How to Build a Community | My First Million #213

the dominant way to advertise is not super high production value, finely produced content. It's what we call selfie content, right?

Yeah. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off on the road. Let's travel. Never looking back. All right, let's do it. We're here. What's going on?

What's up, man? Okay, you want to jump in? A little bit of chit-chat, how you want to do it?

I want to tell you a quick story. So our friend, um, can we— the, the guy who emailed hotels and asked for discounts, can we name him or not?

No.

Okay, um, well, he, he's our friend. He emailed hotels for a European trip and he got some crazy good deals. He got like a $3,000 room for like $350. So I'm in New York, I need a place to stay from September 1st to September 25th. I made a list of 20 hotels and I emailed them. And these hotels probably would cost me maybe $15,000 to $20,000 for that period. So like $1,000 a night. I'm getting some at like $350, $400 a night. It's working.

That's amazing. And what's the gist of the email?

I have something that's unfair. So I say, hey, my name's Sam Parr. I am in town for 3 months, but I need a place to stay from September 1st to September 21st. I need a relatively big room because I record this podcast called My First Million, and we have about, I'd say like a million listeners a month, and we record it with video. So I need it to look really nice. I also write this daily email that goes out to 2 million people. And so like, I need a comfortable place to work from my home. Right. My budget is $350 a night. Can you help me?

And, uh, and that works. So, uh, why aren't they giving it to you for free, bro? That's big influencer shit. You should be getting it for free.

I don't know. I, I did— I'm happy to pay for— I don't want to be a total mooch. I just want a discount.

It's not mooching. You're going to give them a shout, right? Whoever you pick?

No, I won't. I wouldn't give them a shout out just because they get me a place to stay. I would only give me— do you shout people out because they get— I mean, I get given stuff all the time. And when people give me stuff and then they ask for a shout out, I say, you know, fuck off.

Yeah, actually, the other day there's a company that I'm using their product, so I reached out to them. I was like, hey, I can name them. I think I can name them. I think they should be fine. So basically, I use this thing called Passport. It's like international shipping company. So let's say you have a brand, you want to ship products to France or UK or Australia or whatever. Each country has its own little problems with shipping, with customs, with tax, with, you know, finding the right carrier to get a low, low shipping cost there, all that. So these guys take care of it. So I'm like, oh, this is a great product, great idea. So I emailed the CEO, Alex, and I was like, hey man, like, this is great, we're going to use it, but how do I invest also? And he's like, oh, like, you know, we're not really raising around right now. And I was like, please. And he was like, He's like, you know what? Like, I think you've already been pretty helpful because you made some intros. I think you can do some more. I think you can do more. He's like, I don't want to fuss with paperwork. Like, honestly, it's just a big headache. How about I just give you some free shares? And I was like, I was like, perfect. Like, that's amazing. Because this is like a legit company. It's not like, oh, here's advisor shares in my no-name, no-revenue, no-user company. Like, this is a real company and it's a very small amount. But I was like, he's so smart because he sent me an email. He goes, Hey dude, excited to have you on board. Just sign this, return it. He goes, here's kind of my expectations. Like, what would make this a win for me is A, B, and C. And they're all like totally reasonable requests, but he just made it clear what he wants. And I was like, dude, you couldn't have paid me to do these things, but just by giving me something free, I feel the need to reciprocate by like overdelivering on this for you. I would have rather— in retrospect, I would rather just buy my shares and Ultimately smart move by you.

So that's called the law of reciprocity. So there's been a lot of studies on this. And if you read the book Influence by Robert Cialdini, it's a, it's basically been proven through a lot of different studies. So a great example is if we're next door neighbors and I say, hey, Sean, here, you know, I had, I ordered pizza and they gave me 2. Here's an extra one if you'd like. Right. Okay. So I did something for you. I gave you something. The next day I go, hey Mike, I don't have a car. Can I borrow your car for an hour? You are actually incredibly likely to let me borrow the car, even though those two favors are not at all equal. Right. In order to make like, this rule works regardless of if they're equal or not. It just, if someone owes you one, you want to pay them back in some capacity and you'll do it in the first possible chance you have. So it's actually a great rule. And when I used to buy stuff, so when I would buy cars, I would always come with two— I wrote a blog post. I would come with two cans of Coke and I would have one like a Diet Coke and be like, hey, you know, they had a sale and they had a sale. You want— you thirsty? Want something to drink? And I would get discounts like that through buying stuff.

Dude, that's great. The Coke can hack is awesome. Yeah, I actually now I'm so like aware of it that I have to fight my inner tendency to want free shit. So like if somebody wants to send me something, I'm like, not only do I not want to give out my address anymore, I'm just like, I don't want to feel like I need to reciprocate anything to you. So it's actually not worth it for me to take these things. This is different because I think this company is going to be really big and I really respect the founder. But now I'm like, somebody hands me that Diet Coke. No, thank you, sir. Right? It's not like I think they're trying anything. It's just I don't want to have any On my inner balance sheet, I don't want to have any debts. I only want assets on that inner— my internal balance sheet.

I completely agree. I do the exact same thing. If someone offered, or if they offered me something and I do want it, for example, someone sent me something for my dog because his hips were hurting. And I was like, just, you know, I'm not going to give you a shout out. If I think that the thing's like life-changing, I'll talk about it just casually. But like, in no way are you— you're just doing me a— you're giving— this is a gift, not a payment. Exactly.

Um, all right, so let's, uh, let's jump into some ideas or some topics. What do you want to talk about?

I want to talk to you about a couple things. Um, I want you to teach me about something that— did you want to talk about this? Two things. Friends with benefits. Are you prepared to discuss that? Yeah, yeah, we could talk about it because this is your realm, but this is— it's totally your world, but it's the first time I've seen something in this space that actually interests me. Um, and I think it's actually— it's like, well, okay, so first explain what it is and then I'll tell you. But basically— and I'll tell you why I'm interested— but basically it's like, uh, uh, the, the first time I've seen this technology used in a useful way that isn't just gimmicky, right?

Yeah, yeah. Okay, I know, I know what you mean. And ironically, this is the one that I think I'm interested, but I'm like, I don't really get it, and then I like move on. So, so it's cool we're on the other end of this. Okay, so what is this? Friends with Benefits is a It's basically a community. It's a membership club that was created by this guy in LA that, you know, he was the co-founder of this company called Brood, and they make Lil Miquela, that Instagram influencer who's just like a digital avatar. It's like, looks like a kind of looks like a real girl, but like, clearly it's kind of digital. And so they're using like Disney Pixar style technology to make influencers on Instagram. That's the company. So he creates Friends with Benefits. He's basically like, all right, This is like a digital Soho House, basically. We're going to invite only cool people in and you basically buy the Friends with Benefit token in order to enter. So you buy this token called FWB. And so there's 1 million FWB out there and you buy in and in order to get access to the, to the, to the club, which is basically just a Discord group, right? It's not like there's nothing, there's no physical place to go. There's no like perks or discounts or whatever. It's basically, it's literally like you get to go into our Discord and talk to other members here. And, and so they were selling this thing. It was like 75 tokens or something to join at the beginning.

Yeah.

Which was like, I don't know exactly what it was, but I think it was more like $100 when it started. And now that thing is, that's like a $4,000 membership to join that same because the token has appreciated like crazy. So the, the token, even just since we were going to talk about this last podcast and I was like, $91. Hang on, I'm going to talk to somebody. Who knows about the stuff. Let's do it in the next episode. Wow. It's up 46% since last week when we talked about this.

And so that means it's $6,825.

Yeah. So the membership is roughly $7,000 now to join. And Equinox, which is a high-end gym in LA, New York, SF, where you get to go to this like fancy gym that has spa, steam room, members, whatever.

Equinox.

Equinox is $2,400, I think, $2,400, maybe $3,000. So this is double that now to get into the Discord. So obviously you can tell I'm a little bit skeptical just to put some more numbers around it, just to give you a sense of how big this is. So basically this is now a $90 million market cap community. I think the founder's tokens are like, I don't know exactly how much he holds, but roughly. I think the guy has like $40 or $50 million of his token. Now, the thing that's— which is exciting, but you can't sell. That's the real problem. You can technically go sell on the market, but on Uniswap you can go, you can go sell this thing. But you practically speaking, if the founder started to sell because he's like, sweet, I want to bank $10 million from this, I think it would, A, crash the price and B, send a negative signal, or as they call in the crypto world, like It's a rug pull. You pull the rug out from under the people who believed in you and bought into this thing, and you basically screw them all over. And so this is like when I bought your Bitclout and then you sold all your Bitclout, and it's like, oh, fuck, now I'm holding this empty bag that Sam cashed out of. I bought his token. I believed in him.

Sorry, I didn't know you did that.

So that would be— I don't even know if I actually did buy it, but plenty of people did. And right now on Bitclout, let's say I have, I think, my token. I have like $50,000 of my own token. Cool. My current usage of BitCloud is pretty low. My belief in like it becoming the next big thing is, you know, it started off like a long shot and now I'd say it's a longer shot. So I would love to go sell that, but doing so would basically screw over the people who invested in my tokens. I'm not going to do it like I'm in it for the long haul. So I think that's the challenge with this model is on paper you get this big gain, but in reality I don't know how much they're going to— how much value they can reap out of this. So that's a high level. Tell me, tell me some things.

Yeah. So I'm going to tell you why I think this is actually incredibly interesting. Friends with benefits itself, it's not— that's not interesting to me. Basically, if you look at it, it's just like really good looking dudes and ladies who are like going like and hanging out like it's like a hip, young L.A., New York type of thing. I don't really have too much faith in those types of businesses that are— they're more jokes to me than they are actual real businesses. Would you say that's accurate?

Why is it a joke?

Because I don't know if this is run like a— like when I, when I see it, I'm like, oh, you're just going to run this like a, like an art project, not necessarily like—

are you a party promoter? Is this a nightclub? So either it's a fad, right? Because the problem with cool exclusive things is when you try to grow them, they become less cool and less exclusive because you're letting more people in. Who, you know, so it comes, it comes less, less tight-knit. The other thing is, are you doing this because you want to be a cool guy or are you doing this because it's actually like a really solid business underneath? I think that's kind of the other thing you're talking about, which is like my point, what are your sort of intentions with this thing? Do I take it seriously or no?

But, and here's the but. So the thing about communities, communities are great companies. The problem with them though is that they're challenging to scale. The more people who join, Oftentimes the worst it gets. That's like—

so that's— yeah, that's the law of communities. But why are you saying that communities are great businesses? Because I would say communities are not great businesses. What communities do you think are great businesses?

Well, let's define—

these are all generalizations.

Let's define how we mean great. When I say great, I don't mean— it's really hard to be huge, huge, like north of $100, north of a billion dollars. But like, they could make someone $10 to $20 million in sales a year at a pretty good profit margin, and you can use that profit to build more stuff. So for example, Trends, I didn't realize it at the time, but had I still owned it or The Hustle, we could have turned that into Trends as a paid community. We could have turned it into an investment vehicle to invest in cool startups, things like that. Yep. And so that's why it would, it would've been great for me to own, even though it may not be huge in itself, it would've led to opportunities and it could have been quite profitable. You know, I could have paid myself millions of dollars a year because of it. So that's my definition of great. Now what's interesting about Friends with Benefits is they use this software called Collabland. Have you looked at Collabland?

Yeah, well, actually they used to use a different platform. They used to use, uh, Roll, I think. Uh, so Roll was their old platform. Then it got— Roll got hacked. And so all the, all the tokens that were built on all the social tokens that were built on Roll crashed, uh, when that happened. And so I guess they switched over to Collabland.

So Collabland is cool because the thing about communities is the more people who join, the, uh, sometimes the worse it gets. And so why this is interesting to me is that people are incentivized to stay and make the community valuable because their value goes up, even if they don't necessarily want to sell it. Um, well, I actually do think that like 1 or 2 people could sell their, their thing, their, their token, and if they want to bail, but they're incentivized to make the community better and And I think that's a great model. I really actually think this model is amazing.

So I thought about this two different ways. So let's first do— let's break it into three parts. There's what is this and why is this interesting? There's how big could this be? And then there's what other shit could you do like this? What do you think the future looks like? So let's do what is this and how big is it? So I would say we kind of explained Friends Benefits. It's a social token. It's used to create a membership club. The membership cost now $7,000. It's really appreciated like crazy. You know, if you're friends with benefits, if you hold that token, like Ben, Ben is a member. So Ben got in at like probably $100 or a couple hundred bucks membership. He never uses it. So he's like, God, the Discord is super noisy. Like, I'd have to like really go spend time in there to like make friends and do all this stuff. He's like, I'm too busy for all that. So like, I never, I basically never go in there. But he's like, it's cool because I hold this token. It's going up. So I have this like seat in the club and I could sell that if I wanted to, or I could use it if I wanted to. So he's like, it's kind of cool. He bought it kind of like just to, just to play with the technology, just to play with like this new experiment. So these are called social tokens. The idea is that any creator, any set of creators could create one of these. So the Paul brothers, I think, have had like the Maverick Club. I think the Nelk Boys have their own club. And these are just like, you know, traditional, you pay us a monthly subscription and you get access to insider content. So this is basically owning instead of renting. So instead of renting your spot in the club through a monthly fee, you own your spot in the club and there's a limited number of spots. And then that's an asset that you could then flip later to somebody else if you want to get out of the club and you want somebody else to take your spot.

And that way everyone's online and everyone's online.

Everyone is aligned and it becomes instead of an expense, it becomes an investment. So I think that is a switch that gets flipped, right? Instead of a $9 a month. Okay, cool. I paid $900, but I own this thing. And if I was correct in betting that, like, let's say we made one for My First Million, right? If we— if they were correct in betting that this, like, let's say 9 months ago, they're like, oh, I think this podcast is going to get bigger. Well, guess what? It did. And if there was only whatever, 1,000 spots in our, in our private club, in our private group where we're sharing either insights, deals, making introductions between people, that sort of thing. It's a community of people that could be pretty valuable, right? Like there's a pretty strong case why we should create one of these for the like kind of fans of the show that are like hardcore members, right? And then they own it and then they say, all right, cool. The more popular Sean and Sam get, the more people are going to want to get into this club. And my $1,000 seat I'm going to get value from it today and then I might flip it for $3,000 or $10,000 2 years from now or a year from now. That's like the promise.

Yeah. And, and I think that's a great idea. Now let me put something in perspective. So did you know that Soho House went public recently?

I saw you put this here, so I started doing some research on it. Pretty, pretty fascinating. Break it down.

Yeah. So Soho House, it doesn't have to be a bad business, but it is. So Soho House is basically a members-only club. It's basically a country club, but instead of a golf course, you get access to like a library feeling building, like a, with a bar and a restaurant and maybe a pool. Maybe sometimes they have a gym and it's basically in New York, LA, probably Paris, London. It's in where all like rich, cool young people live. It costs about $2,000 to $3,000 to join depending on how old you are. And they have 100,000 members and they recently went public at a $3 billion market cap and The reason why their business isn't great is they took on a lot of debt. COVID really hurt them. And I think maybe it's slightly mismanaged, but it's not a bad company.

Putting some numbers around that. I think they had like $900 million of debt from because they're buying real estate in the most prime locations right there. They have real estate or either leases or own, I don't know which one in like, you know, Manhattan, LA, not San Francisco, right now, London. So they had $870 million, I think, of debt. And then during COVID they furloughed 90% of their workforce, I think. So they furloughed 90% of the workforce. They only churned 10% of members because, A, the members are kind of wealthy and whatever, and B, they offered other perks, like kind of like digital perks, to try to come up with other ideas because you couldn't go into the building and do your Soho House mingling or whatever people do at these places.

And so the reason why Friends with Benefit interests me is I don't care about this. I don't care about that company. Like I said, I don't think that they're going to run it like a proper company. But if you were going to, I think I would do the Soho House model where I try to have buildings that are really nice and you really want to come and it's run like a proper company. I would 100% do it this way. That takes a lot of risk, you know, like I got to make sure that these members, uh, this, the membership stays valuable. But it incentivizes me to make my— make it great for my members. And I could use some of that money to buy buildings. And I think so. I think that I would use this model for a Soho-style membership.

Yeah. So, so what do you think about us doing it? Why, why would you or why wouldn't you do it?

I think that it makes a ton of sense. There's really only one reason why you wouldn't do it, which is do you want more work?

Yeah, that's pretty much the only reason. And it's like the thing we were talking about at the very beginning, like reciprocity. If somebody gives you a Diet Coke, you feel like you kind of Yeah. All right, cool. I'll kind of hook you up. There's— as soon as somebody becomes a member of your club, you feel obligated to make a really fucking awesome club. You're like, I will not sleep until this club is— until you feel like you're, you're getting the edge on this deal by 10x. Unfortunately, that's the way my personality is wired, and I think you're the same. And so it's like, oh good, do I want to overdeliver on something right now? I don't know. I got to, I got to think before I commit to that because—

yeah, I've committed to that before. That's the only reason why you wouldn't do it. But if you wanted to run this like a company and you wanted to create a coworking space and you wanted to do it with this model, I think that's a, that's a, I wouldn't say easy, but it's a very interesting path to build something quite big.

Yeah. And I don't know if I agree with you that you have to have a physical space. I don't really think it's that. It's more like you have to have value. So, okay, so Soho House is valuable because it's a place you can go. It's kind of like a third place. You can see, you know, you know that everybody else who's there is cool. So I think for this, like, The idea of having a digital community, a Discord, Slack, Facebook group, whatever, where everybody's cool, like you've seen this with Trends, that's pretty valuable. People, people dig that. They think about that. Like with Trends, you produce research reports, right? So you're going to get access to intel, intelligence about the market that's interesting to you. Cool. That, that works too. There's also other stuff like, for example, I think that being able to access deals and deal flow is like pretty important to people. Or at least a certain set of people who have more, more sort of money than good investments and good investment opportunities around them. And then the last piece is you could also do this with— you could sort of like auction off time in a way. So like there's a world where we basically would say, all right, we create a friends with benefit token. And with that token comes, you're going to get access to me and Sam. Like right now that token gets you 1 hour with me and Sam. And so we create basically 1,000 booked out bookable hours when we mint these tokens. But you also know that our time is going to become more valuable and you want to use it when it's really important to you. And so that's going to appreciate in value over time as our, you know, Elon Musk in 2000, his time was easier to book than it is today. Today it's basically priceless. You basically cannot pay any amount of money. There might be some huge amount of money that you would have to pay to get an hour of his time. With him not getting anything else in return. And so I think that's the other thing you could offer of value is basically time with people of value. And that time could be like an investment. You're basically betting today that I want to, I want to hold a block of Sam's kind of like advice or coaching or, you know, just hangout time because I think that's going to go up in value over time.

Yeah. So anyway, it interests me and I agree. I think we're aligned there. Can I tell you about one more interesting thing that is related to rich people? I—

yes.

Have you ever heard of this company called Wealth-X?

No. What is it?

Okay. So every year Wealth-X is— Wealth-X is a company, it's a database company. And what they do is they basically use publicly available records. So property records, and sometimes you can get people's tax returns, things like that. And they look for people who are ultra high net worth. Ultra high net worth is defined as $30 million in assets. And they create this massive database. I believe there's 800,000 or 700,000 people in the world that are considered Ultra high net worth. And all they do is they comb through loads of different data and then they have independent researchers who work their hardest to verify that this is true. And the reason why I discovered this is for years Wealth-X is famous. Every year they put together a study that says, here's how the wealthy are investing their assets. And they create this end of year asset allocation and they say, wealthy people have this much in gold, this much in real estate, whatever. And I think that this is an interesting business and it was actually recently acquired by a publicly traded company. So I was able to look back at their, at their numbers. And I actually think that a company like this is shockingly easy to start. And I think this company undersold. So they sold for $20 million in cash. They were doing about $12 million in revenue with $800,000 in profit. If I was the founder of this company, I never would have sold. They sell this to people for $15,000 or to other companies for $15,000 a year for subscription access. And they basically are selling it to people who manage, um, people's money. So, um, right. Financial advisors, things like this. But the interesting thing to me and the takeaway to this, if you're listening, I think this model of business, this data business, we've called this, um, I think we said that, that messy data wants to be free. Is that what we— or sorry, data wants to be free.

Data wants to be free.

Yeah, data wants to be free. And, and, and, and, um, the founder—

free doesn't mean free price-wise. It wants to be it's like trapped and it wants to be let free, basically.

Correct. And the founder of CB Insights that does kind of like this for publicly or for privately held companies, he told me the same thing. He goes, our whole motto, motto, motto is, uh, there's a bunch of dirty, muddy data out there and we're going to go and find it and just make it really easy to consume. That's what WealthX did. I'm just pretty certain. I read the Glassdoor reviews. I'm pretty certain that this business is amazingly easy to copy and to figure out. So the ways that they get data is they'll, they'll tell you, they'll look at who owns a jet, they'll figure out who's donating money. So if you donate money to a nonprofit, oftentimes that's made public. If you're buying personal property, if you have certain hobbies, if you donate—

get on the list, they don't know how much you have, but they're like, oh, Sam Parr, big donation, must have money. All right, put them on the list.

Yeah, they look at, they look at what— so if you're part of Tiger Glow, uh, what's it called, Tiger 21. If you, um, if you have certain interests, certain hobbies, if you donate money, that, that's how they get their information. It's just not that hard to build this type of business. Now, it is hard to sell, but everything's hard to sell. If you got to get on the phones and you got to call people and you got to sell some $15 grand, that's always hard. But by creating the data out of your blogs, I think this is such a straightforward business if you wanted to make some money.

Um, so, so So they didn't make a ton of money. And why is that? So this seems like CB Insights is a big business. I don't know what CB Insights— what's it worth?

Close to $100 million.

Worth that or making that revenue? Revenue. Yeah, exactly. Worth probably closer to $1 billion then.

Yeah, probably more.

By the way, founder listens to the pod. Shout out to Anand. I think he's a pretty avid listener. So that, that business worked in a much bigger way, but same principle, like you're saying, right? Data's there, it's muddy. We go dig it up, we wash it off, we rinse it, we polish it, we package it, and we say, here you go. Here's that data you've been looking for. It was here. Like, yeah, you could have gone and got it yourself, but man, you don't want to go scrub through that mud. Well, let us do that for you. Let us organize this whole thing. So you just type in the name you want to know about, type in the industry you want to know about, and bam, here's the info. And so, um, that business worked. Why is it? Is it because financial advisors did— there just weren't enough of them? No, there's a lot of them. They weren't willing to pay for this info. Why do you think this business didn't work and what would you do differently?

It probably didn't work because they probably just hired a ton of people to make this stuff. So whenever— if you go to the website, you can kind of tell some of their technology is janky. What I would do is I would use something like import.io or another third-party service like that. And I wouldn't build too much technology. I would only have, uh, my only technology that I would build was a pretty interface that pulls it all together. But I think you could build most of this stuff using Zapier, Import.io, Airtable, things like that. I think that you could build like a pretty robust MVP that you could charge money for using things like this. And so I think they probably didn't make money because they probably, their staff was just a bloated staff. The company was founded in 2010. So when they launched, a lot of this technology, that third-party technology, wasn't available. And so I think they just have a bloated staff that was mostly doing manual work to go and find these types of people.

Yeah, okay, I can see that. This is a cool service though. I never actually heard of WealthX, so I'm going to go read the report. I think that's pretty dope. By the way, I want to say one other thing on the community side that we were talking about going back. I don't think communities are great big businesses.

That's what I mean.

Community of communities of communities can be great big businesses. Discord is a community of communities. Reddit is a community of communities. And both of those are like $10 billion-ish sized companies. And so if you can build— and so that's why I actually think collab land, like if I was going to put money somewhere, I'd go put it in collab land, not in friends with benefits.

Same page.

The platform you're using to launch all these different communities, that has the potential to be much bigger than any one of these random tokens. I don't know who the fuck is buying Friends with Benefits. This might be a thing that they could just manipulate themselves, by the way. I have no idea. I think these thinly traded things could be potentially— I'm not saying they did. I'm just saying, who the heck is bidding up the price like this? It doesn't make a ton of sense to me. But yeah, my main point is that community of communities are better businesses than an individual one.

One's a community, one's a technology company. And so my point of bringing it up was Collabland I would rather invest in, but I wouldn't— I think that you can own a community that does $10 or $20 in sales and is profitable. But yeah, you're not going to knock it out the park with that business. All right. What do you got?

Uh, all right, let's do another one. Um, let's do, uh, okay. I have a little like hot girl side hustle. So we've done blue collar side hustle. We've done teenage, you know, the puberty side hustle. And now this is my hot girl side hustle. So I'm just trying to identify simple things that anybody who's in a certain demographic can do that will generate, you know, $10,000 to $50,000 a month of profit without big upfront costs or like specific hard skills that you need to have. And I'm not going to say OnlyFans, although that is definitely a hot girl side hustle. So this hot girl side hustle is a little bit different. There are— I don't know if you kind of follow this too much. Actually, you do, because I think you guys run ads like this. The dominant way to advertise for products now, because you're advertising on social networks, the dominant way to advertise is not super high production value, finely produced content. IPhones. Yeah, it's selfie content, right? UGC is what they call it. I call it selfie because it's UGC. Who the fuck knows what that means? So user-generated content, basically.

And they're not doing— companies aren't just doing this on social at this point. If you look at a commercial on TV for Chime, it's the same thing.

Well, yeah, the digital-first companies, when they go to TV, like Chime, right? First spent $100 million on digital, and now they go do their first TV spot, and their whole company's been trained of like, hey, you know what works? When it just looks like a normal person talking because an ad, people just get sort of blind to an ad. They just glaze right over it. And so what works really well, like I see this with, with you guys with Morning Brew, which basically like it's a TikTok ad and the person's like, you know, my secret to getting my boss to think I'm super smart. And then it's like, I fucking, I subscribe to The Hustle and it's like, that gives me the news every morning and I look really smart.

That, that, that ad crushes. That tagline. Like, so Morning Brew does it, The Skimm does it, The Hustle does it. All of everyone who's in the email space does that. You know who invented that or who first used that line? No. I wrote that. I wrote that. I wrote that. I stole it from an old ad book. I wrote that in 2016. I think I stole it from an old ad book of like something about a guy being a piano player. Uh, there was like a piano lesson ad from the 1960s about being a great piano player. He goes, uh, he thinks I'm naturally a great piano player. I'm not. I really just use this, this lesson or this way of learning music, and I took that and I applied it here. Now everyone uses it.

Well, that's kind of genius because that's not even like a word-for-word, right? That's actually like quite a different thing, but you got inspired by it.

Yeah, it's called swipe files. So I keep swipe files. So, um, I keep digital files of all my favorite, favorite old ads. So for, for example, there's this one great ad about the Wall Street— from the Wall Street Journal, and they— it's made them like $50 million in recurring revenue. And it was launched in like the '70s, and it was called like the Tale of Two Young Men. And it was like both of these young men went to the same college, they had similar jobs. One did this and one did that. One earned this, one earned that. What were the difference? One bought the Wall Street Journal subscription their freshman year of college. And that's like the whole— the story of the ad. And it's like the headline is like, why did these two young men do almost the exact same thing but end so, so much different?

We should run that same ad for the podcast and we should be like, basically that one listened to— one listened to My First Million, one didn't. One became a millionaire by 30 and the other one, you know, still, still like hoping that retirement kicks in, you know, at 65. Uh, we should run that same ad and then we should— when you click it, we should tell the backstory of the ad basically and, and tell that story.

It's a great ad. It's a great ad. So I keep a file full of these types of things. So anyway, go ahead.

By the way, if people want to see, uh, go to swipefile.com. Our friend Neville owns swipefile.com, which is a great little domain to have, and he's built like a pretty fucking awesome WordPress digital swipe file. I wish mine was like that. My, mine is like in my Notes app and I have a Slack channel. That's where I keep my swipes. But like, if I could, I would have one like that. But he's got tons of great stuff there. Okay. Going back to actually this marketing thing, by the way, that I kind of want to give you more props. That's kind of a genius way to market the Hustle, right? So how would a normal person approach this? They would say Hustle, it's a daily newsletter. So I'm going to say sign up for our daily newsletter, get the news delivered to you every morning, right? Like that. They would focus on the product and you focused on basically the happy ending. And even the happy ending, you didn't just say, and now you're informed, because that doesn't get people emotionally to register at all, right? What you're basically saying is, what's the outcome you want? You want to look smart in front of your boss. You want to look smart at work. We help you look smart at work. Read The Hustle if you want to look smart at work. You drew this line. Is that how you think about it? That's how I think about it. How do you think about it?

Exactly.

What's your framework?

Basically, one user told me one time that they were in a job interview for Lyft. And they brought up a certain line, like a certain story at the end of an interview that wasn't going well, and that created a relationship with this person interviewing her. And there's like, oh, okay, great. I'm in this person's head. We were able to have chit chat. Thank you, Hustle. You made me look smart. And so the idea here is, um, I wanted a story, uh, but I ha— I only wanted to be able to tell that story in like 200 characters. And so I believe the original ad was like, my boss thinks I'm a smart parenthesis. I'm not. The hustle is my secret weapon to trick them though. It's working wonderfully. Try it. Or something like that. And yeah, that was the whole idea behind, behind the ad.

That's amazing.

That has reached 300 million people, I think, at this point. Yeah.

And then everybody copied it. But, you know, whatever, you do what you got to do. So, okay, what was I talking about before this? I was talking about—

oh, TikTok.

Okay, so, so So, you know, what I was trying to get to was basically that my hot girl side hustle, though, what I was trying to get to is almost all digital advertisers have realized that this selfie-style content that looks like native content, if you're on TikTok, it's got to look like it's going to be a funny or cute or interesting or amazing video. Or if it's on Instagram, it's got to look like an Instagram post. If it's on Facebook, it's got to look like a Facebook post. Those perform better than your professional commercials, your professional ads that look highly polished. People just skip past the polished stuff because they're looking for entertainment. So you have to look like the type of entertainment that looks like that's native on the platform. So this has created a shortage of people who can create great on-script, on-brand selfie content. And so I know this for our brand, but many, many brands, everybody is trying to farm this out to either influencers or agencies. The agencies are like, look, we can run your ads, but like making this creative takes a lot of time and energy and thought and like we don't have actors and like a place to a nice house to do this in. So the hot girl side hustle is this. There's this girl on Twitter, her name's Social Savannah. If you go look her up, she's like a kind of like a, I'll help your brand grow through Facebook ads, through TikTok ads. And she's what she's not doing or what she does some of, but it's not the important part is like I do brand strategy, I do advertising strategy. Well, guess what? A lot of, a lot of agencies pitch that same thing. We will, we will manage your— we'll run your ads, we'll be your ad agency. What she does that's different is she basically is— it's her. And I think she has like a couple of other like girls with her that do this. They're like, send us the product and then we'll take a bunch of these selfie videos and we will be the actor in your content. And because I know what ads work, I know what to say on here and I just look like an average person. And that's why this ad is going to work, because I just look like an average person. I'm not like— I can make— I can get somebody's attention when they're scrolling, but I don't look like an actor in a set with a professional camera and a professional background. I look like a girl in her house. So this is my— if you're a college student, if you're a college girl specifically, there are a huge number of brands that will pay you. Don't try to become Instagram famous, become Instagram ad famous. And what that means is be the person who can take any product and just do a demo, a sales pitch, and a testimonial and create branded ad content. And you can charge thousands of dollars a month and you can charge even a percentage of the ad spend for this, which is kind of insane if you're good.

How much do you think Flo from the Progressive commercial gets paid a year?

Oh my God, I don't even know. This depends how good her agent is, but You know, they're spending tens of millions easily on that campaign. She's like a branded part of it. Like if you switch, if you switched out Flo, it'd be like, hey, wait, that's not Flo. Who the heck is that? It's like, you don't know this, but there's this children's cartoon that's like the second most video watched video on YouTube. It's called Blippi. Have you ever heard of Blippi? It's like Baby Shark, but like Blippi is this guy. What he does is he goes into like toy stores after they're closed and he films a video of himself playing with all the toys. And it's like mesmerizing for like my daughter. She can't look away when like Blippi can play for an hour. It's like you're playing with the toys, you're just watching him. And then like halfway through, like the YouTube channel, they just switch the guy and all the parents are like, who the hell is this guy? Like, this guy's— you can just switch Blippi. Like, I could see the kid. It's not like there's a new Barney under the hood. It's like, so kids can't tell, or at least like at the age my daughter, she's 2, like she can't tell. Maybe like a 4-year-old can tell or something like that, but the parents always have to sit there with it. And so there's tons of online forums where people are like, did you see that? They tried to just switch Blippi on us like that, whatever. So basically, yeah, I don't know if they can switch Flo at this point. Maybe they can, maybe they can't. Like the Old Spice guy, the Dos Equis guy, these become part of the actual— they become non-fungible parts of the of that.

I think this is great for this woman. How much money do you think she should make in this? This, uh, what's her name?

Social Savannah. I have no idea. I mean, if you told me she's making $50,000 to $100,000 a month, I would say, yeah, that sounds about right. If you told me she's making a little bit less, I'd say she's probably going to be at $50,000 to $100,000 soon. Why? Because brands need this content. I don't want to have to arrange photo shoots or put myself in front of the camera. I just want to send you know, product to this person once a month and they sit there in their bedroom and they record a new ad every day. And then I have 30 pieces of creative at the end of the month, by the end of the month that I'm testing on Facebook and I'm saying this one works, this one doesn't do more like this. And I'm looking at her.

This woman is perfect. She is perfect. This is so— here's why. Here's why she's perfect. She's perfect because So I've run— my team, we've run 8 figures in ads, a lot of ads. I personally have probably ran $5 million, maybe $8 million. So like a fair amount of— when we first started, I ran a lot of them. And my— our podcast, we've gotten accused of being bros. I'm just going to say what I'm going to say, but don't like hate me for being a bro.

For a second here.

This is just the truth. Okay. This is just the truth. Okay. So we would have 3 different types of ads. Well, actually 4. A hot guy, like a good looking, but not like hot, like an everyday next door type of guy.

Right. The gym from The Office.

Yeah. The equivalent for a woman. So like a pretty girl next door woman. And then like a smoking hot, like traditional.

A 10.

Yeah. Or at least like the stereotype of like this, like, you know, whatever you like Barbie.

What you think a model looks like if you're going to make a, have a model for your brand.

Yes, for both men and women, the pretty next-door girl worked significantly better. Significantly. It always works. And so that shocked me. It worked amongst both men and women. And when I look at this woman, I'm thinking in my head, this is— she's like kind of exactly the, the ads that, that we run. They look like this woman, the ones that won, at least.

Exactly. That's exactly it. So even though I called it my hot girl side hustle, it's really not a hot girl side hustle. It actually should be called more like— the reason, actually, the way I was thinking about this was approachable. Yeah, girl next door side hustle, basically. And if you, if you are like cute, basically that's the bar because you have to get somebody's attention when they're scrolling. And the way the social media works, whether people like this or not, if this is a controversial statement, like get over yourself. The way social media works is people react to or they stop or they pause when they see somebody attractive in their feed, right? We're like monkeys just scrolling through our feed. And so that's why I think you have to be a certain level of attractiveness. But really the most important part is the thing has to look like somebody just like posting something from their account, not a branded thing. And that works the best. So anyways, I think this is an easy way to to get to $5,000 to $10,000 a month easily. And I think the upside can be $100,000 if you're gonna manage a group of people. Like, there's some people who are on college campuses that are smart. They know how to put other people on campus to work for them. You could easily get this to 6 figures a month of income, and it's almost all profit.

I don't know this woman, but we run in the same circle. So this woman, I'm looking it up now. So there's a guy named Taylor Holiday, and I forget the other person's name, but they're listeners of the podcast. They follow both of us on Twitter, and they used to run this company called Common Thread Collective. And I think it's just an agency, right? It's just an agency. They seem like great guys. And I looked up Social Savannah on LinkedIn. So her name's Savannah Sanchez, this woman, and she used to work at that company as a paid manager. And, uh, and I imagine what happened when she was there was they were like, hey, we got to create these ads. And then somehow it came to like, oh, Savannah, you're like, you You're, you're like good looking and you're charismatic and you're creative. Like, let's just use you. And she was like, okay, fine. And then she actually kind of learned how the business worked a little bit while she was there. And this is how she started this agency. This is amazing. I'm totally on board with this.

Yeah, it basically unbundles the ad agency. So the ad agency does, they do creative, but then when they usually, when they do creative, they usually farm it out to a photographer, videographer, another, another creative ad agency, whatever. Uh, they'll do media, like strategy, like what's your buying strategy? How much you're going to, how are you going to structure your campaigns? What's your budgets, etc. They do like reporting, client reports, all that bullshit. Then they're like, oh, you need to be on Google, Facebook, Snapchat. We'll manage all those. We'll put it all in one place for you. We'll keep it all organized. And the smart thing is that somebody just unbundled and said, man, the most important part of this whole thing is the ad creative. That's also the part where you don't have to do almost any of the like client services and the undifferentiated stuff. And, and the good part about this is that if you are good at it, it's like sandwich video where basically you get known as the group to go to. That's who the D2C companies go to. So I think there's like an opportunity in that to become like the sandwich video for, for D2C.

And look at the link I just sent to you in Zencastr of the people who work there.

All right, let's take a look. Employees, employees. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. They all look— they all fit the profile. Yes. Yeah.

I love this company.

Yeah, exactly. Like, if I could invest in this company, I'd be like, hey, great. Just— I don't want to— not long term. Like, give me a monthly dividend out of this company and I'll be very, very happy. I think I'll make my money back in 6 months.

God, this is great. All right, you want to do one more thing?

Yeah, let's do one more. All right, let's do— I'll do a more high-tech one. Okay, so we did the bro science one. I'll give you kind of like a cool technology one. So cool technology one is more blue-collar, actually. There's a whole bunch of blue-collar jobs around construction sites, like forklifts, whatever the big— I don't know what they're called, like tractors, like the things that dig up dirt, cement trucks, whatever.

Dude, you didn't even know who Dolly Parton was. Did anyone email you and say, like, what the fuck's your problem?

No, nobody emailed me because nobody else knows about Dolly Parton either. Unless you come from a certain part of America. No, I'm just joking. I think a lot of people do know, and they were just like rolling their eyes like, how does this guy not know this? So the thing I was going to bring up is on construction sites, you have a lot of these heavy machinery drivers, basically. So drivers of forklifts, drivers of cranes, things like that. And these are really expensive labor and it takes skill and it's also dangerous, right? And so I think what's going to happen is if you just fast forward 10, 20 years from now, I think all of this gets replaced with this technology that's— it's not self-driving, it's more like self-operating, which is basically like remote or what they call teleoperated. So have you ever seen a teleoperated thing? Have you ever seen a demo of this?

Yeah. So I forget what they're called, but basically I remember about in 2015, I went to my friend's office, AJ, and it was called iCracked, and he had an office in New York and an office in San Luis Obispo— or sorry, San Francisco and New York or something like that. And he had this like thing, you know, remember like a hoverboard, like the two wheels?

Yeah.

And he had like a stick coming up from it and then an iPad. And basically what you could do is you could use your iPhone and you could be remote and you could have this like screen hover around the office and you could be looking at it from your phone and talk to people. So you can go into like different rooms, things like that. And they also have them at stores now. So some stores are fully operated by those things.

Yeah, there's a— we used to have one at our office. It was kind of like a joke. Nobody really used it, but it was like a Segway, but it's like an iPad on top of it. And anybody who's not there could roll around the office in theory. So it's a similar sort of idea, but basically there's a set of technologies that say, hey, look, self-driving, like full AI, that's hard and far away. But what we can do is we can basically have a— we can do kind of like a labor arbitrage. So you can have like a driver Instead of being in Los Angeles where labor might be expensive, you can have a driver in Santa Fe or a driver in the Philippines. Doesn't matter.

Yeah, that's badass.

And basically the driver can basically drive and you could drive a full car. So there's just like 8 cameras. The driver is basically looking at it like it's a video game. Like they have 3 monitors. The front monitor is the front windshield. The left monitor is if you looked out the left window and looked at your rearview mirror. And the right one is the right one. And basically they just drive. and like the, they've gotten this down low latency where you can have a, I can go sit in a car. I've done this. I sat in a car that was being driven by somebody at a computer somewhere else that I had never met, that I never knew. And he drove me around the parking lot, no problem, parked the car and I got out and I was like, oh, that's cool. That's Uber. But the driver's not here. The driver's a video game player somewhere else. And, um, and then that gets even better because, okay, that's, that takes advantage of geography, right? Maybe I make $25 an hour here. And I can pay $12 an hour in another city. But still, that's like kind of a lot of technology and risk for just saving, you know, $12 an hour. So then they go next level. They say, well, you know, we really only need the driver when they're at an intersection trying to make a left turn or trying to park. So but like on a highway or, you know, on a straight road, very simple stuff, the computer can just do it super accurately. So what they do is it's like the Deep Sentinel, it's like the security company that you invest in. Where one security guard monitors 100 different doors. Because for a security guard, they only need to look when there's a, when there's a person at the door. If there's no person at the door, the screen's off. And so what Deep Sentinel did was smart, was they made it where like you have like a super, a super agent who instead of just a bodyguard monitoring or security officer monitoring one location, they can monitor 100 at a time. Similarly with this technology, you have things driving, and then only when the computer is confused or gets into a defined situation that's like, hey, this is a left turn. We only trust humans to do left turns right now. Then it pops up on the driver's screen. The driver says, great, I will take over from here. They do the left turn and then they say back to autopilot, and then the thing drives off again. And so that's called human-in-the-loop technology, where it's mostly AI, but then there's a human in the loop of doing the process. So human in the loop is super interesting. Most people view it as like a, just a Band-Aid, like a bridge until we get to full AI. But I think there's going to be big companies that just do human in the loop stuff. And one of the human in the loop things that I think is going to happen is remote operated heavy machinery on construction sites. Because if you take the people away, you reduce a lot of the danger, you reduce the skill requirement, and then maybe you only need an operator to do certain high skill tasks. and they just like basically load in like a video game, they do the task and then they leave and then they go do it again. So one driver can be like working on 10 construction sites every day. I think that's going to be pretty cool because that person will make, they'll make 3 times more. What's the name of somebody doing this? So there's a couple of different companies that are doing this. There's some that are doing this with construction. I don't know their names. Then there's a company that's just doing teleoperation as a service. So basically it says, hey, you want to create a company doing teleoperated forklifts? Cool. Or cranes? Great. Put our kit on your crane and it'll work. Put our software kit. Wow. This is what your driver sitting somewhere else is going to use is our camera kit, basically. And that's a company called— I want to say it's like Shadow or something. Let me see. That's pretty great. As a service. Phantom. Phantom.auto is one of the companies. Now, I've heard some mixed things, so I don't know if it's a great company. This is a former YC partner left to go start this. They raised a bunch of money.

Who?

They're trying to do it for self-driving cars. What'd you say? Who?

Who?

I gotta look them up. Phantom Auto founder.

And what were the mixed things?

Well, some people are just like, you know, anybody who's going to do this, they end up building this in-house. They don't actually self-driving is like, you have so many engineers, you're working on this so hard, and your use case might be different. And so they were skeptical that a third party can provide the software that every one of these companies is going to use, because it's not like there's going to be millions of companies that need this. It's more like dozens of companies today that need this, and all dozens of those companies are probably going to do this in-house. I want to say Phantom was done by the YC guy. Maybe it's something else, but maybe I'm mixing up two of these. No, I think I'm mixing up two of these. There was a different YC founder doing this.

So really quick, there's this company called Winner Winner. So winnerwinner.com. Have you ever been there?

Yep, I've checked it out, but explain it because it's pretty cool.

It's pretty cool. So Joe Spiser, you know, our friend, he's, uh, maybe a co-founder or helped get it going. But basically what they do is they have a warehouse in Las Vegas. Well, so How cheap is a Las Vegas warehouse? You would know more than I do. Do you know?

I mean, dirt cheap.

So like you could have like, I think Ramon had a massive, like many tens of thousands of square feet for like $20 grand a month. And then these guys, so these guys rented this massive warehouse and then they filled it with claw machines and you could play a claw machine. Like you see the camera, there's a camera on it and you could play this claw machine virtually from your phone. And then when you pull a gift, I actually don't know. You've done it. What happens when you win a gift?

They'll mail it to you. So like you basically, you buy credits and then you like play the thing. And then if you win the toy, you can basically like pay. I think you, I think you have to be at a certain level to get the free shipping, but otherwise you like pay to have the toy shipped to you. And so it's, it's a, it's an arcade you can play from far away and it's a teleoperated little claw. That goes down and picks up the items. It sounds silly, but these are actually really popular games, uh, both in the US but also in Japan. I think there's like a pretty big market for this either in Korea or Japan. And then Winner Winner, their numbers are pretty like decent as well. Like they're doing, they're doing fairly well. I think you guys invested, right?

No, we haven't, but they're thinking about, we don't know if there's going to be a, a, um, conflict of interest. We're trying to figure it out, but they're investable, you know, like it's getting to that size.

Yeah, it's a really cool concept. Uh, it's definitely worth like playing with once just to see it. Kind of like makes you think more is possible than you thought of, right? Like it's kind of a crazy idea to be like, hey, you know that little like $2 thing where you can like maybe win an iPhone or like a stuffed animal? Like, yeah, what if you could just play that from your phone?

I don't think this was that hard to set up either.

Like, no, I don't think so either. They say like, because little things do matter, like latency or like if I push right and it doesn't go right until it lags, but by then I've pushed right 3 more times. Now it goes right 3 times and I'm like, you can easily just get frustrated, throw your phone and be like, this is stupid. So there's definitely some tech you have to do to smoothen that out, but that's getting better and better every day. And any group of smart people can solve that. That's a lot easier than self-driving cars or whatever. But I think this whole space to watch is teleoperation. Remote operation, remote drivers, remote arcade games, remote, you know, construction, remote cleaning. There's a whole bunch of things where the machine can do 80% of the stuff. The machine can't do the last 20%. So instead of just waiting until the machine is perfect, you say, cool, we're going to put a human in the loop. The human will take over when that 20% needs to be done, when a decision needs to be made, when an adjustment needs to be done or whatever. And then the machine goes back to doing it. And now you have humans that are working remotely. They make more money than they would if they were just working on one site. And the cost of the thing goes down too, because you don't need so many humans working on stuff to make it work. So I think it's like a win-win-win that's going to be more popular, but people don't really talk about that today.

Do you follow— do you know how much Onnit sold for? You know Onnit?

Yeah, Joe Rogan's like thing. You had told me something. They sold for a couple hundred million, right?

Dude, someone told me like $200 million, right? Is that crazy? So on its own by this guy named Aubrey Marcus. Do you follow him on Instagram?

No. Should I?

This guy is nuts. I've heard some crazy stories about this guy. I like, I don't met him. When I say nuts, I don't, I think he's a fine guy, but he's just like an oddball. I've heard some stories about him that basically one time he went to this rural area and went into an isolation area, but it wasn't like an isolation tank. It was like a room with no sound or no light. And he stayed there for like 4 or 5 days. I've heard other stories about how he goes to this area and does massive amounts of LSD. I've heard stories about how he had an open relationship with his wife and it didn't work out. And she was like, I believe her name's Whitney. I think she's like a a former Miss America, something like that. And they had an open relationship. This guy is wild. If you follow him on Instagram and he's like, he's like a hunk. Like, he's like, looks really good looking. Like, he's good looking. And he like—

the word hunk in a long time, dude.

He's like a hunk. He's like ripped. He's huge. He's good looking. He's got like cool tattoos. This guy, you got to follow this guy on Instagram. It's wild. This is like some weird shit.

I'm watching him. I'm watching him work out with a steel mace.

Yeah, that's what they sell.

Warriors used to use.

And there's like videos of him with like war paint on. And then this guy, he— this is the most— this guy is so fascinating to me.

I love the founders of all these companies. So like, if you want to see interesting founders, look at the founders of supplement companies, you know, like energy drink companies. Like, go look at the guy from Bang Energy. Dude, tell me that's not a good time. Tell me that's not a good time on Instagram. Go look at the guys who do supplements.

The Bang Energy guy is like legit weird.

Yeah, all these guys are legit weird, dude. And that doesn't mean like it's not a bad thing, but they're not, you know, they're not like, you know, some corporate— they run big corporations, but they're not corporate. They are not buttoned up. They are— they're a little wild.

Yeah, man, this is a good follow. You got to follow Aubrey Marcus. He like, he does all this spiritual stuff. Like, there's— here's a video of him. He's getting like blessed by a spiritual shaman or something. I don't even understand like some of this terminology.

And all right, I have a good follow for you too on Instagram of a tech founder. Do you follow the founder of Telegram, Pavel?

No. Is he a nutty?

Okay, so just type in Pavel, P-A-V-E-L. He's the CEO of Telegram. Telegram, if you don't know it, Telegram is basically WhatsApp, but it's made by this kind of like guy who's he won't sell the company. So he's like, you know, this guy's actually kind of like a genius. I think he started VK, which is the Russian Facebook.

It's the only country—

Durov, D-U-R-O-V. And his handle is just Durov. D-U-R-O-V. Yeah, I got him. So, so this guy's story is pretty nuts. So he starts VK. Damn, he's jacked. VK is the Russian Facebook. Facebook, the Facebook basically has taken over every other, like, oh, I'm Facebook for Brazil. It was like, or no, Facebook comes, wins. It's like, oh, I'm Facebook for like Bebo. Bebo was Facebook in Ireland, in the UK, and in Australia. Boom, Facebook won. And then in Russia, they just could never beat VK for like a combination of like slightly political reasons. But also I've seen interviews with Zuckerberg where he's like, dude, they're engineers. These are like the most brilliant mathematicians ever, and they've just made it their mission in life. As soon as we release anything, they have it copied in 24 hours. Like it's and it's like pixel for pixel copy. So VK is Facebook, but instead of blue, it's red. It's like a pixel for pixel copy of Facebook, but it's red. And it has withstood Facebook. Facebook has not been able to win in Russia even after like all this time. But then, you know, Putin or whoever, the government there, they basically took over VK. They just like took over the company and like demanded certain things. He refused. And so this guy had to flee the country. So this guy flees and he creates Telegram, which is this like ideal— this like encrypted messaging app. And it's like WhatsApp, but it's not owned by Facebook. So a lot of people like it. I love it. It's a great product. And he basically self-funded it for a long time. Like he just put like $50 million of his own money into like doing it. He's like, there's no ads, there's no whatever. And then he made a bunch of money when they did an ICO, a token sale, but they never actually went through with it. But they got free money for a while from that. But this dude's Instagram following is hilarious.

I'm looking at him now.

You'll never see anyone else in his Instagram feed. No friend, no girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, kid, nothing. It's only him.

It's usually him with no shirt on and he's pretty ripped and he's, he's very ripped. I mean, he looks like Bruce Wayne.

He is always doing like model-esque photoshoots.

Dude, he's like Vito.

He's like sitting on a sand dune or he's like riding a horse into the sunset. Like he's in a Speedo under a waterfall. And this guy is just hilarious to follow. I just find this guy to be like an actual character.

He's 36 years old, worth $20 billion, and he's got like pictures of him, like with his mega yacht. This guy's fascinating. I'm going to— I'm going to obsess over this guy.

He's the Billy of the week. Pavel, Pavel, you are the Billy of the week.

So where does he live?

Just, he floats around. He doesn't tell anyone where he lives. He's in Dubai a lot, but he travels around and he doesn't, he can't go back to Russia and he can't go, he can't go back to the States or he can't come to the States or doesn't want to come to the States. And so he just goes to like, you know, beautiful places that are, you know, I don't know if he lives in one place. He's just like always traveling. It seems sometimes in the US, sometimes in Dubai, Finland, Brazil, wherever, Paris. And then he runs the company sort of like remotely.

So Wikipedia says, I don't know this word, um, ascetic. Like, what's that mean? Ascetic? I guess that means you don't own much.

And he— you give up your possessions.

He promotes freedom of property, so I guess he doesn't own, uh, that much stuff.

Yeah. Wow. He rents some nice shit, I'll tell you that much. So he may not own—

like, he's renting like a, like a mega yacht, probably a $100 million yacht. This guy's fascinating.

And his kind of like mission in life is just sort of to be like the anti-Facebook, anti-VK. And so I find him to be cool because he's like an idealist. Like if you use Telegram, he writes the update and he'll be like, we have 10 million more members. Telegram remains 100% free, 100% encrypted, 100%, you know, like what's it called? Like you know, independent. And he's like, you know, we released these new features and he's just like, he definitely has like an idealistic streak around privacy, around freedom. At least that's what he promotes.

And this company is like a $20 billion company, right? Or like a multi-billion dollar startup.

Telegram would be a multi-billion dollar startup. But again, there's no, there's no outside investors and there's no— he'll never sell. So, you know, it's— nobody knows the real value.

This might be one of the most valuable companies per employee. I'm looking at their jobs page. They only have like 5 jobs up: a content moderator, a translator, a translator, a junior accountant, an assistant to the CEO.

Dude, that's a sick job. If you can become an assistant, if Pavel's the CEO, that's a sick job.

That's crazy, right?

Yeah.

What an interesting company. Does it make money?

No, it doesn't make any money. He doesn't care about making money. He doesn't want it to make money. They did the— they were like pretty pure until they did this ICO thing. They basically—

yeah, yeah, yeah.

They were like, we're going to beat Ethereum. We're going to like build a better version of Ethereum with all this crazy shit. They released this white paper that was like, we are solving all these impossible computer science things. And people who were smart technically, they were like, all right, well, like if anyone's going to do it, it's going to be these guys. But I don't think— I don't think anybody can do this. And definitely nobody can do this in this timeline that they're talking about. Like the crazy sharding schemes and whatever. And basically they— so, so, so they did this ICO. I think they raised like $4 billion or $3 billion. I have some of the details wrong. I didn't really prepare for this one, but they raised a few billion dollars. And then the US basically said, yeah, you can't— that's a security offering. You can't do that unless you follow these regulations. And so they just pulled the plug on the ICO. But for a year, they held everyone's money. Saying it's going to get listed at the end of the year or 2 years, maybe even. They held everyone's money. So they had like a free float of a multibillion-dollar float for multiple years, and then they gave back the money. But for the deal was so hard to get into that all these middlemen who had allocation, I think you had to buy $20 million slots. That was like the minimum purchase at the time. I think people would buy the $20 million and then they would sell chunks of it to individual retail investors like me. For $30 million or $40 million total. And so people got back the $20 million. But if they sold it for more than that initial strike price, you were screwed. So a lot of people put in, you know, $100,000 into this thing and got back $70 million 2 years later. You know, but that's the risk you take.

I'm going to be researching this all day.

Yeah.

So that's the episode. I got to run.

Cool. All right. See you later. Yeah.

I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.