Kim Dotcom's Millions From Megaupload, Million $ Panic Attack App, and Million $ Waterproof Shoes

here's the exact quote he goes do you want the numbers alright and we'll in the year one we cleared a hundred and ten million dollars in retail sales sorry two hundred and fifty million in retail sales and a hundred and ten million gross internally alright we're alive what's up what's up dude have you been following this prime energy drink thing or prime i don't know what fuck it's isn't a gatorade alternative right have you followed it yeah i followed it because a a while i don't like a month ago ben business partner of ben he he told me he met some guy who was like involved with it he's like dude the numbers are insane for prime like they're there's telling you leap amount of just this one sku and like like let alone the main the main drink and i was like there's no way that's a crazy number and then i think recently they came out and said some more numbers what they saying there's two takeaways here the first takeaway is the numbers so logan paul said the beverage brand he launched with k on so january fourth so about a month or something ago he said it did two hundred fifty million dollars in revenue in the first year and it did forty four million in revenue in just january of two thousand twenty three so recently and then he also said but then check this out here's the exact quote he goes do you want the numbers alright and we'll in year one we cleared a hundred and ten million dollars in retail sales sorry two hundred and fifty million in retail sales and a hundred and ten million gross internally so the takeaway here for me is one that's huge numbers two what the fuck does what what the hell does that mean i this guy doesn't even know his numbers yeah that's i could take away throw you're off by half like that's crazy also what the hell is a hundred and ten million gross internally what he's saying is they sell wholesale so this because they sell this thing let's say at walmart so in walmart it did two hundred fifty million in sales but to them they're they're getting bought at wholesale prices so they the markup is you know what what's you know they basically sell in half price right so they sell it to walmart they sold a hundred and ten million worth to walmart so their company sold a hundred ten million the total product sold two hundred fifty million is what i think that has to mean well crazy crazy that this is that big i've actually seen a few interviews with logan and he says what the numbers are and then someone from behind the scenes goes no no it was this and he goes wait what oh my bad it was this and it's pretty wild that like i think logan's is a smart guy i would love to have him on the pod and everything but it's pretty wild how he's really just focused on the content thing and probably doesn't know much about the business thing it it's pretty interesting i've seen them like asked mister wonderful or something about that about like different stocks and things like that and he's pretty has a pretty rudimentary understanding of like certain finance topics that i thought for sure he would be somewhat on top of but i guess not you can crush it without knowing that well i don't know about that like i think he i think he's like anything else like the way we are probably good at business but and we're just enough to be dangerous at at the kind of like content you know like you know like when we see a youtuber both of us have had this reaction where we're like oh we're horse carriage operators and tesla just drove by like this is when i see somebody on tiktok you know you might as well be you know it might as well be at hogwarts with a magic wand i'm yeah like we're doing something i don't know how to do those things and i will never know and like it's awesome but i i just can't imagine myself really doing those things at the level you can do them and so i think he's good enough to be dangerous on the business side and smart enough obviously to know what categories to go into and what who to partner with so like if you look at their moves right like just zoom out so that you can't you know you know hear what we're be saying or or whatever you look at their moves the transition from vine to youtube great jump the transition from youtube canceled to youtube like you know rejuvenate that's a good good move there then from youtube to boxing celebrity boxing he ended a boxing floyd may weather for he did alright it alright yeah like and his brother's you know doing he's one of the most you know high earning you know boxer out there maybe like not a boxer yeah so that that's incredible then the next jump you know for logan was wwe so now logan is one of the big stars in wwe he does it on his terms he then transition his youtube content into podcast context he's like you know i'm maturing by the way have you seen him in wwe he's he's really good he's really good exactly like if i was thirteen i pretty sure i would think logan paul is the fucking shit because i'm thirty four and i think logan paul dude the fucking shit yeah i like he's good like he he's got the acting down he's got the he looks ripped he's good and people love to hate on these guys for you know good sometimes good reasons they've done some things that are like you know whatever he did the stupid video in japan he's gets some he's gotten some trouble for his like n thing but like i don't know i think there's a lot to be to to learn from an admire in these guys i'm not saying they're great people perfect people i don't know them personally i can't say either way on that but i think from a marketing perspective and i crush it fifteen out of ten right like from a brand building from a sort of learning how to keep writing new waves and stay relevant these i mean these are the phenomenal the same way that the kardashians are phenomenal in some way and you could dis dispatch them for a bunch of reasons or you could look at the things they do great and say cool i'm just gonna take inspiration from the things they do great rather than hate on the in a very common way about you know the same stuff everybody else does so yeah i think know what he's done here is is pretty phenomenal i i think they're kind of him and k are kind of like minor partners i think it's business i think it's a like a like a third a third or third type of thing the operators get a third here yeah i mean i i saw an interview and it was either a third or like a twenty percent but yeah minority but meaningful i mean it this that's gonna be a billion dollar brand dude i invited him to a camp m my family by the way and i was like yeah you should come it's gonna be awesome and he was like he's like dude i can't hurt this just like i'm doing the wwe if i go play basketball of i'm gonna get hurt why did you my you i can't like spray and ankle or twist the knee and like not be able to go wrestle at wrestle man in a month what what platform did you speak to him on you know actually what happened was what had happened was of that's what happened was i jumped into twitter spaces where he was there and i just started talking there and then he dm me afterwards and then i was like hey you know you actually he had talked about my club house or med tweet on his podcast too and i was like y you actually talked about my other thing you know that i'm that guy and he's like oh cool and so you know twitter dm is kinda where we talked dude that's actually kind of a a hack there's like a handful of youtubers that have five ten twenty million subscribers who i've chatted with on twitter and they only have like ten or a hundred thousand followers on twitter and their fans children aren't using twitter and it's such a good way to like get in front of them and i've i've actually pulled that move a few times on twitter it's pretty pretty i'm shocked it works that's genius so just not the same without thousands of roaring fans chanting our name signing you know people's backs and shit like that carry backs hairy backs sweaty backs you wanna do a recap so basically the gist of this is is sean and i did a somewhat impromptu to it was supposed to be a meetup turned into like a live performance basically in vancouver i don't know how many people were there between a thousand or thirteen hundred ish but we sold out this theater in vancouver it went pretty great you wanna talk about a few things that surprised you yeah let's let's do that okay surprising surprisingly hard to be on stage even though we kinda at this point talk for a living there was a moment about an hour before where we're both like like how do you use your tongue do you touch it against your teeth when you're making sounds what do you do with that and we just had no idea what to say why did it it was like you know the moment of panic where it's like are these people even coming for us who are they is this did do they sell the tickets or did people just click maybe like you know we just question to everything for a moment what are we gonna say upfront how do we make this amazing for people and there was really no thought that went into this like one hour we went and got sushi ahead of time and we were like so what do you wanna talk about we talked about that for five minutes and then we started talking to each other about family just fun stuff but you know we had like a ten minute pow wow to try to figure it out but i think it turned out okay either to i think the content turned out we we basically we're pretty tough critics of ourselves i think we gave the overall event and eight out of ten and i think the i think it was not it was not a ten because i think it was a little poorly structured like the opening part was a lot of intro welcome to our spot thank think our sponsors that sort of thing and also we weren't as well prepared as we could have been in terms of like we could have come up with things that that play better live than than on states like i had the moment of clarity afterwards i was like oh it's a show that's live with the audience we should be doing things like a b and c yeah yeah yeah and and we didn't fully get that but we did like a little shark tank pitch competition we did q and a we did some stuff with the crowd you think that was good all things considered i thought it was actually a nine i think like given the amount of preparation and the amount of fund people had another shocking thing was people came i think the value in order was to see us to meet one another then to actually hear what we had to say yeah right right exactly and i think there was some benefit in doing it in vancouver where there's probably just not a lot of events going on for entrepreneurs or tech people that are like exciting versus i think if we had done this in san francisco we probably would have got more numbers but they wouldn't have cared as much like there was a lot of people at this thing of vancouver that traveled from toronto or from portland or from different places to come see it because oh might as well it's couple hours away and you know you know there's not gonna be another thing like this anytime soon where i'm at so anyways those were some quick quick recap i guess if people weren't there what should we explain what did we actually do so was me you and andrew wilkinson on stage it was in this theater so there's like a balcony seating there was like you know based a giant theater where like a comedian would normally play in fact backstage as we're walking up yeah it was truly bubbling and i mean humbling in the in the most shit on myself way which was they're walking up to the stage and it's like these framed pictures of guys who were in that stain same green green room before us it's like jerry seinfeld dave chappell it's like all these like legendary comedian it's like some of the best podcast that you've ever seen in the entrepreneurship category on apple podcasts one it was humbling another thing that was humbling was after it happened we left the stage and we went and just hung out with people and there was this a huge line and what it made me realized was that so a lot of people don't realize this but it's basically sean and me and and producer ben jonathan sometimes and we are sitting here just recording talking to each other you forget all we forget on a regular basis that it's being recorded when the podcast gets published we don't see comments we don't know like we could see the numbers but it's just like an analytics screen i don't know who's listening right why they're listening i don't know any of that and so you forget that this stuff actually kind of matters to some people and it's really fun to go and meet people who could consume your thing and realize wow this actually matters to them that was humbling as well and that yeah would be like a father and son be like we always listen to the pod together and then we brainstorm he's fourteen but he wants to be an entrepreneur like you guys so after we listen to the pod we then brainstorm and do stuff it's like oh that's really cool this is like a nothing like embedded in your kind of like family a little bit the you know there were examples like that that were very surprising to me but but cool also i should say you were good at that like you were really good on stage sam was i don't know what happened i think the nicotine pouch kicked in and sam went to another level i must start doing nicotine dude that was a great ad for for that sam had great jokes and then afterwards also i feel like in the meet and greet you were good at being kind of the celebrity like i didn't know what to do with my hands you know people would come up like can take a picture and my response was like why oh yeah sure i guess and then they would stand next to me and i would do this like point thing to each one of them like this guy like if you look go look on the instagram every picture with me i'm just doing nah it's about this guy right here or the family and you were given them the billionaire hug which i don't know if people picked up on but you you you taught me this afterwards i didn't know this trick explain the billionaire hug so i have a theory that once you hit a billion dollars you get like invited to this like seminar and they teach you how to do a billy hug which is basically when you hug someone your hips and ass are in one direction but then your shoulders and arm lean hard to the right and so you can be touching them shoulder to shoulder but ass to ass you're never touching them and this is like a way to like look we're touching and i'm being affectionate but like my crotch isn't in the vicinity therefore it's safe it's all good this is pc and so i do the billionaire hug i also bring my wife along to all these things as well because it always freaks me out i'm like i don't know man i don't wanna ever i don't want anyone to get the wrong idea sometimes you know it's just it's just it can be uncomfortable every once in a while so i do the billy hug i do that i'm not a belly but i did the billy hug because i've learned billy is it a is it a sexual thing is it like you know you're keep it your wallet away from them what what do you do what why does the why do the hips need to be away is there even an explanation or it's just something that it only billionaires would understand it's just a a time honored tradition i don't know i'm not there yet so i don't know but i just i you know it's like singing in the shower i copy my heroes you so that that's why i do it and this is a man and a woman thing by the way it's from the man as well i've noticed that sometimes we have this relationship with people where they hear us talk and they think oh you're so approachable and sometimes they'll come out to me and go dude let's fuck let's do this and i'm like whoa you're coming on too hard to me i know i say this stuff but you're coming on too hard so sometimes you need to set some boundaries and that's my mini boundary it's the crotch boundary right we we so we had our buddy andrew on there andrew was really funny too i i gotta say andrew who's been on the pod a bunch of times i've never met in person so i've talked him on the phone we've done zoom calls he's come on the pod but in person i gotta say he's got a lot more juice than i expected and to tell the story about dinner or lunch so we can so we go to lunch so before the show we're like oh dude we gotta hang out ben you're he's kinda from this area i thought vancouver b is all the same thing actually you gotta take a sea plain yeah of or a helicopter so he took a fucking chopper to come to the us which is honestly one are the more big dog moves anyone's ever done to me the reason we knew it was a big dog move because he was a he was like five or ten minutes late and instead of saying you know my flight was delayed he said i was late for my flight and i was like wait what yeah that's subtle i didn't think that i just heard over what he called on the phone it was just i just heard the chopper going and i was like hey wait a minute is there a fan on near you what's going what is that so he lands and before he lands he goes i'm gonna be five to ten minutes late again i was late for my flight and then he goes just order me and list order to me and sammy goes eight oysters two two salmon to gary this like you know whatever wagyu used steak you know a miso soup i have a nut and shellfish allergy i'll die if somebody does that and then he he just signs it off thanks but just t h x and i see this i'm i was was running late to as as per usual i in a shower at this point i just started laughing sam replies what did you say i was like did you just say thanks to me like yes sir i mean it was like ridiculous and he was like so try you tried to blame an auto correct we're like now bro you're just used to talking to people too much like that you you you have people who let you get away with that that shit might fly in canada but you don't bring that week t shit too yeah to the united states of america we we reject that we send that back we go to lunch and we're having a a good time we're just catching up again andrew's got the juice he's got the juice in the way that my best friends who i look up to the most have that juice you have that too when you hang out in person with sam that he's got a little bounce in his step and it just seems like he's eager he's excited he's got a plan wherever you go there's not gonna be it's not gonna just be a default normal experience something a little more fun is gonna happen something a little extra is gonna happen a little more laughter a little more you know learning something extra is gonna happen so andrew had that which i was which was awesome to see because he's quite i don't know would you say like reserved or calm he's got almost like a calm brand but in person his energy was a lot more kinetic pre willing and i liked it he had a very kinetic and energy where he was physical you know he was moving and that's that's a great way of putting it yeah he was kinetic he had that and i have that too people always yelling at me because i've got big thighs and i shake whenever i shave my thighs the table moves and they're like two your two kinetic so yeah he's got that kinetic energy and we're having this wonderful launch it's probably an hour and a half in and then we're not quite done eating yet or at least it doesn't feel there and then all of a sudden he goes and oh shoot and we're like what like here like it's like a panic he was dude my uber been outside waiting for me for ten minutes gotta go by and he just stands up and walks away and we're like no he was even better than that he just stood up like he was stretching for a second and then he picked up his jacket and he's like i'll see you guys at the place and we're like what and he goes yes sorry i gotta go my uber been outside for ten minutes like when did you call an uber and he floated away like a balloon like he was the grandfather and up and he just went away the house flew away and then me and sam were like okay you was that weird that he just got floated away like a balloon yeah it's like we'll we'll work on conversation skills later andrew have a nice day yeah he just kinda bounce i i had to blow a kiss who's learning ransom so far is the only appropriate goodbye but in general the thing was awesome now i i don't i'm not gonna put you on the spot but i would like us to do a five or three like thing where like a day thing where we could do like you know three dates in five days i wanna go to like c and b cities so not new york not the s something like denver or toronto or kansas city something where they're you know what what did you call it small fish small pond syndrome that's what i wanna be wanna be a a big fish and a small pond because these people were pissed in a small farm that's hard were to say are you wanna you have a little something on your shirt here i think you got a little taste of fame a little dr of that fame that just stained the shirt there you you like that taste of fame didn't cheese well here's why i like it but we've talked about it i know why you like it yeah because being famous is awesome it is awesome but it is exhausting now i understand why like the touring bands who last a long time they show up they do the concert and they go home and go to bed i was like i couldn't sleep because we were like did we hung out with everyone then we had like breakfast the next day but anyway i liked it because it was a challenge i also think that in our little tech world we assume that we're this little niche internet nerds which we are to but it's actually cool to like flex and see the people it and and honestly felt like a movement and there was times where i i felt it was you and i were great at what we do but in reality we were just an excuse in like a steward of like a particular type of movement of these people who are like you know we're all on a journey some people are further ahead some people are not there yet some people don't wanna go far some do but they're all going some place and it felt like we were just an ex an skews to gather those people and it really felt beyond and bigger than us i know that sounds voodoo woo and shit like that but that's truly how it felt and so that's why i thought it was cool i agree one hundred percent at first i felt so excited i was like man i can't believe we sold out this theater there's two thousand people on the wait list they came to see us and i think there was a a small part that was like that's like the stated excuse but the reality is that the value was just if you like this podcast that's put you through a bunch of filters and the filters are like a lot of our our of our sayings right so it's like you know no small boy stuff right so it's like people who wanna think big for themselves but they define what big means for them but it's also people who don't take themselves too seriously if you want the smartest podcast you should go listen to and invest like the best and go listen to all in and go listen to a bunch of podcasts with people who are for their intellectual horsepower out runs ours right the oven burns a little hotter for those guys than it does for us if you want somebody who like we will celebrate a dude who's like a plumber that's hacking the yellow pages to get more leads as much as we will a guy who's building a new a new city or a new country you know from scratch and so the there's like this set of people who appreciate the same things we appreciate and when you put them together we're prop like it's not easy for them i think of their day to day life to be around a bunch of other people who are like them the sort of scheme and dream you know a profile or archetype and so that's what i saw was the best because i was like oh man sorry you guys had to wait they're like no it was awesome i was in line with a bunch of other people who were i met this guy who's doing this and this guy who's doing this and i said oh wow okay that makes sense to me like the real value here wasn't coming and getting a selfie with me as i do my awkward point it was because actually just getting like to be in a community of other people who have that who have the same sort of freak energy that you have and then once that once i saw that i was like okay this makes sense we should do you know more of it do i met a guy like there is a couple billionaires in the crowd i don't know if you know that and i'm not gonna call them out but i i met one of them or at least their their stake and they they they own multiple they they have large states and multi billion dollar companies and i remember i met one of them and he was like a typical like do guy and then i met this other guy who had a sheet rock business that like you know it's like a blue collar thing and his hands were just so medium fat and i remember chicken his hand but i told her was like dude like you it rep by hand or around your hand and i'm not small and that's and i was like dude that's sick we got we got the neck beard they had the call hands guys and and this guy one of the guys i go yeah just you know dm me on twitter he goes okay cool you'll see me my twitter handles is called fucking man and that's what he said david i was like alright that's bad i give us a hat yeah he's he said something me he's like my wife has a big following for women's stuff so i just decided to create fucking manly to to like counteract that that was awesome i wanna tell you about one woman who i thought was really had a really her well they came out i know her well so i was at the there was a dinner the night before that the tiny guys hosted and at the dinner met some people whatever was good one woman came up and she goes she's was like hey my name on you know big fan about and then she gave me a high a little like quick high fives she goes i just made my first million and i was like nice what do you do and and she was like well you know we i created this app for people with panic attacks it's called rooted and i was like panic attacks is that like the an app for panic i never would've have even thought about that niche and she's was like yeah you know i struggled with it like crazy and so then i created this app so she pulls out this app called rooted and rooted as in like you know feeling grounded instead of having you know this sort of panic thing and there's like a red panic button you could hit if you're feeling something in the moment but there's also just like sleep there's like lessons where you can learn about like what is this thing and why does this happen drills and breathing exercises exercise breathing exercise and so on and so forth and she said she has had two point something million downloads of the app and i okay that's pretty great that's that's not even the crazy part then i was like wow are you are you just really good at facebook ads or what she goes no i don't do any paid marketing yeah and i was like so how do you get two point something million downloads off this she goes well i think you know it's solved a a real problem and also i dominate like the app store search for this because everybody else went really broad they tried to go for like sleep or anxiety or breathing and i went for panic attack because everybody else thought that was too narrow and i just really like did a good job owning that in the app store certain as right instead of a seo the the app store optimization and then i started getting good reviews and it just snowball and now i'm like the top one in that and i thought did she tell you how big the team was exactly so i was like i was like she's already halfway to being my hero at this point and i go and this our first deal deal this is our first seal the deal for me how big your team she goes it's just me yeah crazy right i go what and she goes yeah it's just me i have a couple contractors that you know help me with things but there's no employees i don't want any employees and i was like i wanna be you you're you know you're she's building something that has an impact you know she dominated it her way when anybody else would have like if she went to go ask you know smart guys like us or you know they go ask come mentor what should i do they'd either say you know go us an investor they'll say it's too small level a market go as a mentor they'll say well you need to you know what's your growth strategy and she's like i don't know i just wanna build a useful product and like i'll figure it out as i go third is like you need to scale up you in no way because she she's closing these deals now with like health care companies where they'll just provide it for like you know all of the members of their gold plan like they'll pay for it for fifty thousand members or something like that now and you know do you need a a bd rep and a sales team and all the she's like no i just go take the meeting myself and it took some time but we we got the deal beat them on linkedin she because i just messaged them on linkedin fantastic so i thought on the you know shout out to her she's the she's got the i don't know not billy of the week not blue color side hustle she's something else but like you know the riches and niches award of the week you goes to her because i thought that was pretty amazing story no it was amazing and this is her first business and so like you know everything that she said or everything that she has done if you told me like if if she told me the idea which is i'm gonna i've never done anything tech related before and i can't code i'm gonna hire contractors overseas to do this i don't know anything about marketing i'm like oh you're everything you're saying you're gonna lose this won't work right and she completely has pulled it off and if you and if you go to the reviews did you look up her app i mean it's legit like there's like i think it's like a four point nine rating it's like a really high rating thousands of reviews and she completely has pulled it off i'm almost positive it's only two ish years old like it's not it's not it's not right and then she also just went full time as of recently so this was like a end just started monetizing it's like most of the app is free she's like yeah i want most of the app to be free you know because obviously i'm trying to help as many people like yeah trying to find that balance where it's a sustainable business but also mostly of the apps free and i just thought that was a bad bad ass story there was a bunch of people there that had like really big stories but to me that was a a really just say incredible incredible win and she had a kind of a an intensity about her oh yeah you could almost tell when you were talking to her like okay even though on paper you got no attributes right and we all know the rule you gotta have some attributes if you wanna win she didn't have the experience she didn't have the skill of of certain things but she did have a certain level of intensity and you could see that just in talking to her like here just the way she came across she came across like a person to be taken seriously and like she was like a like a very small person it wasn't like her stature well she didn't have a natural na at that it was just the way she was talking that that that stood out to me did you did you meet the vest guys so v e s s i yeah we've been out for lunch so i i don't know if i can say what what they do i don't maybe you could say but base basically if they told you that the i'm not gonna say any numbers but tony was the the guy who there as the founder and they make awesome shoes apparently i i haven't tried them so i i can't but they're hard for in vancouver and so i my the lady at my hotel saw me wearing them and she goes oh you're wearing investing those are those are happening so basically this she didn't say they're happening because she's not sixty years old but you know she's other they're cool those are jazzy right yeah but anyway so it's a shoe called v they look just like tennis shoes apparently they're like waterproof which is a big deal in vancouver because it rains a lot and wet and the guy bootstrap the bootstrap the company and he told me the top line revenue which i don't know if we could say are not to say it and we'll bleep it oh okay fine we'll say say and bleep it but over and so basically you you guys didn't hear what i just said but we're talking like not we're talking in the same ballpark of like an all birds or something like that like a a publicly traded company quite huge completely bootstrap and i started talking to him and he's like hey i i wanna like i'm thinking about like getting popular on twitter and then he started talking to me and i started giving feedback and then he told me about the company and i and he told me the size and i'm like wait wait why do you wanna be on twitter you realize this is totally not worth your time and you are like way better than any of the thread boys including me don't go on twitter dude just keep crushing it and the company that he had was entirely bootstrap and it started as a kickstarter so he was like was like why are you guys so he's a negative cash flow like negative cash cycle which means you know people sell the stuff before they have to pay for the goods yeah he's like we just have good terms with the with a manufacturer and we started as a kick kickstarter so it's been profitable since day one and and this is another thing where it breaks all types of patterns that i thought possible so starting vancouver vancouver is not a big city i think the metropolitan area is like eight hundred thousand or sorry the metropolitan area is two million the city's is only eight hundred thousand so it's not like in episode i went for a run and i like ran across the city and i don't run so something yeah and it's like not that big of a city it's in canada which i didn't realize how like ken is kinda pod like it's it's a it's like it's like it's like there's only like thirty million people in that whole place it's like yeah canada has the same population as california it's crazy oh in the same population as like the metropolitan new york area i mean it's right but the size of that it's bigger than the united states in terms of like the actual land mass so it's like just it's a lot of empty space or a lot of space per person yeah like it's not that big and it's a little behind in terms of like it's not like a a sophisticated place was isn't bad but like i remember when i went to the airport and they checked my passport in such a odd location and like i meant they checked it like as i was going to the security thing to like scan my my body not ahead of like you guys know it would be way faster if you do this this the whatever and so anyway i met this guy and his company kills it and so he huge company in vancouver dominated vancouver they love the shoes there everyone was talking about it incredibly quiet and nice no like they opened up they opened up a a physical store in vancouver you see you saw the video of that yeah the video of the line there's like a line like half hundred long and i was like yes you like this is i'm like a marketing stunt you like paid people to stand in this line he's like no these are like actual customers he's like it's complete this too but he said they're gonna do out of their retail location this year i was like what the hell that's a absurd number it's crazy this guy was really really cool so i'm happy i got to meet him but anyway good weekend we had a good time we'll do it again our software is the worst have you heard of pub hubspot see most crm are a cobb together mess but hubspot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous i think i love our new crm our software is the best hubspot grow better do you wanna talk about you have another topic or you want me to go i got one and then but let let's do let's do okay let's do this one first so we went international we went abroad some might say some might say offshore you know they'd be wrong but but you would say offshore i they caught me thinking about off a sure companies s money and like i don't know about you but i've always heard about this but if you had ever asked me to explain yeah i wait how do companies like offshore what is what's a tax haven like how do these things work do you actually know how this shit works because no i went down a random and rabbit a hole last night and pretty interesting stuff dude did i have no idea what's really how this actually works i don't know what it means but i like using it you know what i'm saying like i don't know i don't really want one yeah yeah yeah yeah like it's it's right under shell shell corporation when we be to actually they're related alright so so the here's the kind of the headline or the takeaway which is that companies like nike apple huge companies right the the companies that we've all heard of use this this is not just like oh i don't know shady crypto guys that are open up a company in the bahamas or whatever this it's like you know the most blue chip of blue chip companies apple at one point had like three hundred billion dollars offshore overseas that they weren't bringing back into america why because the the here's the general like first principal explanation so you every country has a tax rate so let's say in in the united states it's the corporate tax rate let's say it's twenty one percent well if you make money here you're gonna pay twenty one percent on all your profits but if you're able to shift those profits so that they're taken in another country you can use that country's tax rate well guess what there are several countries that have a tax rate of pretty much zero and so what these companies do is like i'll give you an example of nike so nike did this brilliant thing that resulted in nike paying like i don't know something like three percent a year tax rate on billions and billions of dollars of of revenue and profits and so how did they do this well what they did initially was they created a a a shell company there we go bingo shell company in bermuda and the shell company bermuda owned the sw like the trademark to the nike check and then what happened is company in the united states is selling shoes but the and it might rack up let's say ten billion dollars of revenue or even like gross gross profit so like you know after taking out and took out the shoes and the shipping and all that well normally they just have to pay the tax on the ten billion well what they would do is the sw company in bermuda would then charge them nine billion let's say in royalty payments saying hey you're using the sw you gotta pay us for that so all of a sudden the taxable income in the us goes from ten down to one and now they just pay the twenty percent on the one billion and the nine billion that the bermuda company got pays a tax rate of zero right so their effective tax rate goes way way down so this is what they did initially and then and and this lasted for like you know some period of time but then and then they kinda closed these loop loopholes over time so nike had this had this set up in in the netherlands and they had this set set up in the netherlands where they had you know some nike international company over there they were doing this where in the netherlands they didn't have to pay taxes on on the money for some period of time because there was like a rule where on royalty income you don't have to pay taxes so they're like great all the revenue this company is making is the royalty income from the ip the the the su trademark that we're we're that we're trademark we're we're renting out basically to our other companies and so they were not paying any taxes on europe middle east whatever and then what happens is you know after ten years people start complaining they closed that loophole the politicians high five they're like we did it these big corporations are gonna pay their fair share and like he goes hold on let me they get the blackberry out they call they call up the lawyer they say hey one whole close open up another please hang up the phone and that the lawyers get to work and they realize we could do something different here's what we'll do will create two dutch companies and one of them will have a director in the united states because here's what happens in the united states the law says if your company if the company is incorporated somewhere else it should be taxed in that country and then the netherlands that says well if it has us directors it's gonna be taxed in the us so it's kinda like those like goofy those movies where like the two guys are pointing he's got it he got it wait what nobody's been taxing this thing and so they they had the what was called a stateless company a company that was taxed nowhere which is called nike innovate cv and it paid zero tax basically and so the companies like nike have been able to do this apple does the same thing facebook does the same thing i don't know if ever seen like why all these tech companies have offices in ireland in dublin and everyone has a dublin a dublin and i was like wow you know okay must is it the great is it the the the fantastic world renowned engineering talent of dublin what what is the reason for this and the reason is because there was something called the double irish strategy which said if you have one one irish company that owned the ip and then another one that was you know just like subsidiary of it and then that one had us director same thing zero taxation and so for for five years i think apple made thirty billion dollars through their irish companies and paid zero taxes on it and i just think this is you're gonna do this how they do this stuff and by the way tim cook goes and he he stands in front of congress this is amazing clip where he goes apple pays every dollar that they owe in taxes we don't depend on tax gimmicks we don't stash money in some caribbean island it's like yeah you stash it in an ireland and instead like what you what are you talking about here and then like you know they've they've kinda shut that double ira strategy down and then the and then apple goes and this is all this all got leaked from this thing that you probably remember called do you remember like the panama papers yeah yeah that got leaked yeah do you know what actually happened there a bunch of they panama was a city or a country sorry a country where this happened and i don't know how it got leaked i think the accounting firm that did a lot of the work for people got hacked exactly the fourth biggest law firm was something called mo font and basically this is the fourth thing they're and they're known for like creating shell companies and all this stuff they got hacked or dot hacked actually somebody just leaked eleven million document oh my god they don't know who leaked it but somebody was like a whistleblower and leaked this thing and there was like these this team of journalists that looked at it for a year before finally going forward and public publishing the panama papers well after that there was something called that's where like the sort of epstein and putin's stuff came out of the the panama papers then there was the paradise papers which came after that and that was leaked from this accounting firm called apple b and you know and name you're familiar you're in her client in there yeah is there a is there a like a hoo llc like i can handle my cook x like like yeah these guys do shell companies and soft shelves kill like show we like all types of shelves shell macaroni and shell companies exactly so so you know they they basically they got leaked two and then that's when the the company stuff that came out came out of as far as and then you could see apple will go into their law firm then they leaked the email saying we we've you know the the irish thing is coming to an end we'd like to find another country that has this favorable advantage can you find us something in the you know maybe in the caribbean like yeah pretty much the exact us a thing as he said in front of a congress you did something that i think is funny and so basically when people discuss these topics they use all type of all types of words so that in itself are not like by definition are not bad words and they actually don't mean bad things but they use it in this context and people automatically think villain and sometimes i find myself using those words on purpose but like bragging about them so for example loophole use used the word loop loophole why don't we just call it a rule you know like we're just following the rule this is the rule we're gonna we're gonna use the rule they use loop loophole loopholes aren't bad just the rule another one manipulate why don't we just use like persuade or influence and so like people use that word manipulate all the another one is exploit i love that word exploit i'm like oh so to efficiently use something like people talk about amazon is exploiting their workers i'm like what does that mean is that the point is we give you money and then we exploit you like we buy myself don't you cancel don't you cancel sam well they just got famous bro don't don't don't ruin this well they use these words and i'm like that word like that's the that's the point is to exploit we're gonna use this in a very particular way and we're gonna use it efficiently and you you just did that where you use these words but it's like you're saying the word loophole as if it's a scam where it's like no loophole the opposite of a scam it's right this is we are playing in the rules well i think they they do mean something which is that they're within the rules but not the the they're within the letter of the law but not the spirit of the law and i think that's the the that that's the delta pro bon lawyer omni pro there's bro science now you're doing bro legal jargon by the way tim cook actually even said that too in that same clip he goes we not only comply with the letter of the law but a spirit of the law too which was yeah that's a lie but yeah i i think you're right which is there are rules of the game and you can if you play by those rules you should not blame the player you should hate the rule maker right should hate the game and so i i think that that's that's where a lot of people go wrong right they hear this stuff what i'm explaining these i'm not saying apple and nike are evil what when i explain it i'm i'm really what i'm saying is i never really knew what this meant i never knew actually how it works because you're a capital you're a capital j journalist you're just saying the facts i'm a capital man i think we used that that myself so so yeah i think this is kinda interesting and then it's like what's the game's theory so one thing that trump did which is actually pretty smart which is another loaded thing you can't say was he was like dude these companies have like hundreds of billions of dollars overseas because what happens is once they get taxed in the low low low tax place they can't just move the money back into their you know chase bank here in america and like you know go down to the atm and pull it out like it would get taxed when it comes back so they leave it overseas so this is money that never reaches and so what trump did was he goes alright look i'm gonna make a one time exception for you to what's called rep the cash bring the cash back to america i'll lower the tax rate it's like kinda like alright guys get in here kinda like you know the store owner like opens the back doors i get in it's like you five minutes it's like a gun give back you ever seen those where you can like no questions asked just give us your guns and right right exactly and i think there's some some value to those the scenarios and so he like you know it's fifteen percent tax on that cash this is like one time one time only if you want the cash back in america so you can invest it here and use it in your corporate activities here you know here's your your sort of like discount half price come on in and and and that brought like i don't know sixty or and ninety billion back in but but not like the full amount he thought four trillion and would come back in and it they just didn't speaking of crazy people and huge men in terms of size and and loopholes and tax evasion i've got a cruel story for you and i have a feeling you know about this person this is yeah this is the i don't know if he's feasibility a ability but he's he's he's close enough have you heard of kim dot com do you know who this guy is yeah yeah he's he's prolific as you like to say dude this guy that's the phrase here i was gonna say this guy a prolific freak he's a total freak so this guy named kim dot com has all these interesting facts and i read about him because he he's like six seven three hundred and fifty pounds this guy's massive he's huge and he lives in new zealand and he him and his wife he married like a philippine like beauty queen or something like that and she divorced him and and these people thought that they were gonna like she was gonna talk shit about him she's like no no like i have nothing bad to say about him it just it the marriage didn't work up but he was a nice guy and so i started reading about them by the way what's his real name it's so kim sc but then he was known as kim tim jim vest or kim and then eventually he legally changed his name to dot com so the wife the x wife kept her married last name and her name is like you know like sarah dot com and so like the article refers as like mist dot com it's like so that's her legal name so this guy is like i'm gonna become sean worldwide mister worldwide in my life missus is worldwide nice to meet you dude that the article referred to is as mist dot com and so check this out so this guy in the nineties he starts in germany as a hacker and he hacks something like forty million or he claims this but this is not verified he said he hacked into some like famous bank and he took forty million dollars and he donated it to greenpeace at least that's what he said but tb if that's actually true because greenpeace is like no it's not true and then eventually he starts building all these other programs and all those like software that is like mildly successful and he tries to set and he's a hacker all while while he's doing it's doing a bunch of illegal shit but while doing this he's trying to send a file to his friend and the email that he's trying to send it through says alright you've exceeded the limit we can't do this so we creates this thing called mega upload which eventually like gets huge have you heard a mega upload if you ever download of an illegal movie or anything like that you've probably come across mega upload upload have you of course yeah never never used it for textbooks but definitely have used mega upload on yeah so mega upload it's kind of like naps but you don't need a die i don't think you it's just a website so you don't need to download a client so it's like pirate bay i guess it's a similar one but again you still don't need a client it's just a website where you can like trade files and it goes viral because all these people would share files and he would put like mega upload like in the like image so like that's how it like groove and got viral so anyway he creates this thing and it swell he launches it in two thousand five and in two thousand ten he's basically he's able to pay himself forty two million dollars that was his personal income and from that and eventually after like eight years he gets sued and hollywood suits my guess i don't know what hollywood is but big hollywood sue him the government suits sign yeah the sign and they say that he made close to two hundred million dollars in personal profit from this whole thing and all during this he's doing like this other crazy shit so out of like fifty million modern warfare players this guy was ranked number one he was the number one player call of duty yes in two thousand and twelve he was the number one person in the world at call of duty he also finished first in the gum ball three thousand know what that is it's like a a race it's a car race across europe he finishes first then he releases an album of original music with any like clouds and other articles other artists it's called good times and it's not that bad of an album to be honest then he creates the internet party which is a a new political party in new zealand and it kind of gained some traction and he's doing all of this while running mega upload well mega upload gets sued and he actually goes to jail for the second time he's already been in jail for a few i think a few weeks a few months before for his hacking stuff this time he gets locked up for a longer period of time and when they arrest him they go to his house in his compound and they just swarm it swat style and in the house they find like forty cars like the nicest cars you know like these fancy mercedes amg bug god all this shit they find all this art but they also find a hundred and seventy five million dollars in cash this guy had that much money in cash in like up in a room in his house he's kind of like a proper gangster i mean he's like a gangster of the gangster and to give context mega upload had fifty million visits a day it was like the seventh most popular website in the world at one time it accounted for four percent of the of total traffic in america and it had a hundred eighty million users and people were transferring eight hundred files a second on mega upload this thing was huge he had and it was ran almost like a proper company he had a hundred and fifty five employees you know engineers customer my service admin all this stuff and it was wild and this is a wild story that like i just came across because i was reading about mist dot com his wife or his ex wife very fascinating guy this guy super prolific he even created this thing called a bit a mega car so he was trying to launch a car company that was like internet connected and it didn't like work out wonderfully but he built like a handful of the cars but super prolific very interesting and i thought that you might have a little bit of stories about this guy this just seems like he runs in your world a little bit i'm gonna send you this i can't say this on the pod but we've jammed before and i have to show you what's in this dm we can't this this is not gonna be good content but you you have to see this what what what was it just like crazy up i'll send it you after this but yeah this guy's is prolific i feel like he's kind of like the rogue marc andre totally like mark and is also surprisingly massive a prolific internet guy who was like you know had like a bunch of ideals and like took took at it mark jason just like sort of took more of the straight path and this guy went rogue that's kinda of how i think about him i can't blow i'm blown away by this call of duty thing yeah like he like like this isn't like a he said she's said thing i mean that this is like rankings like he can actually see like leader boards and he was number one but does he just have like a basement of like you know fifteen year old korean boys that a playing for him or something like do i really believe that this guy was the number one worldwide call of duty player that is insane that is so crazy that that's like what's the story about the the uber guy travis where he was the number one we tennis player in the world or something think it is like so basically the story is like chris sac this famous investor and travis were like at chris sac like vacation home chris sac mister sa was there travis sa well you know that's how we gotta deal you know that's thought we gotta explain the story so you know the difference between the the two sack so so kind not the light so mister sa and travis are playing we tennis and travis crush the dad mister sa and travis at the end of the game goes mister sa i've got a confession and he kinda like you know what's that princess movie with like i don't think the word means what you think it's a princess diary he kinda like throws the weak controller into the right hand he goes i've been playing left handed the whole time but i'm really right handed and he just like obliterate some even more and he goes i have another confession and he goes to the the the game the rankings and he's like two or three and we tennis and he's like the lift of we tennis seven out of ten we'll give him and so yeah this is kim dot com guy he's crazy man we got i would love to have him on the pod he's super interesting yeah that's a crazy story also he i feel like he didn't he didn't launch his own crypto token like the odds of him not doing his own token in the last five years like that had to be like a one in one million chance of him not doing it he probably i mean he was like he died about he talked about it but yeah he probably had like i bet you he was like banned for like you know selling securities i bet you he had some i i didn't look into like what is what his band was and what the what the verdict was but i mean he was in like legit trouble i mean was in prison but right and so he probably can't but what's crazy is number one and call duty number two that he had a hundred and seventy five million dollars in cash in a room in his house that's that's wild i don't even know how i would like to know how much like physical space that takes up but that'd be a lot isn't it like i was disappointing it's like that's just two brief cases yeah dude on the sop i was watching last night they gave a guy seventy five thousand dollars and it was in an envelope like not a like not a like a manila like not even the type that you've you gotta go to fedex for type that you have in your home i can't tell you how disappointed i would be like if i ever am i'm involved was any kind of ransom or if i win some sort of prize like i need the giant check if i win a prize and the if you're gonna give me some cash like just get it in the smallest bills possible i want duff bags i want i want like a you know a costco trolley bringing me the cash like if i get something in and it's in an envelope i don't care what's inside i'm throwing it away yeah if it it fits in my jacket pocket i'm out and if get and it was like the side pocket of like a suit where you reach in so you know those pockets are small and if fit and that seventy five thousand ever fit in that jacket very keep it yeah sleeping it yeah i bought a lottery ticket in canada i didn't win by the way you buy lottery tickets yeah i i have this moment whenever i get up to the counter where my brain just goes in and into an instant fantasy of like and then this was the day and then i'm telling people that i almost didn't buy it but i just said hey screw and i bought it and i won that's it shit ever i do that at least one out of three times i'm at of counter in the us they they require cash so that just that's what saves me for not buying it but in canada you could buy it on your cards it's great we're gonna wrap there yeah we could we can wrap there alright that's the pod we gotta start saying the gentleman's agreement every time by the way i keep forgetting to go subscribe to us on youtube that's it