4 A.I. Business Ideas To Start Using Dall-E, GPT3 & Deepfake Technology

I think this is one of the multi-billion dollar trends that like you could be on right now. And I don't say that for hyperbole. Like literally this is the window. The tech is just now finally good enough. It's not quite there, but you need to start now and you could disrupt all of these marketplaces.

All right. Uh, I went out with, uh, Hassan last night for dinner. Can I tell you about it really quick? Do it. It was awesome. So he like admires you a lot. Do you know that?

I admire him a lot.

So, uh, you pronounce his name Minhaj or Minaj? Minhaj, right?

I think, I think his name is actually pronounced Hasan Minhaj and everybody calls him Hasan Minhaj because it sounds awesome and it's like Nicki Minaj. Nicki Minaj. And so, you know, whatever. I don't know what the— I don't know how strict he is on that.

Well, we— so basically the story of this is Sean interviewed him last year. I thought I saw him on the street and I ran up and like went and said, hey, and it actually wasn't him. And I looked like an idiot and I tweeted about it and he texted me. I guess he got my number from you and he texted me and we went and hung out. So this guy's like this, you know, pretty big deal comedian. He is so smart. He's so much smarter than I am. And that's what I learned that. And number 2, I was so intimidated to be around him because I didn't know if like, if I was like, can I make him laugh? If I can make him laugh, I'm like, this is a win. And I really didn't. I didn't make him laugh. I failed. I did not. I could not make him laugh. And he like showed me these books that he's reading and I wanted to Google Like, I wanted to tweet this out, but I was too embarrassed. So maybe you could tell me. But I like, like Googled like books on how to be funny because after I hung out, after I hung out with him, I was like, dude, this guy's got me in a trance. He could tell me about anything. He's so funny and good at storytelling. Like, I'm so into it. And I was like, I want to figure out how to be funny. And I went on Amazon and I Googled like how to be funny or like how to be clever. And do you remember years ago when I wrote that article about this guy who games the Amazon Kindle system to rank really high and It's like shit books, but he like buys reviews. Dude, it's like 6 of the top 10 on page 1 were all him. It's all this guy. I know the author. I know the guy's name. So it's all bullshit. What is there? Are there good books that I can read, you think, on how to be funny or how to be clever? Like, I felt like such a nerd. Like, I was going to tweet this out, but I'm going to look like the biggest virgin on earth. Just like, how do I, like, be clever in a conversation?

Yeah, I don't know, dude, that I feel like this is a, um, it's like a, it's like a skill that's only passed down, like, you know, by hand. And you can, it's only like trial by fire. Like you have to like learn this when you're 12 and get good at like busting people's balls and like saying the funny thing in class. Um, like Theo Von has this like hilarious, I know you like Theo too. So he has this hilarious story. He tells, he goes, dude, I was in my like freshman. I remember the first time I realized I was funny as a comedian. He's like, I was a freshman year at college. And I was going to school in Louisiana or whatever. He's like, and my professor said to our class, he was like, you know, look to your left, look to your right. You know, statistics will say that, uh, you know, one, one of the, one of the three of you, uh, one out of every three people are going to end up being like a child, uh, whatever, molester or something like that. He goes, and I stood up and I just go, not it. He's like, he's like, that was the moment. And first of all, it's just a hilarious story. And secondly, uh, I think there's some truth to like, you have these little moments where you get rewarded for being funny early on in life and you're like, ooh, more of that, more of that.

All right.

How do I get more of that? Last, I want more of that. And then you just keep doing it.

Talent's real, but I think it's a, I think just like anything, like, you know, some people will never be able to dunk, but you definitely can improve. You can learn how to dribble better than before. For sure. Like there's gotta be a skill. There is definitely a skill here. You know, I think like the best are definitely just born better, but I can be good. I can be good at—

There's a YouTube video that you should watch. So I've gone down this rabbit hole, probably also after I met Hudson, and I was like, shit. He would tell me a story on the pod where he'd be talking and I'm so into the story. I'm like, you know, what is it, eating out the palm of his hand? And then he would ask me a question mid-story and I just— I'm like nodding, like I'm still listening, like it's a TV show. And then I didn't realize that he said something to me. Like he said, he was telling some stories like, everybody's got that kid growing up. Like you had that kid. Who, who was it for you? And I was so enthralled by the story that I was just like, yes. And I realized that it was like, oh, he asked me for a name. And then I thought about who that would be because I said now I'd said yes, that there is a kid. And he's like, who was it? And I was like, I can't remember any names growing up. I'm so into you that I've like forgotten who I am and my entire past. And so, you know, that was what was happening when he was telling stories. But he, I asked him afterwards and I think he gave me a YouTube video that was fun that, that he, that he is like, this is kind of interesting. Um, so it's called Mark Normand, How to Write a Joke. And I think it's like an hour-long podcast. So it's the, the thing is called Writing a Joke with Mark Normand. And Mark Normand's a good joke writer. He's a funny comedian.

Um, yeah, he's great.

And this 1-hour thing, he like kind of, breaks down some of the, the like mechanics of what makes something funny. And it's not like follow this, these 3 easy steps and you too can be funny, but it is like, oh, okay, I can see how this, like, if I constantly, if I consistently practice these mechanics, I can take something that's like not so funny and make it funnier repeatedly. And then like from there there's more, there's storytelling and there's setups and there's like tagging jokes and there's other like things that you got to learn, obviously, if you want to do this well. But I think that video is pretty good.

I'll watch that.

100,000 views.

There's these guys who have this YouTube channel called Charisma on Command, and it's a beautiful name. They've been doing it forever. Have you seen these guys?

Yeah, I remember for like maybe 5, 7 years ago I was like watching those videos.

Yeah, and they're cool. They're— it could be a little lame because it's a, it's a little bit more on like nerdy guys how to meet women, which is cool and fine, whatever. But like You know, I was not trying to— I was dating my wife at the time, so I was like, well, I just want to learn how to be like more charismatic. And I remember their name and they like taught a course on it and like they had all this stuff. I was like, that's a beautiful name, Charisma on Command. I'll watch that Mark Norman joke. But anyway, hung out with this dude last night. It was dope. He paid for dinner. So good first date. It was awesome.

Did you try to pay? Did you do the thing? No, no, no.

Oh, for sure.

A lot me.

But I, you know what's funny is when I go to— he like liked this. We went to Gramercy Tavern, and he likes that place, which is, I guess, is like a fancy or kind of fancy place. And I was like, dude, you come here a lot? He goes, yeah, I love it. I go, I'm not even gonna look at a menu. Whatever you wanna order for me, just, you just do it all. And that's, that's how I love, I love going to restaurants like that. I do that all the time. I'm like, I, I don't care. I eat meat and vegetables, get whatever. So I was, I was eating meat.

The best is then after they order, then you complain. Uh, you gotta do that too. That's the, the true D-bag move. By the way, you know, one thing people liked from the last pod, or maybe a couple pods ago, I got a bunch of DMs about this. They were like, dude, I love the homie move that you said. And I was like, I don't even remember what he's talking about. He's like, remember the homie move? That's like one of the top 10 things you've shared on the pod, which was you were like, dude, guess how many blah, blah, blah. And when you say that, obviously it's something impressive, but I kind of guessed low so that you can have your punchline where you're like, 100 million. And I'm like, oh, I only said 10 because I kind of knew it's more than 10, but let me give you this. Moment. People love that. Uh, that was hilarious.

Yeah, I saw the comments. People did dig that on YouTube. Uh, all right.

Um, so I made a little vow to, uh, myself to bring more specific ideas and stories, uh, to the pod because I personally love the free-flowing, just like whatever, wherever our conversation goes, it goes. But I want to make sure that, you know, we have the entrée not just tapas. It's not just the appetizers. I want to have the entree. So let's jump into a couple ideas here.

I got a few too, or I got one big one.

I'm going to go one and then you go one. All right. So we've talked about this a little bit in the past, DALL·E and like how much AI is advancing. And I don't know if it's just like my TikTok feed keeps feeding me these, but every day I see a new incredible thing. That AI can do.

You have to explain what DALL·E is.

That has just blown me away. What's that?

You have to explain what DALL·E is.

Oh, DALL·E is a program. It's an artificial intelligence program. Um, DALL·E 2, I think is the current name of it, that basically you just type in any word and it generates images on that. So you could be like, Sam Parr, you know, um, fishing, and it will just generate images that like look like they're either hand-drawn or like a stock photo that are Sam Parr fishing, even though no such image exists. Let's say it will create the image. So it like flips the whole idea of like creating art or taking photos or, or painting something. And it kind of like flips it on its head. It's like, no, computers and robots can now do that almost as good, if not in some cases better than what would be, you know, the real thing or humans, human stuff. And so you see that. You see deepfakes, like there's videos where you'll see the Mona Lisa and then they're like, watch this. And they push a button and all of a sudden the Mona Lisa starts turning her head and she starts rapping like, you know, Notorious B.I.G. And it looks like the mouth is like in sync with the lyrics and the thing looks real. It's like, yeah, they just took, they can take an image and they could turn it into a video using AI. Like AI can basically say, oh, if I have this image, I know where the eyes and the nose and lips are. I have been trained on what talking looks like, what singing looks like. What looking around and acting natural looks like. And I could turn any image into that.

And it's really good. It's really good.

They can take Barack Obama and they can make him like— this happened now with the Ukraine thing. They took the Russian president, like, and the way that people can Photoshop an image to make it look real, um, you could take Barack Obama and you can make it sound and look like he is saying something, you know, completely racist or whatever. So yeah, it's like, oh man, I can't trust videos.

Well, I heard a podcast about that particular one. I think someone made one of these things to show how amazing it is. And then they also showed— but here's the downfall— and they made Obama— I think he said the N-word or something like crazy, like not cool. And they're like, he said that. And that amazing— obviously he didn't, but like, it seems exactly like he said it. This is where it's going to get— it's going to get dangerous. Totally.

And let me— so, so I'll just keep going to some random examples. So there's another one where you you can draw like a very basic smiley face on, uh, on your iPad on this app called Procreate. Um, uh, and then you can— it's basically just like eyes, nose, mouth, and you're just like pencil drawing it. Then you change the brush to the AI paintbrush and you just kind of like shade in, like, you know, like when a kid would like scribble in a shape and it like colors in as if you like painted this in fine detail with the shadows and the colors, the— And all you're doing is literally just moving your hand like a fool. And it's like, it knows already what like high quality art looks like and it just turns your crappy art into high quality art. Um, there, it's amazing. And so every day there's all these little amazing magic tricks and they're not like foolproof yet, but the demo is getting ridiculously impressive.

And so I use it to come up with a logo for a business I'm thinking about starting. I use it to come up with a logo and it was awesome.

Oh, I do that all the time. Yeah. If you just Google AI logo generator or brand generator, there's like 4 websites that you can use. Yeah. And you just say like, like, I, you know, it's a legal, legal startup. The mood is serious but still sophisticated. Go. And it'll spit out like an infinite number of logo variations that you could then— and you could be like, cool, print this on business cards. That's like how they make money is like, print this on a business card. Or like, give me the high quality photo. You actually use it, right?

Like, I used it. I used it. Yeah. Normally what I do is I go to 99designs and I have like 99designs is amazing because you can get like 30 graphic designers to like make up a landing page and you'd be like, I like details from number 1, number 8, and number 14. And then someone combines all of them and they give me the one that I want. Whereas when you work with just one designer, you got to like, A, kind of be nice to them and be like, no, this, this is, you know, this is okay, but can you kind of change it like this? Instead, I could be like, no, this sucks, do this. But also, B, you can see all different combinations. And with DALL-E, I'm excited to use it in that way.

And so let me give you like, um, a couple ideas that I've had based off of what I've seen. So here's what I, I, I think these can be very big ideas. Now the problem with these, I'll, I'll tell the problem also, um, is that I think it's so easy to do that you're gonna have a bunch of competition. Um, so you know, you have to find a way to be defensible. But here, okay, here we go. 4 ideas that you can do with AI, um, like right now. Okay, so number 1. Is, um, uh, which one do I wanna start with? Okay. So number 1 is gonna be, uh, fake speech. So I'm investing in this company called Unreal Speech. Uh, I don't know if you've heard this, but check this out. This guy sends me fake, uh, deepfake audio of somebody, of Gary Vee and Jordan Peterson reading The Milk Road. So I'm gonna just play one of these. I think you can hear it. Let me just—

This is The Milk Road. The newsletter that brings you so much entertainment, news, and laughs, it should be illegal. Yeah, no, hypothetically speaking, of course.

Here's what's happening around crypto.

Dude, it sounds just like Jordan Peterson.

It's just like Jordan Peterson. Here's Gary Vee.

The newsletter that brings you so much entertainment, news, and laughs, it should be illegal. Yeah, no, hypothetically speaking, of course.

You can see it messes up sometimes.

What's happening around crypto. The new stablecoin on the block.

So, so you can—

that's amazing. That is so good. Is that, is that available?

Very little. There's very little training data. Um, and literally just like takes my thing and you could see the, the places where my, my written stuff is like kind of like casual. I'm like, you know, blah, blah, blah. It's like, it doesn't do that part very well, but the other parts it does like pretty dang well for a very small amount of training. Unreal Speech.

Is it available to everyone?

Yeah. So, well, it's like, it's like brand new. So, um, so he was like, hey, yeah, Sean, you want to never do an ad read again? He's like, you know, you have hundreds of hours of audio of you and Sam's voice that's on the podcast. Like, all you need to do is just say the word and I can make it so that you'll never have to do an ad read again.

Did he do it?

I can make you, I can make it so that the Milk Road, it'll auto-add a companion audio. Like if somebody wants to listen to the newsletter on the go, like it'll do it in your voice. Um, like I can just do that now. And I was like, wow, this is incredible. He's like, yeah. And the way we're doing it is cheaper, faster, and like more accurate than like the, the kind of the other models that are out there on like Amazon or whatever. Um, so it's like, you know, dramatically cheaper to do, cause this is a little bit expensive whenever you do this, cause it's like machine learning, but the cost just keeps falling every year. And then there's techniques to make it even smaller. And so think about this, like language translation. So for example, there's a world where we do this podcast and Unreal Speech could translate this into another language in our voices with our tones, but just speak in another language. And so now all of a sudden our podcast is in, you know, is being, you know, done in Spanish and in French and all these other languages. And so we could grow without having to actually do extra work ourselves.

Damn, dude, that's crazy.

All ad reads, stuff like that. So I think that's a, that's a great business. There's also, um, yeah, there's, there's other kind of like use cases for it, but I'll, I'll, I'll leave it at that. Okay. Here's another one. Student essays. So I told you about that guy who made a thing called writelikeSean.com and it like, I like mentioned it in my email and it like blew up and like caused him to have like a $1,000 bill on his servers. And he, he was like, you know, oh shit. Like, you know, this side project now is like a, a financial burden for me. Um, but basically this guy, trained AI to write like I do, and it was pretty damn good. And I shared an example last time, but this is not like, has nothing to do with me. It's just you could take any corpus of text data. In this case, he just used my Twitter feed as like the, the corpus of text. It could train it to write like that. Well, there's one of the big things like, uh, you know, I don't know if you remember growing up, but like you get assigned, you have to write an essay in school and you know, some people would pay other people to do it for them. Some people would go find one online and try to plagiarize it. Well, this is gonna basically screw that whole thing up because I'm gonna be able to go on there and say, hey, write an essay about World War II and Germany's role in it, um, in the sophistication of a 10th grader. And it's just going to spit out a full essay or like 1,000 versions of an essay and I could just pick the one I like and I could just edit it in like maybe 5 minutes to like get rid of any like crappy computer mess-ups. Dude, this is wild.

You remember Turnitin.com? Did you have Turnitin.com? Like, it would help you, like, if you submitted— you have to submit an essay in high school. It happened. So I used to, like, I had this website that, like, would give you free essays and I would use them all the time, you know, and like most— well, I don't know if most people do it, but, you know, a lot of people do it. Some people out there will think this is okay. A person and a person did it and it was awesome. And I, you like rewrite it a little bit. But then they came up with Turnitin.com, which ended up becoming like a huge company and sold for billions of dollars, I believe, where you would turn in your paper essay, but then you also had to submit an electronic copy and it did a pretty good job of finding out if it was plagiarized. Frankly, I have no idea how it did it, and I don't actually think it's that sophisticated of technology, but they just sold to schools and they like trusted that it was legitimate. Because like if you just Google a phrase in quotations, you could see like where, you know what I mean? It's like not like that sophisticated of a, of a thing, but like it would alert teachers like, okay, like 98% of this is copied from somewhere else.

Right. But yeah, the teacher doesn't want to like Google, the teacher doesn't want to Google everybody's thing. So yeah, that makes, that makes total sense. And that's, that's exactly the case. I think you're going to have the creation of stuff, of content on the AI, uh, uh, auto-generated content. And then you're gonna have the fact-checking side, the detection businesses also. Both are gonna boom. You're gonna have things that's, that take a video and say, is this a deepfake or is this a real video? You're gonna have another one that's like, is this a auto-generated content or did a human write this? Like, it's like the opposite of CAPTCHA. You know, when you go to a website and it says prove that you're a human, it's gonna basically be like, prove this isn't a robot is basically what you're gonna have to do in order to trust that this person actually like did the work, that it's that's required for this. Um, so I think that that's gonna be like on both sides, there's gonna be businesses. I'll give you another area that's gonna get totally disrupted. Um, print and patterns. So people talk about like using AI for stock photos, using AI for maybe like auto-generated music. That's all gonna happen too. But here's what I think is like more, uh, more low-key. Like when, when, um, Patrick came on, he was talking about quilt businesses. So there's a huge market of just pattern making. So this is for all like clothing, you know, blankets, you know, curtains, whatever. Basically patterns and prints are everywhere, you know, in apparel and fashion. And so if you want to go and actually like make clothing, you will often use like websites that have large libraries of patterns and prints. What happens is today somebody hand draws each one of those. It's like, oh, this floral pattern or this, uh, you know, repeating pattern of, you know, whatever. It could be like fire trucks for like, you know, some kid thing or whatever. And then that person gets paid when you go buy that, buy that pattern, you buy it for whatever, $100. And now they get that as their like royalty stream. Well, this is all gonna go AI in my opinion. Somebody can compete with these, these, cuz the sites that do this, they're worth hundreds of millions of dollars. These marketplaces that have the creators and they have the searches.

Yeah, we talked about one of 'em. I forget what it was called. Called? I think, I think it had gotten acquired by GE for like $400 million. Yeah, Flower something.

Yeah, some flower, Flower Cloud or something. They, um, uh, what that's going to turn into is I'm going to go on there, I'm going to be like, cool, I'm making a, um, you know, a galaxy theme. I want a galaxy-themed repeating pattern. So I'm just going to write galaxy-themed repeating pattern and it's going to generate galaxy-themed patterns, and then they will be able to charge 1/10 of what the other sites do because there's no human involved, and they'll just keep all of that revenue for themselves. So they will become the supply side of the market. So this is like, you can build a billion-dollar marketplace because you now don't have to worry about supply. It's what Uber's trying to do with self-driving cars, right? It's like, hey, we can make these rides way cheaper and we can like, you know, make this whole system more efficient. We just gotta get to self-driving. And Tesla's trying to do the same with the Robotaxi. It's like, The big idea in, in transportation is getting rid of the driver. The same thing is gonna be the case with artists. It's like, we're gonna get rid of the artists. We're gonna not need somebody to do the photography, the videography, the music, the pattern making, um, you know, the, the voiceover work. That's what Unreal Speech is, right? It's voiceover work. Um, the, the, the essay writing, the 99designs, every single one of those, they're either gonna have to release this and kill their own supply side, or someone is gonna come and do it and eat their lunch. I think this is one of the multi-billion dollar trends that like you could be on right now. And I don't say that for hyperbole, like literally this is the window. The tech is just now finally good enough. It's not quite there, but you need to start now and you could disrupt all of these marketplaces.

Do you ever recognize stock image models on different websites? Yeah.

There's this guy who's in The Bachelor who's a stock image, uh, and he's like in like a bunch of like funny, like whatever, random like kids Halloween costumes. It's like, there's that guy. And then you see him again on this like hot sauce commercial. Like, there's that guy. And he's just like this generic smiling black guy. And it's like they just reuse him everywhere.

I saw like the lady that was on the Google Analytics page. It was two ladies and I saw one of them in public and I went up and got a picture with her and, and like I saw her and I recognized her. And then there was this other lady that was on the Google Analytics page. She's— it's like, it's always— it's like a lot of times the same person. It's like a racially ambiguous woman with like curly hair. It's like, you know, she could be Italian, she could be Black, she could be Jewish, white, who knows? Like it just represents everyone. And I see this woman everywhere on all different websites. I used her a couple of times. I love this lady and I get sick of using the same pictures all the time. So for some of my projects I've been using, if you, you can use DALL-E and you can use a couple other services and they'll give you fake people. So I have a couple of websites that have like testimonials and they're real testimonials, but I don't want to use the people's face because I didn't exactly ask them for it. It was like an email that they like wrote me, you know what I mean? I didn't want to use like their face because they didn't give me permission. But like, it's who cares? It's just a sentence. I can use that and I'll use— I Google AI sample faces and you can get all types of faces and you could say like, make this person this race, make this person happy, make them serious. You can change it and you can make them all types of stuff. And I've been using that for sample images because when we were running The Hustle, every once in a while we would like do it the right way where we would like use an image that was for commercial use. But sometimes it would get categorized wrong and we would, we'd get like a, what do they call it? Like a, I forget what it—

Violent notice.

Yeah, that's right. And they say like, you know, you have to— in multiple times we've had to pay $5,000. You know, you just like, oh, fuck, these guys, like they're going to cause an issue. We just got to pay them $5,000 and they're going to go away. But this is— we just— we're going to get, you know, we're getting screwed here, but whatever, we got to do it. So I've been using them for stock images so I don't have to worry about getting sued or get one of these cease and desist letters.

Totally. It's gonna be the case with stock images. You know, like designers always use these libraries of like icons and illustrations and there's like websites like The Noun Project and other things like that. So what DALL-E did was basically they just read all of the text on the internet and then they used it to create new stuff. And some people are like, dude, that's messed up. Like GitHub is doing this too. GitHub basically read all of the code that was on GitHub They had a crawler basically index all of that, learn, they fed all of that, that user data and they fed it into machine learning. And now they have this thing called GitHub Copilot, which is, I think like, I don't know how much it is, like $100 a month or something like that. But it basically is like, you know, if you're a programmer, we will, this GitHub Copilot can basically help you write your code. You're like typing your code and it'll just autofill, like autocomplete the line of code. So it's like, oh dude, that makes a, you know, this $250,000 a year software developer, more efficient and more effective and less bugs and less mistakes and less thinking. Uh, it lets a less talented person sort of create these functions and write code. And it's like a no-brainer. Like GitHub Copilot is going to generate like hundreds of millions of dollars for GitHub. That's crazy. They create this product, flip the switch, it's going to be a multi-billion dollar product line just because it's generating so much revenue.

Wow.

And some people are mad about it because they're like, dude, you read my code, you use my code as the training data. And I get nothing from this. Like, that's crazy. You're gonna basically put me out of a job by using my own data as the training data for this. And that's the same thing that's gonna happen with these, like these websites. By the way, Ben found, uh, Spoonflower was the name of the pattern.

Spoonflower.

So all you have to do if you're doing this is like, you're gonna go and you're gonna scrape and crawl Spoonflower. You're gonna ingest all of the patterns with all of the tags, and then you're gonna basically train it, train a dataset so that it says, okay, cool. The, this is what a pattern with X, Y, and Z keyword looks like. Great. Now you give me that keyword again, I can generate 500 new patterns from scratch. And Spoonflower is basically going to create its destroyer in that sense. It is going to— the data from stuff that's already on the internet is what's going to destroy those services. And I say it kind of in a violent way, like destroy and all that stuff. But it is true. These are going to be very competitive very quickly. And it's going to be like the same way that the chess programs got really good really fast. And all of a sudden it's like, oh yeah, a human cannot beat them. It's going to be like this.

The gangsta of graphic design.

Yeah, exactly. Like this thing is going to like enslave and pillage, you know, it's going to go to your village. It's going to kill the men. It's going to marry all the women and it's going to put the children to work. Like that's what's going to happen with this, these AI marketplaces. That's my prediction. So Ben, go to this website I sent you in the chat. Can you share this? Uh, Sam, I think you've used this before too, but it's a cool one for people who don't know. Um, It's thispersondoesnotexist.com.

Yes, that's what I used.

And so like, look at this guy.

That looks like you, Ben, kind of. I mean, just looks like a basic white dude. This guy, this sounds like a mugshot on Dateline.

It takes a quick picture of you from your webcam and it just makes someone like you. Um, this is a dude that— this person does not exist. That's an AI composite of a face. So you can use this face anywhere on your website, copyright free, because nobody's going to be like, hey dude, that's me. Um, this is like such a useful, funny website and it shows you in the bottom right, it'll tell you exactly how the image was created. It's like, it was imagined by a GAN, which is a type of machine learning thing or whatever. Um, here's how it works. You can use it yourself, you know, blah, blah, blah. And watch this. You can use it for cats and horses and chemicals. It's like this cat, this cat does not exist. And you can like click a cat and it'll like AI generate a cat.

Yeah, this is amazing. I usually just take screenshot of those and I use those on like different websites.

And so, uh, so yeah, those are 3, 3 ideas I think I said. Student essay generation, uh, Unreal Voices for voiceovers, um, and never, you know, never having to basically turning your voice into a programmable asset. And then patterns and prints. And that's just like, that's not even saying some of the obvious ones that I met, the other ones I mentioned, like stock.

This is great.

Million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool?

A billion dollars. All right. I have something for you. Have you heard of Jon Steinberg?

Is he the guy who did Cheddar?

Yeah. So listen to this story, and I'm going to— there's a reason why I'm telling you, but let me tell you the story. So basically, Jon Steinberg was the COO of BuzzFeed for a long time. I think when he joined BuzzFeed, it was like 20 people. So he wasn't quite the co-founder. But he was— he worked his way up to be COO, and he was like the ad sales guy who became COO, and he kinda was like pushing it hard, and it was almost like a co-founder of BuzzFeed. And he's incredibly aggressive, very aggressive. And he started this thing years ago, like 8 years ago, or maybe 6 years ago, called Cheddar. And the whole shtick was that it was gonna be a live TV station for Facebook Live. And when he launched it, we were just getting started, and he like messaged me, he goes, Have we met yet? Which is just an alpha, like, there's such an alpha way to like, hey, I forgot your name. It's like, dude, it's written. You just messaged me. Yeah. He was like, hey, Dave. I was like, dude, it's, it says Sam, right? We're on Facebook. I know.

Hey, sorry, I'm really bad with names and faces.

Yeah. What? He goes, have we met yet? We should meet. That's what he said. And I go, okay, cool. He goes, I'm in San Francisco. What's your office? I'll come tomorrow. That's what he said. And I was like, all right, cool. Yeah. So I hang out with him. Nice, nice guy. Incredibly aggressive. Basically told me that like BuzzFeed was great, but he wanted to sell or something, or I don't know if he said this or I read about it, but like he wanted an exit and it didn't happen. So like he was like, I'm just going to build this thing and I'm going to have an exit. And he told me, he goes, what's going to happen is I'm going to raise a little bit of money, like $30 million. It's going to do pretty good. And then a big cable company is going to buy us because it's just going to be cheaper for them to buy us than to go make one of these cable, uh, like a, like a 24-hour news network on their own. And they're just going to buy us for like $200 or $300 million. And at the time, and even at the time they got bought, no one watched this thing. You would go into the Facebook Live and like there'd be like 20 people watching at any given point. It was all on Facebook and like no one watched it. And I remember thinking like, this guy's crazy. This is not going to work. No one wants— this is This is nonsense. This is a bad business. This is a bad company. And 2 years in, he told me, he goes, in year 2 or 3, we're gonna get acquired for a couple hundred million bucks. In year 3, I think he sold the business for $250 million. 100% called his shot. If you Google Cheddar Acquire—

to a cable company also.

To a cable company, to like an Australian cable company that I never heard of. I think they're popular in New York. I think they have like a thing in New York too. And he sold it and he totally pulled it off. And he completely disappeared. He fell off the map. Before, he was like speaking at all these conferences, but he called his shot and he nailed it. And I remember talking to other guys who worked in the media industry and they're like, yeah, he told me the exact same thing and he absolutely called his shot. And this guy is so aggressive, man. He's a shark. Not in a bad way, but like he just bulldozed through this. It just put so much intensity and energy and he pulled it off. But the reason I'm bringing this up, he did it. And another woman who we're friends with, Rebecca, I asked her how she got popular on YouTube. She's like, well, I just quit my job and I like worked 50 hours a week and I had like, I got up at 9 and I like worked till 7. And like I studied the data and I just treated it like a business and it like became popular. Now I make, you know, 7 or 8 figures, whatever she makes a year, and I'm rich and famous and whatever. It worked because I was talented and I worked hard and I treated it like a job. What I think is going to happen, and this is a little circle jerky because both you and I like Twitter, I think that very few people take Twitter seriously enough to do that. You know, like 5 or 8 years ago, we'd be like, MrBeast, you're going to like Dedicate your life to YouTube. That's the stupidest thing ever. That won't work. Like, what are you doing? This is just a hobby. This is a joke. Now it's not. It's not funny. Like, we all know that. Like, that's real. You can become a YouTuber and, you know, you can be like MrBeast and make hundreds of millions of dollars a year. You become a TikToker and become like some of these other famous people and do all this crazy stuff. No one takes that seriously about Twitter where they think like, well, you know, if you just like quit and like take this seriously and like build a following and like write interesting stuff. And I think in the next 2 or 3 years, we might see like a few empires be built on top of Twitter. And it sounds kind of silly now because like, oh, it's just these like stupid, like, you know, Twitter threads of guys talking about X, Y, and Z and summarizing Wikipedia. And they're kind of right. But I think that there's going to be someone on Twitter that treats it kind of like Cheddar did. It's kind of like MrBeast, and they take it really seriously. And I think there's actually a huge opening and a huge gap in the market right now where very few people are taking it seriously. And it's incredibly easy to capitalize on this second right now.

This is one of the more interesting things I feel like you've said. This is— I actually, I don't even think you normally think like this. I feel like this is a, like a, this is not your— you say a lot of interesting stuff, but it's your, you usually fall into, I found this really interesting diamond in the rough. You're amazing at that. Another is, uh, I see what these people are doing and let me break it down in simple terms. Like all they're doing is X. And sometimes you're like, uh, you know, this is a trend or an industry I see. This is different. This is like, this is something, something different. So I like, I like that you're bringing this up. Let's break this down. So every time, you agree with me at first when you, I think you tweeted this out and I was like, I don't really understand what he's talking. I didn't really understand it. Uh, then you just explained it and it's, I'm starting to come around on it. I'm like, oh wait, he's kind of right. Every, big social media platform has like native stars. So yes, if you're, uh, you know, whatever, you're the president and you go on Twitter, you're gonna get a bunch of followers. That's one thing. But basically if you take every medium, so podcasting, you have Joe Rogan, you have like, then the people like Joe Rogan, you have the Call Her Daddies and you have like other, Tim Ferriss, you have other people who like, they become stars on that platform and they use that to build a pretty big empire, you know, tens of millions if not hundreds of millions that they can make off it. YouTube, obviously there's YouTubers. TikTok has TikTok stars, people who were not famous on YouTube but got famous on TikTok. Instagram also, right? There's Instagram models and Instagram like influencers that they were nobody and they became big on Instagram.

Multi-billion dollar companies. We're talking, you know, Kardashians, Rihanna, like these like huge things.

Well, I think they were— Rihanna, Kardashians, they were big off of Instagram. They were big without it. Like, Instagram also— and Instagram had turbocharged to them. But like, there are other people that are, you know, um, just Instagram. Like, Instagram made them famous. Like, Dan Bilzerian is a good example, right? Like, he's not famous without Instagram. Then with Instagram, he becomes famous, and then now he does multiple platforms, right? By the end, everybody does multiple platforms, but you kind of You're really good at the medium. So like, for example, Dan Bilzerian takes photos of himself blowing up cars with hot girls like in bikinis. Guess what? Instagram is a visual, like, you know, put one killer image on there and they're amazing at it. And so, uh, that worked really well there. You're kind of right. Who is that on Twitter? Who is, who is a Twitter native star? I don't even know what that would be. Like, is there somebody who comes to mind?

I mean, there's a, there's a few, like I would say like, and I'm on Twitter.

10 times a day. Like, how do I not know this?

Like, you and I are like very miniature versions, but we haven't really— like, I'm talking like Sahil's a bigger version. So our friend Sahil Bloom, Trung, who used to work for me, he is kind of like that. But, you know, we're still talking like 500,000 followers. No one has really pushed it to where it's like, how do I get 10 or 20 million? You know, how do I become— like, how do I build a proper empire as opposed to a niche? Now, the difference is, uh, basically between everything you mentioned and Twitter is Twitter is copy-based, text-based, whereas the other ones are visual-based. So I think there's one of two routes that's going to happen. You figure out how to add visuals to your thing and videos don't usually do that well on Twitter, but pictures do. Or you just get really good at writing. And I was like, well, writing's not that important, but I'm like, wait, no, I'm an idiot. Like, you know who Danielle Steele or James Patterson is?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

These people have sold literally like, I believe Danielle Steele has sold like 100 million plus books. I don't know if you know this, but in San Francisco, she's got like the biggest mansion in San Francisco. Fattest house. Yeah.

On Billionaires Row, her house is like the big fortress.

Yeah. And then you got James Patterson. I bet you he's a billionaire too. James Patterson basically writes like 50 books a year. I don't even know if he writes a lot of them, if he just smacks his logo on it.

But like, you know, I was thinking of like, well, that sounds outrageous, but okay.

I forget, but it's maybe a week. It's like one a month. It'll say like, You know, what he does is like, it'll be like written by James Patterson and Bill Clinton. And then it says like, and also this other name. And it's like a duo about them. It's like a story written about like the White House or something like that. And he like partners. It's like this weird thing that he does. He writes a ton. He's prolific. And a lot of like, like real quote authors, like these like artist folks are like, oh, that's just garbage. But he's like, dude, I don't care. I'm pumping this shit out anyway. Authors, like, definitely crush it still, and the power of the written word is very powerful enough to, like, you know, get these people to buy all these books. And I still think that's possible, but I, I do think that we're gonna see, like, an empire built on top of Twitter. Arguably, you and I have created— we've easily created, uh, 7 figures of personal income through Twitter. Maybe you could say even— I would have to add it up— maybe 8 figures, but a lot. Uh, I think though that there's going to be literally billionaires created on Twitter and it hasn't happened yet though.

Wow. Uh, yeah. What's, we can't call ours empires. Like what's a, what's a very, very small, like a Lego, like a convenience store. Yeah. Like we, we created like a Kwik-E-Mart. Uh, yeah.

We own like 4 Burger Kings. You know what I mean?

You're right. That's Sahil and Trung are good examples of like, they actually try. So like, they like religiously write content, they schedule it, they research it, they like publish, they like try to amplify it, they have calls to action at the bottom, and it works. And I've seen them crawl from zero to— Sahil's at like half a million, maybe more, I don't know. Uh, dude, a lot of people don't even know that Trung—

so Trung worked at The Hustle, he wrote the daily email. We found him when he was working at like as a financial analyst, analyst, not like— it was all internal reports. We like— he signed up for Twitter while he worked at my company and we all like shared each other in this like silly circle jerk circle. And now he's got 600,000 followers and he's like a personality and like people know him, like they talk about him and how he's funny and all this stuff. And I think it's going to happen. And like when I tweeted out that event thing, 1,000 people signed up and I'm like, oh my God, like, why aren't you actually see Instagram, like you'll see like the Logan, the Jake Pauls and Logan Paul. They'll like say like, I'm going to be— when they were starting on YouTube, they're like, we're going to be at this location, come. And they film all these crazy videos of all these people around us. No one's doing that shit for Twitter. And I think that someone needs to just take the YouTuber playbook and just deploy it here and take it full time and seriously. And they could create tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of wealth.

And so what would you do? Because like, I think, well, the guys we talked about, they, you know, Sahil basically does like kind of like mental model, intellectual, like stuff where it's like, oh, you know, either like kind of what I'll call like the generic life advice, generic business advice, or like, um, you know, hey, let me tell you about this phenomenon in psychology about cognitive biases and here's 30 cognitive biases you, you wanna be aware of. And like, I don't know why these do so well. They do incredibly well. Uh, that's not my cup of tea, but it's definitely other people's cup of tea for that kind of content.

Here's what they need to do. Here's how you cross the chasm. Here's how you cross this threshold. So basically these guys are popular on this Twitter medium and Twitter is a— it feels like a 1 to 1 a little bit, or maybe like a 1 to 10. It's like me and my 10 friends, like, consume this and we'll joke about it. But I'm not talking to a guy on the train or I'm not like telling a family member like, hey, you know, did you guys see X, Y, and Z? Like, we're not talking about that. So what they need to do is two things. Number one, they need to meet up with like mainstream celebrity people or like mainstream people and take pictures with them and show it. And it's like, oh man, this guy's like bigger than just my little audience. Look at this. Like these people, like Arnold Schwarzenegger likes this person and took a photo with them. That's amazing. The second thing that they need to do is they need to get off of Twitter and into real life. So for example, in the early 2010s, when the Caspers of the world were coming out, uh, Subways in Manhattan were underpriced for the billboards. And a couple of these companies like Subway, Oscar, they go, let's advertise on these billboards. Billboards down in the subway and then we'll actually buy real billboards. And people are like, why would you do that? Like, we could track all this on the internet. And they're like, well, because if we get it out off of the internet, it's gonna see more than just an online thing and it's gonna feel more like a real tangible thing. You know, you're gonna see like this ad next to like, uh, you know, a Ford ad and next to this thing, it's gonna feel like this is actually a little bit more legitimate. And so what they need to figure out is how to do that. So you do that by having real life events. You do that by like getting a book that you publish. You get that by getting a cameo on a TV show. And you like get everyone in on the joke. It's like, hey everyone, check this out. They asked me to be a background on Friends. Like, here, look, you can see my head. Isn't that hilarious? Like, you do these things like that where it's like real life and like bigger than just this 1 to 10 thing. And then people start taking you seriously and realize that it creates FOMO and it creates social proof and you start becoming actually culturally relevant, you know what I mean? And that's how you should do it. So you just like take pictures with you and celebrities and then try to get in more in-person stuff. So you're off the internet. And I think that would work.

Yeah, I think, I think that's good advice. Like, uh, people will believe about you what you believe about yourself. And, um, and also people will believe about you what they think others believe about you. So if I see you hanging out, you know, if I see you, this is why YouTube works, right? Like people on YouTube will have like, you know, or Instagram, they'll have like, they're taking a picture, but it's actually the background. That's the picture. It's like, I'm just trying to show you that I'm sitting in this car or at this place or with these people. And, um, there's like everything that's said is actually in the background. The foreground is just kind of like your excuse to say it.

Or when Casey Neistat's like walking through New York and he has kids coming up to him and goes, hey, what's up kid? Say hi to the— you're on the vlog. Like, you know what I mean? It's like, oh wow, like in New York Casey gets recognized everywhere. He's more than just what I see on my screen.

And like celebrities do this, they like when they like tip off you know, the paparazzi to come like take pictures of them and they're like, they like pretend like they're trying to not be seen, but then like they actually, it's like a deal. Like, hey dude, I'm going to be here. Come on, come show up and take my photo. And then we're going to use that photo for this. Or they'll like, you know, uh, do stuff like that. So, so I think that's a thing. Like I had a buddy who created a, um, he's got like an online e-commerce brand. They opened up their first store. The store is not going to do that many sales, but just showing that, hey, we opened our first store in New York. It's like kind of like, you know, wherever in New York, some like small place. And it's like, just that makes it feel like this brand is more trustworthy. It's more established, it's more legit. And then they had a bunch of friends, like 15 friends show up and they were like doing a ribbon, uh, ribbon cutting ceremony. And the friends are all like, hey, wow.

Yeah. Yeah.

Hey, hey, question for you. Like, you know, like trying to pretend like they're the media. And, um, and, and, and like if you zoomed out, it's like 10 people standing in a small cluster.

Yeah.

But like from the right angle, it looked like a mob was at the store. And again, it's like this perception creates some version of reality. So I definitely think that helps. I don't think that's enough to build the empire. I think you got to do two things. One, be in it for like the next 7 years. Like MrBeast, all these guys, they didn't start with like, you know, as big as they are. It takes like 5 to 7 years to build something like really truly massive. The second is I would stop trying to jump off Twitter and go to other places and be like, this is where the good shit is. I'm going to master this medium and this media.

Totally.

I'm gonna make it work here. The third is I would do some of the stuff that just helps build fame in the first place. So, um, I think having your lane or your niche helps because it'll attract people who are interested in that. Second, controversy or collabing with others, I think is gonna work.

Uh, you know, and people don't do controversial stuff really on Twitter right now, but it should be like, oh my God, I called in to like this show and I got, you know how people used to call into Howard Stern and like get him to like say this crazy shit like, check this out, got him. You know what I mean?

Well, some people do it that, and it works. Like there's a guy who's doing this, Zach Weinberg or something like that.

Yeah, he's hilarious. I love that guy.

Built and sold like, I don't know, a $2 billion company in like the biotech space or some shit like that. But why does everybody know him? Because he's the guy who just will consistently shit on crypto. He just is challenging people to fights about crypto and he's just trying to debate them in public and embarrass them. That is his whole shtick. And he's getting so much fame for dunking on people in crypto. And because there's a set of audience that likes to, A, watch a fight, and B, that likes to, that is anti-crypto, has some anti-crypto feelings, and they're like, he's their champion. You go debate people, because I don't know if I'd be able to. And so that's exactly how Ben Shapiro got famous too, by the way. And on top of that, then you have like Keith Raboi or whatever, people who are just like a dick. To other people. Like he'll just like respond to somebody like wrong. And they're like, well, explain, like, you know, I'd love to hear your perspective. And he's like, I don't share my perspective with fucking losers. You know what I mean? He's like, he'll like, he'll shit on you once and then he'll, even if you try in good faith to come back, he'll be like, the data is out there. Go read a book.

And then one time he was like, one time the best thing goes, I've forgotten more about startups than you'll ever even know.

Yeah, exactly. Or he'll be like, Call me after your 6th unicorn, cuz that's where I am, or whatever. You know, like he, he's like, you know, obnoxiously just like shitting on people and it's hilarious. And because of that, like the controversy spread, some people hate him, some people love him, and, uh, he kind of uses that to, to, to, to grow. So anyways, I, I think controversy is also another underrated thing. There's a bunch of things that people need to do, but I would say the main one is like find your, your angle, your hook, your niche. Like for Casey Neistat, it's the daily vlog. For other people it's the explainer videos. It's like whatever. You gotta find that for you on Twitter and then like do it for 5 to 7 years and have faith that like, just like it wasn't obvious that being a YouTuber was just such a big deal back then, I think it's not that obvious, you know, to your point that you could do this on Twitter too.

Yeah. I, uh, so that's my, that's my, I'm, I'm, that's my pitch. I think it could be cool.

All right. Can I tell you about something that I kind of knew about but has recently blown my mind? Yeah, it's the Thiel Fellowship. So, you know, yeah, it's amazing what the Thiel Fellowship is. Ben, I'm curious, do you know what the Thiel Fellowship is? Come off mute for a bit because I think Sam already knows. I want to talk to somebody who's maybe more where the audience is, which may, you know, aware but not familiar.

Yeah. So I know the Thiel Fellowship is, I'll tell you just my impression of someone who doesn't know a ton about it is just that it's for essentially high schoolers who are super geniuses and Peter Thiel is going to give you a bunch of money. In order to not go to college and do something cool instead.

Uh, kind of. You're in— it's actually, I think it's actually for people in college to leave college for a year. So $100K to basically leave college for a year and work on something interesting. And, uh, Ben, if I asked you like, hey, is it like successful, unsuccessful, do you have any idea?

Um, no, except for that I know, um, What's his name did it? The guy who did Ethereum.

Vitalik. Yeah, exactly.

Vitalik. Yeah, yeah. So, which by the way, I still haven't told my Vitalik story on air, which is I was in Amsterdam and I saw him and I couldn't think what to say and he's walking right past me and I just turned and went, you're Vitalik. And he didn't like look or say anything. He just kept walking.

But it was him.

Did he have security with him? No, he was walking all alone on the streets of Amsterdam at 8 AM in the morning. It was just us. Our software is the worst.

Have you heard of HubSpot?

See, most CRMs are a cobbled-together mess, but HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous.

I think I love our new CRM.

Our software is the best. HubSpot. Grow better.

Yeah, we need to protect this man. He never has security with him and he's just like wanders around to random cafes and goes to events and stuff like this. I'm like, dude, So yeah, I really hope he's got such good security that you just can't see them. I'll, that's what I'll tell myself. Um, so this Thiel Fellowship thing is amazing. The Thiel Fellowship was exactly what you said. Uh, Peter Thiel comes out. Peter Thiel is the kind of, uh, original founder of PayPal. He was the first investor in Facebook, put $500K into Facebook early on, which became hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars. And, um, also, you know, prolific investor in a bunch of other things, including SpaceX and, and other businesses. So Peter Thiel comes out and he basically says, college education is a bubble. He says, college education is sort of a joke. He's like, it hides under this banner, like it's teaching you something, like you're getting information, but really what you're getting is some version of an insurance policy. Like, I got this degree, so I'm not going to fall through the cracks of society. And you're getting some status symbol, like, oh, I got this stamp on my thing. So it's like a luxury, it's like a luxury product, like wearing a, a nice bag. Your Harvard degree is like your Louis Vuitton bag. And, uh, and so he talks about college and he is like, it's costs just keep going up and up and up, but the value and the, the salaries that you make don't go up. Um, and so it's this like overpriced bubble, just like the housing bubble. He says, and he says, I'm going to offer, um, I'm gonna offer something called the Thiel Fellowship, which is $100,000 if you drop outta college and go work on something interesting. and a bunch of people criticize him. They say, dude, like, you know, how dare you? You're telling kids, like, the normal phrase is kids stay in school. You're like, we get it, you're contrarian. You're saying kids don't stay in school and you're like trying to get people to drop out. Like, what kind of, like, you're worse than a vape, you know? And so, you know, people didn't like what he was doing and other people were just like, oh, it's cool. But like, you know, who knows if this is gonna work or not? Like, all right, you're gonna pay this kid 100 grand, to, you know, do a summer project. Great. So what? This thing is amazing. It is produced.

Yeah, it worked out really well, didn't it?

And nobody talks about it. So let me tell you some of the things that have come out of this. Um, you have, like you said, Ethereum, which is like a $170 billion market cap thing that came from Vitalik. Probably like this generation's version of Facebook is like, you know, is Ethereum. So that comes out of this where Vitalik does the Thiel Fellowship and continues working on Ethereum during that time and he launches. So that's one super, super, super successful thing. Also Figma, which is like somewhere between $5 and $10 billion— Closer to $10. —company that takes on Adobe in the design space. And Dylan, who is the founder of Figma, was in the Thiel Fellowship. Another one, OYO Rooms. So this is in India. It's like a You know, kind of like an Airbnb-ish sort of thing. It's like a hospitality, uh, you know, website. OYO Rooms, multi-billion dollar company. Tens of billions, I think. Luminar Technologies. Um, most people don't know this. It's a like LiDAR company that basically, uh, the technology you need for self-driving cars. And this thing I think went public in a SPAC. This guy's like, I don't know, 21, 22 years old, 23 years old, something like that. And he's worth like a billion dollars. He's like one of the world's youngest billionaires, if not the youngest billionaire off of this thing. Um, that is just alone is crazy. Also Polkadot, another crypto protocol valued at, you know, $7 billion. Um, like I just told you basically $200 billion worth of business value that has come from this program and it's just— but then there's way more.

There's actually like a, uh, dozens that are in like the $100 million range. I invested in a company that recently raised another round. I think it was Owner.com, the guy Adam. He, he was a Thiel Fellow. And I believe, I mean, that, that, that potentially could be a unicorn, but it's hundreds of millions for sure. And there's like dozens more like that.

The reason I got reminded of this was because I invested in Italic and Jeremy Kai is the founder of Italic. And he was like, oh yeah, I was a Thiel Fellow. That's how I was like, how did we meet? Eventually he's like, oh yeah, I was a Thiel Fellow. We came to your office and you gave a talk and I thought it was awesome. And so that's why we kept in touch. And I was like, dude, was Vitalik in the room? He's like, I don't think he's like, I don't think he was at that event. But he's like, dude, he used to like crash on our couch. Like, you know, he was part of the program and he's like, he's— I was like, what was he like? He's like, he's genuinely the weirdest person ever. Like the weirdest person I've ever met. And like, he's like, yeah, in a good way and a bad way. Nothing like, he's just nothing like, nothing like I've ever seen. Just different, different sort of cat. And, um, I was like, this is, this is too good.

I think, I think you should, uh, keep using the word cat, by the way.

You like how I did that? I've been with something I'm workshopping right now.

Yeah, it looks good on you.

Yeah, I take it out for a spin. I take it out of the garage, you know, twice a week and I just see, do people kind of like flinch when I say that? You know, um, it was a good flinch. Tried it with Lit and that was, I had to put that one back in storage. No, you're too hot. That one's not coming back out. I put that one on eBay actually.

Got rid of it. Yeah, no, you're, yeah, you're, you're, you're, you're too much of a gray bush for that one. But Cat, yeah, Cat was cool. I would stick with Cat. But it is crazy, man. This— the Peter Thiel— I thought at first it was real. It was kind of stupid. I'm like, this is weird. Like, what are these, like, little 18-year-old nerds? Like, they're not going to do anything interesting. Obviously, I was wrong. I like— I— when I— when I— when I was, like, rethinking my opinion on it, I was like, wow, I guess just like high IQ matters. Like, these guys, they're just— they have more power than I do. I always say they're just— they're higher— you're higher functioning than me. You know, that's just the only way I can describe it. You have more horsepower, your oven burns hotter, and it, it actually, it, it, it, it, it truly matters and it makes a difference.

Your oven burns hotter is so good. Oh God, I love that. That was great.

You know what I mean? They just got that, they got that, that totally, uh, heater furnace.

That's how I felt when I was at Twitch. I was like, uh, I was like, okay, let's see what are the, like, cause you know, I had kind of had opinions from the outside, like, okay, at these big tech companies, what are the people like? What are What are the execs like? What are the average people like? How hard do they work? How smart are they? Do they have all these processes that are way better than the messy stuff I was doing at my startup? And for the most part, I would say it's kind of like I walked out a little cockier than I came in, and I came in pretty cocky. And that's what I was just sort of like, oh, okay, they don't have some magic processes or the people aren't that much better except 2 or 3 people at the company, one of which was Emmett, who's the founder. We would sit down and there would be like, data science would be presenting some report on some trends. And I'm just sitting there trying to, it's a 6-page memo. I'm trying to stop yawning because I'm just like, why do I keep yawning? I'm having this reflex and I'm reading this thing. I'm just trying to understand these charts. And you just hear this little click and it's like someone's pen is down. And it's like if you're taking a math test, who's done with the test already? And it would be Emmett. He'd be like, pens down. He'd be playing Hearthstone on his phone. And you're like, no, he like, he must have already read this. Or like, he must just skim. And then, then they're like, all right, yeah, we're ready to start the discussion. And he would be like, so on page 3, you know, this chart, actually, I noticed that the axis is a little wrong because, you know, if this was true, then, but then this other chart on page 7 would show this. I'm like, what the f— you know, what is happening? How is your brain processing this much information this quickly and somehow always getting to like, like the heart of the issue. It's like we all spent our time and energy like trying to parse out what's important. Like he immediately got to what was, what was important and had the conclusion and had like the follow-up question and also identified why this Piper wasn't very good in the first place. And once I saw the brain doing that, I was like, oh, okay. There's just some cars, you know, have more horsepower, like, or as you said, the oven burns a little hotter and like, His oven burns way hotter than mine. And I was like, oh, that's good to know. Like, cause I have this thing I always say, I like to see what level 12 looks like. Like what is, oh, that speaker system's a little too loud for me, but like, I want to know what volume on 12 even is. I want to feel, you know, my own chest, you know, like vibrating with the bass. And it's like, okay, I don't want to be somebody who never sees it. I want to see it.

What was he like in like real life, like outside of work? Because have you ever seen some of these people interact in like normal, like life? Like they like— I told you about one friend that's like intense and he literally only owns 2 t-shirts, 1 pair of underwear, 1 pair of socks, and his laptop. That's like the only thing he owns. And he's worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And then like, I know a bunch of these guys that are like this and like for hobbies they're just all in and like, so if they're into like, you know, like fucking their body or something, they've got like every gadget you could ever imagine in there. They could tell you all about it. And or if they're into dieting, they've got like their pants. Like my friend Jack, He's into supplements and he's got literally $30,000 worth of supplements in a closet. And they'd be like, what's this do? What's this do? What's this do? And he just like tests everything. What was he like in like, like, was he like if he's into cars, could he like tell you every single thing about like a Porsche and what year it was from and why it was special?

Yeah. Yes. But before I tell you about him, I just read this thing that was like about Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google. And it's like, oh, what is Sergey like? You know, because he's in the news because of his wife and Elon and all that stuff. And some people are like, what is Sergey doing nowadays? Cuz he's not, I don't think he's at Google anymore. Um, and it said over the last year or two, he's become very into personal fitness. In fact, he has been trying to master several Olympic sports. And I was like, what? Dude, I don't know, man.

I looked at this guy, what, like what Olympic sport? Ping pong? I don't know.

Like skeet shooting? Yeah. Curling. Um, yeah. The other one is, it said he's currently writing a physics textbook. And I was like, of course he's writing a physics textbook. Like, that's more like, come on. Yeah. Um, so, so anyways, that, yeah, these guys are wired like that where like when they go in, they go in like very deep. Uh, Emmett, honestly, I don't know him super well cuz I interacted with him mostly at work. Um, and anytime it was outside of work, it was, it was really cool, but it was like, you know, limited. It wasn't like I hung out with him like 100 times. It would maybe be more like 5 times, you know, something like that over the couple years that I was there. Um, what I would say is like a couple of little things that stood out. One, he's like us. He's an idea machine. In fact, I need to get him on the podcast because you've been saying that for 3 years now.

I know, I know.

And when I was there, I didn't ask him cuz I was like, uh, you know, already, you know, me doing this podcast is not a, you know, yeah.

You're like, hey dude, you wanna bail at noon and go and record?

Yeah. It's not everyone's favorite thing I do. Um, you know, But, but I think now I can do it. Um, but he would like, like he told me this idea. He's like, I tell you about his gym idea. No, he's like, he's like gyms. He's like gyms need to be, uh, made like video games. If I was gonna leave Twitch, I might start this, uh, a gym that's structured like a video game. So he's like, this is how it works. You show up and you're like, uh, at the beginning character of a, of a game. Like you show up and we give you kind of like your basic uniform and we have a little, little wrist strap that like tracks your level of like fitness and intensity as you work out. And you let basically level up. And so like every time you come to the gym, you're earning points. And like, as you earn points, like we give you like better gear. Like we'll give you the, the, like the, the more fitted, you know, clothes that look cooler. And so you can like visibly see people's different levels as they go to the gym. You would be able to like go into certain sections of the gym that were previously locked to you. You would be able to get like protein shakes and stuff for free. And he's like, uh, he's like, I think if you gamified a gym, people would come more. And like, actually, this is kind of played out with Peloton. Peloton is very much organized like this with leaderboards and stuff like that, gamification. Uh, but I was like, this is a crazy idea. He's like, yeah, it would be like the World of Warcraft of gyms. Like, people would grind like years of their life to level up their character to 60, and they would like work to do it. He's like, I think you could do that with a, with a gym. I was like, wow. Yeah.

I mean, people do that with like karate and, and jiu-jitsu, you know, black belt, brown belt, blue belt type of thing.

Exactly. And they stick with it and they keep showing up.

'cause it's 10+ years.

And he's like, but you know, you don't want the increments to be like a year before you see some progress. Like every time you come, you need to be earning a little bit more and getting a little bit more unlocked, you know, and see that the next milestone is just within reach. Um, so I thought that was interesting. The second one, he was like, uh, he was like trying to plug in the computer to like screen share one time with me. Like, uh, like normally these meetings are like set up by somebody else, but like if it's just you two, like, hey, you gotta do it, plug it in. And he's like, These fucking cables. He's like, you know, honestly, I think I could create like the Apple for like accessories for computer accessories. He's like, just like the best connecting cables, the best cable management, the best plugs. He's like, he's like, nobody is like, look at this. It's like every office in the world has these and look at how bad they look, how ugly they are, how poorly they function, how confusing they are. He's like, I think you could just build like a really nicely designed cables and connectors and accessories company. For every office in the country. And like, you know, people would, people would pay for it. And I was like, huh? Like, why do you think of these things? Like, this is weird. And so that's what people say about you. He had a dozen ideas that were like this when I was there. All right. That's one thing that I noticed.

We'll wrap this up real quick. But I— there's this famous story. So this guy named Chris Sacca was a popular investor and invested in Instagram and a bunch of other stuff and Uber. And he's supposed to be one of the best angel investors of all time. He told this story somewhere where he is in Tahoe or Truckee where he has a home and he's with his dad. And Travis Kalanick, right when he was about to start Uber, came over to just spend the weekend, you know, family vacation. And Travis and Chris Sacca's dad, Mr. Sacca, they start playing Wii tennis and Travis is playing and the dad's playing and they just like are being casual. And Travis was like, all right, you want to step it up? So he steps it up and he just crushes them and he just beats this guy like so bad. And Mr. Sacca was like, what the hell, man? And Travis goes, I've got a surprise to show you. And he puts the Wii from his left hand into his right hand. He goes, I was playing left-handed the whole time. I'm actually right-handed. Let's really play. And he goes, Travis goes, all right, but I do have to tell you something. And they go to the ratings board and he's number 2 in the whole world at Wii tennis. And Chris Sacco was like, right then and there, I realized I never want to compete against this guy because his drive and his hobby is winning. And he just proved that, like, in his free time of starting this company, he's just going to be number one in the world at Wii tennis just because, just because he has to. And he just hustled my dad thinking that he was left-handed and it worked perfectly. This guy is a winner. And that's why Chris Sacca said he invested in him. He's like, I just see his intensity in just walking around.

Dude, 100% agree. Peter Thiel is the same way. He's like a master or grandmaster at chess and like in the PayPal Mafia, which is now like the most successful entrepreneur group ever. Uh, I think several of them were like very, very high-level chess players, um, that, that, that have gone through that, you know, that, that like were, were in that thing. There's like something to the, the oven burns hotter. That's like true for some of these people. It's a combination of intensity and capability. Um, that is, that is definitely true. Like, uh, another kind of like Emmett observation that I was like, huh, that's weird. That doesn't seem normal. Um, so I guess two little ones. One was, I was like, what do you do for fun? Like, what do you, when you hang out, like what are you doing? He's like, oh, like, I love board games. He's like, you should come over for like a board game night. And I was like, uh, okay, like, what, like, what are we playing? Like, you know, Monopoly, like Twister, what do we got going here? And he's like, he just looked at me like, we only play like deep strategy games. And it was like, we only play Catan on like hard mode, or like even Catan is like the beginner one. He like named two other games I don't even know about that like, you know, are like this, the, the, like the board games that are like actually, you know, like multi-level, multi-hour strategy games. And basically it was him and the brothers from Stripe and like the founder of Reddit, and they would just get together and play these games on the weekend. That's what they did.

That's exactly how I want them to spend their time.

Exactly. So I thought that was kind of funny. And then the other one was like, um, we were in a meeting and we were talking about like, I don't know, like some policy, like, oh, these, you know, whatever. Yes. Some girl streaming on Twitch and like her nipples showing, like, is that okay? But it's like, you know, she lives in Denmark. You know, what are the rules around this? Should we ban her or like what? And, and so there was always these policy questions coming up over and over and over again. And it felt like you can't win because whatever Twitch did, it was like, oh dude, they're trying to control us, censor us. Like they're inconsistent. They should have also changed it over here. Like it was a no-win policy. And then, you know, like he would, he would have these, like, he would have these hobbies, which is like reading like old books that nobody would read. Like no normal person's reading these books. And then he'd be able to connect the dots on two like completely unrelated things. It's sort of like Ben's podcast stuff where it's like, like, oh, actually, like, you know, the Rothschilds similarly set this up in a, you know, set up their will in a weird way because of this. Maybe you should do this. Like, dude, how do you know all this, like, really specific stuff from history? He would be like, do you know how the potato farmers governed their, like, you know, farms in the Netherlands during the potato drought? And then, like, the head of policy at Twitch is like, no, just tell me what. He's like, actually, they created this governing council that was blah blah blah, and like, the cool thing about this rule of law was blah blah blah. Maybe we should, you know, you should read that. Like, tell me what you think about it. And they're like, all right, like, where do I find this like out of print book that you read like randomly and you remember what the potato farmers did? And so he would always bring these like really unrelated examples in. Um, that was one thing. And the other one was he would debate you over semantics like to death. So you would be like, um, you know, like it'd be like an exec offsite. He'd be like, and somebody would be like, you know, I just feel like we don't have enough like trust on the team. And everyone's like nodding like, yeah, you know, like like, he's like, collaboration is a problem or whatever. And he'd be like, well, is it trust or collaboration? Because trust means this and collaboration means this. Well, just like the general trust, collaboration, just working together better. He's like, but again, define for me what you mean when you say trust. I just want to make sure I have it right. And he's not trying to, it's not a gotcha. He's like a hyper literal person. So he is like, when you say it's failing, I take that to mean it's failing. Is it failing or is it this other thing? And people are just getting lost in the sauce of this semantical debate. But he really wanted to be hyper-literal about it. And I've never seen anybody do this in a— There were upside— I gave a bad example here, but I think you understand the general premise, which is that he really cared about words, what they mean and why we're using them, and if we're using them correctly to describe what's going on. And everybody else was kind of hand-wavy about stuff. Especially the higher you go up in an organization, you sort of get paid for being sort of hand wavy like a politician. And he was the opposite of that. So these were some of the things I noticed that now when I invest in founders, I'm like, I can invest in this guy who created this company called Skeo. And he is like, yeah, I'm this, like, I was like, what'd you do before this? He's like, oh, I was a professional Call of Duty player. Like before that I was grinding in World of Warcraft. Like, it was a waste of time, but yeah, I was top 3 in the world or whatever. It's like, what? Oh, you were a top 3 StarCraft player on the East Coast server? Okay, you're a winner and you're obsessive and you find the rules of the game and then you optimize to win it. And sure enough, now with his thing, he's just a wrecking ball with acquiring customers because he just finds— this is the new game and he's finding rules and he's maximizing his edge in everything that he can do. To the point where he's kind of like a nutjob, dude. But like, you know, it works.

At the end of episodes like this, I'm exhausted. I feel like I just exerted so much energy, both listening and speaking. Do you have to take a nap at the end of this? Because you just spoke like with incredibly high energy for— we've done this for— we're an hour and 17 minutes in. Do you get exhausted? I take naps after. No, not at all.

I really leave these on a high.

Um, so do I, but then I need to go to—

always you.

Well, yeah, you never have water. I usually drink 3 drinks while I'm, I'm doing these, but like, I'm exhausted. I get exhausted just listening.

Well, that's probably my fault, so I'm sorry. Uh, I—

no, no, it's a good exhausted. I'm like, God, I just learned so much and I need to get so much better at this, this, and this by hearing this story. And I was just so intensely listening and enthralled by this conversation that I need a nap. I've gotta go lay down. That's how I feel.

I gotta go rest. Balaji went on Tim Ferriss's podcast and did like a 3-hour podcast and I listened to it last night and like literally while it was happening, I could feel my brain fatiguing just trying to like digest what this man was saying. He's so, and by the way, you also hear Tim Ferriss sound, I love Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss sounds like an absolutely defeated man on these podcasts with Balaji. Because Balaji would be like, um, anarcho— you know, on one hand you have the woke capitalist, on the other hand you have the anarcho— uh, anarcho-capitalist. Do you know what I mean when I say that? And Tim's like, no, tell me. And like, that happens 40 times in the episode. He's like, um, are you familiar with the concept of the, uh, you know, the Schrödinger window? And Tim's like, um, no, but I assume you could tell me. And he's like, he just does that over and over and over.

Dude, one time when he was with us, he was like He's like, you know, Bitcoin is kind of like Battle of the Bulge. And you remember how the Germans were doing it? I'm like, dude, I don't— I needed an analogy for your analogy. Like, you don't— please don't reference Battle of the Bulge when trying to explain a complicated topic. Like, you know, it's like, you know, Bitcoin's kind of like, uh, like neuroscience. Like, you know how like the chemicals of like this, this, and this interact this way?

Think about the— think of Bitcoin as the amygdala of the crypto ecosystem. Yeah. Like, well, what's the amygdala, dude? I don't know. Yeah, that's what, that's what was happening. And, uh, I guess I did that to you in this case, but no, you, you're, you're, well, you're way dumber.

I could totally keep up with that. It just was a good story. No, you just talk more. No, I thought it was good. That was a compliment. I get exhausted because I'm like so into it. Like I, like I, I, I love hearing these stories so much.

We used to do these mastermind, uh, like dinners or hangouts where it'd be me, Sam, and like 3 other guys and we'd meet up every 2 weeks or, or 3 weeks, something like that. And it would always be like, you know, each person gets 20 minutes and you'd sort of say what's going on in your business, what's working, what, and what you want help, what you want the other guys to like, you know, basically help you think through. And then, and those things last, basically if you just do the math, it's like 6 people, 20 minutes each, but everybody runs 10 minutes over and like, you know, we start 10 minutes late. It's like this thing is 3 hours long and we would always start it after work. So we'd started at like 7, it would finish at 10, 10:30. Uh, we skipped dinner. Nobody's like gone to the bathroom. And basically there was two reactions. Some people were like fucking exhausted by the end of this and they're like, oh, this was great. But like, man, next time let's try to be a little shorter. Uh, and like, I get that logically. My reaction, and we used to do some of these at your office, I remember, um, at the Hustle's office. I don't know if you know this, I would leave your office at 10, 10:30 and I would go straight to my office and I would just work 4 or 5 straight hours because I was like, I can't do that. I was so inspired. I was like a combination of inspired by the, like, your guys' awesomeness, um, panicked that like, oh my God, I have so much I need to do that I now realize, and like, oh fuck, I need to do all of this, and I'm just gonna try to do as much as I can tonight, uh, and like, I was— it was a combination of like enthusiasm and like feeling overwhelmed by like the amount of potential and ideas and like stuff I could be doing to make our stuff grow more.

No, I gotta go like drink Gatorade and take a power nap. Like, yeah, I need to fuel up. I'm gonna go eat a Clif Bar. I get worn out. I'm like, my blood sugar is low. I could feel it. I guess that's the episode, right, Ben?