Kevin Rose: His $100M/Year Watch Blog, Money From Digg.com, & Web3 Business

when i saw you went and did the watch site h first of sean have you ever read that like when i when i i was like a blog i i like watches i have rolex this was like a blog for luxury watches what the hell is this guy i thinking did you did you just say that it went from like a million or two in revenue and now it's samsung said it's so far a hundred million yeah yeah we're over a hundred million in revenue now man that is why insane what's up alright in this episode we are sitting down with kevin rose a lot of you know kevin because he's an internet og he created dig back in the day he was a seed investor in twitter and a bunch other cool companies he was been he's been a vc he's been a founder he launched a recently launched an n project that's done hundreds of millions of dollars worth of nxt sales and so kevin's has been around for a while and the cool part of the interview if you if you listen to it you're gonna see very chill guy very down to earth very humble and not a kind of like oh my god i'm gonna go take over the world you know bubbling over with ambition and a big chip on his shoulder seem like a happy dude who was enjoying himself and had a ton of success in the process and i like that i like seeing diff people who play the game with different in different ways and he's definitely somebody who's interesting we talked about a bunch of his projects that you may not know about so for example is creating watch this niche project for watches that grew from one million in revenue to now over a hundred million after it got acquired and merged with h then also we talked about how he hires writers we talked about you know how he got into twitter as an early investor and what does he do with his money so he's got a bunch of money how does he invest where does he put it and the answer is not not what you may have expected the last thing we did at the end is we did the crypto debate so sam is sort of a a crypto skeptic kevin is obviously a crypto believer and one of the kind of most welcome known guys in the crypto scene and we had a little debate where we talked about is it all bullshit or are there some use cases so i hope you enjoy this episode with kevin rose i like it i think you will too we should give like a brief overview overview but like your resume we don't really talk too much about like resume this up but your resume is like crazy long so i've been following you forever so i've known about your work so you started dig which was when did you start that at o four two thousand four that's right yeah and so you're were it was like one of the original like site like link ag and it was like a cultural phenomenon and that was crazy and you were like was it time magazine that you were on the cover of like you know business week business week it was like here's this young kid taken over silicon valley what's the internet and who's this kid controlling it type of thing and like the it had all this hype but like dig didn't turn out maybe as wonderful as like we we all thought maybe it could have done but then you like had your finger on the pulse of all these other things you've done that dig you done is it i read it all the time but is it pronounced h key h yeah dink a watch blog that also like sells watches you're a partner at google ventures you have this app called zero fasting that i use i love partner at true ventures which i still take you're at now you've got the you got the the oak meditation app and then i have a feeling there's like five or ten other things that you just have brewing that like i don't even know like most of people probably don't even know about but basically my point is is like you're kind of an internet og and you are incredibly prolific i mean does that kinda summarize it yeah i mean the the most recent thing i started was proof which is our our venture into the world of entities and so that's that's the only thing missing from from that and that that's about ten months old now so that's on the newer side so from the outside if i look at this kind of like collection of our like the career path it looks very random it's like you know from you know from venture backed to angel vest to venture investing to kinda like a niche communities you know these like kind of apps that are like simple like like meditation or fasting you don't podcast you need to show you know you've done a bunch of content you you did a bunch of different things was there a method to the madness or is this do you just describe it as random or is there kind of like some underlying theme to this whole thing yeah there's i would say that i've always been one yeah ever since i was little kid to just tinker and just to to play and and if there's any method to the madness it is this common thread of exploration and just wanting to if i see something that doesn't exist that should exist i wanna go build it and i've done that a handful of times you know probably at least ten to fifteen businesses of which you know ninety percent of them go to zero and then there's a few that pop and become you know pretty big so it's just this idea that i don't wanna sit on the sidelines if there's something that's exciting that needs to be built i i'd i'd rather just spin up a team and and go after it of all those projects i'm and i'm actually gonna exclude proof from that because i wanna talk all about that in a little while but of all those projects that i mentioned which one has been the most financially successful for you personally that's a good question certainly i would say when i was in the middle of web two point o which was the the when dig was at its its peak which was about a two thousand early two thousand six you know we were hit around thirty eight million people a month using the site it was you know of the web two properties it was one of the largest it it led me to sitting down and you know dinners and conversations and hangouts with the you know jack do and evan williams and zuckerberg and all the household names that became these big products and they were just friends and so because of that it was more like hey well you know do you wanna invest in my new thing and and so would say the investment side has definitely been the the best financial returns i did start a media company that well i would say there's there's two things that that well three that are two are unrealized in h which is is is gonna be crazy it'll you know it's over a hundred million revenue a year now which is nuts whoa really and then we have you know this stuff i'm doing it proof right now which has just been been another crazy rocket ship but in terms of like true exits of businesses that i've started revision three i was the c cofounder as a media company that became discovery channel's digital arm and we sold that for a thirty five million dollars back in two thousand and eight or something like that so that was probably the biggest company sale that i've had but you know the they're much larger on the more angel investment side and maybe that sale gave you the the ammo to do the angel to do angel investing or would you have been able to do it without it a bit but i was already starting to do small investments prior to that so i i didn't have any money i didn't come from money but when dig really took off and we were a couple years in to dig investors and this is a very common practice it doesn't get talked about a lot but investors come around and they're like hey you know you're doing this around a financing can we take a little pressure off of using as an entrepreneur and buy some of your stock personally right and so i saw a little bit of my dig stock enough to give me the ammo to go and do small c checks you know and put you know twenty five k to you know twitter's seed round and and put you know twenty five k and or it was more into facebook but they're were a little bit later stage and and so it was it was those little tiny checks that you know when they turn into multi billion dollar businesses we're were pretty meaningful how much does twenty five k into twitter and facebook early on actually turn into million dollars i mean that that math is even hard to comprehend in twitter seed round what was the valuation then well it was difficult because they were a podcast company doing podcast software and then they they did a new round they they they pivoted into twitter and so oh gosh i'm drawing a blank on the name of the podcast audio audio that's right they were audio so yeah i didn't invest in audio they had become twitter and i asked of who i was the tight with the time because i didn't really know jack that well at that yet and i asked to have he ceo and i was like you know can i can i invest and it there was no round available at that point they but he's like i got this engineer that blake that was leaving and had some stock and was like you just wanna buy some mode stock i was like yeah that sounds great just buy saw i think gary vaynerchuk said the same story and bought he bought yeah so really yeah so here's the funny thing i so i bought in from blake and then i i told gary that blake was selling some and then twitter ended actually they had a preemptive round come along that really like like five or ten x their valuation and then blake was like oh whoa whoa no there's a new valuation now and he charge carry the new price so gary still pissed at me because i got this like really cheap price for twitter stock you know and then and then gary had to pay the more expensive price but that was a a funny what do you think blake saying right now i mean blake probably just he something he held on to like half or more and so you know he probably i don't know he if i had to guess he it made fifty plus seventy five plus million dollars or something on it he i'm sure he's okay did at the time because twitter kinda had like well there's like audio kinda of failing twitter who knows and then there was like this like small community of people in silicon valley that were like using it back when it was like texting the the your updates out mh like when you're when you were writing that check did you feel like this is the you know the next big thing or was just kinda like i don't know my friends are smart let's see or where was it something like it was the next big thing because there was i i loved so as someone that was building a social graph of sorts at dig you know there was always this idea back prior to excuse me prior to twitter that was bidirectional friendships so you know on myspace you in friends and all the others they come prior to twitter you had to actually know the person to see their content so it was like i would you like to send a friend request yes do you accept this front request yes right and it was like same thing with facebook and when twitter came out with that model of just this idea following and and and it allowed like there was no levers on the platform it was like me and lap port and a couple others that were the top fall people on the platform at the time but i i i thought to myself like wow if this catches on the with the celebrity crowd it's just gonna be insane it's gonna be because everyone will just wanna see and also the barrier to entry a lot of back then it was it was it was impossible to get you know celebrities to sit down and kind of do technical things because that that we didn't really have smartphones but the fact that you could text to that number that short code just what you were up to anybody can do that it doesn't require any special software it doesn't require you sitting in front of a computer and so it was just so dead simple to use it felt as though as i saw the tech crowd you know kinda catching on it it it i knew eventually it would spill outside of that that small vertical of users into the mainstream and if that when that would happen that was the bet and when that would happen if and when that would happen that would it would it would blow up and and it did so that was that was awesome and do you remember i've also seen you did a video back in the day when square was like a prototype i was like a youtube video i remember you you're were like hey yeah check this out like you know here's this little square and you could plug it in your phone you could take credit card payments you're like and it was not even released yet and you were like you know promote i think you did you invest in that too because that would have been like yeah that's a great story because i hit jack up and i was like hey i heard you're doing this new credit card thing i'd like to be an angel investor and he's like oh dude it's overs subscribed i'm sorry like we've closed the round like blah blah and i like damn it i'm like well let me see if i can help you in some way and so he he gave me a prototype and i just went and recorded a video and it got a lot of traction and it got a lot of people excited about this new product and it was like a early glimpse of what was to come and it started getting you know tens of thousands of views on on youtube and he calls me back and he's like i had an investor dropout out i've got some room do you wanna do you wanna put a check in and so that's what got me this to to their seed round which was which was awesome what was it like you know i live in san francisco from two thousand twelve up until someone recently sean is still there it's definitely a bit different now because like startups are are quite popular and and jack's and jack do sees is like a basically a celebrity mark zuckerberg was obviously celebrity what was it when back then in the the you know o four zero five zero six you know two thousand ten when these things were just getting going did you actually think that a guy like jack do was gonna be like this kinda like titan of of industry like he kind of is like what was it like being around some of these folks early on when they were just you know you guys were just messing around well it was you met a lot of entrepreneurs back then and there was it was clear there's a few people that stood out is just being wildly creative and and just deep thinkers and i was really drawn to those folks i wanted to just like pick their brain more and get to know them better and so you know one of the things that struck me is just how mature mark zuckerberg was when he was younger like it was you know i'm i'm quite a bit older just excuse me than he is and how old is this now he's still only like thirty eight he's younger than that oh my god yeah so how old is mark that's oh yeah you're right he's thirty eight yeah still that's still obesity he is thirty that's pretty wild yeah it it's it's it's crazy he was he was really young so yeah so when i met him was two thousand and five i wanna say so he was twenty one wow so he was twenty one years old and i remember just thinking about how put together he was and how well spoken and just what a deep thinker he was about the space and he wasn't wing he was taking it very seriously and that was that was a big big shock to me i remember just those conversations being like i was like wow for twenty one i was definitely not as big as he was a twenty one what what's something he said that made you made you think that well you know one of the things that i was always frightened by as an entrepreneur in my in my youth was just this idea of would people take me seriously and could i admit when i didn't know something and it was it was it okay to i tried to hide my vulnerabilities as an entrepreneur and he just came in and was asking so many pointed questions and you know i asked him about some of his hiring and firing practices and how he would edit his team how he ensured that he made the right hires on the engineering side because it was it was those was a very challenging thing to do back then at to scale websites you were like racking your own servers and you know the way where it wasn't in aws of the world and we were talking a lot about that and it was just it was one of those things where he just told me that he just you know sir it's the obvious stuff you surround yourself people smarter than you and then you ask a lot of questions and you're not afraid to ask those questions so you know back then i had some great investors and and board members but at times i was a little hesitant to be like hey i i don't quite understand how this works can you help educate me and i think it was due to my lack of like for some reason i thought because i was a college dropout that i i i had to hide that and and they would be like if i asked a question that i should have learned in college that it would've have looked had had egg on my face and so there was a lot of of of nervous ness around that and and just to see mark just be so open and just curious and there was no it was clear that if he if he didn't know something he was gonna get to the bottom of it right away it was it was inspiring i had a i i had an experience just like that when we were selling our our last company i met with all the big companies facebook google amazon whatever we also mess met with discord and i go in and i meet jason who's the ceo of discord and i'm like pitching him on like you know basically if you bought our thing like it would add this dimension to discord it would be awesome and what i was so used to was most founders if you if you're just kind of saying how awesome they are and how they can take over all these different how there's so much more they can do how this is just the beginning and how there's all these different ways that they can expand normally they're like yes yes yeah yeah totally we can do that too we can do that too it all sounds good and he was just sort of like you know i would acquire you guys because i like you and i like that you came in and you had this like whiteboard and you just like painted a picture for me but we won't do any of that and he's like no that's not what discord should do what we should do and he said no and he was like we should just be this one horizontal utility that does this one thing and that's our that's that's the right strategy for us and he was the first guy that said no when i was like kind of giving him some ice cream of like you can have this too right right and and i just thought oh that's what like this is this is probably what z was like you know this is probably was somebody who was focused was like because back when z was building facebook it was like my myspace was adding music and then tv shows and doing these like brand deals and like he was just like no real names simple profiles we're just gonna let you like you know communicate and add photos and do the stuff and like he said no to a bunch of different things which is why spoke with some such a cleaner site than my myspace and all the other competitors that were out there yeah i would argue they've lost a lot of that because they say yes to a lot of the cl of features of other other competitors but yeah you're right that relentless focus is is so essential and oftentimes it's it's more what you say no to than what you say yes to want on the product side you know i i that totally agrees and vibes with me for sure do do you sort of when you're doing all these projects back to the projects do do do you have like a set of rules like for example i know a guy who incredibly successful i talked to him one time as kevin or a couple times his name's kevin ryan he started like mongodb db business insider gil group all these like amazing companies and he was like well i just do back of the envelope math and then i give each project six months and me and my partner typically fund it with three hundred thousand dollars and we kinda like feel it out it's little mathematical but it's also like let's just see what happens in six months and see if this is promising and we'll decide and so he's like six months three hundred k can we make something cool and i talked to atomic labs either day you know what atomic labs they're like that incubator that's they're not really an incubator like start companies and they said something like they're like yeah well sometimes it won't only spend fifty grand and like two months or something like that do you have like something like that when you're starting a about of projects like the fasting app or the meditation app where you're like i think you did another one milk or is that the name of the production yeah it the name of the the kinda incubator studio yeah like yeah do you like like rules for what you're looking for yeah i mean it's there is i guess the the question really comes to when you decide to kill something or sell it off or get rid of it and or move on to the next thing and and oftentimes it's because your original kind of thesis around either the market size or just the concept behind it just didn't take hold and so i don't have any like hard set number of months sometimes you're early so you know the fasting app for example you know when when i launched zero it it's sad at you know tens of thousands of users for the first eight months and then fasting hit and it became more of a household thing and people are talking about intermittent fasting it was all over tv and different you know places picking up and so people are just naturally searching for fasting in the app store because that's just what they do and then that's when it exploded to you know hundreds of thousands and you know million plus monthly active people doing fast and but it was how do i shut that down after the first six months you know they've been too soon so something like that if you if you just believe the market is not quite mature enough i typically put it into a little bit more of a maintenance mode you know i i got it to that first version where i felt like this is a useful utility for people that are looking to learn more and get into fasting now let's just let it kind of organically build from here you and we were seeing you know nice slow consistent kinda week over a week month of a month growth but nothing explosive like you you're used to seeing in a in a high growth startup so if that one that one in particular was just like let's just just wait around and then other times you know you create something and you've just clearly missed the mark it's it's like we created this app called tiny which was a a fun little photo sharing app that was yeah i used it about i liked it oh you did awesome yeah i was these little little little tiny postage style size looping videos with no audio and we thought it would just be like a little bit more quick a little intimate way to show kind of how you're traversing throughout your days and weeks rather than having to take the time to set up to look all perfect in front of your perfect instagram footage it was less your pressure literally because it was small right like that part actually kinda true yeah and and that was a crazy one because you know we launched and it just it caught fire immediately and we had you know hundreds of thousands of downloads in the first week and then it just died off completely and everyone was like that was a fad that was a that was a a fun little fad and that one we shut down pretty quickly after that because it was clear that it was a fun little thing but but it there was no depth to it was a it was a feature not not a real product so yeah it it varies from product to product i guess is the best answer i can give you cool okay so you talked a little bit about like you know which one was the most lucrative okay yeah obviously you sort of angel investing in twitter and then getting into you know facebook and and others is is it works out well which one was the most fun so which chapter was the most fun and kind of with that is i'm on this mission i just you know like after selling companies like i got time and so i was like alright well what's the part party and i was like i wanna find out who's having the most fun in their career and like because that's what i wanna do now i just have the most most fun type of crew who's having the most fun with their life right now so i wanna know for you which of your projects must one and then who do you see who could who's a blueprint i could look at where you're like dis i've met this person they're having a blast with what they do yeah well i would say that the you know there's the the nice thing about starting your own businesses is you're you're doing it because there's a personal drive behind it like i've never created anything because i thought here's an opportunity to make money it's never been that it it's it we were talking about this as we were just you know prior to hitting recorder or whatever about the little podcast case holder on amazon right and like there's there's there's sometimes there's these little businesses where you see a broken piece of an industry and you're like well gosh if i went out and created this i could sell x number of units per year and it'd be a great little profitable business and like that's never really interest me it's more about the this the creativity of it all and just the exploration of an idea that i'm drawn to and so no startup is fun they're they're all they're all roller coasters loop loops like there's the chaos of all those things right especially as you grow your team and there's hr issues and people getting sick and product's not getting shipped on time and customers being upset and you know that there's there's it's never gonna be just like this perfect dream but that said as long as it's something that you're just naturally drawn to i'm always having a good time and and i'd i'd say though that said that's kind of a you know a little bit of a dodging the question but the more recently when i've kinda gotten into the art and in nlp side of things that world in the world of cryptocurrency is probably the most fun because it is so blue ocean and there's just so much to be built there it's not building yet another app and competing on on ka in the app store it's like it's it's really there's there's so many different directions you can go and and very few well there there there there's is a decent amount of of high quality entrepreneurs in the space but not as as much as say you know building something for the app store so i enjoy kinda of more of the blue ocean aspect of of that world man i remember when so basically i i started this company called the hustle it was like a daily email and we sold it for we bootstrap and sold it for tens of millions of dollars it kinda it's it's kinda sounds a little bit similar to what you were saying about your story i lived in san francisco and i started a media company because i was like i'm not capable of starting a tech company but i wish i were and also i'm good at writing when i saw you went and did the watch h first of all sean have you ever read that like when i when i i was like a blog i i like watches i have rolex this was like a blog for luxury watches what the hell is this guy i thinking like he just like he he he like it started to something else are started i was like watch or it was like a it was something else you got acquired emerged and you became like the ceo of this i remember looking at just feeling like i have no idea what the hell he's doing i don't know wear watches so i had no i was completely out of touch with it and it just seemed like a you know a hobby project at the time and then i started looking into it and i was like oh wow there's was like a huge passionate base around this and this company makes a lot of money then it's been around think time i don't think it did make a lot of money didn't like i remember i read that and i was like i like this business because i'm into it but like this guy is frankly way above this what is he thinking like this is he's like the same hard well watch phil was so again like just kind of like personal passion stuff so i was in a watches mainly because when my father passed away he left me with a single watch and it's something that i aware every once in a while it was for him it was like to afford a single rolex in a in a middle class household is a big deal like that's like back in the eighties you know when my dad bought that he was just like i've made it you know i have and i'm not talking about one of the crazy relaxes i'm talking about just the standard day date kind of like you know simple rolex relax and like that was like the one thing he was really proud of you know that is like gmc pickup truck right and so those that that was something i was left with and then i started reading some of the content so bin climber created h the actual blog and i created watch fill which was an ag in an app that brought together all these different sources so that people could read this stuff on the mobile on their mobile phone because a a lot of silly as it sounds back then most of the excuse me most of the watch sites didn't have mobile versions of their site so they were on just like old old software publishing software that what that was just horrible so i i i i made it all very readable push notifications like all the stuff just a kind of a wrapper for like all of this great content and it it just started growing and growing and growing and i had a lot of eyeballs like some of the the the biggest collectors were were now using the product and you know i i h was the most kind of best prominent sources of this content that took it very seriously so it was you know they had had a couple full time writers and so i talked to ben and said hey you don't have the tech team here let let's let's merging in combined forces so we we merged the two companies together he was three or four people and i was three or four people i moved to new york became ceo at the time he was doing maybe a million and a half dollars to two million dollars a year in revenue so just enough to kinda do payroll and we grew it from there and then turned on e commerce and then started selling and and creating partnerships with the big watch brands and now you know as authorized dealers represent you know several dozen of the big watch brands that are out there and that just became a massive it was still a relatively unknown back then whether or not people would actually spend large sums of money over apple pay right and so i remember we had someone from apple that was you know helping us on when you get to certain size they kinda give you a little bit more concierge help on the apps stuff and they said that they had seen their a two hundred and fifty thousand dollar transaction come through apple pay on an american express and that was like the largest known transaction at that time had been done over apple pay for a site unseen vintage rolex which was which is kinda crazy but anyway yeah so that i mean new new new luxury watches are double digit billions of dollars in a a year in in terms of market size so it's it's a big industry that that many people it's not as a apparent in the states when you go overseas it you'll see how in and in europe their you know watches are so much more kind of a a type of thing that is is worn versus smartwatch watches are more of than normal more no no watch at all here in the states did you did you just say that it went from like a million or two in revenue and now it's samsung is so far a hundred million yeah yeah we're over a hundred million in revenue now man that is why insane and a lot of it's commerce i mean you guys like when people talk about content and commerce i think most of the time it's nonsense like buzzfeed talks about it and i'm like i don't no man i don't think people gonna be buying a lot of branded buzzfeed pillows and shit like that or like they had that tasty thing i was like i don't think people gonna buy a buzzfeed oven it i just don't think that's gonna happen and you guys did it and i was like oh no is this like gonna be a thing it seems so challenging but you guys are a perfect example of that you know the other good example g i bet you go to bring a trailer do you go to break a trailer dot com i've been to bring a trailer many times yeah it's one of his favorite sites actually they are awesome and so they've done the same thing but with cars mh where basically it's like this perfect tie of like i just i i bought one car from actually those websites and but i read it every single day i'm like let's just see like what they're gonna write about with cool cars out there and then you guys did it with watches and i loved your videos with john mayer where we talked about his watch collection and all that stuff it's awesome but what what other verticals or what there like industries have you thought man maybe i could actually do this model i've always thought software but like that's not nearly as sexy and cool as watches and vintage cars but has there any it's like when you were like thinking about this model i i bet you're at that night you're like i'm gonna do it but i bet you not gonna apply this here here and here yeah i mean in in some sense it's kind of what we're doing right now in the world of entities where they're everyone that's armed with photoshop can create a digital piece of art on the blockchain and there's this mad rush into the world of t's but there is just a ton of clutter right and and just a a ton of of of of projects to sort through so well we created with proof was this this idea of you know it's the same thing with h ink it's the same playbook it's this curation with the point of view where you can have a strong editorial team come in that isn't talking about the flipping side of the industry that isn't talking about how to make a quick buck and entities that is really talking about what would you buy and hold for the next decade plus right and the playbook that that h nailed so well was that we took editorial so seriously and really hired out just a absolute stellar team of writers that had a deep understanding of the world of watches and not just a announcement this is a new watch that was dropped but a understanding of the the mechanics of the internals of the watches so they could tell you about the different movements and escape and why certain complications were harder to pull off technically than others and so it was a real geek blog and with that technical hardcore writing developed trust and so you and once you have the trust of your readers then you're able to extend commerce in a meaningful way and it's not asking them to buy you know a a a microwave or some like inexpensive or a throw pillow it's it's it's saying we have your trust this is what we believe to be a very important you know watch or collectible and because of that you know you're willing to pull the trigger on a on a twenty thirty fifty thousand dollar purchase so it's trust is so essential do you think that well i at the hustle we were trying to we hired a bunch of ryder sean hired some writers as well for his thing is crypto thing and i i've always debated this in my brain i'm like do i hire good writers and teach them about business or do i hire smart business people and teach them how to write what did you find was the best way to do that for watches yeah i mean the best way to do that was to find people that had the natural organic built in a love for like just this site for for all things mechanical watches so you know we would have writers that if you take for example like the speed master though the the the watch that made it to the moon from omega you know they could tell you every single variant and movement change and the reasons why and they were just super geek on this stuff and they may have been just like b plus writers where you get them but they had the technical knowledge in their brain and that's a lot easier to fix because you get them to put that that technical information out in draft form and then you just apply an editorial layer over the top of it where you have copy editors that come in and help you know stitch together a a better more more cohesive story before you actually publish it out to the world yeah love that this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrate well i can see the client's whole history calls support tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally missed hubspot grow better you're pretty chill guy when do you get like really fired up like what what gets you excited or in a good or bad way like you know i get really enthusiastic about the most random shit like the most it'll be like a creative project and i'm like i bet i could pull this off and i just go like i just get too excited about it sam has that same but he also has it where if he feels he's wrong sam like you know willing to fight to the death about it and so he gets really pumped up what gets you really pumped ray rage is my fuel i i love i love fighting yeah so for me new ideas and working with creative people is the the the most kind of like strongest source of fuel for me so when i get together with an artist or an a fellow entrepreneur and i actually it doesn't have to be someone that has created something big has it has it's rather someone that just has wild ideas that that are potentially just new new ways of looking at the world so there you meet a lot of entrepreneurs entrepreneurs that are opportunistic iterative entrepreneurs where they'll see something they'll say oh there's some the rough edges on that particular product i'm gonna go sand them down make it easier for consumers and go launch a business and they have great success i like the ones that are just like really thinking about entire new verticals or just flipping something completely on its head in new and creative ways so that is what i'm really drawn to from just a a straight idea point of view and so entrepreneurs wise and when i i invest in some of these startups ups those are my favorites are are those those crazy a more world changing entrepreneurs in terms of the the rage side of things you do you've had don't you've had a bunch of rage to inducing moments i've i've followed too i've seen i've seen you this fucking raccoon we saw that one i dog i've seen people protest outside your house i've seen you get in trouble for like i don't know wanting to demolish like a historical building i don't know like the whole story but like you you've had you've kind of been a target yeah i mean those the the those all have their own unique story that the historical building thing was definitely not true that that that was a that was a pretty funny one in that but but that was that was just people wanting to keep an old house up in the neighborhood and they called it historically even though it really wasn't we wanted to take it down because it was filled with the asbestos which we didn't wanna live in a house that had a asbestos in it but that's a whole on their story the rage stuff you know the the the the last four to five years of of my life has been spent trying to to to kind of master my own mind and and it i i think that if you can't come to grips with your own and purse like personal peace of mind it it's it's a horrible place to be and so you know i i remember as a young entrepreneur or just kinda being on this twenty four seven hustle to go bill build build i gotta win i have to win i have to win and it created a level of anxiety that was not good for me and and so i think that's part probably why you saw me kind of do things like the meditation app and other other things because i it was just a a natural forcing function for my my own self to like take some of that stuff more seriously and so you know i i just want to be able to to be able to sit and not have to have my mind be always on and that that's kinda been my goal and it's something i'm still i'm still working on so that it's not like i remember there was this interview with elon musk and i'm not comparing myself elon musk but i there's one thing that i i can certainly relate to where he talks about how his mind sometimes just never shuts off and he's always thinking about things problems new ideas like all these things and and it's it's for me it it's always been that that has been not a blessing but something that i it's just been as weighed on me and and i've always tried to i guess the the big push in the last few years have been to try and w that what kind of gets you all hot and bothered now where you're thinking about like the new industries or the things that excite you what what ideas would you pursue one caveat that you're that you're not currently pursuing so because it's easy to say i'm excited about this project i'm doing i think like for example palmer lo was on the last episode and he was talking about alright we're like you're doing and you did oc what are the ideas that are on your kind of like oh that's interesting but like i only got one me so i can't go do it because i think right that's the most interesting to the audience and to end into ourselves and that's actually the origin of the podcast me and sam have more ideas then we have time to do them and so we're like well if we just say them out loud here maybe people will take them and run with them or or find something interesting in it by the way have you ever talked to palmer kevin that guy is wild no i've never i've never chatted with them i i i have to go back and listen to that episode though i'm i'm really curious to know i've i've i've seen some written interviews but never never hitting on video form it went live yesterday it's sounds like you our youtube and most of our listeners partnerships on like podcast feeds he is he's something man dude that guy's a ec he's just like enthusiastic about everything he like knows a lot about a lot he's like biology but more but almost he's as smart but is more common you know what i mean like he's for some reason i can relate to him even though i know that he's just like so much more smarter than i am yeah i i had read some stuff and and i i don't know how much of his true but some of his is company stuff that he was creating around drones for tracking people and and some personal controversial yeah i just it doesn't it doesn't fit well with my ethos so i i i haven't really followed his careers is closely but i'd be curious to listening to interview for sure i think it was probably was probably our best guest episode awesome done a bunch of them and and the reason why is he's like you know he's like a he's like pretty jen he's pretty hey he's high energy but he's he's like direct so it's like you know why why do you do this or how you think about this and he's like for example he's like i thought about you know i'm kinda overweight could i like solve obesity and he's like you know but here's what doesn't work telling me to eat less of foods that i don't like the taste of and bottled blah blah and he's like he's like my solution was and i started prototyping this in my house was to just instead of beyond meat and stuff there where they try to make like a burger out a chick piece is like i wanted to just make fake food out of oil zero calorie food that tastes amazing because oil tastes amazing and we can manipulate oil into anything we could turn oil into candles could turn it into wax we can turn it into this into that he's like i created a grilled sandwich that was zero calorie that tasted delicious using mobile and we're like dude that sounds kind of insane and like he's like the we're like why don't you do this crazy idea you sounded pretty passionate you went pretty far he's like well there just simply wasn't gonna be enough oil supply to do it and he's like we would have had to take the oil out of the sewage system and cent to the recycle it he's like i and i realized you know even i couldn't do that and i was like wow this guy's is like you know half genius half crazy and i you know i don't even know where the line is but i find it fascinating that he a thinks like this and b doesn't just think about it you know literally is like yeah in my house we converted the dining room into like this lab in order to like do these you know these sorts of projects and like you know out of one of them came end though the eight billion dollar company and the other one was gonna be this crazy like you know oil based fake food that's crazy that is awesome i love yeah see that's the type of entrepreneurship that i'm i'm really drawn to it's just like people that are hacking on stuff at night you know for me a lot of the stuff that that i think about in that that vein i tend to outsource and get other people to to to work on it a lot of the stuff around longevity i've been interested in specifically a drug called rap mice where where it's been proven now to extend life in in in various animals and now applied to dog so myself and jack do and brian from coinbase and a few others all have been putting money into funding studies out of the university of washington to to really prove this out in dogs and canine and then eventually move into human trials so you know some of that stuff and the bio hacking stuff i i still put a lot of effort and time and and and attention and i i try this stuff out on myself as well you know i'm i'm i'm trying some of these experimental things not because i i'm not one of these people that wants to put you know young people's blood in them and live forever i i i i wanna die i just you know i i do like the idea of not yet since i am an but i am an older dad i didn't have my first kid and until my four at i was forty i i i would like to be around a little bit longer for them and that's that's all well i've heard of people doing this i know tim's doing this with the what's it called cy like mushrooms yeah psilocybin yeah and how much does it cost to fund of study and what do you get out of it other than like the altruistic of like well we're just contributing to like the grand thing but is there is there like a direct outcome that you can get from it like we can use this to fund a company no no not not in this particular case yeah tim was also put some money into this one as well there there was there's nothing you get out of it other than just trying to help further science you know a lot of these in this particular case the study was funded but be depending on the sample size and how many key you have evolved you can only to detect certain levels of of of output you need a larger sample base it is called like a properly powered study in order to detect smaller little nuances in the data and so we wanted to make sure it was powered enough to detect i believe up to ten percent lifespan increase and so to power it was to add another million dollars or so into the study to to make sure that what they could bring on the additional canine required to make that happen and you know i put my dog on it as well and and i and he's twelve now and he still runs around like a pup and and i attribute some of that to to a cycle of this that he did but yeah it's it's nothing other than just like you you you're figuring out ways in which you can like there's there's all these different avenues on the film philanthropic side where you're you're like what what is meaningful to me personally and the this this this particular study you know i think even if it just worked for dogs would be fantastic like forget humans if if i could have my dog live an additional five years like what a win you know so that it was kind of a a win win study dude i i talked to this guy that was like building i think it was called it's it called a age list rx i forget his the name of his company but he was he's trying to like you know do longevity stuff supplements and shit like that and things are going well for him but i he was kinda explaining his reasoning he was like you know a lot of people are afraid to take these medicines but we've been thinking if we told them it's good for their dog they're actually will give it to their dog and he was he was kinda like hypo to me and like brainstorming with me in real time he was like maybe we should just like do this for dogs and just give it to dogs and if once people see that it makes their dog live longer then they'll be like yeah yeah you know if i get give me that pill i'll take that thing because there's there's so much easier to commit to to give it to their dog i'm with kevin oh for sure and humans die so much dogs live forever well genome wise there's so much more overlap and and and in in connection there between key nines and humans and there is a lot of other animals out there so but you know the back to your question though about you know out of curiosity what what would i go pursue right now in terms of startups that i'm not doing i believe and it's very very clear now that ai is in the next five years is gonna change everything we're seeing open open ai and a lot of the projects they put out there recently will it be creative writing or i believe fiber as a company it will just be non existent it's gonna just joy the low end of the the creative market initially and then work its way up the chain and you know just the the outputs that you're getting now from prompt based art you know the future versions of photoshop are are not gonna be about moving mouse and pixels around it's just gonna be telling the computer what to do on your behalf you know you'll highlight an area and say you know change this aspect and and it'll all be done via prompt and and meaning you type in what you wanna see change in the a well we'll just make it happen we're seeing that today and i'm seeing you know advancements on the a side in in in medicine obviously all the creative side there's probably a half dozen or so tools now that will complete you know write complete paragraph you if you're writing sci f you give it some initial kind of prompts of where you want the story to go and the writing is quite good i i have no doubt in the next five years we'll see new york times best seller that was ninety percent written by ai so it's it's i i there's just so much interest and with the interest and excitement flows the engineering talent so i've seen a lot of friends that are these you know a lot of people are worked with it google and and other places where you know they're they're very insanely amazing engineers you know previously working on distributed systems and some of these hard problems that they were trying to solve and now i said hey i'm i'm actually gonna pivot into this this new world of ai and anytime you watch that kind of flow of high quality engineering talent and go move into something you you you pay attention so i'm looking for at a lot of investments in that particular sector and i'm i'm very bullish on it and something i don't have time to work on but i i believe some great businesses are gonna be built there what would be an application you would wanna do in that space so all those kind of like threads where it's like creative work medicine you know writing an ai book is there an application that you can think of that you're like i feel like ai i could solve this because i think that's that's the it's a hammer in search of nails at this point that's what i john you made a joke you made a joke i i i i've always teased sean about web three because i'm not the biggest fan of it and he was and we were joking about how he was like coming up with ideas with with ai he's like finally a use case we found it if like with ai it seems like there's actually way more obvious use cases right but yeah what what application excites you oh i'd love to have that web three debate at some point too but on on the ai side you know it we're already seeing this right so so fig was purchased by adobe probably saw that it was crazy acquisition you know probably the the the the the standard these days for prototyping and and creating interfaces for everything from mobile apps to websites to to you name it we're seeing already built in plugins to fig that allow you to prompt based build anything in in just a matter of seconds so you can say hey give me an interface for a mobile app that has these five options in this color with this futuristic type style and you know you get something back in real time in in in in the twenty five seconds and it's it's rough but it's giving my design team and other designers out there just a great starting point and it saves them a ton of time and effort but this is like inning one like two three years from now it'll be doing ninety percent of the work versus you know the first right now was probably twenty percent of the work so that is is is super exciting in the assistance and and time to market for new ideas new projects i think it's gonna be compressed even further it's it's the same thing that we what happened with the kind of like late web two when we went from racking our own servers to fully deployed in and in an automated and manage you know aws instances that and in some of these databases that just auto scaled as you threw traffic at it it it really compressed the time to the go to market time you know by quite a bit and i think we'll see the same thing on on the design side so the speed at which we can develop and deploy new ideas is just gonna be you know probably an order order to order of magnitude better than it is today so i'm excited for that where do you a question that we started asking people and it's actually i've always learned so much from this but what message boards or facebook groups or websites what corners of the web are you lurking it in right now like for me i i love facebook group there's always like a weird facebook group like a tiny example is over overland do you guys know what overland is it's like no it's like i don't know the exact definition but it's like you know how you see like toyota four runners or f one fifty to have like campers on it and it looks like they can go in the desert for like two weeks so i started like joining landing groups like three years ago because i was like this is kind of an interesting turn that's picking up or another one that we got really into a couple years ago was mobility so like all these grown men not caring about yoga but they called it mobility and it was all about like stretching and it's like what's going on with there's like all these weird instagram guys like doing all this stretching shit it's kind of intriguing and like a lot of times it's like instead of instead of therapy executive coaching you know yeah yeah that's what happened from from you'll go to mobility yeah they just changed like mayo aioli and it totally worked it's awesome like i love mobility now and like for for the body stuff tim ferris was always pretty good at like he'd be talking about all this weird stuff like fasting like dude what the hell is this fasting thing what are you talking about and that was like a really cool corner of the web to like look in on and like see like how the geek behaving now so i can learn like how the rest of the normal like average joe is gonna care about in the next five or ten years where there's that chris dixon and quote you are you familiar with it yeah what is the case this this what the geek who are playing with on the weekend will become like what we're all using like if several years later it's something in some version of that yeah so like what geek places are you hanging out now right now from for from sean i like a lot of twitter people so we'll find like specific people in twitter who are yeah quirky and we're like what the hell is this guy talking and he's start crazy i mean it's really cool yeah i mean i i follow a ton of people in in crypto twitter so i i pay attention to all the on you know the what's happening on web three via via twitter and then also you know mostly discord it's just a lot of private discord it's a lot of private telegram small groups and gatherings of peers that get together discuss new ideas new projects these dow these decentralized autonomous organizations where people get together to discuss and collect and purchase things so it it it's a lot of i i've never spent so much time in discord it it's like it's crazy that the the conversation has shifted there and in twitter largely dude i hate that by the way i love the fact that like i dig or a reddit or something exists where you can just like if you googled it and found it like you could participate now i'm like oh what the fuck man kevin's probably got this craziest telegram group that like there's i even i can't get in because i even know exists no you could join proof fifty thousand dollars and you're in broke it's easy no it's i i think it's more like it's people realize that they wanted a little bit more intimate conversation so i i have a feeling that like there was a there was a lot of of this move to do smaller private discord and smaller telegram groups because it would lead to just not the masses flooding in and and the chaos that you would see on reddit and so i that's kind of been the move that that i've seen in in the the reason behind a a lot of that but it it's not hard to get into the you just have to actually show them that you you know what you're doing like you have to you know get in there and embrace web three which it sounds like sam you may not be the biggest fan of but you have to you have to get in there and and and and talk the talk and know where to go and people will tell you like this is the be place to be hanging out or and i'm enjoying this this discord over here you'll learn about this and this is where the ai discord are or whatever it may be and that's just kind of the new it's the new facebook facebook it it's it's it's i'm sure it's good for some things but it's it's it's dead when it comes to web three you want me to tell you my why i'm not a fan of this and yes please i'm gonna get you i'm gonna try and get you fired up here and then yeah i'm about this let's try talk about proof i do it sounds like i'm making an easy out which i kinda am but basically like i am i'm i'm i'm decently educated just by hanging out with sean and so i have to admit that like some of my beliefs are a little bit loosely held and and i'm not the most educated on the topic but my opinion on web three is basically it's a bunch of like it's just this kind circular economy of a bunch of people making making products to serve an industry that has yet to like truly figure out or i don't know what you call industry a movement that yet to truly figure out like what the what the thing is that they're doing and there's so many examples where people i think are fairly like ego and elitist us about it saying like web two point o is old and like the way the this has to be decentralized or this has to be this way it's like man just because you're putting web three in front of something that doesn't mean that there's actually a problem here and i think you're just wasting so much time and energy working on something that is just like a circle jerk that doesn't actually solve a problem better than the web point web two point o version also i thought it's pretty dogma where it's like decentralized everything it's like dude i want some stuff centralized like can you imagine like calling customer service out a decentralized like it's like no i like there are some things that i want like to have a to to be centralized and i thought that they are a little bit too dogma and i thought that they were oftentimes i'm saying like they like you people like you guys like didn't always have wonderful solutions you were just making shit up in order to like get in the game and i just thought that it it kinda bothered me yeah i mean i i i feel your frustration there and that i too and am someone that when i look at what's being built in web three if it's it's just for the sake of calling something decentralized and there's nothing behind it or no structural advantage for that being the case i think it's it's it's it's silly you know it's like i'll i'll give you a great example we're we're working on there there's a lot of things that you wanna do in web three some of them are high value and some of them are are low value when you were talking about working with the community so we have a community of people that come together to do all all different types of things and some of it is what we call token gated content so it's like a membership model where you have to be a member of something on hold a certain in order to unlock certain access to videos or content or whatever it may be some of those things can be high value items where you receive an a tea or something that is actually has some financial like you know something behind it that is a case where you wanna actually have that hardware wallet and pull it out and and do it in a way that is secure and that is protected and but the rest of the time you don't need that you can use a google login it's okay to use a web two login it's okay to use your email and password with two factor authentication like we don't have to throw away a lot of the fantastic technology that's been built in web two there's other things like for example some decentralized maximal and i think maximal is really what we're talking about here because anyone that is a maximal on means what you just like extreme and extreme means that you are so into something that you can't see any other way and it's like it's your way or there there's no possible there are people out there that say there is no other cryptocurrency than bitcoin that's the only one is if you give pops our our our buddy isn't pop like don't they call online bitcoin maxi he i don't think he i think he is a max on bitcoin and and you know do is in that camp too where he's like trying to extend bitcoin and says that's that's kinda of the only currency and i i think this applies to so many different things like i don't wanna get into to political talk but anytime you get to the fringes of anything where it's like this is the only thing that matters you get into crazy town in my point of view and so you know i think that is a danger of web three where there's a lot of that kind of idea that if if it's not pure web three it's not right and i'm with you i a hundred percent degree but that said like i've seen this idea and a lot of the d defy tooling when i say i mean decentralized finance a lot of the d defy tooling that's being built on the blockchain in a performant way in a cost effective way in a way that when you think about wells fargo as an organization with you know a hundred and fifty thousand employees i'm just making that up by maybe it's fifty thousand or seventy five thousand and somewhere in between that that range where that is just a lot of b and it and because of that b and because of that insane monthly not that that company has to cover you know that those dollars are are not not flowing to the right people and so there are examples of more efficient ways of doing finance on the blockchain that that can be done in a trust way written into smart contract code that that will mean for better outcomes for the consumer now those can be paired with centralized solutions right like coinbase is a centralized organization you have a email address that you can send it if something goes wrong with your account but they hold and keep decentralized currency right and they and they do things like decentralized staking where you earn four percent on your ethereum but they're a centralized company that gives you that customer support so i'm not i'm i'm a i think that the the ones that really win here yes they're are gonna be the people that say self custody is the only way they there's just famous saying that if it's not your keys it's not your crypto like like you have to hold your own private keys i'm not in that camp i do that personally and use safety deposit box and a whole slew of things to safeguard that for some things but there's other solutions where where a hybrid approach makes more sense so know that your argument is completely valid and that a lot of entrepreneurs that are building a web three completely agree with you and that let's not throw away the baby with the bath water here there's a lot of great things but there are also some great advantages that come with being decentralized or a whole slew of other technologies that's being built on web three that that i could point to that you'd say like oh that yeah actually that that does make more sense than the old way of doing things so so let's let's do this real quick so you've probably seen just like anybody else these like there's like these permanent like just like there's perm bowls for crypto there's perm bears and their mission and life is to basically find every stupid use case of crypto and highlight it or every bad investment or every sure clip of a a pro you know some dude at a sixteen z who goes on a podcast and says something dumb about crypto when asked about a use case and talk about me because i was just on their podcast two weeks ago so no no they i haven't seen out who you're you're you but dixon but like you there's there's people that sort of are are are focused on on poking holes and i think there's some value in poking holes but there's also you know it's a little bit bear embarrassing to spend your whole day poking holes on it's something you know but let let's put it this way i'm a on this podcast i'm the the crypto believer i'm the one who puts a significant portion of my net worth i have a crypto media company i have a bunch of belief in crypto but for this use kit for this exercise here i'm gonna point out two things that i think all would be would be you know strong and valid points against crypto to somebody like you who is also a a crypto believer so i you to kinda argue against these and i hope that this doesn't get clipped as like you know famous investor x fumble the ball when trying to explain you know crypto thing so let's try to do better than that yeah let's do it okay so the first would be around n entities right so you're a big n guy and there's n t art which i think pretty hard to argue against at this point like digital aren't cool their ability to own digital art that's one use case for entities mh but a lot of people who believe in entities will also say but that's just the beginning n entities is a is that's file format it's a protocol there's all these different use cases for n entities and i saw the founder of of opens i think talking about this yesterday out on a podcast where he's like they're like why he you know he's like oh another use cases n nfc tickets and they're like so why would there why would you wanna have a n ticket he's like well because then you it's you know you could plug it into def defy and you could take a loan against your ticket and then people were like why the fuck what i wanna take a loan against my sixty dollar like concert ticket like is that right really what the hype is about is sort of a silly use case i would like you to give me the non silly n use cases that you're excited about so like yeah and the well let's let's take a take an example let's take the ticket example and and the art one is easy it's a new canvas but let let's actually let's cover that first yeah one is easy it's a new canvas you can do things and pull from real time data to display our in very unique fun creative ways right like it's it's really not that much different than your than rolex x's i mean like there's no reason why a rolex is a hundred and fifty thousand dollars other than like a lot of people think it's cool so yeah well i would say there's a difference there because it was something you may not know about rolex as they make over a million rolex is per year and so rolex it hides that number and the reason they hide that numbers is because if they didn't have a sense of scarcity around it and they they do this specifically when you go in their stores they'll always be next time me walk by an actual true rolex boutique noticed how there's like some missing spots and and when you go inside and that's all play it's play because they're like oh they're they're sold out they're not available but we can put you on this list and in in three to four months we might you might get a phone guess what you always get the phone call and and the the watch coming because there's they're making a million a year the nice thing about you know the the one of the things that i was always so confused by is i was a common comic book collector way back in the day and i bought wolverine number one because i love wolverine it was like my childhood like i always wanted to own one right and so i bought wolverine number one and it always hovered around fifty dollars and i was like why is this not going up it's a very first wolverine launched in the eighties right it wasn't the first appearance of wolverine but it was a first wolverine comic and i finally got a hold of a really well known collector and he goes oh he goes you don't know they knew by that point that wolverine was a hot character and so they printed over three hundred thousand copies of that first edition as like oh shit like that's why there's just the a flood of these in the market so you know n t's is the beautiful thing about this when you have an artist produce a piece it has proven proven on so you know where it's come from as proven scarcity so you can't like create you know additional add ons or duplicates because it's all recorded on the blockchain and then you have the unique ability to do very creative things like animation oracle work the art can change based on the stock market price or time of day or a phase of the moon and there's just so much more extension it's a new vertical for art fine that's great awesome like digital frames are gonna be getting better it it it is gonna be a thing like there's no in my mind there is no argument to be had there that this won't be correct i don't that against the the future or the inevitable and art is the easy use case for entities but ticket thing is different right so the ticket thing i i i'm with you like i understand that people are in in web three are trying to like create these fancy financial instruments to like leverage you on anything that you own they're like hey you have a ticket to that upcoming concert that's sold out you know spin it into this d defy unit and take a loan against and then you can buy it back and used the money in the short term it's like that's all bullshit man that nobody's gonna do that right it's it's it's don't don't get me wrong there's there's there's da specific use use cases where that does make sense like loan against f t's is gonna be the same thing that happens when christy gives you a loan against your picasso right like these these happen this happens all the time it's just a parallel for the digital world there are certain types of of assets digital assets that getting loans against them if it's something you want will make sense the tickets thing for me is very confusing but while i will tell you is interesting and i've talked to actual rock stars about this like i had mike s from lincoln park on my show and he's a huge t fan and he creates them and you know awesome awesome flex by the way you you know i've talked to some rock stars about this i'm gonna that no but like i don't i've not making a fun of you upside that's cool i think it's cool i think it's important because like you do you wanna get the artist to buy in on this totally too because they're saying it's cool yeah yeah he's he's an awesome guy very approachable we're very approachable in the terms of rock guys but no will tell you that like well what we talked about which is an obvious one is like okay imagine the tickets well but let me step back one thing i believe to be true ninety plus percent of people that interact with n t's over the long term i believe won't even know it as they're doing it as an it'll just be something where they have a digital wallet and app or something like that and they have a ticket there right they're not gonna know that behind the scenes that is powered by the blockchain and recorded by the blockchain right so i think what's gonna happen is the nice thing about the blockchain is because it is a ledger in an in immutable ledger that is that is a way to say prove that you have done something that you either attended an event or you've you know you've actually physically done something there's a ton of possibilities that i can unlock right if i go and i see mike sc to play five shows or ten shows maybe he says okay now according to the blockchain in our app and again the consumer doesn't need to know about this anyone that's attended ten of shows gets a vip meet and greet before the show right and there's a thousand different things that you can do that you want to have that security of the blockchain behind the scenes so it's not being forged so there's not being copies of it being made so there's not like a way to fake it and that's the nice thing about the blockchain is it provides you a way to have the security and knowledge that something is not being faked and you can imagine that's broadly applicable to a whole slew of different industries i don't think we'll be calling them quote unquote n t's you know it it's just gonna be a great piece of tech it's just another database that's all it is it's it's a a distributed immutable database that is decentralized it's that's all this is which unlocks a bunch of fun new use cases let's caveat it alright so let's say because i think i get when i get what you're saying but i also get the the rolls that people get when it's like cool tell me like how this is gonna make my life better and it's like well the cool thing about a blockchain is that it's preferable scarce it's like it's like wait you're telling me about the under of the hood part whereas for example if my mom is like if i'm like mom you should set up an email address and she's like what the heck email i don't need that and it's like well no check this out like you know you send letters or you you know you send letters to your sister who lives across the country like watch this if you do it this way it's free and it'll be instant and like oh wow that's cool hey you know even better because it's all digital you could just type the word and it'll find that file you don't have to keep it organized somewhere in a folder in your house yeah alright so i can i don't have to tell her how it works at all i can literally just say it major your life better by be by giving you you know more time more money more whatever and so i think the question is what does n entities give what what does what will an n nlp give a person that makes their life better without explaining how how the tech works at all sure oh i'll give you i'll give you a great example of one that hasn't launched yet but something that that i'm personally working on so i'm i'm working with a well known like very cult kind of wine producer out there and you know wine at the highest level at the high end it it it's a tricky it's a tricky business because there's you know forge trees there's fake labels there's they're putting hologram on the side of them they're putting chips inside of the labels so that they could be scanned to to prove that they're authentic right that's one piece so the the first question is if i'm buying off the secondary market and not directly from the producer am i getting something that's legit excuse me the the second piece of that is once i receive that bottle you know how do i store it to ensure that if i'm gonna keep something and i want this asset to appreciate over time and i wanna drink it a decade from now or two then you know how do i ensure that it is being stored the right way so one thing that is happening in the next four months will be the issuance of in t's to people that is gonna be from a major well known winery where it will represent one physical bottle of wine there's a couple of advantages here one you don't have to take possession of it right away you can let it sit in its proven perfect storage conditions and age for decades to come you can let it appreciate in that in those storage conditions and you can hold on to the proven ownership of as an tea let's say that bottle of wine for four or five over the next decade you don't ever have to then pull the wine in out of the seller take ownership of it find a third party to sell it and then resell it where that person's questioning the authenticity of that wine instead you can just transfer that n to a buddy you can get it through to them for a special occasion or anniversary and then when they decided hey i wanna drink this they press two buttons in that bottle of wine that has been stored perfectly for a decade shows up at their door that is efficiency that eliminates fraud there is just so much to love that equation and that'll be applied to the watch industry to the luxury world to all these different verticals and it just makes sense like what about that i'm just curious if as you hear me explain it it doesn't sound like a better world like in in terms of fixing a bunch of problems i think if i was gonna if i was gonna argue against that like just a steel man the argument i think it would be cool like maybe it's gonna maybe these are certificates for collectible most you know it's not gonna that doesn't impact most people's lives as most people are not collecting high end bags or wines or this where there's huge problems of forge like that that may be one thing which is it's not gonna impact that many people in in that sense you're telling me and a he's of this game changing world changing technology but that's a really niche specific you know one percent or type problem and then the other is like you know sounds like an n is like a digital certificate you know you could've done that with with another type of certificate but or another type database maybe and and but maybe this is better like i do agree it's better but like it was possible before it didn't take the impossible we'll make possible it made the the possible made maybe made it more efficient or a little bit more convenient for the consumer and so i think that would be maybe one argument against it but i don't wanna go too far in the weeds yeah i i the other thing that i think that to add on to that though is that because you have well i'll give you an example like back and and and you know the back to the rockstar star example of of a an artist you're reliant upon if you did wanna do some type of rewards program or something for well actually let me step one when the point you made about the one percent problem and is this applicable to those people you're absolutely right like there's only certain number of people that are gonna collect art at the highest level and why at the highest level and all that i mean granted these or double digit billions of dollars of year like big markets to go after but you're right these specific use cases that i'm giving are are very niche right i think on the more broadly on on the on the idea of just membership and access and prove where you've been what you've done to lock unlock loyalty and rewards over the long term and think about you know replacing the am max points or you know other point type systems or reward systems with blockchain the beautiful thing about it being decent decentralized and this is one argument for decent centralization is that it's forever on the chain and you're not dependent upon a company being around for the the for that to exist so if an artist isn't engaged with a startup up that is worked on a loyalty rewards program for them and they run out a capital and die three years later as long as they stored their information on the blockchain that artist can then just pick up where they left off and it just it continues forward and we've already seen this happen where there's been several startups that have stored their information on the blockchain where they go out of business because they just their their idea didn't hit and then someone fills the the void and comes says i have a better take on this and now let me tap into that public data and use it going forward so that not all is lost which is kind of a a new concept and rather than a just a database going away it's always gonna be there and can be reused which i think it's pretty compelling the really simple two second example of this is you play a game you you you get really into fortnite you go buy a bunch of skins you you dress up your character you got the cool you know like glider and you be bought all that stuff and you know a year and a half goes by your friends have moved on they're all playing call of duty now you've sank three hundred fifty dollars into fortnite you don't own those items you can't resell those items you can't recoup any of that value nor could you take those items into any other game so in a web three world either another game could come out that says hey we accept item we we we plugged into this protocol so you can bring your cool sword from game one to game two that makes the sword more valuable because now it could be used in multiple games so maybe i'm this already the inter interoperability ability between multiple web three platforms saying that this is a defined standard and now these items can digitally move between platforms it makes a ton of now those items are more valuable because can be used in more places and the other one is that if i'm just done with the game i just dump it onto to the next person who's really interested fortnite and i can recoup some of my investment which will make more people want to spend in games because it's not just a money pit it's an asset that they could resell alright so that's like the the quicker example maybe i love that you join my side and that you you're trying on your side but i have to argue the other way in order for this to be interesting let me get at the end you're like i get it i'm in the other crypto nerd argument would be okay for years people have been saying that bitcoin is this this inflation head or this currency that that's that's that doesn't inflate and oh my god you know how lucky for you guys the us government starts printing trillions of dollars inflation is that record highs it's in the news every day wait what happened to that awesome inflation hedge asset why is it down fifty percent when inflation is is is the bigger problem than ever shouldn't this be shouldn't this be your time to shine bitcoin so yeah what say you to that yeah i mean it's it's the real shame that that bitcoin has been so spiky because if it hadn't been this linear growth to twenty thousand to where it is today we'd all be like this is the most amazing thing ever like like if you just take the spikes out and make it look linear it it's it still looks like an incredible asset like you know just go back five years look where it is now versus five years ago so it it's the spiky nature of it that that that hurts it in the end i would say that you know i'm a fan i think bitcoin is is a tough one because it's i i i don't like that it's not a green currency and i don't see a clear path that ever being the case and i know everyone's trying to extend it in new and exciting ways and try to make it more ethereum like and so that it i can do more than just be this type of digital gold for me you know when i when i think about those types of assets it's i'm responsible in that i i i'm not betting the farm on this but it is it a small percentage of my portfolio absolutely and i just considered another asset class that provides me a little bit of of diversification across the board so you know the majority of of my you know personal holdings is is still standard you know index funds that that are are pretty vanilla the low cost index funds you know the vanguard way right yeah and i was actually gonna ask that what what is your liquid portfolio look like like we're like i was i i was been waiting to ask you that sam sam is like a etfs low cost etfs and bonds and and eighty percent in vanguard index funds twenty percent bonds it's that's all and then i built private businesses yes sean like i put everything into i'm like i you're investing crypto and then like you know five companies i believe in and you know a little bit of index funds like it's like yeah zero like it's like five percent or something like that it keep ten percent in cash or something and so what would your what would your pie chart look like and obviously it changes over time so so my my pie chart would be essentially this you know eighty percent well i think there's an important thing to caveat here is that as a venture capital partner over true ventures i have a lot of risk on the table there in venture early stage investments did you have to put your own money into that or is that just your care i do yeah i put my money into it as as an investing partner you also invest alongside the fund so that is my bucket of risk right so just setting that aside and saying okay you know i have carry in the fund that's why you could have high you high risk too much capital right you put like don't know what like quarter million dollars or a million dollars or something like that in into that it depends on the size of the fund it's it's a it's a it's a percentage of the fund we just closed our latest fund which is seven hundred fifty million and so the partners put in a percent of of that in in back into the fund i'd have to look at what the exact numbers are but it it's substantial they want you to have skin in the game when you're investing so you know i consider that to be like those are those are the big high risk buckets so everything else i do i want it to be just super vanilla and it's it's that it's that vanguard index fund keep it you know keep it really simple i don't do bond funds i'd rather rely on people to buy bonds on my behalf you know i i'm ladder into bills right now because you're getting four plus percent in the short term and so you know just just ladder into to into those makes a ton of sense right now you know anyone out there that has ten grand that's sitting around that doesn't go by an eye bill right now it's earning over nine percent is just insane like that's the most no brainer scenario for for someone that's listening to this podcast by the way there's like one week left of that right i was like right obviously not investment advice but you are getting the full faith of the us government as the back and it's over nine percent and you can do ten thousand for yourself and ten thousand for your spouse which is amazing so anyway it it's i keep it really simple and then and then the rest is is is the crypto the crypto side of things is like you know let's call it fifty percent n t's and fifty percent digital assets and that's you know probably ten percent my overall okay so so ninety percent of non venture stuff is in just an index fund yeah yeah and in multiple index funds that cover a variety of markets yeah we'll call touch estate at all or no not really other than just you know my own stuff do you own or rent i own we're we've always had this debate and i know you gotta go to i hear your alarms going up but we always have this debate but well we both agree i i own i wish i would rented dude i just wanna rent everything i don't wanna own a lot of stuff do you regret owning or or do you like being an owner you know the the thing is when interest rates were low you can just take a bunch of capital back out of your house and pour back into the market assuming that you're gonna beat that you know if you could get own a house take a loan out against get against that house and get you know a two to a couple couple of points and and earn five to seven in the market like i'll take that delta all day long so that's kind of the way i play it cool well dude you're i'm really happy we got to talk i i used to work out of the reddit building a third in bryant and i remember seeing you walk by and i was like oh shit that's kevin i was sure to said hey that was in two thousand twelve so it's only been eleven years later ten years later but i'm happy that we were able to talk been a big fan of yours i know sean has as well so it's really exciting to to be able to meet you i i love that you guys are doing this show i mean it reminds me a lot of like the the kind of fun little hash out debates that tim ferris and i have when we do our random shows like they're just fun right you gave a couple of friends together and shoot the shit and some some crazy discussions it could come out of so that's that's great dude those were i can't believe how big those were back then i remember the the kevin and tim shows i think the call that he like had a funny name for you like tim tim top you know i call him tim tim still and it ke ka but yeah we just shot one here in person maybe two weeks ago which was fun it was good to see tim again i seen them in in a minute but there's like little things you like i remember you talked about wim hof back then and i was like you know next day i'm on my floor like breathing everything yeah so hyper on purpose i even remember your what it doctor da is that her name yeah da like it it's funny it's like that stuff was so i mean it still but it was like particularly when i was in twenty two and just getting the silicon valley like i really looked up to you guys as like just show me how to silicon valley you know what i mean it and it was really cool yeah that was that was a fun i was i i missed not living in the same city as as tim because we we we always have getting some trouble when we're together so yeah you guys were the blueprint for us in in terms of like hey if you could find something you got chemistry with and you shoot the shit and like what's your content your content is just you know i'm super curious and interested in a bunch of things and this becomes my outlet to summarize you know my set of experience and rabbit holes i've been going down and like you know we would have never done a podcast off like oh the ad revenue will be enough it's like no it's not really like fuck that that's not really relevant and we're seeing you know tim and you and how oh actually it's these relationships and these investments and there's these little side projects you kick up and actually you can make this whole thing work without having to go you know do this like you know traditional kind of venture path of yeah of of raising money to go do this thing so that was pretty inspiring so you know thank you for that i think you know just seeing a blueprint is like that roger ban or four minute mile where you're like oh i can have the lifestyle i want but on my terms and yeah because these guys can do it then we can do it oh i mean it's it's congrats to you both it seems like from from what i heard here at the beginning of this episode you guys have done quite well and and congrats on your success it's awesome congrats you too and thanks for kinda paving the way we appreciate it and thanks for coming thanks for having me