie or deloitte in san francisco you’re like the low class person you’re not the high class person because the high class person is the founder with the idea or the angel investor who’s betting on ideas so the just that culture where that’s normal and possible to just constantly quit your job have an idea throw everything into it maybe get rich um that’s what makes silicon valley so awesome or at least that’s what it did and what you’re talking about where like if your friends group has these types of success stories and is doing this type of [  ] your brain will just automatically change into thinking that’s possible that’s normal that’s super doable for me too and that you can’t underestimate that i think for some people that’s what this show is it’s like if you hear us three times a week at least that’s like part of your friend group that talks that way thinks that way and will make it feel normal to have ideas to bet on ideas to make a bunch of money to make huge investments whereas in your your geography may not be people around you and your neighbors and stuff like that may not think that way yeah it and it basically changed my perspective from um like this only happens to other people to obviously this is obviously i’m going to matter of time yeah i’m going to achieve the desired outcome it’s just um a like for on which swing am i going to get my hit and b uh which thing do i want to dedicate five or ten years on right because if you like work eight years on something and you’re around the right people and you’ve been like going like i felt like living there i was like i was in school so it’s like well i’m in school i know like i know it when i see it and i can just keep working on something and then i’ll see right away that it’s working and then i just spend time on it and just give it time and it works it will always work that’s kind of like the attitude there’s um uh i i think i’ve told the story have i told like why i did the e-commerce thing and why i think it worked no so i was sitting with our mutual friend i think i could say his name maybe we’ll bleed this out later but uh i was sitting with him and his backyard he had this you know he has that awesome and when he lived in california this awesome backyard with a basketball court and like a putting green and pool and chickens stuff like that and we were just chilling for the day and his dogs are running around and uh we were talking and while we were talking the shopify cha-ching kept going off on his phone and he would have that thing all the time i used to yell at him i go turn that [  ] off too yeah so it was and then like two minutes later and then i was like i was like what is that he’s like oh my bad i might like i’m sorry i totally spaced i didn’t even realize i didn’t like i’m so like i’m so numb like i didn’t even realize that was happening like that’s obnoxious my bad i go no no leave that on what is that he goes that’s the shopify like every time we get a sale it does that i said i leave that on because you share i was like yeah leave it on so it went on the whole time it goes off the whole time by the end of the i we were talking about some other [  ] completely we’re talking about dogs and family and kids and like whatever by the end of the hour i was like all right man i gotta you know whatever i gotta go um but i’m definitely starting at a shopify thing i want my phone to do that and he’s like he’s like he’s like yeah you totally should i was like just literally that experience if i did not have that and the jealousy worked to my favor right the jealousy was a signal if i want that more than what i have maybe i need to make a change right because i was like i’m gonna go back to the office where i earn a fixed salary it’s a great i was making great money but like it is capped i will make the same amount whether i do a good job or a bad job whereas for him it was like he got to chill it was making money passively and um and if he did a better job he was gonna make more money so that was the first thing it made me maybe decide i’m gonna do this and then i started like moyes i was like what can i sell what can i sell all right what can i sell okay what were the other options of other ideas i had to sell yeah um i remember going through candles uh candles are kind of an amazing business but very competitive candles are same thing as deodorant you you use them and they burn out they they literally melt away and you have to buy them they’re so expensive i just bought a hundred dollar can’t candle yeah they’re they’re high aov they’re super high margin so they’re not expensive to make they’re just really you could charge a lot for them you can have a whole bunch of skus very easily that are all the same they’re all just different scents there are the high end middle and low end there’s candles that are like you oh this smells like your hometown of missouri there’s like a bunch of gimmicks you can do this whatever so candles was definitely one that was on my mind i told you about the crystal story i was basically like because i asked my buddy so i asked that friend and i asked others i said how do you think about this they gave me some frameworks of how to think about it right like look you’re gonna the reason this whole thing works is facebook ads so that means you’re gonna acquire customers so something like this dollar amount all right so you need to how much was that dollar amount so like 20 bucks at the time it was like 20 25 bucks something like that but now it’d be higher now it’s higher now it’s like 40 45 bucks something like that but it’s like all right let’s just say in a best case scenario you’re gonna break even on the first purchase so you want a product that’s gonna have 65 to 70 gross margins so that means the actual let’s say i don’t forget public math but like let’s just round numbers here a candle let’s say the cost of goods is five dollars you want to make sure that you could sell that thing for thirty dollars or whatever to have that type of gross margin so uh and then you’re going to have you know let’s call it 15 to 20 is your cost of fulfillment so that’s like packaging it um you know picking it in your warehouse and then shipping it to the customer and customer and um okay cool so then you take all that out so basically you end up with a break even the question is if you can break even on the first purchase meaning it costs you 25 let’s say in facebook to get a customer then you want that to be your net profit on a single order uh then you’re basically that’s like the that’s like a great position to be in because you’re breaking even on day one and then everything you purchase you build up your customer base by recycling that cash flow on this you know every month you’re not going you’re not going deeper and deeper in debt and then as you build your customer base when they come back and repeat purchase and you want that repeat purchase rate to be high so like you know one of our friends has a thing that doesn’t have hyper refrigerate the other one has like deodorant has amazing repeat purchase rate so if they repurchase that means your lifetime value will be higher for your customer and all that extra every next purchase will be much more profitable all right and this business would be more valuable and then little things like hey the way that the shipping works in the country is like you know things that are under one pound um they ship at this low rate once it’s over a pound shipping is like much more expensive like there’s like a normal usps usps like whatever priority mail that if it’s under a pound it’s like whatever five bucks or four bucks or whatever so there’s like certain little things that help and so like if you talk to moyes moyes used to like change his packaging so that he would be at .99 pounds right like he was like i want to be just under one pound and that was like his his like keith one of the key things that helped control cost so anyways there’s a whole bunch of frameworks so i went through a bunch of product ideas to figure it out and then the ones you’re gonna like you know the easiest thing to sell on facebook is stuff that appeals to like white women in middle america so like how do you sell to a 35 to 65 year old woman that lives in texas and like that’s the that’s the persona that’s like the most easy to fish for on facebook you can obviously sell anything to anybody facebook’s huge but like if you can get one for white women in middle america like your gold like because that’s what the majority of your customers are yeah uh ours are a little younger than that but like uh yeah that’s like the the white ladies why women in middle america is like a great market and most of silicon valley makes a mistake they go for what is la new york and san francisco millennials single millennials like me and that’s such a expensive customer it’s an expensive customer there then their lifestyle changes very quickly and they don’t need your [  ] anymore um and they’re competing with uber and lyft and [  ] like the ad spend it’s just too hard everything is very competitive it’s just like i guess the way to think about is not necessarily that one is that much better than the other i wouldn’t actually say that it’s just more like don’t narrow your scope to your single lifestyle as like a 25 year old dude in san francisco who like orders you know every meal on postmates it’s like you’re not representative of the world you know like don’t limit yourself to just that um because like you know it might be truckers in middle america that love you know that buy xyz or whatever there might be just like a different market that that’s really lucrative that you’re not really paying attention to right now so pay attention to other groups so anyways the second thing that happened was i asked them i asked so we had two buddies that were doing the same thing two was enough where i was like oh if he can do it he can do that i could do it no problem and um and so i was like i asked him i was like what are your sales and you know it shocked me right it’s like oh you know the business we did seven million our first year 21 million our second year and 41 million our third year i was like what the [  ] is going on i was like and they’re like oh yeah we didn’t raise any money it’s just profitable you know i just take a dividend out i’m like what like what are these words prophet you know like where i come from silicon valley we don’t we don’t say that word that does what’s that what’s that p word like you know the prophet like jesus muhammad what are you talking about so when i heard that i was like all right and then that became my normal like i was like okay i’m gonna do seven million my first year i’m gonna do 20 million in my second year i’m gonna be like that became my what i thought was achievable and normal if i hadn’t heard that from them i would have never scaled as fast and sure enough we did you know seven million the first year now in our second year hopefully we’ll get to 20. i hit this exact i hit the exact thing to the point where i’m like maybe i should have shot higher maybe maybe just hearing their number created like an artificial ceiling but i definitely created it are you how many people work there full time at yours that’s a couple right yeah like four or five are you happy with e-commerce i’ve asked you this uh like every quarter are you happy and i say the same thing it’s it’s a great business in one way and it’s a terrible pain in the ass and the other way you know like you know whatever like right now everything is it’s a lot of headwinds are going against e-commerce so facebook’s getting more expensive shipping anything around the world is getting super expensive and slower so those are the two core costs right getting a customer and then fulfilling your product all the material you’re doing physical products and guess what with inflation everything gets more expensive so like there’s a lot of headwinds against e-commerce right now um and it’s very competitive so you know there’s a bunch of reasons why it’s bad then again it’s working and like you know i’m happy with our business so you know it’s good but would i recommend it to the next person not necessarily i think if if you can do software do software if you uh if you don’t really want to do real work uh don’t do don’t do ecommerce because ecommerce has real work like we have a house you know it’s annoying let me tell you something really quick before we are prep i just invested in i don’t ever do d2c companies like these consumer shipping companies but this guy listening to our podcast i bet you he reached out to you too it’s called the good crisp company yeah so he sent me like i guess on the podcast i mentioned that i love snacks or something i don’t know well we know we were talking about better for you snacks right so so junk food that’s like keto keto cookies whatever so he’s got pringles that are like better for you than pringles but they taste like they send them to you yeah they’re awesome i ate this entire box of like and it was like a lot of chips like it was it was kind of messed up it’s a can of pringles yeah and i was like dude this is awesome the valuation was like two times sales i ended up investing in it i really wanted to invest i’m just too i told the guy i was like you have to amaze you have a great business i would totally invest in this i’m just completely obsessed with crypto and like every dollar every extra dollar that i could put into something speculative i just want to put into crypto i don’t want to put into anything else what’s your crypto stuff that you’re that you’re doing now then dude i bought luna luna’s just been like on fire i don’t know if you follow luna how much should it go up by well depends which time verizon but mine is basically i don’t know up 40 in like two months or something right it’s like amazing but uh and and i think it has like a long way to go still not again not financial advice i’m just like gambling so you’re here imagine me saying here’s what number i’m betting on in roulette just take it as that don’t take it as like you know my word i think there’s a lot of interesting things about it i heard i had heard about it from a few interesting people and then i was like all right what is this thing actually and i can explain it if you want but basically i i’ll refrain for now that’s the that’s the thing i’ve been interested in good and you didn’t do good crisp that it was a cool company man the problem with all ecommerce so our mutual friend has this great phrase which is e-commerce businesses are great to own horrible to invest in um now i wouldn’t say not horrible but it’s like it’s great for the owner of the business it’s not great for the investors and that’s only because the upside is somewhat limited so even native which sold for 100 million dollars it’s like these almost never go for multiple billions but they’re often valued at the same valuations as like a software company which can become a multi-billion dollar company and so like you know you invested i think uh you know i don’t know about that one but i was looking at other another good deal that was in e-commerce that i liked it’s like oh we have you know we’re doing 10 or 20 million dollars in revenue you know 20 percent of that is is profits or ebitda um you know we’re valued at 50 billion or 60 million it’s like it was a good company it was definitely going to work like the business was working and was gonna probably keep working and um you know the reality is that that it’s unlikely that that will ever even sell for 600 million let alone six billion right so it’s like you get these like 2x 3x 4x of revenue like sales um or sorry evaluation sales and that’s just not super compelling when you have better options like if you can invest in software do it you know and in a couple weeks we’re gonna have this guy on i lined it up aj patel from high key cookie and zesty paws that guy’s amazing he’s one of the most impressive people i’ve ever read about um and he was an owner of one of those businesses and by the way i should say two other things there’s all there’s obviously exceptions to every rule so you know i’m like there are there are definitely some e-commerce investments that are going to do awesome uh like native did awesome because it sold for 100 million but it only raised i think 2 million bucks or something like that a million dollars so you know he was super capital efficient whereas most of these are not they burn a [  ] ton of money on marketing and inventory uh second thing the only other bad thing about ecommerce is like even when i say oh we did seven million ten million whatever this year that doesn’t mean hey that’s revenue not profits and b almost and whatever you do have for profits gets reinvested back into the business because you’re buying inventory for the next four months so if you’re buying ads for the next month and like so you’re always cash poor until you finally turn the corner and there is a corner that you turn when you’re a good business but early on you don’t have you turned it we have not turned that no um because we’re like we are like oh great we need to buy double or triple the inventory for the next season and for the next season and after that and so you know it’s gonna stressful as [  ] yeah like you know but it’s cool it’s like it works but it works if you don’t need a bunch of cash to pull out um and you’re okay being cash poor for a while real estate’s like this often too you could be cash poor in real estate but be like you know have a lot of value yeah but it’s not gonna go to zero yes real estate is slow way slow but it’s more liquid and um it’s not gonna grow fast but it won’t go away so it’s a little different whereas your thing can go away in the sense that if the valuation drops then you know you’re more you know you don’t make a profit it’s not that it goes to zero but you’re you’re what you owe the bank is the now the value of the company and so your equity can go down right like yes but a a ecom business can double or triple in a year real estate likely will never do that but that econ business let’s say that like something’s made illegal or there’s an embargo who knows like there’s a world where it can go out of business yeah for sure i have a couple more i don’t know if you want to stay on we could just split these into you know we talked about just like releasing these as like segments instead of all right hour-long episodes do you have time or no yeah all right have you seen this thing that happened uh called sos sos token no what is it all right i gotta tell you about this this is genius okay so there’s a there’s a there’s an app called openc or a website called openc you’ve heard of openc it’s basically not that big it’s ebay for nfts um so it’s a place where you go and buy buy and sell nfts and openc is it’s in crypto but it doesn’t do some of the things that crypto people like so it’s like it’s not fully open source uh you know all the code is not open source like they like the website the way the website works i think it’s you know proprietary it’s uh that you can’t just fork that code and just put your name on it the second thing is that they don’t have a token involved with it um and the third is that you know they raised a bunch of money from private from from traditional venture capitalists and in the crypto world that’s like a uh you sell out type of yeah um so andreessen horowitz i think put money in it’s a multi-billion dollar marketplace and i think it’s gonna be it’s gonna be huge i think they did like ben you can look this up but they did like i don’t know eight billion dollars of transaction volume in like one month this year so it’s been it’s been growing like it’s like crazy it is one of the best startups you can invest in right now would be openc now what happened so they their cfo they hire this hotshot cfo cfo goes on some shows some either podcast or some talk show and he says you know we’re looking at potentially going public and he’s saying it because that’s a good thing for the company and immediately the users are like oh you’re using the old route of like getting liquidity that’s going to make you guys rich but all of us users who have built this into the most popular nft marketplace we’re going to get nothing from that like we don’t own stock in your company so you go public we don’t get anything we built this thing and again that’s against the uh it’s against the core the ethos of uh of your everything yeah ben just found it 10 billion and 10 billion in trading volume in august alone so that’s insane same same numbers um uh oh sorry i think it’s yeah i don’t know whatever so basically um so what happened so this group of people got together i think the guy the guy who’s behind it his handle is like 9x9x9x or something like that right so this guy comes they create something called the open dao if you go to the opendao.com and they say they created a token called sos so openc is the name of the platform so this is like sos like save our ship he creates this token called sos it creates a hundred trillion tokens and he gives them out and what they did was kind of genius so on like two days ago anybody who was in crypto twitter anybody who buys nfts started seeing oh there was an airdrop which means if i look in my wallet i’m going to have tokens it’s like finding 20 bucks in your wallet and so they did an airdrop to all the users of openc based on how much you use openc so how did they get that information it’s the block it’s on that’s the beauty this can only happen in crypto so because i know but i would have thought that like i guess you could just scrape the website and just get a list of everyone’s wallet no no no it’s not not the website all open c is just like a website that accesses the ethereum blockchain so all the transactions happen on the ethereum blockchain the buying and selling of the nft the minting of the nfc is on the blockchain the buying and selling is all there and the blockchain again is this open source public public record basically that you can go access you can go i can go type in your wallet address like your public wall address and i can just go see how much money is in your account right now if i just go into ether scan and so now you might have multiple wallets but like that’s one thing you can do so what they did was they went they looked at every every transaction on openc all the wallets and they said okay sean’s wallet has spent 10 eth he’s done five transactions um so he should get x percentage of it so they took of the hundred trillion they said half of it we’re just going to drop to all the users of openc so i woke up and i had 58 billion of these tokens are there at a point oh whatever price my total was whatever like 300 whatever it was like 500 because i don’t use openc a ton i didn’t do too many transactions but if you’re one of these people who’s like an nft collector or flipper who um is very active on the platform who buys and sells you know you know board apes and things like that people made like three thousand dollars five thousand dollars fifteen thousand dollars so it’s like finding five thousand dollars in your wallet and you’re like what is this ah i got this for free money and it’s money that they minted and they basically it was almost it’s a marketing stunt but it’s almost like a hostile takeover so they basically went out there what they were saying was here’s what opencv should have done they should have given all the users some tokens proportionate to their usage basically so based on how much you’ve been using the platform you get some of the openc token and that and then the openc token will be publicly tradable so you get to benefit and the core team will keep some of the openc token like the company will keep 20 of this that’s how that’s like the normal way in crypto so the genius part of this is that some third party just did this on their behalf and it’s like and now what and they so now there’s a liquid market of like hundreds of millions of dollars i think it was like 300 million dollars the the group okay so here’s how they did it they said 50 goes to the users 10 goes to the stakers and the liquidity pool uh 30 goes like the stakers in the liquidity pool and 20 will stay with the treasury of our of our foundation and we are going to build an open source version of openc we’re going to build a competitor to openc and all you users who are power users of openc you now have a stake in our new openc that’s to come that’s going to do things the right way but they’ve got to build i mean building now they have to build it’s [  ] hard so i mean how many people work there 500 people no no no dude these things can be built by like you know four motivated developers if you needed to then why the hell does airbnb 5000 people it’ll take a lot to maintain it and do customer support and all those things yes though that will take time but just building the actual product that will start to get people to shift off of opencv to do this a team of five to ten contributors can actually do this if they’re great developers that are focused now that’s tbd it’s like a kickstarter it’s like we give your money in a kickstarter are they ever gonna build the thing well it kind of depends are they honest and are they gonna work hard i don’t know we’ll see but these guys basically they they essentially raised it’s like they hijacked open c and they raised their share was 20 trillion out of the 100 20 they have 130 million dollars now in their treasury that they can pay their development team to build the open source competitor to this who’s who’s the guy behind it the people behind it this uh 9x9x9x and then someone else who’s x dot xyz that’s that’s his handle i think that’s who’s behind it and so i think it’s look i don’t know if this is gonna work but i think it’s something that’s only possible in the crypto world because again this is one of this is one of the reasons why people are like um you know uh decentralization is cool it’s cool because the users can always pick up their ball and leave they can go to another court and so openc does not own their their wallets it does not own their nfts they have no lock-in to keep the users there except for behaving well and treating them well and if somebody else says i’m going to treat you better over here it is very easy for me to take my wallet take my nfts and go over here and then even better that other group can incentivize me to come over here and try it out by saying hey here’s some free tokens that we minted out of thin air so i think this is possible takeaway it’s like a hustle takeover it reminds me of i had a buddy who was gonna do this to a company called ripple have you ever heard of ripple yeah but they they’re shady right okay so ripple was this thing kind of like started pretty early on um and they had this like you know honestly not a bad idea they were like look uh you know the way the international banking system works today is off this thing called the swift standard ripple was like we’re gonna be a bank to bank communication layer that uses blockchain right so they’re like we’re going to use blockchain technology with a real use case which is banks sending money back forward to each other so that was their idea they got a bunch of funding from founders fund and others and they released this thing called xrp that’s the name of their token all right so whatever nobody cares about that how it works nobody cares but the interesting part is xrp has like was worth a lot the founders of ripple became billionaires overnight before like that’s the thing with crypto you can get rich before like this open down has 130 million before they have a product in ripple those guys became billionaires before banks ever used their product which is like a really [  ] up incentive and which is why sometimes [  ] doesn’t actually get built in crypto because hey i already got the millions i could just run away i could just do a half-assed job it doesn’t really matter at this point i went public on day one ripple um has a market cap right now of is this right 94 billion dollars i think i’m reading this right 94 billion something like that no no sorry 44 billion dollars 44 billion dollars right that’s like that’s like the market cap of like you know bank of america or some [  ] like that so obviously ripple’s not actually valued at that but ripple had believers and they had early momentum they were very early in the crypto games they had a lot of pr and the ceo would go on cnbc and talk about how this is going to change the game so what happened in the crypto community people were kind of like poo pooing riptil they’re like this is like centralized they they took way too much share for themselves they didn’t give enough to users that’s why these guys are billionaires their product kind of sucks and they’re kind of shady whatever whatever so the reputation was ripple anybody who was in the know encrypted crypto pretty much the general consensus was ripples full of [  ] and uh so my buddy had this idea he was like he was like i’m gonna do the first hostile takeover of a crypto network i was like what do you mean he goes look i can see every single person’s wallet who owns ripple i was like okay that’s kind of interesting here you go i go but you don’t know their name and all that because i don’t need their name i was like you don’t have their email address because i don’t need their email address i could just put something in their wallet and they’ll wake up and they’ll open their wallet and they’ll see that they have something in it i was like okay he goes so i’m gonna go out there i’m gonna say xrp is stupid for these five reasons number one the founders took anyway people anything you can include a message in the transaction of giving them the thing in the memo of the of the thing but like the way you do it is you first drop the token you tell people hey if you held ripple you got this token today and then you write your manifesto on your twitter or your website about what this is all about so you it’s kind of like somebody put a 50 check in your wallet you’re like what’s this all about it says go to this website to explain why you just got this 50 so that’s how this that’s how this marketing mechanism works so he was like i’m going to put some money in there i’m going to put my currency in all the ripple holders wallet and then i’m going to tell them ripple is stupid for these five reasons the founders took too much this other problem this other prop you know their the right the token is inflationary blah blah blah so i’m gonna change all that we only take 10 we are not inflationary we do not do this sketchy [  ] blah blah blah my five-point plan of how to make ripple um and we’re we’re calling it our own thing and here’s the deal if you own if you send your ripple to my wallet i will send you back five times your value of this if you’re in the first for the first thousand people that do this then for the next ten thousand people that do this you’re gonna get four times your your ripple back and for the next ten thousand people you’re gonna get three times ripple back so basically there’s this urgency of like okay if these if this is gonna become the next ripple if i send my money in now i’m gonna get five i’m gonna get a 5x multiplier on my money and what he was going to do was just he goes when you send it to this wallet we’re going to just dump it we’re just going to sell it and we’re going to put so much cell pressure we’re going to crash the price of ripple so if you do it do they do this or someone finish the story so here he goes if you do this early you’re gonna get five times your amount and you’re not gonna sit there holding the bag while we dump this thing it’s like a prisoner’s dilemma game through it was so genius he’s like he’s like here’s the math if you’re if you’re holding this thing you have to assess are other people going to take them up on this offer if they do then the ripple i’m holding is going to go down like crazy i’m going to go down like 5 to 10x if i jump if i jump ship i get a 5x multiplier on my money and i don’t sit there holding the sinking ship and the game theory of this i think was gonna work so he has his plan and he starts and he starts uh and so he’s like okay well he needs to be credible so he went to some very very wealthy people and he got about 50 million dollars lined up to do this hostile takeover and he was like he needed it to be like 200 million and so he’s like i need to create this huge war chest so i can tell people look we have this much money so you this it’s backed by something come on board and he’s like dude he’s like basically i’m going to this investor i’m saying if you give me 200 million dollars i’m gonna take down this project i’m gonna absorb all the value of this project that’s currently worth 40 billion right so he’s like it’s a huge return for those investors and they and they also don’t even believe in ripple so what was this high stakes [  ] james bond [  ] what the problem was one of the investors that he had went to for leaked the plan to a journalist this guy uh dan primack or whatever he’s like pretty famous journalist yeah from axios axios axios writes the story ahead of time he says hey there’s somebody planning a hostile takeover xrp and here’s how it’s gonna work xrp obviously the ripple team obviously sees this and they’re like okay just in case they so they sold some amount of their ripple um to create a like few hundred million dollar buffer so that if somebody tried to do this and tried to tank the price they had enough liquidity to buy back the buy back the tokens and keep the price high so it kind of foiled his plan where they the only the only way it would have worked is if he had caught them by surprise and he could have done it in like a two day period he could have tanked the price of ripple and created this competitor and had all the momentum on his side but because they had heads up they could create enough liquidity and they could be able to like support their price before somebody could do this to them but how crazy is that dude this is like some barbarians at the gate [  ] like this is like 1980s like drexel um like hostile takeover where they like were like what’s it called the green mailing have you ever read like these like 1980s finance i have i have the book barbarian i haven’t read it yet uh yeah that’s basically what they did like it was like it was like warfare i was like this is some george soros [  ] you know that george soros broke the bank of england yeah i was like that’s actually what he was telling me he goes this is some george soros [  ] and i was like what do you mean he goes by doing something very similar to this and as he was explaining i was like there’s no way this works he’s like well you know it’s risky but like if it works who who did it and so he didn’t he didn’t end up doing it um but i mean who who’s that it’s an artist is it public uh i don’t know if it’s public but i’ll tell you actually it’s our friend who remember we went to dinner after our live show in miami it’s our friendly way yeah okay okay yeah that’s crazy i thought uh if if dan would have wrote about it he would have named him yeah i think he didn’t know the name or he i don’t think he included the name of the thing but how [  ] nuts is that that’s crazy if you can if that person could have pulled it off that’s wild this is barbarians at the gate [  ] hostile takeover stuff yeah i love it um all right i have a couple more topics if we want to do them or if we want to go we can go all right i got i can do 15 more minutes all right let’s do one more um okay i got two random ideas for you okay here’s the here’s the first idea all right this idea is my gift to the uh chief marketing officer of gucci you know you’re welcome courtesy of shop party okay i see this headline [Laughter] all right so i was thinking the other day i was i was sitting there and sitting at the at a restaurant and as i do i’m just watching i’m just people watching i’m just watching these crazy creatures called humans what the [  ] what the [  ] are they doing and i saw all these people that had fancy bags gucci bags louis vuitton bags it’s very different from my world i don’t i don’t give a [  ] about that but they obviously do i was watching this then i came home i’m watching this show selling sunset funny show on netflix about real real estate teams dude i watched it too man you know i watch all that [  ] yeah so so you know i dabble and uh if you notice every day they come to work they’re wearing like the craziest like what nobody wears to work they’re wearing like five thousand dollars dress with like a five thousand dollar bag and they put the bag right on the middle of the desk it’s like there’s no laptop there’s no computer it’s like a desk with a chair and their purse on top and then they just close up with each other right that’s where the show is at this point i was thinking about this like luxury thing the luxury’s just caught my eye i said what else what else could you do and and i don’t know how this came to mind but here’s a crazy idea it’s really a marketing stunt it’s not a business idea it’s a marketing stunt for gucci so here’s what you’re gonna do every year there are over a million joint replacements in america so people getting hip replacements knee replacements people getting you know they they fracture their foot they get a steel rod put in there are over a million people a year that get this done i got it done you got that what’d you get done i’ve got screwed i broke my leg i’ve got screws and a little i got metal on my feet now you’re not the right person to ask but is there a version of sam that might have paid an extra 500 bucks to have that be a gucci nail the answer is yeah of course the answer is yeah the answer is yeah so we’re talking about i thought you were gonna go with like gucci prosthetic legs yeah but you’re talking about like just brandon on the internet that’s actually a cool idea inside and you only see it on the x-ray like you you have the picture before it goes into your body right so you get the instagram porn of okay hey guys i’m doing well post surgery here’s my picks and as you’re swiping it’s an awesome phone it’s a [  ] louis v hip that’s coming into your body that’s an awesome flashlight dude you can always see that in airplanes they do something so that exactly in x-ray you’ll always see an emblem on the thing now i don’t know how uh doctors will figure out the science of how this works without [  ] up here pretty great that’s good how good is that dude that is that is amazing this is just an extra little revenue line tons of news because everyone’s going to say this is what’s wrong with the world you’re going to take over and guess what there’s going to be a bunch of people out there who are going and getting surgeries done that are going to say yeah okay it’s the average knee replacement is like 25 30 000 like all lint uh i think that you know maybe it can be as low as 12 to 15 000. you tell him in the actual part itself that goes in i think is a 5 000 part that the hospital orders you’re telling me i wouldn’t get the 7 supreme [  ] you know the nike logo come on yeah come on yeah that’s just licensing revenue for them it’s working it’s it’s influencer candy dude it if people get grills if rappers go get diamond grills if they’re if you know somebody out there like me some some guy like me out there was like yo diamond braces what yeah diamond braces actually [  ] it not even for braces just diamond teeth diamond teeth worked if diamond teeth worked the louis v hip could work dude this is a good idea this is pretty funny this is brilliant this is actually a good that one was for you for tic-tac that’s for you tic-tacs out there that was my tic-tock segment that’s actually this is actually a fun idea all right wait who who did you research this is that even possible i have no idea if it’s possible i’ve got like i don’t think you could i don’t think you could see stuff like that i’ve got x-rays of my screws and like you can like look at them but i don’t think i i don’t know how that would work but it might have to be a striping it might have to be a dots polka dots it might have to be something that will show up there might be an emblem that’s just on it a tiny emblem uh but you know like the red bottom shoes uh for what’s it called you know yeah i don’t know yeah we’re [  ] nerds but the the black uh or the red bottom shoes they rap about them yeah exactly whatever people will find a way to see the [  ] and you just if that’s the only problem with this idea we got a good problem to have so um and also by the way tattoos i think you could also do this with tattoo parlors i think you could drop branded official licensed designs of tattoos for brands and be like yeah if you get this one it’s actually that’s like actually the brand because like you people get tattoos of brands like yeah like a louis vuitton i think jake paul has a nike swoosh where his like sock would be on his on his calf that’s hilarious actually and i was like that’s funny he got a brand tattooed on him and i think i was also like yo why wouldn’t brands actually drop tattoo designs just like they dropped bag and shoe designs like i feel like that should happen that’s interesting that’s another interesting idea all right two for two all right i have one more for you okay this one’s less fun but i think it’s still good do you remember glamour shots love them did you your mom have glamour shots do you know anybody who has no but i didn’t do it but like my sister did it’s hilarious it’s like napoleon dynamite [  ] where you go to the mall and you wear stupid makeup and a bad haircut and you take these awesome pictures of course do you know the business behind glamour shots no uh okay so is that is that the name of a brand glamour uh glamour shots was the name of the company i think okay so here’s the here’s the quick backstory i did like uh you know two seconds of research on this so could be wrong started by a frat party photographer who was like you know taking pics at frats and i was like all right what else i got so initially starts it calls it party pics then when they were like kind of looking at trends they were like oh people are liking this like high glamour style like big hair loud loud clothes certain backdrops and so they were like all right um he’s like so renames it to glamour shots and it’s physical locations and within first year it already starts working by year three seven million in revenue and copycats popping up everywhere hollywood headshots freeze frame you name it there’s different portrait shops popping up at one point it just expands through the franchising model expands to 380 stores taiwan japan everybody wants a piece of glamour shots and the trick the thing that like really made it work was most great name most professional photographers you would go well there’s a couple things made to work one was the style was iconic the second was so it wasn’t just come i’ll take a picture of you was come i’ll make you look like a hollywood star with the hair the makeup the clothes and it was only like you know top half up so you would be wearing your jeans underneath and then your top would be like this denim studded jacket or whatever with the collar pop or whatever so backdrops with the colors everybody knows the look fan blowing your hair that whole thing so that was one one innovation the other was instant gratification so you would take the photo and for most photographers they’re like great i’ll i’ll go you know get these exposed then i’ll um i’ll uh whatever touch them i’ll pick the best ones i’ll get i’ll get you you know some some options in a few few days few weeks glamour shots they used a special like kind of camera technique or whatever so it was actually taking a video i think and it would grab an image and you could see it right there on the screen in real time and you could pick and be like oh i want that one that one’s so good they got you in the heat of the moment when you were in peak state when you were already caught up in the frenzy and people were dropping 300 400 500 inflation adjusted for on their glamour shots um average customer spend so it was like highly lucrative because that’s basically like you know for like a 30 minute shoot you’re making you know huge profits and they had these like six categories of styles that you got to pick from the names are hilarious one is can’t wait to be touched another spontaneous tailored elegant bold and that’s where these like classic looks come from so there was some genius behind the person who really understood what the customer wants behind it whatever happened to the company so it gets to 100 million in sales by 1994. by 2001 it’s now dropped back down to 93 stores now there’s like 40 stores left it’s basically withered away and dying it didn’t didn’t last didn’t keep up with the times here’s the idea right rebooting glamour shots and we’re rebooting glamour shots everything nostalgic from the 90s is crushing oh you’re rebooting spider-man batman x-men you’re rebooting home alone home alone’s getting rebooted we’re rebooting glamour shots that’s what i’m telling you i’m on board so there’s i’m looking at it now there’s only five so there’s only five of these locations left yeah they’re we’re down to the last stones you know remember the alamo where we’re down to the last stand so the question is how would you actually rebuild glamour shots so i wanted to brainstorm with you for two minutes how would you reboot glamour shots i got a couple ideas i don’t know if you have one off top your head otherwise i’ll go you gotta do it in person i think i think that’s that’s part of it do what do you need to do that’s different i mean you just do an ad campaign with really cool celebrities or some celebrities and you’d be like here’s what they would have looked like like you know a modern a modern person what they would look like with a glamour shot what would you do so i i’m going to reboot it i’m not okay so nostalgia is one cat one one angle you could you could just say this look would come back uh but i think that’s that’s short-sighted i think what you got to do is you got to work backwards so my mom had glamour shots on the wall the end product was a framed picture on the wall of her looking like an 80s soap opera 90s soap opera person basically with the hair blown out and crazy lighting and crazy dress well what is the what’s the end product people want today instagram baby they want epic instagram content so we’ve talked about museum of ice cream we’ve talked about some of these i think those are secretly glamour shots reboots i think you gotta go all in on the glamour shots reboot so you’re gonna you’re gonna make somebody look [  ] amazing for social media i know how people out there are throwing up in their mouth they’re like oh this is everything that’s wrong with well guess what people people care what they look like how they come across on social media if you if you hate that fact cool delete instagram but if you still got instagram you’re still in on this idea okay so how are we gonna do it one idea was could you get airbnbs convert them into like basically like dope lifestyle looking airbnbs and just rent them out for shoots instead of you know renting it out for seven hundred dollars a night you’re renting it out for a hundred dollars an hour and you’re doing 200 an hour and you’re doing shoots for people where they get to look like they live in a dope lifestyle they look like they’re living but that’s that’s different than a glamour shot a glamour shot is like supposed to be funny it’s not supposed to be funny dude that it looks funny now when we look back like i look back at your dad with an afro or whatever like actually you had an afro in high school so if you look back at your own high school that’s supposed to be funny at the time i don’t know if you were trying to be funny but for glamour shots like they are they’re trying to be grammar but that’s different with these instagram things you’re talking about be like lying you’re trying by looking cool yeah so so that’s one one angle to it i think you’re lying you don’t live in that fancy-ass house yeah but you’re not saying i live here you’re just posing a picture like people do this we’re gonna have like a like people rent fancy cars and they take pictures with it and then they’ve returned the question you know anyone who does that personally thank god no have i seen the people who do that on instagram yes i’ve seen people do it on instagram tons of people do that on instagram it’s like uh what you would need is people write dresses for the day you know dude you would just need like a like one airline seat and like what yeah dude you’ve seen that right the half private jet it’s like a movie set it’s like where they film pornos exactly so so there’s that i think okay but that’s a little capital intensive to get airbnb’s maybe you do it with a green screen so i think one one way you can do this is you could just have someone come take pictures with a green screen and you just do it where once they take the pictures once in one of your locations with a green screen very cheap to do then you cgi them into like a whole bunch of different looks that becomes their collection of of like they could be power suit they could be it could be boss mode they could be party mode they could be whatever but you just have green screen props and scenarios and you show them exactly how to pose to look good most people don’t even know how to pose myself included when you meet somebody who knows how to pose you’re like oh like that’s [  ] half of it the other half is like lighting and [  ] props but like and editing right like but do you remember when the guy came to take photos of us at the miami thing he was like all right stand here half squint your eye you’re like why yeah i was like i was like down syndrome what do you mean he’s like no trust me kind of squint your eye he’s like then you know like protrude your neck forward i was like no this looks like a turtle he’s like no look watch i got rid of your double chin you know you look like sharper and like more powerful okay look at this angle this this gives you confidence look from this angle specifically whereas for me i’m like the [ __ ] nutcracker if i take a photo it’s like stand straight look straight hands on my side smile cheese like that’s how i take all my photos right but there is an art to posing and most people don’t know how to do it so i think there’s a there’s a version of glamour shots that somebody could reboot that just gives you an end product that you want for social media i don’t know exactly i would just say i would just say bring back the classics i think that you could just you could just do it as what happened to the company so did it dude you could just do this with like dating profiles and stuff whatever um i don’t know the company still exists but i think it’s kind of like just gone down the drain i don’t know i i don’t know the ending of that story i wonder what happened to the founders does he have like some his name’s bob does he have like some huge like mansion now in la like that glamour shot money one thousand percent he’s going to have a huge mansion advantage take two seconds to just google that i bet you i bet you this guy’s got to have a thing in l.a and if he doesn’t we’re just going to edit this part out i can’t see but is it actually bob ooh he lives in texas in dripping springs texas which is near austin and it’s where like it’s like where moms who get glamour shots live it’s like the suburbs of texas by the way that’s the glamour shots is still thriving in texas i think that’s the only place where it’s still like a thriving business i think i read that dude this guy’s awesome that’s all i got those are my topics this is awesome we got to get bob on here um all right that’s the pod you