Our 2020 Predictions For OpenAI Came True… Here’s What’s Next

All right, this morning Sam texts me a great idea. He goes, Let's go back Through the archive. Let's find things that we predicted or opin strong opinions that we had at the time. And let's bring'em back up. Let's see, did we get'em right? Did we get them wrong? What did we get right? What did we get wrong and what can we learn from it? And so we're gonna go back. Nobody does this, by the way. Everyone loves to make predictions and have opinions.

And nobody ever goes back unless they were right. Well We're gonna show you where we were wrong on a bunch of these. We did seven or eight of these that um we had a strong opinion a couple years ago and now they've played out and we can review how we did. And at the end We make two new predictions. So two new things that

Things that have our spidey sense tickling, things that feel like they could be big opportunities. That we're gonna plant our flag and say, look, I think this is the n this is one of the new ones. We'll see in two years if we're right or wrong. That's at the end of the episode. All right, enjoy. 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 song on the road, let's try to have a look at it. We're live, what are you drinking?

Uh, this is my secret sauce right now. I'm not telling people about this yet. Water. Nope. You can see from the color it's a little different. I'm just doing some experiments. You know, I thought uh

You know, we had this guy we had Derek from More Plates More Dates On. And he was talking about pre-workout, right? He created Gorilla Mind that supplement. And then we talked about bucked up. And they are a pre workout supplement. And basically it's like people take a scoop of something before they go to their workout so that they get a way better pump. And just really like sort of dilates the you know vasal dilation and it gets them to have a better workout.

I want that for work. I want pre workout for work and so I am uh Experimenting with some things that will How do I have like a boost of Boost of focus, a boost of productivity.

Yeah, uh caffeine. I think it's called, but that's okay. No. No, not caffeine. Caffeine is for for mere mortals. By the way, today's episode's gonna be exciting. So we're gonna actually gonna go over Some of the predictions that we've made, both right and wrong. Since the pod started.

A lot of these predictions are to come from the two thousand twenty era. We're gonna look back when we're gonna call it what did you say? The I told you episode. I told you so. I told you so. But it is also gonna be I told ya, we Are stupid if we get things wrong as well. I told you so, and sorry I told you that because I might have been wrong. But I definitely told ya. I definitely told you. I just want you to take your right hand. I want you to put your right hand in the air real quick.

And I want you to reach back. And let's give ourselves a little pat on the back here. Why? Not because our predictions are so great, but because we're actually revisit revisiting predictions, because predictions are one of these things. That people love to do. They love to s people love to spout random opinions about stuff. And then they just go they just it just all gets washed away in the noise of social media.

Rarely do people ever go back and when they do go back, it's only for one reason. When they were right. Nobody ever goes back and says, You know what? Nobody asked, but hey, I just want to tell you I think I was wrong about th about that one. Or I was at least half wrong about that one. And uh

That's not the code we live by. Not here, not us. And so we're going back. Nobody asked us to do this. We're going back and we're Revisiting some of the shit we said. And we're trying to figure out

Were we right? Were we wrong? Or something in between. And uh we have a s uh a handful of these that we're gonna go back. And these are, like you said, two, three years ago. So they've had time to bake. And uh we'll see how they're gonna be able to do it. Not much time, but a little bit of time. And the thing about predictions is I was uh you know, there's a lot of crazy stuff going on in the world right now.

And I was curious, I was like You know, you and I have been having this discussion a little bit off the pot about like Where do you invest your money if you think the world's gonna end? Like part thought exercise, part like Things are crazy. And I was looking at like a lot of really smart people, smart money people, Bill Ackman, Ray Dalio. You cited Ray Dalio. Well, Ray said this.

My reply to you was Yeah, but he's been wrong about X, Y, and Z. And I had to go and dive deep about where they are wrong, because if you just read the W Wikipedia page, you see. When they are right. Like Bill Ackman was right about all these things, but like, oh, but he actually lost a ton of money on this thing. Predictions are challenging, uh, because But the people who get right

G get them right a bunch of times are also wrong a ton of times. So it's really challenging to know who to listen to. It's like a batting average, right? Like you can bat if you bat three hundred You know, like I don't follow anymore, but I think you're like an all-star. And that means, you know, you're missing two out of three, right? You are you're you're not hitting on two out of three. Predictions are way, way, way worse than that, right? Like if you're predicting Correctly. on five to ten percent of your predictions, but you're right in a big way.

Meaning You're non consensus. So you're Bet you're right about something that A lot of other people are wrong about Then you make it big, which is

One of my one of my Favorite quotes. Uh I said this on the Chris Williams pod. Pessimists get to be right. And optimists get to be rich. And so one thing we'll see when we go through these, I think, is that

The times where we said, Ah, it's not gonna work. Those are the ones where we have a higher hit rate. Right? Because pessimists naturally get to be right more often. However The money is made when you're an optimist about something that other people are pessimistic about.

Or as my father once told me, hey, even a blind squirrel will find a nut once in a while. So I love Speaking of nuts and seeds, let me tell you about this first one. So a few years ago I was interested in freezing sperm. The reason I was interested in freezing sperm is because. No, listen.

Men's men's sperm count is going down like a crazy amount. Remember Ben, our old producer Ben had this big thread on Twitter where he was like he documented sperm count and he like made some drastic prediction that like in fifty years, like very small percentage of men are actually gonna be able to uh procreate and this is actually a really big deal. And so I've been I've been research I've been interested in that topic for a minute. And so I tried fr freezing my sperm and I actually re re looked at the episode that we talked about it and The episode was

Sam's unboxing of his of his sperm kit. Yeah, because you had it. You like held it up. Dude, here's the story. I so like you have to like You know, you have to like get the sample. First of all, to do it at a hospital Which I also did. You have to Bring the specimen.

Thirty minutes after capturing it. So like if you're not close to a hospital, I don't know what you do. You go in the room, you go in the parking lot. I don't know. It's like a really weird thing to collect and it's a very shameful thing to handle. Parking area. It's a very shameful thing. Like when you walk into the doctor and drop the bag. It's way more uh have you ever given P it's like that's Kinda shameful. Giving is is way worse. I'm always making excuses. I'm like, I just didn't have a lot of water today. Uh but they're like we don't even know. I'm like I captured the specimen though. Yeah. It's a very shameful thing to do. Um and I uh so anyway, I tried one of these at home services and I brought it to my office because you have to f You have to do it and then you have the refrigerator and then you have to mail it in. And I like packed it in a box within a box so no one even knew, but I didn't have I had to do it at at lunchtime. And people in my office were like, What's in that what's that in the refrigerator? What's this box? And I was like, Oh, it's it's just a it's just a thing.

It's a thing. But it says like it it says it's like a biohazard or something on there. And then eventually someone like was like Alright, what is this? And I'm like It's my sperm. And uh they got r my employees got really angry at me and they like told HR and I was like, I I I don't know what you want me to do, man. I just this this is what I had to do. So th so that's like a funny update. But I was using I tried two services. One was called Legacy, one was called Daddy, D A D I. At the time Legacy had raised uh one point five million dollars. And uh The update on them is they've since raised uh a round of three point five, around of fifteen million, a round of twenty five million. So what's that? That's uh

Forty five million dollars they've raised. So I presume things are going well with them. So the most recent round was in two thousand twenty two. Daddy, the company that I talked about at that point. That's it's kind of a weird name. I don't even like saying that. Uh they had only raised that out. Yeah. Yeah, it's weird, man. So that company has since been acquired. They're bought in 2022 for a hundred million dollars. So that is a a thing that we we nailed, I think. Uh and I think you almost had back to back episodes because you also were talking about

Uh TRT. Mm-hmm. D we said D to C T R T. We I think we were like Six uh six letters and we want to make a hundred million dollars. D to C T R T and

We were both like that's a great idea. And I thought you were gonna start that company because I was like, This is genuinely shit like crazy a fantastic idea. You researched it and I was like You're kinda shameless enough to go do that. But you didn't do it, but you did introduce me to the company that was doing it, I think. And we bested in it. And we both invested in it's doing fantastic at a company called Hone. And um they've gone I mean, they're gangbossers. Every one of their updates is fantastic. So Yeah, I think you were that was a that was a right prediction, I I would say. And those were both Off the beaten path. I don't think a whole lot of

entrepreneurs were were thinking about capturing the specimen, so to speak. And uh you were. And that it it paid off. I think I invested at a ten or fifteen million dollar valuation. I don't actually I haven't read their updates'cause it I think I got sent to my old email. If you're listening to this hone, uh update my email. But uh I imagine that business is worth nine figures. I would think. I think it's worth ten times what we invested in. Um anyway, th that's uh that that's an interesting one. TRT and um Uh

Sperm collection. Yeah. Th those are those are correct. Um, let's do one that was Maybe incorrect.

So we were bullish. Uh, I don't know if we are bullish, but we are very fascinated on BitCloud. Another thing that we are fascinated is, I remember the day you told me about what an NFT was. When you explained it to me, I thought it was awesome. You're like, I just bought this Kobe thing, this Kobe card, and I was like, All right, that's kinda cool. And then it gets things the world went a little bit crazy. Which is Like it was it was genuinely beautiful to look at.

Whereas like NFTs then became like I got this rock. I have the squiggle. And it was like uh okay, you know, like you're trying to make a buck only. There is no like art aspect to this. And I think you paid five hundred dollars. I think I pay we paid Seven hundred dollars or something like that. And then we flipped it for ten thousand, like

I don't know, thirty days later. It was actually credit to Ben. So Ben was the one who Got us talking to a bunch of NFT guys early on. And um No, the right move would have been to just go like

go crazy on it for a while or invest in the companies behind it. But I saw that this artist I really like Boss Logic was doing one. And the Kobe one looked great. I bought it. And then when I saw a seller for ten thousand, I was like I mean that doesn't look that great. Like I'll I'll sell it to this guy and I can still look at it whenever I want. So I was out of there.

The other thing we talked about was BitCloud. So Mar episode one hundred and sixty four, March twenty sixth, two thousand twenty one. I said I signed up to this thing called BitClout'cause my friend Ryan, Ryan Biggleman called me. And he said, This thing looks cool. Let's try it. Um and so we both you and I both signed up for it. It was all the rage for a minute. So Ryan was on that episode, so he he kinda was pitching it to called us before, told us to get on.

And then he pitched it to us on the episode. So what did he say? So Bitcloud, by the way, it's basically a social it was basically Twitter, but there was a crypto component where you could buy some you could buy into someone's uh Right. You don't just use Sam. You basically buy some of the SAM coin. And if Sam is gonna get more popular

Other people are gonna buy the same coin as well because that's how you kinda subscribe or follow the person. And so you could kind of We've all had this moment where you see somebody early on, you're like, Oh man, this person's awesome. They're gonna get big And BitCloud was organized such that you could do that. And it also had almost like because of that, it had a Patreon built in. It's like

Oh. I already have all these kind of paying shareholders. I could Just create content just for them. Only if you own X amount of my coin you get to access this content, which is what OnlyFans and then the Twitter blue subscribers and Patreon, they all do a version of this. So it was like baked in from the start versus

Usually those are third party services. And it was a service. It was one of the very few crypto things I actually thought was interesting. You said uh you said y I think you were saying it's interesting because Ryan goes I remember when Facebook came to my college and we were one of the first colleges. It was really fun. This is the first time I felt like that in a long time. That's why I wanted to come on the show. And then you Jump in and you were like

Yeah, two big differences though. One. You didn't have to have money on Facebook. You just you know, y you just could you go use it. Um And

You're putting money into this thing that we don't know the people behind this. We don't know who who how it's working, like It's a little nerve re nerve wracking and you don't even and there was no withdraw button at the time. And even withdraw money from it. You're like hey. Red flag, money can only go in and it can't come out. And then we were like, Nah, don't worry about all that, bro. Like Downer over here and

And I said Here's my part. I don't know is this a s is if I don't know if this is a scam. It kinda looks scammy to me. And then I had found out who's behind it. They were anonymous at the time, but I had found out who was behind it by asking around. I said, I do know the founders, they're legit people in the tech scene, and they do have a reputation in our circles. And they had. They had raised I don't know, hundreds of millions of dollars from

Andreessen Horowitz and others like And we had the founder on. Later we had the founder on. And then And I said, you know, and I what I liked about it, I was like, you know, today

Um If I sell on Amazon. I keep Seventy percent of of what I of the value I'm creating being a merch on Amazon. If I stream on On

On YouTube. I'm keeping You know, seventy percent of what I what I um Actually not seventy percent. More like it's like a sixty forty split of the of the ad revenue. Um Twitch, you know, roughly fifty percent.

Then you go down to like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and the users at the time Capture Zero. Like Those were multi multi multi multi-billion dollar companies that the users who created all of the content

And consumed all of the content. The users did all of the work to create the value of the network. We're getting nothing. And I said, Well it does seem like crypto's kinda cool'cause it can It could change that. It can basically reward the people who do the work, who create the content on the on these networks.

Um And the second thing is we loved the growth hack. So what they had done was They took all the popular Twitter people. And they just pre bought a bunch of their coins. So

When I joined I think there was like seventy five thousand dollars of value for me to just go claim. And I was like, hmm. Okay. Uh Push I'll push that button. Let's see what happens. And uh

And so they had used the money they raised To buy up popular people's coins and then to to claim your coins you had to be like sign up for your account and tweet out Hey, I'm verifying my bit clout. And that was kinda going viral for a bit. And that mechanic

Worked. Until It didn't work and big cloud failed. And we know several people personally Darmash. And a few others.

That invested millions of dollars publicly into Bit cloud. And that one and so you you know, smart people were doing it. It was an interesting idea. Ultimately that idea failed. And so

I would say, you know, we were excited I I was more excited about it than you for sure. Um you were like immediately I think We were pretty much out, correct? Well, I I I was out, but I liked the idea of it. The idea of it was actually fairly interesting. I liked the free money. Yeah. Well no, like Twitter ended up doing it where they just like gave you money. So I get paid I think

three thousand dollars a year. It's on track for three thousand dollars a year for tweeting and like getting impressions. I that's cool, but you didn't need the crypto component of it. No, but that's different. You got you get paid a share of ad revenue. Me for following you um early on Kind of

being one of your early ear early believers for retweeting your content for all that stuff. I couldn't I couldn't benefit from that, right? Yeah, but it's the same outcome for me as as the creator. I get like I feel a little bit more bought in. Well no,'cause like what was your last Twitter check? Fifty dollars. Uh Whatever three thousand divided by twelve is. Three hundred dollars maybe. Something like that. Th four hundred dollars maybe.

So let's say you pay four hundred dollars. Bit cloud early on when it had I don't know fifty thousand users or something like that. Yeah, you're seventy five thousand. My account was worth seven hundred fifty thousand dollars. Like uh you know I could've c I could have literally pushed the button and cash that out if I had cash out of a little bit of it. Someone bought A bunch from someone's like, Hey, I'll give you Ethereum for all this and I was like, yours. I sold it. So someone wire. The funny thing, do you know there's a new one that's basically the same model and it's crushing right now. Friends in tech or something?

Frontech, yeah. I'm not on it right now. Just'cause I have been busy with other stuff. But uh It's I mean, it's generated like two hundred fifty million in revenue as a like as a for the project itself. And I think it's distributed the equal amount to to Uh or people have generated that much on it as well.

So then it sounds like BitCloud w well, let's do an update on BitCloud, but it sounds like we are wrong about BitCloud. And that it BitCloud didn't work. The idea did work. In Friend Tech. Right. I think I would bet that in the long horizon

Let's call it twenty years. Um these networks will be built in with these networks will do this. They will have a currency for the users on the network. And so the users will The users who contribute to the network will own and control.

the the network. I do believe that that's gonna be true. Frontech, I think is like another kind of like attempt. I don't Think it's probably the one. Um, but I do think over the long haul somebody will do that. So where's BitClout now? Um they they changed this thing called DSO.

I think, right? The Yeah, they're doing a bunch of stuff. I don't I haven't kept up with it, but yeah, BitCloud, they were like, Oh, that was just one app on top of the diesel protocol. And then the diesel protocol had like many apps. The diamond app and this app, um I don't think any uh on uh the honest truth is I don't think any of it's gotten off the ground in a in a meaningful way. All right. Pick a winner. Or pick don't don't pick a winner, pick an interesting one. Okay. An interesting one. Okay. Clout kitchens.

So um Way back we did an episode. Let me find the I think we were talking about My cookie dealer and a bunch of other uh So I came over to your office to record one day, you couldn't make it for whatever reason, and you were like oh my buddy S Stu, who had been kinda listening to some episodes, Stu Iverson uh was there and he was like

I'll jump in. And he jumped in and he had a bunch of ideas. One of the ideas he had was he sa he goes Um You know how Travis Kalanik has left Uber and he's got this idea of cloud kitchen. So he's like, you know, I'm gonna

create these restaurants that are just built for Uber Eats, built for DoorDash. And there'll be delivery only. There's no physic, blah, blah, blah. Because Well, there's a better he's he I have another idea. Clout.

Kitchens. And I was like cloud kitchen, what do you mean? He goes like You know social media guys who have clout, you know, they have this like you know, they have a big influence. He's like, I think they're gonna open up their own restaurant, just like you know, there's Margaretaville and there's uh Gordon Ramsey has his restaurants or whatever. You're gonna see Celebrities.

create their own restaurant brands. Uh they're just gonna license their name and face to somebody. And then Fast forward like I don't know, a year, year and a half. Mr. Beesberger comes out. And

Mr. B's, one of the biggest social influencers, launches his own virtual restaurant chain, exactly as Stu had predicted. And At the beginning it looks great because The launch is insane. There's videos of people just like going and trying to to order this stuff.

And I think it did over a hundred million in sort of gross revenue, uh, you know, just sort of purchases of uh uh from from Beesberger. In year one. And you're one. And so it looked like at the time Damn, Stu called it. Great idea.

However Club kitchens thing has a couple of issues. One is uh Do Really hard to control quality. Why why?'Cause the way these work are There's just mom and pop restaurants and they send the packaging to them. They're like, hey

If an order comes in that's in your area You're gonna make a burger. Just make whatever burger you normally make. Uh just try to make a good burger, a good cheeseburger, but wrap it up in this speeseburger packaging and put it over here, the guy's gonna come pick it up. That's how cloud kitchens work. It just gives existing restaurants extra order flow.

But because of that you have Total like no control over quality. Because you have Yeah, four hundred operators, each making a different recipe, each with a different uh, you know, sort of quality control around this and

At some point Mr. Beast was like, You dude, this is actually bad for my brand. People are ordering It's like not not right, it's not good, whatever. I need to distance myself with this and now they're in a lawsuit with each other because they're like, Nope, you signed the you signed your rights to to us. We're gonna keep calling it this. And uh you're hurting our business by saying that. And so now he can't really talk about it. So it's not a fail that that's not a failure though. I mean but it's a failure for him. Poor execution, but it it could work.

You know, it just so happened he was the biggest, you know, at the time, or still is, and it got too big too fast. That doesn't mean it's a bad a bad concept. And I still think if someone's gonna do this, you could do this. You just need to like, um have a much more controlled skew. So somebody needs to do it with like just Like. I don't know. cookies or they need to do it with a um

Like they need to do like, you know, uh what's it called? The edible eats, edible arrangements or whatever. It's like uh here's a gift you can send somebody. It's like you know, you need some celebrity who's going to Just pr like create the version of edible arrangements on top of DoorDash or whatever. Just like this gifting Thing.

Uh that's like can be more consistent. So maybe you could just send the final thing to each location. I think Reed told us on the pod when they launched Bees Burger. He was like me and Jimmy were just like in a bedroom We threw it together in ninety days. Like he made it sound like

Pretty ragtag. Like it was just like Oh, let's just throw it out there and see what happens. I don't I don't know if that's the truth. That's the kind of the energy that was implied. And uh you know, so it just didn't work out for execution reasons, but it could still happen. Um, okay, here's one that we were uh okay, I'll give you two that I was right but pessimistic about. So um

Clubhouse. So I wrote a Twitter thread that was kinda like the thing that blew up my Twitter for a while. I wrote a Twitter thread that basically was telling people why Like Clubhouse was the hot name at the time. It was

It went from like nobody was on it. Two The cool kids are on it too. This is You know.

A two billion dollar company. All the course of like a year you know, less than a year, right? This thing was just like flying. And it was like, Oh, this is the next social network and All the big names were believers in this thing. I remember Uh I remember being like

I enjoyed being on it, but I was like, Oh, this is not gonna work for certain reasons. And then I Would hear really smart people you know, Mark Andreessen. invest in this thing. Andrew Chen, the you know, the social guy. Oh, he's investing in this thing. Then you hear Naval who's an investor in it and he's like, um

This will be bigger than Twitter. And then uh you know, Sahill from Gumroad, I remember listening to him on a clubhouse thing and he's like Um Clubhouse will be bigger than Twitter because everybody can speak Not everybody can write. And I was like That's not how this works. You can't just be like, uh my app, it's called Breathe and everybody breathes. So I'm gonna be the most valuable company. Like I was like, what is this logic? And I wrote this thread. I said hey, everything's closed could be the next big thing.

I think it's gonna fail. And here's how I think it goes down. I wrote this thread. The thread goes viral. Yeah, you had like celebrities reach out. Isn't that how you met uh uh Hustan Minaj and who else? Yeah, you had to uh There was a bunch of people that were like You know

I don't wanna I don't wanna like name drop, you know what I mean? But like yeah, there was it was crazy. It was people that I admired Yeah, it was like your heroes. I don't I mean like I like some of these podcasts, the sports podcast uh guys, people who were famous, you know, authors or or writers or whatever either followed or DM being like that's but that was so so good. So I was like, Wow, that was great. But I also got blocked by a bunch of VCs who were in V Mark Andreason blocks me. They're like, you know, th you know, they go from following to blocking like instantaneously. Why? Because I like, you know, I told them that maybe their investment wouldn't work out. And um

And I got some hate. Some people were like, Oh, why are you rooting a startup to fail? I didn't say I'm rooting. You said I don't want them to fail. I just have experience in this space and it doesn't I I don't think it's gonna turn out nicely. Yeah, but I think rightfully so people don't believe that, where it's like, look I wish you the best. They say that like when they're fighting like look, I wish you good luck. And it's like, No, you don't. But I think, you know, fast forward, I don't know when that was. I think that was twenty twenty one. So fast forward two years now.

And uh I feel like Not just was I right that Clubhouse failed. Step by step, because I was like, This is what they're gonna do. They're gonna realize that this doesn't like that they can't grow the thing this way. They're gonna then launch a recording feature because they're gonna say, ah. You're missing the live show, just record it.

We're gonna optimize towards people creating shows versus people just hanging out. And they're gonna try recording. And then no one's gonna watch the recordings. And then here's what they're gonna do. They're gonna be like we looked at the data and actually, yeah, people don't watch these recordings because the what makes a great live show isn't as good in it. Is it

And well edited recording. Um So then they're gonna be like, you know who really uses this? People who hang out and make friends on this. And we're gonna switch to a hangout product. And sure enough, they switched to a hangout product. And they did basically each of the steps except for the last one, which I predicted was like You know, they end up sort of fire selling it to Facebook for

Yeah. Whatever, seventy million dollars and then he becomes a product manager at Facebook. Like Yeah, that part hasn't hasn't happened yet. Um But pretty much step by step. So that one was a was a

Right. But pessimistic. And uh, you know, I guess one takeaway is Doesn't really matter to be right when it's pessimistic. There's nothing really that great comes of it. You kinda look like an asshole even if you're right. Yeah, exactly. I'm like and then I'm like, Oh great. Now I'm like, Yeah, I told you they would fail. It's like oh okay. Speaking of uh things that you say that you don't really mean.

Did I tell you about that time that a kid flew in from England? No. What. One time when the hustle was getting started, this kid called me from England. He goes, I love the hustle. And I was like, All right, let's talk. I started talking to him, which just bullshit. At the end, I go Yeah, if you're ever in S F, just let me know and and we'll help you out. And I meant it as like a way to end the conversation. And I learned at that moment you should never say that. I get a message three weeks later and he goes

Sam, it's the guy from England. Um So my flight lands my flight lands tomorrow And he just shows up and and we have HustleCon, like my big event, and we make him work the whole event. And we're like, Here, you could sleep on our couch. And we dress him up in a Texas outfit. He had never been to America before. We gave him cowboy boots and a hat that we had in office and we call him Texas Sam the whole weekend. And he stayed with us for like five days all because of the phone. I was like, Yeah, you know. So now I don't say those things anymore. If I don't mean it, I try to say it. That sounds like an amazing experience. That sounds awesome.

It was only No, it could have been it could have been bad. Um it could have been horrible. What was the other one? You had two. Was it Thracios? Thrassio, yeah. So Frazio was this company that was buying up all the uh buying it was a roll up An aggregator of Amazon Amazon brands. Amazon. One of the fastest growing startups ever. I think they went from zero to a a billion dollars in market cap or uh valuation in like twelve months. And tons of revenue and then tons of copycats because everyone's like, Oh, Thracio, one of the fastest growing startups in the world.

We're gonna repeat this. And um And we had friends who did it too. Some of our friends went and did the same thing where they bought a bunch of Amazon businesses. May they rest in peace. Uh, but it it didn't work, right? That's the the problem. So, you know, uh I remember calling Andrew Wilkinson. And I was like, Yeah, what do you think about the Strasio stuff? And I was like I was like, I kinda get it'cause you know, they're doing

Uh you know like Roll I think roll ups in general are just like a a really nice blueprint for a business. This roll up kind of makes sense. Andrew had done a semi roll up with uh Shopify apps. And so I was like

Do you see this as like You know, a really good opportunity. What do you think? And he goes, I think they're picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. And I never heard that before, but I guess that's a phrase. Uh like a like a Charlie Munger type phrase. If Andrew says anything interesting, it most likely came from Charlie Munger. That's a zero. Uh and Charlie is like has wonderful phrases. So most of the stuff, most of the wisdom he has is from Charlie Munger. And I go, What do you mean? And he's like, it's like picking up a penny's in front of a steamroller. Like, you know, you're gonna pick them up, you're picking up these little kind of like what seems like these little cheap free cheap assets.

You think it's all going well? Until you get completely run over. And if you fast forward till today, that's pretty much exactly what played out. These guys bought up a bunch of businesses, they rolled up what looked like a lot of revenue. And then they got run over. And at the time we did an episode And the things we had said were basically um

So I basically took Andrew's point of view and I was like That does. feel more right than the other way. And I said, Well what what could be the problems? And I was like Basically these FBA businesses are not very durable. So if you're gonna do a roll up, you kinda want durability to be one of the highest

characteristics. Like Normally in business we think growth is the best thing. But actually when you're buying businesses It's more about not being wrong than it is about everything going right.

And so you want durability when you're rolling these up. They bought trash. They bought like they would buy like Um Um, one of the thousand vendors on Amazon selling Chinese dog leashes for twenty five dollars. You know what I mean? Like they I think they bought trash. So like, you know, Amazon uh is not durable for many reasons. Number one

Uh, the r you know, like the your your spot in the rankings for these commodity products really matters and like It's a constant battle to keep to to get your ranking to stay high. Which includes things like People going and leaving fake reviews on your thing so that your account gets taken down. Like, oh, let me just Spam you with reviews so that Amazon detects you and then delists you, right? That's shit like that.

Or copycats or People who pay more or whatever. Then there's Amazon themselves launching basics. So for every good category, Amazon's like cool. Here's the Amazon basic. I don't what do you know? It's at the top, right? Like That was also happening.

Then there was the last thing that's sort of the death blow, which is Andrewette Tiny, they sort of believe uh what I think a few other Of these like hold co types believe, which is that Synergies are massively overrated.

That like It's very easy to talk yourself into. We're gonna buy these five companies. And then Synergy. And it's like, what's synergy? It's like, um we're gonna centralize the back office and we're going to uh cross promote with each other. It's like

No, actually none of these brands had enough brand love for you to cross promote anything. You didn't nobody trusted you. Um the synergies in the back office actually just turned into like a bunch of people not really watching what was going on in these individual businesses the way they were when it was just one person owning them. So what's the update on him? So Thrash was basically dead. Um, it's I don't know if I don't know exactly what the stage is, is it?

It's either fire sale, bankruptcy, but it's dead. And so are all of the aggregators. And so now there's like the opposite phenomenon. There's like a delading, and which is actually probably a better opportunity to go pick the best 10 assets from all these aggregators who Are completely underwater and they just have to, you know, basically get rid of all these assets. And so um, yeah, it n Thrasio and all the Thrasio copycats did not work out. Alright, I'll tell you one that we uh I wasn't exactly right in the times that this turned out to be true, it didn't play out how I thought it was going to. So some something that I talked to you about, I think since two thousand nineteen, two thousand twenty.

was privacy. So if you look back on some of our episodes when we were still in the old office, so this was twenty nineteen. I had this insight from the founder of Pandora. So Pandora's the music service. The founder one time told me He was like yeah like m mo many of our users are like Middle of America

Like dentists who like have Pandora playing in the background. And what we've noticed about them is they sometimes won't sign up because they don't want to click the link that says they agree to our terms and services and our privacy statements. And To me, that meant The average Joe cares more about privacy than a lot of people think at the time, two thousand nineteen, privacy wasn't that big of a thing where

You you just click yes no matter what. I think that that and and so I predicted there's gonna be a lot of businesses that are gonna be created on top of that. Another example that I had was duck duck go. DuckDuckGo is a privacy search engine that doesn't like track you in the same way Google does. Their searches have gone up like crazy. And the business has gone on to raise a hundred million dollars, of which most of it, I believe, was a secondary sale. So they're quietly killing it.

But I thought that this was gonna be more popular than it has been. It's kind of gotten popular because TikTok Uh so I'll I think in Minnesota it is or uh Montana it is. Uh they b have banned or are trying to ban TikTok for privacy reasons. They're mostly doing it because they don't like China, not because necessarily So this is where I was wrong. I th they're doing it for the Chinese purpose, not exactly the privacy purpose.

But I thought that this was by now gonna be a lot more popular than it is. It slowly Growing. But it's a good thing. But you better give it up to an American company. Yeah. Yeah. So that has that we didn't I I didn't nail that. Yeah. I but I I I'm still I'm still holding out. But it I thought by now it would have picked up a little bit, but it hasn't. Tom I'm gonna give you one that uh we got right and wrong at the same time. Meaning

We did an episode back in twenty twenty. July of twenty twenty. Covid has been like raging for three months. And we do an episode. Called Is GPT three the next big thing? Episode number ninety four. We're like in five hundred now. This is ninety four.

And We had gotten access to this tool called GPT three, which at the time you had to like get an API key. They had to you had to borrow that. You had to get a friend to get you an invite to get GPT. And it wasn't that good. It was okay. We were pretty stunned by it mostly because we're twelve year olds and we Like made it write like a rap song in the form of Cardi B for us and we were like, This is hilarious. This is amazing. It just wrote a rap. Like this rap so I I said, write a rap.

By Cardi B. And the title of the rap was Walk That Plank. And it was a very long it was like it had rhymes, as if Cardi B was saying it. It was very, very and we were both so impressed and we were like, This is amazing. And we were we were basically like, Hey, this is super cool. Uh

Oh. And we so we correctly July twenty twenty. Before chat GPT became the fastest growing product of all time. Before OpenAI became a hundred billion dollar company

Before AI was the tr was the trend. We said we released an episode with the title is GPT three the next big thing. Answer was yes. However. I count this as an L. Why?

'Cause we just giggled about the rap lyrics and didn't do shit else. We didn't do anything about it. You know, the move the the the optimal move was drop everything and go work for OpenAI. Which you said. You said one of the episodes, you said If I'm smart, I should drop everything and go work in that area. And I'm not smart, turns out, right? Then I proved to myself that I was not smart. I could have d there was a hundred ways

To make a hundred million dollars with this. I could have started a company using GPT three. As the the backbone, which the guys from Jasper did. They were like, Oh Let's use this to help. Marketers Write blog posts, write tweet storms, write uh captions, write anything. That story needs to play out still, though.

Yeah, but they built a company that like got to one of the fastest growing companies I've ever seen. Like getting ARR over fifty million dollar dollars in one year is like insane. And so Could have started a company, could have gone and worked for open AI, could have invested in the open AI spin outs like Anthropic, which is now a twenty billion dollar company, or, you know, name the go through the list. Could have um

What else could I have done? I could have just yeah, so between investing, starting a company or joining a company, there was A lot of different ways. Two Capitalize on that. opportunity that we identified.

But I didn't. And I think this has happened, you know, many times where he's sort of like You the opportunity the elephant in the room is the opportunity and you just sort of like, Oh, that's cool, there's an elephant over there versus being like, Oh my God, wait. Stop everything I'm doing. And let me reassess what I'm doing in order to What's this analogy? Did you kill the elephant? Are you gonna kill the elephant? Look.

Like. You know how it is analogy is on the fly. Sometimes you gotta weave two and two together. Do you kill the elephant. Sometimes the elephant needs to strike while the iron's hot, and now you got another elephant the striking iron, right? Like we don't know what the elephants in Rome, my friend. It's like that Michael Scott. That Michael Scott episode of The Office where he's like Sometimes I just start a sentence and I have no idea where it's gonna go. That's podcasting for you. What's uh what's the Bryant Okay, so uh let me preface this.

I one of the things I like to take pride in is either hiring people because before they get like uh before they kinda reach their the the pinnacle of their career. I also like this on the podcast when we find interesting people. And we talk about them. A lot of times they're still popular, but we got'em a we got'em before the curve. One of them was Andrew Huberman. We interviewed Andrew Huberman. I forget exactly when, but when I remember when he interviewed us.

He was just using his AirPod headphones, looking at his laptop, like it looked like he was in a Like a bathroom or something. Like he like with like as if he was like ran to like some room, you know, it wasn't like a big deal. So that one was a cool one. So I got somebody here that this is all you. So you come on the episode one day and you go, Do you know this guy Brian Johnson? And I'm like, nah, not really. You're like You know Venmo? I'm like, yeah. Of course. And you're like, Well, it's owned by a company called Brain Tree. You know, Brain Tree, I'm like kinda vaguely payments company something. And you go.

Listen to this guy's story. So this guy's story is basically Brian Johnson I'm not gonna do his whole life story, but like Interesting kind of early on, door to door sales type of guy. ends up creating a tech company.

Braintree buys Venmo, sells Brain Tree to PayPal for like seven hundred, eight hundred million dollars. Creates this Like Neuralink type of things, brain reader. Yeah, you're like but Forget all that. I'm like, forget all that? That was a lot. That was amazing. Like

Forget all of it. Go to this website. Blueprint.brianjons.com and I go And it's like size six font. It looks like I'm reading from a like a textbook. And you're like this guy is measuring every part of his body. Every single organ.

Um, he is measuring it and then he is optimizing it and he's doing crazy shit. And look at this, he's been doing this for like a year. And I had never heard of this. Most people had never heard of this. Brian Johnson now, I would say like I think he's kinda tipped where like Actually mo in the tech industry, everybody knows about him. Yeah, but even some mainstream people though call him the guy who's trying not to die or something like that. Yeah, oh that guy, yeah, I've seen him.

He looks weird, right? Like it's like the like I'cause I bring him up in like every conversation I could find an excuse to because he's fascinating. And people are like, that's great. Oh, I don't I just don't feel like that's gonna work, right? But it's like a very polarizing thing. But you found this early and you were watching him and you were like talking about it. Then we got him on the pod. Early is great. And uh we're about to release a new another episode. I went to his house and we've recorded another one, but like I feel like you spotted this was your a uber angel investment, right? You spotted Brian Johnson.

Way before anybody else was really paying attention to him. Let me explain the story. It's been long enough I can tell the story finally. Here's how I found out about Brian. I ha I I can't name names. I have a friend That was going on a first day. With this lady he had just met. And he goes, Hey Sam

I'm gonna take this lady, she seems awesome. I'm gonna take her on a first date. I'm gonna take her I have a little plane. I wanna take her up in the plane and we're gonna fly around. F one. You know, F1 wasn't Austin. We're gonna go above the stadium and it's gonna be an ordeal. Would you and Sarah like to come on this double date? I would love it if you'd come. We said, Yeah, sure. Sarah gets sick and I text him, I go, Hey man, Sarah's Not in anymore.

But I'll still go. It's so I go third wheel. I third wheel on this date. And we go on this date. And she's a lovely woman, whatever. And she it wasn't trying to be cool, but

I was trying to hype up my buddy and I go, Hey lady, have you uh Have you ever been in a plane on a first date? Like this is pretty cool. She wasn't trying to damp the mood or, you know, like rub it in this guy's face, but she goes, Oh yeah, you know, this other guy I used to date it, he he liked to fly. And we're like, huh? So we asked a few more questions, and we're like, What does he fly? And she named some jet that's like a

Forty billion or forty million dollar jet. And we're like, What? And she's and and then she says something like, Yeah, but he likes to fly it himself, but he has a staff, and we're like Who the hell is this guy? And so I Google it. Like who this person is, and that's how I find Brian. It was she used to date him and that's how I find out about him. I just start Googling and I come across Blueprint that he just launched a few weeks prior. And I'm like

This guy's amazing. That's how I found Brian Johnson. How did that date go, though? Uh it didn't work out. I joined the date. Dude, it's them it's them two in the front two seats and me in the back. And I have my headset, but I'm like putting my hands over the like hey guys like

It was so funny. I had never been up in a plane like that, and I was like I'm not passing this out. Can I still go? And I was pipping them up the whole time. I was like, hey, guy. Have you told Lady uh about that one time you did this amazing thing. But you're doing it through the plain headset thing, which is like you have to yell. Yeah, but I'm still lead enough. Did you tell her about the time that you paid for everyone's dinner? It was two thousand dollars? Roger.

Yeah, I'm like I'm trying to like pip'em up while I'm wearing this headset. Like, hey, we could go there next week. Hey, uh guy, did you tell uh lady about the time that you had the uh box seats at the F one and you took all of your friends'cause you're so nice? Yeah, it was like that type of thing. It didn't work out though. I tried my best, guy. I'm sorry. You know who you are if you're listening to this. That's uh that's hilarious. You um You had a couple more on here. I don't know if you have time, but y you had a couple more on here that that looked kinda interesting. So you had uh

Do Paid communities and then what's this inertia one? Let's do inertia. Okay. So you uh this was you you you talk a lot. Uh, that's no surprise. But every once in a while you say something that's pretty profound. One of the profound things that you said, it stuck with me. This was in two thousand twenty one, March of two thousand twenty one. You had this episode uh where you it's just called inertia, I believe.

And you said um inertia explains like uh inertia explains why ninety percent of people are doing what they're doing. In my life, I've had moments where I realized Inertia is a bitch. Inertia is the reason why I'm doing these things, not because not actually because I want to, but because of inertia. And oftentimes I've got to check myself and ask myself am I really doing the right things. And I think that you were referring to a business that you had previously sold where it wasn't doing that well and you're like Do I even believe this is a big opportunity? Would I even be doing this if I weren't already doing it? Would I've hired these same people? Would I work with these same people? The answer uh at the time was hell no. And that's when you decided to get out. So my question is. A

No question, comment. That was good. That was a really good insight. But question number two You've since sold a business. So you started and sold a business, I think Post this comment. Yep.

Do you still use like do you still think about inertia? All the time. And by the way, this c um this came to be about inertia. Yeah. It's like the Roman Empire for some guys. For me, it's inertia. This happened because I had a come to Jesus moment. I Uh I was with Our buddy Sully and we went we used to go in San Francisco if you drive like thirty minutes down uh south out of San Francisco.

There's these like Casinos that are like Half casinos. Yeah. So we go down there. And uh

We're hanging out, we're playing, we're having a good time. At the end of the night He's like um He's like, So why are you he's like, So I don't get what you're doing. And I go like

Casino? What are you talking about? He's like, No, no, this whole thing you were'cause I was at Monkey and Friends at the time. And to the outside. What I was doing Was the greatest job ever. If anybody had ever seen you've seen our office at Monkey Fernando, it was Literally the nicest office you have ever been to in your life.

I called it a billionaire's playground is what it was. And that's what it was. Yeah, he literally built his a billionaire literally built his dream office and We just got to use it. There's a chef every day and there's a gym and there's a but it's like for only the fifteen people that we were there. And then you had twenty or fifteen Yeah, twenty or fifteen engineers who are paid really nicely and you can just do whatever you want. And the job was, Sean, you you get to come up with any idea you want. Here's a team of super talented engineers to build them and designers.

Here's the funding. You never have to go raise funding. You you get paid the salary and you own the equity. Um You can y by the way, you don't only want to do you don't want to focus on one? Go ahead, do four at a time. Build four time, you've enough resources. Go ahead, do everything, right?

And I'm twenty five years old when he uh twenty four years old when he names me CEO. And At twenty four? That was the greatest opportunity, the greatest experience ever. At twenty five. Incredible opportunity.

Then I was twenty nine. And I was still doing the same thing. Except for Now the pressure of like succeeding Like

At the beginning was like, dude, this is gonna be awesome. We're gonna we have so many shots on goal, we're gonna do it. And we took a lot of shots on goal. And we made some good things happen, but no big huge win, which is what we're all going for. And by the end We're really trying to like force a square peg into a round hole. It just wasn't working.

But our mandate was like build the next Twitter, build the next Snapchat. It's like, dude, that's really fucking hard to do. But like, okay, we're gonna keep trying. And so I got this talented team in this beautiful office. I'm CEO, I'm getting paid well, I got equity, I got everything you would want. And here's my best friend, the guy I looked up to saying

What the hell are you doing? And I was like, he's looking at me like I'm a junkie. Like, dude, what are you doing with your life? And I'm like, What are you talking about? This is amazing. Of course this is amazing, right? And he's like, You told me how much money you made back then, and I think it was like low six figures, like over it was over a hundred thousand dollars, but less than two hundred thousand dollars. And I remember when you told me that, I was like, one sixty at the time. Yeah. I was like, that's the most money of anyone I know like Do you have a hundred thousand dollars?

Like that was it was huge. I remember you told me that month that amount and I was like, You're so huge to me too. I was like, This is amazing. Then and then I was like, And if any of these ideas hit, this is great. So he's talking to me, he's just like I feel he's like I feel like you're just doing the same thing over and over again. And not getting the results you want. And I was like he's he basically asked me a very simple question. He's like, you know Um

If you weren't already working on this project. If I just took the project away. I s if tomorrow this whole company f had to fold'cause oh, they forgot to pay their bills and Whatever. This fold it. Tomorrow.

Pick up the phone. Would you call these same people and say, Hey, we're still doing this idea, right? That's the biggest idea we could possibly think of. It's the one we must do. Would you call these same people to work on the same idea? And my answer was Yes, the same people. Hell no, not the same idea. He's like

He's like and I and I was like, that's kind of a shitty realization to have. It's like I was like, W am I an idiot? And he's like, No. He's like, This is common. He's like inertia is a bitch. And he's like almost all of us are just doing what we're doing because we were already doing it. And like this this even happens with investments. After we got acquired

I got a bunch of Amazon stock. And so my portfolio was like super skewed towards Amazon. I was, you know, All of a sudden, here's millions of dollars of Amazon stock. Okay. If I if you had just given me the millions of dollars, I wouldn't have put All of it into Amazon only.

But because it was already there. I was like, should I sell Amazon? I don't know, it's a good company. Right? Because it was already there. My decision was totally different than if I had just re underwritten the the decision from scratch, saying if I

If I just had this money today, is this exactly how I would allocate it? Yeah. The same thing happens in your portfolio as happens in the time of your life. Like Would I would I allocate my energy and my talents to this project? Or am I just doing it'cause I've

Been doing it. If I'm just doing it because that's what I'm already doing. And I think the sad answer is that for most people, they're doing what they're doing. 'Cause they're already doing it. It's not the thing that if they had a blank slate today, they would just go back and recreate this. That's the same argument my wife gave to me about selling HubSpot stock. I've not sold any and she was like, Well, would you buy this stock anyway?

My argument was Well, first of all, I bel I do like the company, but do I like it enough to have that much of my portfolio in it? I I don't know. But my argument is like, Well, but I don't want to pay taxes. And frankly, I'm not sure if that's a good argument or not.

Um, but I I am a victim of it as well. Yeah, yeah, of course. There's right, there's nuances to some of these things, but like That same principle just applies to a lot of parts of your life. A lot of people are in relationships they don't wanna be in Because they're already in the relationship, they're in jobs they don't want to be in because they're They're in it.

And uh And I just kinda had this like it was two AM and I'm in this Chinese casino and my friend is telling me this thing, and I remember we drove to our office A badge in at like two thirty in the morning. We go to the whiteboard and we say, We're gonna spend the next hour trying to figure out if we can actually make this company work. And if at the end of this hour we don't look at a plan on this whiteboard That we feel

Is like this is gonna work. Like I believe that this is worth a shot. Then I'm gonna sell this company. Like tomorrow. I'm just gonna get out of this company. And then At the end of that hour we looked at it and we were like, This is I mean These are all just like Random long shots that like

We can't sit here and say we have a ton of conviction in. And then like the next day I talked to Armane Investor and I said, I think it's time to to shake it up. Like I need to shake up something in my life. This is all beautiful. This is amazing. I can't believe you gave me this experience. But like I don't want this anymore. Let's either sell the company or you should replace me or something. Something's got to change. I can't unhear what I heard last night and uh

I have a lot of flaws, but the one good thing I have is that Once I hear the truth, I Just act on it. Like I just agree that like I've heard the truth now and that's it. There's no going back from that. Uh, whereas I think some people will see or hear the truth and then they'll go into denial or they'll delay. And I don't do denial or delay.

That's a good one. Um Yeah, I always um I thought that that line Inertia's a bitch. I I remember that one, so I had to bring that one up. Um, maybe the last one.

Is paid communities. So I've been interested there's a there if you listen closely over the last Five hundred and fifty episodes. There's like Two to three things that I've like have been obsessed about. And I knew I was gonna act on one of'em. I acted on one of them.

It's a paid community. So By the way Can you say the two or three? What are the what would be the two or three? I I uh the j uh helping people find j jobs. So I call it job boards. It's beyond that, but I've always been fascinated by that. Um And then creating um Like m um

Somewhere related, but I was I've always been fascinated by the trucking industry. Or other like blue collar essential jobs that aren't don't have a lot of technology or software in order to help them be more efficient. Um, so th th those are like two or three things that I've always really liked. And then of course B2B media companies and database and research businesses. Um, but the other one that I really loved was paid communities. And if you listen closely, starting in two thousand twenty, I did a a lot of breakdowns on different paid communities. So I mentioned Tiger Twenty One, Vistage, which uh has since sold. So I I talked about Vistage. A lot of people didn't know what Vistage is. It's like um Similar to what Hampton does. Similar to what YPO does, but the target market is

uh CEOs and business owners of like plumbing companies uh in the in middle of America. Doesn't sound that huge, but it has since sold for about one point eight billion dollars, I think about eight or ten months ago. It was do and now it's doing close to five hundred million dollars a year in sales, very profitable. And so I talked about paid communities and I talked about Tire 21, a few other ones. Here's the I'm I I made a list of pros and cons back in 2020. So this was March 2020. And I'll tell you if I think the pros and cons are true, since I've now run Hamped for about one year.

So pros are paid paid communities. They can grow quickly. They seemed fun to run if you're interested in the topic. You don't need a lot of money to start'em. They definitely seem profitable. Um And then the cons were

Uh a lot of times they don't scale that well. I think churn could be pretty t Pretty high. Uh and those were like my two main Cons

So the truth is is that They can grow quickly, but you don't want them to grow quick quickly. You want them to grow slowly. So I was a little bit wrong about that. Can you start them with zero money? Zero dollars? Yes. I started Hampton with no money. Uh we didn't even buy a website.

Or domain name. Um can they be very profitable? Yes. The answer is yes, they can. Um what I got wrong or didn't mention was how meticulous you have to be about growth. And

They can get big. But they just take longer. And that's okay because I think if they take long uh usually, not always, if something takes longer to grow Maybe that means that it's gonna die. It has is less likely to die quickly.

Example Therasios. Grew quickly, probably he's gonna die very quickly. There's a lot of examples of that. And so it has in fact proven to be a big business. Or can be a big business.

It's harder to grow than I thought. But not because of demand. But because you don't want it to grow quickly. You need it to grow slowly. You have to be really thoughtful. So I underestimated how challenging that is. Um but I did a lot of the work in front of people. I I I would have thought that someone was gonna launch this. I even interviewed uh the funny thing is you you invited a couple of Other paid community CEOs on the pod as guests.

Ask them a hundred questions. And then Took their lunch. And I just find that to be an incredible story. That I look forward to telling uh as this plays out. I I need it to work.

Uh I need to work first. At the time you had a community called Club L T V. Which was an econ community. I I think it was making a hundred thousand dollars a month pretty much right away. I think you actually that name is wonderful. It was uh it was free. I didn't charge for it, um, but it was Like Invite only. Like I basically that was

I was running an e commerce business. But I'm Part time in it. And I've never done e commerce before.

And so I have a strategy of like if I'm gonna do something that I don't know how to do. There are hacks to learn faster. One of the hacks is surround yourself with other people who are doing the playing the same game. Uh one to two levels above where you're playing it. Meaning they're one to two notches better at it than you are.

And further along than you are. And so when we wanted to grow big on on Twitter, I think both of us had a similar idea. We created a group a text message group called the Hundred K Club. And we invited six people who all had that same goal. And then we all

Talked in there about Initially, like stuff we were doing to make that happen, then we all just became friends. But like Immersion into a small club of people who play the same are playing the same game Eddie

One of the one of the hacks. To get better at something faster. And so Club L T V was Cool. If I just create a curated group of awesome e commerce owners I'm gonna learn

a bunch of shit that I need to know to make my own thing successful. So I'm not even charging these people Um because I don't need to make money off this. I want the information I actually wanted the network. From it and that's exactly what I got out of it. But you made money through advertising. Um and so we have sponsors.

Yeah. And that model actually works. So there's a company called Aventa who does this, but they did it with like chief information officers. So these are like Fortune five hundred. And They were making, um they they sold for seventeen times profit for two hundred fifty million dollars. So they're making, I think, fifty million in revenue, and then whatever that profit is, I can't do that math. Um but they so so that model that you had, it works. The downside Which I don't think you you knew getting into it.

Logistically there is a it's it's a very operationally heavy business. It's very, very challenging. Yeah, it's not e com is also operationally heavy, but it's more so like there's like three or four things that you have to nail with people, there's like way more things. There's like people's feelings that you have to like account for, and it's a little bit more of an art and it's actually quite challenging to hire. uh help for that type of business. But you were on to something.

And I actually think Club. That one was a business that could've totally worked. Uh me and Ben, I remember we just had a A conversation like, Hey, do we wanna actually turn this into a business? It can, it'll work, it would be profitable. We just saw Better opportunities for ourselves.

Uh, but like that's one where if I knew the right person, I would have totally just handed over Club L TV, uh Club L TV and be like, You're the operator of this now. Uh, there's a clear path to make this a business. There's like one called e commerce fuel that's out there that's kinda Like the Which I love. Older version of the side. Really? Why? Wha why you didn't do e commerce?

I just thought it was awesome. Uh Andrew, the guy who started it. I used to read his blog and I thought it was sick. It was three hundred dollars a year, I think. He listens to the pot. I I and I talked to him every once in a while. I just thought it was cool. I thought e commerce field was great. In fact, I was a pay member in Moy's Ali. Very rich, successful guy. Sorry, Moyes, I'm gonna blow your cover. He used to use my account because he didn't want to pay three hundred dollars a year to he would use my we would share a password. Uh so like it's pretty funny, but I liked e commerce view. I thought it was great. It's still a thing and he limits it to three thousand people, I think, right? Uh something like that. I don't actually use it'cause it's a forum and I don't really love like forums and then like live events or whatever.

I I like the way we did it with Club L TV. I thought that was more more fun and easier just easier to to like actually participate in. Um So anyways, I thought that uh yeah, that that definitely could have been a business. Uh just you know, you gotta pick and choose opportunities. So long story short

Uh W what do you think is the what's your takeaway from this? So like what do you uh okay, we made a bunch of bunch of predictions. We go back, we look, we see what we were right about, what we were wrong about. What's your To the Chris Barling question that I love. What's the right lesson to learn out of this?

The right lesson to learn uh there's a few. The number one is We We make money. Talking about this stuff. And that's great. You could say we make a great living doing that.

I feel like a I guess I acted on one But like There's been five or ten or twenty things where you've told me and I'm like That's cool. I should go in on that.

mainly there's only been three things that I've gone in on, which is TRT, but like Fuck, we talked about open AI. Uh like I we should have put our money I think you have in a few cases, but I should have put my money where my my mouth was a little bit more. So that's one lesson, which is predictions aren't that easy or aren't that terribly hard. having the courage in them is hard. Uh mine is the exact same thing, which is that The predictions that matter are the ones where

You notice something Early. Before everybody knows it. But then you ha like that's you know. Yeah, it's kinda cliche, right? Ideas are kinda cheap and ex use everything. No, the idea is actually quite valuable.

However. It's potential energy. You gotta turn the potential energy into kinetic energy. How do you do that? Through like motion, right? So it's like chasing it down and actually doing something with it. Is

Um is where all the value gets created. And me and Ben have actually figured out A little bit of a better way to do this. both through like actually having like vehicles to invest in these things, but also we just continually stop and ask ourselves, like I think in the last six months, there's probably been two or three times where we say

What's the thing That we see right now. That three four you know, three years from now we're gonna be like Dude, we talked about that. That was in front of our face. Why why didn't we just go and meet the guy? Why didn't we go and invest in the thing? Why didn't we Start one, whatever it is, right?

And so By asking that question regularly, like what's the thing that's actually hidden in plain sight right now for us? Um I think I'm gonna like Turn that dial from like uh

missing a bunch of these opportunities to taking advantage of them. We should do a whole episode on what those things are. Yeah. Yeah, I will. I I'll tell you the way I learned that, by the way, was I met this guy Anamitra and Anamitra came to my office and he was the first product manager at Twitter. And I was like

Tell me what it was like back then. He's like, Well, there's like I don't know, twelve people in the company. Uh, I join uh you know, fifteen people, something like that. I joined and I was like, Was it obvious at the time that like Twitter was gonna become Twitter? He's like, No, no, no, no, not at all. Like Twitter was Kinda interesting, but looked pretty frivolous and useless. People were

Texting out like what they were eating. There was no app. At the time. It's just you just texted this number like four four four four four or whatever. Like whatever you're having for lunch.

And in Silicon Valley people were like kinda having fun with it a little bit, but it didn't seem like a serious like He's like I had like job offers from Microsoft or whatever, like I had serious opportunities and then here was this like Twitter thing. Even the name sounded frivolous. And he's like um

But I had learned one important lesson, which is that Whenever you see Like a phenomenon of behavior. Meaning you see people acting in a way that seems strange, weird, or inexplicable, or irrational. The natural reaction

is to just write it off, be like, I don't know, those are weirdos. I that that makes no sense. Idiots, and move on. And he's like, What I've learned is now he's a VC. And he's like, As a VC and as at the time, and he's like, Thank God in my career I realized that, which was When you realize when you see that weird behavior that you don't understand The thing is not to the thing not to do is label it and write it off.

It's to lean in and try to understand it. Exactly. So I saw that people were like Like why would you Text out what you're eating right now. Like what do you Why? And why do why do you like to see what other people are saying in that same same way? Like

That seems completely like strange behaviour. But people are doing it. He's like anytime you see strange behavior and people doing it. Like That's usually the the inner that's what a gr amazing opportunity actually looks like. And since he told me that

I then saw that many times over. Like we got acquired by Twitch. I remember in college walking into my The dorm room, the guy next to me who who lived next to me. And he was watching A like a replay of someone playing a Starcraft tournament.

And I was like, you are King Dork. Not only is Starcraft on your screen right now You are not even playing. You are watching Some guy

in Korea play this game. That is literally like the dorkiest, dumbest thing. I didn't and I literally made fun of him for like a year. Later when we got acquired and he's like Oh, you're head of esports at Twitch now? He was like uh He literally was like you fuck.

He called me and he was like, You used to make fun of me for this and I was like, dude, I Agree. I was Totally dumb and wrong. I should have I d I I don't even play games, but I watch people on YouTube playing. Yeah, and I was like, I should have leaned in. Why would somebody do this behavior that seems completely irrational? Why would somebody watch someone else play video games on the other side of the earth? through this replay that he had to download at the time. There was no Twitch at the time. It's like he had to download this thing off the server for eight hours and then watch it at night.

And I was like Weird. I don't want to hear it. And then of course you know so s missing that five times has taught me like Lean into that. Like and I just remembered the opening AI example, by the way.

Sam Altman, president of YC. Right. He is he had the best job in Silicon Valley. President of Y C was the best job of silic in Silicon Valley at the time. Y C is probably the most like A value generative company at the time. Or like organization. He's the president.

He got picked over anybody else. And he left to go join an AI nonprofit. Yeah, like something something's up. These billionaires are putting a hundred million dollars into this AI research company, this nonprofit. Why would they do that? And again, I was just like weird.

Sam may doing a weird Inexplicable thing. Hey, the smartest guy in Silicon Valley just left the most prestigious job in Silicon Valley to do this thing that sounds Sort of like strange to me. Lean in.

And uh yeah, that's the lesson I would share uh my takeaway with this whole thing. Let me wrap up with one quick thing. I forgot. I should have said this earlier. But we did this episode about this guy I think he was in India. And W we called him in and he like talked to us without his video on

And I found him Because he had this website called Uber Pro. I think it was called Uber dot pro and I've Googled his name la I Googled his name last night. I can't find him anywhere online. Oh, he's gone. I can't find him anywhere. And if anyone can find him, please do this. This would be amazing. I want to see what he's up to now. He was twenty three years old, or even younger.

And w what I did was I gave him a thousand dollars and he gave me ten thousand dollars in Uber credit. And for like years. I took an Uber Black everywhere. Because what he did was

I think this is how it worked. What he did was he found all of these Indian kids that were like in his Town. And when you rode Uber for the very first time and you referred people You've got twenty five dollars in free credit.

And somehow he made it so he could Convince all these kids to take a free Uber to get twenty five dollars in credit and to continually refer themselves. I also think he ranked really high on Google for Uber discount code or Uber promo code. And he so he accumulated Millions of dollars of Uber credit. And you could buy

the Uber credit from him for ten cents or twenty cents on the dollar. And I found this website and I was like, I'm doing this. And I bought a I think a thousand dollars worth of Uber credit. And I And then you have to change your iPhone from America to Moldova. Your Uber account has to be in Moldova. And that was this loophole.

And he was making a lot of money doing it. For an Indian a guy in India, he was making thousands of dollars a month, which I think in the Paddy's like, Yeah, I'm this is so much money. I think he was making thirty grand a month. And I w always I've always wondered what is that kid up to. I wanted to know we're having him on. He was fascinating. He was he was fascinating. That was a great arbitrage that the guy uh you know had architected for himself. Very I don't know if it's illegal, but definitely against the rules, questionably unethical, but when you see things like that They're going somewhere. And I've always wanted to know what happened to that guy. I want to leave you with two

Do you know why I talked about like Why am I hearing about this three times? Don't just ignore this. Like I'm training my brain to not ignore these signals now. I'll give you two of them.

For people who made it this far in the episode, these are the gem this is the gem now. Uh, this is the part where You're like, Holy shit, I can't believe they saved this for the end, which is basically The two trends that I see right now that are Strangely big.

Go to Go to character.ai. And pull up how much traffic you see that that website has. Oh my God. I would have thought like ten thousand a month.

Oh my God. Two hundred million. Exactly. Two hundred eighty million.

What? This Like You could go to the Wall Street Journal, it won't have two hundred million. You could go to New York Times, it's not gonna have two hundred million. This is no media site has that and it has an average visit duration of thirty three minutes.

It's beta.character.ai. Okay, so I've been on all direct. I've been talking about AI and I've been talking about like OnlyFans and this like kinda sometimes the crossover between AI and like this like AI OnlyFans thing and I'm looking at investment opportunities in the space. There are so many companies.

That are doing this like chat with a AI type of thing, replica, character AI, whatever. And I never thought that would be a thing. They all have ludicrous traffic.

We called it by the way. We talked about replica like a year ago. Um girlfriends. AI virtual girlfriends, exactly. And that's a lot that's a lot of how people use this character AI thing. Like they kind of Chat with uh

Yeah, the the chat I think goes into the gray area a little bit. Um I mean it's a lot of like smart people like Einstein, but it but the the top person is Ariana Grande and Billy Eilish. And then like Some K pop lady. Like there's that probably a

Oh weird. People being willing to chat with AI for a really long time. So easy to write off as weird, loser, but it's it's my friend watching Starcraft tournaments in the room next door, right? Dork King Dork behavior. I will not make that mistake again. This is def this is definitely something. I don't think that these companies necessarily are the winners. But like, you know, every every product, there's a kind of like the wave one of attempts, wave two of attempts, wave three, and then finally there's like the last mover, right? The the last mover who actually nails it and builds a full on product around this. And so there's something in this space that That's like ranges from companionship to

Um naughty. chat that's like with AI, that's gonna be massive because the numbers are off the charts. The behavior of the strange thing is off the charts. Okay, that's one. Second one, which is less crazy. Is um

There's a bunch of really smart people. That are now. have a new business strategy and their business strategy is to buy Wounded unicorns. And so

Heard it once, heard it twice, heard it three times. First heard this from Andrew Wilkinson. Andrew Wilkinson he he called me back couple of years ago, I was living in my old house in San Francisco and he I remember him telling me You know what I would do if I was you? is I would find one of these uh startups that's raised venture capital But it's not gonna become a billion dollar company.

But they got uh five million in revenue, ten million in revenue. And you could buy these for cheap because they don't have a they can't raise their next round. And there's no way out. And so there's not really like a a good exit market for that. Group and those people don't want to like

Fire a bunch of the engineers. Stop paying high prices for their San Francisco office space. And like become profitable. They could in theory, but they're just not gonna eat shit. In order to do that, they're just gonna Shut it down, return investor money, sell the assets to whoever.

And they're gonna go start their next company or go get a job. He told me that first. He had then done that with a company called Meteor. So Meteor was his developer framework and I think he bought a company that was doing like Five to seven million. It was doing like five million plus in revenue.

For Like One ex revenue or less. I don't know, it was like some like Ignore the multiple the exact multiple. I think they raise thirty million dollars. They had raised a bunch of money.

It had customers, it had revenue, but it just wasn't going to be the next big thing, which is venture capital is called become the next big thing or bust. And what he realized was If they bust, we can pick some of these assets up. So Andrew had said it. Then um You hear other people that are talking about this that are doing this. Our friend Xavier and Sieva.

They're doing this right now. If you're driving to San Francisco There is a billboard. With w with their company that says like Whatever, like There's never too late for a second chance or something. It looks like honestly, it looks like a divorce

Lawyer'cause it's KJ with her arms crossed and it says like Um, you know, there's always uh you know, there's always a second chance or something like that. And I don't know what the billboard is. They look at the billboard entering San Like when you come in on whatever the one on one, it's like um Uh it's right there. And it's basically saying, you know, like Don't just shut down your company, sell it to us. So they're doing this.

Jeremy Giffin is like He came on invest like the best and he was like, Yeah, I think one of the big opportunities right now. You hear this four or five times from smart people. Like you gotta be an idiot to not realize that there's probably something there. And it's like

It's not You're hearing it from the news. Like you gotta know where you're hearing it from. You're not hearing it from the news or like the hype cycle type of things. It's like Your smart people mentioned these things in kind of passing. Or these opportunities, but it's not consensus yet.

You realize like, Oh, that's probably one of these like what I call like you know value spots or fat pitches. So like What are the big fat pitches that you could go swing at? You don't have to go swing at it. But like you should identify that at any given time, there's like a couple of fat pitch opportunities that you could be going for. That's one of them. I wanna learn more about it. I wanna

How do you find I mean, I want to know I've got questions like how do you find it. Just run happen, bro. Don't don't even don't even think about it. Just keep running happening. You already got your fat pitch. Well, Um by the way, love saying fat pitch, by the way. Just a fun fun phrase to say. Yeah, I agree.

Uh Uh that it's a good one. It's a good one. Where'd you see that from? T Teddy Williams? Warren Buffett. Who stole it from Ted Williams? Who knows?

I know. I re said it in his biography. I know. Hard to say. No, it's uh I said it very easily. Um all right. That's the pod. 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 song On the road less travel never looking back

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