Nigerian Scammers & Con Artists | Fake Airport Sold For $240 Million | My First Million 6/24/20

It's like, you know, Martin Luther King's one of my heroes, but he also cheated on his wife a lot. Uh, I was saying, I talked to this lady, I met her at a conference, and she worked, uh, for Google, or like the thing inside of Google, uh, what's it called, Google Labs or something? And she told me about these like businesses that they've launched where they'll do like $100 million in revenue or something, but they're like, it's too small. Like it won't move the needle. They just—

Really?

Yeah.

That's surprising. I don't believe that. I'd love to hear which ones of these projects that they had done got to that scale.

She told me that, she was like, it's like, we don't know how big it can get. So we're just gonna kill it. And she also said that they had a hard time finding leaders because the people who they would have were people who had started companies in the past. and they just paid them so much at Google that they were like, ah, like, I don't give a— I don't care if this works.

Yeah, there's a pretty cool story about, uh, have you heard about the Cisco spin-out, spin-in model?

No.

So, uh, so a lot of companies try to do these like innovation labs, innovation arms, innovation blah blah blah, you know, just a lot of it's just like kind of PR puff, but the companies genuinely, they do want to innovate, right? Why would they not? Um, but it's really hard for them. Cisco is one of the few companies that's done this really well where they have incubated and they do what they call spin-out, spin-in, multiple businesses that have been worth over a billion dollars to Cisco. And so I was like, how the hell do they do that? And what they have is they have this little group of, I think, 4 people who have now since left, but they had this group of 4 that were there for God knows how many years, 15, 20 years, something like that. And they called them some nickname, I don't know, I'm gonna make it up, called the M Group or something like that. It's like the M Team. And what they would do is they would have some idea, or they would, uh, either that team would have an idea or the company would have an idea, and they would spin out this group. So they were their own company, they would get their own little office, they would build this product, they would, they would build it up, and Cisco would have the right to just rebuy it for like $500 million whenever they're ready, um, whenever, whenever they view it's ready. And so there's a whole bunch of— and so that same team did this 3 or 4 times, uh, that same group of 4 or 5 people, they went out built the thing, spun back in, and they did it again and again. And then now they've actually left, and that group of people, I think they're just doing their own thing. But, um, if you want to look it up, I should have looked it up before this, but I didn't know we were going to talk about it.

But who's on that cap table?

Uh, I think it's just those 4 people and Cisco itself or something like that. I don't know how— I don't know exactly how it works.

Starting companies with a buyer in mind with—

well, you are though, you have the right to buy. I have the right to buy back. Which is an interesting strategy.

I talked to a VC, I forget who it was, and he's like, I don't really, I typically don't invest in companies when they have an exit plan in mind because I want them to, because I think that then they're not in it for the right reasons. But he goes, one time I did do that. I invested in this guy and he said, this company is going to buy us probably in 36 months because we're going to build something they can't build and I'm going to operate faster than them. And it ended up becoming true.

Right. All right. So here's the article, Business Insider article, why Cisco showered these 3 men with billions. And of course, it's like behind a paywall, but who are the guys?

Do we know them?

Prame somebody, Mario Mazola, and now we— I don't know them. They're older. They're older. They're not sort of— I don't think they're in sort of like the same scene that we roll in. But yeah, it worked for a while. And then now they stopped doing it. I think some companies have tried to replicate it, but it hasn't worked for them. I'm not sure exactly exactly why. But you know, if you could figure out how to help big companies innovate, there's obviously a lot of money to be had there.

So, um, before we get into this, I gotta ask the listeners and you something. So Jack, our friend Jack Smith, introduced me to this guy a few years ago, and I don't even want to say what the service is yet, but okay, I think I could say a little bit. There's a ride-sharing service, one of the ride-sharing services, and what this guy does is He had— I think this is how he does it. I don't exactly know, but you can buy discounted credits, right? So you know how I pay $20 and I get $40 worth of rides? Have you done it?

So he showed it to me years ago, right? This was like, I don't know how long, 2 years ago maybe. He showed it to us and I was like, oh great, I take rides all the time, would love to. Then as I went through the website, I was like, is this like a— hey, is this a scam? I don't think so because Jack said he's doing it and he recommended it.

I've done it.

But then I was like, is this gonna get my account banned? Like, this is too good to be true. So my skepticism went off. I didn't do it. I forgot about it. And then he posted about it in the— in our private My First Million Facebook group. He said, hey, did you guys know about this? It's a really cool, clever, uh, hack and system that this guy's created. Uh, Jack loves those things. So tell me more about what's got your eye here.

Yeah, so first of all, Sean, turn your mic up just a little bit, I think. Okay. Yeah. Say something. Hold on. Just a little, right? Abreu, he's got to turn it up a little bit.

Input. Okay. I turned it up. Is that better?

Much better. Okay. So he has the service now. He's doing it for similar things and okay. So Jack was like, hey, you should have this guy on the podcast. And I'm like, okay, so pros, this guy is a hustler. He's doing amazing stuff. And I'm pretty sure, I think he's either said it or I figured it out. I'm pretty sure the way he does it, this guy's in India. I think what he does is he has a network of like thousands of teenagers and kids and he just gives them a first ride on a ride service and he gets the $10 back like in referral and then sells it. Either that—

He's gaming the— it's not, as far as I understand, it's not like illegal. There's no like sort of illicit hacking or anything. He just says, hey, they have referrals. They have a referral system, which is cool. You get a, you know, every time you refer somebody, you get a certain amount of credits. And what he realizes, he can do cheaper, maybe shorter rides in India, and that will count as a new customer that's been referred. And so he can give you in the US, you know, your full credit for a lightweight ride there. And the arbitrage, there's some money, he keeps some money and we get a saving. And then the ride, the person who takes the ride gets a free ride. So it's like a win-win-win. For everybody but the service.

And to add to complexity, if you pay with Bitcoin, you get a bigger discount, which is what I've done. And if you like do XYZ, like it's, it's, it looks incredibly shady. Long story short, it's interesting. It's a cool story. It's definitely, it's not a scam, but it's questionable about the ethics. And so do we want to promote this or not?

Um, yeah, of course. I, it's not promoting it. I am interested in this guy's story and I think a lot of people will be interested in it. You can make your own judgment after hear them out as to—

well, we've been called out for promoting unethical behavior.

Yeah, but people will call you out for whatever. I, I don't think we're promoting anything. It's one thing, okay, it's promoting if we say this is awesome, go do this. Okay, that's fair, but that's an opinion, right? But I think the right thing to do is to say, hey, here's somebody who's doing something interesting. They're— they found a way to hustle and create, uh, you know, create a business for themselves as well as value for others. We should hear them out and then let people judge for themselves. Is this like past the gray area and not cool for them, or is this actually like, you know, fine? And so I think, I think that's— we should leave that up to the listener. But our job is to tell the story, and also I'm curious, so why not have them on? Who cares?

Capital J journalist. All right, well, uh, he's met— he messaged you and I. We'll set it up. Um, I don't even know if he speaks English well enough. I guess we'll find out.

Right? Yeah, we'll find out. We'll bring them on. So I had some other of these. Um, um, these are more like actual scams, but I wanted to talk about them. I don't know why I wanted to just tell you some things that I've seen. Okay. So, um, recently, I don't know if you've seen on YouTube or if it's just in my recommendations, but all day, every day, there's a live stream of Chamath Palihapitiya, who's kind of like a known investor, early Facebook guy. Billionaire. Um, it's like Chamath talking about Bitcoin, and it has always like 40,000, 50,000 live viewers watching it at any given time. And it says Bitcoin giveaway, Chamath Bitcoin giveaway. And what they did— so what someone's doing, which is just totally a scam, they have a stream going, they have a video embedded of Chamath talking about Bitcoin from like 5 years ago. It's not Chamath doing this, by the way. He's trying to get it taken down. And then on the screen it says Bitcoin giveaway, send me your address and I'll send Bitcoin to somebody. And I think they're just making money off the ad revenue of this live stream. Um, and it has like 40,000-50,000 people. I'm sure some of that's bot traffic and some of it is real traffic. Um, but it's hilarious that somebody's doing this. Like, A, what a waste of time, and B, it's hilarious that YouTube allows this. Chamath's trying to take it down. Um, but hey, okay, so that's one little thing I noticed. Here's another one. Um, you know when the US government came out with the kind of PPP, like, hey, if you're unemployed or you're an employer and you have people, you can get access to money. So, um, of course the Nigerian sort of scammers came out and they actually took out $100 million from the system. I don't know if you heard about this. They just filed as either unemployed people or employers of unemployed people Uh, or sorry, employers who qualify for PPP, the sort of Nigerian scam ring.

It's called the, uh, what's it— it's called the 409 scam, I think it's called.

Is that the name of the program?

Is that like the country code of it? So a lot of these guys are based out of Lagos, Nigeria, I think. And I think— and I believe that they're there because for some reason it's part of— I don't know how it got embedded into that particular culture where they're— where they— it became a thing. But I think, um, I also think that there's a not really strict laws around— like, there's a lot of loopholes in law that you cannot get punished.

So this guy totally scammed— or these, this group of people scammed out $100 million out of the government, out of the US government, while the US government was giving away money for like in a really intense 2-week, 3-week frenzy. Abreu just linked some guy in from Wikipedia, Emmanuel Nouadje. I don't know how you say his name. But he sold an airport for $240 million. He didn't own this airport, he just sold it, which is crazy. So there's that, and then here's some other ones that I thought were interesting. So, you know, Super PACs, like the political fundraising thing, which sort of like gets around the normal donation limits for individuals?

Yeah, it's like they like form a company or a fund and you give money to the fund and that fund's allowed to donate a larger quantity of money, right?

So there's Super PACs for every cause. So my friend who's, my friend Jason had this hilarious idea. He didn't do this, but he was just like, he's very politically minded and he hated Super PACs 'cause he's like, oh God, like it's the Super PACs who get behind, let's say the gun lobby or whoever that like fund these things that I don't agree with necessarily. And I just think Super PACs are kind of shady. There's lack of transparency, blah, blah, blah. And then he sort of had this idea of like, if you can't beat them, join them. So he was like, I know what I'll do. And I thought this is a hilarious idea. He's like, for every issue, I'm just gonna spin up two super PACs, one taking each side, and I'm just gonna raise all the money I can for both sides, and I'm gonna take a cut of both sides of it for every issue. Um, he's like, until they shut down super PACs. And I thought that was a hilarious way to fight super PACs.

Didn't, uh, do you remember Founders Dojo, where I used to work out of, it was like this office that was kind of like Erlich Bachmann on the TV show Silicon Valley. I think Dave did something like this where he created a, a donation thing. Who was running? Trump versus Obama— Trump versus Hillary. And he created like, he like created something where he was like, pledge your support to Hillary. And then he also had a pledge of support for Obama. Uh, he did both of those things.

Yeah, exactly. There's all kinds of crazy stuff. I don't know, I don't know why I needed to bring up a bunch of fake scams.

What's— who's the wealthiest person who you know who got money off of like a shady way?

Hmm, I gotta think about that. Do you have one?

I don't know if this is shady, but I have a bunch of friends that have made a lot of money, like $30, $40, $50 million off of what I consider to be borderline unethical internet marketing practices. Like for example, who have run call centers, like, you know how you get a phone call from like Marriott Hotels? It's not really from Marriott. It's like, or, you know, if you, I knew a guy who had a company.

Hold on. So it's not really from Marriott. And then what?

I don't know how the scam works. I get the calls all the time, but they'll say like, you know, you won this You won, like, it's basically they're selling you travel packages. I see. Like, you were picked from a random drawing to get a discount on an all-exclusive trip to Sandals. So that's not unethical, it's just obnoxious. And then I know a guy who made a bunch of money off a co-registration company. So like, when you sign up, uh, on Expedia, they sell your email address to 18 other travel stuff. And he was the middleman and he made like $50 million and bet it all on, uh, in the stock market in one big—

okay. Um, the closest— I— the first thing that came to mind, or the closest thing that came to mind— I don't actually know this person, but I, I, you know, know, know the guy's kid and, and this is the dad. Um, so this guy Naveen Jain, who—

oh, I know him—

CEO of this thing called InfoSpace back in the day. And like during the dot-com boom, InfoSpace was like, you know, riding high. And then, you know, sort of overnight InfoSpace crashes, but he had sort of sold out or, you know, protected his own interests right before the crash and was like, you know, everybody lost their jobs and their 401s in the company, and this guy was like a billionaire. And so that was sort of shady. And then he started this thing called Intellius after the fact. I think that's the name of it.

Yeah, and it had a similar outcome.

Uh, yeah, Intellisense is this like shady thing where you would sign up for a free credit check, I think, or it's like back— you could find information from public records about people or about yourself. I don't remember exactly what the, what the product was because I don't spend too much time, you know, like thinking about this stuff. But basically there was this tiny checkbox at the bottom which was like, cool, you got this free credit check, but then we're going to charge you $20 a month just kind of on subscription after that for some bullshit. And so they were making millions and millions of dollars, and people were all like, wait, what am I getting? I just paid like $200 this year for Intelius. What does that mean? What is this? And people kind of screenshotted the flow and showed how like, you know, size 4 font the fine print was that you're gonna get charged for this thing. Um, and so that was pretty bad.

Yeah, that guy claims to be a billionaire.

Yeah, exactly. And he's a pretty like kind of crazy charismatic guy, and he's now got this like company that's about going to the moon, like a rockets company and all kinds of stuff. But he's definitely, you know, behind that smile there's definitely like some skeletons or some baggage. Um, like, you know, neither of those two, two stories, InfoSpace or, or I think it's called Intellius, um, neither of those seemed like the most up-and-up, um companies.

Well, let's talk about some legit companies. Right after our Podcast Monday, I went and bought a car on my trip.

So there you go, you committed. I love it. Uh, if anything, take, take, um, take inspiration from the massive immediate action that, that Sam and hopefully me take whenever we say we're gonna do something. We just go commit and just do it right away.

Yeah, I, uh, like, I made the decision Saturday. I bought a car Monday. I just went, like, I showed up to buy the car and I was like, yeah, I guess I'll take that one. And, uh, they're like, how do you want to pay for it? And I was like, oh shit, I didn't even think about it. And they just took a debit card, right?

Um, okay, so, so let's do some other companies or some other ideas, uh, that you got. What else you got? Otherwise I have a couple we could do.

We did a ton of research that we didn't even get to last time, so why don't you— I, I pull— I have our sheet up. Why don't you kick it off?

Alright, so I'll do one. So this one actually comes also from Jack. So this is sort of the Jack episode. He's the guest, but we don't have him here. So he was talking a little bit about baseball cards, and I know baseball cards are hot right now because Gary Vee's been really pumping baseball cards and talking about baseball cards all the time. And so baseball cards are like a collector's item. They have value, they appreciate over time. It's, you know, like many, many goods of that kind. Now, one thing that's a common problem for people who are buying, selling, and trading baseball cards is the actual receiving of the— you know, you receive a shipment, you have to open it up, you hope it's not damaged, you have to verify that it's real. And then if you sell it, you got to sort of go through that whole shipping process right back to the other person, hope that nothing goes wrong in the process. And so for people who are collecting these as a sort of financial asset in some ways, and they don't— they're not like sitting there trying to carry them with them to school or something like that. You don't need the physical card. He was saying, why is there not sort of a central repository where you can— like a, like a, like a safety deposit, a Fort Knox for, for the baseball cards, where basically you buy and sell it online but it never moves? It just sort of exchanges ownership, but it's all stored in this central vault where it's cooled properly so they don't degrade. They're all verified by a professional there who's centrally located. You don't have to deal with any of the shipping costs or potential issues there.

Um, so I think that should be the headline: the Fort Knox of baseball cards.

Yeah, so I think it's a pretty clever idea, and obviously could extend to sneakers, could extend to art, could extend to other things. Maybe there's something like this that exists. I don't do baseball cards or art. Do you dabble with any of this stuff?

Um, I got into shoes after I learned about them. We wrote about it on Trends about a year ago, and I've since gotten into them. Yeah, but not to the point of wanting to make money off of it, but to the point of like spending $300 on a pair. But I did do research on this and it seems as though there's not a great solution. So Jack's onto something. We wrote about this actually. Heritage Auction House. What I would do if I wanted to create this, which I actually think this is a wonderful idea. I don't, I certainly don't have time, so I'm not going to, but this is a great idea. And what I would maybe do is contact a lot of the auction houses and be like, what are you guys doing now?

Right.

What— why can't this work? And—

or collectors, you know, high-end collectors, people who have a portfolio of these things. Um, because I think it is a very small— it's a small— it's a niche community, obviously.

It's a small number of people, as you think.

Well, just, just— that's like a— it depends on your reference point, right? So it's like, in all of society, yeah, it's super niche. But in terms— like, how many people do you think are actively investing in or trading baseball cards, right? Like, is it in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands?

Billions of people.

I'm saying like potential customers you have to convince to use your service.

Hundreds of thousands.

Hundreds of thousands. Okay. That's interesting. I would bet it's lower. Like, and the reason why is like for, there's always a long tail of really casual people, but of people who actively do it and have like some, you know, above, let's call it $250 worth of value locked in it. You know, like Shopify has like, 50,000-ish, or it did 2 years ago when I looked at this. Maybe it's 100,000 now, power sellers. Etsy's sort of in that same range. Twitch has like in the 50,000-ish partners.

Sorry, I don't think there's 100,000 sellers. I think that there's 100,000 people who are interested in transacting in this market.

Right, right. So I think you could get— I think what my point is that the kind of circle of influence is pretty tight here. Where the number of people you would need to convince and that you could go learn from to see if this is a real problem is kind of small. And that's great. It's like kind of like online poker where you just go get these 15 pros to do something and now they sway the rest of the casual community with them as like, oh yeah, that's the best practice. That's how we do things now.

It's pretty interesting and I love it. And I like it. I wonder, I would have to imagine this has significantly better economics Or maybe not, in storage. So do you know how the companies like Clutter are doing?

I always assumed that those companies are on the verge of failure. Now I don't know if they— and I think Omni actually, it's like everything's going great, we keep raising money, we keep adding high-profile people, and we shut down. That's how these companies tend to go. Or they break out.

But you know that Public Storage, you know the company Public Storage?

Public Storage is huge, yeah.

It's the most profitable. Company on the stock market.

Is that right?

By cool claim, is that by margin? So it like does $4 billion in revenue and like $2 billion in net income.

Interesting. Yeah.

It's like the most profitable thing. Now they don't do what they don't do all this high cost shit that all the new startups do where they like want to bring you your stuff. They just say like, here's a room, bring your stuff. It's yours. Give us $100 a month. But it could be, it's a really cool idea. That's my point. And so also another thing, I'm sure a lot of people know this, but I was ignorant and I didn't know this, but these storage companies, they're real estate businesses.

Yes.

Um, it's just a, it's just a way to get profit to buy real estate.

A great book I read when I was in college that inspired me, I was like on the verge of going down the real estate track rather than entrepreneurial track. Or the sort of startup-y track. Um, and it's called Confessions of a Real Estate Entrepreneur. It's an awesome book if you're a total noob and you're just curious about how the hell do people make money. It's not about the terms and the tactics and all that stuff. It's this one guy being like, I wanted to make it in real estate. So then, so he's like, my first deal, I had no money and I found this warehouse, and then I negotiated this. And he just walks through deal by deal for like 10 deals of Confessions of a Real Estate Entrepreneur. And one of them was about storage and You know, the whole game with real estate is you sort of need to see value where others don't. So other people look at this 25,000 square foot store warehouse and they say, okay, warehouses are valued at X dollars per square foot, so this building is worth Y. And what you need to say is, hey, if I subdivided this warehouse into tiny storage units and I added it all up, now it's worth, you know, X plus Y dollars per square foot. It's more— it's worth more. So I can go buy it I can actually pay more than the guy next to me because I'm gonna— I know I can get more value out of it than that person can because I know how to change use or add value in some way. That's what WeWork did. They took office floors and say, hey, what if we subdivided it and rented this out by the desk? And so that's like a common real estate strategy. That's what storage units are.

And if anyone listening to this— I think some people will get mad at me, I don't give a fuck— real estate has the highest ratio of rich and dumb people. Like, right, uh, well, how do you— what, you know what I'm saying? Where exactly what you're saying, it's got the highest ratio of low IQ rich people.

Yes, that's very true. Doesn't mean if you do real estate you're low IQ. It means there are more wealthy people in real estate who are not superstar geniuses who, you know, work themselves normal, just normal, smart, hardworking people, right? A normal, smart, rational person who obviously had some skills, took some risks, but there are more wealthy people in real estate that way. If you just said, hey Sean, you know, in the next 10 years you die if you don't get wealthy, I'd be like, cool, go into real estate. Like, that's, that's my best path. My highest likelihood chance of becoming wealthy is through real estate versus any other sort of venture.

Yeah, it's the, that's the highest, it's the highest dumb people to rich people job I've ever seen in my life. I love it.

Uh, okay, so that's my— that's, that's Jack's, uh, Jack's idea, which is sort of Fort Knox for baseball cards. I like it. Uh, what else we got?

Um, let's go to, uh— are we gonna talk about hay? Did we talk about hay? I don't think we did.

We didn't. Go for it.

Um, okay, by the way, this— look at what I'm drinking here. I drink these all day. Heineken 0.0. It's called Heineken Zero. It's not non-alcoholic. It's not the same as non-alcoholic beer. It's zero alcohol beer. I've been drinking these all day. They're awesome.

Wait, what do you mean it's not the same as non-alcoholic beer? What's the difference?

I don't know the legality, but then I drink a lot of non-alcoholic beer because I like beer. The normal non-alcoholic beer says it has less than 0.5% alcohol. This has 0.0, and Heineken said that this is their fastest growing category.

And you like it?

I love it. I drink, I'll drink 4 a day.

So what's in it that makes it taste, does it taste like beer or it tastes like something else?

It's a, they call it a malt and yeast beverage. It's a unique recipe. It has 0% alcohol, is brewed with pure malt and Special A yeast, just like the original Heineken lager beer. It has the same taste but without the alcohol.

That's hilarious. They sell the same product without the expensive ingredient and can charge the same for it.

It's like, here, Well, let's give you less ingredients. Water, malted barley, hop extract, and natural flavor. That's all it is. So, oh man, I love these. Uh, I drink them like crazy. Um, they're awesome. Okay. Um, we apparently we did talk about Hey a little bit, but what did you want to talk about?

Uh, I just wanted to sort of call out the sort of marketing side of things, uh, of what they do. So have you read the book Rework, which is their, the 37signals book?

Years ago. But they basically say that like one of the marketing principles that they talk about is like to have an enemy, right?

Yeah. I think there's a chapter called Pick a Fight. Um, and I want to read it. So let me see if I can pull it up real quick. Um, hold on, give me 2 seconds. And I don't know if you do this, but, um, I do it all the time. But here's the summary of the thing. Okay, so I should have pulled up my book before I did this. Hold on. Okay, so here's a section of it. If you think a competitor sucks, say so. When you do that, you'll find others who agree with you and rally to your side. Being the anti-blank is a great way to differentiate yourself and attract followers. For example, Dunkin' Donuts positions itself as the anti-Starbucks. Its ads mock Starbucks for using, you know, these fake Italian words, you know, instead of just saying small, medium, large. Or they'll do a campaign like they made a site called dunkinbeatstarbucks.com where visitors can send e-cards with statements like, friends don't let friends drink Starbucks. Audi is another example. It takes on the old guard of car manufacturers. It puts old luxury brands like Rolls-Royce and Mercedes on notice. By touting how it's a fresh alternative. Apple jabs at Microsoft with ads that compare Mac and PC owners, etc., etc. All these examples show the power and direction you can gain by having a target in your sights. Who do you want to take a shot at? You can even pit yourself as the opponent of an entire industry. Dyson's Airblade starts with the premise that the hand dryer industry itself is a failure and then tells— and then positions itself as a faster, more hygienic option. I Can't Believe It's Not Butter puts the enemy right in its own name. Having an enemy gives you a great story to tell your customers. Taking a stand always stands out. People get stoked by conflict. They take sides. Passions are ignited. It's a good way to get people to take notice. What do you think?

Picking an enemy? Yeah, I'm down. I, right now, my enemy is the New York Times a little bit. And basically the media and people, journalists who say they don't have a bias, but like they can't admit they do. So yeah, I'm down with that. And with hey.com, I call it hey.com, I think it's working well.

I think that, um, so they picked, uh, who I think initially they picked just traditional email like Gmail as the enemy, um, for being like cluttered. You just keep getting spammed by random things, email you don't want, it's a headache. You know, now they picked Apple, and it was a way better fight to pick because it's a more novel story and it doesn't seem as self-serving as when they picked Gmail as the competitor.

And I like that. I actually like these guys a lot, and so I'm gonna talk shit about them a little bit, but in general, I really like them and I respect them. But I do think that it's a little lame what they— like, some of these moves are a little bit lame because They also pick a fight with like main mainstream startups about giving equity when they're like make millions of— these guys probably make $10 million, $15 million a year in profit and they're very, very wealthy. And I feel like it's a little hypocritical.

So they, they, um, on Twitter people are calling this beef marketing. So just have a beef with everybody just to keep, keep your, keep your name relevant. And there's always going to be some people that agree with your side of the story. So For example, against the startup industry, they are anti-VC. Don't take funding, be profitable.

Which is weird because they've taken funding from Jeff Bezos, right?

But on the whole, they, they don't play this, or they are profitable, and they don't play these sort of raise the A, B, C, D, E, like sort of get big, big, big, big IPO. So they pick that fight. They pick the fight of you don't need to work 80 hours a week, 30 is enough. Be productive, just be smart. Don't kill yourself. You don't have to be a workaholic.

The other day that they are working through the weekend to resolve all the issues, right?

But I'm saying in general, they've— I'm not saying these are correct. I'm saying these are the fights that they, they easily trigger people, just like they triggered you just now. Then there's, uh, then they also do like they take summers off, which is part of their kind of like don't be a workaholic thing. And they have one more which is sort of like don't depend on any platform. Um, so like don't be, don't be dependent on anybody. And these—

I get it, and I like a lot of their philosophy. Fee. I just think it's stupid when you make rules. You know what I mean? Like when you make rules around something, it's like, dude, not everything has a rule. Like a lot of times, like you can't say that you are anti-VC. I'm not anti-VC at all. I'm just like pro, like, let's be logical and let's look at a variety of options.

Right. But that doesn't sell. Right. So, so if you just looked at it in terms of like, if they, if you just said they're doing all of this for marketing purposes, If you believe that to be true, then what they've done is incredibly effective. It's sort of like Buffer, right? Maybe you don't agree that you should transparently put all your company salaries and revenue and losses out there publicly, but if you looked at it like marketing, it's been undeniably effective at marketing the company.

No, I'm on board. I think, look, it's working for them. I just think that some of their opinions are bullshit, but I like them a lot and I think that it's incredibly effective for them.

So why don't you pick more fights? That was kind of my takeaway when I saw this. I feel like you guys could do way more of this.

I think we should.

And so like, let's come up with a game plan right now.

So I just picked a fight with the guy today. Did you see my Twitter?

No, I didn't. What is it?

Wait, hold on one second.

Yeah, okay, I'm looking at your Twitter right now. So you picked a fight with this 2VD— VLDY? Is that the person?

Yeah.

So what is this? Tell me what happened.

They copied my landing page. They copied Trends completely. And I just— they're full of shit. Um, and I emailed them and told them to fuck off, and they like try to justify it. I'm like, no, you're lying. Like, I just looked you up on Web Archive. You just copied our page. Like, I see when we launched and then when you launched, you word for word ripped us off.

That's, uh, okay.

So you picked a fight with them, but that's actually, uh, if you look at like what the rules are of this game, that's actually a bad fight. You don't pick a fight with people littler than you. You gotta pick a fight So who should I— what should I do, you think?

Well, you said New York Times, so first I was thinking, uh, because you guys have as a competitor like, uh, Morning Brew, right? So like, they pretty similar, pretty— they're kind of similar size, and that's one that could be more like PewDiePie versus T-Series where the feud actually would help both sides grow. So that's more like wrestling where you could be like, cool, I'm gonna attack you, you attack me, this is just gonna generate a bunch of buzz. It's sort of like the Barstool Call Her Daddy thing where it's like Both sides end up more popular and through the, through the drama. So like, that's one that I think you guys could do. The other one would be more like against the mainstream, mainstream media, which could be New York Times. Now there has to be some level of authenticity to it, so it's got to be something you genuinely do believe. Like, it could be the thing that like, why are you guys pretending like you're not biased? But that doesn't tell a great story about you guys and what you do. It's not that you guys are like It's not that the value prop of The Hustle is to be opinionated clearly and be subjective, not even try to be objective. I don't think that's like what y'all do. So I think you got to pick a fight that A, makes sense, B, is polarizing, uh, and C, somehow tells the story of what The Hustle is all about by being the opposite of the thing you're hating on.

I thought about making fun of The Skimm because I think they're like a joke, but then I was like I, I don't know if I would win that fight.

Yeah, I don't know. I think there's something here because I think in general you do have strong opinions about things, um, but I don't see that come through via The Hustle. Maybe intentionally, maybe you've censored it, maybe you haven't, but I think you guys—

I'm not in favor of censorship. Um, how about this? Um, let me, let me, let me— a small tangent. Something that I'm— we're testing and I'm thinking about launching is I'm pretty obsessed with the idea of expert opinion as opposed to journalist opinion. And one thing I'm testing is I've built this network of like 1,000 experts, and every day we're emailing them stories and getting their opinion, and we're gonna just publish their opinion. We're not gonna touch it, we're not gonna edit it, we're just gonna say, here's exactly what they said, right? And that's interesting to me, and I'm gonna get people to pay money for it.

Yeah, I think that's actually pretty dope.

Um, it's like a private Twitter.

I saw the, um, like mock-up you guys did. I didn't love that, but I love the idea of this because when I think about it, this actually what I care about. I care about what do the people who actually know their shit think about this, and not the journalists with their opinion, the editor with their agenda, the journalist talking to an expert and then like siphoning off one quote and having that be, you know, that fitting into some narrative. I just like, let's say it's the, like right now the NBA is about to resume And there's a big debate, should they come back or should they not come back? Um, some of the players don't want to come back because of coronavirus. Some of the players don't want to come back because it takes away from the Black Lives Matter movement. Um, and there's all these ESPN talking heads that talk about this. Like, there's literally this guy Brian Windhorst who's like, you know, the opposite of a basketball player. He's like a short, fat, white guy who's never played basketball, and he's always talking about what should happen, what shouldn't happen. And I'd rather just be like Cool, the, the ping goes out to all the NBA players and here's the 80 responses we got back. LeBron said this. I don't know if it's anonymized or if it's with their name, but that would be way more interesting to me. It's like, here's what they actually think.

Yeah, so that's what I'm thinking about building, or that's what we're attempting to build. And, and in that case, the enemy to me is clear.

It's just like journalism as a whole.

Journalism. Because yeah, when you think about it, like, we don't need you. Everyone with a phone is a journalist. And I hate when— I hate the fact that journalists— journalism is a circle jerk on Twitter. Like, they only want to impress each other. They don't want to impress their audiences. Like, you have to— like, what I tell our team, I'm like, guys, we don't serve each other. We serve our readers. Like, we are their waiters. We are their servants. We exist to give them information. And my team, who has worked at a variety of places, are like, Well, that's so different than other places because it's all about how do we win awards or how do we, uh, do this or that. And I'm like, yeah, that baffles me that that is the thing. So that's our enemy for that.

Yeah. Okay, I like that. I think that could be good. Um, cool, pick a fight. I like it. Okay, I haven't— I have another random idea or, or thing to talk about. So we both like this comedian, Chris D'Elia. and, uh, he was a funny guy. We thought he was great, the best. I'll speak for myself. Yeah, I don't know, I don't know how you felt, but we thought he was hilarious. Whatever, he's a comedian.

I thought he was the best.

I've, I've seen him live a couple times, and, um, I listen to his podcast a bunch. That's one of the few podcasts I listen to. Anyways, last week gets exposed as sort of like a creep, and so, um, a bunch of people come out and say, hey, Chris D'Elia was messaging me when I was, you know, 17, 16 years old. And asking me for nude pictures and all this bad stuff, right? So a whole bunch of people come out at once. Turns out Chris D'Elia is creeping around, or allegedly creeping around. And so this comes out, he's sort of getting canceled right now. Um, so two questions for you. Um, Art, question for you: what was your reaction when that happened? Um, and then I have an idea based on that.

My reaction was, if I was even bummed that he was accused, uh, and the evidence was pretty strong.

Pretty damn—

so I believe it to be true. And in my head I think, well, fuck you, like, you're, you're the worst. So I feel pissed off because I, I was a huge, huge, huge fan. And, uh, I, uh, I don't know, I'll still listen to his jokes, but, uh, I will not, like, support him financially.

Yeah, so that was my other question. Well, if you're listening to him, you're still supporting him in some way.

I guess so, but I don't know if I would pay money to go see him.

Right. So that's kind of my other question is, uh, and nobody really talks about this. It's sort of like, cool, I'm a fan, or you're canceled. But I think in reality, you know, as so many people— this is, you know, two of my favorite comedians, Louis C.K. and Chris D'Elia, both came out to be doing really creepy, messed up behavior. But there's also people who are clearly still fans of Louis C.K. They're probably not fans of what he did, but they're still fans of him. They'll still listen to his stuff, they'll go to his shows. And I was wondering, how do you deal with that kind of like being torn between like, well, you don't like what they did and maybe you don't even like the person, but you kind of like their art, you know? Like, I don't know, do people still watch the Cosby Show or whatever, you know?

Yeah, I still watch The Cosby Show. I listen to R. Kelly. I love Michael Jackson music. Here's my logic, right? Here's, here With great people, people who achieve greatness, who are like world-class at their craft, are 9 out of 10 times fucking weird. And hopefully only weird. Sometimes they're also bad people. Right. And I just accept that like the people who I like are also good. There's a great quote where it says like every great man is a bad man. And in this case, it is incredibly true where like he's— with all this great stuff, he just has also done a ton of bad shit. So I still like will absolutely listen to his stuff, but I won't, uh— I think he's a piece of shit, right?

Isn't that weird? That's— I'm sort of in the same boat. I don't know how to feel. That's why I brought it up, because I'm like, that's not weird.

I mean, if you like— surely like there's some like, like I don't know, I don't even like getting political, but maybe like Chick-fil-A. It's like, dude, my taste buds don't know that you hate gays, right?

Right, right.

So it's like, I can— it's hard, you know. I could disagree with you but still enjoy your stuff, right?

Yeah. And I think, I mean, with all that's coming out, um, everybody's gonna have to figure out how they're gonna deal with this because your favorite something— musician, athlete, comedian, politician— one of your favorites is gonna go down for being a total either asshole creep, criminal, bad guy, you know, something's gonna come out. And, um, I think everybody's gonna have to ask themselves, cool, how am I gonna deal with that? Am I gonna still consume their stuff that I like, or am I gonna protest it? Am I gonna think they're a piece of shit? Am I gonna be conflicted? What's gonna happen?

It's like, it's like, you know, Martin Luther King's one of my heroes, but he also cheated on his wife a lot, right? Or that's like the rumor. Um, so it's like, I had heard about that.

That's really crazy. Apparently I just learned about this, but like The FBI was tracking him for a while because he was seen as sort of like a potential enemy of the state. And they like bugged his hotel rooms or whatever. There's reportedly, no one's seen this, I guess, but there's reportedly tapes of him sleeping with like 40 different women, you know, outside of his marriage and participating in, you know, some sort of sexually deviant activities. But he's Martin Luther fucking King, right? And he's got like, you know, a day named after him and everything else.

Yeah, so that's what my opinion is, just like everyone who's great is also bad in another person's perspective, and you just, you just got to take the whole person, right?

Okay, so the idea I had off this was actually, um, a WikiLeaks for creeps, because one of the things that was really disturbing that came out of this was not just, oh, this guy I thought was cool, I liked, turns out to be not so cool and I don't like what he did, um, but it was like a lot of these text messages were from like 10+ years ago And so, and same thing with like a lot of the people that get canceled, like the Bill Cosby stuff. A lot of that stuff I think was happening like in the '90s or something like that, and it takes sometimes decades for the stuff to come out. And I think that's a shame because, you know, A, the person sort of gets away with it and continues to harm other people, or sort of, you know, be, you know, a menace in society is out on the loose as long as these things stay secret. But I understand why people don't expose things, because then they get tied up and wrapped up in it and You know, you could see the girls who came out and said something about Crystalia, their Twitter, they're getting attacked by his fans who are like, you know, well, why'd you, why'd you send them the picture? And like stupid stuff like that. And so I think there needs to be sort of a WikiLeaks for creeps, um, where there is a, there is a way to dump anonymously, uh, evidence and claims against people. And then there needs to be some sort of like verifying function, like a set of journalists, kind of like the people who went and studied the Panama Papers and like dug into it, try to figure out which— what's real, what's not. Um, but like a guaranteed sort of anonymity layer so that, you know, information can get out faster. What do you think of that?

As long as there's a trustworthy third party to verify, I'm into it. It's just so easy to accuse people of doing bad stuff.

Totally. And that's the reason this can't be a company, because you'll just die of sort of libel and slander, you know, like, because anything that turns out not to be true, you get— just get sued out of existence. I think there was like a— there was an app that used to rate guys. I think it's called Lola or Lala.

I remember that. I remember that. I, uh, my roommate was rated on it and it said like, not so nice shit, cheated on me, and like small dick. And I was like, oh dude, that sucks. I was like, I'm sorry, right? I mean That sucks.

So yeah, like, I think you can't really do this as a company, but I think for society it would be good if there's a way for people to be able to come forward about bad behavior better, for a whistleblower network to come forward, and not just about like how WikiLeaks is about sort of documents around certain things, but actually around, you know, racism, sexual harassment, things like that. I think there needs to be something like this. And obviously I haven't put a lot of thought into this. I'm not an expert about this stuff, but when I saw that it takes 10 years to come out, I'm like, something's broken.

Yeah, it is crazy that like Hannibal Buress joked about that Bill Cosby thing, and his joke was something like, what, everyone knows this, everyone knows this guy Harvey Weinstein, everybody knew that, like everyone, we all talked about this, we all know this. And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what? I didn't know this, this is crazy. Like, I wish I would have I agree with that. I also think that there's a lot of room to deconstruct Wikipedia. I think Wikipedia is— I, I'm like, I wouldn't say I'm a hardcore libertarian, but I'm libertarian, or I tend to be on a lot of topics. And I think that Wikipedia should actually be a nonprofit or some type of like owned by the government and should be like a national treasure that—

yeah, the Department of Education should just own Wikipedia and fund it through, you know, What is the— look up the Department of Education funding, and I bet that would cover, you know, easily what Wikipedia needs to stay around. And it's doing a hell of a lot more than the Department of Education probably is. Isn't Wikipedia already a nonprofit?

It might be a nonprofit, but I want to make sure it never goes out of business. I think that Wikipedia is a treasure. And same with Reddit. I'm like, Reddit, don't make money. You don't need to make money. Well, you just ask, put a little donation thing and just 'Let us see your expenses and I'll just give you a little bit,' and everyone will. It's like one of the few things where I'm like, donation or government funding is the way to go. Right on.

Uh, okay, I want to give people in the last 4 minutes— oh my God, Department of Education, $68 billion in funding. Yeah, they could afford to—

how much you think Wikipedia— I don't even know. I mean, if you're— if you have 5 billion page views a month, how much—

well, they say on their thing, we need this much to survive. I don't know what it is, but it's like, it's nowhere— I don't think it's above 2 billion. I don't think—

I don't even know. Like, what do you think Twitch costs to run?

Like, if you have no people, I can't say.

Okay, if I— or just for the hosting, like, I'm ignorant, I know nothing. Does it cost more than $10 million? Do you think it would cost more than $10 million a month?

Yes, but I can't— I can't say about Twitch, but I would just say Wikipedia.

Sorry, Wikipedia. You think Wikipedia costs more than $10 million a month just in hosting?

I think it's probably about that. That'd be my guess.

So they need, uh, $200 million a year.

AWS could just fund it and be like, hey, this is powered by AWS. It could be on every page, powered by AWS, get free hosting.

Um, that way Wikipedia's funding is around $100 million a year. There it is.

Um, okay, so I— let's give them one more idea before we go because we talked about a bunch of random topics today. Um, okay, business idea. So I just got my new house and I'm renting this place, and as part of it you need renter's insurance. And so I'm like, oh fuck, here's a task I don't want to go do.

You gotta go get lemonade.

Yeah, I gotta go do whatever. But then I was thinking about it, I was like, and the guy who's telling me I need renters insurance is the broker, the agent who like rented me the house. And I was like, why isn't this just part of the lease where like you're like, hey, by the way, check this box because you need renters insurance, so just do it through me, um, and you have your renters insurance done. And so obviously this guy's not an insurance company, but what I think you could do is create a back office insurance company where the storefront is actually just all the rental agents and brokers that already are talking to the customer, just signed the deal. They're the ones trying to enforce these terms and force you to have insurance. Um, why aren't they empowered? So I'll give you an example of this. I have a buddy named Guy Gal. Great name, fucking top 5 name.

Guy Gal.

Guy Gal is his name.

Oh, that's great.

And, uh, Guy has this company, um Called Rise, I believe, is the name of the company. And what he does is he's like, hey, you know all these— when you go to sell a house and the sign goes up and it's like Caldwell Banker or like, yeah, whatever, KB Homes or whatever it is, it's like always the brokerage name and then like the agent is kind of like a very secondary footer thing. Um, he's like, dude, the, the world is shifting where the agents really want their own brand up front. The agents are the one who go do the marketing, the sales. So what he did was he's like, he go— and the brokerage takes a huge fee. So when an agent gets their fee, I think the brokerage would take 50%. And so he was like, look, through technology I can make a more streamlined brokerage. And what I could do is I can be a hidden back office for any agent. So you're the agent, your, your name is Alex, you know, Alex Rompero. Well, you could just be the Rompero Group and you could build your brand as the, as the storefront. Forget Caldwell Banker, you don't need those guys. I will be the, the back office. I'll take care of the legal compliance and paperwork that the brokerage normally does, and I will only charge you X percent fee. And it's less than the 50% that—

that isn't this exactly what Caldwell Banker does?

Caldwell Banker does it, but they are the back office, but they put their brand first. And, um, a broker can try to like kind of put their own marketing front on top, but it's not their core model, and they take a huge cut. So what this guy did, what he did with Rise, is really smart. He, he targeted the top 1% of agents in every market. He goes to them, he said, dude, you're a top 1%, you don't need Caldwell Banker, you are the brand. And he said, bring your book of business to me, I'll do the same work that they do for you with the lower cut. And I'm gonna— and look, you push a button, your website gets spun up automatically. I'll take care of all your sort of technology needs. And I take 15% instead of 50% or whatever it is. And so I think it's a really smart model. He's doing really, really well. Is he doing I can't say, but the company's doing well, and I think it's a really smart model attacking a very big space, which is this backend brokerage thing for home sales. I think you could do the same thing for insurance. I think you could build an invisible insurance company and have the brokers or the agents be the storefront and just say, hey, you should just offer this to all your clients when they rent from you or buy from you.

But why wouldn't Lemonade or all of these companies go to those guys and do this?

They could. I don't know, maybe they, maybe they will. Um, I'm not sure, but I know that Compass kind of did this in the real estate space. Um, I know that, uh, there's this awesome company I really wanted to invest in called— what is it called? Damn, I'm gonna forget the name. But there's someone doing this for business insurance where they, where they're trying to be a back office as a service. I think there's more that— I think there's more companies that can do this that are not doing this today. Where you empower the agent who is already at the point of sale and you give them a thing to upsell that gives them a little bit of money and it makes your customer acquisition free and you just need to provide the backend service for it. So I think there's a whole class of businesses like this.

Yeah, I need to go and research all this. I'm— this, and this interests me a lot. I'm gonna go look up Caldwell Banker. I don't even— I see their signs, I don't even know what they do entirely.

Yeah, deep dive it and deep dive Compass because they kind of disrupted this.

Yeah, they crush it.

Um, all right, I gotta run. My computer battery's at 1%.

By the way, Michael Bisping— uh, I believe Abreu says Compass is BS. Michael Bisping wants to come on the podcast. You want him?

Yes, I love Bisping.

That'd be great. Down. Uh, I'm gonna shut my computer. I gotta go. See you.

Me too. See ya.