these are the five most interesting businessman man alive these are gonna be eccentric billionaires people who not only have a crazy business life but also have a crazy personal life and have just done a variety of wild shit these are people that they should be making movies about so we got a list i feel like i could rule where to i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on roll can i start off with number five we're gonna go five to one one being who we crown as the the most interesting man alive the criteria for this by the way is they gotta be interesting so not just rich not just successful but fascinating interesting that can be good and bad they have to be men we have a a separate list coming for women and they have to be alive so nobody who is you know some dead historical figure fair enough yeah you're gonna kick it off yeah okay it off okay so number five is a guy who won the game twice and on his way out the second time is just flipping the bird to everybody and this is a guy named pavel du i called this guy james bond with wifi f if you stand this guy's instagram you'll know why i said it he looks like james travels around the world he's international man of mystery but he he built his his claim to fame as you know using his laptop use a wifi f so this guy's basically the russian mark zuckerberg he it's even more impressive than z so when he was young he built the facebook of russia and it was called v k and what's cool about this is is two things number one he actually beat facebook so there were many countries in the world where somebody built the facebook of brazil the facebook of africa the facebook of europe we there has been tons of these and in every single one of them the endgame was no no facebook is the facebook of brazil facebook is the facebook of india and facebook dominated the one place they couldn't dominate was russia and in an interview z was talking to sam alt and he even said he's like god the only ones we could never beat were the russians he was like it was insane he's like we would make a change and literally like twelve minutes later they would have that update on their on their side like if we moved to pixel bay moved that pixel and he's like these guys were just the most prolific copier we've ever seen and we just could not figure out how are we ever gonna overtake them if they're the world's smartest mathematicians and programmers who have dedicated or dedicated twenty four seven to beating us or cl us and doing exactly what we do if if they can't get come up with a better idea and he and so he gave them you know a hat tip so he creates v k it becomes the facebook of russia he won but he had to sell it because one day the russian government approaches him and says pavel we need some information he's like cool what do you need to know like we need some information about all your users and what they're saying he's like what why and then they're like well they've been you know there's been some users we're saying some anti government things as you know that's not how we do shit around here so give us some names and we'll make sure that they get quiet and he's while at it drop your pants and bend over in cough so he doesn't wanna do it and so what pavel does and by the way this is not like you know this is not just a business move this is not a lawyer sending you a cease desist when the russian government comes knocking there's a pretty serious there's serious consequences for what you decide to do after that you comply great if you don't comply there's not only consequences for those people they were after now there's consequences for you and so what he does is he not only does it comply he flips the bird so he goes and he posts on v k the government request the memo that they the secret like kind of letter that they sent him telling him what they needed they said they're asking for your data i'll never do it and here's my official they asked you know here's my official response and he posted a picture of a dog wearing a hoodie and that's this famous picture of a dog in a hoodie that he posts he's like here's what i have to say about this and he just supposed a dog or the hoodie and so immediately he's now in trouble you know the they they raid his apartment he ends up losing this company has to flee the country never allowed back in russia you know costs some basically everything his entire life gets completely uproot and his it's not like he was just like you know a guy he had something to lose here and so at the end of all this he says and i would do it all again without hesitation and i love that i love this guy and if what he does he now gets kicked out of russia he loses his company he does get three hundred million dollars because he sells it on the way out to some other guy who is gonna comply so i don't know fully if i if i you know what happened to your principles i'm not sure i'm sure what happened after that but whatever he gets three hundred million dollars and he he's he hasn't fully left russia yet but he's like kind of like figuring out his way out but he's like dude i can't even message my brother who to tell him like what you know what we're gonna do because they'll just see these messages like the they wanna see my our message they're gonna see all these messages so his brother who is a double phd and math it's like you know what let's make a encrypted protocol encrypted messaging protocol so that we can communicate like this is a bullshit that they can just read all our goddamn messages and this becomes the the precursor two telegram which is now one of the biggest messaging apps in the world so this guy not only invented facebook he then got kicked it's like if the wink bosses have beat up mark in the locker room took facebook from him kicked him off harvard campus and then he goes and creates whatsapp because that's basically what he did how how big is is telegram i i know it's huge but i don't use it do you use it i use it i love it probably my favorite messaging app of all messaging apps it's an incredible product it's got a billion users dude what's so good about it other than the encryption thing which is huge i mean the decryption thing is huge it's just like really well made like the app is really fast works really well it's got a ton of features like you know you can do a broadcast channel where it's like twitter and you're broadcasting to a bunch of followers you could just message each other you do huge groups you can have admins you could send like stickers and memes and like you could send a ton of different types of messages it's a it's a really well made app and has a billion people using it yeah about a billion users now last i think i had heard was like eight hundred million but like i think recently he said something like we have about a billion users never run the ads he's refused to sell any equity in the company he took about a billion dollars of debt but he never sells any equities was just him and his brother own the whole thing he's got thirty full time employees so he's got thirty employees running a service that a billion people use all around the world and every government attacks them and tries to like break their encryption or ban them because no government wants this nobody government wants the citizens to be able to speak freely he is the sole director equity holder and he's the sole product manager he works directly with every engineer and designer himself he has no hr he only recruits people through something called contest dot com which is a contest platform where he puts up engineering challenges and the people who are the best at cracking his engineering challenges get hired if they get an offer to come work with telegram is it a russian company no he's like it's crazy ever calls us a russian company we have no office in russia we have no employees in russia we have no servers in russia but the media just will be like oh russian founder available blah he's like dude i he basically for a while he just moved around the world every three months living in different airbnb bs and then finally he now settled in dubai this guy's worth about fifteen billion dollars so he's the richest expat in dubai he's one of the you know top hundred fifty richest men in the world and then you go look at his instagram you're gonna love this dude the guy's ripped he's absolutely ripped and every photo there's never another human being in any photo with him every photo is him alone with his shirt off doing something manly as hell it's hilarious and look all the fun look ai generated it's like if i said hey generate a rich billionaire living in dubai who is on the brian johnson protocol and wants to book become instagram famous this is what dolly would give me he's literally on a pirate ship on some of these photos yeah i have a we're gonna show him on youtube if you're listening to this you should go to youtube for this episode we're gonna show a bunch of things people's houses and crazy shit another quote i love from him so yeah he says they're like you know you're a billionaire billionaire billionaire he's like dude this billionaire of things like a little over play he's like he's like yes it's true i've had a few hundred million dollars of both dollars and bitcoin in a bank account for ten years and i've never touched it he goes yeah that's true he's like but i don't own any jets or yachts or mega mansions like i don't do any of that shit i would rather make decisions that i would influence how a billion people are gonna communicate rather than sitting there choosing the color of the seats in my house that only me and my relatives are ever gonna see that's amazing i read an i read another interview with him where he goes i went to san francisco to see if i wanted to open an office there and i met with jack do and it was great and i went to the twitter office which the twitter office is in the epicenter of kinda of bad stuff or crime is happening in san francisco he still have done the block from it and he said after the meeting i was walking around and three guys tried to mug me and the interviewer was like well how to go he goes blood was spilled but he doesn't that that he doesn't say like who's blood he just said that there was blood well he he he was like yeah three three you guys i say my phone i fought off the robert and then he posted on twitter he's like i i he's was like my goal was i was trying to tweet out i just hung out with jack do because jack do made twitter like that's what i was trying to do on my phone when they did this so he post a pic a picture of his bloody knuckles reaching for a book which is just a hilarious thing he goes and this is the tweet he goes just got to a fight with guys who tried to grab my phone near mission nine eighty scary neighborhood question mark not for a russian yeah this guy's pretty badass ass i like the idea that san francisco is like the nice quaint neighborhood in russia it's the nice clean it's family family area of russia yeah i read that and it was so funny yeah he he's clearly manic his social presence but i think i believe it yeah the guy's amazing and he just flexes on everybody his instagram is just a pure flex yeah i mean he's awesome this guy's a good one how does telegram make money or do they they basically don't make money they've made i i read somewhere i don't know if this is a hundred percent sure i trying to find it but like two things one they take donations and so i read something that they've had over a billion dollars in donations from users and that's been part of what keeps it going and like you know it's thirty people and then it's the the the server cost so it's like you know they're there's burned but it's not like he's running a three thousand person or thirty thousand person company in addition to that he raised a billion dollar a debt bond which is basically like a pre ipo coupon so he was basically like we're gonna make money someday and we need money now to get there he had offers to sell ten percent at a thirty billion dollar valuation got turned it down so he turned down three billion then they came back and said we'll buy ten percent out of forty billion dollar valuations so four billion dollars he turned it down and he said i don't wanna sell any equity i'm scared of what an investor will do for this he did a crypto token back when crypto was really hot and he raised over a billion dollars for their crypto coin but then the sec came after him and was like this was basically like you were selling equity like you called it a token and as a utility but like this is equity so he had to return a bunch of money and that that that token project never got off the ground because he had raised and i think the minimum at the time because i was looking into investing in it is you had to buy in chunks of minimum twenty million my god so basically people were forming syndicate it was like oh you wanna come in for five hundred k alright at cool we're trying to get to twenty million so we could buy some some of the telegram token because you had an app that actually had a ton of usage the most brilliant you know like engineering team probably that exists on earth or you know one of the top twenty engineering teams on earth and and now they were gonna do a token to try to make money and you know figure out like basically you'd be able to to use the token to to do things inside the app so anyways that's kind of some of the things they've tried but you know i he has you know quote unquote some plan of how they're gonna make money that doesn't involve you selling user data this guy's is really cool alright that's a good one yeah who's number four who do you got alright so my goal with this was to pick people who you have no idea who they are and hopefully most of our audience has no idea who they are either and so we did not talk before this so it's just a coincidence that my guy is also russia i call the russian richard branson his name is ole tin off so you'll have to google to see what he looks like but ole egg o o l e g and then tin off t i and ko v so he grew up as a in a mining family so very like humble beginnings but he goes to the city because he wants to experience freedom and he gets into cycling for some reason he's in into cycling and he goes abroad for a bike race and he sees someone wearing blue jeans and this is in the eighties in the soviet union the soviet union's about to crumble and become russia and he starts bringing home these blue jeans and selling them and he's like alright it looks like people in russia really want this like western fashion and so he opens up a chain of stores where he starts selling blue jeans but then everything else perfume vc electronics this is right in eighty nine ninety where the the soviet union's crashing and these people actually wanna be able to buy stuff from from western countries and he kills it and so in his early twenties he sells that business and he makes something like seven million dollars and then he does something that you'd expect him to do he starts a ravioli business is this guy just watching commercials in the states he's like levi levi's got it okay next one ravioli cool we'll we'll do that too well what he does is he goes to america every once in a while and he like he like he says he goes every five years learn what's popular in america like different advertising whatever and he like basically brings that to russia have you ever heard of the phrase bop it's a it's a word baba baba baba i can't even say it right it's it means russia it's like a russian grandmother it's like when you think of like fiddle on the roof it's like a abu yeah ba it's like a russian grandmother with like a scarf over head so typically ravioli they have a different one word firm him in russia but the ravioli were made by that type of person and it was like a comfort suit and so he gets the idea where he's like we're gonna do something sexy we're gonna make this like really stand out and so he buys this huge ad and it's just a woman's bare ass and it says something like ravioli not made by your grandmother it's like a woman's bare ass with flower on it as of i guess this woman's ass is pounding out the flower i don't know we just kinda weird but when you think about it don't want ravioli like that but i don't understand but i'm hungry yeah but it takes off it works this business works he eventually sells it for twenty one million dollars so his next thing is that he's in california and he actually meets with dan gordon from gordon bi that's interesting to you and i because gordon bi was a micro brewery outside of san francisco one of the c cofounder are at the time ceos was actually lorenzo for ti from u and he starts seeing this trend in the nineties where these micro breweries are quite popular and so he opens up a micro brewery in russia and he calls it tin off breweries and it it's kinda like sam adams beer we're at the time beer in russia was like not that good tasting and he goes we're gonna actually gonna charge four or five times the price of normal beer and we're gonna make this thing very american eyes and he says like he's got this famous phrase race he says beer and freedom go great together and he's all into like freedom and like not in line with what russia wants him to do and so he starts this brewery it takes off so they started in nineteen ninety seven but by two thousand three it's doing thirty five million in sales two years later two thousand five it's doing two hundred million dollars in sales and that year he sells it for two hundred million dollars which is a huge sum he owns most of the company so he's just sold sells his company he's immediately in nectar neck island with richard branson and ola is talking to richard he goes was richard i was in america recently i moved there for just like a few months and i was able to get a credit card it was so amazing how easy i got a credit card wendy d at russia and richard's like you should start it and so that's exactly what he does like six months after selling his beer company he starts this credit card company it's called tin off bank i guess is how it translate but our bank of tank off and he for some reason names everything after himself because he's great at marketing and his name is popular and so he starts this bank with seventy million dollars of his own money and he actually buys a bank and the reason why this guy is thing is because or this bank is interesting is we know what mercury is we know what a bunch of these neo banks are he beat all of them he started this in two thousand and five and it gets huge to the point where goldman invest into it he invest seventy million dollars of his own money a bunch of people invested in it and becomes massive and so the business takes off it's up until recently two thousand twenty one it was the second largest issuer of credit cards in russia it was the largest digital bank in the world and the idea being like we don't need branches we don't need any of that just all gonna be online and we'll send you your card and so it goes public and his stake in it is worth ten billion dollars and here's where the story gets kind of crazy just like pavel russia does not like ole he talks a ton of shit basically at one point when they invade the ukraine he's very anti the war he says he just says putin you're full of shit all these oli in russia you're all full of shit he tweets us out he goes the generals they wake up with a hangover and realize they have a shitty army how can army be any good when our when the rest of our country is also shit like he says these things on he tweets us out he says all this crazy stuff and eventually they deli list tank off bank so it's no longer public and he loses most all of his money and so at this point he's worth i think he's he was able to like force sell some of his shares and he walked away with like two hundred million dollars and he's now he has lac leukemia and he's dying he's gonna die soon and he basically is still talking mad shit he says like they wanted to punish me for this and to that i say fuck off i wanna die with good karma and for people to remember me for being strong and fair and so he's paid the price for being outspoken and he's still being outspoken and he's been completely screwed but he's doing a good job of kinda still sticking it to the man the other thing that he's done is he's always done he's done really well at challenging the status quo the reason i have found this guy is he owned a very successful cycling team cycling is not a very popular sport i'm one of the few guys that watches it but he did a great job of like getting into the cycling game and he like criticized a two of france for tons of stuff they eventually changed tons of rules and finally he's a shit head in the best possible way so there's this famous story where for his micro breweries he wanted to name the street that the brewery was on tin off he wanted it to to have the same name of his restaurant and so what he did was he got a basically a version of an encyclopedia and he made a fake encyclopedia that said years ago in the seventeen hundreds there was a brewery on the street named tin off and so we need to do a justice by naming the street out it after it because this is a historical thing and so they named the street after it years later he admits he made the he made one page in an encyclopedia it just put it in there and they totally went for it and so he's done tons of things like this and he's gonna die soon they he says that he's he's he basically has said he's gonna die soon and he's donated what's left of his big fortune it's now a small fortune to leukemia and so he's young and if you look him up he he's famous for dying his hair he kinda he looks like richard branson actually and so he's very richard branson s he dies his hair purple because that's the color for his cycling team he's pretty eccentric very unique guy he also wrote a book but the book's hard to read because it's it was translated but he's a columnist and he and he writes slots so you can read a lot of his work speaking of which this is my cue for you you know books are cool but books are a little little heavy for me if any of these people wanted to to put their thoughts out there they would have great newsletters and if they wanted a great newsletter they would use a great newsletter platform like b hive and that is our thrill of the show this week the most interesting men in the world if they were ever gonna write a newsletter they would write it on behalf back to the show anyway so what do you think of ole like he's an interesting guy you've never heard of i think fascinating never heard of them well done you you got me with that one i like that yeah this is this is super cool i i also like just the idea the the move of i'm just gonna export western culture i feel like this is a common blueprint for coming up with you know really really big businesses which as you go to japan you observe japanese culture you find the most interesting bits of it and then you export that culture to a different country that doesn't quite yet have it but you but you know most humans are pretty similar and and you can sort of create the demand especially when some cultures just tend to be neck net exporters like i think the us is a net exporter in you know movies and entertainment and you know has certain strong values like freedom and whatever else so you can like use those in bringing that to a place that's sort of you know deficient in those areas and so i think that's a that's just a cool model is exporting culture from one one place to another and that's what he did he went and studied business for some classes at berkeley and he would just see what's going on in san francisco in the bay area what's interesting what's neat and he was inspired by that and he said every five years i go to america to learn these things and i wanna bring them back but right huge quotes and that we both chose russian russian guys russian ex expat sorta of i guess that kinda tells our stance and sticking it to the man sticking at the putin alright my next i think i'm gonna do a back to back here because i have one one to do so number three for me i call him the walking middle finger number three is sean parker and sean parker is a fascinating guy so a lot of people know him because in the social network movie justin timberlake is supposed to be sean parker and he's this like super charismatic kinda know it all guy that you know tells them to hey drop drop the the in the facebook just make it just facebook it's cleaner right do you think that's real yeah so that is real but a lot of that role is not how sean parker actually is like he he's like i'm all he they were like what do you think the movie got right he's like well they got some of some of this stuff right but the most of the characters is he's like i'm not like justin timberlake like he's like i'm not cool and smooth he's like i'm weird and insecure i'm like i'm a lot more eccentric like they made him seem like cool and normal i'm not cool and normal he's like i might be cool but i'm i've done it normal and i wanna just tell you a little bit about this guy so one of the commonalities i had when i was searching for for people like this and you'll see that next guy i have has the same story is that when he was in his teens hacked was a hacker hacked into something and got arrested i don't know if you know this but basically when he was a kid he was sixteen years old and he basically got tracked down by the fbi because he hacked into like a fortune or five hundred companies network and they were like hey he got offered he eventually got offered a job with like i cia he turned it down he was like no i'm like you know i'm on the rebel side you guys are the are the authority i'm i'm rebel and so he creates of course naps and naps is just like one of the coolest slash like biggest middle finger companies that i i think has ever existed you know obviously if people today pop there's probably some generation people today who don't even know what naps is but naps was like the first place before spotify per first place where you could just go and you could just like get access to all of the world's music and then movies and other things too but like really music was the main thing and it was illegal you could upload the songs you had other people could download those songs and it was music file sharing and it got mega mega popular and then it got sued out of existence and to like let the young people know this was game changing i think you and i must have been in grade school like twelve and eleven and fourteen when this came out this was such a big deal i got to the point where artist would even release fake music that were all remember that when they were scrambled after ten seconds i get scrambled because they went the fake song to go viral yep yep exactly or like a comedian i remember for who was it was like dan cook yeah dan cook basically it'd be like chris rock comedy special featuring dane cook and like people just rip chris rock comedy special in the first three minutes for chris rock doing comedy was like now dane cook and dane cook up mega mega it popular by you basically it's a growth hack of a genius growth hack which is to say oh how do i basically like hijack the seo the search intent of chris rock in order to distribute my own you know comedy virus to to everybody else so naps super cool gets to out of existence but the thing i like about sean parker is that there's just phrase that kevin van trump said once and but we're gonna have him on the pod he's he's the guy who what's a newsletter called the farm and newsletter i forgot it's called but he basically writes the biggest newsletter for farmers in the in the country and he has farm and a bunch of different things but he said something to us once he goes you know the the trainer always comes back a second time or we're like what do you mean he's like for all of the best possible deals investments trends opportunities you overlook at the first time very common and you think you totally missed it i missed the boat he's buddy i he's like i just see it over and over again the train comes back around you know maybe you you know you you didn't invest in facebook but then the stock tanks for a couple months that's your time to get back on isaac like it's not always gonna be the same price as it was the first time but for the truly great things the train has such a long runway it's a so much upside that even if you just get on the second time you still get feel rich he's like same thing happen with bitcoin the people who just kicked themselves from not buying bitcoin the first time they heard it at a hundred and fifty dollars instead of just buying it at five hundred they just kept telling the story about how they missed it at one fifty and then they missed it at six hundred seven hundred eight hundred a thousand and now it's at sixty thousand they're still missing it he's like but the smart people are like well the train came back around let me hop let me hop on i do i now recognize the value in this thing and i feel like sean parker did that with his career so for a period of time sean parker was seen as this kinda like bad boy but like kind of untouchable like you couldn't invest in sean parker he's too rebellious he's getting sued out of existence the big companies hate him the government's after him he was like an untouchable and then later it was like oh sean parker this guy was you know he he led the round into facebook and he was a early huge investor in spotify he was did did this and that and he became the guy who could do no wrong but those weren't his companies but he recognized that those companies were winners and actually made his fortune not on the thing he did naps but in recognizing the brilliance of the next sean parker and that was you know daniel lac for spotify or yeah when he was like basically he he did this when he was like he was the elder at twenty five yeah yeah and and every hacker looked up him because he's guy's an icon if he used the reputation but not necessarily the money to make all his money usually you use your money to make money he uses his reputation to make money so couple things that this guy did that was that's pretty fascinating so first i'm gonna give you some lifestyle things and then i'm gonna give you the career story so crazy lifestyle things so i met somebody who went to his wedding have you ever heard about his wedding yeah man he got a ton of shit for it in like the heyday of sam silicon valley so this guy basically spent somewhere between five and ten million dollars on his wedding and he was like and so the interesting thing here is just like weird people are not just like they're not just like crazy in their business and super chill in their normal life most of them i'll if you're if you're wired a certain way you just apply that to everything that comes your way so for example when it came to time get mary like alright the budget no budget let's just do the sickest thing we can imagine so they're like we're gonna go to a forest in the big sir and it's not just gonna be a wedding it's gonna be like like an immersive theater eater experience i gotta help people who were there and they're like it was crazy walk in and like you could see the stars above you but it was daytime i was how the hell are their stars and like there was rabbits running around like wild rabbits that were just like you know there because we were in the forest and but it was all planned they had the the costume designer from lord to the rings made to everybody's outfits you know he ended up paying like two or three million dollars and fines because you're just you're not a allowed to just use like the most beautiful public like forest for your own wedding but he was like fucking doing it to propose sean are you sure they're like does there permit and he's like put on your foot on your costume and get in here to propose he baked his wedding ring into an onion came it to his wife like what i you know what this is did it like it's like being mad at the u c fighter for getting like drunk in a fight in the streets it's like yeah animal what do you expect like right the guy who gets cage up and his underwear and fights another man to the death like he he wasn't super chill outside their octagon weird he bought this fifty five million dollar house in la from ellen d desi and then like tricked it out he's just got like his houses are crazy like it's worth a thirty minute dive just to go look at his houses but even in his other stuff like you know richard will do phil but like how you do it is also interesting so for him he's like i wanna bet on he's like i'm gonna take a venture capital approach to phil philanthropist so he's like i'm not just gonna donate to the red cross or whatever he's like i'm gonna find the people that trying to cure cancer in the most interesting ways and then nobody will fund them because it's too crazy it's too unproven they have to like that have to convince the whole world that their crazy approach is gonna work he's like but that's what that's like in the start world that's exactly what happens some crazy kid has a crazy approach that like you know most likely will not but if it does is gonna change the game and that's what vcs they bet on that he's like i'm gonna do that and you know for curing cancer and so he's poured in tons and tons of money into unorthodox cancer treatments how wealthy is he he's very wealthy so when he identified facebook as like a thing and he was like you know what i wanna you know invest in this be a part of this mark really liked him he's the one who connected mark to peter till to make to get the investment the first five hundred k investment he's the one who convinced them i think to move to palo alto and leave boston which then let them you know recruit the best talent which let them you know succeed when other social networks like friends during and myspace were failing so sean end up owning four percent of facebook which is a like became worth like i at a four or five billion dollars just on his facebook stock then there's an interesting story of how he invested in spotify have you ever read this email that sean parker sent to the spotify founder wasn't it something like this is naps but done legally exactly so he just cold emails them in two thousand and nine spotify launched in i kinda like o six zero seven range spotify launched in europe though so daniel i think lived in sweden and then on top of that you know they've only launched in europe because the rules allowed them to do it in europe but he he knew he had to build up enough critical mass before entering the united states market markets like one of the the weird reasons that spotify worked and all the other music sharing services never worked because they all tried to start in the united states and all of the music labels were so ready to just sue the shit out of everybody from naps that like you couldn't have done that that was not it would they would come after you when you were just a a baby an infant so he writes some of this email and just subject line thoughts he's like daniel and shaq he goes i've been playing around to spotify you've built an amazing experience as you saw z really likes it to i've been trying to get him to understand your model and i think he just needed to try it to see it for himself then he talked a little about facebook and he's like you know we should partner because we can integrate like you know spotify his music stuff with facebook social graph all that but then he's he just compliments me he's like your your design is clean elegant tight and fast it's clearly lacking some important features like the social stuff but i think you've done a great job sequence you've nailed the core experience blah ever since naps i've dreamt of building a product similar to spotify i might have tried had i not been quote sidetracked with facebook founder responded and like you like this dope shit that i've been doing and he's like to be fair i also was like you know pretty scarred from the record labels he's like and he's like you know so i've adopted a watch and wait thing to try to see a when the labels would come to their senses and realize that they need something to distribute music and two until a product that would come in that would fix all the things we got wrong with naps as like you have done that and then he just goes on and articulate from a product point of view what they have done right and what they need to change and he's like i can help you do this shit and he ends up leading a fifteen million dollar investment into spotify which is like you know an an amazing investment i wanna read you one other sean parker story so the guy's pretty magnetic and actually this story comes from you a long time ago you posted on the hustle a blog post about the the the famous story of the painter who took stock in facebook i guess he was like supposed to get paid sixty grand and instead of taking the sixty grand for the painting he did on facebook's office wall he took stock in the stock ended becoming worth two hundred million dollars i almost chose him for this segment because he david c i think he's a crazy man he's a crazy man and he did this interview on howard stern and what that's cool about it so i knew the story i think i've already kinda know the story of the painter what i didn't know is why he took the stock and the answer to why he took the stock is that motherfucker sean parker he's like that guy he and so he's like dude and so howard returns like why did you pick the stock like you know were they offering not a lot of money and he's like no they were i told him the price is sixty thousand they said yes he's like that's a lot of like yeah i just decided that's what it was gonna be worth and i think he was like coming out of jail or something at the time and sean parker loved this artist was like no this artist has to be the guy and he had tried to get him to do something for plaque so his other company but they didn't have any money he's like finally hit him he's like you know we finally have money i'm at this new thing called the facebook we i think we have enough money come on i want only you who can do this banking thing so he comes over like it'll be sixty grand and you wanna paid this whole building it'll be sixty grand by the way if you if you i've been to the facebook office and they've redone it but like parts of the ceiling they use the same drywall so you could actually still see the painting right and so howard she was like what happened like they they didn't have the cash he's like no no had the cash he's like so why'd did you take the stock did you did you believe in this are you like an investor did you believe this he's i dude i never invested anything in my life he's like they he's like i asked sean i was what's this company he starts describing you know what facebook is a social network for college kids and i was like dude that's lame as shit and he's he's like i wasn't on friends sir i wasn't on my myspace i hate that shit he goes and this is for college students oh even worse i hate education i hate college i never went i don't even like college students and he's like so you hate no social networking you hate college he's was yeah i dropped out of school i hate everything about school and he's like and it's only starting on harvard and stanford campus oh man like hey it's harvard i hate stanford i'm like a anti anti all those things at they stand for six so why did you do it he's like because every time i'd hang out with sean parker he would just tell me like y'all i'm gonna make some shit happen he's like before he went and met with peter t he says oh i gotta go i gotta raise money for facebook he goes i'm a bend these fucker minds he's like he came back and he's like he's like yeah the rich he's like those ended up being like the richest man in america like you know like you're at reid hoffman and peter t and he's like dude this little nerd this sc nerd he's got a lot of swag and confidence and he's like he's just and he came back he had raised the money from that and he's like okay interesting and he's like so he's like you want those cash he wants stock he's like you're you're in this he's like yeah he's like alright i he's like i sized him up and i'm like this guy going somewhere he's like so that that's why i took stock that's awesome that is so awesome and it ended up being worth hundreds of millions of dollars i don't know what he sold and when he sold it but that's insane and that's what you know these people are they have a sort of magnetic a magnetic trait to them that i think is is pretty common man that is a good example of it were you gonna talk about his career or is that the career part let's go to the career right well you know that he's done a few other things they had a bunch of things that failed we had plateau he had aired air airtime he had you know bunch things like that and he was managing partner of our founder fund that's all i know what what else is there have you heard of opportunity zones for real estate mh you know i believe he invented that so basically i'm i i i read this a long time ago i'm going off the cuff but basically opportunity zones if i remember correctly their zones designated by the government that show these places are impoverished or they're like warehouse spaces and we want incentivize investors to open up i believe residential bill build stuff there and i think it was his idea and he any he lobby the he lobby the government and he turned it into a reality opportunities those are the brainchild of sean parker he in in the early two thousands he was faced with first president and he wanted to minimize his capital gains on his tech doc fortune so he lob the government to create this idea of opportunity zones so that investors would be incentivized to invest in areas that you know we're we're not receiving enough investment and if he did it that's pretty that's pretty fascinating but yeah he convinced the obama administration i think it was to make this a reality and now it's a thing where billions and billions and billions of dollars go to this and it was his idea and he didn't just come up the idea he he lob the government he changed the law which is really fascinating that he did this so he's done a bunch of interesting stuff and i think in fact i think he also played a hand in obama getting elected a little bit or something like that i mean he's a political guy so he's he's done a bunch of interesting stuff alright let me do number two that you do number one alright so number two is tom anderson aka tom from myspace and i call him the guy who won the game and simply stopped playing which is really critical almost all these guys like you talked about ole leg like he did this and then he went bigger and then he went bigger and i think that's a common thing but tom had one thing those guys will never have he had enough and he was able to walk away and so tom story is pretty wild i didn't i didn't know the backstory so it's also age fourteen hacks chase bank gets through access into chase bank all of the names the bank accounts the the the the the amounts in them and he could've have wired as much money as he wanted out of it he did not he knew their mortgages he knew everything and he was basically the leader of a hacking crew and his nickname was lord flat and so lord flat gets root access and he leaves a message in in chase bank and he says basically you need to let me keep my access or i will you know expose all this information i will leak all this blah blah like you need to give me give me full access even even you know just acknowledge that i won and give me access to this thing and he starts bragging about it so he tells forty of his friends shows them exactly how he did it how he hacked chase bank at age fourteen and this is why the fbi conducted one of the biggest raids they've ever done a simultaneous raid of forty different people all happening at seven pm all in one area because they didn't know who was the the kind of the the mastermind behind it but they knew who all had you know had seen it or had access to it i was talking about it and so they rate everybody at seven pm they steal his computer to take all but they leave them alone because they're like the guys fourteen what are we gonna do we can't charge him and so he gets off if he agrees okay i'm not gonna hack stuff anymore that's his origin story so now he ends up creating my myspace my myspace obviously it was one of the biggest social networks in the world and myspace was dope for a bunch of reasons that don't even exist anymore so you know if there's he's on our top five but he was in everybody's top eight on my myspace which was like you know my top eight friends and he was the first friend to everybody on my he has the iconic picture of him turning away from a whiteboard wearing his white shirt everybody knows that photo everybody who's our age at least that grew group on my myspace and my myspace like was kind of a culture shifter like something that facebook never really actually captured was that my myspace actually was cool for bands and getting you know discovery for music and talent and art and and myspace was kind of amazing and he sells myspace for five hundred eighty million dollars and he pieces out he bounces this he he he has a quote where he's like yeah before the acquisition i do wherever i wanted it it was pretty fun he's like now i have it takes all his time to get anything that you agree on things because they sold to news corp i think and he says you know there's like a budget review and a process for everything it's a pain so i'm out so he he pieces out and he's i think thirty eight years old or something when this happens he's pretty young and instead of doing what almost every other business guy does which is like cool and now i shall you know change cancer free speech i'll take rockets to mars tom like no now i'm a travel the world and and just take a bunch pictures he's like i'm gonna go have fun i'm gonna read you what i admire about this guy hey his twitter bio is not it doesn't say i'm tom i invented myspace i exited to news corp five hundred eighty million dollars currently a vc and you know professional dad you know husband of two husband of one father of two he doesn't do all that shit signal point he just says and join the good life my new hobbies are surfing architecture photography and golf and what he does is you know basically he's like i'm not gonna waste my time just debating politics or like trying to be the next big you know venture capitalist or whatever he's like i'm too busy busy like you know my eyes are too busy blinded by the by the reflection from the mold sea i can't i can't be bothered with all that bullshit i'm just gonna go travel the world do awesome things and take awesome pictures and so he becomes if you go to his instagram he becomes like a world famous photographer today has set almost seven hundred thousand followers and he takes beautiful pictures like his his instagram is amazing and it's just pictures from his life traveling the world and he even he's surprised he's like i didn't have a big background of he's like i took a few photos i traveling and he's like i couldn't believe what was coming out of the camera he's like i couldn't believe that this was coming out of my camera so he's like i decided i i'm a post this stuff and so you know he starts posting it gets popular so his second act was was was as this the reason i put him on this list is because i was on air chat at the other night and somebody shared a story about them they go you know the they go tom is a hero of mine of all the tech heroes he's one of the biggest because he was able to win the game and then bounce and they go not only did he win the tech game but he won the photography game and then he bounced from that too so if you go to his instagram his last photo that he posted was like three hundred weeks ago so you're like what happened where do you why did he stop and why did he stop because tom has the ability to have enough and what happened was this guy goes i i ran into tom and i was like tom why aren't you posting pictures anymore he goes dude i was traveling when time i was in wherever thailand and i was he's like i i keep all my camera stuff in my locker and my locker got jacked and he's like somebody stole all my cameras so i was like alright that hub is done moving on can you imagine like not only win the business game then you win the social media game and you're super popular and everything you post you get the dopamine rush of hundreds of thousands of likes and common saying how beautiful it is how they're so jealous of your life and then someone steals your camera and of course you could afford another one but you're like that maybe it's a sign time for the next adventure and he just moved on to the next adventure so what he doing now so the last thing i could find because i was like i needed to know this answer and i went into by the way he does reply to some tweets i did i did remember he applied to one of mine and if you go to his replies or maybe he didn't but i i somehow he came never mind recently and it was like the last time somebody had heard from him and he just replied like with emojis to somebody and i'm people are like oh tom he's back and somebody on reddit it was like i bumped into him in hawaii he's like and i basically got the sense that this guy who's literally just like swimming taking pictures do it like kind of like you know he's just like swimming hanging out he's like i think he's just like you know hooking up with like smoking hot women and i think he's just having a great time and he's like not bothered by anything they're like that's the vibe i got from him from my thirty second encounter that was the last information i could find about look at this picture i just posted on on the md thing tom's on that longevity protocol this guy's is in his fifties now and look at him he looks great he's as young he looks fresh he looks happy he but he it looks like he's in his thirties he looks really good yeah without you know life hacking every or you know bio optimizing and taking ninety six pills a day and like cold plunging for ten minutes and every morning like he's just like cool i'll just live a stress for happy life and get a lot of sun and hang out and eat good food and meet cool people dude when i think of hackers at fourteen i don't think guys who look like sean parker or or tom so god bless these guys what do you think they look like har rounder like for sure hair and for sure rounder these guys aren't that hairy or round they look great so they've won yeah that's part of why we put it on this list because they're awesome in more ways than just just their you know the net worth alright i'll i'll bring it home like i said i tried to pick people who you or the listeners would not have any idea who they are there's a five percent chance that you've had a run with this guy though and i only put maybe ten percent because i think he would have ran in the circles of michael birch but basically his name is vi n so vi v space n e v o google this guy for me really quick tell me who you think he looks like you probably don't know pop culture enough so i'm actually gonna say it he looks exactly like sting okay don't looks like a rock and roll icon or like you know what i think the guy who invented zara should look like yes exactly exactly that's a great which by the way google the guy who looks who who started zara don't look like that looks like what i think a hacker looks like so i call this guy the israeli great ga and so i need to tell you this guy's story because he's incredibly mysterious so this guy he's famous for being an investor he claims to be and many people including new york times claimed that he was the largest shareholder in time warner he was a very large shareholder in goldman sachs so he like runs in all these amazing circles he's the god parent of some of rupert murdoch kids and he's like incredibly well connected the reason i've heard about him was do you know how there's that famous like bo grove like who's who of of the world conference called alan and c like the sun valley alan and c conference where everyone walks out and their vest you know i'm talking about and they have those high def photos every photo on google limited images is him at the alan and c conference he sticks out he's a really good looking guy and he does not look he looks like a rockstar and i thought it was sting it first and they said this name was vi n and i was like who the hell is this guy so i started researching him so here's his backstory he was born in romania eventually moves to his israel and his parents die when he's in his twenties and his parents were very successful they owned a chemical company and they leave him something like three million dollars and he was obsessed with hollywood and so he moves to la and he's like somehow i wanna make it into the entertainment business and so the story is is that he got some type of low paying like not low paying but he got he convinced some guy who he met at a gym to hire him at this man's investment bank because v was like look i like investing i know a thing or two about it i've been investing my parents money hire me and so this guy eventually goes on record his last name is burke and he goes somehow he just this guy just starts showing up at my office and he was incredibly engaging however he didn't do anything and that was his whole point is that he did nothing he was kind of a go and he didn't really do anything and all the traders and money management guys were like what the hell does this guy even do he doesn't keep a schedule he can't he he's like a humming bird he's so ad he just jumps around from thing to think and i didn't even know what he was doing but he just showed it up at my office until suddenly he quit showing up and i don't see this guy for years i went to his apartment to see if he's okay he moved out of his apartment i couldn't find any records for him i just i was looking all over the place in yellow pages i couldn't find this guy he comes back into my life like three years later and he's totally different he dresses fancy he starts hanging out with celebrities and we have no idea what what he did in those two three four five years and so the rumors about this guy and there's all these articles about what the hell does this guy do for a living none of us can figure out because he basically has said that he's one of the largest shareholders of time warner which was eventually sold for tens of billions of dollars like i he was one of the largest shareholders of goldman and he's hanging out with all of these celebrities and so he's like i said he's friends with the rupert murdoch vi he owns homes in new york city he owns home in beverly hills he owns these mansions in malibu and lenny k eventually lives in one of his guest homes that's how fancy it is and a reporter goes to like check out his house because it's like this amazing piece of architecture and they're like what do you do for a living and he won't tell anyone what he has done for a living it even comes out that he is engaged to the actors actress from cro tiger hidden dragon this woman is like one of the top five most famous women in china and he's engaged to and everyone's like dude what the hell has this guy done like we have no idea what he's done for a living and it turns out he's also one of the larger investors of twitter one of the larger investors in square and if you google him you'll see there's all types of photos of him with leonardo d cap with all these like young amazing attractive women even though he's like sixty five now he's hangs out with all these celebrities the who's who of everyone and his reporters are like i have no idea how this guy is everywhere he always at the biggest events i don't know what he does for work i can't figure anything out about this guy and he's a prolific investor now in start he's that's how i thought you would have known him and he owns homes that are worth tens of millions of dollars many of them you know he's got one in i think beverly hills that he tried selling recently for like fifty or sorry that he bought recently for forty eight million dollars the homes are filled with the most amazing art you know these things by ba yeah keith herring like tens of millions of dollars worth of artwork and he claims to be a startup up investor he claims to be a public equities investor have you ever heard of this guy i've never heard of this guy and also i'm still unclear are you saying you don't think he is those things because you're kinda like he claims to be this he claims through that but like the story doesn't fully add up so what's the what what's your take here the story doesn't fully add up because if you own more than five percent of a publicly traded company you have to be listed as that and and new york times have asked time warner and a bunch of his people they go he is a shareholder that's just all those say they'll say he is in fact a shareholder and he's in the ears of the ceos and the ceos of time warner will be like hey v vi is really important to our operation he's been a big deal now a lot of people think there's rumors that he's part of the facade which is basically like the israeli like secret service because no one actually understands what he does and you'll see him with all these interesting celebrities he looks super fit and they all say the same thing about the guy they go he's the most charismatic person we have ever met and like story after story after story it's billionaire after a billionaire after billionaire saying oh vi he's one of my best friends and they'll say well do you know what he does for a living you know we don't really talk about that but he's the most engaging guy we will ever you'll ever talk to he's the least boring person and they go we're best friends because just like this person this person and this person who will say the same thing he came up one day and he sat next to me and i couldn't stop listening to what he had to say because he was so interesting to talk to you and so my theory is that he is in fact very wealthy and he's wealthy because he made connections to a bunch of different people and he connected them and would get little bits of equity to a variety of businesses and he's fascinating to me is because he's completely kind of made up this fake persona that has become a reality and you know if you read that book forty eight laws of power one of the rules is to change your image constantly and he basically disappeared in his thirties and he came back with a new persona and he became that person and many like hollywood people have been like this guy needs a movie if you guys would go had the greatest new year's resolution of all time he's like alright new you're new me literally literally now i'm the most charismatic interesting well connected romantic and richest person in the world fantastic you've never had run ins with them no i've never i never bumped in this guy have you and i'm glad too because it sounds like you have you ever seen eric weinstein talk about jeffrey i've epstein like this first time you met him what did he say that he was charismatic well no he's like the hair on my next stood up immediately he's like it didn't add up like you know where did this guy you know how have i never heard of this guy where did he get his wealth how did he create this hedge fund what how is he splashing cash around like this how does it why does nobody know him from like before a certain time and he's like he's he's like hey jeffrey i've seen was a government construct like he was basically a government you know created entity that was meant to you know ultimately like get you know comp like in a blackmail on a whole bunch of rich successful people and that's what he goes around talking about on podcast i don't know this guy at all but it just reminded me of of of that like the map the mystery of like who is this person how how does this all that up like we're okay you your mom left you ten million bucks but then how did you become such a big shareholder and all these things like that's not a a big starting amount of capital to be able to to accumulate big stakes and things it's also interesting that like you know he he was one way that he came back years later as like a totally different guy with a totally different personality in a in a different persona to the new york times said he's the single largest shareholder of time warner which is a big deal that's that's billions of dollars and it's amazing that in today's age that you can't find out this guy's background no one really knows no one talks about it look at this picture i put into the dock it's ham at the allan and code conference riding a bike while the two people he's talking to are walking yeah and he's like dick not possible dude how are you gonna ride a bike and then how are people gonna walk and talk next to you you can't even i've tried that you can't ride slow enough where they could do that and they can't walk fast enough for you to do this this just added to the to me in a way that nobody else will really understand this is impossible he is defining physics to be able to socialize laws like this and you see him with literally the most powerful people on earth and he is always talking with his hands fl yeah he's just like crazy and all the pictures and and the people who are the most powerful people on earth are are leaning in listening there's a fit photo of tim cook str his chin leaning in like oh what's your opinion on this and he's just engaged them wildly and so this guy like he is like somehow in the ear of the most powerful people under earth but no one knows who he is i think it's hilarious that we to this list with a guy that we basically know nothing about no one knows anything about may not actually be an interesting guy and we are also massively reading into these signals of like from these like random photos where we're like look at the way that lean is happening oh he must be charismatic or like i'm like look at this bike look at how he's biking while all the people are walking how can he even do that wow this guy is is fantastic and we have so little to go on we are grasping rochelle on this not big he's i'm grasping be you're grasp there's something here about there's something here about this person i need someone to message me information about him surely people in our audience know who this person is i did that on a t shirt by the way i'm not grasping your grasping that's our version of like you can't triple staple double stamp alright well that's that's the list i think the real list here is basically that these are the most interesting billionaires you've never heard of that's try where we've i agree i agree that alright that's a pod i feel like i could rule to where to know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never looking back