3 Crazy Billionaire Stories

this may not be the best acquisition ever but i'll be damned if it day is an up there yeah right like i think that he bought this i don't know the i don't know the exact number but he bought majority of only fans for i think single digit millions of dollars maybe low double digits possibly low double but let's even say it was ten million dollars this is now a more than ten billion dollar company yeah i feel like got rude where i know why i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on bowling i wanna start the episode with a survey or the listener and we'll actually let john and ben chime in so just ben turner camera so i could see your face alright so we're gonna start with the survey so on monday morning at seven thirty am i wake up from a text from sean and here's what the text says it goes hey you got good topics for tomorrow i just texted emmett from twitch to do a pod and he said he'll do it tomorrow so i'm gonna drive to san francisco tomorrow and record an interview with him and so what i want jonathan and ben turn your cameras on what i want you to do a thumbs up if you think that it's the first one a thumbs down if you think it's the second one do you think that this text means okay in lieu of sam and sean recording together i'm gonna do one with emmett or do you think that this means in addition to the recording tomorrow i'm also going to do one with sam sean thumbs up for the first one thumbs down for the second one alright great i just wanted to make sure i'm not crazy and i wanted to oh bend the betrayal oh you too ben you too so i thought that that's what it meant and when i heard that i was like alright so i have some free time between left and noon i'm ladies and gentlemen the jury let me just say this what i say do you have good topics for the pod tomorrow if we weren't gonna do a pod with a good topics together i don't know seems like that might be something that you know that we're gonna do alright well i just wanna see what the audience thinks mh so whatever i have a bunch of topics today what do you have i got bro you think you got a bunch of topics i got well many topics you have add one that's how many topics i got well i see a big list you you have like an interesting you have a few interesting things what you you you wanna kick us off with something let's start with this yeah so we've talked a lot about one business on this podcast probably more than any other podcast has talked about this business i would say we are the champions of of this company we are the ones out here letting people know that this company legit that this company is big as this company is very interesting everybody's overlooking it we've been saying it for years we've been a paying customer of this company i'm not a paying customer because i'm a married man but well you can be a merry man do appreciate customer but like i've never paid customer because free porn exists and i'm talking about only fans the so only fans is annual numbers leaked and not leaked actually what what happened was actually kind of interesting you know this but maybe a lot of people who were listening don't which is that any company that is based in the uk has whether it's private or public has to report at the end of the year of sort of a financial summary and the more the bigger your company is the more data you have to include basically like a like a public company you have to report like like a public company so in the us if it's public you can go look up their information maybe the quarterly quarterly earnings or you you can go find their s one but if if it's a private company you're just shit out of lot you're just guessing but if you go to only fans dot com and you scroll down to the privacy policy you click privacy policy you will see that only fans is run by a company called phoenix international limited and what is phoenix international limited it is a company based in the uk so if you go to the there's an entity called companies house and company's house is where all of the company information is housed and so if you go there you can find you can look up phoenix international limited and then you can look at filing history and you could see that there are several reports several reports about this director replacing this director but the one you wanna the one you care about is the one that basically says here is the twenty twenty two financial summary year end financial summary and when you go to that you're gonna see the following picture of a business only fans is a business that generated or or collected five point six billion in revenue in twenty twenty two it's take on that it was twenty percent so they're their company took one point one billion so for every four dollars a creator makes they make one dollar on that one point one billion dollars in net revenue five hundred and twenty five million dollars of profit so this company is spitting off half a billion a year of profit their pay little tax the after tax profit is still four hundred million dollars and then the beauty of it is if you scroll down to to the i don't know the balance sheet so somewhere down right out right for the p and l it says dividends and it shows that the owner leo took three hundred and thirty eight million in dividends last year oh my god and the year before that he took like two hundred something million this guy is taken out five hundred and fifty million dollars of dividends in the last two years off this business which is just incredible because let me run let me remind you this is a company that he bought in twenty eighteen this is five years what did he five years what do he he bought it would do you know what he paid for non public information but he bought seventy five percent of the business at the time for what i believe was low millions of dollars what's he wealthy before that yes so leo is a kind of a gangster of the internet and he by the way if you can just go to his website his website website's it's awesome so there's really two things i love he's a listener i think well that's one of the things i love about the website if you go to his website which is just his name leo la leo red dot com if you go to things i like so he's got things i like and then the very first category podcast the very first one of two podcasts is my first meeting so he's a listener of the pod which which is no just a cool thing fun fun thing to see but i love his website because i love when people sort of put up their flag and they're like y this is what i'm all about and it's just they just make it really easy for you to just understand here's who i am here's what i do here's what i'm into and if i'm into this if you're into those same sort things we'll probably get along so his his main thing says he's a software company architect angel investor and open source software support this guy gives millions of dollars a year to open source projects that probably would have died had he not done that he's he's a huge supporter of of open source software and sort of like a like he's like you know like sort of freedom entrepreneur right he he wants projects that are increasingly the overall amount of freedom in the universe so whether it's he'll fund these open source social networks that are like like a mastodon type of type of social network that are are not owned and controlled by like mark zuckerberg or elon musk like one private company closed source owned by a mega billionaire he's funds projects that are alternatives to those and listen the this also if you go to his so you see like he has sections about me projects open source things that i like if you click projects only fans isn't even number one of the listed projects it's number two number no and it just it just says like one paragraph and it says what it is but number one is some open sourced project that's what he has listed yeah before x he's like before x is like tools for rapid prototyping being and development you know microsoft discontinued visual basics and before x stepped in to try to make this happen probably would have died you know they're basically like i when i looked into this they probably would have died and then twenty ninth team he decided to put a ton of money into it just so that project could stay alive and so then like under giving he's like yeah i don't i done a bunch of my time effort money to causes i care about including open source initiatives and traditional charities my goal one day is to sign the giving pledge to sign the giving pledge you need a billion dollar net worth i'm pretty sure he has like a multi billion dollar net worth now i think he's has achieved this goal because in into five years and you can go look at the company filings but like twenty nineteen twenty eighteen the company has like he pulls out like one point five million in dividends and so in like a three year period he went from pulling out one point five million in dividends to two hundred and fifty and then three hundred and forty million dollars in dividends out of this company so this accelerated extremely quickly and i think like you know there's all these great tech acquisitions there's like you know google buying youtube for a billion dollars probably worth fifty billion now facebook buying instagram for a billion dollars probably worth a hundred billion now this may not be the best acquisition ever but i'll be damned if it day is an up there yeah right like i think that he bought this i don't know the i don't know the exact number but he bought majority of only fans for i think single digit millions of dollars maybe low double digits just possibly low double but let's even say it was ten million dollars this is now a more than ten billion dollar company so he turned let's just pretend it was ten million dollars into essentially ten billion dollars of value personally not a fund not a company this is him this is one guy who owns the other twenty five percent and is there a story of him buying this and like what he saw because like i would if if if this was me five years ago i would been like dude this would never this will never work right i mean everyone would have said that so it was already kind of so it was always working in a very small scale so this guy guy s was the founder and if you go look at guy stoke he looks like an instagram model is like a like every picture of him he's flank by seven women and the story is the that guy s his dad's on the finance world he takes a little small loan of like ten thousand pounds from his dad starts only fans and they kind of c owned the business or whatever it's like a father and son was like toward of the origin of this a good bonding yeah yeah some guys like golf some guys like fishing some some fathers and son start only thing like that's that's amazing and i don't know why he sold or when he sold but yeah leo approaches them and they buy and he buys the business he at the time it was reported that he bought seventy five percent of the business i don't know if later he bought the rest i suspect he did because there's one of these filings that guy stoke is removed as a director in the company so maybe he just won't step down i don't you yeah somehow just reading a bunch into these statements you can't say for sure exactly what happened and so this whole thing was very secretive in fact when i first found out about leo owning only fans at the time nobody knew who owned only fans it was not clear there's nothing on the internet this was several years ago and i was trying to figure it out couldn't figure out and then i get a message from somebody who's who's like hey i know the guy who owns only fans and he loves the pod i was like whoa that's cool like i i've been trying to find who owns this thing i wanted to invest in this and anyways that's how we kind of like i we ended up having a chat you know while i wanna meet this guy someday he's got a really interesting story so now there's like a photo of him on the internet and and there's he's a very private guy but now a little more information has coming out about him very early on i think when he was a teenager like fifteen sixteen years old he got into the business at first i think like domain so he would basically buy and sell like hundreds of domains so like maybe thousands of domains in fact there's like a some he got sued at some point some there's like a court filing of like here's a thousand domains that this guy still owns and it's just like every variation of like you know sort of like websites that you can imagine many of which were sort of in the adult category and then he creates my free cams and my free cams basically took over the cam grill market and i think that site still makes great now you that's how we i think he got very very rich was off that site and he used that money to invest and to par that into other other businesses but he he owns a portfolio of these businesses and now phoenix international which is only fans has become a major major one this is amazing in a lot of different ways one it's amazing that company's house but it's always a weird day i hate saying that it's companies plural companies house it's amazing that that exists and it's one of my favorite places to do research it's amazing how fast this grew would you would you invest in this company or do you not do you like yeah i tried to several times you know the problem is they didn't need any investment they're making so much money so i was like hey i can add value and i was like i don't even you know i really yeah you're crushing it what are what am i do right like hey i'm a fan i think i'm a good hang can i invest that's really ultimately tell what my pitch picture is it's like i'm a fan of what you're doing unlike most people i don't j like you know at the time when i was saying this like only guys had a it's over time become more and more mainstream over time become more and more accepted as a thing that's legitimate at the time it was seen it's very very sketchy it was sort of the butt of the joke and yeah so i definitely would have invested in this i wanted to they were doing so well that i don't think they ultimately needed needed any investment now the one thing they do need is liquidity like you know he's taking massive dividends which is great like you know they could realize a several billion dollar liquidity event if they could go public or if they could sell but there's no buyer and it's hard to go public with a business like this and so i think you know i don't know what they're gonna do with it but you know it's not a bad plan b to just suck out hundreds of millions of dividends every year it's fine yeah i would gonna say is that what he wants i don't know why you'd ever wanna go public with it i know if he wants that but you always want the option right like any business person who want the option whether you take it or not secondary in fact most of the things in my life i'm pushing for and people are like do you want this and i'm like oh haven't even gotten there yet all i want is the option and if i have the option off then i could things what what i definitely know is i don't not want the option right and i think that's just a better way to operate as a business person is to to make sure you have the options on the table for you four hundred million dollars a year and a dividend there's probably only five or ten i would imagine people getting have who up in the world oh at least in america who have who have higher income like i remember steve schwartz from blacks stone one year made a billion dollars and then the other guy is like what's the guy's name if is it griffith or griffin the like it's usually just like penn griffin it's usually like the top five or ten hedge fund managers who make this and they're actually if they're the best they're it's fairly reliable but they're like they're those are the guys who are buying the hundred million dollar apartments in new york you know like the bill ackerman and there's probably only ten of them maybe twenty but like that income you'd be the highest in america in the top thirty or something like that you know what i mean so like i don't really i don't know man i would probably still own that well this is cool well i've i've thing that's cool about this guy by the way what i talked to him like you know eighty ninety percent of our conversation was not about only fans at all it was about these different open source projects he's interested and he was just he's very like he's a technical guy he's very curious very interested so he was showing me like oh but by way i check this out i'm send you this link one you know like try this try this site out it's kinda like it's like this fringe niche site open source project but like i think it's really cool for these reasons and i just love that i love you one of the things i love the most about tech is that it red distributed wealth to a bunch of people who had different interest so like when the wealthiest people were all from finance you just got this like one homogeneous pool of of rich people it's like here's a bunch of rich dudes that live in the same place like out the same stuff white guys wear your suits alpha new york you know power suit watch wearing art buying greed is good guys yeah and then like crypto made a whole bunch of other people rich right because it was like you know a different type of person got rich through that and they had different interest they're like y i'm gonna spend money on this digital sq and this board ate and i'm gonna donate to this other thing and i'm gonna fund these types of projects and these types of this type of world view i'm gonna fund and you know tech companies were started by you like mark zuckerberg you know this guy i didn't he wouldn't wanna start a hedge fund he wanted to do something else and because he does that now he could spend his money doing other things or elon musk he's like i'm gonna fund companies that will do space travel with no investor would fund that's i'll fund it myself and so i love when wealth gets distributed to new pockets of people who have different interests different values because they're gonna bring some new like it's not the thing they created it's actually all the stuff they do with their money that creates a hundred new new things that's kind of interesting to me i've a i've emailed pack and forth with them just a few times i've asked them me to come on i think you have two i don't know if that will ever happen yeah he's was like i'm pretty private for person i don't think he's i don't think i'd make a a very good guess but you know well okay fine we'll talk about your dividends then you either come out as a guest or we find you on companies house that's the rules of this podcast dude let me tell you about another person that is hard to find information on and is really fascinating but really evil have you ever heard of the sack family i saw that there's a documentary or a movie out on netflix about the our show but i don't know anything about them so in the perfect spot i'm interested and aware but completely ignorant so there's two documentaries one on who or they're both actually fictional shows so they're both really good one call i think dope sick one called pain killer one's on hulu one's on netflix the story is about purdue pharma so purdue pharma is basically i wanna i'll tell you a little bit about that and i wanna tell you about the early even before that because that's more interesting to me at the at this point but basically purdue pharma started by three brothers they it was mo raymond and arthur sack they were in yeah they were in the can you be named mo and not be evil like that's i mean he's and he's one of the evil ones and so basically these these three brothers i'll talk about their background in a second but basically they were in the medical industry forever since they they started as doctors and then they worked at psych hospitals where they did lob bottoms and they're like alright let's create let's start making these medicines and drugs and so after fifty years of doing this they eventually start or buy purdue pharma they buy it for not a lot of money but they it evolves over forty years to where they create this drug called oxy cotton oxy cotton was basically it's an opioid and it wasn't popular at the time it was kind of unknown they had a drug previously that was similar they kinda changed it and they the big change they did was they called it a time released technology i guess so and they do a lot of just shady practices it seems like they bribe the fda they hired lots of x fda people after they approved the drug and they promise some all this stuff they got the fda to approve oxy cotton and the big thing was that they called it time release and they said that it was believed that and that that word believed is important the first time the fda ever said that it's believed that less than one percent of people who takes oxy cotton will ever get addicted so what they do is they go in hire literally two thousand salespeople who go to all of these hospitals these doctors these clinics and they say hey look we have this new drug it's for a moderate pain it's you can you used to prescribed vic in only if someone had surgery and had major pain or if they're dying from cancer we have this new drug very few people get addicted to it and has a time release capsule which means that it's really hard to get addicted to so you can give this people if they just have like a a sore back or if they have headache like like it's not that big of a deal and they train these salespeople and they're very aggressive about training they hold contest where you can win a trip to bermuda if you sell a certain out of drugs you could do all these types of things where they would give like watches they would their parties with hot girls like they did all this stuff but it's for medicine particularly in opioid which is incredibly controversial in my opinion very unethical and so they make oxy cotton popular to the point where the company is privately owned it's owned by two families each the mo and raymond family i believe raymond son richard become richard sack become ceo and they grow this company to be doing like thirty billion dollars a year in revenue and they're also famous because in order to help their reputation they donate billions or they a hundreds of millions maybe billions that added up to two art museums and so the met in new york they have a sack wing like the the louvre and pairs they have a sack wings they these guys never went to harvard but there's like the harvard school or or the harvard museum that's for the sack there's the columbia there's the nyu like they've donated so much of their money to arts and it's basically what they call a reputation laundering so they try like get like into high society even though they're selling this drug turns out two years ago i think the government finally cracked down on them made them go bankrupt and i'm not sure where they are now but they're very private so that's the story of purdue pharma the the book empire pains really wait so sorry the end was the government cracks down on them and it goes bankrupt so the government did what because isn't oxy still like everywhere well so what's i i'm i don't know much about these set of drugs but there's oxy cotton that's like the brand name and then there's ox decode on and i think that's the generic drug and then there's hydro on and then there's there's all these forms of opioids i think you could still get oxy cotton but basically at first the government made them pay a ten million dollar settlement and then people spent five years trying to track them down and like find like one thing that they did that broke the law because it was very weird because they weren't actually breaking the law or if they were it was very hard to find which law they are breaking because the fda kinda concluded and allowed them to get away with a lot of stuff so technically they kinda weren't breaking the law they got hold up in front of congress and what the government eventually does is they're were like oh you lied to congress because you said you didn't know was addict but we found this email from four years ago where you did so you knew it was addict and so that's actually what they got charged with sort of like how a capo poe got charged with tax of evasion not killing people it was sort of one of those things and that led to a domino effect where eventually they had to pay something like an eight billion dollar settlement the sack family had to give control of the company and they were no longer allowed to be involved in this industry and so that's kinda where we are today where purdue pharma it still exists but not as it did before but we'll see if there's any actually long lasting change with all that but it it's a it's a really fun story like in the sense of its thrilling in that they were just horribly unethical they did a lot of crazy shit does that make sense yeah i mean this basically killed hundreds of thousands of people right like just through addiction it killed hundreds of thousands it killed hundreds of thousand people directly in that hundreds of thousands of people just taking that medicine were killed but then what it led to is what we experienced in san francisco and all these other places you take oxy and then you're like i love this i need more of it now i need something cheaper in something more accessible heroin and then which leads to fentanyl and all and so it creates this huge opioid crisis where part was like hey we didn't do that we just prescribe oxy cotton these guys are dying from heroin when everyone's like man it's such a clear like there's such just a clear transition here like you guys are definitely responsible so that's why it's like a thrilling story at harvard there's still this this building is still called the sack whatever the sack museum or whatever it's called still up which is kinda crazy that they haven't sort of canceled the the name off the building so here's where things get interesting and this is what i wanna talk about so i mentioned there was three brothers only two brothers owned purdue so the eldest brother his name was arthur he died and i think the late eighties or mid eighties and basically he was the eldest brother and he got them all into the industry when he died his estate sold his portion of purdue to the other brothers and the other brothers are the ones who purdue eventually created oxy cotton and so arthur heirs are like look we had nothing to do with this it's same name but like we had nothing to do with this and arthur was the one who liked to donate a lot of money to museum so same last name but their argument is at different people but arthur was incredibly shady and i wanna tell you his background this is where things get really interesting so check this out so this guy arthur sack he was the eldest brother so he was a pay patriarch he kinda and he brought in his two brothers into the business and he was originally a doctor but his first hit was as he was the doctor he started an advertising age agency a medical advertising agency and he studied copywriting that was his thing he learned about copywriting through a traditional agency where he would work at a traditional agency at nights and weekends in order to help pay the bills and he was like copywriting is awesome i gotta do this for volume or this other drug this other drug and so all these huge pharmaceutical companies at the time this was in the fifties sixties and eventually seventies like what what's that big one roche ro o c e i believe that they were the adventures of volume and they start saying hey arthur your little agency hear you have good ideas what are your ideas he's like well we have to hire a salesforce then we're gonna create these ads we're not allowed to advertise towards consumers but we can advertise towards doctors and they popularized volume by making it like an everyday drug like oh if you're a little stressed and you know just like you would take an advil bill just top a v papa of v you'll be calm and they have like house wipes vacuuming and pearls like with a val like logo or he also popular as tranquil so he makes them popular so he builds up this agency but ins secrecy he does two things that are interesting one he finds his comp competition is another medical pharmaceutical ad agency and he buys half of it and so what they what he does is he eventually corners the market for pharmaceutical advertising and he owns the other one secretly and he'll say stuff like look you don't wanna work with us fine go to our competitors they sound like they're a good fit for you and they c glued together on how to like market it together and like which techniques are working the second thing that he does as he creates this thing called the medical tri it's a bi monthly newsletter for doctors so he's in the newsletter industry he get it's a free thing a free newsletter that is eventually read by three hundred four hundred five hundred thousand doctors and he what he does is no one knows at the time that he owns it but he starts using his original company macarthur for advertising buys ads in the medical tribune and through this he it creates two huge companies and that is how he creates his original fortune and i found i went and like dug through the newspapers dot com that's one of my favorite sources you can find old newspaper clipping i found some of the numbers so check this out so mick mca adams sorry i called macarthur it's called mca adams when he died the company was doing a hundred and seventy million dollars a year in revenue and that was in nineteen eighty five i believe found it had a hundred and seventy employees and then his other company medical tri it was it was not sold for a significant amount of money it actually sold for around seventy million dollars to axel spring who also bought morning brew our friend austin's company so i've been given a hard time about this austin sack yeah for sure austin sack and so annual revenues for medical tribune range between fifty to eighty million dollars in the last few years of existence this was in the late eighties and adjusted for today that's around a hundred and fifty to two hundred million dollars a year he also arthur while he was doing this he was buying he owned like three new york city town homes he was making seven sometimes eight figure dollar donations this to arc to museums and he had an art collection valued at sixty million dollars when he died i think he was seventy five that was in the late eighties he was worth around a hundred and fifty million dollars which today is around four hundred million dollars maybe five or six years after that that's when oxy was created but besides the fact that these guys are you know do illegal horrible unethical things what's crazy as this guy owned two companies that were doing close to each of them over a hundred million dollars a year and it was medical advertising and a medical newsletter for doctors and he owned it was him and his wife owned the whole thing so like super fascinating background story about how this guy originally got wealthy wow prolific prolific family for sure that's crazy that's a crazy story it's crazy so a lot of this stuff like that the purdue families or the sacramento family is about it's about oxy cotton and i thought that was interesting but what i thought was really interesting was just like i was just from an entrepreneur perspective how to get started so i did all this research tried dug deep and then i went into like i i used this it's like a historical money calculator and so it helps you calculate how much money is worth today i then went looked at real estate prices from the seventies and eighties in new york city and i found out how much he was paying for homes i found and i basically like reverse engineered like the income from this medical newsletter because i was just curious how it works i think by the way that still works today in there was another company i don't know if you remember this but there was a company that used to give out free tvs to doctors tv and these tvs had like skeletons on and you could like you could like move the skeleton around in order to like show like alright your colon is actually right here and we'll zoom in on that but on the tv was ads for drugs and this company eventually gotten trouble interestingly enough for fraud it turns out they were lying about a lot of stuff but this pharmaceutical industry is so interesting to me because it's something that we're supposed to trust turns out it's a lot of its bullshit and it's just as shady as someone would say that this my free cams website is or even worse and it's really fascinating and how this whole industry works but medical newsletters super fascinating a legit company axel spring which is a five billion dollar german newspaper company bought it and so i actually think these still work today and if you go on tv still running by the way or no no they shut it down they i believe they shut it down and like everything involving sack like people don't have anything to do with it but if you if you're on do never ever watch cables tv yeah sometimes dude it's only car commercials in drug commercials so that's like all it is it's like cia alice and like it's so anyway this pharmaceutical advertising industry it's i would never enter it but it's really fascinating how it's done and it's incredibly lucrative it created this fortune and i think it could still create more well i put this out there before which was that we get asked a bunch about hey i'm doing a new can you help can you invest can you advise whatever and we've basically i think both of us say no to pretty much all of them the one that i think is interesting still or two the two areas that i am interested is who's doing an amazing job of this in real estate who's doing an amazing job of this the newsletter for doctors those are the two that i really care about and i'm like i really wanna find whoever's doing a great job of that and you know invest or adviser a partner with them to like help make that bigger because i think those spaces are amazing spaces if you have the right person going like doing it the right way there's a lot of nuance to it but yeah i still think this idea would just work again and then and they sell huge multiples so aging media did this for nursing homes so somewhat senior living yeah related i i don't remember the multiple but i heard rumors it was like fifteen times profit which is really great and so these businesses are still super lucrative and i think what arthur did whether you think that's good or bad the way that he did it i think it's bad inherently i don't think it's bad but the way that he did it is i think it's still incredibly lucrative so let me tell you let me tell you another story about it a smart weirdo alright so here's here's a smart weirdo so smart smart weirdo slash maybe bad people this guy i don't think is considered bad but he's my billy of the week million dollars isn't cool you know what's it's cool a billion dollars okay so we've have we have some actually multiple contenders this is a billy of the week runoff off actually a a a maybe this is a actually a a campaign but this guy is is doing some interesting so his named is steve davis you probably don't know who that is just because it's a fairly generic name but and if you google his name it's a it's a professional sn nuclear player what is that pool yeah s pool some kind of like pool if you if you had like you know the wrong color balls or something so this guy is elon musk's long trusted like right hand man so let me tell you about this guy he joined spacex back in two thousand and three so very early on crazy background he's got a twin master's degree in particle physics and aerospace engineering so you know guys got a dome on him and but i think what he was doing i think he was doing something like a completely unrelated but he was one of the first employees and that ended up getting hired by spacex i i for some reason feel like i remember right he wasn't like working in the industry was doing something else and then he got and the stories about this guy are kinda so when when elon bought twitter people were like who's gonna who's he gonna make ceo and a lot of people were like it's gonna be steve davis before he put the the lady from nbc in charge which was sort of a weird pick it seemed like it was be steve davis why because steve davis was living and sleeping in the twitter office with his wife and their newborn child had just do like three weeks for what a brown knows there intense so this guy if you go read the stories about him it's like it's like a full floor so one person said he's been working six hours a day every single day seven days a week for years and years another person said he's insane he gets more work done than eleven people working together just himself what one time one time elon musk they were doing something with the production of of a part in in one of the parts of the of the rocket i guess and this was a hundred and twenty thousand dollar part elon like we need to get this down to five thousand dollars and nobody with everyone's like what are you talking about like yeah of course i wish i wish it was free too but like that's is not how things work yeah he's like five thousand dollars and he's just left the room right and steve davis takes us as a personal challenge he's just working for months and months to try to figure out how can we do this for five k instead of a hundred twenty k he ends up getting it done for three three thousand nine hundred dollars he figures out a way to do it he elon he emails elon so excited elon we did it after months we figured out how to lower the price of this part down to only on less than four thousand dollars you said five we got it in at less four elon just replies okay period doesn't matter steve davis is un unsecured from this and he he just keeps going he's become now he's the ceo of boring company so elon like you know third company or whatever that he that he created after all that right used and that company's legit right boring company they actually are making stuff or is it just a share company no they are doing things but there's a lot of criticism like a cool like how you know how how's that tunnel going yeah right like where well what's going on you but you dug this tunnel but like it's only compatible with tesla and they have to put like roller blades on before they go through i know this seems kinda shitty right dude i want my city to look like swiss cheese just holes all over the place like what's what's going on you're just selling flame there and so you know on one hand they have improved the speed of of boring of actually digging the tunnels but the reason i found this guy interesting so not only is he like elon right hand man that you haven't heard of that you know i find that interesting not only is he probably worth maybe a billion dollars at this point like based on the you spacex stock has appreciated like crazy since two thousand and three but this guy's totally weird so he just is he's got a great sense of humor that he takes the business okay so he basically elon sends him elon trust us right he's like hey we need somebody on the ground in you know he's up like this like city in texas and like at one point that he sent him to dc for lot like you know they needed to be near dc because a lot of their contracts are government contracts so sends steve out to dc from california and steve's living there he's doing his job he's like god you know what i miss i miss just having great frozen yogurt he's like they don't have that dc all i got is this crap i missed the california frozen yogurt you know what so as a side job from his very important job at spacex he opens up a fro shop called mister y and he that just opens it up he goes and he works there after work for fun what and so he goes and he works there and he starts to make it fun for himself he creates just a bunch of ridiculous policies so if you go to mister y if you can stump him with a seinfeld filled question your fro free if you come in dressed as bj bo or whatever the like tennis player you could not i don't use the types babysitter say there's a musician or something you get twenty five percent off if you let him stamp mister y got on your forehead ten percent off and so he created this long list of rules essentially on the secret menu for what he could do then when he had to leave he had to move away you know spacex needed him in some other places he's like oh shit i'm not gonna be able to go work on my yoga shop after work okay hey come whoever comes to mister y'all got today one of you is gonna get the shop for a dollar he just gave the shop to some guy for a dollar at the end i was here's the keys the only rules i wanna keep you know being able to come here and eat half off and you know and also you gotta keep some of the the the the the rules alive like if you can recite a speech from brave hart in a scottish accent twenty percent off and so he so he does this yoga chop he also at one point the the headline that if you google make mister y is it's from an article and the washington tony it says twitter's next ceo might be the mister y dude yeah i think really like the rules are amazing just usually should go look at the rules of this rule number eight anyone wearing a kick ball uniform and has played hard evidence by dirt on their knees will automatically receive ten percent off the yogurt anybody who can re enact the forty seven second michael jackson thriller dance twenty percent off if you perform a shorter choreographed dance you can get ten percent off this is actually genius by the way order a yoga for thirty consecutive days and we'll name a flavor after you i mean this guy's awesome yeah so he's having a good time so then he opens up a bar called thomas fu short name tom fu and same things instead you know every bar has a happy hour he created the angry hour where if you shout your order of the drink to the bartender angrily you get a discount on your drink you know they served like cookies and ice cream at this thing and he's like this is a place where we're gonna take you back to being a kid but with alcohol oh my god and i was like dude to i love this guy this guy is hilarious and weird and all the best ways and i just went down this rabbit because he's his this guy kinda fa me there's nothing about this guy really on the internet nobody does interviews with him people discovered this mystery yoga thing but there's not much out there about them how'd do you find this there's only a few times that's like you know part you know just digging like what are some of the other craziest things that this guy does when they announced the boring company it was a press conference with elon and some guy the sum guy is steve davis sitting next to him during the the talk and what they did was to make their points this is i i kinda love this marketing to make their point that like why did you create the boring company and he's like well in like whatever a hundred years we haven't gotten any faster at drilling like we're still the same speed we were like fifty seventy five years ago at digging these tunnels nobody's done anything innovative and to do when they and they did the press conference it's them talking but around them is a circular track and on that track they put us little like a a snail or a slug or something and it was just walking around the track super slowly to represent how slow this industry is and how slow other people are drilling and at the end of the two hour seminar it was still only halfway around the thing oh my and they're like you know that's the industry today and we're gonna change it i love these little nuggets these sort of like marketing gimmicks that make a point in the sort of simplest most meme viral way possible you know i gotta give elon credit and this guy steve steve credit for how they do that where where did do you work before how do you get a job with elon well just early on you know if you're twin master's degree in particle physics and aerospace engineering there's it's not how many places to go work you work in nasa or you work you know boeing or you go work here right so he he got a job there early on and just like started grinding like crazy and that's why like even now just sort of grinds like crazy sleeping the office with the with his newborn the child that was just like his his wife just just birth i a rule we have a rule in our house in the in the par house where i will only sleep under another man's roof for one night and if it's my father if it's my father in law's house he gets two nights i don't like sleeping at another man's home it's the most ema thing on earth i can't imagine moving my wife in newborn baby into the twitter office can you use my boss out yeah my boss's house like elon like hey how's our wife doing like you're like a billionaire you you're not like an intern yeah you're you're like i i i don't even like i don't stay at under the man's house i don't even like saying up my father's the law's house let alone staying at the twitter h cute can you imagine with a newborn with a newborn or or a baby i can't imagine that i that's not for me dog what what's your phrase corn and face tattoos yeah it's not for me but i'm glad freaks like you exist so got it exists sleeping at the office with my wife and baby you got you can have that i'm happy you exist with but that for me is there any part of you that is en of this guy because i don't find any amount of envy other than i appreciate his sense of humor oh yeah i think this guy's is great i think do i wanna be him no that's what i mean do i think that this guy probably you know this guy's is interesting and seems like he fixed differently and i think i could learn or be inspired by it sure for sure for example i went deep so one so one of the things he did while he was working at spacex and they moved him to dc in addition to the yogurt shop he went to george mason and got like a phd and his thesis if i found his thesis paper and i read it which was very now don't wanna go into into a detail you find this when i'm googling him i can you can barely find anything it's the same like four photos to a a lot of great determination you're the steve dave you're the steve davis researching deep steve davis exactly i applied to searching researching other great man more so than than being one myself slept on your couch for literally ours define this it was literally i ignored that jobs so i'm gonna assume read you today so first the paper the reason i really liked it is it's about the deb basement of the us currency i think he wrote this in what year was this it's basically like very it's very early it's like kind of like early bitcoin days so let me just search steve davis this deb basement so yeah twenty ten and his papers called the trend towards the deb basement of the american currency and he talks base lot does that mean it's at the bottom does that mean dev so so you know he he talks about the history of like you know basically you know don't have my notes in front of me now but like one of the things he talks about is you know did you take notes on one diapers just for yourself yeah so i was like you know he's like one dollar or whatever you know a one or one ounce of gold was worth this many dollars before and now that same ounce of gold requires whatever like you know a hundred x more dollars like basically like we used to be peg to gold we got off the gold standard and look at how look at how much the dollar is dev value relative to gold in that time and he's basically like there's a trend towards a deb basement of of currency and he talks about like people think this is like a you know over overtime slow slow thing but actually like ninety five percent of the b basement has just happened in the last like forty fifty years or something like that like it is accelerated quickly and this is not just like yeah this is not just like you know a a a slow thing alright here we go so ninety eight point three percent has occurred from nineteen a seventeen ninety two to the present time but even if you shorten that like still a ninety percent of it happened in a very short window of time and he talks about why he talks about how he talks about like what that why that's such a big problem and this is basically like a a cryptocurrency like like pre precursor not talking about bitcoin in it but this is like this is crypto is a solution to this problem right like bitcoin currency could not be d based exactly which is like the meme but it's it's also like the truth you know it's like these things are cliche because they're there's an element of truth and then those are that's why they stick around in his acknowledgment in this paper so he she says oh wanna i wanna thank this professor this professor i wanna thank this person and at be he's like i wanna thank my mom and dad he's like finally thanks to the unknown chef that makes great brownie at small enterprise hall cafeteria hopefully they will one day become a topping at mister y or its successor little y high like that plotting this guy just hilarious fad this guy is so funny to me and yeah there's like a hundred page paper if you're gonna go read the most impressive part works is that you read this guy's thesis paper and you got as far as to the acknowledgment at the end no no acknowledgement at the beginning list for my friend that's like the this the thank you at the beginning of a book so i didn't read the whole it was a hundred sixty two page thesis i read like forty pages maybe that's step by step step by step where the deb basement started and how it happened and i'm like oh wow this is fascinating like i never knew any of this is that what we have to do to become a date your phd is to write a hundred and forty page like original work on something that's amazing i didn't think i didn't know that thesis is worth that long not only do we not have a phd we honestly don't even know what the hell phd is all what it takes to get one i had my phd i thought it meant poor hardworking and driven like that was my joke i i play a hate and degree yeah i didn't realize that it's you have to write a hundred plus page like report on this that's amazing correct i'm not that hungry ribbon yeah yeah definitely not that sounds really challenging by the way one of the great get to know you questions in the business world that's sort of do but actually is a good one which is if you had to give an impromptu two forty five minute talk on a subject what would you give it on like for you it might be like copywriting or news newsletters or right like it's something like that the history of denim what i got joking i could do it you wanna talk about denim i got you what would yours be there is no answer that is better than that answer i i don't wanna entertain the podcast for so good you see we're joking power the things about looms is in the pre portion of the door the shutter looms pre nineteen forty four were particularly special but no i could talk all about it and then post war when japan was rebuilding shi they needed to just a ton of machinery and that's what the shutter looms of america went to japan i i can do it let's we that's insane alright you're you're turn what's your topic where do we go from here you wanna do post pilot i like post pilot alright let's talk about invested in post pilot did you yeah me too i didn't you know i don't like as you call it talk in your own book too much i don't like talking about stuffs that i'm involved but since we're both involved about it and we're up front we could talk about it well explain what it is first yeah so let's talk about it so our connection to post pilot is with the owner his name is drew but he actually bought the company and the reason he bought the company was because he owned he used to buy software company so he bought design in public dot com he bought he bought karma loop dot com and then he owned this thing called auto anything which was an auto parts store and the thing about his whole like playbook is that he would buy these e com companies and he could be like well your email list stinks so we can like improve that we could do those we can do that and one of the things that used to do at these companies that worked really well was he would email or mail them like snail mail them like flyers direct man and direct mail pamphlets on the company however it was really hard to do it was like a painstaking process and so he bought this company called post pilot he bought it i think he bought it for sixty thousand dollars and what it does is if you're a e com brand you just sign up to post pilot and they plug in i think to shopify to woo commerce to like a lot of the popular platforms and they have a done for you service meaning they'll help you design a pamphlet that you could send to not only your customers but i think some of your email subscribers and people who haven't already bought from you and they can send direct mail in a click of a button and so what he has found like this whole thesis is like look if i have an email list in some of these companies that i bought their email list was a hundred thousand people but ninety thousand people wouldn't even open the email ten thousand would but how do i get the other ninety thousand people to interact with me let's just send them mail and so they create a process that you can use someone's address that they've already supply to you or i believe what they do is you can you can use someone's email and phone number and help use other data sources to find out roughly where you live and they'll send mail to you or that area or people who match your it's like a lookalike audience and they send you mail and they could track if you eventually bought something through their mail so it's a very roi positive business a roi positive marketing channel and i think he bought this company in two thousand eighteen he bought it for sixty grand it's making well over sixty grand a day now i think that the last the the public information that they said was they crossed ten million a year in revenue like eighteen months ago i think and it's growing like a weed and he sent amazing investor updates where like there'll be like a theme so for example him and his cop partner or him and his partner sent an update where it was him and his partner dressed like step brothers and so like he does these really funny updates but the business is growing like a weed it's growing crazy and they're it's really fascinating is that what what i'm not an e com guy is that what you what how you we use it so so we use it and like you know if you do advertise on facebook are you advertise on google and you know the the key metric for any e commerce brand is your your return on ad spend when it comes to marketing so you spend a hundred dollars on ads what's your return are you gonna get a hundred back you're gonna get two hundred dollars back you can get fifty dollars back fifty dollars be a point five return on ad spend two hundred dollars would be a two point o return on ad if you can be like getting a two point o return on ad spend at scale you're printing money right yeah you're putting in a hundred dollars you're getting two hundred dollars out every single day and that's you know obviously you if you could scale that up that's that's extremely extremely lucrative if you use post pilot you can get like a ten x return on a heads spent it's not the most scalable but it is pretty ridiculous the type type of return yet he said a lot of people are getting five to ten x he said most retention campaigns come in between five and ten five and ten so like he kills it they i i don't use it yet these are these are like retention right so you're you know you're trying to get people to that come back or you're trying to get a warm lead who hasn't bought from you but they gave you their their info to try to convert so it's you know obviously different for a completely new customer versus a returning customer versus whatever but the blended ro for these is really really good so it's very effective right you sent a postcard it's got a bunch he's got a photos got photos on it it's got an offer on it and the cool thing what they did was they basically took this they they weren't the first to do you know how do you send mail campaigns we'll send it for you what they did was they're treating it like it's cla so most of outside of commerce don't even know about cla except for the fact that it just filed to go public and how bunch people are paying attention to this like ten billion dollar company raised very little money email marketing for for e commerce actually it didn't raise literally little it raised four hundred million it only burns sorry in that fifteen million dollars which just shows how capital efficient mean sorry so every e com brand basically uses cla at this point it is like the the the the the dominant player in the space there's some others like send lane or whatever but they basically said we're gonna automate this so like we will take all your your customer data from shopify and we'll be like cool when somebody first joins we'll put make a welcome flow so automatically it'll drip out like one hour after they after they sign up for emails they'll get this three days later they'll look at this at this days later they'll get the cal play out yeah yeah and now what post pilot did is they take the same thing they're were like cool you wanna send a one off blast you can just go in our editor and do that you wanna create automated flows that are just gonna be triggered based on customer behavior you could do that too so they basically did for physical mail the same thing that cal did for digital male which is very very smart so yeah anyways i i think they're they're doing really well and we'll see kind of how how big i think the only question of this one is just how big does it get it's a high floor unknown ceiling so it's like this business is definitely gonna work now the question working is it a yeah and even when we first invested it was like this clear this is gonna work and it wasn't it was a low valuation compared to everything it was not low it was a reasonable valuation compared to everything else i think i have about twenty five grand in the company yeah i did something similar it was it wasn't wasn't like you know massive massive bet but you know the question is this gonna be a fifty million dollar business a hundred million dollar it's a five hundred million dollar business or billion dollar business i have no idea on that one like we'll see but but it's definitely like it was like a clear this isn't gonna be a zero type of investment so i did this one personally not out of the fund because i was like you know you don't know the profile of this one i thought so i have twenty five thousand of my own money into the company i think i in my head when i was looking at it i was like i think the the the likely worst case scenario is that this will sell for seventy or eighty million dollars i was like i think i could five x four x my money i think in a unlikely but high outcome scenario i was like many many many hundreds of millions of dollars this could sell for and i could for sure one hundred percent ten this maybe more that right that that was kinda my thinking with that investment and twenty five thousand of bio money is i i usually do small small checks that that's a smaller check so that's a that's a good one for me right on well i have some another other topics i we should save them one thing i wanna do is i wanna start doing episodes that are business ideas only so sometimes basically if you think it episode of my first you you kinda don't know what you're gonna get there's a box you might get a billy of the week story about crazy people who've done crazy things you might get a business breakdown like we did with only fans just like here's a business here's the numbers here's how it's doing maybe it's a business like post pilot like a business you never heard of that's doing really well we're kind of expose you to the sort of things that are under the under the radar or not not on your radar and then sometimes we do ideas and opportunities things that we think people could do that could be that could work and monday i say i proposing this to you monday i think we should do when we record monday we should do business ideas only i think i think we're good monday and i have a good one which are people's favorites the the business ideas and opportunities is definitely people's favorites so we'll do that but you know what if we're gonna do that people gotta do something for us right like i know about you but i kiss i like to get kiss back i hug i like to get back and if i provide value i like to get value yes means yes yeah and all we need from you to get value back put you all away you know we don't it doesn't take money it's not free though and ain't free ain't free it sure la ain't free but but your money's is no good here we will be doing need is you to take that little finger of yours open up the podcast app click subscribe go to my first mail and click subscribe next thing you're doing where do they do that youtube what do they do that they do on spotify any spotify apple podcast podcasts whatever whatever your comfortable place i'm not trying to get you to go somewhere you're not comfortable right don't where you're comfortable but just make sure you're click and subscribe now go to youtube you ebay youtube don't open youtube type in my first million click subscribe hit the little bell so you get alerts we need both of those things from you we just need it and i don't ask very much but i for this don't let me down and if you want leave a comment you could leave a comment we read all of them and we even the funniest ones we send to each other particularly if they make fun of us yeah the most insulting ones definitely get the most attention and we can't resist we're not one of those we're not those people who are like nah i don't read the comments i don't read the haters read all of them we read you yeah think about you and i recognize usernames you're living in our head yes i've googled some of these people i do a reverse google image search and find out their linkedin and here i'll actually leave i'll leave like a hint so for next monday you you can see on here which company i'm talking about if you scroll down so i was gonna start this with a business that used to exist that was way ahead of its time that i think should exist today now is the time now is the time if you could possibly pull this off you agree with me do you see what company talking about i know what you're talking about i agree with you i can't wait to talk about that one and i have one that is similar to one of the best businesses in andrew wilkinson portfolio and i think you could create a new version of that that would work really well that's the teaser alright manic monday we'll call it i don't know what we'd always go from ideas ideas or where we just look at the comments and just stress out over like blemishes we have on our face but it's manic monday so you you don't have to pay money for this show but it ain't for free and and you know how you know how to pay for it so alright that's the pot yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's all on a road less travel never looking back