Five Ways To Make Money, Vice Businesses, Fan Fiction And More

there's five ways to like make money in a assist in any system there's like five roles and you could decide which one you're gonna be in so like one is the logistics and labor so like let's take a house you're building a house the guy who's actually literally laying the bricks and out there sweating in the heat and building the actual home sorta gets like paid the least but does the worst does the most work right does the hardest work and does the most work in the process right he's the logistics and labor he's actually moving the bricks around and you could choose to do that you could choose to be kind of a worker b who's moving the bricks but you're gonna work the hardest and you're gonna capture the least and life feels kind of unfair it's unfair that you know the real estate developer sitting in his second vacation home is gonna make more off that house than the guy sweating outside every day but that's the reality that's how it goes yeah so there's logistics labor that's the lowest level of the pyramid next level optimization happy thanksgiving everybody we got an episode for you you know a little break from the family never hurts this is a dope episode i really like this one we talked about a bunch of things so we talked about the the lurking giant of an industry that is fan fiction that's right fan fiction we talked about vice businesses and a billion dollar company that's serving marijuana businesses and a arbitrage around the new kia car logo which is pretty funny and then sam what else you got we talked about a very famous billionaire who recently said that fifty million dollars is about the cutoff to where any more money won't make you happy we talk about our opinions of that and then we also reference a few other the people who said their opinion on what their number is we talked about a billionaire who's only thirty nine years old you've probably not heard of he's built a payments company which is kind of interesting but even more interesting he's built the world's largest training company to train pilots incredibly fascinating guy it's a good episode i think you're gonna dig it check it out let's jump in we have some topics sam you have a topic then i got a i got a bunch i've got a bunch too if you sort on you'll see the rest okay but first a light lighthearted topic i tweeted this thing at the other day cha off was on le freed podcast podcasts and there was one three minute topic that didn't really get enough justice that was very interesting le goes hey so you're this billionaire now can you explain how life has changed being rich and he said basically there's if it's zero to a hundred of different levels i've tried it all i've gone from zero to a hundred and back i've done all the stuff and money doesn't change stuff after a certain point and i think that point is fifty million dollars and i thought that that was and he referenced the study he i actually can't find the study that he referenced but he said like you know i read this ivy league thing and i don't know if it's true but they said that after fifty million nothing changes because that's plenty plenty of money to have homes all your loved ones are handled you don't have to work you could think about what's really important and i actually thought that that was a really interesting answer because without having any evidence other than just friends and family i think that number is about right but no one ever discusses this they always say that stupid seventy thousand dollar year study which is just absolutely nonsense i don't believe that that to be true at all but i thought it was a really interesting thing and i tweeted it that like you know that's what he said in jason cal who's cha buddy and also i imagined quite wealthy he says i don't think he's totally off but i think a couple million in america in two thousand twenty two and you're good ten million that's f u twenty five plus you're dangerous anything above that who cares and so i wanna know what do you think do you have levels like that my biggest takeaway is that i should just be referencing studies that don't exist all the time dude like that the thing you just said that is you know her there was a harvard study count what year but totally backs up the point i wanna make so i'm gonna make this up now google i could not find the study and none of my twitter followers is good i tweet this out too to almost two hundred thousand people not one person said they could find it that's why he's a black belt in bullshit and i'm trying to get my black belt at bullshit and now i i learned a move that i didn't didn't have in my bag the the fake fake study reference yeah there's these two scientists out of pen who it's really interesting what they did so okay that's my first takeaway away my second takeaway is i don't know if the numbers fifty i think it's like complete like it's completely context dependent somebody said this somebody tweeted this out in the crypto world they go would you rather have just had a hundred thousand dollars and still have a hundred thousand dollars or have gotten really lucky during the crypto bull run turned a hundred thousand into a hundred million and now it's all come crashing back down with f t and all this other stuff and you're back at a hundred thousand would you rather like have the emotional stability of of the of one year of just staying where you're at or would you rather have tasted the highest highs and now crash back down to it to earth of of course not the second one no that that that second one was horrible but you know loss aversion i i i care more about losing than i do gaining that's crazy so you would rather just stay at the hundred k well so like objectively you're at the same level right and so rather have never never flown so high and then crashed i think it would it would i would i would have a life of regret that's insane ben what about you what do what do you think i i think there's some street cr that comes with having been rich that makes it easier to make the money back so i would rather have been rich and and now not be so i did this in poker i used to play online poker pretty like aggressively back in the day and generally yeah pretty generally like you know like why pay for college when you can go lose money in online poker instead i've gone to class like those those seem to be my strategy and so but i did have some runs and sometimes i would go from the ten cent twenty five cent table which is like they know the very low blinds up to dollar two dollar up to two four up to three six five ten ten twenty and if you're at the ten twenty basically like on any given hand you know twenty thirty thousand dollars could be swinging you know left and right and so you were going on these massive swings for like a nineteen year old at the time but then inevitably because i would not manage my bank role properly i would go crashing right back down and i'd be like well i can't afford those tables anymore i have to go back and play the you know ten twenty five cent or the you know to four cent or whatever like the lowest stakes that were offered on full tilt at the time were poker stars and and it was the worst feeling when he had to go back it was at because it wasn't the worst feeling like it wasn't the regret like the regret is obviously a part of it but the worst feeling is that it's just really hard to get excited about winning twenty bucks when that same thing could have been twenty thousand and you've tasted twenty thousand at that point and so just re wiring your brain to like go back be humbled and be humble enough to play low stakes again was really really tough but really important and but i did learn one thing which is that once you taste higher stakes it does like break your frame and so the only reason i would say i would rather have gone up and down even though emotionally mentally it's harder is the value you in having your frame broken and thinking bigger at thinking differently and not limiting yourself in some way that you previously thought was a some limit for you is actually incredibly valuable so even though yes you're back at a hundred thousand you have one new valuable asset which is you think of yourself differently and you think of the world differently and you think of what's possible differently than you did it had that never happen i don't know man i think that that is just so i was pretty convincing i i think that i think the argument of like you a frame breaking is good i well what you're saying is that there was a lesson to be learned and that you're gonna be left off better than you than europe it's not just the money yeah you'll i think that that is that that is almost a fair argument but i would say that you're gonna be broken from the journey down more than your baby we got therapy on one side then we got the the other i'll repeat the same thing i've said all the time which is i don't think that your opinion is relevant here because you are this rare thing called being emotionally healthy for most individuals i do not think that this would help them i think it would hurt them more than it would help them maybe maybe i don't know maybe so so the but you did ask a question about the number so you said fifty and i think fifty probably sounds appealing to you sounds appealing to anybody who's got less than fifty but then there's a whole bunch people who are there and they you know they continue on and i i don't know what they would say you know i'm not at fifty million and and like kind of that word so i i don't know if that's the right number or not what my experience tells me is that it's about triple what you got whatever you got triple what you got feels like the number where i could finally it'll finally be good and then when you it's always double actually if you know this is actually two and three x this actually is a real thing i don't know if study is legitimate but i did read like a thing where they sample like ten thousand people and consistently the number was actually double people said i want double what i have you know if you're worth familiar they're like you know if i had like two i would feel better it was almost always double so i'm so you're onto something i'm thinking about what project i'm gonna do next year so twenty twenty three i'm i'm plotting i'm scheming it's like pinky in the brain but i'm both picky and the brain and every night i think myself what am i gonna do next year and it's i actually don't say the same thing we do every year trying to take over world that's not actually what i'm trying to do this year has a different frame and it comes from a quote i heard it i think i think maybe naval had said it somewhere and he said he goes you are retired when you stop sacrificing today for some future tomorrow basically when the day in and of itself is complete at that point you have retired and it's not about to me it's not about retirement but that's also like just replace the word retirement with winning like the ultimate form of winning to me is when the thing you do in and of itself is the reward you're not doing it for some maybe future speculative hopefully reward that will come right like what most people will do is they take some they do something that's a sacrifice in order to have the thing they want later and they think the sacrifice leads to the thing i want and then what but what are like the pillars for you you know i i are the columns you know if you're in excel like you like content creation you may like investing like where what are your what are your columns labeled well i'm i'll give i'll i'll i first when i heard this quote i was like was that even possible or is everything just feel like you know hard work sacrifice until it pays off i was like no actually the podcast is the only thing in my life that feels this way the podcast is the only you know it's not even business but i i guess it is technically a business now but it's the only project i've ever worked on where the act of doing it is the reward like i am you you know like when it's a normal startup up i'm like what are the growth numbers what are the what what are we trending week over week what's the revenue how can we grow this grow this grow this scripts all i would think about with a normal business and with this i don't and it's not because i don't want this to grow no of course i want it to grow it's because like the reward for me isn't if this grows then a good thing will happen the reward is i love sitting down here shoot the shit with you having a bunch of topics and then like you know the the sort of reaction to the pod that comes so i immediately after it gets dropped and other people get to listen to it and so like doing the pod is the reward not if the pod gets big then there's all these rewards to be had and that's why when i look back i say man it's always been really hard for me to stick with projects you know this you've told me this like a thousand times stop pivoting do whatever you're like the average lifespan of my projects is like one year or less or i have to hire somebody to take my role and i basically check out the podcast is i've been we you're doing this what three years now and like i feel like we just got started could do this another thirty years i feel zero fatigue in this whereas anything else three years in i'd be looking for the the exit path and so that to me was a really strong signal that hey projects like that do exist and then it's a frame breaker right if that exists then i want that out of my next project now to answer your question about the pillars i think the most important one for me is i like high creativity things not i i like create i like creativity not optimization meaning i'm not a good operator who likes to optimize the the engine every day come tweak it make it one percent better every single day i love when people do that but i personally don't get a lot of joy doing that i love creativity like basically making stuff whether it's content or it's a product or it's a business id whatever it is so i'm like how do i make it where it's creativity based and i kind of had this like big epiphany during that process that like i haven't really fleshed out but i'm gonna i'll share it with you wanna hear what you think about this so i realized there's like there's five ways to like make money in assist in any system there's like five roles and you could decide which one you're gonna be in so like one is the logistics and labor so like let's take a house you're building a house the guy who's actually literally laying the bricks and out there sweating in the heat and building the actual home sorta gets like paid the least but does the worst does the most work right does the hardest work and does the most work in the process right he's the logistics and labor he's actually moving the bricks around and you could choose to do that you could choose to be kind of a worker b who's moving the bricks you're gonna work the hardest and you're gonna capture the least and life feels kind of unfair it's unfair that you know the real estate developer sitting in his second vacation home is gonna make more off that house than the guy sweating outside everyday but that's the reality that's how it goes yeah so there's logistics and labor that's the lowest level of the pyramid next level optimization that's the person that goes into any business and is trying to make it incrementally better increase sales increase decrease cost this is usually a manager of some kind and so optimization make things more efficient make things grow a little more you can choose to be a great manager you'll capture more value than labor but not by much then comes performance that's kind of what this podcast is we get on with push recorder to rep perform and we get paid more than you know whoever does our podcast editing gets paid because we have to perform and it's like the the the result of our performance is gonna be it'll be a complete flop or complete hit based on how well we perform your performer okay so that's like the third level then there's creativity that's coming up with the concept you know creating original things creating whether it's content whether it's code whether it's the original idea creativity like that that next layer and then the highest layer is like one who makes the most and does the least amount of like you know labor boy work is warren buffett who sits in a room plays bridge for you know four hours a day reads and it will go sometimes years without making an investment but when he does make an investment he's getting paid paid only on his judgment and so he doesn't get paid on creativity performance optimization or labor and logistics he gets paid purely on judgment did he make the right call or not and that that person you know captures the most value in any value chain and so i think that's the way that that like kind of like any enterprise works or any ecosystem works for money and i'm trying to decide which layer i wanna play at do i wanna try to play a judgment because i think logistic is best but it's not the most fun to me i think creativity is the one that's the most fun for me or performance one of those two do you think that you'll bill a company or do you think that you'll build like you'll just get more famous and make money off that somehow probably not either of them right now neither feel appealing so i don't think i'll create a company because i've done that like for the last i don't know feels like almost fifteen years and and i'm like okay what if my brainstorm was limited right a brainstorm is pretty helpful when you have a creative constraint so my creative constraint is what if i can't operate a company so i gotta do something and i wanted it to be awesome but i'm not gonna be an operator of a company so that could mean for example you could buy a business and place an operator you could be an investor you can do other things but i'm gonna create a company that in in operators that's why i you like investing what's that do you like investing i do like investing yeah but i don't know if i love investing but i do like investing and so that so so that's one and then the second one you said which is getting more famous that also feels really lame to me even though i kinda know it's a good thing like it's clearly worked it's clearly paid off for me like getting big on twitter or getting big on the podcast or whatever like this has clearly helped my life in a bunch of different ways but it feels kinda lame now and i was kinda saying this during the saw hill thing i was i'm i saying it to him but i was kinda just projecting i guess which is like it's like is that it i'm just gonna be a guy who tweets and a guy who like goes on to youtube was like here's three hacks that you gotta know if you wanna get big know twenty twenty here it's like oh man i can't bring myself to do that so i'm like maybe i just also say no to that path because feels like a lot of people play that game and it's not one i would have a ton of self respect for if i won so then that would be a big loss if i i achieved it and didn't even feel great about it we should do an entire episode next week or the week after and like the decisions that you're gonna make yeah yeah i'm starting the process now we'll see how it goes in the do you no i'm in no rush do alright let you do one of your topics and then i'll do another one after that alright so check this out have you ever a read fan fiction like do read any fan fiction like with with like is that like a thing you do what it what is that okay hand that answers like what i i i maybe maybe i do it but i don't know what it is fan fiction is basically like imagine okay you read i get for me i read harry potter harry potter is great i've done with the books but i want more harry potter i love that world i love the characters all that stuff so then there's people were super fans we'll just go write their own as if they're jk k rowling they go right into the website and then you can go i i i don't i play sports yeah exercise my tendons and l work so no i don't do ben i'm curious just quick yes or no do you do you know anything about this world or not a very very little mount okay so that's kinda what i expected and i in my mind i'm like well that's the case for everybody like you know seems like a really really niche thing but sam i know you know about this business watt pad and huge tell you some things about fan fiction it's insane so so there's probably all women though right what's that it's probably almost all women i imagine it's eighty percent women i don't know it's it's majority i don't know if it's eighty might be seventy or sixty something like that but it's somewhere in that rate i think seventy eighty is is is about right on the writers side for sure i don't know on the reader side i think it's also there okay let me just tell you some interesting things two of the biggest books in the last like twenty five years started as fan fiction so twilight started as fan fiction and then the the whole vampire series and then fifty shades of gray started as a fan fiction of twilight and fifty shades of gray weekend right so like these were best selling books became billion dollar box office movies on top of that for the twilight series and that's insane okay so then now you go to watt and you you look up the traffic for watt pad and you're gonna see that watt gets almost two hundred million visitors a month has almost a hundred million registered users you should explain what w is w is basically a website where you can go and you can write fan fiction and upload it or you can read it right so it's the same way like youtube you can go and upload a video or you can watch videos w is that for people writing kinda like fiction basically and they sold about a year ago for about six hundred million dollars in cash yeah they sold through a korean company called neighbor for for six hundred million and do you i i remember you told me something about them way back there i think you knew the founders or friends you i remember you and our buddy so we were talking you guys both had met these founders you had something interesting to say i don't know if you're feel free to say whatever you and your were there no i don't know what you're talking about okay maybe it was you maybe was our friend but they were like yeah i've met the founders and like this business is actually crazy gets a crazy amount of traffic it's super like under monetized right now and yeah just like i met them and they're super cool like they love their community but like they're never gonna make it like in terms of like building it into a business like it could be a juggernaut given them out of traffic it has and i found this to be true for for for them and i was looking at the traffic i saw they were ranked number two in the books and literature category i was like what's number one what could be a bigger two hundred million visits a month that's more than like wall street journal new york times like that's more sure huge websites and so i'm like what's number one and it's just website called archive of our own you ever even heard of this no keep love i'm looking all this stuff up as you talk three hundred four hundred million visitors a month arc archive of firearm own and it looks like like a craigslist type of website it's like basically like a wiki like it's like a website with no images you know what i mean it's like a viking if a library was like a website it would look like this and that was the intention so basically i was like this is really big and it got me thinking about fan fiction it's got me thinking about this whole the all these genres right like and i started connecting all these dots it's like i remember when i moved to san francisco there's a street in san francisco that they call billionaires row and on billionaires row you got you know a bunch of tech ty who you know are billionaires the biggest and bad house of them all belongs to danielle steele danielle steele and then i was like ro like hundreds and hundreds of basically is it or like erotic or romance it not just romance novels yeah one of the best selling authors of all time out you know has a bigger house than you know founders of of you know what's the same for sex david sex yeah like all these huge companies and so then you and i'm like danielle steel that sounds me like i remember when i was growing up my mom probably read like fifty of these books like my mom loved danielle steele she used to read all these books like maybe this john maybe this little niche is like bigger than i thought i thinking a little more about it so there's some crazy stuff so so one of the the backstory of this archive of our own because i where the hell did this come from and basically what happened was there was this in two thousand seven there's a website that get started called fan lim and they're like we're gonna fan fiction it's a great niche we're gonna build like an awesome website make a bunch of money it's gonna be great and it's a bunch of dudes building this company and all the users were women and they were like at some point the women were like it's kind of annoying the way this business is running and that all these men are like trying to like monetize our work our hard work of like our attention on the reader side and our writing on the writers side so in two thousand and nine one of the writers is called naomi woman named naomi only me she guides of blog blockbuster says we need an arc archive of of of one zone and was playing off this thing a room of one zone by virgin virginia wolf for this basically this idea that riders need space time resources to create and she's like we just need our own not this fan lip and so a bunch of volunteers create arc archive of own and that's this thing that now does three hundred to four hundred million visits month it's a non profit and they run entirely off donations like wikipedia so they raised basically three hundred fifty thousand in donations there's seven hundred volunteers that run this thing and crazy and it just covers the burn rate of the actual like bandwidth to run the site basically and yeah you could you can look up the nonprofit called organization of transformative works and they're you could look up all nonprofit sales it's only like eight hundred thousand dollars a year and what's interesting it says their logo says archive of our own launch in two thousand and seven but it says archive of our own beta it's still in the beta and so and so this and like the top fandom are like so what it what is it what do you do so it's like you're fandom of some world or characters or whatever and then people write their own remix of that story it'll take the liberty to like write their own and so you have the top ones are marvel sherlock harry potter supernatural natural those are the top ones and it's it's just kinda crazy and so like for example the original lord of the rings is like the spec trilogy plus the next two books was like a total of seven hundred fifty thousand words seven hundred fifty k a fan has written written like a fan fiction version of lord of the rings like they're the extension and it's over five million words it's like seven times longer that somebody is written for free right there's like extreme passion and you know better than anyone like these are like red hot signals for where you're like oh my god like you can make so much money where if you're a greedy pig like us you're like oh there is a bunch of energy and passion and enthusiasm but probably some broken tools or like under invested in infrastructure can i go in and build something right that's like a a a general question and i just got fascinated by the space and it's pretty cool what they're doing so like what pad basically after twilight fifty shades of grade became big hits they two things started happening one the publisher started scouting what watt pad like crazy so like you know anna todd was on watt she's like a a scout for for simon and sc or whatever and offer like a six figure deal to you know a writer on there to basically like option their they're like blog posts basically into a book and a potential movie and they created their own studios division and they're making millions of dollars adapting these fan fiction works into into you know actual actual movies from here and they say oh we got this data like the the guy from neighbor he's like we have this data like not only can we see what's popular let's turn that into a movie but we can say we know exactly where they're reading and where they're skipping where they're dropping off we can say chapter one and two are great chapter three after paragraph two they you know people are falling off and five six and seven you know are good but you know need to trim them and you know they have like hundreds of thousands of comments and they could basically take all that data and try to do a good job with it that's the that's the pitch out at least i found this fascinating what do think i'll give you two data points that i i think show you're you're you're onto something the first one which i brought up is the website lit lit erotic have i told you about that this was your home page right what is what is this yeah right lit how do you spell it it's it's like lit literature and erotic yeah so lit you have com okay i'm there okay so it's the same thing it's just like ugly looking website that looks like it's you know built in in the the nineties basically what's the traffic for similar website that it has so this tells me sixty million visits a month to this crazy right text yeah website it's a plain text website so it's another example of just these like basically lit erotic i think that's how you say at liter erotic dot com it's like jersey i some erotic man yeah it it's it's similar but it's basically like user submitted stories most of them sex based it gets crazy amounts of traffic and it's i think it's only run by one or two people but now that's another example of one of these like low key websites that crush it which is like a nice proof of concept but the second proof of concept that actually is a wonderful company is have you heard of fandom yeah fandom is like a like a wikipedia basically for all the different stories right yes so basically any tv show that you care about particularly if it's like animated or a cartoon or something but even if it's not like you go there and it will like give you a list of episodes a list of characters and things like that and i think they have a fan fiction section but what i didn't realize was it was started by jimmy wales the founder of wikipedia right and he's actually i think as of recently was still the president of the company he sold it the the company was sold and it now does over two hundred million dollars a year in revenue and is incredibly profitable it's owned by the churning group i believe is that t g no no t g so this is a different one so just a pre pe firm yeah one of the yeah so it's owned by like like one of the biggest pe firms in the world and they kill it so i believe that you are absolutely like on onto something spotting like an interesting trend yeah and and so i don't know where the opportunity is yet i haven't like sort of done the kind of full exercise of like okay what what's the play here are you taking it to mobile are you doing some sort of subscription thing and we've talked to in the past about the idea you had prototype i don't know if you wanna should we tell that again or or you think that's covered enough wait wait i'll i'll i'll get it in in thirty seconds which is basically my friend and i had this idea where we can create like an audible but for erotic stories and we created this really simple website what was it called it was called short but romantic and we drove like five hundred dollars of the facebook traffic to it we got someone to write a story on five we got someone to narrow it on five and we got like five hundred dollars in subscription revenue overnight or over a weekend and i don't think what happened did we we we told we talked about on the pod and then a person went and started a newsletter that was this but only specifically for black women and he ended up selling that business i think after six or seven months for like six figures right yeah that i think that's what he said i don't know we don't know too much about so i think i can't say if it's if it was for real or not but yeah definitely definitely super interesting niche that's like underserved i think not most i think it's those entrepreneurs and most kind of like programmers are not really thinking about this stuff but there's a lot of attention i mean fandom gets seven hundred million visits a month like is is kind of insane right like it's insane these are kind of mind boggling numbers so yeah i think that's kinda crazy can i tell you another slightly like kind of niche almost like yeah like vice type business have you ever heard of a company called du no so if you just google dutch tri d dot com does that is that like a weed thing yeah it's a weed thing so they're basically what they did was they created like a point of sale system for for dis and so what du does they've i they basically they took like the same model of like square or you know stripe in a way but mostly i square because they have like sort of the in incur in person like card reader type thing and they're like look these guys like dis are underserved is getting legalized in more places and the big companies are never really gonna go here because it's like too much you know hair on the on it for them they have too much to lose and so wow these guys are huge though they're huge they they're basically a multi billion dollar company i think they were valued in one or two billion dollars i think three three billion dollars and they they say they have like thirty or forty percent market share was just like kind of say they get a crazy saturation i've hundred but or six hundred million dollars yeah so really really impressive in a in a fairly short amount of time i don't know when it was launched exactly but it is it's not like you know yeah twenty seventeen so like you know five years and three billion dollars later and and we talked about this before like you know we one of the early ideas i got a lot of traction on the pod was stripe for vice which is basically like taking payments as a pain in the ass if you're doing anything that is that gets blocked by banks by visa by you know mastercard whatever and the companies that end up serving you know marijuana porn these different industries those companies you know and picking up a lot of adoption very very quickly and can become very very valuable in a very short amount of time dude this is yeah this is fascinating i hadn't heard of this company they're quite big i can find this client in poll have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform so it shares its data across every application every team can stay aligned no out of sync spreadsheets or fueling databases hubspot grow better here i'll tell you about another one that is kinda niche but incredibly fascinating and then i always actually have a payment story for you as well so google group black have you heard a group black no alright so their url is group black dot c and this company what these guys are doing is incredibly fascinating in how they've inserted themselves so i believe they call themselves a media collective and accelerator but here's the opportunity so in two thousand and twenty and two thousand twenty one i feel you hate these sorts of things like media accelerator and collective i feel like if i just i told you hey hey man i got a media and collective and and accelerator i wanna tell you about you'd be like oh god yeah i i don't like the language because it does sound fluffy but what these guys are doing is way more fascinating than that so basically two thousand twenty two thousand twenty one black life matters becomes a thing and a lot of companies advertising companies they publicly state basically it it happened with byron allen is one of the guys he's one of the most powerful men in hollywood he's a black guy who owns a a really successful production company and he's is like look it's just crazy that we we black owned media companies aren't getting ad dollars we think it's wrong that mcdonald's as an advertisement with black owned companies and so that plus the b thing a lot of the largest ad agencies in the world like wp and all these other companies they collectively said alright look we now commit and i actually don't know the exact percentage of that wp p said but they basically said we're gonna give around four or five six percent of our budget to black owned media companies but there's a huge problem with that which is there's actually not a lot of black owned media companies or at least there's not a lot of black owned media companies at scale and when i say like you know they they actually group them one of the world's largest ad firms they call them their clients that they said we're gonna spend at least two percent of our ad budgets on diverse owned media and you're like two percent what's that you know who cares two percent that's nothing well it comes out to be like across all the other media companies something like six hundred million dollars a year and then mcdonald's is like hey we're gonna increase our ad spend from two percent to black owned media companies to five percent it's like well you know who cares that's just a few points that's again another like seventy five million dollars a year it's like quite substantial but again there's this problem there's not a lot of group a lot of black owned media companies so this company called group black they went and talked to pro and gamble wp p inner inter republic all these huge media companies and they go hey commit to spending money with us and we're gonna help you deploy it and they say yeah okay you know that's like a crazy conversation i don't know how they got that conversation now they have five hundred million dollars a year in ad commitment from these companies but they have a problem they don't own any media assets and so at this point they're out there trying to buy bustle you know bustle though it's a it's a yeah women's focus a media company that i think does like two hundred million dollars a year in sales it's like one of the bigger like new age digital companies out there and i think they you know they're the size of vice we're refining twenty nine things like that group m is now making a bid to buy bustle and and then they're also like i've heard rumors that they're in talks to buy vice and so these guys have just totally pulled off this like amazing it's basically a keeper if he asked me but like these these like they're like well we spot an opportunity a keeper like you know like a like a like it's just like such a bold plan to be like oh you see this opportunity you know of course like i'm making it sound like they're just like these evil scheming guys i don't think that's actually the truth but like it is like an interest it's basically like a coup it it feels like where it's like oh we see this opportunity we're going super big and we're gonna pounce on it and so now they're out trying to buy media companies that could support them spending five hundred million dollars of ad budget a year which is huge just substantial i don't know how much money buzz feed makes but i bet you so in it's probably in that ballpark and so let me what you're sad what you're saying is they saw the demand to advertise on black owned media companies there's like there's not enough inventory it's not enough supply so let's just go buy media companies and then turn them black by buying them well right i don't know i don't now right that's what they're now yeah and they're they're black o now it's it's like that's what i mean that's when it's fascinating about it you know and there's like there's nuance in this and i don't entirely understand everything they're doing obviously but that's exactly what it sounds like they did and so they're saying well let's go get some blackout code companies but before we do let's go talk to wp all these other companies and make sure that they're really in and so oh hey look and so they go to blacks stone or some other private equity firm they go hey look we have five hundred million dollars of commitments partner with us to go and buy these five media companies and it's like a guarantee that we're gonna have increased revenue for okay okay now i understand why you love this so much how fascinating is that if they could pull this off so they're in deep talks this is according to ax axiom they're in deep talks to buy muscle which was gonna go public they're in talks to buy a few other media companies and it's just like cram my million is up for grand yeah i fell it i'm already around i'm halfway there how fascinating is this like is this this is this is a cape that's why now you understand why i i called it that they're they're they're seeing opportunity and and i applaud i i they're pounce on only i think it's incredibly fascinating i don't know a whole lot about this but i have heard that there's a a version of this which is like a certain percentage of like government contracts and consulting gigs have to go to minority own businesses and so there's a whole industry of basically like a middle so they go and they win the bid and then there's just sub subcontractors out to the company there's no they themselves don't have like the company that goes and does the thing they just go win the bids and they're like yep because they've fit like a demographic they're like oh yeah i and i think magic johnson does this the basketball player i think i think yeah i heard that this this is like part of like kind of one of his like business strategies or like you know something that's helped his business do well which is that like he wins all these bids because they're one of the few you know minority led businesses and then he doesn't actually it's like wow i didn't know he has a construction company he's like no he doesn't he just then farms out the construction to a sub contractor who does the construction and they they keep their their vague and i was like oh that's also really you know smart but you know a cynical person would would look at it differently dude it's fascinating and i read about this and a friend who had talked to them told me about it and i was like oh that sounds pretty sc and then i started thinking about it and i'm like no that's not ski at all like they're just trying to get theirs and they are playing by the rules of the game and like if you do believe there's injustices they're out there making it right you know they're getting theirs so i i i applaud them and so i think it's really interesting it's it's just if they're able to pull this off it will be very fascinating to me alright i gave you a d now let me give you a quickie so here's the here here's a quick one have you seen the kia car re brand the low dude the k the it's it's looks like k it's supposed to be k n but it looks like k or supposed it's like be k k i a but it looks like k n oh it's it's supposed it's not supposed to be k n no that's the problem it looks like k n and it's supposed to just be k i a but the i and the a are like joined and kinda like sla it whatever it can that's horrible put the picture on screen so this guy ash know we've talked about it before win is his is his handle on twitter he tweeted out he goes the kia logo is so unread that at least thirty thousand people a month are now searching for k n car ever since it debuted and he could go see like search volume go for my flat for k n car to like pretty significant now and and so i have a friend who i've met recently that is i'm gonna get him on the podcast we're gonna do it in an episode with him but he is a master of these light internet arbitrage and he previously had done one like this and somebody we were slack about it in go oh my god is exactly the type of arbitrage you would do he goes that's right up my alley and he and i go so what would you actually do with this information because most of people are just gonna make fun of all the logo sucks move on and he's like so he's done this before so when i when i was talking to was like you're you're super successful now how did you get like wealthy for the first time in in the first place it what was the first successful thing you did he goes it's kinda of embarrassing but like you know back of the day i tried a bunch of stuff that wasn't working and then i just like i went to paradise poker dot com i wanted to play poker and i misspelled paradise i didn't know how i was supposed to it a pair of dice as a paradise with the ads like what what is it he's like i realized that i went to the wrong one i just went to like a dead page and he's like that's crazy i probably bet a lot of people misspelled this so he's like i just bought paradise poker instead of paradise poker and he's like yeah that's all i did and he's like something i had this website was gonna be a bunch of free traffic from google this on the traffic google would before google would auto correct and he's like so i got a bunch of and so he's like i became one of the number one affiliates for paradise poker because i and so he's like so that's why i made my fresh start i was like a kid and i was making you know like tens of thousands of dollars a month just off this is like typo basically and then he's did this many many times i'm gonna have him come on or tell the full story but he did one where tesla was doing a referral program where like if like five people bought a a tesla you from your code you would get a free tesla roadster which is like their a hundred thousand hundred and twenty thousand dollar car and he's like challenge accepted and he like built a site that would immediately became like the top ranking like tesla like whatever like blog or i don't even know what he did i think what he did yeah i think he did one with like that he ended up getting he's like i got a tesla roadster then i you know every day i would like earn a new tesla roadster like hey dad you wanna test the roadster through okay you get the next one i got my brother one and i got another one then my friend got one he's like tesla shut down the whole program i they had to stop the entire marketing program that they've been pushing because like within a month i like village it and was like winning too many free you tesla roadster he goes so bad he's like i like what else give me more and he just has like this endless he's like yeah i'm like haven't paid for uber in like years i was like what because yeah like back when uber had there like you know referral program i i just built a website that was like comparing lyft for uber like like fair est like i built the fair estimate that i would estimate what does it cost to take an uber versus lift right now and from your destination he's like so then and then i would just get lyft credits or uber credits he's like so you know i have like millions uber credits from this side we have to get this guy on just to talk about all these stories he's amazing so so then i asked him i go what would i what would you actually do with this k n thing because i i don't really understand how these work and like i only understand a high level and as he he goes well i would go to someone in fleet sales at kia and a kia dealership and i would make them a deal and if i send them leads i wanna cut of the sales he's like then i would just then i would start ranking for all their newest cars like k n tell ride like instead of kia tell you're right k n tell right twenty twenty three k n this k n that and i was just frank for each of the cars individually and and then i would basically be capturing their intent that you know they this person wants is is interested buying a car and i would sell that lead to to one of the the the fleet sales people hey goes the only problem is that google's auto correct now is is much better and so you would need to find the like terms where it's not being auto correct which like you know whittle down the opportunity here but i was like whose brains are wired like this and it's kind of incredible to me it's not a skill set i've ever had am i friends this guy no damn yeah we gotta have them on i'm interested to hear all these things all these schemes yeah it's one of those things though i'm i'd like you know we've had these situations where we have a dinner with somebody and the conversation is amazing you're like god i wish i could just pushed record this would have been a top five podcast episode ever where you meet them and then we invite them on and and then they're like they like forget all their stories they're like they like you know very very bland and you're like dude come on like you know it's saying the good things that you told me before and like that's my only fear is it was so good did i want the pod to be cool to that i don't want any slippage from that government how'd you how'd you meet them well that's part of the story that i'll tell when he comes on i can't tell that part right now sorry so that's part of the story alright you have yeah i've got one for you have you heard this guy named jared isaac men does that ring a bell dev alright what's my billy week million dollars isn't cool you know what it's cool a billion dollars alright so he's thirty nine years old have you heard of shift four payments no alright so shift pulled four payments it's basically like square but less known so this guy he started it when he was sixteen he dropped out of high school and he worked at a payment processor processing company and it took like a month somebody to get a new credit card he said getting a new credit card back then was like getting a market try to apply through all this paperwork and he's like that's kinda of nonsense so at sixteen years old he convinced his grandpa to give him ten thousand dollars and he goes and he starts a credit card process to get the reader or to get a card to sorry if you if you own a restaurant right or if you own a sandwich shop and you say oh i wanna be able to like collect credit card payments it it was like getting a mortgage it was it was it was very challenging and they didn't really help you set it up and it just was cumbersome but he said well i can make this way better so at sixteen he got ten thousand dollar loan and he starts building this business where he gives people their credit card processing with just one or two pages of an application and one or two days wait and then he gives you the the hardware for free and so it's just he just takes a small per cut of all the dollars that go through it and he builds this company doing that bootstrap it up to like the point where he they're creating they're processing like a billion dollars plus of revenue and so he builds this big thing it's called shift four payments originally it was called united bank card he started it in pennsylvania he was pretty low key but he bootstrap it for fifteen years and sold fifty three percent of the company where he was able to make like two hundred fifty million dollars at a very young age and eventually he takes the company public it's public now and now he's worth like one point five billion dollars at the age of thirty nine very few people talk about them so that in itself is amazing but here's where things get really interesting when he was about twenty six the company's like ten years old he's making some money he's trying to blow off steam so he gets really into taking flying lessons and so he takes flying lessons for like two years and after two years he gets so into it that he says i wanna try and set the world record for the fastest around the world flight in a light jet so basically from new jersey to alaska in sixty one hours he does it and that's like a really big deal and he raises a hundred thousand dollars in charity for and it's like this really big amazing thing and so clearly this guy isaac he's got this like personality of like i go all in on stuff so he gets into a hobby and he like makes it into like a real thing but at the age of twenty eight he starts or sorry at the age of twenty six he sets it up a notch and so he actually forms a crew of people who start doing like shows so you know like fourth the of july you see like an aircraft or like a like a like a flying i don't know what they call it what do they call those things yeah like a air show like an show like he forms a group of people that are doing like acr stuff for like the indie five hundred at nfl games and he other things like that and he turns it into like a small company and he called it the black diamond jet team and it has a a few other retired pilots and so he starts getting embedded in this world and so at the age of twenty eight he starts this thing called wait where where what what's it called it's called drake so it's called drake international he's only twenty eight years old great and he starts this so strong name drake international the name and basically the premise is he starts hanging out with these retired pilots who are part of his is like a little flight show side business and he realized that the air the military at you know post two thousand and eight they're like hurting for money there's a financial crash and they are basically have the way that they would train pilots is they would get people who should be out in the field like doing whatever the air force does they would pull them out to go and train other pilots and that's incredibly inefficient and they lose money on it and they say this isn't sustainable and he goes i see an opportunity and so we search drake international which is a flight instructor school for the air force and so the air force goes to drake and they go hey help us train our pilots and he goes out and he hires tons of retired pilots your retired air force people gives them a job and they now are getting contracts but it takes like four or five years to get their first contract but they get their first ever contract and it's two hundred and eighty million dollars a year or i don't know if it's actually a year a two and eighty million dollar contract sorry over five years and that's the air force paying drake in order to go and train all these pilots and at this point this guy he owns this company called drake and isaac does and they have the world's largest privately is jared isaac sorry jared whatever tomato tomato jared you're awesome regardless of your name at this point now they own the world's largest privately owned owned military tactical jet aircraft so they have the largest collection in the world and this guy he's only thirty nine years old people never talk about them and now he's doing all this other crazy shit like going into space and stuff like this just one of these guys who goes all in on things on totally separate industries totally unknown incredibly fascinating guy wow that is amazing how did you find out about this guy well michael the guy who does our tiktok told me about him and i thought it was crazy fascinating and i wrote a forbes article about it him and thought he was crazy interesting i think he's based out of like pa like and so shit four they basically do like the credit card processing i think for like little caesar's and like ar so it's not like right they're not like the sexiest thing but they kinda kill it it was bootstrap and he's just incredibly fascinating guy so when i read about this person i was like how is this how is this kinda out more well known yeah that's amazing there's a lot of people that are like this like for every elon there's like you know we had brian johnson on that episode i think will have come out by the time this comes out brian johnson is very elon musk very a lot of musk in them right like that guy that guy guys got a lot of musk in them and and you you find this where like the number one person is like you know super well known but then there are like ten other people that are very very similar that are completely under the radar and my favorite move is i go buddy up to those guys because i'm like oh wow you're amazing but also you're not inundated with people trying to get your time and attention and and i find you fascinating so you know i wanna i wanna hang with you and and it's way easier to network with that person then continuing to just email mark cuban you know on loop or email you know on musk or whoever trying to get their attention and tweet at them and you be like they notice me you know notice me please dude and i've met a few of these people there's this other guy greg mercer who i'm friends with in in austin he started a jungle scout and there's a few of these guys that i've met and they have this energy that is another one is brett ad cock who started archer it's like the flying car company before that he started vet which is like a job board basically that he's sold for a hundred million dollars his next company that they're making robots and i've met some of these people and there's a few commonalities that they have one they're incredibly logical but two they're very emotional in the sense of like why are you doing this and they'll say because it's awesome because this is so cool like they just like although they're logical of like well i'm just gonna call this person they're gonna tell me x y and z then i'm gonna go and like deploy this much money and like maybe by year four i think we'll figure it out but if it doesn't work that's okay because then we'll do this and this so like they're pretty logical but they also balance this incredible amount of contagious enthusiasm whenever i'm around them i just feel like good about myself i'm like oh you just make this sound so easy and they're like well it's it is pretty straightforward you just do this this this and i just i'm gonna take a lot of risk but these people like are incredibly you leave them feeling hyped and i don't think if i hung out with elon i don't think i would feel hyped when i left him but there's these other guys that are arguably as smart maybe slightly less successful but still uber successful but i leave them and i feel like oh you're you're quite relatable and i've like caught your your your enthusiasm and so i love these types of people yeah that's a i think that's a good good description of it you know like that they call it the mid wit meme what's that it's that meme where there's a curve and there's like the it's hard to describe a a a meme that's like visual but like okay it's like a bell curve and on one side is like the og and on the other side is like the jedi genius and in the middle is the stressed out anxious sky with like a vain burst through forehead yeah and basically it's like you know there's a you know and and then it's always almost like what's what does the thought process and so like you for in this case it would be like the idiots like rockets are cool or like know jets are awesome and then got the the jet guy is like jets are awesome and then the middle guy is like you know but given getting government contracts is really hard and this isn't like you know like a thousand words spiel about why it's a good idea and a bad idea and it's like all the pros and cons jumbled up together it's over analysis right and i've actually come to believe i was gonna make this kind of a bigger video but i'll say it here and i'll i'll flesh it out later i think most like most of life comes down to that mid with meme that mid with me might be the most insightful meme i've ever seen in my life so much you know let's like for example let's say let's just break it down into something non business let's sit let's pretend you're in a fight with your wife in a fight with your wife you could you know the the middle guy the stress van busting out the forehead type of dude is basically like you but she said this and she always does this and yeah i did say that but what i really meant was right it's looks like this whole thing trying to be right about a situation and then the jedi and the eight eight which else just be like yeah but you know i love it's okay right like and they they move on and they don't they don't fuss with any of the bs that the guy in the the mid midway in the middle does and and i think that all everything is like that i ever everywhere i walk in life i'm just seeing the mid meme i'm like you know you know i've just see it in business i see it in relationships i see it in like parenting i see it in my kids it's like my kids are like this so i'm like oh yeah they figured it out like dogs and kids have it figured out they understand they're like more like the jedi and and or the yogurt in either case like yeah they're they don't have it fully formed but they understand like this is fine i'm gonna do this and have yeah i'm gonna be playful and smile and laugh and it's not that serious right like and that's how i think most adults end up on that middle of bell the bell curve where they're over analyzing everything and thinking through all this shit and you really just wanna be the jedi you just wanna be the jedi like this is awesome or you know we need to like we need to do this right or you know like i'll figure it out right like there are certain like three word kill shots you have when you're when you're operating like the jedi and and that's what that's more how you wanna be do you remember boosted skateboard so ever tell you about when i hung out with him no so years ago remember boosted skateboard it's like a skateboard that was motorized it was like before all the scooters and stuff so it was like a pretty big deal and i remember i met the guy who founded it one time so boosted skateboard it's a skateboard that goes was like thirty miles an hour and i met the guy who started it and i was asking him about his background and i believe he like worked in nasa and like these like really big hard problems and he was like telling me all about his background then he was telling me all about the boosted skateboard and like the science behind it and the mechanics behind it and how it's so interesting and it's actually way more technical and then i remember saying like yeah but like do skateboard he goes no i didn't until i got into this and i was like so you know like why you leave like nasa to do this and he's like because a fast skateboard fucking awesome like he just said like because it's because it's badass ass or something like that i was like yeah yeah yeah you got a good point yeah you're you're correct it is it is in fact awesome and i remember he said that to me and i was like that is just the best answer that is the best answer of like having a guy like telling me all the technical aspects of something and and like how it actually means this this and this and but then just his reason for why he's even started on in the first place wasn't passion it wasn't anything else or wasn't to make money it was just because it's dope and i remember thinking you're my hero yeah and if you look at what like the stuff that elon does i think it's very similar right it's like you know whether it's like the need based one where it's like yeah we're gonna need another planet right like yeah we're we'll use this one this one will be done and we're gonna need another one right that's like the the impetus for like you know a spacex type of company or it's like you because it'd be awesome to like go to mars so i'm gonna like i'm gonna trying to do that period it's just the best end of just end of end of reasoning end of justification end of analysis right like you could just start with that or it's like same thing with electric cars it's like yeah like because your cars car should be electric it's better for the environment period not like oh do you know no no car companies been sorted in a hundred years and manufacturing is totally different than software it's it's it's completely different ballgame game and you know financing is gonna be tough and then you know the batteries are it's like yeah you could analyze everything but like at the end of the day and same thing with like you know as much as i find elon obnoxious i think he truly does do the mid meme where he's like you know twitter it's like twitter should be awesome and it's not like that's basically his things like twitter's is awesome in spite of everything being bad about it right like they're doing dumb things but like twitter's kind of awesome even still twitter should be really awesome dude the the best example of this is like when he was talking about like i don't remember exactly but it was like the the his spacex acts and like the rockets and like wait a minute you're telling me that it's not gonna like fall from a parachute it's literally gonna go up and just right back down he's like you know when someone's like why he's like us it's cheaper yeah yeah we need to be able to reuse them yeah he's like we we you know we can't just like have this land in the ocean like we gotta like go and reuse it so so we're just gonna have it go up and then just come right back down to where it is like we'll we'll figure out how to do that and that it can be done right okay yeah if it can be done then then we'll do it yeah alright like i i remember he he says that like if it's not against the laws of physics then we go for it if it's a gets a lot of physics we don't do it i thought that was great but anyway this guy the basic guy was interesting but yeah this what what's this name jared isaac we call them isaac i'm here the bi my boy isaac this is guy's awesome i love jared isaac man not isaac son so i'm dude jared if this gets to you i hope it does i'm i'm sorry i i you know a rose by any other name is that like the phrase it doesn't matter what i'll call you whatever you wanna be called here great in my book we had we gotta to get this guy in the pod right he's awesome but ben's back ben can you say why you were gone i had twins or i did not my wife had twins we are pregnant you you you i remember the day after we finished recording you're like you could just see it all your face like what happens like we just had the ultrasound found out its twins and like the implications of it being too not one i mean that is that's a pretty big fun but also crazy blinds side and i remember you were wearing it on your face that day how does it feel now good yeah i felt like i just seen a go that day but it had and you know it's funny i was at a conference that sam was also at and steph smith comes up to me and was like hey i heard you're having twins i just met this other guy who at this conference who's having twins and you should go talk him so i and talk to him and i was like yeah man so what's it like having twins and when i had my first kid anytime you ask someone what's it like you know having a kid they'd be like oh it's a lot of work but it's great so steph introduces me to this guy and i'm like hey man what's it like having twins and he goes it's horrible like you're you're you're gonna die it's so much work like i don't know how you're gonna make it through i was like oh this guy's kinda crazy i found it's a theme i've talked to multiple people and they've all been like buckle up it's not good you you should dread it it's gonna be awful and my review after like a week and a half of having twins is not that bad alright for anyone out there who's going twins there you go at least the first few weeks not that bad sam what does your thing say only money what does it say oh it's only money alright what's that tell me the story nothing i bought it you know that's just i think that's a good life's motto when you lose a bunch of money it's only money and also when we think about it all the time it's not that important but let me ask you guys a a quick question would you ever consider not naming your child right away like getting to know the baby over six or twelve months at then naming them you know it's like if if i was the california government and then somebody commits a crime here but then they leave and they go to you know china it's like would you consider going and getting them it's like not my jurisdiction that's what's like with with important kids decisions it's not my jurisdiction if i were to my wife and i was like yeah we're crazy she's like nothing thank you next you know you noted we will be moving on now dude i had a friend who didn't name his he named his child legally baby and on the child's one year birthday they named her and i at first i was man think that's crazy just be normal you know just how do they how did they eventually name her so they basically had three envelopes with names that they liked and they laid them out and they let her crawl to one and that's what they named her the one that she crawled to and i was like that's when they explained to me what they're gonna do i was like that's just crazy why would you ever do that and after a while i realized that's actually fantastic that's that's the way to go you know it's kinda weird to name something and i've met another parent that renamed the child that for six months and they're like he just didn't feel like a george we're gonna call bill or something like that and i actually think that's one hundred percent the right way to do things yeah i think it's pretty common i think my mom was named something else and then changed it after like whatever the change after a little bit of time my wife's sister same thing after six months they changed her name she was like having dreams and being like her names not that that's not what it's supposed to be she wouldn't change her name yeah it's kinda crazy i think it's cool my naming philosophy i have come around to a new naming philosophy which is this it's it's a hack for my we we had a boy and a girl for the girl we gave her my mom's middle name and when we told my mom within like five minutes her reaction was well i'm i'm flying out next week like if you need me to stay up past midnight multiple days i'm willing to do it like you could tell there's like a little extra investment of course she's already invested in her grandkids right but like when it was named after her there's like a little extra investment that like clicked on in her brain and when you name them things that are not your parents or grandparents names you're just like leaving money on the table so that's it it's just hilarious just name them after parents or grandparents and get that extra help that's right i think that's that's what you read how to win friends and influence people while you're you know you're at the hospital baller alright that's the episode to you