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 if you got into ethereum early on in the crowd sale and you you bet on that thing at 30 cents because uh you’re a developer and you you really believed in this new programmable blockchain you deserve your tens of millions of dollars you deserve your 100 million dollars if you’re rich because you bought like a picture of a rock you know three months ago or you know a computer generated squiggle that’s now worth a quarter million dollars [ ] you yeah i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to i put my all in it like my days off on the road let’s travel never looking back i’m looking at my uh my phone i just got a text message because my my three nieces went back to the winter you know first day of school today and uh i was talking to one of them this morning and i go ellie how you know how are you feeling first day ever going to a school and she goes i go i go how are you feeling in one word she goes my heart is going fast i was like oh i’m melted i’m melted your uncle is a puddle on the ground now he cannot function anymore so that’s awesome shout out to ellie for uh her first day of school hopefully it’s going well that’s awesome that’s a great one okay um can i start by telling you a quick story that i don’t think i’ve ever told you but i think you’ll get a kick out of so about this is the bitcoin one we’ll tell that one soon but about three years ago i so i talk about solid time so i don’t want to like rub it or like continue talking about this [ ] because it gets boring but basically i don’t do any drugs i don’t drink i’m pretty straight lace all right i’ve been straight laced for eight years i don’t do anything i’m i’m fearful of anything but i was getting really curious about uh uh psychedelics so like mushrooms okay mdma therapy ketamine therapy i did what a lot of people did i read the book how to change your mind by michael pollan and i was like oh this is great i’m really interested in this and so i found a person who was going to lead a an mdma therapy like session and so i went to dinner at her house with my wife came with me and it was like three other couples and we went to this thing and i was we were and she wanted to do like a session to get to know people in order to determine if this was a good fit because basically what you do is you take a dose of mdma and then like she’s talking about molly i think so yeah i believe so uh it’s all or similar at least i’m not i i really frankly don’t know but i think it’s like the same thing and we uh you eat it you drink it it’s like a pig it’s like a pill i guess it’s a pill you swallow it okay and we go to this group and i’m into like the the idea of psychedelics for therapy like uh to like you know for veterans but also people who just want breakthroughs or who have depression i’m on board with i’ve got friends to do it i love it i don’t really do i don’t do drugs because i just don’t feel comfortable doing it but i really wanted to explore it and get and get to know these people and try this out and i went to this group they were crazy hippy dippy like super hippy dippy but mind you this is in san francisco and she had a really nice place and so like we start talking all of a sudden it gets so hippy-dippy and woo-woo that she’s like you know like this medicine needs to be free for everyone and capitalism is just ruining everything like you know we need to live in a society where we can just barter and trade and like this way we can get some medicine let me just guess sam triggered it starts a debate triggered so hard and uh and then we start talking we i’m like in my back of my head i’m like well then why am i paying you like four thousand dollars for this but you’re like yeah refund me right yeah so give my money back and we start talking and like this is just sitting in my head and i’m like oh man four grand this thing was four grand to do or 2500 it was like multiple thousands of dollars i think it was closer to three or four thousand than it was two thousand i forget the exact amount because you can take a family of four to disneyland get the fast pass get the turkey leg go get the mickey mouse ears and still come in under four grand that’s a real psychedelic experience if you want yeah i look i agree it was crazy but look i’m trying to be open-minded i wanted to explore this i i just read the book i was all enthused but in my head i’m just sitting there at this dinner with this in the back of my head and i’m thinking about this i’m like oh my god like i can’t believe like this is these people are so [ ] and and then i i asked her and i go what what did you used to do for a living she used to work at lehman brothers and now has a venture capital firm on the side and this whole and and i like when i heard this i was like i started giggling and i was like well you do realize that this is like just ridiculous what you said earlier right and i said this at the dinner i’m like you know that’s that’s just like crazy and they are also talking about how like this medicine needs to be available for everyone and like they need to help the masses and they’re like where are you from i’m like i’m from missouri and they said oh flyover country uh and i’m just like oh my god this is the most smug thing ever so eventually i get into an argument with her at the dinner table and she was just like you know i don’t think this is a good fit and i was like i agree this is not a good fit i can’t do drugs with you not a good fit and so i can’t even do dinner with you yeah i can do dinner with you let alone like get high and talk about my feelings with you like not going to work this is a horrible fit and so i just i had to leave i got kicked out like i basically got asked to leave they’re like sarah you’re cool i i just wasn’t in a good place and so i got kicked out of the group i wasn’t able to do drugs with them and that was my experience with psychedelic uh that was my only experience with like the psychedelic therapy but i think that these style these retreat styles for psychedelic stuff starting in like 2015 i had friends that would go do ayahuasca you know ayahuasca is oh so i’ve heard ayahuasca many times so i know of it i know kind of what the what the the why people do it you should explain it anyways but if you said hey this is like my dolly parton thing i couldn’t pick dolly parton out of a lineup if you said hey draw ayahuasca i draw some feathers in a in a bowl of liquid i don’t think that what the hell is actually i don’t think you’re far off again i’m a total noob here as well but my friends do it i believe it’s like a powder and you mix it with water and you put it in a bowl or whatever and you like pass around like this thing and you take a drink out of it and then you stay up all night like doing wild stuff and like you a lot of times they make it makes you throw up and that’s like part of the the journey and experience it’s freaking weird but like whatever i’m open to it and i’ve been had i’ve had friends like start doing this in 2015. now on instagram i am seeing so many of my friends go to south america go to mexico all talking about like these journeys i started listening to this health podcast backpacking through europe is 100 america and i and i like to make fun of it because it’s some basic bit [ ] but you want to know what it’s i’m on board i’m so on board with this i am totally on board with this and i think that psychedelic retreats like i’ve been i read a bloomberg article about them and uh this guy in jamaica and they charge like it ranges from 25 000 to 2500 to 30 000 and they bring you to this like nice place they get you they give you the the drugs like it’s a variety of sometimes it’s ayahuasca ketamine um uh what’s it still asylum what’s mushrooms um yeah and they like do this therapy stuff i am so on board with this and unfortunately my one experience was horrible but i’m so on board with this it wasn’t the drugs it was the people it was the people it was the hypocrites that they’re trying to get me to take this drug yeah i’m like like i can’t trust you like you’re gonna tell me like you want to solve you want to like like solve the world’s problems and you’re gonna make fun of me for being from missouri like that this like this is a bad fit uh you know right just tell me your [ ] first dude i i have so many yeah exactly it’s like a a meeting it’s like hi i’m sam and i’m full of [ ] yeah all right so so i have a bunch of thoughts about this uh where do i begin first shout out to the guy who came to our live podcast show in austin who is apparently his mushroom dealer don’t remember his name i remember that showed me some show he loved that like i loved to take out his phone and just show pictures of his he opened up his camera roll not a single friend or family there just different exotic mushrooms in his hand and they all look the same they all look so he kept showing like dirt i was like yeah cool man cool somebody who’s never never done mushrooms couldn’t couldn’t tell it was like showing me different bottles of wine and i’m sober like i uh yeah okay it looks great it looks fantastic that one’s that was dark red cool that’s one thing i just remember that guy when you were telling this story second i’ve i met this guy who’s really interesting uh did i tell you about this guy robbie bent no okay so this is this is cool all right so this guy so robbie ben what’s his story so he’s a founder of a he’s a startup founder he has this idea for um by the way when i tell stories i’m pretty sure like at least 40 of them are just the details are completely wrong but i always get the essence of the story right so i’ll say that so robby if i butcher your story sorry about that all right so i think he had a startup that was like this was back when cell phone roaming was a big problem like you would go travel somewhere and you’re if you like turned your phone on for one minute you’d like spent a thousand dollars so basically roaming was a problem and so he was trying to build this like sim card company for like international roaming like an international sim card and raises i think like 25 million dollars or something like that and uh you know like pretty soon after that uh like roaming became like free or something you know something happened the company like was pointless at some point and he’s like oh [ ] okay uh what do i do now company kind of fails he’s kind of in a funk he’s in a depression and so i think he was uh he was i think he was depressed i think he was using drugs i’m not sure exactly what the story was but he’s kind of in a low place in life and his friend is like you know what you need to go backpacking through europe you need to go to south america and do some ayahuasca or he decides he’s going to do it so he goes on this ayahuasca trip and he’s like uh you know same story as everybody who goes to burning man or south america for ayahuasca they’re like oh life-changing best experience i think if you don’t have a good experience they must just kill you because i’ve never met anybody who didn’t have a life-changing experience it’s all positive so so he’s got this all positive experience and he meets this person there also doing the trip and um and they’re you know i was hanging out together and this guy’s like hey he’s like you know so what do you do he’s like oh you know robbie’s like i just went through this crazy thing i’m like broke my company failed i’m like in the dumps and this guy’s like oh you know i’m uh i’m actually creating this crypto venture capital fund this is five years ago six years ago now he’s like you know i’m we’re raising one of the first funds for crypto to invest in crypto and um you know like a lot of these people we invest in they’re like you know great engineers or they’re uh they’re just really into crypto but they’re not great at marketing and so like maybe you could just help out some of my portfolio companies like if you’ve got nothing else to do just come hang out with me and let’s let’s do this and by the way you should check out this thing called ethereum and uh and so he’s like oh ethereum what’s that they just done its crowd sale i think ethereum was like at six dollars at the time so ethereum today is like 3 500 as of this morning and uh and so he he starts organizing all these like meetups so he’s like i don’t know anything about crypto but this guy said get in there’s a lot of energy here and he followed his gut after the ayahuasca trip and was like look i got nothing to lose so let me do this and he starts organizing like basically like hackathons and then with the hackathons he gets engineers and then he tells the engineers hey you should go work at these like portfolio companies potentially so he’s like kind of creating some values just helping a bunch of people out and he starts getting really interested in ethereum because he’s like that’s where the most energy is so he starts organizing like all the ethereum hackathons and people are loving it the ethereum foundation reaches out it’s like hey you should come on and be like the first marketing person for ethereum so this guy joins joins uh the ethereum project and he’s the first kind of like marketer guy non-technical person working on the thing and he’s basically building the community and the passion around it he’s hosting events and things like that and so he went from like the dumps he gets into ethereum like under ten dollars ethereum runs up and by the way i was like i asked him i was like did you like how big did you bet on this he’s like well i had nothing he’s like but i took every dollar i had and i put it into ethereum he was like i didn’t have much i heard it’s probably like 10 grand or something like that he’s like i think i borrowed money from like my parents and i just put it all into ethereum and it was like amazing for me and so anyways he makes life-changing money and uh and after a couple years in the crypto scene he’s like you know what um crypto’s great i made a bunch of money doing this now but i’m ready for my next thing and he’s like goes back to his roots he’s like that psychedelic trip ayahuasca trip was like so meaningful for me so he in the meantime had been getting into all kinds of like different types of like kind of therapies so he was like cold therapy heat therapy breath work all these like kind of like you know kind of like these hippy-dippy like sort of alternative ways to like improve your body and so when i called him i met him for the first time he’s on the zoom and his background is like this oasis i’m like oh cool background like cool background image he’s like no this is like my garage i built out and he basically built this in he’s in canada he built this epic like wood cabin looking thing it’s got this custom cold plunge he made it’s this 20 person sauna that he created because he hosts events there it’s got all this greenery it’s like a greenhouse he’s got this like musical stuff and he created basically this experience where you could come if you wanted to have one of these experiences you could do hot cold therapy and he would take you through an intense cold plus heat like you know you go back and forth between that like a like a banya bath type situation and then the second thing he did was these like kind of facilitated mdma type i don’t know what drug it was but facilitated like psychedelic experiences where they have a doctor on site and then they do this like group experience together and you’re guided through it exactly like what you’re talking about yeah and i was like dude that’s a great idea i was like because you know i’m a [ ] i don’t i kind of want to have a life-changing experience but like with no risk can you like give me that and this is like the closest you’re gonna get which is like doctor supervised in a group of people with people who’ve done this before and like it’s for beginners and it’s not just go do drugs in the in the in this like sketchy place like in a nice beautiful environment with music and it’s controlled he’s like yeah dude i put this up like i think he put it up on airbnb as an experience or he put it up a groupon or something i don’t know where he put it we put it somewhere and he’s just like booked out his his little like garage is basically booked out like 24 7. and since then he basically uh he’s he he’s like his next thing or the way he like evolved it he’s like still he still does the live events but to scale it up he created this app called um inward and so i invested in this thing it’s basically a breath work app so i started doing this every morning now the app’s not even like fully out yet like you just sent me doing it yeah because i’m into i’m into breath work i like kind of heard about when wim hof and dabbled with that and i went to this buddhist thing once and like they do chanting which is like a form of like meditation i’ve done it before too it’s great and so you should i’m gonna send you the soundcloud link uh and i had him come in my course when i taught the writing course i was like dude this thing’s amazing i use this now for my morning routine like wake me up basically so i was like you know teaching over zoom can be the most [ ] boring thing and so i had him come in and do a five minute session for the students at the beginning and everybody was like hyped out of their mind by the end of it also some people were like yo i’m like lightheaded i need to like go sit down it’s like yeah yeah that happens but he has this five minute guiding thing where it’s like dope music mixed with a guided breath work session and he did in five minutes he was like waking everyone up anyway so i’m pretty like excited about this and i thought his story was pretty awesome of like his little journey to get here so i wanted to share that with you so well let’s just keep going so i went to um when i lived in san francisco these guys i met these young guys on uh they went to stanford they were [Laughter] they weren’t that young uh these guys these guys that went to stanford they basically i found this thing on eventbrite where they were doing like it was very clear what was happening which was it was two guys testing a startup idea and they either got someone to donate them a really big room uh or they like rented it for a very little amount of money but i think someone just donated them this room and one of them was like an enthusia enthusiastic person or enthusiast of breath work and he they basically we all went there and they put this eventbrite link up we each paid 30 and 30 of us went there so uh what’s 30 times 30 is that 900. okay uh well we yeah we don’t do public math and so yeah i take that i bleep that out i don’t do public math uh so i went to his i went to this guy and he the the lights were down and they start playing this music and like i went with my co-worker he was like hey i found this thing on eventbrite let’s go check it out and we went to his place and 30 of us did breath like a breath work session it was it was have you been to a soul cycle studio i was gonna say yeah it sounds like exactly yeah it felt exactly like that and it was the best business ever and they were clearly i talked to him afterwards he’s like yeah we’re just testing this out and we might turn it into a business and they didn’t do it and they totally should have because it was way better than soul cycle why they had nothing it was just a room with lights sound and you’re sitting there and they just hit play and the guy guides you a little bit he kind of talks to you and it was awesome but it was like the you walk out with a high so you’ve given people an experience so we talked about this a while ago with the simone biles thing we made a prediction that next five years mental fitness not mental health mental fitness which is training your body and your brain to sort of like be able to master your mind a little bit better um and not just avoid disease and illness but actually be fit mentally um this is gonna become more in vogue i think that this breath work i think breath work is gonna be the new meditation um i think that the same way that you know soul cycle and barry’s boot camp and hot yoga have become these alternative you know we had the gym which is this kind of cold sterile isolated solo one player experience and then you have soul cycle come in it’s like no this is multiplayer with a leader you just submit to they just tell you they just shout tell you what to do and they’re like they look heroic on the stage with their body and their voice and their microphone and then we’re going to program you with this music that you can’t help but feel like you just went to the club we’re going to heat you up so you sweat because that feels good you’re going to feel like you’ve got a workout in and we’re going to guide you through a process and whether that process is cycling or it’s boxing at rumble or it’s barry’s boot camp and you’re running on a treadmill or it’s hot yoga and you’re you know trying to touch your toes this is a model that works it is an experience that you give somebody is a feeling it is a one hour guaranteed high that you get to you get to get without the use of drugs and so um so i’m pretty convinced that there’s going to be a breathwork style version of barry’s boot camp or or hot yoga that becomes just as popular as some of those other ones perhaps even more popular and i think that the app that he’s building is going to be like a calm comm style app if they execute well because i think there’s a big market for this you know these are sort of like ancient techniques completely can be modernized another thing that stood out for during your story was i i’ve actually read about this so i’ve there’s this like recurring theme of people i look up to so chris sacca or is it saka chris saka there’s this uh israeli guy named uh uh vivi have you heard of vivi v so his uh his full name is uh aviv nevo so a v iv space n-e-v-o so this guy he’s an israeli guy he’s probably in his 60 now 60s now he kind of looks like sting he’s like this like good looking like suave looking dude who’s like in shape he’s probably in his 60s uh he came from israel his parents were wealthy they died when he was young gave him 10 million dollars uh in an inheritance he used that 10 million dollars to invest in some stuff ends up becoming the largest shareholder of time warner and now is this like big shot guy who hangs out with like bono and like he’s like a jay-z like they all looked like he’s got like they think yeah yeah he’s like this like spiritual guy you could google i mean there’s a lot of like really interesting articles about him he’s kind of like the great gatsby so anyway there’s him there’s chris sacca another person who this story applies to is this guy named cowboy cerrone cowboy cerrone donald truoni he’s a famous ufc fighter they all have locations outside of major cities so cowboy cerrone has a place in denver this vb guy has a yeah he’s got and this vv guy has a place right outside la and then chris sacca had a place in tahoe three hours outside of san francisco and their competitive advantage in getting into interesting deals is they have like interesting places that aren’t necessarily expensive vivi’s got his place is expensive expensive donald cerrone’s at first probably wasn’t that expensive chris hacker’s not that expensive and he gets these like founders to come out to his place he’s like hey look i have this cabin out in the woods you want to come chill and hang out and he like shows them around and gives them this amazing experience and that’s how they like end up investing in different stuff i actually think that strategy is amazing to have a just to live you can live a little bit on the outskirts and like everyone comes to you they’re on your terms because that’s the best way to like get [ ] done is everyone on at your house on your terms where you’re the boss they get to know you i think that’s a competitive advantage i’ve thought about doing that in either texas or new york where i’m staying now is getting a place that’s like two hours outside of the main area dude let’s let’s time share it my my first million ranch i’ll go in i’ll invest in it with you we’ll get five other cool people that we like and then whoever wants to retreat to the ranch at any given time can it would totally work like i think it’s a real like a huge competitive advantage don’t you i well i think it’s cool i think it’s definitely cool i don’t know if it’s a competitive it’s a competitive advantage in that um you can go deep so there’s this idea of like do you go wide or do you go deep i would say most people go wide i go deep in terms of in terms of your strategy with people so what what is wide wide means you have a lot of light connections loose ties you know a lot of acquaintances a lot of a lot of friends but not a lot of friends that you could call when you need something or not a lot of friends who are gonna think of you first when they see something awesome and going deep is the exact opposite it’s having a group of you know 10 or less people that you’re like okay i would go i don’t go to war for you and you would go to war for me and i think that both of us have more of this deep strategy than wide where it’s like we have a handful of people that we just trust implicitly i could give them my bank account and sleep well at night and um and because of that we can share information we can say dude so like how how do you do this how much you make doing this how do i set this up like what is this good for me bad for me you know what do you think or a deal happens and uh like this morning i’m in a deal that’s going really well startup deal is going really well and a buddy texted me was just like hey look like get me into that and i was like okay i will i will put as much credibility as i can into this to get you into that deal and uh and vice versa if they if they had something then then the same and so i think that the ranch style escape is a great tool for going deep so krasaka talks about he would uh he had the founder of instagram early on uh he was like i think working out of dog patch labs as his like co-working space and he invited him up to his tahoe cabin to come like work out of there and i think he like stayed there for like a few weeks if i remember the story correctly like living in the guest house or whatever and then travis kalanick when he was starting uber the story is yeah he came to tahoe we spent four nights or three to three days together he was we were in the hot tub just jamming on what what could happen it’s like immersion by the end of three days with somebody like you really trust that person you like that person it’s so different than a meeting than a zoom call and trying to have eight back-to-back zoom calls and we had what’s her name uh brie kimmel on the show and she showed us her calendar and it was like 30 minute zoom then 30 minute zoom then 40 minute email follow up then 20 minute zoom then it’s like okay that’s one strategy i want to basically say clear the calendar you know let’s go road tripping together let’s go you know let’s spend a day let’s go to this mma fight together let’s have unique experiences that are longer more in depth and that build more trust and i’ll i’d rather do that with a few people than try to do it try to know everybody same we’re the exact same i find it to be exhausting um you want to do a few topics here yeah let’s do it which one you want to do you drive um okay i’ll do [Music] let’s see let’s do this um let’s do the i don’t know you want to tell the story about the consultant one i think that’s probably the most interesting one all right uh so i i i i’ve not told you about this guy i don’t think so it’s a pretty memorable story all right so i have this friend that i was i was talking to recently and um i’m i’m trying to be a fair bit vague but i’m gonna try and give as many details as i possibly can and basically this person they had a normal job a normal high-paying job like a lot of people listening to this they were a consultant at a large place and they lived very frugally and they were able to save a million dollars by the time that they were in their uh lower to mid thirties and when this happened this was around four years ago bitcoin uh was priced around twenty five hundred dollars three thousand dollars when this happened and this person is eccentric they’re crazy um even though like they have their normal job and you would talk to them and you think that they’re normal he likes to bet he just loves gambling like in a sense of like betting at all like he it seems like he’s that’s just like in his dna he’s not afraid i think you’re a little bit like that um not as extreme but definitely have a touch of that and so you know he started talking he goes you know i don’t see any good place to invest this money right now and i’ve been doing crazy amounts of research i’m gonna go all in on bitcoin and this was when it was three thousand dollars twenty five hundred dollars we thought it was crazy so he cashed out his 401k he borrowed a little bit of money and he used kraken or something like kraken to get massive amounts of leverage like five or ten times leverage and he invested all of his money to the point where he had like four thousand dollars left of his one million all of it into bitcoin and recently when bitcoin hit its house by the way this was this was bitcoin after it had crashed from about twenty thousand down back down to three thousand so it’s not like it was just all on the up and up no and recently when it got to sixty thousand dollars his some his one million is it was worth about like 95 million dollars and and you talked to him you caught up with him i i had a a mutual friend was with him and he and he called me and he goes man this guy you like we were talking you know i was like hey whatever happened to this this person he goes well you know i caught up with him he’s worth almost about a hundred million dollars right now and it totally worked and i was like wait what he goes yeah he’s got a hundred million dollars at bitcoin right now and started with a million and did you know him when he was making the bet like were you there yeah what the hell are you doing yeah and i and i went out to dinner with him uh in 2000 and uh when did the one three years ago was what uh when did that was i think i think 2017 or 2018 i remember which one but there was a uh it peaked at the 2017 december or something yeah and then it crashed back down we went out to dinner and he was telling me about this and i was like you you’re crazy you’re a crazy person this is a horrible idea just invest in the index fund you know i’m really conservative and i’m like just invest in index funds you’re nuts this is a horrible idea do not do it and he was enthused so enthused i couldn’t talk him out of it and he was like thinking i was crazy he was like what are you crazy this is like it totally makes sense and i’m like it doesn’t this is a horrible idea do not do this and he did it and so recently uh when when about four months ago whenever it was at like 50 60 grand it was worth close to 100 million dollars and i was asking about their lifestyle like not a lot had changed um and it was just or leaving it letting it run cashed out a little bit i think like 10 or 20 percent i believe but still letting it ride so now it’s halved or i guess it’s back up again but and and and the point of the story is basically i am so enthusiastic the point of the story is a dude bet a million dollars and made a hundred million dollars there is a plural but that’s the point of the story let’s be clear the point is that like i love that part of the story crazy people exist i’m not one of them and i’m happy that they exist so we just did this episode remi and i align with the ramit we’re both fairly conservative just like 10 a year boring [ ] i love that these nuts these nutty are real and exist because that’s where progress come from comes from and i’m happy that they’re real and so that yeah i just wanted to tell that quick story because i caught up with them recently that’s an amazing story uh so i saw this um i saw this tweet that was great and basically what it said was great uh to be great at investing just make bets that everybody agrees with dot dot dot later i thought that’s so true which is uh there’s a lot like baked into that which is that ultimately uh was that by shane parish he tweeted something like it and then somebody somebody replied with a simpler version of it shane had had the original one i think sahil bloom had the the the the punchier one-liner version of it yeah um and i thought there’s so much baked into that which is you have to remember that if you’re going to invest if everybody agrees it’s a great investment then the price is baked in right so ultimately if you want to have any kind of outsized return you have to be betting on something that not everybody is agreeing with you is a uh is a good investment and so um and so i think that’s important i think so i think it’s important to know and so when you’re doing something that doesn’t mean everybody disagrees with me that’s gonna be a great investment it’s almost the opposite is true if everybody agrees with me on this then this probably isn’t going to be a great investment it might be a good or solid investment it’s probably just not going to be it’s almost definitely not going to be a great great investment so that’s how you kind of use that advice yeah i saw that i thought that was good um all right what do you want to do now uh by the way on this uh because the world’s crazy and we’re talking about like people just making 100 million dollars on random bets there’s this great blog post that i think everybody should go read um i don’t know how they’ll link to it because it’s weird maybe put in the show notes it’s got a great headline the everything bubble and it’s written by ftx which is a crypto uh cryptocurrency exchange we we talked about the the guy he was our billy of the week once this guy sam bakeman freed um and who had also made a pretty crazy trade uh to get the bankroll to be able to do this to build this exchange i think he’s the youngest crypto uh billionaire or he’s the youngest he’s the wealthiest known crypto billionaire i think he’s got a net worth of 10 billion dollars i think something like that somehow that’s more than vitalik i don’t know how that works but i guess so so anyways he um it’s just packed with data so it basically starts with like bubbles people talk about bubbles and um and it’s like what is a bubble right bubble is when you get this like sort of enthusiasm delusion greed and everybody sort of thinks that everything can only go up and then you know then there’s just pull back or pop and it talks about like the size of pops and um and how when they happen and how that’s played out through different bubble times and where we might be in this thing then it talks about like maybe this is a bubble that will never pop right why would that be and it basically talks about it goes through all the data around stimulus right so it’s like 32 trillion dollars of stimulus has happened globally just since covet which is the largest stimulus the world has ever seen in terms of a perce even in terms of percentage of global gdp uh you know global banks are printing 100 834 million dollars per hour to buy bonds right now and um and 25 of those bonds are negative yielding so it’s just like he starts to talk about all these different macro indicators and there’s all these charts and graphs and numbers and it’s very simple and it basically talks about where are we at um where are we at with with stimulus where are we at with commodities like copper aluminum uh why you wire used cars up 45 year-over-year and then it talks about um you know what’s happening in the crypto market and equity market and i think there’s one great quote which is basically it talks about like risk assets so traditionally you’d have like a risk asset which is let’s say bonds and um bonds are like the safest thing and so the quote here i’ll just read this out which is because of the amount of printing so the quantitative easing because they call it qe infinity which is basically the central bank and the fed just deciding to print an unstoppable amount of money with no end in sight so it says because of this your savings account turned into your checking account the bond market turned into your savings account the equity market turned into the bond market the venture market turned into the equity market and the crypto market became the new venture market basically like everything shifted over one unit so things that were low risk became everybody seeked higher higher risk and higher returns because the safe stuff was this sort of negative yielding and so everything shifted over one notch and i thought that was a good kind of observation so anyways there’s a bun it’s very you find a blog post that’s this high density of like signal to noise i would go read this it’s called the everything bubble and so what’s your what’s your opinion of i know that you’re uh texting with me and a few guys earlier yeah you you have some strong opinions what’s your opinion of what’s going on with like the the nfts and and and all the rock like the the i don’t even know yeah i was joking around i basically said like look okay if you got into bitcoin early because you you understood the difference between fiat currency and sound money and you’re a technologist you understood cryptography like props to you you deserve you deserve your tens of millions hundreds of millions of dollars at 30 cents because you’re a developer and you you really believed in this new programmable blockchain dollars you deserve your hundred million that was my that was my point of view um i like my level of respect and like the level of durability i think that comes with these different waves um i might regret this later it might be that all these people they just truly understood this intersection of technology financial markets and art in a way that i don’t get and you know to basically to get rich with with bitcoin early on you had to understand like uh the you know the financial you had a certain economic understanding of the world and a technical understanding of the world and you had to be sort of a little you know a little libertarian you had to have those three to bet on it super early on and for ethereum the same thing you had to have a certain mix of technical plus financial like uh savviness for this it’s basically like art plus finance uh plus technology if you if you’re gonna get rich during this and i just feel like i don’t know if it’s my twitter feed or if it’s everybody’s twitter feed but um i feel like half the people i know have lost their mind and um and i know i sound like that sometimes with crypto so this is just one of them that i don’t get but i really don’t see the sustainability of this nft market i think it is it is built on greater fool theory this is people that are not buying things because they like the art they’re buying things because they think they’re going to get rich they think that the next person is going to come in and buy it i think there’s a whole lot of like either you know wash trading or painting the tape which is basically when when two friends sort of pass something amongst each other in order to drive up the price and then they sell it you know and then you know the next sucker comes in and buys it you know for because they think that’s the market price and i think that it could be one person with multiple accounts it could be you know a handful of people that are manipulating these markets i don’t believe in the nft craze in the same way that it seems like a lot of people in tech do i think it’s really cool technology i think there’s a lot of cool stuff that’s going to happen but i think people are just diving into every freaking project and that to me seems misguided and the the crazy returns that they’re getting like i’m the hater you know sort of rooting for it to fail because i don’t get it i’m not participating in it and it just doesn’t seem like it doesn’t seem like a true value creation it just seems like you know um delusion i completely agree i’m freaked out by it we’re on the exact same page it like that and by the way as you say when i when i say that like i will still buy a few nfts because i’m a i’m a believer of like when i have this strong of an emotion it’s a signal to me that that’s where i need to go lean in and learn now i don’t go crazy with it i will make small bets i’ll talk to people i will be open-minded because i’ve felt this way many times before and been wrong i felt it and i’ve been right but i felt it and i’ve been wrong and so all i know is that that means there’s something really interesting going on i will still play in that field i will make small bets i will meet a bunch of smart people and if something changes my mind i’ll go make a big bold bet but i would say like the thing that seems off to me is um you know it just seems like every third week there’s a new crypto project like yes just yesterday there was this thing called loot did you see this well what is that i don’t understand it explain it to me so here’s what i know about it the uh the founder you know you know this guy dom hoffman he created vine and then he created uh some other [ ] since vine i don’t know if he was with h maybe he was hq yeah maybe maybe he was uh he’s one of the one of the vine founders early on so he just released a new project yesterday called loot and so instead of it being like a uh you know a crypto punk which is like a little eight bit character or uh you know an ape from board 848 yacht club which is like a you know monkey a picture of monkey this is a black square with like i don’t know 10 words of white text that make no sense just gibberish it’s just computer generated gibberish and that’s the whole nft and just yesterday you could just all you had to do was pay the gas fee which means just pay the processing fee to like mint one so it came out ben saw the tweet ben minted one and uh i think today it’s worth 10 to eat which is about thirty thousand dollars this is in one day he paid he paid you know probably under a hundred dollars to mint one of these just to just the processing fee he paid 50 bucks or whatever the gas price and then today i think the floor is like six or six or ten eats which is like you know no for this black square that will say like lions mountain spiking diagonal line castle you know valorant you know it’s like doesn’t mean anything right and then and it’s like open ip you can go like you can build like games on top of it there’s cool stuff you could do on top of it but like it’s so hard to wrap my head around like this and it just feels like every third day there’s like a new one and um and this is where i’m like the old guy on the lawn shaking my fist like you kids don’t understand the meaning of hard work and usually i’m the one laughing at the old guys you’re saying that just saying you don’t get it in this case i don’t get it do we want to keep hating on stuff and go to whoop uh yeah okay this is the play what would you call it the player haters ball this is the player haters ball episode because i have another one that i could hate on uh let’s do let’s do whoop first yeah so um well you go ahead go ahead i’ll frame it whoop raise 200 million dollars a series f whoop which if you don’t know is like a wristband uh like a kind of health tracker fitness tracker thing you wear i have one i lost the charger so it’s dead right now um but it’s basically like a little fitbit you wear and it tracks your sleep attracts your exercise it’s i think that the the word on the street with whoop is basically amazing marketing and product is uh it’s like you know not the most accurate but who gives a [ ] and uh basically they charge you you know some amount for the band and then there’s a monthly subscription 20 30 bucks a month or something like that i think the the part right now the band is free and it’s 30 dollars a month if you subscribe for the year or something like that you have to subscribe in order to use it yeah so that’s whoop uh and then same thing eight sleep which is a bed that tracks your sleep and it can kind of it can it’s thermo regulating so it can make you cold hot i had one i returned it because i wasn’t super impressed by it um they raised 86 million dollars at a 500 million dollar evaluation so what do you which i think i know based on the way you started it i but the reason i put it on here i wanted to know are you a believer or are you like you know where do you bet that these end up how how much do you believe in these how much was the what valuation um i don’t know i think whoops over a billion dollars that’s my guess i don’t i would have to think i would have to see that yeah 3.6 3.6 billion dollars oh and and also the wonderful kiss of death softbank and then kevin durant and other athletes are investing you know that’s uh that’s called the sucker round it’s not called the series app it’s called the sucker round so the eight sleep thing i’m well check this out look up right now what’s casper’s market cap right now so casper between one and three billion dollars is my guess uh let’s see oh my god way worse 200 million dollars okay so casper has a market cap right now of 200 million dollars we had the founder of casper speak at hustlecon awesome guy great story really great business when it was just getting started i made a million dollars and i think it’s first week they raised prior to going public around 250 million dollars i think as of this second they have a market cap they went public of 200 million dollars so they are worth less than the amount of money that they raised point five x of revenue point five x of revenue i think that for eight sleep i i and i think that that is a good valuation for casper i’m on board with that because it’s really hard to do i think that that is what’s gonna happen to eight sleep whoop i think is a little bit different because it has subscription revenue um you know i i i’ll buy by the way i think i think eight sleeps trying to do the same thing so they don’t just sell you the mattress they sell you the subscription with the mattress they’re like they won’t they think the bold case is it’s peloton it’s a piece of hardware everybody sleeps you sleep eight hours a night you can optimize your sleep it has some such good health impacts for you right like all true and um you know mattress industry is big so what we’re going to do is we’re going to sell the best you know connected mattress and then we’re going to charge you a monthly subscription on top of that that’s my guess i think they might have no man i think that’s a really hard argument to make that that’s expensive that’s it that’s another tesla of beds says their their ad i um so when we first when we were getting the hustle going um this company called quip advertised with us and i used to write these advertorials i’m not sure if i made this up or if i stole it from somewhere else that’s a toothbrush right yeah and i wrote and i when we were getting started i used to write these articles and i wrote this one article for hint and the headline was like i forget what the headline was but it was great like and it got like 10 million views 5 million views and they spent so much money driving traffic to it and so if you go to outbrain and you scroll down and you see these little articles um you see these little articles on the bottom of cnn and it says like a headline you would see the hustle’s article and i wrote that article and it was called like it was like a hint yeah it was called like it had the word sweetie like sweetie this is never going to work said this one coke executive or something like that or what was it do you see like i’m trying trying to find it right now and so i wrote an article like that and it crushed then quip saw and they’re like that’s great write one for us so i wrote one for them and i called them the tesla of toothbrushes and that crushed and they said they spent a ton of money driving traffic to them now i’m not going to take credit for it i actually think i did copy it from someone but i don’t remember now the tesla of like a bed the tesla is it’s it’s it crushes it um what do you see the article what was it called dude why didn’t you start a d2c brand i feel like everything every bone in your body was made to build a brand like this i’ll tell you why so um all birds filed to go public today i was reading through their s1 here’s why i didn’t start a d2c i think it’s fun i think a d2c brand is like the hardest thing that one of the hardest things that you could do in business it is so challenging i looked at their the auburn’s s1 here’s why commerce kind of sucks the more revenue you you make the less money you have it’s such a pain in the ass am i wrong about this uh yeah you’re wrong about this let me show you something real quick that’s crazy dude you i i think these d2c companies are are such a pain in the ass to run can you see this number aj hang on come on camera focus on that there it is that’s that’s the last 30 days so your your business has made sales in the last 30 days that’s right it’s not that hard to build these businesses it’s okay it’s a lot of schlep work there is a lot of shelf work right like i spent hours yesterday trying to find a forklift for the warehouse but the electrical and the building doesn’t support the battery that we need and i’m like uh where do i get this forklift from i’m calling forklift providers turns out by the way great business to be in just selling used heavy machinery like forklifts um and there’s a lot of room for like building aggregator there but uh but yeah dude if you have the marketing chops you have it’s like it’s like where do you plug in that if you’re a plus at that skill and i think you are like your writing skills and your advertorial skills your marketing skills are so strong if you had plugged that in on a d2c brand uh and by the way this is we are one year and one month into this business that’s crazy and that’s in a month doing basically so okay um how much how much cash you have in the business bank account uh a good amount yeah a lot why because are you buying a [ ] ton of stuff for november in december uh yeah we have we have a bunch of inventory yeah we do spend a lot on inventory but there’s uh yes it took cash uh so i put in when i started the business uh i put in a good amount of money because i put in so do you have wow you don’t wait and you don’t have to say these numbers but do you ha do you or you can but do you have more money in the business bank account than you started no uh we so we have a line of credit basically that we we use so since then we basically pulled that out use the line of credit um but what i’m i guess the point yes it yes we you do have to wait some time to be able to pull profits out because while you’re scaling great this month is profitable you’re going to reinvest that into either marketing or inventory for the next month so yes you are cash poor for a while but you do turn the corner like this month is it turn the corner type of month where oh good like there’s actually leftovers after you reinvest everything in growth and all that and so i think that if you have a good product if you have a really truly great product do you think that you have a great product we do we have a great product like a truly great product and so uh and so when i think when you have that you’re not just like is you’re not just an arbitrage you’re not just a drop shipper just taking some [ ] from uh you know random [ ] off of aliexpress and and sending it to customers and trying to capture your margin like we spend a lot of time on product development things like that uh to get it right and we also use the product ourselves so so it’s not like so so we have to live with any issues with the product so i would say you um you can turn the corner and also there’s a bunch of different companies that have popped up that let you float money so like let’s let’s just take a normal d2c business here’s how it can work you can uh let’s say you rank facebook ads you put the facebook ads on a credit card cool your facebook ads should be returning more than one x um you know within seven days how much you have 30 days 30 yeah it depends on your product and your your brand all that stuff but let’s say you’re returning 1.4 x or you might be returning 2.5 x whatever different brands do a different amount you know if you’re doing 3x you’re you’re you’re amazing you’re laughing if you’re doing one and a half x you know you’re all right you’re doing okay um so let’s say you uh you do that you’re paying back your ad spend in seven days but you don’t pay your credit card for let’s say 30 days so all of your marketing spend you should be paying it should be paying itself off you don’t need an external investment to do that okay so now you have to deal with inventory well for inventory you have supply you have terms with your suppliers so you don’t have to pay for it all up front as we get bigger we get better and better terms with our suppliers in addition to that there’s all these companies that have popped up like clear bank or settle or whatever way flyer different companies that will basically say cool for one percent interest we will front your inventory financing for you we’ll pay all your kind of accounts uh payable for for you and so one percent is one percent per month is not cheap but that basically replaces the need for external investment and so then by the time you have to pay your bill for your inventory you’ve already received it and sold it and so if you do those two things you can manage cash flow well you your ads pay themselves back before your credit card bill is due and your inventory pays itself off before your inventory bill is due and you just pay a small vig on insurance so there’s a lot out there now to help you scale and i think a business uh these businesses i think sell for about 1x revenue which is you know maybe four or five x times even uh and do you think that um what do you think’s gonna happen with it do you think you’ll sell it or is this something that you want to run for and own is this like a family business that you want to own forever yeah i like running it so and i definitely think we can grow it more so you know if we could do this in one year you know let’s give it four more and let’s see where we can take it i do think that there’s like some amazing thing about these companies which is you probably if i had a guest have i i don’t know how you quantify because you have so many projects but you probably have a skeleton crew right yeah like this doesn’t require there’s no office you know there’s there’s some employees the biggest thing we have now is we brought the where we you know we do our own warehouse but you could also not do that you could use a 3pl uh you know pay somebody else basically to to do your fulfillment for you and uh and then you don’t have any crew there so so you don’t have that headache um so so you could do this with a pretty small team of people there are people doing this with like like i think you know um we had we did an episode with the founder of native deodorant i think he was the only employee for like the first i don’t remember what it was maybe five times yeah and then you know and then and then he hired a customer service person which is basically you know you can hire somebody for six dollars an hour overseas to answer your customer service emails and that’s your first hire then you might hire another one of those people then you might hire somebody for operations to deal with like supply chain you know but so so it depends on kind of like how complicated your business is but yeah like you don’t need i would say i think it’s probably whatever you had with the hustle this is probably one-fourth the manpower you need for that it is cool i look i think there’s a lot of i was down on it but i there are a lot of cons i think there’s a lot of pros as well the cons it depends what month you catch somebody you catch them in a month where the facebook algorithm is not treating people well and they’re crying you know the business doesn’t work anymore it’s like it went from great it was a money printer and now it’s a money suck uh and there’s nothing you could do about it facebook just change something or there’s a pandemic and you can’t you can’t order anything yeah or shipping containers went from three thousand a container to twenty thousand dollars a container uh okay now you know how does that mess up your money and that everything’s stuck at the port it has i mean all these things have happened right like all of you we’ve had theft we’ve had uh facebook ad changes we’ve had container costs go up we’ve had our stuff sitting on a boat at the port for three weeks and it’s just floating there um you know we’ve had to go get line of credit we’ve had to do a lot of things in this amount of time but um so i would say that’s what i said there’s a lot of schlep work it’s not clean and easy like doing a podcast and just having a bunch of people listen to it and make money like this is a lot easier a lot more fun but those can those can get bigger and i guess i don’t even remember how i started this but basically i was just saying dude i can’t believe you haven’t built one of these um it’s insane to me given your skill set so maybe maybe i will one day and we’ll wrap up this in a second but let me ask you one more question because this is interesting to me because so you’ve done a social app that is like the most poppy cute thing ever and had had some had some mild success you’ve also have family that are mega successful in real estate we have interviewed all types of people you now have an ecom thing that’s like appears to be a potentially a home run what would you if go back now to uh 10 years prior you’re you know what you know now what do you think you would like to do hmm that’s a hard question that’s a really really hard question okay i’ll i’ll rank i’ll give them it’s like the oscars i’ll give them some awards okay so most likely to succeed goes to real estate congratulations come up and get your prize uh if i had just said cool i’d like to be worth you know a few million bucks you know in my 20s by the time i end my 20s i want to be worth a few million dollars maybe you know liquid maybe a couple million on paper i could have you know 10 to 20 million net worth uh i could have done that in real estate um with pretty much like no luck required right most likely to succeed is real estate because there’s no luck required it’s just hard work blocking and tackling doing the things uh so that’s real estate but i wouldn’t go do it myself like if i could go back now i wouldn’t switch paths to that but i would have told myself hey look here’s here’s one option and uh the award for absolute worst idea goes to trying to create the next social media app this required maximum difficulty uh light highest luck factor trying to catch lightning in a bottle and honestly the prize okay it would have been [ ] sweet if we had invented twitter or youtube yeah i gotta admit that would be amazing i can be just as happy not having done it and yeah i can name all five guys who’ve done that so like you know uh that’s that’s not the path okay then if i say all right you know sort of like medium return this is the mediocre playbook you know the sort of mild success playbook a pretty good chance of a pretty good outcome but kind of a lot of work and uh you know would i do that e-commerce is the answer for that one which is like e-commerce is one that i think you can definitely make work if you just keep trying um it’s kind of a pain in the ass it’s never going to be the most fun or the most successful right however however ecom of of maybe all three of those i think is the most exciting the most exciting no way most of you have been running ads and seeing cash like that is so exciting okay that that loop is fun uh that i give you that the feedback loop is instantaneous and it’s [ ] it’s monetary it’s not real reviews real estate’s not that very like real estate can be kind of fun but i wouldn’t i wouldn’t call it it’s not like an adrenaline like a dopamine rush right so okay so if i was going to go back and convince myself of anything it would have just been to say this uh look you could you could win in all these different ways every flavor works the choose the one with the most fun journey corny yeah i know this is cliche but choose the one that’s going to be fun before the success comes basically in that case you win win you have fun while you’re doing it because you have fun you keep doing it because you keep doing it you get good at it because you get good at it you eventually win and uh look all these things that as long as they leverage you know either either like physical real estate or the internet the scale is big enough you you’ll have enough money you don’t need to worry about money ever again and so i would have advised myself to say look there’s some pretty interesting [ ] going on in these like new waves like genomics you know biotechnology uh cryptocurrency just go dive in become there’s no experts because the things like a year old go become an expert meet all the cool people doing it take a bunch of invest in [ ] and build build in that space um you know create a podcast talking about that stuff like yeah just do all the things in that space you know information so you know podcasting so media you know information like courses and you know uh crypto you know investing so i mean you have a pretty a collection so i i i think the of all of them i’ve had the most fun doing the podcast the media thing and really it’s more of just like do the thing that doesn’t feel like work to you do the thing that feels like play to you right so like imagine you already had the money but you still were going to work on some projects what would you work on that my answer was i would want to basically like i would want to make content based on stuff i’m learning stuff i think is cool i think it’d be really fun to have an audience i find it like energizing i don’t feel i don’t feel like it’s work when i have to do the podcast and prepare for the podcast and um and yeah it keeps me kind of like on my toes because i got to come up with new stuff to talk about so i got to keep learning so that’s like that was the most fun path for me so i would have done that or i would have similarly done this in a domain like this is a general podcast i would have done the same thing but like in crypto like there’s these guys that do this podcast called bankless have you seen them no is it awesome it’s like yeah it’s cool i mean i don’t listen regularly but like okay defy is this new thing this is new wave crypto is this new wave there’s so much to learn about so much to talk about so these guys they went in they created a podcast called bankless and bankless is basically great great name great name and they just talk every week they’re just like oh here’s the new [ __ ] going on in the world of d5 here’s the new thing to talk about here’s the ups the downs the prices because of that they’re building a good community around them they can make money off sponsorships they’re seeing a bunch of stuff if they’re smart they’re investing a bunch and getting equity in all those businesses and eventually they should launch their own branded business in there maybe it’s an exchange or an etf or something else with that following and so that’s kind of the playbook i would do given my strengths and what i’ve seen but like yeah tried all i’ve tried a bunch of these different things and that’s that’s what this is good i think this is um i think maybe we should end here i think this is a a a sick episode i was thoroughly and uh like i was enjoying hearing hearing the stories hopefully people will enjoy it what do you think we gotta title this one this is the play haters ball we will try next time to hate on less stuff and we will talk about stuff we like more but that’s all right this is this is the episode that we hated on everything well i’ll pat ourselves on the back here we don’t default to hate most of the time like right like we hate on everything except for ourselves we compliment it we typically are not haters i i think i default to optimism so do you on most everything we want it all to work but uh yeah i i feel you and i complete i agree with just about everything you said all right dope uh okay i’m gonna go eat a steak and a salad and enjoy myself all right that’s the pod let’s travel never looking back