#217 - Why Direct-to-Consumer Companies Are Awesome to Own

if you gotta do ethereum early on in the crowds sale and you you bet on that thing at thirty cents because you're a developer and you you really believed in this new programmable blockchain you deserve your tens millions of dollars you deserve your hundred million dollars if you're rich because you bought like a picture of an rock you know three months ago or you know a computer generated sq that's now worth a quarter million dollars fuck you yeah i feel like i could rule to where to i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a road travel never looking back i'm looking at my my phone i just got text message my my three nieces went back to the went to you know first day of school today and i was talking to one of them this morning and i go ellie how you you know are you feeling first day ever going to a school and she goes i could go i go how you feeling in one word she goes my heart is going fast i was like i'm melted i'm melted your uncle is a puddle on the ground now he cannot function even so that's all shout out to ellie for her first day hopefully it's going well that's awesome that's a great one okay can i start by telling you a quick story that i don't think i've ever told you but i think you'll get a kick out of so about this is the bitcoin one let's all that one soon but about three years ago i so i talk about all times i don't wanna like rub it or like continue talking about this shit because it gets boring but basically i don't do any drugs i don't drink i'm pretty straight late sorry i've been straight laced for eight years i don't do anything i'm i'm fearful of anything but i was getting really curious about psychedelics so like mushrooms okay md therapy ketamine therapy i what a lot of people did i read the book how to change your mind by michael poll and i was like oh this is great i'm really interested in this and so i found a person who was going to lead a an md mma therapy like session and so i went to dinner at her house with my wife came with me and it was like three other couples and we went to this thing and i was we and she wanted to do like a a session to get to know people in order to determine if this was a good fit because basically what you do is you take a dose of md and then like she talked to you molly i think something yeah i believe so it's all or similarly at least i'm not i i really frankly don't but i think it's like the same thing and we eat it you drink it you like it's like a pill i guess it's a pill you swallow it okay and we go to this group and i'm in just like the the the idea of psychedelics for therapy like to like you know for veterans but also people who just want breakthroughs or who have depression i'm on board with i've got friends to do it i love it i don't really do i don't do drugs because i just don't feel comfortable doing it but i really wanted to explore it and get and get to know these people and try this out and i went to this group and they were crazy hip dip like super hip dip but mind you this is in san francisco and she had a really nice place and so like we start talking and all of a sudden it gets so hip dip and woo woo that she's like you know like this medicine needs to be free for everyone and capitalism is just ruining everything and like you know we need to live in a society where we could just barter and trade and like this way we can get let me just guess sam triggered starts to debate triggered so hard and and then we start talking we i'm like in my i back my head i'm like all them why am i paying you like four thousand dollar for this but you're yeah refund me right yeah give my money back and we start talking and like this is the sitting in my head and i'm like better four grand this thing was four grand to do or twenty five hundred it was like multiple thousands of dollars i think it was closer to three or four thousand than it was two thousand i forget the exact amount it because you can take a family of four to disneyland get the fast pass get the turkey leg go get the mickey mouse ears and still coming under four grand that's a real psychedelic experience if you want yeah i look i agree it was crazy because but like i'm trying to be open minded i wanted do explore this i i just read the book i was on enthused but in my head i'm was just sitting there at this dinner with this in the back of my head and i'm thinking about this i'm like oh my god like i can't believe like this is these people are so bullshit and and that i i asked her and i go what what did you use to do for a living she used to work at le brothers absolutely le and brothers and now has a venture capital firm on the side and this whole and and and i like but i heard this i was like i started giggling and i was like well you do realize that this is like just ridiculous what you said earlier right and i said this at the dinner i'm like you know that's that's that's just like crazy and they are also talking about how like this medicine needs to be available for everyone and like they need to help the masses and they're like where you i'm like from missouri and they said oh fly over country and i'm just like oh my god this is the most sm thing ever so eventually i get you an argument with her at the dinner table and she was just like know i don't think this is a good fit and i was like i i agree this is not a good fit i can't do drugs with you not a good fit and so i can't can't even do dinner with it yeah i get do dinner with you let alone like get high and talk about my feelings with you like not gonna work this is a horrible fit and so i just i had to leave i got kicked out i like i basically got asked to leave and they're like sarah you're cool sam yeah i i just wasn't in a good place and so i got kicked out of the group i wasn't able to do drugs with them and that was my experience with psychedelic that was my only experience with like the psychedelic therapy but i think that these style these retreat styles for psychedelic stuff starting in like two thousand fifteen i had friends that would go and do ayahuasca you know ayahuasca is so i've heard ayahuasca in meantime so i know of it i know kinda what the what the the why people do it you should explain it anyways but if you said hey it's like my dolly part in thing i couldn't pick dolly part out of a lineup if you said hey draw ayahuasca i i draw off some feathers in a in a in a bowl of liquid i don't think that's the hell is actually ayahuasca i don't think you're far off again i'm total n here as well but my friends do it i believe it's like a powder and you mix it with water and you put it in a ball or whatever and you like pass around like this thing and you take a drink out of it and then you stay up all night like doing wild stuff and there you a lot times they make it makes you throw up and that's like part of the the journey and experience it's freaking weird but like whatever i'm open to it and i've been had i've had friends like start doing this in two thousand fifteen now on instagram i am seeing so many of my friends go to south america go to mexico all talking about like these journeys right started to listen to this health podcast the backpack back back through europe is one hundred percent america and and i like to make fun of it because it's some basic that shit but you wanna know what it's i'm on board i'm so on board with this i am totally board with this and i think that psychedelic retreats like i've been i read a bloomberg article about them in this guy in jamaica and they charge like the it ranges from twenty five thousand dollars to a twenty five hundred dollars to thirty thousand dollars and they bring you to this like nice place they get you they give you the the drugs like it's a variety of sometimes it's ayahuasca ketamine what's is it psilocybin what's mushrooms yeah and they like do this therapy stuff i am so on board with and unfortunately my one experience was horrible but i'm so on board with this i wasn't drugs it was the people it was the people it was the hip step to trying to get me to take this drug yeah it i'm like i like i can't trust you like you're gonna tell me like you wanna solve you wanna like like solve the world's problems that you're gonna make fun of me for being from missouri like that this like this is a bad fit you know right just tell me you're shit first dude i i i have so many yeah exactly it's like a a and it's like hi i'm sam and i'm full shit yeah alright so so i have a bunch of thoughts about this where what begin first shout out to the guy who came to our live podcast show in austin who is apparently mushroom dealer don't remember his name i remember that showed me some show he he loved the the guy loved to take out his phone and just show pictures of his he put open of his camera roll not a single friend or family there just different exotic mushrooms in his hand and they all look the same it's they'll he kept showing gift i was like yeah cool man cool pile never never done mushrooms rooms couldn't couldn't that was like showing me different bottles of wine and i'm sober like i i yeah okay it looks great looks fantastic that one's that was dark red cool so that's one thing i just remember that guy when you were telling this story second i i met this guy who's really interesting did i tell you about this guy robbie bent no okay yeah so so this is this is cool alright so this guy so robbie ben what's his story so he's a founder of a he he's a startup founder he has this idea for by the way when i tell stories i'm pretty sure like at least forty percent of them are just the details are completely wrong but i always get the essence of the story right so i say that so rob if i butcher you your story sorry about that alright so i think he had a started up that was like this was back when cell phone roaming was a big problem like you would go travel somewhere and you're if you like turned your phone on for one minute you'd like spent that thousand dollars so basically roaming was a problem and so he was trying to build this like sim card company for like international roaming like a sim card and raises i think like twenty five million dollars or something like that and you know like pretty soon after that like roaming became like free or something is something happened the company like was pointless at some point and he's like oh shit okay what do i do now company kind of fails he's kind of in a fun he's in a depression and so i think he was he was i think it was depressed i think he was using drugs i'm not sure exactly the story was just kind of in a low place in life and his friend is like you know what you need to go backpack back through europe you need to go to south america to do some ayahuasca or he decides he's gonna do it so he goes on this ayahuasca trip and he's like you know same story as everybody who goes to burning man or we're south america for ayahuasca they're like oh life changing best experience i think if you don't have a good experience i must just kill you because i've never met anybody who didn't have a life changing experience it's all positive so so he's got this all positive experience and he meets this person there also doing the trip and and there you know i was ayahuasca out together and this guy's like hey like you know so what do you do he's like oh you know robby like i just went through this crazy thing i'm like broke my company failed i'm like in the dumps and this guy's is like oh you know i'm a i'm actually just creating his crypto venture capital fund and this is five years ago six years ago now hey he's like you know i'm we're raising one of the first funds for crypto to invest in crypto and you know like a lot of these people we invest in they're like you know great engineers or they're maybe there's really into crypto but they're not great at marketing and so like maybe you could just help out some of my portfolio companies like if you got nothing else to do just come hang out with me and let's let's do this and by the way you should check out this thing called ethereum and and so he's like oh ethereum what's that he just done its crowds sale i think a ethereum was like at six dollars at the time so theorem today is like thirty five hundred dollars as of this morning and and so he he starts organizing all these like meetups so he's like i don't know anything about crypto but this guy said get in this is a lot of energy here and he followed his gut after the ayahuasca was like hey i got nothing to loose so let me do this and he starts organizing like basically a hack and then with the hack he gets engineers and then he tells the engineers hey you go work at these like portfolio companies potentially so he's like kind creating some values he's just helping a bunch of people out and he starts getting really interested in ethereum because he's like that's where the most energy is so he starts organizing like all the ethereum hack and people are loving it the ethereum foundation reaches out as like hey you should come on and be like the first marketing person for ethereum so this guy joins joins the ethereum project and he's the first kinda like marketer guy non technical person working on the thing and he's basically building the community and the passion around and he's hosting events and things like that and so he went from like the dumps he gets into the ethereum like under ten dollars ethereum runs up and by the way i was i asked him almost was like did you like how big did you bet on this he's like well i had nothing he's like but i took every dollar i had and i put it into theory he's like oh i didn't have much i it's probably like ten grand or something like that he's like i think i borrowed money from like my parents and i just put it all into ethereum and it was like amazing for me and so anyways he he makes life changing money and and after a couple years in the crypto scene he's like you know what crypto great i made a bunch of money doing this now but i'm ready for my next thing and he's like goes back to his roots he's like that psychedelic trip ayahuasca trip was like so meaningful for me so he in the meantime had been getting into all kinds of like different types of like kind of therapies so he was like cold therapy heat therapy breath work all these are kinda like you know kinda like this hip dip like sort of alternative ways to like improve your body and so when i called him i i met him for the first time he's on the zoom and his background is like this oasis i'm like oh cool background like cool background image he's like no this is like my garage i built out he basically built this in case in canada he built this epic like wood cabin looking thing it's got this custom cold plunge you made it's this twenty person son that he created because he hosts events there it's got all this greenery it's like a greenhouse it's got this like musical stuff and he created basically this experience where you could come if you wanted to have one of these experiences you you could do hot cold therapy and he would take you through an intense cold plus heat like you know you go back and forth between that like a like a bon bath type situation and then the second thing you did was these like kind of facilitated md a type i don't know what drug was but facilitated like psychedelic experiences where they have a doctor on and then they do this like group experience together and you're guided through it exactly like what you're talking about yeah i was like dude that's a great idea i was like because you know i'm a pussy i don't like i i kinda wanna have a life changing experience but like with no risk can you like give me that and this is like the closest you're gonna get which is like doctor supervised in a group of people with people who've have done this before and like it's four beginners and it's not just go do drugs in the in the in this like sketchy place like in a nice beautiful environment with music and control he's like yeah dude i put this up like i think you put it up on airbnb as an experience or you put it up on group on or some don't know where you put it we put it somewhere and he's just like booked out his his little like garage he's basically booked out like twenty four seven and since then he basically he's he he's like his next thing or the way he like evolved it he's like still he still does the live events but to scale it up he created this app called inward and so i invested in this thing and it's basically a breath work app so i started doing this every morning now the app's not even like fully out yet like you just sent me like doing it yeah because i'm in i'm in into breath work i'd like kind of heard about wim wim hof and dabble with that and i went to this buddhist thing once and like they do chanting which is like a a form of like meditation breath or too it's great and so usually i'm a gonna send you the sound cloud link and i had him come in my course when i taught the writing course i was like dude do this thing's amazing i use this now for my morning routine like wake me up basically so i was like you know teaching over zoom can be the most fucking boring thing and so i had him come in and do a five minute session for the students at the beginning and everybody was like hyped out of their mind by the end of it also some people were like yeah i'm like light i need to like us sit down was like yeah yeah that happens but he has this five minute guy anything where it's like dope music mixed with a guided breath work session and he in five minutes he was like waking everyone up anyway anyways i'm pretty like excited about this i thought his story was pretty awesome of like his little journey to get here so i wanted to share that with you so let's just keep going so i went to when i would live in san francisco the these guys i met these young guys on they went to stanford they were yeah no they they they they the that they come out well they they weren't that young these guys that went to these guys that went to stanford they basically i found this thing on a event right where they were doing like it was very clear what was happening which was it was two guys testing a startup up idea and they either got someone to donate them a really big room or they like rented it for a very little amount of money but i think someone just donated them the this room and one of them was like an ent enthusiastic person or enthusiastic of breath work and he they basically we all went there and they put this event right link up we each paid thirty dollars and thirty of us went there so what's thirty times thirty and is it nine hundred okay well we yeah we don't do public math and so y i take that i bleep that i don't do public math so i went to his i went to this guy and he the the lights were down and they start playing this music and like i went with my coworker he was like hey i found this thing on a event right let's go check it out and we went to this his place and thirty of us did breath like a breath work session it was it have you been to a soul cycle studio i was gonna say yeah it sounds exactly felt like yeah it felt exactly like that and it was the best business ever and they were clearly i talked him afterwards towards he's like just testing this out and we might turn it into a business and they didn't do it and they totally should have because it was way better than soul cycle why they had nothing it was just a room or lights yeah sound and you're sitting there and they just hit play and the guy guides you a little bit he kinda talks to you and it was awesome but it was like effect at the end you you you walk out with a high so you've given people an experience so we talked about this a while ago with a simone bile thing i we we made a prediction that next five years mental fitness not mental health mental fitness which is training your body and your brain to sort of like be able to master your mind a little bit better and not just avoid disease and illness but actually be fit mentally this is gonna become more v i think that this breath work i think breath work is gonna be the new meditation i think that the same way that you know soul cycle and berries boot camp and hot yoga have become these alternative you know we had the gym which is this kinda of cold sterile isolated solo one player experience and then you had soul come in and it's like no this is multiplayer with a leader you just submit to they just tell you they just shout tell you what to do and they're like they look heroic on the stage with their body and their their voice and the microphone and then we're gonna program you with this music that you can't help but feel like you just went to the club we're gonna heat you up so you sweat because that feels good you're gonna feel like you gotta work workout in and we're gonna guide you through a process and whether that process is cycling or it's boxing at rumble or it's barry's boot camp and you're running on a treadmill or it's hot yoga and you're you know trying to touch your toes this is a model that works it is an experience that you give somebody is a feeling it is a one hour guaranteed high that you get to you get to get without the use of drugs and so so i'm pretty convinced that there's gonna be a breath work style version of berry boot camp or or hot yoga that becomes just as popular as some of those other ones perhaps even more popular and i think that the app that he's got he's building is gonna be like a calm calm style app if they execute well because i think there's a big market for this you know these are sort of like ancient completely again it can be modernized another thing that stood out for during your story it was i've actually read about this so i've there's this like recurring theme of people i look up to so chris sa or is it sa chris sa there's this israeli guy named v have you heard of v v now v so his his full name is a v ne so a v i v space n e v o so this guy he's an israeli guy he's probably in his sixty now sixty now he kinda looks like sting he's like this like good looking like suave looking dude who's like in shape he's probably in his sixties he came from israel his parents were wealthy they died when he was young gave him ten million dollars in an inheritance he used that ten million dollars to invest in some stuff ends up becoming the largest shareholder of time warner and now is this like big shot guy who hangs out with like bon and like he's like a jay z like they all looked like he's got like an yeah yeah yeah he's like this like spiritual guy you could google i mean there's a lot of like really interesting articles about them he's kinda with the great ga so anyway there's him there's chris sa another person who this story applies to is this guy named cowboy ser cowboys ron donaldson ron he's a famous u fighter they all have locations outside of major cities so cowboys sir has a place in denver this vi guy has yeah he's got and this v guy has a place right outside of la and then chris sa had a place in tahoe three hours outside of san francisco and their competitive advantage in getting into interesting deals is they have like interesting places that aren't necessarily expensive v got his his place expensive is expensive donald at first probably wasn't that expensive chris saga is not that expensive and he gets these like founders to come out to his place he's like hey look i have this cabin out in the woods you would come chill and hang out and he like shows him around and gives them this amazing experience and that's how they like end up investing in different stuff i actually think that strategy is amazing to have a place just to live you could live a little bit on the outskirts and like everyone comes to you either they're on your terms because that's the best way to like get shit done is everyone on at your house on your term where you're the boss they get to know you i think that's a competitive advantage i've thought about doing that in either texas or new york where i'm staying now is getting a place that's like two hours outside of the main area let's let's time share my my first million ranch i'll go in i'll invest in it with you we'll get five other cool people that we like and then whoever wants to retreat to the rant at any given time can it it would totally work like i i think it's a really like a huge competitive advantage don't you i well i think it's cool i think it's definitely cool i don't if it's a competitive it's a competitive advantage in that you can go deep so there's this idea of like do you go wide or do you go deep i would say most people go wide i go deep in terms of in terms of your strategy with people so what what is wide wide means you have a lot of light connection loose ties you know a lot of acquaintances a lot of a lot of friends but not a lot of friends that you could call when you need something or not a lot of friends who are gonna think of you first when they see something awesome and going deep is the exact opposite it's having a group of you know ten or less people that you're like okay i'll would go i go to war for you and you would go to war for me and i think that both of us have more of this deep strategy than wide where it's like we have a handful of people that we just trust implicitly i could give them my bank account and sleep well at night and and because of that we can share information we can say dude so like how how do you do that how much you make doing this how do i set this up like what wow is this good for me bad for me you what do you think or a deal happens and like this morning i i i'm in a deal that's going really well start deals going really well and a buddy texted me was just like hey look like can get me into that and i was like okay i will i will put as much credibility as i can into this to get you into that deal and and vice versa if they if if they had something than than than the same and so i think that the ranch style escape is a great tool for going deep so chris ak talks about he would he had the the founder of instagram early on he was like i think working out of dog patch labs as his like c working space and he invited him up to tahoe cab and to come like work out there and i think he like stayed there for like a few weeks if i remember the story correctly like living in the guest house or whatever and then travis cli when he was starting uber the story is yeah he came to tahoe we spent four nights or three three days together he was we're were in the hot tub just jamming on what what could happen it's like immersion by the end of three days that somebody like you really trust that person you like that person it's so different than a meeting than a zoom call and trying to have eight back to back zoom calls and we had what's your name a brie kim on the show and she showed us her calendar and it was like thirty minute zoom then thirty minute zoom then forty minute email follow ups then twenty minute zoom then and it's like okay that's one strategy i wanna basically say clear the calendar you know let's go road tripping together let's go you know let's spend a day let's go to this mma fight ticket together let's have unique experiences that are longer more in death and that build more trust and i'll i'd rather do that with a few people than try to do it try to know everybody same were the exact same i found it to be exhausting you wanna do a a few topics here yeah let's do it which one do wanna do do you drive okay i'll do let's see which let's do this let's do the i i don't know you wanna tell the story about the consultant one i think that's probably the most interesting one alright so i i i i've not told you about this guy i don't think so it's a pretty memorable story so i have this friend that i was i was talking to recently and i'm gonna i'm trying to be a fair bit vague but i'm gonna try and give as many details as i possibly can and basically this person they had a normal job a normal high paying job like a lot of people listening to this they were a consultant at a at a large place and they lived very frugal and they were able to save a million dollars by the time that they were in their lower to mid thirties and when this happened this was around four years ago bitcoin was priced around twenty five hundred dollars three thousand dollars when this happened and this person is accenture they're crazy even though like they have the normal job and you would talk to them and you think that they're normal he likes to bet he just loves gambling like in a sense of like betting at all like he he it seems like he that's just like in his dna he he's not afraid i think you're a little bit like that not as extreme but definitely have a touch of that and so you know he started talking he goes you know i don't see any good place to invest this money right now and i'm doing doing crazy amounts of research i'm gonna go all in on bitcoin and this was when it was three thousand dollars twenty five hundred dollars we thought it was crazy so he cashed out his four zero one k he borrowed a little bit of money and he used kraken or something like kraken to get massive amounts of leverage like five or ten times leverage and he invested all of his money to the point where he had like four thousand dollars left of his one million all of it into bitcoin and recently when bitcoin hit its high by the way this was this was bitcoin after it had crashed from about twenty thousand down back down to three thousand so yes it's not like it was just all on the up and up no and recently when it got got to sixty thousand dollars his sum his one millionth is it was worth about like ninety five million dollars and and and you talked to him you caught up for them i i had a our mutual friend was with him and he and he called me and goes man this guy you like we were talking you know i like hey whatever happened to this this person and he goes well you know i caught up with them he's worth almost about a hundred million dollars right now and it totally works and i was like wait what he goes yeah he's got a hundred million dollars at bitcoin right now and started with the mail and did you know him when he was making the bet like were you there yeah what the hell are you doing yeah and i and i went out to dinner with him in two thousand and when did the when three years ago was what when did that i i think twenty seventeen or twenty eighteen i remember which one but there was a a peaked think twenty seventeen december or something like that and then it crashed back down we went out to dinner and he was tell me about this and i was like you you're crazy you're a crazy person this is a horrible idea just invest in the index fund you know i'm really conservative and i'm like just in invest in index funds you're nuts this is a horrible idea do not do it and he was enthused so enthused i couldn't talk him out of it and he was like thinking i was crazy he was like what are you crazy this is like it totally makes sense and i'm like it does it this is a horrible idea do not do this and he did it and so recently when when about four months ago whenever it was at like fifty sixty grand it was worth close to a hundred million dollars and i was asking about their lifestyle like not a lot had changed and was just or leaving it let me run cashed out a little bit i think like ten or twenty percent i believe but still letting it rise so now it's halved or i guess it's back up again but and and and the point of the story is basically i am so enthused part of the story is a dude bet a million dollars and made a hundred million there is a little but that's the point of the story let's be clear the the point is is that like i love that part of the story crazy people exist i'm not one of them and i'm happy that they exist so we just did this episode with ram remit and i align with the remit we're both fairly conservative just like ten percent a year of boring shit i love that these nuts these nutty people are real and exist because that's where progress come from comes from and i'm happy that they're real and so that that yeah i just wanted to tell that quick story because i i caught up with them recently an amazing story so i saw this i saw this tweet that was great and basically what it said was great to be great at investing just make bets that everybody agrees with dot dot dot later that's that's so true which is there's a lot like baked into that which is that ultimately was that might shane parish he way to something like it and then somebody somebody replied with a simpler version of it shane had had the original one i think saw hill bloom had the the the the the punch one liner version of it yeah and i thought there's so much baked into that which is you have to remember that if you're gonna invest if everybody agrees it's a great investment then the price is baked in right so ultimately if you wanna have any kind of outs sized return you have to be betting on something that not everybody is agreeing with you is a is a good investment and so and and so i think that's important i think so i think it's important to know and so when you're doing something that doesn't mean everybody me that's gonna be a great investment it's almost the opposite issue if everybody agrees with me on this then this probably isn't gonna be a great investment it might be a good or solid investment it's probably just not gonna be it's almost definitely not gonna be a great great investment so that's how you kinda use that advice yeah i saw that i thought that was good alright what do you wanna do now by the way on this because and the world's crazy and we're talking about like people just make a hundred million dollars on random bets there's just great blog post that i think everybody should go read i don't know how they'll link to it because weird maybe put in the show notes it's not a great headline the everything bubble and it's written by f t which is a crypto cryptocurrency exchange we we talked about the the guy he was our billy of the week once this guy sam bank fried and who had also made a pretty crazy trade to build to get the bank role to be able to do this to build this exchange i think he's the youngest crypto billionaire or he's the youngest he's he's the wealthiest known crypto billionaire i think he's got a net worth of ten billion dollars he's i think something something like that somehow that's more than metallic i don't know how that works but i guess so so anyways he it's it's just packed with data so it basically starts with like bubbles people talk about bubbles and and it's like what is a bubble right bubble is when you get this like sort of enthusiasm delusion greed and everybody sort of thinks and everything can only go up and then you know then there's just pullback or a pop and it talks about like the size of pops and and what how when they happen and how that's played it out through different bubble times and where we might be in this thing then it talks about like maybe this is a bubble that will never pop right why would that be it's space talks about it goes through all the data around stimulus right so it's like thirty two trillion dollars of stimulus has has happened globally just since covid which is the largest stimulus the world has ever seen in terms of a even in terms of percentage of global gdp you know global banks are printing a hundred eight hundred and thirty four million dollars per hour to buy bonds right now and and twenty five percent of those bonds are negative yielding so it's just like he starts to talk about all these different macro indicators and there's all these charts and graphs and and numbers and it's very simple and it basically talks about where are we at where are we at with with stimulus where are we at with commodities like copper aluminum why you why used cars up forty five percent year over year and then it talks about you know what's happening in in the crypto market and and equity market i think there's one great quote which is basically it talks about like risk assets so tip traditionally you'd have like a risk asset which is let's say bonds and bonds are like the safest thing and so the the quote here i'll just read this out which is because of the amount of printing so the quantitative easing because they call it q infinity which is basically the central bank and the fed just deciding to print an unstoppable amount of money with no end in sight so it says because of this the your savings account turned into your checking account the bond market turned into your savings account the equity market turned into the the bond market the venture market turned into the equity market and the crypto market became the new venture market basically like everything shifted over one unit so things that were low risk became everybody see higher higher risk and higher returns because the safe stuff was this sort of negative yielding and so everything shifted over one notch and i thought that was a good kind of observation so anyways this a button it's very you find a blog post that's this high density of of like signal to noise i would go read this it's called the everything bubble and so what's your what's your opinion of i know that you're texting with me and a few guys earlier yeah you have you have some strong opinions what what's your opinion of what's going on with like the the n entities and and and all the rock like the the i don't even know i was joking around i said like look okay if you got into bitcoin early because you you understood the difference between fiat currency and sound money and your technologists you understood crypto like props you you deserve you deserve your tens of millions hundreds of millions of dollars if you gotta do ethereum early on in the crowds sale and you you bet on that thing at thirty cents because you're a developer and you you really believed in this new programmable blockchain you deserve your tens millions of dollars you deserve your hundred million dollars if you're rich because you bought like a picture of an rock you know three months ago or you know a computer generated sq that's now worth a quarter million dollars fuck you that was my that was my point of view i like my level of respect and like the level of durability i think that comes with these different waves i might regret this later it might be that all these people they just truly understood this intersection of technology financial markets and art in a way that i don't get and you know to basically to get rich with with bitcoin early on you had to understand like the you know the financial you had a certain economic understanding of the world and a technical understanding of the world and you had to be sort of a little you know a little libertarian you had to have those three to bet on it super early on and for ethereum you the same thing you gotta have a certain mix of technical plus financial like stab for this it's basically like art plus finance plus technology you if you're gonna get rich during this and i just feel like i don't know if it's my twitter feed or if it's everybody's twitter feed but i feel like half the people i know have lost their mind and and i know i sound like that sometimes crypto and this is just one of them that i don't get but i really don't see the sustainability of this n market i think it is come like it is built on greater full theory this is people that are not buying things because they like the art they're buying things because they think they're gonna get rich they think that the next person is gonna come in and buy it i think there's a whole lot of like either you know wash trading or painting the tape which is basically when when two friends sort of pass something amongst each other in order to drive up the price and then they sell it you know then you know the next sucker comes in and buys it you know for because they think that's the market price and i think that it could be one person with multiple accounts it could be you know a handful of people that are manipulating these markets i don't believe in the n nxt craze in the same way that it seems like a lot of people in tech i think it's really cool technology i think there's a lot of cool stuff that's gonna happen but i think people are just diving into every freaking project and that to me seems misguided in the the crazy returns that they're getting like i'm the hate you know sort of rooting for it to fail because i i don't get it i'm not participating in it and it just doesn't seem like it doesn't seem like a true value creation it just seems like you know delusion i completely agree i'm freaked out by it i we're on the exact same page it like the by the way i was gonna say when i when i say that like i will still buy a few f ftc so because i'm a i'm a believer of like when i have this strong of an emotion it's a signal to me that that's where i need to go lean in and learn now i don't go crazy with it i will make small bets i'll talk to people i will be open minded because i've felt this way many times before and been wrong i felt it and i've been right but i felt it and i've been wrong and so all i know is that that means there's something really interesting going on i will still play in that field i will make small bets i will meet a bunch of smart people and if something changes my mind i'll go make a big bold bet but i would say like the thing that seems off to me is you know it just seems like every third week there's a new crypto project like but just just yesterday there's a thing called loot did you see this what what is that i don't understand it explain to me so here's what i know about it the the founder you know you know this guy dom hoffman and he created vine and then he created shit since vine i don't know if he was with h maybe he was h here yeah and maybe maybe he was he's one of the one of the vine founders early on so he just released a new project yesterday called loot and so instead of it being like a you know a crypto punk which is like a little eight bit character or you know an ape from forty yacht club which is like a you a monkey a picture of monkey this is a black square with like i don't know ten words of white text that make no sense just gibberish it's just computer generated gibberish and that's the whole n nxt and you just yesterday you could just all you had to do is pay the gas fee which means just pay the processing fee to like mint one so it came out ben all the tweet ben mint did one and i think today it's worth ten to eth which is about thirty thousand dollars this is in one day oh way he paid he paid you know probably under a hundred dollars to mint one of these just to just the processing fee he paid you know fifty bucks or whatever the gas price and then today i think the floor is like six or six or ten each it's just like you know no dollars for this black square that will say like lions mountain spiking diagonal line castle you know valor you know it's like doesn't mean anything right and then and it's it's like open ip you can go like you can build like games on top of it this cool stuff you can do on top of but like it's so hard to wrap my head around like this and it just feels like every third day there's like a new one and and this is where i'm like the old guy on the lawn shaking my fist you mean like you kids don't understand the meaning of hard work and usually i'm the one laughing at the old guys who saying that and just saying you don't get it in this case i don't get do we wanna keep hating on stuff and go to whoop yeah okay this is the play what would you call at the play haters ball this is the play haters ball episode i have the other one that i could that i could hate on i let's do let's do whoop phrase go yeah so well you you go ahead go ahead i'll frame it whoop bra two hundred million dollars a series f whoop which if you don't know is like a wrist wristband like a kind of health tracker fitness tracker thing you wear i have one i lost the charger so it's dead right now but it's basically like a little fitbit you wear and it tracks your sleep it tracks your exercise and it's like i think that the the word on the street with whoop is basically amazing marketing and product is it's like you know not the most accurate but who gives a shit and basically they charge you you know some amount for the band and then there's a monthly subscription twenty thirty bucks a month or something like that i think the the for the part what right now the band is free and it's thirty dollars a month or if you subscribe for the year or something like that you have to subscribe in order to use it yeah so that's whoop and then same thing eight sleep which is a bed that tracks your sleep and it can kind of it can it's thermal regulating so it can make it cold hot i had one i returned it because i wasn't super impressed by it they raised eighty six million dollars at a five hundred million dollar valuation so what do you what's i think i know based on the way you you started it but my the reason i put it on here i wanted to know are you a believer or are you like you know where do you bet that these end up how how much you believe in these how much was the whoop valuation i don't know i think whoops over a billion dollars is my i guess i don't i would have to think i would have to see this three point six three point six billion dollars oh oh wait and and also the wonderful kiss of death soft bank and then kevin durant and other athletes are investing you know that's that's called the sucker round it's not called the series it's called the sucker round so the eight sleep thing i'm well check this out we'll look up right now what's casper market cap right now so casper between one and three billion dollars is my guess let's see oh my god way worse two hundred million dollars okay so casper has a market cap right now of two hundred million dollars we had the founder of casper speak at hustle con awesome guy great story really great business when it was just getting started i made a million dollars and i think it's first week they raised prior to going public around two hundred fifty million dollars i think as of this second they have a market cap they went public of two hundred million dollars so they are worth less than the amount of money that they raised point five of revenue point five x of revenue i think that for eight sleep i i i and i think that that is a good valuation for casper i'm a board with that because it's really hard to do i think that that is what's gonna happen to eight sleep whoop i think is a little bit different because it has subscription revenue you know i i i'll buy by the way i think i think eight sleep trying to do the same thing so they don't just sell you the mattress they sell you the subscription with the mattress they're like they want they in the bold cases is it's peloton it's a piece of hardware everybody sleeps you sleep eight hours a night you can optimize your sleep and it has some such good health impacts for you right like all true and you know mattress industry's is big so what we're gonna do is we're gonna sell the best you know connected mattress and then we're gonna charge you a monthly subscription on top of that that's my guess i think they might be know man i think that's a really hard argument to make but that that's expensive that's a that's an tesla of beds says they're their ad i the so when we first when we were getting the hustle going this company called qui advertised with us and i used to write these tutorials i'm not sure if i made this up or if i stole it from somewhere else that's like the toothbrush right yeah and i wrote the and i when we were getting started i used to write these articles and i wrote this one article for hint and the headline was like i forget what the headline was but it was great like and it got like ten million views five million views and they spent so much money driving traffic to it and so if you go to out brain and you scroll down and you see these little articles you see little articles on the bottom of cnn and it sounds like a headline you would see the hustle article and i wrote that article and it was called like it was hint yeah it was called like it had the word sweetie like sweetie this is never gonna work said this one coke executive or something like that or what what was it do you see like i'm trying to i'm trying to find it right now and so i wrote an article like that and it crushed then qui saw and they're like that's great write what for so i wrote one for them and i called them the tesla of toothbrushes and that crushed and they said they spent a ton of money driving traffic to them now i i'm not gonna take credit for i actually think i did copy it from someone but i don't remember now the tesla of of like bed the tesla yeah it's it's it's it crush it what do you see the article what was it called do you why didn't you start a d brand i feel like everything every bone in your body was made to build a brand like this i'll tell you why so all birds filed to go public today i was reading through their s one here's why i didn't start a d i think it's fun i think a d brand is like the hardest thing that one of the hardest things that you could do in business it is so challenging i looked at their the a s one here's why commerce kinda sucks the more revenue you you you make the less money you have it's such a pain in the ass am i wrong about this yeah you're wrong about this let me show you something real this crazy dude you i i i think these d companies are are such a pain in the ass to run can you see this number what camera focus on that there is what is that's that's the last thirty days so your your business has made sales in the last thirty days that's right that did not that hard to build these businesses it's okay it's a lot of sc work there is a lot of sc work right like i spent hours yesterday trying to find a forklift for the warehouse but the the electrical and the building doesn't support the battery that we need and i'm like we're like it's forklift from i'm calling forklift providers turns out by the way great business to be in just selling used heavy machinery like forklift and there's a lot of room for like building ag there but but yeah dude if you have the marketing chops you have it's like it's like where do you plug in that if you're a plus at that skill and i think you are like your writing skills and your editorial skills your marketing skills are so strong if you had plugged that in on a d brand and the by way this is we are one year and one month into this business that's crazy and that's in a month basically so okay how much how much cash you have in the business bank account good amount yeah a lot why because are you buying a shit ton of stuff for november at december yeah we have we have a bunch of inventory yeah we we do spend a lot on inventory but there's yes it took cash so i put in when i started the business i put in a good amount of money so i put in so do have you don't wait and you don't have to say these numbers but do you do you or you can but do you have more money in the business bank account than you started no we so we have a line of credit basically that we we use so since then we basically pull that out use the line of credit but what i'm i guess the the point yes it but yes we you do have to wait some time to be able to pull profits out because while you're scaling great this month is profitable you're gonna reinvest that into either marketing or inventory for the next so yes you are cash poor for a while but you do turn the corner like this month is a is it turn the corner type of month where oh good like there's actually leftovers after you reinvest everything in growth and all that and so i think that if you have a good product if you have a really truly great product do you think you think that you have a great product we do we have a great product like a truly great product and so and so when i think when you have that you're not just like is you're not just an arbitrage you're not just a drop shipper just taking some shit from a you know random shit off of all express and and and sending it to to customers and try to capture your margin like we spend a lot of time on product development and things like that to get it right and we also use the product ourselves so so it's not like so so we have to live with any issues with the product so i would say you you can turn the corner and also there's a bunch of different companies that have popped up that lets you float money so like let's let's just take a a normal d business here's how it can work you can let's say you rank facebook ads you put the facebook ads on a credit card cool your facebook ads should be returning more than 1x x you know within seven days how much you have thirty days return thirty yeah it depends on your product and your your your brand all that stuff but let's say you're returning one point four x you might be returning two point five x whatever different brands do a different amount you know if you're doing three x you're you're you're amazing you're laughing if you're doing one and a half x you know you're alright you're doing okay so let's say you you do that you're you're paying back your ad spend in seven days but you don't pay your credit card for let's say thirty days so all of your marketing spend you should be paying it should be paying itself off you don't need an external investment to do that okay so now you have to deal with inventory well for inventory you have you have terms with their suppliers so you don't have to pay for it all up upfront as we get bigger we get better and better terms with our suppliers in in addition to that there's all these companies that have popped up like clear bank or settle or whatever wave flyer different companies that will basically say cool for one percent interest we will crunch your inventory financing for you we'll pay all your kind of accounts payable for for you and so one percent is one percent per month is not cheap but that basically replaces the need for external investment and so then by the time you have to pay your bill for your inventory you've already received it and sold it and so if you do those two things you can manage cash flow well you your ads pay themselves back before your credit card bill is due and your inventory pays itself off before your inventory bill is due and you just pay a small vi on insurance so there's a lot out there now to help you scale and i think a business these businesses i think sell for about 1x x revenue which is you know maybe four or five x times eb and do you think that what do you think is gonna happen do you think you'll sell it or is this something that you wanna run for an owned own is this like a family business that you wanna own forever yeah i like running it so and i definitely think we can grow it more so you know if we could do this in one year you know let's give it for more and let's see where we can take it i do think that there's like some amazing thing about these companies which is you probably if i had a guess have i i don't know how you quantify because if you have so many projects but you probably have a skeleton crew right yeah like this doesn't require there's no office you know there's there's some employees the biggest thing we have now is we we brought the we you know we do our own warehouse but you could also not do that could use a three p you you know pay somebody else basically to to do your fulfillment for you and and then you don't have any crew there so so you don't have that headache so so you could do this with a pretty small team of people there are people doing this with like like i think you know we had we did an episode with the founder of native deodorant i think he was the only employee for like the first i don't remember what it was maybe five ten million revenue yeah and then you know and then and then he hired a customer service person which is basically you know you could hire somebody for six dollars an hour overseas to answer your customer service emails and that's your first hire then you might hire another one of those people then you might hire somebody for operations to deal with like supply chain you know but so so it depends on kind of like how complicated your businesses is but yeah like you don't need this is i would say i think it's probably whatever you had with the hustle this is probably one fourth the manpower you need for that it is cool i look i think there's a lot of i was down on it but i there are a lot of cons i think there's a lot of pros as well the car it depends what what month you catch somebody you catch them in a month where the facebook algorithm is not treating people well and they're crying you know the business doesn't work anymore it's like it went from great was a money printer and now it's a money suck and there's nothing you could do about it facebook just change something or there's a pandemic or can't you can't order it or shipping containers went from three thousand a container to twenty thousand dollars a container okay now you know how does that mess up your margin and that everything stuck in the port it had i'll mean all these things have happened right like all of we've had theft we've had facebook ad changes we've had container costs go up we've had our stuff sitting on a boat at the port for three weeks and it's just floating there you know we've had to gil get line of credit we've had to do a lot of things in this amount of time but so i'm saying that's why i there's a lot of sc work it's not clean and easy like a doing a podcast and and just having a bunch of people listen to it and make like this is a lot easier a lot more fun but those can those can get bigger so i agree i guess i even remember how i started this but basically i was just saying dude i can't believe you haven't dealt one of these it's insane to me given your skill set so maybe at maybe i will one day we'll wrap up with this been a but let me ask you one more question because this is interesting to me because so you've done a social app that is like the most poppy cute thing ever and had mild had some had some mild success you've also have family that are mega successful in real estate we have interviewed all types of people you now have an e com thing that's like appears to be a like potentially a home run what would you if go back now to ten years prior your you know you know now what do you think you would like to do that's a hard question that's a really really hard question okay i'll i'll rank i'll give them it's it's like the oscars i'll give them some awards okay so most likely to succeed goes to real estate congratulations come up and get your prize and i had just said cool i'd like to be worth you know a few million bucks know but my twenties out by the by time i end my twenties wanna be worth a few million dollars maybe you know liquid maybe a couple million on paper i could have you know ten to twenty million dollar net worth i could have done that in real estate with pretty much like no luck required right most likely to succeed is real estate because there's no luck required it's just hard work blocking and tackling doing the things so that's real estate but i wouldn't go do it myself like i could go back now i wouldn't switch paths to that but i would have told myself hey look here's here's one option and the award for absolute worst idea goes to trying to create the next social media app you know yes i this required maximum difficulty light highest luck factor trying to catch lightning in a bottle and honestly the prize okay it would have been fucking sweet if we had invented twitter or youtube i gotta admit that would be amazing but i can be happy not having done it and yeah the i can name all five guys who've done that so like you know the that's that's not the path okay then if i say alright you know sort of like medium return that this is the the mediocre playbook you know the the sort of mild success playbook pretty good chance of a pretty good outcome but kind of a lot of work and you know would i do that e commerce is the answer for that one which is like commerce is one that i think you can definitely make work if you just keep trying it's kind of a pain in the ass and it's never gonna be the most fun or the most successful right however however e com of of maybe all three of those i think is the most exciting those exciting no way most being running ads and seeing cash like that is so exciting okay that that loop is fun that i i give you that the feedback loop is instantaneous and it's fucking as monetary it's not real estate reviews real estate not that very like real estate can be kind of fun what i wouldn't i wouldn't call it let's not like an adrenaline like a dopamine rush right so okay so if i was gonna go back and convince myself of anything it would have just been to say this look you could you could win in all these different ways every flavor works the choose the one with the most fun journey corny yeah i know this is cliche but choose the one that's gonna be fun before the success comes basically in that case you win win you have fun while you're doing it because you have fun you keep doing it because you keep doing it you get good at it because you get good at it you eventually win and look all these things that as long as they leverage you know either either like physical real estate or the internet the scale is big enough you you you'll have enough money you don't need to worry about money ever again and so i would have advised myself to say look there's some pretty interesting shit going on and these like new waves like genomics you know biotechnology cryptocurrency just go dive in become a there's no experts because the things like a year old go become an expert meet all the cool people doing it take a bunch of invest in shit and build build in that space you know create a podcast talking about that stuff like yeah just all the things in that space you know information so you know podcasting so media you know information like courses and you know crypto you know investing so i mean you have a pretty collection i i think the the of all of them i've had the most fun doing the podcast the media thing and really it's more of just like do the thing that doesn't feel like work to you do the thing that feels like play to you alright so like imagine you already had the money but you still working gonna work on some projects what would you work on doubt my answer was i would wanna basically like i would wanna make content based on stuff i'm learning stuff i think is cool think it'd be really fun to have an audience i find it like en energize i don't feel i don't feel like it's work when i have to do the podcast and prepare for the podcast and and yes it keeps me kind of like on my toes because i gotta come up with new stuff to talk about so i gotta keep learning so so that's like that was the most fun path for me so i would have done that or i would have similarly done this in a domain like this is a general podcast i would have done the same thing but like encrypted like if there's these guys that do this podcast called bank have you seen them no is at all it's like yeah it's cool i'll i don't listen regularly but like okay d defy is this new thing this new wave crypto new wave there's so much to learn about so much to talk about so these guys they went in they created a podcast called bank and bank is basically great about great name great name and they just talk every week they're just like here's the new shit going on in the world of defy here's the new thing to talk about here's the ups the downs of the prices because of that they're building a good community around them they can make money off sponsorships they're seeing a bunch of stuff if they're smart they're investing a bunch and getting equity in all those businesses and eventually they should launch their own branded business in there maybe it's an exchange or an etf or yeah something else with that following and so that's kind of the playbook i would do given my strengths and what i've seen but like yeah try to all i've tried a bunch of these different things and that's that's what i think this is good i think this is i think maybe we should here i think this is a a sick episode i was thoroughly in like and i was enjoying hearing hearing the stories hopefully people will enjoy it what do you think you gotta title this one this is the play haters ball we will try next time to to hate on less stuff and we will talk about if we like more but sorry this is this is the episode that we hate on everything well i'll pat ourselves on the back here we don't default to hate most of the time like right like we hit on everything except for ourselves we compliment we we we typically are not haters i i i default the optimism so do you on almost everything we wanted it all to work but yeah i i feel you and i complete i agree with just about everything you said alright dope okay i'm gonna go eat a steak in a salad and enjoy myself alright that's the pod i feel like i could where know could be what i want to never looking back