i can't believe we just agreed to do public math it's like we only have like two rules here one don't get canceled two don't embarrass yourself but do a public math and we did it it we do it a bunch of times frankly i feel like i could rude where i know i could be what i want to put at all in and like a days on on a road less travel nights i got a business that you're gonna love okay so this is a business that in ten months has gotten to ten million in arr i think i know what you're talking about okay so it started by this french guy and the business is called time left yep i heard it on my topics list too okay so check this out you i don't know i don't know how deep did you go did you go into the backstory or i know it took a lot longer than it appears yeah exactly it's a a a multi year overnight as they tend to right heard the word the phrase like ten year overnight success it's kinda like that so i wanna show you some things about this guy so the first thing is this graph here's the revenue graph and if you're listening on audio you should go to youtube so you can actually see what we're showing because it's when we're fun and you could also see what we look like and by the way i'm sean this voice this is sean the indian guy sam talk you're the white guy you should talk now it's like they think that i would talk like a white like alpha jo because of the way that i look and i talk like an indian nerd and they think that you would talk like an indian nerd but you you talk like a white bro alpha jack so exactly and we need the record to be to be clear on that okay who's it alright so check this out so this is the revenue graph already impressive you could see it kind of starts super super flat and then gets to now you know over a million dollars a month that the this business is generate and what does it what month did it it's describe that graph okay so this is basically if you start in january of last year it's like zero you get to january of this year and it's still you know the arr is still under i don't know care or some tens of thousands maybe a month exactly and now as of october november it's over a ten million dollar annual run rate it's crossing twelve and a half million and so in ten months to go to do greater than ten million in arr is great it says he said it took seven months to reach one million and and then another seven months to get to from one to ten right so so crazy growth okay so what's growing like crazy what is what is this business even so time left is a business that is just gets people together for dinner it is a solve for the loneliness epidemic that is everywhere and so if you go to their website it just says every wednesday night strangers meet for dinner book your seat and meet five strangers over dinner all match by our personality algorithm book your seat and in you know hundreds of cities every wednesday people get together for a dinner with a bunch of strangers that are kinda curated by this by this app and so you pay something like twenty ish bucks a month to be a part of this club be a part of this separate club and every week on wednesday they're gonna set up a dinner and then you go then you pay for the dinner separately while you're there they booked the restaurant the book the table you show up and it's supposed to be a bunch of other the people that you should find interesting or get along with and then and then you split the bill at the end they call product and they claim that they have an algorithm where it's like you are you logical are you more emotional are you this are you that that helps match yeah roughly what age are you are you you know kinda single and look at a ming like kinda what what what are you all about and you so you take this little quiz and you do that now the back so i first i found it pretty fascinating that this business which is so simple a dinner club with strangers is scaling so well and this is not a new idea obviously like people have been doing this not even as a business for a long time i remember when i first moved to san francisco i used to use this app called i think let's lunch it was called and it was same idea every you would just agree hey i'm down to get a lunch with a random person who's also in the tech industry and i used it when i first moved there and i knew nobody i used it to meet some cool people and it's kind of a hit or miss first date without the romance remember group before that i loved group group was it was you and two friends go on a group date with three other ladies and they tell you where to meet and you have a you have a blind day a three way blind day i guess a six way blind day right okay so now here's the backstory that i find interesting so let me just get you interested in this guy and i know that there's really only one way to get you interested in a guy do you know what i'm about to show you what's this calf cyclic like i'm gonna show you a body transformation there he is i'm gonna show you what this founder looks like without a shirt on right so not only did he transform his business in ten months i think this is also like a ten month body transformation where he went from the skin he ever was did he he sick he was trying to run a like ultra race or whatever so he got to like less than ten percent body fat and then he was like cool now i'm gonna try to become the strongest i could ever be and in ten months he kinda transformed his body too so this guy is pretty fascinating before doing all of this so here's here's his story so this guy starts out and he's a nightlife promoter which ding ding is a bit of a pattern scott harrison from charity water before he you know went to say of the kids in africa nightlife night nightclub promoter in new york there are several people who have this same sort of background story before they make it so it starts off as a nightlife promoter then he's he's decides to start a media company and so like you like ida we start he start a media company now his media company was the the twist was i'm only gonna say good news because the news is always bad news if it bleeds it leads instead i'm just gonna tell uplifting good news stories every single day and they did it he grew the business to ninety employees sold or kind of got acquired by this larger french broadcasting company and went through that whole process what was that called is i think it had like it's called buzz like buzz something millennium buzz something like that i don't know don't know the exact name of it and they and he's written about it because they got acquired and they merged but they had this horrible deal structure it sounds like which was it was a three year earn out but the way the earn out worked was year one we're gonna make all these changes and invest in the business you're two we're gonna continue with those changes and invest in the business it's gonna be losing money and then year three if it hits if it performs you get this big payout right and if by year three we haven't done that thing you get nothing and he basically that was too aggressive of a plan too too risky they did not hit the three year plan it's kind of a messy divorce he gets ousted by the majority shareholder and he basically walks away with nothing it sounds like i don't know the exact details but it it didn't end well for him i think they ended up settling and he got a little something out of it but it wasn't the thing that he wanted out of this whole thing okay and this was after creating kinda like this video first online only news company that was doing hundreds of millions of views a month and he was getting excited that hey we've we've built something here that's the future and this this traditional company was buying them and it you know one plus one is getting equal seven right and it it sure didn't so he goes through that experience and he says okay he gets the settlement so he finally leaves and i think he's got you know some money but he's got a lot of time and so he goes and he decides to travel now this is right when twenty twenty happens covid hits and this guy basically while everybody else is locked at home he's traveling solo he planned i think to travel for thirty days solo and it ended up being seven hundred days because he was like covid happened he's like well i i might as well just kind of travel around a different different you know locations anyways by other mean boarded up at home how old is he he's i think thirty years old at the time and so he something like this so thirty something years old early thirties he during this time he's posting on social media he starts getting some pushback and people are like dude like there's a pandemic going on i'm stuck at home a lot of people are kinda miserable right now and you're out here posting pictures of you on a beach in australia or scuba diving or doing these like kind fun exotic solo travel things and so he'd meet somebody and friend suggests to him hey you should you should do a little shake up you should have coffee and meet with a hundred strangers do a hundred coffee meetings with strangers so he does hey does he accepts the challenge he does a hundred coffee meetings and something that happened in that changed his life he's meeting with these people and what he realized is that the common denominator amongst hundred strangers was like man what stood out to him was i meet these people and i asked them what they're excited about or what they dream about and their dreams have been snuff jeff prob at the tribal council has snuff their torch basically they've forgotten how to dream they've been suffocated by everyday life and they don't really even have like a compelling vision or dream for themselves and so he decides to make his own bucket list and you could see his bucket list on his home homepage you got a hundred things he wants to do before he dies what's his name i see barbie i think is how you say his name french guy and if you go to his blog as daily max you could see a hundred things that are on his bucket list things like swim naked in the ocean number one crossed out participate in a protest do a live dj set at a festival you know things like that so he's got this reach twelve percent body he's got this bucket list for himself he decides he's gonna make an app so he says okay i got i got my new company my new company and this is kind of like ideal one in twenty twenty he says i'm going to create a app that lets people create their bucket list so create share your bucket list so he sets out he draws the wire frames he finds a code he hires a guy they make the app and people upload thousands of their dreams to this but kinda goes nowhere after that so he says okay strike one christ says okay maybe i'll try something different you know what was the problem with this one i i got people to create a bucket list but they're not doing anything what if i connected people over their dream so it'll be like tinder for bucket list and so now this is twenty twenty one so year two he says i'm gonna make a dating app that's not dating i meaning you say what your dream is i say well my dream is i if i swipe right on a dream and you both you and i share that it'll connect us over our share dream and maybe we could actually go and do it together right so that's aspirational people message but they i don't actually go do anything but this is still under the same all under the same name of time left yeah i i should explain that so why is it called time left it's called time left because when he did was traveling and recharging his batteries after that acquisition and the kinda of messy divorce and the settlement he ends up doing some math and he goes okay i'm thirty i thirty six years old or something at the that time thirty five maybe he goes so i'm gonna live till i'm eighty he did the math he goes i have six hundred months left in life and he goes that's my time left and he read that blog post on wait but why yeah which was your life in weeks where it kinda of prints out a poster that visualize the number of weeks left that he did he he created that he put it on his wall every week he would take a black dot he would mark out one week gone and he just had this urgency around himself about how much time do i really have left and what do i wanna do that's what spurred the bucket list thing that's what wanted other people to realize how how little time they have left and he love that quote which was i don't forgot who says the quote but it's you know every man has two lives and the second begins when he realizes that he only has one does this stuff inspire you as you're talking about this i can't decide if i am like all in or if the old man me is is like that's a lot of work but like i'm pretty sure i'm like sixty to seventy percent on the side of like this is inspiring i i need to have a bucket list yeah i give what you mean it's like i saw these kids that were like skateboarding and doing tricks by my house and i was like this is awesome this is great this go what they're doing there i i'm so much fun to do anything thing and then i was also like kinda out of breath from watching and i was like okay yeah i probably just move along with my day you know it is a lot of work to his system his list was inspired by yeah like he wants to go for a run around paris he wants to get his voting license some of these aren't crazy but then he's like i want a world record so by the way sixth thing for personal loves website i'm gonna steal this put this on my site which is bucket to start crossing them out publicly on there i think it's great and he links to the story behind each one once he does it it's great so anyways he's he names the company time left because he realized he's got about six hundred months left in life and he starts doing this bucket list thing bucket list doesn't so app one but create a bucket list fail app two connect people over share dreams now they can message each other also fail now it's you're three and he says okay here's what we're gonna do i'm gonna connect to people so you have the same you wanna do the same activity i'll actually like connect you and get you to go do the thing in real life let me get you off your phone the whole point is find somebody to do the thing with and it starts off okay but then he realizes that women don't feel safe doing one on one stuff of strangers right so this is kinda like why group worked so that's twenty twenty two another year no traction twenty twenty three he says okay forget the one on one small groups doing an activity in the city you love and he gets small groups together and he has one feature on there which is like you upload a photo of who you are so that you when other people are trying to create the group they could just check you out before they do the thing trying to make people feel comfortable but what you realize is talking to users as soon as you put photos in the app they're thought of it like dating though it wasn't a dating app yeah right and the people immediately wanted to gravitate towards certain people they started judging people it's like this is not at all what i wanted to do so twenty twenty three goes by third year of no progress and he can't cross off have a winning app on his bucket list you know it's just un crossed un crust twenty twenty four this year finally he hit he realizes okay this company is called time left well i got nine months of cash left so now cash left is sitting there realizing this doesn't work he had raised two million dollars initially back in twenty twenty for this idea nobody wanted to invest anymore he said i had an honest conversation with myself and by the way so many so many success stories start with this i had an honest conversation with myself he says do i wanna continue and if i do wanna continue more importantly what do i no longer want to continue doing and so he realized he's made some rules he goes i wanna do an idea that i can launch in two weeks or less without any technical team so i no code no code needed and i can launch this thing in two weeks number two i wanna actually make some money it's been three years i've made zero dollars in the lifetime of this company i wanna make some revenue it goes three i wanna have it be a group thing connecting people over an activity but it's gotta work without photos meaning i can't have it be where people won't need to check out the other person to be willing to go do the activity so he comes up with this idea of time left as dinners with strangers so in three weeks he launches this thing it's the first time left dinner there's four tables of six people that he launches with on that wednesday in his city and he makes a hundred and ten dollars and at the time he does it with just he makes a type form so he just the form you fill out using type form off the shelf a whatsapp account that's how he coordinated all the dinners and a stripe account for how you pay and he was able to spend that up in three weeks and he was doing all them matching manually for three months so he himself was the algorithm no code he was just figuring out who should i put together at these dinners that i think will work and then he starts to move it to low code and eventually he's getting three hundred people together every wednesday and he makes twenty twenty grand but he does the math he says alright i still don't have a lot of cash left here i'm default dead i'm dying slower than i was before but i'm still gonna die unless i figure out how to do this in a more in in in a more scalable way so he quickly builds a simple app and he makes one shift he goes do have any employees it's just him and a cofounder and so he goes i'm gonna figure out how to do these without having to book the go visit the restaurant in person because what he was doing was he was doing this in his city and he would go to the restaurants he would talk to them and say hey there's gonna be a group of six strangers they're gonna come to a table you need to seat them you know make it comfortable for them and then they need to split the bill at the end and don't make that awkward for them okay and he was checking out each restaurant himself he says i gotta figure out how to scale this so he takes a leap of faith he says we're gonna do this without without doing that that pre step just gonna book the restaurant book the table and see what happens do they have like a i guess like automatically use like a handful of like popular booking platforms or something like that yeah you know open table type of things to book these restaurants and so he does it like that it works on that wednesday he says holy shit this is gonna work so now he starts opening up more cities not just his city that he's in he's like do this without geographically being in the place i was being too precious about that that was a sacred cow that once i slay that sacred cow oh the the the ceiling for my business you know got removed and i could explode this thing so now he opens up hundreds of cities how are people hearing about it ads so he's he's advertising about it and people are talking organically about it and he's getting a ton of free press so he's been written up in four hundred free press outlets because the narrative fits the the the the zeitgeist guy still stay which is that people feel that people are too alone they're too depressed if it's the trends of people you know not getting married if it's the trends of people being sad after covid people being in cells of all this stuff right there's all these other stories that you could you piggyback news jack on and on top of it's just a feel good mission right i'm getting people together in person not on social media not on their phones but actually in real life listen to the working the ad from facebook it says dine with five strangers all match by our algorithm every wednesday night in your city all it's said if it's nothing very simple and if you go look at their tiktok go look at tiktok content about them it's really you could see what's going on and so in one year now he's exploded this thing so it's now in three hundred cities it's the app is translated in eighteen languages he's got seventy employees that are all ops people organizing thousands of dinners eighteen thousand dinners a week they have to plan what he did you know over a million dollars by november their ig exploded they now have a million ig followers written up in four hundred articles and the reason why he says is because i tapped into a simple universal multicultural need people want to get together and they enjoy eating at a restaurant and i love the way he talks about by the way he goes i realized that dinner is a technology that if i wanted to get people together to actually have a good time dinner is a piece of tech that just works it makes that whole meeting new people thing just work because we all know how to do it already it's an activity every every single person knows how to do so there's no skill required it has a natural flow that we're all familiar with it has a natural start you know beginning middle and end and at the very least you're gonna break bran any eat good food at the very best you might actually meet a couple of cool people that you wanna have you know ongoing connection with you met some cool cool people in your city and how amazing is this dude how amazing is this business this is great how did he hire and i'm looking at his jobs page how did he hire all these people that fast he's he's like i'm hiring every week i'm hiring people i'm interviewing everybody myself and the job is pretty simple which is like it's all ops it's all ops and user experience so he's like you know we take the dinner and we try to break it up in a moments a dinner is not a single thing a dinner is like scott harrison said on podcast it's the moments between the moments that matter so you think it's just about the dinner well break the moments down so there's the greeting the sitting the connecting initially getting to know each other the sharing of information and food there's the bill and the awkward of the of that at the end and he's like basically how can we make each one of those steps a little bit better and if we could do that we can make the user experience better we don't measure clicks and daily active users we measure you know how many people had a great dinner this week and kpi we'll just last yes i think this will last i think that some ideas just take like the time when the time is right the time is right so in the same way that calm the meditation app went from this kind of fringe behavior that not a lot of people were gonna do it seemed like outside of the mainstream you know we all had a buddy who meditate but like you know wasn't a behavior everybody did and then only when we all got too hooked to tech not technology did the need for calm breakthrough through and all of a sudden calm head space and these apps became mainstream and i think that this like getting together with strangers thing people are lonely than ever they're more addicted to the phone and technology than ever and you know whether it was covid or was other things that that accelerated the need for something like this to exist and so i'm a believer in this i think this is like the new meetup up dot com i think it's gonna scale and i think that you could build a kind of ritual thing and i think there's gonna be a lot of churn in this business but it's a huge tam everybody needs this and it's inherently viral you're gonna tell people you were doing this well it's it's they're charging now in a monthly subscription it's not a month it's not gonna be a monthly subscription business but it's still gonna be an awesome company i i think their branding is fantastic too yeah exactly i think this is like an inspirational company that a lot of people are gonna rally behind and you could see like that's why the traction is what the traction is i went read a bunch of reviews on reddit they're overwhelmingly positive people love it they'll say like we met up i was so awkward and comfortable at first but we hit it off and it it was great but then what they said was after their dinner let's say their dinner went from like seven to ten pm at ten pm they said that there was like i guess there's eight people at dinner so there must have been ten other dinners happening in that city that night because seventy other people met up afterwards at the after party that was also arranged by brian left and they're were like it was a little too crowded but it was awesome like i got to meet these people and i didn't leave it early but i had a fantastic time and then they even i we have a text group now and there was even an after after party where people were hanging out till far four am and i'm gonna do it again and so it sounded like people absolutely loved it yeah exactly and this is a big city problem like dude it's so hard to make friends when you become an adult like once you're out of college you don't really realize this till you leave college but you're like man my number of new connections that i just get to stumble into per week drops dramatically because you're at home you know alone or with a couple of roommates you have work which is a static number of coworkers and then you might go to like a bar or go to a you know go to some place where peep you don't people you it's not clear that people default want to meet you and it's so different than when you're in school and i think that yeah but particularly man shocks a lot of people men just like won't talk to anyone i was reading this thread where it says like what's something that women should know about men that that would surprise them and the top comment was most men never get a compliment and i was and i thought i was pretty yeah either life it it it's always would take a story about how you know they're with their boyfriend or something and someone else just like said they smell nice or i don't even remember just some like random compliment and the guy was like very affected and the woman was like why why are you like that he's like i haven't had a compliment commit in like eight months like no said anything nice about me so long and then so it's like complicated should we change the world right you look great today we create should we create yeah exact thank you i love your love your commit jacket love your inspector gadget outfit nope wait did it wrong should we just start like you know a you know like a note net november should we start a new trend should we pick a month and it's basically just bros complementing bro yeah yeah and it's was like hey every day your job you gotta you gotta give another guy just a solid compliment yeah a one way a one way flight to feel good and and that's that's what that's i what month has like nothing going on just like just a bunch of guys being dudes every may yeah the march man it's like yeah here we go every march every day thirty days gotta give another guy compliment but that's actually a great idea this is also what i wanted to do with like you know people were hosting these m mfa meetups in every city this kind of what i wanted this to be which is like i would love it if we could do this with like if we could basically have time left create like a you know an m m an button or whatever or like a or i don't know somehow somebody create this for for our listeners which is like if it was you know on the first of every month and it's always on the first of every month there's a dinner and hundreds of cities around the world where you're gonna be with you know five other people six other people who listen to the podcast we're gonna have call like more than a nod because that's basically like my interaction with most every man ever is just a nod and it's like is we gonna i'm gonna do more than an nod to each other now is that yeah yeah exactly the knot is it's pretty effective to be honest this i see you yeah it's just not odd i see you and i respect you yeah let can i ask you a question about your weekend you i have a strong i have a strong opinion about something but i have nothing to do with the industry and you do how is you are working in the e comm world was black friday and i guess cyber monday is still for you miserable or awesome well for me now i have a full team in place so it was awesome i didn't have to do a thing i didn't i just looked at the app and i said wow that's a that's a great number right there was not i was not on the you know it's like the perfect thing i'm not i'm not on the hook for the inputs but i get the outputs not to be clear i sweat this business for you know three four years to be able to get to that spot but like now it's great before that i will say very stressful and it's stressful in the same way that i don't love birthdays i don't like forced fun and i don't like high expectations based you know events where it's like you you need this to go well you want this to go well it seems like it's going well for everybody else because you'll just see screenshots of people crushing it and i remember in the first couple of years i was so under overwhelmed and disappointed by black friday which was a combination of me not knowing how to do it but really when you start a like black friday is basically people who already know about your brand who kinda wait around for discounts who like your brand to come back which for a new brand you just have a very small pool of people that already know and care about you that want to shop that are you know have been waiting to shop with you for your discount discounts so the first couple of years just sucked and now it's amazing now i get why they call it black friday you know why it's called called yeah let me tell you the the the background really quick but basically in the seventies originally black friday was negative it was called black friday because for some reason or there was a what was the army versus navy football game it was it was the the philly police called it black friday they hated it they the friday thanksgiving living this is the day that all the bad people come in town and it's just gonna be crowded and then retailers also use black friday because they're like this is when our employees never show up because it's day after thanksgiving like black friday sucked and then like in the eighties or nineties you know it kinda got shifted to where black friday now means people we're gonna change it from the this is the your business your retail business is in the red meaning you lose money all the time this is the one seat the beginning of the season the first day of the season where you're gonna switch to black and you're finally gonna make a profit for the quarter exactly exactly they split they flipped it on its head right they they lemon since eliminated it where this this bad day where all it's gonna be a huge rush in the city everyone's gonna try to do their shopping at once it's gonna create traffic then there's gonna be a bunch of drunk people because of the game and they turned it into this like shopping event now that the retailers love and then in two thousand and five a assortment there was like a trade group that included like google and amazon and a few other other online retailers they said hey this black friday thing like that's that's pretty good but like we need our own thing and they come up with cyber monday and so they like collectively agree to do cyber monday together and then once amazon gets even more famous and more big they kind of are like you know pushing it forward to where cyber monday's is huge and now all the other retailers are are doing it but as an outsider my opinion and and it's not entirely rooted in data other than there are there are numbers where like if you discount something like you know twenty percent and you only have a forty percent gross margin you gotta sell like two times as much if you discount it thirty percent you to you know sell three three times is like the stats are pretty crazy how much more you need to sell for each ten percent discount but from an outsider i hate black friday like i just think that it like ruins people's brands like to me like everything eventually is gonna turn into jay crew where it's like i only buy it when inevitably they have their fifty percent off sale i actually it kind of works the other way which is every brand wants to discount but doesn't wanna dilute the brand why do you want a discount you got too much inventory left over and that's just cash that's tied up sitting on your shelf maybe it's expiring maybe it's just out of season but it's definitely cash that's tied up in inventory so every brand is not perfect with inventory that's the first problem the second is if you you wanna juice your numbers so if you have a way to juice your numbers you would love to have more revenue more profit if you could the problem is just if you just start discounting you sort train people did it to butt shop it just sounds like you said the beauty of black friday is against every brand air cover it says alright we're all gonna do it i'm not less of a premium brand because i'm doing this right i'm gonna join in and so you get the kind of middle set of brands right you know in every like category you're gonna have the low end that are always trying to compete on price they're always trying to lower the price they're always trying to discount they're known as discount brands you have the mid tier which was trying to find that balance between still value still a value purchase but maintaining some brand premium what would you say that think i that's like a j crew i don't shop j crew so i couldn't tell you anything about j crew but that's like a nike for example right nike is not louis vuitton it's not truly luxury scarcity but it's also not trying to be thirty two degrees you know the costco at leisure wear brand right and so you you have that middle group and that middle group they want to participate in a black friday because it gives them air cover to do the discounts like the cheap brands without being seen as a desperate cheap brand because it's like well today is the day we all do it right and so i i think it's really important for them and then you have the luxury brands who can go the other way and they could say zero percent off in fact it's ten percent more expensive today right because they're gonna use this as a branding moment they're not gonna sell high volume anyways so they use this as a moment to reinforce their position as luxury so it kinda works for everybody i think i prefer the last one i'd like i would hate to have to do this i've been friends with you and i've been friends with you know dozens of other people who have startups in the com space not established yet brands some established but and like their fridays are miserable and it seems like their entire year kinda is make it makes or break this two weeks does that seem like accurate it is for a lot of people it's not that that's not the case for us like i saw somebody who does there like fifty percent of their revenue for the year in this like eight weeks sprint or six weeks sprint between you know black friday the start of your early black friday sales to the christmas shipping cutoff off by the way can give you two funny things what one is jack butcher used to do this great reverse black friday sale do you remember this he always did some crazy stuff he's great man he's an artist what what which he's an artist and he knows that kind of that positioning and cut positioning is all counter positioning meaning you positioned yourself relative to the position of other things that's how positioning works it's all a relative exercise and so he gets that and so what he did was i think he had like a course or something like that and he would do a reverse black friday sale where he would start the price at a certain thing and then they would just go up in the like two weeks leading to black friday every day the prices are gonna go up so if you wanna buy it buy it now because over the next two weeks prices will go up every single day and it wasn't even really that that was that effective of a sales tactic but it's like rather than do nothing or dilute your brand he decided to use it as a branding moment which that was cool we also talked about the i don't if it was brooklyn and who started this but it was the the old leaked email ta well i still i i did it and i stole it from chu did today they also steal from brooklyn i think they also think they also stole it yeah i've seen like a ton of people do the same yeah trend but we talked about on the podcast seems beneath brooklyn in but but most consumers don't know they don't care they don't they have no idea they fall for it right that's kind of the point which is you send this email out to your user base that looks like i it was supposed to be an internal email where someone on the marketing team is was like hey just doing the testing final testing for black friday i have it you know the the code is x you know go test it out and see if it works and then you said a follow up oh my god whoops that was not meant to send to everybody but we're gonna honor it they're not fired you know or or you know whatever we'll deal with jacob's you know mess up internally but but you whatever have added it while we're gonna leave it up for twenty four hours and then people go crazy because they feel like they got access to elite discount cut and it works by the way i did that too it it was super effective i did it in two thousand and nineteen yeah right before we sold about a few months before we sold and i did it in nineteen and we did it for trends dot c which was a digital product which is like the best black friday deal ever i don't have to fulfill anything and it's one hundred percent profit and i don't remember exactly but we made something like a million dollars in profit in one day right from that yeah it's from that email and you love black friday what the hell are you talking about what i guess like if i were to own a brand now like a like a a particularly i think by friday is mostly clothing or furniture something like a like a normal retailer i don't think i would do it but i would be tempted to you're you're like those people who live in a gated community with twelve foot fences were around their house and then want like an open border it's like bro are you with your house doesn't even have an open border what are you talking about it's like you're like i hate black friday after you like you know totally leaned into black friday and did the like yeah once i got yeah exactly it's jumping beneath me now yeah oh you used to do that yeah no it's i i do did you buy anything yesterday no by way i find it so funny there's is a great meme that was like thursday everybody's is like i'm so thankful for everything that i have and i just feel so full by cup is so full with all the love and and everything in my life my life is so so full i'm so thankful for everything so grateful and then friday you're like i need more more i don't have any i don't have anything i need a i need more you know much stuff i need right now that i don't have it's like literally the clock strikes twelve and everybody's attitudes flips dude do you wanna do it alright you were talking about challenges how about this challenge what if you try to go one weeks or seven days without spending a cent on a consumable so like your mortgage or rent is okay day cares is okay but like coffee but like no it hasn't like out it you can't eat out you you know you can't eat out it's just like what you bought the week before at a grocery store you think you can go seven days without spending a cent so you can't buy anything extra can i absolutely will absolutely not i think i'm down i wanna do that as the n m m m challenge you know we we a whole week of not buying anything they do you don't do look people do fast we gotta do a money fast i'll tell you what i wanted to do that you're not i'll tell you where i'm gonna get your butt to cl so i was pretty inspired by burning man and everybody if you live never gone to perfect man have you no but i'm just it's like it's like a movie it's based on a true story so everybody if you lives in san francisco people will make you nauseous tell you how amazing bernie man is and what they're trying to do is convince me to go but what they don't know about me is i'm like a cat where the more you try to pep the further i run away so are you telling me to do something only makes it less cool in my books and so by this at a certain point i was like i'm definitely just not going why because i'm stubborn you're dug i am what the what the french call dug in and but i was like oh what's cool about it and i was like i do like the idea of like you go to this deserted place you basically build a town it's all barter and free love and you know all that good stuff and then they burned this thing at the end and it's sort of symbolic in this way and i thought what's my version of that and i came up with this idea and i piss out the dinner and this this guy was like that so here's the idea i go we should do a money burn i was like so much of our life is based around money and wanting money and this attachment to money and people have unhealthy relationships with money and money has this power over you and i felt it on me money has a power over me it gets me to do what i don't wanna do sometimes it gets me to act in ways that are i'm ashamed of sometimes it gets me to it just takes up so much of my mind space that it really shouldn't that that portion of my mind could be used on other things money has this power of over here go you what we should do once a year we should do this thing where you take some amount of money then for everybody it's different you come with an envelope and it's an amount of money that hurts you to burn oh my god and we burn it and i was like think of a how it would feel b what it represents see how polarizing and how angry this would make people how much how much news and buzz this would create and how much of a conversation this could create go imagine if the the sort of like tech head up their ass you know elites in san francisco do the the most obnoxious thing if possible they go and they literally light money on fire and they say they're doing it for this reason but it's gonna piss off a bunch of other people it's gonna inspire a bunch of people like this is actually a tremendous idea and my friend was like dude this is one of the best ideas you ever had i'm hooked who which friend say this was good yeah i have to make sure i never listened to their opinion number again alright i'm not i'm not gonna say their name because i don't wanna out them on this but they were like and for years every year they text me the same thing when are we doing the money burn and i don't do it because i'm like i literally already feel anxiety over that idea of like taking it i don't know seven thousand dollars and just burning it just some amount of money that would feel horrible to burn like what does that minimum are you gonna say that you're willing to burn seven dollars but i'm just saying don't spend like a hundred and fifty bucks in one week on coffee well because i think it's like if i'm gonna do it i might as well do the more dramatic impactful version of it you know what i mean like how good of a story is it if i'm like yeah and then for one week i didn't drink coffee outside the house like nobody gives a chance right it's like okay it's like doing a fast where you still eat sandwiches it's like okay well it's not really that impressive so if i'm gonna do something i gonna do something that's makes for a better story than your like consumables fast which is not catchy and not not buzz worthy and not brag worthy yeah i mean that sounds like a horrible idea but i think you should do it i i would love to imagine there was the money burn would you do it no but i would love to watch you do it what i'm still too scared to do alright let's move on yeah by the way i did a great chad gp prompt about black friday just wanna share this prompt prompt tag prom tag is so i go to chad and i'm like hey tell me about black friday the origin and anything interested thing blah blah blah and then it's like oh the philadelphia police department i did the thing right so many of you both did the same thing here's the prompt then i went and i said it it said something about the macy's day parade i go tell me about the macy's day parade as if you were malcolm glad teaching me about it what would he say i just like i use malcolm glad willis as this like yeah guy who gets interested in the things that we all overlook or the the the things we've all like already accepted and then turns it into like a bigger story so he goes so it just goes a tipping point for american consumer culture and he talks about how the macy's day parade was started by this immigrant and how it was the employees that were dressing up almost like clowns and cowboys and nights they borrowed live animals and malcolm would say this is how all great i great movements began messy grassroots and deeply personal and then it talks about how each symbol of it right like the balloons or why the balloons were a genius thing over the live animals and just using this how malcolm glad would explain x or you can you know switch out malcolm glad but you can be like richard fe how would he you explain this scientific topic is such a prompt tag for chat gp it makes chad t talked to you in a different way our friend saw hill he had a tweet and he said what's the best one shot prompt that you've made in the last thirty days it could be for a recipe a friend end developer an image generation the more specific the better the best answer gets a thousand dollars and it's all these pretty good like prompts that people have submitted that were amazing like the simple one that i actually liked which is based off of everything that you know about me suggests three to five books that you think i'd enjoy reading it was that was pretty good and i went did that and it suggested a a book that i'm gonna start reading another one was you are a lawyer that specializes in working with startups plea review this legal document that was sent to you by your client and summarize each section in plain english and to determine if that's good or bad for me that's actually a pretty good one too but there's like this is good today has been chaos ask me questions to help me figure out what to do next don't stop asking until you are fully sure you have all of the contacts of doing situation and can generate an actual plan for me i use chad gp this way to i i use i tell chad often to ask me questions so say i'm your role is this i'm trying to figure out x i don't know where to start start asking me questions and don't stop until you feel you have enough necessary information to give me to give me useful advice or ask me a question i just i keep saying yeah know ask me more question i'll just answer parts of their questions along the way and it's a such a useful thinking tool this way versus just searching and getting an answer if you try to say hey how should i do x it's gonna give you a generic answer but if you say ask me the questions that you would need if you were my coach who has tons of experience in the subject in order to get me to figure out the answer to this it forces you to think about it better are are there like deep questions it could it be like meredith to marriage advice or could it like what do do it with my life advice or like i'm struggling with this person help me solve it like things like that yeah because any of those any of those personal things i've used it with tax things because if you ask it a tax question or a legal question it'll give you a generic answer but this high risk right like it doesn't have all your context because you you don't know how to give it everything you need so it just gives you kind of a general answer which could be totally misleading when it comes to tax or legal but instead i say here's my situation ask me the questions that you would need to know if you were my lawyer so then it asked me the question then it at that's point now it has the context then as i said give me an informed answer based on what i just told you and then it knows well you could do x but but since you said you're incorporated here blah blah right and it it can give you a smarter answer that way oh that's pretty good how have you used it for any other prompts that like are helping you solve like just like light problems where it's like like a therapist would help guide you or like an executive coach yeah i use it i tell it it's my coach or it's my therapist or it's my strategist or it's my analyst and then i'll either you know ask at the questions or i'll tell it to ask me the questions by the that's one of the useful things about chat is tell it the role up upfront so the oh prompt structure that works is role goal and then i think context and so you go roll you say you are my research assistant your job is to find examples that support the ideas that i'm gonna present you gold i'm trying to write a really persuasive a blog post about x so i need to come up with great examples and counter examples and then i'll give it the context the context is blah blah and then it knows the role it knows the goal and then it has the context in order to actually do the job dude that's amazing i love chat so got my ai tutor every every week to teach me how do you actually use these tools better i i have a friend that works at it open ai and apparently he was able to sell some of his shares and he was like do you remember when i told you i was starting to work there and i told you like if things go well how much money i think i could i could make at a zero to that and that's how much that's just a percentage of the shares that i sold to achieve that number wait could you say like roughly the roughly the level of senior of this person and roughly the amount of money they made and roughly what time i'm i'm gonna gonna be very vague on purpose i'm say let's say they've worked there for two to three years and i think according to the news like if business insider they just did an article and they said the average pay all in pay was like eight hundred thousand dollars so if you're making eight hundred thousand dollars three years ago let's say that's four hundred cash four hundred equity so you're expecting four hundred a year in equity i don't know how much their value has gone up in three years but i think ten x yeah so if you're expecting four that four hundred grand a year in equity you now have four million dollars a year in equity and if you've been there for three years that's twelve million dollars nice that's crazy right and that's like not even all your shares because i think like they do like they're known for paying people even more now that there's even more competitors and you didn't even invent artificial intelligence right like you didn't even have to do the incredible thing at that company in order to do that did good work and i mean this in a good way you didn't have to pull off a miracle in order to get incredibly well and you are like the one thousand employee like which is why people listen to our sarah's list episodes and whether you believe that the companies we picked her right or not you should do that if you're gonna take a job might as well take a job on a rocket chip right like it might as well take a job where your equity is gonna appreciate this like absurd rate or you has as the has like a realistic chance to the problem is most people have no ability to assess that and it's not always obvious like like like like for example i think open raised money at a hundred and twenty million dollar valuation recently is that right twenty billion sorry a hundred and twenty billion and i would imagine the majority of people listening to this are saying that's outrageous but in five years there's definitely a world where we look it back and be like that was a steal how did i not like put my whole life's savings into it like it it there's a there's a world where that's that's definitely a possibility yeah yeah there's still a ten jump from here for for an open ai they could open ai could be become as a legitimate a realistic chance of becoming a trillion dollar company i think i could only say about a handful of companies i was listening listening to this thing about facebook and sky was talking about working there and he was like when i joined it was worth seventy eight billion dollars and i thought like is his peak i'm selling i'm i'm selling everything like i gotta get out facebook's now worth one point five trillion and so these numbers they're really hard to to comprehend i mean i do if you're thought about a trillion dollars how much is it honestly have it trillion a trillion dollars is one thousand billion dollars that is like an insane number they should call it that this should call in one thousand billion and not even trillion julian actually doesn't even do it justice that's so and you know what in about five is that is it a thousand billion or is it a hundred billion no it's a thousand billion it's a thousand billion is that insane is that insane that's insane not only is that insane there's a world where in ten for sure twenty years that a human bean is worth that because i think how much is elon musk worth now two hundred two hundred billion so if it just if he just has a a seven percent yeah annual growth rate that's gonna double in ten years and then double again so you're looking at eight eight hundred like it that's just so much money one thousand billion he he's the betting favorite to become the world's first trillion that is so which be i think he said that he thinks putin might already be that or he said that he's the richest man but he's not on the eighth list so that would be like let's say if you're worth the difference between so a hundred million device so that'd be like the equivalent of a one hundred thousand so a trillion to a a billionaire is the same thing as a hundred millionaire to a one hundred thousand there does that make sense yeah that's insane right that's insane so like the a hundred billion dollar person it's with a hundred thousand dollars they're not in the same ballpark like their lifestyles are like drastically different now right to a billionaire billionaire trillion that's the that's the how difference it makes a billionaire like just like a six figure like w two yeah like like like one bad medical field knock you out yeah or it's like you know what i mean like you still use wow airline and you only did it because you got the the voucher for two and fifty dollar run trip like it's like ridiculous that i was thinking about like that that math it's crazy and the reason i was thinking about is because warren buffett just did this big speech or this big letter where he wrote that he dude he's such a good writer he was like father time always wins and father time he's a mean son of a bitch and he like that's basically yeah like he said like father times always wins and he's like a real f guy and he took my wife susie for me and our plan all along we just assumed because you know he eats horribly we're like we just assumed that i was gonna die first and so the plan was that it was her job to give away all the money unfortunately she died and then we also gave the the money to our children but you know it's crazy our children are in their seventies now and they are not going to live long enough to be able to give away all of her money and so when susie died they each got ten million dollars and warm up it's currently worth a hundred and fifty billion so ten million is nothing but they each got ten million dollars and now it's their job when i die to give away the money i don't think they're gonna live long enough to be able to give away this much money and the future generations i don't know them as well as my current kids and i cut i trust my current kids but you know it's hard to say with my future generations and so they have this monumental task to give away all of this money and if they don't it has to go to this foundation where everyone has to vote on it because this way each of the children as well as a grandchildren have an excuse to say something like well my brother doesn't think that's a good investment so i'm so sorry i gotta pass on you and so he wrote this letter explaining a bunch of tips and tricks he's like even if you're rich or you're wealthy my opinion is you should discuss your will with your children before you die it's a great way to bring the family together like he and and and he also says that's so funny by way isn't it funny that will is like a surprise it is weird it is weird it's like oh let's open up the time capsule see what was it like why is it a surprise that even make sense dude there's so many issues with wills that like that i've learned about because we're setting up a states like for example a lot of people and he talks about this but i've read about it constantly and i know friends their wheels are it aren't equal so particularly women so and then like van did this whereas like the women get four hundred thousand the men each get ten million dollars and it creates like all this like anger amongst siblings which ruins families and he talks about that in his letter so it was a really good letter that he just released like last week about how he's did didn't he sign the like giving pledge though right like yeah but he pledged i don't think he pledged a percentage i think he pledged an amount that he said in the letter and he's like but the amount is now huge so i need to give more and so yeah he's he's giving an ninety nine percent of my wealth will go to phil during my life time we're at death maybe it's just the one percent is now huge is that what this is that the issue i didn't understand well i didn't understand because in the letter it was like i am now gifting a hundred and fifty thousand shares of berkshire hour hathaway previously we did this but now we need to give more that so he didn't reference the giving pledge it was like an absolute amount not a percentage amount other than saying he gave each of his kids ten million dollars and he's like that's all i gave them so he's selling these gifts on i'm making today reduce my holdings of berkshire shares to two hundred and six thousand a fifty six percent decrease since by two thousand six pledge so he's cutting it in half and so how much that two hundred six thousand shares i think it's one point five billion dollars that he just gave away i think it's more due to how how much berkshire a stock is seven hundred grand a share seven hundred grand a share times two hundred and fifty thousand just to use round numbers is almost oh oh sorry wait so it's like do my calculator like yeah how many commas is this is two hundred almost two hundred billion oh yeah well i what that's a lot of money what's happening point the numbers are so grand that i it's frankly incredibly hard to comprehend but basically he's making like the largest gifts of all time i can't believe we just agreed to do public math it's like we only have like two rules here one don't get canceled two don't embarrass yourself i do public math and we did it we did it if budget do times frankly but dude that's a it's a good article right you gotta it you you'll you have to read that wanna buffett buffet talk about giving out away a hundred and fifty billion dollars but doing he's doing it in a way that we can easily understand by saying everyone should read their way before they die with their children do buffet doing anything i'm in i'm so in on buffet telling any story or talking about any subject of his liking he is absolute blank check of attention from me right yes yes my bill simmons had this thing that he coined once called the tyson zone about mike tyson where he goes the tyson zone is when somebody reaches a love of crazy that somebody could tell you anything about mike tyson and you would believe it like if it was like oh mike tyson got arrested because he's eating sharks every morning it's like a fuck that's crazy you know he bid it year he he's going to jail it's like there's no story that is out of bounds on mike tyson and i feel like the the buffett zone is basically somebody who you have my un undeveloped attention at will whenever you want it for however long you if he's like i'm doing a sixteen hour live stream i'd be like okay well i guess i i guess a better you know like get a comfy chair because i'm gonna be here for sixteen hours today you know like there's no there is no nothing warren buffet could do that i would not be interested if he was just like i'm gonna live share myself that you know like doing as asmr eating soup i'd be like alright i'm in i'm gonna search like attributing facts and stats to him well you know what buffett says he says yeah buffett says is the the new harvard study yeah right yeah there was a study at harvard to support whatever point i'd like to make and similarly you know buffett once said x oh really quick can you tell me if this is true is this en run thing a joke i think it's real but i'm not sure alright which is i i hope it's a joke which is what is it what's the story they someone bought en is re relaunch it as a crypto token like you you could it's like worse than a bad like silicon valley plot i don't know if the story is is out but the the twitter handle en ron which en if you are you know under the age of twenty eight you probably don't even remember this but en is like oh was a t checks for oil yeah it was like an oil energy company in the nineties that was one of the biggest companies in the world and then in month's time it went bankrupt up and it turns out because the executives had all committed fraud and a bunch of them even killed themselves before they got sentenced and a of them got went to prison whatever horrible on twitter somebody is now tweeting from the en run twitter handle with their logo saying we're back and they are talking about a their new decentralized product and no one online knows is this real or is this not but it's the perfect way to say fuck you to the crypto crowd because that's basically what they're doing where they're just sitting they're sitting in a road of like should we name our new crypto scam after a scam dude dude dude two do two wrongs to make it right like this is like what a rapper samples an old song and they're like yeah like like one a new fraud sampling an old front yeah they're remix crying dude i just give you one rant real quick was watching this video that was like it's called i was on youtube was called the elon musk learning method oh alright click that's like another warren buffett says yeah exactly elon explaining how he does this or like you know some some backstory about elon but one thing he says in it which i think it just it just struck me it is an obvious point but i guess the implications of it really just like slap me in the face he was like people say like you know we have to give people better access to education he goes he's like that could not be further from the truth he's like you can literally learn anything everything you wanna learn is available online at a world class level for free to anyone who has internet connection which is almost everyone and he's like basically there is no lack of access to education and it's so true like i if i want if i was oh man i wish i could have gone to harvard okay just google it watch every harvard lecture you want is online you could sit there you could get a harvard computer science education today for free in your underwear at home and nobody does it just like they do second i do it i spent hours this weekend learning how different match tricks were done on youtube hours i can't be fooled oh not even learning how to do them no learning how they're done i just needed to confirm that david blaine well just a hammer yeah dude that when that show came out magician greatest sneakers revealed do you remember that is so pissed was i remember literally thinking it to myself i was like just i was like tnt you sure do no drama this is an amazing premise they were like this magician has to wear this mask because if his peers in the magic industry knew what he was about to tell you they're gonna kill he would be killed os sized he could never show his face in a magic room again i was like oh holy shit my mom what is the remote and i was like it was like pre recording i was like got a notebook out and i was like oh my god how do they do it and he just showed you every magic or trick how they do it it's the greatest that's the greatest right listen is absolute greatest that's what i do that's what i do youtube like you're telling me he didn't actually bite that quarter in half yeah oh so sad what said about the on though sad it doesn't matter that's the pop alright that's it i feel like i could rude world i know i could be what i want to from at all in and like a days off on a road less travel a look bag ever