MFM Goes Viral on TikTok, Solana Billionaires, Right to Be Forgotten, and More

it's almost a self fulfilling prophecy there's so much talent being sucked into this thing these guys are gonna build things that actually have these cases actually it's actually gonna make it all work you can't have this much talent spend all day thinking about this and building in this and have nothing come from it alright we're live what's going on i'm self conscious now because we're blown up on tiktok i just look at myself i'm like i should shaved and now now that i have to see myself and i see people and also the tiktok comments of brutal they're they're good but they you know they're like just wanna argue with every point that gets made so let's talk let's talk about when i see myself i'm like shit this is going on tiktok i better i i need to shave for the next one so basically ten days ago or fifteen days ago something like that like not long ago we told everyone that we're gonna do this contest we're gonna get five thousand dollars to like three people who take our clips and turn them into videos the best people are on tiktok so i actually posted the tags down there for you so i must have made a mistake i told people to say to to to use the hashtag m m clips but then i also i must have said clip as well without the s and so people are using two hashtag clips and clip m mfa clip and m mfa clips and some aren't using both but if you use those links i i i showed you we have in the ballpark of around fifteen ish million impressions from these videos and it's mostly young folks who created these tiktok handles from scratch took our our content and some videos have over a million some of them have yeah there's hundreds of thousands of likes they're great and do you read the comments no what do they say did they make sense us any content creator you go through the cycle of like you get excited and you read the comment the early comments are good and then the more popular you get the comments start to turn mean and then you just you everybody reaches a point where they no then the third phase is you say you don't read the comments but you secretly do and then finally you know whatever these are the seven stages of of grief for something social media grief you finally stop reading the comments because you're like this is just too toxic so yeah they they basically just shed on us for whatever we say like if we say you put down twenty percent to by house then all the comments are about ways that you can you can also not put down twenty percent if you do this this is this it's like alright okay dot comment or you got me you are smarter than us you are gonna constantly find some like edge case loophole or you know mistake in what was said do they make fun of how we look or talk or anything like they insult us no they don't really they're either like these guys are annoying like they'll be like let's say somebody cuts a clip of one of us breaking down you know our monthly expenses or something like that and then the comment would just but they don't know like the the vibe of the pod they don't know why what someone would just say that out of the blue right it's not something people normally talk about so they're just like why did he feel the need to tell us how much he's spending on eggs or like why is he telling us his body fat percentage or whatever they're just like there's that kind which is dude what a douche nobody asked you know why are you doing that then there's the comments that are like you know actually actually it's this other thing and then there's some comments which are like bro i don't i don't want that future no i don't no thanks you know because we'll be like here's how things are changing and a big do companies just only think about money and like you comments like that so those are the three flavors of hate we get so far luckily so far nobody's is just shitting on our like face and body oh that's good that's a that's a surprise that's a win as far as i'm concerned yeah i and it's general sticks stones may break my bones but words about my appearance do hurt me yeah just like don't make fun of my teeth or like hair you can make fun of my brain they this promotion has been a home run like i i thought it was gonna be pretty good i didn't think it was gonna be this good and so what we'll have to do is there's like a couple people who i'm recognizing because i i watch them that are killing it we're gonna have to have them on the pod and explain how they got so many views it's pretty amazing right and let let's talk about this for a second because i think there's something interesting to learn here so you have said many times i've grown a lot of things i've grown an email a newsletter to multi millions i've grown a subscription business to multi millions i've you know of grown whatever you're like a podcast is the hardest thing i've ever had to grow and you say that i think it's just kind of a cool thing to say in general agree with that i i agree with it in the sense of it it there's no like easy growth hacks to growing a podcast there's there's no just like button you could push paid ads don't really work nothing really works like that the good news is once somebody actually subscribe to your podcast they become like a really loyal fan and they like feel like they know you so it's got a lot of value but it's hard to get that easy growth this is the first and we tried a bunch of shit we've tried we did nothing initially then we tried placing it in our email newsletters we tried bringing on big name guess we tried paid ads we tried a bunch of different things none of which really like kind of felt like it was really working but the podcast kept growing organically this is the first thing oh by the way we also tried making our own clips paying an agency tens of thousands of dollars a month to be making really awesome animated clips of our content and they were great and they were high quality clips but it didn't lead to this this was different this was hey anybody open playing field just go for it and we'll give out prizes to the people who are actually good at it merit it based right and what they're good at is they understood tiktok whereas like we suck at tiktok we don't know how to create content there they pull clip they pull the right clips because they're actually listeners and fans of the show so they know which clip is actually gonna be interesting versus like you know some random employee our company being like you know at the forty two minute mark let's use that one for the clip these guys will put like ten that they think are interesting and put about there and and they're motivated because they're like shit if i do this good i can get a million views on this and i can go give me you know i get five grand from these guys like that's a pretty sweet deal for for doing something you know pretty fun so this has actually worked yeah it's pretty wild and like some there's one guy who basically took our rob d episode and i looked at his feed and he i'm not i don't think i'm exaggerating it's fifty clips in a row of like he basically just took it and just divided it up and like three of the fifty he did was he just took hour talking out and just fired rob to he grabs the clip which is smart yeah and in in his whole feed i looked at his feet it was all that one episode and like three of them had like five hundred thousand views yeah so go go follow them i think m cuts is one on on tiktok and twitter there's m mo m clips then there's a bunch of other variations of that name alright i wanna tell you about something interesting i i got a few interesting things to talk to you about okay so let me tell you about something that i was thinking about this weekend so i've got a buddy you kind of know them and we i'm not gonna name them but a few years ago he did something he was accused of doing a crime that was a horrible crime one of the worst crimes you could commit and he was the he was an executive at a company and it would made the news so six months later after he went to court it went the trial the government dropped the case because it was a horrible misunderstanding he didn't do what he was accused of doing and they exon him and they go we're sorry we were wrong we we we called this one wrong and the first time the story went out it made all the headlines and if you google this person's name it came up on top but what didn't come up on top was like six months later it said charges dropped the the misunderstanding came for this reason this person lost their job because of that and lost obviously a lot of money and i was i've always thought about this and i listened to a podcast this weekend and it was called the the right to be forgotten and it was by radio app and so this it's this idea of the right to be forgotten and it's in europe it's actually a law i don't know exactly what the law says but it says like if something isn't particularly news worthy but you're writing about it anyway and it really hurts that person more than that provides value to the common or to like a reader you have to take it down and there's a couple of newspapers like the boston globe as well as in this particular podcast they looked at this company this newspaper in cleveland ohio and there's stories of like a cop emailing them and he's like look you wrote about this time that i lied about some paperwork and i ended up getting fired i didn't hurt anyone and now i can't get a job and another as a police officer there anymore can i fill in the gap on the right to be forgotten for you here yeah so so basically it's a law that says search engines should have to remove links about your past if under certain circumstances and it came about because there was a woman an actress who had who's in a movie and then it got dubbed so there was that the film was called the innocence of muslims and then her her original line her original line got dubbed over and then they made it made it so that it looked like she was saying is your is your mohammed a child mole right so that was the clip and she starts getting death threats and like people would go crazy about this and she's like what is this like why like okay this thing got i dubbed now this clip got on to into the search engine and it comes up if you search my name or certain things and it's causing you know like harm to me in my personal life and so she sued google in two thousand fourteen and ultimately they they upheld it which was you know like she would like to have it have the film forgotten from youtube but unfortunately the right to be forgotten which is recognized in the eu is not recognized in the us and so it's a the eu does respect this as they're they're tighter on privacy with gdpr and things like that the us does not so yeah and so in the us we don't have that but it's kind of interesting because i personally have seen this her people but you think like right now like let's say that you're at a bar in your drunk and you call someone like a really bad word and it's on reddit and they find your name you're screwed like to a point of like your life is gonna be hurt meaningfully like the next decade and like you should suffer some consequences for someone's calling something something rude but not like that serious you know and so i've been thinking a lot about this business about this reputation management business have you ever researched it yeah my former c founder used to work there so he used to tell me stories all the time great i wanna hear all about it and i know a little bit about this because listen to this so one of the companies is called reputation dot com so there's a porn star named sasha gray so do me a favor type in sasha gray on your google and click images this sasha gray it doesn't she's not an actress anymore and not a porn actress anymore but she was like a very prolific porn actress when you click images what do you see here we go i'm here okay so i see a bunch of head shots of her i see no real porn well i guess i guess some scandalous stuff but porn yeah mostly just pictures of her fully closed or like in a bikini so one time at the hustle right when first launched i helped write this article about sasha gray and she hired this firm called the reputation dot com and she basically wanted to retire from pornography and become like an actor and right what whatever else something different and she hired reputation dot com to hide or like basically blog a bunch and write a bunch in in order to get the porn images to go down and i remember when we wrote this article reputation dot com did something kinda of funny and if i would go on my google analytics at night i would look at real time and there would be thousands of people reading this article and i saw that they searched sasha gray and so reputation dot com manipulated it so the article that we wrote about reputation dot com and sasha gray came up number one if you googled sasha gray and at night when people are gonna look at porn they googled sasha gray and they landed on our article it was pretty wild i would see you at night every week or every night it would go up and so i got crazy fascinated about reputation dot com so for this segment i wanted to talk about reputation dot com i think there's y and they're sprinkler and these are businesses that do like four or five hundred million dollars a year and all they do is reputation management what do you know about reputation dot com so he you used to tell me stories like you know i asked him i was like would you you know before this what was your job before that and eventually he said repetition come and i got fascinated like you was what is that so he told me like you know here's a scenario you're a senator and your son who has the same you know john chambers junior a sorry to any john chambers out there it's hypothetical so your son who has the same name as you basically get to dui or gets arrested for battery or something like that so now anytime somebody searches john chambers this mug shot gonna come up or this and bad news story is gonna come up and basically they go to reputation dot com and they say i would like this to disappear off the front page of i would like this to disappear a reputation comp says i can't make it disappear the internet sort is a is uncontrollable but i can get you off the front page at google and they're like that would be amazing and they say for the low low price of a hundred twenty thousand dollars seventy five thousand dollars whatever it's expensive sick expensive because they know people are by the time you're at reputation dot com you're bent over the barrel you they can charge pretty much whatever they can get away with to like you know a nascar driver a politician whoever people of interest people who wanted their their names or their kids names to get out of the bad news and so they had a team of engineers that were just it's a constant cat and mouse game to figure out how to beat google so like he might might go out dolby is like one of the big the biggest days at the company was when we figured out you know google has the auto complete right so you go yeah you type sam it's gonna be sam par the hustle sam par net worth sam par wife sam par is gay it'll be like at all these likes the same ten queries for everybody right and what he figured out was that when do you type you know sam par if it used to say felony like f would now say friend a felony like it would they would figure out how to even finish the auto complete because even when they were good at getting you off the front page by blogging by promoting other articles whatever getting them higher ranked if the auto complete was still always suggesting felony then people would click it and they would search for felony and it would be reinforcing then google would search for more so they needed to clear that so they was just constant cat and mouse game to understand how is google doing how google deciding what goes where and then how do we content farm or manipulate this in some way that will change what the first page result are ninety eight percent of people don't go past the first page or something like that yeah and so it's amazing to hear about that and then there's a company called y y e x xt they're publicly traded and they do i think that they are just a direct competitor reputation dot com they're publicly traded they did three hundred and ninety million dollars i think last year in revenue their market cap is not very good it's like four or five times revenue are you looking at it i'm i'm on rip went to reputation i wanted to see the latest like you wouldn't even know when you go to this what they do because it says this is their headline at first it looks like a hospital website like a nice health tech website or something like that and it says a world of interactions demands a platform of action it's like we're a fixer is what it should say so but here's a problem by the way maybe they change what they do i don't know i think they still do it i think they offer like a a a smaller package like like when we brought the sasha gray articles that was in two thousand sixteen they have like a thirteen thousand dollar package but the problem is there there's there's kinda two problems with us the first is that the results aren't guaranteed like you can't guarantee that it's gonna work which is i guess that's not a problem but that's just how it works you know you when when someone calls you i get these calls all the time because i own domain names i forgot to hide my name it's like hey we'll put you on the first page at google like i that's a scam you can't just promise that but the second thing is that if you're an individual if you're just someone who like said some stupid drunken thing someone one day and now your names all over the place you you it's really really hard to to like unless you willing to pay a hundred thousand dollars which is what a lot of the stuff cost it's incredibly challenged to manage your reputation if you're just like a person and so i was thinking about like is there anything interesting in that space i actually think that there could be something i like this company called do not pay you know what do not pay is yeah i love do not pay the guys the guy behind it's awesome and it's a great idea so do not pay it started by this guy and i actually didn't research this so this is all the top of my head it started as getting josh brow i think louder and he's young like when he started i think it was twenty twenty one maybe yeah oh twenty five okay well no now i think he's like twenty five when he was started he was even younger yeah he was obviously and he was like like it was like a prodigy type of thing and originally the business existed to help you fight parking tickets automatically but now they have a bunch of features like it's basically all basically all i'll stick it to the man so the another feature is like we will sue we will sue cold callers on your behalf or something like that right we'll also do like you know we will unsubscribe you from stuff that you're you're not using that you pay for you know just ways to say ways that you do not pay which is why it's a great aim and a great idea and i think there's a world where like a do not you could use a do not pay service like this to help manage your reputation online and this is a a need that i think we're actually gonna see more and more and more of it it's like a very like exponential thing where it's like more and more people gonna be written about and more and more people gonna need this and i don't know it's just something i'm been thinking about what do you have any do you have about i know where the new opportunity is in this one because i think it really depends on it's kinda like you need google to exist for reputation dot comp to exist and so really it's about thinking okay there was a version of this on social networks that people were doing like i remember this one guy came to me and he was great entrepreneur he he ended up not doing this idea but like i always thought it was a great idea others have done it which is when you everybody has social media where they post stupid stuff when you're younger when you're just drunk or whatever and so what they do is they go to companies and they say hey we ran a check on all your employees and we found these red flags and you know you should be aware of how you're of what you know who you're hiring as well as what they're saying and representing your company how how they represent your company elsewhere so they end up getting contracts with companies to monitor and clean up and then they're not like title they're sort of like and hey like an insider helping you out saying hey you have this employee who's saying this you may wanna take action but the action might just be to letting the employee know that we we flag this as potentially controversial and maybe they wanna delete it and so it's a monitoring service for social media reputation and social media controversy which i think a great great idea it just sucks like you gotta do that well it sucks that the world is the way it did it it sucks the world well some people think oh it's good he held you accountable but in reality it's just a bunch of like you know don't say don't say what you really feel is really the result of most of this because people just get afraid to say anything because if we're worried about getting and canceled so in your buddy liked working at reputation dot com but they like they were by the book he was like technically it was super interesting to figure out how we do all this stuff i you know he's like i he always says thing like at one point we had indexed every person on the web and we had to like them and they're were cluster in their reputation and so you know i think it was technically very interesting but obviously like sort of soul sucking and boring as well so he you know bounced yeah i think i can see that but it it is an interesting problem i've been thinking about alright let me tell you about one more thing alright so i was reading the information the information dot com and they had an article about sol so i told you about this on slack so there's just sol sorry i don't know anything about it really other than yourself here as a yeah i'm not crypto nobody yeah i don't wanna act like i'm an expert here i'm not i just i i i i i've read a lot about it though but news articles so chris mc mccann i knew this guy named chris mc mccann because he had this thing called start up digest and that's one of the reasons why hustle con became popular is because i would email chris and i would say hey can you please put this in the email and he had this email called startup up i digest started in san francisco and he would email email each week different events happening in san francisco different startup up this is was when the startup up community was much smaller and everyone wanted to go to events and it was just here's a roundup of cool events happening he eventually expanded it to different cities he sold it not for a lot of money probably a hundred probably six figures i bet but he kinda worked his way into benchmark where he like was just an employee there and somehow or another invested two hundred and fifty thousand dollars into what's it is this sla or lana i'm a fucking new he invested two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in sla and the information wrote an article about how that two fifty turned into a billion dollars is that crazy and probably i think three three years maybe four years max yeah it's insane i sent you i sent you somebody else who also has made multiple billions of dollars from their investment i sent that last week to you but but basically has gone oh like the fun yeah so has gone from let's see i mean it was like sub a dollar not long ago and now it's two hundred dollars per coin and basically it's it what is salami salon is it competitive to ethereum if you know what ethereum is if you don't know what ethereum is just fast forward in the segment you probably don't care so salon is like a competitor theory ethereum mean as recently is okay so this time last year salon was a dollar fifty four and when it launched when it did its ico was just under a dollar i think it was and so and that was only that was you know a couple years ago two years ago or something like that so basically if even just take last year a dollar fifty four you put a hundred thousand dollars into that and now you have i think twenty million dollars or something like that i'll i'll i'm actually gonna do some public math here for but yeah twenty million dollars so sol salon has had this in insane run up and it sounds like he i think through he's in this fund called read something red circle like that a race yeah rate erase something they were like the seed investors in and you know that's the right project to be a seed investor in is a crypto project that becomes a you know multi billion dollar crypto asset and sure enough if you could turn two hundred fifty k into a billion dollars that's kind of insane i don't think it was that personal two hundred fifty k necessarily but even fun the the article made it sound like it was but even if it's not that doesn't change much sanity yeah it doesn't change much because he's still is gonna walk away with nine thick over a hundred million some bigger like there but this article i was reading about it and they're basically like saying there's like a lot of really high profile tech folks that traditional tech companies giving up amazing things in order to like flee to this crypto thing and i'll get and i wanna ask you a question about that but example like this woman sandy carter vp of amazon's cloud computing she left to join unstoppable domains brian roberts who was the cfo of lyft he left to join open c and he said i've seen enough cycles and paradigm chips to be cognizant a when something this big is just emerging and that we're only at the beginning and it's just gonna be get bigger we had david marcus he basically led facebook's cryptocurrency thing he bounced to start his own thing the this one dude left google in order to become coinbase chief product officer and when it went public his stake was worth six hundred million dollars and then of course jack do bounced from twitter in order to work at square and it's like definitely involves crypto rename they renamed a block because there's block example blockchain but it's crazy and my question to you is this have you ever seen someone create that much wealth that fast and do you have any stories of people who you know or know of that are doing this and like what their stories are because this is crazy well i'll say the first thing is that you're right that there's basically a giant black hole that's sucking up all the talent in the world and it's called crypto and it's almost a self there's a lot of people who don't believe that crypto is thing or they think it's massively over hyped and they say you know give me one example of a real use case of this thing nobody's actually using it for payments or web three there's no real web three products and it's sort they they're they're there's some true to what they're saying i i wouldn't say that they're completely off base it's like a valid critique i don't think it's true but it's a valid criticism but the there's almost a self fulfilling prophecy there's so much talent being sucked into this thing these guys are gonna build things that actually have these cases and actually it's actually gonna make it all work you can't have this much talent spend all day thinking about this and building in this and have nothing come from it that's like the biggest like takeaway for me if like even if you're the biggest crypto skeptic there's a self fulfilling prophecy here which is that it's sucked up all the dev talent it sucked up all the smartest people sucked it sucked up like twenty billion dollars of venture capital every year now and all that funding all that talent is gonna is gonna create things that actually do work and do hit beyond what's already there today so there's that now to your question of have i seen somebody to get rigs to quick i wanna have my buddy on i have a friend who used to work work with me and i caught up with them and his story he basically went from like average like an average job like you wouldn't look at this person and say oh that's a star career and they're good they were doing well obviously but they were doing like normal person well and they went from normal person well to making like to personally making like fifteen million dollars in the last year just by they they basically quit their job and they went down a a crypto rabbit hole and started betting on things in d defy and they started playing with all the projects investing their money in def defy and they didn't have a huge base of capital to head you know call it half a million dollars that they put in and to turn a half million dollars if you and if you have no path in your career to being like a you know a deck a millionaire right like if you don't have a path where you're yeah i'm gonna have fuck you money to go from no path no no like reasonable storyline that makes sense there you have a job at a company that pays your good salary and that's that to that is amazing to me and awesome and like you know just like blew my mind more so than these guys who become multi billionaires who were like prod and like invented the protocol or invested two hundred fifty k in a random token it's like this is somebody who just took their own money out of the stock market and i was like instead of an apple google or facebook i'm gonna invest in lazy crypto and turned a normal amount a normal like life savings amount of money into a life changing amount of money and i wanna have him on to tell his full story because it actually has like a bunch of twists and turns that are like kind of amazing so i'm gonna ask him if you'll come on at share i know willing to yeah you know them i don't know if they're willing to share but if they are it's gonna make for an amazing episode i'll ask him a feel do it next week did they did they earn the did they sell do they have usd or like some type of stable currency no they're they're still in crypto like a hundred or a hundred plus percent because they you know but does it state like a bit like a a popular thing it's a mix of popular things and like they could sell stuff and they everything's liquid if they wanted to cash out and say i'm done i'm going to malibu and i'm gonna chill i'm gonna pretend that this year never existed and i basically want a lottery they could do that because we have a buddy in our chat group who said he made all this money in some crazy coin but he's like i can't sell it so it's like that's different that that's like those are like either ill liquid like oh there's just coin but it's not listed yet or it's liquid but there's like no trading volume whatsoever on this coin and so like yeah if you have ten million dollars and you go to sell even a hundred thousand it'll crash the price of the coin that's not what this is that's that's a different thing that's a what that is is i i i make a million coins i keep nine hundred ninety nine thousand for myself and then i sell one of them for a dollar and now the total value of my thing is a million dollars and it's like no it's not really you there's such a lit such a small amount of the supply out there being sold it's not indicative of the true price this is what i'm talking about is it's not that situation is there any other person alright so you have a story of someone who did five hundred thousand to fifteen million i just told you about this guy who in like two years this person non technical never was a trader or a financial person like they would own like a index fund or mutual fund before that didn't know how to spell blockchain you know like this person is that's why this blows my mind it's not just this like know that amount is not the craziest amount of money it's an awesome amount of money for anybody but what's crazy is the got point a to point b it makes no sense it's like how could those two points connect in that amount of time it's mind blowing to me so i told you a story about this dude chris who did two hundred and fifty thousand up to a billion you just said five hundred thousand to fifteen million do we know what anyone else that has this like crazy crazy journey personally you've talked about this guy you talked about somebody right that you're feeling and a friend that that they hundred one million to a hundred million yeah so at speak when bi bitcoin was sixty thousand so i whatever is that discount okay i have another one there is a kid who i call him my kid because he was actually a kid he i built this a product called lab back in the day is as like kind of like club house he you could basically go hang out and chat with people and this kid used to come home every everyday from school he used to get on in chat and he didn't chat in the other rooms that had thirteen year olds he came to our rooms because he loved technology startups he wanted to be in the start scene and i think he was maybe thirteen at the time okay so fast forward it's been like six years since and now he's like i twenty one or something like that it's been it's been a while and he created some but he was he's a technical guy he created a a protocol like i was like oh what you've been up to like how's your startup going and he's like odds yeah startups okay we haven't been focusing on it for the last few months i was like i know man it's tough yeah just hanging in there buddy you know just pivot find me hey he's like actually like we ended up creating this thing anonymously on one of these random like side chains and it was like a what blah blah blah bunch of terms i don't even understand that it's a you know it's a it's a derivatives perpetual contract for you know adding liquidity to this blah blah blah i'm like i don't even understand what you're saying and he's like yeah the market cap of it like you know but basically like the market cap of is like nine hundred million right now and you know i i think he cashed out ten million dollars in this he's like he's like dude has been insane the market cap went up like crazy now it's at two hundred million and he's like i was able to like take out like a life changing amount of money he i took out ten million he was he was like he was asking me because he goes i heard you guys talking about charities in charity water you told the charity water store really moved like i've set aside seven figures to donate you're like what i was like you set aside seven figures like like are you seven years old what how did this happen where what if what has happened to this amount of time like i used to talk to you when you would come home from eighth grade and get online like you're donating millions of dollars to charity now like what is again a and b it broke my brain and i don't think this as an insult to them like if they're if they were only fifteen then so they're still only like nineteen yeah i think they're twenty hour twenty one something like that it's been like seven years since we've made that thing so you know it's not it's not mind blowing to me that this person is successful in both cases i i really like this person why i used to hang out with them that's why i we i used to work with one of i think they're really smart and we're gonna be normal person successful it's like when you know oh i went like my sister went to high school with this girl lily gal who's like this super famous instagram star now she's like has i own on tv show on bravo and it's like wait that's the lilly girl he used to come to our house after school like she was just like a normal girl like wait that's her like that doesn't even look like her anymore and like yeah she's had some work done right it's like just mind blowing to know a normal person who who's like yeah that's a cool normal they'll don't do well in life to be like no actually they're like one of those crazy outlier stories and in a way that you wouldn't have otherwise predicted you know it didn't make any sense like you know it's not it's not that that was their skill set and they tried tried tried that thing for ten years and finally hit it's like just i don't know where they just did this thing get a hit and crypto this amazing thing like that so by the way i'm gonna say something when i first talked to my friend i caught up with my friend i felt insanely jealous i was like so i was happy for him and i like him and all that but i was also like i was like in my head i was just like what the fuck have i had to do with my life wait with the the friend that you sort for you both of them both the same reaction yeah mean because it feels weird because you're like oh wait you kinda looked up to me and i would now now i'm like you know way less successful than you so like what just happened you just like catapult really crazy we're like yeah between the last time we caught up and now but there there is jealousy there it's easy and i just wanna say like you know an interesting thing to observe is what is your reaction to hearing stories like this there's a part of me that i'm not proud of which gets jealous of it but that used to be like it used to be i would feel that i wouldn't really acknowledge that that's what i was feeling and i would kinda of find reasons why it was like that's just luck or like you know well well they probably are taken a bunch of risk and they might lose at all i'm kinda secretly rooting for it to not not all workouts just so perfectly as it has that's gone but i still got a little bit of that like jealousy paying left and i'd say the interesting thing is my my coach said this to me he goes you'll you'll encounter people in your life where your six success just reminds them of their failure and they're not focused on your success to focus on their fail your success has reminded them of their failure or your abundance has reminded their them of their lack and if you notice that in yourself you wanna be aware of that and change that and if you find other people and they're like these people are haters like you know just understand what's coming on they don't actually hate you it's your successes has reminded them of some failing that they have in themselves and that's where their attention has gone and so wanted to share that because i i definitely felt it like crazy feeling that i hadn't haven't felt it a long time but these stories were still mind blowing that i could i was like wow i this i i don't even know what to say i feel lucky the yeah know who i know which we have the same group basically that i've like these stories that sound unbelievably true a like yeah i know that person i saw it it it was wild so like an example is mo ollie selling native deodorant for a hundred million dollars two years after starting it i was in we shared an office when he was starting it and i saw him try to learn facebook ads like i saw the thing come to fruition i saw it right in front of my eyes every single day for like six or ten months and that was almost half of the journey it's actually pretty amazing you know and i think about like this isn't like a one to one correlation because there's other components here but like i was thinking about this i'm like jamaica is a very small country there's not a lot of people there but they just dominate the hundred meter dash and obviously there's some genetic there's a lot of genetic factors going there but it can't be significantly different than america and and i was thinking like man of the reasons being is they just are just surrounded by like it's just normal to be great at something and that then and that makes it normal to work hard and you're like well i should be running these these times in practice and you don't like freak out you just get it done because you that's what's expected and i kinda feel that way in terms of making money because of our friends are who they are it's like well you just wanna spin something up and it's if yeah if you're willing to dedicate three years like you definitely can add eight figures of net worth to your like it it's for sure like it's easy it's not easy but it's simple and it's kinda cool to like be around people where you start seeing like yeah like it's really simple just do this of course you gotta dedicate every right you have to dedicate tens of hour you know fifty sixty hours a week for like many years but yeah it's very simple it's straightforward well the first example you gave with boys is starting at literally at the table i think you sat at the table next right like in the yeah and and and founder dojo or whatever those hacker dojo founded dojo founder dojo like i think he was interested at first if i remember correctly he was like what should i sell should i do mattresses and then he was like ordering mattresses and like measuring them and like singing like see she oh that's too much work mattress are too big what else is there by the way the public story is like my sister was pregnant and she couldn't find a deodorant that had didn't have chemicals which might harm her baby so i wanted to create that product and it's like dude i know you you were like alright how do i build i wanna make a business i wanna sell some shit do people want oh people like cl mattresses aren't too big to ship okay yeah scratch that off the list deodorant small under one pound ships easily people will use it every month it's a renewable and there's a niche of and there is a genuine problem for but like i know you dude there's a there's a real story and then there's the narrative it's just like which like story is not narratives it's not bad he was just like seeking problems to solve he's like boom promoted it and i respect that i i like that and that's how i think so you know it's normal to me the there's something to when you see it being built day by day brick by brick you're like there's a just a respect and and for me like total joy i never feel the jealousy in that like for example i remember when you started the hustle i remember when you were doing just the event and then you're were like i'm gonna do this thing and then i came to your office with you and john and it was like like it was like we went into a room that was like a conference room that was like the size of a bathroom and like you had a presentation and like i listened to it and i like okay this is cool but like what about this this and this and you guys were like i know we'll figure it out and then you like you started with these like long form your your original thing was long term stories and then like kind of was working but not really here you're like i am thinking about switching to this like newsletter thing just daily news skim is doing it's working these guys are doing it i think we could do it in our niche i think it'll be even better and so seeing that then it's like cool seven years later sam whatever i don't know how long been seven years was it seven we sold it about five okay five years in sam sells the thing and a successful nothing but props were speck and and joy of like wow i i was so cool i got to sit there on the journey with you there's a difference of that watching somebody build it brick by brick and a difference of actually this happened in twelve months you didn't get to see the hard work that was obviously going in and the risks that were being taken so you'd all you hear is like i tried this thing just hit a hundred x two hundred x like what you know it's it feels more like a lot of reading feels less like the hard and i think that happens a lot of crypto that's there's a little difference there the second part is i remember when i moved so i moved from australia to silicon valley without having a a game plan i think you were kind of the same way didn't you because i come to silicon valley like showed up just showed up i do the same thing i i was sitting in australia i went i remember specifically i i i went to a meetup and they asked me to speak about the about lean startups about startups and i went and i spoke and everybody at the end was like yay you know great talk people after was like wow that was really great talk and in my head my buddy was like what's was wrong because you could see i was just like kind of upset he's like what's wrong get didn't like it i was like i was like i don't know anything about startups and i'm like the thought leader here this is like i'm doing something wrong like this is like i feel like not impostor syndrome i feel like idiot syndrome it's a blind leading the blind like these guys know zero about startups ups i know point one about startups ups but if i'm the smart guy here then that where are the actual smart guys they're not here and i asked i was like yeah what are the success stories in brisbane about like startups ups is you guys are not and the start saying the yeah these guys did great oh where are they they don't these no they moved to san francisco these guys moved these guys moved and was like oh all the smart people move okay maybe i should move so i changed my phone number first just to mentally be like alright i have a silicon valley area code i don't know why for me that was just like i i think i could just do it like over the like i did it in one night before i could move i was like faster than moving was just to change my phone numbers was make statement and then i remember being like alright i'm gonna move there i'll figure it out and i quit my job you know on the spot and i was like i'm just gonna move there i played poker for three months to hold myself over while i applied for a job literally one job and they didn't hire me they were like kept swinging me along and i was like this is the one ended up working i'm for it was like a slow process two month process so finally i was like fuck i'm just gonna move there and if this doesn't work i think i'll get this job but if it doesn't work i'll get some i'll do something else what was the title which just product manager like i was just this first pm there so i i i finally came and when i came there like our why'd you move like why'd did you why'd you come here and i was like well you know i wanted to see what's in the water here right like if this is where all the department people are this what the little startups are like what do you guys know that i don't i don't know and i was thinking it's about tactics it's about operations maybe people are just like literally this is the cream of the crowd these are they're the smartest people and there's certainly some of that but i'll tell you what to me was the actual this was the actual difference the thing that made come to silicon valley work i went to this coffee shop you remember the creamer or this like a it's like this like everyone would be a nice it was so south park it's second and brand and i think yeah exactly so it's placed all the creamer it's kinda famous for where people take meetings and i went there and i just sat there for like half a day i was just eating i didn't i didn't have anywhere to go out didn't have an office i didn't have an apartment so i was like well i was sit here and then i'll go search for apartments later and i remember just seeing table after table next to me somebody would come in and they'd be like just pitching their idea to either an investor or a buddy like trying to make a c kinda like a c cofounder or two friends catching up or an investment pitch and it was always like these like hair brain ideas it's like oh you know linkedin but for you know cat doctors or whatever this is a stupid ideas and i remember just sitting there thinking oh that's a stupid idea that's a stupid idea and then i was sort of realizing like oh that's actually kinda cool like the normal conversation here the coffee shop conversation here is i get i got this idea i'm gonna change the world like got this idea it's gonna be huge i was like everybody kind of has bought into this and then like if you go to hollywood that's what happens like the waiters and waitress i'm gonna be a star and in new york is a different thing and it's in silicon valley it's basically i got those i got this idea it's gonna be big and that's normal whereas before everywhere i lived if you were the guy who's got an idea and you're gonna quit your job to go do it you're crazy you're the crazy guy here you're the normal guy here if in silicon valley if you're like i work at jpmorgan you basically have to like bow your head in shame you have to like come up with some excuse it's like you know because my wife is pregnant with twins and i really gotta pay the mortgage but as soon as that's over you know like i'm back in the game i'm gonna go back into the startup game like if you're a cons if you work for mckenzie anywhere else that's great if you work for you know mackenzie you're deloitte in san francisco you're like the low class person you're not the high class person because the high class person is the founder with the idea or the angel investors who's betting on ideas so the just that culture where that's normal and possible to just constantly quit your job have an idea throw everything into it maybe get rich that's what makes it look about like so awesome or this that's what it did and what you're talking about where like if your friends group has these types of success stories and is doing this type of shit your brain will just automatically change into thinking that's possible that's normal that's super doable for me too and that you can't underestimate that i think for some people that's what this show is is like if you hear us three times a week at least that's like part of your friend group that talks that way thinks that way and we'll make it feel normal to have ideas to bet on ideas to make a bunch of money to make huge investments whereas in your your geography may not be a people around you and your neighbors and so like that may not think that way yeah it and it basically changed my perspective from like this only happens to other people to obviously this is obviously i'm going of time yeah i'm going to achieve the desired outcome it's just a like for on which swing am i gonna get my hit and b which thing do i wanna dedicate five or ten years on right because if you like work eight years on something and you're were around the right people and you've been like going like i felt like living there i like i was in school so it's like well i'm in school i know like i know it when i see it and i can just keep working on something and then i'll see right away that it's working and then i just spend time on it and just give it time and it works it will always work that's kinda like the attitude there's i i i think i've told the story ever told like why did the e commerce thing and why i think it worked no so i was sitting with our mutual friend i i his name maybe we'll bleep this out later but i'll was sitting with him and his backyard he had this you know he has that awesome and when he lived in california he had this awesome backyard with a basketball court and like a put green and pool and and chickens stuff like that and we were just chilling for the day and his dogs are running around and we were talking and while we were talking the shopify ching kept going off on his phone and he was to have that thing all the time i see yelled and i go to that shit off i it was like chi and then like two minutes had a be ching and then i was like i was like what is that he's oh my my like i saw i totally spaced i didn't even realize i like i'm so like i'm so numb i i didn't even realize i was happening like that's obnoxious my bad i go no leave that on what is that he goes that's the shopify like every time we get a sale it does that i said i'll leave that on he goes to i was like yeah it so we it got on whole time it goes off the whole time by the end of the i work about some other shit completely which talking about dogs family and kids and like whatever by the end of the hour i was like alright man i gotta you know whatever i gotta go but i'm definitely starting at a shopify thing i want my phone to do that he's like like he's like he's like yeah he's totally should i was like just literally that experience if i did not have that and the jealousy worked to my favor right the jealousy was a signal of if i want that more than what i have maybe i need to make a change right because i was like i'm gonna go back to the office where i earn a fixed salary it's a great i was making great money but like it is capped i will make the same amount whether i do a good job or a bad job whereas for him it was like he got to chill it was making money passively and and if he did a better job he he's gonna make more money so that was the first thing it made me maybe decide i'm gonna do this and then i started like moe i was like what can i sell what can i alright alright what can i okay what are the other options of other ideas i had to sell yeah can i remember going through candles candles are kind of an amazing business but very competitive candles are same thing as deodorant you you use them and they burn out they they literally melt away and you have to buy another one it's so expensive i just bought a hundred dollar can't handle yeah they're they're high ao they're super high margin so they're not expensive to make they're just really you could charge a lot for them you can have a whole bunch of skus very easily that are all the same they're all just different cents there are the high end middle end and low end there's candles that are like you know oh this smells like your hometown of missouri there's like a bunch of gimmicks you can do this whatever so candles was definitely one those on my mind i told you about the crystal story i was basically like because i i i asked my buddy so i asked that friend i asked others i said how do you think about this hey they gave me some frameworks of about how to think about it right like look you're gonna the reason this whole thing works is facebook ads so that means you're gonna acquire customers so something like this dollar amount alright so you need to how much was that dollar amount so like twenty bucks at the time it was like twenty twenty five bucks something like that but now it would be higher now it's higher now it's like forty dollars forty five bucks something like that but it's like alright let's just say in a best case an scenario you're gonna break even on the first purchase so you want a product that's gonna have sixty five to seventy percent gross margins so that means the actual let's say i don't forget public map but like let's just round numbers here a candle let's say the cost of goods is five dollars you wanna make sure that you could sell that thing for thirty dollars or whatever to have that type of gross margin so and then you're gonna have you know let's call it fifteen percent to twenty percent is your cost of fulfillment so that's like packaging it you know picking it in your warehouse and then shipping it to the customer and customer and okay cool so then you take all that out so basically you can end up with a break a breakeven and the question is if you can break even on the first purchase meaning it costs you twenty five dollars let's say in facebook to get a customer then you want that to be your net profit on a single order then you're basically that's like the that's like a a great position to be in because you're breaking even on day one and then every purchase base yeah you build up a customer base on by recycling that cash flow on this you know every month you're not going you're not going deeper and deeper in debt and then as you build your customer base when they come back and repeat purchase and you want that repeat purchase rate to be high so like you know one of our friends has a thing that doesn't have high repurchase rate the other one has like deodorant has amazing repeat purchase rate so if they repurchase that means your lifetime value will be higher for your customer all that ex every next purchase will be much more profitable alright and this is business would be more valuable and then the little things like hey the way that the shipping works in the country is like you know things that are under one pound they ship at this low rate once it's over a pound shipping is like much more expensive like there's like a normal usps usps like whatever parody mail that if it's under a pound it's like whatever five bucks or four bucks or whatever so there's like certain little things that help and so like if you've talk to boys mo used to like change his packaging so that he would be at point nine nine pound right like was like i wanna be just under one pound and that was like his his like keith one of the key things that help control costs so anyways this there's a whole bunch of frameworks so i went through a bunch of product ideas to figure it out and the ones you're gonna like you know the easiest thing to sell on facebook is stuff that appeals to like white woman in middle america so like how do you sell to a thirty five to sixty five year old woman that lives in texas and like that's the that's the persona that's like the most easy to to fish for on facebook you can not obviously sell anything to anybody facebook huge but like if you can get one for white women in middle america like you're gold because that's the majority of your customers are yeah our ours are a little younger than that but like yeah that's like the for white ladies why women i'm in middle america is like a a great part celtic and most of silicon valley makes a mistake they go for what does la new york and san francisco yeah millennial single millennials like me that's such a expensive customer it's an expensive customer their then their lifestyle changes very quickly and they don't need your shit anymore and just which uber and lyft and shit like the ad spend is just too hard everything is very competitive it's just like i guess the the way to think about it is not necessarily that one is that much better than the other i wouldn't actually say that it's just more like don't narrow your scope to euro single lifestyle as like a twenty five year old dude in san francisco who like orders you know every meal on post nights it's like you're not representative of the world so you know like don't limit yourself to just that because you know it might be truckers in middle america that love you know that buy x y z or whatever there might be just like a different market that that's really lucrative that you're not really paying attention to right now so pay attention to other groups so anyways the the second thing that happened was i asked them i asked so there's be had two buddies i would doing the same thing two was enough where i was like oh if he can do it and he can do i could do it no problem and and so i was like i asked them was like what are your sales and they're you know it shocked to me right i was like oh you know the business we did seven million our first year twenty one million our second year and forty one million our third year i was what the fuck is going on i was like and then they're like oh yeah we didn't raise any money it's just profitable you know i just take a dividend out i'm like what like what are these words profit you know like where i come from silicon valley we don't we don't say that word what the what's that keyword were yeah like like you know the prophet like jesus like the muhammad talking about so so when i heard that i was like alright and then that became my normal like i was like okay i'm gonna do seven million in my first year i'm gonna do twenty million my second year i'm a four like that became my what i thought was achievable and normal if i hadn't heard that from them i would have never scaled as fast and sure enough we did you know seven million in the first year now in our second year hopefully we'll get to twenty like i hit this exact i hit the exact thing to the point where i'm like maybe i should've have shot higher maybe maybe just hearing their number created like an artificial ceiling but usually created are you more are you how many of people work there full time at yours let's great yeah like four or five are you happy with e commerce i've asked you this like every quarter are you having say the same thing it's it's a great business in one way and it's terrible pain in the ass in the other way you know like you know whatever like right right now everything is it's a lot of headwind are going against commerce so facebook's is getting more expensive shipping anything around the world is getting super expensive and slower so those are the two core costs right getting a customer and then fulfilling your product all the you're you're doing physical products and guess what with inflation everything gets more expensive so like there's a lot of headwind against e commerce right now and it's very competitive so you know there's a bunch of reasons why it's bad then again it's working and like you know i'm happy with our business so you know it's good but what i recommend is so the next person not necessarily i think if if you can do software do software if you if you don't really wanna like do real work don't do don't do your commerce because commerce has real work like we have a to you know it's a annoying let me tell you something really quick before we wrap up i just invested in i don't ever do d companies like these consumer shipping companies but this guy listening to our podcast i bet you he reached out to you too it's called the good crisp company yeah so he sent me like i guess on the podcast i mentioned that i love snacks or something i don't know well we we know we were talking about better for you snacks right so so junk food that's like keto keto cookies whatever so he's got pringles that are like better for you than pringles but the tastes you yeah they're awesome i hate this entire box of like and it was like a lot of chips like it was it was kinda messed up it's it's yeah and i was like dude this is awesome the valuation was like two times sales i ended up investing in it i really wanted to invest i'm just too i told the guy i was like you have amazing of a great business i i would totally invest in this i'm just completely ob obsessed crypto and like every dollar every extra dollar that i put into something speculative i just wanna put in into crypto i wanna put into anything else what's your crypto stuff that you're that you're doing now then do dude about luna luna just been like on fire i don't know if you follow luna how much would they go up by well it depends what's time horizon but mine is basically i don't know up forty percent and like two months or something right it's like amazing but and and i think it has like a long way to go still not again not financial advice i'm just like gambling so you're imagine me saying here's what number i'm betting on and ro just take it as that don't take it as like you know my word but i think there's a lot of interesting things about it i'd had heard had heard about it from a few interesting people and then i was like alright what is this thing actually and could explain it if you want but i'll i'll refrain for now that's the that's the thing i've been interested in good and you didn't do good chris that it's a cool company man the problem with all e commerce so our our mutual friend has this great phrase which is commerce businesses are great to own horrible to invest in now i wouldn't say not horrible but it's like it's great for the owner of the business it's not great for the investors and that's only because the upside is somewhat limited so even native which sold for hundred million dollars it's like these almost never set go for multiple billions but they're often valued at the same valuations as like a software company which can become a multi billion dollar company and so like you know you invested i think you know i don't know about that but i looking at other another good deal that was in e commerce that i liked it's like oh we have you know we're doing ten or twenty million dollars in revenue you know twenty percent of that is is is profits or eb you know we're valued at fifty billion or sixty million it's like it was a good company it was definitely gonna work like the business was working and was gonna probably keep working and you know the reality is that it's unlikely that that will ever even sell for six hundred million let alone six billion right so it's like you get these like two x three x four x of revenue like sales or sorry of evaluation sales and that's just not super compelling when you have better options like if you can best in software do it you know and and a couple weeks we're gonna have this guy on i landed up a aj patel from high key cookie and zest pause that guy's is amazing he's one of the most impressive people i've ever read about and he he was an owner of one of those businesses and by the way i should say two other things there's all there's obviously exceptions to every rule so you know i'm like there are there definitely some commerce investments that are gonna do awesome like native did awesome because it's sold for a hundred million but they only raised i think two million bucks or something like that a million dollars so you know he was super capital efficient whereas most of these are not they burn a fuck ton of money on marketing and and inventory second thing the only other bad thing about e commerce was like even when i say oh we did seven million ten million and whatever this year that doesn't mean hey that's revenue not profits and b almost whatever you do have for profits gets reinvest back into the business because you're buying inventory for the next four months so if you're buying ads for the next month and like so you're always cash poor until you finally turned the corner and there is a corner that you turn when you're a good business but early on you don't turned it we have not turned that no because we're re like we are like oh great we need to buy double or triple the inventory for the next season and for the next season and after that so you know it's gonna stressful fuck yeah like you know but it's cool it's like it works but it works if you don't need a bunch of cash pull out and you're okay being cash poor for a while real estate like this often too you you could be cash poor in real estate but be like it'll have a lot of value yeah but it's not gonna go to zero yes real estate is slow way slow but it's more liquid and it's not gonna grow fast but it won't go away so it's a little different whereas your thing in the sense that if the valuation drops then you know you're more you know you you don't make a profit it's not that it goes to zero but your you're you what you owe the bank is the now the value of the company and so your equity can go down right like yes but a a e com business can double or triple in a year real estate likely we'll never do that but that e com business let's say that like something's made illegal or there's an embargo who knows like there's a world where it can go out of business yeah for sure i have a couple more i don't know if you wanna just stay on can just split these into you know we talked about just like releasing these as like segments instead of alright hour long episodes do you have time or no yeah i time alright have you seen this thing that happened called sos sos token no what is it i gotta tell you about this is genius okay so there's a there's a there's an app called open c our website called opens you've heard of open it's basically do it's ebay for n t's so it's a place where you go and buy buy and sell n entities and open c is it's in crypto but it doesn't do some of the things that crypto people like so it's like it's not fully open source you know all the code is not open source like they like the that website the way the website works i think it's you know proprietary it's that you can't just fork that code and just make put your own name on it the second thing is that they don't have a token involved with it and the third is that you know they raised a bunch of money from pry from from traditional venture capitalists and in the crypto world that's like a you sell out type of yeah so h i think put money in it's a multi billion dollar marketplace and i think it's gonna be like it's gonna be huge i think they did like ben you can look this updated like i know eight billion dollars of transaction volume in like one month this year so it's been it's been growing like in this like crazy it is one of the best startups you can invest in right now would be open see now what happened so they their cfo they hire this hotshot cfo cfo goes on some show and some some either podcast or some talk share and he says you know we're looking at potentially going public and he's saying it because that's a good thing for the company and immediately the users are like oh you're using the old route of like getting liquidity that's gonna make you guys rich but all of us users who have built this into the most popular marketplace we're gonna get nothing from that like we don't own stock in your company so you go public we don't get anything when we built this thing and again that's against the that's against the core the ethos of of your everything yeah ben just found at ten billion and ten billion in trading volume in in august alone so that's in same same same numbers so or sorry i think it's yeah i don't know whatever so basically so what happened so this group of people got together i think the guy the guy who is behind it his handle is like nine x nine x nine x or something like that right so this guy come you they created something called the open dial if you go to the open dial dot com and they say they created a token called sos s so opens c is the name of the platform so this is like sos like save our ship he creates this token called sos he creates a hundred trillion tokens and he gives them out and what they did was kinda genius so on like two days ago anybody who was in crypto twitter anybody who buys entities started saying oh there was an air drop which means if i look in my wallet i'm gonna have tokens it's like finding twenty bucks in your wallet and so they did an air drop to all the users of open c based on how much you use open see so how did they get that information it's it's the bot it's thought that's the beauty it's this can only happen in crypto so because i know but i would've have thought that like i guess you could just scrape the website and just get a list of everyone's wallet on no no not not the website all all open is just like a a website that accesses the ethereum blockchain so all the transaction happened on the ethereum blockchain got it the buying and selling of the n the mint of the entities is on the blockchain the buying and selling is out there and the blockchain again again is this open source public the public record basically that you can go access you can go i can go type in your wallet address like your public wallet address and i just go see how much money is in your account right now if i just go into ether scan and so now you might have multiple wallet but like that's one thing you can do so what they did was they went they looked at every every transaction on open see all the wallets and they said okay sean's wallet has spent ten eth he's done five transactions so he should get x percentage of it so they took the hundred trillion they said half it we're just gonna drop all the users of open c so i woke up and i had fifty eight billion of these tokens are there at a point o whatever price my total was whatever like three hundred dollars whatever like five hundred dollars because i don't use open c a ton i didn't do too many transactions but if you're one of these people was like an collector or flipper who is very active on the platform who buys and sells you know you know board apes and things like that people made like three thousand dollars five thousand dollars fifteen thousand dollars so it's like finding five thousand dollars in your wallet and you're like what is this i got this for free money and it's money that they mint and they basically it was almost like it's a marketing step but it's almost like a hostile takeover so they basically went out there what they were saying was here's what opens should have done they should have given all the users some tokens app proportionate to their usage based based on how much you've been using the platform you get some of the open c token and that and then the open c token will be publicly t so you get to benefit and the core team will keep some of the open token like the the company will keep twenty percent of this that's how that's like the normal way in crypto so the the genius part of this is that some third party just did this on their behalf and it's like and now what and they so now there's a liquid market of like hundreds of millions of dollars i think it was like three hundred million dollars the the group okay so here's how they did they said fifty percent goes to the users ten percent goes to the stickers and the liquidity pool thirty percent goes to like the sneakers in the liquidity pool and twenty percent will stay with the treasury of our of our foundation and we are gonna build an open source version of open c we're gonna build a competitor open and all you users who are power users of open you now have a stake in our new open that's to come and that's gonna do things the right way but they've got build i mean building have to build it's fucking hard so i mean how many you work there five hundred people no no no do these things can be built by like you know four motivated developers if you need it to then why the hell does ten thousand people it'll take a lot to maintain it and do customer support and all those things yes though that will take time but just building the actual product that will start to get people to shift off of to do this a team of five to ten contributors can actually do this if they're great developers that are focused now that's tb it's like a kickstarter it's like hey give your money in a kickstarter or are they ever gonna build the thing well it kinda depends are they honest and are they gonna work hard i don't know we'll see but these guys basically they they essentially raised the it's like they hijacked open seat and they raised their share was twenty trillion out of the hundred twenty percent they have a hundred thirty million dollars now in their treasury that they can pay their development team to build the open source competitor to this who's who's the guy behind it the people behind it this nine x nine x nine x and then someone else who's x dot x y z that's a that's his handle i i think that's who's behind it and so they i think it's i look i don't know if this gonna work but i think it's something that's only possible in the crypto world because again this is one isn't is one of the reasons why it people are like you know decent is cool it's cool because the users can always pick up their ball and leave they can go to another court and so open c does not own their their wallets it does not own their n t's they have no lock in to keep the users there except for behaving well and treating them well and if somebody else says i'm gonna treat you better over here it is very easy for me to take my wallet take my t's and go over here and even better that other group can incentivize me to come over here and try it out by saying hey here's some free tokens that we it out of thin air so i think this is move it's like a hostile takeover it reminds me of i had a buddy who is gonna do this to a company called ripple have you ever heard of ripple yeah but they they're shady right okay so ripple was this thing kinda like started pretty early on and they had this like you know honestly not a bad idea they were like look you know the way the international banking system works today is off this thing called the swift standard ripple was like we are gonna be a bank to bank communication layer that uses blockchain right so they're like we're gonna use blockchain technology with a real use case which is banks sending money back forth to each other so that was their idea they got a bunch of funding from founders fund and others and they released this thing called xr that's the name of their token alright so whatever nobody cares about that how it works nobody cares but the interesting part is xr has like was worth a lot the founders of ripple became billionaires overnight before like best the thing with crypto you can get rich before like this open out has a hundred thirty million dollars before they have a product in ripple those guys became billionaires before banks ever used their product which is like a really fucked up incentive and which is why sometimes shit doesn't actually get built in crypto hey already got the millions i just run away i could just do a half ass job doesn't really matter at this point i went public on day one so ripple has a market cap right now of ninety four is right ninety four billion dollars i think i'm reading this right ninety four billion dollars something like no no sorry forty four billion dollars forty four billion dollars right that's like i that's like the market cap of like you know bank of america some shit like that so obviously ripple not actually valued at that the ripple had believers and they had early momentum they were very early in the crypto games they had a lot of p r and the ceo would go on cnbc and talk about how this is gonna change the game so what happened in the crypto community people were kinda like poo poo rip build they're like this is like centralized they they took way too much share for themselves they didn't give enough to users that's why these guys are billionaires their product kinda sucks and they're kinda shady whatever in him that's so the reputation was ripple anybody who was in the known and encrypted crypto pretty much the general consensus was ripples full of shit and so my buddy had this idea he was he was like i'm gonna do the first hostile takeover of a crypto network i was what do you mean he goes look i can see every single person's wallet who owns ripple i was like okay that's kinda interesting here you go go but you don't know their name and like i don't need their name i was like you have their email he goes i don't need their email address i could just put something in their wallet and they'll wake up and they'll open their wall and they'll see that they have something in it i was like okay you go so i'm gonna go out there i'm gonna say xr is stupid for these five reasons number one the founders took these people anything you can inc include a message in the transaction of getting memo the thing getting in the memo of the of the thing but like the way you do it is you first dropped the token you tell people hey if you held ripple you got this token today and then you write your manifest on your twitter or your website about what this is all about so you it's kinda like somebody put a fifty dollar check in your wallet you're like what's this all about says go to this website to explain why you just got this fifty dollars so that's how this that's how this marketing mechanism works so he was like i'm gonna put some money in there i'm gonna put my currency and all the ripple holders wallet and then i'm gonna tell them ripple is stupid for these five reasons the founders took too much this other problem this other prop the you know they're the right the token is inflationary blah blah so i'm gonna change all that we only take ten percent we are not inflationary we do not do this sketchy shit all blah so my five point plan of how to make ripple better and it we're we're calling it our own thing and here's the deal if you own ripple if you send your ripple to my wallet i will send you back five times your value of this if you're in the first for the first thousand people that do this then for the next ten thousand people that do this you're gonna get four times your your ripple back and for the next ten thousand people you're gonna get three times ripple back because basically there's this urgency of like okay if these if this is gonna become the next ripple if i send my money and now i'm gonna get five i'm gonna get a five x multiplier of my money and what he was gonna do is just he goes when you send it to this wallet we're gonna just dump it we're just gonna sell it and we're gonna put so much cell pressure we're gonna crash the price of ripple so if you do it and then do they do this or so let me finish this so he he goes if you do this early you're gonna get five times your amount and you're not gonna sit there holding the bag while we dump this thing it's like a prisoner of dilemma game through it was so genius he's like he's like here's the math if you're if you're holding this you have to assess are other people gonna take them up on this offer if they do then the ripple i'm holding is gonna go down like crazy i'm gonna go down like five to ten x if i jump if i jump ship i get a five x multiplier around my money and i don't sit there holding the sinking shit and the game theory of this i think was gonna work so he has his plan he starts he starts and so he's like okay well he needs to be credible so he went to some very very wealthy people he got about fifty million dollars lined up to do this hostile takeover and he was like he needed it to be like two hundred million and so he's like i need to create this huge war chest so i can tell you but look we have this much money so you this it's backed by something come on board and he's like dude i i he's like basically i'm going to these investor i'm saying if you give me two hundred million dollars i'm gonna take down this project i'm gonna absorb all the value of this project that's currently worth forty billion right so he's like it's a huge return for those investors and they and they also don't even believe in ripple so was this say mistakes fucking james bond shit and what the problem was one of the investors that he had went to for this leaked the plan to a journalist this guy dan p or whatever he's like pretty famous journalist yeah from ax ax ax axel writes the story ahead of time he says hey there's somebody planning a hostile takeover xr and here's how it's gonna work and xr p avi the ripple team obviously sees this and they're like okay just in case they so they sold some amount of their ripple to create a like few hundred million dollar buffer so that if somebody tried to do this and tried to tank the price they had enough liquidity to buy back the buy back the tokens and keep the price high so it kind of foil his plan where they it the only the only way it would've have worked is if he had caught them by surprise and he could have done it in like a two day period he could have tanked the price of ripple and created this competitor and had all the momentum on his side but because they had heads up they they could create enough liquidity and they could be able to like support their price before somebody could do this to them but how crazy is that dude this is like some barbarian at the gate shit like this is like nineteen eighties like dr like hustle takeover where they like we're we're like what what's it called the green mailing you know have you ever read like these like nineteen eighties finance i have i have i have the book barbara i haven't read it yet yeah that's basically what they did like it was like it was like war there i was like this is george so shit you know the george so broke the bank of england he i was like this is how he was that's was actually what he was telling him he goes this is some george so shit i was like what do you mean he goes george so broke the bank of england by doing something very similar to this and as he was explaining i was like there's no way this works he's like well you know it's risky but like if it works who who did it in also he he didn't he didn't end up doing it but i mean who who's the it's an artist it's is it public i don't know if it's public but i'll love you our friend who remember we went to dinner after our live show in miami it's our friend who with okay yeah that's crazy i thought if if dan would wrote about it he would have named him yeah i i think he didn't know the name or he i don't think he included the name of the thing but how fucking nuts is that that's crazy if you could if that person could pulled it off that's wild this is barbarian preparing at the gate shit hustle takeover stuff yeah i love it alright i have a couple more topics if we wanna do them or or if we wanna go we can go alright i got i can do more minutes alright let's do one more okay i got two random ideas for you okay here's the here's the first idea alright this idea is my gift to the chief marketing officer of gucci you know you're welcome courtesy of shop okay i see this headline alright so i was thinking of the day i well i was sitting there and sitting at the at a restaurant and as i do i'm just watching i'm just people watch i'm just watching these crazy creatures called humans what fuck what the fuck are they doing and saw all these people that had fancy bags gucci bags louis vuitton bags and it's very different from my world i don't i don't give a shit about that but they obviously do and i was i was watching this and then i came home i'm watching the show selling sunset funny show on netflix about real real estate team but i watch it too you know i watch all that shit yeah so so you know i i dabble and if you notice every day they come to work they're wearing like the craziest fat like what nobody wears to work they're wearing like five thousand dollars five thousand dress with like a five thousand dollar bag and they put the bag right on the middle of the desk like there's no lab top the no computer it's like a desk with a chair and their purse on top and then they just caught up with each other right that's where the shell is at this point so i'll think about this like luxury the luxury just caught my eye i said what else what else could you do and and i don't know how this came to mind but here's a crazy idea that's a it's really a marketing stunt it's not a business idea it's a marketing stunt for gucci so here's what you're gonna do every year there are over a million joint replacements in america so people getting hip replacements knee replacements people getting you know they've they they fracture their foot they get a steel rod put in there are over a million people a year they get this done i got it done you gotta done what you get done i've got screwed i broke my leg i've got screws in a little i got metal in my feet now you're not the right person to ask but is there a version of sam that might have paid an extra five hundred bucks to have that be a gucci nail the answer is yeah of course the answer is yeah the answer is yeah so we're talking about i thought you were gonna go with like gucci legs yeah but you're talking about like just branded on the side actually calling the inside and you only see it on the x ray like only see it you you have the picture before it goes into your body right so you get the instagram porn of oh okay hey guys i'm doing well post surgery here's my picks and as you're swipe it's an awesome it's a fucking louis v hip that's coming into your body it's like awesome it's a l knee dude you can always that in air they they do something so that exactly in x ray you'll always see an emblem on the thing now i don't know how doctors will figure out the science of how this works with without fucking that's good how good work that in that is amazing this just a extra little revenue line tons of news because everyone's gonna say this is what's wrong with the world you're gonna take over and guess what there's gonna be a bunch of people out there who are going and getting surgeries done that are gonna say yeah okay it's the average knee replacement it's like twenty five thirty thousand dollars like all win i think you know maybe it can be as low as as twelve to fifteen thousand you telling him in the actual part itself that goes in i think it's a five thousand dollar part that the hospital orders you're telling me i wouldn't get the seventy five hundred dollar supreme fucking you know need nike logo nike the just do it hip come on yeah come on yeah that's just licensing revenue for them it's working it's it's influencer candy dude it if people get grill if rappers go get diamond grill if they're if you know somebody out there like me some somebody guy like me out there was like y diamond braces what yeah diamond braces actually fuck not even for braces just diamond teeth diamond teeth worked if diamond teeth were the louie hip can work dude this is a good idea this is pretty funny this is brilliant this is actually a good that one was for you for tiktok that's for you tiktok out there that was my tiktok segment that's actually this is actually a fun idea alright wait who who and did you research this is that even possible i i have no idea if it's possible i i've got like i don't think you get i don't think you could see stuff like that i've got x rays of my screws and like you can like look at them but i don't think i don't know how that would but it might have to be a strip it might have to be a dots polka dots it might have to be something that will show up there it might be an emblem that's just on it a tiny emblem but you know like the red bottom shoes for what's it called you know like yeah the balance i don't know what i yeah we're fucking nerds the the black or the red bottom shoes i've they wrap a bottom them yeah yeah exactly whatever people will find a way to see the shit and you just if that's the only problem with this idea we got a good problem to have so and also by the way tattoos i think you could also do this with tattoo parlor i think you could drop branded official licensed designs of tattoos for brands and be like yeah if you get this one it's actually that's like actually the brand because like you people get tattoos of brands like yeah he'll louie leave a ton i think jake paul has a nike sw where his like sock would be on his on his calf not looking that that's hilarious that actually and i was like that's funny he got a brand tattooed on him and i think i was also like you know why wouldn't brands actually drop tattoo designs just like they drop bag and chew designs like i feel like that should happen that's interesting that's another interesting idea alright two for two alright i have one more for you okay this one's less fun but i think it's still good do you remember glamour shots love them did you your mom have glamour shots to you know anybody go but i didn't do it but like my sister did it's hilarious it's like napoleon dynamite shit when you go to the mall and you wear stupid makeup in a bad haircut and you take these awesome pictures of course do you know the business behind glamour shots no okay so is that the is that the name of a brand glamour glamour shots was the name of the company i think okay so here's the here's the quick backstory story i did like you know two seconds of research on this so could be wrong started by a fat party photographer who was like you know taken picks that of at france and i was like alright what else i got so initially starts to calls it party picks then when they were like kinda looking at trends they were like oh people are liking this like high glamour style like big hair loud loud clothes certain backdrop and so they were like alright look he's so he rename it to glamour shots and it's physical locations and within first year it already starts working by year three seven million in revenue and copycat cats popping up everywhere hollywood head shots freeze frame you name it there's different portrait shops popping it up at one point it just he expands through the franchising model expands to three hundred and eighty stores taiwan japan everybody wants a piece of glamour shots and the trick the thing that like really made it work was most great name most professional photographers you would go well there's a couple of things made anywhere one was the style was iconic the second was so it wasn't just come i'll take a picture of you was come i'll make you look like a hollywood star with the hair the makeup the clothes and it was only like you know top half up so you would be wearing your jeans underneath and then at your top would be like this denim studded jacket or whatever with the collar popped or whatever so backdrop with the colors you everybody knows the look fan blowing your hair that whole thing so that was one one innovation the other was instant gratification so you would take the photo and for most photographers they're like great i'll i'll i'll go you know get these exposed then i'll i'll add you whenever touch them i'll pick the best ones and i'll get i'll get you you know some some options in a few few days few weeks glamour shots they used a special like kinda of camera technique or whatever so it was actually taking a video i and it will grab an image and you could see it right there on the screen in real time and you could pick and be like oh want that one that one's so good they got you in the heat of the moment when you were in peak state when you were already caught up in the frenzy and people were dropping three hundred four hundred five hundred dollars inflation adjusted on their glamour shots average customer spend so it was like highly lucrative is that's basically like you know for like a thirty minute shoot you're making you know huge profits and they had these like six categories of styles that you got to pick from the names are hilarious one is can't wait to be touched another spontaneous tailored elegant bold and that's where these like classic looks come from so there was some genius behind the person who really understood what the customer wants behind it whatever happened to the company so it gets to a hundred million in sales by nineteen ninety four by two thousand one it's now dropped back down to ninety three stores now there's like forty stores left it's basically where they're way in dying it didn't didn't last and keep up with the times here's the idea rebooting glamour shots and we're rebooting glamour shots everything nostalgic from the nineties is crushing oh you're rebooting spider batman x man you're rebooting home alone home loans getting rebooted we're rebooting glamour shots that's what i'm telling with you i'm on board so there's i'm looking at it now there's only five so there's only five of these locations left yeah there's if we're down to the last this you know remember the alamo where we're down in the last nap so the question is how would you actually reboot glam shots so i of the brainstorm with you for two minutes how would you reboot glam i a couple ideas i don't know if you have one off top your head otherwise i'll go you gotta do it in person i think i think that's part of it do what do you need to do that's different i mean the you just do an ad with really cool celebrities or some celebrities and you'd like here's what they would looked look like like you know a modern a modern person where they would've looked look like with a glam shut what would you do so i'm i'm a reboot it i'm not okay so nostalgia one one one one angle you grew you could just say this look would come back but i think that's the shorts side i think what you gotta do is you work backwards so my mom had glamour shots on the wall the end product was a framed picture on the wall of her looking like an eighty soap opera nineties soap opera person basically with a hair blown out and crazy lighting and crazy dress well what is the what's the end product people want today instagram baby they want epic instagram content so we've talked about museum of ice cream we've talked about some of these i think those are seriously glamour shots reboots i think you gotta go all in on the glamour shots reboots so you're gonna you're gonna make somebody look fucking amazing for social media i know how people out there throwing up in their mouth they're like oh this there's everything that's wrong with well guess what care set people people care what they look like how they come across on social media if you if you hate that fact cool delete instagram but if you still got instagram you're still in on this idea okay so how are we gonna do it i one idea was could you get airbnb b's convert them into like basically like dope lifestyle looking airbnb bs and just rent them out for shoots instead of you know renting it out for seven hundred dollars a night you're renting it out for a hundred dollars an hour and you're doing over two hundred dollars an hour and you're doing shoots for people where they get to look like they're live in a dope lifestyle they look look like they're living but that's that's different than a glam shop glam shot is like supposed to be funny it's not supposed to be funny dude that it looks funny now when we look back like look back at your dad with an a or whatever like actually you had an a in at high school so it look right back at your own high school that's supposed to be funny at the time i don't know if you were trying to be funny but for glad shots but they are they trying the grammar but that's different with these instagram things you're talking about be like lying you're trying looking cool yeah so so that's one one angle to it i think you're lying you don't live in that fancy house yeah but you're not saying i live here you're just posting a picture like people do that we're gonna have like a like a people rent fancy cars and they take pictures with it and then they've returned the anyone who does that personally thank god no that have i seen people do that on instagram yes i've seen people would do that on instagram tons of people do that on it's like what you would need is people dresses like a day you know dude you would just need like a like one airline seat and like what looks like an you've seen that drive the the half private jet it's like a movie set it's like a where they film porn o's exactly so so there's that think okay let but that's a little capital intensive to get piece maybe you do it with a green screen so i think one one way you could do this is is you could just have someone could take pictures with a green screen and and you just do it where once they take the pictures once and on your locations with a green screen very cheap to do then you cgi them into like a whole bunch of different looks that becomes their collection of of like they could be power suit they could be they could be boss mode they could be party mode they could be whatever but you just have green screen props and scenarios and you show them exactly how to pose to look good most people don't even know how to oppose myself included when you meet somebody who knows how to oppose you're like oh like that's fucking half of it the other half is like lighting and fucking props but like an editing right like but do you remember when the guy came to take photos of us at the miami he was like alright stand here half sq your eye you're like why yeah i was like this i was like looks like i down center what do you mean was like no trust me kinda sq your eye he's like then you know like pro your neck forward i was like no this looks like a turtle he's like no look watch i got rid of your double chin you know you look like sharper and like more powerful okay look at this angle this this gives you confidence look from this angle specifically whereas me i'm like the fucking nut cracker if fight take a photo it's like stand straight looks straight handsome my side smile cheese like that's how i take all my photos right but there is an art posing and mo would how to do so i think there's a there's a version of glamour shots so somebody could reboot that just gives you an end product that you want for social media i don't know exactly say i would just say bring back the classics i think that you could just you could just do it as is you what what happened to the company so did did you do this with like dating profiles and stuff whatever i don't know have this but i think it's kinda like just gotten down the drain i don't know i i don't know the ending of that story i wonder what happened to the founders does he have like some his name's bop does he have like some huge like la like like lamb shot money one thousand percent he's gonna have a huge man like yeah take two seconds to to just google that i bet you i bet you this guy's gotta have a thing in la and if he doesn't we're just gonna edit this part out i can't see but is it actually bob oh he lives in texas in dripping springs texas which is near austin and it's where like it it's like where moms who get glam shots to live everything's between like a the suburb by the way that's the glam shot is still thriving in texas i think that's the only place where it's still like a thriving business i think read that dude this guy's is awesome as they that's all i got those are my topics this is awesome we gotta get bob on here alright that's a pod