Julian Dorey Podcast - #25 - Mike Lacsy

Episode Date: December 10, 2020

Mike “Lacsy” Lacsamana is a solutions engineer, entrepreneur, and podcaster. Currently, he works with Fortune 500 companies to re-engineer their software in emergency events. In addition to that, he is also the Co-Founder of Aeronaut Skincare—and a Co-Host of the company’s podcast, Project Aeronaut.   ***TIME STAMPS***   5:05: Mike’s Torn ACL; Cliff-Diving Adventures; Gary Vee   12:37: The early days of IG, TikTok Content   18:07: “Creative Engineer”; People skills; Being molded by your environment   27:26: Revisiting Mike’s college years and his mentality there; The importance of support from friends/ as an entrepreneur   36:17: Relationships as an entrepreneur   40:39: The opportunities Covid presents; Past downtime cycles and the companies that came from them; Amazon’s growth during Covid   49:06: Amazon is scary big now; the history of Amazon; The dispersion in the stock market and between corporations and small businesses; “The game”   1:01:39: How The Communist Chinese Government subsidizes their tech start ups (insane system); The 4 frontiers of modern technology   1:10:57: Moore’s Law (Tech); The TikTok issue with China; The slippery slope TikTok represents right now   1:16:53: Capitalism vs. Freedom in the Winner-Take-All Era; Companies buying out competition; Convenience vs. Data   1:25:17: Aliens; Simulation Theory   1:28:28: Renewable Energy & Adoption   1:33:27: The problem with a 2-party system; Climate Change & Politicization;    1:41:43: Dr. Steven Pinker, “Enlightenment Now,” and appealing to data/reason/logic; Our Culture of Fear   1:49:04: What Mike liked about Bernie Sanders in 2016; Left vs. Right polaization; The difference between Leftists and Liberals   1:58:57: Our need to feel validated online; Empathy; Peace among those who don’t respond to the noise   2:07:42: Zuckerberg saving himself with Instagram; TikTok created a perfect app; Instagram API’s   2:16:54: Mike’s crazy story about changing jobs at the beginning of the Pandemic; Mike’s work at Fire Hydrant   2:26:27: Automation even in the tech world; More background on Fire Hydrant   2:32:37: Julian tells a story about Grand Central Station 2 weeks before the Pandemic hit; Mike discusses fitting into a new culture without meeting people in person; “Sitting with genius”   2:40:47: The next disruptions coming; Internet of Things (IoT)   2:45:05: Living in NYC during Covid; Mike talks about his mental health; Meditation; Julian’s “Connector” status; and some thoughts on what it takes to “keep going” ~ YouTube FULL EPISODES: Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It won't take long to tell you Neutral's ingredients. Vodka, soda, natural flavors. So, what should we talk about? No sugar added? No sugar added? Neutral. Refreshingly simple. You're going to look back on this podcast and see the inner makings of what these people are doing at this specific time and how they thought about it.

Here's a blueprint. And anyone, you have to find the things that you're interested in and passionate about. You must find that. Yeah. And I know there are some exceptions and some people, you know, they have the discipline and be like, I don't really like this, but I'm good at it and I'll roll with it and, you know, whatever. But if you find the things that you are good at and are willing to know, it's not always going to be fun and just get after it and learn, make mistakes, iterate, learn, make mistakes,

iterate, whatever the order is. Anyone can do it with consistency. And I speak on that coming from a point where I still, you know, am chasing the right side of the rainbow here to be able to say like, all right, pulled it off, did it right. But I've seen enough people who have done it and I've been through enough including a lot of failures to know like okay that's the that doesn't work yeah you know and and you have to do it you have to be in there and be willing to say well i that one up yeah no that's fine i mean i couldn't have said it better myself that's literally that's like facts and that's what That's it. Out into the world. What's going on, YouTube? One quick note before I start this episode with Mike, which was a good one.

I hope you enjoy. You will hear in the first 25 minutes a very, very small, slight buzzing in the background. You're not hearing things this studio which i call the bunker if you've heard the show before it is literally soundproof i have soundproof curtains it's above ground like this place is i mean it's it's locked and loaded apparently unless there are two of the loudest goddamn leaf blowers that you've ever heard in your life operating outside the entire time you're trying to record so for for the first 25 minutes, like I said, you will hear that little buzzing and that's what it's from. And then it goes away and it comes back for about three or four minutes, maybe a half hour after that. And I think in the first 25, it's not consistently on. So there's sometimes where

it's on, sometimes where it's off. My apologies on that. It was low enough that I absolutely didn't want to take it out because I really, really enjoyed the beginning of this podcast. We got personal on some things with Mike. So just wanted to give you a heads up. And with that said, you know what it is. I'm Julian Dory, and this is Trendify. one of the great questions in our culture where is the nuance you're giving opinions and calling them facts everyone understands this but few seem to do it if you don't like the status quo start asking questions experimentation and it's because you hear you're polarized because you hear all these stuff from social media gary v biggest example like drop your notebook and do fucking something like

listen man listen you gotta get out there you gotta do it's not gonna fucking come to you i was in a liquor store when i was 27 i I was stacking boxes. You're young, bro. Gary, I'm 69. You're young. You're so young. He's like, stop listening to me right now. Don't listen to another. Turn me off.

Unfollow me. I love losing. Shit on my chest. Come over here and shit on my chest. No, it was, yeah. That was it. That was the was it that was the type of content i was listening to right and at the time like yeah like fuck the corporate world or nine to five i never worked nine to five so i didn't know at the time i was like you know yeah fuck

all this like let me go out there i could do this on my own i become a millionaire on my own um so that's where it came to experimentation phase. And so the first one actually was Instagram. It was like 2014. No, it was 2016. Sorry. And Instagram wasn't that big yet. It was just starting to blow up. That was, yeah.

Yep. And so what I did was I had an account, Cliff Diving Adventures. It was literally an Instagram account of just people jumping off cliffs into water, into bodies of water. All right. So before you go into that, how does it happen that you're just sitting around one day in New Jersey in a college dorm and you say, all right, I'm going to make an Instagram account right now. What am I going to make it on? You know what? I think I'll do cliff diving. How does that happen? Oh, no, you know what? That's actually a good question. I tore my ACL twice in high school from basketball,

and then it was way too early. I was playing basketball again. I just tore it again. So a nine-month recovery process with a torn ACL, horrible. And imagine going through that twice. You forget. Sometimes even just walking walking you appreciate the ability to walk let alone do other actual activities so i was very that was one of the probably biggest moments in my life where i was the most upset with myself the second time i tore my ac ACL because I was genuinely telling myself and feeding

information to myself that I'm not going to be able to do the things that I was able to do before. That fucks with your head. Yeah. And that summer for me, that was freshman year of college, was a huge summer for me because that's where I was feeling a little bit better. I was six months out of my recovery, and I started really just adventuring, going out, doing hiking, and then more specifically cliff diving, cliff jumping. We would find these spots, random spots, like PA, New York, even Jersey, some spots where it's kind of like pure wilderness and

you're just jumping into a river, you're jumping into the lake, you're jumping into the ocean. And it's like one of the most, it was one of the most exhilarating things for me personally, because that's when I was able to take a look in the mirror and say, okay, that was a really low point in my life. Amongst other things of the torn ACL, like I was also dealing with a pretty, pretty tough breakup for me at that time. And, and now I felt like as if I turned a chapter in my life, I took away that negativity that I was feeling and feeding to myself and said,

okay, there's a lot more to this life and I'm really excited about what's to come. And that's what cliff, that's really what cliff jumping and cliff diving unlocked out of myself. That was my freedom for that summer. And that was the turning point. That was one of the turning points in my life, honestly. So you captured a moment for yourself, basically, like a moment in time.

Yeah. And took that and made it into a product yourself. Because on a selfish level, it takes you back to that moment and gives you something like when you're making content of people doing this like you know how they feel yeah you see them diving off that cliff wherever they are in beautiful place in the world and and just the the freeing and also helpless feeling that is at the same time but in a beautiful way and you're like oh yeah that was my therapy when i needed it for all these things going on in my life and now in a way it's like you are and i mean this in a positive way you're selfishly spreading that to other

people so they can be like you know what that looks fucking cool i might try that too yeah that's pretty much what it was especially when you're so young you're less cynical of the world yeah and the biggest thing that you want to give back is just that feeling, right? A positivity. It's easy to be, for me, it appears that it's easier to be more positive when you're younger because you know less. Yeah. Which is the, hence the less cynical about the world.

Right. And so that was my biggest goal. My biggest goal was like, okay, I love doing this. I unlocked it. Instagram. I've seen some accounts starting to blow up. Like my brother had a cat account that had 10K followers at the time. A cat account?

His cat storm, which he doesn't own anymore. Never get a relationship with a pet. A pet with a relationship. Oh, he's the girlfriend's cat? Yeah, yeah. Yikes. Well, it was their cat together. Mitch took care of it, but Mitch lost the custody.

Never works that way. Women get the custody, man. That's how it works. I don't know took care of it but mitch lost the custody yeah it never works that way women get the custody man that's how it works i don't know the statistics about it but i feel like they're not positive for men i'll tell you that but that's neither here nor there continue yeah um so that's why i got interested i'm like okay if i could mitch's instagram starting to get big you start to see influencers out there cliff jumping cliff diving something that i don't see out and about in instagram right now like let's go ahead and make an account here and and just from that idea that's where it stemmed and like i eventually grew that account like 70k followers thousands of likes i was posting every single day day one and where'd you get the content from uh it was content started off in my content and then i

realized like i'm not out here jumping. Yeah. You only jumped off so many clips on video. After four photos, I'm like, fuck. Wait, it was pictures too? How are these people doing? Yeah, they're, they're photos. So no videos?

No videos yet at the time. Just photos. Yeah. So then what did you do to go source it? Just literally hit up Twitter or what? Honestly, like what I was doing was I was taking photos from other people, but I was adding them and giving them credit that it was their photo. Oh, good for you. So I actually wasn't even doing it with permission. Good, good for you though, because a lot of people, even today still build accounts, just like taking stuff and not other people's photos. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't know the legal repercussions of it. And I was, I was 19 years old. So I was like,

yeah, I'm going to try this. I'm going to try this out. But as I got bigger though, that's when I did start hitting people up and I started actually becoming friends with people in the community and Instagram, people that had over hundreds of thousands of followers around there,

you know, not only asking them for permission, getting to know them a little bit, even going on video chats with some of the biggest influencers today. Instagram's not as big anymore, but before like there's these two dudes that used to dive d1 in hawaii and at the time they had like 5 000 followers and they were making dope ass content so i was taking a lot of their content it was mutual but today they have like over millions of followers so i was talking to some of these

influencers when they were small time and that's how that's how much Instagram have has just evolutionized can that does it even happen like that these days on Instagram because like I talked to I mean you know Luke Cervino so when he talks about like the early days of Instagram when he was in there in like 2012 like when it came out yeah and he got a big following and at the time like he wasn't even doing anything now he does stuff so i guess it's worth it but you know i was like dude how'd you do that and the networking of like the early influencers and what became air quotes influencers and stuff they would just like they would go on like comment sprees on like the biggest ones so like kim kardashian's account and then they would they would hop into like chat rooms with each

other just to like talk over like how literally only how they're amassing followers. And then I guess at some point it also then translated to what you were seeing in 2016 where you actually found people who were focused in a similar direction with their content and what they wanted to do. Trying to reach out to other people and then exchanging ideas and now like i feel like it's such a saturated cesspool that it's like you know how do you even get in touch with people anymore just because there's there's spam in the in these inboxes everywhere like how do you even send a dm honestly i'm a little bit more out of touch with instagram now just because i'm more focused on tiktok but it back in day, it was a culmination of many things. So you had to get to a certain point in time where you didn't have to rely on other

software to help you gain followers. So what I mean by that is like, I'd be setting an alarm at every single hour to follow and unfollow 60 people for a total of 120 actions of following and unfollowing per hour. And I knew I wasn't going to get flagged by Instagram because Instagram's not looking at accounts specifically. It's just their algorithm looking for how many actions are taking place per hour. So that's how I was able to capitalize. What I actually did to gain followers of real people was I would go into these other big accounts

and just about adventure in general. And I would follow 60 people from the list. Then I go to my account and unfollow 60 people to keep the ratio really good of my instagram account you know what i mean you set an alarm every hour every hour i'd be playing fifa with my boys and we'd just i'd be like everyone hear the alarm go off and we'd be like okay we know what laxity has to do i'd be at a party and the alarm goes off if one of my friends heard it they would laugh and they'd be like i already know what laxity has to do you know what i mean yeah they don't have to optimize for the time like every time that i'm not doing it right when the alarm goes off i'm missing out that exponentially stacks up over time if i'm missing a minute

every single time i would have missed like a shit ton of unfollowing and following after over the span of a year because that minute stacks up every hour so uh that's that was one way to get natural organic following and then the other that you mentioned commenting on uh commenting big posts just reaching out to people individually like it was a lot of work instagram's a lot of work it is a lot of work and once you get to a certain point i think it was around for me like 30k followings. I didn't have to do that as much just because now I was getting natural engagement and following to my specific account. So when you hit that specific curve, I don't know exactly where it is. That's when you have the luxury and freedom of not having to do too much work. But there's still the content creation, you know.

Which is the hardest part. It is – it's very easy to just make fun of influencers and say fuck them and all that with certain things. And sometimes it's well-founded because people post the same goddamn picture every day of the same thing. It's all fake. It's all whatever. But – well, let's be honest. But there are a lot of people out there who may fall under that tag from the public. And in reality, people don't see the 18, 20-hour days they're working just to create that. Especially like guys, if you want to even look at YouTube specifically and stuff like that, like to create like vlog content like these guys do.

It's not as simple as like, oh, I think I'll just record myself today. It's not as simple as like, oh, I think I'll just record myself today. It's not like that. And when they're starting out, when they're building, you know, even to get to 50,000 subscribers, they have nobody working for them. It's just them. And then a lot of times they have it beyond that where they still don't have anyone working for them. And it's a hard gig. So I guess you kind of saw that up close and, you know, you were doing pictures and stuff, but you had to be able to go source these and make them be a certain quality and then be able to make sure that you're going to be able to build on that and do something different. Because especially when you're niching yourself into something as focused as like, hey, I'm getting people jumping off a cliff. Well, you got to go find that shit.

That's tough. Building that content calendar, it was hard for me to even build past a week just because of how rare that content was so yeah that was that was definitely tough and even the quotes bro i was like every every photo had some sort of motivational quote and i was running out of quotes i was like there's only so much motivation how many times did you google motivational quote? Oh my God. That was all in my browser. You were on Google page 7,000. If you type in P or something, you think that's something inappropriate to pop up?

No, it's probably like a quote from fucking Prince Charles or some shit. That's an interesting one to drop right now. Neither here nor there. That was a bad example. Wait, wait. No, no. That was Prince Andrew. Prince Andrew is the one, the Epstein guy. Gotcha. Sorry was a bad example. Wait, wait, no, no. That was Prince Andrew. Oh, Prince Andrew.

Prince Andrew. He's the one, the Epstein guy. Gotcha. Sorry, I got my princes mixed up. Yeah, Prince Charles the old dude. Yeah, I don't pay as close attention to him. I freaked out a little bit. I was like, damn.

Yeah, that's a little, I don't know. I got to take that out of my analogy. Not good. But so you were doing that, but like when did you, did you have any idea when you were coming out of college? Like, all right, I think generally like this kind of space, maybe I don't know exactly what, but this kind of space is where I want to be. And then I'll kind of go from there and start to make my plan once a minute. Like, did you know any of that or was it just totally like, no, I had no, all I knew is that my degree

of electrical and computer engineering gave me options of what I wanted to do. Like I could have been, if I wanted to go into marketing, for instance, like I could have gone into marketing, right? If that was something that I was like super interested in. So I think having the ability to have options is what made me at ease a little bit more. You know what else you have though? Because like you say that comment, and for you, you're right about that. There are other guys with that degree who are really smart, and that's not right though. Like they couldn't just do anything in marketing because not to be a stereotype but they may have like no fucking personality yeah like you have a very and you call yourself the creative engineer i think it's very accurate not really like you

laugh but seriously like i always thought that was a pretty accurate thing because you legitimately have that bit by bit piece piece by piece, you know, building creativity of an engineer, which you have to have. But then from like an emotional intelligence side and like dealing with people and understanding how other people think and trying to get a feel for that, you're good at that. You know, that's something. I appreciate that. Really though. I mean it. And you are, you're somebody who I will even go so far as to say is like, when you were a kid, I'll bet that

didn't even come as naturally to you. And the reason I say that is just because I always see you working on that. Even when you probably don't have to, I mean, it's always good to work on stuff, but like, you're always thinking about like, I wonder in that situation, like, like how you should, how you should deal with someone like that or how you should, how this person would want to communicate and how I could help them best do that. Like these are abstract things I'm saying, but that's like how you think. Yeah. What, what you just brought up about, it's not natural. I don't think any of that is natural for anyone people that are really good at it maybe have those little cues that they do over and over again or have like templatized something but don't realize it they go through they go they do

specific things that are actually very engaging tactics whether that's understanding emotional cues or whether that's conversating but if you know what those things are and you take that information in retrospect and then actually apply that next time you communicate with someone on specific situations, whether it's approaching a girl, whether it's a business meeting, you're trying to sell a solution and so forth, like all those things. And when you, once you actually take those principles and then you apply it, that's when you start to realize like oh damn all these people that are really effective in what they do it wasn't it's actually by design i would take it a step farther and i would say environment house in an environment people you know we we are psychologically so formed the younger we are. Our earliest development, I'm talking when we can't even talk,

the little cues we get around us, whether or not our parent smiles at us when they look at us, whether or not they hold us, or whether or not they're constantly guiding everything we do, or letting us explore certain things, or whether or they might, like if we have two parents, whether or not they fight or get along or, you know what I mean? Like all these little cues we get, the younger we are from an infantile level, the more it is picked up in our own personality. And then that's, you know, that's also, and I don't know the science on this. I don't want to speak out of my ass. But when you're talking about learning languages and stuff, for example, which is literal communication and tonality and flow and all that, not just the literal words and vocabulary you learn, they're always saying the younger you are, the better and the more you can pick it up because you're more impressionable yeah so there's there's a level to it that you know when you're talking about where you come from and what you were surrounded by was it positive was it negative pretty much everywhere has a level of both depending on what it is what the context

is people learn to influence others or even like influence themselves based on the stimuli from that environment yeah you know it's not there's a lot of books written on this from all kinds of different levels, but there are a lot of talented people who have learned to be the way they are based on how they had to respond when they were young and curious enough to not know whether or not they were relying on themselves for survival for sure for sure i'm a huge believer in all that yeah i know for me even though i had my environment at home was safe it was comfortable but growing up in malcolm hill when i first moved here in sixth grade it was a predominantly white town what happens in school which is most of my day where that's spent and the people that

i'm hanging out with my parents are just shielded from they don't know what's happening there behind the scenes right so when i got here yeah of course like when i first got here racist comments bullied like you name it from the full spectrum that was early until i started making a lot of friends here like i took that notion that feeling that i had all the way back when i was in sixth grade how i felt and knew i didn't a i didn't want other people feeling the same way that I felt and be just trying to understand why they felt that way towards me mmm you were thinking about that yeah I was definitely thinking about that I was curious as to why like people felt that they had to say these specific things to

me just because of the color of my skin would you ask him about it literally no i wouldn't ask about it i would i did a lot of politics from sixth grade till i graduated high school which is why i was like ended up becoming class president oh like like school politics school not just school politics but just politics in general like people that that didn't like me for no reason they didn't know me they didn't like me that actually affected me as crazy as that that sounds like i did care crazy i did care about what people said and as opposed to letting that work me up i learned to instead say okay just understand maybe why they feel that specific way if it's something out of your control it's out of your control if it's something that you could help with maybe something that you misinterpreted or that you missed that you could be better at. Great. I learned something from it. Right. Uh, so that,

that kind of politics I was playing with people at a young age, understanding like different people that, uh, that felt some type of way towards me or how I could become friends with different friend groups, like just spread my seeds out there for, you know what I mean? To get everyone like interconnected and feeling like positive about each other. That, there was a lot of politics behind that. And I think that's where I learned that type of environment. That's where I was, my parents were shielded from that.

That was me on my own. I was like living on my own out there in a weird way, even though I had that safe environment when I got back home. And you had that recognition at a young age that there was that line between where your parents saw you in an environment versus where your environment was during the day away from them. Yeah. You understood that.

Yeah. And that's why when you talk about environment at a young age, I'm very thankful for where I was at. And my cousins would always joke around and tell me that, you know, Mike, if you don't want to be a computer engineer, like if you want to be a school teacher, do this, do that. Like, don't listen to your dad. They always thought my dad was forcing me to go the computer engineering route just because, cause he was like a global director for software engineering for like a midsize corporation. So he did that his whole life but for me i never viewed it as like i was forced to have to go to that position i viewed it as at every point in time

my dad was presenting to me the current outlook of like not only the market but where things are going towards and what do you mean and i just want to make sure i understand what do you mean by the market because that can mean a lot of things um sorry just like the global outlook really of where where are things in the world maybe the economy things are moving towards and innovation and just because he's worked innovation in software engineering his whole entire life he knew things were moving towards tech but also what could come from tech, like what, what opportunities lie outside of actually just being like a software engineer, if you want to do this, you want to do that, because you have that specific degree, that's like very, very low level, very technical, you're able to branch off, I, I thought to myself, like my cousins didn't actually understand that because it was maybe their environment that didn't teach them specifically about realistic things. Maybe how the way the world works, it was more of weren't being had behind the scenes that are being very realistic about the state of the current world, how it works and so forth.

So you were, and it sounds like obviously your dad was a huge impact on this, but you were very tactical and listening to you talk about this earlier like it's pretty clear you're very tactical about the applicability of things so even though you got to college and you were a electrical engineer what was the full name of it electrical and computer engineering okay electrical and computer engineering smart shit anyway when you were there even if you didn't know where you wanted to apply that yet you had an understanding even just going into college and saying like all right that's gonna be my major you had an understanding of like okay i know that even if i don't know what exists on

the other side of college yet i know that this major and this focus this area of study and some of the the the soft and hard skills i'm going to get from it too are going to be able to allow me to do a whole bunch of different things and we always pick on it as the main stereotype but whereas if you go in and get a gender studies major i don't know where the fuck you land really i mean you know there's some people that can go out and get a phd and write books with that and that does great but how many people get to do that well if you know where you're going to land that's a different story like i'll advocate if you do want to be a teacher for instance you know exactly at the situation where you want to be and you understand your financials at that point in time

whether you had student debt how much you're going to be making and so forth to be comfortable in that specific position then by all means do that right some people have that understanding of the debt yeah but for me I didn't know exactly, exactly what I wanted to do right after college. I just knew the certain options I had, the salaries that that allowed me to do, to like do the things that I wanted to do, right? I only, so it wasn't clear. That's why I just chose again, chose that path because for me, it was the most options for someone that wasn't really sure of exactly where they wanted to be at. So at the time I just made in my head, the most logical decision based on the information I had and also not knowing where,

where I fully wanted to be. Yeah. So you controlled the variables you could control and you understood there were a lot. Yeah, exactly. So you come out and you didn't go to Saros right away. Where would you do first? I'll let you walk into that one I graduated early just because I could AP courses and honestly I was just ready to I was ready to go out in the real world that's the simplest way to put it

I was ready to go out in the real world I was excited I know a lot of the work I was putting in was just going to come into fruition did you have fun in college i would i had a lot of fun in college but i would say this college there was a never there's a never-ending thing on the back of my mind anytime i was out or having a good time that I had to be studying or I was way behind in my current subject of what I was doing because it was like that for me I did have challenges in college it was just it was just a hard major and something I wasn't passionate about it was one of those things were like I had to get through it right I had to get through it the minutiae sucks yeah

but knowing the minutiae allows you to unlock the things that don't yeah yeah so mentally it it it did take a toll on me just that specific major and that was always on the back of my head and i i always thought in the sense of like okay what is my i know for sure that i didn't want college to be the best four years of my life. So like, how could I set up myself right now to be in a position to have everything and anything? Let me push back on that though. How do you know for sure going into college that you don't want them or even that they're not going to be the four best years of your life? And how did you define that? Because yes, if you're talking about like, oh, am I going to be rich and famous in college? If that's what you want, I'm not saying you do to be rich and famous in college if that's what you want i'm not saying you do but i'm saying like that's what you want i love that yeah yeah chances are unless you're a fucking influencer no that's

not the case right like you're going to be poor and having a good time and drinking natty lights and you know playing beer pong but doing some other stuff too but just because that might be it you're still in it it's it's for most people it's the first time you become independent from the household you grew up in yeah physically literally and you go to a place as long as you go to college and don't remote or whatever where you are a part of a set community of people who are all in the same part of their life and they're all trying to get themselves educated in some way hopefully and you know they're all partying and having a good time so when people say like oh it was the best four years of my life there are guys who are billionaires who openly say that you know and they they loved everything they did after but it's more

the the time of your life the the youth the vitality the lack of responsibility at the time while you're in there you know you're responsible to go to class and and do your job there but the rest of it's having a good time so why was that like kind of it seems like that was a little shut down in your head like like you knew i mean you literally said it you knew you didn't want it to be that that was a very fair by way, everything you just said there, very fair, very fair. And I actually agree with everything you said there. I think too, with something to think about with those billionaires, they had their cake and ate it too.

Yeah. So it's easy to be in that position now where like I had the best time of my life in college. And then now I don't know what their upbringing was or how they got to that specific point in time. And then now to where they're at now, they're billionaires. But for most people, and especially what I've seen from my friends now, and a lot of people that I know now, it's like after college, like, okay, what happens now? Where am I currently at?

Do I even love what I'm doing? Not getting paid as much, like just going through the motions, waiting for the weekends to come. You know what I mean? That's just so dull and so boring to me, right? Nothing is exciting about that. And naturally I'm going to say, okay, that's the rest of my life. I don't not want to be feeling like that for the rest of my life. It's not worth it for me to have the best time of my life for these four years and completely neglect what that's going to mean for the future. Um, because everything that you do, every, every little thing that you do right now

is going to stack up over time and it's going to mean something later down the road, geometric progression. So it's, I love that term. Yeah. And so it's like, okay, I'm not saying don't have a good time. Cause when I have a good time, like i don't like to skimp out and have a good time and you know that right this man likes to have a good time i don't like skipping out so i'm not saying don't have a good time i'm just saying yeah some people are listening right now like what the fuck yeah this kid's a fucking weirdo he's fucking wild i am weird i am weird i'll give you that but i care more about i care more about where I want to be so much and so much so that I'm willing to make those kind of sacrifices to get to that point in time. You mentioned specifically, though, the fact that there are a lot of people who come out of college and start going about life and get down on things because college is over. And it was the best four years of their life.

And they thought that going in. And now they're saying,'re saying well what is there for me i think that's what you said and what's next or what do i do or what is life and what are what are my expectations and there's still a level to it to which you had to and have to experience that too just because you don't know for sure like i'm going to land in this thing or do that thing. You just have a more focused idea of, hey, I know the targets of where I'm going, and I know that those targets line up to other targets, and it'll line up to this thing, like the bit-by-bit part you talked about. But do you ever feel like, you know, even people you're close with, everyone, who's the most brilliant people you know, the most not brilliant people you know,

and everything in between, do you feel like they can't exist on your wavelength of how you see the world and how you see your progression, to use your word in it? It would depend. I have friends that I'm just really close with that even just that emotional support and their investment into me is something that means a lot to me.

And what do you mean by that specifically? It means even I've done a lot of ventures that have failed up until this point in time, but they have supported me every single time along the way, got my name out there. They were my number one fan, so to speak. Even if they maybe not agreed with a certain lifestyle or what i was trying to do or maybe they thought i was crazy at times they still did support me and so that kind of emotional support is something that's huge especially when you're someone that continuously does things over and over again and you're not gonna it's not gonna

be sunshines and rainbows sunshine rainbows right you're gonna have like a million failures but all you need is that one success. So that, that meant the world to me. And then as far as like that wavelength and the creative thinking, I don't think I necessarily needed that from my friends and much so where I don't feel like I need a relationship right now because I don't feel like I need, I don't need comfort in that level, right? I don't need someone to have that emotional connection in that deep of a level. To me, that's not at the forefront of what's important for me.

Because you feel like you're, I just want to make sure I understand, because you feel like, number one, your goals and the time you have to put into them and the focus you have to put into them, this is the time to do it. That much is pretty clear. But you feel like you also have enough emotional support from existing family and friends who have been there every step of the way

including when things go wrong and that you feel like that tank of fuel i guess you could say is is full enough that you don't want to also then feel forced to bring in someone else. And I don't want to say that like too transactionally, but bring in someone and I don't want to say tie yourself down, but potentially have to like, you're the kind of guy, like you're going to give of yourself. You're not just going to get in a relationship and like, say, all right, fuck it. You're going to roll with it. Like you're the kind of guy it's, it's a very much given taken. So you feel like you have enough that right now you have enough existing that right now that give and take is is a little less of a focus because you don't need it and you don't

want to have to force yourself to do it yeah like of course i'd love to chill with people like elon musk and you know what i mean bill gates i love where you took that people at the forefront a hundred percent if not right now, at this point in time, my biggest thing is I don't need to, I don't need to specifically that emote, that kind of support from other people that may feel the same way that I do, because I already think I have a lot of crazy things going on inside my head that I think about and want to do, uh, and that sort of direction. So that's not something that is the type of support that I care as much about right now. Do you worry about like, you know,

finding a woman who's going to understand that drive in you and understand like how you think and what you want to do? Yeah, before I was always set on like a girl being as crazy as having that kind of mindset. Now I not so sure and i think that's always something that's ever changing like i don't know if i want someone that's not as as trying to be as busy let's put let's put it that way and so let me be clear though like everything that i'm laying out to you of how i think about things i don't even know if i'm thinking about it.

Right. Like people say life is too short sometimes. And that if you get lost in what you're trying to do or where you're trying to go, you eventually, it would have all, which went away. Right.

And you wouldn't have enjoyed yourself. But my only counter to that right now is that I'm having, once you start seeing results, you just start having like a great time. You get hungry for more and more and more. And that's how I currently feel at this state. And that's what keeps me going to like, want to continue to like put my head down and focus on specific things that I wanted to focus on. So yeah, I don't know the right answer of, you know, where, I don't know if maybe four years of college should be the best time of your life. I don't know if like, if people should be spending

so much time focusing on their self and not going out there and just like finding someone who loves you having like a happy life. Cause being happy doesn't mean you have to be rich. It's just like, you're very happy that you're doing like, again, I don't know. I don't know all these things. All I know is right now is like how I currently feel and where I want to be. And to me,

that's the most important thing. It's like, if I know that's where I want to be, that's my number one focus. How am I going to get to that specific point in time as fast as possible? So it's, it's tough. I think about,

especially in the COVID era, like when you think about a lot of things that you're doing mentally, you definitely sit back and think about what the current state is, what's going on

and reevaluate where you're trying to be at. And everyone feels that way. You know, I just, I always want to, even if I feel that way, I'm uncertain.

It's like when you have a bad breakup, you just start working out. Like, I'm just, that's what I'm doing. I'm just like fucking doing those things

and now starting to see the results for it, which keeps me which keeps me up going up every day yeah and you have made a habit of controlling what you can control and you have an awareness of it and covid is the ultimate test of that because i was having this conversation with someone yesterday but there are some things that are out of your control. And they convinced me on some of that because some things I'm like, ah, well, you know, you can kind of do this or decide to do that or not. And they're like, well, no, not really. And frankly, like, I think they had a better argument than I did. But there are opportunities in something like this.

And sometimes that even says that that sounds basically insensitive to say but it is a reality because yeah we man is not supposed to be on an island we're not supposed to be isolated we're not supposed to be away from each other we're not supposed to be focused on our thoughts all the time and be in an environment where we're forced to do that. But if you fill your time in that environment, and specifically, if you fill your time in that environment with things that you care about and things that you might even be good at or great at and get better at it, or try the things that you've never had an opportunity to try before and actually take

advantage of a time where it would be very easy to sit around and say man this sucks all the time you know you can do some great things you look at a lot of especially in the world of tech which you're in so speak in your language here some of the seriously some of the best projects some of the best stuff that rose up to prominence rose out of the ashes of you could even go back to the tech bubble where tech was like dirty word internet was a dirty word right after that yeah but the best ideas that had actually had a revenue plan as that bubble burst and was cleaning out it rose up and that ended up birthing internet 2.0 where social media companies started to come out and facebook things like that amazon amazon came from that amazon's the best example but there was i think the company i always forget to look this up we'll look it up after remind me

but i think the company was alta vista was alta vista was like the amazon before amazon i was i never even heard of alta vista and no one knows who the fuck this is i thought i was supposed to know this. I was like, I have no idea who Ultimista is. I don't even know if that's still the right name. That's why we got to check it. But there was a company that was like, oh, that's going to be blank. And that was going to be Amazon.

And to your point, Amazon had the better plan. And Amazon had the better innovation. And Amazon saw the piece by piece bigger picture. Piece by piece. Piece by piece. They started with fucking books yeah and the way I loved a video where you see like little Jeff Bezos like when he was a nerd and he's like well he was like talking into a into like a shitty camcorder and he's like told your name I'm Jeff Bezos and he's like looking up here his other eyes looking over there

yeah and and they're like all right well what was the. And he's like looking up here, his other eye's looking over there. Yeah. And they're like, all right, well, what was the idea? And he's like, well, basically, I did my research and when you look at individual products, there is the most of anything made through books.

When was this video made? Is this a real video? Like 97, 96. Yeah, it's awesome. And he's like, the second was music. So I decided on books and we were just going to focus on that and that's what they did for five six years and then he went to the next

thing yeah like if you ever want to see your mind blown by what kind of innovation can come out of opportunities where no one's in demand in the market no one's tech bubbles bursting and people are losing their portfolios and shit people aren't demanding shit september 11th was happening no one's fucking demanding like products and needs for them but he created something that when they were ready to do it again they were going to do it 0809 what comes out of the bubble right there bitcoin that's just one example but like bitcoin is not even a company you know it's an idea that's formed think what you think look at how big that entire space is now 10 years later yeah and now you look at corona and corona is sitting here like it literally created the need for tech yeah because it it made people have to be able to communicate more like at traditional industries in ways they never had before yeah so like one guy

was talking to who's going to come on the podcast next week he was he was telling me I don't remember the numbers so I don't want to say him but you know it was in it was in the tens of millions of dollars that his company was looking at for funding ahead of covet yeah now he had sold a company when he was 21 for millions of dollars so this is like his baby now this is like this is like the big one yeah and you know this kid's like he's still 24 25 so he's still like all right let's see you know if we can get as much money as we want yeah and he's like dude the minute i won't go and go into his idea yeah it's pretty mind-blowing they already have the product was it seed funding by the way or was it series a or wasn't it series a yet i don't think oh so seed funding like he didn't he doesn't know what product

you know what i don't want to speak out of turn on that gotcha it's not that i'm even giving context but i'm not entirely sure we just went through like high level numbers so but yeah the product exists and everything and it's insane but he was like dude i'm tech because i asked him i'm like you know this has been a pretty good opportunity for tech. And I'm like, I assume it's been the same for you. He's like, bro, you have no idea. He's like, our pipeline within two weeks of this thing started was so big. We had to call people and say, I'm sorry.

Like, no disrespect. We don't, we're not going to be able to talk to you. Like, we don't have time yeah you know and so the people some people like people in tech had the ability to lean in more than others but if ever there was going to be a time that you just say i'm going after this thing i've always i've always thought about doing this or always want to do whatever when else now's the time yeah i know it's it's easier said than done too i know know that. I know that. 100%. But for that, in tech specifically, doing things one at a time,

I think the hardest part about people taking the time right now to say, hey, this is the time to do something, is because they think about going back to it. They think about this grand vision and tackling all that at once it feels like you're tackling a fucking mountain and you know how big that mountain is so you just you never tackle a mountain i tackle little bits and pieces i'm fucking with you go dominoes geometric progression you know this i will tackle that mountain smartly but people that's why people don't i really believe and truly believe

that's why people don't get into something even right now when now is the perfect time you have no other time but to focus on yourself right now they still don't tackle it because they're tackling it in too big of pieces as opposed to bite-sized pieces so alluding back to amazon they started off as a book company right how aw How AWS even came about, how it shaped the world and everyone's on the cloud now is because as Jeff Bezos is building up that specific website, getting huge demand, huge traffic, understanding that, okay, because they own all the hardware that's powering those websites, they host all the servers. They started to realize, damn, at this scale and how much resources we put behind scaling infrastructure and also managing that software, we're actually pretty fucking good at this. Okay, we're really good at this. Let's build AWS. Let's actually not only show other people how to do this, let's take it a step further.

For people that don't know, tell them what AWS is. Yeah, AWS is Amazon Web Services. And when people say the cloud, it really just means that someone else is hosting or storing your websites, your data. It's just not like your physical, your own computer at your home. It's someone else's computer. For lack of a better way of putting it, it's basically like being able to log in

and use a computer that isn't physical in front of you and it's hosted by Amazon. And they charge you for the data bit by bit that you use. They charge you to use that computer, pretty much. You know what I mean? And so it started one by one. Jeff Bezos didn't think when he built Amazon, I'm going to build aws right i'm gonna

have one of the largest uh scalable infrastructure infrastructures in the world that like really infrastructure as a service he didn't think he didn't think about that at the time he didn't it's to go right at that though it's a little scary what they're doing just being honest with amazon like i got my one guy who's like he calls me up and it's always like a two-hour conversation when we talk and i know 90 minutes of it is going to be about the devil of jeff bezos what he's doing what he's doing to the world and the thing is like this guy's brilliant and um look i don't know jeff bezos you don't know jeff bezos we you know we hear what we hear who the fuck knows there's but you read what you can and there's no doubt that he built that brilliantly as we've put it and he did it piece by piece but like have you ever looked at the history of amazon wikipedia

page oh my god dude i gotta pull that up it's when you think about what they've done over the years and you see it's it's exponential progression so when they start with books they wait what five six years to move to the next product i think they started with like toys or something but then the next time they move to something they don't just move to one thing now they move to like three they have the foundation in place already and and they're staying in that case they were staying in the same thing product delivery right and and support but over time what do they move to they move to like you know cloud services totally vertical into

gration man yeah totally different businesses they move to logistics supply chain yeah like we do this all the time let's own this third-party sales and then what do they get through the third party sales they get access to all the data behind the sales yeah then what can they do they can come in and they can beat you in retail i talked with bill on a podcast fessiolo about the what's it called the amazon loft or whatever in new york you know i'm talking about you mean the space anyone could go into they were doing we work while we work was doing we work except amazon said we're not fucking charging we'll give you free lunch we'll buy the best piece of real estate in the best cities but guess what you come in you get your data that's it that's it but i'm just scrolling through this

list i'll put this in the show notes but you can see as the years go on here you know they start 94 they're founded 98 they acquired imdb you know the internet movie database so that they get some some input that allows for user data online so that's where they started thinking like okay let's think down the line yeah and then then it wasn't until August, 1998, like four and a half years into the company where they said, we're going to move beyond books. Yeah, just an announcement. And then they actually started defining what that was

throughout the early 2000s. But then once you get like into the 2010s, there's like a million highlights for each year because as they get bigger it's economy of scale man yeah now they can be like all right we can have a department for this and that'll be their only focus and what they do yeah and it's like it goes right to the concept of takes money to make money and even the shareholder letters from jeff by the way amazing i recommend everyone read his yearly shareholder, the shareholder letter that he sends out there because he tells you straight up exactly what he's thinking, how he feels the

market's going to move towards where they're currently at right now. And that take that I told you about the infrastructure, how they built AWS, I actually took that from one of his shareholder letters back in, maybe it was 2003. They went on a retreat, like all the executives on an island and they all talked about what's next and all of them said hey we're really fucking good at infrastructure this could actually be something you know he does kind of tell you exactly what he's going to do yeah that's the thing outside of buying out all these little companies no but no but really he doesn't say that like he may not say hey all the companies that make x amount of million to x

amount of million you're fucked of million, you're fucked. Like, no, he doesn't write that in the letter. But he does say like we are going to focus on this, this, and that. And here's why. Exactly. Here's how they all relate. Here's why we're focusing on that. Exactly.

And if you're an analyst or just someone basic reading it who has any kind of understanding of industry, you can tell, oh, that's the death so and so or oh that's it for so and so and now you know and the reason i think everyone's thinking about it is because what we're seeing right now is the greatest wealth transfer in probably human history ever yeah and it's happened during corona and i think a lot of people are looking at this going hmm forget just here it's other places around the world too other countries we are basically seeing governments tell businesses who are the bedrock of the economy who take all this risk to do this stuff don't have anywhere near the economy of scale that jeff bezos does yeah we are seeing governments come in and say when you can open and when you can't and then we are seeing things like amazon decide what's what and decide i'm gonna go kill that dog hold on one sec

hey shut up hey we return from this intermission sorry about that anyway right back where i was like people look at this and they go hmm like they get their tinfoil hat on and conspiracy hat but that's the thing we call things like this conspiracies but just like jeff telegraphs what he's saying in his letters i watch people's actions and i watch the overall market flows and what i see right now and you and i were talking about this earlier we can literally define it by looking even at the highest level of society in the stock market you know people are looking at the stock market this year like oh it's up yeah like despite all this shit it's up it doesn't really tell the story at all there's a huge thing called dispersion

and with dispersion we what i mean by that is you see a lot of companies doing better than they ever had before yeah and they're also bigger and so they're dragging up all the averages so like amazon takes up i don't know i don't know what the percentage is right now, but maybe it's like 6% of the S&P. All of the S&P. Yeah, exactly. And who follows them up? The other companies right with them. Google, Facebook, all these companies who are benefiting from this.

So you don't really pay attention to the types of industries that are through the floor. And so that's the highest level. Now think about the regular economy and think about all these places who are being forced to not do business, who are being told and had the goalposts move a million times on what's safe and what's not and are being told when and where they can actually perform the duties they do. And all the while, Jeff Bezos comes into some of these things and it's like a giant sucking sound during all this. He just sucks the whole thing up and takes everything that's in front of him so when you look at even new york city and you see all the retail stores and i'm hearing about that are closed forever just in times square yeah well the the people that bought stuff there and maybe times square is a bad example but you know you go five blocks down the second avenue and all the retail stores

close there well the people who bought stuff there now gotta go somewhere else to do it it's not like other retail stores are opening up and they're also home right now so where are they getting it getting it from fucking amazon comes in and ends businesses yeah so it's scary because yeah you see great innovation but i always wonder about that point right yeah like he gets really rich before this whole wealth transfer obviously one of the wealthiest guys in the world yeah and he gets far past the point where it matters you know but it there's like this thing that happens where it's about the game you know there's the game of it but they there's this chasm that guys like him may or may not cross we don't. I don't know his heart,

but I can only look at his actions where it's like, they get so lost in the game. They forget about the common good and they lose sight of the word enough. The word enough. Cause we talked about your grandpa right now and how he's been building things his whole life. Right. And loves to build things even when he's 80 years old with this this is gonna be a hot take and don't

don't hate me for this because china's a really up country and a lot of things to do i don't think the people in china are up i'm talking about agreed a thousand percent yeah we need to be careful about that too yeah it's very easy to like say they suck right and then you drag hatred onto an entire nation there it's the same as north korea man in that sense like there's great people in there they're controlled by their government it's not their fault 100 so that was good to clarify that and i think the ability of what jeff bezos is doing right now and why that's why that also compares to china is because they have total control of something the innovation that they're trying to do is how they see fit

and their vision they're able to actually implement that and put that into into place because of the amount of resources and backing that they have whereas it relates at the covid you can even relate that to our response as a government they don't have the totalitarian author i don't even know the word totalitarian totalitarianism authoritarianism whatever right word here they just don't have that power to even implement that strict of a national mandate they could do maybe these mask laws or or whatever right but having that having that type of coordinated response in america is a little bit trickier and we we all know that right but so going back to going back to amazon what

they're and what they are specifically trying to build, I think it's hard for me. And here's where my hot take comes in. Innovation can only happen when it happens in two ways of how I see it. It's either you know that you're in this specific box. It's like, what can I do knowing that I'm in this specific box? Or it's understanding how can I get outside of this box? Right? Innovation happens in those two ways of how I see it.

So the route that Amazon's in right now that's a little bit unfortunate is that they're in a position where they are outside of the box ready, and they own that fucking box. Like, they could literally do whatever they want, maybe even more powerful than the government right now just based on the amount of how many... It's not only going vertical now. It's expanded horizontally, the different industries that they're specifically in. My hope is that I don't want America to be like China in any way, like total terrorism, all of that. But what would be awesome is if there

was a way for America to get past the bureaucracy and to be able to invest in areas of the future. Like for instance, if we were to invest in renewable energy, because there's going to be a point in time where it's just way cheaper to be in renewable energy as opposed to natural gas, coal, oil. That point in time is coming. It's going to be cheaper per kilowatt. It's really close, if not already there right now. Why are we not, as an entire nation, investing, maybe even subsidizing on renewable energy electric cars, knowing that it's going to be the future and we are going to

be the number one supplier or the number one leader as far as tech in that specific space around the world like china's already investing a lot of resources into that and they're shaping up to be able to be the leader in that space when that time comes because of that totalitarianism government it's the vision of that specific government. No one could tell them no, right? No one could tell them to fuck off. So that's why innovation in America today gets like a little bit complicated. And I don't know the answer to that.

Like where we live in the world right now, United States is the best country in the world. It's just, I don't know. I don't know how we get to that point in the way the current government stands. And I don't know if you have a thought around that or what I said or disagree with what I said. I'm just thinking about it from an innovation standpoint, like with this many restrictions and different opinions and bureaucracy, like how that innovation is ever going to be possible with America. how we still see america as you know not from these privatized companies that are shaping the way even with tesla i mean elon musk and spacex right they're shaping the way the future uh to go

into space but like how can the government get involved to also be a part of that so that america as a whole the whole entire economy is benefiting from this innovation as opposed to like the select few and then maybe trickle down economics from there. Okay. Okay. Okay. You just, I think you just opened up an entire can of worms right there. I think you knew it too, but I fuck with it. Let's go with it. So remind me. We're going to come back to like your whole Saros into fire hydrant thing, which people don't know what I'm talking about with that. But we got to come back to a little bit of your path here and what you're doing. But I like this rabbit hole, so let's roll with it. So renewable energy, I'm going to want you to define some of that a little more because you just painted a pretty good picture and gave the high level.

But I think we should talk about that, especially because that came out as a – not really last minute, but at least nationally as a last-minute big issue in the presidential campaign because of some stuff that got said. But let's look at that China thing you just raised because – and again, we said this earlier, but Chinese government, Chinese people, two different things. So when I'm referring negatively, I'm referring directly to the People's Communist Party of China, which is a scumbag government. Anyway, communism is obviously a terrible, totalitarian, bullshit form of government that no one should support because it's evil that said one advantage that they do get in this whole world we have right now which is very sad but it's unfortunately true is one thing that they do that on the front end is actually very anti-communistic or however you say it are you aware of how they specifically how they subsidize their tech companies? Okay. So if you are any kind of company looking for funding, just any industry, you can go around, you look for investors. And in tech, as you've alluded to a million times today, you go to VC. Yeah.

And you pitch ideas that you think can scale with new ideas and products and if a vc likes it they take a flyer on it and they invest a certain amount of money where they think that due to the ability to scale technology they can make thousands of percentage points potentially on on a return so it's it's a high risk high reward industry because a lot of ideas never make any money but the ones that do they make a lot yeah so with the chinese communist government it's like anything else it has a power structure so you have xi jinping winnie the pooh at the top if you know you know and um down towards the bottom level not the smallest bottom level but towards you have the mayors of towns even you know let alone some of the big cities and like anything else the mayors want to rise up in the party they're incentivized to try

to you know become a governor or whatever the hell it is above them and shit like that so to do that they have to appease the party because it's not a democracy the the communist party and xi jinping decide what's got what goes so the number one thing that china has been looking at is technology and they've been doing it for a long time it's a long game and you and i have talked about how they were a third world country technologically in 2000 and they just kept on stealing ip and then building on it it's genius actually like they just the world let them see their ip including the united states worst offender all, and they just took it and then developed their own shit on it. And over time, especially with that Made in China 2025 campaign that the government started back in 2014, 2015, they empowered the lower-ranking members of the Communist Party to make a name for themselves through the tech industry

and through subsidizing ideas in tech and specifically here's how they did it they said you know as a communist government they have a lot of money they tax the shit out of their citizens they don't give a fuck about their citizens and so they have stuff to spend and you would think government's not going to spend on you know the money-making ability of people because they don't want that. In tech, they make an exception. And so what they do is they tell the mayors that they are permitted to pick out startups or ideas that come across them and they're incentivized to do it in tech. And they're permitted to act as a venture capitalist. The mayors. Literally literally so here's why

that's important there's a kicker to it very anti-communistic what i was alluding to when the mayors go to invest in a project let's say that i am a tech startup and i'm looking for 10 million dollars in funding we'll use dollars they use you know whatever We'll use dollars. And I go to the mayor and the mayor likes my idea it out, I'm not saying, hey, I'm at zero right now. I really need you. Now I have a light to stand on. Number two, it is literally the government who controls everything and everyone has to look to for guidance on everything who has decided to invest with the people's money into this. So it is another level of, the government likes it oh and we want to do right by the government so let's help them out the third thing is what makes the

difference though and that is they cap their return so if i'm that mayor and i invest five minutes is genius and i invest that five million into that project that's looking for 10 million i may say to them like they cap it low they'll say the maximum return we the government can get is eight percent now if i'm that company now and i go to raise that other five million dollars i want the best companies the best vcs i can get right because they have the best resources, the best help, whatever. So now, if a VC was going to evaluate a full $10 million investment at a return of 1,000% maybe on the upside, now with $5 million of that money capped already at 8%,

the difference between the 8% and the 1,000 gets to go into the other pool. So if you're a venture capitalist and now you're looking to make a $5 million investment that you would have evaluated at a 1,000% return on the upside if everything went right, now maybe it's 3,000 or 2,000, whatever it is, whatever the number is, because you have that extra money trickling over. So when you talk about what we got to do here in our own private economy to be able to incentivize the private sector to work with the government and innovate, they already have a, I don't want to call anything perfect, but that is a brilliant system. And I have to admit that. Now, I didn't know how they subsidized it. I just know they did subsidize their own businesses, which gave American companies a little bit of a disadvantage. Because if you're getting out-competed by that kind of funding that you just described, eventually, how are we going to be able to compete, right? And that's the problem.

You know, now we've protected our IP more than we have. That was, you know, Trump is a guy who came in and had never had a computer on his desk let's call it what it is you know he's a boomer right and so that was a little terrifying and got more terrifying as i became more aware or i hate using this word because i don't even know what it means anymore but informed on tech issues whatever you want to call it right and you know there there's an extent to which he's standing up to china and he was the first president to really do that but he's standing up to them on like manufacturing and stuff it's not nothing but that's not what they really give a shit about they're already making money all over the world with that if we hurt them with a 10 tariff like

yeah it doesn't help they don't like it but they just continue on the side being able to do what they really want to do which is be able to build the machines and the software that surpass us yeah and so now we're at a point where china is legitimately there's like four kaifu li the venture capitalists of innovation ventures talks about the four pillars of technological advancement that they measure it with and in the year 2000 we were not only ahead of china in all four but again they were a third world country no comparison yeah by 2018 they were ahead of us in two tied with us in one conservatively and still slightly behind us in one of them and the one they were still slightly behind him was artificial intelligence what are the one they were still slightly behind him was

artificial intelligence what are the other three pillars i don't remember the exact terms so i don't want to give them out of my ass but they measure it around it's my understanding is that it's mostly like the the the four pillars all come back to how software is led is leveraged but it includes within it measuring the semiconductors and some of the like physical hardware that goes into creating better technology that can create better software which they're great at gosh i guess maybe it's capacity of how many transistors could fit in one chip. Correct. That's exactly it. No, that makes sense. That's where Moore's Law was accepted.

Tell people about Moore's Law, by the way. Yeah, Moore's Law is... The definition of Moore's Law is that every two years, technology is going to be twice as better as it was before. And it does it in like half the space, I think, right? Yeah, so transistors specifically, it's saying that, okay, I can fit a million transistors in the square box. Two years from now, I'm going to be able to fit two million in that same square box.

But Moore's Law eventually scales out. It's not exponential forever. Correct. At least that's our thought process behind it. But we are still in the exponential phase, technically. Yeah, it's waning down a little bit from what I've read, but yes, we're still in the exponential phase technically yeah it's waning down a little bit from what i've read but we're yes we're still in that we're still in that phase and like if we're talking about china though here and why this is important because people go okay well they're doing their

thing we're doing ours it's not that simple man you know machines don't give a fuck what you think we laugh and and it is kind of funny to say but you know you look at what was a powerful computer built by the government in say 1997 it was the size of a football field the same power was built in 2006 and it was a football think about now think about what's what's in your hand you have more power in the palm of your hand with an iphone significantly than george w bush had on september 11 2001 yeah with the whole resource of the government so now think about just math i mean china's got you know billion with a b is billions of people whatever the final number is a lot more than us and they have a government who's incentivized to not care about basically the bottom 90 percent

of society 95 percent of society they care about the people who are who are making having the opportunity to make the most money and become billionaires and shit because they still those people happen to usually be in tech and then they get access to all the tech and that i mean have you looked at the tiktok issue at all this is the tiktok issue yeah i don't know much i don't know much about it i only know what's currently going on the climate of i know they got like a nine-day extension to sell it to another american company yeah which it's basically don't have to explain it it's very simple there's a company bite dance that owns tiktok right now they are a chinese company they are therefore at the control of the chinese government and despite the fact that they claim publicly probably straight from the mouthpiece of the chinese government that they steal no data and that it is all housed in america chinese government has full access to all the data

we're putting in there every day and it's it's it's a problem just because you think about what they can do with that with like machine intelligence and i don't need to tell you man like anyone who doesn't understand artificial intelligence in here is like, okay, I don't know what that means. I just know it's some science shit, tech shit, whatever. We can all understand that the way things learn, the way human beings learn is we take in more information and we keep it, right? And then we use it to deduce in the future. That's what machines do. And they can do it at a non – they don't sleep.

They do it at a nonstop rate. And the more information they get, they automatically do it at a non, they don't sleep. They do it at a nonstop rate. And the more information they get, they automatically remember it. It's hard for me to comment on data being transferred because you're talking about petabytes of data and the servers that they operate in, TikTok specifically for America, those servers are in the United States of America.

So I don't specifically know, I'm not saying it's not possible or it's not happening right now. I just don't know technically how they're transferring petabytes of data over to the chinese communist government like in china mainland hey maybe if they have agents in the united states that are sifting through this data that's a different story um but going undetected or maybe it has already been detected maybe it's something that our government actually knows one of those things

they're not telling us yeah that they know is going on i have i have no idea but tiktok as a whole as a platform is like incredible platform to me it's like dude yeah what is it different than the information that tiktok's getting from me as a user than facebook is getting from me or google is getting from me right agreed it's like a pay-to-play system i'm not you these platforms are free for a reason and everyone should understand that when they're using any platform that's for free on the internet that's just how i view it personally i personally love tiktok i have zero argument with what you just said i think it's entirely true i mean google what do people think happens when we plug in search terms into google and shit it is it is complete machine learning inside of our minds and how we think down to the word patterns we use you know so course, it is the same sin in that case. The difference is here,

and believe me, Google, Amazon, even the social networks, they concern me a lot. It's a problem, and it needs to be addressed. And they have the antitrust suit going against Google. That's a good start, but it's a little start, right. The reason I single out TikTok is because the one thing that TikTok doesn't have in common with those other platforms is that they are not from America and they are, and again, it's a very valid point you raised that can they get all that data over there?

By what we know, frankly, the answer is probably no. Without being undetected is what I'm saying. Correct. Is my question. And that's the point. What is it that may be out there that we don't know about? You know, and that's, that's the ultimate question. Yeah. There could be many things to it, but I think at the end of the day, the biggest thing I was worried about, about that was not the fact that I love that

platform and use it for my own personal use, but for the fact that what does that say about america and foreign companies that aren't bad actors coming into america is taking a huge share to the part where the government's going to say hey you need to give this to an american-owned company like you're going to have to play ball if you're going to if you're going to be in america oh wait like we're going to take your you know and that's like the other side of it that's what we're that's what worries me it's tough because you know capitalism is the best system but everything's got a ceiling especially with technology because technology you know in the past you open up a business there's only god only made so many so much land and so many pieces of real estate that you can use to sell that product yeah that's not relevant anymore as long as you can get warehouse space like if that like you know it's not like facebook needs warehouse space right yeah but you know

looking at the amazon example the scalability and the size to which you can take it and therefore the convenience you can create for the end customer yeah people like you and me and everyone else we're gonna do like we have lives we have shit to do we're not thinking on the micro basis we don't have time for that so when we want to get a product for whatever it is we go the easiest best place to do it i get fucking everything i have at amazon yeah it's the easiest best place to do it yeah you know and i didn't for a long time. I held off on that. And then I was like, well, got to do it. I mean, that's the biggest reason why

to build, to get up and running in an app today, for example, the way that systems today currently work, they make it easy for you to plug and play from different other applications to build your own app. So what I mean by that is like, say you're Uber, for instance, and Uber and Lyft, they're all using Google Maps as API. That's how they have

geolocation. API, define that for people. Yeah, basically, it's like a way to communicate from for one computer system to communicate with another, maybe like speak the same language, for instance, that's their form of communications, like how many communicate and speak English to each other. That's how we're passing information to each other right now. So Google is communicating. Basically, Google's proprietary Google Maps. That's what really powers Uber and Lyft's GPS. So if Google were to ever say, wake up one day and say, hey, we're not going to have this as an available open API anymore.

You can't just use our app and your app. Uber and Lyft are just going to have to use their own in-house like technical solution. Right. So it gets to the point where like easiest way to get up and ground running is already taking from what people already built. But when you get in the scale of Amazon, you're buying what people built and now it's part of your own infrastructure. Or if you're Apple,

like Apple proprietary, everything proprietary, every, everything we have an Apple, whether it's a phone, Mac, iMessages, like those proprietary things that are just involved specifically with Apple, it's always gonna be retained by them, which is where they have all the leverage to keep on continuing to build and buy out really anything that even becomes competition, like best believe Apple, if something ever competes with Apple specifically, and this happens with Google and Apple today, they're going to buy out that company,

whether it's hardware, whether it's software, and they're going to sunset it. They're just going to buy it to sunset it. Or use it. Or use it, right? Either one's a win. Yeah. So even though we talk about like

everything being open source or, even when we talk about open source in general, or anyone has the same- And define open source too. Yeah, it's like tesla's cars for instance uh it's open sourced in the sense where everyone has the same information to how something was built but they could take that information and build something of their own on top of it right so they basically and another way to put it would be like the the nuts and bolts of the software is available for people to see or whatever it is the product for people to see and then they can then add to

it if they want to because they have the it's like they have the user manual this goes here it's like here's exactly how to build the car but you have to build it entirely yourself that's really thinking about like when things are open source. Wild. Yeah. It's just, it's, these are topics that not enough people are aware of. And I don't mean to be like the, you know, person up here pounding the fist saying,

you guys don't see the storm coming. Like, I don't want to be that guy, but like, we don't think, and I say, because i was included for a very long time here we don't think about when we double tap that heart like how that happens yeah we don't think about how the things that come in front of us come in front of us at least now there's like an understanding that like people realize but they don't do anything about it including me like yeah

that your phone listens to you and you know but what what is what does that mean and and where does that line draw i mean there was there was another guy i was talking to like i don't know last night or the night before and i was asking him about technology that he and he doesn't know i want to highlight he doesn't know but like he's the kind of guy who runs in circles and like is very legit and can hypothesize very confidently yeah i was asking him about like types of technology that he was i said if i said x existed right now at apple and or google would you say confidently that i'm correct about that and every single thing i asked him he said yes yeah every single one yeah that's at he said, yes. Every single one.

That's at least been explored, right? They've all been explored. We know that. But it's like, what are you willing to give up to have this? And that's it. And for me, I enjoy, just from someone coming from the tech background, I enjoy the innovation that's happening

and the apps that are currently out in the market today and what's provided for me value-wise. And what i'm getting it's not right now doesn't hit that barrier of like okay i'm not willing to give up this sort of information anymore because this is too much for me it's like i'm willing to give up this kind of data on myself for what it's actually allowing me to do on a day-to-day basis like prime example slack for instance right i don't know how much information slack's actually collecting, but for the past three years, I've been using Slack religiously for ventures

and also just my professional career. So you're a big Slack guy. Love Slack. And that's something I'm willing to give up like any information that they have in me that I'm saying through there because it's enabled me to be where I'm currently at today and communicate how i can at this very point in time you know it's the trade-off that we make every single day it's the short-term trade-off yeah it's like you

know what am i it all comes back to time and convenience it's what everything in life ever has been you know when they when they made the first wheel and rounded a rock they're like well now we can roll whatever into fucking town. And that saves. See, bro, it's the same as investing. I'm investing in commercial real estate, in wine, and in the fucking stock market all on my phone. All on my phone. How are you investing in commercial real estate?

I use Fundrise. Love that app, by the way. My returns have been great there. But it's to say, like, the fees to use these robo-advisors or these apps are nominal, right? Nominal is low. I believe so. Yeah, I'll take it. I'm using the context. I'm Filipino, so I'm not sure if that's the correct word for it. Even though I was born here. You know I was born here. So don't use that against me. But the fees to having these robo-advisors, nominal. And the returns are great. I don't have to worry about

day trading, for instance. I know everything that I'm putting into these apps, long-term investment. I see exactly what my portfolio is. I see how much money I'm making, the dividends I'm getting in return, what I'm invested in. And that's all done for me, as opposed to having a human being that could have human error, right? Don't know what they're specifically thinking or why they view something like as important as opposed to maybe AI or a robo-advisor would, right? Because these things, they could pick up a million things at once as opposed to what a human could do. So these type of advances, I'm about it. No one in their previous generation, you worked in the financial space before understanding that.

There just hasn't been a time where this was around ever before. And now this is a real thing that not even everyone has picked up on just yet. I still have some friends that their companies like providing them, for instance, like a financial advisor to go over their portfolio or to invest a little didn't know about these hidden fees that are, that are going to come with it as opposed to, you know,

maybe getting that money for themselves and maybe investing in the SPY for instance, right. Just putting it in their own stock brokerage account. But it's, I'm happy with what technology is providing me today and what that allows me to do. I don't know much about AI specifically,

because I don't, that's something I actually don't read up on enough, but I don't know what there's going to come a point in time. We're going to have diminishing returns on technology in general. It's like maybe that point in time, that's fucking doomsday where it's Terminator three. Yeah. Someone coming from the future here and telling us that we're fucking up right now and yeah yeah maybe that's already happening you ever think about that that could be it could be happening what if like what if like all this stuff that's happening like the craziness in the

world is because like the aliens are already here like they just came and they're like the simulation has worked if someone's gonna do it i think it's donald trump you know what i mean like i wasn't gonna say it but like if someone's the alien dude but that's the thing he does he's either gonna reveal it or he's the alien yeah it's one or the other i honestly i wouldn't even i'd fuck with him about you're like oh you're an alien you have my vote that would make up that would make up for everything here yeah he's like i have damning information about the public or just yeah do you ever think about that like simulation theory sometimes what i think about most that scares me

is the fact that if there are aliens out there for sure there has to be mathematically statistically it has to be and they may or may not be involved yeah i don't know but the fact that they're not the government's not telling us anything about it that's what scares me because like what if doomsday is coming they know about it but they're not gonna panic the american people and that's also why presidents before us have not said anything about it that's what scares me i'm like there's no way this information that the government doesn't have this right you you say that in a very interesting way you say you said right there and they're not going to panic the people are you referring to coven interesting year to say that if you really wanted to go like full tinfoil hat you could really go with that but yeah i look i don't know what i

don't know and that's like that once you get past a certain level when you're hypothesizing things forget the word conspiracy and all that it gets to a point where you make so many leaps of faith that it is statistically and mathematically impossible to say if you were for sure if you are anywhere even in the right direction so i don't really know but when you say something like simulation theory which is like the idea that all of this is kind of set up over time and time is a myth and gravity's a myth and all that and that there are beings that control what's happening here and they've done it before in the galaxy and all that bullshit like when you get there then it's more like you're philosophizing i don't know if that's a word but you know what i mean

like you're more or less thinking about what's what's possible versus like so this guy did this thing with that guy and then they they handled this thing and that's why they made this policy and then announced it like once you start going down that rabbit hole like that where it's not just purely philosophical it's like it's kind of a waste of time and now everyone's sitting at home and coming up with a lot of fucking things in their heads so i can easily say i wake up every morning i have a choice of what i'm doing and then i could all say but yeah it is possible that this was already yeah a simulation yeah it gets into like free will and all that yeah but i want to go back to the renewable energy point before we forget about that so this became like a last

minute major issue in the presidential campaign because you had biden have the slip where he was like in the last debate you know i want to get rid of the oil industry and he wanted to do it i think by like 2030 or something like that like soon like that's fast and we all know not maybe not all of us but a lot of people know intuitively that like yes there's going to be better things in oil we're already discovering those and using those in some cases yeah but like anything else oil is not crushing the climate it's not great for it but it's not crushing it if it lasted for another 300 years that's a different story yeah but it's not great for it but it's not crushing it if it lasted for another 300 years that's a different story yeah but it's not point being it's not the kind of thing where you need

to be like it's over tomorrow we need to phase it out tomorrow because now you're dealing with people in one generation and what i mean by that is like people who are working in that now you create a panic scenario where they suddenly have to leave and learn something new and you don't create a a strong very long-term natural phase-out process whereby oil companies can also reinvent their business yeah and be something new when it's profitable to them when it's profitable to them so you have to create that so when you're saying renewable energy what are you referring to specifically yeah i'm just talking about as far as what powers our homes, for instance, right? Just right now we have a good source of that energy is like nuclear reactors, for instance, but it, renewable energy can mean many things,

even if it's coming down to cars, Tesla, for instance, like just lithium batteries, just being able to have a sort of market where everyone is driving electric vehicles. Right now, at this very point in time, unless you're like Elon Musk and you have that kind of capital where you can invest a fuck ton of money in building these dope cars that everyone can drive, it's not profitable for a business, even companies like shell for instance to go all in and renewable right now because right now they're a public traded company all they care about is the profit as it stands today so when the point in time comes where it's going to actually be profitable to invest in renewable energy those companies 100 will i have no doubt about it

because it's just it's just pure. It's just pure business for them. And that's why I was talking about the possibility of subsidizing for. I didn't know what you mentioned about China, how they subsidize. But I was reading a book somewhere, the ability to subsidize these type of things that are going to be innovative for the future. That's what's going to enable us as a country to get to that point in time faster where it actually is cheaper for renewable energy just to be broadly widely adopted because we invested the resources into it as opposed to just pushing it off as like a side project for these smaller companies or these bigger companies

it was a side project for them to throughout the entire time so that's that's what i personally meant about subsidizing these things like economic standpoint too, I'm pretty sure it was just 2018 or 2016, the Pentagon labeled climate change as pretty much one of the biggest, not warnings, one of the biggest challenges we're going to have to face in the coming future. I think the term is like global something. You know what I'm talking about. Yeah.

Global threats or something like that. talking about. Yeah, right. So it's actually not only is it- Global threats or something like that. Global threat. Yeah, exactly. So it's actually in our best interest to be investing in these things from a global threat perspective, but also economically.

Because we're not gonna competing with China. Like jobs that are being lost here from whether that's steel or whatever, we're not gonna get those jobs back. And it's just supply and demand. If China's manufacturing them at such a cheaper rate and as well as labor, why are we gonna we going to try to out compete for the same exact thing we're not going to be able to here in america right it's a matter of okay what can we

what can we compete in when people talk about retraining coal miners to be computer engineers that's like stupid first of all or just you know teach them how to code right learn to code that was that hashtag that got like people it gets it starts getting complicated there when people don't want to leave people aren't even willing to leave a specific area even if you pay them to move somewhere else and there's numbers behind this even if you pay them to move to another location maybe to get that retraining and have a better life say that's in new york city people don't actually know they don't like that so don't like being told what to do they don't like yeah exactly so there's a culminate it's easy for me to say like this should this is what should be getting done but you know i'm sure it's things that people think about on a day-to-day now especially in the government but it's one of those things just

because of the nature of how our government works the changing it's just going to be hard to have that long-term vision and start playing for that future unless you have like an administration there for eight years that's eight years it's going to take at least the very minimum that eight years that's fully invested in that and even its predecessors after yeah i would say at a minimum there needs to be some level of consistency which is tough and you're stepping on a big egg right now that is i mean it's a bigger and bigger topic and it's so important because it represents so many of the issues and that is how polarized things are and when you look at these two parties and this is why you know whenever i can i speak out against the archaic system of creating two choices

that are becoming more and more on the opposite ends of the spectrum for you to to decide and basically endorse an entire set of ideas across the millions of policies and say i agree with at least a majority of these in these two choices and it's it's not an easy solution to fix that at all it's one of the hardest things i've ever tried to concept in my head and i think a lot of people would agree with me but it represents a lot of the problems and i look at climate change as such a prime example because how did climate change become a forefront issue like when was the first time you heard about climate change maybe al gore's i was young

you nailed it but yes i was really young though when that came out i don't even know what age i was yeah i was inconvenient truth yep an inconvenient truth i think it was like 0607 i was young too and you nailed it that's that's when that was the first time people were like hmm okay that's interesting yeah and the problem with that is number one al gore was from one party very specifically he was a prominent member of the democratic party because he had run for president famously and literally almost won like lost by 500 votes and And he painted a disaster over a specific timeline, meaning now when I look at it with all the context we have, and over the years I learn more, learn less sometimes too. You get stuck in all the noise, and I'm a believer that this is a problem, and I've been that way now for a while but when he painted the picture he showed you manhattan and he did it in his calm al gore voice he goes here here's manhattan that's 2012.

click the button like on this documentary i'll never forget this he's like it's underwater manhattan will be gone and and it's like holy you know you're fucking 10 years old watching this you're like holy fucking shit and see in 2012 he was right for about three days because hurricane sandy happened yeah and then the water left because it was a fucking hurricane it had nothing to do with that you know whether or not you want to say hurricanes have to do with climate change different story i'm saying over like he was saying it's going to be gone like the island in manhattan is going to be gone yeah and he's painting all these pictures and so the part of the motivation behind the documentary was to legislate because of it which by the way on the idea and concept like oh this is a problem let's

figure out ways to fix it that's not a bad thing yeah but he made it so extreme and then made it an ideology of the left that what did he do and became a part of that party so what happens you get this just how you know equal but opposite reaction works the other side then comes in doesn't matter if they're like smart not smart whatever their instant reaction is they're under attack yeah because it's not their battle because the left picked it first in this case and so the lefty whoever whichever side yells right or left which whoever yells at the first one first and becomes the face of their party and so what does a dog do when they're in a corner they bark back and they get real desperate and so you had years there and it still happens in some cases where the entire republican party said it's it doesn't exist

right and now like it seems like based on some actions and let me highlight underscore in bold some because it's very minimal it seems like trump at least realizes like okay it's not a hoax which he called it once but like it's he still when he was in office like obviously didn't prioritize it and doesn't think it's a big deal he's smart he only cares about what his current constituents care about and the same as politicians they're smart they know what their people care about they're not saying these things for a reason but like we talked about renewable energy but even consumerism right for me as a consumer to afford either to buy this non-renewable type of straw or just cup in general, or me as a consumer have to invest money to buy these recyclable products, renewable products, that's tough on the consumer.

So expecting it shouldn't be up to the consumer. It's tough to ask the consumer to change so that it just trickles down all the way up. So that company's change, that a really tough thing to do. Us as a consumer are going to buy what's cheapest and most convenient for us at that specific point in time. That's where I also think the government could help with. Yes. Like incentivizing companies to move away from plastics, for instance. Yes.

There's so much behind it. But again, it comes down to it needs to be something that's consistent longer than eight years, longer than one presidential term, two presidential terms. And that's the problem because – It can't be political. It can't. It can't. Because now you've had the two sides. That documentary was like 06, 07. We'll check that later.

Either way, it was like more than 10 years ago, like almost 15 years ago. Over that time, each side is dug in more and more so if you talk if you hear from the republicans they're still like you can't let like i think a famous line i think marco rubio said this he was like you can't legislate the climate i mean if you just took his words literally yeah he's right but that's not that's not correct because you can create through some regulation you can create some incentives to stop certain trades, whatever, industries from doing certain practices, air quotes, from further harming certain things. Then on the left, you have everyone screaming – they keep on moving the date back, but the world's going to end. They put the climate clock in Times Square, which historically historically speaking every death clock that's ever been created is wrong

so they're gonna be wrong about that and they lose credibility every time because when they want to legislate too it's like it's not just like hey let's let's do what's smart it's like how do we get more control yeah and so then people see that especially people who are i won't even say conservative they definitely right away go fuck that you know they won't even listen but people who are like moderate businessmen and women are looking at that going no i feel like that is just an excuse to to take away free markets we got to do something about this climate but this is kind of crazy that's why i'm afraid of polarization because if people on the left for instance get too overworked up the fact that not

enough is happening and that's where that's where more a little bit too far-leaning liberal ideas come into play where they're not even taking into consideration the average day american on the other side what actually impacts them or how that's going to change them they just want this change all at once which is just not which is just not going to happen so now the rift just keeps on getting bigger and bigger because the right's like saying like, this is crazy. I don't, this is too many things changing at once. I don't want this shit to change. And the left is just still pissed because they're like, it's been years and this, like, we're not making movement anywhere, which is just completely opening up that political divide. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's scary in that

sense. And it's tough and that's why i try to be open-minded when i have conversations with uh with people from both sides because i don't consider myself like even though i voted for joe biden i don't consider myself a democrat i don't consider myself a republican sure i only care to really about like three main things in my head which we talked about earlier that's the only reason why i voted for biden i'm not worried about a million different little things at once because there's just too much in my life going on day to day that I don't have time to be as informed about all those little things. And I think in my head, the same thing goes for other people out there, whether they're

left or right. Some people like life is life, right? You can only consume so much and only care about so much. So I'm sure other people people either way that they voted they cared there was like really main key concepts underlying that they cared about which is why they went for that specific way and I'm like hey understand that you know power to you that's the whole point of why we're here do you ever have you ever read uh Dr Pinker Steve Pinker I have not oh you would love him you would love him here Steve like you of all people he's a uh he's a psychologist from harvard long time psychologist one of the more brilliant psychologist minds in the world and respected ones but he he's written a lot of books his most recent one was enlightenment now and a key theme that he has across i won't say all of his books but a lot of them is he focuses on using empirical data and then

reason to determine how we're making progress around the whole world even in places that are still ass backwards yeah like i had ad in here this morning and you know we're talking about guinea and like you know it's rough over there right now like they're not anywhere close to here they live in conditions that many of their people that we would never dream of yeah but even those places as crazy as this sounds are significantly better off than they were 50 years ago oh yeah right facts yeah so one of the things that pinker points out and i think he may have used this exact example i've definitely said this before but he said let's look at something like moms against drunk driving or something like that. He goes, so who are a lot of people who join this group?

It's mothers of kids or people who were, you know, their sons or daughters that were killed by – at the hands of a drunk driver, right? And so that's one of the worst things that could ever happen to a human. You are emotionally like, oh my god. And it's a very beautiful thing to then dedicate a big part of your life to try to help other people not feel that pain. Right? Like it's a great group. And that's – his argument is that great group. But he said – he says what does a group like that have to trade on? They have to trade on their constantly being a disaster.

And even if that – and it's not like they go out there and say, guys, how can we make this a disaster today? It's not like that. They're not out here like manipulating people. They're doing everything for the right reason in that case. Maybe some other groups aren't. That one, that example, they're doing everything for the right reason. But they do it by showing you all the bad things that happen so they don't come out and say like on january 1st every year they don't send out a newsletter and a tweet and an instagram saying congratulations

guys deaths and duis went down by 45 last year we're doing great because then what happens human beings go oh shit i guess that problem is almost solved and then they don't get any donations they get no attention and they can't they can't trade and therefore legislate on that on that culture of fear and so now i bring this back to the two parties and we saw the greatest example of the opposite ends this year yeah i'll start with george floyd when george floyd happened there is no one i talked to including like some of the most conservative people i know who didn't watch that and go that is fucking bullshit like that is one of the worst things i've ever seen didn't matter who george floyd was or whatever anyone sees a dude neutralized

in handcuffs they watch a video some guy sitting on him it's like fuck man like you're watching a slow motion murder the reaction to that at first like these protests got out of control because groups ended up taking control of them but a lot of people who got involved in that at first and like you were in some of them in new york you weren't for all the right reasons they're like that was just fucked up like we want to show support it's a beautiful thing that the younger generations have and so at the beginning there trump had a chance to and you know he did come out and say like this was terrible like he did i'll give him that credit but he had a chance to at least hear the problem publicly more and as the guy who supports like law and order and the cops and everything he had a chance to put some

nuance into it and say okay i can do that and i can also say like it's not all perfect and we need we need to fix it and it hurts other certain environments and certain races more than others statistically yeah and not only did he not do that but he responded to it and this is a bad word to use but it was comical i mean it was it was it was one of the worst presidential responses i've ever seen to anything like it was so bad i was like you almost had to laugh like i can't believe he's doing that he did the fucking bible thing in front of the church oh yeah like it was one of the worst things i've ever seen yeah so and i point that out because that was an example of one side in this case completely even if they didn't mean to through their actions almost denying a problem and what did that do that pissed off the other side and it should and whatever came of that

maybe some negatives ended up coming of that fine but the beginning of being pissed off about that every right to be pissed off about that so now you saw the other side of it as the year went on as the year went on you saw the left side come out and you see all the all the you know social media memes and stuff you know one of my favorite ones favorite in air quotes is like the one every fucking person posted this it was like uh vote as if you're you're your sister's disabled your brother is gay your your dad died at at 22 your mom is on welfare like every single worst possible thing that can happen to a human and you know in that case they're telling you to vote against trump which is fine you know you're allowed to put your opinion out there but they're painting a world as if america is this third world shithole of a country where

we're not doing anything right and don't get me wrong we got a lot of social problems right now yeah but we can point out those problems because we are that strong as a nation and so we're constantly trying to perfect so when we see things that aren't good enough we go fuck that but the fear culture that's what's leading to a lot of polarization yeah i i feel for everyone on both sides. You hear conservatives just being like, these people are out of control, these people are crazy, when in reality, liberals just want change. But then liberals get pissed when conservatives

don't see it the same way as they do. And it comes to a point where like, okay, conservatives are just looking at this from a standpoint of, what we talked about before it's just unrealistic for all this change to happen at one point in time so i can definitely feel i can definitely feel for what you're saying like that's definitely it's tough dude it's tough anyone that anyone cares about whether it's a product whether it's the government it's it's really around the people that are behind it do you think there were a lot of people like you who whether they

voted for trump or biden did so where and forget actually actually forget trump and biden for a second let's take it a level above that a lot of people like you who voted in this election and either voted democrat or republican and did so and wasn't exactly happy about it they're just like all right well i'm here to vote i'm making And like, yeah, I guess that one's a little better. Yeah, definitely. That was me in 2016, actually, even worse so than 2016, because this election is like, it is what it is. I just didn't like Donald Trump for what happened. But 2016, the only reason why I voted for Hillary Clinton was on climate change. I was worried about what Trump was going to put into place, like reversing what we've done in the past eight years.

And that would just always be one of the biggest points for me specifically. And I absolutely hate Hillary Clinton. Yeah. So I was pissed at the system for that specifically. Like I was a huge Bernie Sanders fan when I was younger. He's the one that got me into politics to begin with. What did he do to get you into politics? I want to ask about that. me into politics to begin with what what did he do to get into politics like what was when i want

to ask about that like what was the first when was the first time you became familiar with him and what was he talking about and and what did it do to you yeah just about the social injustice and of course this was coming from me being in college not having my own job making money like it was being provided by my parents. And just hearing about all these social injustices and this person that every single decision that he's made or every law that he's backed has been for that specific cause of what he believed in. And it wasn't like big corporate lobbyists,

for instance, right, on what he was passing for. So I really fucked with that. And I thought we were at a at a point in time where it was a point in time where that that election itself maybe not bigger than this one it was still a pretty big deal so all that really combined together to the point where that's why i got into politics in the first place starting to understand like now that i'm an adult and now that i can vote these are all topics i'm interested about i do america's great i do want it to be in a better place though it's like yeah yeah america's great right now and conservative conservatives say

uh hardcore conservatives that is or like oh if you don't like america then get the out well that's not the reason why we're talking about things we're talking about things because like we love america where we're at but we also believe there's always there's always better okay so let me ask you this because i i agree like and you just pointed out one of the prime examples you get the hardcore conservatives say get the fuck out if you don't like it right and then you get the hardcore liberals saying it's place of the fucking worst exactly so like you look at it like i know whatever box you put yourself in or don't put yourself in you look at it realistically and with hope and with with good intentions up front towards what this country means to you yeah because you know it

presents you with a lot of opportunity the the issue is the conservatives get body bagged online for having that attitude in my opinion more so of that though is a response to the left i will not say liberals to the left like that's a separate thing like liberals are they have an ideology that i with a lot right i consider myself progressive that falls in line a little bit yeah i don't even know what that means anymore but you know like i look at and maybe we're talking about the same thing and just calling it different but i look at it like i kind of know most of what i get when i look at conservatives and and what they stand for they're a little more consistent yeah when i look on the other end of the spectrum there there are kind of your traditional Democrat liberals, and then there are leftists. And so a lot of the policy points in – there's a couple things like fiscally I'm probably a little conservative on. traditional liberal standpoint that's that's where i fall including by the way like dovishness or whatever they say where like in foreign policy you're not a hawk you're not trying to go out

there and just create endless wars and shit like that which now like everyone in washington abandoned really until trump actually but you know when i look at this a lot of the response of the conservatives like that whole side is to the loudest voices on the other end of the spectrum who happen to be the leftists who are the most extreme yeah who by the way preach a lot of things and then practice the opposite like they preach openness and love and we're just all about you but the minute you say something they don't agree with they want to cancel you and they're actually like also racist about shit like they god forbid a black person has the audacity to not vote left you know they they they chastise yeah just because you're not liberal that you're

racist it's like dude someone brought that to my attention the other point in time the other day and and everyone that voted for trump is racist for instance right and i was like okay well why that why is that the case i have family members that I know for sure, well, I'm not going to say that. I know a lot of people that aren't racist that voted for Trump. What makes them racist for voting for Trump? Oh, well, the definition of racism changed. Now racism means like it's been, you're taking advantage of a system that's been institutionalized, even though you don't know that you're benefiting from those yada yada, which I understand what they're saying, but also I'm saying to myself, okay, well, is it fair for other people now to have to interpret a different meaning of racism? Like now racism means something else and everyone

has to abide by that definition change. And now they're all racist. Like to me, that didn't make really any sense. And I think the whole, the whole idea of being moderate is being able to understand or even understand how to get other people to at least move a little bit to your side of things. And that comes from little bites, as opposed to saying, hey, if you don't fucking view it this way, you're an idiot. Or if you're finally here, you do a little bit to get into it. Maybe Black Lives Matter, for instance, you post a photo blackout it's the first time you ever publicly in social media have even gone out there about a social issue social justice good for you now you have other

people saying oh well it's not enough it's not enough right or enough it's never enough and now those people are like disincentivized to even participate even further because they thought they're taking one step closer to being they already put themselves out there and now people and then you're gonna have people shit on them uh because it's not enough so those are things that like i'm not okay with and that all comes down to the misunderstanding miscommunication that you can't but it's something you can't expect from everyone to have that same kind of thought process when it comes to these things. I think it's full circle. I think because you just gave one example of it.

And in that case, you're focusing on race, which has been a big issue this year. So it's something we talk about all the time. Yeah. Which in certain aspects is obviously healthy to do, like an important thing to do. When it's taken a certain place as though it becomes like completely counterintuitive and actually hurts the process rather than helps it yeah but when i say full circle the left whoever's on the left like far left extreme right full stereotype pink hair screaming fuck the patriarchy whatever you know and no hope unfortunately probably statistically many of them carrying college debt they can never pay off because their major that they were told to get doesn't actually have jobs around it, which in a lot of ways is a system that was set up for a 17-year-old or 18-year-old to fucking fail. So I empathize with it.

The other thing I empathize with is one day, and it's generalization, doesn't go for all of them, but a lot of these people were told by older people when they were growing up be it their parents their aunts their uncles their teachers whatever what you think is not how things go you the kid oh oh you have that opinion no no no that's not how we do things here yeah and they shut it down and they say no no no run along and play the adults that's even if they don't say that out loud the adults got this yeah and so when you we talked about environments earlier when you are in an environment where everything you ever think of is shut down and told no no you can't think like that you you no no that's not how it works here which you know to be stereotypical a lot of times people who don't

want change tend to be more conservative too and so they not always but they can be the people that then put that on them and so over time that kid grows up and they're going through puberty and they're getting more and more pissed and neurons are firing in their brains and hormones and shit and they're like oh my god you know like this is bullshit and then suddenly one day they wake up and they get out of bed and they're like well fuck the patriarchy oh my god everything i once knew is just out the door yeah yes or it's their foundation to keep on going off into a specific correct and so i look at those and i see them as a response to it and i say full circle because now it's become a response where a lot of people who are even like younger conservatives who were have never had the opportunity to be that person to say

that's not how things are done here are being told that they don't have a place at the table god forbid they're not the wokest motherfucker ever and forget conservatives moderates people like you and me like when i put some opinions out there people are like you shouldn't say that and i go um i'm sorry is this america or you know do you want me to not speak my mind and put ideas out there to be afraid of what you have to say a specific opinion that's not even far off they're threatened by ideas yeah they're threatened by debate and so you have this very negative cancerous circle cycle where two very opposite ends and then therefore the people who are caught in the middle are a part of this constant tug of war and there's

no like hey we can talk a little bit this way in a little bit that way it's no we want everything or nothing motherfucker yeah it's tough i don't know the answer i don't know the answer to that of how to fix that i just know it's what your your world kind of changes once you're able to open your mind and understand there's not one right way to do something and that you could always learn and and have a retrospective of something that you did learn and understand why hey maybe this fact why is this useful and why should i change the way i viewed this thing before because when you had a conversation or something presented itself,

you're able to like take that information and now rechange where you're currently at. I think that's what real open-mindedness is. It's not always being open to what someone's saying. It's being open to listen if that specific thing that they're saying is more valid than how you currently understand it at this point in time.

Like actually clear-headedly assessing that people um people vast how hillary clinton through all the ups and downs of her career and the controversy and everything has been able to last this long and be so relevant and actually almost become like the first female president despite everything around her that's known and some of her likability metrics and all that but there's a book that i know you read somewhat recently the uh the chris foss book i never split the difference and so i remember i haven't read that in like four or five years but he talks about in that book and he makes a great point so chris foss for context was you know an fbi interrogator with with our boy jim and uh but he was specifically focused on hostage situations and for building rapport with people in high stress scenarios where obviously

the end result needs to be getting them in custody and no one dying and so he talks all about communication and one of the examples he points out is hillary clinton not he's like forget whatever she thinks politically or what she ends up doing but he goes when you watch her in the past and i say in the past because he wrote this before the 2016 election and this is where she missed the boat in 2016 because she didn't talk to people but the way she was able to build such a brand and even get past all the baggage that came with her and the things that were around her brand negatively or whatever, she would sit down and be able to hold – at least do the greatest acting job of all time, if that's the worst-case scenario, of having an empathetic conversation with people who did not agree with her and i actually also think that barack obama was very good at this too very good at this and meaning to use the hillary clinton just stick with her for a second she could sit there with someone who was very conservative and maybe hated her and hear them out in a way and and communicate

with them in a way that made them feel like they were actually heard yeah and so maybe she's never going to do any of the ideas that they say because either she's already decided that we don't know or they don't convince her and make a better argument but they at least feel like she makes them feel like they had a seat at the table to let those ideas enter the forum and win or lose. And so she therefore gained the respect. I'm not saying like conservatives went and voted for her, but I'm saying she gained the respect to some people and set that example for a lot of people like, oh, she gets it. She listens.

Yeah. That was validation. Yeah. That's all they really wanted was validation that, hey, someone's actually listening to something that I'm saying. Yeah. And it's – you're always going to get – especially when you you're in politics like you're going to get people from the opposite side coming up with gotcha moments like they do it all the time and i i get it and you know sometimes it's like they come up and say the exact opposite thing of whatever it is you think and

you can't sit there and say i agree with you it's even feedback now the show like our show that we have uh project aeronauts the same thing we're now just because of the traction we're getting comments that we don't necessarily agree with or maybe these questions and comments or feedbacks coming from a demographic that we didn't mean a target which is like females for instance because we're we're four men specifically it's always interesting because now i i could empathize with influencers today in the sense where like everything that you say people want it's like who you're going to please here right people want to feel validated like someone's actually listening to them you could say it back to them what they were actually thinking which is a skill set we talked about and never split the difference so that's that's important

but at the same time you also don't want to change your brand or what you're doing for the minority of these people that might be saying or feel like a different way or a little bit outlandish, right? So that's something that I'm struggling with today as far as just being out there now. A lot of my content is just completely out there. My employers can see this, my family, everyone. And this is going to be content that's

always there. So it could be used against me in the future. These comments, social media, it's something, it's something that I'm still navigating today that hopefully, hopefully it doesn't become one of those acts that maybe Hillary Clinton was doing before, like pretending to empathize with people. Right now it's not, but hopefully it doesn't come to that point in the future where that there's just so much of it coming in that everything just becomes like a fucking act. Right. Well, yeah, I don't know if we even did this on the podcast. We might have been on the podcast when we were talking about this, but you were talking about how you care. At least growing up, like you really cared about the opinions and and in a way that you

implied was even like detrimental to you because you're so worried about molding your actions around that and with the power of the internet and you know being an influencer or being someone with a lot of attention out there you invite in a world behind a keyboard yeah that you don't know. And. I'd love to get your thoughts on this. But one of the trend patterns. That I've noticed. Is that the people who get the longest standing. Negative stigmas around them.

Are the ones who. Are more prone to respond. To negativity. With more negativity. And do it in a very public way. I mean you could look at james charles you and recently he was involved in this one but like the charlie d'amelio girl and how she decided to respond to that um who are some i'm gonna forget some names but the way they respond

to this stuff is first of all they respond to it in the first place and secondly they get real defensive and so the mob mentality in that case is oh we got them like it's just human nature it's like oh we have control and power over them now that's scary yeah if i was her like i'd be scared shitless i'm 16 17 years old and there's millions of people that are looking at every single thing i do everything i say could all be used against me like that's kind of scary as awesome as that is and the trade-off is she's making a fuck ton of money. Yeah, she's set for life You know So you have to have that reality too meaning people can use shit against you How much is it really going to affect you know your bottom line?

Or is this going to matter in the future as long as you're not saying some crazy Exactly crazy shit. Whereas if you're the idiot on instagram with 10 followers you know screaming out about you know the illuminati yeah you know a future employer if that's public might be like all right this is a kook bag and now you have no leverage right yeah um but there's not there's not that problem when you're at a certain size and i noticed that some of the bigger influencers or figures online who just ignore it literally don't respond to any of it no matter what's said about them it never sticks these people get really it's like they the mob gets tired yeah and they they move on same thing that happened with charlie right that's what we did. There was one video that we had like hundreds of comments

about Pacific Islanders. Like we were fucking around about, well, this was true. We used to mark Pacific Islanders in SATs, official documents. I genuinely didn't know what the fuck a Pacific Islander was. But a lot of people, hundreds of people felt the need to comment and say and talk about that topic extensively right and it came to a point where there was a lot of there was a lot of like stupid ass comments that were like hate quote unquote and there was also the same amount of comments from people defending us

and all saying like it was a joke and or also like hey your facts are actually wrong it came to a point before we started answering when there was like 50 comments maybe but after that we're like we're not even gonna say anything anymore yeah we're gonna let these people like fight with each other and we're gonna go about our day like not even address these comments at all and like lo and behold the video blew up but we didn't we didn't have to do anything we just like let people talk in amongst themselves and we just avoided it and now it's just doesn't even matter anymore because at the end of the day even with those people you represent between watching the video and doing the comments 60 to 180 seconds of their day one day yeah they do a lot of other things sometimes saying more too is what gets you in trouble yeah well and and that's the thing you live with that because you're

also the man in the arena in that case if everyone could do this they would i mean everyone can they can put their thoughts out there and make it public but if people were actually taking the time to create the type of content you are and put all the work into this and also stand behind or you know just say like hey i'm going to say some things some things will be wrong some things will be right and put it out there there is a credibility that you have and also a set of balls that you have to do that as a person that goes for men and women like that most of these commenters will never just statistically will never be able to say they had yeah that's why i like shows and podcasts at this specific age in this specific time in life because we're coming from a point where we actually have had experience around things.

Whether that's work, whether that's living in the city, and so forth. Just being a better man in general, right? We actually have this experience as opposed to having that type of podcast in college. There are some shows that I do like. One of them is called Suburb Talks.

It's called what? Suburb Talks. Where it's literally just a bunch of dudes on the table and they're talking about the typical typical guy shit like oh what would be your favorite pick-up line to a girl or oh if your boys if if your boy has slept with us with this girl like would you would you date this girl like the typical question that you could ask because you're in college right yeah so that's why shows in this capacity like and this one here that we're talking about today it's it's way different and a little bit of a harder thing to nail down um because

or no sorry not a little bit of a hard thing to nail down but i think it's a little bit more unique in the sense where now you're actually coming from a place of experience as opposed to doing something that it's very easy to do it's very easy for a lot of kids to just start a podcast in college and talk about that same college shit right there's nothing um innovative of that so to speak in my in my mind how you message it how you do it yeah or not sorry there's nothing that's not there's nothing innovative that's the wrong way to say it it's it gets harder to be innovative what you mentioned how you say it might have to change especially when you're going to spaces that become a hot run like a podcast gets more and more just by volume it gets more and more saturated yeah so when things get saturated hey there's a

lot of opportunity there but as it gets more and more saturated you have to come in with a better and better product like lit it has it comes down to like little things now yes which is which is always tough it's like you you have instagram reels right now and then even youtube shorts are trying to get in the market that tiktok's in right now but they're really just trying to already create something that was already created better than what they have today yeah and whenever you're in that type of catch-up mode, even if you have all the resources in the world, it's still going to be tough. Yeah, and it comes down, you mentioned this earlier, but it comes down to what can you buy

to either phase out or integrate. Sunset or the other side. Think about Zuckerberg right now. He's still one of the guys on top of the world, even if he's liked or disliked, wherever you fall on that but like he bought instagram in 2012 for whatever amount of money he did wasn't that much money i think it was a billion dollars exactly which you know relatively speaking you know what i mean yeah and uh if he had not done that problem yeah or even or even instagram stories what they did yeah

because snapchat's product is not like it was innovative i mean it's not like that couldn't have been copied verbatim right they didn't have an algorithm like tiktok does today for that organic engagement and the amount of engagement they're getting how long people are actually staying on the platform like that's something that's proprietary tiktok created perfect that yeah i mean it's amazing the guy tristan harris who's been doing like every podcast known to man the dude from the social dilemma talks about him like he doesn't even use it himself he's looked at it now but you know the smallest things like coming into the app and it plays immediately it shuts off whatever sounds on your phone and the sound comes out and it it does not wait and then

you even include the fact that it gives its videos that are short enough to be able to feel like you can invest the time to consume and also short enough to feel like you can always do one more yeah you know and that's personalized it's personal it's like what you like snapchats your friends that's okay it's synchron uh chronological order here's the latest story that posted yeah let's go check it out instagram added a little bit more to it where now it's like people that you actually engage with more that's the story that's going to fill up in your in your story timeline i'm not sure if snapchats is still chronological from a time it's not chronological anymore but it's like it it does go based off of it's similar to instagram

in the sense that it's based off of who you engage with more but i'm not even sure like who knows what some of these are doing because like yeah i don't there's some people that i like haven't i don't even know who maybe it's because I watch a lot less Instagram stories than I used to, but they'll like come to the front of my feet. I'll be like, who is that? And then it's like there. So maybe that's just like because I watch less, but that's the other thing. When you look at these algorithms and the power they have behind it, you also don't – you only know what they tell you. You only know those nuts and bolts you know whereas

and and the thing is then we get pissed about that transparency but it's easy to use and we use it and we don't ask questions about how the double tap happens or how comments are stuck here versus there or why this story comes in front of that story or why this one moves to there we don't ask about that and then we see things like bitcoin we see things like you know anything in the crypto space or blockchain space and they came to market saying we're going to be transparent about everything we're going to tell you how all the nuts and bolts work and then we end up punishing them for it because then we get to see the inside and we're like wait how the fuck does that work huh wait what block blockchain people want high level yeah and that's what i love about tiktok specifically it's at the

end of the day all you need is good content like we went from zero to 10k following in the span of two months hundreds of thousands of likes solely because we're just consistently posting good content you can't expect one thing to go viral specifically, but if you're continuous about it, like day over day, TikTok is going to reward you one way or another, just because of how that algorithm works. It's just encouraging you to continue to produce great content relative to like how other people, you know, relative to other people, like they view your content as great content, they reward you. So that's why to me, it's also crazy because Instagram is like not rewarding you before back in the old days, not rewarding you for great

content. Like you're posting, but you have to find other means to actually get people to engage. Yeah. Instagram is like very closed end. I mean, all the way around down to like the fact you can't even put a usable link in a caption you know like there and it goes back to the api point you were talking i don't know if that was on the podcast either but maybe it was before the podcast but you're talking about the importance of being able how different pieces of software are allowed to communicate with one another so in this case like the instagram app who what they allow from other apps or other web services to be able to integrate with their app like they're very very strict about it so it keeps people in the app but it also pisses them off

because then it's like shit you know i can't integrate that or this which by the way helps my business and my ability to make money versus like you even look at tiktok tiktok really lets you off i mean they let you download videos that are branded, share it. Oh, so usability. Because I would say Instagram actually does have good APIs. Like a lot of the bots that I was using, the following and unfollowing, was because people built these products on top of Instagram's APIs. Instagram punishes you for that, though.

Yeah. That's the thing. Oh, no, they will. Well, it's strongly discouraged now. Like if Instagram finds out that you're an app that's doing that, the thing oh no they will well it's strongly discouraged now like if instagram finds out that you're an app that's doing that they will punish you yeah and they will find you yeah they're strict like there are some that got it that's the point they had to get around it yeah there's no like you are allowed to do this it was like okay how can we like hack around the system and then sell that to people and again they they crack down on it but tiktok really and i don't know about like

the whole following unfollowing metrics or anything like that on tiktok or how some of that works but as far as like your ability to coordinate content from outside that app and inside that app and back out is shareability is like yes everything it's it's everything and they like the subtle branding having the name appear in the top left corner and trickle down to the far right or bottom right corner whenever you share it on another platform i mean anesthetic wise right like instagram i do this i have an aesthetic in my profile like um it's uh it's tailored it's curated i've curated content on my instagram and i'm very proud of that

tiktok anything goes doesn't matter basic bitch like ratio yeah i'll admit i love i love curation i think it's a nice representation of you know what how you're trying to present yourself as as i like to present myself you know how i like to present myself but tiktok anything goes like ratio for instance followers and unfollowers doesn't matter you can follow you could be following 2 000 people and no one gives a shit or you could have you could be following like 300 people you have zero followers you posted zero videos but you're like a crazy active user and like commenting on on mad shit you know like anything goes on tick tock it already just comes down that good content and then it always stems back to that good content at

the end of the day which like blows my mind i mean we could talk about tiktok all day but we had started the whole rabbit hole this conversation towards the beginning of the podcast was kind of going through some of the things you're working on yeah and now people are hearing you talk about all these different subject matters all over the place they're like who the fuck is this so you were at ceros maybe we covered that on the podcast i i can never tell i can never tell towards like once we get halfway through i'm like was that before was it after but you were at ceros and now you're at fire hydrant and first of all walk people through how you ended up at fire hydrant because this is a pretty this is a on the fly like okay i just was thrown some shit and now i gotta make some lemonade out of said

shit i don't think that's physically possible but you know what i mean and make a really not great situation a good one so walk through your decision to leave ceros and then how you ended up at Fire Hydrant and how that was not a linear process. Basically at Saros, I just wanted more money and then also I wanted flexibility to scale. I didn't think I could grow in that company more than

I could grow in other ones. I felt like most of those needs, maybe half of them, were being addressed with my offer from Verizon Media. So you had an offer from another company. Yeah, this was around March. This is the time COVID is just hitting in New York City.

I left Saris early. I put my three weeks notice in, and I'm like, okay, I'm out of here. I didn't even get an official written offer from Verizon Media. They just gave me a verbal offer at the time. So I just got up and quit. That's one of the mistakes I made. I put my emotions into it. Put my three weeks in.

What date was that? That was in early February. So what was your last day? End of February. Early March. And for context. Great Late, end of February. Early in March. And for context. Great month, by the way. I think everyone remembers this, but Corona quarantine officially happened, depending on who you were, either that Friday the 13th or Monday the 16th of March.

Yeah. So literally, not that you could have seen this coming, but two weeks before that you you had already put in your three weeks and you left ceros and i think you did it by the way i'll compliment you on this you did it in a very classy forward way like you put in the word ahead of time and you said look i do have an offer i'm gonna take this you know obviously mitch had a lot of connections with verizon, you were very familiar with them. And there was no, like you did it 100% in the classy way that you should have. Yeah. And then what happened?

Yeah, so it turned out Verizon's rent offer came to me and it was like a low ball offer. More than I was making at Saros, but but relative i know how much my brother was making at the same company given it was a different division low ball of an offer and this was march like 12th at this point a lot of shit was going down but i was thinking my head like i just left i shouldn't have left right away like that but i just left this company i'm not gonna join and at least spend another year of my life in this company if i'm not happy off the get-go like that's fucked up i know my worth and i'm

not gonna be spending my time yeah with with with a company that just low-balled me like that so i said no the offer i said uh respectively like here's what more of what I'm looking for. No leverage at all. Right. Three weeks gone by, like coronavirus hits heavy. The CEO of Verizon media steps down. And then on top of that, I like asked for more money. Right. Reject the offer.

So it was like a culmination of everything coming together. They're like, okay, we can't afford this anymore. Oh. And it was on the ad tech side of things. So ad tech industry just went crashing down because of coronavirus. And just define, I mean, people obviously understand advertising, but specifically you're tech side of things so ad tech industry just went crashing down because of coronavirus and just define i mean people obviously understand advertising but specifically you're talking about you were programmatic advertisement so like back in the day you used to buy like an ad on a

newspaper now it's just all done by computers of course that's what you just call like programmatic advertising so you were on the back end of that like kind of the middleman with it yeah exactly solutions engineer for there so world ends world ends you have the balls to to say i am worth more than that yeah but a year is such a long time even though the pandemic is something that is so much uncertainty a year is such a long time and for me i don't have time to wait for a year yeah i'm not going to waste my time with a year when i know my my value my worth right so they resend that offer entirely they're just like we don't we don't have this position available anymore and i was like damn out of nowhere life comes at you fast yeah i was like

on the up and up exponential growth and then i just had this like blockage to stop that just hit me out of nowhere so of course initially i panicked a little bit. I'm like, holy shit. You know, this is, uh, this is real. Like pandemic is real. Also questioning the value that I have to, to provide at that, at that very moment in time. But, you know, woke up the next morning. I'm like, okay, it is what it is. I've been, I've been through some crazy shit already. Like it is what it is. I can't control that. I can only control where I'm i'm at now um so that's where i worked my ass off to i really was floating around there wasn't a lot of opportunity out there at the time first at first uh but it was the same four jobs that i interviewed for and that process took around a month um but one of those jobs that i did accept

was fire hydrant specifically which so happy like it could all the stars aligned for that specific opportunity and i got that opportunity during um the heart of the pandemic within a month of like what had happened like i just said okay fuck i can't do anything i can't do anything about the stupid decisions i made and then also what just happened i can only back my decisions i made and what's the story with fire hydrant how much so compared to what you were doing at ceros how similar is it now and what's the value add of the company completely different honestly like ceros was a platform made for like marketers while fire hydrants a platform made by developers for developers so essentially like specifically who yeah yeah fire hydrants around incident response

and that's something that's a big big topic in in tech world today english so say for instance like facebook or netflix whatever go down there's a lot of shit happening behind the scenes and a lot of people freaking the fuck out of how to get the back uh how to get that app back up and running and fire hydrant is that is a tool used for folks, for those developers to get that done as quickly as possible, facilitate all the communication necessary to specific customers, all that automated. And what do you developing on a day-to-day basis to continue to make that process of getting things up and running faster and faster and less turnaround time? Yeah. So our product really manages that entire incident response life cycle, even down to retrospective, like understanding why a system's broken, how you

can learn from it and get better. That's like the entire spectrum that fire arching covers. And then where i come in i'm a little bit more i'm a hybrid of pre-sales and post sales that means they're already existing customer versus not and or other other way around and so uh what i really focus on is like understanding the current pain points that someone has around their inside when they come to you guys first yeah exactly okay i understand that since i'm a solutions engineer i understand like okay what's your current tech stack what are using? Because in today's world to be a developer, there's a million fucking tools, a million different languages out there,

depending on how you want it. It just gets crazy, right? So everyone usually has a different tech stack and it just always happens. And when I believe I understand what you mean, but just to not get lost in some of the buzzwords, When you're saying tech stack and then different languages that are used, are you talking like literally, you know, C++ versus whatever and figuring out the code end or what specifically? So code, when it comes to code, you can think about it as agnostic, meaning there's different languages, but they all mean the same thing. It's like, you talk Spanish, you talk English, like there's different words. The words sound different, but they mean the same exact thing. It's like you talk Spanish, you talk English, like there's different words, there's the words sound different, but they mean the same exact thing. And those are what different computer languages are essentially. Yeah. Right. Some of them are easier than others,

but when I talk about tech stacks and you're talking about the life cycle of incident response, you can think about it as like you're in an ER room, for instance, right? You have a monitoring solution in tech, in tech world, that's like Datadog, SignalFX. They're looking at the health of your actual systems, like the servers that you're running on. And you relate that to nursing, for instance. It's just like you literally check the vital signs if someone still has a heartbeat. When shit hits the fan,

when someone's heartbeat's diminishing, that's when you hear beeping, beeping, beeping. Now that's where alerting tools come in in the modern tech space you have like pager duty or victor ops for instance they're the ones that start beeping beeping beeping when there's something going wrong um now the actual doctor coming in there and fixing that shit up that's like fire hatching comes into play there's not a lot of tools around that actual fixing there's just a lot of like disparate tools about little things that are being done throughout the entire process. You guys are essentially the emergency room for tech and streaming.

Yeah. They connect the tissue to all those tools that are being used, like just streamlined into one, like we're the doctor. Now, how much of what you do is everyone thinks about this, especially like even in tech where there's specific roles and jobs that you do right now, but are even those jobs going to be there 10, 15 years from now? How much of what you do, or have you even thought about this, do you think is automatable or however you say it? Whereas like, let's say I'm just throwing numbers out, you know, you have a company like yours, a hundred employees, whatever it is. Yeah.

And you know, like, hey, just based on how things are going and what we're intuitively able to do with machines now that machines are going to be able to do themselves in, you know, five, 10, 15 years, whatever, you know, where we have a hundred employees, we may only need like 40 to 10 years. To man this shit. You need less people to man this shit. Do you think about that? And do you think it applies to what you do right now potentially no the reason why i don't think that is because technology is so complex and to be a software engineer is only getting harder and harder with the amount of tools and languages you have at your disposal in my mind um so because these systems are getting ever more complex

it's going to get even harder to understand how to handle that and manage that when incidents do arise it's not when your software is going to go down your app is going to go down it's not if, it's a matter of when it's going to go down and so as it actually gets increasingly more complex

that's where something like this actually and from what we've seen in the market it has an even bigger value add And so as it actually gets increasingly more complex, that's where something like this actually, and from what we've seen in the market, it has an even bigger value add, especially the nature of a lot of companies today, like especially big companies like banks, they were still hosting, they owned all that infrastructure as opposed to having it on the cloud,

like letting AWS own the infrastructure, handle like literally fucking warehouse security, people with guns and shit. Like they started to realize, okay, it's actually a lot more scalable to not have to put our shit on the cloud. And because of that, there's going to be also migration pains. There's like a million different things that could go wrong in tech. But having something that's that connective tissue, like agnostic of what tool someone's

using, what different, what their tech stack is, and just being able to respond to incidents in general in a streamlined way. Like that's really, that's why I see this kind of space. They call it DevOps. In our world, they call it DevOps. They call it site reliability engineering. That's a space that's actually like growing like crazy. Every middleman in any industry ever, you can go back to prehistoric times, right? Every single middleman at some point gets innovated away. Yeah. But every middleman has to start. Like there's a date where they start. And this is a very – the space you're in is a very infant type space as a middleman.

And so one day it'll be – there will be something on either end of you know who you connect where someone's able to just completely take care of it but right now there's so little of what you guys do like especially like even in the competition of other companies doing it that there is you're at the dawn of this middleman era you're in a very good spot it's not it's never it's probably despite like even the question I asked about some automation of specific jobs, when it comes to your company existing and doing what it is in the context of your lifetime right now, it's probably not going anywhere for a long time. It's super, super early in the industry right now, and we're the best in the market. The competition is copying what we do today because we've already built it. That's how far ahead we are

that's crazy man with a specific product so i'm like i'm super excited about the the job itself gives me the flexibility it gives me way more free time mind you way more free time paid way more money there and stock option like i think the company's gonna go ipo so i got a lot of stock options there like um financially not only so not only financially but what i'm learning from a startup perspective because like i report directly to the ceo that's awesome brilliant dude we're like i was the 10th employee now we have like 25 but this dude is he built the product from ground up so he came from the software engineering world do you guys have a chief of staff too not yet not yet not yet okay um but he literally just deal directly with the CEO a lot. Yeah. That's awesome.

Yeah. And he was the one demoing his product before. So imagine me trying to understand prospects, what their pain points are, and then mapping that with Firehatch and how that's going to help them. Imagine me performing those demos in front of the CEO, the dude that built the physical product. That was more nerve wracking for me than demoing. I can't say that these, these people's names just cause of confidentiality, but like these huge, huge fortune, a fortune 50 people, uh, clients, right. That's not nerve wracking

compared to me demoing in front of the CEO who built the damn product. Now what's the CEO story? What's his name and what's he been involved in? Uh, Robert Ross. He was a software engineer at, uh yeah they call him bobby tables but he was a software engineer bobby tables you got to tell me that nickname come on what's that i don't know do you know the i don't even know the fucking comics there's a comic where it's it's literally a cartoon of someone saying they dropped the database. It's some tech stuff. Oh, so it's a confusing story. Yeah, it's a confusing story.

I don't even know much about it, honestly. Continue, sorry. Yeah, because I've never seen the comic. He keeps dropping it, and I'm like, I have no idea what he's talking about. So, yeah, this guy was a software engineer at heart. He was the one that was building systems at scale, and he was the one running into these problems

where they're using a million different tools. They're responding to an incident, and it's just chaotic. They're they're like getting waken up at 3 a.m in the morning as an engineer you're just on call and so it's like being an on-call doctor right it's very it's high stress and you're always like looking for your phone to see when something's going to break we talked about it it's like when it's going to break so that's why he's like i need something that is going to help me do all this shit like i just need something that's gonna be there for me when i wake up at 3 a.m i'm not stressed out and i'm able to effectively like just fix the situation and that's when he started building fire hydrant on the side but eventually became a point where like oh damn yeah i actually have my pain but all that pain that i, every other engineer is feeling the same exact thing

right now. Like I actually have something here. And that's how the whole thing got started a couple of years back. Now, obviously tech has had like a good run during COVID by and large, maybe not everyone, but a lot of tech companies have done quite well, including in the startup space, just because of the emphasis that covid now put on moving towards products that are out in the tech universe that industries previously didn't consider like we got our series a in march wait like before corona or after technically before but corona was like still it was like yeah yeah and the tech community they knew that was coming early they, I got the whispers of that like three weeks before they're like, oh fuck. But what is it, you know, and it's crazy to think about too, like how fast that happened

and the context of it. Like I will never forget ever going for a meeting in New York on February 28th. Same, I think your same last day. That's my last day. And I'm driving into the city I'm gonna be meeting this guy in like an office in the building above um Grand Central so I get in like I don't know an hour early something like that and on my way in I kept on looking at the market because the market's just that was the first day the market was like it had been tanking but this was the day where like the dow went down at one point like almost 2 000 points and it was insane and i'm like

i'm looking at this and i'm taking a couple calls while i'm waiting so i go down into into grand central and i stand in the middle of the concourse which seems crazy to talk about but i see all these people walking around and there's people of all different backgrounds, whatever. The entire time, I think I see two masks. Like there's nobody wearing a mask. Everyone's going about their day. They're eating takeout. They're talking.

I wasn't wearing masks. Yeah. No one was. No one was. But that's the point. Like once in a while, you would see people, especially from foreign countries like where it's more norm. They might wear a mask. When they're sick.

Yeah, exactly. But that's the point like i saw literally like two people who didn't appear to be from this country like wearing masks so i'm looking around and i'm just like taking a temperature of it and i'm like we're gonna be all right we're this is fine and then i remember like call i called you like that afternoon i'm like yeah there's corona things bullshit right you're like oh totally yeah this is bullshit this is not gonna affect and like that is i think about that conversation like mitch left in the background and how poorly that

aged within about two weeks and then we're on the phone like fuck man the world this is real but no to get back to the original point i just it's crazy because i think about that and all the context of what was happening in your life literally like smack dab in the middle of this in such a short period of time yeah but when you join the new company you were even if it's a tech company and you guys are used to remote and and used to doing all the things kind of like new school era you're still joining an entire culture and a new idea with all new employees yeah for the first time without ever fucking meeting it was a lot more technical than my last job too i'll tell you that much a lot more technical but how like from a personal standpoint how like it it seems to me in all the

conversations i've had like you got some pretty serious relationships at this company now and you did that just from a human level like remote you didn't you didn't meet these people yeah like have you ever even met the ceo in person i met them one time we had drinks like when things died down a little bit uh same and there are other directors but what's that like that's what i want to know like how how weird was that and and how real do you feel like the connection was, especially when you went to meet them physically in person for the first time? Was it like, oh shit, this isn't the same.

Or was it like, no, like we did this right. I thought the connection was real, but it was definitely weird because I've only seen like the top half of their body. And my seat to the co-founders, like six foot four. And I'm like, and you're not i'm barely five eight as in i'm not five eight i'm like hello i'm michael yeah five seven so very short yeah so it's just funny like just being there in their actual physical presence and also being in in just an environment a work environment again where like i'm with my co-workers i'm not drinking again

because in sarah's that was big that was a big culture just like you guys literally had a pub in the office yeah we literally had a pub in the office which was awesome by the way like Friday night Thursday night Wednesday night it's like literally every night it's insane wasn't your just wasn't your founder like Scottish or Irish or something yeah he was uh he was from UK yeah so he's a huge yeah huge British dude you know I guess likes a pub yeah so you haven't had that at Fire Hydrant so it's like a little bit of a different culture, but it obviously was pretty seamless for you. to our investors. Like our quarterly board meetings, for instance, that information's all shared with me. What numbers we're trying to hit, how we're going, through what specific, who we're hiring, like down to the T, all that information's always presented to me and they're

very open about it, which is another big reason why I joined that specific company. Those are things that I really want to learn about a startup as opposed to the information I could gather at face value from working for Saros, for instance. Like I knew the numbers that Saros were doing because I went out of my way to figure out what was going on and talking to a shit ton of different people. It's not like I always had direct access to my CEO to sit down with me and be like, you know, tell me how to be an entrepreneur. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Within fire hydrant, different story. I like have multiple conversations with my CEO and just like walk through everything together, how he's thinking about growing it. What's next? Like I'm a part of that. And I'm also a part of directly contributing to fire hydrant scale and growth, which is, which is

all super exciting. And I'm not saying this just because, but I'm gonna say it again. I think fire hydrant is like a fucking hell of a product and I think we have a chance to go to an IPO yeah I think I think the idea is pretty if you get there literally like if we get and I mean that in a positive way like that company dude they gave me a raise and more stock options without me even asking for it just recently yeah and I'm like what company series a does this right outside about valuing employees yeah and that's why we have great employees even though our team's small that's why we have a great And I'm like, what company series A does this, right? It's about valuing employees. Yeah.

And that's why we have great employees. Even though our team's small, that's why we have a great fucking team. You also get access when it's that personal, like dealing with the guys who built the product all the time on a level where you can have that bounce ideas off of relationship. You're getting a view into genius. You're getting a view into guys who have kind of been there, that with certain things and now they're doing it again and and they you know literally by age and experience they know more about the world in general but about the tech world and the patterns that they've seen over their longer career than you that you now get access to that knowledge and that information. That high level as opposed to always being low level technical.

Yes. Right? And so we talked about options before, but the options that this gives me is like, I am interested in the VC space, if not leadership, like just in what I'm doing now, but in the VC space of working with early stage tech startups, for instance, right?

And having all the information that you know, this is what is going to allow me to get to that specific point in time. And I do have relatives that have gone into the VC space exactly from the position I'm in today. But outside of my professional career as well, I'm doing side shit right now. What I'm learning right now is actually contributing and directly helping me, even from Seros, learning from that company as well. All that knowledge is going directly into what I'm actually doing right now and what I have more free time to do not only because of coronavirus but because of the position I'm in today with

this specific company like what has my hard work this whole entire time it's all brought me to this specific point in time where I have great professional career growth and also the time like very I don't I don't have to work like 12 hour days like sometimes I was working at Saros and then now I also just that more knowledge I'm building something sustainable and scalable on the side right now yeah um that's just the way it went you know what I mean and you know covid is obviously the shit storm that moved everything on a faster pace yeah especially i mean we've hit it six times now in tech obviously that is exponential so we've seen some trends born during covid or at the beginning of covid that probably were still a year or two away and now it's like they got put in hyperdrive

yeah but based on where we are and everyone heading into these more lockdowns and this never-ending motherfucking pandemic and all this shit aside what are you seeing right now where you can cut and you can't predict anything like definitively we know that but we're on a high level view what are you seeing to the point that you can say hey i know that our innovation in the world is it's here right now whatever here is and maybe like i can see three five years out based on the trends that i have access to understand now from smart guys like your ceo where do i see us heading like what it and you may not know the answer to this and don't feel like you got to give one if you don't, but where do I see the next crazy

disruption happening? You know, best example, because disruption can mean a lot of different things. I don't want to box you in on, on what that could be, but just high level disruption. So like social media disrupted marketing, you know know and it disrupted communication yeah you know so where do you see like the next frontier of of tech and and what it's going to do to the average american on a day-to-day basis i definitely think internet of things iot not define that for people for sure so it's it's the idea that everything in your home is connected to the internet we're not just your home your car too say your toaster you just like open up an app, fucking toaster bread.

Yeah, no. And then get on with your day, right? It's not, there's a lot of security things that come into that, into play there. But in general, as far as a disruptive industry goes, sooner or later, all of our homes are going to be revolved around IoT. Like today in logistics, for instance instance right now um trucking companies to understand the temperature shout out sloan

shout out sloan to understand the temperature of the products that they have in in in their in their car like the the state of their car that's currently in it's being driven like thousands and thousands of miles the different factories that they drop by maybe pick up new goods all of that is being monitored by software right now and they're think about it think about it as like smart cars yeah right everything that they have in the car is connected to a device to the internet so that they have this information um and know exactly and have full transparency of what's going on or if they need to make a fix or a plethora of things. And so that's just talking about a car specifically. But imagine as we get older in our house, every common day things that we do, it's connected to the internet.

And the implications of that, I have no idea. Your heater and your air conditioning in a lot of places are that now. Obviously, you have Alexa or Google Home. A lot of people do. Yeah. That allows you to set timers, ask questions, whatever, without using the bits of your fingers to be able to have to type it in. Yeah. You have – I had Horo in here.

He's the chief of staff at 8Sleep. That is literally your bed is controlled by artificial intelligence that's connected to an app people's ring doorbells people's doorbells and the security of their home their alarm systems everything is connected to apps i mean it's already here but what you're saying is next level down to i mean i'm being ridiculous right now but down to close you know it could go that fully adopted into everything that we do it could go that far i mean i'm someone that's in the tech world but i don't even i don't even with apple's face recognition i've never used it those are things that i just don't actually trust so me adoption of full iot like i'm i that's one thing i am worried about the implications of of what could actually happen from a security

perspective no you don't trust that but you trust because i'm gonna hit you on this a little bit yeah but you trust maybe trust is the wrong word you are willing to look past some of the same access that you give on like social media apps yeah to me that's a little too close to home no pun intended when it comes to it's funny but that it is the truth it is the truth you know there's things that i'm not willing to compromise on and face recognition someone knowing when my face pops up in screens screen is not one. Yeah. You know? Well, one other thing, and then I'm going to get you out of here, but I wanted to bring up some of the realities of COVID.

Because, you know, look, you're lucky in the sense that you've had this great journey going on during this. You're also doing significant things, Project Aeronautaut on the side as well which has taken up time and and you're hustling and and you basically are busy in a beautiful way and you're enjoying what you're doing which is very it's a lucky thing i mean there are a lot of people right now who just had their life moved upside down and they are stuck at home and you know they haven't had like thoughts of what they could do in this scenario and they don't have anything and and they're chilling so chilling is the wrong word but you know what i mean they are we are seeing a lot of people lose their minds a little bit it's it's a very common thing for people to talk about because what's happening is not natural and so yes while

you're filling your time and and are busy and can have things to focus on and goals to have, which definitely helps, you know, you have been in New York this entire time. Obviously, that was hit by the cyclone at the beginning and has continued to be a high focus area. Life has been very much quarantined. You're kind of boxed in literally by real estate. There is a total change in lifestyle and understanding of communication with basic people outside yeah you know we don't even we're not even able to mouth fuck you to people on the street like we do in new york and it's it's very difficult especially as someone who loves new york and hasn't been in new york during this time like me

to see from afar that reality and then know that yes beyond the cities like new york it's extending everywhere you know even people in rural areas are seeing lockdowns and stuff right now yeah and we're all so lost in our thoughts but how do you you know have you struggled at all with some of the mental around this and how unnatural it is for a very sociable, I might add, individual like you? And how do you deal with it? Yeah, it was tough. Like even alluding to when I met my coworkers, like even then I felt like a fucking... You know what I mean?

Some things of how to conversate, it's just interesting because you're taking in a new dynamic. Like, do I dap this person up? Easiest example, do I dap this person up? Do I leave my mask on while we're drinking our beers here and chilling we hug in and we there's like that thing because you're so

worried about all these little dynamics already you're kind of getting lost and like why you're even there in the first place like not even having to worry about that to begin with and just conversating with each other as human beings so that's interesting dynamic when it comes to social but as far as mental the mental aspect to, like I do meditate at least five minutes every single day, like every morning I try to separate myself from what's going on because everything is revolved around that box that you're talking about. It's New York city, right? Everything's revolved around that box that you live in before. It was like, even where you work out, everything was in that one confined space. And that gets to you sometimes, like even,

even my days right now, they're not as pretty. It like i i wake up work hit the gym two hours of cutting clips immediately like two hours of working in a project or not immediately and then i go to bed like the the days get repetitive as not in the fuck yeah and it gets to me sometimes but the only reason why i think it's not getting to me as much as it typically would you feel that repetitiveness is because i'm actually starting to see like the returns of what i'm doing and like the work i'm putting in is actually i'm getting the dividends for it yeah so i would say from a mental standpoint when it gets when you feel as if you're not getting things in return or not being a reward for what you're doing, you got to understand that everything is long term.

All great things are long term and I'm fully bought into that, which is why I've been able to stick around with it. And now I'm in this position that I am even during the worst times. That's why I'm in the position I'm in now because I've always believed in that and i stuck with it like people leave people drop off early on because it gets mentally exhausting it gets physically exhausting but staying on that track is is one of the hardest things you can do but the most rewarding now what do you do because i like this that you specifically at the start of your day focus and it's not that long of a time investment either which is interesting you focus five minutes you said on meditation yeah like what are you it sounds like that obviously sets your mental for the day and keeps things in perspective and if i'm wrong about that correct me but what do you do specifically when you meditate because a lot of people

i think like meditation they're like yeah you know and it's not that simple you know it's not people do it in different ways. So what works for you? I do guided meditation because I have a hard time just sitting there without thinking. But honestly, even with guided meditation, I'm already thinking about a million different things that are happening during the day. So to be honest with you, I don't even know how much, I know it's helping me because I feel like better when I go throughout my day, not going directly to my email, to Slack and so forth. But to the extent, it's the whole long-term thing again. I'm like, I know if I do this consistently. Build. Yeah. You know, I'm already starting to feel it a little bit, like just not being so attached to my job and also my side hustle. Like anything I could do that could help me out with that, I'm going to try it out. Yeah. And to try it out, I'm not going to try it out for and and to try it out i'm not gonna try it out for like a couple days i'm gonna try it out

for like a little bit that incorporates my routine so i'll let you know maybe like two months from now three months from now let you know like yo meditating has been banging huge for me like i'll be the first one to advocate like yo you gotta i can see you coming in now hey jules i'm meditating man just like blue like that so jule get, you got to do this shit. Not FDA approved, but bro, you got to get, I'm telling you, you know, listen, man, I know you got to get out of here and get, get to dinner. So I'm going to let you go. But this is like old times, man. Every time I have in like someone like you, someone like Mitch, where we took it for granted,

I guess, but being able to just kind of talk for hours on end and go back and forth about life and what we're trying to do where we make mistakes what we're doing right everything in between and kind of having that relatability of people who are at similar points in their life literally identical points in a lot of ways you know trying to do great things and there's that human connection that we just had all the time before this and and we get to have it a lot less now and now we're also like geographically separated for the time being here and you know it's it's really cool to be able to bring you in here and we do it on camera but we forget it's there and just kind of shoot the shit like the old days like the kennedy days

yeah i'm honestly surprised of how the how long it's been time-wise because I feel like we didn't even cover like a million different things that happened. Even between us specifically, like we've a lot of funny shit. Like even the story about how I even met you. Yeah. For instance, like my best friend went to Africa and then you became one of my best friends.

And you're his cousin. Well, you and I, that's not how we met. Like we were vaguely friends. Oh, not how we met like we were vaguely friends yeah we were vaguely friends for like years we got that uh-oh better not have any family that was that was years ago it was dark days anyway um but yeah like the way that kind of worked out was seamless and neither adam talked about that today when i recorded the podcast with him like how that just kind of all came together and then he told us all about him we're like what you're doing what like you know we were all becoming friends before that and then

like he left and he's like well julie you're the backup which i was like i'm in i'm cool this guy's the craziest connector i've ever met in my entire life by the way like he i don't know how he didn't have a heart attack at the age of at the age of 25 years old i ask myself that would be about well maybe you feel the effects of it now maybe it's not coronavirus maybe it's uh all that connecting that you're doing earlier on maybe that's what it is but you're kind but yeah man i miss that and um i'll have you back when you're in town in a month or two we'll do this again because we can actually like dig into some of that stuff but i like i like the intellectual conversation about some of these things because we've been just naturally being busy we we've talked less about this stuff

and exchanged the ideas and you know i'm gonna have to listen to this when i edit it but from first feel like people out there as far as like how this goes when we sit down and just say let's talk about existential shit this is what it sounds like like this is unedited uncut like this this is what we do and you know mike's there to be the voice of reason and i'm there to say all the crazy shit really loud and him say i hear you now let me tell you why we need to go to the middle on that you know so i hope people could take away too the fact that like we are uh everything that we're to right now, what we're talking about, we're not saying that we have everything now in Pat. No. Except we're saying far from it.

We're saying, hey, listen, here's where we're currently at. Here's why I view it. But when we're rich and famous in the very near future, you're going to look back in this podcast and see the inner makings of what these people are doing at the specific time and how they thought about it. Here's a blueprint. And anyone, you have to find the things that you're interested in and passionate about. You must find that. Yeah. And I know there are some exceptions and some people, you know, they have the discipline to be like, I don't really like this, but I'm good at it and I'll roll with it.

And, you know, whatever. But if you find the things that you are good at and are willing to know, it's not always going to be fun. And just get after it and learn make mistakes iterate learn make mistakes iterate or whatever the order is anyone can do it with consistency and i speak on that coming from a point where i still you know am am chasing the the right side of the rainbow here to to be able to to say like all right pulled it off did it right but i've seen enough people who have done it and i've been through enough including a lot of

fucking failures to know like okay that's the shit that doesn't work yeah you know and and you have to do it you have to be in there and be willing to say well i fucked that one up you know to to get there and and that's why we really with each other because you know you can definitely say that about yourself too like you've done and you've done some things that had some some success and you've done some things that flopped and like you just kind of keep going and it's that's a really cool thing yeah no that's fine i mean i couldn't have said it better myself that's literally that's like facts and that's what we're trying to project that's it out into the world that project out into the world let's end it there dudes

Mike thanks for coming in brother love you everyone else you know what it is give it a thought get back to me peace