SPEAKER_03
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SPEAKER_01
If you have $10 million at a jawline,

SPEAKER_02
Jess is all in, Sam is all in. Yeah, definitely all in. So I love this guy.

SPEAKER_00
I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off on a road.

Let's travel never looking back.

SPEAKER_03
I have a feeling you're coming with fire or something. You seem fiery today.

SPEAKER_01
I got some good stuff. 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.

SPEAKER_04
Stop scrolling. You have 24 hours. We're Carol Lunka, 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.

SPEAKER_01
Carol Lunka, go off. I bet you can do it.

SPEAKER_04
This year, we're trying to grow our fan base. So for the first 15 people who DM us on Instagram in the next 24 hours, we're going to send you a special gift. So I bought the DM us now.

SPEAKER_01
So the beginning of the audio didn't play there, but it goes, do you recognize these people? And it's like Biggie, Poc, whoever like just like a bunch of famous rappers. It goes, stop scrolling. And then he basically does this little thing.

So I was like, so Ben, leave you, Ben sent this to me. And I was like, what is this amazing this? Let me, I must swipe up. I 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 team. And it just says, it automatically sends them a message from you saying, send me the free gift.

Okay, so that happens. And then 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 below some of your research.

So they go, yo, Sean, what's good? So they use my name and 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 rap group. And it's basically like introducing themselves. 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, you know, for your gift, we wrote your own custom song.

We personalized the lyrics just for you. And so, you know, let me know what you think. It links to their SoundCloud.

And it says, Sean, king of the first million. That's the name of the song. So then.

["The Homey Sean"]

SPEAKER_05
Oh, yeah, the homey Sean, he run it up, ain't no underhand. Got his dogs with him, yeah, that's the gang. Hope you understand.

I saw the homey on Twitter, now he done messaged us. Invest your funds with a fee out of E.T. Get it done, but I can't afford it to keep a real Sean's a busy dad. He been providing a feed of meals.

Still these other rappers I got in my custody.

SPEAKER_01
So they sent the song and I'm like, OK, I don't know what's happening right now, but like this has never happened before where you go from, there's an Instagram ad about a band that you never heard of that 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 follow it up again. They're like, yo, I don't know if you're in New York.

I'm going to pretend you are. We're doing a show. Here's the here's a 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.

It's like rolled down. I don't know what is going on, but this band is kind of genius in the way that they're promoting themselves. And they're still small.

They're called Kara Lanka. They're still small. But when I saw this, I was like, 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? It's like, there's a lot of 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 is amazing.

SPEAKER_03
Is this 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?

SPEAKER_01
Well, it's not just that. Like it's not just to buy tickets to a specific show. It's basically the way I think about it is every business you got to find a way to get like your first 100 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 every business has this. And so the question is like, how do you actually do that? And at YC, they have this thing that they say, do things that don't scale. They talked about the early Airbnb guys, how they used to go and 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 going to 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 going to get a thousand people to really love us.

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 kind of sort of like you.

Or, oh yeah, we got 10,000 views on this thing. I say, okay, but 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 goes deeper down your funnel. So I think that this is amazing because they're brute forcing that thousand fans who really care about them.

SPEAKER_03
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, let's see, but I think Mr. Beast is his whole operation is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

That's a pretty brute force. I don't know what it looks like, but just talking to him, fairly unsophisticated operation. I think when I talked to Nerdwall, you know, Nerdwall, it was a blog that was at the time making like 30 million in revenue.

And I think like 15 million in profit. Incredibly, I like saw a little bit behind the scenes, super unsophisticated. 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 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.

SPEAKER_01
So our buddy Ryan Hoover built product time and he listens to POT as well. He came on the POT as well and told the story, but I was there kind of like front row when he was building that thing. Meaning like, I think I'm user number 17 in product time history or something like that.

Like very, very early, first dozen people or so that were on the platform. 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 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 human invite system, the notification system, the retention system. He was all of it. And at the time I was like, this guy is literally like sending out like hundreds of personal welcome emails a day, maybe a hundred personalized tweets per day.

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

He'd 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 25 people. And he didn't even have his own website.

He was using this thing called LinkyDink at the time. It was like some third party tool to go use. And every day he would send out the email, email digest in the morning of the cool stuff people posted.

And then he would tag each person with an individualized thing. Oh, Sean, I know you guys had once looked at building a product like this. What do you think about this? And he'd get you to share your thoughts because 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 $20 million? 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 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 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 trends 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 didn't build that. You just literally went on there and typed a title in and hit enter. And then, but what made the Facebook group good was 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?

SPEAKER_03
100% it was intentional. And so what 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.

SPEAKER_02
You know, it's Sean, Sean has done all these impressive things, funny seeing you here, how cool.

SPEAKER_03
If you have any questions for Sean, just like ask them right here in the comments. And I would do that all the time. So I would add these people who did that.

SPEAKER_01
That worked by the way, because I was like, oh, shit, this group has cool people. And it's in reality that you added 300 paid members that I've never heard of. And then you added one interesting person, but you made the intro post baller.

You're like, you ever seen a plane fly? Yeah, that's because of this guy. It was always the most like baller intro. You're like, did you know they didn't have $100 bills till this guy came around?

SPEAKER_02
It's like, wow. I did that all the time.

SPEAKER_03
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 talk about it. Or B, I would write comments for smart people 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 when HubSpot was looking to buy us, I saw that Brian Haligan, the founder and then CEO of the company, he joined.

And I messaged like 80 people and I said, hey,

SPEAKER_02
reply to Brian, here's a message to say to him.

SPEAKER_03
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.

SPEAKER_02
And I remember thinking like, got them, got them.

SPEAKER_03
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 is a good example of people who have grown without like really caring about 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.

SPEAKER_01
And I'm gonna give you another 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 you shouldn't be able to keep this up like Airbnb still does that photographer thing, by the way, they turned that unscalable thing of them going to people's apartments, taking photos for them and saying, hey, 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 that they actually turned it

SPEAKER_03
into a scalable thing. And that's another thing when people talk about, well, that's not scalable. It's like, 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 5,000 employees.

Like 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.

SPEAKER_01
Most things can scale past what most people think. Like, you know, this also happens in engineering all the time. You work with engineers and they're like, well, we're going to need to build it right before we launch or we're going to need to build it right because this won't work in production.

And so this won't work when it scales. It's like, did 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. 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.

SPEAKER_03
And like- Dude, 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 the first or second employee was this Mexican guy. And you know, he, 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 so my friends who were early there, they told me, yeah, like it was kind of thrown together and kind of 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.

SPEAKER_01
And think about how many rules of Uber got violated of, how many rules of startups that Uber violated. So for example, Uber founders, Travis and 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 first version of the app. They outsourced the coding. Yeah, most of the investors who invested in Uber would tell you, if you're 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, yeah, this is not, yeah, no go. Okay, then what's the next thing? Then they literally broke actual laws. It was like running and they got a cease and desist from San Francisco saying, hey, for every day you're operational, you owe us $5,000 per day.

And they just kept going. Then the next, they just violated rule, another one at the time. I remember at the time when Uber first came out, Airbnb 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, ah, no, Bits, not Adams. That was like a common phrase in Silicon Valley, which is you wanna do startups that are software based because 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, some people will say, oh, they're right. Uber's not that profitable. But the reality is that the founders and investors in Uber did fantastically well scaling this thing up.

And it was kind of a narrative violation. There was all these narrative violations, all these general rules that were broken that like today, if you said, yeah, 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 worked.

SPEAKER_03
All right, everyone, today's episode is brought to you by Imperfect Action, hosted by Steph Taylor. It's a podcast on HubSpots Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Imperfect Action is a bite-sized online marketing podcast for business owners.

So join Steph Taylor, as she answers all your business marketing questions that deep dives into the nitty gritty of online marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, and marketing for strategy for business owners. A few recent episodes include some of the biggest mistakes you can make with your launch. Another one is why growing your audience feels so hard in 2022.

And another one is five ways to make content creation less consuming. So check it out. It's called Imperfect Action.

You can look it up wherever you get your podcasts. Dude, we gotta go on a quick story tangent. There's this guy named Scott Belsky.

You know Scott?

SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I like him a lot. I like to think of Fresno, the reality is I've talked to him twice.

SPEAKER_03
Yeah, friendly with him. He invested in my company and I've hung out with him once or twice. He doesn't know this, but he's kind of like, I'm his secret admirer.

He's like this good-looking handsome dude who dresses nice and seems really wealthy and rich. And I see him, I'm like, dude, you're the best. And I've talked to him.

SPEAKER_01
If you have $10 million at a jawline,

SPEAKER_02
yes, it's all in. Sam is all in. Yeah, definitely all in.

SPEAKER_03
So like, I love this guy. And he's great. So basically, I gotta tell you a quick Scott Belsky story.

So right now he's like 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 is one of like the 30th largest companies in the world. I think their market cap is like $300, $400 billion. And Scott Belsky is, he's pretty young.

He's in his early 40s. And 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 26 years old, I was starting my company called Behance. So Behance 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 grandfather started like Kaplan, you know, Kaplan University.

Oh, no way. Yeah. And so I was like stereotyping him as, oh, you guys just, you had everything handed 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 90 grand a year there. And when I left, I had like 50 or $60,000 saved. I started Behance.

It didn't go very well and we bootstrapped it. And I noticed that with Behance, we were getting a lot of traffic from two different websites. The first was called StumbleUpon.

And people and designers would post school designs and we would get traffic from StumbleUpon. And the second was a small company called Pinterest. And I emailed both these guys.

And this was, I forget, what year, 2011, 2010. 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 are these websites? And this guy, Ben, told me about this website called Pinterest. And then this guy named Garrett told me about StumbleUpon. And Ben was like, hey, I'm gonna raise a little bit of money.

Do you wanna invest at the $3 million valuation? And Scott was like, dude, I only have like 50 grand. And, but I don't wanna like look like a noob to this guy, whatever, I'll invest $15,000. And that's a big deal to me.

And then Garrett was like, hey, my friend and I are starting this other thing. None of us are gonna work there because I'm too busy running StumbleUpon. But it's basically like a car service.

And Scott was like, I don't wanna invest in a limo company. Like there's no way a limo company is gonna take off. But like, I don't wanna look like an idiot.

This guy's been sending me some traffic. And I kinda wanna like appear a little bit like a big shot. And so he gave him $15,000.

I think at a $3.5 million valuation. And he did both of these in a span.

I think of about two weeks. So he's like, I basically had like 50 or 60 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 him each $15,000 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 looked it up and I was like doing the math. And I'm pretty sure each of these $15,000 checks turned into around 50 to $100 million each inside a span of like, you all 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 another thing a lot of people don't know is Behance, his company sold, I think for $175 million. And I think he owned, he told me around 70% 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 want to look silly.

SPEAKER_01
That's a, that's an amazing story. I love that story. It reminds me, I just got a DM from this guy.

By the way, this is nowhere near 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 there's a guy who, I don't know, maybe six months ago or nine months ago, something like that.

I was like getting kind of interested in the like AI stuff about like, you know, these basically artificial intelligence that can create art and things like that. And I'd said something offhand on the pod. So somebody reached out and they were like, Hey, you know, heard your interest in this.

I'm trying to make apps that will do this. We just released our first one. You know, I want to see what you think about it.

And you know, we're raising a little bit of money. We'd love to see if you wanted to invest. Never replied.

I get another DM or no, I see somebody mentioned this app and I go, I go click on the founder and I click the DM. Oh, this guy DM me a while back saying, I invest, I should, I should see how it's going. So I go, Hey, how's the biz going? I'll share a screen show of 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 then I released another one and it's also been downloaded like a hundred million times. And yes, really, it's going really well, man. How are you? Oh my God.

I'm currently walking off of a cliff because I never responded to that initial DM.

SPEAKER_02
You were like, well, I recently switched from trader shows to whole foods, I've been tearing with that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01
I just did my 401k match.

SPEAKER_02
Yeah. That's pretty fascinating. You sure buy it not much, you.

That's crazy.

SPEAKER_01
I want to share one other story that's kind of 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 have done it a bunch of times. So that's, you know, people normally try to go learn from that mentor type people, people that are in the game. There 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's 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. Because if you ask the same question to all three, you're not going to get valid information.

You're not going to 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 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 sort of the 19, 21 year old or whatever, I don't know how old they were at the time, maybe 21, 22.

Dylan and Henry, they were fans of the pod. Then they offered to come help us with our video setups at the time.

SPEAKER_03
Well, and previously they were fans of the pod 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.

SPEAKER_01
Exactly. And that became a full on agency that does pretty well. 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. 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. But you can go look at the views. Nobody watches the thing.

But that's OK. Like, 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 kind of studio setup in my garage at the time.

And I went out there, you guys need some water? You guys all right? You guys, have you guys eaten anything? I was like kind of like parenting them. I was like, you know what? Are you guys OK? What are you doing here? 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? I was like, give me advice.

Like if I was your friend and I'm like, you guys got a podcast, that's pretty cool. Like most people you raised don't have a podcast. What's your 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, we kind of, we like podcasting. It's fun. So that's why we do it.

The second thing is 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.

So 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, it's another smart thing.

And I go, but nobody's watching your shit, right? So like, is it even working? It's kind of like what you were saying about this band thing. Like, does this even work? Like this is cool. It's interesting.

But is this valuable? Like, is this actually going to work? Yeah. And he goes, oh, I'm just waiting. He goes, nobody watches it today.

He goes, but someday 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, basically, we just want to have a rabbit hole for you to go down. Because if anybody ever gets it, like today, nobody's interested. But if people ever get interested, I want to have this bank of content that they can go binge.

And sure enough, after like, you know, 45 minutes down this rabbit hole, you're going to 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 I was like, that's really fucking smart.

I was like, that's the way to think about content. Because most content doesn't just like immediately hit and blow up. But you want to have this.

And I thought about it because 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 dig, 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'd be like, this guy is awesome.

This girl is amazing. And they had to create that like library of themselves, that personal library to go and let you binge. And I thought about it because you know the band, like the guy, Macklemore, the like the famous rapper guy.

I remember maybe 10 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 binge 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 do in this show at this small college in Wichita. Oh, we like we're waiting every day right now.

We're waking up at this time. We're trying to record in the studio because we suck at create the creative process. So we're just trying to train ourselves, right? They were just like just kind of sharing along the way.

And we watched this stuff and we were like, I remember these videos had less than a thousand views or like 700 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 treasure.

SPEAKER_03
Dude, people say that in our comments on YouTube.

SPEAKER_01
Like, oh, I'm like, I'm surprised this isn't bigger. Like I'm happy to be here.

SPEAKER_03
Yeah, they're like, they're like, I'm happy we're catching up. Yeah. And that that definitely gives me encouragement. It makes me happy.

But yeah, people say that. And are you literally they know that like our podcast has like 10 times more downloads. So they're like, oh, this little shitty podcast only has 10,000 videos on this thing or 10,000 views on this thing.

And I'm like, yeah, we suck. Sure.

SPEAKER_01
Please share, please. Yeah. But I'm a big fan of this binge bank concept. I once I once they said that that clicked with me, I started thinking 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 know YouTube is kind of structured this way, but I kind of wish that you could just have a thing which is like your greatest hits. It's like, yo, if you if you're kind of interested in me, this is the curated rabbit hole.

It's like 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 kind of stupid, but like, you know, it captured how I was thinking at the time.

SPEAKER_03
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, none. So I read a ton of biographies 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.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 the guy who owns the Cleveland Cavaliers or I forget. He owns everything.

And so like his company got it was called Rock Financial originally. His company got popular in the 90s. And so I just Google Rock Financial, Dan Gilbert, set newspapers.

com to 1985. So I knew that's when he started to 1990 and then went public in 92. So I was like, I want to find everything.

I read all of these articles 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 tools, newspapers.com. The second one for anything that's internet related is 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 OK. And it also makes me feel like, all right, it's OK to be shitty even at this size. It's OK to be only OK around this size.

You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_01
Totally totally. Yeah, you go look at early startup landing pages. I have a blog post about this actually like 10 throwback 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 lunch? Like 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.

SPEAKER_03
So this guy DMed me and I found his YouTube video and it was really amazing. So basically this has got me thinking on this whole topic. But in 2014, 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 2014. 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 if you Google like Rahul Tech, Tech jobs and I bet you it will come up. So basically I'm going to summarize it, but here the video is great.

But here's basically the offers that he got. So the offers that he got from Twitter with a combination of stock and salary was 190,000 with a combination of stock and cash. His Facebook offer was $200,000 a year.

His Microsoft one was around also $200,000 a year. His square one around $160,000 a year. And this is both a combination of stock equity and sign up bonus.

And his Google one was $250,000 a year. Now fast forward eight years. What would that stock plus cash be worth? So basically the cash is mostly stagnant.

I think he added like an 8% annual growth. The stock, he looks at what each, 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 his Facebook's first year comp went from 200 to 220. His Microsoft comp, it started at 200.

If you fast forward today, it would be worth around $300,000 a year. Now here's where things get interesting. His square stuff and he was only 22 when he graduated or something like that.

And his first year salary and comp back then would be $160,000. Fast forward, the stock is now worth a $580,000. And his Google stuff was worth $250,000 a year.

Now worth almost $700,000 a year. 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 that I didn't think was any good because the recruiter said, you know, if square one day becomes a $7 billion company, the stock that we're offering you now, it's only worth $100,000 over four years. It could be worth $400,000. But he goes, I'm really doubtful that square will ever be a $7 billion company.

Now it's worth $50 billion and it's down right now. I think at its peak, it was $70 billion. 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 going to grow at 7% a year every single year, that's actually kind of hard to understand. But that what that means is going to double every 10 years.

If it's going to grow, if it's going to grow at 30% a year, which a lot of these tech companies are, that means it's going to double, I think, every two or three years. And like exponential growth is really hard to understand. Another thing that is really interesting is leveraging offers and negotiating is very possible, even if you're a 22, 23, 24 year old.

And so you always do better when you have another offer in hand and you play them off one another. And finally, the most important thing for people listening, employees at tech companies, 100% can get meaningfully rich. And 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 and they hire tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands a year.

So it's not like that coveted. 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 you're talking about Square being worth like, you know, it might be worth seven billion dollars. I have a very small lens here, but I see what the private company valuations are. They have reset and even better, the public companies have reset.

So we have Square, Facebook, Twilio, maybe Robinhood. I think like a company like HubSpot or something like that, a coin base. 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 could be worth potentially eight figures in 10 years.

SPEAKER_01
That's really interesting and a great ad for HubSpot. Very well done, very native. I enjoyed that one.

When we were selling Bebo, 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 not papered, but like only because we turned it down early, but he was interested. The Discord offer and and I did an exercise recently where I looked back and I said, what was I thinking then? Because I wrote it all down and 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 walk through this.

SPEAKER_03
Yeah, let's go through each one.

SPEAKER_01
So for example, we'll start with the one that's relevant to what you're talking about, which is the stock. So basically Discord was like, look, we like you guys. We think this is cool, but 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.

SPEAKER_03
So what would 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.

SPEAKER_01
Yeah, less than four years, three or 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, you know, one and a half, two billion.

So let's say two billion or no, I think at the time Discord was valued at a billion and it was one billion then. And he goes, you're basically just betting that Discord can be worth five billion. If it gets to five, then this is the best offer.

And if it's not going to 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 was a big admirer of Discord.

I was like, Discord is kind of amazing. The CEO at Discord, Jason, he's kind of amazing. He of all the meetings that we took, I thought he was the, he was actually the most impressive in there.

And he cut straight to the chase and was like, yeah, I'll do this. No, you know, the cash is going to be small, maybe one, two, three million. And then the rest will be stock.

And so, you know, you guys have to, you know, is that interesting to you? And at the time I was like, no, because that sounds really speculative and like illiquid and like, I can't go buy anything cool. And I can't like 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 15 billion now.

So it would have been by far the best deal.

SPEAKER_03
If they gave you a million dollars of stock and private valuations, that would be worth 15 million dollars now in four years.

SPEAKER_01
Right. Right. And we were getting more than a million dollars of stock if we had done that deal. OK. So it was the worst deal. It would have turned out to be that.

So now that there was one caveat, which is it was going to be vested. So, you know, I'd also have to spend, you know, three years earning that stock for four years earning that stock, which I didn't. Yeah, you probably would have been fired way before that.

Yes. So, you know, one of the odds I was going to capture all that, I don't know. But like it just shows, you know, how our brain is not really like the idea of Discord becoming worth 15 billion was not really like it didn't seem very likely.

But in actuality, the odds were probably in its favor, but it seemed like a very low probability thing because it just sounded big. It sounded like a big jump. It's like, am I betting that discursing become 15 times bigger than it is today? And actually, yeah, I did like the user base grew by two or three X.

The monetization grew, the the overall market grew. And there's like all these different ways that you just multiply these things together and you get to 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 hard to say it's illiquid. Then the next one is the Facebook offer. And it's like, all right, well, Facebook's offer is higher in cash, higher in stock.

But we don't know about this. We don't know exactly which stocks are going to prefer better Facebook or Amazon. They both seem like great stocks.

And so then it came down to intangible factors. And we ended up ruling out Facebook for some intangible factors, which were in retrospect, somewhat silly reasons to decide. The first was 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, man, this is just going to be like another startup. Like they're they're 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, man, we're going to be pushing a boulder up the hill. I was like, I just want to go join the Warriors and play on the winning team.

SPEAKER_03
Facebook just hadn't decided they're going to win yet.

SPEAKER_01
Yeah, exactly. And also, like my mentor was like, that's such a stupid way to think about this. Like you're going to walk into Facebook and they're going to be like, cool, game streaming is over here.

And you're going to be like, actually, I'm going to wander around this area over here. I'm going to go play in virtual reality. I'm going to go to AI.

I'm going to go to the news. I'm going to get is like, you can just walk into any other department you want. 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 going to be like there. And like you have no idea what your day to life is going to be like there.

And he was absolutely right.

SPEAKER_03
By the way, have you ever been to the Facebook campus? Yeah, it's it's basically just like 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 of 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.

SPEAKER_01
The barber. That's that's the biggest one. I was like food.

I expected. But when I just saw you 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 haircut.

That's kind of amazing.

SPEAKER_03
Yeah, they're like, it's free. All you have to give us is your life deal.

SPEAKER_01
Yeah. Did you say there's two pizza shops? How much of the Facebook?

SPEAKER_03
So a million in Facebook back four years ago would be worth what?

SPEAKER_01
A million in Facebook stock would have been it's gone, I think, up 30% since then. So it's like, you know, a million would have been 1.3. Right. So that's the like where the stock landed at its peak. It was double.

So at its peak, it would have been double. Right. So and so in that one, we made the mistake of basically optimizing for really intangible things. One one that seemed really tangible was like, they weren't going to take our whole team and I was like, oh, I don't want to like toast at the celebration party of this acquisition and be like, but not you for they didn't hire you guys.

So like, you know, it's been awesome. The rest of us were going to go and you guys, you won't believe the recommendation letter. I'm going to write you right.

SPEAKER_03
Like that would have been here's some cab money. Thanks for your last night. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01
So that was that wasn't going to 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, oh, 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, oh, yeah, I guess I should.

SPEAKER_03
The commute, they have a bus, like a bus that basically has like a restaurant, cafe, like toilet, internet, TV on the bus. It's not even a real commute anymore.

SPEAKER_01
Yeah. People on the bus complained. They're like, oh my God, like 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.

We made a really hard decision. And it, whatever, it ended up fine. But 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 going to be worth down the road. That's awesome. So I have another topic that I want to go to.

All right. Quick ideas. One is around what I just talked about, predictions.

So there's this company that Brandon sent me that's called Pressy Taste. I don't even know what this is. It's a horrible name.

Pressy Taste. You got a pressytaste.prcitaste.

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 cameras, like historical trends, whatever.

And what it's trying to do is tell the person in the back how many burgers to put on the stove. Like how many fries to take out of the freezer? Because 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 an 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 going to be like six months from now.

It's like, oh yeah, it turns out there was a pandemic, a war. Like, you know, stimmy checks that like caused everything to go up and then like everything that could go down and then shipping broke and like, it was impossible to predict. But 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. And there's a couple of different ways you could go about this. So for example, for our e-commerce store, it'd be nice to know how other e-commerce 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. Another prediction might be, you know, 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, you know, food today versus any other day. And if you just think about like, if you can be smarter and cut waste by 10 to 15 percent in these types of businesses and these types of industries, that's probably going to add up into like the tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars per year of money saved.

And so I think these businesses are very interesting. This whole like demand prediction industry is very interesting to me.

SPEAKER_03
Dude, I have done a ton of research in the trends predicting business. Obviously, like we have this thing called trends and before launching that, I was like, what, what do we do? I think I told you about this years ago, but everything I'm about to say, it's from years ago of research. And I'm doing it mostly off memory.

So I'm going to be a little bit off, but not totally off. But have you heard of this company called WGSN? I think I told you about them.

SPEAKER_01
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, lily or whatever.

SPEAKER_03
But listen to this. So they're publicly traded. So these numbers are actually facts.

So the 2021 revenue was 91 million pounds. It's British company. So 91 million pounds.

So I don't know what that would be. I don't know what that would be. $30. Yeah. Yeah. Like I don't know the conversion of monopoly money to real money, but no, 91 million pounds. Listen to their adjusted or their EBITDA was 41 million.

So basically for every dollar they made, 45 was like net income profit. And what they do is they tell you which colors are going to be popular. And I'm pretty sure the product, they only have 6500 customers.

So they're paying like 25 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 going to like start wearing. You know what I'm saying? Like what I'm saying?

SPEAKER_01
Nine months later, 10 months later. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03
Yeah. Oh, do you, are you an 18 year old who has 100,000 followers on TikTok? Check. Okay. So like whatever they think there's going to be cool, that's what they like, what they predict is going to be cool. And it's just a PDF and a real life use case of this is like Starbucks is going to like make 100,000 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 $25,000 to get this like quarterly PDF as well as the ability to like DM someone who works at WGS.

I didn't 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 space.

SPEAKER_01
I talked to somebody who does like a fashion company or whatever and they were like. A fashion company or whatever. Yeah. As you can tell, I wear a blue shirt. My fashion senses, you know, frozen in like the third grade, right? Like I was right in cursive the last time I thought about fashion.

And they were like lemons so in this year. And I was like, what do you like? Like I didn't even understand they were talking about. What does that mean? A lemon? Like a fruit? And they were, 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. 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 what? Look at the difference between like lemon and pineapple. And it's like lemon. The pineapples were everywhere recently, weren't they? It was a bad example, but it was like, you know, basically like you 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. Pineapples are so in. Llamas are so in.

SPEAKER_03
It's like a picture of a lemon on a shirt.

SPEAKER_01
Yeah. Like a design with a lemon on it or a pattern or whatever. Right. Like, all right. 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 WSN or whatever. I don't know if that's the exact one, but they're like this could be concept of like knowing which colors, which scents, which which styles, which are like, dude, is that so that's so exhausting.

Yeah, it sounds like a horrible business to be in.

SPEAKER_03
Like if I'm going to be in the fashion business, I'm going to be in the men's tuxedo business. That shit has not changed for literally three years. Have you seen Jack and Titanic? No, I'm not even that shit.

SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I'm going straight big and tall for men because literally the only criteria is like, do you fit? You fit? If you fit, you're in. If you don't fit, you're out. That's your only, I was like, that's what I like.

I like a simple yes or no when it comes to fashion. Do you fit or not? Because I just can't find stuff that fits.

SPEAKER_03
Dude, fashion is exhausting. I that's not a business I want to be in. Although I do think like, there are some brands, you know, a brand freaking crushes it and I never buy any other stuff though because it's just too expensive, but a Louis Vuitton, Louis Vuitton, they're like suitcases.

Louis Vuitton. Yeah. LP. Dude, they've crushed it for like 150, 200 years, and it's the same ass logo, the same colors, and it's just timeless. I do love those timeless things.

They do kill it.

SPEAKER_01
There's like a little arbitrage going around. I don't know if you've seen this, but like a few months ago, somebody said this, they're like, because the dollar and the euro like got to parity and the luxury stores hadn't changed the prices. So basically like things were always typically priced higher in dollars than in euros or whatever.

So I might get that backwards, but like you, the 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 30 to 35% under market. And that was like your spread that you could then go and sell it for in the United States. It was like kind of crazy.

And so there's like 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 suitcase and bring it over for you across the border. Just because like, you know, flying to Europe to do this yourself, it's 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, I just did

SPEAKER_03
research on one of these that I discovered. It's called grabber. So the URL is G R A B R.

I O. So they went with like the misspelling and the dot IO. So you know, they're really a startup, but it's grabber.

io. And their whole shick 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 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 example of that.

There's this thing called a wicked laser because I'm

SPEAKER_02
like a grown up. I'm like, is the wicked part just like yourself describing a standard laser? Or is it actually called that? I'm much well of your old money. Basically there's these.

I found this laser online, this laser pointer online that's so strong that they made it illegal in America.

SPEAKER_03
And if you shine something like a piece of paper, it catches fire and you can't 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 300 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 from Benz Warehouse. I had to find someone who would buy this in China for me and get it from Canada to America for my

SPEAKER_01
300 dollar laser. Wow. You should go work at grabber.io. That's what you should go do.

SPEAKER_03
We're just going to sponsor every incel like subreddit. Do you like lasers? Tired of not getting

SPEAKER_01
their laser? Tired of driving to Canada for your favorite lasers? Use grabber. Someone grab it for

SPEAKER_02
you. Bring it to you. 12 year old with money.

This is so stupid. I saw this TikTok speaking

SPEAKER_01
like 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. And they just held it on the light switch.

They go, and they apply just enough pressure 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? I know this one isn't real, but could it happen? Because imagine not having to get out of your bed to turn your light off at night, just grabbing your laser pointer off the bed stand and turning your light off. That's

SPEAKER_03
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 called these wicked lasers.

Wait, so how did the, wait, how'd the light switch go down?

SPEAKER_01
No, man, I never got to the bottom of it. I liked and followed to find out. They got me.

They said if I didn't forward that, that take back to 10 people, my family would die of lasers. So I had to do it. Oh, you're so stupid.

I want to tell you about another thing that's kind of 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.

Yeah. Yeah. I know. I know. I know.

SPEAKER_03
It's really like that guy. I'm one of the few people. Yeah. No. Well, strip ball guy is his fake name. So it's be Trent.

No, there's another guy who's real

SPEAKER_01
straight. Maybe they're two different guys. All right.

I think strip ball.

SPEAKER_03
Real estate Trent and strip mall and strip mall guy. Yeah. I met up with the strip ball guy and we became friends. And so I have to make sure I don't accidentally say his name.

SPEAKER_01
So one of those guys, I forgot which one now. Sorry. Tweeted about private security. They caught my eye because he goes, man, private security is booming right now.

I know so many cars. Like I've seen so many cops who retired and just doing this because it's better money. And I was like, what? Okay, tell me more.

And so I started looking into this and basically, you know, very, very, very briefly. But do you know much about this like private

SPEAKER_03
security trend or industry? I know that we used to hire them for our events because the insurance made you have one. And you and I had a buddy who we knew who's a friend of a friend who started

SPEAKER_01
a security business. He started like an Uber for bodyguards, right? Like did it work? He tried. No, that one failed.

But he tried to make it like sexy. It's like he just did not sexy. So basically, okay, so there's some big players in this thing.

So private security. So there's companies like security toss or if you just go to a us dot com, it's allied universal security,

SPEAKER_03
which I think is like multi billion dollar companies. Yeah. So one's 11 billion, the other

SPEAKER_01
one's 7 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 as you go, like corporate security.

So for example, I remember when I was at working at a company, I saw on the CEO's calendar a meeting that was like with like the private security detail to go over like the latest updates to the private security. It was like, you got private security? It's like, oh, yeah, like, you know, it's worth 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 to be able to, you know, to go out and do their thing and be safe. And so I found this kind of interesting. And it makes it like 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

SPEAKER_03
than what they're doing today. Yeah, I, you know, like 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

SPEAKER_01
of money. Facebook, they said last year, 26 million was spent on Zuckerberg and his family, which was 6% higher than in 2020. So that's kind of crazy, right? 26 million just on his personal

SPEAKER_03
security. You know how many people work, work for the Secret Service? No. Six thousand.

You know how many people they protect? Yeah. You know how many people they protect? 25, 25 people.

SPEAKER_01
Spoken like a man who owns a Taser and a laser. Dude, I just, no, I met a Secret Service agent at

SPEAKER_03
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.

I was gonna say pretty shitty Secret Service guy.

SPEAKER_02
He's like, big fan of the pot. Happy to share. They just read out the Wikipedia to me, but like,

SPEAKER_03
it was pretty interesting. That's cool. No, I don't know anything about security, but I think it's

SPEAKER_01
speaking of, speaking of Tik Tok, there was a Tik Tok of a guy who saw Jeff Bezos on the corner in Seattle, just like waiting to cross the street. And he's just like, Hey, Jeff, and he like had his Tik Tok recording or whatever. And he's like, you know, how's it going today? Whatever he's like, going fantastic.

And he's like, you know, he's ready to like walk across street. And they go and somebody in the comments was like, the top comment was like, check out the hand of the security guy. And you look at he had basically a false, I think it was like a false hand.

And his, basically his real hand is like in his pocket, like probably holding a gun or a taser of some, some kind of weapon. And he just had it like a kind of a fake hand out. And I saw that I was like, that's awesome.

That's awesome. Dude, you know, what's even weirder is

SPEAKER_03
there was a, 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 UFC security to keep the UFC fighters

SPEAKER_02
from not fighting each other. Yeah, you know what I mean? Like what, what, what, like what

SPEAKER_03
type of job are they getting into? You know what I mean? Like they just see like something

SPEAKER_01
happening and like, what are you going to do? Well, you saw the woman that data white hired,

SPEAKER_03
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

SPEAKER_01
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 because 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 buys like, Hey liability, you attacked a, you attacked somebody in our store and she's like, Oh my God, I'm doing my job. I'm the security guard at best buy.

What did you want me to do? And data white was like, that's bullshit. Like he went on Instagram was like, who is this woman? I want to hire her. And she's like now he's like personal security guard

SPEAKER_03
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 going to have to protect a UFC fighter from hitting another? It's all the x Jerry Springer

SPEAKER_01
security guards have years of experience breaking this up.

SPEAKER_03
This episode is really good off a tangent. But do you remember how? Remember Steve,

SPEAKER_01
the security guard from Jerry Springer? Probably like the top earner on cameo right now.

SPEAKER_03
Next to Kevin from the office or Gilbert Godfroyd. Oh, shoot. I think Gilbert just died

SPEAKER_01
actually RIP, but whatever. I guess I guess you know that DMX died. Yeah, dude.

Yeah, I saw that.

SPEAKER_02
Yeah. You treated out. Why didn't you tell me you knew this information? You with Elvin? Reminds me of what Dave Schupell.

You know, I don't leave my house. Dave Schupell was talking

SPEAKER_03
about like celebrities and how it's weird. They talked to them during tragedies and he's like, just imagine like 9 11 and and jaw jaw rule was like being interviewed actually. And they're like, you know, we need jaw right now to make sense of this tragedy.

Where's job? Someone go give me job. We need job to make sense of this strategy, this tragedy. That's like you wondering like, why did anyone fill me in that the DMX had passed? By the way, did you see this? This blog post

SPEAKER_01
is a little close on this little last random thing, but check out this blog post. So this guy listened to the episode that we did with Rob Dierdek, which is probably, I don't know, if not the most popular episode we did, one of the most popular episodes we've done. People love that one.

And one of the things that Rob, one of the reasons people love it is because it 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. 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.

And so this guy wrote this blog post that 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 noted a keeps the divorce attorney away.

And he goes, you know, I was listening to my first million. And Rob Dierdek was on there and says that he writes a note to his wife every day, because sometimes 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.

So he goes for the last six months, I wrote a note to my wife every single day. He goes, all right, that's a lie. You know, 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 or kids or finances, how we're spending our time. We talk more than ever now.

You know, we have more trust, we feel less stress, we're less aggravated with each other. And like we're better parents because we're kind of like more in communication with ourselves 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 under 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, and like my goals or my deadlines, anything I'm excited about, anything that's bothering me, any ideas I have, just like random ideas on my head about parenting or fixing stuff around the house, transactional stuff like, oh, we need to remember to do this, we have to do this, but don't forget that. Questions like, hey, are we going to that thing or hey, do we ever book that? You know, hey, do we have an event coming up? And lastly, again, gratitude for the life we have, the things we have, the time we have, the kids we have, etc.

I don't do all these sections every day. But those are the general categories of things I try to write. It takes me just about 30 minutes if I'm not distracted.

And, you know, it's been a huge like win for me. And then he did this YouTube video with his wife, like where they both like talked about afterwards, because the post blew up on Hacker News, it got like probably, you know, 100,000 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

SPEAKER_03
awesome. I just DMed him while you're talking, saying this is amazing. And this is a really good headline.

Write a note to your spouse every day. A note a day keeps a divorce attorney away. This is a really good title.

This is a beautiful find. I think I guess I'll start doing this, right? 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 playmate, like a, like a, like a, I don't know what the word is, Playboy model or something. I mean, she's like pretty amazing.

Yeah, I'm definitely doing

SPEAKER_01
this now. Yeah, I guess I'll do this. Why did this guy write so many words? Well, anyhow, it's like,

SPEAKER_03
if you Google, here's, here's one of the ways that I knew that Rob was like crazy rich. If you Google Rob Deirdic home, there's like 13 different articles and it's like all about like a different

SPEAKER_01
five or $10 million house. Did you mean homes? Did you mean mansions? Yeah, and he buys all these

SPEAKER_03
houses and he seems happy. He's got his act together. So yeah, I'm on board.

I guess, I guess

SPEAKER_00
I'll do this. Fine. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like no days on on a road.

Let's travel never looking back.