Greatest Business Of All Time, Psy-Ops As A Service, Work Harder Not Smarter Hack

you sam have you heard the story about how the mormon church has a hundred billion dollar hedge fund yeah and kills my eye yeah that was that that's old right that's from two thousand nineteen or tells twenty nineteen exactly and ben you're ben you are i don't know how to explain it you are mormon you are a a member of this great business you are a a patron of the business that that we described first so far ben have i offended you not yet okay great let's fix that to keep going so you're saying this chair alright we're live dude you're wearing the brightest sweatshirt it's like bothering me almost i'm here and i'm ready to to shine brightly like a diamond rihanna style oh diamonds looks like rihanna halftime outfit a little bit if i just had the belly bump i'd be there some would say i do i i wouldn't say that subway but i wouldn't i had to take the shot before you did there no i'm not gonna i'm not gonna you're you're not chu anymore you're you're strong so you got your shit right bro we i've got a couple things to cover that are pretty good i think you do too yeah i'm luck i'm locked and loaded alright do it what do you it's amazing what not running another business will do to you so much so much time to to work on this podcast okay i wanna tell you about what i think might be the greatest business of all time okay the greatest business ever i think this is the greatest business ever and i'm gonna convince you of that let me let's just walk through the before even tell you which one it is let me walk through the criteria for a business like this okay so if we were gonna describe the greatest business of all time what would be some of the it gotta have attributes what would be some of the attributes so the lt tv high high lt tv so you want a customer around for a long time that pays you for a long time k great what about like let let's say i told you there's a high lt tv business but it's only been around for eighteen months well you'd be like i don't know not not a long operating track track record or history here so you want longevity right you want the longevity years what if i told you this business maybe been around for thousand plus years would love you'd be interested in okay let's say something are you gonna tell me there's tax tax advantages too these this business doesn't pay any taxes okay i love this no taxes how does that sound i like that like it even better if the government would subsidize it that's a big but yeah that sounds good to me i like that company kind his mom had to come back out for this one okay cost structure what have i told you you basically don't employ anybody volunteers do all to work i and there are franchisees essential that pop up to sell your product and just pay you a royalty wouldn't that be quite nice i'd say hallelujah i i love that what if i told you you know you might say well what's the balance sheet you look like okay you've told me the p and l is fantastic but what about the balance sheet well what if i told you that these types of companies have or the this this this product this business has not just billions of dollars but but often tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars and assets on the balance sheet with no liabilities wouldn't that be something you'd be interested in i would be very interested in this yes i i pray to god and i would thank that god that that they gave me this idea you're a product guy you love product it's all love product hair products any product and have product you love it this is a product beloved by millions has insane product market that people use it daily weekly didn't even need an app they could just use it in their head that good even if there's evidence that it it's a bad products if if if somebody said hey there is no proof that this product works they they would not care they would not care they would they were not hear a word of that they would like even more baby in fact in fact it drives them together what if i told you this product spreads by word mouth what if told you that some people would not only teach their kids but they would leave their house go to other people's houses knock on their door and tell them about this product that's how much they believe in this product what if i told you to you're gonna be true core issues their morals their ethics their community their self development what if i told you that the product is so good it not just guarantees you a good life today if you use the product but not but in your afterlife will you die you might go to a nice special place where you'll be happy after you die that's how good this product is internal lt tv i'm in but i told you it touches every part of your life cycle from when you're a baby to when you're old and dead you you how you pay for your funeral and everything in between your marriage you know give away part of your salary to this to this company just because you feel like it and it's part of everything in between if i told you this this company not just sold this product but also had the number one best bestselling book of all time this sounds like the k and blood like a gang but even better be your blood in blood out i love this you love real estate they also own a shit ton a real estate so tons of real estate okay so let's let's review billions in revenue tax free with basically no customer acquisition cost and super super high lt tv it's a product that solves a core needs spreads via word mouth and the people who use it believe it and use it day at day at day to day week to week month they're for it they weren't really for it people run this business with volunteers and franchisees it lasts for a thousand years has network effects it sells an information product there's no manufacturing even involved it's got the number one book of all time and the tam the market size is every human from birth to death how would that sound because religion that is the greatest business of all time and i'm gonna tell you why i got excited about this but how was my rant that was good i i i knew where you're going because i'm i'm you know like i'm born and raised catholic i i i catch your you're stepping in i'm all about that you smell what i'm fart that you know you go on that one quick so i i wanted to to talk about this because there was this news article that came out or like there was like a wave of news about this recently but actually there was like a whistleblower thing in twenty nineteen and ben wilson you're gonna have to come on to talk about this did you sam have you heard the story about how the mormon church has a hundred billion dollar hedge fund yeah and kills my eye yeah that was that that's old right that's from two thousand nineteen or tells twenty nineteen exactly and ben you're ben you are i don't know how to explain it you are mormon you are a a member of this great business you are a a patron of the business that that we described first so far ben have i offended you not yet okay great let's fix that keep going so you're saying this joke second ben what can you explain this hundred billion dollar mega church fund or sorry mormon church fund and what your reaction to it was when this dude broke in twenty nineteen i don't know how deep you want me to get but the the church that you described lottery saints popular known as the mormon church tit it's it's members so we all pay ten percent of our income to the church and but yeah not only that the church also has a number of businesses associated with it has and a lot of this is comes from over a hundred years ago when essentially the mormon church controlled utah so it's spun off a lot of those businesses it it basically doesn't run businesses anymore but what it did was create basically a big a big hedge fund and because of its association with the church that hedge fund does not pay taxes and has done really well and now is worth as you point out over a hundred billion dollars yeah could hedge fund be invested in just public equities as well yeah like can you just do normal wow basically here's here's here's what the here's how the hedge fund works so so it it owns so forty billion worth of us stocks so companies like apple microsoft yeah facebook things like that they can't own stocks that are like caesars entertainment or like starbucks they don't they don't own that because of the caffeine and or whatever so they they they they select some don't they own coca cola i don't think they i don't think that they own microsoft apple facebook they test they made eight million dollars on the games stop squeeze when that was happening so that was pretty cool they also own two percent of all the land in florida which is kind of amazing they they basically grew from forty billion to a hundred billion just from twenty nineteen to to today for or or or sorry front that was from twenty like twelve to twenty nineteen so like in a seven year period it kinda doubled there they also invest in hedge funds they own a hundred million dollar hotel at maui they out bill gates for like two hundred million dollars of land in washington so land stocks hedge funds that's what they do and then they've donated sixty four million dollars to charity since nineteen eighty five so that's kinda where the knock on this comes from which was the the the the complaint was basically wow that's a lot of money but we it's just like why they're homeless when you all got this that's like that and why are we giving ten percent of our income when maybe i actually need that money right if it's going to this massive stockpile and then that's not being red distributed to this and then the the answer was like they called it this is where there's some all time all timer lines i gotta gotta give credit to whoever these people are in in the church that are given these lines out i mean you to say these are the straight face is amazing they go it's a rainy day fund so this hundred hundred billion dollar fund is is a rainy day fund and actually it did start out like that that was the initial intent i believe like in the seventies or something like that when it started it was like alright for every six dollars we get we'll put five towards you know operations and furthering the mission and we'll put one away for for for the rainy day fund but then maybe it it's still rainy day it's just their household now has a hundred or two hundred or however many hundreds of millions people it is instead of whatever it was but there's not that many members i think there's ben how many members so this like sixteen million members or something like that not that ballpark yep yeah not it's not that many members they overall overall they this thing is just sort of balloon up and so that i think they don't know exactly how much members contribute every year some one guy said seven billion in the whistleblower blow report seven billion there's like some historians who think that's too low it's probably closer to thirty billion gets contributed in per year so there there's a there's a bunch of like kind of there's a lack of transparency that's the second complaint because not only was this not openly discussed like that's why a whistleblower had to come out and say hey there's this management company called ensign peak and ensign peak is take getting the money from the mormon church and deploying it and ensign peak now has a hundred billion dollars in a management and they're not being open about this and they said well we didn't want people to know how much money is in there because then they might not feel like contributing so that was the first first line and the second one was like well how come you did it through these like thirteen shell companies so that nobody could track you know what you were investing in and how and you bought this mall and you bought the stock what's going on here they said well we we obscured it because we didn't want our members to try to copy sign peak and maybe they would mis manage their funds not having the same info that we have and so these are just like i just love the the you know the the sort of the rep here between between people that that were running this thing so i thought this was kind of amazing and it was just staggering that they've accumulated this much while from a very small base of of of people and that's why i kind of had this realization oh man religion really is the greatest business ever invented and yeah there's there's five big ones and then they they they sort of dominate in the same with the same sort of they all share these same benefits and and characteristics you're hindi or hindu is that are you nothing i don't i'm not i'm not a believer but yeah like most people in india are hindu and is there no central hub there's no organization you know like catholics or the mormons have like a like a crew you know you don't got an hq i don't think there's as i think it's more decentralized than that so i don't there's no like there's no like the church like there you nobody says that i don't know i don't if that means there's not one or what but there are many many like temples that are sort of like the vatican that get tons of donations and people make the pilgrimage and there's tons of you know s us around that too where like you know we went and you're in line on this mountain to get to the top to see this like statue and then it's like hey hundred bucks cut the line and it's like the the guy who's taking the the the bribe essentially the cut cut money he's like a priest and so they don't even like obscure it's like the guy comes down in his robe and it's just like yeah you're your family your family come here come here we wanna give you a special special treatment you know do you have some something to donate and then you're like yes and then he's like cool cocoa come to come to the front of the line and they found like these guys have gotten raided and they're like these guru and sort of like you know leaders in a of these temples and they have like it's like oh open up your master bedroom and it's just like piles of gold just like yeah yeah just like you know it's a gold storage for facility it always i so i went to catholic school in my whole life so kate eight or okay to twelve and then i went to a a another religious college and at so we used to go to church three times a week catholic mass three times a it was like monday friday sunday for since i was till i was eighteen and every week your mom and dad write at check and they like someone comes around and like collects it right and i remember hearing about this like all powerful god and how smart he is and like you know this guy's the greatest you know he's just he's brilliant you know like forget great at us it like you know we just came from his hip and all this stuff and like we're just magical like like this guy's magical but he's really bad with money you know he he she needs and he needs more of it he needs more of it and he just he can't get enough of this buddy and he's really bad with it and if he loves you but look if you don't give him money you're gonna go to hell where you burn free all eternity forever buddy loves you but he needs fucking money i it like it's fucking god man he's like the worst uncle ever yeah he just needs money come scratch his back he's like hey babe yeah yeah like what you got i'll think that you guys you don't literally just give me change and you got changed i'll think you change you got check i take a check and now you can even vent me and i just remembered being that church every sunday thinking this guy man oh he ain't so good with money but he's all knowing but he but he can't he doesn't know which stocks is short because he cannot figure this out he needs more money there's also another little side thing before we get off this religion tangent ministry brands have ever heard of this pe firm yeah yeah yeah are they the ones who buy software companies for churches yeah they've i brought them up a thirty thirty church related software businesses and it does a hundred million in eb a hundred million essentially a profit before taxes just on this roll up which is kind of amazing i mean it's it's sort of a billion dollar billion dollar church roll up which is church software roll up which is pretty awesome alright i have a story for you well let's stick with scandal and like a negative stuff because i got a good one disclaimer the product of religion genuinely is great it genuinely helps people i'm also just saying that the business of of religion i think is amazing from a pure business point of you and also a little sketchy to me i think the product is amazing and the believers you guys are awesome and ben you're awesome you're you're super awesome and i hope we didn't offend you i i have i you didn't offend me still haven't offended of me but i just like final word on this which is kind of the mormon perspective on our hundred billion dollar hedge fund which is the the leaders of the church so like the profit the possible their salaries got leaked by some people who are disconnected members of the church term yeah who want to make them look bad tell me more what you got you guys wanna know what you guys wanna guess what the salaries were three hundred thousand that's pretty good those i would have guessed two hundred two hundred close a hundred seventy i well i am i believe there was a hundred seventy thousand dollars a year and they get like a a car which is usually like a toyota highlander and a highlander that's a that's like the so specific there's like pious that's like i thought like they've just decided don't know they just own a bunch of toyota there's no cup holders can't put soda i can't put out in it my dad was one of these people who who was getting this he was a a clergy so he you know he's a stanford nba was making a bunch of money they asked him would you come work for the church so he takes you know like a ninety percent pay cut and goes and makes this and he had a he's driving around to this is my point toyota highlander just like very middle class and so the point is no one's getting richer off of this even the people who manage the hedge fund kinda get paid below market rates right they can get paid fine they get paid well but less than they would make at other big hedge funds that are doing equally well that we know of because because with the catholic thing it's a little bit different right the catholics on the catholic side it was like oh this whatever bishop took seventeen private jet rides last year and that's there yeah there was like a bunch of things like that so so maybe in this case it wasn't or maybe it was more obscured where the benefits come from and not just so obviously on payroll like but but i know that with other religions that also have a big balance sheet also have huge revenues and and tax exempt status the perks or or were sort of substantial but this is why it seems like it's a bigger controversy outside of the mormon church and within it a lot of people like myself or we hear about it we're like well i wish it was two hundred billion you know like doesn't bother us that the church is low doubling down on it yeah it takes twenty percent of my income dude well not everybody i one guy sue you know one guy famously suing them he for five like i want all my tit money back because i was basically under the impression this was going to help people or like expand the church did didn't get it and was sued for five million dollars and i don't know if that's been resolved yet let let me let me tell you another interesting the controversial story so we talk about software as a service we've talked about saas we talked about a few other type of as service products i'm gonna talk to you about sci as a service meaning psychological warfare so this story i'm basically my researcher here he he's around here on the on the yu eugene he's here on the riverside so he might have to pop in if i get something wrong but i found this article that blew my mind and was totally under underpaid and i thought not talked about enough so i'm gonna be rec recast a bunch of the story so nothing here is crazy original but we found a bunch of articles that we kinda tied together so basically this starts in the summer of two thousand twenty two and a bunch of journalists from all different newspapers kinda teamed up to to to write the story but it basically is a they went undercover and they found this company it's called team it's it's pronounced i actually don't know how it's pronounced but it's j o r e so maybe jorge hey i'm gonna call it team george like george like george mo at all but we're gonna call it team george but it's team george and it's this israeli company that does si ups as a service and so what that means is you can give them one to ten million dollars and they'll basically hacks stuff for you and this company it's based in israel they have employees this isn't like like the guy who runs it has a linkedin this isn't like a a criminal enterprise necessarily this is like a legitimate company and i wanna tell you this crazy story so it starts off they're a private they call themselves a private intelligent agencies they charge anywhere from fifty thousand a hacks someone's phone four hundred thousand dollars to have their services on retainer six million dollars to get involved with a an election to sand six million to metal in an election this is hilarious if that's on the menu dude and the guy gives like these crazy stories so the guy's name his the named is tal han so he's the guy he's like the ceo of the founder and he does this like crazy stuff and so basically their their three set part process is to gather intelligence construct a narrative and then deploy maximum impact all wonderful phrases and so i'm gonna give you an example so this guy tell he's the head of team george he's in kenya with these journalists who he thinks work for an african government who wants to hire them to do some work and at the seminar or at the meeting where he's pitching his services he shows his phone tal shows his phone and he's talking to a person who's supposed to be in an an african government consultant or something like that and he goes here check us out i just sent your mom a few messages from your telegram account and the guy's like why i goes yeah here's my phone look i'm logged in into your account i hacked you already and and so they do these crazy things where they offer these ridiculous services so they do they have this tool called a profile of which is can it can create all these different fake social media accounts and so what they'll do is they'll figure out what what story they wanna con like who they wanna hurt what story they wanna construct and then they use these fake social media profiles to make it really popular and they have something like i think it was like fifty or six or sorry thirty nine thousand of these profiles out there and so here's like a handful of crazy stories so here's a a couple of examples so the claim that the team claimed to have a sex toy delivered via amazon to the home of a politician with the aim of giving his wife the false impression that he was having an affair thank you my love it was a wonderful night waiting for you whenever you come back write a note inside the box the wife received the package and then the team george they sent a film true to film this and they found the politician sleeping in his office for the next two days and they found out who the sender was it was this woman named shannon and i think she's one of their fake avatars and they found out who she was and she's active on twitter and on facebook and has a gmail account and whatsapp account but i don't believe this one real and her amazon card was connected to a digital wallet so they could like track all of this and so that's like an example of the things that they do another thing that they do is to prove the journalist to prove how powerful these guys are do you know who a emmanuel the em is do you know who that is heard of that person no who's right so there's this tiktok this lady who's got a tiktok and she's wonderful i i followed her forever and she has an emo you know what in emo is like an ostrich looking thing yeah like a pet that went viral and tiktok and she talks to the and his name a manual well the journalist asked team george to make it go viral that emmanuel was dead and so overnight they did that by way start really weird request by the journalist what the hell hell were they i don't know it's just weird they're strange choice makes zero sense and it got to the point was where this woman who owns emmanuel the em who i follow i love her though that's why i found those articles i saw the story where they're talking about it emmanuel the em i've love a emmanuel i know about them i i own an emmanuel the emo t shirt and they i've thrilled and they like she tweeted today i saw online that rip i ip emmanuel the em was trending on twitter so i just wanna let you know i had i ran outside to check what was going on he's totally fine i have no idea why this happened right at this company they like create all these crazy stories while they'll be like hey you know one one company will be like hey the ceo of this billion dollar company we need a we need something bad to happen to then find some dirt in their past and what they'll do is they'll hack in to a person's gmail or google drive using that they'll find passwords to all these other things and they'll create these crazy stories then they'll use their network of twenty or thirty or fifty thousand fake social media profiles to share all this stuff and then they'll also bribe some journalists or create fake blogs where they'll write these stories and then the avatars or social media profiles share that stuff crazy fascinating and i read this article and it blew my mind it absolutely blew my mind yeah this is really really wild and the you know sci ups i thought was like when you use like the social media thing or articles to influence somebody's beliefs not just like but like hacking their phone is sort of different so so it's interesting that they do both i have a couple quick reactions number one prices seem really low i feel like they can seem low yeah team george triple your prices this is this is small boy still for what your what your the value you're providing that means it's only six million dollars to metal in an election that's it like you you know i've taken shit's bigger than that come on look what's going on here so so i don't really understand their pricing fifty thousand to hack into a phone you know much chaos you can calls by hack does someone's phone that that seems wild so i think that's crazy good find that this business exists that's my second reaction and my third is this kind of lines up i think i've i feel like this is a thing on social media that peep that you sound like a conspiracy theorist if you bring it up but it's clearly gonna have it clearly happens and it makes total sense that this would happen i also know that this happens in the like non election you know this is basically also done for influencer marketing right like we like what like we've talked about my buddy steve bartlett and how he used to own a huge number of twitter pages and he would own pages that had nothing to do with anything he'd be like you know hermione favorite books it's like some harry potter fan page and they would have like freshman problems they would own that page and like things i overheard in manchester they would they own that so they own a bunch of things that if you were like a fourteen to twenty one year old in the united kingdom you followed probably you know four to eight of their accounts and so what they would do was when we wanted our app to go to to grow and to our goal was to to go get a bunch of downloads for cheap we worked with him and i was like alright steve what can we do to grow this he's like well we can use my network and i was like great so just say you know hey this is a great app download it you know blah blah here's the link and he's like just looked at me like okay you know get out of here get out of the room dad like you know don't you don't understand and he was like yeah we're not gonna say this is a great app because nobody cares and that looks like an ad we're gonna say like my mom's reaction when she sees me checking be for the forty third time that day and then it's mom slapping a i kid i was like well i don't think that's a good image for a new app and he's like no he's like do that and then be like you know when i you know when i you know my notifications blown up because of this annoying effing be app as shows forty seven notification like but you're calling it annoying that seems bad right steve he's like no when somebody sees that there's an app that it's forty seven notifications they wanna know what it is and that you're complaining about it makes it look like not an ad and i was like but then where are you gonna find the link he's like i put the name bib and the thing they'll go they're gonna look for it and he's like then they'll search for it and then they'll find it and then they'll share it because they saw seven he's like when you hear five people talking about something on social media the same thing in a day that you hadn't heard about it feels like everybody's talking about it and that was his core insight we called this the thunder clap and we did it and we ranked number one in the story all collapse thunder clap is like the name of going getting popular yeah that's what we called when when all the accounts start talking about it at the same time that that's great same day yeah thunder clap see who made that up you make that up well i used to say that when like you know it's yeah you if your thighs get together or something like that yeah it's under cloud i just decided to reuse it for a better purpose now so from when your thighs get together mess around no i we made it up but i think it is actually a social media term i remember looking it up because i was like oh this is genius what do you call it when all the accounts on the same day just flip on and start organically talking about something like what is that and as some other person had made that up so i i stole that name off them but basically that's what that's what these guys were able to do and he used to and we've talked about this before so i'm repeating a story here but like he gave a talk once on stage and goes watch this this is you know whatever i've made up a name like freddie d freddie d yeah he puts him on he puts a slide on the screen of him wearing like an you know a manchester united uniform he goes freddie d just signed to manchester united for seventy two million dollars one of the craziest contracts for a prospect is only seventeen years old oh but the thing is freddie d doesn't exist and he never signed a contract but watch this we're gonna make this go viral just by the end of my talk this will be trending on twitter and oh my god like nod into like you know one of the like nineteen year olds that worked for him off stage because you like like launched the missile and that's exactly what they did by the end of the thing it was trending real like you know sort of like espn type news sites started picking it up like for db sides for seventy to two million because like they're all trying to find information on it but they just published first because they don't wanna be late to the news and it just showed how much influence you could have and so this happens i think from a commercial for like you know just in the business world plus in this case for like you know political power shit that's wild what a badass ass presentation i know you're that's like that's a really good presentation i mean that's so why you're like the swag knob is broken it's stuck on twelve there's nothing you could do we've tried to take them into the shop the hustle we now are read by about three million people a day so we're not a big deal and we're definitely not like influential enough that one of these companies would be like let's get that company to influence the masses but and like same with this podcast like we're not you were not a big enough deal or we're a target where someone's gonna or early least i think so where someone's gonna trick them into saying this because then they're gonna like actually have influence over the outcome of whatever we want we'll we'll make your analytics guy say what happened today but that's it yeah know yeah that was going crazy yeah like it might be a little bit of note on like your spread your spreadsheet for that day but that's the at at best that's it and but like i would see a little bit of this like fake new stuff because i would do little tests where i would create like you know so my parents do this all the time they'll look up a celebrity and they'll say oh nick cannon only worth eight million dollars that's not is that even a big deal and i'm like you guys like and like they weren't even like click the article sometimes they just see like the paragraph text and and i'm like or they'll be like their day today or this past weekend i was with my father law and he's like oh look if you google it it says the worst way to sleep is on your belly and it's like because we talking about the one back answer yeah yeah i'm like you guys realize like how like anyone can write these articles and i can make them show up and so i used to write these articles about net worth so like ross the silk road guy i would write an article about net worth i would just fucking make it up but i have no idea what it is i was just make it up and i would track my analytics and people would start linking to it and i would start getting traffic and that happened a lot of times or there'd be times where i made errors in articles and i noticed i would see that same air in on a few other people's websites and you start seeing wow this is how it starts like these little things how it starts and so this whole fake news conspiracy it's one of the few things where i'm like no there's actually truth to that like and i have very small examples of that but if you're like a much bigger deal you can find lots of bigger examples of that it's actually this whole fake news thing is it is one hundred percent real and so this story is definitely proof of that dude as soon as you see how the sausage is made in any industry it just really ruins it for you i remember when we doing our restaurant startup up we were like dude we don't know anything about restaurants like how does a restaurant even work like this is like what are we doing and we had learned a little bit about sushi because we just restaurant but i was like dan who's my our our business partner i was like my off fish seems like the best the best platform to learn by the way yeah yeah exactly exactly of my favorite sport russian ro yeah so we're were like dan go work at noodles and company and go learn their like process stuff and he's like alright so dan graduate this duke graduate goes applies for a job at noodles a company they're like wow son you you intern at goldman accent now you're here he's like always been a dream to be on the back line and they this they whatever and so he used to bring home noodles and company every night and we were like dude what's so he's like he's like brother the way they make this the way that he's like the amount of salt in this and he of this like this guy that worked this guy who barely spoke english that worked back in you know like a line cook with him and dan was like eating the tomato soup and because he's like i'm gonna eat he's like i wanna get like super fat i i guess just have the soup so he's like put the soup at a bowl at the guy just like knocked it out of his head go no don't the soup too much all jeez he's like he showed him like when they make it just like take us selfie and just it's like is it measured in grams no it's measured in seconds what do you mean second it's like how long do you hold the the the lid with can affect down pouring salt there's like seventeen seconds worth of salt and so here's used to tell us like dude don't eat the shit and that's how i feel about everything like when we sold the milk road to mike and kendall these guys are they come from an affiliate marketing background and so what they do is they make websites that are like news or blog sites that rank at the top of google and they're the authoritative example like they were doing it for gold buying gold online and so they were like gonna should i buy gold or the price of gold over time should i buy gold coins or bars and so whatever question you would ask they wanted to be the number one result the other guy did it in for for sports betting so it would be like you know is it legal to gamble in the state or like you know what's the best place what's the best place what's the safest place to do x and so they're good at at during this time google so as i met them and i was like okay so who else does things like that since like dude have you ever googled anything like every top result in google is the same model like oh you you're worried about that whatever like that that thing on your elbow yeah google that oh you found health fine cool yeah health fine it seems like a great website right it's super helpful for you you're making a medical kinda decision on whether to worry about this or not off health online an seo company yeah red ventures red it's like oh this rolled back up to red ventures and so does this credit card website and so does this other thing you wanna know what's the best credit card don't google it you wanna know what what's going on with the health don't google it because not only is their model that they're just gonna write whatever's is gonna rank and then when they rank they're gonna promote whatever they get paid on as an affiliate and they'll try to say no no no we just say that what's the best now if they happen to be an affiliate they happen to be an affiliate but we don't let that affect our editorial rent yeah right bullshit that's how you make your money you're going to promote the things that'll pay you a bunch of money and so we used to have like a tv in our office the person who had the most page use that day like things like that so it's like what does that make the writers room do oh you bet page page yeah get more page like i don't thirty thing like i don't think there's a malicious intent it's just a natural incentive is all on i'm which is that if your natural incentives is that one company does not offer you an affiliate deal and the other one does you're probably not gonna put the one that doesn't give you the affiliate deal as the number one best choice you might put it as number four right and so the editorial thing has been slightly sm with that as so you see this with with everything and then you're like okay cool who's writing these articles must be like you guys have all these doctors on staff or not a chance that's an seo specialist in up upwork yeah exactly you know this is jorge hey and you know he is the guy writing our best articles and know we pay him nineteen dollars per day they don't i'm just making all these numbers up but like you get the idea this is like it's basically what ranks in google if somebody who understands how to rank in google which is not the same thing it's person has the right answer once you see how the how the content gets made once you see how the tomato soup gets made and noodles as the company you become very you know suspicious or skeptical of of things yeah which has you know pros and cons i would say alright well sorry everyone so what do you got next topic what else do you wanna shit on okay let's do a quick one and then i have a have another one i put this thing in here the works smarter not harder hack i sent that to you you said this okay this is amazing explain what this is so no you explained you well we just need to like send this this i i said this to the group chat because i thought it was hilarious this is this one really funny a guy at bar stool basically it's a guy who works at bar stool or sorry bart re retweeted this but the there's kind of an ad so there's a a tweet we will will play it in the in the youtube video if you see it but like basically there's a guy who goes out to like a party and he's just looks like he he he's wearing no shirt he's like in miami somewhere it looks like and it looks like he's live streaming and so he goes over to this girl she's like no way fifty thousand people are watching this oh my god and then he's like yeah what's up guys over oh they wanna know what well you what's the craziest place you ever a she's like she's like panic it because fifty thousand people are watching she's like how are you so famous yeah and he just like doesn't answer something like and then he just does it's a montage of a bunch of people reacting he's like going into the club and he's like yeah up y'all we're at this place and the guy's like hey go ahead vip and so basically it's all fake it's just a fake live stream c screen and so it just looks like you're live it looks like you're on ig g live it'll say live it'll show fifty thousand people are watching this the comments are flooding and you look like you're some sort of celebrity but it's that's all the app does it's called parallel live i think it's a real app by the way it's real i'm on it right now yeah by big brains it's llc work harder or sorry it work smarter not harder yeah it's like everything i try not to get jealous anymore but i'm jealous i didn't think of this app to be honest with you because by the way i did this when i was younger we did a a a version of this that made sense back in the day where we paid a guy to walk around with a camera behind us like we were on a reality shit like an on the shoulder camera and we were like dude i bet you like you know we won't need to do anything tonight you know we don't need to pay for stuff we don't need to approach people we don't need to wait in line watch and it it's sure sure enough it played out completely that way and so i i i was sort of on this idea you know more than a fifteen years ago now and i think this is so smart what a great idea people dude my best friend neville so you can google this so neville med med so n e d h o r a so neville one year during south by southwest so neville indian but he's from wherever part of india he's from he looks persian so one year he he wore like a like these stereotypical things that you see in the middle east where it's like a white you know like what do they call that i a white gown with like a yeah yeah with like a head cap thing and he basically looked he's like i'm gonna look like a middle eastern prince like that's my goal tonight and his other friend i think it was noah and a few other guys wore black suits and he said they walked around south they walked around in the evening on south by southwest and he goes we got in everywhere they thought i was from the middle east and i had like i was a king or brandon said and i had people coming up for me up to me constantly and like yeah it's for noah with like whisper new girls ear like hey this man wants to speak to you and they like kept up the shit going for a while and if you google it you'll be able to find it but dude this happen these types of prank are my are my favorite what's the what's the play the clip sometimes you just wanted do hood ratchet shit with your friends but i wanted to do whoever stuff from my friend and that's what that's what this is this is a app that lets you do hood rat shit with your friends parallel live genius big brains ls llc i went looked at what other apps they've made there's one thing called a relationship one right a relationship tracker and it's got seventeen ratings and two stars you know the this is you can almost see the the development of an entrepreneur or go to their app store and it's like starts with like productivity app to do list you know bus tracker so to be more efficient oh something that helps you save your you know your favorite memories with your family and then it starts to become like hot or not hey livestream simulator get late tonight yeah yeah exactly so you know that's like it's like eventually you stop selling what you want people to do and you start selling what people wanna do i can find this client in full 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 are doing databases hubspot grow better alright let's do one more thing what do you got yeah more i had a fun meeting i wanna tell you a little bit about so i went and met up with james career who is an internet og i know this guy i like him he runs something called n now which is a big fund like a they have like a billion he's at one point two billion under management or something like that oh i don't know that so it's grown grown a lot back in the day he started a company called tickle here's another example of you start by doing what you think you should do and then you at the end you give people what they actually want so tickle started off doing cycle like site quizzes so it'd be like you know i forgot what's that thing called briggs myers and myers briggs or whatever that and i think it originally for like which jobs are you built for or something that things like it was like trying to like help you figure out what you should quit career you should do blah blah blah and then the thing that went viral was what dog breed are you when you take a crazy it's like you're husky and you're like that's so cute i'm gonna tell all my friends about this and went super viral and then they started making more and more silly quizzes eventually they sell a thing for for about a hundred million dollars to to monster but or kinda like a good a great win in the early internet days and then they did a bunch of other things so they've and they kind of like it invented a little bit of the of the internet morality if i remember correctly your old boss michael worked with them and i think like rick marin was there too who rick marin now owns what's the gay dating app that went public grind rick marin rick mar owns that yeah well he owns he didn't started it no he didn't start it but rick mar owns or founded the pe firm that eventually bought grind and i think that either took it public or they sold it to someone and it went public something like that but it was like a a pretty big yeah yeah yeah so these guys are all about they've been doing this from the beginning and if i remember correctly like they invented little things that we like take for granted today or things that don't even work anymore like for example enter in your gmail here and we'll email all of your friends to ask if they also wanna join along this thing and they grew that way yeah they they basically were like kind of they were early to the viral game and so they bought mike so michael birch was my former boss and then investor they bought his first social network ringo and what michael the way michael described it to me was he's like i built the social networking thing it grew like three hundred thousand users which is like really big at that time in the internet like that was like a big internet like it was a call so much money to run it pre facebook didn't know what to do with it didn't know nobody thought social networking was gonna be a like a money making thing it seem like a kind time waste he's like so they offered a couple million bucks i i sold it i worked at tickle for like nine months or something like that and then i i was like you know i learned a bunch of things through sitting in an office with these really smart people and when my earn out was done or my my my non compete was done i went and i was like now i know how to do this right and he built be which got a million members in nine days using everything he had learned during that period and ended up selling for eight hundred and fifty million dollars and so yeah they kind of were were all this cluster of people that were doing the early address book imports and how to measure viral vitality with a k factor that sort of thing so i go meet with james and what was the premise of the meeting so the premise of the meeting was just ketchup up so he knew that i sold the milk road he was like you know what do you think about doing next and i was like i'm not sure let's let's chat so he invites me down to palo alto and so it could've have been a zoom but i was like no no sean leaving in the house today let's go meet belly deb belly here and and and i i think it's it's gonna be worth it totally was totally was worth it so i go down there first thing i noticed was like his office is right on like whatever like university ave or whatever that is in in palo alto where it's like everything is there it's like right in the middle so i i just kinda noted that observation i was like that's interesting that he like made that choice could've have been somewhere else bd d e that's that's big day energy second thing was the one's really gonna be in the office but like he was there and i think other people may be working remote so we sit down we we started chatting and i wanted to give you some of my notes from from this thing so the first thing is he's he i have you ever met before yeah he's like a he's he's really nice and can have a conversation but he's like a quirky not quite i wouldn't use the word eccentric but he's just like loves this network density stuff it's like shit sharing stuff i don't know it means very academic most about it he yeah personally wise he's got a great vibe like he's very light hearted and warms off too seriously like you know i i even wrote i i emailed him afterwards which is a little life hack by the way email them afterwards i was like here's my notes from the meeting people don't usually do that they don't hey they don't even take notes but like if they do they keep it to themselves but if you actually send the person the notes they really appreciate it and it it's almost like it's a double meeting and then he'll let it so he sent me like a revision of one thing so here's my can i read you my my takeaways from from the meeting i ago here's here's my my notes five big takeaways i like your lifestyle so i learned something great compliment too by the way yeah i go i like the i like your lifestyle i like how you've used your financial freedom so he said he spends four months a year with his kids so like just four months out of the year he's with his kids they travel they do if companies he's like dude that's the max your kids will wanna be around you it's like i i have teenage kids like that is i'm pushing the boundary of like how much i can match four months and one turns like summertime per year yeah no no like steps spread out okay probably a couple in the summer and then whatever the rest he's writing a tv show for fun right now and i was like like that wanna do things like that i think that's dope that you have a life that lets you do that noted because i'm he's fifty five i think and i'm thirty five and so you know i'm basically looking at like i'm always hunting for blueprints like who's got go lifestyle and not their whole blueprint but like part of their we're i'm i i wanna cherry tickets like costco wanna i go around and sample different people and then be like oh i like that i like the way that sam has his ranch and how he does things and his i like your home gym for example i went to your your place in austin your home gym was awesome and then i came home and i was like sam what'd you use for the floor what you buy for this how do you get the leaves what do you do this and you gave me the thing and i recreated that in you know with a ten percent change in my how's going is it awesome oh dude it's amazing yeah and so like good that's that was what i stole from you and then i get you get the cordless leaf blower the leaf blower dope it's also a great party trick by the way if people are just like if people people love it but it's super effective it's way but way easier it than sweeping so so anyways i was like i like your lifestyle for these reasons i i told him a bunch of stuff then i go then i go the second good thing he told me he goes i think i could say this let me let me try to say this without causing any a rough night feathers here so he's like where do he's like where do you wanna land in the the status game so he's like okay so he draws this like line on the board he goes one side of the spectrum you have like let's say gary v or like five hundred startups or like he's like you know think about like people who go for a like a mass market like tony robbins they try to reach like a mass market type of individual with their content and and then that becomes their audience that becomes their deal flow they so you know if if a really popular person sends me like oh here's a startup up i got pitched i'm like he's like i kinda know where that's gonna be in the quality filter versus if sequoia or benchmark sends me a deal like i know where that is in the quality filter that's on the other end of the spectrum they have a much more niche audience they're only creating like n he creates really niche content that's for like an a plus founder who's trying to build a billion dollar company using network effects and the so is you're referring to ana the blog or n their customer base or both or like the blog is to attract a certain type of founder he doesn't need a million hits on a video he needs like the right hundred people to read the thing right so that they think about nfl and they they've learned from and so he's like we're on this you're you're making content but who's your customer are you more like mcdonald's or you know we're like a say a michelin star restaurant they're like mcdonald's you know we're not gonna get the volume that they get but they're not gonna get the the quality of clientele we get you know so we're he's like today m m he's like he's in he's it's in the middle here he's like and my advice to you is don't slide down that way he's like because today i like you guys and i tell people to listen to you guys because you're like you keep it real when it comes to entrepreneurship like a you guys are real entrepreneurs you've done it before b you just tell it like it is c you don't talk about the most like complex subject i'm just you like simple businesses and and and you know more achievable business models for most people but you're not yelling at them to hustle harder you're not just hustle porn that's just saying like get bro you need to grind and like you need to do whatever and then motivational because we try to be motivational and we're not promoting paths that are like you know drop shipping and like you know flipping things on ebay or whatever like you know there's a a a type business class there we're neither nor are we saying like enterprise saas isn't like the main thing we talk about either so it's like you know we're somewhere in the middle he's like i think you should stay in the middle because it'll be tempting to slide there to get more views but i don't think that's what you're gonna want in the end because that will be the network you create those would be the people you get those would be the people who like you those would be the people you meet and so you will your your content will define which network you're a part of today you're here you can kinda go either way you should either stay there move up market but like he's said like my my my advice to you is don't don't slide down market there so i thought that was interesting nobody really talked about that and there's also like you know i had gone through this exercise recently where it was like defining kinda like your brand like who you talk to who who's your customer and who who do you who you like to create content for and initially the thing i thought about was like usually it's like oh you know i'm all about entrepreneurship i'm all about starting on business and that's what i did and that's what i like there's many different flavors of that there's like tech startups ups like more like yc there's stuff like starting an agency there's different stuff in between and then there's some people who are like they cater to a market of people that are like kind of like entrepreneurs only so it's like quit your dying to five job don't be a slave to the cubicle get out there and be your own boss type of messaging and i'm like i don't feel like the people who listen to us are mostly in that category like i think the people who talked often are like second time founders they're people who are they own small businesses or they they're actually planning to take shots and they're not like they already have made the decision of like i'm not gonna like struggle this nine to five i don't you know i think it's derek queen worker that's our main like kinda of personal listen so it was just like interesting to hear that okay here's the last thing that i think is two two last things one partnership advice so him and his buddy stand have been partners for i think like twenty years now yeah forever and i had talked to stan before i met james and i asked him i go hey i wanna have a business partnership that's like yours like a business marriage not just a partner like your thing is like multi decades there's no end in sight and it's been great and you guys have had multiple successes with the same people what's the secret and normally when you ask somebody this like the odds of them actually saying something insightful or very very low but you can tell like how good they are that off the cuff he's like there's four things you need to know he tells me that people he tells me the four things and i'm like whoa one are these four things i so here's what he told me he goes he goes most relationships are both sides are focused on what they're getting out of it he goes you're he goes the first thing if you want this to work is you make it a giving contest i go giving contest he goes yeah he goes when we sold our first company james own ninety percent of it or something like that eighty ninety percent and he owned stand on like ten percent or twenty percent and right before the deal closed james like even up the the thing and he's was on hill what he's like no no don't need to do that because james had a i think some financial success right before that or something and so he's like no that's not right and james was like no this is this is right and he's like in a moment where everybody would have been selfish he had every right to just keep the deal exactly as is i'm i'm more of a gift basket type of guy dude and i've i've i've kind of done it both ways so it's not about like you don't have to just make everything fifty fifty i don't think that's the right answer but i think making sure everybody's taken care of is an important thing when we sold be the first time or when i still be able to twitch i own double the equity that my c founder fe and so on paper i should've got double what he got and as we're getting close to the deal i told him i said hey we're gonna get the same like whatever that total pool is we're just gonna split that fifty fifty of what we get out of them between me and you because you know that's what felt right to me and you know i was like this is i think this is the worst this before fe con had was this before app app love and sold no that's all but then actually so wow and so for those you don't know sean's partner helped found app eleven which varies in market cap between twenty and forty and fifty billion dollars it's like a huge thing and so you still i mean he had a that that's probably a home run for him financially the the app eleven yeah yeah i mean the level of things way bigger for him than than our deal was and we knew like he was gonna be wealthy from that so you know it wasn't i i don't know like i just felt failures i think and what i the it was actually it wasn't like dude i'm gonna make it so that we're even that's that's not really the mentality it was i the original deal was not fair and so i just wanted to correct it like when he joined the company he had like point five percent of equity or something like and so i had already up and once up and twice something i've been upping him without him asking anyways just because i was like this first deal was wrong so now i just try to cut the right deal up upfront so you don't have to do that anymore but like the point is like you try to do what i what is actually right so anyways so that was the first lesson from stan was like he's like i never feel like he's like i basically feel like we are both trying to give more and that's not about equity only like it's like effort like he's gonna do something i wanna do more he's gonna you know try to like you know sacrifice make some sacrifice i wanna sacrifice the same amount or more let's turn it into a giving contest that was less than one he goes lesson than two when you disagree or you fight which is gonna happen a lot you have to decide which way do go do we go my way or do we go your way don't use logic use the sleep test so he's like i ask who cares who is more emotionally invested in this in this decision because if i if we go with my way but you were more emotionally invested you're not gonna be able to sleep at night and if i turn out to be wrong it's gonna really hurt you if i'm a little less emotionally invested in this let's go your way and we agree that we'll just you know we'll we'll pivot if we need to you know later and he's like when it's really like just a deadlock deadline that's how we resolve the deadlock is who's not gonna be able to sleep at night yeah all about this thing and when you have that attitude you know both sides end up trying to compromise versus trying to get their way three he goes i think in twenty year increments so if i'm gonna work with this person for twenty years what decision would i make today that's gonna be the best in a twenty year time period versus how most operate is they just make a decision today about what's good today and then the future consequences may not be that good but they're thinking short term whereas if for if we plan for this to be long term we're gonna make different decisions today to set ourselves up for long term success so that's number three he goes number four the last thing i go i go i i asked him i go go okay that's the partnership stan why why are you great why is z recruiting because he ended up getting recruited by mark zuckerberg to go wrong i know this guy facebook messenger and did he go and actually do that he went it and and he and he they've been trying to get recruit him for like years like seven to ten years and finally he said yes and i go i i asked him two questions i go what what makes you great and what makes that great he goes because i'm not that talented but here's my thing i'm not i he because i don't have the same bias as most people i don't have to be right and like what you mean he goes when i look at data everybody else i find they'd look at data and they just they have a story in their head they want to be true then they look at data and try to find well they keep searching through data until they find something that supports their story it goes i look at data and i ask a simple question what story is this telling me and he goes he goes i just keep doing that and i just make better decisions because i do that because that's my approach to to how i actually read data that's why i can have more business success than what about suck now the z side i i go i what makes that great he said you know he didn't wanna say the obvious things there he's brilliant hardworking like that'd be a pretty b answer again that's how you know the quality of the person they just skip over the blind answer they give you what you want the easy little candy so here's the candy he goes i was sitting with z when he decided to buy whatsapp and everybody said it was way too expensive they bought it for nineteen billion dollars and whatsapp wasn't producing any revenue what's that worth now you think i don't even know hard to say i don't know a lot more though i think more yeah and like the instagram won definitely they bought it from one billion probably worth a hundred now whatsapp that probably double that i'm sorry but what's that probably also a hundred billion dollar franchise so he was trying to decide to do it and he goes you know what's great about you mark you're luck you're smart enough to know that you got lucky once and you found lightning in a bottle with this when social networking was gonna be a thing but you're smart enough to know when somebody else got lucky to and he goes he goes you are smart enough to know that this this messaging thing was like this was the big winner of this era and these guys got it and you need to pay whatever f and price you have to pay to get it because there's only gonna be one the way that there was facebook like there was only gonna be one big winner right and you you know that you don't think you're so genius that you're just gonna out compete everybody and beat everybody and everything like you're you can recognize when somebody else got lucky too and and i thought that was just like a fun answer for her for for the answer that he like work did he like working with stuff you know he's not gonna tell me if he hated it and he but you know the actions speak louder he's been there for for quite a while i think he's i think he just left this year and so i think he was there for like seven years or something so how don't this guy run n nfl labs while working at facebook he didn't he just worked at facebook and he's like came as an adviser and then james was like again no problem go do that take the big fat check i'll run on fx you keep your partnership dude how much does a person like that make at like if you're the head of a facebook person a facebook business are you making over ten million a i have no idea yeah yeah sure you you think so for sure wow i have no i say for sure like i know i don't actually know what he was making but i would be stunned if it was less than ten million a year i think it's probably closer to twenty million a year that's so much money that be much money there are people at this discover as a make forty fifty billion dollars per year like because they had these backgrounds early on and they just stayed their like not the early on type person like they'll get a package in twenty nineteen that at the twenty nineteen prices is gonna pay them twenty to forty million dollars year they're usually like the top ai guy because they're like look this if this top ai guy leaves and goes to another company not only do we lose this talent that's kind of irr replaceable but then google gets them and then you know now they have a problem so like google has published some of these numbers about guys were making like you know thirty forty million dollars a year i wanna have a i don't know if this has to be anonymous or what but i wanna have a conversation with one of these kind of og guys who saw the twitter facebook like some of these companies get created google like get created because you know they're around they're and they're probably only fifty or six years old you know the people who saw google like who are a little bit older when google was getting started i wanna ask them all stories about that and just what's it like being around some of these people and what are some of the stories around when it was getting going like you hear these crazy stories about like i think we i think we had someone on here talk about ebay and they're like i joined ebay when we have fifty people and they were just explaining what like the day to day office life was when you're adding fifty employees a month or fifty employees a week when you're only at fifty people and but i anyway because this type of stuff doesn't it truly exist anymore because the map the playbook for a for a fast growth company is kind of it's not entirely made and there's still companies like uber that are recreating it as they go but like there's a story there and you have a history but if you're a google you're a little bit of a pioneer and you're like i don't know man how do we how do we add bodies to this problem i i don't know but anyway i i wanna get some og geez on to tell those stories yeah that yeah the that would be awesome i've heard i've i've been lucky to hear a couple like the guy who was the my boss at twitch essentially was semi earlier at google so he would be like you know larry says this i talk about larry page like from the google and so like he didn't do it often but like he would say these little things that i would like ask him a million questions about it dude so when my wife my wife sarah worked at facebook from two thousand and i feel f forget exactly maybe thirteen to sixteen and during that time facebook i think she was she joined at like five thousand and then when she left there at like fifty thousand something crazy and during that time z would do these meetings every friday in like an auditor or in a cafeteria on facebook's campus and any employee can could show up and just ask them a question and they would also stream them and every once in a while i would like look over her computer and watch her streaming these conferences and there'd be like fifty or a hundred people in the cafeteria asking questions to z and i'm like sarah you're crazy you should be in that cafe cheer every single friday like this is like being around like john rockefeller or like teddy roosevelt or jfk and like this is like a pretty big deal and if you just ask an interesting question every friday maybe eventually he'll say something like sarah nice to see you again you know like why don't you just come talk to me afterwards and we could help maybe you can work on that product like things like fan fiction yeah i'm like then he'll story with you and then i'm like creating this story in by head of like what can put that julie happen and it never happened to each other in the elevator and he says yeah like you're still right you have like a meat queue in the cafeteria and need like says like nice shoes it's like you already know me like i wanna hang out with maybe i'll follow you on instagram who knows and maybe you're posting bunch your pictures of me i just don't have to like say bobby it i don't know haven't thought the you already but like like i there's all playbook and she didn't do any of it and then said we just had a traditional fawn love marriage and all that boring she's like i'm gonna get yoga class during the all hands yeah we could about a t with zach but no well do dude this is this one of the other things that james was talking about actually like to to kind of actually relate to that he goes i asked him i was like so i asked him about his office i told was like i noted that he was i was why do you have the why'd do you get an office right here he's like i mean it's a no brainer if you he goes he goes i made one mistake when we sold tickle he drew a diagram he goes he drew a circle he goes the diagram guy i like this oh dude if you if i'm gonna meet you in a person we're gonna be on the whiteboard like you know yeah that's what's gonna happen yeah it's going down yeah it's going down at you know i'm a lady in the streets and a freak all the whiteboard and so you know like i'm going a white and and so he's he draws a circle and he's like yeah they'll let's say that he's like the white hot center of silicon valley was like let's say sequoia benchmark these you know these people these founders at that time facebook was just getting started facebook was like the hot center of like where all the action was happening google it goes and then like you know one ring out from that the you know we were kind of like adjacent like we knew a lot of those people like i helped you know i i you know i i advise some people to take jobs there you know i had a job offer there he's like i didn't take it because maybe i had to looked too much ego i thought i was an entrepreneur probably should just just joined facebook it would have been great he's like yeah but we were like one one hop away we were like one one one ring away in this like circle he goes what we should have done is realized that silicon valley is a network and in a network like all the value like a lot of the value concentrates at the core like the closer you are to the center of the network the more value you get physically in many cases as well literally physically which is like what he's like he's like he's like he's like the further you go out the the more you're on your own island he goes we decided to go start our own thing our own lab self funded doing our own startups with new people and like you know doing our own thing and it felt so entrepreneurial to go out on our own terms and build our own island he goes i he goes i could see you making this mistake too because i wish somebody had explained this to me at the time he goes and you see this all the time you know he goes i can't believe people are moving out of the tech people are moving out of the bay area to go live in austin or you know florida or these places you're gonna save thirteen percent on your taxes but make ten times less money like you know that's the trade that they're making they just don't really buy that and he goes when we did this he's when we moved out you know when we decided to go off and kind of do our own not physical not geographically but just like in a philosophically all of a sudden he goes i had a meeting with a meeting schedule with the uber founders because you know they were in our network and our friend was like you should meet with uber guys travis is doing something cool and i had the meeting scheduled but i was so focused oh i'm doing my thing here and i got busy and i had to i canceled the meeting didn't take the meeting miss uber would would've have definitely invested in at that time just because in the network as our friends put us all check you know no big deal but i was so focused on building my own little island i i stopped paying into the network it goes you know similarly i could've took a job at facebook at that time and like you know one of the earliest people at facebook i kinda knew facebook is gonna be a big deal but again had my own thoughts about what i wanted to do so i went the other way and made things harder for myself rather than easier he goes you could see what like the value of the network he goes when facebook started getting popular facebook started in in boston and he goes z was smart and peter t told him the right thing which is get your ass to you know get your ass to silicon valley as fast as possible is the startup up that builds this in silicon valley is gonna have a better shot better high expected value than one that tries to do this on their own in a new talent network you know at a new funding network outside of silicon valley he and and i was asking about yc i go didn't kinda yc he do their own thing he goes no i have the opposite view of yc yc is is fully a network and he goes paul graham did the first one in boston and immediately moved to silicon valley because if he had figured out oh shit this is the blueprint for for investing in early stage startups so that's gonna work whoever does this in silicon valley is gonna be the winner and he goes guess what they moved to silicon valley right away as soon as the first batch was done paul his two little kids they just forget drop everything pick up and move like he's like you it wasn't convenient for them he's like i know the architect that was building their house and you know they they had to get there quickly and that they just rushed it moved in start their second batch in silicon valley because they look at all the other accelerators that copied their exact blueprint the all you know techs stars is the one older bolt every other city and you know they've had like a couple unicorns paul you know has had hundred and it's like you know the difference is like a you know more than a ten x difference in outcome just by being in the center of the network and he goes and i saw so i was was thinking about that i like you know there's a physical location part of that then there's like staying in touch with people so like me doing that meeting with james was great because like yeah this guy's in my network but i was just sitting in the verbs over here you know do my own thing here create my own content i wasn't like a silicon valley guy because you're dude i outside i haven't been going to anything like i don't meet with anybody i don't go to anything it's like dumb and then this brought my awareness to like wow i'm silly for not taking advantage of the network that i the hard network that i've built over you know ten twelve years that's crazy that i'm not taking advantage of that and then so i asked him i was like you know what do you think i was like how do you actually take advantage of the network besides physically being there i okay i i believe the physical thing and i've always said this like proximity is power the closer you can be to the people you like and the people you wanna be like and the people you wanna be around like literally physically the closer you could be the better and i go why does that work and he goes he goes what you should do is that you wanna build something that brings brings value not only to you but also to those people around you also you wanna be like an api so like you know when when a when when twitter is a product they create an api that lets other people like read the twitter stream right create apps that help twitter like they twitter stronger it makes twitter stronger he's like you wanna be like an api you wanna tell you wanna tell people how they can plug into you where can they get help from you how can they give help to you like if we know that andrew wilkinson buys internet companies then when we see an internet company we talked to some guys who was like yeah i'm thinking about selling we'll make that introduction because andrew has an open api he he has made it clear how somebody can interface with him how somebody can help him and how he can help other people you know he he's made it clear for those founders hey if you wanna exit i'll i'll buy you out and so he's like that's why silicon can valley is great because you can invest in other people's stuff you can join them you can partner with them you can work for them you can send them talent you can do a podcast exchange you can share ideas about growth with each other you can share knowledge about a term sheet with you he's like that's why silicon valley works is because the network are super dense and people share a ton within that and so you get all these extra benefits that you don't really plan for that are sort of ser when you're in there and i i thought like this is all obvious like i kinda nod in my head but it brought my awareness too i not that a lot of people don't take advantage of this stuff and even me who still who knows this stuff and still lives silicon valley i wasn't maxing that out and i'm gonna make a you know a a a sort of like turn that knob a little bit and do that better if i could i only live where i live now for family reasons but if my family were willing to live in california i would be in palo alto not san francisco actually but pal i would be down in the peninsula in a harley total one hundred percent i would be there in a heartbeat i think it's the greatest and people say well it doesn't matter anymore i'm like well maybe like currently it doesn't matter that much but things that maybe in the six or twelve months it's gonna be happening but i actually think it is kinda happening still a little bit but i think new york and and and silicon valley are a little bit on even actually now whereas for years they weren't but still silicon valley i think has a much better you have a much better existence living there but i would be there in a heartbeat if i could if it were if i a single guy i'd be there tomorrow right cool alright i think we went a little over but that's it that's it that's the pod