#132 - A Simple Email Hack That Generated Millions, The World's Cheapest Billionaire, and A Simple Startup Idea No One Has Done

u yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like the days off on a road travel never looking back alright what sam we got a thanksgiving special special episode other people would take the day off but that's not how we roll what's going on to be honest we were like one minute away from taking the day off but sam said he's got something big to discuss so i'm excited well i don't know i don't wanna it's a little different but you can't un unhook the hype i already i already hyped it okay i so sean doesn't know about what i'm gonna talk about it's not big but we'll see if you have anything to say about it i wanted to talk about a couple of things okay so i'm really interested in a few things family wealth so there's a book called family wealth not that i'm even implying that i have family wealth i'm just it's just a topic that it like the idea of how someone can have something and pass it down like there anything that lasts a hundred years kind of interests me right the par dynasty yeah and so like i i like buildings that last long time i'm literally reading about wealth i'm also interested in books written about business that are already from like crazy successful people who don't care if you read it or not so like you know not like people who get rich running about getting rich yes there's this one book that i came across and it's by a guy that's incredibly fascinating to me and it's called how to be rich and it's by jay paul getty you know who that is well getty images is that who that is no that was his grandfather so this is why okay it's that's why it's interesting is because getty images is a getty images i don't know what they're worth they could be worth like twenty billion dollars they do a billion a year in sales i don't know what that's worth but it's a because it's a privately held company and i think jenny images is just a part of it right they have like kind of a broader yeah empire that's right that's why it's interesting so let me tell you the background about the family so jay paul getty died in the seventies and in the sixties the fifties and sixties officially in the sixties he was the richest man in america he wasn't quite like the jeff bezos but kinda he didn't have that same the world didn't view him kinda in the same light he was known as being a a lot more sting and a lot more greedy whereas bezos definitely gets that but a lot of people are like hey so smart he's brilliant whatever he was a little bit different and it started because jay paul i think people call him jay paul or john paul i don't actually know what they call them i call them but yeah jp getty i think i i don't know whether like they call them him back then but anyway his father was an insurance guy who somehow worked his way up and hit it big by buying an oil field for a relatively small amount of money and it worked out so where the father died with around the equivalent of a hundred million dollars his father died with the net worth of like ten million dollars which now is about a hundred million so incredibly wealthy and before he died he gave john paul ten thousand dollars which is about the equivalent of a hundred and fifty k and john paul bought an oil field at age twenty one which turned into multimillion million dollars and then what he did was he learned arabic and he was the first kind of american to go over to saudi arabia you know saudi arabia was founded i think in the thirties like the modern day saudi arabia founded in like the thirties forties i believe it's it's brand new and j j made buddies with the with the king i guess that's the proper title a shake okay alright and i think he's a king i there it's a monarchy i'm what they call a king whatever sorry if you're from saudi arabia i'm trying my best and he spoke arabic and they're like oh this white american speaks arabic so he's like trying to be respectful right my yeah and so he went over and he made these amazing deals and he's one of the first people to go into the middle east and discover oil and then he started buying oil companies and eventually bloom into getty oil which is now out of business but at the time was like the it was the biggest one of the biggest companies in the world and he owned fifty percent of it so incredibly interesting but let me explain a few more things so he was known for being super frugal at a huge asshole and growing up he was he part and the rest of his family like his kids and his grandkids if you look up what happened to him like the reason i got interested in this is it's just the other day like two days ago his grandson just died and like it's kinda like the kennedy but worse all the grant like so many a dozen plus grandkids and sons have died from drug overdoses they love getting fucked up they love drugs and jp p's grandson was kidnapped kidnapping in italy and held for ransom for seventeen million dollars they cut off the grandsons ear send it to him and goes because they they said seventeen million he goes no not a chance so they cut off the ear and sent it to him and he was like fine i'll do like sixteen five i'll i'll do like he like he he goes i'll do two point two and the reason he came up with that is that's like the tax deductible number for oh my god i always think about that with ransom like why seventeen million why not like all the money because is there really any amount that the person's not gonna pay a court like with him yes it was him there was like would hang up on the negotiators and he goes nope sorry he was known for being so frugal and he also had five wives with five kids in his home he had huge mansions he would collect art but in the home it was all fake art and he would only buy shit that could make money so he bought art but he wouldn't keep it in the home and he would not he would lau his clothes by hand he would reuse paper all the time so he was famous for sending you a letter and like only the backside was written for you because the front side was like his note taking for something else and he had a pay phone in his house and he would yell one of his wives he had a handicapped son i think a blind son and the wife the mom would spoil the kid because she felt bad for him and he would like yell at or like no like you're spending way too much money in this kid he was main that brady just posted on something i'm just gonna read it out slower it's what you said but it's just the the the details so when the kid members finally reduced their demands for three million did agreed to pay no more than two point two million which is the equivalent of twelve million today this is the maximum that is tax deductible he then lent his son the remaining eight hundred gram to get to the three million at four percent interest the grandson just found alive on december fifteen it's crazy like he was like the guy was nuts i believe that every great man is also a bad man like in order to like be great you're gonna piss off a lot of people this guy took that way too far so i don't agree with lot said but i still find them incredibly fascinating super interesting very mysterious polarizing figure it sounds like rich money broken wisdom like his sounds guy's like mentally des yeah yeah he was a real piece of crap but you know you know there's something you can learn from everyone and he has this book on called how to be rich and it's interesting because the getty okay and then the getty grandson started getty images right so he was the the grandson was successful but in general all house money the yeah he was totally so yeah definitely started on third base and got a home run or whatever the phrases is have you ever heard that phrase she's born on third yeah i've heard that one but i don't know about the third the phrase oh no i it's he was born on third base but thought he hit a trip home or something opinion that's a good one it's something like the so eddie anyway i love your quote by the way the ever evergreen man is also a bad man i love that quote that's like in my top five like life like if i was gonna boil it down like what's the core philosophy i think that would be in the top five of the core philosophy yeah i don't think i made that up i mean i someone has said it i don't know if i i sure i i think i've used that terminology on my own but is a very common idea which is like like let's say you love obama like he still had to kill some people so they definitely didn't like him so like everyone hates you although you gotta do the twenty twenty remix to be make it like politically correct and it's gonna be like every great day it's also a bad day it's true i was supposed to say every every great person is also a bad person there you go that much better anyway this guy jay john paul it's so fascinating and i just wanted to bring it up because it's interesting to me but also i wanted to get your opinion on a few things okay so first billy of the week i i suppose then goes to to jump off we should actually do the billy of the week i think i i enjoy every time we i learn about a new billionaire i learned something something interesting and so i think we should do it religiously alright well we'll do it next week next week is gonna be bernie k stone i think that's how he says his last name the guy who started formula one google that guy go ahead and google that guy look at what he looks like okay let me let me do it my he's five foot five i think with a bowl haircut x maybe echo i even know as say his last name i've read his biography he's cool and he'll he has six foot tall smoking hot wives who are forty like a g he looks like like professor from harry potter but but the man version of that yeah you gotta like up this guy if dumbledore combined with with with her this what he would look like so that's the one we'll do next week but jp what do you think about this guy kind of and you see what he looks like he looks like scary and like he looks like a mis at the word mis he looks like a do to me doesn't look scary but if i was sitting at a poker table i would not wanna get into hands with this guy like i know this look this look is the look of a person who who knows they know more than you about whatever you think you know and so so so i definitely i i think it's fascinating i didn't know this story i only knew getty images i knew they had some family wealth but i didn't know from what so so i i find that interesting what i really love is it's was actually kinda like while you were talking i was like okay this guy just sounds ridiculous sounds like you know like i said like wisdom poor money rich but that's okay i think there's there's still some interesting stuff in there but the part that i always stands out to me is i have this theory about like branding or especially personal branding which is like a lot of people wanna be known as whatever right i wanna be known as smart i wanna be known as bold i wanna be known what whatever in this case i wanna be known as frugal then this guy is a great example of you don't just say he's frugal you say that you know when his when his grandson was put up for ransom he only agreed to put play you know he offered ten percent of what the we never wanted because that was the maximum that was tax deductible that year right like it's the anecdote that gets for the person to think man this guy's cheap man this guy's frugal and so this what you told me was like twelve straight anecdotes that the anecdotes that that painted such a vivid picture of this person about being like both like really smart and clever but also really frugal and also like a real asshole without you didn't even need to say any of those words but like the stories just tell that story so like amazon does a great job of this too where they were like in the early days it'd be like you know they don't buy desks they would go to the hardware store and get these like doors because they were cheaper than desks and they would just come in and they would you know if you go to the amazon office every desk is a door which by the way when we started a company we did that it's way more expensive to do doors cost more expensive than an ikea table exactly because it's a p story right so the lesson the learn from this is that you can manufacture so i'll just give people a little tip i did this exercise i have this exercise called the three pillar exercise i'll do a video on it some to explain how it goes but the short version of it is you write these three words three words that you want everybody to know you are and one word that you want them to all know you're not so sean is blank blank blank and he is not blank and then the test and the game is can you just tell three you write three little anecdotes under each one and if you just said those anecdotes would the person have this conclusion about you right so like for me i wanted to say that i was bold right i i was going to a job interview and so i i made this game up and i was like alright i'm gonna make sure that i'm gonna have have five interviews lined up today with people in this company when they go in debrief about me i want them all to say the same things that guy was blank blank and blank and he is not blank and so i wrote bold as one of those one of those blanks and so i like alright how do you how do you make someone see that you're bold how do you make someone believe that you're bold and so i started looking into my past like are there stories of me being bold that i could drop in or or you know mention during the interview that would make them think this right so the one i thought of was when we were doing the sushi we want we had this idea for a sushi restaurant never made a sushi role in my life but i was watching tv watching the food network and i saw this sushi chef on tv and right then and there i googled him and i cold called him and he's a chef in la and i pitched him to join our company right and like people are like whoa that's like a bunch of act got a bold action you took and so i had like three under each and so when you were telling this story i was just like looking at these anecdotes and if you go to his wikipedia it's these same stories that you're talking about like he washes all is closed by hand right what does that mean that doesn't mean anything it's probably a dumb thing to do but like man for the brand of like rich guy who washes all his clothes by hand himself okay frugal like emphasized you know and so so once you start to realize that that little hack that little storytelling hack like the branding hack you'll see it everywhere anytime a brand is trying to tell you some story you know that they're just using an anecdote to build up some word that they're trying to like associate with themselves i think that's a great exercise i'm gonna i'm gonna do that later five guys does this the burger the burger chain they say we have no freezers all our food is you know all our burgers are fresh we don't even have freezers in the restaurant and so they they say this and like you know in reality they just you know that they're their supply chain model a little bit different it's not that there's damage fresher than anybody else but they say this so that you think that their burger tastes different than anybody else it's fresher right and so we used to do this with our sushi restaurant we we used to say you know all of we start off saying our our salmon is never flash frozen and then like later like this the chef was like yeah why do you guys say that and we're like because we want fresh fish for sushi they want it to be like super fresh and he's like you know that the freezing is like really critical for sam like kills the bacteria and stuff like it's you should really not serve anything that's not flash frozen like oh shit okay so that's actually a famous copy technique so there's this kind named joe sugar he's a great copywriter he's real famous it's probably in the seventies now and he wrote a really great ad for was it cas i forget what it was for a watch company and like not an expensive watch like a fifty nine dollar watch and i think he was one of the first people to use the phrasing space age metal is in this watch and then something like quartz movement i think it was courts move i could be wrong but something like this and i'm almost positive that like that space grade like i i don't think that means that not only does it not mean anything i think all watches like it's like that's like a very normal thing same exactly same with i think was it quartz movement something like that it's like well like they all have that and he was like yeah but like the people don't know that you know what i mean or like if someone's saying like you know this is like polarized sunglasses it's like yeah but like every sunglasses is polarized right sixteen hour aged poor or whatever right it's like they're all like that so that that's like a really good it's it's called it's like based on this idea of the knowledge complex which is when you're trying to sell something you have to remember or you have to keep in mind that most people have no idea about the story or like the insight behind this and so because you know you think other people's people know and you forget that this simple shit is not simple right we had a a mentor from college just got dan ariel elliott here wrote the book predictably irrational and so we went to him and we were like hey we're you know you're super smart we're starting to sushi thing what do you think are some things we can learn from your experiments that will teach us about like that will help us with our sushi chain he goes well first thing is you have fast food sushi right people people don't want may may not want fast food version of sushi they may look at that very differently than fast food burgers of fries you know and so he goes he goes i would learn from the wine industry and we said what he goes wine is just grapes you goes but the wine industry will tell you that it's not just grapes and he was basically saying like they built a whole dictionary of terminology there's like you know like certifications you can get to be a and there's like all this my mistake into what the different types of wines on and why it one's more expensive i mean other it's like how do you charge six thousand dollars for a bottle of grapes because you create this whole lexicon of of words and knowledge around what is amazing versus good versus great versus outstanding versus you know you create all these like tiers and you have to educate the market first and then you decide which tier your brand is gonna live in i thought that was pretty fascinating i like that yeah and and i buy into that as well so to wrap up getty here he was i think of a lot of words to describe them a lot of negative words but the guy was crazy intense like super intense do you think that these people who are the best so in the field the business that likely as correlated to who are the wealthiest do you know any examples of people who are not intense at all who are there or is everyone who you know we might have a couple billionaire friends amongst us or at least they will be in the next twenty years if just with compounding interest but i think we probably do have some in that range yeah yeah for sure we there's a handful so i would say yes all of them carrying an intensity some are very vocal and some are some are not some have a lot of ethics and others are like ruthless fucking killers like i think i'm seeing differences on that like i've definitely seen a difference in who's willing to like cut their partner's throat versus somebody who's like never i'll never do that that's not a differentiator but the intensity and the like man focus i have seen as like i have never seen one who's not in fact i've told you about about michael birch who i worked with at the ideal lab that he had started called monkey inferno and so michael had had made it rich he's he has sold his company for eight hundred fifty million dollars so by the time i met him this was like four years five years after that sale and i was like this british dude is chill as hell like he you know he's funny he's really like engaging he's really thoughtful the court culture was like nine to four thirty you know every day and then fridays we'd stop at three and kinda have her happy hour and like all the shit and like he was traveling all the time and he was just very laid back and so i thought oh this a good example of someone who you know i guess she can make it while still being you know a good dude and not a work alcoholic and not a not a super uber intense demanding guy and then our coo is his sister law lucinda and she she was also the coo when he was doing people the startup up that he had sold and so i asked her i was like was he you know the same way during that she goes oh no it was like night and day difference basically she's like we had to beg him to just come home at night like he just wouldn't leave the office he was a man act like he would just always be thinking about it always be working on it and you know he wasn't hiring people he was just trying to do it all himself like it was crazy he worked crazy crazy crazy hard and now i just don't think he does i just don't think he wants to do that anymore and to the point where like he had like a pretty serious surgery four months after they sold because of like the toll that the stress it put onto his body and you know and all that stuff so even the one example i thought i had found of like a not uber intense person turns out i was totally wrong and he was he just now he wasn't in chill mode so there's this so i'll what might say will tie exactly into that and it ties into the premise of this conversation which was i like reading books of people who they don't really they don't need to make money off the book there's this great book called how to get rich again it's a really poorly titled name titled book because it's pretty tacky but it's by this guy named felix dennis who started maxim maxim magazine but before that he the maxim and the music magazines of britain you know he was like a richard branson but more vulgar type a person where he's pretty ec and had his hands and a lot of stuff probably worth eight hundred million i think what he died he did drugs a lot of drugs and he died single and he wrote that he's like if i could do it all over again i would have worked my ass off till i was thirty five hopefully i would have made enough money that i could last for a little while and live comfortably but then and then i would quit because i was like a boxer who was punch drunk i like i had to go back every single time i'm like he's like i i actually he this guy i actually wrote a bag on muhammad ali he was like i was like that i like i should have retired but i kept going fighting and i just looked like an idiot and i regret it all and it hurt me and he ended up dying from cancer because he was a big smoker and an alcoholic and drug guy sometimes i wonder like what should you just grind as hard as you can starting at a young age and hope that you can get something relatively young or do you know just that you're gonna be punch shrunk and just keep going you know like i i think about that sometimes so there's what's it called there's there's a there's two like schools of thought so one is that which is like you know you you you hustle really hard at the beginning and then you sort of shift gears as you go i see that like jack mah the founder of alibaba he he has a a phrase like this where he's like in your twenties you work hard for someone else in your thirties you work really hard for yourself and your own company in your forties you invest in in your fifties you you give back or something like that like you some i don't know the exact chain of events but it's that idea and so there's some people that definitely advocate for that definitely seen a lot of people who just you know you get addicted to the medicine you can you can't you can't get off of it and and you just keep going and there's like a never ending more but it does seem like there's like another way which i think you hear less about these people because they're non extreme athletes so because they're not extreme they're not in the news because they're not extreme they don't go for the eight billion or eighty billion dollar outcome they go for the like eight to eighteen million to eighty million you know over time get rich slow tactic and so i think that there are some people who play the game a different way and their way is basically they work on the stuff that they're interested in they don't care too much about the money but they work really hard at it and because they're interested in it they become some of the bet they become the best person at that thing or one of the best and because we're one of the best they make money right even the best plumber in the world is a multimillion millionaire right like it doesn't matter which field you go you if you can get to the top just a really good one in a local area right i personally think that there's like the better method is not the not the like let me work super super hard for till up thirty five and then come to a cold stop and then figure out what i wanna do with the rest of my life i think that's the extreme athlete path that's like literally what most athletes do like they were they're they're you know michael phelps until they're thirty three and then they retire or their kobe bryant and they go till they're thirty seven and then they they retire and they have to figure out what the hell life is after that personally that's not the path for for me i i've realized but i do think that for extreme success it does look like these olympic style athletes where you are you devote your whole life you sacrifice like crazy you sacrifice your personal life all that's a good stuff like elon musk he's got what five six kids three four wives you know like for all his like and for however much you idol utilize him in the business realm for by most people's definition he's totally failed in the family realm right you know sleeps in the office two hundred days a year like i don't know if that's life right doesn't seem to look like the healthiest guys he's not winning in that air that front so i so i just think that there's like there's an extreme cost to extreme success and i haven't personally seen outliers from that there's a getty in his book he said i hate and regret the failure of my marriages i would gladly give back all my millions for one lasting marital success right and like you know i'm trying to think like even like warren buffett for example it seems like a very even killed guy you know has had long sustained success i i don't i think i think he got divorced i don't like his his marriage ended up working out which is okay not you know no harm there but that's not my goal my goal is different so don't wanna follow a blueprint that seems to be leading to that doesn't seem like the healthiest dude in the world but he's got good energy so so you know that's cool he's lived a long time times he's got a lot of energy so i think that's good i don't know i'm of the opinion that the extreme extreme success takes a big toll out of the other areas of your life it's it kinda kinda like the laws of physics it's like energy not created to destroy it it's just transferred and if you're gonna transfer the energy it takes to become like mega mega mega successful like that i'm talking about like billions and up i definitely know people that have a hundred million dollars that live a very balanced life and have have have been able to not like they work hard but they're not like they're not working ten times harder than anybody else i do too and i know a lot of people who so like well you're kinda disturbing your point i'm just saying for the top the absolute top like their company is the leader in an important category they're they're in the billions category on in terms of wealth and they're they're you know they have that sort of like that that's the top to me well i wanna also acknowledge that like i know people that are hardworking working and smart and i hate when and i used to do this but i don't anymore like we have to acknowledge that there's definitely a lottery ticket type of luck thing there for some of sure for some for sure like i there's a bunch of people who are like they're gonna crush it no matter what but they had they maybe had a little lot of ticket that in one of the you know they're playing a ton of different hands and it's like well one of the hands it just kind of worked in their favor like they likely would've have won something in all those hands but that particular one it just was kinda magical yes exactly i would say the fact that they succeeded was not luck the amount that they succeeded had a big degree of luck like i sold my company you're gonna sell your company someday whatever that outcome is we have friends like like i could just take michael as example again right like sold that company for eight hundred fifty million the timing was perfect social networking was that it's absolute peak facebook was too expensive for anyone to buy myspace had already sold for five hundred million so they were the only you know the the only girl left to ask out to the dance and so they got like a very high bid from a a big bidder and that same company a year later might have sold for half the amount or less and not to disrespect michael that acquisition is sit that and mark cuban acquisition are considered the two worst acquisitions of all time right that's not the fault of the seller that's the fault of the buyer so yeah yeah so a but i i guess that that's what i mean but but he would have been successful either way and he already was actually built multiple smaller successes the first one for like single digit millions and the second one for a little bit more on the third one you know like it was gonna always be successful now was he always gonna end up kind of in the in hundred million category like no i can't i can't say that that's true well what do you wanna talk about now i blue i i i i don't have much i have okay i have a couple lot what i mean is random that was that was what i prepared okay yeah there's no no problem i saw something don't know if you saw this but the guy who started cruise this guy kyle vote put out this video did you watch this video that he put out which is a video of seventy five minutes of their cruise vehicle driving through san francisco and it's him talking to sam alt who's the ceo of open ai right now and what's kinda like the head of of like comb and he's kind of like i would say he's like probably the number one like young gun of of silicon valley yeah young being relative like just like kind of like powerful people under forty i think sam is probably number one in silicon valley what do think of that is that right yeah maybe maybe sucks got don't out don't a hole z is but oh well z you know is he really z like thirty five yeah so so some okay sam mom maybe maybe in the top five well he's like not the richest buddy's he's like got his hands and everything but give the background of this kyle guy because he's actually more interesting i think than same alt so he actually was the cofounder of or kirk founder i think i think he would be considered the c cofounder founder he's definitely the the early engineer the first engineer at twitch and so he helped start twitch and he is a brilliant guy and and actually emmett made a good point about this recently so somebody said somebody was saying this like kinda common start up wisdom which i think is actually true but there are always exceptions so some some guy was like hey you know sometimes when you wanna disrupt an industry you wanna be an outsider right like you actually don't wanna be from within the industry because then you think just like else in the industry sometimes an outsider who doesn't know anything is the best person to disrupt it i i think the guy was kinda making a stance it's not saying sometimes he was like that's usually who does it and then emmett made a good point he goes you know for technical products i actually thinks is the exact opposite i think for technical products it's the person with deep domain expertise that's actually the best person ability he goes kyle have been trying to build self driving cars since he was in high school like twitch was like a d tour for him and he he's like you know there's the timing wasn't right back then but he had been thinking about this at working on this f with this for a long time he was the probably one of the five people on earth who should have started a self driving car company was kyle and so he starts crew sells crews for a billion dollars to gm like twelve months or something into the journey two years and something like that yeah before basically there's no no self driving cars on the road right but like you know sell sells the technology to gm because these big car companies they're very worried right like a car company needs self driving because once cars are self driving people don't need to own cars once you have self driving cars everywhere you know just push a button a very cheap uber will come to you essentially because there's no driver inside so it's super cheap and you just take it from wherever you wanna go so the next spot and then you hop out and it keeps driving around like you're not gonna need to have your car and park it it's you know cars are parked i think ninety five percent of the time doing nothing just like a d depreciate asset that's just idle so buying a car a horrible ideas that's why gm and others are trying to buy their way into self driving so anyways it's been multiple years now seven years or something like that i don't know how long since this company has been around and so we just released this video and it's a cool video because they're just like two two absolute nerds nerd out and i if wanna look it up the guy seems kyle what is bought yeah vote or v on an nice v o g t so kyle v o g t and then type in the word sam alt you'll see it it's i'm watching it now it's seventy five minutes of autonomous driving with kyle and sam alt this company i think is worth like twenty billion dollars under gm it's worth a ton yeah yeah i don't know like they raised funding as a subscription they raised seven billion dollars or something like that now but by the way this guy is like one of those total ultra achieve nuts like he's the one who did that seven marathons in seven days on seven in seven different countries or seven different continents or something crazy like that where you basically you run a marathon during the day then you hop on a plane and you fly to the next and then you do it again and you do that for seven days straight he did one of those recently right so like if you're trying to feel bad about your life look this guy up but anyways i love this video and i only understood what fifteen percent of it because i don't know if shit about machine learning i don't know shit about self driving cars like i don't know the difference between deep learning and you know like whatever the hell else like ultra deep learning and and any any other technique that there is and they're talking about stuff like that but i just love watching people nerd out about shit and self driving is like one of those game changers it's like a a one way door once we walk through it we'll never go back and so it's gonna happen in our lifetime it's one of these like like the internet happened in our lifetime this is gonna be i think like i'd say the internet cell phones and this those are the three big ones in our lifetime probably that we will see i think to check it out it's crazy how good the car is self driving now of course these are all demos and sometimes they kinda like you know like cheat a little bit in the demos to make it look good but man this thing is impressive do you know this guy kyle i never might of know he has to be like i find him to be one of the most interesting people there is because i think that like sometimes when i imagine like these like gritty tough people like like i think of like a tough guy i think of like a formidable person who i never like i wanna be enemies with i think of like a tough looking person right like tattoos or like like i think of like mma fighter or something and then i see a little like i mean he's not like bad do looking but he's like a small kind looking if he told me he sells insurance at a small company in the midwest i'm like yeah that makes sense yeah like he doesn't particularly look like a killer i mean like you know by the i'm surprised people don't make fun of us for this because we always judge when we hear about these remarkable people we have this like instinct reaction to their looks we talk about it everybody has it when we talk about it we're like look at this guy this guy looks like a fat rich guy it's like this guy looks like you know like a door or whatever but i'm surprised we don't get called out for this like have you ever seen the guy who created a ethereum oh of course yeah when i see that guy i'm like yeah you look like you created a ethereum like you look like the part he looks the part i literally bought a shit ton of ethereum early on not super early but early enough where right now i'm looking good because i saw this guy and i heard him talk and i was like okay i didn't understand pretty much any of that but i i'm pretty sure this is like the next x so i'm just gonna like place a bet you know seems like this guy i i have a hard time believing this guy's is gonna fail in life i think this little super genius who's like really obsessive cryptocurrency is gonna make some shit happen exactly and it's like and then when i see bros with abs and tattoos who are doing ico or whatever those crypto things recall i'm like oh no stay away from that it doesn't matter what that person says they should look like that it's do and it doesn't it doesn't take much you you'll you can make money just doing that but yes but this guy it's so funny because he kinda breaks them mold of what we're were talking about earlier of intense i i don't know if he's tensor are not probably yeah of course he is but he looks like just a gentle nice person and yet i think the word genius is thrown out too much a person like this definitely has to be genius iq genius level at many different things and i follow him on instagram or something where he did his marathon in seven days yeah seven days seven i'm like seven x seven yeah seven wow like how courageous and bold must this person be in order to do something of like who is crazy enough if i think at the age of twenty eight or old he was or probably younger to start a self driving car and now like the founders of gm or or the ceos of gm are like kyle like what do you think we should do it's just like audacious i think it's the right word i just i really right i i just love these audacious people so he exactly i i don't know anything about them might be might be smart might not be i mean obviously he's smart but i don't know if he's like super genius but what i will say is not knowing the person you can learn a lot just by the fact that he took some very interesting swings twitch early on was not like a sexy place to go work right justin tv it was not a sexy place to go work it wasn't like a clear big market wasn't a big company it wasn't making a ton of money it wasn't like you know a smart person like this can go get any job they want and to go work at justin tv was because it was an interesting challenge right it was like doing what they were doing with live video at that time when the infrastructure of the internet was what it was that took some courage and it was an interesting swing it was interesting swing to be working on same thing with self driving right like cruise there wasn't that many self driving car companies at the time that he started cruise and that was an interesting swing and so i gotta give respect because i think that this guy took some really interesting swings and if i wanna do something more like if i if i think about my own career i wanna take more interesting swings i think that's a a lesson learn from this dude yeah so i have the video on it's playing in the background it's it's definitely amazing i don't understand how a car can get all the data that this video has it's pretty amazing i guess they're using some type of radar or something yeah so the the car basically has a combination of camera sensors lidar which is a long distance like radar essentially and then normal radar and it has the combination of all three input sources to create essentially like a map of what's going on in the world and so for self driving you need to create a map of what's around you you need to predict what every what they call agents so what every other thing on around you is going to do in the next like five seconds so if you to make a prediction and then you have to make a plan for what you're gonna do based on that plan that based on that prediction and then you have to do it do it and so that's just constantly happening in a car and so like in the self driving car world there's like this religious holy war of like do you need lidar or do you not everyone thought you needed lidar and then elon came out and was like lighter is stupid it's expensive he don't need it cameras can do everything and so that became a big fork almost everybody took the lidar path and tesla took the camera only path and the lidar people said camera will never work and a camera people said lidar is is a fool errand and they're all very vocal about it and now we're gonna see whose technical decision was correct which is actually very interesting because if you ever read the book i think it's called paypal wars have have you read this book i've heard of it great book i really like this book it's a book about this founding story of paypal from one of the guys who was like i employee fifteen ish at paypal so most of you all don't don't know know this but elon was the ceo of paypal when the so he didn't start paypal he started x dot com x dot com was also trying to be what what paypal was doing which is like a internet bank basically and they merged when they merged elon became the ceo elon was a ceo for a while and then when elon went on vacation he went on like a seven day vacation had a coup and they basically like kicked him out they went to the board and they said we're you know and you need to get rid of on now and they got rid of because i think he he like didn't wanna sell or something no no well well in the book at least they talked about it was a technical decision again like i'm sure there was many factors a lot of pressure on the company in general but one of the big things was that there was a technical architecture decision he wanted to use dot net which is like this one type of infrastructure and they all wanted to use this other like on a modern thing and to this day they disagree about which was the right choice like they ended up doing the other one paypal work and elon still like no like that would have worked just fine and so him and max le kinda had like a huge flooding of the heads about that and then peter t became the ceo so who's right like with this tesla stuff i i'm i'm so educated with it but a lot of people who i speak with say that the that the self driving tesla stuff is pretty bad there's two ways there's again nobody nobody knows right nobody knows till you pull it off because what a lot of people say is yeah this works in most cases but most cases is not good enough for self driving because you're gonna kill people if you can't do all cases and so they'll say yeah cameras work except for in bad weather because when it's rainy and your camera starts fogging up you need lidar you need radar to be able to to detect stuff and so that's like one of the arguments for example is that yeah camera's good enough most of the time but most of the time is not good enough for this thing to to really be autonomous and tesla says no we're gonna do it we're gonna do it by the end of this year now they didn't pull it off this year you know his timelines are kind of always wrong so i have friends that they're like always are fun they're always wrong i have friends that are pretty deep in the space and the opinion has shifted from most people thought tesla was on a you know on a dead man dead man path dead and path and now now both people would agree that tesla is the furthest ahead i shouldn't say most people agree because it's just like a bunch of random opinions but from what i can tell a bunch of smart people now agree that tesla is ahead because they are the ones that have humans driving cars around everywhere collecting all the data also so all the map data all the city data all the lanes data and because a human is driving they're getting trained their system is getting trained by so they they run what's called shadow so basically while you're driving at tesla self driving is predicting what it would do and then the driver's driving the self driving is checking based on what the human did like oh human did something different than i would have done noted and then the engineers can go like look at that and that does all those differences get noted and so a lot of people think tesla's is getting better because they have the most data and then other people think that tesla's reckless and that you know way or whoever else has you know the better the better tech but we'll see somebody's gotta show it i definitely want elon to be wrong some of the time he's right too often no person should be right that often yeah i i i could see that and he and and he's become a little too sm for me oh he's he's super sm i like i think it's cool to be a shit head sometimes but he's kind of a i respect him a lot and i like him a lot i also think he's a douche he was also super wrong about coronavirus and i think that was like another one who was really really sm about and then has proven to be completely wrong where he was like it'll be gone by april and you know very just trump and and like you know saying the worry about coronavirus is stupid and stuff like that and you know has been wrong on on pretty much all fronts and he got it yeah we wanna keep going yeah let's do let's do a brooklyn okay brooklyn and tactics this is just kind of a this is a tactical one so this shot of shot to people who like operational tactics so my guy ben showed me this thing that brooklyn had done last year of black friday right black friday in a couple days biggest e commerce day of the year and he showed me this thing that brooklyn had had done which i thought was pretty cool and they basically emailed all of their customers and they said they basically emailed them a a whoops email basically so it was like it was a forwarded email from two people inside the company like the head of marketing to like the junior marketing i was yeah look we like we enabled the code you know black friday twenty or twenty five for twenty five percent off should be ready to go for black friday but it it's it's live now but we'll announce it a black friday or something like that and they forward this and so so there's a they send an email to the whole user base and the email is basically the reply the two these two people replying and it's kinda like it looks like and the the subject line is like you know re you know re black friday like and regarding black friday and so they said sent and then they were like oh my god they they said a follow like oh my god oops so sorry that that that was not supposed to be sent but like you know what whatever we'll honor it and they get this huge rush and this huge spike can sales because people feel like they got something that they that they didn't you know they weren't supposed to get and and they went and rushed and and bought it before i got and so we so ben was like he shared it with me and we were like let's try this so we did this yesterday and so we did it with my wife's e commerce store and so we sent out an email to all the customers did to work it worked like a charm dude like it was the biggest sales day in the company's history it was awesome and basically what we did was same same idea so sent out a code to when we did it in a little bit differently we sent it out to a small number of people and then we went and said and then they posted it on facebook like oh my god guys did you anybody else get this email and they screenshot in it and so then we commented on it like hey this was this is an error like we told our developer to fix it but you know with like friday is really busy like it'll get fixed soon but like hey ladies like i guess in the meantime you know go crazy go shopping and so people thought oh my god this i wasn't supposed to get this and it's gonna get fixed soon so we like turbo charged it by by adding that like this we were gonna fix this plug today but like you know while that's up there go ahead and and people just gonna do that this i'm gonna do that today yeah do it it's gonna work you know they didn't make that up the first time i've saw that was chu chu did that about four years ago i remember chu did it chu is like a short company and it was like from their accountant dave and their accountant dave was like saying like you guys you cannot send this email to everyone this is gonna bankrupt rep us right that's a good one i'm gonna do that i'm gonna like literally right after this how to do perfect so said that's one tactic let's see how much time i'm i guy got where do i find that did someone i'll send you an image of it it's not like that well talked to about it i'm i'm putting up a blog post about it so i'm gonna talk about it but this would be great how did you format that in your mail provider i'll show you we just made it like a plain text email that has the you know like when you see four email you could see the trailing email so we just had the trailing email and then our email and then it just got sent but did you actually like send it to one it like did you and your wife talk to each other in gmail and was just like we just made it look like we just took an email like format and it we could've have actually emailed it but we didn't need to we just like copy paste one it and so that must only took a few minutes few minutes yeah great tens of thousands of dollars awesome in a day is great here a bra just linked to it yeah brooklyn there it is that's that's the one this is written up in architectural digest which is probably why most people will haven't heard of it i like these little tactics that kinda of work once and then you know they get saturated and you gotta move on to the next one but i like doing them and sharing them with kind of people who who like to like to use them before they get they get abused okay well i'll stick on oh god i'm looking at this now this is like the greatest day i've ever so i'll i'll do another e commerce thing oh this actually gonna be kind of boring but i think there's an opportunity so here's a free idea for somebody you know the website maker card card dot c no it's like a or it makes like mobile friendly websites yeah i make single page kind of which are mobile friendly it's like a super simple website builder so i really like it i've used this for a bunch of my like random project phone wanna make on personal website i use card like to me it's simpler than web flow it's simpler than squarespace it's like faster and simpler i can't do everything that everything can do but i don't need everything i just need the basics and card does the basics really really well so a couple things so i've met the founder of this by the way i think he's awesome you know just guy live in the midwest built this as a side project started to make some side hustle money and then just like it's just grown over time and it's pretty pretty great business and so i was i was looking at for e commerce so in e commerce you you have these events like let's say black friday and you wanna make a landing page or like you what do you use for your landing page pages use like adobe spark or some shit like that right no for landing pages just wordpress or click funnels yeah we're click exactly so most marketers use like click funnels or know there's a whole bunch different landing page you know tools out there un unbalanced unbalanced exactly into insta pages there's a lot of good stuff e commerce i think needs the somebody needs to build the click funnels for e commerce that is basically it just connects with the shopify so use the shopify at the back end but on the front end it lets you really really easily spin up these one page mobile optimized basically card for e commerce and everyone's you're be like oh that already exists no trust me i tried all of them they all suck and is a difference between something not existing and something not being done well this is something is not done well yet it's hard and see it's two r's c a r r d dot c so the big ones in this space are like s gun net there's stuff like that that like is what they call headless commerce which is basically means your store is made in shopify but your front end that the customer you can use a bunch of different you can use it you i've had the same exact problem yeah i've had this exact same problem so awesome problem i'm like i just wanna use shopify for the back end but i wanna use click funnels to design my pages quickly exactly and like even click like but somebody needs to make the you the most user friendly and if you wanna say an example of what's really user friendly one look at card and like think somebody needs to make card for e commerce and i think that person will print money because every e commerce site is constantly just trying to do two different things make ads send emails as the three three things send send emails make ads and then make landing pages that actually convert the the the traffic into buyers and you don't wanna make new shopify templates it's like way too much work to do that to like use a different theme and like switch your store it's like way too complicated and so you just need to be able to spin up offer pages deal pages sell certain inventory that you're trying to move launch a new product line and just make that the focus of that page like so simple so pain problem if somebody can truly say this dm dm me everything you say that does this and most of them wanna be like this is not simple this is not good but if like if they're actually is one we send it me because i need it this problem is bad i've had this exact same problem i dig it i totally agree i use zapier or zapier and like woo commerce and we're it's like it's all duct taped together same thing i agree i would love to use i don't know why there's no good solutions i completely agree okay last thing that i wanted to do before we go i don't really know where to go with this but i'll just say it since we talked about getting images so stock photo stock sound stock video websites have done pretty well historically i just think they're great businesses because the people who use them keep coming back to them like kind of designers or like professionals that like just keep needing the stock stuff and like the bigger your kind of database and cert the better your supply the more def defensive your businesses essentially because you have the biggest repository of stuff if i wanna go find a certain sound or song i gotta go to pond five because pod five has just the most variety to choose from so they become like the category leader ai has kind of changed this right so order for advertisers kinda change it so there's all these little demo projects where it's like look this website play songs that are generated by ai like the song you hear when you refresh this page has never been created before and we'll never be created again the ai is just making up songs and they're actually like pretty good and what's it called the song one these are little demo projects but like here's another one for faces there's this person does not exist dot com oh i've seen that that great space that i love that you need a stock photo of a person look this is a ai generated person this is not a real person but it looks exactly like a real person if you just go this person's is not exist dot com i love that right but it got me thinking like do this means that somebody can basically disrupt the all the stocks the stock websites because you can just programmatic generate anything anybody searches for you can create you can have the computer basically make five hundred variants of whatever they search for based on their keywords and then they'll pick from them and then you're like cool those are all saved and like you can create like a huge database of stock whatever images icons sounds videos whatever it is and you can programmatic generate a ai based stock website and you don't have to pay anything to the photographers you don't have to pay anything to the video makers so your margins are gonna be way better because you have you have no supply side fees to to to get the content so i think there's something interesting there i actually i agree that it's awesome but i actually think it'd would be a shit business because there's no not now babe maybe because everybody can do it now there's no defense like the only def is like do customers know you and are are you high up in search you know like maybe that's the def at this point but this i don't know there's something there like the technology can now do a thing it couldn't do before so that means there's businesses to be me i would totally not wanna be at person's is yeah it's awesome i'm into now i'm like oh i would never wanna start that because it's like starting brain and when there's taboo and they both do the same thing it's a race to the bottom so you're just gonna make prices the lowest and then they gotta merge yeah i think still the customer relationship matters the most so like that is a problem but i don't know there's i think there's something there i'm not sure exactly what it is i've i've been thinking about these stock websites a lot i think they're well we out a lot i've i've always said i liked stock photos we talked about getting images we've in the past we've talked about not flicker but what's that one it started by a guy new york who's like stock photo or no he like owns part of the knicks now or they like i forget his name john's his name john or i think right okay i don't know what that is it's shutters stock shutters stock okay yeah yeah so so these have been great businesses historically maybe now they're not going gonna be as great because you can get disrupted by this sort of thing i've also been thinking about like where do you need stock stuff that's not this so there was a a recent one video well video there was a few like but i'm thinking like kind of even more on edge so let me find this company that i i dm the founder and i was like y i gotta invest in this so his name is alba and sketch fab is the name of the company have you seen sketch fab yes do just said a bunch of times so it's it's a platform where you can publish three d models so three d if you go to their website the first thing you see is like this nike shoe that's like you can rotate it in all directions it like looks awesome it looks realistic and this is like a rendering and so people can three d makers can upload their stuff like here i made a door i made a table that you can you can use in your whatever and and you could buy and sell them it's a marketplace and their traffic has been growing and this is like a very good company i believe and so i'm trying to invest in this but i think that this is like and they're gonna be the the category leader of this and there's there's the funny tweet was like somebody showed that google tried to like compete with them and amazon tried to compete with them and like if you search for like common things like tesla or a car on on both of those engines the google one shows like zero results and the sketch fab one shows like three hundred right there's just like dominating this market right now and so i think there's there's some niche things there's some niche things that are for different types of stock items that are like not just photos and sounds but i don't know three d objects is is a good one so they've raised eight million nine million i didn't making any money i believe they're they're profitable as of as of now i believe felt that was it i think that was on the tweet might be wrong that's a great one that's such a great one yeah that's great i'm one hundred percent about to go do that email thing alright let me know how it goes and then yeah we'll we'll we'll swap nuts okay we're out of here happy thanksgiving everyone if you're not america then happy wednesday or thursday which this thank you yeah if you're not america go buy some mac cheese and mashed potatoes at eat it's it's allowed yes it is alright see you are