Solana Billionaires, MFM Goes Viral on TikTok, Right to Be Forgotten, and More

it's almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's so much talent being sucked into this thing. These guys are going to build things that actually have use cases and actually, it's actually going to make it all work. You can't have this much talent spend all day thinking about this and building in this and have nothing come from it.

All right, we're live. What's going on?

I'm self-conscious now because we're blowing up on TikTok. I just look at myself, I'm like, I should have shaved. And, uh, now, now that I have to see myself and I see people— and also the TikTok comments are brutal. Um, they're, they're good, but they, you know, they're like, just want to argue with every point that gets made.

So let's talk, let's talk about—

now when I see myself, I'm like, shit, this is going on TikTok, I better— I need to shave for the next one.

So basically, 10 days ago or 15 days ago, something like that. Like not long ago, we told everyone that we're gonna do this contest where we're gonna give $5,000 to like 3 people who take our clips and turn them into videos. The best people are on TikTok. So I actually posted the tags down there for you. So I must have made a mistake. I told people to say, to, to, to use the hashtag #MFMclips.

Okay.

But then I also, I must have said clip as well without the S. And so people are using 2 hashtag clips and clip, MFN clip and MFN clips. And some aren't using both. But if you use those links I, I showed you, we have, um, in the ballpark of around 15-ish million impressions from these videos. And it's mostly young folks who created these TikTok handles from scratch, took our, our content, and some videos have over a million. Some of them have hundreds of thousands of likes.

They're great. And, uh, do you read the comments?

No, what do they say? Do they make fun of us?

Any content creator, you go through the cycle of like you get excited and you read the comment, the early comments are good, and then the more popular you get, the comments start to turn mean, and then you just— you— everybody reaches a point where they— oh no, then the third phase is you say you don't read the comments but you secretly do, and then finally, you know, whatever, these are the 7 stages of grief or something, uh, social media grief. You finally stop reading the comments because you're like, this is just too toxic. So yeah, they, they basically just shit on us for whatever we say. Like, if we say, um, you put down 20% to buy a house, then all the comments are about ways that you can— oh, you can also not put down 20% if you do this, this, and this. It's like, all right, okay, TikTok commenter, you got me. You are smarter than us. You are gonna constantly find some, like, edge case loophole or, um, you know, mistake in what was said.

Do they make fun of how we look or talk or anything? Like, they insult us?

No, they don't really. They're either like, uh, these guys are annoying. Like, they'll be like, let's say somebody cuts a clip of one of us breaking down, you know, our monthly expenses or something like that, and then the comment will just— but they don't know like the vibe of the pod. They don't know why someone would just say that out of the blue, right? It's not something people normally talk about. So they're just like, why did he feel the need to tell us how much he's spending on eggs? Or like, why is he telling us his body fat percentage? Whatever. They're just like— there's that kind, which is Dude, what a douche. Nobody asked, you know, why are you doing that? Then there's the comments that are like, you know, actually, actually it's this other thing. And then there's some comments which are like, bro, I don't want, I don't want that future. No, I don't. Uh, no thanks. You know, cuz we'll be like, uh, here's how things are changing. It'll be like, dude, companies just only think about money and like, you know, comments like that. So those are the 3 flavors of hater we get so far. Luckily so far nobody's just shitting on our like face and body.

Oh, that's good. That's a, that's a surprise.

That's a win as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, I, and it's like general sticks and stones may break my bones, but words about my appearance do hurt me.

Yeah, just like don't make fun of my teeth or like hair. You can make fun of my brain. They, um, this promotion has been a home run. Like, I thought it was gonna be pretty good. I didn't think it was gonna be this good. And so what we'll have to do is there's like a couple people who I'm recognizing because I watch them. That are killing it, we're gonna have to have them on the pod and explain how they got so many views. It's pretty amazing.

Right? And let, let's talk about this for a second cuz, um, I think there's something interesting to learn here. So you have said many times, I've grown a lot of things. I've grown an email newsletter to multimillions. I've grown a subscription business to multimillions. I've, uh, you know, I've grown, uh, whatever. You're like, a podcast is the hardest thing I've ever had to grow. And you say that, I think it's just kind of a cool thing to say in general.

Something about that. Do you agree with that?

I, I agree with it in the sense of it ha— there's no like easy growth hacks to growing a podcast. Um, there's no, there's no just like button you can push. Paid ads don't really work. Nothing really works like that. The good news is once somebody actually subscribed to your podcast, they become like a really loyal fan and they like feel like they know you. So it's got a lot of value, but it's hard to get that easy growth. This is the first, and we've tried a bunch of shit. We've tried, we did nothing initially. Then we tried placing it in our email newsletters. We tried, um, bringing on big name guests. We tried, um, paid ads. We tried, uh, a whole bunch of different things, none of which really like kind of felt like it was really working, but the pod kept growing organically. This is the first thing. Oh, by the way, we also tried making our own clips, paying an agency tens of thousands of dollars a month to be making really awesome animated clips of our content.

And they were great.

And they were high quality clips, but it didn't lead to this. This was different. This was, hey, anybody, open playing field, just go for it and we'll give out prizes to the people who are actually good at it. Merit-based, right? And what they're good at is they understood TikTok, whereas like we suck at TikTok. We don't know how to create content there. They pull clip, they pull the right clips cuz they're actually listeners and fans of the show. So they know which clip is actually gonna be interesting versus like, you know, Some random employee at our company being like, uh, you know, at the 42-minute mark, let's use that one for the clip. These guys will pull like 10 that they think are interesting and put them out there. And, um, and they're motivated because they're like, shit, if I do this good, I can get a million views on this and I could go, you know, I can get $5,000 from these guys. Like, that's a pretty sweet deal for, for doing something, you know, pretty fun. So this has actually worked.

Yeah, it's pretty wild. And like some— there's one guy who basically took our Rob Dyrdek episode and I looked at his feed and he— I'm not— I don't think I'm exaggerating. It's 50 clips in a row of like— he basically just took it and just divided it up and like 3 of the 50.

All he did was he just took our talking out and just every time Rob talks, he grabs a clip, which is smart.

Yeah. And his whole feed, I looked at his feed, it was all that one episode, and like 3 of them had like 500,000 views.

Yeah, so go follow them. I think MFM Cuts is one on, on TikTok and Twitter. There's MFM Clips, then there's a bunch of other variations of that name.

All right, I want to tell you about something interesting. I got a few interesting things to talk to you about. Okay. Um, so let me tell you about something that I was thinking about this weekend. So I've got a buddy, uh, you kind of know them, and we— I'm not gonna name them. But a few years ago, he did something. He was accused of doing a crime that was a horrible crime, one of the worst crimes you could commit. And he was the, uh, he was an executive at a company and it made the news. So 6 months later, after he went to court and went to trial, the government dropped the case because it was a horrible misunderstanding. He didn't do what he was accused of doing and they exonerated him and they go, we're sorry, we were wrong. We, we, we called this one wrong. And the first time the story went out, it made all the headlines. And if you Google this person's name, it came up on top. But what didn't come up on top was like 6 months later, it said charges dropped. Uh, the, the misunderstanding came about for this reason. This person lost their job because of that and lost obviously a lot of money. And I was, I've always thought about this and I listened to a podcast this weekend and it was called, um, The Right to Be Forgotten. And it was by Radiolab. And so this is this idea of the right to be forgotten. And it's in Europe. It's actually a law. Um, I don't know exactly what the law says, but it says like, if something isn't particularly newsworthy, um, but you're writing about it anyway, and it really hurts that person more than that provides value to the common or to like a reader, you have to take it down. And there's a couple of newspapers like the Boston Globe, as well as, uh, in this particular podcast, they looked at this. Company, this newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio, and there's stories of like a cop emailing them and he's like, look, you wrote about this time that I lied about some paperwork and ended up getting fired. I didn't hurt anyone and now I can't get a job at another— as a police officer anywhere else.

Can I fill in the gap on the right to be forgotten for you here?

Yeah.

So basically it's a law that says search engines should have to remove links about your past if under certain circumstances, and it came about because there was a woman, an actress who had, who was in a movie and then it got dubbed. So there was a, the film was called The Innocence of Muslims. And then her, her original line, her original line got dubbed over and then they made it, made it so that it looked like she was saying, is your, is your Muhammad a child molester? Right? So that was the clip. And she starts getting death threats and like people go crazy about this. And she's like, what is this? Like, why? Like, okay, this thing got dubbed. Now this clip got onto into the search engine and it comes up if you search my name or certain things. And, um, it's causing, you know, like harm to me in my personal life. And so she sued Google in 2014 and ultimately they, they upheld it, which was, um, you know, uh, like she would like to have it, have the film forgotten and stripped from YouTube. Unfortunately, uh, the right to be forgotten which is recognized in the EU, is not recognized in the US. And so it's a— the EU does respect this as they're tighter on privacy with GDPR and things like that, and the US does not.

So yeah, and so in the US we don't have that. But it's kind of interesting because I personally have seen this hurt people. But you think like right now, like let's say that you're at a bar and you're drunk and you call someone like a really bad word and it's on Reddit and they find your name. You're screwed. Like to the point of like your life is gonna be hurt meaningfully for like the next decade. And like you should suffer some consequences for someone calling something, something rude, but not like that serious, you know? And so I've been thinking a lot about this business, about this reputation management business. Have you ever researched it?

Yeah. My former co-founder used to work there, so he used to tell me stories all the time.

Great. I want to hear all about it. And I know a little bit about this because listen to this. So one of the companies is called reputation.com. So. There's this porn star named Sasha Gray. So do me a favor, type in Sasha Gray on your Google and click images. This Sasha Gray doesn't— she's not an actress anymore, not a porn actress anymore, but she was like a very prolific porn actress. When you click images, what do you see?

Here we go. I'm here. Okay, so I see a bunch of headshots of her. I see no real porn. Well, I guess, I guess some scandalous stuff, but mostly porn. Yeah, mostly just pictures of her fully clothed or like in a bikini.

So one time at The Hustle, right when we first launched, I helped write this article about Sasha Gray, and she hired this firm called reputation.com, and she basically wanted to retire from pornography and become like an actor and whatever else, something different. Uh, and she hired reputation.com to hide or like basically blog a bunch and write a bunch in order to get the porn images to go down. And I remember when we wrote this article, reputation.com did something kind of funny. And if I would go on my Google Analytics at night, I would look at real time and there would be thousands of people reading this article. And I saw that they searched Sasha Gray. And so reputation.com manipulated it. So the article that we wrote about reputation.com and Sasha Gray came up number one if you Googled Sasha Gray. And at night when people are going to look at porn, they Googled Sasha Gray and they landed on our article. It was pretty wild. I would see it at night every week or every night it would go up. And so I got crazy fascinated about reputation.com. And so for this segment, I wanted to talk about reputation.com. I think there's Yext and there's Sprinklr. And these are businesses that do like $400 or $500 million a year. And all they do is reputation management. What do you know about reputation.com?

So he used to tell me stories like, you know, I asked him, I was like, oh, what'd you do? You know, before this, what was your job before that? And eventually he said reputation.com, and I got fascinated like you. I was like, what is that? So he told me, he's like, you know, here's a scenario. You're a senator and your son who has the same, you know, John Chambers Jr. Sorry to any John Chambers out there.

Let's—

it's a hypothetical. So your son who has the same name as you basically gets a DUI or gets arrested for battery or something like that. So now anytime somebody searches John Chambers, this mugshot's gonna come up, or this bad news story is gonna come up. And they basically, they go to reputation.com and they say I would like this to disappear off the front page of— I would like this to disappear. And Reputation.com says, I can't make it disappear. The internet sort of is uncontrollable, but I can get you off the front page of Google. And they're like, that would be amazing. And they say, for the low, low price of $120,000, $75,000, whatever it is. Expensive, expensive, significant, because they know people are— by the time you're at Reputation.com, you're bent over the barrel. They can charge pretty much whatever they can get away with. So like, you know, a NASCAR driver, a politician, whoever, people of interest, people who wanted their, their names or their kids' names to get out of the bad news. And so they had a team of engineers that were just, it's a constant cat and mouse game to figure out how to beat Google. So like he, my, my co-founder told me, he is like one of the big, the biggest days at the company was when we figured out, you know, Google has the autocomplete, right? So you go, yeah, you type Sam Parr, it's gonna be Sam Parr, the hustle, Sam Parr net worth. Sam Parr wife, Sam Parr is gay. It'll be like all these, like the same 10 queries for everybody, right? And what he figured out was that when you type, you know, Sam Parr, if it used to say felony, like F would now say friend instead of felony. Like it would, they would figure out how to even finish the autocomplete because even when they were good at getting you off the front page by blogging, by promoting other articles, whatever, getting them higher ranked, If the autocomplete was still always suggesting felony, then people would click it and they would search for felony. It would be reinforcing. Then Google would search for it more. So they needed to clear that. So there was just constant cat and mouse game to understand how is Google doing, how's Google deciding what goes where, and then how do we content farm or manipulate this in some way that will change what the first page results are? Because 98% of people don't go past the first page or something like that.

Yeah. And so it's amazing to hear about that. And then there's a company called Yext, uh, Y-E-X-T. They're publicly traded and they do, I think that they are just a direct competitor to reputation.com. They're publicly traded. They did $390 million, I think, last year in revenue. Their market cap is not very good. It's like 4 or 5 times revenue. Um, are you looking at it?

I'm, I'm on repu— I went to reputation.com. I just wanted to see the latest. Like you wouldn't even know when you go to this. What they do, because it says— this is their headline. At first it looks like a hospital website, like a nice health tech website or something like that. Then it says, a world of interactions demands a platform of action. It's like, we're a fixer, is what it should say.

So, but here's the problem, by the way.

Maybe they change what they do, I don't know.

I think they still do it. I think they offer like a smaller package Uh, like, like when we wrote the Sasha Gray article, that was in 2016. They had like a $13,000 package. Um, but the problem is there, there's, there's kind of two problems with this. The first is that the results aren't guaranteed. Like you can't guarantee that it's gonna work, which is right. I guess that's not a problem, but that's just how it works. You know, you, when, when someone calls you, I get these calls all the time cuz I own domain names and I forgot to hide my name. It's like, hey, we'll put you on the first page of Google. Like, that's a scam. You can't just promise that. But the second thing is that if you're an individual, if you're just someone who like said some stupid drunken thing to someone one day and now your name's all over the place, you, you, it's really, really hard to, to like, unless you're willing to pay $100,000, which is what a lot of this stuff costs, it's incredibly challenged to manage your reputation if you're just like a person. And so I was thinking about like, is there anything interesting in that space? I actually think that there could be something. I like this company called, uh, Do Not Pay. You know what Do Not Pay is?

Yeah, I love Do Not Pay. The guy behind it's awesome and it's a great idea.

So Do Not Pay, it's started by this guy, and I actually didn't research this, this is all top of my head. It started by this guy named Josh Browder, I think, Browder. And he's young. Like, when he started it, I think it was like 21, maybe. Oh, 25. Okay.

Well, no, no, now I think he's like 25.

When he started, he was even younger. Yeah, he was obviously, and, uh, he was like, uh, like it was like a prodigy type of thing. And originally the business existed to help you fight parking tickets automatically, but now they have a bunch of features. Like, it's like basically all sticking it to the man. So another feature is like, we will, um, sue, uh, we will sue cold callers on your behalf or something like that, right?

They'll also do like, um, you know, we will unsubscribe you from stuff that you're not using that you pay for, you know, just ways to save you ways that you do not pay, which is why it's a great name and a great idea.

And I think there's a world where like a do not— you could use a do not pay service like this to help manage your reputation online. And this is a need that I think we're actually going to see more and more and more of it. It's like a very like exponential thing where it's like more and more people are going to be written about and more and more people are going to need this. And I don't know, it's just something I've been thinking about. Do you have any— do you have an opinion?

I don't know where the new opportunity is in this one because I think it really depends on— it's kind of like you need Google to exist for reputation.com to exist. And so really it's about thinking, okay, There was a version of this on social networks that people were doing. Like, um, I remember this one guy came to me and he was a great entrepreneur. He ended up not doing this idea, but like, I always thought it was a great idea. Others have done it, which is, um, when you— everybody has social media where they post stupid stuff, uh, when you're younger or when you're just drunk or whatever. And so what they do is they go to companies and they say, hey, we ran a check on all your employees and we found these red flags. And, um, You know, you should be aware of how you're— of what, you know, who you're hiring, as well as what they're saying and representing your company, how they represent your company elsewhere. So they end up getting contracts with companies to monitor and clean up, uh, and they're not like tattletaling, they're sort of like an, hey, like an insider helping you out saying, hey, you have this employee who's saying this, you may want to take action. But the action might just be to letting the employee know that we, we flagged this as potentially controversial and maybe they want to delete it. And so it's a monitoring service for social media reputations and social media controversies, which I think is a shitty— great, great idea.

It just sucks that you got to do that.

Well, it sucks that the world is the way it is. It sucks. Well, some people think, oh, it's good to hold you accountable, but in reality it's just a bunch of like, you know, don't say— don't say what you really feel is really the result of most of this, because people just get afraid to say anything because they're worried about getting canceled.

Um, so, and your buddy liked working at reputation.com, but they like they were by the book.

He was like, technically it was super interesting to figure out how we do all this stuff. You know, he's like, he always says this thing like, at one point we had indexed every person on the web and we had like them and their cluster and their reputation. And so, you know, I think it was technically very interesting, but obviously like sort of soul-sucking and boring as well. So he, you know, bounced.

Yeah, I think I could see that, but it is an interesting problem I've been thinking about. All right, let me tell you about one more thing. Um, all right. So I was reading The Information, uh, theinformation.com, and they had an article about Solana. So I told you about this on Slack. So there's just Solana. Sorry, I don't know anything about it really other than don't out yourself here as a, as a crypto nobody. Yeah. I don't wanna act like I'm an expert here. I'm not. I just, I, I, I, I, I've read a lot about it though, but news articles. So Chris McCann. I knew this guy named Chris McCann because he had this thing called Startup Digest. And that's one of the reasons why HustleCon became popular is because I would email Chris and I would say, hey, can you please put this in the email? And he had this email called Startup Digest. It started in San Francisco and he would email, email each week different, uh, events happening in San Francisco, different startup events. This was when the startup community was much smaller and everyone wanted to go to events. And it was just, here's a roundup of cool events happening. He eventually expanded it to different cities. He sold it, not for a lot of money, probably $100,000, probably six figures, I bet. But he kind of worked his way into Benchmark where he like was just an employee there and somehow or another invested $250,000 into, uh, uh, what's it called? Is it Solana? Solana. Solana. I'm a fucking noob. He invested $250,000 into Solana and The Information wrote an article about how that $250,000 turned into a billion dollars. Is that crazy?

In probably, I think, 3, 3 years, maybe 4 years max. Yeah, it's insane. I sent you, I sent you somebody else who also has made multiple billions of dollars from their Solana investment. I sent that last week to you, but, but basically Solana has gone—

Oh, like the fund?

Yeah. So Solana has gone from, let's see, I mean, it was like sub a dollar not long ago. And now it's $200, uh, per coin. And it's basically— it's— what is Solana? Solana is a competitor to Ethereum, if you know what Ethereum is. If you don't know what Ethereum is, just fast forward this segment, you probably don't care. So, um, Solana is like a competitor to Ethereum. And as recently as— okay, so this time last year, Solana was $1.54. And, um, when it launched, when it did its ICO, it was just under a dollar, I think it was. And so, um, and that was only, that was, you know, a couple years ago, 2 years ago or something like that. So basically if you even just take last year, $1.54, you put $100,000 into that and now you have, I think, $20 million, something like that. I'll, I'll, I'm actually gonna do some public math here for everybody. Yeah, $20 million. So Solana has had this insane runup and it sounds like he, I think through, he's in this fund called Red something, Red Circle or some shit like that. Race. Oh, Race.

Yeah.

Race something. Um, they were like the seed investors in Solana and, uh, you know, that's the right project to be a seed investor in is a crypto project that becomes a, you know, multi-billion dollar crypto asset. And sure enough, you could turning $250K into a billion dollars. That's kind of insane.

I don't think it was his personal $250K necessarily, but even if it was the fund, the, the article made it sound like it was, but even if it's not, that doesn't change much insanity. Yeah, it doesn't change much because he still is going to walk away with 9— over $100 million, some figure like there. But this article I was reading about it, and they're basically like saying there's like a lot of really high-profile tech folks at traditional tech companies giving up amazing things in order to like flee to this crypto thing. And I'll get— and I want to ask you a question about that, but example, like This woman, Sandy Carter, VP of Amazon's cloud computing, she left to join Unstoppable Domains. Brian Roberts, who was the CFO of Lyft, he left to join OpenSea, and he said, I've seen enough cycles and paradigm shifts to be cognizant when something this big is just emerging and that we're only at the beginning and it's just going to get bigger. We had David Marcus. He basically led Facebook's cryptocurrency thing. He bounced to start his own thing.

The—

this one dude left Google in order to become Coinbase's chief product officer. And when it went public, his stake was worth $600 million. And then of course, Jack Dorsey bounced from Twitter in order to work at Square. And it's like, definitely involves crypto.

Well, they just renamed— they renamed it Block because they're focusing on blockchain.

But, um, it's crazy. And my question to you is this: have you ever seen someone create that much wealth that fast? And do you have any stories of people who you know or know of that are doing this and like what their stories are? Because this is crazy.

Well, I'll say the first thing is that you're right, that there's basically a giant black hole that's sucking up all the talent in the world, and it's called crypto. And it's almost a self— there's a lot of people who don't believe that crypto is a thing, or they think it's massively overhyped. And they say, you know, give me one example of a real use case of this thing. Nobody's actually using it for payments, or Web3, there's no real Web3 products. And it's sort of— there, there's some truth to what they're saying. Uh, I wouldn't say that they're completely off base. It's like a valid critique. Um, I don't think it's true, but it's a valid criticism. But the— it's almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's so much talent being sucked into this thing. These guys are going to build things that actually have use cases and actually— it's actually going to make it all work. Um, you can't have this much talent spend all day thinking about this and building in this and have nothing come from it. That's like the biggest like takeaway for me of like, even if you're the biggest crypto skeptic, there's a self-fulfilling prophecy here, which is that it sucked up all the dev talent, sucked up all the smartest people, sucked— it sucked up like $20 billion of venture capital every year now. And all that funding, all that talent is going to— is going to create things that actually do work and do hit beyond what's already there today. So there's that. Now to your question, have I seen somebody get rich this quick? I want to have my buddy on. I have a friend who used to work with me and I caught up with him and his story, he basically went from like average, like an average job. Like you wouldn't look at this person and say, oh, that's a star career. And they were good, they were doing well obviously, but they were doing like normal person well. And they went from normal person well to making like, to personally making like $15 million in the last year. Just by— they basically quit their job and they went down a crypto rabbit hole and started betting on things in DeFi, and they started playing with all the DeFi projects, investing their money in DeFi. And they didn't have a huge base of capital. They had, you know, call it half a million dollars that they put in. And to turn half a million dollars— and if you have no path in your career to being like a, you know, a deca-millionaire, right? Like if you don't have a path where you're like, yeah, I'm going to have fuck you money, To go from no path, no, no, like reasonable storyline that makes sense there. You have a job at a company that pays you good salary and that's that. To that is amazing to me and awesome. And like, you know, just like blew my mind more so than these guys who become multibillionaires who were like prodigies and like invented the protocol or invested $250K in a random token. It's like this is somebody who just took their own money out of the stock market and was like, instead of investing in Apple, Google, and Facebook, I'm going to invest in crazy crypto and turned a normal amount, a normal like life savings amount of money into a life-changing amount of money. And I want to have him on to tell his full story because it actually has like a bunch of twists and turns, um, that are like kind of amazing. So I'm going to ask him if he'll come on and share it.

Do I know them?

Willing to? Yeah, you know them. Um, I don't know if they're willing to share, but if they are, it's going to make for an amazing episode. Uh, I'll ask him if he'll do it next week.

Did they, um, did they earn the, did they, uh, sell, do they have USD or like some type of stable currency?

Um, no, they're, they're still in crypto, like 100 or 100+ percent, because they, you know.

But, but is it stable, like a big, like a, a popular thing?

Uh, it's a mix of popular things and like something they could sell and stuff. Yeah, everything's liquid. If they wanted to cash out and say, I'm done, I'm going to Malibu and I'm gonna chill, I'm gonna pretend that this year never existed and I basically won a lottery, they could do that.

Because we have a buddy in our chat group who said he made all this money in some crazy coin, but he's like, I can't sell it. So it's like, that's different.

That, that's like, uh, those are like either illiquid, like, oh, there's this coin but it's not listed yet, or it's liquid but there's like no trading volume whatsoever on this coin. And so like, yeah, if you have $10 million and you go to sell even $100,000, it'll crash the price of the coin. That's not what this is. That's, that's a different thing. Um, that's a— what that is is I, I make a million coins, I keep $999,000 for myself, and then I sell one of them for a dollar. And oh, now the total value of my thing is $1 million. And it's like, no, it's not really. You— there's such a little— such a small amount of the supply out there being sold. It's not indicative of the true price. This is what I'm talking about is not that situation.

Is there any other person? All right. So you have a story of someone who did $500,000 to $15 million. I just told you about this guy who in like 2 or 3 years—

this person, non-technical, never was a trader or financial person. Like they would own like an index fund or mutual fund before that. Didn't know how to spell blockchain. You know, like this person is— that's why this blows my mind. It's not just this. I know that amount is not the craziest amount of money. It's an awesome amount of money for anybody. But what's crazy is this guy, point A to point B, it makes no sense. It's like, how could those two points connect? In that amount of time. It's mind-blowing to me.

So I told you a story about this dude, Chris, who did $250,000 up to $1 billion. You just said $500,000 to $15 million. Do we know anyone else that has this, like, crazy, crazy journey?

Uh, personally, you've talked about this guy. You talked about somebody, right?

That your friend had a friend that, that they did $1 million to $100 million.

Yeah.

So at its peak when Bitcoin was, uh, $60,000. So I don't, why don't, whatever it's at, discount it.

Okay. I have another one. Uh, there is a kid who I call him a kid cuz he was actually a kid. He, I built this, uh, product called Blab back in the day. It was like kind of like Clubhousey. You could basically go hang out and chat with people. And this kid used to come home every day from school. He used to get on and chat and he didn't chat in the other rooms that had 13-year-olds. He came to our rooms cuz he loved technology startups. He wanted to be in the startup scene. And, um, I think he was maybe 13 at the time. Okay, so fast forward, it's been like 6 years since then. So now he's like, let's say 21 or something like that. It's been a while. And he created some, but he's a technical guy, but he created a protocol. Like I was like, oh, what you been up to? Like, how's your startup going? And he's like, yeah, startup's okay. We haven't been focusing on it for the last few months. I was like, ah, I know, man, it's tough. You just hang in there, buddy. You know, just pivot and find something. And he's like, actually, like we ended up creating this thing anonymously on one of these random like sidechains. And it was like, uh, what up, blah, blah, blah, some bunch of terms I don't even understand. It's, you know, it's a, it's a derivatives perpetual contract for, you know, adding liquidity to this blah, blah, blah. I'm like, okay, I don't even understand what you're saying. Uh, and he's like, yeah, the market cap of it, like, you know, basically like the market cap of it is like $900 million right now. And you know, I, I think he cashed out $10 million in this. He's like, He's like, dude, it's been insane. The market cap went up like crazy. Now it's at $200 million. And he's like, I was able to like take out like a life-changing amount of money. He, I took out $10 million. He was, he was like, he was asking me, cuz he goes, I heard you guys talking about charities and Charity Water. You told the Charity Water story. I was really moved. Like I've set aside 7 figures to, uh, donate.

Um, and you're like, what?

I was like, you've set aside 7 figures? Like, do you, like, are you 7 years old? What, how did this happen? Where, what if, what has happened in this amount of time? Like I used to talk to you when you would come home from 8th grade and get online, like you're donating millions of dollars to charity now? Like what is— again, A and B, it broke my brain. And I don't mean this as an insult to them.

Like if they were, if they were only 15 then, so they're still only like 19.

Yeah, I think they're 20 now or 21, something like that. It's been like 7 years since we've made that thing. So, um, you know, it's not, it's not mind-blowing to me that this person is successful in both cases. I, I really like this person. That's why I used to hang out with them. That's why we— I used to work with one of them. I think they're really smart and we're gonna be normal person successful. It's like when, you know, oh, I went like— my sister went to high school with this girl Lily Galici, who's like this super famous Instagram star now, and she like has her own TV show on Bravo. And it's like, wait, that's the Lily girl who used to come to our house after school? Like, she was just like a normal girl. Like, wait, that's her? Like, that doesn't even look like her anymore. Like, yeah, she's had some work done, right? It's like just mind-blowing to know a normal person who's like, yeah, that's a cool normal, they'll do well in life, to be like, no, actually they're like one of those crazy outlier stories. And in a way that you wouldn't have otherwise predicted, you know, it didn't make any sense. Like, you know, it's not, it's not that that was their skillset and they tried, tried, tried that thing for 10 years and finally hit. It's like just outta nowhere, they just did this thing and it hit. And crypto is this amazing thing like that. So, by the way, I'm gonna say something. When I first talked to my friend, I caught up with my friend, I felt insanely jealous. I was like, so I was happy for him and I like him and all that, but I was also like, I was like, in my head I was just like, what the fuck have I been doing with my life?

With the friend that used to work for you?

Both of them, both the same reaction.

Yeah, because it feels weird because you're like, oh wait, you kind of looked up to me.

Yeah, now, now I'm like, you know, way less successful than you. So like, what just happened? You just like catapulted really crazy. Like, yeah, between the last time we caught up and now.

There, there is jealousy there. It's easy.

And I just wanna say like, you know, uh, interesting thing to observe is what is your reaction to hearing stories like this? Um, there's a part of me that I'm not proud of, which gets jealous of it, but that used to be like, uh, it used to be, I would feel that I wouldn't really acknowledge that that's what I was feeling. And I would kind of find reasons why it was like, ah, that's just luck. Or, um, like, You know, well, well, they probably are taking a bunch of risk and they might lose it all. And I'm kind of secretly rooting for it to not, not all work out just so perfectly as it has. That's gone. But I still got a little bit of that like jealousy pang left. And I'd say the interesting thing is, my, my coach said this to me, he goes, uh, you know, you'll encounter people in your life where your success just reminds them of their failure. And, uh, they're not focused on your success, they're focused on their fail— your success has reminded them of their failure, or your abundance has reminded their, them of their lack. And, uh, if you notice that in yourself, you want to be aware of that and change that. And if you find other people and you're like, oh, these people are haters, like, uh, you know, just understand what's coming on. They don't actually hate you. It's, uh, your success has reminded them of some failing that they have in themselves and that's where their attention has gone. And so, uh, yeah, I wanted to share that cuz I, I definitely felt this like crazy feeling that I hadn't felt in a long time, but these stories were so mind-blowing that I couldn't, I was like, wow. I, I This— I don't even know what to say.

I feel lucky to know who I know, which we have the same group basically, that I've like these stories that sound unbelievably true. Um, I'm like, yeah, I know that person. Um, I saw it, it was wild. So like an example is Moiz Ali selling Native deodorant for $100 million 2 years after starting it. I was in— we shared an office when he was starting it and I saw him try to learn Facebook ads. Like I saw the thing come to fruition. I saw it right in front of my eyes every single day for like 6 or 10 months. Um, and that was almost half the journey. It's actually pretty amazing, you know? And I think about like, this isn't like a one-to-one correlation because there's other components here, but like I was thinking about this, I'm like, Jamaica is a very small country. There's not a lot of people there, but they just dominate the 100-meter dash. And obviously there's some genetic, there's a lot of genetic factors going there, but it can't be significantly different than America. And, um, and I was thinking like, man, one of the reasons being is they just are just surrounded by like, it's just normal to be great at something and that thing, and that makes it normal to work hard. And you're like, well, I should be running these times in practice and you don't like freak out. You just get it done because that's what's expected. And I kind of feel that way in terms of making money because of our friends are who they are. It's like, well, you just want to spin something up. And if, yeah, if you're willing to dedicate 3 years, like you definitely can add a figures of net worth to your— like, it's for sure, like, it's easy. It's not easy, but it's simple. And it's kind of cool to like be around people where you start seeing like, yeah, look, it's really simple. You just do this, this, and this. Of course you gotta dedicate every—

right.

You have to dedicate tens of hours, you know, 50, 60 hours a week for like many years. But yeah, it's very simple. It's straightforward.

Well, the first example you gave with Moise was starting it literally at the table. I think he sat at the table next to you, right? Like in the, in the, in, in Founders Dojo or whatever that was. Hacker Dojo? Founder Dojo?

Founders Dojo. Like, I think he was interested. At first, if I remember correctly, he was like, what should I sell? Should I do mattresses? And he was like ordering mattresses and like measuring them and like seeing like, oh, that's too much work. Mattresses are too big. What else is there?

By the way, the public story is like, my sister was pregnant and she couldn't find a deodorant that didn't have chemicals which might harm her baby. So I wanted to create that product. It's like, dude, I know you. You were like, all right, how do I build— I want to make a business. I want to sell some shit. What do people want? Oh, people like Kleenexes. Mattresses are too big to ship. Okay. Yeah, scratch that off the list. Deodorant, small, under 1 pound, ships easily, people will use it every month, it's a renewable, and there's a niche, and there is a genuine problem for it. But like, I know you, dude, there's a, there's a real story and then there's the narrative. And like, I like stories, not narratives.

It's not bad. He was just like seeking problems to solve. He's like, boom, found it.

And I respect that. Uh, I, I like that, and that's how I think. So, you know, it's normal to me. The there's something to when you see it being built day by day, brick by brick, you're like, there's a just a respect. And for me, like total joy. I never feel the jealousy in that case. Like for example, I remember when you started the hustle. I remember when you were doing just the event and then you were like, I'm gonna do this thing. And then I came to your office with you and John and it was like, like it was like we went into a room that was like a conference room that was like the size of a bathroom. And like you had a presentation and like I listened to it and I was like, okay, this is cool. But like, what about this, this and this? And you guys were like, I don't know, we'll figure it out. And then you like, you started with these like long form, your, your original thing was long form stories. Yeah. And then you're like, kind of was working, but not really. You're like, I am thinking about switching to this like newsletter thing, just daily news. Skimm is doing it, it's working. These guys are doing it. I think we could do it in our niche and I think it'll be even better. And so seeing that, then it's like, cool. 7 years later, Sam, whatever, I don't know how long it's been. 7 years, was it 7?

Uh, we sold it about 5.

Okay. 5 years in, Sam sells the thing and it's successful. Nothing but props, respect, and, and joy of like, wow, this was so cool. I got to sit there on the journey with you. There's a difference of that, watching somebody build it brick by brick, and a difference of actually this happened in 12 months. Um, you didn't get to see the hard work that was obviously going in and the risks that were being taken. So you, all you hear is like, I tried this thing and it just hit 100x, 200x. Like what? Uh, you know, it's, it feels more like a lottery and it feels less like the hard work thing. And I think that happens a lot in crypto. There's a little difference there. The second part is I remember when I moved, so I moved from Australia to Silicon Valley without having a game plan. I think you were kind of the same way. Didn't you just like come to Silicon Valley? Like showed up, just showed up. I did the same thing. I was sitting in Australia. I went, I remember specifically I went to a meetup and they asked me to speak about the, about Lean Startups, about startups. And I went and I spoke and everybody at the end was like, yay, you know, great talk. People afterwards were like, wow, that was a really great talk. And in my head, my buddy was like, what's wrong? 'Cause he could see I was just like kind of upset. He's like, what's wrong? You didn't like it? And I was like, I was like, I don't know anything about startups. And I'm like the thought leader here. This is like, I'm doing something wrong. Like, this is like, I feel like not imposter syndrome. I feel like idiot syndrome. It's a blind leading the blind. It's like these guys know zero about startups. I know 0.1 about startups. But if I'm the smart guy here, then that, where are the actual smart guys? They're not here. And I asked, I was like, yo, what are the success stories in Brisbane about like startups? You guys are— have the startup scene. They're like, yeah, these guys did great. Oh, where are they?

They don't come to these events?

No, they moved to San Francisco. These guys moved. These guys moved. And I was like, oh, all the smart people move. Okay, maybe I should move. So I changed my phone number first just to mentally be like, all right, I have a Silicon Valley area code. I don't know why. For me, that was just like a— I think I could just do it like over the— like I did it in one night before I could move. It was like faster than moving was just to change my phone number is make a statement. And then I remember being like, all right, I'm going to move there. I'll figure it out. And I quit my job, you know, on the spot. And I was like, I'm just going to move there. I played poker for 3 months to hold myself over while I applied for a job, literally one job. And they didn't hire me. They were like, kept stringing me along. And I was like, all right, fucking up. This was the one I ended up working at, Monkey Inferno. There was like a slow process, 2-month process. So finally I was just like, all right, fuck it. I'm just going to move there. And if this doesn't work, I think I'll get this job. But if it doesn't work, I'll get some, I'll do something else.

What was the title?

Just product manager. Uh, like I was the first PM there. So I, I finally came and when I came they were like, all right, why'd you move? Like, why'd you, why'd you come here? And I was like, well, uh, you know, I wanted to see what's in the water here, right? Like if this is where all the smart people are, this is where the little startups are. Like, what do you guys know that I don't, I don't know? And I was thinking it's about tactics, it's about operations. Maybe people are just like, literally this is the cream of the crop. These are just the smartest people. And there's certainly some of that, but I'll tell you what to me was the actual— this was the actual difference. The thing that made coming to Silicon Valley work. I went to this coffee shop. You remember the Creamery or this like a, it's like this, like, yeah, that's for everyone. Coffee and ice cream or whatever.

It was at, uh, South Park, Second and Brannan, I think.

Yeah, exactly. So this place called the Creamery, it's kind of famous for where people take meetings. And I went there and I just sat there for like half a day. I was just eating. I didn't, I didn't have anywhere to go. I didn't have an office. I didn't have an apartment. So I was like, well, we'll sit here and then I'll go search for apartments later. And I remember just seeing table after table next to me, somebody would come in and they'd be like just pitching their idea to either an investor or a buddy, like trying to make a co— trying to like a co-founder or two friends catching up or an investment pitch. And it was always like these like harebrained ideas. It's like, oh, you know, LinkedIn, but for, you know, cat doctors or whatever. This is these stupid ideas. And I remember just sitting there thinking, oh, that's a stupid idea. That's a stupid idea. And then I was sort of realizing like, oh, that's actually kind of cool. Like the normal conversation here, the coffee shop conversation here is I get the, I got this idea, I'm gonna change the world. I got this idea, it's gonna be huge. I was like, everybody kind of has bought into this. And then like, if you go to Hollywood, that's what happens. Like the waiters and waitresses, I'm gonna be a star. And in New York it's a different thing. And it's, it's Silicon Valley. It's basically, I get those, I got this idea, it's gonna be big. And that's normal. Whereas before, everywhere I lived, if you were the guy who's got an idea and you're gonna quit your job to go do it, you're crazy. You're the crazy guy here. You're the normal guy here. If in Silicon Valley, if you're like, I work at JP Morgan, you basically have to like bow your head in shame. Uh, you have to like come up with some excuse. It's like, you know, because my wife is pregnant with twins and I really gotta pay the mortgage. But as soon as that's over, you know, like I'm back in the game, I'm gonna go back into the startup game. Like, if you work for McKinsey anywhere else, that's great. If you work for, you know, McKinsey or Deloitte in San Francisco, you're like the low-class person. You're not the high-class person because the high-class person is the founder with the idea or the angel investor who's betting on ideas. So just that culture where that's normal and possible to just constantly quit your job, have an idea, throw everything into it, maybe get rich, that's what makes Silicon Valley so awesome, or at least that's what it did. And what you're talking about where like if your friends group has these types of success stories and is doing this type of shit, your brain will just automatically change into thinking that's possible, that's normal, that's super doable for me too. And that you can't underestimate that. I think for some people that's what this show is. It's like if you hear us 3 times a week, at least that's like part of your friend group that talks that way, thinks that way, and will make it feel normal to have ideas. To bet on ideas, to make a bunch of money, to make huge investments. Whereas in your, your geography may not be, people around you and your neighbors and stuff like that may not think that way.

Yeah. It, and it basically changed my perspective from, um, like this only happens to other people to obviously this is, obviously I'm going to, it's a matter of time. Yeah. I'm going to achieve the desired outcome. It's just, um, A, like for on which swing am I gonna get my hit? And B, uh, which thing do I want to dedicate 5 or 10 years on?

Right.

Because if you like work 8 years on something and you're around the right people and you've been like going to, like, I felt like living there, I was like, I was in school. So it's like, well, I'm in school. I know, like, I know it when I see it and I can just keep working on something and then I'll see right away that it's working. And then I just spend time on it and just give it time and it works. It will always work. That's kind of like the attitude.

There's, um, uh, I, I think I've told the story. Have I told like why I did the e-commerce thing and why I think it worked?

No.

So I was sitting with our mutual friend, I think I can say his name, maybe we'll bleep this out later, but, uh, I was sitting with him in his backyard. He had this, you know, he has that awesome area and when he lived in California he had this awesome backyard with a basketball court and like a putting green and pool and, and chickens, stuff like that. And we were just chilling for the day and his dogs are running around and we were talking and while we were talking, the Shopify cha-ching kept going off on his phone.

And he would have that thing all the time. I used to yell at him, I go, turn that shit off, dude.

Yeah. So, so it was like cha-ching and then like 2 minutes later it'd be like cha-ching. And then I was like, I was like, what is that? He's like, oh, oh my bad. My, like, I, sorry, I totally spaced. I didn't even realize. I didn't like, I'm so like, I'm so numb to, like, I didn't even realize that was happening. Like, that's obnoxious. My bad. And I go, no, no, no, leave that on. What is that? He goes, that's the Shopify. Like every time we get a sale, it does that. I said, I leave that on. He goes, you sure? I was like, yeah, leave it on.

So we, it went on the whole time.

It goes off the whole time. By the end of the, and we were talking about some other shit completely. We were talking about dogs and family and kids and like whatever. By the end of the hour, I was like, all right, man, I gotta get, you know, whatever. I gotta go. Um, but I'm definitely starting a Shopify thing. I want my phone to do that. And he's like, he's like, he's like, yeah, you totally should. I was like, just literally that experience. If I did not have that, and the jealousy worked to my favor, right? The jealousy was a signal of, if I want that more than what I have, maybe I need to make a change, right? Because I was like, I'm gonna go back to the office where I earn a fixed salary. It's a great— I was making great money, but like, it is capped. I will make the same amount whether I do a good job or a bad job. Whereas for him, it was like, he got to chill. It was making money passively. And, um, and if he did a better job, he was gonna make more money. So that was the first thing. It made me maybe decide I'm gonna do this. And then I started like Moise. I was like, What can I sell? What can I sell? All right, all right, what can I sell?

Okay, what were the other options of other ideas I had to sell?

Yeah, um, I remember going through candles. Uh, candles are kind of an amazing business but very competitive. Candles are same thing as deodorant. You, you use them and they burn out. They literally melt away and you have to buy another one.

So expensive. I just bought a $100 candle.

Yeah, they're, they're high AOV, they're super high margin, so they're not expensive to make. They're just really— you could charge a lot for them. You can have a whole bunch of SKUs very easily that are all the same. They're all just different scents. There are the high end, middle end, low end. There's candles that are like, you know, oh, this smells like your hometown of Missouri. There's like a bunch of gimmicks you can do. There's whatever. So candles was definitely one that was on my mind. I told you about the crystal story. I was basically like, because I asked my buddy, so I asked that friend and I asked others, I said, how do you think about this? Hey, they gave me some frameworks of how to think about it, right? Like, look, you're going to— the reason this whole thing works is Facebook ads. So that means you're going to acquire customers. So something like this dollar amount. All right. So you need to—

how much was that dollar amount?

So like $20 at the time, it was like $20, $25, something like that.

But now it'd be higher.

Now it's higher. Now it's like $40, $45, something like that. But it's like, all right, let's just say in a best case scenario, you're going to break even on the first purchase. So you want a product that's going to have 65 to 70% gross margins. So that means the actual, let's say, I don't forget public math, but like let's just round numbers here. A candle, let's say the cost of goods is $5. You wanna make sure that you could sell that thing for $30 or whatever to have that type of gross margin. So, uh, and then you're gonna have, you know, let's call it 15% to 20% is your cost of fulfillment. So that's like packaging it, um, you know, picking it in your warehouse and then shipping it to the customer and customer. And okay, cool. So then you take all that out. So basically you end up with a break even. And the question is, if you can break even on the first purchase, meaning it costs you $25, let's say, in Facebook to get a customer, then you want that to be your net profit on a single order. Then you're basically— that's like the— that's like a great position to be in because you're breaking even on day one. And then every purchase— customer base, you build up your customer base by recycling that cash flow on this. You know, every month you're not going— you're not going deeper and deeper in debt. And then as you build your customer base, when they come back and repeat purchase, and you want that repeat purchase rate to be high. So like, you know, one of our friends has a thing that doesn't have high repeat purchase rate. The other one has like, deodorant has amazing repeat purchase rate. So if they repeat purchase, that means your lifetime value will be higher for your customer and all that extra, every next purchase will be much more profitable.

All right. And the business, business would be more valuable.

And then the little things like, hey, do, uh, the way that the shipping works in the country is like, you know, things that are under 1 pound. Um, they ship at this low rate. Once it's over a pound, shipping is like much more expensive. Uh, like there's like a normal USPS, USPS, like whatever, priority mail that if it's under a pound, it's like whatever, $5 or $4 or whatever. So there's like certain little things that help. And so like if you talk to Moyes, Moyes used to like change his packaging so that he would be at 0.99 pounds, right? Like he was like, I wanna be just under 1 pound. And that was like his, his, like key, one of the key things that help control cost. So anyways, there's a whole bunch of frameworks. So I went through a bunch of product ideas to figure it out. And the one thing you're gonna like, you know, the easiest thing to sell on Facebook is stuff that appeals to like white women in middle America. So like how do you sell to a 35 to 65-year-old woman that lives in Texas? And like that's the, that's the persona that's like the most easy to fish for on Facebook. You can obviously sell anything to anybody. Facebook's huge. But like, if you can get one for white women in middle America, like, you're gold.

Like, because that's who the majority of your customers are.

Yeah, uh, ours are a little younger than that, but like, uh, yeah, that's like the thing. White ladies, white women in middle America is like a great market to sell to. And most of Silicon Valley makes a mistake. They go for what is LA, New York, and San Francisco. Yeah, millennials, single millennials like me.

And that's such an expensive customer.

It's an expensive customer. Their, then their lifestyle changes very quickly. And they don't need your shit anymore. Um, and you're competing with like Uber and Lyft and shit.

Like, the ad spend is just too hard.

Yeah, everything is very competitive. It's just like, I guess the way to think about it is not necessarily that one is that much better than the other. I wouldn't actually say that. It's just more like, don't narrow your scope to your single lifestyle as like a 25-year-old dude in San Francisco who like orders, you know, every meal on Postmates. It's like, you're not representative of the world. So you know, like don't limit yourself to just that. Um, because like, you know, it might be truckers in middle America that love, you know, that buy XYZ or whatever. There might be just like a different market that, that's really lucrative that you're not really paying attention to right now. So pay attention to other groups. So anyways, the second thing that happened was I asked them, I asked, so there was, we had two buddies that were doing the same thing. Two was enough where I was like, oh, if he can do it and he could do it, I could do it. No problem. And, um, and so I was like, I asked them, I was like, what are your sales? And then, you know, it shocked me, right? It was like, oh, you know, the business, we did $7 million our first year, $21 million our second year, and $41 million our third year. I was like, what the fuck is going on? I was like, and they're like, oh yeah, we didn't raise any money. It's just profitable. You know, I just take a dividend out. I'm like, what? Like, what are these words? Profit? You know, like where I come from, Silicon Valley, we don't, we don't say that word.

That doesn't— What's that P word?

Yeah. Like, like, you know, the prophet, like Jesus, like Muhammad. What are you talking about? So, so when I heard that, I was like, all right. And then that became my normal. Like, I was like, okay, I'm going to do $7 million my first year. I'm going to do $20 million my second year. I'm going to do $40 million. Like, that became my, what I thought was achievable and normal. If I hadn't heard that from them, I would have never scaled as fast. And sure enough, we did, you know, $7 million the first year. Now in our second year, hopefully we'll get to $20 million. Like I hit this exact, I hit the exact thing to the point where I'm like, maybe I should have shot higher. Maybe, maybe just hearing their number created like an artificial ceiling, but I definitely created an artificial floor.

Are you, how many people work there full-time at yours?

Um, let's call it, just a couple, right? Yeah. Like 4 or 5.

Are you happy with e-commerce? I've asked you this, uh, like every quarter. Are you happy?

I say the same thing. It's, it's a great business in one way and it's a terrible pain in the ass in the other way, you know, like, you know, whatever. Like right now everything is— it's a lot of headwinds are going against e-commerce. So Facebook's getting more expensive, shipping anything around the world is getting super expensive and slower. Um, so those are the two core costs, right? Getting a customer and then fulfilling your product. All the— you're, you're doing physical products and guess what? With inflation, everything gets more expensive. So like, there's a lot of headwinds against e-commerce right now. Um, and it's very competitive. So, you know, there's a bunch of reasons why it's bad. Then again, it's working and like, you know, I'm happy with our business. So, you know, it's good. But would I recommend it to the next person? Not necessarily. I think if, if you can do software, do software. If you, uh, if you don't really want to like do real work, uh, don't do, don't do e-commerce because e-commerce has real work. Like we have a warehouse, you know, it's annoying.

Let me tell you something really quick before we wrap up. I just invested in— I don't ever do D2C companies like these consumer shipping companies, but this guy listening to our podcast, I bet you he reached out to you too. It's called The Good Crisp Company.

Yeah.

So he sent me like, I guess on the podcast I mentioned that I love snacks or something. I don't know.

Well, we were, you know, we were talking about better for you snacks, right? So, so junk food, that's like keto, keto cookies, whatever. So he's got, Pringles that are like better for you than Pringles, but they taste like—

yeah, they're awesome. I ate this entire box of like— and it was like a lot of chips. Like, it was, it was kind of messed up.

It's a can of Pringles. Yeah.

And I was like, dude, this is awesome. Uh, the valuation was like 2 times sales. I ended up investing in it.

I really wanted to invest. I'm just too— I told the guy, I was like, you have an amazing— you have a great business. I, I would totally invest in this. I'm just completely obsessed with crypto and like every dollar, every extra dollar that I could put into something speculative, I just want to put into crypto. I don't want to put into anything else.

What's your crypto stuff that you're, that you're doing now then?

Dude, I bought Luna. Luna's just been like on fire. I don't know if you follow Luna.

How much did it go up by?

Well, it depends which time horizon, but mine is basically, I don't know, up 40% in like 2 months or something. Right. It's like amazing. But And I think it has a long way to go still. Again, not financial advice. I'm just gambling. So imagine me saying, here's what number I'm betting on in roulette. Just take it as that. Don't take it as my word. But I think there's a lot of interesting things about it. I had heard about it from a few interesting people, and then I was like, all right, what is this thing actually? And I can explain it if you want, but basically I'll refrain for now. That's the thing I've been interested in.

Good. And you did do good, Chris. That it's a cool company, man.

The problem with all e-commerce— so our mutual friend has this great phrase, which is e-commerce businesses are great to own, horrible to invest in. Um, now I wouldn't say not horrible, but it's like, it's great for the owner of the business, it's not great for the investors. And that's only because the upside is somewhat limited. So even Native, which sold for $100 million, it's like these almost never go for multiple billions, but they're often valued at the same valuations as like a software company which can become a multibillion-dollar company. And so like, you know, you invested, I think, you know, I don't know about that one, but I was looking at other, another good deal that was in e-commerce that I liked. It's like, oh, we have, you know, we're doing $10 or $20 million in revenue. You know, 20% of that is profits or EBITDA. Um, you know, we're valued at $50 million or $60 million. It's like, it was a good company. It was definitely going to work. Like the business was working and was going to probably keep working. And, um, you know, the reality is that, that it's unlikely that that will ever even sell for $600 million, let alone $6 billion. Right. So it's like you get these like 2x, 3x, 4x of revenue, like sales, um, or sorry, evaluation sales. And that's just not super compelling when you have better options. Like if you can invest in software, do it, you know.

And in a couple of weeks, we're going to have this guy on. I lined it up. AJ Patel from HighKeyCookie and Zesty Paws. That guy's amazing. He's one of the most impressive people I've ever read about.

And he was an owner of one of those businesses. And by the way, I should say two other things. There's obviously exceptions to every rule. So, you know, I'm like, there are definitely some e-commerce investments that are going to do awesome. Like Native did awesome because it sold for $100 million, but they had only raised, I think, $2 million or something like that, $1 million. So, you know, he was super capital efficient, whereas most of these are not. They burn a fuck ton of money on marketing and inventory. Second thing, the only other bad thing about e-commerce is like, even when I say, oh, we did $7 million, $10 million, whatever this year, that doesn't mean— A, that's revenue, not profits. And B, almost whatever you do have for profits gets reinvested back into the business because you're buying inventory for the next 4 months, or you're buying ads for the next month. And like, so you're always cash poor until you finally turn the corner. And there is a corner that you turn when you're a good business, but early on you don't get that.

Have you turned it?

We have not turned that, no. Um, because we're re— like, we are like, oh great, we need to buy double or triple the inventory for the next season and for the next season and after that. So, you know, it's gonna stressful as fuck. Yeah, like, you know, but it's cool. It's like, it works, but it works if you don't need a bunch of cash to put pull out, um, and you're okay being cash poor for a while. Real estate's like this often too. You, you could be cash poor in real estate, but be like, you know, have a lot of value.

Yeah. But it's not going to go to zero. Yes. Real estate is slow, way slow, but it's more liquid and, um, it's not going to grow fast, but it won't go away. So it's a little different.

Whereas your thing, uh, e-com can go away in the sense that if the valuation drops, then, you know, you're more— you know, you don't make a profit. It's not that it goes to zero, but your— your— what you owe the bank is the now the value of the company. And so your equity can go down, right?

Like, yes, but a, a e-com business can double or triple in a year. Real estate likely will never do that. But that e-com business, let's say that like something's made illegal or there's an embargo, who knows? Like, there's a world where it can go out of business.

Yeah, for sure. Um, I have a couple more. I don't know if you want to just stay on. We could just split these into, you know, we talked about just like releasing these as like segments instead of hour-long episodes. Do you have time or no?

Yeah, I got time.

All right. Have you seen this thing that happened, uh, called SOS? SOS token?

No. What is it?

All right. I got to tell you about this. This is genius. Okay. So there's a, there's a, there's an app called OpenSea or a website called OpenSea. You've heard of OpenSea? It's basically like eBay. It's eBay for NFTs. Um, so it's a place where you go and buy, buy and sell NFTs. And OpenSea is, um, it's in crypto, but it doesn't do some of the things that crypto people like. So it's like, it's not fully open source. Uh, you know, like all the code is not open source. Like they, like the website, the way the website works, I think it's, you know, proprietary. It's, uh, you can't just fork that code and just put your own name on it. The second thing is that they don't have a token involved with it. Um, and the third is that, you know, they raised a bunch of money from private, from, from traditional venture capitalists. And in the crypto world, that's like a, uh, sellout type of—

yeah.

Um, so Andreessen Horowitz, I think, put money in. It's a multi-billion dollar marketplace, and I think it's gonna be like, it's gonna be huge. I think they did like, um, uh, Ben, you can look this up, but they did like, I don't know, $8 billion of transaction volume in like one month this year. So it's been, it's been growing like, and it's like crazy. It is one of the best startups you can invest in right now would be OpenSea. Now what happened? So they, their CFO, they hire this hotshot CFO. CFO goes on some show, some, some either podcast or some talk show, and he says, you know, we're looking at potentially going public. And he's saying it because that's a good thing for the company. And immediately the users are like, oh, you're using the old route of like getting liquidity. That's gonna make you guys rich, but all of us users, who have built this into the most popular NFT marketplace, we're going to get nothing from that. Like, we don't own stock in your company, so you go public, we don't get anything. We built this thing. And again, that's against the, uh, that's against the core, the ethos of, um, of your, everything. Yeah, Ben just found it. $10 billion in, $10 billion in trading volume in August alone. So that's insane. Same, same numbers. Um, so, uh, or sorry, I think it's Yeah, I don't know, whatever. So basically, um, so what happened? So this group of people got together. I think the guy, the guy who was behind it, his handle is like, um, 9x9x9x or something like that, right? So this guy come, they create something called The Open DAO. If you go to theopendao.com and they say they created a token called SOS. So OpenSea is the name of the platform. So this is like SOS, like save our ship. Um, he creates this token called SOS. He creates 100 trillion tokens and he gives them out. And what they did was kind of genius. So on like 2 days ago, anybody who was in crypto Twitter or anybody who buys NFTs started seeing, oh, there was an airdrop, which means if I look in my wallet, I'm going to have tokens. It's like finding $20 in your wallet. And so they did an airdrop to all the users of OpenSea based on how much you use OpenSea.

So how did they get that information?

It's, it's the block. It's on, that's the beauty. It's like, this can only happen in crypto.

So because I know, but I would've thought that like, I guess you could just scrape the website and just get a list of everyone's wallet on. No, no, no.

It's not, not the website. All OpenSea is just like a, a website that accesses the Ethereum blockchain. So all the transactions happen on the Ethereum blockchain.

Got it.

The buying and selling of the NFT, the minting of the NFT is on the blockchain. The buying and selling is all there. And the blockchain again, again, is this open source public, public record basically that you can go access. You can go I can go type in your wallet address, like your public wallet address, and I can just go see how much money is in your account right now if I just go into Etherscan. And so now you might have multiple wallets, but like, that's one thing you could do. So what they did was they went, they looked at every, every transaction on OpenSea, all the wallets, and they said, okay, Sean's wallet has spent 10 ETH, he's done 5 transactions, um, so he should get X percentage of it. So they took of the 100 trillion, they said half of it we're just going to drop to all the users of OpenSea. So I woke up and I had 58 billion of these tokens in there at a point, oh, whatever price. My total was whatever, like $300, whatever. It was like $500. Cause I don't use OpenSea a ton. I didn't do too many transactions. But if you're one of these people who's like an NFT collector or flipper who, um, is very active on the platform who buys and sells, you know, you know, Bored Apes and things like that, people made like $3,000, $5,000, $15,000. So it's like finding $5,000 in your wallet. And you're like, what is this? Ah, I got this for free money. And it's money that they minted. And they basically— it was almost like it's a marketing stunt, but it's almost like a hostile takeover. So they basically went out there, what they were saying was, here's what OpenSea should have done. They should have given all the users some tokens proportionate to their usage, basically. So based on how much you've been using the platform, you get some of the OpenSea token. And that— and then the OpenSea token will be publicly tradable, so you get to benefit and the core team will keep some of the OpenSea token. Like, the company will keep 20% of this. That's how— that's like the normal way in crypto. So the genius part of this is that some third party just did this on their behalf, and it's like— and now what? And they— so now there's a liquid market of like hundreds of millions of dollars. I think it was like $300 million. The, the group— okay, so here's how they did it. They said 50% goes to the users, um, 10% goes to the stakers and the liquidity pool, uh, 30% goes to like the stakers and liquidity pool, and 20% will stay with the treasury of our of our foundation, and we are going to build an open source version of OpenSea. We're going to build a competitor to OpenSea. And all you users who are power users of OpenSea, you now have a stake in our new OpenSea that's to come that's going to do things the right way.

But they've got to build. I mean, building—

now they have to build.

It's fucking hard. So I mean, how many people work there? 500 people?

No, no, no, dude. These things can be built by like, you know, 4 motivated developers if you needed to.

Then why the hell does Airtable need 5,000 people?

It'll take a lot to maintain it and do customer support and all those things. Yes, though, that will take time, but just building the actual product that will start to get people to shift off of OpenSea to do this, a team of 5 to 10 contributors can actually do this if they're great developers that are focused. Now that's TBD. It's like a Kickstarter. It's like, hey, we give your money in a Kickstarter. Are they ever gonna build a thing? Well, it kind of depends. Are they honest and are they gonna work hard? I don't know. We'll see. But these guys basically, they, they essentially raised— it's like they hijacked OpenSea and they raised— their share was $20 trillion out of the $100, 20%. They have $130 million now in their treasury that they can pay their development team to build the open source competitor to this.

Who's, who's the guy behind it? The people behind it?

This, uh, 9x9x9x and then someone else who's x.xyz. That's his, that's his handle. I think that's who's behind it. And so they, um, I think it's— look, I don't know if this is going to work, but I think it's something that's only possible in the crypto world because again, this is one of— this is one of the reasons why people are like, um, you know, uh, decentralization is cool. It's cool because the users can always pick up their ball and leave. They can go to another court. And so OpenSea does not own their, their wallets. It does not own their NFTs. They have no lock-in. To keep the users there except for behaving well and treating them well. And if somebody else says, I'm going to treat you better over here, it is very easy for me to take my wallet, take my NFTs, and go over here. And even better, that other group can incentivize me to come over here and try it out by saying, hey, here's some free tokens that we minted out of thin air. So I think this is a hostile takeover. It's like a hostile takeover. It reminds me of— I had a buddy who was going to do this to a company called Ripple. Have you ever heard of Ripple?

Yeah, but they, they're shady, right?

Okay. So Ripple was this thing kind of like started pretty early on. Um, and they had this like, you know, honestly not a bad idea. They were like, look, uh, you know, the way the international banking system works today is off this thing called the SWIFT standard. Ripple was like, we are gonna be a bank-to-bank communication layer that uses blockchain, right? So they were like, we're gonna use blockchain technology with a real use case, which is banks sending money back and forth to each other. So that was their idea. They got a bunch of funding from Founders Fund and others, and they released this thing called XRP. That's the name of their token. All right, so whatever, nobody cares about that, how it works, nobody cares. But the interesting part is XRP has like— was worth a lot. The founders of Ripple became billionaires overnight before— like, that's the thing with crypto, you can get rich before— like, this OpenDAO has $130 million before they have a product. In Ripple, those guys became billionaires before banks ever used their product, which is like a really fucked up incentive, and which is why Sometimes shit doesn't actually get built in crypto because, hey, I already got the millions, I could just run away, I could just do a half-assed job, it doesn't really matter at this point. I went public on day one. So Ripple, um, has a market cap right now of, um, $94— is this right? $94 billion? I think I'm reading this right. $94 billion, something like that. No, no, sorry, $44 billion. $44 billion, right? That's like That's like the market cap of like, you know, Bank of America or some shit like that. So obviously Ripple's not actually valued at that, but Ripple had believers and they had early momentum. They were very early in the crypto games. They had a lot of PR and the CEO would go on CNBC and talk about how this is going to change the game. So what happened in the crypto community? People were kind of like poo-pooing Ripple. They're like, this is like centralized. They, they took way too much share for themselves. They didn't give enough to users. That's why these guys are billionaires. Their product kind of sucks and they're kind of shady, whatever, whatever. So the reputation was Ripple, anybody who was in the know in crypto, pretty much the general consensus was Ripple's full of shit. And so my buddy had this idea. He was like, I'm going to do the first hostile takeover of a crypto network. And I was like, what do you mean? He goes, look, I can see every single person's wallet who owns Ripple. I was like, okay, that's kind of interesting. I go, but you don't know their name. And I was like, he goes, I don't need their name. I was like, you don't have their email address. He goes, I don't need their email address. I could just put something in their wallet and they'll wake up and they'll open their wallet and they'll see that they have something in it. I was like, okay, he goes, so I'm gonna go out there, I'm gonna say XRP is stupid for these 5 reasons. Number 1, the founders took—

can you message these people anything?

You can include a message in the transaction of giving them the thing, like in the memo of the, of the thing. But like the way you do it is you first drop the token, you tell people, hey, if you held Ripple, you got this token today. And then you write your manifesto on your Twitter or your website about what this is all about. So you— it's kind of like somebody put a $50 check in your wallet, you're like, what's this all about? It says go to this website to explain why you just got this $50. So that's how this— that's how this marketing mechanism works. So he was like, I'm gonna put some money in there, I'm gonna put my currency in all the Ripple holders' wallet, and then I'm gonna tell them Ripple is stupid for these 5 reasons. The founders took too much, this other problem, this other problem, you know, they're The, right, the token is inflationary, blah blah blah. So I'm going to change all that. We only take 10%, we are not inflationary, we do not do this sketchy shit, blah blah blah. My 5-point plan of how to make Ripple better, um, and we're, we're calling it our own thing. And here's the deal: if you own Ripple, if you send your Ripple to my wallet, I will send you back 5 times your value of this if you're in the first— for the first 1,000 people that do this. Then for the next 10,000 people that do this, you're gonna get 4 times your, your Ripple back. And for the next 10,000 people, you're going to get 3 times your Ripple back. So basically there was this urgency of like, okay, if these— if this is going to become the next Ripple, if I send my money in now, I'm going to get 5— I'm going to get a 5x multiplier on my money. And what he was going to do was just— he goes, when you send it to this wallet, we're going to just dump it. We're just going to sell it and we're going to put so much sell pressure, we're going to crash the price of Ripple. So if you do it early—

do they do this? Or—

so let me finish the story. So he goes, if you do this early, you're going to get 5 times your amount and you're not gonna sit there holding the bag while we dump this thing. It's like a prisoner's dilemma game theory. It was so genius. He's like, he's like, here's the math. If you're, if you're holding this thing, you have to assess, are other people gonna take them up on this offer? If they do, then the Ripple I'm holding is gonna go down like crazy. I'm gonna go down like 5 to 10x.

Golly.

If I jump, if I jump ship, I get a 5x multiplier on my money and I don't sit there holding the sinking ship. And the game theory of this, I think, was gonna work. So he has this plan, and he starts, and he starts, uh, and so he's like, okay, well, he needs to be credible. So he went to some very, very wealthy people, and he got about $50 million lined up to do this hostile takeover. And he was like, he needed it to be like $200 million. And so he's like, I need to create this huge war chest so I can tell people, look, we have this much money. So you, this, it's backed by something. Come on board. And he's like, dude, I— he's like, basically I'm going to these investors, I'm saying if you give me $200 million, I'm gonna take down this project, I'm gonna absorb all the value of this project that's currently worth $40 billion, right? So he's like, it's a huge return for those investors, and they, and they also don't even believe in Ripple. So it was this high-stakes fucking James Bond shit. What the problem was, one of the investors that he had went to for this leaked the plan to a journalist. This guy, uh, Dan Primack or whatever, he's like pretty famous journalist.

Yeah, from Axios.

Axios. Axios writes the story ahead of time. He says, hey, there's somebody planning a hostile takeover XRP, and here's how it's going to work. And XRP, obviously the Ripple team obviously sees this and they're like, okay, just in case. They, so they sold some amount of their Ripple, um, to create a like few hundred million dollar buffer so that if somebody tried to do this and tried to tank the price they had enough liquidity to buy back the— buy back the tokens and keep the price high. So it kind of foiled his plan where they— the only— the only way it would have worked is if he had caught them by surprise, and he could have done it in like a 2-day period. He could have tanked the price of Ripple and created this competitor and had all the momentum on his side. But because they had heads up, they could create enough liquidity and they could be able to like support their price before somebody could do this to them. But how crazy is that, dude?

This is like some Barbarians at the Gate shit. Like, this is like 1980s, like, Drexel, like, hostile takeover where they like were like— what's it called? Like, greenmailing. Have you ever read like these like 1980s finance?

I have, I have the book, but I haven't read it yet.

Yeah, that's basically what they did. Like, it was like, it was like warfare.

I was like, this is some George Soros shit. You know, George Soros broke the Bank of England. Yeah. That's actually what he was telling me. He goes, this is some George Soros shit. I was like, what do you mean? He goes, George Soros broke the Bank of England by doing something very similar to this. And as he was explaining, I was like, there's no way this works. He's like, well, you know, it's risky, but like, if it works—

who did it?

And he didn't end up doing it.

But I mean, who's the— it's an article. Is it public?

I don't know if it's public, but I'll tell you, it's our friend who— remember we went to dinner after our live show in Miami? It's our friend.

We went together. Okay. Okay. Yeah, that's crazy. I thought if, if Dan would have wrote about it, he would have named him.

Yeah, I think he didn't know the name, or he— I don't think he included the name in the thing. But how fucking nuts is that?

That's crazy. If you get— if that person could have pulled it off, that's wild. This is Barbarians at the Gate shit, hostile takeover stuff.

Yeah, I love it. All right, I have a couple more topics if we want to do them, or if we want to go, we can go.

All right, I got— I can do 15 more minutes.

All right, let's do one more. Um, okay, I got two random ideas for you. Okay, here's the, here's the first idea. All right, this idea is my gift to the, uh, chief marketing officer of Gucci. You know, you're welcome, courtesy of Sean Torrey.

Okay, I see this headline.

All right, so I was thinking the other day, I was, I was sitting there and I was sitting at the, at a restaurant, and as I do, I'm just watching, I'm just people watching. I'm just watching these crazy creatures called humans. What the fuck, what the fuck are they doing? And I saw all these people that had fancy bags, Gucci bags, Louis Vuitton bags. It's very different from my world. I don't, I don't give a shit about that, but they obviously do. And I was, I was watching this and then I came home, I'm watching this show, Selling Sunset, funny show on Netflix about real, a real estate team.

Dude, I watched it too, man. You know, I watched all that shit.

Yeah. So, so, you know, I, I dabble and, um, if you notice every day they come to work, they're wearing like the craziest fa— like what nobody wears to work. They're wearing like, like $5,000, $5,000 dress with like a like a $5,000 bag and they put the bag right on the middle of the desk. It's like there's no laptop, there's no computer. It's like a desk with a chair and their purse on top. And then they just gossip with each other. Yeah. Right? That's where the show is at this point. So I was thinking about this like luxury thing and the luxury just caught my eye and I said, what else? What else could you do? And then, and I don't know how this came to mind, but here's a crazy idea. That's a, it's really a marketing stunt. It's not a business idea. It's a marketing stunt for Gucci. So here's what you're gonna do. Every year there are over a million joint replacements in America. So people getting hip replacements, knee replacements, people getting, you know, they, they, they fracture their foot, they get a steel rod put in. There are over a million people a year that get this done.

I got it done.

You got it done? What'd you get done?

I've got screws. I broke my leg. I've got screws and a little, I got metal on my feet.

Now you're not the right person to ask, but is there a version of Sam that might have paid an extra $500 to have that be a Gucci nail?

The answer is yeah, of course. The answer is yeah. The answer is yeah. So we're talking about— I thought you were gonna go with like Gucci prosthetic legs. Yeah, but you're talking about like just branded on the inside. That's actually a cool idea, like inside, and you only see it on the X-ray.

Like, only see it— you, you have the picture before it goes into your body, right? So you get the Instagram porn of "Oh, hey guys, I'm doing well post-surgery. Here's my pics." And as you're swiping, it's an awesome— it's a fucking Louis Vuitton hip that's coming into your body.

It's an awesome flex.

It's an LV knee, dude.

You're going to always see that in airport scanners.

They do something so that— exactly, in X-ray, you'll always see an emblem on the thing. Now, I don't know how doctors will figure out the science of how this works without fucking up your system.

That's good.

How good is that, dude? That is— That is amazing. It's just an extra little revenue line. Tons of news because everyone's going to say this is what's wrong with the world. You're going to take over. And guess what? There's going to be a bunch of people out there who are going and getting surgeries done that are going to say, yeah, okay, it's the average knee replacement is like $25,000, $30,000, like all in. I think that, you know, maybe it can be as low as $12,000 to $15,000. You tell him— and the actual part itself that goes in, I think, is a $5,000 part that the hospital orders. You're telling me I wouldn't get the $7,500 Supreme fucking, you know, the Nike logo, the Nike, the Just Do It hip. Come on. Yeah, come on. That's just licensing revenue for them.

It's marketing.

It's influencer candy, dude. If people get grills, if rappers go get diamond grills, if they're, you know, somebody out there like me, some guy like me out there was like, yo, diamond braces.

What?

Yeah, diamond braces. Actually, fuck it, not even for braces, just diamond teeth. Diamond teeth worked. If diamond teeth work, the Louis V hip can work.

Dude, this is a good idea. This is pretty funny. This is brilliant. This is actually a good—

that one was for you, for TikTok. That's for you TikTokers out there. That was my TikTok segment.

That's actually— this is actually a fun idea. All right, what up? Wait, who— who— did you research this? Is that even possible?

I have no idea if it's possible.

I've got like I don't think you get— I don't think you could see stuff like that. I've got x-rays of my screws and like you can like look at them, but I don't think— I, I don't know how that would work.

But it might have to be a striping, it might have to be dots, polka dots, it might have to be something that will show up there. It might be an emblem that's just on it, a tiny emblem. Uh, but you know, like the red bottom shoes, uh, for what's it called, you know, like—

yeah, I don't know. Yeah, we're fucking nerds. The black or the red bottom shoes, they rap about them.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Whatever. People will find a way to see the shit and you just— if that's the only problem with this idea, we got a good problem to have. So, and also, by the way, tattoos, I think you could also do this with tattoo parlors. I think you could drop branded official licensed designs of tattoos for brands and be like, yeah, if you get this one, it's actually— that's like actually the brand.

'Cause like, you people get tattoos of brands, like, yeah, like a Louis Vuitton tattoo.

I think Jake Paul has a Nike swoosh where his like sock would be on his, on his calf.

I've seen that, that's hilarious actually.

And I was like, that's funny, he got a brand tattooed on him. And I think I was also like, you know, why wouldn't brands actually drop tattoo designs just like they drop bag and shoe designs? Like, I feel like that should happen.

That's interesting. That's another interesting idea. All right, 2 for 2.

All right. I have one more for you. Okay. This one's less fun, but I think it's still good. Do you remember Glamour Shots?

Love them.

Did you— your mom have Glamour Shots? You know anybody who had Glamour Shots?

No, but I didn't do it. But like my sister did. It was hilarious. It's like Napoleon Dynamite shit where you go to the mall and you wear stupid makeup and a bad haircut and you take these awesome pictures. Of course.

Do you know the business behind Glamour Shots?

No.

Uh, okay.

So is that the, is that the name of a brand? Glamour?

Uh, Glamour Shots was the name of the company, I think. Okay. So here's the, here's the quick backstory. I did like, uh, you know, 2 seconds of research on this, so could be wrong. Started by a frat party photographer who was like, you know, taking pics at, at frats and was like, all right, what else I got? So initially starts, it calls it Party Picks. Then when they were like kind of looking at trends, they were like, oh, people are liking this like high glamour style, like big hair, loud, loud clothes, certain backdrops. And so they were like, all right, um, he's like, so he renames it to Glamour Shots and it's physical locations. And within first year it already starts working. By year 3, $7 million in revenue and copycats popping up everywhere. Hollywood Headshots, Freeze Frame, you name it. There's different portrait shops popping up. At one point it just, he expands through the franchising model, expands to 380 stores. Taiwan, Japan, everybody wants a piece of Glamour Shots. And the trick, the thing that like really made it work was most—

it's a great name.

Most professional photographers, you would go, well, there's a couple things that made it work. One was the style was iconic. The second was, so it wasn't just come, I'll take a picture of you. It was come, I'll make you look like a Hollywood star with the hair, the makeup, the clothes. And it was only like, you know, top half up. So you would be wearing your jeans underneath and then your top would be like, this denim studded jacket or whatever with the collar popped or whatever. So backdrops with the colors, everybody knows the look, fan blowing your hair, that whole thing. So that was one, one innovation. The other was instant gratification. So you would take the photo and for most photographers, they're like, great, I'll, I'll, I'll go, you know, get these exposed. Then I'll, um, I'll, whatever, touch them. I'll pick the best ones and I'll get, I'll get you, you know, some, some options in a few, few days, few weeks. Glamour Shots, they used a special like kind of camera technique or whatever. So it was actually taking a video, I think, and then it would grab an image and you could see it right there on the screen in real time and you could pick and be like, oh, I want that one. That one's so good. They got you in the heat of the moment when you were in peak state, when you were already caught up in the frenzy and people were dropping $300, $400, $500 inflation adjusted on their Glamour Shots, um, average customer spend. So it was like highly lucrative cuz that's basically like, you know, for like a 30-minute shoot you're making, you know, huge profits. And they had these like 6 categories of styles that you got to pick from. The names are hilarious. One is Can't Wait to Be Touched. Another, Spontaneous, Tailored, Elegant, Bold. And that's where these like classic looks come from. So there was some genius behind the person who really understood what the customer wants behind it.

Whatever happened to the company?

So it gets to $100 million in sales by 1994. By 2001, it's now dropped back down to 93 stores. Now there's like 40 stores left. It's basically withered away and dying. It didn't, didn't last, didn't keep up with the times. Here's the idea. We're rebooting Glamour Shots and we're rebooting Glamour Shots.

Everything nostalgic from the '90s is crushed.

Oh, you're rebooting Spider-Man, Batman, X-Men. You're rebooting Home Alone. Home Alone's getting rebooted. We're rebooting Glamour Shots. That's what I'm telling you.

I'm on board. So there's— I'm looking at it now. There's only 5 So there's only 5 of these locations left.

Yeah, we're down to the last— this, you know, remember the Alamo, where we're down to the last stand. So the question is, how would you actually reboot Glamour Shots? So I wanted to brainstorm with you for 2 minutes. How would you reboot Glamour Shots? I got a couple ideas. I don't know if you have one off top of your head, otherwise I'll go.

You gotta do it in person, I think. I think that's part of it. Um, do— what do you need to do that's different? I mean, you just do an ad campaign with really cool celebrities or some celebrities and you'd be like, here's what they would've looked like. Like, you know, a modern, a modern person, what they would've looked like with a glamour shot. What would you do?

So I'm gonna reboot it. I'm not, okay. So nostalgia is one, one, one angle you could go. You could just say this look would come back. Uh, but I think that's the short side. I think what you gotta do is you gotta work backwards. So my mom had glamour shots on the wall. The end product was a framed picture on the wall of her looking like an '80s soap opera, '90s soap opera person, basically with the hair blown out. And crazy lighting and crazy dress. Well, what is the, what's the end product people want today? Instagram, baby. They want epic Instagram content. So we've talked about Museum of Ice Cream. We've talked about some of these. I think those are secretly Glamour Shots reboots. I think you gotta go all in on the Glamour Shots reboot. So you're gonna, you're gonna make somebody look fucking amazing for social media. I know how people out there are throwing up in their mouth. They're like, oh, this is everything that's wrong with Well, guess what? People, people, people care what they look like, how they come across on social media. If you, if you hate that fact, cool, delete Instagram. But if you still got Instagram, you're still in on this idea. Okay, so how are we gonna do it? One idea was, could you get Airbnbs, convert them into like basically like dope lifestyle looking Airbnbs and just rent them out for shoots instead of, you know, renting it out for $700 a night, you're renting it out for $100 an hour and you're doing, or $200 an hour and you're doing shoots for people. Where they get to look like they're living a dope lifestyle. They look like they're living it.

That's different than a glamor shot. Glamor shot is like supposed to be funny.

It's not supposed to be funny, dude.

That—

it looks funny now when we look back. Like, look back at your dad with an afro or whatever. Like, actually, you had an afro in high school, so look back at your own high school. That's supposed to be funny. At the time, I don't know if you were trying to be funny, but for glamor shots—

but they are— they're trying to be glamor. But that's different with these Instagram things. You're talking about being like lying.

You're trying to look cool. Yeah, so, so that's one, one angle to it.

I think you're lying. You don't live in that fancy-ass house.

Yeah, but you're not saying I live here. You're just posting a picture like people do.

We're gonna have like a, like a—

people rent fancy cars and they take pictures with it, and then they return the car. Anyone who does that personally, thank God, no. That— have I seen people who do that on Instagram? Yes, I've seen people do that on Instagram. Tons of people do that on Instagram.

It's like what you would need is people rent dresses for the day. You know, dude, you would just need like a, like one airline seat and like what looks like an airplane.

You've seen that, right? The half private jet. It's like a movie set.

It's like, it's like where they film pornos.

Exactly. So, so there's that. I think, okay, but that's a little capital intensive to get Airbnbs. Maybe you do it with a green screen. So I think one, one way you could do this is you could just have someone come take pictures with a green screen and you just do it where once they take the pictures once at one of your locations with the green screen, very cheap to do. Then you CGI them into like a whole bunch of different looks that becomes their collection of, of like, they could be power suits, they could be, they could be boss mode, they could be party mode, they could be whatever. But you just have green screen props and scenarios and you show them exactly how to pose to look good. Most people don't even know how to pose, myself included. When you meet somebody who knows how to pose, you're like, oh, like that's fucking half of it. The other half is like lighting and fucking props, but like, and editing, right? Like, but Do you remember when the guy came to take photos of us at the Miami thing? He was like, all right, stand here, half squint your eye. You're like, why?

Yeah. I was like this.

I was like, it looks like I have Down syndrome. What do you mean? He's like, no, trust me. Kind of squint your eye. He's like, then, you know, like protrude your neck forward. I was like, no, this looks like a turtle. He's like, no, look, watch. I got rid of your double chin. You know, you look like sharper and like more powerful. Okay. Look at this angle. This, this gives you confidence. Look from this angle specifically. Whereas for me, I'm like the fucking Nutcracker. If I take a photo, it's like, stand straight, look straight, hands to my side, smile, cheese. Like, that's how I take all my photos, right? But there is an art to posing, and most people don't know how to do it. So I think there's a, there's a version of Glamour Shots that somebody could reboot that just gives you an end product that you want for social media. I don't know exactly what it is.

I would just say bring back the classics. I think that you could just, you could just do it as is. What happened to the company? So did it—

do this with like dating profiles and stuff, whatever. I don't know, the company still exists, but I think it's kind of like just gone down the drain. I don't know. I don't know the ending of that story.

I wonder what happened to the founders. Does he have like some— his name's Bob. Does he have like some huge like mansion now in LA, like that glamour shot money?

1000%. He's gonna have a huge mansion. Yeah, take 2 seconds to just Google that. I bet you, I bet you this guy's got to have it. Thing in LA. If he doesn't, we're just gonna edit this part out.

Uh, I can't see, but is it actually Bob? Ooh, he lives in Texas, in Dripping Springs, Texas, which is near Austin. And it's where, like, it's like where moms who get glamour shots live. It's like a burb— the suburbs of Texas.

By the way, that's the— glamour shots is still thriving in Texas. I think that's the only place where it's still like a thriving business. I think I read that.

Dude, this guy's awesome. His name's Bob.

That's all I got. Those are my topics.

This is awesome. We got to get Bob on here. Um, all right, that's the pod.