Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh - Elon Musk Didn’t Invent Sh!t with Ben Uyeda

Episode Date: May 6, 2021

Join Andrew Schulz this week on Flagrant U as he sits down with Ben Uyeda - a true master of everything. Ben and Andrew sit down to discuss: Futurism, Apple Car vs. Tesla, Creating Insatiable Content on Youtube, Elon Musk, and much much more. INDULGE

And eventually there'll be AI comedy. You're not, I mean, you do the work. What did you call Greta? She's the Jake Paul with a good con. I think it's better that we have celebrity CEOs than celebrity celebrities. The iPhone is the most successful product ever created in the history of mankind.

More successful than the condom. How many of those do you use? It's been a decade, Ben. What's up, everybody? Welcome to Flagrant U. Today, we are sitting down with one of my favorite people in the entire world okay ben uyeda close friend of mine and a uh a person whose advice i cherish i always go to him no matter what the fuck it is because i think he has absolutely brilliant takes

on just about everything um he was an advisor on the Netflix special. He actually built our studio in New York. He has dominated YouTube in the DIY space, and now he's building hotels all around the world. This is all off of his own just gusto, hard work, and sheer brilliance. So it is with great, great pleasure that i get to share him with you guys i don't think like people love blue cross and blue shield as much as they like the service that

they get from amazon right and if like signing up for a new primary health care provider is a pain in the ass like and ordering something on amazon is a joy and it just shows up i would probably like lean towards them as a healthcare provider. So they're going to dominate healthcare. They're going to dominate everything, I think, right? Like they already kind of do. Like even if you split off like their web services, like that would still be like one of the biggest companies.

Explain the web services thing because I think a lot of people don't realize that this is where Amazon actually made their money. Well, they made the money in a lot of things, but they were spending a lot of money, I think, on web hosting. Yeah. And because they were doing e-commerce and they're like why don't we just do that yeah and that's consistently what they've done is be like oh we're spending money on this why don't we just make this yeah and now they did that with the the e-commerce stuff they're like you can do it with their own products right which is seems a little bit unfair like you see what

sells the most right does that not seem fair like you see you literally have the platform you decide what's you don't decide but you see what sells the most let's say it's a bag right we had this travel bag for all of our equipment then alex put our uh cameras and stuff in and um i think al bought one from this company and then next time around amazon just right they just recommended the same fucking bag it just said amazon on it and it was what it was a little bit cheaper and actually a little bit better quality and then we just bought that bag and that's the one we do it with like tripods they did it with batteries and what's crazy is that they figure out exactly what's selling the best that other people are investing to create that product

prototype they know exactly what colors are selling the most yeah they know people in which demographics and in which regions of the country are most likely going to buy this. Yeah. They have all the inside information. Like, you know what? Let's just make these ourselves. So if you're somebody

that's like selling products on Amazon, obviously you have to do it because you want to be part of that marketplace where all the people are. But aren't you terrified? Isn't a little bit of you going like, I'm just giving them all the information they need to replace me.

Yeah. But it depends. If you're a massive, if you're a company like Target, that's a bigger problem. If you're like a small entrepreneur and there's a lot of people that make a lot of money on Amazon, the same way a lot of people make money off of YouTube. It is a platform that can really enable and empower like small entrepreneurs and people that kind of want to launch a product. It's just whether or not you can sell enough to like make a good amount of money without drawing too much

attention that they dominate your space like a drug dealer right like if you're on a corner making good money you got a nice house somewhere you're okay the second you start making big money the cia finds out and they're like whoa we're the only ones you know drugs there's been so many stories about drug dealers that like got huge and we're doing like millions of dollars yeah i want to hear like the story of like the middle class drug dealer yeah that just like said you know i'm making like 400 grand a year i'm never going to make more than that i know how to not push the limits i'm never going to get caught i'm not going to cross it you won't and that's why they're still doing it right but i would love to hear fucking mouth shut i would love to hear like the diary. Some of them are listening right now.

Of like the 65-year-old drug dealer who just had like a real like upper middle class career. Like not sensational. Making money like a principal. I don't know. I just stayed in my lane. I never caused, never brought any heat. I wasn't this like massive ride

in this roller coaster up and down. But you know what's tricky with that is like when you're taking those risks, you want the reward like not a lot of people are going to risk 25 years in jail to make 100 grand 25 years in jail to make 100 million you're like okay true well it's funny like i i did have some drug dealers in my family and the most brilliant one uh was in southern california and he's not a violent guy he's not a gangster he's more on the

hippie side of drug dealing yeah and he had the most genius way of like not getting caught is that he only used really attractive college no he wasn't white okay but his couriers he basically looked at it's like where do drug dealers get caught and he was like it's all from traffic stops so it's like you know your registration's out of date you get pulled over the person's nervous and they sweat him so all of his couriers and delivery people was all like blonde girls that went to your alma mater yeah right university southern california santa barbara yeah so and he would only use them if their car was like pristine but not like a fancy car it's always had to be like a honda carola license and registrations and when he changed his whole couriering system to that demographic lawn surfer chicks from southern california never never because they're also like

it's even if they do get pulled over for speeding or something like that the chances are for like the checking the vehicle yeah never yeah maybe you get a ticket usually you get out of it right and then there's always like the tears that you can fall back on and it was like it was kind of it was like that one move that he made as a decision it was a little bit inconvenient because it was a little more work to find those kind of couriers but it was that one move that kind of made him pretty bulletproof and never been caught no absolutely absolutely amazing okay so amazon does health care yeah the fascination with going to space is this a big dick contest with elon is he really curious what advantage does that give them i think engineers want bigger problems and i I think it's like, I think of them looking into space for the same reasons why I became interested in sustainability.

At some point, if it looks like you can kind of do things, then you start questioning. And you start feeling, because when you start off in your career and you're young, you're kind of like, am I capable? Can I even hang in the arena that i'm pursuing yeah once you sort of get validation you feel that you can do that you're like well what is the legacy what am i actually here to achieve other than just being another asshole that's doing the same thing as all these other assholes right making a good living but i look at them and i'm at that level but like is it really that meaningful or important yeah so i do think that genuine that's that sort of legacy pursuit of being a multi-planetary species is like i don't think that's bullshit i think they're sincere about that okay but i think the motivation to pursue it aggressively and lose a

lot of money at it is the ego-driven part so i think things can be ego-driven and sincere at the same time. But is this the first thing that we've seen like Bezos do that isn't increasing his current businesses? Like everything that he's done that you said before the space exploration, each one of those fields improves his ability to sell goods. Right. Right? Or he's going to get into the good itself, right, which is the healthcare. But space, how the fuck does that help him sell books, sneakers, cabinets, etc.? Clothes, it makes sense. Like if you have, for example, like they do the Amazon Prime, they do the video, right? Or what is it?

They do movies, TV, it doesn't matter. I'm sure at a certain point you're going to be able to pause the program see the person's shirt and you will be able to link to where you can buy that shirt on amazon if it exists on amazon right if that doesn't already exist right now so it's a perfect advertisement for selling the goods how the fuck does space help that i'm not sure it does i think it's highly possible that they're post-rationalizing it so it might be that you decide i want to go to space yeah and why is it good and then you're like how can i make money to fund it along the way and it might be with some

sort of telecommunications satellite system stuff like that uh the other thing that i think is interesting is there's a considerable amount of money in government contracts. And Amazon and it's kind of funny, right? Like I'm interested in the gossip of these things because one, we use these platforms on a daily basis for our work. We both put videos up on YouTube. So what happens with Google matters to us. We use Instagram and Facebook for monetization. I care what Facebook is doing. And I use Amazon affiliates for moving product and stuff like that in my videos. So I use these things and the people that are running them are

kind of interesting, but still very flawed. So you can feel both like envious of their success and occasionally superior, like what the fuck is this idiot doing? And I think that's the most intriguing thing is when somebody is better at something or in a situation, you're kind of like, they get your attention because you're like, I'm not, I'm not quite there yet. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You have more money than me. Um, but at the same time, but they made mistakes. We love seeing people more successful than us in situations that justify us to temporarily

call them an idiot yes um yeah so i think the space thing is partially ego-driven but it doesn't mean that it's bad and it's still probably good and i they might have a million possibilities for how they can monetize it yeah and i don't think their vision has to be perfect i think with any of these tech companies they tried a lot of things exactly because they weren't sure what was going to make the most money right and then they slowly cut away the things that don't work yeah i mean remember google glass yeah and now like google's not pushing it and that's yeah that's a good thing that's not just can't make products they're great at software but hardware forget it like oh they make phones for poor people but it's like it's good that they try right like you've got to try things that are different and then you also have to give up on them when it's not clear or when they're clearly not working

but don't you think that like just back to the google thing don't you think that's an investment in like a cool and i'm going to put that under quotes like apple seems to care about cool and they seem to care about dictating culture whereas google's like we just want the information we want the data and then we'll put things out based on information data i'm sure some nerds crunch some shit and they're like people want glasses that do things and then they did it out whereas apple's rollout would have been completely different for that i think the first thing would have been aesthetic apple is is a luxury company right like? Like it's a luxury brand with a limited amount of offerings. This is interesting about it.

So if you look at like the – if you were to map the data of where people are using iOS versus Android and map it over New York, all – and it directly correlates to real estate value. Like Queens? Oh, look. There's a lot of – A lot of a lot of green text yeah and then like manhattan it's all it's all ios yeah um but they're also really fanatically great about how well the hardware works like yeah and i always love it when people are like apple those idiots they got rid of my headphone jack yeah and then i just saw that the sales on airpods

just airpods yeah the revenue from airpods was greater than uh the revenue from spotify snapchat and twitter combined yeah just that one product yeah and so it's like it's always funny to me when people oh what's apple doing they totally screwed up yeah they're not it's never gonna be as good why do they keep making things worse this keyboard sucks and it's like bro relax like they just they know they're done right they were setting it up they knew they were moving towards the the wireless airpods they knew that they were going to slowly get rid of that and they're just setting you up one step at a time down the road so it's really i think the big difference though google does more research like they have so many initiatives

and you can go on like their websites and their see what their employees are doing yeah they're trying so much random stuff like the other day someone from i did a talk at google right before the pandemic yeah i met a bunch of employees and they're working on like artificial intelligence and art grab your mic yeah make sure you're good and i'm like what does that have to do with like search engines and stuff like that but they're almost run like a university where they just have all these things they just try to keep the smart kids happy yeah give them a playground so they can mess around yeah give them free cafeteria food and just keep collecting that intelligence but they're not always sure where they're going with it where i think apple's like very like we make the best

products in the world that have incredibly high margins but they're not even the best what's better i thought that the android phones were better i thought they were like in terms of physical characteristics and the quality of the phone. Oh, you're like one of the megapixel guys? I mean, look, that's what they tell me, right? Like anybody that has one of those phones is like, oh, there's so many more megapixels and the video quality is so much better. And this has six cameras instead of four cameras.

I'm not going to use it because it's not seamless with my lifestyle and Apple's got me hooked. Right. But in terms of actually breaking it down, like if you want to want to look at statistics right like we can see one basketball player is better than another there are certain basketball players that are better than alan iverson i want to hoop like iverson true right it's one i think best is tricky right because it's different for different people but i would say that the way they advertise and talk about their products is telling so if you see like a google or android like for the pixel yeah it'll be like this many megapixels they give you stats yeah yeah if you see the billboard for the iphone they go they

just show you the photo and we took this with an iphone right yeah yeah and it's just it's a great photo yeah and it's so tell it's so it's so scoreboard related it's like oh you average that many points that's cute you You have many pixels. Yeah. And there's no right answer to that. Yeah. And it doesn't mean that megapixels aren't valuable, but it's just a different approach. And clearly it's resonating better with a higher end audience. But you don't think that they're attacking, not attacking, but like attaching themselves to culture and that's why they end up winning? Yeah.

Like that's the move, right? Yeah. Also, Android just doesn't understand culture. They don't have an ambassador either. Like who the fuck? This is the weirdest thing about also android just doesn't understand culture they don't have an ambassador either like who the fuck this is the weirdest thing about about google that i don't understand you know who runs google i don't most people don't we know who runs tesla we know who runs amazon we know who runs facebook we know runs Apple. We don't know anything about fucking Google. Well, it's also more complicated, too, because like Larry and Sergey, the sort of founders, are still kind of in the scene and on the board. But they have a CEO, Sundar, who's technically the CEO.

But it's a more complicated structure. But they're not a celebrity-run company. And they don't care about using the celebrity equity to bolster their company because they've won. Like Apple's still competing. Like Apple doesn't own the greatest market share in terms of like iPhones around the world. I imagine Google owns Search. I would say that Apple's won. Look at it this way, right?

Take a company like Spotify. Have they won in terms of they sell the most phones have they won in the way that google has won i think they've won in the fact that the iphone is the most successful product ever created in the history of mankind wait a minute yeah more successful than the condom how many of those do you use it's been a decade it's been a long time only one of those products i had a good run with those condoms back okay not very user friendly but i did use them quite a bit yeah look the i think the margins on the iphone i from what i understand is makes it the most

successful product ever created okay do your own research and check up on it yeah but but i would think of it this way the the demographic of who uses the iphone also plays into it this is great yeah so when spotify got into podcasting and it's like wait what's apple going to do and now apple's actually making moves with their own podcasting sort of thing which i think we'll see those sort of top 10 shake up a lot with like oh yeah suddenly weird you were all the apple podcasts are yeah just like netflix remember they would do their recommended and now everyone got a little land on the top yeah right man netflix doesn't miss on netflix but it's so just to set it up what happened was uh spotify comes into the game they

start taking over definitely music right everybody goes oh you gotta go spotify and they have these great curated playlists and the music a bunch of money on rogan spent tons of money on rogan to get into the podcasting space now a lot of people are listening podcasting apple's gonna catch up with podcasting but a lot of people are like yo it's over for apple apple's on spotify is basically taking over listening if you're going to listen to something you do on spotify and what a lot of people didn't know is spotify is just a store in the mall that apple owns so apple wants to own the mall right they own the rails they own the infrastructure yeah yeah yeah so it's the same thing with like with like amazon if uh i can't remember if it was amazon or a different thing but real quick just so that so it's like for example when

you pay for spotify every month yeah apple's getting a percentage yeah apple's the mafia bro yeah you have your store and then they come and collect their little protection fee and it could be it's like what like 20 right so 20 of every time you pay spotify that money goes right to tim cook yeah well that's the boss up move but yeah not you know what i'm saying but that is the boss i move right there it's brilliant because now apple is tied to spotify success right the bigger spotify gets the bigger apple gets it's it's so funny to like i mean i think it's why like facebook actually made the mistake of not having a device right so now there's this kind of battle between Facebook and Apple.

And it's kind of a little bit cultural. I think there's a little bit where if you look at Tim Cook, he's really polished, very well-spoken, doesn't cover his face in sunscreen and take awkward surfing photos. He's older and he worked his way up the sort of ranks. Right. Whereas Zuckerberg's a college dropout. Yeah.

Kind of dictatorial and autocratic and, you know, made some questionable decisions. Ethical decisions. Yeah. Yes. And Facebook, I mean, Apple more and more is sort of pitching, they're sort of connecting the idea of them as a luxury brand with more privacy. And so they're making it so that it's easier and easier to sort of opt out of Facebook tracking you.

Not on Facebook, but tracking you on other apps on an iPhone. So for the average person that's listening, I knew nothing about this either until I started looking into the TikTok stuff. When an app is downloaded on your phone, it also has, some of these apps have access to the other apps on your phone. Right. They can look at how you hold your phone, which direction you're holding it. I'll think the MasterCard Pay app, one of the things they're working on is to fight fraud, how you use, was it a touchless pay?

Oh, it's almost like a signature imposter. Literally that, a signature imposter. So if you touchless pay with the bottom of your phone, they might go fraud. You've never paid like this before. Someone else is using your phone to pay. Oh, it's almost like a signature imposter. Literally that, a signature imposter. So if you touchless pay with the bottom of your phone, they might go fraud. You've never paid like this before. Someone else is using your phone to pay. So they're using the weight, the balance, all these different things, but they're attaching yourself to all these other apps. I think that was a big thing with TikTok.

It was absorbing so much data from all the other apps on your phone and using it for their algorithm, which is pretty great because it keeps you locked in. Right. So Facebook is doing that. So they were tapping into like Spotify's data. So Facebook could see what music you were listening to or what podcast you were listening on Spotify. And so Apple's just making it easier and easier to opt out of that.

And why that's interesting to me is that, you know, we're in ad supported media. Yeah. I put videos on YouTube. I do sponsored integrations and I make the AdSense money from the ads that youtube populates on top of my videos so i'm interested in that kind of ad marketplace and so if iphone which we already talked about tends to have more affluent users and they start cutting the data that Facebook can collect from mobile, from Instagram and Facebook on iPhones, they've suddenly cut Facebook's ability to collect data and not of like all the people,

but of the richest people. Which is, yeah, which is what you want. Right. Now, it's questionable how many people actually opt out. Did they allow you to just opt out of Facebook? Because that seems petty. Like, is there a button that goes just Facebook? moving it i'd have to double check but i think they're generally moving that for all sort of apps where they're just trying to encourage it and make

it a little bit easier to turn it off or yeah i'm not sure if they switch the default to automatically no but they're they're just surfacing it up yeah yeah and what's interesting like do you clear your cookies or do you take much no yeah i i. I'm not really too worried. I'm not doing anything, you know, that bad. Yeah. So it's like, what's the big deal? But I guess privacy. I'm always actually kind of curious on how people actually feel about privacy because one of those things is thrown around. But it's not like when I talk to my friends, they're like, they're worried about it abstractly, but not directly. Yeah. I'm not actually worried about it at all but not directly yeah i i'm not actually worried

about it at all and if anything it i kind of enjoy the lack of privacy because the advertisements that i'm getting served up on on instagram are unbelievable i mean like i'm searching for outdoor furniture and all it's doing is giving me outdoor furniture and it's pretty good and it's beautiful yeah i want to buy every single thing i see yeah and it wasn't this good before no i remember years ago like it would it would serve up like cool uh pseudo tech things what was that store back in the day i was just asking you about it brookstone or sharper image right like every instagram ad for a dude was like something from brookstone or sharper image right because you're like oh dude's like cool things this looks like it goes faster it's sleek and i was like right, sometimes you need a one-wheeled scooter.

That'd be fun. Now this shit is pinpoint, dude. Yes. I am moving furniture. Yes. That's all that I see. Yeah. I'm in Miami, surf lessons or something like that.

Go to the beach, blah, blah, blah, hotel stays, et cetera. It is really, I mean, it's functional. How can I stays etc it is really i mean it's functional how can i say i don't like it it's functional it's great it's great yeah it's until they do something horrible with it it's great right yes yeah i'm not it doesn't really concern me too much if i like ads are something that we all have to endure so if i'm going to get better ones that are more related to what i've been thinking and talking about and consuming in terms of content yeah that's a better thing i don't think it's a it's a worse thing yeah i mean if someone's like would you rather see these ads or pay a dollar a month for instagram i'd probably see the ads yeah

yeah even though a dollar is nothing? To you. To us. What are you, an Android user? Come on, bro. What are these green text clips you've got going on over here? Okay. So you see a little bit of an ego play between Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah, I think it'll be fun. Again, I think it's ego on top of solid fundamentals.

I think the idea of privacy is a real thing but i also think it's like he doesn't like him either okay fair enough let me ask you something facebook how is this an effective tool when nobody we know uses it i mean my parents use a lot of facebook well it's funny face facebook you understand what I'm saying? It seems to have passed this generation by. Our generation and below are on Instagram. Now it seems like the younger generations are definitely a lot more on TikTok. Yet Facebook has this incredibly robust advertising system that's about to be archaic, antiquated, because nobody's on the platform to advertise to.

Yeah. So I don't like Facebook as a platform. I don't really go on it and consume content there. I just find it kind of noisy and messy. Also, I think it's because it's populated with my high school friends because that's when I was using it the most, like in college and before then. So I don't really enjoy it as a consumer,

but as a producer, I'm doing numbers on facebook that i'm not touching on youtube so i've just started taking my old youtube videos and putting them on facebook and we're doing like 15 million views a month yeah and now that they have like a adsense type automated ad placement yeah so but the thing that facebook's really good for is running advertising campaigns targeting yeah right so what's interesting is that like i'm way less precious on facebook by the way yeah yeah youtube i'm like no it's got to be a masterpiece right on facebook let's try it out yeah throw it up there it's sloppy if it's bad the algorithm will say it's bad remove it and and the you get more views the views are way shittier like the average they can't like

views that's like you watch it for three seconds score it it's a lot of it's a lot of gimmies yeah but the the targeting is kind of impressive and that's why facebook is like one of the most valuable media advertising companies in the world is that you can basically create venn diagrams in a really creative way yeah find the perfect customer and spend the least amount of money to reach people that are going to be the most likely to purchase your product yeah so if we want to sell uh let's say cigars and fake money and briefcases to flex and uh on your podcast yeah you could sort of say like well these people probably like monster energy drink they probably like the ufc yeah they probably like this rapper that flexes this way yeah and you can just buy you can actually design the person you're trying to reach

by a series of of consumer choices yeah yeah and that's a really creative in uh interface that's like a different way of thinking of demographics. You're not being like, oh, it's 18 to 35. It's like, oh, like if you're going to advertise for like a vegan restaurant and everyone's competing for vegan search terms on Google, on Facebook you might go, oh, it's people that like Morrissey. Right? And that have also like watched National geographic right and that way that we can that that combination of interest might be a cheaper way to reach vegans than actually marketing directly to vegans i might uh age us here a little bit but you know it's really funny it's like when we were younger and then you met somebody that you felt was similar

to you it was a special moment yeah right like you could maybe be on vacation or something like that but you meet someone who has like you know similar interests i'm not even talking about a girl like you're like playing basketball or something you're surfing and you just get along you're like oh this guy's awesome hey next time you're in california like let's hang out right because you couldn't believe there's another human being on the planet that had similar interests as you from a completely different place right is one letdown of the internet that it shows us how unique we are not yes there's there is there is a multitude of all of us no one is special no one is special like we were lied to for generations about we're all snowflakes we're all so unique we're all so different and every one of us has their own little intricacies and then facebook was like yeah it's like it took

a fucking robot to figure it out well there there was i always wonder about like you ever drive through like a small town and see like an elk's lodge okay and i'm always like outside like a vfw type thing yeah it's just like a place for guys of a certain broad demographic they'll all go and hang out and spend time yeah and i feel like now with internet there's a million sort of like facebook groups reddit pages yeah podcast that deal with like a niche thing it's it's completely made accessible any niche that's above five people um and like i'm in i'm in one of those niches in the kind of like diy maker woodworking kind of design things yeah and to us it feels like the biggest thing ever but it's like you know our overall contribution to media is like about the size of what like hgtv

is to all the other cable channels like it's you know a five percent to three percent of the of the total media landscape but to us it's everything and that's what's kind of i guess that's the good part of the internet is that everyone can like find their little it's college tribe which is kind of a gross word but no no i i see it just like college i mean i remember like high school you know if there were kids who were maybe a little awkward didn't have a lot of friends and all of a sudden they go to university and then there's a whole like major or minor that's based in their interests and they have all these other people they get to connect with and they have these robust friend groups that they never had in high school and it was like freedom

for them and i see that as the internet you know like if you're like a loner you don't have you have any friends like even on the internet right now it's you bro yeah if you don't have friends even on the internet like if you're in on the internet people don't like you that's rough dude because there's a there's a reddit forum for people who are not liked and you guys can at least connect on that right and it's like it's even like those like introvert memes what is it what is it well where it's like i mean i think it's kind of i hear so many people sort of saying oh i'm an introvert memes what is it what is it well where it's like i mean i think it's kind of i hear so many people sort of saying oh i'm an introvert and oh you wouldn't understand because

i'm i'm this kind of sort of pseudo-scientific kind of category of person i actually don't know what it means but it just feels like it can be uh a way to sort of justify my otherwise lack of sort of social interaction yeah um and again no shame on sort of introvertedness i probably fall a little bit more on that spectrum but it's just funny when people are so overtly about this kind of thing that they sort of identify with and that they kind of used to kind of qualify any sort of their lack of social interactions but i guess that's a it's kind of a nice thing is that you'll see so you didn't fuck with clubhouse right no i thought it was the stupidest thing i've ever seen in my life that i knew was stupid from the jump yeah

it was if android made an app you were right uh and you gave me pushback everybody gave me pushback everybody said i was an idiot they're like yo this is the new thing and i'll tell you what made me realize it wasn't i don't think you can have a social media app if you don't have uh hot chicks or cool people and the app was that the the clearly you've never heard of reddit wait for it wait for it let me think let me think because you're on to something here you're on to something reddit gets away with it because they're at least talking about hot chicks and there's pictures and there's a compilation of intelligence yes i actually i like right i want to get into a discussion about right in a second but like it's specific with clubhouse i knew it was going to bomb because what is the purpose for the average person the casual to go on there like the the coolest person on your

platform platform can't be eric weinstein it just can't be you can't that's not your he can be. He can be a part of it. But he can't be the guy that you go to and you're like, that's who I need to hear every single day. Yeah, I think it's much more of like a, I don't think it makes sense for someone in your position that's already monetizing content. I think what's where it makes, it's much more like Eventbrite than it is like a podcasting, a Spotify, a YouTube type platform. It's like in my line of work as sort of a architect and designer, I used to go to a lot of design conferences and you basically go to hear some thoughts of like industry leaders. It's not a big enough industry to be televised and sort of pre-internet it's like where else do you get these kind of like thought leaders in this thing that's really

important to me but not broadly appealing to a mainstream audience and you have conferences and there's conferences for engineering medicine all this kind of stuff let me let me take back what i was saying what they did is they um what is it called when a company uh creates an evaluation they they created an evaluation for the company that was far too high yeah and like we work like we work right so they we work themselves if clubhouse was just like this young cool thing and let itself evolve into basically a conference app hey here's going to be a conference about architecture here's a conference about design here's a conference about ufos here's a conference app. Hey, here's going to be a conference about architecture. Here's a conference about design. Here's a conference about UFOs. Here's a conference about math, etc. You know, I like what Tim Dillon was doing on there. Yeah, right. He would have like sarcastic conversation.

Can women own Bitcoin? Like, that'd be great. Awesome. Funny. You're satirizing what everybody else is really talking about it. Great idea. If they did that, they literally came out and said, this is replacing Instagram. This is replacing Twitter. This is replacing Facebook. This is the new thing. Everything else will get shut down. This is the only way you make money. And when you do that, you set yourself up for failure because you don't even know the

identity of the app yet. Like I looked at it for a second. I was like, hot chicks can't be on here and they can't show off and they're not going to talk. It's not going to work. The technology is kind of impressive, talk it's not going to work the the technology is kind of impressive although it's not their technology they use sort of a standard off-the-shelf piece of tech from what i understand it kind of mixes the voices and stuff it works

really well i think the thing that they hit on is the same thing that you realized for a long time with podcasts is that there's a lot more available inventory of partial attention than there is full attention like how much break that down okay i don't watch that many shows but i listen to a lot of audio content because i have a lot of time where i'm working out or uh driving driving or building something or uh so you have a lot more passive time than you do like active attention time. When I was doing MTV shows, I called them laundry day shows.

Right. MTV didn't like that. But I knew what the people were doing when they were watching Guy Code. They wanted to show that they could pop in at any time in the episode. It could be 12 minutes in. It could be six minutes in.

It could be 23 minutes in. And would be fine right because there was no beginning there was no middle there was no end and they could fold their laundry pop in for a joke come back out continue folding their laundry everything was fine game of thrones we are locked in right you and i can handle one of those or two of those right you can't watch four hours of that in a day i mean you do but then that's it right you can't do four hours of that in a day. I mean, you do, but then that's it. Right. You can't do four of those shows a week where you're just locked in. Impossible. Right. So there's a lot more of this kind of snacking partial attention time that.

So I think that's what's really interested. And then the ability to sort of connect it with live. Like, I think the future of Clubhouse, one, everyone else is creating a competitor for it. So the question is whether it can be its own platform or just just a feature in every platform it's kind of shared audio experience yeah but i think it's a really great idea for like kind of like ufc fight companion kind of super bowl parties and stuff like that where you can create a custom one with your friends across the country and like all be on like one sort of audio channel like and it's pretty seamlessly and pretty easy to use that's what i thought it could be uh used as like you know on like one sort of audio channel. And it's pretty seamlessly and pretty easy to use.

That's what I thought it could be used as. Like you know how like Twitch, there are people who will stream something and then react to it while it's being streamed. And I was like, okay, if they can do this for a UFC fight and then like what Joe did with the Fight Companion. Now you have a platform where you can at least listen to your favorite commentators or even your favorite fighters talk about the fight as it's going on while you're watching it at home right i thought that was great if they could integrate that in any way even if they don't integrate it even they get the timing synced where it's happening live i think you're good that'll be great with sports and eventually these sports channels will offer deals to those people that have really popular clubhouse channels and yada yada yada doesn't matter that could be what it is but in its current form i was like no this can't be it dude yeah and the evangelizing you saw for

it was is i saw a lot of people that hadn't really built up big audiences on other channels and they go over to clubhouse and they're early adopters yeah and they suddenly get a hundred thousand followers in one week and then of course they're incentivized to say this is the truth this is the best thing ever because i kind of got a little bit of a lead on here. And it must be a good app because they're recognizing how great I am. Yeah, well, I mean. The other apps are good.

They have great taste. Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm appreciated here. This is awesome. Yeah, like comedians start like posting on TikTok and then like they'd get these huge followings on TikTok and the videos would do crazy numbers and then they're like, this is the app,

this is the truth, et cetera. It's like, well, is TikTok getting people to the show? Yeah. Are those numbers real? Yeah. Well, I went on TikTok. I did like one video. And it did big numbers.

I'm like, oh, TikTok's pretty cool. Then I did five more videos. And they got shit. I was like, stupid fucking platform. And you know what that is. Yeah. You get the initial bump. They know what they're doing.

Yeah. They see it's your first time. They want to from everyone else yes and so they kind of know that oh if we distribute that if we distribute virality kind of randomly and maybe kind of pump up the numbers we'll encourage people and they'll keep chasing it feels good when you do something that wasn't hard and it gets seen by hundreds of thousands if not millions of people you know add the wasn't hard part is so important yeah and then it's like if that happens once early in the first month of using it you're gonna kind of like come back oh yeah yeah yeah yeah that's a weird thing about like our business though is that we need the numbers to equate to something else yeah you know like we need for example if if there's advertising being sold on those numbers on TikTok and then you're seeing a paycheck based on that, you're like, I don't care if you fake it or not.

You're going to have to pay me. Yeah. And for me, it's like if people are coming out of the shows because of TikTok, I'm like, great. Whatever those numbers are, awesome. But if you give me a million and then we don't sell any tickets off it, that's a zero for me. And by the way, thank God we protected our national security and got rid of tiktok yeah i'm down to get rid of it still i know because we don't use it exactly you try to get rid of instagram if you get rid of youtube or instagram we got a fucking problem that yes we're also very self-serving in that way 100

that's like yeah i don't really use that one it seems like a younger people are doing it it could be an eventual existential threat to my media career oh that's what oh yeah let's ban it that's what you said i was just like this is for pedophiles why would you let a pedophile okay um going to the going to mars what do you see this as like what do you what first of all what are your personal opinions on like the celebrity ceo specifically musk i think it's better that we have celebrity ceos than celebrity celebrities like it's like saying what do you think about these green smoothies? Well, were we going to just have milkshakes instead? Then it's probably a health improvement,

even if eating nothing but green smoothies probably isn't good for you. You're saying you'd rather somebody be famous for doing something great than just be famous for the sake of being famous. So Musk over Kardashian. Well, I mean, is there any debate? Well, it depends what you need.

Do you need an electric car? Do you need to evacuate your testicles? Well, I think that's why people buy those electric cars. I'll send something to Mars. No, it's like, look, if we're going to... Tell the mic back over to you. One, the celebrity CEO is not new. We've had a lot of them.

I mean... Rockefeller, JP Morgan. I mean, those guys, the Robert Barons were probably all celebrities at the time. Well, look at some of the antics that like Tesla and... What's his name? Edison, sort of. Some of their sort of... Oh, Nikola.

Yeah. Oh, okay. The original Tesla. If you look at some of their sort of battlesola yeah okay the original tesla if you look at some of their sort of battles yeah it's it's kind of interesting i think edison electrocuted an elephant as like a public display to prove that uh he had the best tesla was a cuck i think that's how it was something like that so one none of this stuff is new yeah uh the idea of sort of a prominent CEO. I mean, Howard Hughes, I guess, was kind of –

Yeah. Was Elon Musk before Elon Musk, and it worked out well. Well, did it? No, he ended up peeing in jars. So look, it's like if we have – Hold on. I want to make this so you can – There we go.

Okay. Okay. So go and we're back. So in a nutshell, famous smart people probably better than famous dumb people. I'm cool with that. As a general thing. I wasn't asking more of like from an ethical standard. I meant as a tool for the business. Is it a useful tool or are you putting too much liability on the company on your actions as a person? It's both, right?

Like if you look at – I was having a debate with one of my business partners that we also share some investment initiatives with. Yeah, Adam. And we were talking about sort of investing in Tesla versus amazon at the beginning of the pandemic yeah and he was sort of following a lot of that kind of kathy woods uh sort of mentality and was really bullish on tesla and i'm like i really respect what they've done i think what they've done is incredible but i find that i feel safer with my money with someone like bezos it seems more methodical a little bit more measured i I think Elon Musk is a singular brilliant genius. But with any genius, there's no such thing as a bulletproof genius

that hits to all fields. He's not like a five tool player. He's asymmetrically talented in this sort of area. But he's still going to be a flawed individual as anyone else. And when so much of the corporate identity is tied up to him, and so much of the corporate identity is tied up to him and so much of the stock price is tied to retail investors are sort of evangelizing for a truly great person but perhaps not really seeing that there is no such thing as an individual uh entity in business it's all teamwork it's all collaboration there's thousands of employees there's thousands of engineers all working together and he's a fantastic leader yeah but it is a it's it's something that would show up i think in the

the stock price that if like if he dies if something happens to him an accident over yeah that is so interesting and yeah that's what it's not well diversified in terms of its leadership yeah that's what i was trying to get at with the question, right? Is when you evangelize a CEO, you can probably take the company higher than if you really promote or exalt the company itself, right? Because we can look at one person as almost, for lack of a better word, a god, right? But we don't really look at companies like that. We think they're really cool, but we're not going, oh my god god you have superhuman powers and superhuman powers can take you up there but they can also take you way down the second kanye leaves yeezy i don't

know if it has any value right right because we're really investing in con what about steve jobs so so here's a perfect example jobs right like jobs was this person that like kind of became a superhero late in his career earlier in his career they bounce his ass out of the company right like i feel like we almost have revisionist history with jobs because he wasn't initially when we i mean i had one of those first uh what i think i was a macintosh i had one of them as a kid right and like i never was like oh steve jobs is the man right i just thought that the company was really cool. Macintosh, the Apple, the thing was a little bitten out of. It was cool.

The branding was great. So I guess what I'm wondering, you could even see it with Dave Portnoy, right? The company spend, Portnoy's porn comes out, spend dips 5% on the stock market. I think it was 5% or 10% or something like that, right, Dov? Something like that? So when you are tied to the stock price, when the personality and the actions of that person are tied to the stock price, there's immense pressure to live life a certain way and make all those decisions because your personal decisions can affect the company. As brilliant as Jeff Bezos is, I don't know if the average person is going,

Jeff Bezos is smarter than Elon. Do you think the average person thinks that bezos is smarter than elon or is he like no he just figured out how to put things in boxes good i think the average person confuses company leadership with the idea of invention uh people think that elon invented things when really he's leading a complex team through a scientific and engineering process to make innovation at scale in these new markets yeah and that's sorry that's leadership vision and coordination not like i figured out the special formula of mixing this with this to be fair to elon he is also capable as an engineer right Right. Right? Whereas Bezos is not an engineer, so he's not going to be working on the rockets for Blue Horizon.

Right. He'll be an amazing leader and get the people who will build those rockets and know how to manage them and get the most out of them. But when push comes to shove, from what I've read, is sometimes Elon will get in there, get down with the nitty-gritty because that is his background right but they're also they're i think what they're really getting rewarded for is their ability to play this complex chess game of deploying capital and resources towards non-linear processes that are unpredictable right and that's what sort of research example of a non-linear process that's unpredictable uh the development of like figuring out the best way to make an electric car if there aren't a lot of electric cars already and the previous ones were very unsatisfactory from a customer standpoint yep they have a bunch

of hypothesis that they're going to test yeah but no one's manufactured those at scale before so a linear process is it's like a recipe here's how to make chocolate chip cookies give me chocolate chips give me flour sugar boom right you know all you know all the variables it's just like you doing it and you're going to get better at it over time so non-linear is we know how they did it before that might not be the best way let's find a new way to create the recipe for this and i know how much capital that we need to deploy in order to do that. Right. I know the people that we need to hire, etc. Right. And when you have too many unknown variables, you have to kind of like make working hypothesis.

You can't predict it all. You have to kind of guess on this and then watch the results, track that, learn from that mistake, apply it to a different thing, try something else. And it's sort of experiment and advance. and advance um so i think that's what's really good about them is like i don't think they have like this perfect roadmap from when they started amazon or tesla and this is where we're going what they had to sort of see was to learn on the fly keep deploying capital keep impressing investors to keep more capital coming in and then keep sort of managing that relative to the increasing amount of competition they have on all fronts. Both of these companies have taken on all comers. I mean, remember that company like Jet or something like that?

It was like, we're going to compete with Amazon and then nothing. Or it's like now there's like every car company says we're going to make electric cars and stuff like that. So I think it's not the genius of sort of like, I figured out this product. I'm an inventor. And then I translate into a entrepreneur. Yeah. I think it's really this game of strategically seeing the whole field and industry and deploying

resources appropriately. But the stock price goes up when we think he's a great inventor. Yeah. Like literally, we're at least three of the four of us in this room, meaning everyone except you, has invested in Tesla because we think Elon's the best inventor. Not because he's good at, what is it, nonlinear capital deployment.

You know what I'm saying? I've invested 80. If we're being honest, I'm like, that motherfucker just made an electric car really good. He's probably gonna make a spaceship be even better. He's gonna go to Mars.

Okay, take a few thousand dollars, Elon. That's literally my thinking with Tesla. I invested in Tesla even though I thought it was overpriced simply because i had fomo and so many of my close friends were heavily invested in tesla yeah and i wouldn't feel comfortable with them being significantly wealthier than me yeah yeah yeah i feel you that's the only reason why i have crypto yeah it's like it's fucking akash it's the fomo so much money when it all goes to the bottom the The FOMO investment strategy. Yeah.

One of my close friends that's invested in some of my real estate projects, he invests in all of our friends from colleges, startups, strictly because he just couldn't live with himself if one of his friends, like he has blue right the fuck past him. I'd rather lose $100,000 than be poor than my boyfriend. Absolutely. Because it makes it awkward. It really does.

It makes it awkward. You know what's not awkward? When they're poorer than me. Not awkward at all. Or if we're all poor together, that's great. That's how we started. Best time of our life. It's like the three musketeers.

All for one, one for all. Yeah, all at the bottom. Okay, fair enough. So for one, one for all. Yeah. All at the bottom. Okay. Fair enough. So it does make it, so it is a little trickier and maybe Elon is misunderstood, but he understands that him being misunderstood is advantageous. Yeah. I think the thing that's really interesting is what he kind of is doing jokingly with

like Dogecoin and tweeting about it and just like driving these masses. What is his thing with Dogecoin? First of all, are you familiar with Dogecoin and what it is? I took an edible one night. I saw some really cute doggy memes. I'm kind of partial to animal videos and memes in general. And so I went on Robinhood and I think I bought like maybe like two to three grand. No, like just kind of like...

Dabbled. Yeah, I bought it like just under one cent uh a coin okay and then i immediately texted my buddy norbert shout out to norbert um and it's like hey i bought some dogecoin you want in he's like fuck and so of course he has to buy some because again doesn't want anyone to get ahead of him yeah and it sort of went up to like four cents we hedged our bet sold off like our initial sort of uh stake and then sort of went up to like four cents. We hedged our bet, sold off like our initial sort of a stake and then sort of watching. Now it's like at 40 cents. Yeah.

Stuff like that. But my thought was just like I was looking at it was trending on Twitter for like days and days in a row. Yeah. And when I look at like if you were to spend money, you know, you'll see like, oh, this new movie without remorse starring Michael B. Jordan is like, you know, the promoted trending thing on Twitter. Yeah. I'm like, that's probably really expensive i don't know exactly how much it costs to put yourself on the trending page for a media campaign yeah but it's it's got to be

probably low six figures high five figures at the very least assume it is sure so if dogecoin was getting that kind of media value organically every day regardless of what you think of the asset i know something about sort of media pricing and exposure and i'm like they're organically generating a lot of views so if i'm buying that at one sense and they're consistently getting this much view okay i'm only investing in that sort of phenomena not in any fundamental so let's digest it right so so basically you're saying if it wasn't Dogecoin, if it was an advertising for underwear or something like that, and they were going to yield like 1% return on the trending, not trending, on their advertisements, right? Or let's say that 5% of the people that saw their advertisement up on Twitter were going to go buy the underwear.

You can apply the same thing to Dogecoin trending organically. Right. You can be a viable business with just one advantage and if you have like three or four that stack and play well with each other you can be a juggernaut yeah so if somebody and this is why sort of like influencer created products are kind of interesting yeah that if they speak to the audience demographic of that influencer and they're cost neutral and that person has unlimited inventory to publicize it to a pretty good sized audience, they're going to have a competitive advantage. Now they might not be able to scale and they might be limited at like a $300,000 a year in sales kind of company, but they have an advantage from zero to something.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. So back to Do to doge what is do you understand the technology behind it my understanding is like this old blockchain like beta yeah and it doesn't seem like from i am by no means a blockchain sorry bitcoin beta version yeah i am not a sort of blockchain expert by any sort of means from what i understand that what's really nice about bitcoin as a cryptocurrency is that there is actual real scarcity with dogecoin it just seems like it's actually uh uncapped meaning that you could always produce more yeah so what we're seeing is surges based on popularity and novelty and it kind of makes sense if that if you're going to have something uh like a cryptocurrency you might as well make

it cute and fun and meme memeable yeah and like i don't think it'll ever become this like dominant thing obviously but like cuteness gets a long ways yeah it does okay what do you think musk's curiosity with it is i think he thinks it's funny i think it you don't think he's fucking with anybody you don't think this is like a fuck you to the sec i think it's all tied into that general sort of sense of humor uh i mean he's he's like a nerd with clout so it's like what would you do this is the kind of jokes that they would make right like it would be like making linux jokes or something like yeah i think it makes sense i think it checks out with like the general sort of like persona i just wonder if there was like a

greater cause here that he was trying to do i feel like he's flexing it could be a flex right it's like yo if i just tweet about something anything i can create millionaires it's you know what you want to talk about like the greatest creation of wealth in history? That's what's happening right now with crypto, isn't it? I don't know in history. I mean, I bet you oil and those things made a lot of wealth. In this short amount of time? To this many people?

I mean, oil and that kind of stuff. Yeah, I guess it could be. Yeah, we're talking about a handful of people were able to like collect money on oil yeah we're talking about the average person i have like comics like road dog comics that i'll see tweeting and they're like yeah but dogecoin was at like 0.4 of a cent now it's up to 40 i made more money than i have in the last 10 years well that might be more saying about how much money you're making under your day job comedy Comedy is not that lucrative business for money. Yeah.

I think it is a vehicle for upward mobility. I think the question is, though, is how big the bet was. Like, it's not hard to predict these things. It's hard to commit to them. Yeah. Like, it wasn't hard for me to buy Dogecoin at sub one cents, but it was hard for me to spend more than two or three thousand dollars on it, which I clearly should right yeah so and then i still hedged it yeah so i'm not ever impressed by i'm never impressed by people that have the foresight to see these things coming i think

a lot of people sort of see them and they're not that hidden the question is do you actually have the foresight and the balls and the discipline to go big on the things that you should yeah but having an understanding of what those things are is always difficult especially in like this crypto space yeah what is your feeling on crypto first of all how invested are you uh i try what percentage would you say uh in the pandemic i moved about probably like 15 to 20 percent of my net worth into crypto really and that's not so much me being bullish on crypto it's me sort of anticipating inflation I moved about probably like 15 to 20% of my net worth into crypto. Really? And that's not so much me being bullish on crypto. It's me sort of anticipating inflation relative to the increase in money supply.

Yeah. So it's a slight hedge in that. It's not a perfect hedge against that. You should do a whole bunch of things. So I saw it in my industry. I'm doing a lot of real estate and residential construction. Could you break that down, by the way, how you're hedging against the inflation? Okay. So I'll tell you what I saw first.

Yeah. So I'm building houses and building hotels. I'm buying building materials. Yeah. I saw during the pandemic. Timber, right? Lumber went up 230%. Yeah.

And then because lumber becomes more scarce, people start buying more steel. Steel becomes more expensive. And so I'm seeing prices go up and then i'm wondering is this a temporary price surge due to reduced production because of the pandemic and how much of that price will come back down as we're producing more money and these companies start to anticipate inflation and so yeah if my cost of goods is going up 200%, I want something to keep my sort of cash that could be going up as well. And if houses suddenly become more expensive, that's a major point of consumption for most Americans. So that could be an early indicator of inflation.

So for me, it's much more of a hedge against inflation. So I'm about 30% real estate, about 30% stocks, about 20% crypto. And then the rest is sort of real long shots in startups. So what do you keep in cash? Just enough for like six to 12 months of expenditures if everything shut down and I still didn't pay employees. Yeah, I'm such a baboon when it comes to money. I know. It's just like sitting in a PayPal account from your YouTube. If there was a pool that I could empty and just put the money in, it'd be more like a jacuzzi.

But if there was a jacuzzi I could put my money in, I'd probably do that. And I understand it's bad. I'm trying to like break this psyche. But the idea of putting a super significant amount of my money in like crypto or something. Like I could put a significant amount of my money in Amazon, in Apple, in Microsoft. Why don't you do that? I'd put a little bit. I'm starting to dabble.

I'm starting to get there a little bit more. But always in the back of my mind, I'm like, but what if we need to you know build a new studio or what if we want to buy a house there's a good deal for a house in my mind i feel like for some reason i just can't get that money out even though i can sell the stocks not like bezos gonna say i can't it's so funny how much swagger and confidence you have in some venues and then absolutely i know void of it and others a hundred percent yeah yeah and i think that's actually like kind of consistent with just about everybody it's like there's no smart people and there's no idiots it's like oh i mean there's that dumbness is a real thing but every smart person you know you

know one way that they're actually kind of a moron yeah right like oh no yeah and every every genius i know is also just like incomplete completely incompetent in something else which is why i laugh when any of my friends say well you know i try to do things with logic and reason i'm like not everything yeah i guarantee it's not everything it's some things yeah but no we're all very asymmetrical in that sense yeah i gotta get better yeah i gotta get better at that it makes more sense yeah yeah go pee we'll take a break and i'll come back and we're back okay uh melinda gates is single uh open her up or what i mean sure why not she seems like a nice lady i actually applied for one of their scholarships for like the bill and melinda gates foundation i think college was a pretty long time ago but i think i got some

money so you know really i'm a shill there you go just just they were helping you know bright young minorities get ahead in life what do you think happened there do you think something bad is going to come out and she's distancing herself or do you think it's just 27 years or whatever the fuck they've been together for and it was just time they have a good they had a good run they've done a lot of good in the world i know you guys like to make fun of bill gates yeah but it's like look they like saved a lot of lives with hilarious fun of bill gates too yeah you didn't make fun of him you had an interesting take you were like he's trying

to saint himself i think if you spent your whole life making billions of dollars through being uh sort of data driven yeah and crunching the numbers on which sort of probabilities are going to yield the greatest return yeah and then you turn towards philanthropy and you approach it with the same ruthless pragmatism and rational way of thinking, you're going to get this very cold robotic types of philanthropy that has done a lot of good, but isn't warmly received by a lot of people. Okay, so let's just back that up. So usually philanthropy is, let's build a museum.

Right. Let's build a school for girls. These are all very heartwarming things. It's often led with imagery of the little child with the cleft palate. I mean, one of the charities I've always donated the most is like the Operation Smile because it's like if they fix someone's face, it's like it's not really saving their life. But you just it's so tangible how one operation is going to make one person's life a lot better. And it just feels like a very real thing. Yes, yes, yes. You can connect with it on every sort of empathetic level. Yes. It just

makes sense logically. Yeah. Philanthropy is emotional. Right. And you take a person like Bill Gates, who I don't know him personally, but I think it's fair to say he might be on the spectrum a little bit, might not have tons of emotions, at least when it comes to business. So you take that i think it started with the question of where can we save the most lives per dollar yeah okay so let's look at the best possible way right how do we save the most lives per dollar i remember us having a conversation where initially he was like we're gonna fix aids right and then he was like too much money right not enough lives right so was like the, that was the right bet

because it kills a lot of people. Yeah. And mosquito nets are not super expensive. Like there was lots of ways they could kind of do it. They could reduce mosquito habitat. Yeah.

They could provide netting. Yeah. Clean water is another way. So many people suffer from a lack of clean water. Yeah. That's a great meme. The water filtration.

Did you see that meme? The structure. Right. Did you see the meme with him? Oh, with him drinking the poop water. We took shit into water. And then the next page is his wife leaving so those things are really good things yes the world is better because he's doing those things but it i think he was sort of surprised that he wasn't more embraced as like this hero savior yeah people don't want the

sabermetrics of do-goodism. They want the heroic thing. They don't actually want a reduction in crime. They want Batman. He's the James Harden of philanthropists. He's the Tim Duncan. No, because Tim Duncan was beloved and appreciated for what he did. James Harden is, without a doubt, the best offensive basketball player we've seen maybe in history he puts up the triple doubles he has the amazing numbers etc but people are like

hey he doesn't play defense he's not doing a team he doesn't win championship he doesn't care and james harden's looking i'm like do you see what i do every single fucking day i change the game yeah like i got rid of malaria bill gates is like i got rid of malaria and worried you're worried about like vaccines and me putting microchips on Indian kids? Yeah, I didn't get the microchip things. Like why would he do that? Like these – look, I think QAnon is the Da Vinci Code for people that can't read. Yeah.

So I think the Da Vinci Code – it was a fine book. It was very entertaining. I loved it. But I think it was one of the most important books in the last 20 years, not because of what the book is, because of what it sort of showed was coming. And you had Alex Jones on. Yes. Congrats. Your favorite. Yeah. And when I hear people say, well, 95% of what he says is true. 80. Yeah. Debatable. Yeah. But you'll hear that sort of sentiment yeah the same thing's true with the da vinci code yeah it can you can have a bunch of you can reference true things yeah in a

completely false narrative yeah and only only the dumbest least insightful most clueless people goes like well that's a real person that's a real person checks out the story is legit yeah it's kind of like um if i offered you a dessert and i said it's 95 ice cream yeah you're like i like ice cream yeah what's the other five percent that five percent matters a lot if it's cat piss kind of a no if it's just so you know it's a few additives to kind of keep the ice cream mixer from sticking a little soybean oil stuff like that no big deal that other five percent really matters so yeah yeah uh the bill gates conspiracies i didn't i didn't get them it's like oh he's gonna conspire to like ruin his entire legacy and all this stuff and lose all his money and go to jail yeah or what more money. After he's already giving it all away? Yeah.

Okay, yeah, that sounds like a motivational path that checks out. Yeah, I think the question for a lot of people was, why does he get to play God? Because he's richer than them. Yeah, yeah, I guess that's the answer. Oh, those people don't like capitalism now? Oh, those are the socialist complaints? Oh oh the q anon people don't like capitalism liberal cucks so pick a fucking lane yeah maybe the lane is to complain yeah

oh yeah shocking internet behavior yeah maybe the lane is to complain welcome to reddit reddit's actually reddit's a pretty smart part of the internet i love reddit and we had this conversation yesterday i think we really understood what reddit is yeah reddit is a lot of very uh smart people who are clever and wish that they did creative endeavors but for whatever reason maybe life presented itself in a weird way where they could not right and they really resonate with the underdog yeah and they literally built my career i remember my first clip that went viral was because of fucking reddit you know i'm here because of reddit right and uh but once you no longer become the underdog like once you become the hero or something like

that, the love is definitely different. There's a lot more criticism. And I think a lot of times that is a reflection of them going, Oh, I didn't get to do that. I was with him on the underdog journey cause I was also an underdog. Right. And yeah, so it is, it is really cool. It is like the place that I go for for information if i need to find something like i need to find a color of a car that i'm gonna get yeah i went to reddit and was able to find the guy who owned the car from the picture and dm him that doesn't exist on anything else all right what's this car are we really oh yeah not yet okay we're gonna go get it we're gonna go get it soon they view it on tiktok but

but you understand what i'm saying it's amazing the ability to do the research there it's amazing their ability to like um i don't even care about the meme culture as much but like to curate ideas and stuff too like there's interesting conversations going on on reddit there's a lot of really smart people and then they self-organize into disciplined communities that regulate themselves. Yes. The Wall Street Brett things was so fascinating because it was like people are like, wait, it was so interesting to see sort of the mainstream financial media try to understand it. And they're trying to separate both what's demonstrably like kind of idiot behavior in terms of some of the language and stuff like that like what was it we can be uh yeah it was they couldn't separate the silliness of the meme

culture with the intelligence of the operational strategy that they were doing as a collective billions of dollars to like how and i kind of feel like people had that that approach to barstool it's like yeah how can these these apes actually be like just dominating in that i remember when seeing that like uh when uh pardon my take sort of surpassed pardon the interruption yeah on the podcast charts i was like oh this is so internet this is so meta like yeah the parody is more popular than than the thing that is parody actual thing yeah and i think that's what i think is really uh fascinating about reddit is that a lot of people chipping in like they're one and two sort of clever insights yeah and also a lot of hours of research yes and get augmented by other people with similar interests hours of

research well what does entertainment do it just magnifies right right that's why memes are so exciting and so brilliant in a lot of ways is they can take a piece of information that's valuable and they can magnify it they can highlight it to everybody shared around the world because it's entertaining if i give you some dumb data point that's not going viral but if there's a dog there going to the moon but it also shows a chart of exponential growth for Dogecoin. Then all of a sudden you're like, oh, shit, maybe I need to get into Doge. You said earlier, the memes got you in.

I was also really high. Also the mushrooms. Memes and mushrooms. Deadly combination. But has a hundred times return on investment. So, yeah, so it's really brilliant. Like you have the insightful commentary on Reddit. So the people who are coming up with smart ideas. And then you have the entertaining folks on there as well who are amplifying those ideas right plus an inability to self-promote

so you know the reaction is genuine yeah i always think of like the good reddit communities as being like a bunch of people doing manual labor but they're kind of singing a fun song while they're doing it it kind of sounds like you're talking about slave hymns or whatever like that you have to be very careful right now talk about more like construction site stuff more my background stuff it's like you kind of figure out these little kind of figure out these little ways to make the slog of it all kind of entertaining yes yes now you you had an interesting take that i've uh definitely quoted you on on flare which was like what we're witnessing right now is the domino effect of the internet being a disruptor right and you're just seeing one

industry fall after another right i'm sure this happened with you in your industry it definitely happened with me in in my industry and can you elaborate on that a little bit well one that's not new every time we've had a new communication technology the printing press what happens after the printing press a little little trouble with uh uprising with the catholic church yeah and uh martin luther your boy martin luther when radio first happened you know what like the cbd of that time was goat testicles you ever hear about this guy i think it's like john brinkley or david brinkley john brinkley and he was like one of the first big radio moguls and he had a doctor from a degree that he bought not real and he started creating his version of blue chew which was he would

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had to be created to stop charlatans like him right right so what we see with the internet is not new when radio was new people immediately used it for snake oil. When the internet's new, people use it for selling internet stuff. And there's this quick emergence where the early adopters benefit from them. The mainstream looks at them and be like, well, this is irresponsible. And then they kind of put some gears on it. And then slowly all those things merge into normal. So I think we're at like the tail end of the disruptive part of what the internet's done

towards pretty much every business can you go through how it's disrupted a few industries just to give an example like wall street bets was a perfect example right but i mean the internet what is it it allows common people to come together and make decisions as one it's like a check for the balance of power right well i think it combined media that you watch i think at its most basic it combined uh the idle i'm trying to think how to say this i guess that it's most simple it turned television into something that's also searchable and interactive so it took like this sort of tendency for us to sit back and watch stuff with our free time sports stuff like that and then it turned into this interactive thing that can also drive purchasing and e-commerce

and stuff like this yeah the the sort of secondary effects is now i mean have you have you what is your sort of like average phone use per day like per hours do you get that kind of metric yeah it's a lot right yeah i would say between six to eight hours a day damn yeah right so so think about that six to eight hours and how often are you awake like 16 hours a day i usually sleep around like six hours a night yeah so it gets the majority of your waking attention yeah and you know you remove a few sort of perfunctory things like shitting eating all that kind of stuff yeah it's getting most of your time so i think that's that's

where you know there's never been anything that's been that disruptive in terms of it's consuming a pretty and you're not a person without options you're a person with options about what they consume you make enough money to be comfortable so you can choose what you want to do with your time yeah and you spend six to eight hours a day looking at this screen so i think that's the really i think it's important to acknowledge though that this screen encompasses many things that would divide up our time in the past. So like this screen is my newspaper. The window, not a cul-de-sac.

Exactly. It's my newspaper. It's my telephone. It's my letter writing. I guess people used to do that. It is my TV. It is my email. All these things are now done in one place. So of course our time is going to increase.

So if you look at my work day, if the average person was going to work for eight hours and they were like staring at their teeth at their computer screen for like, let's say five of those eight, right? Maybe I average about three more or like one to three more hours, like looking at my screen and the average person going to work. So I look at it,

it's like, it's not too crazy. Now I know that I'm bullshitting and a lot of it is on fucking instagram and twitter etc but say what sort of work is it is but it's like it's also just all right how's this how's this doing right how's this video doing i guess what i'm trying to say is like we look at our we look at like our phone timer go oh my god i'm just so distracted i'm not doing anything productive at all when it's like yeah you are just now everything is done through that one device right so that's the power of apple right there is that everything you're doing your office your work your correspondence your

entertainment it's all on infrastructure apple owns is that why they're and i want to get back to this disruption point you made because i don't think that we clarified that yet but is that why apple's getting into the car i think they just saw what i think tesla sort of proves that if that you because car companies before tesla were not great businesses it's not like people were rushing to put more money into car companies because basically it was a low margin thing and it's very expensive to fold and bend steel the majority of a car is steel that's folded bent and welded together yeah that's a low margin expensive business that takes a lot of capital to get it to the point where it's efficient

yeah i think what what sort of tesla showed is that one people are willing to spend more for something that's better and there was a lot of design disruption there was a lot of low-hanging design fruit that car companies had just neglected off of just tradition and doing things their own ways i remember i was on like a panel with i think it was like the head of design from ford and this was this was a while back when tesla was just getting started and people were asking him about electric he's like i just i just don't think electrics cars are real cars and he was so blinded by his own expertise and he wasn't wrong he's a very knowledgeable person about car design but he wasn't really watching where the

future was going yeah and that's why tesla very quickly had a stock price that was worth like the next 10 auto companies combined yeah and i think that's what apple saw is that sort of stock price and that ability to create you don't you don't think that they see valuable screen time yes within your car now it's another point to collect sort of data and and but also affinity with the other platforms but also think about it as we move towards self-driving all of a sudden you will have unbothered screen time in your car right do you want that to be on a tesla screen or do you want that to be on an apple screen that's the really interesting thing right so that's what i thought it was combined with one other thing and i'm curious about your take on this apple are let's say they're the masters of battery life. The biggest inhibitor to electric card use from the average consumer outside of price is battery life.

Well, I can't go visit my grandparents. I'm five hours away. I've got to stop two times on the way. If they're the best at battery life, then they can solve that problem. life and they can solve that problem plus they get to be part of this extra screen as we go into the era of driverless cars or self-driving cars don't they want to be yeah and it's also a thing like where if you own a apple laptop you're more likely to get an iphone because same type of interface yes compatibility yes and so if you have an apple laptop that is the majority of your work the rest of your work is done through your iphone and then getting an apple car that extends that sort of office to your commute kind of makes sense right it's like

all the same messaging you're going with seamlessly with your conversation through them all yep it kind of makes sense i mean i would probably get an apple car if they made one. I'm not like a huge car guy. I kind of look at them as like what's functional transportation. So if it was more seamless with the things I use a lot of, I would get it. But you don't drive to work every day for a half an hour. No. I don't drive to work every day for a half an hour, but I'll either Uber or I would take the subway back home. Yeah.

That's phone time for me. Yeah. Apple has my screen time. Now that the commute is going to be phone time, they have to. For the good of their business, I mean, I look at this no different than like the Fuji

Nokia thing. Have you heard about that story? When Fuji bought the 92 Olympics or something? They bought the rights for like the 92 Olympics and that was what shrunk the moat that enough for like fuji to become equal of equal standing to nokia this is back when they film cameras when i'm speaking to the millennials right now they have no fucking clue what i'm talking about but in other words they're like certain moments in history where you let someone approach your market share and without even seeing it you don't recognize that now that's

your biggest competitor and i think that Apple's super smart to get in there because if we're going to spend significant time in our cars and then we get super comfortable with this Tesla screen, if Tesla comes out with a phone, we're like, well, shit, I want my phone to be like my car screen. I'm in my car for an hour a day. Some people drive in an hour a day. Matter of fact, how many more people would be willing to drive

if, one, they don't even have to find parking. They could send the car home. Eventually, you'll just be willing to drive if one they don't even have to find parking they could send the car home eventually you'll just be able to send the car home right there won't be any parking drive me to work send it home come pick me up when i'm ready yeah i tend to think that that's farther away so this is how i look at like the self-driving car thing is walk down a street of sort of like a mixed income neighborhood yeah and look at all the cars and find the car that's the oldest and like what is the average age of those cars okay so even once we get to the point where there are new fully capable self-driving cars it'll be a ways beyond that point where we see

full adoption of them meaning that if we walk down the street of like the the airbnb you're staying out in florida we'll see cars that might be 15 years old right we'll see some uh early 2000s models like pickup trucks and stuff like that mixed in with some brand new cars so it's going to be a ways before there's actually fully saturated amount of these brand new self-driving cars so if you look at this example of your street even once we have the car available we'll still be seeing for the next 15 years cars that don't have that availability i'm going to give you a little bit of pushback uh every time you see a huge technological jump i feel like it expedites that transition so for example the flip phone to the smartphone right you could not be seen with a fucking flip

phone when everybody had a smartphone. It didn't have to be an Apple phone. Maybe it was an Android. Maybe it was a Blackberry or something like that. But you need to have a fucking smartphone. And I feel like if we go self-driving or if we go electric, whatever that transition is, once it becomes ubiquitous, if you had a 15-year-old car, you're going to find the cheapest fucking electric car and get on board because you're not going to do it.

What's the longest you've owned a phone, though, for? Great point. Yeah. Great point. The obsolescence of a phone is is a much higher thing yeah the i think the concept is true but i think the the the turnover rate of cars is slower than phones yeah absolutely i'm probably on a new phone like every eight months because i drop them and break them or yep yep no no that's great point the turnover on phone yeah i'm just i'm super curious i'm super curious about it man it's interesting when you look back in time and looked at how we predicted so incorrectly where we'd be technologically wise so one of my favorite things to do is to look at old articles on the future of fashion and they're asking people that are

experts in fashion and these kind of trends and textiles and all this stuff yeah and whenever they like you know you look at like the 1960s what will people be wearing in like the 2000s and it was all like spandex this shit yeah meanwhile we're still wearing denim like we still wear jeans and that's what i'm really curious but we do wear spandex well we wear all of it well here's what happens right jeans denim makes no sense as a fabric in today's thing we can make such high-tech space age fabrics that like wick away moisture that cool that have plenty of like ball like we can do all this sort of innovative stuff with fabrics but still jeans are the most dominant pant yeah but what's happened is it's not that we've replaced denim this antiquated

material we just slowly infect it with 10 spandex five percent lycra we make it a little stretchier we got stretchy jeans you know a little more a little more room and then that's the way i think technology really happens it's not quite as completely tabula rasa clear the decks total revolution it's this little infection and then that changes this other ripple yeah so i look at it in like furniture woodworking and design so for so long it used to be that the the signature of a talented woodworker was if you could make a board flat if you could make a board flat with like an axe and like something that looks like a shovel but sharper like you were really fucking good at what you do yeah all of a sudden we create machines that can do that effortlessly and the woodworker

is just like fuck and then what happens you know what happens flat boards become everywhere and then you know what like sort of interior designers go i don't want flat boards i want those old fashion like and then we have to invent fucking machines to make it look like they're fucking beaver chewed up wood you're describing jeans right yeah and so even as we technologically progress we go well i don't know if i like this new technology i mean like joggers are more comfortable yeah like it makes sense to always wear like stylish looking sweatpants yeah thank god that we've created a more forgiving aesthetic that allows us to wear these in public but at the same time you're kind of like this looks a little too a little too space age i gotta i gotta pull back and look a little more classic culture is

undefeated man it's like we've been wearing the same suits we've changed the material a little bit right we're wearing the same suit for the last 200 300 years probably. Yeah. When did the suit get invented? 200 years ago now. After powdered wigs died down. We could only have really one stiff, uncomfortable thing at a time. Yeah, yeah. So it's like the fact that like, I mean, I bet you look into Japanese culture where they're still wearing, you know, some of the same outfits today, but they've shifted the fabrics. Yeah. You know, the wooden clogs they're similar

but maybe it's a little bit more lightweight wood yeah maybe they're a little bit more comfortable there's certain things they're going to do to make shit a little bit better a little bit more easy for us to get along with today it's it's really interesting what sort of design jeans are around that's american fucking pants here's here's my sort of question and i don't know the answer to this but it's like do you think if you ask somebody will we be wearing jeans a thousand years from now most people i don't think so we'll probably come up with something new but if you break it down being like will we wear jeans a hundred years from now not all of us but like will they still be yes at least 30 of pants yes yeah 100 and then if they make it that long which will clearly have

way more advanced fiber technology. I mean, look at how fast our sort of tech files have gone in the last hundred years. Why wouldn't they make it another hundred? And then it's like, well, fuck, you can't,

we can't break up with jeans. Invest in fucking jeans. So it's, uh, that's, that's how I tend to think about like, uh, self-driving cars and all this kind of stuff is we'll see it in like

it'll definitely be a part of society but a lot of times we were wrong about how completely and dominantly it takes over yeah and even with like the internet and back to that sort of point about the internet is just disrupted things yeah we've been seeing that with like with like television as we know what cable television is declining but what's happened in the pandemic is like it's not like it goes away and it dies yeah it just sort of merges and becomes this mesh of like stuff right so like what is hbo max now yeah like it's a tv channel that's still on some cable packages yeah it's also this like netflix alternative with really good content it's also a publishing house of like really well-made shows it's a bunch of things and it's in this awkward point of like coming together this is what it is it's uh chinese

immigrants come to america they open up a chinese restaurant americans try the food they're like this is too chinese right like what the fuck's going on here so then you have hbo max where it's like okay some of this is still on regular paid cable this is also streaming so now you have like the chinese food that's somewhat reflective of the chinese culture but also somewhat reflected of the american one right and youtube or instagram or whatever these things are is basically the chinese american food where if a chinese person tried it they'd be like i don't know what the fuck this is or pizza yeah pizza is not italian anymore it's american it is yeah you're welcome american so we're

watching the evolution sometimes it happens a little bit faster sometimes happens a little slower maybe elon is an amazing marketer and that's why we all think that electric cars are going to be a thing. I wonder what happens when like, I wonder what happens when these other car companies get involved. I don't know if it was you I was talking to, but it was somebody that said the competitive advantage that Tesla has is not necessarily the tech

because he's made the tech open source so everybody can use the tech, but the data in order to, was it you I was talking to about this? A little bit, yeah. So I think there's a few advantages that Tesla has. I think the most important one now is access to cheaper capital. So let's say – Wait, real quick, before we get into the money thing.

This is an AI thing. I don't know if it was you was talking about somebody they basically said like tesla every person that drives a tesla is feeding information back into that ai and that ai is is that computer learning is happening and is better navigating the streets so all these new electric cars that pop up aren't going to have as good self-driving because they don't have 20 years or 10 years how long has tesla been around now yeah about 10 10 years so they don't have 10 years of people driving so volkswagen's gonna have its first you know self-driving car you have one year of data good luck you might bump into some shit so what tesla's well situated is to have an advantage along with companies like google too because google's been doing a lot of stuff in this

space yeah yeah yeah so like i think one of the i've recently become more involved with ai startups so i'm now on the advisory board for two different ai companies yeah and what what i've learned and i am by no means an expert in this technology i'm just trying to get my head around it and being gonna be part of sort of the public face of helping them with some initiatives but what's interesting is it's not that like you create this brain and that's the genius it's not like the man's height is i created this frankenstein computer brain that's really smart it's not that like you create this brain and that's the genius. It's not like the man's height is I created this Frankenstein computer brain that's really smart. It's trial and error. What you're figuring out is the most efficient way to create software that can learn through machine learning.

Yeah. So it's creating the simplest thing that benefits over time with more data being added to it. It's how do we grow intelligence more than how do we create intelligence. It's really finding what's the efficient path with the least amount of undesirable outcomes to slowly grow as we add more data input into this device or piece of software. So in order for Volkswagen or Porsche

or one of these companies to have an efficient AI self-driving system, they need that data. And if they haven't been put through all these different situations that Tesla cars have over the last 10 years, they're not going to be as efficient in making the decision that needs to be made to save your life just yet, right? So maybe that's the huge advantage. And maybe that's why when all these other cars pop up onto the market, you're going to notice an even bigger bump for Tesla because once you try

the vw you're like dude i don't even trust it all right but think about it this way no i won't it's an advantage but you know what else is an advantage owning ways who owns ways google who owns all the mapping things and that's why like apple and google are always arguing about like whose map is default on your phone so apple has their own mapping thing which is getting information about people's driving past so it's like if you have your iphone and you're using your apple map app to like give yourself directions as you drive your very nice g-wagon congrats yeah rentals but whatever thank you thank you very much shout to 60 i appreciate you fam g-wagon g-wagon not the amg but it's all good they're getting data about where you're

finding traffic in miami they're getting they're getting data on your your routes to and from yeah you're sort of a very short commute so they're getting information too it's not as pure tesla's probably getting more per user but there's way more users there's way more iphones in existence that are getting used for traffic navigation than there are tesla cars yeah and then when you look at like what google has with google maps and ways they're getting a bunch of stuff as well so that's kind of like this sort of informational war and no one has like a clean singular advantage but they're all trying to do it in kind of different ways and that's what's sort of fun to watch is what's going to be more valuable in the end i have no idea is it going to

be having the complete data set from actually owning the data coming out of the car itself or is the mix of seeing how you behave in new york versus miami when you're using public transportation mixed in with uh vehicular transportation that might end up proving more advantageous yeah and that's what that's the beauty of ai is you have a system that can crunch all this data. And keep surfacing discoveries, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're working on AI to do kitchen renovations. Yeah. So that's one of the things we're doing with this startup called Skip.

And what's interesting is that this used to be a case where you had to hire an architect and then your architect has to produce all these drawings and then you have to go back and forth and they can't really show you what it's going to look like. It takes a lot of time to do these drawings and then you have to go back and forth and they can't really show you what it's going to look like it takes a lot of time to do these drawings so what we're doing now is if you want to renovate your house we bring in this laser scanner and we put it on a tripod and it just takes a perfect 360 degree laser scan photorealistic you can put it into a vr environment and you could actually like see your house exactly as it is scanned to a fraction of a millimeter yeah then most kitchen stuff cabinets appliances it's all off the shelf and there's 3d models of all those things

so we can use the ai not to just show you one kitchen design we can show you every possible configuration for the sinks in different places the stoves and that and then we can show you photorealistically what it looks like and because it's all tied in from real data we can do that then over time, we'll learn where sort of trends are and we'll automatically start curating the things that people like the most relative to their demographics. And we can take something that used to be labor intensive and make it better and better with each additional use. And what's exciting about these businesses is that if you can make them work in the short term, you're only going to

increase your advantage over the long term as the system becomes smarter and smarter and eventually there'll be ai comedy you're not immune from it no okay i love when you say stuff like this no way okay no way they've made so far this has already happened yeah they've made uh sort of software that can write paper you might replace the mexicans that are making the kitchens but you're not going to replace the comedians not going to happen so you think that machine learning will never be capable of understanding humor yes correct i think not only will it be a case it doesn't understand anything it doesn't understand anything. It doesn't understand.

Machine learning doesn't understand. They've done that experiment. What is it called? The Turing test? Yeah, it's equivalent to the Turing test. But it's called the something in the box. What is it called? Well, I don't think the question is whether it understands.

The question is whether it can replicate. I'm not saying the study that they made where they just... Does that person speak English? You're asking them questions. They have Chinese. They use Chinese characters and the person in the room had like responses to those Chinese characters, but they don't really understand Chinese in the room. They just know how to respond. So I don't think to answer your question, I don't think a computer will ever understand humor.

I just think it will know what is the right thing to say in that moment. Yes. And then the question is is does is understanding important i don't think so if if you make me laugh it doesn't matter whether you understand it's funny or not it's going to make me laugh right so understand i disagree the ability to make people laugh maybe i mean there's certain things they're just not formulaically funny like there's certain things you just cannot reproduce. Like, you can't make Chris Farley.

Like, there's no AI that can be Chris Farley. There's no AI that can just say things funny, can just be funny, exude funny. I bet you AI could write, like, one-liner jokes. Like, oh, you didn't see that coming? Here's, like, a bait and switch. But I don't think that they can be funny. See, I think the thing that you're thinking that it can't predict new things. Like Chris Farley was a new thing.

Sure, he had references and stuff like that. There's a little bit of like Belushi in him. There's a few other things. But it was his own version that was perfect for that particular moment in time. So what AI can't do is sort of predict what people will like because it's pulling from previous information. But what it can do is it can iterate infinitely, whereas an individual can only iterate within a few concepts of time.

What I would say is, yes, 100% right, but what Farley did, let's say it was unique or not unique, it was personality driven. Right. And I don't think AI will have enough personality to be funny off of personality. We've all had friends like our boy Mike. Right. Mike is funny.

Mike from Modern Builds. Mike from Modern Builds. Shout out to Mike from Modern Builds. We love Mike. Tippy toe Mike. And Mike is so funny, but Mike might not say a joke that's funny. He will just exist as funny. He will just be funny

how do you replicate that with ai you cannot so you can create that with ai you can do it through brute force now the question would be whether or not ai could ever make a popular comedian ai could simulate comedy but they might have to simulate so many versions to get it right that that creates an unwieldy burden that someone would have to curate to figure out what's actually going to pop so i think it's possible in the creation i'm not sure that that creation aspect because they could because an ai can create things simultaneously at the same time yeah so with like the kitchen design as as an architect and designer i can only do one design at a time the software can do every design at the same time yeah now the question is, too many designs is actually not useful to the consumer.

So it could write every single possible joke, but what it might not be able to do is then surface the most probable ones. So it's not the generative things that are impossible. Maybe it's like it generates so much that it creates this infinite mess that can't be navigated to actually surface the things that are going to work to an audience.

Sure. So it could generate like a thousand different possibilities and you have to work through a thousand different ones to find the one and it wouldn't know which one it is because it doesn't feel. And it doesn't understand what we feel. So much of comedy is like this feeling that we have that we know is wrong but is relatable. And how does an AI develop a feeling that they know is right or they don't understand right or wrong and they don't understand relatability they just develop the different kitchen it would be if they could make a audience ai that then interfaces with the comedian ai

and if they studied enough audience members and been like oh these people laugh at this and they could create enough thing where then that audience could do an infinite number of sets then you have accelerated evolution and that's where you're really in trouble i think that that could create a woke comedian like that could create like a like a williamsburg like a comic book store comedian like i'm going to tell that's really what that type of comedy is i think that's why i hate it so much is that i'm just going to tell people the thing that they want to hear and i'm going to be clever about it instead of telling people the thing that they feel that they might not even want to feel but we all feel and we relate to and then making that fun why does that bother you so much though like i've heard you sort of talk

it just annoys you but you're not like an unprogressive person you're like a kind and thoughtful person to the people that are sort of in your life but you're so offended in a visceral way i'm not progressive in my comedy yeah i don't believe in progress is it the performative part that just kind of irks you yeah it's mixing that in with something that's supposed to be for this other thing yeah you're taking advantage of it it's kind of like uh like food is art like kind of a thing like oh here's this delicious sea foam yeah it's like though because i'm so devoid from like making food i'm like so removed from it that i can appreciate that like i can watch what is that a restaurant in chicago that they do yeah yeah like most i imagine foodies would look at that and be

like why are you making bubbles out of food like get over it but i'm such a chimp i'm just like bubble food it floats cool let's go babe so yeah yeah if i just love comedy and i love the authenticity and comedy and obviously all the people that i care about within comedy are super authentic and i try to be authentic so when i see it done in a fraudulent way i just don't relate to it as much yeah but you're you're it's hack architecture yeah that's that's what it's like somebody making this architecture that you know is like super hack and you probably look at you like this is easy this is hack i know what you're fucking doing here yeah imagine they presented it as if it was the most exquisite beautiful art you've ever seen

your life so for me the thing that i'm i think sustainability is really important but the thing that would always irk me is when people be like i put solar panels on this house and it's now sustainable and it's like look that's a good thing yeah it's a great thing solar panels are awesome technology it's really cool to own your energy source yeah the way to like take money that was going to a utility bill and increase the value of your home and you actually own your own means of production that's awesome but it's like it's so additive it's not like artistic it's not necessarily integrated it's not thoughtful it's just like it's additive brownie points in the sort of sustainability arena and it's not necessarily good integrated design

so as a design as a designer you're like i don't like the aesthetic yeah but as someone who cares about the environment you're like all right that's cool you're trying to do something yeah it's it's easy to add something that's like a badge of goodness right it's virtue signaling is that your issue it's the same thing with like yeah it's the same thing with like uh and i think virtue is actually a good thing yeah but the signal part the signal part could actually be signaling real virtue yeah i don't have a problem with virtue signaling i have a problem with disproportionate signaling and a small amount of virtue if the virtue is huge and the signal's small yeah good job if the signal's fucking huge and the virtue is like just slightly above the bare minimum yeah yeah you're not doing much you're

taking the easy way out for the highest reward right and that is my issue with that type of comedy we both know it's funny not you and i i'm saying like comedians we all know it's funny if you're a funny person you know it's funny if you're not a funny person you probably know it's funny. Not you and I. I'm saying like comedians. We all know it's funny. If you're a funny person, you know it's funny. If you're not a funny person, you probably know it's funny. We all know the easiest way out. We all know what will succeed. You know, if I'm opening up a restaurant, I know the thing that's going to sell. But if I'm going to try to push it, if I'm going to try to get you to eat a parsnip,

and I'm going to put extra love and care into that fucking parsnip and make it so good, actually order a parts a parsnip i go to that chef i'm like bro i can't believe you made me order a vegetable like it was a steak you are nice with it but the guy who's just like here's fuck it what is it what is the most common thing right now here's uh duck fat french fries or something like that like you're not being unique right with your duck fat french fries you're playing the hits you're playing the hits yeah you're karaoke exactly there you go um you had a hot take about sea spiracy that i refused to let you tell me you said that there were some flaws in sea we're obviously talking about the netflix uh documentary about how we got to stop eating fish um ben is half japanese so he's mostly made out of fish and uh you thought that the documentary had a lot of good things because you're someone

who cares about sustainability but you thought there were some holes so it's so funny that uh documentaries have i think they've taken on almost too much importance for sort of information gathering because uh what i really like about documentaries is that you get a very distinct point of view but they're presented as if it is the way it is right and i and i i think that's the thing it's not to like look at uh with trepidation at documentaries it's just to consider the way they were made and what i love about documentaries is the handcrafted approach clearly that was the work of years and years about a very passionate diligent hard-working person and he should be celebrated for that and i think

it's a fantastic piece of content that does way more good than it does harm but but there's limitations because it's when you're produced from a singular vision you don't have the diversity of sort of fact checking that you do with more sort of traditional and mainstream so what did he get wrong i'd also like to say that we went out to a delicious sushi restaurant last night uchi out here in miami is amazing what did he get wrong he said that like sustainable fishing is impossible and i could i would totally be fine if he switched that to like it's going to be really really hard and we should be really skeptical about anyone making claims about the sustainability of a particular phishing initiative. Yeah.

But I think it's often overstatement is a part of deception that I think is particularly damaging. Yeah. Saying that something is impossible is such an arrogant claim. How do you know? Yeah. Who the fuck are you? There's so many things that we thought were impossible that later were proved not to be. Just because you can't figure out how to do it doesn't mean it's impossible.

It's like saying that consumers will never really want electric cars. And it looked that way. It did look highly probable. And people doing like deep research into consumer trends 20 years ago it would be fair for them to come to that very reasonable conclusion yeah that it's unlikely that electric cars will ever be as desirable if not more desirable than gas cars except for like the most hardcore environmental nuts that that improbability has happened and when you say if you said that was impossible you're 100 wrong if you said it was improbable you're mostly when you say if you said that was impossible you're 100% wrong if you

said it was improbable you're mostly right yeah so i have a big problem with those kind of overstatements if you want to see a really good fact checking uh shout out to my buddy uh jack and finn harry's they're these twins they do really they're actually what greta thunberg should be yeah um they're environmental activists they're kind of the good ones they actually do the work she's the jake paul with a good cause yeah yeah she's jake paul of of environmentalism yeah and it's like it's i think she's a net positive overall yeah let me explain why this is so good because uh like is she is jake the best No. Is he eating up all the oxygen in boxing, taking it away from people that are actually put way more years into the craft?

Is that his fault? No. Not at all. Matter of fact, he's bringing way more awareness to the sport of boxing. And there's a bunch of boxers that are going to make a lot of money just because new eyeballs are on boxing. Right. Now, Greta doesn't know shit about the environment compared to these people who have

dedicated their lives to it she's no fucking scientist right she's a 14 year old swedish girl who might have a little bit of uh tism it's not for me to say but it will be for me to say i will say it yeah she's got a little bit of tism little tism she got a little tis yeah she's tised i think she's a i think she's a net positive i think's done great things. I think it's important to mobilize that generation. And I think the fundamental idea that like old people are mortgaging her future is not invalid. But what bothers me is that you see people that have spent 30 years sort of working. It's the same way you've seen boxers that are actually really good at their craft.

Yeah. And, you know, maybe it's their own fault for not being better at self-promotion yes that's but it's not unalarming to see someone that's kind of new to a space sort of rise to some sort of prominence and it's not a complete zero-sum game like it's not as simple as like this person gets attention so that this person can't get attention that's a little bit of a fallacy yeah but i think there are there is some resentment by some researchers I know in that community it's like man I've been really trying to get my stuff published

I've been working on this for a really long time there's a lot of people that have really put in the work the Bill McKibbins, the Michael McDonough and like all these people that have actually done a lifetime of book writing and research and gone to conferences where there's

like 30 people and still gave like a good performance and i think it can be a little bit disheartening for them to see a uh a child rise ahead but at the same time like she she created it wasn't handed to her yeah and Everything's sort of a combination to a certain degree of luck, opportunism, strategy, skill, all those things. Also, just check your ego. If you guys have joint interests, just because you're not the one shouting it out to the world and getting

the credit for it doesn't mean it's not getting done. This is where people got to see what they really want. Do they want change in the world? Do they want people to care about the environment or do they want to be famous because they love the environment? Do you want to be a celebrity or do you want to make change right but back to conspiracy so check out uh jack and finn harry's they've done some sort of things where they sort of like sort of went through and sort of fact checked it uh they have an organization called earth rise which is trying really hard it's sort of a young sort of contemporary

media company that's trying to sort of make these issues sort of known right and i think that's what's really good about our current media landscape is that somebody throw something out there yeah and it's not about saying it's debunking it or attacking it yeah it's all augmenting it if you sort of even point out hey i think you were a little wrong on this yeah i think this part was really good yep and it doesn't have to be this sort of flame war of tearing down or standing for something uncritically. It can just be like kind of a little wrong on the fishing thing. So the sea spirit thing is interesting because one of the claims is we've got to stop eating fish. And if we don't stop eating fish, there's going to be no fish left. And if there's no fish left, we're going to ruin our oceans.

If we ruin our oceans, there's no more oxygen. We all die. This is the environmentalist approach towards everything is 50 years we're all dead no matter what we do uh but one thing i really liked about it and the way they got us into it which i think was brilliant is uh they gave us our plastic straws back right and i really think that that was a strategic move right they basically said in the documentary the guy says that plastic straws make up 0.003 percent of pollution. All the ocean pollution is really from these fishing vessels, these commercial fishing vessels that have these huge nets. They just leave the nets in the water.

There's all this, what is it called, byproduct or something like that, by waste or whatever it is. They're just leaving this stuff all over the ocean. It's really fucking up coral reefs. And when I saw that, I was like, yeah, it's on the fishermen. It's not on me. I get my straws back. My life is now fixed.

Okay. Holes. No, I think that's actually what it pointed out was we look for things that hit us emotionally and that tie into a intellectual understanding of a problem, but not necessarily the problem at the appropriate scale. Yeah. So we saw that one video of like a straw stuck in a turtle's nose. And I felt really bad for that turtle. And it did make me feel a very empathetic way and be like,

well, if I would have saw that turtle right there, I definitely wouldn't have used the straw. I would have used the shitty paper one. But the problem is, is that's not really actually any, that turtle as noble as it is and as much as we would like to save it isn't necessarily indication of environmental problems at scale it's still an indicator it's not fake it's just not necessarily it's not showing the whole story of where we're actually polluting yes so plastics in general are a really big problem

yeah it's this thing that we that we produce a lot of straws are a very small part of the plastics we do the styrofoam from all these amazon packaging is way more problematic than that plastic bags all these things so it's funny i've been doing a lot of sort of experimental recycling projects yeah and it sort of sounds nice like oh recycling stuff is good for an environment it's actually like it's not accomplishing that much but it also doesn't make it unimportant not to do yeah like it's not that like trying to save straws is a bad thing we should we shouldn't use straws but it's not the thing that we should be focused on the most so if somebody like volunteer

is like hey i don't want to use straws great but if you're getting to the point where you're then indicting someone else for using something that's actually a pretty small part of the problem meanwhile you have like you know eight cubic yards of styrofoam sitting at your house from amazon packages that you ordered yeah you're not really doing any good yeah so it's really just like putting when a problem's at scale you should attack the biggest scale of the problem first not focusing on the detail that has the heart-wrenching turtle video attached to it well i thought that's what the the documentary exposed right right is like we can't attack the problem because there are forces that be that don't want us to attack if the problem is commercial fishing and there's a lot of money behind commercial

fishing that money is going to point us in the direction of straws because straws don't affect commercial fishing's bottom line at all so i i'm in a weird position in the sort of sustainable community like i care a lot about it i think it's one of the most important things we can do but i'm also not too worried about it because i think collectively humanity is kind of like how most of us were in college that we kind of procrastinate and procrastinate but we mostly get it done at the last minute and so i don't want to fall into that kind of thing like fishing will be fine we'll figure it out because we might not and we'll probably lose some species that we really like eating right now and eventually they'll they will lose something we probably won't lose everything and what happens is is fishing uh

will continue to or fish supplies will continue to be diminished yeah it'll become more and more expensive at sushi restaurants like we went to last night and then more it'll be more economically viable for people to invest in figuring out the next generation of fish farming so it's like right now we farm salmon it's not great salmon yeah but if there was more capital going into it because the price of salmon is better it's that would be better that being said there's going to be other downsides to that you know what is sustainability and environmentalism it's not this thing that can ever be solved it's like the marvel cinematic universe you'll beat thanos there'll be a new bad guy because there has to be more content and we have to keep watching and we have to keep doing it

and it's exactly why i really like this cause as something to sort of tie it's not like my main focus in my career but it's something i always keep touching back into and seeing if i can do a little bit of progress in this arena because we'll never solve it and that shouldn't be the frustrating thing that should be the exciting thing it's a job for life because imagine if you like dedicated your life to like a career and just as you were starting to get good somebody else solved it and you're just like well fuck i always say this about uh i always say this to whitney i'm like the reason that you want to save animals is because you'll never finish doing it yeah for the rest of your life you will have something to do you'll just make more animals from all those animals that

you saved exactly yeah and there's gonna be another animal that's about to go extinct and you want to go save that always be another hair color too that's true yeah and we're ready for it whitney yeah bring it red i think she's gotta go full red i want to see full red okay all right guys we're gonna take a break because you gotta eat better breakfast okay and the way you're gonna do that is with a little bit of magic and by magic i mean magic spoon i'm telling you right now when we were kids we were gobbling up this garbage okay sugar non-stop we're going to school can't even fucking pay attention because we are eating a thousand grams of sugar before it was 8 a.m that That stops right now. For you, for your kids, for your cousins, for anyone you love, you're going to do it with Magic Spoon, okay?

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Let's get back to the show. I thought that like the the documentary inadvertently brought up an interesting conversation which was like if you apply the capitalistic mindset towards a problem usually it will get solved if there's enough profit to go with it and i think that's what happened with straws is like the second we saw the straw coming out the turtle's nose yeah we were like oh we need a different type of straw. And within months, there were 30 different straws that were like plastic. Some of them were paper, but some of them kind of felt plastic enough where you could drink out of them and they wouldn't like fold and bend and break. And there's a million different solutions to this problem.

So when I'm watching this documentary, I'm like, yo, why the fuck don't we just be honest about what the biggest issue is so we can find a convenient way to solve it so i actually think that the the challenge with recycling in particular is that is the point of collection so you know like some states there'll be like a five cent deposit when you buy aluminum cans and then if you turn it to the store you get that five cent back all we have to do is just raise that and we'll return the straws we won't throw them away it says there's there's some point where there's some point if we said like so let's say you go and i think they should do this at bars because like people are if you're paying 12 for a drink right like you're already paying way more than what the alcohol is worth you're paying for that lifestyle experience and that ambiance and

that scene and setting so it's a if they just said like hey the straw is a dollar and you get the dollar back if you return the straw and we put it through the dishwasher done that's interesting either people won't care and then the homeless people go and pick up the straws and return them or you know somebody else will do it because it's economically incentivized to do it so we've done things like that before with like aluminum cans if you're in like remember growing up in california they didn't have that you would see more cans and trash cans and then you go up to oregon and it's five cents a can you would see less cans and trash cans i remember the first time i went to europe i was uh we stopped off in germany in the airport right we can use capitalism we don't have to wait for it yeah that had like five different portals there was was one for cans, one for paper, one for,

I'd never seen this in my life. And this was their, I guess, you know, first attempt into getting into recycling, et cetera. I was like, okay, yeah, this kind of makes sense. But that thing with the straw makes sense. But for me more, it's like, what do we do with commercial fishing? Like, why don't we find a more convenient,

not a little, sorry, less convenient, but a more environmentally friendly way to do that that doesn't tear up the coral reefs, that doesn't, like, get all the turtles stuck in the nets, where you don't have to go out there and, like, I guess call the dolphins in order to catch these fish because they're eating them as well. Like, why isn't that the problem we're solving, not the fucking straws? Because that's a hard problem to solve. Well, let's go fucking solve it. Figure it out. We can get to the moon. I guarantee that's a hard problem to solve well let's go fucking solve it figure it out we can get to the moon there there i guarantee there's people working like at every university there's people studying all sorts of things and they might be studying it from different angles there might be people in like sort of a ocean agricultural program they're

studying the future of seasteading and uh agricultural production at sea yeah and they're looking at the sort of papers that have been done on early studies and they're testing out or going and visiting sort of early fish farming experiments and they're learning from that and they're getting better. But there's, I think the thing that surprised me is, so I used to be part of the faculty at some different universities. Yeah. And when you're there, you sort of think like, oh, there's so many people doing research.

Yeah. But it's not the most focused research it's research to sort of elevate yourself within this sort of academic environment yeah and then you'll interface with like people with like major you know pretty good sized companies companies are doing close to a billion dollars a year in sales and you look at how big their research team is and you sort of have this a vision that it's like a whole floor of like people with lab coats like looking through uh microscopes and like doing science experiments yeah it's not there's like billion dollar companies that maybe have like three people doing research hilarious and even like companies like nike it's not like they have thousands of engineers doing research right right because each one of those people is a few hundred thousand dollars a year it's a few things and it's hard

to predict when they're going to innovate with research. So it's like there's actually not that much money in these kind of things. So there's not like thousands and thousands of people studying these things. There's a bunch of people trying to make a living. They're progressing the ball a little bit forward with a very limited and compromised agenda towards where they're getting paid everyone has the biases of their industry if you're in academia you're biased towards making sort of clean data that's presentable within the arbitrary limits of your vertical or your field yeah and if you're working for a fishing company it's really about sort of

production and if you have some nice sort of environmental sustainable byproducts from that that'll be a great marketing push that we feel better about yeah so it's like you know you weirdly need legislation to create financial incentive in research like if the legislation comes out and says straws are illegal oh there's going to be some financial incentive to make a new fucking straw right because we're going to want to drink out of something and a company is going to step up and fill that void but if you don't get uniform legislation you're basically just hurting the american fishermen or the european fishermen and then helping out the fishermen anywhere else in the world that refuse to have any legislation. Here's the challenge with the legislation thing.

And I don't like being like anti-legislation or pro-legislation. Is I think that we have to have a trial run for these types of legislations. To see if they work before setting them in. Because there's a lot of unintended consequences. And you're not an idiot if you don't predict every eventuality from something as complex as an ecological system that has to interface with a legal system that's hard and complicated yeah that's so what we should do with the straws is being like okay we all agree that the goal of less straws in the ocean would be nice yeah we also think that it's actually proportionally it's only this part much of the problem yeah so let's try this for one year if we see a reduction in the straws the law continues if it doesn't we get rid

of it it goes back to the way it was and we that way there's an automatic provision for that what's problematic is when we keep stacking things that didn't work on top of each other and then to get anything launched as a new product or a building or something like that there's all this bureaucracy and stuff that you have to go through which is all fine if it's all effective. But we should just have like a trial period for these types of regulations. So we should say, hey, let's try a $1 deposit on straws and plastic bags. Let's see if that keeps them from floating around parking lots and oceans. I like that not only for environmentally friendly legislation, but like we could do that with cops. Why don't we do it with everything everything this idea that like you have a trial

period for any change and then you just share data like for example if you have what is it called the you know cop cams what were they called oh the body cams yeah if you have body cams on every cop right you keep them on and if we find out 12 months later there was a 20 reduction in police shootings not just black people but but just in general, right? Without any reduction in the amount of, you know, people who had warrants out for their arrests or whatever assault, right? We need to put these things in beta. Yeah. Remember how like every day.

What's the beta version of this? 100%. So that's the clever thing. Remember like. But just to finish the point. But I guess what I'm trying to say is if we came back and shared the data like yo there was this reduction for this change and then cops come back and go like yeah at first it was kind of annoying but didn't really change the way i police and if 20 less people are getting shot by us that makes

us look better and then if after a year the opposite happened like there was an increase we go hey the body cams aren't the issue let's throw it out but we try to make these declarations and make these like chisel them in stone. And of course you're going to have all this pushback because they're in a wiggle room. I think the most empowering thing a leader could do is just say they don't know about things they clearly can't know. So I really like that. Did you read that Adam Grant book, The Think Again? He sent it.

I didn't read it. Yeah, you didn't read it. Good book. I'll tell you about it later sorry adam thank you though so he talked about it's not necessarily how quick you are to come up with an answer it's often how quick you are to change your answer when your answer is clearly wrong yeah so he brings up the example of like steve jobs versus the blackberry guy remember blackberries blackberries were kind of lit for a bit obama refused to get rid of the blackberry right and it's like the guy that created the blackberry

was an engineer really smart he was much more on the actual inventor side he figured all these things had a bunch of patents to his name yeah he was really into weeds technologically he thought that everything his early success in creating this popular device made him too married to the beliefs about the sort of what made the device successful whereas steve jobs always said i'm not going to do a phone i'm not going to do a phone phones are stupid i don't want to do a phone don't want to do a phone he let himself be convinced by his younger employees that phones were going to be this really important thing in the future so it wasn't that steve jobs always had the vision right he was just he was willing to be wrong and change and i think the same things with that if you if we ask our politicians hey always be right never flip-flop never change your mind

then we get exactly the political climate and world we deserve if we encourage the people that be like this is a really complex challenging issue i want to try this we're going to try it for this period of times if this happens we'll keep doing it if this doesn't happen yeah i was wrong and we'll move on and try the next thing at this really big problem that we all agree is important this seems like a no-brainer i mean it seems like a no-brainer i'm shocked that we don't do this already it's hard to be wrong publicly it really is yeah i can see that especially if your career is based on whether you're right or wrong in the decisions you make in the legislation that yeah netflix is done

netflix is done dude yeah i think you actually might end up being right about that just prematurely really well i think your thesis before i do another special netflix is great um first of all but one i think when they so much of their power was being like a first adopter and when you look at like how much ground disney plus disney plus is kicking ass yeah but it's not affecting culture yet it's it's still yet to uh get a stronghold like the mandalorian was the closest thing they had to a show that people cared about and people didn't even really care about they still need a game of thrones they still need something that's gonna just take over the world like tiger king took over the world for a second and until disney or any streaming platform has that they just can't be in a conversation. They're dominating young people.

If you own the IP that young people grow up with, you're eventually going to win. Yeah, I hear what you're saying. So it's like, I get it from, like I'll watch like The Mandalorian, but I don't watch a lot of shows on Disney+. I watch way more stuff on HBO and Netflix. Yeah. But when I talk to my friends that have kids, it's like Disney Plus is their babysitter. Yeah, of course. And it's those kids get it's like why like we're never you know what Roblox is?

Roblox? It's like Minecraft, but interactive. It's like the YouTube. It's like a platform that lets you sort of make video games on top of this basic infrastructure that's very similar to Minecraft. They just had an IPO and they're blowing up it's something like 50 of kids under the age of 16 have logged into it in the last three days we don't know anything about it right i invested in the stock because i heard it was a good idea yeah that was about it right so the future is

going to be like things like that we're not the future we're the present uh but and we still got a few years to write out and all sorts of fun and i so i like when i look at like a uh netflix i think your prediction has a really good chance of being right just slower than what you actually uh sort of predicted because i still think youtube gets content for free that gets more views than a lot of shows on Netflix. Yeah. I mean, it's unbelievable what YouTube has done. YouTube owns the pipeline of young aspirational talent. YouTube's issue is they're terrified of taking responsibility for content because of what happened with the advertisements going on the ISIS beheading videos.

Yeah. That's just good capitalism at work how so well it's like they're there to make money they're ad supported media you're not paying for youtube unless you're getting the ad free version oh i thought you said putting the ads on the isis beheading videos was good capitalism at work no no but getting rid of stuff yeah no no i i think what they're doing is smart what i'm saying is if they wanted to make a dent in like the paid streaming platform if they want to take something away from netflix or or disney what they've got to do is they got to buy those big shows and when i made that prediction i was like okay they got an unlimited

bank account so they're gonna buy the next game of thrones they're gonna buy these next things and then they're gonna be making their own content and having the platform where we're watching all of our stuff anyway. And then all of a sudden there's no reason to have anything else. They got some pushback for anything they put their brand behind. Right. Because they're servicing the whole world. So if you're servicing the whole world, how dare you put out a show where, you know, a woman is being assaulted, et cetera. And they basically said it's not worth us for us to take this heat.

We don't even want to be criticized for our year-end wrap-ups you remember when they do that like year-end wrap-up and everybody's like this is horrible don't do it anymore so they are just trying to be hands-off and if you're going to be hands-off you're not going to win whether netflix or disney i don't know that's uh i don't know i'm curious about it yeah i think it's this way right like like amazon is going to be a big yeah i think it's this way right like i think amazon is going to be a big player i think a lot of people are underestimating that netflix makes so all these when when they're bidding for the next game of thrones and it's gonna be like the wheel of time and they're basically taking every epic fantasy book and

gonna be turning it into a show yeah shout out to fantasy writers like yeah you're cashing in hey there nerds it took a while all those like sword and sandals uh posters on your wall are finally paying off yeah but they're making like a hundred million dollar bets on these like shows they're really expensive to produce yeah youtube doesn't have to bet anything they just have to like let all these young hungry people so it's like it's like our boy mike from modern belts i think he's like the prototypical youtuber and i actually think he's like a great example for like your audience in particular to kind of like aspire to yeah mike has a channel like 1.5 million subscribers really good sized channel he makes about 500 000 a year right 25

yeah didn't go to a college dropout didn't study what he's doing works really hard yeah worked probably for the last five years seven days a week 70 hours a week and he's crushing it and he's built like a really amazing business for himself at the age that a lot of people with more academic credentials are just getting out of grad school yeah and now he's got a ton of money in the bank yeah he's like on an upward trajectory audience is only getting bigger and he's not doing entertainment he's doing instruction it's like not everyone i think that watches you feels like they could be a comedian because it takes a certain kind of personality type charisma stuff like that right but there's a lot of like hvac technicians plumbers ups drivers contractors builders engineers that could do what mike's

doing where they're just displaying competency in a very blue collar way and there's a lot of people that just want to watch informative things about practical things yeah so i think that's why sort of youtube has a lot of strength where mike has different watching. Yeah. There is a huge appetite for what Mike does, what you do, what I do. There's also a huge appetite for Game of Thrones. Yeah. And those things can coexist.

I don't think one has to have both. I don't think Netflix can take on us because you kind of need, you almost need there to be like a thousand creators for us to exist yes you know there needs to be a tournament yeah there needs to be a tournament of champions a tournament that's algorithmically decided yeah 100 i mean that's what youtube is it's a constant like ecosystem termite hill swarm of ants all competing to get attention and that's why we do the crazy thumbnails and we trial and error and test different ways of titles and yeah like how often do you like how much time

do you guys spend figuring out like titles and thumbnails of clips so it's like it's a considerable yeah an hour after an episode right so if we record for two hours you do it while it's fresh we an hour afterwards we're probably thinking about what the title and thumbnail could be and the and the cleverness is it's it's a needle mover that could affect performance like 20 to 30 percent conservatively or even drive something up if you really nail it really high yeah and what we don't even realize is that we're evolutionarily conditioned this algorithm's teaching us it's like yeah it's teaching us how to behave in a way that fits that particular platform and that thumbnails that look like this work because there are this many pixels at the corner of the screen. It's funny to watch YouTubers like find their niche.

Yeah. Like there are certain YouTubers that you'll see like found what they what resonates with their audience. And then they're basically just kind of like replicating it in different ways, you know. And it's also a youtube trap you can fall into right people go on runs they get hot and you'll see someone just like blow up over like six to eight months and then that person's at conferences being like here's the five best ways to do it and then youtube's like oh that's cute and they change one thing in the algorithm and then it's like but then they come back they figure it out again they go through

that iteration evolutionary process figure out what works and then capitalize on it yeah but yeah i think like it's hard to bet against youtube as a platform i mean it's i wouldn't yeah i i wouldn't i mean i see it as a more effective search platform than um than google in a lot of ways like often when i want to learn something i'm not googling it i used to google it now i youtube it and i watch some asshole explain to me in his living room yeah and that's way more effective for me to learn from i can do that while i'm biking to work i can do that while i'm maybe texting somebody else like i can just have that like we were talking about that like secondary learning experience and um yeah it's just i fucking i fucking love it but i think it has to be something that coexists with fantasy coexist well it could be sports we could have sports on there right but we're always

going to want fantasy we're always going to want like a big epic mission impossible type movie and those things are going to have to happen until those get really cheap to make and it will fucking happen in our lifetime in our lifetime there will be guys like us diy right it's like cgi gets better and better like i saw somebody they made like a will fucking happen in our lifetime in our lifetime there'll be guys like us diying right right it's like cgi gets better and better like i saw somebody they made like a it was like a fake pokemon movie trailer but it looked like super legit and it looked like real animals like fighting i'm like it was like nature is metal like but pokemon like that's kind of it's kind of dark that's gonna happen though that's gonna happen i mean

that's why we're here because cameras got cheap editing equipment got cheap yeah yeah and the difference is like it's so funny and it's like the the answer for tv production companies isn't to also take advantage of the cheapness it's like let's spend even more money on a smaller advantage yes that's really separate that's what espn did oh barstools starting to catch up on us yeah let's build a 10 million dollar set that'll make sports center pop yeah it's like really what they should have done is more talent more creativity cheaper more shows flood the market yeah they did the exact worst thing oftentimes people make the worst decisions benu yeda um you're the fucking man. You know I love you.

We're grateful for everything you've done to help us. And I'm so glad that we got to introduce you to the audience, you know. Go check out Ben. Ben, where can they check you out? Just give them all the platforms. Instagram, Benjamin Uyeda. Check it out. That's where I build stuff and post stuff. And if I do anything where I'm talking, lectures, stuff like that, I normally link off of that.

So check it out. Go check him out on Instagram. He's got amazing's got amazing stuff i mean like it's it's weird like you live a double life to me yeah you're like okay you're like um like either superman or batman i'm deciding which one like you're this like genius that's masquerading as a table builder you're kind of like jesus no you're like jesus benjamin uyeda you might be like jesus i like building stuff it's relaxing to me like it's something where it uses just enough of my brain but a lot of my body and it feels active it feels productive it feels like i'm adding something to the world we should have done this in the beginning of the

of the episode but maybe it's kind of cool to do it reverse yeah as many of us i mean we're here probably because we reverse engineered careers we reversed a lot of different things so maybe we'll end this episode with how you fucking got here you go to school where'd you go pen cornell you went to Cornell. Okay. Ivy, but almost not. Yeah. It's like the blue collar Ivy.

Like we have a hotel school and we have a really good architecture program. So you go to Cornell. You study architecture. Yes. Okay. You start a tech business. Started an architecture company

and then a tech company. Okay. So you start the architecture company first. Yes. Tech company. Yeah. You go back to architecture company first. Yes. Tech company. Yeah. You go back to school?

No. I did my undergrad and grad all at one time. You motherfucker. So basically I didn't start college till I was 21. I was a 21 year old college freshman. Neither one of my parents went to college. They never said take the SATs. I had no idea whether or not I'd be good at school.

Yeah. So I ended up going to community college. Yeah. And. I promise you he's'd be good at school. Yeah. So I ended up going to community college. Yeah. And. I promise you he's Asian. I promise you. Yeah. But I'm also half white.

So, you know. Yeah. Yeah. And that is a dominant fucking gene when it comes to your academics. Yes. So I took the SATs when I was like 20. Hilarious. Did really well on them.

Yeah. Didn't know I had need to have a calculator. And the one of my teachers at community college was like you kind of go wherever you want and that's when i was like all right but it actually ended up being kind of a blessing to get a late start because while everyone else is throwing up in their first year of college and figuring out how to like drink and live on their own i don't know what you're interested i was already working yeah like a sort of adult and so i was like oh college is expensive and i was paying for it yeah like i'm gonna the

more credits i take per semester the more you can get the less i spend on housing and those kind of things yeah yeah yeah and i'm like i don't need to fuck around and figure out how to join a fraternity and all that kind of stuff yeah um so i was just like i'm gonna get my money's worth out of this yeah um so blasted right through college really fell in love with with design and it actually stayed on and became part of the faculty so i didn't through college really fell in love with with design and it actually stayed on and became part of the faculty so i didn't start college till i was 21 but i was a ivy league i guess not a professor but a visiting lecturer same thing basically you're the one teaching and leading and creating the classes by the time i was 27 right then i started a

sustainable architecture firm zero energy design we leveraged a bunch of new technology and 3d uh modeling to kind of get ahead and then i thought okay i'm pretty clever and in like 2006 you could kind of raise money for a tech startup pretty easy it's like there's been these booms yeah and i'm like all right i have this idea i'm going to make architecture free because that's what everybody's doing with the internet yeah uh instead of taking something that was paid made it free blow up and things yeah so it worked i went out and i gave a powerpoint presentation we won this all ivy league sort of business plan competition and we got an investment of over a million dollars i was like wait you can do a powerpoint and people give you a million dollars like and i thought i was so fucking smart yeah i was just like cocky i was

just like oh you know i just changed the way i talked and started using all these like tech bro jargons because because i was experimenting this place i got rewarded for those experiments and it reinforced this kind of like arrogant kind of tech douchey behavior yeah then 2008 happens and our business model was to was to sell advertising in the construction industry yeah yeah what happened to construction budgets they went to nothing what happened to advertising they went to less than nothing and not only that the fund that was investing in us because we were a sustainability forward business they were invested in all the u.s solar and sustainability companies which all evaporated the fund went under we were owed another uh half of the money of the million that we were promised but the fund went under so they

couldn't give us the rest of the money we had to lay off people and it was a great lesson because what i learned was i'm not as smart as i think i was, right? Or success isn't an indicator of how smart you are. Yeah. It's partially that. Yeah, yeah. And my ideas weren't bad, but they also weren't as great as the results too. Yeah.

And I was like, okay, this is humbling. Yeah. But fundamentally what I learned is that the idea that I had, which was to, I loved architecture, I loved designing things. But when you have to monetize design as a service, that means you're only making it available to people

that can pay for custom services. And so the more successful I got as an architect designing sustainable houses, the richer my clients got. So I was designing like $5 to $10 million sustainable homes. Congratulations to those really rich people that have a second or third home that uses less carbon yeah doing absolutely fucking nothing for the environment at the same time i'm winning environmental rewards and that hypocrisy drove me fucking crazy because it's like driving a hydrogen powered escalade and being like yeah

i'm not even flexing with these spinners but like my fuel source is actually really clean and meanwhile you have fucking eight gas powered cars in your garage as well right it's complete bullshit but at the same time you kind of you're not doing that to be a fraud you're doing that because you're kind of just like pushed into things you're like oh i care about sustainability these are the people paying to me and then you try to justify what you're being forced into yeah and that's why when people call people frauds i'm always like are they frauds or are they just like victims of like the pressures that they're kind of pushed into now they're fraudulent if they oversell their actual good that they're doing but they're not necessarily terrible people for making

compromise choices as we all have to you don't have to be terrible to be a fraud no i don't think all frauds are terrible but i think that uh you I think that you can be a fraud as long as you're aware of what you're doing. Yeah. So the thing I learned with the tech company that I pulled from that failure was that I could give away my design ideas for free. I didn't have to charge people. So if I produced design as media content and then monetized it through marketing,

I didn't have to charge people to access my ideas. And that was really fun. That felt like it opened up this kind of, it unlocked this whole way of reaching people. Is that now I can design affordable things, whereas before I had to only design expensive things. And I actually got, I think think like i always thought gmail was such an impressive thing i know like multi-millionaires that uses gmail i know people like mark that use gmail yeah uh like it's like the one product is great for rich people and it's great for everyone else it's in and out so it's like can i do that with like design yeah so i

started making youtube videos yeah and uh they sort of took off and i started by building like little things like coffee tables and just like fun diy projects that would look nicer than store-bought furniture and be way cheaper yeah and then slowly scaled that all the way up to bigger and bigger projects because now we're building spiral staircases with robots we're still building the cheap and easy stuff we're building shipping container container houses. We're recycling windmill blades. Yeah, and I want to get to that. But with the same idea, right, is you're going to give away the architecture. You're going to give away the design.

And then you'll monetize the advertising on giving that away. You're telling people how to make these things. You're not saying, I want you to buy the chair from me. You're saying, this is how you make the chair yourself. And I'm going to do an advertisement with Home Depot and get all my material with Home Depot. To me, you broke the advertisement. When we first sat down like you shattered the mold you're like it was just such a great idea to to basically get the people who provide the materials that you're going to use for the video to pay you instead of the consumer right and it actually benefits

the home depot whoever else is providing it because those people that want to make your chair are going to have to go to home depot you know when you get like a new sponsor they're always like here's the call to action yeah yeah yeah i made it right i made it for you and then if the whole video is the call to action and then you said this to me uh this is when i thought it was brilliant you said that the was it i uh home and garden network or one of these like hgtv yeah it's hgtv home depot might spend half a million dollars on a tv advertisement on a show on home and garden tv it costs 80,000 to make 80 the show itself costs 80,000 to make right so if you tell home depot yo hit me off with i don't know what the fuck you get we're just gonna put an arbitrary number out there hey give

me 50,000 right i'll give you the show, the advertisement. I'll give you the whole thing. And then you use Facebook, whatever the fuck you want, to put those ads out there in the world. They saved $450,000 and got to target the exact people that you want with an influencer. So that's what we did with the shipping container house. Fucking brilliant. We originally pitched it to Netflix and Amazon. So then you went from making these small projects and you start building up.

Right. You do furniture. Then you start going into houses. Bigger sort of home improvement, home remodeling, like remodeling a whole bathroom, building out an entire kitchen. And then from there, we started using robots and 3D printers. And when do you get into the container? That was in 2018. The container thing is so brilliant because I think like for tax reasons.

Yeah, there's some tax advantages for the depreciation thing. It's complex, but if you have a lot of passive income, look into like industrial assets and buying them and talk to a tax attorney about how you can use it to offset your passive income. Anyway, yeah. and talk to a tax attorney about how you can use it to offset your passive income anyway yeah but i was interested in that because when when i look for content ideas i look at one what's popular you can look for what's popular by what people are searching for but that's just one end of the economic spectrum yeah supply is the other aspect of on the other side of the coin of demand yeah so i'll look for things like oh there's a lot of people searching for shipping container housing content like could these be affordable housing could this be a solution for my little tiny house cabin that i want and there's a lot of supply showing good information it's like

a few guys in australia that like built them with charming accents consider consider this creators if you're a creator and you're watching like if you're making the same type of content that a thousand other creators are making that's a lot of competition right but if there's a lot of desire which is what ben was saying there's a lot of desire for a certain type of content and not a lot of people making it right that's how you get to the top of the end if there's proportionately more vegans than vegan restaurants vegan restaurants are a better investment even if veganism isn't more popular than conventional eating and so that's what we saw was sort of the shipping container house thing so we pitched it to netflix and amazon being like hey we want to do like this whole series pitch it to hgtv

the hgtv was the most interested and they said well you'd have to build a house an episode and we're like no no people want to know the details they want to how do you get building permits how do you do septic when you flush a toilet where does it go how do you insulate it and you can't tell that in one episode so we stuck to our guns and we said we'll do it on youtube we got home depot to sort of underwrite it provide all the materials for it so we built an entire shipping container house all out of stuff from home depot we built the whole thing for under two hundred thousand dollars in california expensive place to build yeah showed every step of the process. And then we rented it on Airbnb for like $6,000 to $7,000 a month and then ended up selling it

for $385,000. Amazing. And that's what's really fun is that we can tell you the numbers too. We don't have to like be like, oh yeah, it's all smoke and mirrors. We'll show you the receipts. Like it's much more fun and interesting that way. And series up yeah we did so the average hgtv show i think does about 800 000 views per episode yeah we did about 2 million views per episode and we launched it on a new channel yeah that's right you had no following zero subscribers went from zero to like 370 subscribers and averaged about 2 million views an episode yeah yeah and that was where we're sort of like and that's why i still think like youtube is such an interesting platform yeah it's just great you don't have to wait for the permission like we're in talks now again with the platform so you still always got to entertain your options but it still

comes down to you're going to have to spend six months of back and forth negotiating figuring it out detailing it oh but now they're on your timeline yeah and now they know that you don't need to go with them. Right. Because you can create it yourself and you can monetize it yourself and you have the proof. You can start an entirely new channel and you have confidence that you can build it up. Right. It's a completely different game right now. So if you want to take the bag from them, by all means, take the bag.

And there is value to being validated by them. But you don't have to wait for them. You can constantly strengthen. And this is what I always like about you. And when they're ready to take the shot never stop moving yeah even as you're waiting for them to sort of come around exactly like just constantly reinforce and strengthen your position yeah so i always liked it when like ebay first happened ebay is like so early internet yeah i saw this story of this guy they started with like a paper clip and then he traded it for like a cigarette

lighter and he traded a cigarette lighter for like a stapler all the way up to a car and then to a house yeah you can do the same thing like that with your career and content yeah is you can start with what you can do right in front of you make some content get a little audience do a little bit of a bigger project yeah keep growing and trickle it up yeah and it's funny in like six years we went from making coffee tables to whole houses and now we're like recycling 30 foot long windmill blades and building hotels. That's the, that's the cool thing that I think that if people look at your journey, uh, they can learn how to scale up on social media. Like if you go from your first video to where you are now, and I don't even know if you started making videos for the projects you're working on now like have you have you started telling people about this can we

talk about the hotels yeah we're in the permitting process we haven't released a lot of visuals but it's a direct extension of the container house exactly so like you go from a table to some chairs now you have a kitchen now you have a living room now you have a house but you're doing a container house now you have multiple of them and you sell it as a container community now you have a kitchen now you have a living room now you have a house but you're doing a container house now you have multiple of them and you sell it as a container community now you're building these hotels and you're doing the exact same thing just scaling up along the way and now you what this concept is really cool where you're you're saying that people want an experience in their hotel so instead of going to a hotel that's in a city because they want the experience of the city. Right.

They go to a hotel that's out of the city that has nature that's valuable. Amangiri is a perfect example. It's fucking exploded. If you guys don't know what it is. Fucking expensive. A dog. It is. $3,000 a night.

$3,000 to $5,000 a night. It's beautiful. Check it out on Instagram. Stunning. It is absolutely. Amangiri. Theian jenners went there and i think after that it was to the moon so but like you're now now you're buying actual land that you're building these hotel experiences onto it's just a really cool thing to watch happen you know it's and that you can see the whole journey through what we started

seeing is that like when instagram started taking off we started watching me and my sort of group of they're kind of like people that i occasionally invest in projects with partners they're not really like direct employees or co-workers but we like we partner on things and we just sort of stay interested share ideas yeah uh kind of a group chat type business relationship yeah yeah and what we saw that was interesting we always just have this thing where if you see something that you're not sure what to do with but you see it as a trend bring it into the group and let's all hash it out and we'll figure out something to do with it and we were looking at the rise in visitorships to national parks america has amazing national parks everyone

should go to the national parks they're super cheap they're all over the country they're all incredible but what we saw is that as instagram was getting more users we were getting more and more visitorships and ticket sales to national parks and that makes sense if people are sharing and wanting digital artifacts and photos of themselves, nature is kind of like a nice, subtle flex. It's a wholesome flex. It is the subtlest, but the most flexible. Not flexible, but it's way better than a car. You in front of a waterfall,

you're not bragging that you bought the waterfall, but it's way more cool to look at than a G-Wagon. Watching Lil Duval's instagram yeah is amazing because we understand nature as inherently scarce we cannot recreate the earth we can't these things took so long to the grand canyon took so many millions of years to form yes can't artificially create if we do it looks like fucking disney world and access to natural beauty is expensive usually right so we do we do assign a dollar value to a beautiful waterfall or like pristine water an island etc it's rich without going you i got money right yeah and it also shows that you

have like oh you're kind of a well-balanced thing so it's like it's a flex for both poor and wealthy people wealthy people like showing themselves in nature being see like i'm not all about you know the cars yeah yeah yeah i care about the squirrels and then poor people like me at age because you know see i'm wealthy yeah i can reach this too so it's actually like of all the trends that are terrible about social media making nature more valuable is not a terrible thing but yeah we saw that there's this visitorship to national parks are going up we took this as a thing that nature is only going to get increasingly more valuable and we started buying land outside of national parks yeah and it tends to be kind of inexpensive and we think the future of hospitality will be less infrastructure for the things like i

don't really care like i like staying at nice hotels like the four seasons is great when you just kind of want to be pampered in order room service yeah but i want a more distinct experience than i want a completely catered luxurious experience for the most part i was show me something interesting tell me something new show me something amazing that takes my breath away more than like cater to my every whim right yeah and i think some of these like the amangiri is both right yeah here's this experience in nature but also this is the nicest hotel that you're going to stay at. Right. And what is harder to access? Nature is harder to access than the nice sheets on the fucking bed.

Spoken like a true city boy, right? So we grew up doing a lot of camping and hiking and fishing and stuff like that. So we had all the gear and stuff like that. But we lived in a suburban environment where you have room to store the stuff. I have a lot of friends that live in cities that love to get out in nature, but they can't store anything. So that's why things like auto camp are so popular because you can get out and go camping, but everything's all set up for you, but they're charging $350 a night to stay at an Airstream trailer.

It's like, but people are paying for it. Then I'm telling you every time I open Airbnb and they have like the experiences section and it's just a tree house. It's like a tree house in hudson valley and i'm saying to my grandma one of these weekends we're gonna go to a tree house we're gonna spend 500 a fucking tree house where i gotta walk to an outhouse to go pee or take a shit in the middle of the night i'm like why why is this so scintillating do you know how cheap a tree house

is to make compared to a real fucking house and that that's the sort of arbitrage opportunity that's sort of available it's blowing up there's a lot of investment groups getting into this kind of glamping space we'll ruin it like it will over invest and do it but it's kind of a cool trend it's kind of like when people thought the whole foods kind of phenomena this like kind of more organic but more expensive foods like that's not gonna last oh it'll just become the mainstream it's just cool to see like i had peterson on last week and and i had this conversation i was like i was like your your rise to like success was around the same time as mine and it was both because of the internet and the internet gave access to you know a place for our your ideas my

maybe art or whatever you want to fucking call it stand-up comedy and then it's also cool to see you had the exact same experience yeah and we're all scaling up at the more or less the exact same time and doing very similar things within our business and now we're all kind of cross pollinating i mean you've been involved in our business a lot longer than you know we have known jordan peterson but uh it's just a really cool thing to see somebody do something completely different but scale in the exact same way. Yes. That's how we first connected was talking about YouTube versus sort of like networks and stuff like that. Yeah.

We've experienced very parallel rejections that ultimately were the best things that happened to us. Yeah. And being lifted up by the people. Yeah. Like we're only here because the people enjoyed what we do. Right. And the more we did the more they enjoyed it and lift it up a little higher a little higher a little higher and now

you're making fucking hotels yeah we're doing these specials and coming down to miami and other stuff that maybe we can't mention yet but like and we're doing it on our turn pace yeah that we want to yeah yeah yeah it's great it's great it's uh great to be on a journey with you, brother. I love you so much. Thank you so much for coming on. My pleasure. Yeah, man. This has been Flay Review. Peace.