MrBeast of Gardening!? How The Plant Daddy Built A $27M+ Garden

He quit his job and in the first year he does it. He hits actually five grand a month. So he even surpasses his his one year goal. And he just keeps going. So he first year, sixty K. Second year, like a hundred something K. Third year, two hundred fifty K. Fourth year seven million. Fifth year, you know, it it just keeps growing. Today this business does Over thirty million a year. No way. Are you kidding me? I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to

I'll put my all in it like my day's all on a rolless trip. And do you wanna um do you wanna start with Up Dog? I might fall Uh that's like it to me. That's way below you. You should have just gave it to me. Um All right, before we start

I want to dedicate this podcast, Sean. Oh. To two groups of people. Because I've had run ins with de these two groups of people and I've taken for granted How special these two groups of people are.

The first one. People who start businesses and are English speaking as are are uh not not native English speakers. It's insane. I like have hug I hug out recently with a few friends that uh you know, are entrepreneurs and they don't speak English natively.

That's so impressive. I take it for granted so much until I've got to communicate someone of a different language. That's amazing. So I want to dedicate this pod to that, the second group of people. People who start businesses and they're not wealthy And they're just starting their businesses trying to make their dreams come true while they have Newborns or little kids.

How impressive is that? Like I didn't take I didn't I kind of took that for granted. My parents did that when I was younger. I don't realize now that I've a kid, I realize how scary that is. So I want to dedicate this podcast to those two groups of people. Wow. Good guy points. Okay. I like it. Um Dedication excepted. Shout out to Shout out to all those groups. I have a few interesting things to share with you today. Do you have a few interesting things or or what?

I have two things you're gonna like. Um, what do you got? All right. So we're talking about AI. Talking about fancy shit, right? Well I'm gonna take you on a journey.

So Sam Buckle up. 'Cause I got a little something for you. I'm gonna tell you about a journey I went down. And the journey starts with a tweet I saw that was very interesting. And it was a tweet about Yeah, Bitcoin hit an all time high price.

AI's taken off. My I wasn't in I'm not interested. What I was interested in. Is a picture of a guy holding a giant avocado. And I was like, What is this? And he says he said he goes

These are the best avocados I've ever had. They were grown by my ninety three year old Japanese neighbor. I have had to use Google Translate to talk to her about the variety. And she thinks it might be Uh one that just grew from this se this specific seed.

If that's true, this could be a new landmark variety. The Has avocado was discovered in similar fashion. And is now the most popular avocado in the world. This avocado that I found cannot be propagated with normal methods. Uh it doesn't take well to Air layering. I don't know what this means.

He says, So I'm gonna have to start with the seed. I'm gonna have to grow it out the tree. I'm gonna have to cut it from the mature tree, graft it onto its own seed. I don't even know what any of this means. But then he's like And then I'm gonna try to recreate this avocado. It will probably be a three year experiment. Wish me luck.

And so I saw this and I What a noble quest. I say what does this avocado teach me about life? No. What has life led me to to make my life about this avocado because I am so fully invested in this three year journey. About this guy who's gonna try to grow a better avocado and it led me down a rabbit hole. About him and about the avocado. So the guy is this guy named Kevin Espiritu. Do you know this guy

calls himself the plant daddy on Twitter. No, but I'm in. You don't know this guy. No, I think you do. When I just started describing people. So he's got a pretty amazing story. And I'm gonna first tell you his story, then I'm gonna come back to the avocado. We're gonna Tarantino this a little bit. All right.

So this guy basically he used to work at Scribe, the Like Book in a box company, there they help you produce books. So he's working at Scribe, he's like an early employee there, and on the side. He um used to have hobbies of like video games and online poker and he was just playing nonstop.

And so To get away from kind of his online addiction. He's like, You know what? I'm gonna start gardening. Like him and his brother. They're the quote in the article they go.

Hey, let's go hit up a nursery. They go to a plant nursery and they are like, All right, we don't know anything about gardening, but like uh we want to do something. We're gonna do something away from a computer, outside with our hands. And they go buy a bunch of stuff and they're trying to figure it out. They go online, they're looking at blogs to learn. And

Along the way, he starts blogging his journey. And so he's at Scribe and he His little blog starts getting you know, a little bit of traffic'cause he's posting his experiments. He's very relatable'cause he's an absolute new beginner. And so people who are Googling are also absolute new beginners and they start to like this.

And eventually he's like, You know what? I'm gonna quit my job. At the time, the blog is making I don't know, sixteen, seventeen thousand dollars a year. So roughly Two two ish grand a month, a little bit more than that, right? So Or l a little less than two grand a month, sorry. So he's uh

He quits his job and he's like, I'm gonna go all in on this thing. And at the time, he's all about this one type of gardening called hydroponic garden. Gar is that like where the the plant is like raised? Uh is that right? Yeah, it's like not in the soil and in water. Something like that. I said exactly.

I have no idea. All right, so He's he creates R slash Hydro, which is like a Reddit community. So he starts just building a community around other people who are interested in the same type of thing. He's doing Along the way, he's like, Oh dude, I think this hydroponic thing is a little too niche. He rebrands it into something called epic gardening.

Epic gardening today. It's huge. Dude, I'm on the website and I'm looking at his social numbers. Holy crap. He's got like two million on TikTok, two million on YouTube, a million people here.

So he's done really, really well with this Epic gardening content. He's just a dude in a baseball cap, super like relatable. When you watch his videos, he's like he's just very likable guys. He's got the gift. Um that you need when you're gonna do this type of content. And so he keeps going. And he basically for 10 years essentially bootstraps this company. So starts with like a$10 domain.

Pays five bucks for hosting. And he was like all right, I'm gonna try to get this thing. And his goal was I'm gonna try to get to three grand a month, because three grand a month means I can live off of this like blog revenue. He quit his job and in the first year he does it. He hits actually five grand a month. So he even surpasses his his one year goal. And he just keeps going. So he first year, sixty K. Second year, like a hundred something K. Third year, two hundred fifty K. Fourth year, seven million. Fifth year, you know, it it just keeps growing. Today this business does

Over thirty million a year. No way. Are you kidding me? And he just raised a huge amount of money from Cherning, the same guys who backed We talked about eater, barstool, others. They have this content to commerce idea. And they're like This guy in the gardening niche

is gonna be able to do big things and f and he had already kind of proven it. So what he did was He was doing pretty well with the content. He was just like learning. So he's like, dude, I've been on YouTube for so long, you know, since you know, basically ten years now on YouTube. He's just keep evolving with Whatever the new metagame is of YouTube. And what ends up happening is that in twenty twenty

Shit takes off during COVID. So COVID was the big like inflection point that like really took this from Moderately successful to very successful. Two things happen. Covid first. Where his channel all of a sudden he said he started adding like fifteen thousand subscribers a day. Because

The same thing he had when he was like Oh, dude, I'm just s so sick of being inside on my computer. I wanna get outside, do some gardening. The whole world basically felt that. When Covid hit. And so a lot of people got interested in in this, and then he's like

Cool. All my money up till that point was ads and affiliates, right? So just like YouTube ad sense, uh YouTube ad revenue and then you know affiliate links to products. And finally he's like, Was he doing thirty million that way? Thirty million three ads. No, no, way less than that. He was doing like, you know, less than a million doing that.

But then he decides all right, I'm gonna launch a product and he's like, I'm gonna create a gardening product. So he imports a product from Australia. And immediately it works. And so he's like, Oh, this this is kind of a good idea. And he starts to uh sell that product. And you know, the beautiful thing about these creator businesses, right? We've talked about Mr Beast. We've talked about Logan Paul with Prime, Mr. Beast with feestables.

You know, the the mass creators what they do is they take a mass market product, like Yeah. Or Chocolate. And they're like, Cool, we'll sell this commodity product using our branding and we'll use our branding to get into retail. Well, for like the medium, like the mid tier creators like this guy or you know, like us, for example.

You have to actually create a niche product that's gonna be higher ticket, higher value. Um And you're gonna use your audience to do it. And so what's cool about this is You create something that's called negative CAC. So what does a negative CAC means? Every business otherwise has a sales and marketing. Talk dirty to me, baby. I love negative CAC. Negative CAC, which is customer acquisition cost is

The amount of money you have to spend in marketing or sales to get a customer. And for most businesses this is maybe twenty percent, thirty percent, forty percent, fifty percent for some companies, it's eighty percent of their revenues. are just How much it costs to go market to to to acquire a customer.

With a media business like this, what ends up happening is you get negative CAC, meaning He gets paid one to two million dollars a year for his YouTube stuff for his content, right? His blog and his YouTube stuff. He's making money on that. And that's his customer acquisition channel. So it's like

Kind of an unfair advantage. This is what the Chernen guys are really smart about doing. Shout out to Mike Kearns over uh at uh turn in. Where they I recognize they identify that hey, some of these creators have High trust. They have high authority in a niche. And they actually have a business model where instead of spending thirty or forty percent of your revenue on acquiring customers,

You actually have negative CAC. It's actually Yeah, but not only zero, it's better than zero. You actually have a profitable media company. that is being used to acquire these customs. That's the beauty of it. And so he then he jumped And he was went from making, you know, let's say a million bucks a year to seven million seven million to twenty million, and then now he's over thirty million a year in in revenue. And the other cool thing is

He's bolted on from acquisitions. Hold on, what's he selling? He's got like a seed product. Um, so they like some tray seed. Crap. I don't know. I don't I don't know anything about that's what's called botanical seeds. Um, and he bought that company actually. That's not the one he started. He bought that because

they had retail distributions. They were in like four or five thousand stores. So he's like cool, let me buy this because I know that my audience will help grow this, right? This is what I did with Shepherd too, right? It's like Let me buy this company. That I It's already a good business, knowing that my audience will acquire a bunch of customers for it. And like that's what happened with Shepherd. We basically tripled the business.

using this strategy. He's doing the same thing in the gardening niche. And so he bought the seed business. And then he bought this like houseplant business. Um, which is actually a cool story. So he's like He gets into h he's like during Covid, everybody wanted like house plants. I think you guys talked about this with trends too. Like the Dude, we were we talked about this a year and a half, I think, before the pandemic.

About uh Like succulents. People are wanting to buy succulents online and there's not a lot of options. You were totally right. You were ahead of trend. What he did was he was like Cool. Um should I start creating this content? And he realized A very like, you know, in the in the uh the growth of any entrepreneur, eventually you start to realize that hey, sometimes it's actually easier to buy than build.

And so what he did was like, Well, I could try to create all these articles, rank for them in SEO. Yeah. He found this website that was called like, you know, your houseplant.com. And he's like, d this actually has like good content and it's good SEO. They just don't have any business around it. And so he's like, I think I could make this product a lot better.

But I could like get this off a head start. So he he does a Whois look up. And it's some Indian VC owns this as a side project. He buys it for a thousand dollars. And then immediately, like month one, he's making more than a thousand dollars off this thing. And then grows that property. And so he's done this a few times and he raised money from Cherning to be able to go do more of these. And so I think this guy is amazing. I've asked him so many times to invest because I'm like, dude, this is

You are gonna win and you're gonna win in such a big way, it's gonna shock people. Like I think as I'm saying it now, it sounds like Pretty cool, pretty obvious and as his growth happens, but like Ten years ago. So so non obviously

Even four or five years ago, even when Covid started to get more popular, it's like Okay, cool, you're a YouTuber. Okay, cool, you're a YouTuber with an e com shop. I say no no no. You are gonna be the most trusted influencer.

In the gardening niche. And the gardening niche, you know. Look at how much yeah there's full retail brick and mortar stores that are selling fertilizer and different things like that. Like He can take this huge if he does this right.

And now it's just gonna be a question of how fastest kind of business development can can level up with the content skills he already has. And he's got the look. I'm looking at his Instagram. He's wearing flannel. He's got a nice smile. Like he's got it's he's basically like a Uh. What's the what's it called? Chip and Joanna? Uh gains. Yeah, the games. Yeah. He he's got that type of vibe where I look at him and I'm like, You're relatable. I trust you. You're somehow

It's a little bit aspirational a little bit. That sounded like an insult. I didn't mean it I didn't mean to for it to sound like that. Uh, but this is awesome. Uh, and dude, these guys at Cherning have done this so many times. They did it with Meet Eater, who we or was it Meater who we talked about a few podcasts ago. They did it with Cars and Bid and Doug DeMoro. This is like When people say they're gonna do this, I often think it's like on at a small scale. These guys are doing it at multi, multi, multi billion dollar scale. Uh

It's really cool. Yeah, exactly. So I think this is this is amazing. Now let me circle back to the avocado thing. So he says I'm gonna do this three year avocado mission, and he says something about the Haas Avocado. And so I go look it up, I'm like, where did this havocado come from? Learn a couple of things. Number one. Stop pronounced Hoss.

It's Hass. So we're all saying it wrong. That's the first thing I learned. Second thing. Do you know the story? Have you heard the story about the the has avocado? No, uh why what no. Alright. So basically avocados were avocados were absolutely not popular back in the day. So nobody ate them. They didn't taste very good. Not even like in Mexico? No, they were not they were just not a popular fruit. They were these gr it was a green product. It was not very p uh popular. It didn't taste very good.

And it had oil it wasn't even branded very well. So some people called it avocados. Some people called them alligator pears. Some people call them like in Mexico they call them the Like I don't know how you pronounce the word, but it was the like the Spanish word, like the native word for testicle. Like they're just like, Yeah, you wanna go eat a testicle and so nobody really liked this this fruit.

So Enter Rudolph Haas. Rudolph Haas basically is a mailman from Milwaukee. He's now living in California and he decides he wants to Plant an avocado tree. So he goes and he buys some seeds and he tries to plant it, but like you have to, I guess, do some grafting process or whatever to get thing to like take.

And it didn't work. And so he's like, uh, didn't work, whatever. He thinks about just cutting it down, but he just doesn't get around to it or whatever. So he just lets the tree grow. And he lets it grow for like a year or two and then his kids like notice that there's fruit on it. They pluck they pluck it. They open it up and

The kids really like it. This is how the story goes. Kids really like it. He's like, Oh, why are you eating that? That's uh uh that's not good. And they're like, No, it's great. He tries it, he's like, Oh, this is actually really good. It's way creamier. It's got like kind of a nutty taste. And there was way more space between the seed And the peel. So it was like softer, creamier, and there was just more of the actual like filling.

And he's like, Well, these are actually really good. And so he starts eating it's the you know, word starts to spread. He goes and he partners with a local nursery and he's like, Hey, can you help me grow more of this tree? Um, because this tree is like bearing this amazing fruit. And so the nursery's like, Cool, yeah, we'll we'll do more of this tree and we'll give you, you know, some royalty off this thing.

And then Now Hass avocados are like eighty percent of worldwide avocado sales. These trees are planted all around the world, Mexico and China and everywhere. Like this is the dominant fruit. And it's not even that old. So he patent it in nineteen thirty five. So we're talking l avocados as we know it today are less than a hundred years old.

So now here's a couple of interesting things I found from this. So number one. A lot of fruits are like this, where they actually start kind of shitty. They don't taste very good. And then through a process of artificial selection, so like not natural selection, artificial selection, you find The good tasting fruit, and then it becomes the dominant species because that's the one everybody wants to eat. I just didn't really think about that too much. Yeah, like um Like a banana, like an old uh banana from a hundred plus years ago tasted like a carrot. They weren't as sweet. And that's happened. That's happened with a lot of our fruit. It's gotten sweeter and sweeter and sweeter. So they're like the honeycris ass apple.

Uh, there's like a cotton candy apple right now. And a lot of like health advocates are like Dude, you shouldn't even eat modern fruit'cause it's like it's not ex exactly how it used to be and and the health benefits are are aren't. It does have the same properties in it'cause it's a different thing. Right. Uh optimized for taste. So um a couple a couple of more interesting facts. Number one, this guy, even though he said he got like a fruit patent, which I was like, what the hell's a fruit patent? Um He didn't make much money off this thing. I don't think he really had the patent. I don't think he really benefited from it. His son, Charles

Came out and told the LA Times that Even though he he goes, my dad created the greatest avocado in the world. And his total royalties lifetime are forty eight hundred dollars. Less than five thousand dollars he made off off of uh Uh Discovering this.

And I I say discovering because he didn't invent this. He didn't mean to do it. Um, he didn't like man yeah, you know, like manually try to create this. He discovered it and even he says this, he goes, It was an act of God. That I discovered this th this fruit. And so um

I found that interesting. The third thing I found interesting is the marketing behind this. So Even though this thing tasted good, it didn't take off right away. And one of the reasons why is that Avocado doesn't look Like most fruits. So most fruits are colorful. They look very appetizing. Like the reason they called it the alligator pear was because like

The skin was Basically like all wrinkly and like tough and like like the way an avocado that we all know looks. And so nobody wanted to eat it. They were like, This thing looks bad. And so nobody would even try it. And so

The like Fruit Association of California comes together and does probably what the greatest Like greatest act of any committee ever. They were like, look. Couple things. Number one. We can't keep calling the shit testicles and alligator pears like

We got to come up with one name that we like. All right, we're going with avocado. Everybody needs to call this the same thing so that this can spread in popularity. The next thing that they that they did that was very, very smart. They were like Cool, uh why aren't people buying these? They're like, Well, because they look like they've gone bad, right? They're dark It's like black, basically. It looks like fruit that's gone bad. So like all right, new new marketing campaign?

We're gonna put stickers on every one of these that says ripe tonight. Basically that this is the r this is perfectly ripe. It's ready to eat tonight. And this is already true. It's just that consumers don't understand this. And so they put stickers on on every avocado. And suddenly avocado stakes uh sales started to boom. 'Cause once you try it, you like it, but people weren't trying it because they didn't they thought it had gone bad instead saying

This is ripe, ready to eat tonight. That was the second thing that they did. Um The third thing was that they were like They needed to educate people that a green avocado was actually a bad avocado, and that this was a good avocado, and so they

did all this marketing to make it work, which you never really think about with fruit. Like you don't think about fruit marketing, but Everything around us. Is the product. Of some ad guy trying to boost sales. And like once you realize that, you can learn two things. You can learn a lot about marketing. And you can learn.

A lot about Um, you know, w the products that you see are not as they appear. You become a little more skeptical, a little more jaded towards all products when you realize that even avocados. were basically like, you know, they were just someone's Some drop ship or somewhere had a great idea. Dude, we

First of all, this is awesome. This is very interesting. We should do an entire episode. On fruit. And marketing. It's actually really interesting. Uh Planet Money have a had a podcast on the Honey Crisp Apple.

You know, it's the most popular before uh a lot of apples like that existed, it was red delicious. Uh it it's like kind of fascinating. Uh I met a guy who had done a venture back startup. It was like raised a bunch of money, was trying to grow Business blows up. And we check in with it and we're like, Yo, like What are you thinking for what's next? And I think he's gonna say some AI crap, some like

crazy, you know, whatever, some some big idea. And he's like, I'm I'm trying to invent a new fruit. And I was like, what? And he's like Yeah.

He's like, You ever had a uh mango? Oh yeah, he goes You think you've had a mango. Wait till you try my mango. Like I'd love to try your banco. Send it to me. Send it to me. And basically he was he was cut like he was basically like the shape of the fruit really matters. So for example, like the ease of eating.

So he had these like Uh His mangoes were in like circular spheres, basically. It's like little balls. And His little mango balls were ready to eat.

They were super juicy. The texture was perfect and I was like wow, this is genuinely an amazing mango experience. Thank you for this. What's it called? Well, he kind of pivot off the idea'cause he's like the logistics of it are so hard. He's like to get fresh He's like it tastes really great when it's fresh. He's like, but just the logistics to get this like

to customers is so hard. I would have to go about this in this way, this way, this way. So he pivoted off that idea in the end. But And then you have to I feel very fortunate that I got to try that mango. And the crazy part is, and this is like actually kind of like an interesting mote is that it takes ten or fifteen years to do because imagine if you're building a website and you could only make a change once a year to that website and see the results and be like, ah shit, that didn't work.

Next year, let's see. Because you have to you know, you gotta wait for it all to grow. It takes a long time. Um And so

We should do it. Yeah. You know, I guess th there's r some rules around the patents. So the rules that I read were basically like You if you want to do a fruit plat patent, you can't um You basically it like it has to reproduce asexually. It has to be created by breeding or grafting. It cannot be discovered.

If it's already in the wild that can't be patented, like there's a bunch of rules like that. So like, you know, the first fruit plat for the first Plant patent. was this guy Henry who planted the the climbing Ever blooming rose and like He created that rose.

And he patented that plant and then he gets to benefit from that. So I think when we do our fruit and plant episode I think we gotta go find like the greatest. for prurs to ever live. Uh yeah, we I I just looked him up on Twitter. I have had some interactions with him. You know what's funny about Twitter is These there's so many people like I remember I was talking to this woman named Shelby Church.

And they're like YouTube celebrities. They'll have five or ten million subscribers on YouTube. And you go to Twitter and they've got Ten thousand followers. And on Twitter, they're just trying to learn like the rest of us to get business ins uh insight and things like that. This guy is not that popular on Twitter, but he's got ten million across all of his other socials. We could just DM him and get him on here. That's kinda cool.

Yeah, let's do it. Um So I made a video. of Camp MFM that I wanna I wanna show. So originally, by the way, this is my debut of bl of vlogging. And you'll notice that the video's not a vlog. Why?

Because your boy sucks at vlogging. It's hard. It's really hard. I learned that the hard way. He'd be like Alright, so I'll just get a shot of you. Um walking into the house and I'm like I just walk into the house. He's like No, you can't just walk in. What do you mean? It's like you gotta say something and then you gotta walk in kind of an interesting way.

I was like that I don't walk interesting or say that I just walk into places there's no one here to talk to. What am I supposed to say? Anyways, didn't work out so well, but we have a cool video. So two things. Number one. No one.

If you're just listening to the audio version, you gotta go to YouTube to see it. We're not even gonna put that in the audio version because it's not gonna make sense. So go to go to the YouTube video if you want to actually see the video. Sam, I have three questions for you. What do they search? What do they search? Oh, they search my first million. Or you can just search the greatest podcast of all time. Either one should show up if Google's doing their job, right? And you search My First Million, click on this episode and you'll see the video. Um here. So

Sam, I have three questions for you. Number one. How much FOMO are you feeling right now, knowing that you skipped This year's Camp M FM. In fact, we may need to not even name it Camp M, just name it Camp Sean because you didn't show up. Skip it. I could I had a newborn child. I was committed To being with her.

Uh for a certain period of time. I I didn't just skip it. I couldn't go. There was a hilarious moment when we were there. P uh everyone was like, Dude, where's Sam? And I was like, Oh, he can't come. He uh He just had a baby. And then Everyone's like, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And then nodding and then one guy goes

Wasn't that two and a half months ago? And then we were all like, Yeah, what the hell? You can totally go for two days and it's two and a half months in. And so then we all laughed at you and then moved on. Th it was two and a half months ago, but I committed to three months. I committed to three months. I had to stick with it. So that's point one. What's point two? Point two.

What do you think of my not vlog video there? What could we have done better? So I was I I wrote this down. To let you know, I don't think you could have any of that music on there. You know, I think it's gotta get taken down.

No, I think it's gonna be fine. Connor Price's that's Connor Price's song. He was gonna pretend the camp is fine. The the first song was Dropkick Murphy's. The first song is fine and it's gonna be absolutely fine. Nothing's gonna get taken down. This isn't like a like Oh, I just gotta ask for mission type of thing. Like it literally won't like like the algorithm's gonna like prevent this from going live. So I think you have to change that song, but it's great. I thought it was great. Okay, Narc. Um okay. Third question. Third question for you. Have you noticed this trend? Uh right. Part of this is me just showing you a a a vacation

Photo album, basically. But the other part is noticing that Um I think we started a movement, dude. I think I just fucked around and started a movement. So I didn't mean to do this. Did you just invent vlogging?

No, not vlogging. This m the movement is of these kind of like Man camp. active conferences. I don't know. I don't have a good name for it. I'm thinking it's something like a man business camp type of thing. So I did this.

Camp M F M thing. Then I started noticing other people who heard the podcast were like, Oh, you know what would be cool? Like shown them did it for basketball, let's do it for something else. And so I s I have a few of these that are now started. So um A boy Danny Miranda has like a running club type of thing. Yeah, dude. I see them out there all the time. There's like fifty of them. Looks like a blast. Um Pat Walls from Starter Story.

Uh was like, Hey, what if we did this for tennis, pickleball, whatever? And they called it the MR open. Like the monthly revenue over. Great name. And that's a great name. Better than our name. Shit. This guy, uh, this guy in Hampton messaged me and he goes, Hey, heard about Camp of F M so awesome. Had the same idea. This guy Victor, who's like, I'm gonna do this for poker. And so he did a poker getaway weekend, uh, rented a house, invited a bunch of people, and they just played poker all weekend.

I think this is the new new wave of uh of getting you can either just get together for drinks But guess what? The cool kids don't drink anymore. Everyone's sober as a sound. Dude, isn't it insane? Did you did you see uh Whole Foods announced their most popular beer. that they sell. Do you know what it is? It's Athletic Brewing Company. A non alcoholic beer. Yes. A non alcoholic beer is the top selling beer right now in Whole Foods. Is that insane?

No one drinks. Yeah, no one drinks. So nobody drinks anymore. So w what are we gonna do? Get together and just uh you know suck our thumbs? This is not gonna work. So next thing Nobody uh wants to just sit at a conference or a you know, like a lecture hall and just sit there and listen to speakers. Kinda boring. You want to weave it in with these things. So I think this kind of active conference thing.

is cool. I think more people should make these. Um, you can invite me. I would love to know about them and then politely politely pass just'cause I don't like to leave the house that much. But I think more people should do these and I'm hoping That um I'm just hoping that I get credit for starting this movement. And I know people are gonna go out and say, No, no, this has been going on forever.

What That was the past. But I'm the present future and I just needed to tell you that. I think it's awesome. I uh I wanna go to the next one and I'm gonna make it a point to go there and make a big deal out of it because I do have FOMO. Uh after seeing that video. Good job. Not care if you're given birth next year when it's happening. You better be there.

It uh Dude, vlogging sucks, by the way. Did Mr. Beast made fun of you in that video, or he made fun of he goes always with the camera. Was he giving you guys a hard time for having a camera there? Yeah,'cause I showed in uh you know with a camera following me, basically. And uh the funny part is almost with the camera. That's the first time I've ever done a vlog, as evidenced by the fact that I at the end I was like, that's vlog kinda sucks. Let's just make a video out of it. Um But it was really fun actually having a guy there. This our buddy Max came and uh he did a great job. It's really embarrassing. I see a lot of people like vlogging and walking around and they have a guy ca uh following them on camera. It's it's quite embarrassing. It draws a lot of attention to you. I find it to be very Very humiliating The Upside, you might get famous. The downside, you're immediately humiliated. Um all right, let me tell you about something.

Yeah. I'm gonna talk a little bit about the best business in the world. Now this business Chamath. Who I think is coming on the pot actually, has said it's the singular best business model

and monopoly ever created. This is easy for you to guess, right? Ritzcrackers. No. It's gotta be Google. Google. Yeah.

And so I wanted to talk to you a little bit about Google and search engine stuff because I've been interested in this for years. I've been interested in Duck Duck Go, which I called that shot I think I missed the t I thought it was gonna grow a lot faster than it. than it uh actually has, but it's like slowly coming about.

This is by the way, this is gonna be the episode where we take credit for things that we had absolutely no part in and actually didn't call our shot. And in fact Kinda doubted it. Yeah. Hey, do you like making right hand turns on a red light?

I admit to that. I was doing that when I was sixteen. I created it. I created that. Uh And so the reason let me tell you why I've been interested in it. Type four athletic fitting. Dress pants. Hey, the auto complete didn't even had no idea what I was doing there. That is not a common search. Thick boy pants. Yeah. I was searching for this the other day.

And I had to scroll down. So far. to get to a website. Because if you look through like the first it's it's like Tons and tons of images. Is that what you see? So I see tons of images. So I see a whole shopping carousel.

Then I see uh a couple of ads and then I scroll down, I see Amazon. Okay, yeah. Go ahead. So you gotta scroll down a ton to get to a website. It it's actually quite annoying. And so Google's been pissing me off. And we you just talked about how they uh ha like have gone through some stuff and you still believe in the company.

I'm slowly to lose I'm slowly starting to lose face faith in their company because the search has been really shit. And it's starting to piss me off. And so I've been looking for all their all other alternatives. Did you Google for them? Did you just Google search for alternatives? Yeah. I mean I it's like it's it's like even though I hate it, I use it, you know? Like it's like an a an abusive lover. But I was doing some research on when they first started. So Google started in the late nineties. And when they did Sergey and Larry, the founders, they created this paper called The Anatomy of Large Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.

Riveting, riveting stuff. Please take our my power writing course, Larry P That title is awful. And In that Paper. They talk about like what they think is possible with a search engine and and and they kind of start it from an academic point of view, which is pretty cool though to see like their their predictions. And there's this one line it says in general It can be argued from the cons consumer point of view, the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want.

And then he goes, he says, the goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. So like thirty years later They just went back and edited it and they're like Nah. Yeah. The the subtext on their like the subheadline is just Psych.

Like they just like change. And then and then I said for this reason, uh, as well as about for this reason, we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers. and won't be aligned with the consumer's needs. And they actually go on to say that they think a subscription service uh search engine is actually the answer.

Of course. That is the opposite of what they've eventually uh have become. You know, Google is a One point five. trillion dollar company, a market cap company, and ninety five percent of the revenues come from search. And it's the greatest business model of all time. I would I don't know how many people work at Google exactly, I think Oh, I think over a hundred thousand. But I would I would imagine that you could basically fire everyone but like a thousand people.

And the company would just thrive. It would be the most profitable company in the world. And The crappy part. About Google. Well, I guess it's good for them, bad for us.

is that their moat is quite simple, which is the more people who use the search engine, the better it understands like which results to give you. And so it's just gonna get better or supposedly better and better and better, but harder for a new person to create a uh an alternative. Now, ultimately, I think actually open AI is gonna be An alternative.

Uh Gardner had this report. Where they said by two thousand twenty six they think twenty five percent. Uh, Google search is gonna be reduced by twenty five percent because of uh AI. But

I found a new alternative that just launched uh publicly a few days ago or about a month ago. They've been around quietly, but they like kinda made they had like a big like launch uh coming out party the other day. It's kinda cool. So it's called Actually don't know how to pronounce it. It's

Caddy. Yeah. Sorry. I mean, how do you say this word? K A G I. Yeah. I think. Kaji? Keiji? Yeah, I don't know.

But It's got an interesting premise. So it was started by this guy named Vladimir. And the premise is is that there are zero ads. And it's five to ten dollars a month. For a subscription.

And I think that that's like an interesting premise, but I don't think that that would work that well. However This guy's story is pretty interesting. So he started bootstrapping this business in two thousand eighteen, slowly started making progress. And at this point he's got about thirty thousand people who pay for it.

And if you go to Cad G.com K A G I dot com slash stats. He reveals all of his stats. And so you could see the number of paid members. You can see how many searches are happening per day. You all this stuff is pretty transparent. And I love when people do that stuff. It's so fascinating to see. And the reason he had this like big like launched recently.

is because they just raised eight hundred I think it was eight hundred thousand dollars. And Very stupidly, they it looks like they're spending that eight hundred thousand dollars to buy twenty thousand T shirts to send to their thirty thousand members. So so Vlad, uh Vlad has some questionable judgment when it comes to uh finance. Yeah. Yeah. So they blog like all about the business. So if you go to their uh blog dot

Blog.cadge dot com. They blog about like everything that's going on in the company. And so they're actually pretty transparent. And in the thing, he was like, Yeah, and we're out uh we're gonna be sending out twenty thousand T shirts. And I was like doing the math and I was like, Oh, that's That's like eight hundred grand. Like so So that's questionable. But they had he has like his whole manifesto online. And it's pretty fascinating. And and this to this is the type of entrepreneur who I really like because he's got this blog

Uh his personal webs website. He says, I'm dedicating the work By the way, be honest. When he found out the founder's name was Vladimir. Already you were pretty biased to light this thing, right? Yeah. I'm in. You can add an extra million to that valuation if your name is Vladimir. I'm in a general rule and I have no arguments with that. Yeah, he's he's he's born in Yugoslavia and he like had all these like little like indie hacker projects for a long time. Worked at GoDaddy, so he's got he's a very technical guy. He seems very savvy, he's a VP of product at GoDaddy.

Uh, he had another company called Manage WP, which was a web application that helps users manage uh WordPress sites. And that got to a couple million revenue. So he has some experience. But he has this blog where he goes, I'm dedicating this work on CadGee to my three children children. While I try to make the web a more humane and and friendlier place for them. And I re started reading that and I'm like Okay.

I'm really fascinated by this guy. I'm very interested. And so He on his blog, they talk all about the company and like how it's working and things like that. And he's got all these like great lines about how he's like pay for search engine is unusual, but that's the only choice if you want to build an independent search engine that isn't ad supported.

You could do donations, but I don't think it's gonna work. Five billion people use a search engine. Ninety nine percent of people are never gonna pay. The thing is the tiny minority of people who think differently, the one percent that will pay, it's still quite a large number. That's fifty million people. And he talks about twenty years of ad supported search have created resistance to the idea of paid search, but a lot of people are already coming to the realization that the predicament that they found themselves in with ad supported search is not good for them. And

My point Through all this is I think I agree with this guy. The issue is that I don't think

I don't think he's gonna win. I think I agree with all of his stuff about subscriptions, and I'm on board with that. And uh open AI is really good for that. Uh But I'm very fascinated with guys that are going after Google at the moment. There's been a few. There was U dot com. Which I don't think is that intriguing.

Uh There is Niva.com, so N E V A. That was one. And there's a few others. And this is a type of idea that if you told me that you're gonna launch this. Most people as well as mine.

Got reaction is like There's not a chance you're ever gonna be Google. But When you start thinking about it, I think it's really interesting. And I wanna know what's your opinion uh of these people trying to build these search engines and do you actually think that any of them will work other than open AI?

Well I think I agree with you on pretty much all fronts, which is that Uh Google's search over time has become more and more Just you s you search for something and you get an ad. And they add the result the top Half of the page is ads.

And that's what that's what you get. Google, I think, uh in Kaji's website it says that Google if you just Take the revenue, divide it by the number of users on average. I believe that they make

Like Three hundred bucks a year. Off of Each customer I think it's like two hundred seventy seven. So that's twenty three bucks a month. And that's like what you're worth to Google. So what this guy's doing is basically saying, Hey, instead of Google making twenty three bucks a month off you,

You pay us ten bucks a month and we'll have no ads. And I think that I agree with you, which is that the big threat to Google is obviously The AI.

driven uh engines. And Google's trying to become that themselves. So you know, whether it's chat GPT or it's Google or it's Bing or it's Some new one that we haven't heard of, perplexity or whatever else. That is the big thing, which is it's a better experience. And so they're trying to win with better experience.

Then you have Duck Duck Go, which is basically like we are the anti Google. Right, we're gonna and Kaji's f in that same bucket. We're the anti anti whatever. I would say Duck Du Ghost is the Surprising success. the amount of traffic they had. We we did a whole thing on them, you know, in a few episodes ago, which was looking at the traffic numbers and how stunning they were.

What I think is cool about Kaji is that It doesn't need to beat Google. This is just like I'm gonna build this bus I'm a cockroach. I'm gonna build this business and you can't kill me because I'm gonna be supported by my customers. Right now it sounds like He's probably making like what? two to three million bucks a year in revenue? Uh I think it's closer to one to one point five. Uh so it's making it well say one point five million in revenue

And he's probably able to run the thing. Break even profitably at that rate. And um you know he'll just keep crawling. But you know, next year he'll be at forty thousand members and then next year he'll be at sixty thousand members or whatever. He'll just keep growing. And he's not even worth it's not worth killing if you're Google it's It's too small to matter.

Um, and he doesn't have to become huge. I think what he's saying is like my mission is For people that, you know, believe in this. The the point he says the one percent who would pay. I don't think it's one percent. I think it's like Point one percent that would pay. Um

Here's your option. And now the question is, how good is this? Like, for example, you're into this. Did you sign up? Hey, are you using this now instead of Google? It's so hard to use something instead instead of Google because they're the default everywhere. Yeah, and basically my frustration with Google is Borderline.

to the point where I'm like, all right, I'm out. Fine. The thing is is that I'm like so. Six or seven more times, Google, and I am out of here. I've logged in with everything. Like on Chrome. You know what I mean? I'm like, shit. I gotta type in all these passwords. This sucks. But I mean I definitely you know, chat GPT has definitely taken away at least thirty percent of my like Google time, which is

A pretty insane number, actually. And I uh we're gonna have to do an entire episode on Sergey Byrne and Larry Page. These guys are crazy fascinating. And I was reading a little bit about them when I was like researching how Google started and They were Like huge shitheads. And Like Sergey Breath.

Dude, they were shitheads. You're gonna have to explain that one to me. So Sergey Brent, he's got this uh he had his resume online and in the code. He he put uh if you expect the source code of his website, you'll find Brins Hidden objective laid out bare. Which is and this is in quotes, this is exactly what he had in the code.

I want a large office, good pay, very little work. Frequent expense account trips to exotic lands would be a huge plus. Is that real? That's insane. That's on. You can go to the website right now and find it. Uh You would never expect somebody who's like innermost goal is a big office, no work.

Expense accounts to Create. Fucking Google. Yeah, it's like that's it's funny. It's funny. And then there's stories of Larry Page

Um Where he He was just kind of like They they had this like combination of just like being really blunt and where Uh blunt and just like not

totally understanding normal human emotions. And so Larry and Sergey They took pride in the fact that they would argue with each other and they would call each other stupid. It'd be like your idea's so stupid. That's dumb. Why are you and they would like fight and fight and fight and then one person would win and then the other person would like concede and be like, Oh, your idea is better. And they would bond over that. And then they're like

to all the other employees because they're like, that's what you all need to do. Unfortunately when you're at like fifty or a hundred or three hundred people. Most people aren't like that. And there's these crazy stories of like Uh, apparently, uh do you know how like a janitor, when they take out the trash oftentimes and they replace the bag, they'll actually leave an empty bag at the bottom of the trash in case someone else wants to take it out and they're like, Well, there's a bag already there for you. Larry saw this and he was like, That's the most efficient way I've ever seen anyone clean. That is brilliant. And he made this whole like memo about how the janitor does that and how brilliant that is. And he's like, Why can't you guys be like this? In fact,

Everyone in the office needs to be like this. Here's the new rules. And he laid out these like eight rules and it was like Uh. If you think that your idea is right, go straight to the person who's in charge and tell them exactly what you think and don't hold back. Or it would be like if you are working on a project and you are not providing value, leave that project right away and go and let the doers do what they need to do and just get them coffee and like just like serve them. And like he would do all these things that are very logical and like you disagree some more.

Yeah. Like he would say these like crazy things that you hear them and like, Yeah, I mean that's more productive. Unfortunately, like this whole thing called human emotion kind of gets in the way. And so it's probably not practical when you have five hundred employees. But there's all these stories about how these guys would behave and it's very fascinating. And they were They were shitheads when they first started. I think Google right now is going through this uh period where their CO kinda s I think it kinda sucks, to be honest.

Uh and so I think they're gonna like come back. But right now I'm not bullish on Google. I think they're gonna be around for a whole uh a real long time'cause they're so big. But I'm eager to see something come and kinda crush them. Yeah, yeah. Well I think the the funny thing about all like crush them type of ideas is that

When a company is really successful, it's like a giant castle with a huge moat. And everybody who tries to like siege the castle, it's like the Kajis of the world. They're basically trying to cross that moat and take over the castle. And it's too hard. The castle's too big. Too strong. The boat's too big, et cetera. And what ends up happening is that

You The thing that beats that castle is not somebody who comes and takes their land. It's somebody who just walks over like two miles and is like, Hey, this is actually like This is fertile land over here that everybody's ignoring. And they build a new castle over there and actually the thing that diminishes the castle is that that

original castle is just no longer as relevant. Like the world and the attention has moved. The new plants that everybody wants that grow on this other land over here. And nobody took your thing. But

uh, you know, you became less relevant in the world. No one wants that thing anymore. Like Microsoft didn't defeat IBM or whatever by making, you know Like beating them at their own game, they were like, Oh, actually the game is software. It's operating systems. And then the things that beat the off the Microsoft monopoly, and like Microsoft, the biggest tech company in the world.

Got then beat by the the Google's and the Amazons and the Facebooks of the world, which were like, Hey, okay, cool, you can keep the operating system. We'll take the internet. And Microsoft missed the internet. The internet was the place. And then when the internet was the place, then it was like The companies that made it on mobile were the ones that were like, Oh, cool, yeah, you can have that desktop app.

We're gonna make you know Uber and we're gonna we're gonna create these new mobile companies, you know, Instagram, WhatsApps. And they outpaced The growth of Facebook. And so now the question now the thing is Well AI is here.

And crypto is here and these are the the new lands and then the big projects that are getting built here. they're just comp they're just competing for something in a different game altogether. And I think that's really That's really what ends up happening more so than somebody overtakes, you know, a company like Google. It's that Google becomes less relevant. You don't need search. Why do you not need search?

Well,'cause the AI just does it. Why would I go why would I go search for links? That doesn't even make sense anymore. I don't need that. I just you know I need the answer, or even better than the answer. Oh, I just need this little AI agent that's just gonna like look at what I'm doing and then like do do jobs for me. Right. Like I don't even have to just go search for an answer. It knows the answer and then it does the task. Right. That's where this is going. And so

Whoever does that is gonna actually be the one that Is the next Google, without even creating a new search engine. Right. And that's Nine out of ten times it seems that's how like big innovative things come about, where it's like

You know, all these people are trying to make the world's fastest car and they're trying to make a A V six, turn it into a V eight, and then we're gonna turn it into a V ten. We're gonna put more cylinders in, more horsepower, and then you're like, Oh, this electric car just like went way faster and it has zero cylinders. Uh You know what I mean? That that's exactly how it works. Did I tell you about the um My boss who his boss was Larry Page.

And what he told me he didn't tell me many stories, but he told me one, which was I came in once and I was like yeah Um, I was like presenting my goal. I was like, Yeah, our goal is to do, you know, nine point one This year uh well I don't remember what the metric was. Like nine point one million users or something like that. And he's like

You know what Larry Page used to say when I would uh present to goals, like I'm gonna do nine of something? He's like he would just say That's a wuss goal. If you could do nine, you could do ten. He's like never set a goal at nine. It's like and then I was like what?

He's like I just said what I said. If you can do nine, you can do ten. Sang nine is just a wussy way to go about things. And I was like, He told you that? He said, Yeah, he would tell everybody that. And so I stole that. I

I made the change and then now in my companies I do the same thing. If anybody ever comes to me like Yeah, we're gonna do four and a half. Negative five. Yeah, we're gonna do nine point two. No no, you're gonna do ten. Like if you can if you're gonna get nine point two, you can get to ten, trust me. It's like when uh five ten guys lie and they say they're five eleven. It's like dog, just say six one. Be the real thing. Act as if, my friend. Act as if.

That's the part. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to I put my law in it like my day's off On the road less travel never looking back

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