#69 - Paid News, Burning Money & Solving Climate Change

this episode is brought to you by super sides so super side dot com if you need something designed quickly go to super side dot com give them a try i'm both car and the admit this change is wrong so i am humble and smart what up sam how are you doing hi you got a sweatshirt on this says it's only money what are you trying to say i'm trying to say that when i look at my portfolio and look at my losses it's only money only money you know i met this guy once and he was like he i don't know it doesn't matter my a guy and we were talking and i'm easily ex so yeah if you start talking to me and you start talking a little bit of sense i get really excited and i will triple down and make some kind of commitment that i don't wanna make but i did that with this guy where he we were both talking about money we were like you know what fuck money right like we need to fuck money and we agreed to do a money burn in san francisco we were like okay a thousand dollars you bring a thousand dollars and we're just gonna burn it and god that's so stupid and of course exactly and does money burn yes paper right out paper it's cotton what yeah so there's a it's like a riddle what weighs more all the money printed in a year or all the trains that have ever passed through grand central station and the answer is the money they way the same which is they're both weight list because train sell pass through grand central station and money is it made from paper okay good i love riddles thank you for that it's cotton we it does grow in trees but i'm pretty sure money burns i think seen this in movies unless they're using fake fake paper there but anyways we didn't end up doing it because i pushed out because i was like do wanna burn a thousand dollars i don't think i do and also i was like this is gonna get so much blow bag and no one's gonna care about the intentions behind it it's just gonna come across as a douche thing to do so i didn't do it so i'm sorry to my friend i backed out i it but i do like the idea of sort of letting go of the attachment to money but anyhow yeah it's only money it's only money and i paid fifty dollars for this hoodie eighty dollars for something i bought is because day port noise have you seen what he's done how what do you mean which part of the founder of the bar stool founder of bar stool is trading he put three or four million dollars into a an account and has been day trading and filming the whole thing i think he's down six hundred k right now right yeah and it's awesome it's so good it's really exciting to watch and he wore one of you so i bought it nice are you his plan his plan is going according to plan i think i love it it it is he's losing a lot of money you wanna get into this yeah let's do it okay i think i have two or three interesting things have you read what i wrote i've i'm looking at it right now so are we talking okay we talk about three things on this podcast right ideas so like kind of know interesting ideas based off of trans observations etcetera we talk about people that are doing interesting things we're living interesting lives and then the last one is that we talk about you know just cool stuff we saw or stuff we're trying ourselves and so which one this first one which one is this one i have i have number one and i have number two so the the there's two of them the first is let's do the japanese one okay so one of my favorite things to do and it's kind of a nerdy thing is i love looking at and i told you this i love looking at what other countries do and figuring out why it's interesting and why we don't have it in america or the other way around okay and the the japanese and chinese cultures which i know close to nothing about i don't entirely understand if they have anything in common like i don't know if like the similarities between japan and china is the same as america to china like so i don't know but what i've noticed that both the china and the japanese are wonderful at monetizing news apps and one there's a few reasons the first reason is in japan i don't know if this is true in china but in japan it's still quite common to buy newspapers and to subscribe to news that's still common in china i don't know why it's so much popular but for example in china the people who have podcasts like this they monetize significantly better with subscriptions so like there's like for example cereal was one of the most popular podcasts whenever it came out it had i think fifty six million listens or something crazy like that and it only made like a million dollars in ad revenue shit right whereas multiple creators in china will make five ten million dollars a year and with significantly smaller audience so anyway i'm i got really interested in these businesses and the the one that i think is most interesting is called user base have i ever told you about user base nope okay so the only way you would likely know about them is because they bought courts in two thousand and eighteen for about a hundred million dollars so the interesting thing about user base is they're public in china so i could i went and found a lot of the reports which i love doing and i looked at their decks and i also learned all about them so story right not sorry japan user base is japanese long story short user base is before the corona thing happened they were publicly traded at eight hundred and twenty six million dollars market cap and they only raised five million dollars to start and they're about ten years old so they raised a significantly a very small amount of money for how big they got and the way that they may they make money is they own a handful of products but three of them make them us money the first is courts that actually doesn't make a a significant amount of money and that was a stupid company to buy i don't think they ever should have done it the second thing is speed which for my understanding it's all in japanese when they go to the website but from a my understanding it's kinda like crunch base and then the next one is news picks now here's where i'm being long winded but have you heard a new newspaper tell me tell me why i care about this tell me about these options i will have you heard a news picks i have not heard of okay they only have a hundred and fifty thousand subscribers but they do something like fifty million dollars in revenue and here's where the opportunities are is you know pocket you know flip board yep they have something like fifty million dollars or fifty million users they don't make shit they lose money they don't make shit and so what i wanna ask to you is why how do you think you would monetize flip board and pocket and these things better because we like now is the golden opportunity for new stuff and i guess i'm just excited because i'm a news junkie but these companies are significantly better they make something like a hundred dollars per user in revenue versus pocket which is probably like fifty cents right you know the i think one way to think about this is who who is successfully replicating that model here right so you have the athletic which is built a pretty large revenue business off of subscriptions and then i think one of the legacy i don't know new york times whoever whoever's is doing really well right isn't isn't that the case in new york times wall street journal one of them is not these aren't the same these aren't the same because user base isn't a publisher it's an ag sure which is a wonderful is more like more like flip yeah which is wonderful because you don't need a significant amount of people and the market size is like everyone in the country yeah so i'm not sure why people would why people would pay for that i don't know what the cultural difference is i've heard the same things about podcasting as you have which is that the podcasting industry in china is like worth multiple billions whereas you know in the us it's you know hundreds of millions type of thing and so i'm not sure what the cultural differences are in fact some of these things are pretty nuance so for example live streaming the same thing happen where in china live streaming is like so crazy huge so i'm at twitch now twitch is a big network but we're just in gaming and you know average american doesn't use twitch but in china the live streaming apps are on par in popularity with like a twitter and instagram a facebook it's like part of the mainstream culture and people wondered why my theory on why for live streaming at least was that in china a lot of there's sort of a a sort of suppressed i don't know sexuality or something like that where porn porn sites are often blocked or firewall out and there's just a crazy ratio of men women where there's way more men than there are women because of the sort of one child policy i believe that was in in effect for many years and so people valued boys and so they have more boys and so i think what what the reason live streaming is super popular in china and not in the same way in the us is because of those cultural factors so people will watch live streams because it's sort like this weird flirting software porn thing where you're watching an cute girl from a distance and you're able to chat with her and off you know send her tips and get virtual gifts and so a lot of people in the us just look to china and they're like how do we just oh it's happening in china it's gonna happen here but they missed that the underlying reason it worked in china and why there was demand for it in china where there's less demand for it here so that's what happened in live streaming i wonder if the same thing's is happening in podcasting where why is it so much more popular there than it is here and then the same thing maybe in in the news apps what is it culturally and i don't know what is it culturally that makes people either value this more or pay for this more like for example in india we've talked about education apps and how valuable they are so an app like bi or there's a bunch of different indian apps that are are very big subscription businesses for education you know multi billion dollar companies and you don't really have the equivalent here in the us i i know you don't and i think they're they're all the creators other there i think they can do this and can i explain to you how i would do this okay and and this is interesting because it's it this involves news but involves all types of paid information i think paid information is it can be should be significantly larger than it than it is and i think it's gonna get more popular actually i think that anyone who's doing paid stuff that is normally free it's could be much larger and so here's why i think here here's how i would do it if i was starting from scratch which kind of am i am in this business is the first thing is you'd be surprised that shit that's free or is mostly free if you package it slightly differently people we'll pay for it and they will like it more and so what i've seen with our n mps for trends versus the hustle which is free the trends n mps is significantly higher it's like fucking ninety which is crazy high and i i believe that the content is great but also people enjoy it more because they pay for it so i think people builders out there need to think to themselves man there's this weird mind fuck that i can just literally charge for something it normally is free and people will like it more the second thing is i think people need to charge upfront no freemium i think we charge upfront and don't do any freemium you're gonna get significantly better results the third thing is i things that a lot of times companies like doing this low density with a lot of white space on their pages yeah nope fill it with information get rid of that muted beautiful stuff and that's not right have you been a dr report dot com no you don't know what dr i've heard of but i've never gone okay so it's like yeah it's it's it's name matt dr i i could be saying dr it's a hardware to say it's just like one guy and he's just like pretty right wing guy and i went to the website just now and i was like oh i must have typed it in wrong because the website looks like you know oh it's craigslist garbage dude that website it's a billion views of month that's chris is this conspiracies is that what this is i would say it it depends you ask i don't think it's conspiracy but it is for it's for sure bias in right wing just like like the founder of hu poe this literally gets a billion are you joking or is this get a swear to god like literally one billion it could have declined recently dude fucking do you know dr was the one who broke the story about the clinton when he slept monica oli like he called it oh wow so anyway it's really just an ag of other links and every once in a while who do something original and doesn't he re title the the headlines or yeah use just it's literally just a page that you click off and once only does yes that page is designed in nineteen ninety six and it's never changed it doesn't even you haven't gone to this go to it right now dr report dot com this is so weird this doesn't like literally there's like or or if you go to dr dot com i think too there's like twenty links that are it's a black and white page twenty black links and then there's just a giant picture of an astronaut and because it's like related to one story with a huge headline and then there's again one thousand links below that according yeah it i a report was done in like ninety in like two okay so according to similar web it gets close to a hundred million unique visitors so ten page views a month yeah probably a billion it's very influential this site and it's interesting and i think that if you just like pay all this he would crush it so who's this matt matt dr what's his story he's a former journalist he he's just a guy i don't know he's just a he's just a guy who created a cult following and people love it and when ken lee started hu poe he said i'm gonna make the left wing version of of drug report and so if you go to this this website it does a really good job a big bold headlines that's like yellow journalism that was invented by hears in the what does that mean one yellow journalism basically this has been around forever people think clickbait is new it ain't hears was a pioneer of this so he would have these huge headlines and it would it would all it was all was mostly about like blood and scandal and you know if it bleeds it leads type of thing and then rupert murdoch also did it with his newspapers and that's how they got popular if you go to hu poe dot com it's it's very similar to this it's a huge headline right in your face and that kinda what that does is in your brain is it triggers a little bit of addictive business insiders just like this too if go to business our big ass so they put their stats on the site it says visits to dr today thirty four million in the past twenty four hours one point one billion in the past month ten billion in the past year dude not telling you it's fucking crazy this is like what is happening this website is like the craigslist list of of of news like it's a tiny ass staffing it literally could be five people and it could make fifty million dollars a year and he monetized anything he has any ads or what does he do so he monetize it with a couple ads and i knew guys who were the ad sellers like he uses a third party so this probably has google's google adsense and things like that in there but he also uses like some like a third party direct seller like a company that sells ads on it and they said that it was like the best the best like the biggest side ever for yeah dude i'm i'm on their site right now i'm asking to advertise because i wanna get their info great hack for anybody who wants to know how many how much traffic does something has how many users does it have how many listeners does this podcast have go to advertise you inquire they'll tell you the info and you'll get a sense of it so i'm gonna or using it reply to their marketing emails and there's typically a marketing manager on the other end who will tell you the answer right so anyways if this not like fucking fascinating it is maybe i'm just an idiot and everybody out there's like dude course i know dr i'm one of the ten billion visitors but i yeah yeah young people don't know this literally have heard the name i never even looked at it alan and brady have you heard of this yeah give us a f in the chat if you know it if you don't know it it us something else oh okay he knows he knows now because we're talking about it alright one said yes one said no gotcha he says yell sheltered nice okay good good comedy for super interesting shit man and so why doesn't the hustle lot more visitors dude look at this guy this guy's you know killing it well a few reasons one it's it was definitely easier to to build a cult following in nineteen ninety eight when he or sorry he launched in i don't know when he launch it could've been ninety eight i mean it's like why why doesn't let a beat craigslist he's like well because craigslist has been around ninety six and they just market share real fast do there pardon to me that wants to just like create some ultra ego that just does some sean hannity milo monopoly style character that just says outlandish shit i just wanna see could i do it could i could i you know the answer is yes by the way my way to the top through the answer is yes i one of our friends did this and he got a lot of traffic and then he canceled it and like he like ended the site because he's like i just can't this this is stuck my soul but it worked really well got it okay typically and by the way typically conservative websites get way more page views and traffic than non conservative stuff yeah this is now a conservative podcast just so you know we don't talk about politics but if that helps the downloads go up we're conservative and we appreciate your support so my point in all this was i think news apps actually if you charge money and you offer a similar offering as free one free ones you can do it's like you can actually make way more money than not and to your thing earlier so this also happens in china like you said so think i don't know how you say that them name exactly what it's like tu or something like that it's the to byte dance which owns tiktok yep that's another example of that's just like usa base in japan yeah they own it's t o u tia i i don't know you say but and it's the same thing it's just giant news app with like twenty million da or whatever i know like i'm like like is this is like very big for a news app right like there's not the us doesn't have and i don't feel like news apps that are doing those types of numbers i actually i'm a look up there i think it and i think it went public for like twenty billion dollars i'm so okay i was way under da u seven hundred million m a one point five billion i knew i was under because i said twenty million da and that's not that much seven hundred million da which is just insane so yeah and they for for fixing and giggles what yep and i think that they spun that news app they spun that news app off so opportunity here is i think that news apps in america are way way way under monetized and right now we are the demand in news is crazy high with trump being elected every all everyone experienced what was called the bump which right which what doesn't trump have his own news network or what is this thing that he promotes this oh oh have you seen this thing this news network he promotes instead of fox now no what is it he has this so so somebody back in the day had said like one of the sort of one theory was that the reason he wanted to run was because yeah i thought that was a rumor yeah was a rumor but he promotes this thing instead of fox news i have to find it's like oh something it starts with oh it says four letter domain for the news and he like promotes this like yeah this is the good news or whatever i never heard of this network before it's probably one of those right wing news networks that's like massive and i've never heard of it no nobody in my twitter timeline talks about it so i just never see it but there's some like a lot of a lot of people have tried this it really hasn't worked that well ash k did it with it's called a plus i believe it's called and eight is it a plus it's it's something involving his initial plus a a plus k is that what it is they and they got to like forty or fifty million monthly unique but then like facebook and twitter said alright we're gonna you post links we're actually not gonna show you to a lot of users and so it basically crashed little wayne tried to do the same thing and then that this is actually how b j pen dot com which is something you and i probably both read started yeah because so alan just posted in the chat so it's called one america news network o owen and i've seen trump posting about this i never heard of this before you ever heard of this thing no but it looks like so they only by a larger company a hundred to two hundred fifty employees yeah i don't know who owns this thing but anyways it's something there to dig into but okay news apps we like it i'm personally more interested in this like dr thing than the japanese ag because the dr thing blew my mind but but it's the same it's it it's the same thing this is my point it's quite similar right okay cool what else are you got you wanna talk about neil patel dot com okay let's do it neil patel this marketer guy right yeah he's been around forever he's only thirty five he's we've been kind of a kinda crushing it since two thousand two or he twenty two he started quick sprout it's a it was a really cool blog and one of the ways that's quick sprout made money is they would google or they would write about seo best practices and things like that and then send leads to consultant con consult would then help you with your seo so he eventually sold quick sprout and then he started neil patel dot com and neil patel digital dot com and he kept blogging about the same shit and then he goes you know what fuck it i'm gonna well first of he tried to launch his own software thing that did something similar called kiss metrics it didn't work out and then he said fuck i'm just gonna do my own consultancy i think it's pretty fucking huge and all it this is an seo of consultancy and i was doing research on it and the way that he made this and and this is why it's a interesting to people is everyone has ideas for agencies and they're actually relatively simple businesses to start you're just offering a service but they're real shit to run and they're hard to make a profit if you do incorrectly and what he did that was interesting is a he opened up offices in utah and san diego which are relatively cheapest cheap places to live and second he hired a ceo right off the bat and all he does is he goo blogs in order to get get leads and he it took like million bucks to start to think so he definitely had money front but it's really interesting and the way that he's doing it and his insight was he read slacks s one so that's the document that they that they published when they go public and his whole stick was he goes man slacks s one the majority of revenue it came from bigger companies so the majority of revenue came from like six hundred companies that were huge and also the margins on maintenance and service revenue were significantly larger than the actual software so you are you familiar familiar with this you mean the enterprise contracts where they say okay yeah you know there's a services a professional services component to it yes and so a lot of people including myself because i not an enterprise software don't know this but like at at at atlas which is a large company half the revenue is from maintenance and service yeah there's crazy it's crazy aws does this too you you spend whatever thirty grand a month and they're like oh you need priority support you need enterprise support just in case you know you ever you have a good business so you you don't wanna ruin this and so you're paying five k on six k a month and just just to have the ability to ask questions if you need to ask questions it's my boggling and so what neil appears he is done as he goes yeah like we're not actually gonna sell the software because maybe one day we'll build something actually only gonna like but we're gonna like kinda run it a little bit like a software company but we're gonna make all of our money from that those service that service fee and so they do a little bit of work but in in reality they actually have software on the back end but they're doing seo so he's not selling leads he's actually doing the seo work yes but the interest but why this is interesting to me is if you look at like i i just maybe this is not interesting to people who know what they're talking about but i didn't and i was like wait most of the margin is in the maintenance revenue and so that's like where they're making all of their cash this it's a consultancy and that's super interesting and it got me wondering like man if you just sell like relatively cheap software and a lot of the software is not hard to get and you just add on a layer of service and maintenance it's like holy fuck that's the way you do it alright this episode brought you by super side so here's the deal i'm incredibly impatient like horribly impatient i get a diet an idea midnight and on eight am the next day i want it done and unfortunately hiring people to get that stuff done is really time consuming it takes forever so super side dot com here's what it does go to super side dot com they already have a team of designers ready to go you tell them what you want and they get it done it's twenty times faster than traditional hire and fifty percent more affordable than the agencies if you need something designed and need it done well and fast try them out super side dot com i've used them before love them yeah that's one way i i first heard this because there's this guy on twitter i think i've shattered them out before i grabbed dinner with this guy once but his name's chet chet and p is his his twitter so c h e t a n p i think something like that and he's a he's a investor at benchmark which is probably you know one of the top five venture funds in in the country and he does enterprise he's specialist the enterprise he just made the midas list which is like you know vc like whatever thirty for thirty or thirty under thirty list basically and so anyways he tweets out these little summaries about enterprise companies where it's like seven bullet points and you understand how this company makes their money and how fast they're growing and like what he yeah what he highlights thirty no no i'm saying the midas list is like a bullshit list like the forbes the thirty oh but anyways he he often posts these like hey counterintuitive people think it's all about software look how much mark literally i'm look how much of their contribution comes from services hey you know everybody thinks you should be adopted bottoms up look at this company they do the complete opposite so he's very good at pointing out the like many ways to win and that goes against sort of the conventional so silicon we can valley wisdom which is silicon valley wisdom is like oh technology gets adopted bottoms up now you don't have to sell you know you you sell in later no that's bullshit look at oracle it should be a software play you don't wanna have you know this heavy op x component and it's like you know and so he just walks through a bunch of different examples of companies that are doing it very differently like pivotal and other companies like that by the way i bet most are doing it that way even if you look at slack they've got a fucking sales team yeah of course they have a sales team but like you know they're they're the example where it's like they grew like crazy from this bottoms up and then they hired a sales team but like many companies do the exact opposite and succeed i don't think that that's true i bet if you learn about slack i bet you most of the revenue came from sales team people i don't think so early i i mean they didn't have any sales people early on so it couldn't couldn't have been that way right but i think the revenue then pale and comparison to into where they are now so you know whatever who cares okay so this neil patel guy you think he's interesting because what because okay so you you thought the interesting part was that surprise surprise the software companies actually have a significant amount of of money that's coming from this client services that's interesting the is there anything else about this neil patel guy that you think is interesting or that could be sort of replicated in some way no okay cool well you know shut shout to the indian yeah there is one thing which is his business the way that he came to discover this business is really interesting whenever people ask me what company they should start if they don't like like i'm not sure what to start i always say start a blog and the reason why is his insight he's probably i bet you he's made a hundred million dollars this neil patel guy in profit over the last ten years i bet i i bet he's rolling in it i'll take the under but okay dude i i'm almost positive like neil huge clear the air neil you hear this clear the air so neil i think he's cousins with this guy heat and shot i think that's why they started yeah yeah he match together yeah they're cousins i bet you that he's probably done anyway i bet it's quite large and anyway the way that he did this was he created quick sprout and then he looked at what sold well and just launched it and there's two companies that i have done this really well the first is wp p i mean there's probably a ton the first one that i can name is wp p beginner it's wp p beginner dot com it just blogs about interesting where wordpress up his named sci i bet you sci i bet and so what he did was once he looked at which where wordpress plugins ins did best and then he just launched his own and then put his links in there and i bet i bet you he's got a little empire that does forty million in recurring revenue i've talked to like people who claimed they and it's around it's like in that ballpark and then the second one who's who did the same strategy which i am em letting a soft bank you know soft started this way yep that's right the news sorry information then conferences then yeah so they just started a magazine and they looked at which ads did best and then they started or invested in those companies i like it okay cool so got interesting to me i got a couple topics for you tell me if these are interesting so there's this thing called your mouse is hovering on this i'm gonna talk about it it's called it book a yc team so what this is is there's two guys who were in the yc batch and they weren't able to raise money their start up didn't work out and so they created this website called book a yc team was like hey you wanna hire like a product and engineer from yc like two founders were badass we got into yc that's like harvard you can just hire us and we'll just be like a little two man demolition through for you for some price for some period of time and so it's the just an it's the extreme high end of like the gi upwork fiber like right like that's the low end of like hire a remote like just hire a developer to build your thing and this is the extreme like top end it's like and so i actually think there's a better product idea than their their product was in in yc if they can get more failed yc startups to do this as an interim thing of like hey yeah i do this while i'm in between and figuring out what my next startup is i think that's a very smart idea so i thought that was cool any thoughts on that amazing i wanna well our team joiner us i wanna sign up for this my my concern is that if they're from white i'm just gonna be a hate if they're from y it means that they're soft and care about the wrong stuff and don't move fast and they're just weak but great idea i like it okay i don't agree that at all alright neither of us would really know that's just like buddy okay and i just my port is just like silicon a lot of silicon valley people who make it they just launch slow they do all this user are testing versus just like fucking do it so my favorite thing is actually is it yc funny that way the people who go into yc they're often extremely scrappy you know whatever hardworking they're just one or two people who are building a whole thing on their own and ambitious then they get into yc and then they drink the yc ko and it's like oh now by the way oh you were helping me before fuck you i'm in nyc i don't need you anymore oh you wanna re you you wanna invest in my company it's a fifteen million dollar valuation right it's like what do you have it's like well we haven't launched yet or like we have like two customers and you know it's a like the minimum buy in is ten million dollar valuation and easily we can get to fifteen or twenty it's crazy and so then they get really like you know high and mighty and then my favorite thing to do and and also all the investors are talking to them around that same time and it's definitely decreased because of this problem but like still there's a lot of demand the absolute best strategy i have is i shouldn't even say this didn't give this away because it's such a good it's such a good system give it three months after yc so i don't care about demo day i wait three months after yc then i go talk to all those founders at this point nobody else is talking about they either already raise around or they failed their raise around and they're like humble but they're they they're and now reality is hit where they're like trying to actually grow their business and the yc hype is off and like the yc short term gains that they were getting where they were like just trying to make a nice chart for demo day it's over and so when you meet them in the reality zone that they hit three or to four months later it's such a different conversation and so you can invest on way better terms you have way more real data to use because you're not just in the yc hype engine where you have one minute to hear about the business design this is my point and so this whole like yc book team thing they could it could be cool because those people are generally very smart and a lot of other their designs great but like if they're like soft and madonna then or different well i think what will happen is these are the yc teams that have gone through it and failed and you know by then they are are in a very different like i don't think they're soft i think they're are you know hardened by the by by by the experience and i would bet that they are some of the best talent you can pick up at that point in time so if i like this i think this is cool if i were these guys i would not raise any money and then this would i would just make just fuck loads of cash office yeah exactly i i agree you're just farming the yc talent pipeline okay so start an agency just for yc companies because guys will build your shit for you right exactly love this okay so another cool thing okay so this one's super quick i just i don't even know why i wrote this down so there's this company called remote remote dot com yeah i just raise a lot of money yeah there's raised eleven million bucks i think and they they're doing something really smart which is if you've ever tried to expand internationally one of the biggest pain points is starting your own entity in the region so like we have this problem at twitch all the time it's like hey we're interested in this country it takes like a year to spin up a legal entity in the country now you have to maintain that there's a whole bunch of cost bunch red tape and you need it to be able to do like some countries you need to operate some countries you need it to be able to do ad sales for example in that region so there's all these reasons why you need a local entity but having a local entities really hard and so to employ people and whatnot so what remote doing is they're doing the hard work of opening up legal entities everywhere and then they are figuring out ways for you to use that entity to hire your remote staff as employees on the ground in that country okay so let's let's refund that because i have a few cool insights the first well this is everyone probably has those you know it's still hard to hire state over like state line like state to state it's hard and i've got i've had to pay hundreds of dollars in penalties because i didn't i wasn't i have people now who handled this but when i first started i handled it you have to like keep track of like all your licenses for texas and like i had a one remote play in washington had like register their and shit and i just didn't do it and i didn't do it the right way i'd pay hundreds of dollars and fees for penalties it's quite hard to do that state to state have you done that have you hired i've hired across dates and i'm like most people where you don't even realize there's other shit you need to think about and right i didn't know until i got like a level later yeah i just got like and i'm like where do i organize this so yeah that's interesting another thing that's kinda cool is i wonder if so there's a a whole bunch of companies or industries or you have to have a license to practice but if you only have one person who works at your company who's licensed then you're okay so for example if you sell health insurance if you sell like so if you sell any types of benefits you have to be i believe you have to be a broker if you wanna sell certain types of real estate you have to have a brokers license and oftentimes getting those licenses and every state can be challenging so for example him did i actually tell you about this him when they wanna sell their viagra state to state they have to have a registered purpose you can't like yeah you can't like ship medicine across state lines but that the this is a totally different topic but that law actually has been suspended currently so doctors can prescribe yeah that and so that that's an interesting opportunity that loophole might be closed but that just happened a few weeks ago but i guess what i mean is if you're saying that they like are a registered agent in a certain state to practice a certain type of business kind of interesting you could do that for loads of different things right and so i think what these guys are doing is cool the reason i initially liked it was because the the founder name is job and i was like what your name is job and this what you've do is he's like yeah was like well this is great and this is like you know a small little gl in my eyes when the fastest man on earth is named you saying bolt and i'm like oh wow that's that's how the world is it's amazing the world is amazing i sure it's not job it's spelled j so it's job to me and i was like dude your name is job and you're about hiring people remotely like this is fantastic dude probably job well he's from i think he's dutch i think he's from the netherlands maybe i'm wrong i don't know sorry i talked you before i thought about investing in this company and i liked everything i talked to the guy liked it liked the premise he had a us a win under his belt from get lab before this he was like super early there number four or something and and then i didn't best because i got busy you should you missed out i'm looking at him now he kinda looks like the terrorist from air force one like the like the it looks like the russian terrace who wears like tracks suits alright and moving or from or no from die with the vengeance he looks like one of those guys yeah dude he's not soft this guy's hard dude he's hard as a russian terrorists dude google his name and look at his head he looks he looks like a terrorist in call duty i can't even google i just google job remote i got a bunch of job boards board games job van v and yeah that's right alright let me take it i've talked to this guy on video chat look look good he's a handsome guy what are you talking i'm not i didn't say ugly i just looks like he'll like he'll fucking kill you yeah he looks like he'll fuck you up which i think you need to do international business like this so okay yeah no like he's kinda criticizing it's a compliment if he asked me and he just doesn't he just looks like he's selling nuclear arms not like you know recruiting services okay i got an idea for you this is a boring idea so you're probably not gonna lie it or maybe like i don't know so right now one thing i'm learning this is part of my export my import list from a big company which is basically at a big company one challenge is that you like head count is like oil and so you like kind of your oh every division wants more head count the company raises money so that they can or or or decides every year how much head count they have is it it's like a magic number and and so you know but then the problem is that you know that's like it tells you hey you're gonna hire twenty five new heads this year that's your department that's what you got but the problem is some people leave right so you have attrition but the problem is nobody knows how much attrition there's gonna be and so i'm learning right now how big of a problem this is which is there's like hr people who are trying to model and excel and trying to go back through this stuff and trying to figure out okay year over year what's our percent attrition how many how many people leave the job fifteen percent a year how many you're gonna leave this quarter and you need this to do financial planning so you know how much you're gonna spend you also need it to figure out how much to hire because you don't just think about okay we're gonna do this amount of work we need to hire this many more people you have to take into account you're gonna also lose people and nobody knows how how much you're gonna lose so i think there's something around attrition for big companies which is either a a much better modeling system a automatic projection system forecast system for attrition it takes your historical data it can take the job other companies jobs other company attrition and tell you hey a lot of people are switching jobs right now or like for covid we predict that a lot of people are not gonna switch jobs right now due to the uncertainty of the of the economy and like how isn't isn't that rt is isn't this thing isn't this what peoples did maybe i don't know i don't use people software but i know that like we use workday and other things like that and this doesn't come baked in for that or at least we don't interesting so like if i wanted to get rich and i like software i absolutely would do something in that field there's another version of this which is just if you can help companies figure out who's gonna leave so like one thing that happens when i open up my computer sometimes as amazon has this internal what they call a pulse survey it's a quick one question that pops up and you just answer it and it's like very lightweight and it helps them collect data about like you know how employees are feeling or whatever right and so i think it'd be interesting if you could find a way to make it where employees would comfortable saying if they're thinking about searching if they are job searching and if they they know it's totally an and protected but it helps the company figure out oh shit you have this many this percentage of your engineers that are thinking about leaving the company so map that to potential attrition so so i think there's something there's something to solving this attrition problem for companies i think there's a business there i don't know too much about it because i just i just google it new to me i just google it and there's a few headlines ibm ai backed employee retention software can predict within ninety five percent accuracy which workers wanna leave their job or are are going to leave their job this is cool is a great idea algorithm can tell you when they wanna hear what's going well with employees what isn't it and they will tell you with a ninety five percent certainty if they're gonna leave that's pretty cool something to this okay and then there's one other thing i wanted to talk to you about which is do you know who this guy yi sean and wong is have you heard this name before yeah he was the ceo of reddit yeah ceo of reddit in two thousand five he was at facebook who's very early at face facebook seems like a super smart guy to be honest and i've been reading his like blog for a while i think this guy smart but i didn't know what he was doing and i just heard he's up to like a new company and so i was like alright anytime there's somebody who i think is really really interesting and they're doing wanna know what it is and it's pretty ambitious and i wanted to talk about it so he's literally trying to solve global warming by planting a bunch of trees and okay so what does that mean that you're you're really gonna solve climate change and so that has a blog post called a massive ref a massive global ref station project is how we fix climate change and he walks through just sort of his logic one by and this reminds me of like i love this shit i remember reading i remember reading elon musk's secret master plan that he published back before tesla was famous and i remember reading that being like wow this is like really who's this elon musk guy okay he did this paypal zip to you know he did this other company i should pay attention to this because this guy this sounds pretty out audacious and you know i can't disagree with the logic here and that's how i felt when i was reading this now i think this is out of my death scientifically so i don't know if this is legit but he's a legit guy and so i respect that he's looking into so is this a business it's a business so he hasn't to make money i don't know yet but he because he hasn't released too many details in fact he hasn't like announced that he was really doing this he just posted one blog post about theoretically how would you do it so he just walks through look we produce you know forty five giga tons of carbon dioxide every year and the best way to get rid of carbon dioxide is for to get rid of this amount of we know how much one for how much one acre absorbs so that means we need three billion acres of forest where are we gonna get that well turns out we know how to turn deserts into forests and we've been doing this in in china and israel and other places and so he's like alright there's four point seven billion acres of desert available we need three billion to solve the climate change problem to absorb all the co2 we're emitting and he's like okay so what's the problem there well to turn a desert into a forest you need irrigation to do that you need solar energy to do that you need this and so he's literally walking through and now he bought a little i think he bought a plot of land in hawaii where he's doing a proof of concept for this yeah i'm reading about it in august seventeenth two thousand nineteen he launched this or he announced it so if you google yi sean wong so y i s h a n wong w o n g trees and then just the word trees you'll see two posts on medium dude this is fascinating as shit this is awesome i don't know how it's bad and like i don't know how it makes money but it's cool yeah mean you if you say it's the world fantastic i don't know if makes money or not but you know he talks about like okay the cost of this solar project you know obviously this is a lot it's like i don't know x it's like a single digit trillion and he's like but the global gdp is this much you know could we dedicate three percent of the global gdp to solving climate change i think we're gonna need to and and amazing so i think it's amazing and i love that like you know he didn't come out on tech crunch you know you don't read about this on tech crunch the reason i found this was because says a local hawaiian newspaper was talking about hey this guy's trying to plant this forest over here on this little area and i was like that's legit that he's like actually doing the work so like respect for actually going and doing the work and working on one of the biggest hardest problems to solve so that's how rich this guy how how rich you think this guy is and do you think he's able to do this because he's rich or is he like what do you think is going on here i would guess you know if you're facebook two thousand five that's me it could be with a hundred million dollars really early yeah he could be easily be worth a hundred million dollars i don't know what his role was there exactly he worked as a senior engineer at paypal from two thousand and one to two thousand five right he's going to facebook as a single digit millions he joined facebook as a senior director of or as the director of engineering in two thousand and five so he and yeah there's tens of millions i think in the ipo yeah definitely i mean if you said he has a hundred million dollars in the bank i would not be surprised yeah so anyways i think this is this is badass and i don't know pretty inspiring it's called inspiring and my takeaway away from this is yeah the climate change awesome i'm not like crazy passionate about it but i support totally i think it's neat my big takeaway bill is like the type of balls you have to have in order to have these ambitions and then the follow through with it i find that to be the most inspiring exactly there's also this meme i saw which was and you know great i'm gonna describe a meme on a podcast is hard to say but like it's basically two scientists and they're looking at the coronavirus two two little hump like one that's a you know we've all seen this diagram now of like one curve and then the flattened curve and so they're looking at it and it's like the height of their shin and they're like they're looking at that and then behind them is the climate change help which is like ten times their height and it's like yeah i hope we get through this and it's like because there's a much bigger problem coming and i think you know i could have never imagined there's a world where oh all businesses shut down everybody has to stay in their home like i thought that's a nuclear bomb like i there's the only way that this is the case like there's a nuclear bomb or like i don't know some crazy terror shit and you know coronavirus did this to us in like a month you know when when we hit the tipping point for climate change you know who knows what the world is gonna look like and what's gonna happen it's pretty scary do you think that you're gonna go work from the office again no i actually told my company i was like i don't think i'll ever go come commute to the office again yeah our lease in the our our lease in san francisco is like fourteen k a month and i think it ends in may and i don't know i'm mean man and everyone in their heads like yeah too it's as like there should be like a service where you can like rent it and like only go some of the time and i'm like you mean we work like yeah that's a thing and it's great i don't know why like everyone hated it a few months ago so i think we're i i imagine us doing a we work dude that's interesting because at the beginning of this you were like dude i hate remote i hate this i will i don't believe in this yep and my opinion changes a a a humble and smart man can admit when he's changed and is wrong i am humble and smart sorry we gotta know that that's great you got anything else you wanna shout out no maybe we will have things to shout out soon we're gonna be we're let's we're gonna start i wanna work on some projects like some private q and a's okay nice bye alright we'll shit shoot we'll shoot those out shout those out later alright sounds good so yeah thanks for listening