The Startup Sins Of Uber, Why Scaling Is Overrated, and More

And what he was doing was every day he would wake up at like whatever five or six in the morning and he would go to Phil's coffee. And he would sit down on his laptop, he first he'd tweet out that he was at Phil's every single day. And then he would start Just literally emailing and tweeting at people. that they should be posting their product on Product Hunt or hey, I posted it for you, would love to hear your comment or

Hey, I noticed this product that's a lot like yours. I wonder if you know, or like that's in your industry, you should check this out. And all he was doing was like manually being the human notification system. For product time. He was the he was the human invite system, the notification system, the retention system. He was all of it. I have a feeling you're coming with fire or something. Do you seem fiery today? I got some good stuff.

Uh also I just watched Do you ever watch Barstool's interviews with people? Do you watch are you talking about the Caleb Presley one? I don't know who that is. Maybe that's his name. It's the one with Aaron they interviewed Aaron Rodgers. I watched it today, dude. His name's Caleb. Have you s so it's called uh

It's called Sunday Sunday conversations, but it's like Sunday like ice cream. Yeah, it's like this like chubby guy named Glenny Balls who's sitting in the background and then it's Caleb who's like a bro, but he's kind of he's actually really funny. He's hilarious, he's quite smart, and he interviews these people. He asks the best questions. He's so good. Have you seen the past ones? Uh I've seen a few of them. This one is the first one I've watched like the whole thing and uh God, he's good, man. He that is amazing. So I watched that and sometimes that's all it takes.

You just see someone being great at their thing and you're like I'm gonna be great today. That's it. I'm gonna be great today. I saw great, now I need uh now I need to be great. He makes me self conscious. Caleb Presley is is is very, very good at these funny, awesome interviews. He's great on the spot. He's very good. Yeah, he delivers. Um all right, so let's do uh can I tell you something? This is kind of amazing. All right, this is gonna be a little hard to share on here.

But I put this in To the doc, so you can click the links. Uh Ben, if you can, let's screen share some of this stuff that's gonna that I'm gonna tell you. This is I saw this ad on Instagram.

And this is the most amazing marketing funnel I've ever seen. Maybe ever, but definitely for a musician. So check this out. Stop scrolling! You have 24 hours! We're Carolanka, an independent hip hop group.

Last year, we had the honor of being placed on Brock Hampton's official community playlist, and we were also shouted out by Kenny Beats. This year, we're trying to grow our fan base. So for the first fifteen people who DM us on Instagram in the next twenty four hours, we're gonna send you a special gift. Swipe out the DM us now. So the the the beginning of the the audio didn't play there, but it goes, Do you recognize these people? And it's like Biggy Pac, whoever like just like a bunch of famous rappers. He goes, Stop scrolling. And then he basically does this little thing. So I was like So so uh Ben Levy Ben sent this to me.

And I was like, What is this m amazingness? Let me I I must Swipe up. I n must know what this free gift is, so I do it. What does that lead you to? It opens up Facebook Messenger. with a direct message already ready for their like for the to their team and it just says send it it automatically sends them a message from you saying

Send me the free gift. Okay, so that happens. And then they they respond, Yo, what's good. Immediately. Right? So you're like, okay. I don't know what's happening here, but I'm intrigued.

The next thing that happens, I have screenshots of this stuff, um Below your below some of your research. So they go, Yo, Sean, what's good? So they use my name in the in the Thing they pull it from Facebook Messenger. And then

It says give us a little bit, we'll get back to you ASAP with your gift and some more details. Thanks for your patience. Okay, cool. One day later I get a message. It's an audio note from the guys Who are the the the the rap group. And it's basically like introducing themselves and and again this is kind of mass produced, but it works. They go, Yo, Sean. And then it's the audio, which is like, Yo, here's our story, where these guys blah blah blah, here's what we're doing.

And then they said. Um You know, for your gift, we wrote you your own custom song. We personalized the lyrics just for you. And um And and so you know, let me know what you think. It links to us it's links to their sound cloud.

And it says Sean King of the First Million. That's the name of the song. So then Mm-hmm

Ah, yeah, the homie Sean, he run it up ain't no underhand. Got his dogs with him, yet that's the gang, hope you understand. Invest your funds with a fiat of e key, get it done. But I can't afford it to keep a real shit. So they're the song and I'm like, okay, well I don't know what's happening right now, but like this has never happened before where You go from there's an Instagram and a Instagram ad about a band that you never heard of, then you swipe up. Then they send you an audio note and a personal message. Then they send you a song the following day that's like Got your name in it. And then

They followed up again and they're like, Yo Um I don't know if you're in New York. I'm gonna pretend you are. We're doing a show. Here's the here's the link to a show. Here's the tickets. And then they send like this automated graphic using Canva of You can see it there. It's like me crowd surfing. Uh it's like scroll down.

I don't know what is going on, but this band is kinda genius in the way that they're promoting themselves and they're still small. They're called Carolanka. They're still small. But When I saw this I was like I don't know They may not they may or may not be the best musician, but they are probably have the highest overlap of

Market like Kind of marketing genius for a young band. And they play music, right? There's a lot of g marketing genius out there, but they don't make music. There's a lot of musicians, but they don't know anything about marketing. These guys know enough about both to be very dangerous. I just thought this was amazing.

Is this Uh Effective, you think? I don't understand. So they're basically doing all this to get you to buy tickets to their New York show, is that right? Well, it's not just that. Like it's not just if I take a specific show. It's basically the the way I think about it is Every business

You gotta find a way to get like your first hundred or first thousand customers who love you. And that's like a really specific thing. It's like I just need a thousand customers who love us. Whether it was for this podcast, like we needed a thousand people to listen. Who actually really love the show. And um and every business has this. And so the question is like how do you actually do that? And uh At Y C they have this thing that's they say, do things that don't scale. They talked about the early Airbnb guys.

How they used to go And the they themselves would go and call all the hosts of their New York Airbnbs, they would go to their houses, they would take professional looking photos so that the listings look better. And people were always laughing like, you know. That's not gonna scale and they're like well

First of all, it doesn't even matter if it scales because right now I don't need scale. I don't have scale. I just need something that's gonna get a thousand people to really love us. And um that's what these guys are doing. I thought this was just an amazing example of like actually betting on that strategy, which is that you need a small group of people to really love you and go to bat for you, not a bunch of people who just kinda sort of like you or oh yeah.

I got you know, we got ten thousand views on this thing. It's like okay, but those Those views do they matter? What are those views worth versus somebody who's got a story to tell like I'm doing right now, or Somebody who's really impressed by you or feels interested in you or is invested in your story, actually goes and clicks and learns more about you and

Yeah, it goes deeper down your funnel. So I think that this is amazing because they're showing they're brute forcing that thousand thousand fans who who really care about them. Dude, I always hated this thing of well it doesn't scale or you gotta build the scale. I've always hated that conversation for a few reasons. Number one, most people aren't gonna make it to the point where they ever have to worry about that.

Number two, you can brute force it and just manually and by hand. Do things to a pretty large number. I think the largest number that I've seen uh Let's see. I think Mr. Beast uh is is his a whole operation is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. That's a pretty brute force, not

I I I don't know what it looks like, but just talking to him Fairly unsophisticated operation. I think when I talk to Nerdwall, you know Nerdwall it's a it was a blog that was at the time making like thirty million in revenue and I I think like fifteen million in profit. incredibly I like saw a little bit of behind the scenes super unsophisticated. What are what are some other things and it was basically just them just blogging. What are some other examples of things that you've seen that are s look like a tech or internet based company on the outside, but behind the scenes are like pretty rudimentary. And not even like they've not even thought like oh we need to automate or scale or whatever.

So our buddy Ryan Hoover built Product Hunt. And um he he listens to Pod, so he he he came on the pot as well and and told the story. But I was there kinda like front row. When he was building that thing, meaning like I think I'm user number seventeen in product test history or something like that, like very, very early, first dozen people or so that were on the platform. And so and

For some of us, he was sending like updates on like literally what he was doing to build it. And what he was doing was every day he would wake up at like whatever five or six in the morning and he would go to Phil's coffee. And he would sit down with his laptop, but first he'd tweet out that he was at Phil's every single day. And then he would start Just literally emailing and tweeting at people.

that they should be posting their product on Product Hunt or hey, I posted it for you, would love to hear your comment or Hey, I noticed this product that's a lot like yours. I wonder if, you know, or like that's in your industry. You should check this out. And all he was doing was like manually being the human notification system. For product time. He was the he was the human invite system, the notification system, the retention system. He was all of it. And At the at the time I was like

This guy's literally Like sending out like hundreds of personal welcome emails. Maybe A hundred

Personalized tweets per day. And then he would like Yeah, sure enough, by six six or seven PM he'd close up his laptop, he'd go to the gym. He's a very like structured guy. He hits the bed early, he's not like uh you know, he's not like going out and socializing or doing anything like that.

He would wake up again the next day and he would do the same thing. And sure enough, that community that we were part of, I think that first group he sent it to was like maybe twenty five people. And it didn't even have his own website. He was using this thing called Linky Dink at the time. It was like some third party tool. To go use. And every day he would send out the email more email digest in the morning of the cool stuff people posted.

And then he would tag each person with individualized thing, Oh, Sean, I know you guys had once looked at building a product like this. What do you think about this? He'd get you to share your thoughts'cause he was asking in such a nice personalized way that okay, I'll go ahead and reply.

But that generated all of the activity for that early community. And why did product not work? Why did it sell for twenty million dollars? Well Because at the beginning He got the right people from Silicon Valley to actually participate in the thing.

And The way he did that was like It's like when you watch somebody build a fire. It's like first they're just like You know, they're just hitting the the the flint or they're rubbing the two sticks together just to get the spark. And then when it's there, they're sort of covering it. They're just blowing on it gently.

And then they're adding just the next little few pieces of of sticks and they know it could go out at any moment. And that's how it feels to build a community. I saw you do the same thing with trends, basically, right? Like For trends when you wanted to launch that. It was by no means gonna be a slam dunk.

And I think most of us who are in trans would say the research reports you guys sent out, which was the Product. They were cool. But the real reason anybody liked trends, I think, was the Facebook group. And all it was was a Facebook group. There was nothing you know you didn't build that. You just

Literally went down there and typed a fight type a you know a title in and hit enter. And then but what made the Facebook group good was you picked You handpicked who could get in. And then every day I felt like you were sharing. Like some super high quality stuff to get a conversation started in the group chat. Was that intentional when you do that?

One hundred percent. That was intentional. And so what I I I did two or three interesting things. So this yeah, so trends right now is making many, many millions of dollars in subscription revenue. And it's pretty simple and there's like I think there's only five people who work on it. So it's like a pretty profitable thing. And We added these people to this Facebook group and I would do a few things. The first thing I would do is even people who didn't pay who I thought were impressive, like you or some of our other friends, I'd be like, Hey, I'm adding you to this group.

And I would just tell them and I would manually add them and I'd be like oh look who just joined you know, it's Sean. Sean has done all these impressive things. Funny seeing you here. How cool. Um, if you have any questions for J uh Sean, just like ask'em right here in the comments. And I would do that all the time. So I would add these people who did the actual thing. That worked, by the way, because I was like, Oh shit, this group has cool people. And it's in reality that you added Three hundred paid members that I've never heard of. And then you added one interesting person, but you made that intro post baller. You're like

You ever seen a plane fly? Yeah, that's'cause of this guy, you know? It's like it was always the most like baller intro, you're like Um, you know did you know they didn't have hundred dollar bills till this guy came around? It's like I did that all the time. And and the other thing I would do is I would just write out all these long posts of like interesting things that I was thinking about. And then I would tag certain people who A, either accomplish something like that and would and would talk about it, or B, I would write comments for smart people and re and message them and say, Hey Will you do me a favor, post us on there.

Or I would write posts for other people and make them comment one time. Uh when HubSpot was looking to buy us. I saw that Brian Halligan, the then he's the founder and then CEO of the company he joined. And I messaged like Eighty people.

And I said, Hey, uh reply to re reply to Brian, here's the message to say to him. And so many people commented and then he checked in like eight hours later and he's like Oh my God, I've been overwhelmed with replies and notifications. I can't believe how thriving this community is. Uh and I remember thinking like Got'em. Got'em. And that but that like interaction is how you make all like

That's that feeling you want all community members to feel. And we used to do that all the time. But yeah, Ryan Hoover's a good example of people who have grown without like really caring about scaring scaling. We should have like a segment another time where we like actually think about like the most like thrown together duct tape shit that we've seen that has gotten quite large. Um and but I'm gonna give you another Um angle towards this. So there's one which is the brute force

Do things that don't scale. And they almost do them. even longer than that. They do it even past the point where i you shouldn't be able to keep this up. Like Airbnb still does that photographer thing, by the way. They turn that unscalable thing of them going to people's apartments. Taking photos for them and saying, Hey, we'll we'll improve your listing for you. And now they just have a fleet of photographers around the country that'll just come do this for your listing. It's like it's a that they turned it into a scalable thing. And that's another thing when people talk about well, that's not scalable, it's like uh Yeah, it is. Like they'll talk about like an ad agency and they're like that's not scalable. It's like what do you mean? Of course it's scalable.

You just hire five thousand employees. Like that that's scalable. It may be that's not what you want to do, but like Yeah, everything virtually everything is scalable. Like you just have to add a ton of people probably. Most things can scale past what most people think.

Uh, like you know, this also happens in engineering all the time. You work with engineers and they're like well We're gonna need to build it right before we launch or we're gonna need to build it right because this won't work in production and so this won't work when it scales. It's like Then you hear these stories, it's like, Yeah, Facebook was written in PHP. Why? I don't know. That's just the language he knew at the time and that's what he did. You know, it's like And yeah, actually it still runs, you know, years later, it was still running in that, like way past where it was supposed to. Um and I I've got friends that are early at Uber and friends that are still at Uber and a lot of people don't know this, but

I they might consider him a founder, but the first or second employee was this Mexican guy and you know, he like I think he was lived in America for a little while, but at the time he was living in Mexico. And so the early versions of Uber were written with a ton of Spanish in the code. And and so my friends who were earlier there, they told me, Yeah, like I I forget this guy's name. Do you know who I'm talking about?

I I I remember reading about him about I don't know his name topic. Yeah, he was he was Mexican and so they and he had you know, his friends in Mexico were like, Yeah, well we'll are my the I know a good agency, we're gonna have him do it. And they said it was kinda thrown together and kinda janky. And I've got friends now that still work there and they say every once in a while we'll find Spanish in the early code base because that is, you know, what these guys are writing. We'll find like Spanish notes and things like that. And that was the early version of Uber. And think about how many rules of Uber got violated of uh how many rules of startups that Uber violated. So for example Um

The Uber founders Travis and um Garrett. They Didn't work on it full time. Uber was not a project they were willing to do. They just literally tweeted out, Hey, we need a general manager and

Random guy named Ryan Graves was like I'm a hustler, I'll do it. And they're like, All right. Cool. It's like they literally like delegated the CEO job. Then

Did they have a super strong technical team, technical co founder who could write the code and do this in house? Nope. Use the third party dev shop to build the the first version of the app. They outsourced the coding. Yeah. Most of the the investors who invested in Uber would tell you If you're a a product guy and you go in and you say, Yeah, I'm gonna just use an agency to write the code for the app.

They'd be like, uh yeah, this is not yeah, th no go. Okay, then what's the the next thing? Then they literally broke actual laws. It was like running and they they got a cease and desist from San Francisco saying, Hey, for every day you're operational, you owe us five thousand dollars per day. And they just kept going. Then the next you know, they just violated rule another one at the time. I remember at the time when Uber first came out, Airbnb was was popular at the time.

And I talked to our investor. I was like, Should we be doing a product like this? He's like, uh no, bits, not atoms. That was like a common phrase in Silicon Valley, which is You wanna do startups that are software based because they can s they're the ones that can scale and have profit margins. All these things with real world cars and homes and T shirts and stuff like that. Like That stuff super hard to scale, ends up being super, super low margin.

And okay, and some people say, Oh, they're right, you know, Uber's not that profitable, but The reality is that The founders and investors in Uber did fantastically well. um scaling this thing up and it was kinda a narrative violation. There was all these narrative violations, all these These general rules that were broken.

That like today if you said yeah I'm the I'm the founder of this thing. No, I'm not working on it full time. I found a guy on Twitter to be the CEO and then we're using this. Agency in Mexico to build the app. Yeah, we're the next big thing. That doesn't fly and Guess what?

It works. Dude, we gotta go on a quick t uh story tangent. That's kinda what this whole first half is gonna be, I guess. But there's this guy named Scott Belski. I'm friends with him or I used to be a little uh friends with him, I haven't talked to him in a while, but you do you know Scott? Yeah, I'm I like him a lot. I like to think of friends with him. The reality is I've talked to him twice. Yeah, friend friendly with him. He invested in my company and and I've hung up with him once or twice. He doesn't know this, but he's kind of like I'm his secret admirer. Like he's like this like good looking handsome dude who dresses nice as nice and seems like really wealthy and rich and like I I like and I see him, I'm like, dude, you're the best. And I've talked to him. If you have ten million dollars at a jawline Sam is all in. Sam is all in. Yeah. Definitely all in. So like I love this guy. And uh he's great. So basically I gotta tell you a quick Scott Belski story. So at right now, he's like uh an executive at Adobe, but not just like an executive. I'm pretty sure he's like in line to be CEO, and a lot of people don't realize this. Adobe's one of like the

thirtieth largest companies in the world. I think their market cap is like three, four hundred billion dollars. And Scott Belski is he's pretty young. He's in his early forties, and he uh I cold emailed him to invest in the hustle, and that's how I became friends with him. And I met with him one time and he goes, Yeah, so like when I was twenty six years old, I was starting my company called Behance. So Bahance is basically it's Behance and Dribble are like the two companies where you go online and Designers can host their portfolio and kind of talk to one another. And he was like, I was just starting this company and in my head I knew he worked at Goldman

And I knew that he was from like a wealthy, like Jewish family. I think his fa his grandfather started like Kaplan, you know, Kaplan University. Uh no way. Yeah. And so I was like stereotyping him as oh you guys just you had everything handed to you to him. And like he told me a few stories where I was like, Oh, you actually like it's not exactly how it seems from the outside and he said I left Goldman and I was making ninety grand a year there and when I left I had like fifty or sixty thousand dollars saved. I started Bahance. It didn't go very well and we bootstrapped it. And I noticed that with Bahance, we were getting a lot of traffic. From two different websites. The first was called Stumble Upon, and people and designers would post cool designs and we would get traffic from Stumble Upon. And the second was a small company called Pinterest. And I emailed both these guys.

Uh and this was I forget what year, two thousand eleven, twenty ten. He goes, I've emailed these guys, I go, Hey, you guys are sending us like hundreds of people a day, which for us at the time was a lot of people. What what are these websites? And This guy Ben told me about this website called Pinterest and then this guy named Garrett told me about stumble upon. And Ben was like, Hey, I'm gonna raise a little bit of money. Do you wanna invest? It's a three million dollar valuation. And Scott was like, Dude, I only have like fifty grand And but I don't wanna like look like a noob to this guy. Whatever, I'll invest fifteen thousand dollars and that's a big deal to me.

And then Garrett was like, Hey, um, my friend and I are studying this other thing. None of us are gonna work there because I'm too busy running some upon, but it's basically like a car service. And uh Scott was like, I don't wanna invest in a limo company. Like there's no way a limo company's gonna take off. Uh, but like I don't wanna look like an idiot. This guy's been sending me some traffic and I I kinda wanna like appear a little bit like a big shot. And so he gave him fifteen thousand dollars, I think at a three point five million dollar valuation. And he did both of these in the span, I think, of about two weeks. So he's like I basically had like fifty or sixty grand in my checking account at the time. My startup that I was bootstrapping was only doing okay, it wasn't making much profit, and I was doing consulting on the side to pay the bills, but I did my wife was like angry at me, but I gave them each fifteen thousand dollars. fast forward however many years, they both went public around the same ish time and I remember sending him something to his house and he sent me his address and I remember the address being this like really fancy town home and I'cause I looked it up. And I was like

Doing the math and I'm pretty sure each of these fifteen thousand dollar checks turned into around fifty to a hundred million dollars each. Inside a span of like You'll have to look up when they went public, but they almost went public right around the same time and he gave them money each at the same time. And w another thing a lot of people don't know is Behants, his company, sold I think for a hundred and seventy five million dollars. And I think he owned, he told me, around seventy percent of it. He owned the majority of it. And so this guy has just Knocked it out the park. Over and over and over again. And a lot of it came because of Uber and Pinterest early on, and he was like, I don't think these are that good of ideas, but I just I don't wanna look silly.

That's a that's an amazing story. I love that story. It reminds me I uh I just got a DM. From this guy. By the way, this is nowhere near r related. I am not trying to compare apples to apples here. It's very hard to have a story that compares to Uber and Pinterest, but Uh, there's a guy who I don't know, maybe six months ago or nine months ago, something like that, I was like

getting kinda interested in the like AI stuff. about like you know this basically artificial intelligence I can create art and things like that. I had said something offhand on the pod. So somebody reached out and they were like, Hey, s you know, heard you're interested in this. I'm trying to make apps that will do this. Uh, we just released our first one. I wanna see what you think about it and uh you know what

We're raising a little bit of money. We'd love to see if you want to want to invest. Um Never replied. I go uh I get another DM or no, I uh I see somebody mention this app.

And I go I go click on the founder and I click the DM Oh, this guy DMed me a while back saying I invest I should I should see how it's going. I go Hey, how's the biz going? I'll share a screenshot this. Hey, how's the biz going? And he goes Good, man, good. Yeah, that app I really ended up releasing it. It's been downloaded 120 million times. And um and then I released another one and it's also been downloaded like a hundred million times. And um

Yeah, it's really it's going really well, man. How are you? Oh I'm I'm currently walking off of a cliff. Uh because I never responded to that initial DM. Yeah.

Yeah. I just did my four one K match. Um not much, you Uh that's I I wanna s share one other story that's kinda related to the do things that don't scale. This is something. I actually learned from those guys Dylan and Henry.

So I'm a big fan of this like idea that You have to find a way to learn from three groups of people. People that have Done it. Before. So people who've done it a bunch of times. So that's you know people normally try to go learn from them, mentor type people.

People that are in the game, their peers just alongside you. That's kind of how we got to know each other. We were in a peer group, a mastermind group. And no, we haven't made it, but like we're all trying to make it at the same time. And so we can learn a lot from each other. And then lastly is People who are just starting out in the game fresh.

They don't know any better. And There is a certain tactic to like A spend time with each of those three groups. And then B. Be humble enough and know how to ask the right question so that you know how to actually get advice from all three of those groups.

'Cause if you ask the same question to all three, you're not gonna get valid information, you're not gonna get the right answers from all three, right? Like The question you would ask to somebody who's been through it before and the things you should talk to them about are different than the ones that you should talk to your Your buddy who's going through it right now and the 19 year old who just graduated from college, you can't ask the same question.

So I tell you something that the the sort of the nineteen, twenty one year old or whatever, I don't know how old they were at the time, maybe twenty one, twenty two. Uh, Dylan and Henry. They were fans of the pod. Then they flew they offered to come help us with our video setups at the time. Well, and previously they were fans of the pot and they would chop up clips for us and share it on social media and a lot of their videos were beautiful, awesome and they just brute force their way to having a relationship with us. They exactly. And that became a a

Full on agency that does you know pretty well. They they did it for us, then they did it for the all in podcast. They did it for a bunch of people, and so people kind of know them now. Um But at the time nobody really knew who they were. They were just guys who just graduated from college. They had their own podcast, which was kind of like ours. Uh, but nobody knows you go you can go look at the views, nobody nobody watches the thing. That's okay. Like, you know, it's most podcasts nobody listens to, especially ones by Guys who just graduated from college.

But they flew out to our house there and they were installing the like kind of studio setup in my garage at the time. And um And I went out there was like you guys need some water, you guys are like You guys all right? You guys you guys eating anything? I was like kinda like parenting them. I was like, you know what, are you guys okay? What are you doing here? And um and so I went out there and I started shooting the shit with them. I was talking to them and I was like, So what's your guys' like I was like, give me advice like

If I was your friend and I and I'm like, You guys got a podcast, that's pretty cool. Like most people you raise don't have a podcast, like What do you what's y'all strategy? What are you trying to do? Why are you trying to do it? What are you trying to do? And I was like, Explain it to me like I was your buddy. And they're like, Well Um You know, we kinda we like podcasting, it's fun, so that's why we do it. The second thing is

Um We just think that like making content Like we don't have money to go advertise. We don't have like we don't have connections that we could just go knock on a door and get into some get distribution somewhere. So like content is our only chance. If we just wanted to get good at content, the best way to get good is just to do it a bunch. I was like, All right, that's another smart thing.

And I go, but Nobody's watching your shit, right? So like Is it even working? It's kinda like what you're saying about this band thing. Like does this even work? Like this is cool. It's interesting, but d is this valuable? Like is this actually gonna work? Yeah. And he goes.

Oh, I'm just wa he was w nobody watches it today. Because but Some day if we start to get people to watch. There is now a library, he goes, We call it our binge bank. It's a place where you can go and you can binge

Dylan and Henry. And I was like, What? And he's like, Yeah, well, basically we just want to have a rabbit hole for you to go up go down. Cause if anybody ever gets in like today, nobody's interested. But if people ever get interested. I wanna have this bank of content that they can go binge.

And sure enough, after like, you know, forty five minutes down this rabbit hole, you're gonna walk out being like I think I love these guys. I feel like I know these guys and I want to hang out or work with these guys. And I heard that and I was like, That's really fucking smart. I was like, that's the way to think about content. Espe'cause most content doesn't just like immediately hit and blow up.

But you want to have this. And I thought about it'cause I was like There are several people who I've gone down that rabbit hole with and I've come out with that same exact conclusion after a 45 minute dude. You do this all the time. Like You discover somebody You go read everything there is about them, you go read their old blog, you watch their old talks, and you come out, you'll be like, This guy is awesome. This this girl is. Amazing.

And They had to create that. Like library of themselves. To go and let you binge. And I thought about it because

You know the band like of the the guy McLamore the like the famous rapper guy? I remember Maybe ten years ago now. Me and my buddy Trevor, we started like we like found his one of his songs and we were like oh this guy's cool. Who is this guy? And he had a bench bank. He had these vlogs he was doing on YouTube of him like

trying to make it as a rapper. It'd be like we're going to doing the show at this small college in Wichita. Oh We like We're wait every day right now, we're waking up at this time, we're trying to record in the studio because we suck it. create the creative process, so we're just trying to train ourselves, right? They were just like Just kinda sharing along the way. And we watched this stuff and we were like

I remember these videos had less than a thousand views. There were like seven hundred views on YouTube at the time. Like I just went back and looked at it. Now those have each like millions or like close to a million views each on those videos. At the time, less than a thousand. And we became super fans of this guy. Why? Because it's fun to be early. We liked what they were all about. And we felt like the quality of content.

Was like higher than the views. And so that made it for like an exciting it's like we found a a treasure. Dude, people say that in our comments on YouTube. Like oh the I'm like I'm I'm surprised this isn't big or like I'm happy to be here before. Yeah, they're like they're like I'm happy we're catching up. Yeah, and and that that definitely gives me encouragement. It makes me happy. But yeah, people say that and are you Little do they know that like our podcast has like ten times more downloads, so they're like, Oh, this little shitty podcast only has ten thousand videos on this thing. Or ten thousand views on this thing, and I'm like, Yeah, we suck.

Please, sure, please. But I I'm a big fan of this binge bank concept. I've I once I th once I said that, that clicked with me. I started to think about our stuff that way. And then also I started remembering, yeah, there's actually a bunch of people who I've gone down there Rabbit hole and like And actually there could be like a product that's like this. I I know YouTube is kinda structured this way, but I kinda wish that

You could just have a thing which is like your greatest hits. It's like yo, if you If you're kinda interested in me This is the curated rabbit hole. This was my tweet that went viral. This is this video. This was the first thing I ever made. This was you know, this blog post I wrote back in the day is kinda stupid, but like, you know

It captured how I was thinking at the time. I have two tools that I use regularly and I'm paying subscribers up the first and do you read a lot of biographies? No, not take over the world. Yeah, I read a ton of biographies and

So any biography that talks about a person who is a little bit pre internet era I'm a subscriber of newspapers dot com. Which has aggregated like every newspaper ever. So like for example, I was reading a biography about Dan Gilbert, or something about Dan Gilbert, the founder of Rocket Mortgage, I think it's called, and the guy who owns the Cleveland Cavaliers or oh I forget all he owns everything. Yep. And so like his company got P it was called Rock Financial originally.

His company got popular in the nineties. And so I just Google Rock Financial, Dan Gilbert. set newspapers dot com to nineteen eighty five,'cause that I knew that's when you started, to nineteen ninety, uh and then went public in ninety two. So I was like, I I'm gonna find everything. I read all these articles. uh about him before he was like, you know, it was like really like he was in the making at that point. And so that's like my favorite tool is newspapers.com. The second one for anything that's internet related. It's Web Archive.

So like whenever I talk to anyone who's like popular on the internet I go and look back at right when they started, I like to look at their old websites and you could like see the trend and you could see the trajectory. And that starts that teaches me a little bit about patterns and like all right, it's okay and it also makes me feel like all right, it's okay to be shitty even at this size. It's okay to be only okay around this size. You know what I mean? Totally, totally. Yeah. You go look at early startup landing pages. I d I have a blog post about this actually, like ten Throwback. uh landing pages and it's like go look at the first version of Airbnb of Uber of Snapchat of all these things and then you'll be like

Oh, why are we trying to perfect this before launch? Like It If you could start there and end up where these guys did, like I can start wherever the hell I am now and launch and then make it better over time. Um Do you uh

You wanna go to uh can I let me br let me bring up one. So yeah this this guy DM'd me And I found his YouTube video and it was really amazing. So basically in two the this has got me thinking on this whole topic, but in two thousand fourteen, this guy graduated from Stanford And he got five job offers. And he did this video that he goes Here's the offers that I got in two thousand fourteen, and here's what happened, and here's like how like this story played out.

So he in the video, it's really great. So uh actually it looks like someone's highlighting the video. What's his name? His how do people find this? His name's Rahul. So if you google like Rahul Uh tech panday. E A N D E Y Yeah, so you Google that or just like Rahul and then like Tet Ex

Jobs and I bet you it will come up. So basically I I'm gonna summarize it, but here i the video's great, but here's basically the offers that he got. So the offers that he got from Twitter With with a combination of stock and salary was a hundred and ninety thousand. With a combination of stock and cash, his Facebook offer was two hundred thousand dollars a year. His Microsoft one was around also two hundred thousand dollars a year.

His square one around one hundred and sixty thousand dollars a year. And this is both a combination of stock equity and sign out bonus, and his Google one was two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. Now fast forward Eight years, what would that stock plus cash be worth? So basically the stock the cash is mostly stagnant. I think he added like an eight percent annual growth. The stock, he looks at what each uh uh what it grew since then. So his Twitter comp Fast forward, it would almost be the same because their stock hasn't grown. His Facebook stock. It actually would have gone a lot higher, but right now Facebook stock is down a ton. And so it's Facebook's uh

Se first year comp went from two hundred to two hundred and twenty. His Microsoft comp w uh uh it started at two hundred. If you fast forward today, it would be worth around three hundred thousand dollars a year. Now here's where things get interesting. His square stuff. And and he was only twenty two when he graduated or something like that. And he his first year's salary b in comp back then would be a hundred sixty thousand dollars. Fast forward. The stock is now worth a five hundred and eighty thousand dollars, and his Google stuff was worth two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year now.

Worth almost seven hundred thousand dollars a year. And keep in mind So here's a few takeaways from this. The first takeaway. He said this funny thing in the video, he goes Square offered me something.

uh that I didn't think was any good because the recruiter said, You know, if Square one day becomes a seven billion dollar company The stock that we're offering you now it's only worth a hundred thousand dollars over four years. It could be worth four hundred thousand dollars. But he goes, I'm really doubtful that Square will ever be a seven billion dollar company. Now it's worth fifty billion and it's down right now. I think at its peak it was seventy billion. Uh so the thing that is really hard to understand is that everything at the time, most things

Seem expensive. And the reason why things seem expensive is because exponential growth is incredibly challenging to understand. So if I tell you that something is gonna grow at seven percent a year, every single year, that's actually kind of hard to understand. But that what that means is it's gonna double every ten years. If it's gonna grow if it's gonna grow at thirty percent a year, which a lot of these tech companies are, that means it's gonna double I think every two or three years. And like exponential growth is really hard to understand. The the another thing that is really interesting is uh Leveraging offers

And negotiating is very possible, even if you're a twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four year old. And so you always do better when you have another offer in hand and you play them. uh off one another. And finally, the most important thing. For people listening. Employees at tech companies One hundred percent can get meaningfully rich.

Yeah. People don't talk about that enough because it's a fairly safe way if you are good enough. It's a high bar. If you are good enough to get but it's still like a million plus jobs if you add together Fang. I uh or around there. And they hire tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands a year. So it's not like that covenant. But if you can get a job at one of these tech companies, and I'm talking about a tech company that's growing quickly and has at least a thousand employees. Relatively safe. It is such a good way to build the wealth in a low

Risk way. And the final most important thing on top of that is now's the time. So we're you're talking about Square being worth like, you know, it might be worth seven billion dollars. I s I have a very small lens here, but I see what the private company valuations are. They have reset an even better The public companies have reset. So we have square Facebook, Twilio, maybe Robin Hood. I think like a company like HubSpot or something like that, a Coinbase.

All these valuations are pretty low, if you ask me. And I think now's the time where you can get some of these offers where you're getting paid a hundred, two hundred, three hundred thousand dollars a year in equity. And that w could be worth Potentially eight figures in ten years. That's really interesting and a great um add for HubSpot. Very well done. Very native. I enjoyed that one. This data is wrong every freaking time.

Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated. Whoa, I can see the client's whole history. Call, support tickets, emails, and Here's a test from three days ago I totally missed. Hotspot Pro Better

The um When we were selling Bo uh we had A bunch of conversations and then you know, you sort of compare offers. You're like all right, we had I think at the end we ended up with three offers.

We had a Facebook offer. We had the Twitch offer and we had a Not papered, but like Only because we turned it down early, but he was interested the the uh Discord offer. And

And I did an exercise where I looked back and I said What was I thinking then? Because I wrote it all down. And w how did it actually play out? And I'll be damned if I wasn't wrong on every single thing I believed. Yeah, let's go through this. Yeah, let's go through each one. So for example, we'll start with the one that's relevant to what you're talking about, which is the stock uh so so basically Discord was like, look Uh, we like you guys. We we think this is cool, but it we there's no way we would come up with cash like you're talking about. So it would need to be

Just a tiny bit of cash and then mostly stock. But like we think our stock is great. So what would uh let's say let's say that you walked away with a million dollars of Discord stock back then. And back then it wasn't that long ago, that was four years ago. Yeah, less than four years. Three years ago. Uh three, four years ago, something like that. So at the time I went and talked to one of Discord's investors and I was like, What do you think about this? And they were like, Well, it's real simple, like

Today, let's say Discord is valued just around two, you know, one and a half, two billion dollars. Um so let's say two billion. Um Oh no, I think at the time Discord was valued at a billion and it was one billion then. He goes

You're basically just betting that Discord can be worth five billion. If it's w if it if it gets to five Then This is the best offer. If it's not gonna get to five, then this is the worst offer. And so you just have to like, you know, make an educated decision about that. And I was like in my head I was like, Well

I do like I I was a big admirer of Discord. I was like Discord is kind of amazing. Uh The CEO at Discord Jason, he's kind of amazing. He w of all the meetings that we took, I thought he was the He's actually the most impressive. In there and he cut straight to the chase and was like yep

I'll I'll do this. No ca uh you know, the cash is gonna be small, maybe one, two, three million dollars. Um, and then the rest will be stock. And so, you know You guys have to yeah, is that interesting to you? And at the time I was like

No,'cause that sounds really speculative and like illiquid and like I can't go buy anything cool and I can't like I I the no the total number as valued today sounds way lower. Yeah. And in my head I was just like, I can't do this. Fast forward Discord I think is worth about fifteen billion now. So it would have been by far the best Deal. Uh we had the worst deal.

I if they give you a million dollars of stock Pri and private valuations that would be worth fifteen million dollars now in four years, right? Right. And we were getting more than a million dollars of stock if we had done that deal. Okay. So uh so it was it was the worst deal it would have turned out to be that stuff. Now that there was one caveat, which is it's it was gonna be vested. So you know, I'd also have to spend

Yeah, three years earning that stock or four years earning that stock, which I I didn't Yeah, you probably would have been fired way before that. Yeah, so so you know, what are the odds I was gonna capture all that? I don't know. But like It just shows, you know, uh How our brain is not real like

The idea of Discord becoming worth fifteen billion was not really Like it didn't seem very likely, but in actuality the the odds were probably in its favor, but it seemed like a very low probability thing,'cause it just sounded big. It sounded Like a big jump. It's like is it am I betting that fifty Discord's gonna become fifteen times bigger than it is today? And actually, yeah, it did. Like the user base grew by two or three eggs. The monetization grew, the the overall market grew, right? There's like all these different ways that you just multiply these things together.

And you get you arrive at this private market valuation. Now and also whatever, private markets have corrected. Maybe it's not worth as much now, but like, you know, it's It's hard to say. It's illiquid. Then the next one was the Facebook offer. And it's like all right, well Facebook's offer is higher in cash, higher in stock. Um

But we don't know about the s we don't know exact which which stock's gonna perform better, Facebook or Amazon. They both seem like great stocks. Yeah, and so w then it came down to intangible factors and we ended up s ruling out Facebook For some intangible factors. In retrospect. somewhat silly reasons to decide. Uh

The first was Oh f uh, like Twitch was the leader in game streaming and Facebook was like Nobody watches game streaming on Facebook at the time and I was like Oh man, this is just gonna be like another startup. Like they are they're at z they're called Facebook, but like in this niche. They're at zero and they're hoping that we can help them win and like

Oh man, and we're gonna be pushing a boulder up a hill. I was like I just wanna go join the Warriors and like go play on the winning team. Basically just hadn't decided they were gonna win yet. Yeah, exactly. And also like my mentor was like that's such a stupid way to think about this, like You're gonna walk into Facebook and they're gonna be like uh Cool, game streaming's over here and you're gonna be like Actually I'm gonna wander around this area over here. I'm gonna go play in virtual reality, I'm gonna go to AI, I'm gonna go to You know, news I'm gonna get

He's like you can just walk into any other department you want and just go do that thing. He's like They'll forget you even exist after they hire you. Like You're worried about what your day to day life is gonna be like there, and like you have no idea what your day to day life is gonna be like there. And he was absolutely right. By the way, have you ever been to the Facebook campus? Yeah. It's it's basically a better college.

The way that I describe it, it's like a mall. Where everything's free. So like they have like a food court. And they don't have just one pizza place, they've got many pizza places. And it's one my wife worked there and I would go and I'm like, Oh, this is the best thing ever. And they have restaurants, like a sushi restaurant, everything's free. They've got a ice cream place, everything's free. They've got a woodworking shop, everything's free. A laundry place, a barber, a dentist. The barber. That's that's the biggest one. I was like

Food I expected. But when I just saw you can just walk over to this guy and get a haircut, I was like, damn, that was like That was like a big draw for me. I was like, I could just I don't have to go anywhere. It's just free. I just walk in and get a h get a haircut. That's Kind of amazing. Yeah, they're like, It's free. All you have to give us is your life.

Deal? Yeah. Did you say there's two pizza shops? So how much would the Facebook so a a million in Facebook back uh four years ago would be worth what? Um A million in Facebook stock.

Would have been uh it's it's gone I think up thirty percent since then. So it's like, you know, uh million would have been one point three. Right. So that's the like where the stock landed at its peak it was about double So at its peak it would have been double, right? So Uh uh and so in that one we made the mistake of basically Um

Optimizing for really intangible things. One one that seemed really tangible was like they weren't gonna take our whole team. And I was like, Oh, I don't wanna like toast at the celebration party of this acquisition and be like But not you four. They didn't hire you guys. So like uh You know, it's been awesome. The rest of us were gonna go, and you guys

Y you won't believe the recommendation letter I'm gonna write you, right? Thanks for last night. Exactly. Mm. So that w that wasn't gonna feel good.

Of course, as soon as we rejected them and they were like why? And I was like, Well the team thing they're like Dude, we would have just hired them a few months later. We just didn't have the headcount yet. Like He's like uh he's like that's why and I was like, Yeah, and the commute was really far down there. He's like, Dude, we have an SF office, we could have got you in. I was like The commute? They have a bus? Like a bus that basically has like a restaurant, cafe, like toilet, internet TV on the bus. That's not even a real commute anymore. Yeah, people on the bus complained. They're like, Oh my God, I like the the line for the pedicure on the bus was so long this morning. It's like I don't know what you're complaining about.

Anyway, so we made a decision. We made it was is we made a really hard decision. Ended up fine, but I I guess like my point is It's really hard to forecast and predict these things. And especially hard to forecast and predict. What stock is gonna be worth down the road. That's awesome.

Uh so so uh I have another topic that I want to go to. Right. Quick I two quick ideas. One is around what I just talked about, predictions. So Um

There's this company that Uh, Brandon Sant Me. That's called Fresy taste. I I don't even know what this it's a horrible name. Pressy taste.

You go to pressy taste.prcast.com. And it's some kind of like Basically it's a prediction engine. I don't even honestly know exactly how this works, but basically what it's doing is It's using data like um Cameras, um like historical trends, whatever.

And what it's trying to do is tell the person in the back Like how many burgers to put on the stove? Like how how many how many fries to take out of the freezer? Uh'cause it's basically like how can we help you predict Demand. And so this idea aside, I actually think that there's like a lot of

different ways, but this is really valuable. So for example We own a e commerce store. And we're always trying to predict like how much inventory should we order. We're ordering, you know, six to nine months in advance sometimes. And it's so hard to forecast what's the world gonna be like six months from now. It's like oh yeah, turns out there was a pandemic, a war a war. Like in you know

STIMI checks that like caused everything to go up and then like everything to go down and then shipping w broke and like it was impossible to predict. But Every but like every better prediction. Saves us a lot of money. And so I actually think that there's like a whole bunch of business problems.

That entrepreneurs could go after that basically just help you predict how much demand there will be. There's a couple different ways you could go about this. So for example, For our e com store. It'd be nice to know how other ecom stores are trending. Are we all trending up, trending down by how much percent year over year in our category?

Because that would kind of tell us like where the overall market demand is. Uh another prediction might be Yeah, if I'm a if I'm a restaurant, what is the foot traffic or the sort of drive through traffic like this time of year, right? September or in this weather pattern. How much traffic should I expect today? That might tell me what I need for staffing and for

Yeah, food. Today versus any other day. And if you just think about like If you can be smarter and cut waste. Like ten to fifteen percent.

In in these types of businesses and these types of industries. That's probably gonna add up into like the tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars per year of money saved. And uh so I think these businesses are very interesting. This whole like demand prediction. uh industry is very interesting to me. Dude, I have done a ton of research in the trends predic predicting business. Obviously, like we have this thing called trends. And before launching that, I was like what What should we do? I think I told you about this years ago, but everything I'm about to say is from years ago of research and I'm doing it mostly off memory. So I uh I'm gonna be a little bit off, but not totally off.

But have you heard of this company called W G S N? I think I told you about them. Yeah, they're the ones who like They like say like The color of the year is lavender and the smell of the year is like, you know Yeah, or whatever. But listen to this. So they're publicly traded. So these numbers are actually facts. So the two thousand one sorry, two thousand twenty one revenue was ninety one million Yeah. Pounds.

It's British company. So ninety one million pounds. So I I don't know what that would be. Yeah. Yeah, like I don't know the conversion of monopoly money to real money, but uh no, ninety one million pounds Yeah, listen to their adjusted EB or their EBITDA was forty one million. So basically for every dollar they made, uh, forty five was like net income profit. And what they do is

They tell you which colors are gonna be popular. And I'm pretty sure the product it they they only have sixty five hundred customers. So it they're paying like twenty five grand a year or something like that. And I think the product basically Is a quarterly PDF. That tells you what colors they think might be popular. And I'm almost positive the way that they get this is they put like tablets at fashion schools and they just ask students like what they're feeling, what they're liking. Things like that. So it's like they're asking fashion people, I guess the people who are like

I guess they like like are you a hipster? Are you a gay guy who lives in Fort Green, Brooklyn? Like what like whatever you the qualifications are for like you are whatever you think is cool. The normies, you know, like me are gonna like start wearing, you know what I'm saying? Like when I ten months later. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, do you are you an eighteen year old who has a hundred thousand followers on TikTok? Check. Oh, okay. So like whatever they think there's gonna be cool, that's what they like what they predict is gonna be cool. And uh it's just a PDF and a real life use case of this is like Starbucks is gonna like make a hundred thousand uniforms.

Millennial Pink is the new color. So therefore let's make sure our name tags are this color. So it's a no brainer to spend twenty five thousand dollars to get this like quarterly PDF, as well as the ability to like DM someone who works at WGSN and say like Which shade of green is like the thing that we should be using. And so that's an interesting business in this trend predicting uh space. I um I talked to somebody who does like a fashion company or whatever.

And they were like. Yeah, as you can tell, I wear a blue shirt. My fashion sense is frozen in like the third grade, right? Like I was writing cursive the last time I thought about fashion. The um And they were like lemons so in this year. And I was like what like I didn't I didn't understand their time. What does that mean? A lemon fruit.

And they were I I thought they were talking about like literally like what you eat and they were like, No, as like a print or a pattern or a color And I was like, Okay, it's I was like, it sounds like you're just making things up. And they just pulled up their dashboard and they were like No, like W look at the difference between like lemon and pineapple. And it's like lemon is pineapple recently, weren't they? It was. Uh uh Pad up is a bad example, but it was like, you know, basically like you you can just pick

Is apples hot right now? No. Apples apples are fucking out, dude. Apples are like, you know they're so out right now. Lemons are so in. Pineapple are so in. Lamas are so in. It's like a picture of a lemon on a shirt. Yeah, like a design with a lemon on it or a pattern or whatever, right? Like Um, or or you know, same thing with like scents and color palettes and things like that. And so And I was like, there's no way. I was like, this is all just like, you know, isn't this just You know, ad agency fluff.

They're just fluffing each other with these like, you know, random ass like things and they're like, No, like this stuff is like the Bible to us. We We need to know what people are caring about in order to do that. I don't know if it's this exact W S N or whatever, I don't know if that's the exact one, but they're like this concept. Of like Knowing which colours

Which sense? Which which styles, which uh like um are in so that's so exhausting. Yeah, it sounds like a horrible business to be in. Like if I'm gonna be in the fashion business, I'm gonna be in the men's tuxedo business. That shit has not changed for literally A hundred years. Have you seen Jack and Titanic?

I'm going straight big and tall for men. Cause literally the only criteria is like Do you fit? Right. If you fit, you're in. If you don't fit, you're out. That's what I like. I like a simple yes or no when it comes to fashion. It's just do you fit or not? Because I just can't find stuff that fits. Dude, fashion's exhausting. I I I that's not a business I want to be in. Although I do think like

There are some brands. You know what brand freaking crushes it and I never buy any other stuff though because it's just too expensive. But a Louis Vuitton Louis Vuitton. Uh there are like suitcases. Louis Becan, yeah. L P

Um Dude, they've crushed it for like A hundred and fifty, two hundred years. And it's the same ass logo. The same colours. And it's just timeless. I do love those timeless things. They they do there's there's like a little arbitrage going around. I don't know if you've seen this, but like uh

With a few months ago s somebody said this. They're like'cause the dollar, the euro like got to parity. And The luxury stores hadn't changed their prices. So basically like um things were always typically priced higher in dollars than in euros. Uh or whatever. So might get that backwards. But like

You the a Louis Vuitton bag, you if you were in Paris, you could buy it in Euros for a certain price. That same bag was selling for more that same day if you just sold it in US dollars to a US customer. And in Paris you would also get the VAT refund so you'd get You basically net getting something like Thirty to thirty five percent.

Undermarket. And that was like your spread. that you could then go and sell it for in the United States. It was like kinda crazy. And so Um There's like a whole businesses that are around these like

The version of a drug mule, so it's like You can just pay someone who's traveling. to like stuff a Louis Vuitton bag in their in their suitcase and bring it over for you across the border. And um Just because like, you know, going m flying to Europe to do this yourself is kind of inconvenient, but there's already people flying from Europe to the US every day.

And so there's whole businesses that are based around this like travel arbitrage and flippers like that. I just did research on one of these that I discovered. It's called Grabber. So the URL is G R A B R Dot I. O. So they went with like the misspelling and the dot I. So you know they're really a startup. But if uh

Grabber dot IO and their whole chick is shop anywhere, travel everywhere. I guess that's a really bad tagline. But basically what it means is It connects you with people who are with these drug mules, these Louis Vuitton mules. It connects you with people.

who are going to Overseas places. And you they'll buy shit for you and you'll give them the money and it's like a marketplace for that. This is I've got the stupid ex example of that. There's this thing called a wicked laser. 'Cause I'm like a grown up. Is the part just like you're self describing a standard laser? Or is it actually called back? I'm a twelve year old but money. I found this laser online This laser pointer online

That's so strong that they made it illegal in America? And if you shine something, like a piece of paper, it catches it catches fire. And you can have it because it reaches jets in the air. And it's a Chinese company. And

Obviously I saw this laser and it's a three hundred dollar laser, but you could only ship it to someone in Canada. And I'm like I want A laser that can light shit on fire. Like why do you not want that? That will go perfect in my collection of like tasers. This one laser. I have a BB gun. A blazer for Ben's warehouse, a chaser and my laser.

So I I had to find someone who would buy this in China for me and get it from Canada to America for my three hundred dollar laser. Wow. You should go work at grabber.io. That's what you should go do. Yeah. We're just gonna sponsor every incel like uh subreddit like Do you like lasers? Tired of not getting your laser? Tired of driving to Canada for your favorite lasers. Just grab her. Someone grab it for you, bring it to you. Twelve year old with money?

I saw this TikTok. Speaking of cool lasers, I saw this TikTok of A laser pointer that somebody was in their bed and they're pointing it at their light switch and they go watch this. On the light space they go it and they apply just enough pressure to the lights just to turn it off. And I'm like, This is not real. I was like, I don't know how this is edited. But I was like the comments were like

Bro, it's not real, but like How does it work, though? I know this one isn't real, but could it happen? Just grabbing your laser pointer off the bedstand and turning your light off. That's Dude, so just imagine getting an Instagram ad where you see a guy go watch this and he shines something across the room and it lights it on fire. That's what I got caught with these wicked lasers. Wait, so how did the wait, how'd the light switch go down? Oh no, man, I I never got to the bottom of it. I liked and followed to find out for part two. They got me.

They said if I didn't forward that that TikTok to ten people, my family would die of lasers. So I had to do it. So stupid. I want to tell you about another thing that's kinda interesting. So you know like I think you met up with this guy. I think his name he's like strip mall guy on Twitter or real estate guy. Yeah, I know I know it's really the same guy. I'm one of the few people. Yeah. No, well Sure. Strip ball guy. Is his fake name supposed to be Trent? No.

Uh no, there's another guy who's real strip. Maybe they're two different guys. Real estate train and strip mall and strip mall guy. Yeah, I met up with the strip mall guy. And uh we became friends and so I've to make sure I don't accidentally say his name. So one of those guys, I forgot which one now, sorry. uh tweeted about private security. Uh man, private security is booming right now. I know so many cops I've seen so many cops who retired.

And um Are just doing this because it's better money. And I was like, what? Like, okay, tell me more. And so um and so I started looking into this and basically very very Very briefly, but

Do you know much about this like private security, uh like Yeah, like Trend or industry? I know that we used to hire them for our events because the insurance made you have one and w you and I had a buddy who we knew Who s or a friend of a friend who started a security business.

He started like an Uber for bodyguards, right? Like Did it work? He tried no i that one failed, but he tried to make it like Sexy. It's like he just needed to do it, not sexy. So basically, okay, so there's some big players in this thing. So private security. So there's companies like Securitas. Or if you just go to AUS dot com, it's Allied Universal Security, which I think those are multi billion dollar companies.

Yeah, so one's eleven billion, the other one's seven billion. I think they do everything from like mall cops to airports to events to whatever else. But like it goes like smaller and smaller and more niche like down down as you go, like corporate security. So for example I remember when I was at at um working at a company I saw on the CEO's calendar. A a meeting that was like with

Like the private security detail to go over like The latest updates to the private security. I was like Got private security? It's like Oh yeah, like you know it's Worth I'm rich, worth a lot. Like, you know, like worth a lot to this company. So the company literally pays for private security for the executives.

Um To be able to to you know to go out and do their thing and be be safe. And so I found this kinda interesting and it makes it like it makes sense to me and and uh

It makes sense to me that there's like A private world out there for kind of like retired either army, you know, military or police. That might be higher paying and potentially, you know, an easier job um than what they're doing today. Who who were the executives that had security?

Uh, but which comp you did you say the company? I didn't hear you. No,'cause that would be easy to figure out at that point. Yeah, I I uh You know, like uh Zuckerberg and Bezos, they release what their security budget is each year. And I think Bezos Was six million.

Which is To me, not a lot of money. Um Right. F for Facebook, they they said last year twenty six million was spent on Zuckerberg and his family, which was six percent higher than in twenty twenty. So that's kinda crazy, right? Twenty six million just on his personal

Uh security. You know how many people work uh work for the secret service? No. Six thousand. You know how many people they protect? Yeah, you know how many people they protect.

Twenty five. Twenty five people. Spoken like a man who owns a taser and a laser. No I met a secret service agent at a wedding this weekend and I just asked them everything. I go, Tell me everything. And I you know, they couldn't tell me anything really. Pretty shitty secret service guy. He's like big fan of the pot, happy to share. They just read out the Wikipedia to me, but like uh it was pretty interesting. Um

That's cool. No, I don't know anything about security, but I think it's but I think it's Speaking of TikTok, there was a a TikTok of a guy who saw Jeff Bezos on the corner in Seattle, just like w waiting to cross the street. And he's just like, Hey Jeff and he like had his TikTok recording or whatever and he's like, You know, how's it going today? He's like Go going fantastic. And he's like, you know, he's ready to like walk across the street. And they go and somebody w in the comments was like the top comment was like

Check out the hand on the security guy. And you look and he had basically a false I think it was like a false hand. And his and basically his real hand is like in his pocket, like probably holding a gun. Or a taser of some g some kind of weapon and he just had a like a kind of a fake hand out. And I saw that and I was like

That's awesome. That's awesome. Dude, you know what's even weirder is there is a I l I'm a UFC Super fan. There was a fight backstage amongst the UFC fighters and security got involved. And I kept wondering Who the fuck is doing UF security to keep the UFC fighters from not fighting each other? Yeah. You know what I mean? Like what what like what type of job are are they getting into, you know what I mean? Like they just see like something happening and like what are you going to do? Well

You saw the the woman that Dana White hired. The Best Buy lady. Did you see this? Yeah, she was a football player. She like kept the woman or someone was trying to rob the best buy and she like got down low and like an O line like it was like pushing her out of the way. Yeah, the robber was trying to run out the store and the security guard from Best Buy just starts blocking this person from getting this guy from getting out and he's like

He's desperately trying to get out'cause he can't just be like stealing and just get caught inside the store. And she just ends up tackling him into like a bunch of boxes. She gets fired from Best Buy, because Best Buy's like, Hey, uh Liability you attacked a Yeah, attacked somebody in our store and she's like, Oh my god, I'm doing my job. I'm a security guard at Best Buy. What did you want me to do? And Dana White was like, That's bullshit like he went on Instagram was like

Who is this woman? I wanna hire her and she's like now his like personal security guard or something like that. Like she works for them. Really? Yeah. Dude, I always see those guys and I'm like who Like you need like an Israeli trained, like secret service agent to like I mean who are you gonna have to protect a UFC fighter from hitting another UCR. All the ex Jerry Springer uh security guards have years of experience breaking this up This episode's really good off a tangent but do you remember how remember Steve the security guard from Jerry Springer who also probably like the top earner

on cameo right now. Um Oh shoot. I think Gilbert just died actually. R I P but whatever. Uh I guess I've figured this out. Did you know that DMX died? Yeah, dude.

Yeah, I saw that. You knew this information, you went held it. That reminds me of when Dave Chappelle D Dave Chappelle was talking about like celebrities and how it's weird they talk to them during tragedies and he's like Just imagine like nine eleven and And Ja Ja Rule was like being interviewed actually and they're like where You know, we we need Ja right now to make sense of this tragedy. Where's Ja's Jay Someone go get me Ja. We need Ja to make sense of this strategy this tragedy.

That's what that's like you're wondering like wh why didn't anyone fill me in that the DMX had passed? Uh but yeah. By the way, did you see this uh this blog post is we'll we'll close on this little last random thing, but um Check out this blog post. So this guy listened to the episode that we did with Rob Dierdeck, which is probably I don't know, if not the most popular episode we did, one of the most popular episodes we've done.

Uh people love that one. And one of the things that Rob w the one of the reasons people love it is because turns out The kind of fun loving skater guy from MTV, like Turns out he's like an absolute nut when it comes to personal productivity and like personal efficiency. Yeah, his quote on there was I am human optimization. And one of the things he had said was that he writes his wife a handwritten note every day. So this guy

wrote this blog post. It was like the top post on Hacker News over the weekend. And it's called Write a note to your spouse every day. A noted a note of day keeps the divorce attorney away. And he goes, um, you know, I was listening to my first million And uh Rob Deerdick was on there and he says that uh he writes a note to his wife every day because sometimes

Uh, otherwise she would be the last person to hear from him at the end of the day. About what he was working on, how he was feeling. He was usually tired by then. And wasn't really giving it, you know, his A plus. See it goes for the last six months I wrote a night a a note to my wife every single day. He goes, All right, that's a lie. You know, I I did it most days, but like whatever. Here's how it went.

And he goes, It's amazing. Like we're on the same page about like what's going on in our lives, our kids, our finances, how we're spending our time. We talk more than ever now. Um You know, we have more trust, we feel less stressed, we're less aggravated with each other. And like we're better parents because we're kind of like more in communication with ourselves. Um Uh about parenting.

And he goes, You know, here's why. Writing is thinking. So just writing helped me clear my mind. It wasn't just me dumping my thoughts onto her, it was me like Getting my own mind clear. And he gives this outline. He goes, Here's what I write. First I write Gratitude. Like

Something about her, you know, for her, for how hard she works, for her looks, whatever. Then what I'm working on today, uh and like my goals or my deadlines. Anything I'm excited about, anything that's bothering me. Uh any ideas I have, just like random ideas on my head about parenting or fixing stuff around the house. Um transactional stuff like oh, we need to remember to do this. We have to do this, but don't forget that. Um questions like, Hey, are we going to that thing or hey, did we ever book that? You know, hey, do we have an event coming up?

Uh, and lastly, again, gratitude for the life we have, the l the things we have, the time we have, the kids we have, et cetera. Because I don't do all these sections every day. But those are the general categories of things I try to write. Uh it takes me just about thirty minutes if I'm not distracted. And uh you know.

Turn yeah, it's been a huge like win for me. Is it like a physical note or a email? I think it's a physical note. Uh not a hundred percent sure. I guess I should start doing this. That sounds pretty cool, right? And then he did this YouTube video with his wife, like Where they both like talked about afterwards'cause the post blew up on Hacker News it got like probably, you know

hundred thousand views or something like that. So then they like did an interview together, like talking about this little habit. Pretty cool, right? Yeah, this is awesome. Uh I just DMed him while you're talking saying this is uh amazing. And this is a really good headline. Right a note Write a note to your spouse every day. A note a day keeps a door divorce attorney away. This is a really good title. This is a beautiful find.

Um I think I guess I'll start doing this, right? This is pretty sick. It sounds smart. Maybe I'll start by talking to her and then I'll No, that seems like a no brainer. I'm like reading this and I'm like

Huh. All upside. Pretty much no downside. Why am I not doing this? Right? Good for me. How can I weasel out of doing this? Sorry, my brain's not coming up with any valid reason not to do this. No, like the calculations are like going in my head. I'm like, huh. Yeah. You seem like a good husband. You you probably already do this. You probably leave a sticky note on our pillow every morning.

No, not at all. I I as I was reading it, same thing I was like, Why would I not do this? It seems really obvious, but apparently no one does it. My first movie better husbands one episode at a at a time. I feel like we had to we had to leave'em with something useful because we definitely got off on like, you know A tangent's tangent during this episode. Dude, it worked for Rob. I mean Rob is like successful Have you seen his wife? I mean, she's very beautiful. I'm pretty sure she was like a a playmate.

Uh like a Like a like a I don't know what the word is, Playboy model or something. I mean she's like Uh I'm definitely doing this now. Why did this guy write so many words for the picture up to be done?

If you Google here's how you who here's one of the ways that I knew that Rob was like crazy rich. If you Google Rob Deirdick home, there's like thirteen different articles. And it's like all about like a different ten million dollar house. Did you mean homes? Did you mean mansions? Yeah, and he buys all these houses. And uh he seems happy. He's got his act together. So yeah, I'm on board, I guess.

I guess I'll do this. Fine.

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