#83 - How the Koch Brothers Got Rich, Human IPOs and Why Snapchat Might be the Future

hey so here's sad deal at night i have this weird bedtime routine i go to my first millions podcast page on itunes and i read all of the reviews so can you please after this podcast so even right now just hit pause go and leave us a review and had it doesn't even have me a five star review just tell us how you think or what you think and it's really important to us because sean and look at every single review and we actually adapt to some of the feedback we get so please go ahead and do that and also we have thousands of people who are part of a facebook group where we talk about what the ideas we discuss on my first million if you go to facebook dot com on the search just type in my first million you'll see the group there's thousands of folks in there who are all scheme just like sean and i so come and join us sam what's up hey i'm looking at a email that i just got from milk bar they have a peanut butter and jelly birthday cake my birthday is in a few days if anyone has a if anyone thinking about me alright if someone's thinking about you what should they do just buy me that cake what is milk bars is this a brand of cake yeah it started because what's that guy in new york david chang he he started the like momo fu bars and they decided to open up a dessert area and now that's spun off to its own called milk bar and they make trendy cakes i ordered one the other day it's pretty good how long does it take for to get to you a week oh man see that's the problem i'm not i'm never a thoughtful a week in advance i'm like the day of like i'm gonna do something but i need something that can get done that day it looks delicious can we talk about austin yeah you're in austin okay i've been in austin for three weeks now i'm gonna come home on saturday austin is lovely it is a great place sean is f like is everyone in san francisco so gonna leave no everyone is services is not gonna but definitely some some people are leaving i'm looking at so i have a place in san francisco i pay like five grand a month or something four to five grand a month and i am live and it's like a thousand or eleven hundred square feet with the garage i'm living in a place that's probably three thousand dollars a month and it's like a two thousand square foot house with the backyard and like furnished i'm like what am i doing yeah but the thing is you can go even further with that because like when i grew up i lived in a whole bunch of different countries i lived in in indonesia i lived in china and there it's like you know go to indonesia you live like a king you can go live in bali on the beach with a cook and a driver the same amount you're paying in austin right so the this kind of this arbitrage of like cost of living it really never ends so be careful yeah i'm just it's making me question my life i look on zillow all the time for buying a home in san francisco and the prices are dropping like crazy it says like a hundred and fifty thousand two hundred thousand dollar cut off of everything are you gonna have to cut on your house hopefully not if you're if you're the buyer listening into this i'm not taking one penny less than asking that's position and oh do you have someone who's gonna buy it no no i know i'm not haven't listed it yet but soon good and so your friends do you have lot of friends leaving in san francisco i have friends who were already in the process of it this just kind of accelerated so some people just lifestyle ready to go some people when they're like i'm not working from home and commuting i don't need to be here so yeah definitely this is accelerated people out but it also feels like things are opening back up so i think that you know things can change people can feel differently as soon as life gets a little bit back to normal you you never know what what people will feel like so we'll see as things open up i am very eager so you wanna stop you wanna talk about some interesting stuff yeah you got one yeah i got one so jeff bezos bezos bezos amazon guy he owns washington post and a few years ago he goes i'm gonna buy and i'll let the editorial to do its thing and whatever else i'm gonna like look stay out of it but i kinda wanna take your guys as they build their own technology to publish their articles like i kinda wanna take that and make that like a huge business and a lot of people try this and never very rarely works but yeah what he did was or he didn't do it but he was somehow part of it they've created this thing called art publishing and it does a couple of the first thing is cup companies like me paid money to use it but it's really interesting that you and i have talked about this idea but what arc publishing is doing is they're go to companies like bp so the the oil company that has two hundred thousand companies and they are saying hey bp you have you know two hundred thousand employees we're gonna help you publish newsletters and articles and stuff to your to your employees which you already are but we're gonna help you organize it make sure it's read things like that and they're saying that in the next year or two they're gonna hit a hundred million in revenue wow which means which means ahmed bet washington post probably does maybe five hundred million revenue in total but a hundred million in this enterprise saas revenue would be worth more than washington post it is and i wanted to get your opinion on a that's a cool idea that you and i had been ne with for a while and they're just x executing on in a really interesting way and b the idea of branching out from your main thing to doing more and like some in a totally unrelated thing in some ways it's totally as stupid i mean some there's an or even me to be made like this is just stupid idea never do it there's no even to be made that a lot of people do it successfully so what's your take on this so first this i've never heard of arc so this is my first time hearing about it just to clarify they give other brands or other companies the tools that washington post they sort of product ties their own toolkit kit but is it always like the use case you talked about like bp one has fifty thousand employees wants to publish internally or is it also external publishing i i think that they're still trying to figure it out and i think that they're building it for a variety of reasons at first it was just for publishers and then beat they closed this deal with bp and they i think to them they're like maybe that's the way that's the past now i think they're something to that because you know when when i started the podcast i used to go to this podcast studio before you guys built a dope studio in your office i was going to this like kinda of rent a studio by the hour place and i was talking to the guy who did it and he was like they had a sports radio station on twenty four seven sports radio station and then they were like well we know how to build the studio we don't want one for them what if we turned a few conference rooms into broadcasting booths and we did prop we offered it to podcast these hips are and s they love this shit and so they didn't say that part and by the way in san francisco they're they're there are no they they're basically the only one and trust me i tried sucked yeah and so i went there and i was like hey can i get eleven am tomorrow and he's was like no we're booked up from eleven to three i'm like shit who else who are the podcast using this and he was like oh this is facebook they i was like facebook he's like yeah they have a internal podcast that they do for their employees because facebook has i don't know tens of thousands employees maybe fifty thousand i don't know but they have managers who come in and record a podcast about managing at facebook and it gets distributed only internally and i was like i've never heard of a internal only podcast that a company was doing but of course you know makes sense people want it put out content training you know different things like that whether it's in text or audio form that was my first time hearing about these like internal publishing systems that i had never really considered and that is what arc is trying to do and like facebook that has fifth fifth i don't i don't know what do they have twenty thousand employees tens of thousands of people they need to create a lot of this stuff like hey everyone so here's how we're addressing this situation here's what we're gonna say here's the words we're using yada or we're quitting this product here's why yada right here here's how to use the internal software yada it's a great idea i and and i had discussed a a slight variation of this but i want the listeners to tweet at me and tell me and i always hit the idea when people say like oh i can't do this already exists but i just wanna know does this exist who is solving this problem yeah we talked it we we've talked about a few variations of it so let's go over them so this is all in the bubble of the theme of what i'll call i mean i i wanna say internal publishing because that sounds lame as shit but basically intra company stuff so i i'll think of a good name in a second but basically we talked about q and a or sorry all hands software because you know com big companies do all hands you know for their whole employee base also individual you know divisions will do all hands for their group and what you need there is video streaming you need chat or q and a functionality but it needs to be private it needs to be internal and needs to be behind a wall that nobody else can get into this so a lot of people already have video streaming services out there but that's for mass you know it's like youtube it's twitch it's things for to go get a big audience but this is for a select audience it's a little bit different so we talked about that one we talked about when we were we were going over hemingway way and how it makes you a better writer we were saying what if you could do this for internal your emails inside a company but also just a mailchimp for your company so how does somebody get the word out within a company how do they make nicely formatted easy to read you know company announcements and bulletin that come with the kind of tools that mailchimp has like tracking opens and clicks and that sort of thing so so that's a internal mailchimp internal podcasting what these guys are doing is basically internal you know washington post which is like a whole bunch of different features and functionality they have they these guys have you know broadcasting like live streaming they have blogging they have you know are you reading though the website going through their products they have they have a huge set of things basically everything you would need to make washington post so i think that's just an interesting thing to think about what if you took the best in class products that people use to publish and broadcast to large audiences and you said how do companies need this just for internal broadcasting internal announcements i remember my brother he owns gyms you had like fifty gyms and he was like yeah dude i just need a easy way to mass text all my employees on a text list the kinda numbers for the day and any key announcements about what we're trying to do he's like you'd be surprised it's really hard to like get this stuff set up and get this make this a part of the onboarding of my company so that every the that's the smb version yep the small business version which is also is a good idea and then the second thing you talked about is you know when do you when do you do this when do you take your eye off your core business and how do you expand into other lines of businesses i think that's you know generically a hard thing and it's a case by case thing you have plenty of examples where it worked and it becomes a huge business unit it let's call aws being the best example of this where amazon takes its own sort of server and compute system and services system and makes it available to any company and now aws brings in you know tens of billions of dollars a year and so that's like the best case scenario and then you have a probably you know hundreds of thousands of of other examples that you can come up with where somebody does this it doesn't take off it becomes a distraction etcetera etcetera and you guys have considered this too so how do you how do you guys think about this so yeah so when we consider everyone says the same thing they go well amazon did it let's just make aws for them and i'm like well you have to understand that amazon did it like ten years into the business when they were ten thousand employees and throwing two hundred and fifty people at that problem is eight ain't no thing and so at my company like yeah okay i could hire op person like i have no problem a couple people like doing it but you do need to get like your main thing right first that said i struggle with it because i have add and i wanna i wanna do this shit so it's hard i i don't know what like twitch i bet twitch switches in the same boat they're big enough that they they can have these same projects and a lot of the infrastructure that they probably are built on i bet they had to make a lot of it from scratch absolutely so i don't i don't know so twitch is ten years into the business and you're right they invented essentially the best in class let's say live video streaming at scale where you can have hundred thousand people all watching one channel with low latency and it doesn't fall over and broadcasting around the world nobody else really had that problem so nobody else built a solution and so you could imagine that twitch could say hey we could make this available to others and that they could spit it out as its own business unit and i think that might be a good decision right because you're taking an asset you've already have that you've something that you refined that sort of battle tested and brand able right like your sales pitch is hey we use this for the biggest live streaming network you know out there but at the same time it's a distraction and and they wouldn't have done it year one two or three they you know could do it at year ten because at that point your core is stable it's not going anywhere it's not gonna die and so you know i i always make these analog and i don't know if my team really likes it but i always talk about like you know the startup is like a baby and like with a baby a baby just they need to eat they need to sleep they need to poop and nothing else matters like you don't need to teach a baby calculus right now you don't need to you know do all this other stuff and but as it becomes a teenager or gets ready to go to go off for college you know you don't have to watch it so intently you don't have to worry about is it gonna you know keeping the baby alive every single day and that's the main objective of of early stage but as you get later stage you don't have to worry about that which lets you why why don't they like that's a good analogy why don't they like it i think it's because i'm always like right now we just gotta keep the baby alive and it's just like sort of a a dark a darker way of talking about it but like i did this with one of our companies in the ideal i was like we had one company that was already mature it was already profitable making millions of dollars and we had this other project that was totally unproven and so anytime you had to decide where do spend an hour it always seemed like a good idea to spend it on the thing that's making millions in profit never to spend it on the super speculative thing but if we did that we would have never invested in a new thing and so i i made a decision i said hey we can't have the the baby and the teenager in the same room because they have totally different needs they need different type of care and you know one will always look feeble and weak compared to the other but that one that's feeble week today has the most growth potential and so we need to be investing in that too and so let's split these two companies up and let's spin them out what about you would you think that you are like me where you have ad and you like starting stuff or are you the opposite where you like to run it i have add in the sense that i like i i'm attracted to doing a new thing i'm gonna attracted to new strategies new ideas but the second part of your question was do you like to run it or not run it of course in my ideal world i don't have to run it somebody else runs it takes the idea to fruition and i get to own the whole thing but in reality i found that that is much harder to implement doesn't mean it's impossible much harder to implement yeah this is an interesting discussion i was reading about coke coke land about the koch brothers you know that is i i know the koch brothers i saw you putting this in the facebook group that you were you're sort of summarizing what you had learn what is the tl so all i know is koch brothers super rich old white guys that i think support like you know the conservative party so what what do what do i need to know that's so everything that you've just said is a stereotype about them that ninety nine percent of people think it is about them and the reason i wanted to read the book about them was it was just interesting but what i learned is they're far more rich than that not in terms of money but they're much richer character they kinda to get peg now i'm not saying that they don't do evil stuff but they get peg as these old white guys who control the conservative party in reality they're quite libertarian and they actually give money to all types of charities i mean they give a lot of money to get rights to organizations because one of the brothers is is gay they give a lot of money to prison reform because they don't want people to they think the criminal justice system is screwed up and they're very principled and it just so happens that the republicans definitely do a lot of the stuff that they wanna give money to but they go across the board they're and the way that they got started was the father started an oil company and that oil company was somewhat successful like it was making thirty million dollars a year in american or sorry in today's dollar in profit so like successful very successful but the thirty one year old brother charles took it over with the father died and turned it into the largest private leon owned business in america and and so we took something that did thirty million dollars year profit to now probably like ten billion dollars a year in profit and he not out of oil what what did they do with where we're what they did was that they took their thirty million they that they own owned an oil refinery and they did a combination of things including so the think about oil is it goes through this tower and oil turns into gasoline but then then the leftover sub turns into ke and then the leftover sub turns of vaseline and leftover stuff turns into propane and so they just started like selling all the leftover stuff often and they took those profits and then bought different companies so they you know bounty paper towels they make those a lot of the paper that newspapers printed on they make that a lot of it's called the what's that gore tech is it called gore tech what's like it's like a loop and lu is it luca that's a material that nike makes shoes out of that's really strong it's like that plastic they make they don't they make that so they just make stuff that originally started as oil but now it's expands but it's still like making stuff and their operations are basically this like let's just like start a lot start or buy a ton of stuff and it all started with one thing and that's kinda of one of the reasons why i'm interested in this topic i like that a lot hey that was just a great description and be that totally changes my like kind of like expands the stereotype i had of the koch brothers in my head you know i never brought bothered to sort of look under the hood and be like what is this what how do they get rich are they really just the sort of evil manipulator of the conservative party type of thing or is there more depth to it so that's kind of interesting i never well i'm not saying that they're i i don't think they are evil i think that they do some things that they're some of the things they do a lot of people particularly liberal people strongly disagree with i i told you about my friend my friend who i'm like this guy gonna be a billionaire he's like twenty two years old i'm like this guy gonna be billionaire someday he he interviewed with the code brothers to be there like head of investments or something like that and he was like pretty far down the interview process and i was like dude do you feel like you know a certain type of way that it's you know the koch brothers or whatever he was like he's he's just laughed and he's was just like his money green okay money's green thank you that's all i care about he's like i he's so ruthless about the way he he looks at these things i find it hilarious and ultimately he didn't do it because either a that didn't offer enough or b think they're based out of like kansas or nebraska or something like that wichita kansas wichita he was like yeah i don't know if i go live in wichita for x number of years to to do this so he ultimately pulled it up well if he got offered and he didn't take it he's an idiot but i'm sure he'll figure out his way okay that's that that's pretty interesting i like the anything else on the koch brothers i always otherwise i like that that's sort of i would say that's the billy of the week then in this case that's that's i i'll i'll finish it up with i'm reading coke and so that is a book that has a it the it's it's clearly trying to be negative about them it's still a great read and then there's sons of wichita which is their biography which tries to be objective and then there's another book called the it's it's it's either called one of them called good profit and then the other one's called market based management good and and describes the koch brothers management philosophy and it's incredibly interesting nice okay i like that yeah i just started reading a lot more recently and it's like the best decision i made which sounds like stupid it's not even like worth talking about but the reality is there's probably a lot of people like me who like to read go through these phases where you like intensely read and they're like don't read anything for two years and if you're that person like just do it go back to the reading thing it's great i just did it and i don't regret it at all reading this thing called the happy body which is like really interesting it's about the these guys who study weight lifters they basically like you know what what should you strive for with fitness and they're like well you just strive for these like three or four things that you know you don't wanna be a body builder or you're just strong but you're slow and you're inflexible don't wanna be a baby where you're super flexible but you're weak you wanna be x and they start to outline it and there's all these little tests and so i'm always doing them and making my wife do them i'm like okay stand against a lost standing against a wall raise your hands above your head and i'm gonna count the points of contact against the wall okay here's how you are in terms of you know body you know your your alignment or your posture or whatever it is so there's all these little tests which is makes it a lot more fun to read then i'm gonna buy this are you doing this because you feel like you're getting old i'm doing it because it came recommended i think somebody somebody said this is a great book and then the other thing is i'm i basically believe that everything that the the sort of common knowledge about food and fitness is just so like confusing and bullshit confusing and like contradicts itself so so frequently that i'm looking for better like source material like not sell me a fad diet or a new you know p ninety x this book reads almost like a textbook and i find that a lot more appealing because i don't feel like i'm being sold to some program or some you know diet and products and shit like that so that's why i right i'm buying it graeme getting it i'm gonna read well i i got two ideas for you that are both based on zoom actually i i have a better idea let me go to the better idea first okay so did you see today snapchat did a like they did their developer conference thing and yeah tell me about that thing that they introduced so they introduced us a few things and they were like hey you know last time we introduced games and games are doing great and they were talking they were just kinda high up games to get more people to build mini games on snapchat but they introduced other things called minis and minis is actually i think a bigger move by them so minis are basically mini applications built into snapchat what they're doing is they're copying wechat which is the big messaging app in china wechat has like a million little apps built like oh you need to pay your bills you just do it through wechat and how do you do that well there's this little mini website that the the you know the utility company makes that'll just pop up in your wechat and you hit pay and it's paid or you wanna do this you wanna buy movie tickets together you do it within wechat like we don't do that in imessage we don't do that in facebook with messenger that's what all these companies would love to they'd love to be wechat here in the states so snapchat taking a big stab at doing that and they announced like so for example one of the minis is head space so you can do like sort of a quick meditation with anybody else on like one of your friends from snapchat they did a movie ticket buying thing they did you know so they did several of these what what's interesting here is that snapchat sort of in a position where they have to become a platform to compete because facebook and instagram have sort of just declared like we will steal your we took your mojo already and if you come out with some new great mojo like guess what you know evan sp you're the head of product at facebook actually whatever you come up with we're gonna put in our apps as soon as humanly possible so their only strategy they basically two core strategies one is maybe they can create snap glasses these like ar glasses and they can just sort of get off the cell phone game and get into the glasses game before anybody else so that would be like a what's it what's it call the a snap mini website or what you call that they call them snap minis and what they are are little mini websites that that can pop up and be little like utility things to do inside snapchat besides message each other now the second thing is becoming a platform because facebook and instagram don't do a great job of letting other companies build shit on top of them people dis trust those companies they've built apps on top of facebook and messenger before and gotten screwed and so they don't have great ecosystems so snapchat kinda pushing their chips into the middle of the table and saying come build shit on us we'll treat you better than those guys will you kinda believe it because it's really their only way to compete with facebook and instagram so they kinda have to actually honor this so anyways a quick idea so in general i think that being early to these platforms and these app you know app ecosystems is a good thing there's been several snap kit apps that have been like number one and number two on the app store so they've got a shit ton of distribution from it what's a snap kit app snap kit is basically the tool set that snapchat gives you to build to build stuff so it's like okay snap kit will say you wanna access their bit mo cool snap kit lets you just type one line and you get their bit mod character you can do stuff with snap kit lets you use their whole camera with all their lenses i'm doing this course with go and a lot of a lot of the things we talk about our inflection so what are what are inflection and and there's a a variety of styles of inflection there's technology inflection which is like basically like oh my god the internet is now in everyone's house that is an inflection there's an opportunity there or a belief inflection is like wow people really don't trust the media what can we build the help or people are afraid to be in groups of thousands of people how can we fix it what we are seeing right now is a technology inflection or a platform inflection it's really a and this is it this is like when so pandora the music company tim told me that the company was around for three years and it was doing horrible and he said they heard about the apple store for some reason steve jobs reached out to them and said you guys might be a good like place to put your shit here and once that happened was right and and this i don't know if it will be but this is potentially one of those yeah these are asymmetric bets sure maybe most of the time these platforms either don't work out or there's nothing cool to build and you'll waste you know a month of your time or you might get catch wave early and you might get to the top so for example the very first episode of this whole podcast chain is with zoe and so he talks about he was working at microsoft and he realized he wants to quit and go start a company he quits he moved back home with his parents for like two weeks and the in the first two weeks he's kinda bored and the day he quit basically facebook did their developer conference and said hey we're making facebook platform anyone could build an app on facebook now so he goes home and he's like alright i don't know if this is gonna be a busy i don't think so but he's like i just need to start programming again just to get my you know get get the rest off and so he builds a facebook app that was stupid it was like a super app like which of your friends is most likely to end up in jail or whatever boom goes viral you know he ends up with tens of millions of users and that that changed the trajectory of his life where silicon valley starts calling him and you know neville flies him out to san francisco and wants to invest in him and shit like that so he took a bet on the sort of day the platform launched if i'm a you know board developer today or i'm somebody who's got you know the ability to code and you know a weekend i would be building something on top of snap kit the thing i would build is actually so i think what's hard is when you wanna build something that gets the user to leave snapchat and come to your app so you kinda have to build something that can actually the whole experience should just be on snapchat and it should not compete with what snapchat does so here's the idea i call it cameo kit so basically i think you could build the app cameo on top of snapchat so you would basically the cameo kit would just say cool i wanna buy a snapchat from one of these celebrities and i'll pay you right here through snapchat and then i wanna send it either to myself or to my friend on my snapchat list so basically imagine i it's your birthday coming up right when's your birthday in a few days yeah you actually bought me a cameo you had gilbert god for you caught me a dick dickhead right so i did that last year but but this year i could do it through cam kit a little new invention vine so basically i would go sa snapchat i would open it up i would see a list of influencers that are that have snapchat which is like every celebrity in the world i would request a video and i pay right there and then you would receive a snapchat from either from me or from them in your inbox and the whole cam experience could be built on top of snapchat without having to have separate websites separate apps all that stuff and you compete with cam very quickly so i think that's a very simple idea that could monetize on top of kit i think that's a great idea no this is a good spot by you so okay so here here's another one yeah pay your rent i think is an easy one because younger people who split rent they could you just snapchat or stop cash to just do it and so that's kind of interesting i i don't know exactly how much that's integrated but that could be some a problem that you solve i think that you could if you're a food delivery company you should probably get on this because one of the little fun things i've been doing another birthday thing instead of cameo somebody on my birthday just sent me food via post because they know where i live and so they just ordered me food and just showed up like door and i just said you know like this is from this person and i was like oh that was great that's like a a twenty dollar gift that is awesome and took them no effort and so that's my new hack i just sent people post mates just for fun as gifts and so i think you could do something like that but here's another one i saw a company that's called moonshot very very fun company idea what they did was they're were like hey all everybody's working from home which is cool and convenient in some ways but the one thing you really misses is the sort of cam interaction with your coworkers and and what what tell the readers or listeners and me what kind of google to find that because i just search moonshot and i don't see it search moonshot escape room so what moonshot is it's a virtual escape room that happens over zoom so it costs i think i think it's like three hundred bucks to do the experience but it's great you know that as a team building a team building cost is nothing team you know companies will easily pay for that for their for groups of you know ten to twelve employees to get together and do something and so i i do escape rooms all the time with my team i think it's really fun way to you know go out and do something and so this is done all through zoom they built the whole experience digitally and i'm like oh this is really smart because you know escape rooms are actually pretty good businesses in general but this takes out the one biggest cost of escape rooms which is like you know the rent and the person the human being you need to like facilitate a whole escape room doing this on top of zoom is a really smart idea in my opinion this is great i don't i don't know if that could ever be huge but it it could be good i'm looking at it now it's who what what's reason is that the company owns it i have no idea how did you find this this was on product hunt and then it got shared because again this was sort of remarkable people hadn't seen something like this so people started sharing it it went kind of viral yeah okay it it's i it so here here's another one in the last three months that we've been sheltered in place how many zoom birthdays have you attended none none of you what oh my god i've had to do five of these things including my own did i'm only i'm only oh my god sean did i miss your what was your birthday my birth is back in april but but but basically oh oh wait i didn't give you anything i'm sorry it's all good don't worry about the horrible over this quarantine period i've been to so many zoom birthday parties because people can't celebrate through you know the normal means now i don't know i don't think this a last very long but if you could find some way to do celebrations over zoom if you could find a way to make a zoom well i have one my coworkers getting married on saturday they're twitch twitch streaming i don't know what do call the word they're streaming streaming me on twitch the wedding oh nice okay that's very good so i don't know how long some of these last i i think the the cameo on top of snapchat and i think the escape room over zoom i think that's more here to stay i don't think the birthday stuff will last very long but i like the idea of building stuff on top of zoom and the top of snapchat especially now that people are are celebrating occasions and looking for ways to socialize remotely i would do rent payment easy nope that that's the first thing i would focus on great idea that's a good one you wanna do one or two more sure you you got one or you want me to do a different one okay so two weeks ago about ten days ago we had this guy named mike and he started liquid death it's bottled water i had a lot of people can't a few people message up canned water message us and say they think that the water was bad yeah yeah and i think the idea is kinda cool i don't i'm i like him a lot i think that guy's a winner i think he's a winner too and i went into the thing being like i think this idea is kinda dumb we had talked about it before was kinda dumb and i came out of it being like maybe i hate this guy i have to see if i can invest in this company and the reason why is sometimes it really just is that simple so he's taking a mass product like bottled water or can water is a mass product water is the like you know the definition of a mass consumption product then the second thing is if you just did anything different in the water space and it latches on with any small percentage of that population you're gonna have a meaningful business and i think he's doing something very different compared to how the other brands are approaching it and i really do think this is gonna be a successful company especially once i met the guy and i was like oh this guy's a winner and he understands what this is and what it isn't and that makes sense to me yeah i would like to see how he like operates i would he's the type of guy who would be a little bit i would be a little bit nervous i would want to know him more because he seems like a guy that is a little reckless and that could be both good and bad and that's a good call because he was talking about the previous company he built the the brandy company that he built and i think he's a great starter and he he saw the opportunity he starts it he has a vision for the brand and what the what the culture wants now in terms of the blocking and tackling that it takes to just operate for like seven years straight probably not the best in that other company he kind of he he was kind of vague about it he's like i parted ways with those guys it's all good terms you know it's still have my shares but basically it was like okay thanks thanks for the creativity bud we'll take it from here it it seemed like it was kind of that i could totally see that happening again with liquid debt a person i admire once wrote that being artistic is the exact opposite of being of making money and or basically artist and capitalists are the opposite right and i haven't decided if i fully agree with that but i tend to i say i'm closer to agreeing with it then i am not agreeing with it and that artists are the opposite and that doesn't mean they're good or bad you know i i i think a lot of art you should who gives a fuck about the money it's it's great because it's interesting i don't care if it's if it's expensive and sometimes when people are artistic i think okay you're cool i don't think that you can make a peanut like run a a company that has to make and save money right yeah i i think that's probably true that you know if you have an extreme strength in one area you probably don't have the extreme strength in the exact opposite sort of skill set area what i hope for is you'd have to be just good enough to be dangerous in the other area so like okay you're super creative and you can you can build brands you know do you have just enough of the operational know how discipline to execute on this like you know sophia amr so she she was on she was like she's clearly a great brand builder she did it with nasty gal she did it with i a girl boss service called to get girl boss well she's a marketer she's definitely a marketer and she and she i think it's i think it's a little more of the marketing in the sense that like it it is marketing but i guess it's like to identify what's in the soul of the customer and then be able to build a product or brand that taps into that and so i think she she was doing a great job it i think this guy mike is doing a great job of that you know with nasty gal she didn't manage the other side of it and you know the train went off the cliff and and so you know you you have to know enough of that or you have to hire people that that complement it in that way and if anybody has any wants to read something about this i just read this blog post that was called pioneers settlers and town planners or something like that and it basically talks about like in any given company you have three types of people you have the pioneers who are gonna you know they wanna go breach new land they wanna be the first ones there and live off of you know what they can hunt they can kill and and they keep and then you have sort of the settlers who follow in right after and they start to set up you know the the the very basic systems for for for life to continue and they're not just looking for the next thing like the pioneers are and then you have the town planners that can organize like at large scale systems and so not none is good and bad or cool and not cool it's just a matter of like knowing who you are or knowing where you're at as a company and then making sure you have the right type of person leading based on what's needed if you need innovation you need a pioneer if you need operations you need more of a town planner coincidentally i've read of this article today called managers the difference between managing and leading and the idea was like people who are leaders are great in chaos and they don't really they're like very comfortable with chaos they're very comfortable with ambiguity and that's important and people who are managers are all about creating something sustainable that can operate each and every day effectively and i'm for sure the leader for sure not the the manager yeah right right on okay a couple other quick things that are that are kinda interesting so i wanna get your opinion on this just give me a a a dumb or awesome the website's is called human ipo dot app these guys are doing a very fancy branding around an old idea so what it does is i can go i can go do a human ipo so i'm sean i go public i get a stock ticker which is like you know s a or whatever and i basically ipo off share of my time so i can auction off up to five hundred hours of my time that you can book from me at a certain price and then if people think hey you know this sean guy he's on you know he's on the way up his time is gonna be more valuable in the future i'm gonna buy unit of this guy's time i can either hold it and trade it later at a higher price or i can i can i guess use it to like book an hour of my time so this is the the core i'm on the website now it's incredibly interesting tell tell me what you think of it for sure interesting for sure innovative and wild and whoever invented that this is a nerd and i fucking love those types of people logistically i just don't think it makes sense because well so i can buy brian's time well so if it was i'm looking at this site now i understand why they call it like if they're really just rebranding just like expert networks and consulting like it's just like dude just let me have your time for so definitely cool highly unlikely to work right that's what i think i think this is like an art project that's neat this is i don't know your how did you find this i saw it on i think product hunt and i was like yeah i've been following i think i talked about this some of the previous things i've been following these personal ico personal personal coins that people are creating in the crypto world this this is not crypto but it's the same idea and i think it sort of has the same pros and cons i think it's like kind of exciting in a way to like bet on people and i think it's kind lame in the way which is like what do i get i get an hour of their time like well okay that's guy i just clicked on you have to buy a hundred hours of his time at two hundred fifty dollars an hour so what does that mean yeah twenty five grand yeah so but like i don't think like if i was this guy and i just sold a hundred hours of my time i have a feeling that i would bail on a lot of that yeah so one one piece is are you actually gonna fulfill the second is so what am i doing it's actually basically like a freelancer selling blocks of design time or programming time or consulting hours or whatever it is okay that's cool maybe for really special unique people that that works i don't think this is that interesting overall the ones i think are more interesting are the ones where you actually get a put a piece of their earnings over the next x years so it's like i would never do that in a million years i know but some people would some people would say cool i'll take you know it's like people who raise money for their company right they're selling off future earnings for capital today and some people might instead of doing it for your company you might do it for yourself so i think it's interesting i wanna see somebody like you know i'm gonna find us it seems it does seem interesting i'm just just from like a innovation perspective like it's just so weird and interesting i would love to i would love to try this i like it cool okay so that was the that was the last one wanted to do do you have any other stuff you wanna go over or anything else on this list interesting i i could talk about any of this stuff i'm obsessed with my posture right now because i've gotten like strong and fit over the last three months and that's wonderful but i have scoliosis my my like my posture is horrible and it's making me nervous because i'm like what's the point of getting strong if i'm like crooked and not healthy yeah and i've looked all over the place for like good scoliosis workout routines i'm like man i just want like a just something just like a posture doctor right and it's kind of interesting like a like a a poster doctor's kinda cool to me yeah i thought about was i i went for run the other day and i was like i think i don't know how to run i think nobody taught me how to run and then i started running a certain way and then i got out of shape and i think i just run like shit and i know i don't swim the right way or there's like a better way more efficient way to swim also and i'm like i need to i i i wanna clean all these up i wanna clean up running on wanna clean up by by walking you know cadence or or whatever you call it and then also my swimming but yeah i'm i'm i'm similarly obsessed with these things and you know you've been getting jacked which i think you know props to you for doing every time you send me one of these videos you know sam sends me these videos that are like it's not nude but it's definitely more than what it's like more than friends less than lovers were somewhere in between there and yeah he says me did and you've even been getting jacked and it's kind of amazing and you know so so that's you know props to you for actually doing it it's been a big change i basically like just i i don't i don't know if i a diet i just eat meat and only eat greet greet vegetables and i just don't eat breakfast and i move every single day yeah i don't know it's it's bit easy but it has been awesome i but you know what sucks it's just sitting in the chair it totally fucks you up yeah and so this is my where like a body doctor like a like a posture doctor and they're like i just i i'm i wanna be more like a wild animal in this you know in this book the happy body there's this picture of this like inversion chair i i don't know if you've ever done one of them but i have are they good i've never done one but when i saw it i like well here's the thing here's the thing i have to buy because i think i need to i think i need to do this i think i need to wait but did they say that inversion chairs are good yeah i just hang i have a bar and i just hang from my bar yeah you need to go the other way you need to you need to hang from your legs and so your back decompress that's what they basically say it's for is to decompress the spine oh i'm gonna read this all look how long is it i don't know it's kinda log alright cool let's let's get out of here now we're just dr of bullshit cool thanks for listening share this with your friend you need to just go on your if if you have a facebook page or twitter or in instagram you need to just screenshot our podcast and then just say this is the best podcast i listen to and just post that and you can tag me that's also great but even if you don't tag me definitely post it if you're not gonna post it delete your facebook delete your twitter delete your instagram because you're not using it right that's what we need from you go post the shit it if and if you do it it's we'll call this game fifty fifty do that and tag me and sean and you will either get a shirtless picture of meat or sean or a third party or party okay how could you resist alright excellent let's get out of here